Some Reflections On Ghalib's Modernity

Sahitya Akademi
REFLECTIONS: 'I Think of the Ends of Things': Some Reflections on Ghalib's ModernityA
Bi-Centenary Tribute
Author(s): K. Satchidanandan
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 42, No. 6 (188) (Nov.-Dec., 1998), pp. 10-18
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
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REFLECTIONS
REFLECTIONS
of the Ends of
Reflections
[H Things': Some
: on Ghalib's Modernity
A Bi-Centenary
Tribute
Bi-Centenaiy
'I Think
'I am neither the loosening of song

nor the close-drawn
tent of music;
I'am the sound,
simply, of my own breaking'

(Mirza Ghalib, Tr. Adrienne
lines full of 'intense
Rich)
moral loneliness'
to borrow
a
from Aijaz
Ahmed
who has edited
Thesea phrase
fascinating volume of Ghalib's ghazals in English versions
by different poets, could very well have come from a
a Mallarme,
a Rimbaud, a T.S. Eliot, a Nelly
Baudelaire,
Sachs or a Sylvia Plath or any of the modern poets of
India, especially of the solipsistic Sixties.
: it was a time of.
Ghalib's
times were traumatic
fragmentation
centre cannot
and despair
hold,' when
when the intellectuals
felt 'the
a whole civilization appeared

to be breaking up leaving a cultural and spiritual vacuum
that was not easy to fill. Life that was so far intelligible
the
suddenly
grew unintelligible;
though challenging
tradition
within
given the poet a secure framework

and contain
he could encounter, evaluate
was crumbling.
In Ghalib's
own words, 'a
that had
which
experience
strange time has come
seldom
observed
Ghalib
upon us like a shadow.'
the rituals of Islam; yet the religion was
luminous presence that filled him with a
there, a looming
made
God available
to him in
sense of the cosmic,
moments of crisis. There was too a sense of sharing, there
experiences, concerns and concepts, of love,
anxiety, friendship, brotherhood, equality, giving the poet
the secure feeling of being part of a collectivity and a sense
of relationship, of harmony with the society even in times
were common
of acute
anguish
and suffering. But by the beginning
of
century, things began to fall apart : order was giving

The entry of
to
disorder, self-doubt began to assail civilization.
way
interests expedited
the break-down
of the
the British commercial
the nineteenth
of the subcontinent
system. The subconscious

that soon
of confidence
was haunted
to disillusionment.
by a crisis
Mirza Ghalib
gave way
lived at a time when relationships
were becoming
more
(1797-1869)
and more difficult to sustain and the irrational
was beginning
to
society. The utter sense of waste and the desperate

longing
for lost relationships gave his poetry a tone different from those of Omar
with his sensuous
wisdom
and Hafiz with his moral
Khayyam
dominate
grandeur.
Ghalib's
much
like Baudelaire's
Pushkin's
Delhi,
Paris,
Lorca's
New
Brecht's
Berlin
or
Eliot's
was
York,
London,
St.Petersburg,
a city of crises and carnage, full of the intensities of cultural friction,
the frontiers of experience. The relationship between the metropolises

and the experience of modernity has been explored time and again in
have long
literary criticism. Writers and intellectuals
contemporary
abhorred
its vices
outside
the city and dreamt

noises. Cultural
of escaping from its sprawl and speed,

stability has often been seen as being
the urban order. And yet the city has fascinated them with its
and
of modern history, its turbulent artistic activity, its verve,

experience
drive and vivacity. The city has been a metaphor for all that is modern,
and modernism itself has been more or less an urban form of art, both
in India
and abroad.
of culture and a novel

City, both as a museum
as
the
foci
of
from
the
and as
environment,
migration
countryside
centres of political action, as the dissolver of the feudal order and the
harbinger of capitalistic relations,
artists and writers at the same
that
experienced
modern
of
paradoxical
has always attracted and repelled

It is here that artists have
time.
called
alienation,
with
coupled
phenomenon
position
independence
Cities with their vast agglomerations
indeterminacy.
different origins in different roles and situations
have
of conflict,
places
stimulate
cultural
transformation
innovation
and
novel
with
that
social
of people
of
always been
consciousness
a feeling
that
of moral
and
along
crisis. Chaos, contingency, diversity, heteroglossia
:
these storm-centres of civilization
have been characterised
by these
communicative
pluralizing and surrealizing forces of modernism. Exile, disconnection,

loss: these experiences of the 'unhoused'
writer in the city appear again
and again in Ghalib's poetry. 'Dropped
like a used light bulb, I won't
be shocked'
he says in one of his ghazals,
K. Satchidanandan/11
There's
no way to fix what's

Even with a door, I probably
He comes
to love not the beloved
them.
happened
shouldn't
inside me.
go back in.
herself, but the spaces
between
What can you get watching a life run like clockwork?

It is time to go when you don't even want loyalty.
He ends the ghazal
with the tragic confession,
I've nothing to be proud of.
Ghalib
was literally 'unhoused'

in both Delhi and Calcutta. He
rented
a
the
house
or
use of a house from his patron.
always
accepted
He had no books of his own, nor children except the two he adopted in
1852. Ghalib
materialised.
were tentative
always wished to have a regular income but it never

His marriage was not happy; his relations with his wife
and indifferent. Deprived

of both material and moral
remained
ever vulnerable,
ever on the brink of
He
was
the
wholsale
violence practised by
horrified
breaking up.
by
the British rulers in spite of his admiration for the rationality and the
certainties
Ghalib
of the West
sophistication
poverty and
that he contrasted
with
the intellectual
his
the redundancy
of the Moghal court. He expressed
horror at the British attrocities in his private letters though in the public
he was
his
'Dast-Ambooh'
document,
diary of 1857
generally
of the British despite occassional
remarks against their
appreciative
excesses.
It was the onslaught
of 1857 that really brought about a
in his attitude to the British; he had witnessed

the
in
Delhi
itself.
In
the
same
of
at
least
rebels
27,000
hanging
patriotic
year his brother Yusuf, who had been mad since 1826, passed away.
Many of Ghalib's friends were among those hanged by the British. His
transformation
attitude to the British was indeed
ideas
while
human
he was
also
ambivalent:
disgusted
rights to the Indian
he admired
with their cruelty
their liberal
and
denial
subjects.
Nothing comes very easy to you, human

least of all the skill to live humanely.
Time after time ahead of time, you fool,
standing in panic at the meeting place
creature
lines reflect Ghalib's general attitude to man's inhumanity

left even his body in the grave 'scarred with its disappointments.'
Adrienne Rich).
These
12/Indian
Literature
of
: 188
that
(Tr.
Ghalib's
is essentially a poetry of contemplation.

His atttempt is
to draw the subtlest and the most precise distinctions between one
and
experience and another and between one shade of an experience
another
shade.
The questions
Ghalib
of
Persian-Urdu
questions
asks are not different from the

what is love? What is
poetry
God? What is the place of man in this universe? However, Ghalib is no
mystic; even metaphysics attains an earthy character in his poems. Like
traditional
he brings together the metaphysical

and the temporal to
Baudelaire,
invent a poetics of sudden
of
moments when the
'correspondences',
of
forms
is
illuminated
rapid passage
suddenly
by an intuition of the
or
atemporal
spiritual:
Our time of awareness
a blinding
is a lightning-flash
to know and suffer.
interval in which
(Tr. Adrienne
Roland
Barthes once observed
that around
1850 classical
writing
the problematics
of
was the result of the pluralization
of world views
from the evolution
of new classes and communications.
In
disintegrated,
This
language.
deriving
Ghalib's
Rich)
and the whole
of literature became
poetry we begin to feel the 'great divide' between the past

the present, the beginning
of that break-up, a devolution
or a
dissolution that characterises modern art. Like all modern artists Ghalib
and
too confronts a crisis of culture and is under historical
strain. His is a
art
to
the
of
the
conventional
notions of
poetic
consequent
collapsing
and
traditional
notions
of
the
wholeness
of
individual
casuality
character. When realities become subjective fictions, the public notions
of language
become
discredited.
The dis-establishing
of communal
must
have
been
a
shock
to
a
writer
like
Ghalib
who always
reality
great
for
a
with
the
longed
meaningful relationship
community. He is aware
of contingency
as a disaster in the world of time. The panorama
of
futility was an immediate experience to him. 'I am a pinched out candle,

no longer good for the banquet-table/
he says. He feels he has lost all
the campaigns;
he is unable to find the truth since 'the world reflects
crooked, or the crystal ball distorts.' 'The seer turns blind.... So it's dead
in my breast, the zeal, the principle its only reward was the gleam
while it vanished.'
(Tr. William Stafford). Even in nature he found the
force of pain, 'Spring cloud thinning after rain : Dying into its own
(Tr. Thomas Fitzimmons).
weeping.'
Virginia Woolf thought that human nature changed in or about
December
1910; D.H. Lawrance
thought that the old world ended in
1915; Richard Ellman took it back to 1900; but Mirza Ghalib had seen
the end of the old world much earlier, in his own youth in the nineteenth
century. 'Images of death piled up everywhere, that's what the world
us,' he wrote in one of his ghazals. He could no more

live on the great promise : Well, you can believe it, I'd have died of joy
had the Great One proved the Word.' He says he would never have
had heavenly bliss even if he had lived longer.
fastens around
Exiled, how can I rejoice, forced here from home,

and even my letters torn open?'
(Tr. William Stafford)
'Be, or be lost', that was what he felt about life :

Either one enters the drift, bast and whole
or life is a mere game.
Ghalib
as one,
of his grief 'fall like a shower of sparks'

they call me a disciple of fire.' The market
even the nuanced art of poetry, 'We and the poems we
found the words
so that 'out in the world
place surrounds
make get bought and sold together.' Nietzsche declared in November
1888, 'I swear that in two years' time the whole world will be in
he wrote to August
convulsions.
I am sheer destiny.' In December
of the strength 'to cleave the
Strindberg, that he now felt possessed
contemporary, seems
history of mankind in two.' Ghalib, Nietzsche's
to share this apocalyptic
vision, that man is at the terminus of a long
era of civilization, that history had arrived at a point of destiny, that all
human values are going to be subjected to total revision. Ghalib appears
contraries in a
that fuses workaday
at times to use a metalanguage
theme is
ultimate
that
Ghalib's
of
discourse.
One
feels
new universe
of
of language that signifies the breakdown
is different from Romantic subjectivity,
His inwardness
relationships.
it comes from the isolation of the poet in the city's commercial chaos; it
is a desperate search for a private sense of belonging and of order created
language,
the break-down
fragments strewn around

and sterile, subjected to an entropic
out of the cultural

crippled
They are foolish who wonder

to live, wanting
I am doomed
him. He feels spiritually

anarchy :
why I am still living:

death, a little longer.
of the first masters to bring about that radical

in the nature of the lyric that is typical of modernism.
the traditional subject position of the lyric poet
He very often abandons
as the lover, the courtier, the patriot and the sage. The aspiration for an
Ghalib
is one
transformation
14/Indian
Literature
: 188
order, a feeling of doubt, disbelief in the divine promise,

the possibility of error, confession of sin, meanness
and misfortune :
all these characteristics of the modern lyric are discernible in Ghalib's
verses. The poet here is no more the celebrant of the culture to which
he belongs : he understands
the squalor and baseness of urban living
inaccessible
and like Rimbaud

he often writes a poetry of
Baudelaire,
unorthodox celebrations and chance epiphanies.
This is in keeping with
the spirit of the modern age, where the epic poem that expresses an
as does
ethical
choice
expresses
relevant.
new
the sustained
long poem with fully worked-out

appear out-of-tune with the time and the lyric that
a transitory mood, or a momentary illusion seems apt and
Ghalib's
poetry is like a spiritual
diary that follows the
schemes
conceptual
contours
and
of his individual
start.'
inadequacy
language
disassociated.
experience where 'every attempt is a wholly

In this attempt the poet is also confronted
with the
of language,
its aridity and plenitude.
The surface of
seems
to grow opaque
as the sensibility
becomes
an attempt to discover 'what flowers

Poetry becomes
amid
the
ruins
of
might grow
language,' to listen to 'the rattle of pebbles
on the shore under the receding wave.'
I am too old for an inner
the violence of the world is all around me,'
wildness, Ghalib/when
these lines of Ghalib
and frustration
express the feeling of exhaustion
from the confrontation with a world of destruction and
ruin. Ghalib's
lines 'Anyone
who still can hope is seeing visions'
that comes
reminds
one of what Bertolt Brecht wrote in our own times, 'Those

who laugh have not yet heard the terrible tidings.' He too felt that the
forehead without wrinkles is the sign of stupidity.
Even love finally left him in a state of disillusionment,
and so too
wine : 'The walls and doors of the tavern are blank with silence. I am
of the destroying genius of my love;/this crumbling house
ashamed
contains nothing but my wish to have been a builder.' Even creativity
is only the expression of a failure : 'Today, Asad, our poems are just the
of empty hours;/clearly
our virtuosity
has brought
us
pastime
nowhere'.
(Tr. Adrienne Rich). Here 'The images of collective failure
are.... fully assimilated
in an image of personal
lack of worth and
effectiveness, and of the irrelevance of the creative act itself,' to quote

Ahmed's
comment
on this ghazal.
Ghalib
identifies
the
Aijaz
totalization of knowledge
in the Hegelian
sense with the totalization
of the community itself:
We make new
our life is
an overthrowing
the great faith gathers

deaths
to itself
1
even of its worshippers.

(Tr. W.S. Merwin)
He felt that if the poet went on mourning,

will drift back into the wild.
the cities men inhabit
Ghalib desperately wanted to share his anxieties with others; but

he was living in an age when others were beginning to be perceived as
hell, as did the existentialists more than a century later.
I'd like to crumple this love, this shame into the fire;
What is this need to share what can't be shared?
(Tr. Adrienne
Rich)
He felt he was constantly behind bars and yet did not want others
to think that it was his nest that the lightning had shrivelled. The agony
of living was insufferable: 'What I'm living through now could smash
my house in pieces.' He felt love left no children; it always hid itself

under the veil of dust. Love, he found, did not have the colour of
A sense of
The heart fails even while it courts disgrace.
madness.
the
the
heart
was in
to
seemed
overpower
poet,
impotence
frequently
of registering the meaning of events.
state, incapable
he asks, 'Tears
a meaning to perceive, what is perception?',
He
the other guests see my weakness.'
sting my eyes, I'm leaving/lest
and was aware that the
knew the bitter aftertaste of all sweetness
He felt like a runner in a desert
Paradise
was but 'a long hangover.'
an autumnal
'Without
whose
frontiers seemed
to be farther and farther away
I'm going is farther at every step

the desert runs from me
Where
with my own feet.

In the lonely night because
Of the fire in my heart
the shadow
The bleeding
the desert:
slipped
of my anguish
from me like smoke.
blisters on the soles of his feet leave a red trail across
The trail of my madness crosses the desert

red pearls on a page of manuscript
(Tr. W.S. Merwin)
The eye was bleeding fire, and the earth and the dried leaves of
were being lit up because of him. Even spring comes to him
the garden
16/Indian
Literature
: 188
like a storm. The arrival of God amazes
him. 'The mirror has turned to
ground of waiting.' The world is a net and the desert is its

When his love is
'The
nights of Spring are finished, nightingale.'
prey.
His
he
thinks
of
the
ends
of
of
her
hair,
cry is a charred
things.
thinking
a
dove,
burning nightingale.
a six-tiered
Worse than any fire fed by what was

Was the fire of longing for what was not
nothing was left of the spirit

but the heart's suffering.
(Tr. W.S. Merwin)
Even
when
sun shines and turns everything into day, he only

: 'A strange time/has come upon us like a shadow.'
to be condemned
to live and to love and then to be
sees the shadow

Man
appears
from everything
estranged
he loves.
Asad, my shadow pours out of me like smoke

My soul is on fire; nothing is mine for long.
(Tr. Mark Strand)
Ghalib observes lovers fast turning into 'fascimiles of grief.' Poets

on
until their fingers bleed.
go
writing the histories of this madness
'Even as beggars we were bent on failure' he says, since even patrons
smiles. At the end of all sensual joys,

gave them only compassionate
revellers depart leaving a candle, ravaged for the carousing and gutted
out, silent and flameless. The wild nights vanish as the poet laments:
I am nothing but dust being blown around in her street;
O wind, let me down, I have no wish to be bird again.
(Tr. Mark Strand)
At times he tries to be detached, indifferent: 'Ghalib! Why expect

where to turn?/ Hopes die. You know that. How can you
to know
Love, he found, 'was a fire that lights itself/and dies out of

complain?'
itself, beyond our wills.' Ghalib was tormented by the fear that no one
else could ever share his pain:
Just when you think someone may feel your plight.
It turns out he's worst offeven calloused,
may be.
He asks the preacher not to raise the Kaa'ba's

hide one more idol in which there can be no belief.'
Mirza
Ghalib's
curtain:
are personal interpretations

of the spiritual agony
anxiety. He is the historiographer
poems
'It may
of an age of
of a faithless
time when
seemed to be breaking down and relationships

language
growing inane. Ghalib was a poet of crisis and this is what makes him
our immediate contemporary. He understands
us even better than we
understand
him.
t-*
-J-jL--ej.
U
U[ i-*
K. Satchidanandan
Publisher
18/Indian
Literature
: 188

Some Reflections On Ghalib's Modernity

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Sahitya Akademi

'I am neither the loosening of song

simply, of my own breaking'

lines full of 'intense

when the intellectuals

a whole civilization appeared

given the poet a secure framework

and suffering. But by the beginning

century, things began to fall apart : order was giving

system. The subconscious

society. The utter sense of waste and the desperate

the frontiers of experience. The relationship between the metropolises

the city and dreamt

of escaping from its sprawl and speed,

of modern history, its turbulent artistic activity, its verve,

of culture and a novel

has always attracted and repelled

pluralizing and surrealizing forces of modernism. Exile, disconnection,

he says in one of his ghazals,

no way to fix what's

to love not the beloved

herself, but the spaces

What can you get watching a life run like clockwork?

He ends the ghazal

with the tragic confession,

I've nothing to be proud of.

was literally 'unhoused'

always wished to have a regular income but it never

and indifferent. Deprived

in his attitude to the British; he had witnessed

attitude to the British was indeed

rights to the Indian

with their cruelty

Nothing comes very easy to you, human

lines reflect Ghalib's general attitude to man's inhumanity

is essentially a poetry of contemplation.

asks are not different from the

he brings together the metaphysical

Barthes once observed

and the whole

poetry we begin to feel the 'great divide' between the past

too confronts a crisis of culture and is under historical

futility was an immediate experience to him. 'I am a pinched out candle,

us,' he wrote in one of his ghazals. He could no more

Exiled, how can I rejoice, forced here from home,

'Be, or be lost', that was what he felt about life :

of his grief 'fall like a shower of sparks'

found the words

so that 'out in the world

fragments strewn around

out of the cultural

They are foolish who wonder

him. He feels spiritually

why I am still living:

of the first masters to bring about that radical

order, a feeling of doubt, disbelief in the divine promise,

and like Rimbaud

long poem with fully worked-out

experience where 'every attempt is a wholly

an attempt to discover 'what flowers

one of what Bertolt Brecht wrote in our own times, 'Those

effectiveness, and of the irrelevance of the creative act itself,' to quote

the great faith gathers