Ghalib is, in fact, not solely a poet but a philosopher poet. His couplets are loaded and expose the reader to multiple meanings. He flabbergasts his readers and audience with far-fetched metaphors, historical references and the finesse of his prosodical expertise. His audience is either awestruck or, like his archrival Ustad Zauq, is extremely envious of him.
Being a debonair past master in the art of poetry, he has many disciples (
shagirds), including King Bahadur Shah Zafar himself, who come to him for correction of their verses. This happens so often that it seems that many of the king’s ghazals come directly from Ghalib’s pen. Altaf Hussain Hali, a close companion and disciple of Ghalib, quotes an incident in his book
Yadgar-i-Ghalib, where the poet corrected multiple ghazals by the king in a matter of minutes and added some verses to them as well.
AGONY IN DELHI
Unfortunately, Ghalib’s excellence in the poetic arts does not pay off during his life. He is not acknowledged the way he should be. His financial constraints overwhelm him during his lifetime, save a brief interlude when he is appointed tutor to the king in 1854. But that too is short lived; in 1857, Delhi is overtaken by the East India Company and the king is promptly sent into exile to Rangoon. The poor poet is left without any hope for the future. His poetry duly reflects his plight in detail.
Ghalib’s prowess and excellence in poetry overshadows his prolificacy as a prose writer. The best amongst his prose works is
Dastambu, meaning ‘posy of flowers’.
Dastambu provides sufficient material to gauge the quantum of agony the poet went through. The writing is completely devoid of Ghalib’s characteristic humour. It’s an extremely sad book. In what circumstances and why this prose work was written by the ace poet is a pertinent question to be asked. For that matter, we will have to get back to 1857.
Ghalib is basking in the weak sunshine of slight monetary affluence through the stipend from the king and a meagre salary for writing the Mughal history, when catastrophe barges in, and the façade of Mughal rule in India is rendered topsy-turvy. 1857 is the year of revolt and one of the most turbulent times in Indian history. It is Ghalib’s fate to witness the massacre in the streets of Delhi and to see his city reduced to ruins in his lifetime.
There is carnage in the streets, initially by the mutineers and then by the Britishers. In any case, the loss of human lives is colossal. Ghalib is under self-imposed siege at his neighbourhood Ballimaran (not “Billimaran” or “street of cat killers”, as it was misidentified in historian William Dalrymple’s book
City of Djinns). There is a situation of lockdown and curfew in the city; anyone found in the streets is liable to be killed.
Being a debonair past master in the art of poetry, he has many disciples (shagirds), including King Bahadur Shah Zafar himself, who come to him for correction of their verses.
During these ominous days, Ghalib engages himself in writing about the chaos around and resorts to his favourite medium, Persian, and not Urdu. This Persian is ornate and classical. The title,
Dastambu (Posy of Flowers), is chosen not as per the book’s contents but as a literary metaphor. The book recounts 15 months of travail and agony in Delhi.
A commemorative 1969 postal stamp in India | Wikimedia Commons
Ghalib appears to be an Anglophile when he laments the loss of British lives at the hands of mutineers, and even condemns the mutineers’ ‘act of brutality’ when they resort to killing British women and children. However, in September 1857, when the British recapture the city of Delhi, Ghalib is also courageous and bold enough to express extreme grievance over the British excesses and the atrocities committed by them.
Meanwhile, life at Ballimaran turns out to be miserable and deplorable. There seems to be no access to even basic necessities of life, including drinkable water and food. The people are constrained to live like prisoners in their own homes and have to suffice with rainwater for drinking.
Ghalib dwells in detail about the turmoils he faces those days. He adopts two children from a relative. The poet is saddened when he cannot arrange for their milk and sweets, which they desire the most. But the climax of his agony comes in the death of his brother, whose corpse remains unattended in the streets of Delhi for days.
Despite all these odds, he is a professional poet and writes a paean for Queen Victoria. He allegedly also tones down some passages in
Dastambu that might cause offence to the British, in the hope of saving his skin from British vengeance and of claiming a pension for himself. But these hopes are finally dashed when his pension claim is rejected in 1859.
Whether in dejection or elation, being a poet, Ghalib resorts to his art of poetry for catharsis. He dies a decade later, in 1869. His words and legacy continue to live on.
LANGUAGES OF LOVE
The million dollar question is, why did Ghalib prefer Persian over Urdu? Was it just a subconscious infatuation with the language or was he doing it consciously? To answer the question, we will have to revisit the cultural and linguistic ethos of Mughal society.
Persian was the official language during the Delhi Sultanate era. When the Mughals took over, they kept Persian as their official language. Persian was not the Mughal’s language; their mother tongue was Turkic and
Tuzk-i-Babri was written in the same language.
Unfortunately, Ghalib’s excellence in the poetic arts does not pay off during his life. He is not acknowledged the way he should be. His financial constraints overwhelm him during his lifetime, save a brief interlude when he is appointed tutor to the king in 1854. But that too is short lived; in 1857, Delhi is overtaken by the East India Company and the king is promptly sent into exile to Rangoon. The poor poet is left without any hope for the future. His poetry duly reflects his plight in detail.
With the passage of time, the Mughals let go of Turkic and started adopting more Persian in their daily routine. However, a major breakthrough for Persian in the Subcontinent came with Akbar. Being a proficient administrator, he focussed on revenue records in the country, and made it obligatory that all records be kept in Persian. It became necessary for all the educated lot to know Persian and, thus, Persian came into operations of the state full throttle.
At the same time, there were literary endeavours by the poets of the court in Persian. It’s interesting to note that native Persian speakers would snigger over Indian poets’ overtures in Persian, the way the British mocked Indians speaking their language in the later part of the 19th century.
Meanwhile, the Indian Subcontinent witnessed a rare linguistic phenomenon when Urdu emerged as the common language of people. Initially, Urdu was the pidgin language of the military camps, but soon it gained its distinct character and overwhelmed the Indian linguistic scene.
It had the Persian script, Hindi syntax and Persian-Arabic vocabulary. The royal harem adopted Urdu as their language for common parlance and, gradually, Persian was replaced by Urdu. However, it took time for sophisticated Urdu literature to come up.
It was not until the mid-18th century — during the reign of Muhammad Shah, the great grandson of Aurangzeb — that Urdu poetry was accorded recognition at the Mughal court. Till Aurangzeb’s time, Persian was in full vogue and his own epigrammatic prophecy in Persian, about the future of India, held water. As he said, “
Az ma est fasaad baqi [After me chaos].”
A painting of Ghalib dated 1856 | Wikimedia Commons
Persian, being the language of the elite and the royal court, always had an upper hand over Urdu. That’s why the literati preferred to master the language to show their prowess and eruditeness. It was a sine qua non for the literati of the period. This may explain Ghalib’s obsession with the language.
However, his own etched belief, that he was an adept Persian poet rather than an Urdu one, turned out to be his fatal misperception. In fact, Persian was not his mother tongue but a foreign language. Despite his avid interest in the vocabulary and prosody of Persian, Ghalib’s Persian never reached the level of a maestro. His Persian was, more or less, stylised Indian Persian.
This statement can cause ripples and stirs amongst Ghalib’s admirers but truth needs to be acknowledged. The vocabulary he used in his Persian poetry was more of Urdu than Persian. The vocabulary of native speakers of Persian was markedly different .
Whatever Ghalib is today is solely due to his Urdu poetry. Ghalib’s stature as a poet is neither due to his Persian prose nor poetry. While he kept on perfecting his art and became more mature in the later stages of his poetic evolution, he is at his best when he renders poetry in an explicitly simple and meaningful verse known as
Sehl-e-Mumtana.
This Urdu literary terminology literally means unattainably simple. The extreme simplicity of the verse strikes the reader/listener at once, so much so that he feels that he can also compose such a verse with ease. Of course, when he actually attempts it, he finds himself at a total loss. Allow me to explain this with certain verses of Ghalib:
[O my naive heart, what has gone wrong with you?
What can be the cure for this ache?]
Similarly:
[I invite her but, my dear heart,
May something happen to her that she just can’t help coming to me]