Gopi Chand Narang
Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind
Translated from Urdu by: Surinder Deol
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2017
ISBN: 9780199475919
Pp 464 | Kindle 611.24 | Hardback 1295
 
Highlights the need for multiple ways of seeing and engaging with the world
 
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) lived through one of the most turbulent periods of recent history. Two worlds—the decaying and the emergent—fused and merged. Pathos, confusion and conflict reigned supreme as the Great Revolt of 1857 marked the end of an era and a new world order lay waiting to be unfurled. Ghalib lived in the city of Delhi, saw with his own eyes madness and mayhem descend upon the streets of his beloved city and witnessed the siege and slaughter of an entire way of life. While to some extent his response to the events of 1857 are contradictory since he was dependent on the pension he received from the British (he was, in his own words, a namak-khwar-e-sarkar-e-angrezi or an eater of the salt of the British government on account of his pension, incidentally stopped after 1857 but re-instated in 1860), there is much in his oeuvre that is in the nature of a testimony to his times. There is, of course, the blood chilling ghazal he wrote immediately after the Revolt which speaks of the here and now in unequivocal terms:

Now every English soldier that bears arms
Is sovereign, and free to work his will
 
Men dare not venture out into the street
And terror chills their heart within them still
Their homes enclose them as in prison walls
And in the Chauk the victors hang and kill
The city is athirst for Muslim blood
And every grain of dust must drink its fill

(Translations by the reviewer)

Then there are countless other instances where Ghalib speaks of an emptiness, an indefinable, almost existentialist, angst, that goes beyond the topical. There are, for example, the three couplets he wrote in 1862, possibly in response to the Nawab of Farrukhabad who was picked up by the British for aiding the rebels and abandoned on an island off the shore of Arabia. While some verses, such as those below, reflect the hopelessness and escapism that afflicted many Muslims of his generation, there are countless others that voice a predicament that rises above the here and now of human existence:

Let us go and live somewhere where there is no one
No one who speaks to me in my language, no one to talk to
I will make something that is like a house
(But) There won't be any neighbours, nor anyone to guard it
Were I to fall ill, there will be no one to tend me
And when I die, no one to mourn me

The point of this extended introduction is not so much to establish Ghalib as a chronicler of his time but to point out how Ghalib transcends his time and circumstance and speaks of universal concerns. For, who amongst us has not been touched by the void? Who has not known emptiness? Who has not felt the terrible loneliness of being or the human predicament? It is this deeply mystical quality of Ghalib's vast and varied oeuvre that is picked up by Prof Gopi Chand Narang in his new book, Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind (published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2017, Translated from Urdu by Surinder Deol). As Narang says in his Introduction:

Ghalib's poetry is like a goblet that is filled to the brim with myriad reflections of the universe. A mystifying world of complex and deeply embedded meanings layered with nuances is alive in his verses. The biggest question about Ghalib—one for which there is no easy answer—is: What is that quality that flashes like lightning and illuminates the garden of meaning in such a way that the reader is rendered almost speechless?

And elsewhere:

Ghalib was not merely deeply immersed in Mughal aesthetics, but the way in which he reflected our cultural and philosophical knowledge is hard to find a match in any other poet. While it is true that he was influenced by the Islamic traditions that emanated from Central Asia, but the roots of his own dialectics penetrated deep into the Indian soil. He does not lay unnecessary stress on his "Somnaat-e Khayaal", though it is also true that the rightful consideration that should have been given to its poetical content has never been given. (24-25)

Ghalib's thought pattern, according to Narang, is dialectical; that is why Ghalib rejects every form of dogma—be it in the form of religious beliefs, received knowledge or for that matter even the form of poetics prevalent in his own time (best exemplified in the oeuvre of his illustrious contemporaries such as Zauq, the ustad of the Mughal emperor). Narang traces the source of this otherness which is such a distinctive quality of Ghalib's work and uses the term ‘innovative dialectical poetics’ to describe this distinctness. While literary commentators down the ages (including no less a person than Maulana Hali who introduced the nineteenth-century reader to a new way of reading Ghalib) have commented on this unique quality that sets Ghalib in a league of his own, no one has hitherto attempted to trace this innovativeness to its source. Narang does so; he traces it to Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil, the seventeenth-century poet from Azimabad, considered by many to be the most difficult and challenging poets of the ‘Indian school’ of Persian poetry. In fact, from Bedil, he traces the thread back all the way to Sabke Hindi, and the coming together of diverse philosophical traditions in the melting pot that was Mughal India. Ghalib's mystical and passionate ghazals, that occasionally appear opaque or dense to the uninitiated, on close reading reveal the mingled influences of traditions as old as Buddhist philosophy and dialectical thought found in ancient texts such as the Puranas and the Yoga Vashishth.
 
Through skilful and well documented detailed descriptions, Narang shows how Ghalib encapsulates centuries of Indian thought and dialectics, how he travels through history and culture, delving into the great void that is Time, steering past archetypal patterns and skirting conventional and time-honoured tropes that have been the Urdu poet's greatest treasures, to produce startlingly new images. Ghalib's innate intellectual scepticism never allows him to fully embrace any one philosophical or mystical tradition. He grapples with the dilemmas of mortal existence—much like Bedil—and the answers he seeks to produce through his poetry rise above their time and circumstance and speak to us 150 years after his death. Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind is an important book not merely because of its profound scholarship or the strength of its argument but because it points out the need for multiple ways of seeing and engaging with the world around us. As Narang reminds us early on in his exhaustive study, Ghalib had called himself Andaleeb-e Gulshan-e Na-Afreeda ('The Nightingale of a Garden that is yet to be Created'). As informed readers we can create that garden by reading Ghalib in his true context. Surinder Deol has done a good job by making this invaluable book available for the word-wide readers in English.