Book Title: The Essential Ghalib
Author: Anisur Rahman
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Number of Pages: 448
ISBN: 978-9365692808
Date Published: Dec. 24, 2024
Price: INR 600
Book Excerpt
Pg. xx to xxiv
A Life Not Easy
A Turkish descendent of the Aibak dynasty connected in origin to King Afrasiyab, Ghalib was born on 27 December 1797, in Agra, where he also got his early education. He was later nurtured by a Zoroastrian tourist, or a wandering scholar from Iran called Hormuzd, who, on embracing Islam, came to be known as Mulla Abdussamad, and helped him hone his skills in Persian, Arabic and logic. Although Ghalib had the pride of a grand lineage, he was sadly destined to grapple both with the onslaughts of a difficult life and a terribly consequential era of history. Coming from a family of warriors, his grandfather, Mirza Quqan Baig, had emigrated to Lahore from Samarqand and later joined the services of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II in Delhi. As the tradition of serving the crown and the nobility continued, his father, Abdullah Baig Khan, too, followed the same profession and served Nawab Asifuddaula (or Asaf-ud-Daula) of Lucknow, the Nizam of Hyderabad and, later, the Maharaja of Alwar, but he did not live long enough to see Ghalib beyond his fifth year. His uncle, Nasrullah Baig Khan, a risaalaadaar, or a troop commander in the British Army, looked after him subsequently, but he too passed away even before Ghalib could reach his tenth year.
Miseries kept multiplying with time in Ghalib’s life. He was destined to enter a long struggle against his outrageous fortune. With the confiscation of his uncle’s large estate, an annuity of ten thousand rupees was fixed, but Nawab Ahmad Bakhsh Khan, from whose estate the amount had to be paid, gave Ghalib’s family only one-third of the amount. With several recipients from his extended family, Ghalib’s personal share came to rupees seven hundred and fifty per year. Married at an early age of thirteen to Umrao Begum, aged seven, he shifted to Delhi as a young boy of about fifteen in 1812–13, where he lived all along. Shifting his residence from place to place in the walled city, he got exposed to a world of greater tribulations which had a direct bearing on his intellectual make up and writing. His persistent persuasion for improvement in his pension, first with Ahmad Bakhsh Khan and then with the authorities of the British East India Company, that his uncle had served as a military officer, came to stay as a prolonged and a tedious plot in the larger saga of his life that continued growing difficult, year after year. However, grants in appreciation from the last Mughal emperor and also the nawab of Rampur kept him going somehow.
Ghalib knew no ways of yielding even in impoverishment as he was critically conscious of being an aristocrat by descent and temper. He refused favours and shunned free mixing. He had no house of his own, no books he could claim his own and no siblings, out of the seven, to live long and stay with him beyond their childhood. He was indeed an exceptional individual who drew loans, drank incessantly, played dice, violated norms and was imprisoned, but chose to continue with his manners rather defiantly. Even with all these, he pursued his intellectual pursuits and wrote the finest kind of poetry and prose in Urdu and Persian.
A Time Too Terrible
Ghalib had seen and suffered the onslaughts of his times and climes—the decline and fall of the Mughal Empire and the British rule exercising its controlling hand. He was a sore witness to the upheavals of his age; a sad and helpless observer of one culture replacing another in the wake of cataclysmic events. He grieved the way history was charting its course, rather swiftly but recklessly. As Delhi was ravaged in 1857, his heart bled. He recorded his anguish in his letters to his close friends in no uncertain terms. He wrote about Delhi that was once known for its unique spots and lamented its tragic decay. He grieved that there existed a city once in the land of Ind and wondered if that city was still alive. In this Delhi of his dear dreams and rude realities, however, he remained indebted to both the empires—the Mughals and the British—for his sustenance. The ambivalence of his attitude towards the British, which has concerned many critics, is understandable on account of his personal limitations. It may not, in any case, be considered a betrayal of his essential pride that characterizes his poetry quite prominently. He recorded in Dastanbuy (1858), his Persian diary of 1857, that he received his bread and salt from the table of the British masters, the conquerors of the world, right from his early childhood. It would, therefore, be unfair to ignore this frank and honest admission and consider it as a sign of his servility to the British Empire.
Ghalib’s Urdu letters collected in ‘Ud-e Hindi (1868) and Urdu-e Mu‘alla (1869) unequivocally represent his helplessness at his dichotomous existence that he found too terrible to withstand and absorb internally. They reflect his deep human concern, as much as they represent his anguish and anxiety. They are characteristically intimate in design and are written to close friends, who loved and respected him as a gentleman and a poet. Uniquely conversational in their tone, and suave in their narration, they may be read like tracts of history from a poet-narrator. Ghalib historicized his times both with pain and sympathy, and he found his metaphors of suffering and survival in those tracts of history that he creatively configured in his poetry. His poetry, in any case, may appropriately be read as a philosophical representation of human predicament at large.
Both his diary and his letters are intimate conversations and take us into confidence instantly. They reflect his literary personality and his human catholicity, and may be read as personal interpretations of an age in sheer crisis. These works not only impress us with their dramatic design, for which they are so well known, but also with the deep sympathy they evoke with the readers. With his keen interest in sharing his personal predicament and that of his time, he emerges as a storyteller of tragic times, where objects appear as characters and characters as speaking icons. The dramatic qualities of his narratives hold the attention of his readers who stand astonished at his infinite capacity to bear pain. Like his verses, his prose works combine the best elements of the Perso-Arabic tradition with the linguistic patterns of the Urdu language. Read with his verses, his prose works emerge as complementary writings on contemporary history, politics and culture.
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Literary Identities
Ghalib was a poet and a prose writer, an epistolarian and a diarist, a lexicographer and a polemist, a critic and a historian, and above all, an arbiter of taste. Even though he was a great reader, loved the literature of classical temper, and was naturally given to preserving the vanishing glory of the past, the acquisition of knowledge in his case was more a matter of personal reflections and observations than of merely culling from textual sources. He started writing at the age of nine and had already written most of his remarkable Urdu ghazals by his nineteenth year. He compiled his first Urdu diivaan known as NushKHa-i Amroha or NusKHa-i Bhopal in 1816, the second version of his diivaan known as NusKHa-i Hamidiya in 1821, and the third version of his diivaan called NusKHa-i Shirani in 1825. In 1833, he compiled his ghazals yet again in a final version which is now referred to as his most popular diivaan. Ghalib was extremely meticulous in making the selection of his verses for his diivaans and rejected many of the verses he considered inferior by his own exacting standards. As a sensitive choice maker of his verses and a keen editor of his ghazals, he has handed us a slim diivaan of two hundred and thirty-five ghazals only on which his reputation as a poet of exceptional merit rests firmly and finally.
In pursuing his literary vocation, Ghalib did not strictly follow the established tradition of a given genre as he treated each of these in his individual style, imparting each one the freshness expected of a literary iconoclast or the genius of a language. Unlike the poets and writers of our age, those in the past had a constant and wholetime engagement with writing. So, Ghalib too, apart from writing his poetry in Urdu and Persian in different genres, wrote in various genres of prose with equal passion. Apart from his Persian diary of 1857 and his inimitable Urdu letters discussed above, some of his other works that deserve special mention include a mathnavii he wrote in rebuttal of linguistic blemishes in his works (Baade MuKHaalif, 1828), a Persian diivaan (MaiKHaana-i Aarzuu-e Saranjaam, 1834–35), a scholarly work on letter writing, Persian infinitives, technical terms, reviews and miscellaneous writings under five heads (Panj Aahang, 1849), a historical narrative up to Humayun of the Mughal empire (Mehr-e Niim Roz, 1854), a Persian and Urdu vocabulary verse (Qaat‘i-e Naama, 1856), a polemical writing against Burhaan-e Qaat’i (Qaat‘i-e Burhaan, 1862), a collection of Persian poetry (Kulliyaat-e Nazm Farsi, 1863), a Persian mathnavii (Abr-e Guharbaar, 1864), and a collection of prose works in Persian (Kulliyaat-e Nasr-e Farsi, 1868).
Ghalib is a classic example of a comprehensive scholar, a critical reader and an inclusive writer. Different disciplines that we broadly place under the larger umbrella of the humanities caught his attention. He was an untutored genius but an intellectual in the true sense of the phrase who evolved his own knowledge and knowledge systems. Even though ‘originality’ as a concept is much contested, Ghalib has a claim to originality as a genius of language, poetry and poetics in all fairness. Drawing upon a large hinterland of intellectual resources, he created his own plots and dramatis personae to produce his individual mythos in his life and works. There are types and protypes of men and women, lovers and beloveds, heretics and believers, as well as a series of situations and moments that are plebian and sublime in various manifestations. He knew his exact word and how that word could be turned into an image, an image into a simile, a simile into a metaphor, a metaphor into a symbol and, finally, a symbol into a myth. Ghalib excelled in all these ways to emerge and remain a canonical figure.
Excerpted with permission from The Essential Ghalib by Anisur Rahman, published by HarperCollins India.
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