Review: The Essential Ghalib by Anisur Rahman

There have been more modern interpretations and studies of Mirza Ghalib than any other poet in Urdu. I learnt a few months ago that a bibliography of articles and books related to Ghalib ran to over 300 pages and had over a thousand entries in it. I dare say Ghalib has been the most written about poet not only in Urdu, but also in any Indian language. In the last two years, in English alone, we had a fine translation of Mirza Ghalib’s entire Divan into English by Najeeb Jung, which I had written about here. https://test.everynews.info/books/reviewdeewaneghalib-sariir-e-khaama-translated-by-najeeb-jung-101665152522687.html

The last few years have also seen a spate of wonderful books on Ghalib by Mehr Afshan Faruqi who teaches at Virginia and is a rightful heir to the wonderful exegesis of Ghalib done by the great Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. Without doubt Ghalib remains imprinted in our memory as a poet who stands alone in his brilliance and in his persona. A study published a few years ago in the Indian Express mentioned that the poetry most frequently quoted in the Indian Parliament was Urdu poetry, and the poet most often mentioned was Mirza Ghalib. For the same reason, perhaps, he also remains the most misquoted poet as shallow verses are ascribed to him to gain authority. As Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has written, Ghalib is unique not only because he is the last of the classical poets and the first of the moderns. He is unique also because the circumstances of his life, and his experiences, made him doubt everything about the ancient regime and the values he was handed out. He thus became skeptical and thereby became modern. But he was also modernist, in the sense of not being direct, not being representational, in being fragmentary, in being ironic, and in being multilingual. In his introduction to this wonderful new book, the Kabir scholar Vinay Dharwadker writes that Ghalib is essential because,

“throughout his career, he is contemporaneous with colonial moderns in a different sphere — not only with Rammohun Roy from the 1810s to the early 1830s, but also, say, with Madhusudan Dutt in the 1840s and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in the 1850s and 1860s. (These ‘connections’ are not abstract or remote; Dutt launched Indian drama in English with his play Rizia, written in Madras in 1848-49; Raziya Sultana’s mazar stood just a kilometre from Ghalib’s haveli in Gali Qasim Jan”

Ghalib has, of course, been translated before. By the venerable CM Naim, the father, so to say, of modern Urdu studies in the US, by the late brilliant Aijaz Ahmed, and by the illustrious Frances Pritchett. In this crowded field, Anisur Rahman’s new work Essential Ghalib stands out. It is to his immense credit that he marks his own place with his novel approach and his presentation. He has selected 200 of Ghalib’s verses, that is shers. Compared to the general prolificity of the average Urdu poet, Ghalib wrote sparingly. He was also very particular about what he presented to the world. He was the first Urdu poet to understand the importance of print and to focus on brevity. He ruthlessly excised all ghazals or couplets within ghazals which he thought would not appeal to posterity. He was very fastidious about protecting his legacy so he edited with that purpose and wrote a public proclamation disowning all those verses that had not been authorized or chosen by him. Mehr Afshan has written extensively about Ghalib’s unpublished verses. Rahman selects a verse, and presents it in the Urdu original, followed by a Nagri version and then a Roman rendering. After that he provides a literal translation. On the facing page of this verse he then presents a fuller explanation of the verse, its beauty, its brevity, its lineage and why it is striking. This mode of presentation is novel in both technique and appearance. By using it, Rahman reveals three different kinds of readings to the average reader of Ghalib who is not familiar with Urdu. I dare say these form the majority of Ghalib readers in India. The reader can read the verse directly, read its English rendition, and then find the deeper meaning through Rahman’s presentation. The professor has a long experience of translating verses, and prose, which he brings to bear on this work. His previous work of translation Hazaar Rang Shaairi: The Wonderful World of the Urdu Nazm is a selection and presentation of 140 key nazms ie narrative poems, as opposed to ghazals, from 300 years of Urdu poetry. This was preceded by Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi: The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals (HarperCollins, 2019) and Socio-literary Cultures in South Asia (Niyogi Books, 2019). I was fortunate to know him when I was a young callow student and his was only among a handful of Urdu to English translations in the world. I sometimes visited his beautifully done up home at Jamia where he taught all his life and his urbanity and sophistication was reflected in the décor, while his sharafat was of a piece with the values of that illustrious university where it was possible to be cultured and profane, just like the subject of this book.

In appearance this vertical reading is important. Dharwadekar points out that digital scrolling ends up homogenizing verse and prose whereas the physicality of reading in print “activates neurons in the human brain in a different way, and puts distinct forms of attention in motion that are central to our interaction with poetic texts. In the case of Urdu poetry, a copy of text in Nastaliq (for example, in lithograph), or transcription in Devanagari or roman script (conventionally in cast metal type) has the subtle feature of capturing the form of attention that a sher in a ghazal invited during a mushairah… Print on paper allows the recursive contemplation of a verse and its meanings that repetition delivers in an oral performance.”

Ghalib is, of course, highly cerebral, often metaphysical and philosophical. Rahman remarks on Ghalibs’ ratiocination in his introduction, and how he balanced this with his exaggeration and ‘artfully negotiated between thought-binding and meaning-making with special reference to life, love, death and God.’ This pithiness, combined with his wit, and his ability to ridicule himself makes Ghalib unique and contemporary. Ghalib turns his ghazals, Rahman rightly states, into a theatre of situations, sounds and echoes, as did most other classical poets. This was, as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi reminded us again and again, a poetry of conventions which were less love poems than poems about love. This means they described transactions of love, which was often a public affair and invited onlookers, gawkers, rumour mongers, stone throwers and general busybodies. Here, the poet describes not his experiences but his protagonist’s, who is different from the poet. The protagonist suffers in love, sometimes unbearably so, for in this love, suffering leads to divine light. The persona of the protagonist strongly reminds one of the virahini, the female lover, as depicted in much of medieval bhakti and Vaishnava poetry.

Here is a verse chosen at random, just to illustrate Rahman’s modus operandi,

Bulbul ke kaar-o-baar pe hain khanda haaye gul

Kahte hain jis ko ishq khalal hai dimagh ka

Here is Rahman’s explanation of the verse:

“Bulbul and blossom have been configured often as archetypal symbols in Urdu ghazal. Ghalib draws upon these symbols to mark their relationship as lover and beloved. If the bulbul, known for its melodious notes, sings its song of love for the blossom, the blossom smiles. But here in this verse, it doesn’t smile with love but with certain derision for the bulbul. This is because the bulbul is so much obsessed with its love for the blossom that the blossom thinks that the bulbul has gone crazy. It suggests that love fails at times, and that too because of the beloved’s disapproval of the lover’s craziness.”

There is a lot more on that verse, but I only wished to illustrate his approach. Ghalib was emphatic about the fact that poetry was about meaning making, not mere wordplay, although wordplay was important too. Meaning of course lies with the readers, and not with the creators. There is a wonderful story ascribed to Ghalib’s close friend Allama Fazle Haq Khairabadi, one of the first to be exiled to the Andamans for his supposed role in the 1857 uprising. Fazl e haq was one of the most renowned Arabicists of the 19th century. One day, a young man came to him in a state of perturbation to complain about Ghalib. He was disturbed by an explanation that Ghalib had provided for a verse by Nasir Ali Sirhindi, a great Persian poet of the 18th century. The man complained that there was no way that Sirhindi would have intended the explanation that Ghalib gave. Allama Fazl e Haq retorted that if Sirhindi had not intended to include that explanation for his own verse then he made a grievous mistake. For all his arrogance Ghalib had also said that

Aye ki dar raah e sukhan hamchu to hazaar aamad o raft

In the realm of poetry thousands like you have come and gone

I don’t think we are likely to have another Ghalib ever, certainly not with the same irreverence as Ghalib had said that he will immediately retrace his steps if the Kaba doesn’t open its gates for him. May this irreverence live long and may his interpreters keep updating him for all ages.

Mahmood Farooqui completes 20 years of reviving Dastangoi this year.