About Me
I, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, dubbed forever as 'GHALIB', a name i chose
in the tradition of all clasical Urdu poets. I did this after reading a rather shocking persian couplet of a poet called 'ASAD' which was my earlier name. After i read that, i had a strange epiphany or a revelation or pure stroke of madness..., and then i started writing under the name of 'Ghalib', meaning The Conquerer.
i 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 my horoscope,
that the poet might have been born a month later, in January 1798.Both my father and uncle died while i was still young, and
i spent a good part of my early boyhood with his mother's family.
This, of course, began a psychology of ambivalences for me. On the
one hand, i 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 i showed from very early child-
hood. On the other hand, this placed me in the humiliating situation
of being socially and economically dependent on maternal grandparents,
giving me, one can surmise, a sense that whatever worldly goods i
received were a matter of charity and not legitimately mine. My 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.Now for some quick FAQ round - The question of my early education has often confused Urdu scholars. Although any record of my formal education that might
exist is extremely scanty, it is also true that my circle of
friends in Delhi included some of the most eminent minds of my time.
There is, finally, irrevocably, the evidence of my 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 my tutor, whom i mention at
times with great affection and respect, but whose very existence i
deny -- was, in fact, a real person and an actual tutor of minewhen i 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
me, among others.
Although very different in style
and procedure, my 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.
Well, thats kind of heavy stuff...think i need some mangoes!!1Frankly, i 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 myself and Zauq, the king B.S.Zafar's tutor in the
writing of poetry; and if our drunken brawls and drugged moral indignation and 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 my style of poetry or
life. There is also reason to believe that i 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 am i well-known for admiring the old bloke's verses.
However, after Zauq's death i did gain an appiontment as the
king's advisor on matters of versifiaction. I 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 I 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 my own lack
of interest in the later Moghul kings had something to do with it. Bunch of morons!!!The only favouarble result of my connection with the court
between 1847 and 1857 was that i 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. I did, however, write many ghazals which are of the same
excellence and temper as my 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. You wonder just how many great poems were permanently
lost to Urdu when i chose to turn to Persian instead...many ..they slipped into the darkness of the nite and ran away with the morning breeze...sighing, dyingIn terms of material success, my life never really took
root and remained always curiously unfinished. In a society where
almost everybody seems to have a house of his own, I never had
one and always rented one or accepted the use of one from a patron.
i never had books of me own, usually reading borrowed ones. I had
no children; the ones i had, died in infancy, and I later adopted
the two children of Arif, my wife's nephew who died young in 1852.
My one wish, perhaps as strong as the wish to be a great poet,
that I should have a regular, secure income, never materialized. My
brother Yusuf, went mad in 1826, and died, still mad, in that year of
all misfortunes, 1857. My relations with my 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 I required from my relationships;
given that social order, however, I could not conceive that my
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 my poetry it must be
remembered that it is the poetry of more than usually vulnerable
existence.It is difficult to say precisely what my 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 you 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 me to
have a clear ideological response to the British invasion. There is
also evidence, quite clearly deducible from my letters, that i
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.I had many attitudes toward the British, most of them
complicated and quite contradictory. My 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. My letters, however,
are some of the most graphic and vivid accounts of British violence
that you will possess.Yo u should know that "Dast-Ambooh" was always meant to
be a document that I would make public, not only to the Indian
Press but specifically to the British authorities. And I even wanted
to send a copy of it to Queen Victoria. My letters, are to the contr-
ary, written to people I 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 ,
whenever Ghalib feared the intimate, anti-British contents of his
letters might not remain private, I requested their destruction, as
I did in the 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 I was in fact
feeling at the time. And what I 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 I, like many other Indians at the time, admired British,
and therfore Western, rationalism as expressed in constitutional law,
city planning and more. My trip to Calcutta (1828-29) had done much
to convince me 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 my mind, i 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 I 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 me only when the onslaught of 1857
caught up with the Delhi of my own friends. Whatever admiration i
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
I, Ghalib witnessed it all. It was obviously impossible for me to
reconcile this conduct with whatever humanity and progressive ideals
i had ever expected the Briish to have possessed. My letters tell
of his terrible dissatisfaction.My 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. I was probably not as
fully aware of this 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. My bewilderment at the extent of the
destruction caused by the very people of whose humanity i had been
convinced can , however, be understood in terms of this basic
ambivalence. Or the fact that i may be a completely crazy schitzo!!!The years between 1857 and 1869 were neither happy nor very
eventful ones for me. During the revolt itself, i remained
pretty much confined to my house and undoubtedly frightened by the
wholesale masacres in the city. Many of my friends were hanged,
deprived of their fortunes, exiled from the city, or detained in jails.
By October 1858, I had completed the 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 I had not
supported the insurrections. Although my life and immediate possesions
were spared, little value was attached to my writings; i was flatly
told that i was still suspected of having had loyalties toward the
Moghul king. During the ensuing years, my main source of income
continued to be the stipend he got from the Nawab of Rampur, bless him.
"Ud-i-Hindi", the first collection of my letters, was published in
October 1868. I died a few months later, on February 15th, 1869.
(adapted from www.smriti.com/ghalib)
==========================mushkil hai zabas kalaam meraa ai dilsun sun ke ise suKhan_varaa.N-e-kaamilaasaan kahane kii karate hai.n faramaaishgoim mushkil vagaranaa goim mushkil .............
"Too hard to grasp is my verse, O heart!
Hearing it, the connoisseurs of art
For a simpler style do ask
Difficult, if I write, difficult, if I do not .."
-----------------------------------------------Ghalib Mirza Asadullah Khan
19th century urdu/farsi poet/ghazal singer/beatnik
