by Raza Mir
Ghalib’s letters have been translated by several people, including by Pritchett/Cornwall and Kanda, and by Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam in Ghalib: 1797–1869: Life and Letters (first published in 1969 and reissued in 1994 by Oxford India Paperbacks, New Delhi), and Daud Rahbar’s 1987 annotated selection titled Urdu Letters of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, published by SUNY Press.
Finally, Ghalib’s Dastambu was translated in excellent idiomatic English in 1970 by Khwaja Ahmed Faruqi as Dastanbuy: A Diary of the Indian Revolt of 1857 (Asia Publishing House, Bombay).
Tanqeed-e Ghalib (Literary Evaluations in Urdu)
Ghalib’s work has been subjected to several expository editorial analyses, known as ‘sharaahs’. These sharaahs provide the editor’s understanding of what specific ash’aar may mean and also incorporate annotations, including contextual information, to help the reader get past the words of the verses into a universe of multiple meanings. Far too many sharaahs exist to be listed here, but perhaps the paradigmatic example is Ali Haider ‘Nazm’ Tabatabai’s (1854–1933) Sharaah-e Divaan-e Urdu-e Ghalib (An Exposition on the Urdu Divaan of Ghalib), considered by many to be definitive, though highly subjective in its interpretation. Among the modern scholars, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has published Tafheem-e Ghalib (Ghalib Explained, Ghalib Institute, New Delhi, 1989), which is a selective and sophisticated analysis of Ghalib’s Urdu and Farsi poetry.
Ghalib is arguably the foremost literary figure in Urdu and has been written about in innumerable books, hundreds of doctoral dissertations and several articles in magazines and journals. There are several bibliographic books on Ghalib, and magazines and journals devoted to Ghalib continue to be published. Therefore, my description of books on Ghalib in Urdu is more an act of sampling than an exhaustive listing.
To begin at the beginning, Muhammad Husain Azad’s Aab-e Hayaat (Water of Life) was first published in 1880, eleven years after Ghalib’s death. Azad’s book remains in print and has been translated into English by Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (Oxford University Press, 2001). Altaf Husain Hali’s Yaadgaar-e Ghalib (Memory of Ghalib) appeared in 1897 and is a veritable cornucopia of anecdotes about the great bard. An interesting screed by the poet Yagana Changezi titled Ghalib Shikan (Ghalib Conqueror) appeared in 1935, which critiqued Ghalib in the most vituperative language, but it seems to have been shrugged off by Ghalibians. A dramatic representation of the world of Ghalib was provided by Mirza Farhatullah Baig (1883–1947) in Dilli ki Aakhri Shama (The Last Lamp of Delhi). The original Urdu version of that book is available on the Internet, and it was translated with flair by Akhtar Qambar in 1979 as The Last Musha’irah of Dehli (Orient BlackSwan).
Fast-forwarding to the latter half of the twentieth century, in independent India and Pakistan, work on Ghalib continued and perhaps even accelerated around 1969, the centenary of his death. The noted Urdu scholar and fiction writer Naiyar Masud (1936–2017) wrote Taabeer-e Ghalib (Ghalib Realized) in 1973 (Kitab Nagar, Lucknow). Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s research on Ghalib was compiled into a 2001 book titled Ghalib Par Chaar TehreereN (Four Writings on Ghalib, Ghalib Institute, New Delhi).
Ghalib’s rivalry with Zauq has received a lot of attention in Urdu books; those interested in following it up could begin with Ameer Husain Noorani’s 1967 analysis tiled Urdu ke Adabi Marake (Urdu’s Literary Battles, Naseem Book Depot, Lucknow). An analysis of Ghalib’s Farsi output, including the ecumenical verses therein, can be found in Varis Kirmani’s 2001 volume Ghalib ki Farsi Shairi (Ghalib’s Farsi Poetry, Ghalib Institute, New Delhi). Both books are available as e-books on the Rekhta website; I discuss the Rekhta site later in this bibliography.
Urdu scholarship on Ghalib continues in the twenty-first century. A remarkable book by Professor Anwar Moazzam titled Ghalib ki Fikri WaabastgiyaN (Ghalib’s Intellectual Foundations) was published by New Delhi’s Ghalib Institute in 2011 and managed to provide new intellectual analysis to a much-plumbed terrain. Gopi Chand Narang’s 2013 work Ghalib: Ma’ani Afreeni, Jadliyaati Wazah, Shunyata aur Sheriyaat (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi) attempts to offer a philosophical analysis of his corpus of work, and in 2017 was translated by Surinder Deol as Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind (Oxford University Press).
Ghalib in English
Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam’s Ghalib: 1797–1869: Life and Letters arrived in 1969, the centenary year of Ghalib’s death. In the same year, Mahfil, a journal of South Asian literature, brought out a special issue on Ghalib with contributions from several stalwarts of the Urdu–English bridge, such as C.M. Naim, Aijaz Ahmad, Gopi Chand Narang, M.U. Memon and others. Work on Ghalib in English had begun in the subcontinent well before that, but now it took on an international dimension.
Dissertations on Ghalib began to appear in departments of comparative literature, history and other disciplines in the early twentieth century and work by scholars also continued apace. In the latter part of the century, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s book The Secret Mirror: Essays on Urdu Poetry (Academic Literature, New Delhi, 1981) contained detailed analyses of Ghalib’s poems, and Frances Pritchett’s 1994 book Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (University of California Press, Berkeley) presented itself as a spirited defence of the ghazal as a poetic form, including serious discussion on the work of Ghalib. Scholarly papers on Ghalib continue to pile up. Each one of the stalwarts mentioned above has written scores of pieces on Ghalib in English. Biographies of Ghalib include Natalia Prigarina’s Mirza Ghalib: A Creative Biography (Oxford, 2000), which was originally published in Russian in 1986 and translated by Osama Faruqi; and Pavan Varma’s Ghalib: The Man, The Times (Penguin, 2000), which included several important insights into Ghalib’s Delhi, as well as his personality. I especially enjoyed Varma’s depiction of the long court battle that characterized Ghalib’s early life. A recent self-published book by Anwar Moazzam titled Nightingale of an Uncreated Garden: Ghalib’s Intellectual Concerns is available in electronic bookstores like Amazon, and constitutes a stunningly erudite discussion on Ghalib’s life, poetry and philosophy.
Papers on Ghalib are too numerous to list, but I would especially like to acknowledge C.M. Naim’s ‘Ghalib’s Delhi: A Shamelessly Revisionist Look at Two Popular Metaphors’, published in 2003 in the Annual of Urdu Studies and elsewhere.
Ghalib on the Internet
The Internet provides countless discussions of Ghalib’s verses, many of them quirky, but many very informative. To give a quick example, http://www.urdupoetry.com/ghalib.html catalogues several of his ghazals, while http://www.nitasweb.com/andaaz-e-bayaaan-aur records occasional Ghalib verses. In this section, I wish to highlight three websites that provide a comprehensive roadmap to his poetry. I begin with the magisterial work of Professor Frances Pritchett. If you are interested in Ghalib, or in South Asian literature in general, just type http://www.columbia.edu/~fp7 into a search engine, and a world opens up, a vast cornucopia of Ghalibiat and several other offerings. Pritchett’s work on Ghalib is titled A Desertful of Roses and contains, among other things, every sher in Ghalib’s divaan translated, cross-referenced, contextualized and explained. There are bibliographies galore, papers and books that have been scanned and uploaded, references to other people’s work on Ghalib, a truly extraordinary work. It is a name-dropping pleasure to state that I know Professor Pritchett personally.
The second debt is to the good folks at www.rekhta.org. Sanjiv Saraf and his team at Rekhta have been doing extraordinary work. I have relied on the Rekhta site to find the rarest of books on Ghalib in Urdu, each one meticulously scanned, easy to read and well organized. Friends who are less familiar with Urdu find the translations on the site great as well. I have never met Saraf but am a huge fan.
The third and emerging website on Urdu poetry is www.urdushahkar.org. S.M. Shahed maintains this site, and I am proud to call him my uncle. Urdu Shahkar has a wonderful format, with the poets’ work presented in Nastaliq and Devanagri, a heavily annotated English translati
on and, a feature I find delightful, each poem declaimed clearly as a voicefile by Shahed. I am indebted to Shahed for (among many other things) explaining a particular snippet that I have used in Chapter 2 of Part I. Visit the site for Ghalib but stay for many others!
Appendix 3
A Ghalibian Timeline
1757 Major General Robert Clive of the East India Company defeats Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey, inaugurating the colonial era in India.
1765 Asadullah Khan’s father, Mirza Abdullah Baig, is born in Delhi, of Uzbek ancestry.
1774 The East India Company creates the post of the governor-general of India.
1797 Asadullah Khan is born in Agra.
1801 Mirza Abdullah Baig dies, causing family fortunes to dip.
1808 Asadullah Khan composes his first ghazal. Takes on the takhallus (pen name) ‘Asad’.
1810 Asadullah Khan (thirteen) marries Umrao Begum (eleven), a marriage that will last fifty-nine years, till his death. They have seven children, but none survive infancy. Mir Taqi Mir dies.
1813 Asadullah Khan moves to Delhi. After staying with his in-laws awhile, the couple move to a house in the Ballimaran neighbourhood.
1816 Asadullah Khan adopts the takhallus ‘Ghalib’. He continues to use ‘Asad’, albeit infrequently.
1826 Ghalib begins a trip to Calcutta. He is away from Delhi for three years.
1833 Ghalib puts together his Urdu divaan. It remains unpublished.
1837 Bahadur Shah Zafar is crowned Mughal emperor. Ghalib is sued by a British wine merchant for defaulting on his debts. Delhi’s first newspaper, Delhi Urdu Akhbaar, is published.
1841 Ghalib’s divaan is published by Syed-ul Akhbar Press in Delhi.
1842 The First Indo-Afghan War ends in a humiliating defeat for the British.
1847 Ghalib is arrested and briefly jailed for gambling.
1848 Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general, promulgates the Doctrine of Lapse, seizing all kingdoms where the ruler dies without a male heir.
1856 The British dethrone Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh and annex the kingdom. The army introduces the Enfield 1853 rifle, causing suspicion in the enlisted ranks.
1857 The ghadar starts and rolls across north India. Rebels take over Delhi and put Bahadur Shah Zafar in charge. The British reconquer Delhi and commit horrific atrocities on its citizenry. Ghalib’s mentally challenged brother Yousuf dies.
1858 Bahadur Shah Zafar is exiled to Burma. Ghalib writes Dastambu, an account of the rebellion. Munshi Nawal Kishore starts his eponymous press in Lucknow.
1862 Bahadur Shah Zafar dies in exile in Rangoon.
1868 Ghalib’s Urdu letters are published in a book titled Ud-e Hindi (Indian Perfume).
1869 Ghalib dies. Mahatma Gandhi is born.
1870 Umrao Begum dies.
1897 Altaf Husain Hali publishes Yaadgaar-e Ghalib (In the Memory of Ghalib), the first definitive biography of the bard.
1952 The Indian government issues a ‘Mirza Ghalib’ stamp.
1954 Sohrab Modi directs Mirza Ghalib, the first of several films on Ghalib, based on a script by Sa’adat Hasan Manto. Ghalib’s grave is turned into a memorial.
1969 Ghalib Academy is set up in India on the centenary of his death. The Pakistan government issues a stamp to mark the occasion and sets up the Idaara-e-Yaadgaar-e-Ghalib (Institution in Memory of Ghalib).
A Note on Transliteration and Translation
There are several grounds on which my book can and should be critiqued, of which I want to anticipate two.
First, the transliteration scheme that I have adopted to represent Urdu is admittedly highly arbitrary and capricious. Academics and purists dealing with Urdu have developed a variety of precise and consistent transliteration formats. However, sometimes their very precision renders them arcane and intimidating to the eye. To maintain the popular flavour of the book, I have deliberately chosen to go with an unscientific, ‘vernacular’ format. My schema (if I may call it one) is derived from the way in which Hindustani words have been portrayed in movie posters in India over the years. For instance, a standard transliteration scheme deployed by the Annual of Urdu Studies, a respected journal, would represent a line from one of Ghalib’s poems as lāzim thā ke dēkhō mirā rasta kō’ī din aur. In this book, such a line would be laazim tha ke dekho mera rasta koi din aur. Likewise, Rekhta, the popular website on Urdu, represents the first line of Ghalib’s divaan as naqsh fariyādī hai kis kī shoḳhi-e-tahrīr kā. I have instead gone with naqsh faryaadi hai kis ki shokhi-e tehreer ka. Readers from the subcontinent who are in the habit of reading transliterated movie posters and advertisements will be familiar with this format. I beg the indulgence of others, on the plea that those who are finicky about transliteration are usually familiar with the original script and can therefore make do with the originals. However, I have consistently followed one rule: the nasal ‘n’ has been transliterated as ‘N’ (as in haiN aur bhi duniya meiN sukhanwar bahut achche).
Second, my translations can be critiqued on several grounds. I have chosen to translate several—though not all—poems and verses rhythmically. Others have been rendered as free verse. Some of the ghazals have been rendered as rhyming couplets. That of course goes against the rhyme scheme of the genre, where two lines do not share rhythmic continuity except occasionally. Some might argue that it lessens the ghazal, transforming it into a different genre, akin to a masnavi or Chaucerian ‘heroic couplets’, genres that fell out of favour in Urdu and English poetry over a century ago. A keen-eyed reader may quibble about this liberty taken with the formal structure of the ghazal. For such a reader, the free verse translations might be better. Also, when I have tried my hand at rhyme, I have done my best not to inject myself, the translator, into the relationship between the poet and the reader.
Whether to translate rhythmically or as free verse is a difficult choice. Should one translate poetry as rhyme to reflect its potential ‘singability’ or ‘recitabilty’ and risk it degenerating occasionally into doggerel? Or should one strive to preserve the verbal integrity of the poem and eschew rhyme and metre in the hope that readers will understand the underlying poetics by themselves? In this book, there are poems and verses that cater to those who fall on both sides of this debate. The risk of course is that neither will be fully satisfied. The reader will have to be the final arbiter of whether my choices worked out. To wit, the translation plan is to disappoint everyone partially, rather than cater to one group and jettison the other.
Notes
PART I
Chapter 1: The Paragon of Urdu Expression
1. A divaan is an anthology, but usually contains only ghazals. The ghazals are ordered according to the last letter of the poem and must contain at least one ghazal ending with each letter of the Urdu alphabet. So the smallest possible divaan will have around twenty-five poems (Ghalib’s divaan has 234). It is not a collection of a poet’s entire works. Poets may publish several divaans in their lives, many of which may have overlapping poems.
2. Ghalib’s love for mangoes is legendary. Ali Mir has written briefly on that; see ‘The fruit that sent Mirza Ghalib into raptures’, 18 May 2015, https://scroll.in/article/671801/the-fruit-that-sent-mirza-ghalib-into-raptures.
Chapter 2: The Half-Believer Sufi
1. For more on Sarmad, see N. Prigarina, ‘Sarmad: Life and Death of a Sufi’, Ishraq. Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 3 (2012): 314–30, https://iphras.ru/uplfile/smirnov/ishraq/3/24_prig.pdf.
2. Asadullah, ‘the Lion of God’, is one of Ali’s names.
Chapter 4: Ghalib and His Critics
1. Interestingly, there are very few critiques of Mir Taqi Mir, a poet who was as famously arrogant as Ghalib and was known to have referred to his contemporaries as ‘insects’. Indeed, Ghalib and Zauq often argued about who loved Mir more. There was something about Mir that was beyond critique that even Ghalib did not possess.
2. Referring to Mirza Sauda, an earlier poet.
3. A maqta is the si
gned couplet that usually occurs at the end of a ghazal. The signature is referred to as the takhallus. Ghalib had two takhallus, ‘Ghalib’ and ‘Asad’.
4. Referring to Zauq.
Chapter 5: 1750–1850: The Urdu Century
1. For example, Mir ke sher ka ahvaal kahooN kya Ghalib; jis ka divaan kam-az gulshan-e Kashmir nahiN (What can I say about Mir’s poetry, Ghalib; his divaan is no lesser than a garden of Kashmir). Or, Ghalib apna ye aqeeda hai ba-qaul-e Nasikh; aap be-bahra hai jo mo’taqad-e Mir nahiN (Ghalib, as a dictum I quote Nasikh, that he who does not bow to Mir is wretched).
PART II
Chapter 1: The Ghazal Introduced
1. Ash’aar is the plural for sher (couplet).