His attitude to God was anything but humble.
He was lying on his bed at night looking up at the sky. He was struck by the apparent chaos in the distribution of the stars and said, ‘There is no rhyme or reason in anything the self-willed do. Just look at the stars—scattered in complete disorder. No proportion, no system, no sense, no pattern. But their King has absolute power, and no one can breathe a word against Him!’
From all the duties of worship and the 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.
~
Hali gives a moving account of an incident that occurred towards the end of Ghalib’s life. He had brought a legal action against a man, and the storm that this raised both surprised and distressed him.
When Ghalib brought his action some little time elapsed, and then people began to send him anonymous letters... cursing him for being a wine-drinker and an irreligious man, and so on, and expressing the fiercest hatred and contempt and condemnation. They had a powerful effect on Ghalib. In those days he was extremely depressed all the time and dispirited, and whenever the postman came with the mail his whole expression would change, from apprehension that there would be some such letter in it. It so happened that in those days I had occasion to go to Delhi with the late Mustafa Khan [Shefta]. I did not know about these contemptible anonymous letters, and in my ignorance one day I committed a blunder the very thought of which always fills me with shame. Those were the days when I was drunk with religious self-satisfaction. I thought that in all God’s creation only the Muslims, and of the seventy-three Muslim sects only the Sunnis, and of the Sunnis only the Hanafis, and of the Hanafis only those who performed absolutely meticulously the fasts and prayers and other outward observances, would be found worthy of salvation and forgiveness—as though the scope of God’s mercy were more confined and restricted than Queen Victoria’s empire, where men of every religion and creed live peacefully together. The greater the love and affection I felt for a man, the more strongly I desired that he should meet his end in the state in which alone, as I thought, he could attain salvation and forgiveness; and since the love and affection I felt for Ghalib were intense, I always lamented his fallen state, thinking, so to say, that in the garden of Rizwan [in Paradise] we should no more be together and that after death we should never see each other again. One day, throwing to the winds all regard for Ghalib’s eminence and talent and advanced years, I began to read him a dry-as-dust lecture like an arid preacher. His deafness was by now complete, and one could only converse with him by writing what one had to say. So I wrote a long-winded lecture all about how the five prayers were obligatory and how he must perform them, and laid it before him. It requested him to start saying the five prayers regularly—standing, sitting, by token gestures, in any way at all he found possible; if he could not perform ablution with water before them, then he should use dust to cleanse himself, but he should in no case fail to perform the prayers. Ghalib deeply resented this initiative on my part, and indeed, with every justification—and the more so because in those days anonymous letter-writers were attacking him in the most unseemly terms for his way of life, expressing their hatred and contempt for him in the sort of downright abuse one hears in the market-place. What Ghalib said in reply to my stupid note is worthy of attention. He said,‘I have spent my life in sin and wrong-doing. I have never said a prayer or kept a fast or done any other good deed. Soon I shall breathe no more. Now if in my few remaining days I say my prayers—sitting, or by token gestures—how will that make up for a lifetime of sin? I deserve that when I die my friends and kinsmen should blacken my face and tie a rope round my feet and exhibit me in all the streets and by-lanes and markets of Delhi, and then take me outside the city and leave me there for the dogs and kites and crows to eat—if they can bring themselves to eat such a thing. Though my sins are such that I deserve even worse than that, yet without doubt I believe in the oneness of God, and in the moments of quiet and solitude the words “There is no god but God” and “Nothing exists but God” and “God alone works manifest in all things” are ever on my lips.’
It was perhaps on that same day when this exchange was over and Ghalib was taking his food, that the postman came with a letter... Ghalib concluded that it was another anonymous letter... and handed it to me, telling me to open it and read it. When I looked at it I found that it contained nothing but obscene abuse. He asked me,‘Who is it from? And what does he say?’ I hesitated to tell him, and he snatched it out of my hand saying, ‘Perhaps it is from one of your spiritual disciples.’ Then he read it from start to finish. At one point the writer had even abused Ghalib’s mother. Ghalib smiled and said,‘This 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 Ghalib was not noticeably humble towards God, it was not to be expected that he would fawn upon any of his fellow men. Even with his royal patron Bahadur Shah, while remaining within the conventional formalities he behaves as though he were dealing with an equal.
One day Bahadur Shah, accompanied by Ghalib and a number of other courtiers, was walking in the Hayat Bakhsh or the Mahtab Garden. The mango trees of every variety were laden with fruit, but the fruit of these gardens was reserved exclusively for the King and his queens and members of the royal family. Ghalib looked at the mangoes repeatedly, and with great concentration. The King asked him,‘Mirza, what are you looking at so attentively?’ Ghalib replied with joined hands,‘My Lord and Guide, some ancient poet has written:
Upon the top of every fruit is written clear and legibly:
This is the property of A, the son of B, the son of C.
And I am looking to see whether any of these bear my name and those of my father and grandfather.’ The King smiled and the same day had a big basket of the finest mangoes sent to him.
The King’s real name was Siraj-ud-Din—he took the name Bahadur Shah when he came to the throne. Once Ghalib composed for his entertainment a verse which neatly combines a compliment to the King with a compliment to himself, suggesting that the King matches a revered medieval saint Nizam-ud-Din in holiness and spiritual power, while Ghalib matches Amir Khusrau, who was universally honoured as one of the greatest of the old Persian poets:
Ghalib frequently recited verses for the King’s amusement. On one occasion when the court was assembled the conversation turned on the close relations that had existed between Nizam-ud-Din and Amir Khusrau. Ghalib at once composed and recited the following verse:
Two holy guides; two suppliants. In this God’s power we see.
Nizam-ud-Din had Khusrau: Siraj-ud-Din has me.
mile do mursheedon ko qudrat e haq se do taalib
nizaam ud deen ko khusrau siraaj ud deen ko Ghalib
I have been told that when Ghalib recited the ghazal that ends,
With what style you handle, Ghalib, all these themes of mystic teaching!
What a saint we would have thought you if you had not been a drinker!
ye misaa’il e tasavvuf, ye tira bayaan Ghalib
tujhe hum vali samajhte jo na baada-khvaar hota!
the King commented, ‘No, my friend; even so we should never have counted you a saint.’Ghalib replied,‘Your Majesty counts me one even now, and only speaks like this lest my sainthood should go to my head.’
~
As a poet he would not express approval of any verse he did not like; but he was generous in his praise of those he did like, even where they were by poets of whom he held a poor opinion. Hali writes:
In our society it is the general rule that when a man recites his verse, every line—good or bad—is greeted with cries of approval, and no one distinguishes between a good
line and a bad one. Ghalib’s way was quite the opposite of this. No matter how revered and respected a poet might be, until he heard a line that he really liked he never on any account expressed appreciation. Towards the end of his life he became completely deaf, but this was not the case in earlier years. One had to raise one’s voice in speaking or reciting to him, but if this was done he could hear perfectly well. Yet until he heard a verse that really appealed to him he would remain quite unmoved. Some of his contemporaries were offended by this attitude, and that is why they found fault with Ghalib’s poetry; but although Ghalib was by temperament one who did not like to quarrel with anybody, he never deviated from his practice in this respect.
Yet to any verse that did move him, he gave praise that was almost extravagant—not because he wanted to please anyone, but because his own love of poetry compelled him to praise it. His rivalry with Zauq is well-known. Yet one day when Ghalib was absorbed in a game of chess, the late Munshi Ghulam Ali Khan recited this verse of Zauq to someone else who was present:
Tired of all this, we look to death for our release
But what if even after death we find no peace?
ab to ghabra ke ye kahte hain ke mar jaaenge
mar ke bhi chain na paaya to kidhar jaaenge?
He used to say, ‘The moment Ghalib caught some snatch of this he at once left his game and asked me,“What was that verse you recited?” I recited it again.“Whose verse is it?” he said. I told him it was Zauq’s. He was astonished, and made me recite it again and again, savouring it every time I did so.’
You may see in his Urdu letters that he speaks of this verse repeatedly, and wherever he quotes examples of good verses, this one is always included. In the same way, when he heard this verse of Momin’s:
I seem to feel that you are by my side
When all are gone and I am quite alone
tum mere paas hote ho goya
jab koi doosra nahin hota
He praised it highly and said, ‘I wish Momin Khan would take my whole diwan [collection of ghazals] and give me this one verse in exchange.’ This verse too he has quoted in many of his letters.
* Traditions: see note p. 85.
Ghalib’s Letters
Ghalib publicly expressed the view that Persian was the real medium of poetry and literary prose, and Urdu much inferior to it, but this was to some extent a pose. This is clear from the pride and joy in his own Urdu verse that he expresses in his private letters. In one written in 1851 he writes:
Today at midday I wrote a ghazal which I shall take and recite to [the King] tomorrow or the day after. I’m writing it out, and will send it to you too. Judge it truly: if Urdu verse can rise to the height where it can cast a spell or work a miracle, will this, or will this not, be its form?
And in 1852:
My friend, in God’s name, give my ghazal its due of praise. If this is Urdu poetry, what was it that Mir and Mirza wrote? And if that was Urdu poetry, then what is this?
In other words, my verse is in another class from that of Mir and Mirza (the colloquial names for Mir and Sauda, the two greatest Urdu poets of the eighteenth century)—so much so that you cannot call their work and mine by the same name.
His letters give important insights into his attitude to poetry—both poetry in general, and his own:
The rhythmic speech which men call poetry finds a different place in each man’s heart and presents a different aspect to each man’s eyes. Men who make poetry all pluck the strings with a different touch and from each instrument bring forth a different melody. Pay no heed to what others see and feel, and bend all your efforts to increase your own perception. Poetry is the creation of meaning, not the matching of rhymes.
He was sometimes asked by his friends to compose odes to prospective patrons or to mark a death or birth by composing a chronogram—i.e. a phrase which both refer to an event and at the same time give its date when the numerical value of the individual letters is added up. On occasion he did so, but these were tasks which he undertook very reluctantly:
My friend, I swear to you by your life and by my faith that I am a complete stranger to the art of the chronogram. You won’t have heard of any chronogram by me in Urdu. I have composed a few in Persian, but the position there is that while the verses are mine, the words giving the date were supplied by others. Do you understand me? Calculation is a headache to me, and I can’t even add up. Whenever I work out a chronogram I always find that I’ve calculated it wrongly. There were one or two of my friends who, if the need arose, could work out for me the words which gave the required date, and I would fit them into a verse.
On at least one occasion he refused a request for one:
The lion feeds its cubs on the prey it has hunted, and teaches them to hunt their prey. When they grow up they hunt for themselves. You have become a competent poet, and you have a natural talent. Why should you not compose a chronogram on the birth of your child? Why trouble me, an old man grieved at heart? Ala-ud-Din Khan, I swear by your life: I worked out a chronogram-name for your first son and put it into a verse; and the child did not live. The fancy haunts me that this was the effect of my inauspicious stars. No one whom I praise survives it. One ode apiece was enough to dispatch Nasir-ud-Din Haidar and Amjad Ali Shah [Kings of Oudh]. Wajid Ali Shah [the last king] stood up to three, and then collapsed. A man to whom I addressed ten to twenty odes would end up on the far side of oblivion. No, my friend, may God protect me, I will neither write a chronogram on his birth nor work out a chronogram-name. May Exalted God preserve you and your children and confer long life and wealth and prosperity on you all.
He accepted the occasional necessity to write an ode in praise of a patron, but he did not like writing them and certainly did not approve of writing them where there was no need to do so. He writes to his Hindu friend and fellow poet, Hargopal Tufta:
Listen to me, my friend. The man to whom you addressed your ode is as much a stranger to the art of poetry as you and I are to the problems of our respective religions. In fact you and I, in spite of our ignorance of religious matters, at any rate have no aversion to them while this is a fellow whom poetry makes sick...These people aren’t fit to be spoken of, much less to be praised.
Much of his correspondence with his friends is occasioned by the fact that, as an eminent poet, many of them made him their ustad—mentor in poetry—and sent their verses to him for correction and improvement. As ustad he was kind, but exacting. He writes to Tufta:
I recall that I had taken your half-line and re-fashioned it into a rhymed couplet... In this form it appealed to me so much that I was tempted not to let you have it back but to use it as the first verse of a ghazal of my own. But then I felt that I must not begrudge it you, and I sent it to you. Your lordship didn’t choose to study it. You had been drinking when you wrote to me, and you must have been in the same condition when you went through the corrected verse. Now you are to delete the half-line you have written and let my couplet stand. It’s a good one... My friend, when I correct your verses, read the corrections carefully, so that the labour I spend on them is not wasted.
In Urdu and Persian poetics immense importance was attached to precedent. An apprentice-poet whose ustad criticized some expression in his verse would, if he could, justify himself by producing a precedent from the verse of a classical poet. Ghalib was not unduly impressed. He wrote to Tufta, who had produced a Persian verse, quoting a well-known saying in Persian:
‘To find fault with our elders is a fault.’ My dear friend, in such instances we should not find fault with the verse of the classical writers; but we should not follow them either. Your humble servant will not tolerate a double plural; nor will he say anything against the great Saib.
And again:
In this couplet Hazin [a classical Persian poet] has written one hanoz* too many, it is superfluous and absurd, and you cannot regard it as a precedent to be followed. It is a plain blunder, a fault, a flaw. Why should we imitate it? Hazin was only huma
n, but if the couplet were the angel Gabriel’s you are not to regard it as an authority, and are not to imitate it.
He replied to a correspondent whose writing he had praised and who had suggested that Ghalib was flattering him:
Your humble servant has many faults, and one of them is that he does not tell lies. Because I am a man of noble family that has had ties with the [British] authorities, I often have occasion to meet persons in authority and to have dealings with them from time to time. I have never flattered any of them. I ask you why should I lie to you, respected sir? Why should I flatter you?
…and similarly, to another correspondent:
Friend, my greetings to you. Your letter came, and I read both your ghazals and rejoiced. Flattery is not your humble servant’s way, and if flattery be allowed to enter into matters where the craft of poetry is concerned, then a man’s shagird cannot perfect himself. Remember you’ve never yet sent me a ghazal in which I have not made corrections, especially of Urdu usage. These two ghazals are, in word and content, without blemish.
Sometimes his replies seem to have got lost in the post:
Lord and Master, it was twelve o’clock, and I was lying on my bed practically naked smoking the hookah when the servant brought your letter to me. As luck would have it, I was wearing neither shirt nor coat, otherwise I’d have rent my clothes in frenzy. (Not that your lordship would have lost anything by that—I would have been the one to suffer by it.) Let’s begin at the beginning. I corrected your ode and sent it off. I received an acknowledgement. Some of the cancelled verses were sent back to me with a request to be told what was wrong with them. I explained what was wrong with them, wrote in words that were acceptable in place of those to which I had objected, and said that you might now include these verses too in the ode. To this day I have had no reply to this letter. I handed over to Shah Asrar ul Haq the paper addressed to him and wrote to you the verbal message he gave in reply. This letter too your Lordship has not answered.
A Thousand Yearnings Page 25
