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