GHALIB 1797–1869

Ghalib is probably the most frequently quoted poet of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India and Pakistan, where tens of millions of people know some of his Urdu poems by heart. His popularity, which has only grown since his death nearly a century and a half ago, is especially remarkable given the complexity of his work. Despite the fact that he is a difficult poet, his phrases, images, and ideas have become part of the common speech of Urdu and Hindi, which are closely interrelated languages. He wrote haunting love poems in a style that still seems contemporary, and his words and emotions are on the lips of lovers young and old everywhere on the subcontinent.

LIFE AND TIMES

India in the nineteenth century passed from one vast imperial power to another. The Mughal Empire, which at its height commanded 100 million people, had once boasted great wealth and military might. Babur (1483–1530), the first Mughal emperor, had brought with him rich traditions of Persian art and literature as well as his Islamic faith to create a new dynasty that would rule over the Hindu majority in India for three centuries. His grandson, the great Emperor Akbar, established a well-organized bureaucracy and permitted multiple religions to flourish, allowing Hindus to serve as generals and administrators.

The British arrived in India during Akbar’s reign. As Indian tea, cotton, silk, spices, and opium flowed into Britain, consumers there developed a growing appetite for Indian products. The profits of British companies soared. The French and the Dutch competed for the same goods, and tensions rose between European contenders for the Indian market. These hostilities would last until 1757, when the British defeated the French in battle and seized control of European trade with the entire subcontinent.

While the Europeans struggled for Indian markets, Akbar and his successors expanded the territory under Mughal control, bringing almost the entire Indian peninsula into the hands of the Mughals by the late seventeenth century. Their grand capital was Delhi, where they gathered the works of skilled artists in luxurious palaces. The majestic Taj Mahal, built in 1648 as the mausoleum for the favorite wife of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, captures the sumptuousness and grandeur of this period in Indian history. To European visitors, the enviably powerful Mughal Empire seemed home to untold riches.

In the seventeenth century, Emperor Aurangzeb, a devout Muslim who dismounted from his horse in the thick of battle to recite his evening prayers, pushed to expand the empire and succeeded—but only by stretching his resources to the point of collapse. Some Hindu kingdoms continued to resist Mughal control, and by the middle of the eighteenth century they had helped to weaken the empire. Attacks on Delhi by the Hindu Marathas, as well as foreign invaders from Persia and Afghanistan, further exhausted the regime.

As the Mughal Empire weakened, the British East India Company gradually assumed more and more military and administrative power. In 1804, the East India Company officially took control of India. At first, the British tended to leave local leaders in place rather than getting involved in direct administration; they did not try to convert Indians to Christianity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the nature of British control over India underwent a major shift. A new generation of British career men, feeling superior to the Indians, began a campaign to impose their own moral, linguistic, and cultural traditions on India. Christian missionaries arrived in ever larger numbers, and increasingly the British back home were whipped into an enthusiasm for advancing the “backward” peoples of India. Ironically, it was partly thanks to British imperialism that the Indians could be seen as backward in the first place. India had once had a thriving economy based on beautiful textiles—in 1700 it had been the leading exporter of woven cloth—but Britain’s cheap factory-made textiles and its demand for raw materials from India had forced many workers back into a peasant-based rural economy.

Born in Agra in December 1797, Asadullah Khan—later known by his literary pseudonym, Ghalib (“Conqueror” in Persian and Urdu)—was a descendant of Turkish military settlers in north India. His grandfather as well as his father and an uncle, who ranked as minor nobles in the Muslim ruling class of the nineteenth century, served in the Mughal emperor’s army. After his father died, when he was five, and his uncle, who then supported the extended family, died only three years later, Ghalib was raised mostly among his mother’s relatives. When he was thirteen, his family (then in financial decline) arranged his marriage to an eleven-year-old girl from a wealthier segment of the nobility. In 1810 he moved to Delhi, where the young couple lived in comfortable circumstances with support from her family, a dependence that was to continue for the rest of his life. The young poet, who had begun to write Urdu verse and prose at seven and in Persian by the age of nine, matured rapidly in the next few years, completing a significant portion of his oeuvre of Urdu poetry by 1816, when he was nineteen.

However, in 1822, partly in response to widespread incomprehension and criticism of his early poetry, Ghalib stopped writing verse in Urdu and switched to Persian as his only poetic medium—a practice he adhered to until 1850. Persian had been the premier literary language of Muslim society across Asia for much of the preceding seven or eight hundred years; and, since the end of the sixteenth century, it had also been the official imperial language of the subcontinent under the Mughals. By the 1840s Ghalib had produced a large body of poetry and prose in Persian, and he had become a prominent Indian authority on the language and its literature.

Despite his renown, much of Ghalib’s adult life was marked by bitter disappointments. He spent most of the 1820s unsuccessfully seeking an aristocratic patron near Delhi; in 1827–30, he tried in vain to secure a British pension in Calcutta; and in 1842 he failed to get a position as Persian instructor at Delhi College, a new British-Indian institution. Ghalib’s public humiliations reached a peak in 1847, when he was arrested for gambling in his home and imprisoned for three months. His personal and family life also proved to be deeply unhappy during this period. He and his wife had seven children, but none survived beyond the age of fifteen months, a cycle of tragedies that contributed to the couple’s emotional alienation from each other. In the 1840s Ghalib adopted his wife’s adult nephew ’Arif as his son, but the untimely deaths of both ’Arif and his wife from tuberculosis in 1852 only added to the poet’s sorrows. Ghalib’s elegy for ’Arif—included here as “It was essential”—remains one of his most famous poems today, a memorable mourning of human mortality and a celebration of family life and familial love. And yet his deepest emotional relationship—one that haunted him for more than forty years after its tragic end—may have been with a low-caste Hindu courtesan who died very young and whose loss he mourned publicly at her funeral and in his letters and poetry.

The year 1850 brought significant changes to the poet’s literary and professional life, and alleviated his financial circumstances to some extent. Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar—who proved to be the last in the long line of Mughal rulers on Delhi’s throne—commissioned Ghalib to write a history of the dynasty in Persian; and, four years later, the emperor finally appointed him as royal tutor and court poet. At Zafar’s urging, Ghalib also resumed writing poetry and prose in Urdu, the “mixed” language (combining Hindi syntax and Persian vocabulary) that was the first language of north-Indian Muslims. In the 1850s and 1860s Ghalib became the most sought-after master of Urdu and Persian poetry among Muslim as well as Hindu writers, developing a rich and voluminous correspondence in Urdu with more than four hundred friends and admirers of various faiths across the subcontinent.

The events of 1857, however, transformed Ghalib’s life and his beloved city of Delhi irreversibly. The “Mutiny” (now often called the First Indian War of Independence from British rule) started that summer and quickly overtook the Mughal capital, where large-scale violence ravaged all segments of Muslim and Hindu society over several months, first with the arrival of large contingents of Indian soldiers rebelling against the British colonial army, and subsequently with British retaliation. After crushing the uprising and arresting and deporting the emperor, the British administration and British militias summarily executed some 3,000 citizens of Delhi and razed the most densely populated part of the city (now known as Old Delhi), exiling its inhabitants to the surrounding countryside. Several hundreds of Ghalib’s fellow-courtiers, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors—Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh—lost their lives, families, homes, or property; and for many months he lived in fear for his own life and the safety of his family. In 1858 he published Dastanbuy, his personal account of these events, which asserted his political innocence in the Mughal court’s complicity with the rebels.

Ghalib survived the catastrophe of 1857 by a dozen years, but as a broken and lonely man. He wrote some of his best late poems in Urdu in the 1850s and early 1860s, but old age, deteriorating eyesight and hearing, and long illness increasingly confined him to his dilapidated home in Delhi; much of this is foreshadowed in his first poem in our selection, “Now Go and Live in a Place.” Despite his personal difficulties, however, he kept up a vivid and generous correspondence with younger poets and admirers, including the close Hindu friends who preserved his works. These letters became a celebrated part of his oeuvre in his own lifetime, when, in 1868, they were collected and published as Urdu-i-mu’alla.

Looking back from our own times, Ghalib’s life and poetry seem to represent the Indian subcontinent’s transition from tradition to modernity in all its many-sided complexity. He was the last major poet to be trained in the traditional disciplines (language, poetics, philosophy, and theology), and to work only in inherited forms, even as Indian society engaged fully with Western-style modernity. He was the first—and last—traditional writer to publish his work in the print medium in his own lifetime (which he did around its midpoint), and to experience at first hand the extraordinary transformation that print culture brings to long-standing cultures of manuscript circulation, by fundamentally changing the nature of authorship, the author-audience connection, and literary reputation itself. He also underwent this experience by positioning himself quite uniquely in the shadowy space between tradition and modernity. While most of his contemporaries confronted the British presence in India from the perspective of a traditional “Hindu” or “Muslim” identity, Ghalib explicitly located himself in a prior synthesis of Muslim and Hindu cultures (or a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization) that was open to a productive interaction with European culture. His life and career thus give us a glimpse into the unusual “triangle” of Muslim, Hindu, and European cultures intersecting in unprecedented proximity in the turmoil of nineteenth-century India.

WORK

Ghalib composed his poetry entirely in the inherited verse forms and genres of Persian and Urdu, both influenced heavily by Arabic traditions and the literary conventions of Islam. His favorite form in both Persian and Urdu was the ghazal, but he also wrote the equivalents of odes, panegyrics, satires, epigrams, epithalamiums, verse-epistles, prayers, and chronograms. The ghazal, invented in classical Arabic but widely practiced throughout the past millennium in Persian and Urdu, among other languages, is technically one of the most demanding metrical forms in world poetry. A ghazal consists of a sequence of couplets—most often between five and twelve in number—in a single meter; and each couplet is end-stopped, hence representing one complete poetic thought. All the couplets in a ghazal have to be connected to each other by end-rhyme; the rhyme, however, has to occur at the end of each couplet, not in an isolated word but in an entire phrase. This “rhyming phrase” has two required parts: a final word or set of words that is repeated in each couplet, and hence serves as a refrain; and a word preceding the refrain that rhymes with the corresponding word in each of the other couplets. The rhyming phrase in a ghazal thus consists of a “monorhyme” followed by a refrain. The following metrical translation of two separate couplets from an Urdu ghazal by Ghalib captures this pattern in English, with the repeated word “good” at the end of each couplet defining the refrain, and “more” and “restore” representing the monorhyme that precedes it.

The beauty of the moon, its sheer beauty when it’s full, is good—

And yet, compared to it, her beauty dazzles like the sun, is more than good.

When my face lights up merely because she has looked at me,

She thinks, mistakenly, the patient’s on the mend, restored for good.

The stringent rules of the ghazal also require that the opening couplet contain this rhyme-and-repetition pattern in both its lines (rather than only in the second one), thus defining the paradigm strongly; and that the closing couplet contain the poet’s literary pseudonym, thus embedding the author’s signature in the ghazal itself. This complicated structure leaves the poet free to make each couplet an entire miniature poem that is thematically and rhetorically independent of the other couplets. At the same time, it challenges him to create a thematic continuity against impossible prosodic odds. In the history of the ghazal across Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, Ghalib stands out as an astonishing craftsman who could construct continuous poetic arguments within the strictest constraints of meter, repetition, and rhyme, without sacrificing wit, emotional integrity, intellectual rigor, and range of experience. Among the examples included in our selection, his versatility with the ghazal is especially evident in “I’ve made my home next door to you,” “It was essential,” and “My tongue begs for the power of speech.”

The poems below display Ghalib’s imaginative range and depth in several genres in Urdu. The three poems just mentioned, together with “Now go and live in a place,” are translations of complete ghazals, and they capture the recursive structure of the form as closely as possible in metrical English, while retaining the semantic richness of the originals. Of these, “I’ve made my home next door to you” is represented in two parallel translations, one rendering the ghazal as a “secular” piece (a lover’s plea and complaint), and the other highlighting the same text as a “sacred” poem (about love between God and human beings); the original conveys both meanings simultaneously, which is impossible to achieve in a single English version. In contrast, “Where’s the foothold” is a translation of a complete poem that is composed as a single unrhymed couplet, but is nevertheless classified among Ghalib’s ghazals in Urdu. The separate selection of couplets offers self-contained verses taken from a dozen different ghazals, each presenting a complete and independent poetic thought with epigrammatic force. The final piece, “Petition: My Salary,” is an excerpt from one of Ghalib’s miscellaneous poems, addressed to Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was formally his literary student as well as his royal employer; in this unusual verse epistle, he sought to improve his working conditions and salary as court poet. Most of the poems here contain “Ghalib” as the poet’s signature, and hence they may belong to the latter half of his career; the exception is the prayer “My tongue begs for the power of speech,” which refers to him as “Asad,” the pseudonym he used often as a young man.

Ghalib’s value as a poet also rests on his larger cultural position. In the predominantly Sunni Muslim community of nineteenth-century Delhi, he professed to be a Shi’a; in the midst of organized Sunni Islam, with its mosques, public prayers and rituals, and powerful clerics, he adopted a radical and subversive Sufism in private, as evident from “I’ve made my home next door to You.” He did not practice the five daily prayers or the weekly Friday prayer, did not fast during the month of Ramadan, and did not undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca; at the same time, he conspicuously violated the taboo against alcohol—among the “sins committed” that he mentions in the third piece in our selection of couplets. Moreover, as the fifth couplet in that selection shows, he openly advocated a complete reconciliation between Islam and Hinduism, arguing for a secular merger in shared ways of everyday life. Ghalib was also a universal humanist before his time, as the sixth couplet indicates: in his view, being fully human was more essential than, and prior to, being either Muslim or Hindu, believer or infidel. He actively sympathized with, acted for, and spoke out on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed, and he was doggedly committed to freedom of thought and speech, always speaking his mind tactfully yet forcefully, regardless of his interlocutor’s status or power. At the same time, his contemporaries valued him immensely for his personal kindness and generosity: he had a remarkable gift for friendship, and he conducted himself with wit, humor, and dignity even with his enemies. We see all these qualities vividly at work in his extraordinary prayer “My tongue begs for the power of speech,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime, perhaps because of its subversively modern message.

Ghalib was one of the last figures in a seven-century tradition of Persian writing in India; while his Persian prose was a model for a few later writers, his Persian poetry (about 11,000 verses) has had little effect on later poets in India or Pakistan, and none on poets in Iran. In contrast, his Urdu prose (in his letters) and especially his Urdu poetry have deeply influenced writers and readers in every generation after him. His ghazals have perpetuated this traditional form among Indian, Pakistani, and diasporic Urdu writers down to the present; and, just as importantly, they have spread the ghazal tradition among other contemporary Indian languages, such as Punjabi, Hindi, and Marathi. Since the international commemoration of the centenary of Ghalib’s death in 1969, dozens of American, British, and Irish poets—from Adrienne Rich to Paul Muldoon—have cultivated the Ghalib-style ghazal in English. Since the mid-twentieth century, in India as well as Pakistan, Ghalib’s ghazals have been set to music and performed, live and in recordings, by many popular singers, and his life and work have been the subjects of several films and a television serial. A century and a half after his death, Ghalib remains a living presence in the two countries that have inherited his poetic legacy.