Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, the great Urdu and Persian poet of the subcontinent, was born in Agra on December 27, 1797. His father and forefathers were Seljuk Turk soldiers of fortune who sought employment in the armies of princes. His father married into a distinguished and prosperous Agra family but died when Ghalib was just five. Ghalib spent most of his childhood in his maternal grandparents' home and received education in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, logic and philosophy. He started writing in Urdu at a very young age and in Persian when he was 11. He grew up into a handsome youth, married in his teens, and had several children, none of whom survived too long.
His was born forty years after the battle of Plassey, which gave the first clear signal of the control of British power over India, and died on February 15, 1869, twelve years after the turmoil of 1857, which ended with the removal of the last Mughal Emperor by the British. As such, Ghalib lived and witnessed the fall of the Mughal period in our cultural historyGhalib's ancestors had migrated from Central Asia to the subcontinent in the middle of the 18th century. Although he lived in Delhi where the language of his contemporaries was Urdu and he himself was a great Urdu poet, such was his love and respect for Persian, the language of his ancestors, that he wrote most of his poetry and prose in that language.
In this respect, Ghalib was a literary offspring of those great men of letters who had started migrating to the subcontinent from the eleventh century and had established a tradition of Persian poetry and prose under the patronage of Muslim kings and nobles, some of whom Ghalib considered as his models. In fact, Ghalib's pupil and his first biographer,Altaf Hussain Hali, has lamented that Ghalib did not really belong to the times he lived in; he should have been born a couple of centuries earlier because he deserved to be a court poet for emperor Akbar or Jehangir.
Be that as it may, Ghalib was a true representative — and the only one without a rival — of the two layers of the central tradition of our culture in the last phase of the Mughal period; the culture of the social elite with Persian as its literary language and the culture of the common city residents with Urdu as their language. Ghalib himself belonged to the social elite, and although he took great pride in his Persian poetry and prose, Urdu was his language, and he was a great poet of Urdu, in fact generally considered the greatest.
It is this representative character of Ghalib as a poet which has fascinated our critical opinion during the last hundred years. It is a measure of Ghalib's greatness that he has not only aroused the interest of the critical opinion, which, needless to say, represents the sophisticated literary elite, but also that of the uninitiated common man who admires him and loves and quotes him whenever he can without perhaps having read or understood him thoroughly.Now the question is what are the factors responsible for the vast appeal of Ghalib's poetry for the generations that followed him as against the generation to which he belonged?
The answer to this question entails an understanding of the salient features of the classical tradition of the Urdu poetry prior to Ghalib and the singular contribution made to it by Ghahb's individual talent.
The most outstanding aspect of our classical poetry was that it reflected a sensibility developed by a well-established culture with a set of generally accepted values and norms. It followed a pattern, in as much as the classical Urdu poets had a clearly defined "idea of the poetic" which more or less determined the nature and scope of thoughts and feelings considered suitable and worthy of poetic treatment. A poet did have his individual characteristic as a practitioner of the art but what he expressed in his poetry were not his personal and individualistic experiences. These experiences had a direct hearing on relationship with the experiences of the community because he shared and believed in the community's values and norms.
The commonality of interests between the poet and his community created such a sense of kinship between them that the poet became a true representative of society. He gave voice to the thoughts and feelings of the collective consciousness rather than his own within the limits placed by the prevalent "idea of the poetic". He accepted these limits and did not crave for the freedom to transgress them and enter into his own private and personal world and dig out the unusual, the original and the fanciful. His main concern as a poet was to pick up the commonplace and the oft-repeated and express it in a manner which was new and refreshing. As such the criterion of quality in our classical poetry was skill of expression, the skill to give poetic form to a given content. These were some of the salient features of the classical Ghazal poetry prior to Ghalib. It is in the context of this literary tradition that one has to see the change that Ghalib brought to bear on it. His voice, so deep and resounding, seems to rise from a new and different horizon. It was the voice of a poet who thought and felt differently.
Ghalib had a strong personality and he was very conscious of it. He was also conscious of the extra-ordinary creative gift nature had bestowed on him. This conscious-ness was responsible for Ghahb's urge to express himself in a manner distinctly his own. He had the weight of tradition behind him and yet he stood out as in individual in his own right.The classical Urdu poets were concerned with the experiences of the collective consciousness; Ghalib, on the other hand, was concerned with the experiences of his individual consciousness. In the classical tradition the worth of a poetic experience is judged in its relationship to the value system of the community. In the Romantic tradition, it is judged in its relation-ship to the vision of the individual poet.
Thus it is only in Ghalib that we see for the first time in Urdu poetry, an interaction between tradition and individual talent. He did not defy tradition altogether and yet he carved out a new and different path for himself. There is, no doubt, an element of the traditional in his poetry, although his individual stamp is apparent in the treatment of the subject there also, but his main achievement is that he spoke like an individual and spoke in an authentic voice.As a result, Ghalib discovered new realms of thought and feeling and gave new dimensions to the ones already discovered. He added new shades of meanings to words so much so that a study of his poetry becomes a veritable exercise in appreciating meanings of meanings. What he says is, of course, significant but equally significant is what he leaves unsaid. He creates a sense of the infinite while dealing with the finite.
Ghalib was acutely conscious of the decay and order and lifestyle that he knew. This is reflected in the feelings of melancholy in Ghalib's poetry. He was not at peace with himself, nor indeed with the world around him. Out of day and night, something which might not be exactly called a joy, but which was certainly enough to live by, had indeed taken flight. No wonder Ghalib ceased to be a serious poet as the age he represented came to an end in 1857. He only wrote some pieces of poetry in the remaining twelve years of his life.
This is indeed significant. Ghalib ,the poet, became Ghalib, the letter ,writer in Urdu. He spoke, but spoke in a different manner. His Urdu letters, which he wrote to his friends and pupils, are indeed contemporary history. They contain reports of actual incidents as well as pictures of destruction in Delhi. They also reveal with much sadness the suffering of a man who saw the sarcastic away of something which gave him nourishment while it lasted.
The "still, sad music" of Ghalib's soul expressing itself "in the other harmony of prose" represents not only his personal mood but in fact the mood and temper of a whole generation. In his letters, Ghalib summons up remembrance of things past and gives vent to his feelings of loneliness and melancholy. He recalls with a feeling of nostalgia his old friends and associates and their happy meetings; he talks about the familiar sights and scenes of the Delhi which was no more. He tells the tales of desolation and what it had meant to him and others in a whispered voice. He longed for the joy of living, which he once had, in spite of his personal hardships, in the company of his dear ones in the Delhi of his memories. He complains about the rain and the drought and his own physical ailments. But in all this, his innate sense of liveliness never misses a chance to delight in the lighter side of life, — flashes of his typical wit and humour brighten up the text of the letters whatever the subject matter. Ghalib's zest for life, which he kept up in spite of the series of unfulfilled wishes and dreams, now shows itself in his interest in basic human associations and in common events of day to day life. It is the human element in Ghalib's letters which distinguishes them from the vast literature of letters of eminent writers. There is also the other element of an acceptance of life, which is now clearly distinct. Ghalib seems to have developed a detached and objective attitude towards things, even towards him-self. At one place he says, he has become a spectator of his own self which he now imagines as some-thing outside his being. It is because of this attitude that one finds a kind of restraint in his lamentations. He is trying, even in his agony, to be at peace with him-self and with the world around him.
Ghalib's world, in his poetry and prose, is a very different world and one realizes how different it is only when one enters it after a passage through the world of his predecessors. It is a world inhabited by intensely human experiences of a lively and rich personality with a new and refreshing mode of thought and feeling. Ghalib was conscious of his extraordinary personality; but he had the breadth of vision and a catholicity of outlook which enabled him to see far beyond himself
He had a truly sensitive, free and open mind ready to perceive and absorb. That is why, while Ghalib always remained Ghalib, he could also be you and me and many others. He was not devoted to a particular view of life nor did he make an attempt to systematize his thinking. He was as large as life, and had a real zest for it and a rare insight into affairs. In short, Ghalib's world is a world which is vast and varied and immensely interesting.
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