Take a new woman each returning spring,
For last year’s almanac’s a useless thing.
His sense of the limitations which life imposes also led him to a more admirable conclusion—that life as such, all of life, is to be enjoyed. Five years earlier, in a letter to the same correspondent, he had written:
First I want to ask you a question. For several letters past I have noticed you lamenting your grief and sorrow. Why? If you have fallen in love with some fair cruel one, what room for complaint have you there? Rather should you wish your friends the same good fortune and seek increase of this pain.
At this point he starts writing of himself as if he were someone else—a common device among poets, perhaps from the habit of doing so in the final couplet of the ghazal, where it is obligatory to introduce their pen name. And ironically he uses of himself words always used of a saint after his death:
In the words of Ghalib (God’s mercy be upon him!)
You gave your heart away; why then lament your loss in plaintive song?
You have a breast without a heart; why not a mouth without a tongue?
kisi ko de ke dil koi navaasanj e fughaan kyon ho?
na ho jab dil hi seene mein to phir munh mein zabaan
kyon ho?
And what a fine second couplet!—
Is this affliction not enough to work one’s ruin utterly?
With you as friend, what need is there for fate to be an enemy?
ye fitna aadmi ki khaana veeraani ko kya kam hai?
hue tum dost jis ke dushman us ka aasmaan kyon ho?
And if—which God forbid—it is more mundane griefs that beset you, then my friend, you and I have the same sorrows to bear. I bear this burden like a man, and if you are a man, so must you. As the late Ghalib says:
My heart, this pain and sorrow too is precious; for the time will come
You will not heave the midnight sigh, nor shed your tears as morning dawns.
dila, ye dard o alam bhi to mughtanim hai, ki aakhir
na girya e sahri hai na aah e neemshabi hai
What cannot be helped, he thinks, must be accepted, and accepted serenely. He writes to another friend:
You’ve spent all you had in the bank, and what will you live on now? My friend, nothing that I suggest and nothing that you think of will make any difference. The heavens keep turning and what is to be, will be. We have no power, so what can we do?... Look at me—neither bound nor free, neither well nor ill, neither glad nor sad, neither dead nor alive. I go on living. I go on talking. I eat my daily bread and drink my occasional cup of wine. When death comes I will die and that will be an end of it. I neither give thanks nor make complaint.
He can even look at himself through others’ eyes and empathize with their feelings:
I watch myself from the sidelines and rejoice at my own distress and degradation. In other words I see myself through the eyes of my enemy. At every blow that falls I say, Look! Ghalib’s taken another beating! Such airs he used to give himself! I am a great poet, a great Persian scholar. Today for miles around there is none to match me!’ Let us see now what he has to say to his creditors. Ghalib’s finished; and call him Ghalib if you like; I call him atheist and infidel, and that’s the truth! I have made up titles to confer upon him. When kings die they write after their names,Whose abode is in Heaven, or Who rests in Paradise. Well, he thought himself King of the Realm of Poetry, and I’ve devised the forms Who dwells in Hell, and Whose Station is Damnation to follow his name.
Come along, Star of the Realm! [A title bestowed upon him by the Mughal king.] One creditor has him by the scruff while another reviles him. And I say to him, Come, come, My Lord Nawab Sahib! How is it that you—yes, you a Seljuk, and an Afrasiyabi—are put to such indignity? Well, where is your tongue? Say something! Wine from the shop, and rosewater from the druggist’s, and cloth from the draper’s, and mangoes from the fruiterer’s, and loans from the banker’s—and all on credit all the time. He might have stopped to ask himself where he’d get the money to pay it back.
His poetry never won the appreciation which he knew it deserved. He wrote to a friend:
...by my faith I swear to you, my verse and prose has not won the praise it merited. I wrote it, and I alone appreciated it.
And, a year or two before his death:
Sir, your humble servant has given up writing verse and given up correcting it. The sound of it he can no longer hear,and the sight of it he cannot bear. I am seventy-five years old.* I began writing verse at fifteen, and babbled on for sixty years. My odes have gone unrewarded and my ghazals unpraised. As Anwari [a Persian poet] says:
Alas! there is no patron who deserves my praise.
Alas! there is no mistress who inspires my verse.
I look to all poets and to all my friends not to write my name in the roll of poets and never to ask my guidance in this art.
Asadullah Khan, poetically named Ghalib, entitled Najm-ud-Daula [Star of the Realm]—God grant him His forgiveness.
In his last years he loses some of his buoyancy. In a letter to Salik:
‘God sends His blessings by stealth.’I hear that you are fit and well. We must be thankful that we are alive. ‘If you have your life, you have everything.’They say that to despair of God’s help is to be an infidel. Well, I have despaired of Him and am an infidel through and through. Muslims believe that when a man turns infidel, he cannot expect God’s forgiveness. So there you are, my friend: I’m lost to this world and the next. But you must do your best to stay a Muslim and not to despair of God. Make the text [of the Quran] your watch-word:‘Where there is difficulty, there is ease also.’
All that befalls the traveller in the path of God
Befalls him for his good.
The word for ‘traveller’ in the original is salik, which, in a letter to Salik is particularly appropriate.
His last years were indeed miserable ones. For at least fifteen to twenty years before his death he had been quite hard of hearing, and towards the end he was completely deaf. And this was not all. Extracts from his last letters give a distressing picture.
I don’t employ a clerk. If a friend or acquaintance calls, I get him to write the replies to letters. My friend, I have only a few more days to sojourn in this world... I have had a detailed account of my condition printed in the newspapers, and asked to be excused answering letters and correcting verses. But no one has acted accordingly. Letters still come in from all sides demanding answers to previous letters and enclosing verses for correction; and I am put to shame. Old, crippled, completely deaf and half-blind, I lie here day and night, a chamber-pot under the bed and a commode near it. I don’t have occasion to use the commode more than once in every three or four days; and I need the chamber-pot...five or six times in every hour.
I am near to death. I have boils on both my hands and my leg is swollen. The boils don’t heal and the swelling doesn’t subside. I can’t sit up. I write lying down.
A year and a half later he was dead.
* Hanoz: still, yet (as in ‘It’s still a long way to go’).
* He was in fact seventy years old.
THE ‘NEW LIGHT’:
RESPONDING TO SOCIAL CHANGE
The ‘New Light’:
Responding to Social Change
British reaction to the great revolt of 1857 brought about fundamental changes in India, and not least in Indian literature. Urdu culture and its aristocratic exponents were affected particularly deeply. To understand the extent of these changes, you need to know something about the historical background.
In the eighteenth century, the period of the first flowering of Urdu classical poetry, India was the battleground of many contending powers, some Indian, and some foreign; some seeking to establish virtual independence in a particular region, some aiming at an all-India supremacy. This was nothing new in Indian history. Indians had been accustomed for centuries to seeing this as a normal state of affairs, and not one of the contending
powers was seen as significantly different from any of the others. From 1757 when the East India Company became de facto masters of Bengal, the British too become a major power in northern India, and were initially seen as nothing more than that. In the Urdu-speaking regions their impact upon cultural life was minimal. Though the British took political control over Oudh (the area around Lucknow) in 1765 and occupied Delhi in 1803, they allowed the old Mughal elite to continue in its traditional lifestyle.
Early in the nineteenth century, however, the situation changed, as it became evident that the British would defeat all their rivals and emerge supreme over the whole of India. Even so, this might have brought about no substantial change in Indian attitudes had it not been for the fact that British policy was now increasingly influenced by people who were so convinced of the immeasurable superiority of British institutions over those of all other nations, that they set about attacking the very foundations of the Indian social order and attempting to remould it in their own image. Mass resentment rapidly grew until it exploded in 1857.
Most British writers still call this revolt ‘the Indian Mutiny’, but although it began in the army it was much more than a mutiny. It convulsed the whole area of the northern plains between Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west—the area which was the base of the old Mughal elite and of its Urdu culture. Up to 1857 nearly all the independent Indian powers had formally acknowledged the sovereignty of the Mughal king, and so too had the British. After the crushing the revolt, the British not only ceased to give formal allegiance to the Mughal king but declared that the Mughal Empire had ceased to exist, proclaimed themselves retrospectively the only legitimate sovereign power, tried the king for rebellion against them and exiled him to Rangoon. They also took drastic punitive measures against those they thought, rightly or wrongly, had inspired and led the revolt. Their distrust of all those who had been members of the old, predominantly Muslim, Mughal elite was intense.
This class felt the loss of its former influence keenly. Its leading elements began to think strenuously about what the Muslims needed to do to regain it. They quickly divided into two opposing camps, and conflict between them dominated the last decades of the nineteenth century. Those in the first camp maintained their strong (if now mainly silent) hostility to the British, withdrawing from the political arena and clinging firmly to their traditional religion and culture in the hope that conditions might one day emerge in which they could regain their former dominance. The other camp took a very different stand, calculating that the old Muslim elite could never fully regain its old ascendancy, but could hope to persuade the English to take them on as junior partners provided that they made a complete break with the past, and identified their interests completely with those of the British. To do this they needed to acquire modern education and adopt, wholesale, British cultural norms. It should be stressed that it was not merely to win British approval, fundamentally important to them though it was, that they took this view. They were convinced that it was the mastery of modern science and the adoption of the modern ways of life that had been the basis of British preeminence, and that their own Muslim community would never prosper or win a place of honour in the modern world unless it did likewise.
Upholders of these opposing views were dubbed respectively as champions of the ‘Old Light’ and propagandists for the ‘New Light’.
Outstanding among the champions of the New Light was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) a man who stood head and shoulders above all his contemporaries and was their unchallenged leader. He expounded his ideas in an unceasing stream of essays and books, and gathered around him a band of supporters who did likewise. As part of their modernizing impulse they championed the use of Urdu over classical Persian, and the writing of these men enormously enriched the stock of Urdu prose literature. Within something like thirty years, from about 1870 to the end of the century, prose literature of every kind—essays and polemics on religious, social and political themes, literary criticism, biography and the novel among others—had found a permanent place in the literature.
There was no aspect of religious, social and political life and thought that did not engage Sir Sayyid’s attention, though his main efforts were devoted to the creation of a college at Aligarh where modern education would be imparted to the sons of the old ruling elite and so create a force capable of changing the whole outlook of the community and winning a place of honour for it in social and political life. The movement which he inspired and led is thus generally referred to as the Aligarh movement. In 1875 it had gathered the necessary resources to establish the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, which in the course of time (after Sir Sayyid’s death) became the Aligarh Muslim University and continues to this day as one of the major Indian universities.
This section represents the energy of this new movement through extracts from the writing of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and two of his most articulate followers, Altaf Husain Hali (1837–1914) and Nazir Ahmad (1836–1912), both of whom were young men at the time of the traumatic events of 1857. Hali started as a ghazal poet (the last section had extracts from his memoir on Ghalib); but quickly became a fervent supporter of Sir Sayyid and put his poetic and critical skills at the service of the new movement. Nazir Ahmad was a versatile writer—novelist, essayist, and writer of many works on religion. (I shall say more about him in the section on The Novel.) I have also included an extract from an early novel by Ratan Nath Sarshar (1846–1902) which describes a young man determined to be ‘modern’ in the style of the New Light.
The chapter that follows is on Akbar Ilahabadi (1846–1921), an accomplished poet who turned his satirical eye on both Old and New, and the changing norms of society.
Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh Movement
The proponents of the New Light faced a formidable task, and Sir Sayyid made the running for them. He was an impressive figure, a man of an old aristocratic family whose grandfather had held high positions both in the old Mughal administration and the new British one. He was determined in the radically changed circumstances of the post-1857 world to win a similar position of honour for himself and his fellows, and he bent all his formidable energies to this task, completely undeterred by the enormity of it. He was ready to assail every traditional belief and every social convention that presented an obstacle to the acceptance of modern science and to Muslim-British understanding.
~
‘The Sick Man of Islam’
Neither Sir Sayyid nor his followers felt any easy optimism about what they were attempting. He wrote:
The Hindus and Muslims of our part of the country are still sunk in ignorance and will remain so for a long time to come. In fact, the Muslims may remain in this state so long that it will be too late for them to progress and civilize themselves. They are sick with a disease which may prove to be incurable...They recall the tales of their ancestors and conclude that no one is superior to them, and this blinds them to the garden which is now before their eyes and to the flowers that bloom in it.
Hali makes the same point bitterly at the start of a long poem which Sir Sayyid encouraged him to write:
A man went to Hippocrates and asked him
‘What ailments in your view are always fatal?’
He said,‘The world has yet produced no ailment
For which God has not granted us the cure—
Except when the sick man will take no notice
Thinking that what the doctors say is nonsense.
Explain its causes and its symptoms to him—
He will pick holes in the best diagnosis
Refuse to take his medicine, or to diet
And let his illness gradually grow stronger
Make sure he keeps his distance from the doctor
Until he has no hope of life left to him.
This is the state in this world of that people
Whose ship has slowly moved into the whirlpool
The shore is far away; the storm is rag
ing;
It seems the ship may sink at any moment
And yet the crew sleep on, sunk in oblivion
Sleep soundly, unaware of any danger.
The black storm clouds are gathering above them
And all the signs of imminent disaster
Hover above them like a flock of vultures
And from all sides a voice is calling to them,
‘What were you once? And what have you become now?
Once you were waking, you who now are sleeping.’
But this voice cannot rouse this heedless people
Content as ever in its degradation
Reduced to dust, but arrogant as ever.
Morning has dawned, but it sleeps on serenely
Neither bemoaning its abject condition
Nor envying the lot of other peoples.
~
Reinterpreting Islam
Central to the ideas of the New Light was the question of how to reconcile traditional Islamic learning with an acceptance of modern scientific education. Sir Sayyid argued for a thorough going reinterpretation of Islam. Like all Muslims, he believed that the Quran was the word of God; but he laid equal stress on their belief that the universe was the work of God, and argued that those who, like the British, were making ever fresh advances in discovering its laws—as the Muslims, alas, had long ceased to do—were discovering the will of God. Because the work of God and the word of God could not possibly be in confict, he argued that if there were passages in the Quran which seemed to contradict the findings of modern science, then that contradiction could only be apparent. The task was to re-interpret such passages so as to bring the interpretation into line with the findings of science. The attempt to do so was expressed not only in Sir Sayyid’s own writings, but in essays and articles by many of the best prose writers of the time.
A Thousand Yearnings Page 27
