Ghalib: Selected Poems and Letters

Ghalib

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

Editorial Board

Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair

Paul Anderer

Donald Keene

George A. Saliba

Haruo Shirane

Burton Watson

Wei Shang

GHALIB

Selected Poems and Letters

Edited and translated by

Frances W. Pritchett and Owen T. A. Cornwall

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS   NEW YORK

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2017 Frances W. Pritchett and Owen T. A. Cornwall

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EISBN 978-0-231-54400-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah Khan, 1797-1869, author. | Pritchett, Frances W., 1947- editor, translator. | Cornwall, Owen T. A., editor, translator. | Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah Khan, 1797-1869. Works. Selections. | Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah Khan, 1797-1869. Works. Selections. English.

Title: Ghalib : selections from his Urdu poetry and prose / edited and translated by Frances W. Pritchett and Owen T.A. Cornwall.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Translations from the Asian classics | English translation and Urdu text. | Includes bibliographical references, appendices, glossary, and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016028955 (print) | LCCN 2016048551 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231182065 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231182065 (electronic)

Classification: LCC PK2198.G4 A2 2017 (print) | LCC PK2198.G4 (ebook) | DDC 891.4/3913—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028955

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Ghalib’s Life and Times

PART ONE: GHAZALS

PART TWO: GHAZAL VERSES

PART THREE: OTHER GENRES

1. Poems

Qaṣīda s (Odes)

An ode in praise of the Prophet (1821)

An ode in praise of a sleek betel nut (1826)

An ode in praise of the king (1852)

Rubāʿī s (Quatrains)

A quatrain on childhood and old age (1816)

A quatrain on speaking the difficult (1821)

A quatrain on fireworks and passion (1833)

2. Letters

To Tafta (1858), about the terrible losses of 1857

To Mihr (1859), about Ghalib’s appearance

To Mihr (1860), about the long-ago cruel dancing girl

To Mihr (1860), about being a sugar fly, not a honey fly

To Ala’i (1861), about the poet’s life as a captive

3. Prose

Preface to a Romance (1866)

Notes

Appendix 1. Ghalib’s Comments on His Own Verses

Appendix 2. Ghalib Concordance, with Standard Divan Numbers

Glossary of Technical Terms and Proper Names

Bibliography

Index

Urdu Text

Acknowledgments

Ghalib loved and cherished his friends, and we want to offer a toast to ours. We owe to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi a larger debt than we can describe. We thank Aftab Ahmad, Allison Busch, Arthur Dudney, Satyanarayana Hegde, Pasha M. Khan, C. M. Naim, Sean Pue, Dalpat Rajpurohit, and Zahra Sabri for their advice, help, and moral support; we also offer a libation to the memory of Aditya Behl. We thank Sheldon Pollock for encouraging us to undertake this project. Finally, Jennifer Crewe and the staff of Columbia University Press have been a pleasure to work with, and we are greatly in their debt.

Introduction

Ghalib’s Life and Times

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Mughal empire, once in control of almost the entire Indian subcontinent, was hanging by a thread. The repeated invasions by Iranians, Afghans, and Marathas in the course of the eighteenth century had left the Mughal emperors in possession of little beyond the imperial Red Fort in Delhi and their title. In 1803, the British East India Company officers with their Indian sepoy army captured Delhi and consolidated their hold on North India. From then on, the Mughal emperors were British pensioners.

The traditional date of Ghalib’s birth is 1797, in Agra, into a family of Turkish descent and military background.¹ Ghalib’s father died when the boy was only five, and the family was supported by an uncle, Nasrullah Beg Khan. This uncle, having surrendered the Agra fort to the British in 1803, joined the East India Company army. When he died in 1806, Ghalib was entitled to a significant portion of his British pension, but another, better-connected relative diverted much of it. For decades Ghalib petitioned the indifferent British bureaucracy for his rightful share, even making an arduous but ultimately vain journey to the East India Company’s capital in Calcutta in 1828. His financial circumstances were always precarious, but he nevertheless aspired to live in a style befitting a late-Mughal aristocrat.

The young Ghalib was precocious, talented, and hardworking. In 1813 he moved permanently from Agra to Delhi. At nineteen he compiled his first collection of poetry, and during his twenties he continued to compose ghazals in the highly Persianized Urdu that had begun to supplant Persian itself in the literary life of Delhi. His middle decades were devoted chiefly to poems and letters in Persian.

Persian was the great tradition on which he wanted to leave his mark. Although he felt little or no nostalgia for the political achievements of the Mughal empire, he cultivated the aesthetics of the sixteenth-century Persian poets who had migrated between the Safavid and Mughal empires in pursuit of patronage. In this respect, he might properly be considered the last great writer of the classical Indo-Persian poetic tradition, before the devastating social and cultural ruptures of 1857, when a rebellion against the British was met with ferocious reprisals. But to Ghalib’s regret, Persian was increasingly on the wane in North India during his lifetime.

Late in life he composed additional ghazals in Urdu, at the behest of Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837–1858), the last Mughal emperor, and other patrons. But he always insisted that he was really a Persian poet, for whom Urdu was only a secondary poetic language. Some evidence of his pride in his Urdu poetry can be found in his letters (and in the closing-verse of ghazal 19, though it is early), but only enough for a kind of minority report. Ironically, it was his Urdu poetry and letters that brought him fame, while his work in Persian has received very little attention.

As part of his aristocratic self-image, Ghalib took pride in his position of honor at the East India Company’s durbar, where as a member of a prominent family he was accorded an elaborate title and a ceremonial robe of honor. His pension, even when supplemented by stipends from rich admirers of his poetry, was barely enough to support his household. He had been married at the age of thirteen to Umrao Begam, a distant relative from a richer branch of the family; they had a number of children, all of whom died in infancy or early childhood. The couple adopted two orphaned boys from his wife’s side of the family and raised them affectionately. Relations between Ghalib and his wife were always correct, in the formal style of the time, but the two seem not to have been particularly compatible in temperament. His biographer and one-time pupil Altaf Husain Hali reports that Ghalib was a dutiful husband: he lived in the men’s quarters, but his wife duly looked after his food and other needs, and he never failed to go once a day to the women’s quarters at an appointed time to see her; he was very kind to her relatives as well.²

Throughout his life Ghalib participated in mushāʿiras hosted at venues ranging from private houses to the royal court. Steeped in etiquette, these literary gatherings for poetry recitation also served as opportunities to socialize, smoke the hookah, chew betel nut, earn the admiration of some new patron, and train one’s pupils. For the backbone of poetic education was the master-pupil relationship, in which the pupil (shāgird) submitted poems to the master (ustād) for correction. Though Ghalib never really had such an ustād himself, he had numerous pupils, including Muslims, Hindus, a British officer, various aristocratic nawabs, and eventually Bahadur Shah himself. Ghalib often provided his corrections to their verses through the newly reconfigured East India Company post office, which allowed him to maintain an expansive and diverse circle of friends.

Ghalib’s large body of well-preserved correspondence also reflects his historical position in the vanguard of print culture in North India. His Urdu and Persian letters, which his friends cherished, were collected and printed in his lifetime. He was centrally involved with printing the Persian poetry that was his pride and joy. But his collection (divan) of Urdu poetry also was printed under his supervision four times (1841, 1847, 1861, 1862). Along with books came other new print media. On his trip to Calcutta, Ghalib read newspapers, a medium that did not reach North India until around 1837. Newspapers were double-edged swords: they printed poetry but also dealt in scandal. In 1847, a zealous colonial administrator arrested Ghalib on charges of holding gambling sessions in his house, and the titillating news circulated rapidly in Persian newspapers, spreading as far as the distant city of Bombay. His brief, nonrigorous imprisonment loomed large in his memory as a period of solitude, suffering, and bitter social humiliation.

Nothing could ever crush Ghalib’s spirits for long, however. His mischievous sense of humor often involved him in controversy, as did his unshakeable faith in his own literary and poetic gifts. In defending his complex Persian poetry, he engaged in lengthy lexicographical disputes and provocative criticism. Dismissing more than five centuries of Persian poetry in India, he claimed, Except for Amir Khusrau of Delhi [d.1325], there is no master of Persian among the Indians.³ He regularly drank wine—though usually in modest amounts and diluted with rose water. A beloved anecdote tells of his response to a colonial officer who asked him, in 1857, whether he was a Muslim: Half a Muslim, Ghalib replied. I drink wine; I don’t eat pork.⁴ In his Persian account of the rebellion of 1857, he wrote, I am no more than half a Muslim, for I am free from the bonds of convention and religion, and have liberated my soul from the fear of men’s tongues. It has always been my habit at night to drink French wine, and if I did not get it, I could not sleep.⁵

Ghalib’s resistance to religious rules like the prohibition of alcohol was often articulated within the Sufi tradition that had been prominent in Persian and Arabic poetry for over a millennium. By the nineteenth century, intoxication from wine drinking was a well-established metaphor for the rapture of divine revelation. The Sufi vision of the Divine creating the world in order to know Himself as in a mirror⁶ explains a great deal about the ubiquitous mirror imagery in Ghalib’s poetry. But the stylized nature of the ghazal makes it difficult to tell much about Ghalib’s personal religious life from his poetry alone. In the stagecraft of poetry, it is all too easy to take the play for the playwright. From his letters, however, we can see how Ghalib resisted doctrinaire attitudes and turned away any requests to engage in religious polemic. We also find him abjuring atheism and proclaiming his love for the Prophet Muhammad—only to colorfully lambaste a preacher for hectoring him. His respect for Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, especially beloved by Shia Muslims) is also palpable, though it would be a mistake to draw strong conclusions about his