Ghalib - the pioneer of Urdu Shayari
Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan -- known to posterity as Ghalib, a `nom de
plume' he adopted in the tradition of all clasical Urdu poets, was born in the
city of Agra, of parents with Turkish aristocratic ancestry, probably on
December 27th, 1797. As to the precise date, Imtiyaz Ali Arshi has
conjectured, on the basis of Ghalib's horoscope, that the poet might have
been born a month later, in January 1798. The question of Ghalib's early education has often confused Urdu
scholars. Although any record of his formal education that might exist is
extremely scanty, it is also true that Ghalib's circle of friend in Delhi
included some of the most eminent minds of his time. There is, finally,
irrevocably, the evidence of his writings, in verse as well as in prose,
which are distinguished not only by creative excellence but also by the great
knowledge of philosophy, ethics, theology, classical literature, grammar, and
history that they reflect. I think it is reasonable to believe that Mulla Abdussamad Harmuzd --
the man who was supposedly Ghalib's tutor, whom Ghalib mentions at times with
great affection and respect, but whose very existence he denies -- was, in
fact, a real person and an actual tutor of Ghalib when Ghalib was a young boy
in Agra. Harmuzd was a Zoroastrian from Iran, converted to Islam, and a devoted
scholar of literature, language, and religions. He lived in anonymity in Agra
while tutoring Ghalib, among others. In or around 1810, two events of great importance occured in Ghalib’s
life: he was married to a well-to-do, educated family of nobles, and he left
for Delhi. One must remember that Ghalib was only thirteen at the time. It is
impossible to say when Ghalib started writing poetry. Perhaps it was as early
as his seventh or eight years. On the other hand, there is evidence that most
of what we know as his complete works were substantially completed by 1816,
when he was 19 years old, and six years after he first came to Delhi. We are
obviously dealing with a man whose maturation was both early and rapid. We
can safely conjecture that the migration from Agra, which had once been a
capital but was now one of the many important but declining cities, to Delhi,
its grandeur kept intact by the existence of the moghul court, was an
important event in the life of this thirteen year old, newly married poet who
desparately needed material security, who was beginning to take his career in
letters seriously, and who was soon to be recognized as a genius, if not by
the court, at least some of his most important comtemporaries. As for the
marriage, in the predominantly male-oriented society of Muslim India no one
could expect Ghalib to take that event terribly seriously, and he didn't. The
period did, however mark the beginnings of concern with material advancement
that was to obsess him for the rest of his life. In Delhi Ghalib lived a life of comfort, though he did not find
immediate or great success. He wrote first in a style at once detached,
obscure, and pedantic, but soon thereafter he adopted the fastidious,
personal, complexly moral idiom which we now know as his mature style. It is
astonishing that he should have gone from sheer precocity to the extremes of
verbal ingenuity and obscurity, to a style, which, next to Meer's, is the
most important and comprehensive styles of the ghazal in the Urdu language before
he was even twenty. The course of his life from 1821 onward is easier to trace. His
interest began to shift decisively away from Urdu poetry to Persian during
the 1820's, and he soon abandoned writing in Urdu almost altogether, except
whenever a new edition of his works was forthcoming and he was inclined to
make changes, deletions, or additions to his already existing opus. This
remained the pattern of his work until 1847, the year in which he gained
direct access to the Moghul court. I think it is safe to say that throughout these years Ghalib was
mainly occupied with the composition of the Persian verse, with the
preparation of occasional editions of his Urdu works which remained
essentially the same in content, and with various intricate and exhausting
proceedings undertaken with a view to improving his financial situation,
these last consisting mainly of petitions to patrons and government,
including the British. Although very different in style and procedure,
Ghalib's obsession with material means, and the accompanying sense of
personal insecurity, which seems to threaten the very basis of selfhood,
reminds one of Bauldeaire. There is, through the years, the same
self-absorption, the same overpowering sense of terror which comes from the
necessities of one's own creativity and intelligence, the same illusion --
never really believed viscerally -- that if one could be released from need
one could perhaps become a better artist. There is same flood of complaints,
and finally the same triumph of a self which is at once morbid, elegant,
highly creative, and almost doomed to realize the terms not only of its
desperation but also its distinction. Ghalib was never really a part of the court except in its very last
years, and even then with ambivalence on both sides. There was no love lost
between Ghalib himself and Zauq, the king's tutor in the writing of poetry;
and if their mutual dislike was not often openly expressed, it was a matter
of prudence only. There is reason to believe that Bahadur Shah Zafar, the
last Moghul king, and himself a poet of considerable merit, did not much care
for Ghalib's style of poetry or life. There is also reason to believe that
Ghalib not only regarded his own necessary subservient conduct in relation to
the king as humiliating but he also considered the Moghul court as a
redundant institution. Nor was he well-known for admiring the king's verses.
However, after Zauq's death Ghalib did gain an appiontment as the king’s
advisor on matters of versifiaction. He was also appointed, by royal
order, to write the official history of the Moghul dynasty, a project which
was to be titled "Partavistan" and to fill two volumes. The one volume "Mehr-e-NeemRoz", which Ghalib completed is
an indifferent work, and the second volume was never completed, supposedly
because of the great disturbances caused by the Revolt of 1857 and the
consequent termination of the Moghul rule. Possibly Ghalib's own lack of
interest in the later Moghul kings had something to do with it. The only favouarble result of his connection with the court between
1847 and 1857 was that he resumed writing in Urdu with a frequency not
experienced since the early 1820's. Many of these new poems are not
panegyrics, or occasional verses to celebrate this or that. He did, however,
write many ghazals which are of the same excellence and temper as his early
great work. Infact, it is astonishing that a man who had more or less given
up writing in Urdu thirty years before should, in a totally different time
and circumstance, produce work that is, on the whole, neither worse nor
better than his earlier work. One wonders just how many great poems were
permanently lost to Urdu when Ghalib chose to turn to Persian instead. In its material dimensions, Ghalib's life never really took root and
remained always curiously unfinished. In a society where almost everybody
seems to have a house of his own, Ghalib never had one and always rented one
or accepted the use of one from a patron. He never had books of his own,
usually reading borrowed ones. He had no children; the ones he had, died
in infancy, and he later adopted the two children of Arif, his wife's nephew
who died young in 1852. Ghalib's one wish, perhaps as strong as the wish to be a great
poet, that he should have a regular, secure income, never materialized.
His brother Yusuf, went mad in 1826, and died, still mad, in that year
of all misfortunes, 1857. His relations with his wife were, at
best, tentative, obscure and indifferent. Given the social structure
of mid-nineteenth-century Muslim India, it is, of course,
inconceivable that *any* marriage could have even begun to satisfy the
moral and intellectual intensities that Ghalib required from his
relationships; given that social order, however, he could not conceive
that his marriage could serve that function. And one has to confront the
fact that the child never died who, deprived of the security of having
a father in a male-oriented society, had had looked for material
but also moral certainities -- not certitudes, but certainities, something that
he can stake his life on. So, when reading his poetry it must
be remembered that it is the poetry of more than usually
vulnerable existence. It is difficult to say precisely what Ghalib's attitude
was toward the British conquest of India. The evidence is not
only contradictory but also incomplete. First of all, one has to
realize that nationalism as we know it today was simply non-existent
in nineteenth-century India. Second --one has to remember -- no
matter how offensive it is to some -- that even prior to the British,
India had a long history of invaders who created empires which were
eventually considered legitimate. The Moghuls themselves were such invaders.
Given these two facts, it would be unreasonable to expect Ghalib to have
a clear ideological response to the British invasion. There is also
evidence, quite clearly deducible from his letters, that Ghalib was
aware, on the one hand, of the redundancy, the intrigues, the sheer
poverty of sophistication and intellectual potential, and the lack of humane
responses from the Moghul court, and, on the other, of the powers of
rationalism and scientific progress of the West. Ghalib had many attitudes toward the British, most of
them complicated and quite contradictory. His diary of 1857, the
"Dast-Ambooh" is a pro-British document, criticizing the British
here and there for excessively harsh rule but expressing, on the whole,
horror at the tactics of the resistance forces. His letters,
however, are some of the most graphic and vivid accounts of British
violence that we possess. We also know that "Dast-Ambooh" was
always meant to be a document that Ghalib would make public, not only to
the Indian Press but specifically to the British authorities. And he
even wanted to send a copy of it to Queen Victoria. His letters, are to
the contrary, written to people he trusted very much, people who were
his friends and would not divulge their contents to the British
authorities. As Imtiyaz Ali Arshi has shown (at least to my satisfaction),
whenever Ghalib feared the intimate, anti-British contents of
his letters might not remain private, he requested their destruction,
as he did in th case of the Nawab of Rampur. I think it is reasonable
to conjecture that the diary, the "Dast-Ambooh", is a document
put together by a frightened man who was looking for avenues of safety
and forging versions of his own experience in order to please his oppressors,
whereas the letters, those private documents of one-to-one intimacy, are
more real in the expression of what Ghalib was in fact feeling at the
time. And what he was feeling, according to the letters, was horror at
the wholesale violence practised by the British. Yet, matters are not so simple as that either. We cannot
explain things away in terms of altogether honest letters and an
altogether dishonest diary. Human and intellectual responses are more
complex. The fact that Ghalib, like many other Indians at the time,
admired British, and therfore Western, rationalism as expressed in
constitutional law, city planning and more. His trip to Calcutta
(1828-29) had done much to convince him of the immediate values of
Western pragmatism. This immensely curious and human man from the narrow
streets of a decaying Delhi, had suddenly been flung into the broad,
well-planned avenues of 1828 Calcutta -- from the aging Moghul capital
to the new, prosperous and clean capital of the rising British power,
and , given the precociousness of his mind, he had not only walked on clean
streets, but had also asked the fundamental questions about the sort of mind
that planned that sort of city. In short, he was impressed by much that
was British. In Calcutta he saw cleanliness, good city planning, prosperity. He was
fascinated by the quality of the Western mind which was rational and
could conceive of constitutional government, republicanism, skepticism.
The Western mind was attractive particularly to one who, although fully
imbued with his feudal and Muslim background, was also attracted by
wider intelligence like the one that Western scientific thought offered:
good rationalism promised to be good government. The sense that this
very rationalism, the very mind that had planned the first modern city
in India, was also in the service of a brutral and brutalizing
mercantile ethic which was to produce not a humane society but an
empire, began to come to Ghalib only when the onslaught of 1857 caught up
with the Delhi of his own friends. Whatever admiration he had ever felt
for the British was seriously brought into question by the events of
that year, more particularly by the merciless-ness of the British in
their dealings with those who participated in or sympathized with the
Revolt. This is no place to go into the details of the massacre; I will
refer here only to the recent researches of Dr. Ashraf (Ashraf, K.M.,
"Ghalib & The Revolt of 1857", in Rebellion 1857, ed.,
P.C. Joshi, 1957), in India, which prove that at least 27,000 persons
were hanged during the summer of that one year, and Ghalib witnessed it
all. It was obviously impossible for him to reconcile this conduct with
whatever humanity and progressive ideals he had ever expected the Briish
to have possessed. His letters tell of his terrible dissatisfaction. Ghalib's ambivalence toward the British possibly represents
a characteristic dilemma of the Indian --- indeed, the Asian -- people.
Whereas they are fascinated by the liberalism of the Western mind
and virtually seduced by the possibility that Western science and
technology might be the answer to poverty and other problems of their material existence,
they feel a very deep repugnance for forms and intensities of violence
which are also peculiarly Western. Ghalib was probably not as fully aware of
his dilemma as the intellectuals of today might be; to assign such
awareness to a mid-nineteenth-century mind would be to violate it by
denying the very terms -- which means limitations --, as well -- of its
existence. His bewilderment at the extent of the destruction caused by
the very people of whose humanity he had been convinced can , however,
be understood in terms of this basic ambivalence. The years between 1857 and 1869 were neither happy nor
very eventful ones for Ghalib. During the revolt itself, Ghalib
remained pretty much confined to his house, undoubtedly frightened by
the wholesale masacres in the city. Many of his friends were
hanged, deprived of their fortunes, exiled from the city, or detained in
jails. By October 1858, he had completed his diary of the Revolt, the
"Dast-Ambooh", published it, and presented copies of it to the
British authorities, mainly with the purpose of proving that he had
not supported the insurrections. Although his life and immediate
possesions were spared, little value was attached to his writings; he
was flatly told that he was still suspected of having had loyalties
toward the Moghul king. During the ensuing years, his main source of
income continued to be the stipend he got from the Nawab of Rampur.
"Ud-i-Hindi", the first collection of his letters, was published
in October 1868. Ghalib died a few months later, on February 15th, 1869. |
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