Meet Mirza Ghalib, the poet of poets

Ghalib's poetry stands out for its down-to-earth quality

Like Shakespeare, Ghalib is so often misquoted that a list of couplets wrongly attributed to him could make a whole book. The bard would have been horrified by some of the stuff that’s often credited to him. But he would have also been flattered as it confirms his popularity. He is perhaps the only Urdu poet who literally everyone has heard about irrespective of their interest in Urdu or poetry. He is also one of the most discussed, analysed and translated Urdu poets having been translated into many Indian and foreign languages. His life has inspired at least one memorable Bollywood movie and one highly successful TV series, besides numerous plays and books. 

So, what’s the secret of Ghalib’s fame? What is it that despite his often difficult language and unconventional style Ghalib appeals both to the literary elite and masses alike?  That’s the question that this book by one of the country’s foremost Urdu scholars seeks to answer. For millions of lay Ghalib fans, his appeal is his universality and enduring contemporaneity that make ordinary people relate to his work. In his own words, Hain aur bhi duniya me sukhanwar bahut achhe, kehte hain ke Ghalib ka hai andaaze-bayan aur (there are many brilliant poets but it’s said that Ghalib’s has a unique style).  

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Gopi Chand Narang, professor Emeritus at Delhi University and one of India’s foremost Urdu scholars,  brings an academic rigour to an understanding of Ghalib and his work. He discusses Ghalib’s work in the context of the time he lived in and in relation to the works of his contemporaries and their critique of his work. He believes that most previous studies have tried to “simplify” Ghalib both as a poet and as a person. He was a deeply complex personality and his poetry even more complex —”an astonishing world of layer upon layer of complex meaning”. The fundamental question that Narang poses is about the “magical” quality of Ghalib’s poetry that set him apart from his contemporaries. 

“The biggest question about Ghalib’s poetry is to discover the mysterious elemdown-to-earthes up like a flame and continues to lighten up vistas of meaning so that an ordinary reader is left breathless,” he writes.

His poetry stands out for its down-to earth quality. Ghalib’s focus was on human beings — “their wishes and yearnings, life’s paradoxes, and different ways employed by them to make sense of reality”. The most authoritative analysis of Ghalib’s work came from his equally famous contemporary Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali (commonly known simply as Hali) whose biography of Ghalib, Yadgar-e-Ghalib, remains a  basic source of understanding him and his poetry. It’s also regarded as the most comprehensive and balanced assessment of Ghalib’s oeuvre.  Narang cites it at some length to make the point that Ghalib’s USP was his highly individualistic style and the way he deployed it to express complex thoughts. Which — as Hali noted — didn’t endear Ghalib to those “used to listening the straightforward and easy-to-comprehend poetry” of his peers.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Ghalib’s real name was Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan; “Ghalib” was his nom de plume. Born in Agra, he later moved to Delhi where he spent most of his life and died in 1869, aged 71. The “Haveli” where he lived in Ballimaran, Old Delhi, is now a museum. He had a difficult childhood, losing his father when he was only five. Despite the fame he achieved, his life was never easy. Economic hardships and personal tragedies dogged him throughout his life. He saw life as an “imprisonment”; and marriage a “second imprisonment”! Human existence as a perpetual struggle was a recurring theme of his poetry. One of his famous lines is: Qaid-e-hayat-au-band-e-gham, asl mein dono ek hain, maut se pehle aadmi gham se najaat pai kyon (the prison of life and the bondage of grief are one and the same. How can man expect to be free of grief before he dies?)

Narang goes beyond Ghalib’s biography in what he describes as a departure from the dominant trend of focusing on his life. His focus, instead, is on Ghalib’s poetry, which he defines as “the poetry of defiance, subversion, and freedom of belief”. Ambiguity was a hallmark of Ghalib, lending his work to different interpretations depending on where the reader is coming from. Normally, ambiguity is frowned upon but Ghalib turned it into his strength. The widely acclaimed universal appeal of his work comes precisely from its ambiguity — or what Narang calls his “language of paradoxical contradictions”. 

“Each person reads his own Ghalib... There’s no limit to how someone could interpret Ghalib. His poetry does not fit into any one category. That’s why Ghalib called himself the ‘nightingale of a garden which is yet to come into existence’. 

“Ghalib was way ahead of his time and it has taken the world “a long time to understand him,” Narang laments. Even now there is an inadequate understanding of the full depth of Ghalib’s creativity whose roots go back to centuries old ancient Indian philosophy and Buddhist thought of Shunyata (the doctrine of zero).

The book comes with high praise for the insights it offers into Ghalib’s world. Javed Akhtar is quoted in the blurb as saying that this should be the “first choice” of anyone interested to know about Ghalib. And, no doubt, it’s a seriously scholarly work, but beginners beware: it’s not for you. For, it’s also a highly academic book with often some dense prose with which the non-literary hoi-polloi might struggle.  

The reviewer is a London-based journalist