Ghalib, by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (introduction)

G H A L I B SELECTED POEMS and LETTERS

T R A N S L AT E D BY

FRANCES W. PRITCHETT

and OWEN T.A. CORNWALL

Introduction Ghalib’s Life and Times

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Mughal empire, once in control of almost the entire Indian subcontinent, was hanging by a thread.

The repeated invasions by Iranians, Afghans, and Marathas in the course of the eighteenth century had left the Mughal emperors in possession of little beyond the imperial Red Fort in Delhi and their title. In 1803, the British East India Company o cers with their Indian sepoy army captured Delhi and consolidated their hold on North India. From then on, the Mughal emperors were British pensioners.

The traditional date of Ghalib’s birth is 1797, in Agra, into a family of Turkish descent and military background.1 Ghalib’s father died when the boy was only ve, and the family was supported by an uncle, Nasrullah Beg Khan. This uncle, having surrendered the Agra fort to the British in 1803, joined the East India Company army. When he died in 1806, Ghalib was entitled to a signi cant portion of his British pension, but another, better-connected relative diverted much of it. For decades Ghalib petitioned the indi erent British bureaucracy for his rightful share, even making an arduous but ultimately vain journey to the East India Company’s capital in Calcutta in 1828. His nancial circumstances were always precarious, but he nevertheless aspired to live in a style be tting a late-Mughal aristocrat.

The young Ghalib was precocious, talented, and hardworking. In 1813 he moved permanently from Agra to Delhi. At nineteen he compiled his rst collection of poetry, and during his twenties he continued to compose ghazals in the highly Persianized Urdu that had begun to supplant Persian itself in the literary life of Delhi. His middle decades were devoted chie y to poems and letters in Persian.

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Persian was the “great tradition” on which he wanted to leave his mark.

Although he felt little or no nostalgia for the political achievements of the Mughal empire, he cultivated the aesthetics of the sixteenth-century Persian poets who had migrated between the Safavid and Mughal empires in pursuit of patronage. In this respect, he might properly be considered the last great writer of the classical Indo-Persian poetic tradition, before the devastating social and cultural ruptures of 1857, when a rebellion against the British was met with ferocious reprisals. But to Ghalib’s regret, Persian was increasingly on the wane in North India during his lifetime.

Late in life he composed additional ghazals in Urdu, at the behest of Bahadur Shah “Zafar” (r. 1837–1858), the last Mughal emperor, and other patrons. But he always insisted that he was really a Persian poet, for whom Urdu was only a secondary poetic language. Some evidence of his pride in his Urdu poetry can be found in his letters (and in the closing-verse of ghazal 19, though it is early), but only enough for a kind of “minority report.” Ironically, it was his Urdu poetry and letters that brought him fame, while his work in Persian has received very little attention.

As part of his aristocratic self-image, Ghalib took pride in his position of honor at the East India Company’s durbar, where as a member of a prominent family he was accorded an elaborate title and a ceremonial robe of honor. His pension, even when supplemented by stipends from rich admirers of his poetry, was barely enough to support his household. He had been married at the age of thirteen to Umrao Begam, a distant relative from a richer branch of the family; they had a number of children, all of whom died in infancy or early childhood. The couple adopted two orphaned boys from his wife’s side of the family and raised them a ectionately. Relations between Ghalib and his wife were always correct, in the formal style of the time, but the two seem not to have been particularly compatible in temperament. His biographer and one-time pupil Altaf Husain “Hali” reports that Ghalib was a dutiful husband: he lived in the men’s quarters, but his wife duly looked after his food and other needs, and he never failed to go once a day to the women’s quarters “at an appointed time” to see her; he was very kind to her relatives as well.2 Throughout his life Ghalib participated in mush iras hosted at venues ranging from private houses to the royal court. Steeped in etiquette, these literary gatherings for poetry recitation also served as opportunities to socialize, smoke the hookah, chew betel nut, earn the admiration of some [2]

new patron, and train one’s pupils. For the backbone of poetic education was the master-pupil relationship, in which the pupil (sh gird) submitted poems to the master (ust d) for correction. Though Ghalib never really had such an ust d himself, he had numerous pupils, including Muslims, Hindus, a British o cer, various aristocratic nawabs, and eventually Bahadur Shah himself. Ghalib often provided his corrections to their verses through the newly recon gured East India Company post o ce, which allowed him to maintain an expansive and diverse circle of friends.

Ghalib’s large body of well-preserved correspondence also re ects his historical position in the vanguard of print culture in North India. His Urdu and Persian letters, which his friends cherished, were collected and printed in his lifetime. He was centrally involved with printing the Persian poetry that was his pride and joy. But his collection (divan) of Urdu poetry also was printed under his supervision four times (1841, 1847, 1861, 1862). Along with books came other new print media. On his trip to Calcutta, Ghalib read newspapers, a medium that did not reach North India until around 1837.

Newspapers were double-edged swords: they printed poetry but also dealt in scandal. In 1847, a zealous colonial administrator arrested Ghalib on charges of holding gambling sessions in his house, and the titillating news circulated rapidly in Persian newspapers, spreading as far as the distant city of Bombay.

His brief, nonrigorous imprisonment loomed large in his memory as a period of solitude, su ering, and bitter social humiliation.

Nothing could ever crush Ghalib’s spirits for long, however. His mischievous sense of humor often involved him in controversy, as did his unshakeable faith in his own literary and poetic gifts. In defending his complex Persian poetry, he engaged in lengthy lexicographical disputes and provocative criticism. Dismissing more than ve centuries of Persian poetry in India, he claimed, “Except for Amir Khusrau of Delhi [d.1325], there is no master of Persian among the Indians.”3 He regularly drank wine—though usually in modest amounts and diluted with rose water. A beloved anecdote tells of his response to a colonial o cer who asked him, in 1857, whether he was a Muslim: “Half a Muslim,” Ghalib replied. “I drink wine; I don’t eat pork.”4 In his Persian account of the rebellion of 1857, he wrote, “I am no more than half a Muslim, for I am free from the bonds of convention and religion, and have liberated my soul from the fear of men’s tongues. It has always been my habit at night to drink French wine, and if I did not get it, I could not sleep.”5 [3]

Ghalib’s resistance to religious rules like the prohibition of alcohol was often articulated within the Su tradition that had been prominent in Persian and Arabic poetry for over a millennium. By the nineteenth century, intoxication from wine drinking was a well-established metaphor for the rapture of divine revelation. The Su vision of “the Divine creating the world in order to know Himself as in a mirror”6 explains a great deal about the ubiquitous mirror imagery in Ghalib’s poetry. But the stylized nature of the ghazal makes it di cult to tell much about Ghalib’s personal religious life from his poetry alone. In the stagecraft of poetry, it is all too easy to take the play for the playwright. From his letters, however, we can see how Ghalib resisted doctrinaire attitudes and turned away any requests to engage in religious polemic.

We also nd him abjuring atheism and proclaiming his love for the Prophet Muhammad—only to colorfully lambaste a preacher for hectoring him. His respect for Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, especially beloved by Shia Muslims) is also palpable, though it would be a mistake to draw strong conclusions about his sectarian a liations. His wide circle of friends was religiously diverse, and he deplored sectarian controversies.

When mutinous sepoys of the East India Company army marched from Meerut to Delhi in 1857, killing British o cers and civilians, they proclaimed their loyalty to the elderly Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah; Delhi became the center of a rebellion that spread across much of North India. The jails were emptied, mansions were looted, the postal service was disrupted, social order was at an end. The streets were full of riotous lower-class ruffians, for whom Ghalib felt deep disdain. Stranded in his house, he endured real physical privations and intense emotional su ering. When the British nally retook the city, the terrors continued.

The British executed suspected rebels en masse; many members of the royal family were hanged. After the expulsion of almost all the city’s Muslims (whom the British blamed for the revolt), only a quarter of the original population of Delhi remained. The emperor was tried as a rebel and exiled to Burma; Queen Victoria now directly ruled British India.

Delhi was wracked by famine and disease. The time of the rebellion and its aftermath was the hardest period in Ghalib’s life. He lost many friends on all sides and was deprived of almost all his precarious sources of income.

After 1857, he virtually ceased to compose ghazals. Finally, in 1860 his British pension and durbar honors were restored, to his immense relief.

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In the last years of Ghalib’s life, his eyesight and hearing began to fail. Yet he continued to court controversy by insisting on his superior knowledge of Persian, thus involving himself in lexicographical pamphleteering, vicious name-calling, and even lawsuits. In response to a particularly nasty insult, Ghalib is reported to have smiled and said, “The idiot doesn’t even know how to abuse a man. If your man is elderly or middle-aged you abuse his daughter. . . . If he’s young, you abuse his wife . . . and if he’s only a boy, you abuse his mother. This pimp abuses the mother of a man of seventy-two.

Who could be a bigger fool than that?” When a friend asked why he had not replied to an attack, Ghalib said, “If you are kicked by a donkey, do you kick it back?”7 Ghalib died in 1869. On his deathbed he was still waiting and hoping (in vain) for a gift of money from a patron that would enable him at least to clear his debts. The funeral was held outside Delhi Gate, and he was buried near the shrine of the thirteenth-century Su saint Nizam al-Din Auliya (though Ghalib’s present tomb dates only from 1955). According to Hali, there was a disagreement about whether the funeral should be held with Sunni or Shia rites. Hali ends the story by saying that it would have been a more tting tribute had they used both.8

Ghalib and His Contemporaries Hali’s biography Y dg r-i gh lib (A memorial to Ghalib, 1897) has been a tremendous resource for Ghalib scholarship, because it o ers a candid, insightful, sympathetic but not hagiographical account of the man, his life, and his poetry, from the perspective of someone who knew him well.

It is the mother lode for the great traditional anecdotes, like the following one that highlights Ghalib’s well-known love for wordplay and mangoes: “The late Hakim Razi ud-Din Khan was an extremely close friend of Mirza’s [Ghalib’s]. He didn’t care for mangoes. One day he was seated in the verandah of Mirza’s house, and Mirza was there as well. A donkey driver passed through the lane with his donkey. Some mango skins were lying there; the donkey took a sni , then left them. The Hakim Sahib said, ‘Look—a mango is such that even a donkey doesn’t eat it!’ Mirza said, ‘Without a doubt, a donkey doesn’t eat it.’ ”

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He showed a similarly rakish wit and wordplay when dealing with the emperor Bahadur Shah as well: “One time when the month of Ramzan had just passed, he went to the Fort. The King asked, ‘Mirza, how many days of fasting did you keep?’ He petitioned, ‘My Lord and Guide, I did not keep one.’ ”9 One nal anecdote is so revelatory of Ghalib’s temperament that it is impossible not to include it. It is told by Muhammad Husain “Azad,” in the great canon-forming literary history b-i ay t (The water of life, 1880), and later retold by Hali as well: In 1842 the English government decided to reorganize the a airs of Delhi College. Thomason Sahib, who for a number of years had been Lieutenant Governor of the Northwestern Province, was Secretary at that time. He came to Delhi to interview the teachers. And just as there was a teacher of Arabic at one hundred rupees a month, he wished for there to be such a teacher of Persian also. People told him the names of some accomplished ones. Mirza’s name too was among these. Mirza Sahib came, as he had been invited to do.

Announcement was made to the Sahib. Mirza Sahib came out of his palanquin, and stayed there waiting for the Secretary Sahib to come, according to long custom, and receive him. When neither the one went in, nor the other came out, and quite some time passed, then the Secretary Sahib asked his doorkeeper about it. That man came out again and asked, “Why don’t you come in?” Mirza Sahib said, “The Sahib has not come out to receive me. How can I go in?” The doorkeeper again went and reported.

The Sahib came outside and said, “When you come to the governor’s court in your capacity as a nobleman, then you will receive the customary honor.

But at the present time you have come for employment. You are not entitled to this honor.” Mirza Sahib said, “I consider government service a reason for additional honor, not something in which I would lose my ancestral honor also!” The Sahib said, “I am bound by regulations.” Mirza Sahib took his leave and came away.10

We have, as even more valuable sources, a large number of Ghalib’s Urdu letters, as well as some in Persian, dating mostly from the last two decades of his life. What is surprising is that they were not only saved and assiduously collected by his friends and pupils but also compiled into a volume

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and printed shortly before his death (initially, over his objections)—at a time when printing was comparatively uncommon. Most of these letters were warm, informal, and chatty, in a way unprecedented in Urdu literature. They have an immediacy and colloquial vigor that is almost irresistible. Here is how he wrote (in 1852) to encourage a close friend, the poet Tafta, to send along verses to Ghalib for correction: Listen, Sahib! You know that the late Zain ul-Abidin Khan was my son, and now both his sons, who are my grandsons, have come to stay with me, and they constantly pester me, and I put up with it. The Lord is my witness—I consider you in the place of a son to me. Thus the o spring of your temperament [i.e., your verses] have become my grandsons in spirit. When I don’t get annoyed with these physical grandsons—who don’t let me eat my food, who don’t let me sleep in the afternoon, who walk with their bare feet all over my bed; here they overturn the water, there they stir up the dust—then how will I become annoyed with these grandsons in spirit, who do none of these things? Please send them o to me quickly by post, so that I can look at them.

I promise that then I’ll send them back to you quickly by post.11

Sometimes, however, Ghalib seems in his letters to be an unreliable narrator. We have included in part 3 of this volume two examples that illustrate his readiness to reshape his early biography to suit his current concerns. They are the two letters that he wrote to his friend Mihr in June 1860. Both of them seek to console Mihr for the death of a beloved mistress—but what di erent approaches they take! The rst one over ows with sympathy, the second one is in snap-out-of-it mode. The rst letter presents Ghalib as a romantic fellow su erer who similarly lost a mistress in his long-ago youth, to his lifelong and unforgettable grief. The second presents Ghalib as having learned in his youth from a wise and worldly master how to be “a sugar y, not a honey y”—how to enjoy and then move on, refusing to drown in sorrow. Which letter (if either one) is accurate? There is no way for us to tell. Nowadays most people, including some scholars, tend to take the enticing rst letter as true and ignore the cynical second one. But the actual evidence (did he really have a mistress? did she really die? was he really deeply grieved?) is so scanty and uncertain that we will probably never know the truth.

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Ghalib and His Critics Controversies about Ghalib’s ghazals began during his lifetime, and they have never since come to an end. The literary historian Muhammad Husain Azad conspicuously disliked Ghalib, and in b-i ay t he criticized him severely for his convoluted Persianized style and his love of multivalence and “meaning creation” (ma n - fir n ). Azad conceded that “if some verse manages to come out without convolutions, it’s as devastating as Doomsday” but claimed that there were not more than “one or two hundred” such verses in his whole divan. Thus, according to Azad, Ghalib’s friends complained that his verses were so obscure that they were meaningless (“he himself might understand, or God might understand!”), and eventually they actually wore him down: “For this reason, toward the end of his life he absolutely renounced the path of ‘delicate thought.’ Thus if you look, the ghazals of the last period are quite clear and lucid.”

Azad tells us how Ghalib’s friends teased him by arranging to have a minor poet recite a “ghazal in the style of Ghalib” with the following opening-verse: The circle of the axis of the heavens is not at the lip of the water, The ngernail of the arc of the rainbow does not resemble a plectrum.

Azad is careful to add, “Ghalib was a owing river. He used to listen, and laugh.” But the point has been made: Ghalib wrote poetry in which “the words were extremely re ned and colorful, but the verse absolutely without meaning,” and everybody knew this and mocked him for it.12 Azad is not our only source for such anecdotes. Hali contributes another wryly amusing account, in which one of Ghalib’s friends asks him to explain a verse that he purports to have found in his divan: First take the essence of the rose out of the eggs of bu aloes— And other drugs are there; take those out of the eggs of bu aloes.

The astonished Ghalib soon realized that his friend “was objecting to his work and was insisting that there were verses like this in his divan.”

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Hali notes that Ghalib was not easily intimidated and in fact incorporated into his verses a rm de ance of his critics, as in the following clear example: Neither a longing for praise, nor a care for reward— If there’s no meaning in my verses, then so be it.13 But Hali goes on to argue, just as Azad does, that in later life Ghalib duly saw the error of his ways and ceased to write such di cult poetry.

Certainly Ghalib had to endure the lifelong hostility of those who genuinely preferred a simpler and more colloquial poetic style, one with an emphasis on romantic emotion rather than on more cerebral and metaphysical pleasures. In the aftermath of 1857, the loss of the old aristocratic world, with its leisured and wealthy patrons, was accompanied by a steady drumbeat of Victorian triumphalism and e orts at literary and cultural “reform.” There grew up in due course a strong new movement in favor of “natural poetry” (necharal sh ir ), further reinforcing what might be called Wordsworthian trends (poetry in “the real language of men”) in Urdu literature. Then in the earlier part of the twentieth century, the Progressive Movement insisted that poetry should emphasize workaday concerns, nationalism, and the uplift of the downtrodden. It seems as though the end of this story ought to be that Ghalib’s poetry gradually faded from view.

Yet somehow just the opposite happened. People have continued to nd his poetry mesmerizing. Most of Ghalib’s critics have ended up considerably deader than Ghalib. His poetry has given rise to dozens of books of discussion and tribute, translations into many languages, paintings, lms, plays, waxwork dioramas, and countless musical renderings by singers of every kind, in a steady ow with no end in sight. Most strikingly of all, his poetry has inspired over a hundred commentaries—works that generally go through the 234 ghazals of the published divan and explain the meaning(s) of each of their 1,459 verses.14 To appreciate the magnitude of this commentarial literature, it is necessary only to note that other classical Urdu poets have, as a rule, exactly zero commentaries; even Ghalib’s great predecessor Mir Taqi “Mir” has no more than one or two. Most of these devoted commentators apparently aim to defend Ghalib against the charge of writing “meaningless” verses, by equipping each verse with precisely one meaning before moving on to the next.

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(Their work has its counterpart in the “helpful” insertion of English punctuation into Ghalib’s verse by almost all modern editors.)

But no matter how many of Ghalib’s admirers cannot explain why they love him—nevertheless, love him they do. Even if the melding of form and content makes these tough, punchy little poems next to untranslatable, there they are, constantly tantalizing, constantly calling out to us in invitation and challenge and delight. As Ghalib put it so well in the last verse in his divan, With a special style, Ghalib has sung of subtleties, It’s a public invitation, for subtlety-knowing friends.15

Ghalib and the Urdu Ghazal The Urdu ghazal—Ghalib’s favorite genre, and the crown jewel of IndoMuslim poetry—consists of a number of independent two-line verses unied only by rhyming elements and meter; these verses are most often recited independently, and each must make its own poetic impact. Since each verse is only fteen or twenty words long, every word must count, and as many words as possible must count in more than one way. Thus ghazal verses need a strong support network of shared prior knowledge and stylized tropes.

Newcomers to the ghazal world often ask why, if each two-line verse is so independent, the whole ghazal exists at all. Ultimately, from the poet’s point of view the ghazal provides the sort of framework that, say, a velvetlined case provides for a matched set of jewelry. The necklaces, earrings, brooches, bracelets, rings in the set may be brought out selectively and in any order, but they are guaranteed to resonate well together, and subsets of them will always enhance one another in various ways. (From the listener’s point of view, the ghazal is like a box of chocolates that are outwardly identical; only as you bite down on each one do you discover whether its heart is creamy, nutty, or full of some liqueur.)

The jewel case itself is made of meter and rhyme. The meter is imported directly from Arabic and Persian and is precisely de ned and scrupulously adhered to: in most meters, every single line in the ghazal must contain [ 10 ]

precisely the same prescribed sequence of long and short syllables.16 The rhyme consists of at least one rhyming syllable (q f ya) at the end of each two-line verse, normally followed by a brief refrain (rad f). These two-line verses are technically not couplets, since they do not rhyme.

The rst verse of a ghazal commonly incorporates the rhyme and refrain at the end of both lines, instead of only at the end of the second line. Such a rst verse is called an opening-verse (matla ). Under the performance conditions of a mush ira, this feature enables listeners to perceive the formal structure of the ghazal more quickly: they can at once tell how much will be rhyme and how much will be refrain. The last verse commonly includes the poet’s chosen pen name, and such a verse is called a closing-verse (maqta ).

Both these features of course re ect the ghazal’s strong expectation of oral performance.

A mush ira, the traditional venue for oral performance, usually consisted of a smallish group of (almost always male) patrons, connoisseurs, master poets, and apprentices. Most mush iras were based on a well-known “pattern” line announced in advance, so that everybody’s ghazals composed in this pattern were formally identical (sharing meter, rhyme, and refrain).

This formal identity made them extremely comparable, and individual achievement stood out strikingly. Recitation of the rst line of a verse was followed by a longish pause full of praise and exclamatory comment from the audience, after which the rst line was repeated and then at last followed by the second line. Mush iras were thus lively and participatory. This style of oral presentation created an interval during which the audience had access to the rst line but not the second—with possibilities for creating suspense, misdirection, and surprise that became major factors, along with complex wordplay, in the development of the ghazal’s poetics.

At the most basic thematic level, the ghazal is the rst-person voice of a passionate male lover who laments his lack of access to his beloved. In some verses the beloved is clearly feminine (as for example when women’s clothing or veiling is mentioned); she is then either a courtesan or an inaccessible lady in purdah. In other verses the beloved is clearly masculine (as when the beginnings of the coquettish adolescent boy’s beard are said to appear, destroying his androgynous charm; think of Plato’s Symposium).

In most verses, the gender of the beloved is not revealed. This undecideability is due partly to the brevity of the verses and to the emphasis on the lover’s own perspective and feelings. The beloved is in any case always [ 11 ]

treated as grammatically masculine, perhaps because only masculine pronouns are considered to be appropriate for God—since in the ghazal world, the ultimate beloved is God. In the present volume, we generally refer to the beloved with feminine pronouns. This practice is mostly for clarity: since the lover is always masculine, having a feminine beloved as the default makes it easier to show, in translation, who did what to whom.

Even if the beloved is human, he or she is a kind of divinely powerful and inaccessible being, one whose beauty is fatal. The lover knows from the beginning that he is doomed. This genre thus has at its heart a mood of desperate, mystical, romantic love-as-death, pain-as-pleasure.

The beloved is irresistibly beautiful and always somehow unavailable. The lover’s passion is always transgressive, unstoppable, doomed; the lover would have it no other way and pities those unable to share this transcendent experience. The ghazal universe is thus pervaded by imagery drawn from the most uncontrollable human experiences: intoxication, sex, madness, death. Life in the ghazal world is always on the edge—scenes are set in the desert, the winehouse, the garden, the road, the prison cell, the sca old. These stylized settings of the ghazal world, and their supporting cast of characters (the Rival, the Messenger, the Doorkeeper, the Adviser, the Ascetic), are all precisely calibrated to accompany this passion play.

In the ghazal world there is no marriage, no family life, no work, no raising of children—nothing at all to domesticate the wildness of the lover’s mad quest.

Some modern readers have worried over the depiction of the beloved as a beautiful boy; the possible implications of pedophilia distress them. But if the beloved can be envisioned as a beautiful boy or a courtesan, he can also be God, and plainly the ghazal lives in a world of its own and thus is the very reverse of autobiographical. For if the beloved is a denizen of that ghazal world, so too is the lover, who can speak as a caged bird, a hunted animal, a naked madman, a drunkard, or himself after his own death.17 The point is the transgressiveness, the liminality, the rush to break out of this awed, doomed, super cial worldly life into a larger, truer universe of passion; thus the ghazal often lends itself to Su interpretations. The Moth ying into the candle ame is one of the ghazal’s emblematic images; the burning, melting, self-consuming candle itself is another; and the blossoming rose whose “smile” is also her death warrant is a third. In the ghazal world the conversion of pain into joy, and joy back into pain, is fundamental—just as [ 12 ]

the beloved is an “idol” and the lover an “idolater,” but their bond may also represent the deepest, truest religious feeling.

The thematic world of the ghazal is learned by the aspiring poet through the memorization and recitation of literally thousands of verses. Over time, the ghazal world is extended through the ongoing development of layers of metaphor; attractive new metaphorical conceits are picked up by other poets and thus become established. If the beloved is fatally beautiful, she can be imagined as a hunter, with the hapless lover as her prey. If she is a hunter, her glances might be deadly weapons. In that case her eyelashes may be arrows; then naturally they must be shot from the bow of her eyebrow.

This trope is so well established that Ghalib makes an enjoyably ambiguous verse simply by inviting us to rethink it: Is that coquettish glance shot from the eyebrow?

It’s de nitely an arrow, but it has a di erent bow.18 In this shared thematic world, even everyday items have all, and only, the qualities that are poetically required of them. The liver, for example, makes blood. Mirrors can be either metal or glass, depending on whether the poet wishes to polish or break them. Examples of such poetically de ned images can be found in the glossary.

All ghazal poets thus work in the same stylized (but not at all xed) world and have access to the same tool kit. Their tools include the word ky , which means so much more than “what”; the word ek, which means so much more than simply “one”; the grammatical fact that if you say A is B, you are also saying B is A. When Ghalib practiced the extravagant “meaning creation” for which he was so (in)famous, he used these and many more such tools to make fteen or twenty words do almost impossible amounts of work.

Let us consider one more simple but powerful device from that tool kit, one that has the great advantage of being translatable: Ardor complains, even in the heart, about narrowness of space.

In a pearl was absorbed the restlessness of the sea.19 We know that these two lines must be intimately related, for in classical poetics a verse that lacked a tight “connection” (rabt) would be a failure by de nition. But how are we to connect them? Perhaps the rst line is the [ 13 ]

real subject of the verse and describes a situation of the heart’s struggle and inability, while the second line illustrates and con rms it (a heart vainly trying to contain ardor is like a pearl vainly trying to contain the restlessness of the sea). Or perhaps the rst line describes the heart’s impossible, unsustainable situation, and the second line emphasizes it with a metaphorical example of something seemingly impossible but nevertheless achievable (a heart cannot succeed in containing ardor, even though a pearl may successfully contain the restlessness of the sea).

Or perhaps the two lines represent two di erent situations that are to be compared in their own right. The rst line may describe the struggle of the heart to contain ardor, while the second describes the struggle of the pearl to contain the restlessness of the sea. Perhaps we are invited to re ect on the similarity of these two ultimately vain struggles. Or perhaps we are invited to re ect on the contrast between the two: the rst task is in vain, while the second may be thought of as successful.

Or nally (though there is no nality here), perhaps the real subject of the verse is the inner life of the pearl, with its struggle to contain in its “heart” the “ardor” of the restlessness of the sea; in this case the rst line is a metaphorical depiction of the situation described in the second line.

And we cannot just smile at the idea of the pearl as having an inner life, for in the ghazal world a pearl is the outcome of a terrifying, risky journey by a single drop of water: In the net of every wave is a circle of a hundred crocodile mouths, Let’s see what happens to the drop on the way to becoming a pearl.20 In Islamic (and also Indic) folk tradition, a pearl is formed from a drop of rain that falls into the sea and must survive long enough to reach the seabed and be ingested by an oyster. Such an ardent, passionate drop, successful in its mystical quest, can well be imagined to have, as a pearl, an inner life that somehow embodies the restlessness of the sea.

All these e ects are achieved by the device of juxtaposing two grammatically separate and thematically di erent lines, so as to invite or require the reader to tease out the many ways in which they could be connected.

How extraordinary, then, that this common, readily usable, frequently used structural device has no name (we call it A, B structure) and has received almost no critical attention until very recently. Nor is there any term for [ 14 ]

the “ky e ect,” although it is pervasive throughout the classical ghazal, or any signi cant discussion of it either. The elaborate Persian and Urdu poetic handbooks are full of inventories of various kinds of similes and rhetorical terms, and elaborate rules for rhyme and meter, none of which shed much light on the actual tools of “meaning creation,” the characteristic style of Ghalib (and, somewhat di erently, of his predecessor Mir). The hundredodd commentaries on Ghalib’s poetry are xated on the process of generating at least (and usually at most) a single reading for each verse; they ignore such structural complexities. But it is more fruitful to ask how these micropoems do such compelling work.

The verse just presented about the heart and the sea was ambiguous (readers have to decide how the two lines t together) but not hard to translate. Most of the time, however, Ghalib gives a hard time to translators as well. Consider the multiple internal ambiguities of a verse like the following, which consists of four items and no verbs at all (and, as usual, no punctuation): Thousands of airs and graces, a single averted gaze; Thousands of coquetries, a single t of anger.21 Here we have to decide how to t together items within a line. There are exasperatingly many interpretive possibilities, and no way de nitively to resolve them; there is not even a verb to help us put it all together. Does the beloved o er thousands of irtations for every episode of rejection? Is the beloved’s rejection equal to thousands of her irtations? Is the beloved’s rejection more desirable than thousands of irtations with other women? And, very crucially, is the tone of the verse rueful, admiring, meditative, bitter?

In cases like this, all too many translators feel entitled—or required—to help the reader out by adding a verb or two of their own choosing, or creating coherence in some other way. Our translation of this particular line is virtually word for word literal and thus as radically ambiguous as the Urdu (except that Ghalib used a word with a general meaning of “an immense number” and a speci c meaning of “hundreds of thousands”). Ghalib provides the building blocks and inveigles us into framing the verse ourselves— and then reframing it anew every time we read or recite it. This kind of deliberately cryptic expression is one of his favorite ways of making a tiny poem (in this case, a poem twelve words long) feel much, much larger. [ 15 ]

And this is by no means the end of his wiles, and of the translator’s woes.

Sometimes the unresolvability is even more conspicuously aunted, as in this famous verse with its idiomatic, exclamatory rst line: Oh, for a desolation that is a desolation!

Having seen the desert, I remembered my house.22 Naturally, the mad lover seeks out desolate places. In Urdu, the idiomatic rst line is even more open to expressing either joy or longing. But is the lover praising both his house and the desert for their desolateness, or condemning them both for their lack of desolateness, or praising one at the expense of the other? The verse invites (and requires) readers to decide such very basic questions for themselves. Our translation preserves this carefully framed do-it-yourself quality.

And then, consider just one more very characteristic example of Ghalibian complexity: How narrow is the world of us oppressed ones, In which a single ant’s egg is the sky.23 It might seem to be a bit less cryptic and thus more satisfying. In fact, however, the verse is fearfully and wonderfully ambiguous. Through his clever use of the interrogative or exclamatory word ky , Ghalib has framed the rst line in such a way that all three of the following readings are equally possible. He has then created a second line to match the rst in multivalence, because in Urdu grammar if you say A is B, you are also saying B is A. Moreover, the ant’s egg is described as ek (one), a word that itself has a number of meanings: (1a) how narrow is the world of us oppressed ones!

(1b) is the world of us oppressed ones narrow?

(1c) what—as if the world of us oppressed ones is narrow!

(2a) in which a single/particular/excellent/unique ant’s egg is the sky (2b) in which the sky is a single/particular/excellent/unique ant’s egg It is easy to see that such a verse is a small “meaning machine,” one that whirls around in a cloud of possibilities that can never be resolved. But as [ 16 ]

the mind enters it, the whirling cloud becomes immensely fascinating and readily generates a number of striking interpretations. Here is a tiny poem that feels almost in nite. To pull out any one of these hovering possibilities and call it “the meaning” amounts to a travesty of the original verse. Yet that is what translators of Ghalib often have to do; in cases like this, their frustration is greater than that of the reader.

This is not to say that we have had no successes. Sometimes (if all too rarely) the words just ow. Here is a verse that approaches what has been called, in classical poetics, unattainable simplicity (sahl-i mumtani ): Ghalib, I’ve given up wine, but even now sometimes I drink on cloudy days and moonlit nights.24 Not only is this translation accurate, and not only is it at least somewhat enjoyable even in English, but the humor comes through as well, for if we add together the number of “cloudy days” and “moonlit nights” in North India, it seems that a good part of the year is in fact available for drinking.

Note on the Text and Translation Since Ghalib’s poetry is so close to being untranslatable, for this volume we wanted to cherry-pick the most (relatively) translatable ghazals; and, of course, we also wanted to choose ones of the highest literary quality.

Out of the 234 ghazals in the published divan, we eventually selected thirty ghazals that best met these criteria. We supplemented this group rst of all by choosing a good number of individual verses from other ghazals (using the same criteria). Then we added samples of his work in other genres, the most important of which was his letters. But we kept the amount of material relatively small so that the ghazals and ghazal verses would retain the central role that they have always had in people’s understanding and appreciation of Ghalib.

Some reviewers have urged us to include ghazals from the large group of early ones that Ghalib never published. We did consider the possibility, but nally we restricted ourselves to eight or so representative unpublished verses that Ghalib removed before publishing those ghazals.25 Since our selection inevitably omits the bulk of the 234 ghazals, we did not go out of [ 17 ]

our way to include whole ghazals that were not part of the poet’s self-chosen body of available work. Moreover, it is broadly true that the unpublished verses are more di cult than the published ones, and they have not had the bene t of a century and a half of commentary and explication. So they would have been more di cult to choose and to translate, and they would have required appreciably more annotation.

We were also urged to include more poems in more genres, and more letters. This kind of discussion can (and does) go on endlessly, since all Ghalib lovers have favorites and strongly protest their omission. All we can reply is that many of our own favorites have been omitted too.

As we have noted, Ghalib’s ghazal verses in Urdu not only feel more cryptic, elusive, and ambiguous than our translations, but also include layers of wordplay that we can rarely capture at all. To enrich the reader’s experience, we have provided substantial notes. But more fundamentally here is what we promise: rst, that our translations are line for line accurate in corresponding to Ghalib’s lines; and second, that our translations seek to reproduce the structure of the originals as exactly as possible. Sometimes we have been unable to capture all the certain complexities, but we do not insert our own explanations, poetic language, or imagery into the translation. We emphasize these points because most translations of Ghalib are really independent English transcreations that bear little resemblance to the originals. We have chosen the other horn of the dilemma.

Since this book is meant for general readers as well as scholars, we have tried to strike a balance between simplicity and scholarly exactitude. Proper names have been translated without diacritics, except for the few names with a word-medial 'ayn or hamza; these retain an apostrophe (Ala’i, Ka’ba, Qur’an). Words found in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary have been treated as English words (divan, durbar, purdah). Urdu words are shown in italics, with appropriate full diacritics; most of these occur in the glossary In this volume, we begin with a number of whole ghazals (part 1) and then provide selected individual verses from many other ghazals (part 2).

Because these individual verses are poems in their own right, such independent presentation does them no violence; independent memorization and recitation is in fact how they generally live and move within their culture.

Beyond the ghazal we move on, in part 3, to some poems in two other genres: rub s (quatrains) and qa das (odes). These are included to round out the picture of his corpus; while Ghalib performed at a high level in such [ 18 ]

other genres, he never achieved in them the reputation that he did in the ghazal. Among the quatrains—“four-liners,” in Urdu as in English—by far the most famous is the one on “speaking the di cult,” with its remarkable wordplay. Among the many formal odes in praise of religious gures and patrons, the lighthearted one addressed to a “sleek betel nut” is also a standout. Finally, we turn from poetry to prose. We o er a few examples of Ghalib’s famous and well-loved letters. And as an additional pleasure we provide one thing that’s not a letter: we conclude the book with a rare example of Urdu prose that Ghalib composed very consciously for publication. (He composed almost all his public prose in Persian.) This very complex, di cult, and enjoyable preface has been translated by Pasha M. Khan and reviewed by him in association with both of us. We are grateful to him for making this translation available for the present volume.

The numbering system we use for reference is that of modern standard divan;26 our textual authority is the scholarly divan edition of Imtiyaz Ali Khan “Arshi”27 (though we omit the English punctuation marks that he has unfortunately imposed). The concordance correlates the numbers in this volume with both standard divan numbers (as derived especially from Hamid) and the dates of composition. For dating, we rely on the work of Kalidas Gupta “Raza,”28 who himself made much use of Arshi’s scholarship.

Dating is of considerable interest because of the claims made by Azad and Hali (and many later followers) that although in his youth Ghalib wrote extremely, often culpably, “di cult” poetry, in his later years he rejected complexity in favor of simplicity. Knowing the dates of the verses (to the degree that they can be ascertained) is the bedrock for any consideration of his early as opposed to his late style. Such diachronic comparisons are even more piquant because there are almost no “middle-period” Urdu ghazals; in the 1830s and 1840s, Ghalib devoted himself seriously to Persian. Not until the 1850s, when he was under pressure from the wishes of his patrons at the Red Fort and elsewhere, did he return to composing many Urdu ghazals and letters. After the terrible ordeals of 1857, Ghalib composed almost no more ghazals at all.

In this volume, the glossary identi es individual gures who appear in the ghazal world (Khizr, Majnun), stock characters (the Adviser, the Cupbearer), places (Tur, Zamzam), and other such references. The glossary also contains explanations of technical terms (divan, refrain) and words with particular cultural overtones (collyrium, liver). Other entries are ones [ 19 ]

for which sets of examples may be of interest to readers: some general literary techniques (the inexpressibility trope, insh iya speech); some structural devices (i fat, “parallelism�); some words with importantly multivalent or idiomatic meanings (ky , ek) or with special thematic interest (mirror, veil).

Endnotes provide further information about possible readings and indicate that discussion of a given verse can be found in appendix 1. These comments are responses to letters from correspondents about some of the particular verses they found perplexing and are therefore not full-scale commentarial expositions, but they are virtually all we have of the poet’s interactions with his contemporary audience, so every example is precious.

[ 20 ]

P R A I SE FOR GHALIB “A tour de force, an offering of love.… This volume offers new insight to fellow devotees of Ghalib’s poetry through extraordinary translations, all contextualized by a rich body of historical, cultural, biographical, and secondary literary materials. To the interested novice who takes this book up, a door will open revealing a beguiling and wondrous world.”

—CARLA PETIEVICH, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

“Ghalib once described himself as ‘A nightingale of a yet to be created garden, singing with the white heat of an ecstatic imagination.’ Gifted with the vision of a seer, he could well be describing how this elegant and dazzling translation makes his poetry come alive in English, a world apart from his nineteenth-century Delhi. This is a superb introduction to this marvelous poet, resonant with his subtle nuances and exquisite meanings.”

—ASIF FARRUKHI, EDITOR OF AN EVENING OF CAGED BEASTS: SEVEN POSTMODERNIST URDU POETS

“Ghalib is the first ample and compact introduction to the Urdu oeuvre of the last great ‘Mughal’ poet of India. It fills a long-felt lacuna, and does so admirably well. The translators have provided all that a reader might need to get closer to the poet and the man.”

—C. M. NAIM, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

“The engaging tone of this rigorous volume will make Ghalib accessible to a wideranging audience that does not speak Persian or Urdu. Yet the real importance of the work lies in its profound approach to translation; Pritchett and Cornwall extract beauty from a close reading of the texts without venturing into a discourse that does not accord closely with the original.”

—SYED AKBAR HYDER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN T R A N S L AT I O N S F R O M T H E A S I A N C L A S S I C S COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK | CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.