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 About Ghalib

         Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan -- known to posterity as Ghalib, a
 `nom de plume' he adopted in the tradition of all clasical 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 uncertainity.

         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 occured 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 desparately 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 comtemporaries. As for the marriage, in the predomin-
 antly 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 Bauldeaire. 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 viscerrally
 -- 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 appiontment as the
 king's advisor on  matters of versifiaction. 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 favouarble 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. Infact, it is astonis-
 hing 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 certainities -- not certitudes, but certainities, 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 authori-
 ties. 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 oppr-
 essors, 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 practised 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 therfore 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 preco-
 ciousness 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 brutral 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 merciless-ness 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 Briish 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 masacres 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 possesions
 were spared, little value was attached to his writings; he was flatly
 told 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.
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