Social and literary background to Mirza Ghalib's works. Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan known as Ghalib in Urdu literature was born in Agra on December 27th, 1797
Social and literary background to Ghalib’s works Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan known as Ghalib in Urdu literature was born in Agra on December 27th, 1797 to the parents of Turkish aristocratic ancestry. He spent a good part of his early boyhood with his mother’s family. Ghalib grew up relatively free of any oppressive dominance by adult, male father-figures. This accounts for at least some of the independence of spirit he showed from very early childhood. On the other hand, it placed him in the humiliating situation of being socially and economically dependent on maternal grandparents giving him a sense that whatever the worldly goods he received were a matter of charity and not legitimately his. His preoccupation in later life with finding secure, legitimate and comfortable means of livelihood can perhaps be at least partially understood in terms of this early uncertainty. Ghalib was a remarkable man in many ways. He was remarkable for his personal appearance, for his frankness, for his friendliness, for his originality and most importantly for his wit. Around 1810, events of great importance occurred in Ghalib’s life. There is evidence that most of what we know as his complete works were substantially completed by 1816, when he was nineteen years old and six years after he first came to Delhi. The migration from Agra to Delhi is notewotrthy here, which had once been a capital but now it was one of the declining cities. Its grandeur kept intact by the existence of the Mughal court was an important event in the life of a thirteen year old, married poet. At that time he desperately needed material security thus began to take his career in letters seriously and was soon recognized as a genius, if not by the court but by some of his important contemporaries. As for the marriage, in the predominantly male-oriented society of Muslim India no one could expect Ghalib to take the event terribly serious and he didn’t. The period did however mark the beginnings of the concern with material advancement that was to obsess him for the rest of his life.In his material dimensions, Ghalib’s life never really took root and remained unfinished. In a society where almost everybody seemed to have had a house of his own, Ghalib never had one and always rented or accepted the use of one from a patron. Ghalib’s one wish, was that he should have a regular and secure income, but it never materialized. His brother Yousaf went mad in 1826 and died in 1857 that was a year of all misfortunes. Given the social structure of the 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. While reading his poetry it must be remembered that it is the poetry of a more than usually vulnerable existence.In 1816 Ghalib wrote to a friend who had had his portrait done and sent it to Ghalib to see. Ghalib in that letter speaks of his aversion to following current fashion of the society to grow a beard. He said: “Everybody wears a sort of uniform, Mullahs, junk-dealers, hookah-mender, washer men, water-carriers, innkeepers, weavers, greengrocers—all of them wear their hair long and grow a beard”.Ghalib tells us that somewhere about this time he was in love with a domni, that is, one of a Hindu caste of singing and dancing girls. More than forty years later he was to speak of the grief when she died: “It is forty years or more since it happened……….. there are times even now when the memory of her charming ways comes back to me and I shall not forget of her death as long as I shall live.”A Persian letter written many years earlier refers perhaps to this same woman and it describes not only his grief but the philosophy of love of life which he formed at the time and to which he adhered to the rest of his life. The letter was written to a friend who had recently suffered a similar loss. The expressions that highlight the inner melancholy of Ghalib are “In the days of my youth, when the blackness of my deeds outdid the blackness of my hair, and my head held the tumult of the love of fair-faced women…” Ghalib made no secret of the fact that he never kept the more troublesome commandments of his religion –never said the five daily prayers, never kept the Ramzan fast, he had no ambition to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, and broke the prohibition of wine. Hali wrote of him: “From all the duties of worship and enjoined
practices of Islam he took only two—a belief that God is one and is immanent in all things and a love for the Prophet and his family. And this alone he considered sufficient for salvation.”When Ghalib was nearly thirty he went to Calcutta. He was away from Delhi for nearly three years as he enjoyed travelling and like Calcutta very much. His poetic inspirations derived from Calcutta were its greenery, its pretty women, its fruits and its wines. He had a passion for mangoes and like all men of sound taste; he knew the proper way to eat them. Ghalib ...
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practices of Islam he took only two—a belief that God is one and is immanent in all things and a love for the Prophet and his family. And this alone he considered sufficient for salvation.”When Ghalib was nearly thirty he went to Calcutta. He was away from Delhi for nearly three years as he enjoyed travelling and like Calcutta very much. His poetic inspirations derived from Calcutta were its greenery, its pretty women, its fruits and its wines. He had a passion for mangoes and like all men of sound taste; he knew the proper way to eat them. Ghalib was generally in debt, for he lives in a style a good deal more lavish than his regular income could support. However, he did not let his debt depress him unduly, though there were certain times when he felt it keenly and wrote bitterly about it. In 1847, when Ghalib was in his fiftieth year, he suffered a terrible and quite unexpected blow. He was charged with keeping a gambling establishment at his house, was convicted and spent three months in jail. More painful to him even than this was the way in which all his friends and admirers deserted him at this crisis. Only Mustafa Khan Shefta stood by him in his need. All this is reflected in a poem that he wrote in jail. Extracts from the poem that depict his sorrow are: “sorrow bursting from my heart, transmuted into melody…..I labour hard, hard labour consorts with imprisonment.Bonds shall no longer choke my voice, and I will sing my heart’s lament.”Ghalib speaks with bitter reality of his self styled “friend”:“Old friends, you must not incommode yourself to come and visit me,And knock upon my door- I cannot open it as formerly,Imprisoned thieves are now my friends, and bow to my supremacy…….. ‘Outside there is no loyalty’.”Ghalib’s experiences taught him something he never forgot. It showed him how different were the values which respectable men professed from those which they practiced when it came to the test. It convinced him that those few who, like himself, really practiced the standards of conduct which society proclaimed, were calling down misfortune upon their heads. It must have been with the experience of 1847 in his mind that he wrote to one of his friends fourteen years later:“Glory to God! I find that in so many things, you and I have shared the same fate—ill-treatment from our relatives, grievance against our kin.”After being released from the jail, Ghalib was befriended with the men who had influence with the Mughal king, “Bahadur Shah” and who secured for him what in many years of effort he had not been able to secure for himself, the patronage of the Mughal court. Three years later in 1850, he was commissioned to write a history of the Mughal dynasty. In succeeding years he gained the patronage of the heir-apparent and briefly the stipend from the king of Oudh. However, as a poet and writer, this was not primarily what he wanted. He saw himself above all as a great Persian poet, but what the king demanded of him was the Persian prose, Urdu poetry and even most deplorable of all the Urdu prose. He is pretty blunt in expressing some of these feelings in the preamble to the history he was writing for the king. Ghalib wrote to the king: “Turn your attention to me as my skill demands, and you will treasure me as the apple of your eye and open your heart for me to enter in.” Ghalib’s attitude towards the king was very candid. A man read Ghalib a lecture against wine drinking and told him that the prayers of a wine drinker are never granted, Ghalib replied: “My friend if a man has wine, what does he need to pray for?”Ghalib’s period of prosperity did not last long. In 1857 came the great revolt sparked off by the sepoy mutiny of May, and by the end of September, with the British re-occupation of Delhi, the Mughal court departed from the stage of history, never to return. Gahlib may or may not have foreseen the revolt, but he did know that the British were moving towards the ending of Mughal power, and he tried to safeguard his livelihood beforehand. In his book one of the recognized functions of royal courts was to maintain good poets. Therefore, he drew the attention of the wealthiest royal court in sight to the fact that he would be an eminently suitable recipient of its generosity, in other words he wrote to Queen Victoria: “Your poet and panegyrist seeks a title bestowed by the imperial tongue, and a robe of honour conferred by the impartial command, and a crust of bread from the imperial table”. Ghalib didn’t realize that the British monarchy was of a different colour from the monarchies he knew about. He received a polite reply which encouraged him, but that was about all he ever did receive. Throughout the revolt itself Ghalib stayed in Delhi. He himself tells us what he did:” On 11 May1857 the disorders began here. On that same day I shut the doors and gave up going out. One cannot pass the days without something to do, and I began to write my experiences, appending also such news as I heard from time to time.” Whatever admiration he had ever felt for the British was seriously brought into question by the events of 1857, more particularly by the mercilessness of the British in their dealings with those who participated in or sympathized with the Revolt. Recent researches of Dr. Ashraf in India have proved that atleast 27,000 people were hanged during that summer of one year in Delhi. 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 British to have possessed. His letters tell of his terrible disaffection and resentment towards them. Ghalib had many attitudes towards the British; most of them were complicated and quite often 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 their resistance forces. His letters are some of the most graphic and vivid accounts of British violence.The years between 1857 and 1869 were neither happy nor very eventful ones for Ghalib. During the revolt itself, he remained confined to his house, undoubtedly frightened by the wholesale massacres all over the city. Many of his friends were hanged, deprived of their fortunes, exiled from the city or detained in jails. He was a shrewd and a realistic man as he estimated that the revolt was bound to fail and that would bring disaster in its train. But if his sympathies were not with the rebels, neither did he condone the excesses which the British committed especially against the Muslims. He writes in a poem of the time:“Now every English soldier that bears armsIs sovereign, and free to work his will…The city is athirst for Muslim bloodAnd every grain of dust must drink its fill…”Ghalib has written bitterly of the execution of three Muslim Nawwabs of three small estates in the neighborhood of Delhi. The events of 1857 had deeply affected his family as well. Extracts from his diary highlight’s their own story: “I am face to face with misfortune…Some five years ago I took to my bosom two orphaned boys from the family of my wife, prime source of all troubles. They had just learned to talk, and love for these sweet-speaking children has melted me and made me one with them. Even now in my ruined state they are with me, adorning my life as pearls and flowers adorn my coat….This is another heavy sorrow, another calamity that has descended on me like an avalanche…..we live in anxious thought for bread and water and die in anxious thought of shroud and grave.”A year later when Ghalib looked back on the events, what grieved him the most was the loss of so many friends. He had friends in all camps, among the British, among the Hindus, among the Muslims who aided the British and the Muslims who supported the revolt. Ghalib mourned all of them deeply and sincerely. After the British retook Delhi in September 1857, the Hindus residents were allowed to return three months later in January 1858. It was more than two years when Muslims were allowed to return and take up permanent residence. All this time, Ghalib was there, but his friends scattered wide and far. Ghalib’s friends could not come to Delhi and he generally lacked the money and increasingly the physical health, to leave Delhi to visit them. Life increasingly became a burden to him, and he repeatedly expressed a longing to die which he genuinely felt. Ghalib never to the very end lose his sense of humour and it was his main shield against the afflictions of life. At one time Ghalib was convinced that he would die in the Muslim year 1277, corresponding to 1860/1 of the Christian calendar. Two years before that he wrote: “You know when despair reaches its lowest depth there is nothing left but to resign oneself to God’s will.” Yet Ghalib did not die and the year 1277 came and went by. A friend of Ghalib wrote to him asking why his prophecy did not come true. Ghalib replied pointing out that that there had been an epidemic of cholera in Delhi: “I thought it beneath me to general epidemic. The mention of cholera epidemic is one of the most interesting aspects of Ghalib’s letters. The picture they give of the long tribulations which the people of Delhi had to suffer during these years. Ghalib wrote in 1860, “Five invading armies have fallen upon this city one after another: the first was that of the rebel soldiers, which robbed the city of its good name. The second was that of the British, when life and property and honour and dwellings and those who dwelt in them and heaven and earth and all the visible signs of existence were stripped from it. The third was that of famine, when thousands of people died of hunger. The fourth was that of cholera, in which many of those whose beliefs were full lost their lives. The fifth was the fever, which took general plunder of men’s strength and powers of resistance. There were not many deaths, but a man who has fever feels that all the strength has been drained from his limbs. And this invading army has not yet left the city.”Ghalib turned upon Hamza Khan, a maulvi who had once been tutor to Alai in his childhood and had now been ill-advised enough to have Alai write to Ghalib that it was time to act on the words of Hafiz:“Hafiz, old age besets you: leave the tavern now.Debauchery and drinking go along with youth.”Without even breaking the sentence, Ghalib goes straight on:“…. And give my respect to Hamza Khan and tell him:You who have never known the taste of wineWe during unceasingly.”Ghalib lived at the time in the history of the sub-continent similar to the present in America, in the sense that a whole civilization seemed to be breaking up and nothing of equal strength was taking its place. Worse still was the replacement of the older civilization run altogether, counter to what Ghalib stood for.Ghalib lived at the time in the history of the sub-continent similar to the present in America, in the sense that a whole civilization seemed to be breaking up and nothing of equal strength was taking its place. Worse still was the replacement of the older civilization run altogether, counter to what Ghalib stood for. For a Muslim Poet intellectual who lived within the older order, life was difficult but intrinsically intelligible. Being supported by a tradition within which he could confront and contain experience. There was a religion which he might or might not have observed in external detail and ritual but which certainly gave him a sense of contact with his God and the Universe God has created. There is in Ghalib a moral grandeur as in Hafiz, but also an intense moral loneliness, a longing for relations which were no longer possible and a sense of utter waste. Classic Urdu poetry has always been a favorite of the courts and has thriven in the halls of princes and nobles. Delhi, Luckhnow, Hyderabad and Rampur have been the centers of poetic activities. During those times Qasidas and Ghazals were the two forms of poetry that were being written by the poets of the court, Qasida in praise of their patrons and Ghazals to celebrate some real or imaginary love. During the times of courts Urdu poetry celebrated the love of wine, the woe and despairs of love, complains about the tyranny of sky and unjustness of fate. In the poetry of these times there is a note of deep melancholy and deep pathos, a note of weariness and disgust with life and hollowness of worldly ambition and worldly dreams. However this mystic melancholy has lent a peculiar and incomparable charm to many fine compositions of Urdu. Moreover Urdu poetry is sublimely emotional and makes a powerful appeal to sentiments. It is very sweet and subtle and is pre-eminent in its special sphere. The songs of sorrow, the wailings of hopeless love, the utter despair of unrealized desire, the poignant grief at the departure of the beloved, are all soul stirring and always leave an impression on the reader. The loftiness of thought, the delicacy of emotion, the melody and rhythm, the richness of imagery as well as the haunting quality are all different aspects of Urdu poetry. Urdu literature has bestowed its readers with gems like Mir Dard, Soz, Insha, Zauq, Ghalib and many other poets. The works of these poets are the hallmark of Urdu literature. Each poet has been blessed with his unique qualities yet their works are similar in other respects and hence are a source of inspiration for their contemporaries. Urdu literature places all the above mentioned poets at the same pedestal of uniqueness because the essence of their poetry is the same but their style varies from one to the other. Mir Dard’s ghazals are makes by apt idioms, thoughts, chastened emotions and refined diction. He is best exponent of Sufism and he shows great skill in developing the themes of spiritualism. His verses are simple and direct and the effect of his verses is further enhanced by the introduction f spiritualism. Most of his works are in Persian but he also wrote poetry in Urdu. His verses are quintessence of all that is sweet and sublime. He never wrote lampoons or satires and his thoughts are always sober and staid fixed on high. On the other hand, Soz’s verses are clear, easy and his style is very agreeable. His poetry is characterized by spontaneity, refinement of idiom and elegance of diction. High flown similes, subtle metaphors and obscure allusions are absent. However he equals Mir in simplicity and pathos. Moreover Soz does not apply the Persian construction, themes and idioms which are used by Sauda and Mir. Insha was extremely witty by nature. He had a fund of good humor which has been lavishly used in his works. His versatility is an intriguing aspect of his poetry. He was an erudite scholar with an alert mind but was prone to be humorous. Even his mystic writings are not deprived of his humor as in his masnavi on Shir Biranj.he has followed Sauda in introducing Indian themes and words in his Ghazals and has sought the help of Indian imagery and allusions but in a limited manner. Although Zauq and Ghalib belong to the same period of Urdu literature, still Zauq was an inspiration for Ghalib. Zauq’s similes, similes, metaphors and figures of speech are judiciously subordinated to general scheme of effect. They do not obtrude offensively. The verses are flowing and full of cadence. The beauty and harmony of language is not sacrificed to the flights of imagination and loftiness of thought. Ghalib is a poet who seems to have absorbed all the above mentioned qualities of his ancestors. Meaning his works have a spiritual and mystic element to it yet he has a sense of humor. He is witty yet with depth of meaning. Though he has absorbed all these qualities, yet his poetry reflects the rarity of a style which is exclusively Ghalib’s. His verses are subtle records of his various and varying moods, those of jubilation and exaltation, gloom and despair, as evident from his ghazal ‘eulogy’ and ‘elegy.’ His verses are full of philosophic truths expressed with remarkable facility in philosophic language. He is a mystic and a transcendentalist rising superior to the prejudices of sects and creeds. As he says: ‘He whom I worship lives beyond the bounds of comprehension. To the seeing eye, the temple of worship is only a symbol of the real temple.’ Ghalib intersperses sunshine and joy with despair and darkness. His poems are lit up with a humor subtle and delicate like a bloom on a flower. Another common aspect of his works with other poets is the idea of pathos and sufferings of life, which he incorporates in his poetry. It seems as if Urdu literature poets are deeply inspired by pain, anguish and misery. However this adds a lot of true human emotions to their works. The following couplet shows the pathos and the haunting quality of his work; ‘It reminds me of the number of sore spots in my heart owing to longing unfulfilled. Do not therefore ask me oh god! to render an account of the sins committed by me.’ Ghalib has many facets to his power and skill of writing poetry. His works are always a source of inspiration and joy for his readers. Ghalib holds free thinking and atheism to be abhorrent, and wine drinking to be forbidden, and him to be a sinner. He spent much of his time in correcting and polishing the verses which his many friends who bowed to his poetic superiority submitted to him. It was a task that Ghalib enjoyed and and it is evident that he took great pains with it. Ghalib was kind and firm. He had a very independent approach to the Persian usage and Persian poetry. In the last years of his life, writing letters and correcting his friends’ verses remained virtually his own occupation. His health was failing. In 1863 he fell ill again, and this time it was a painful, long-continued illness which depressed and embittered him. The conduct of his friends at this time distressed him a good deal. His memory began to fail him more and more. By February 1869, Ghalib was on his death bed. Nonetheless, he died knowing that men of his own age had not valued him at his true worth. BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Oxford India GhalibLife, Letters and GhazalsEdited By,Ralph Russel, Oxford University Press.. Ghazals of Ghalib Edited by: Ahmad Oxford University Press
