COLUMN: In the Mirror of Ghalib

Published January 19, 2014
Mehr Farooqi is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is currently writing a commentary on the mustarad kalam of Ghalib.
Mehr Farooqi is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is currently writing a commentary on the mustarad kalam of Ghalib.

It is fascinating to examine Ghalib’s work from yet another perspective: the printed or what I will call ‘authorised’ versus the calligraphed or hand-written nuskhas of his poetry collection. Ghalib’s output in Urdu was not as meagre as we generally assume looking at the slender Divaan-i-Ghalib. Ghalib composed almost double of the 1,800 or so verses that are presented in his authorised divaan.

Asadullah Khan Ghalib began composing Urdu verses at an early age and had a sizable collection of 1,800 verses ready by 1816, that is when he was only 19 years old. At the time, he preferred the takhallus Asad for his Urdu and Ghalib for his Persian poetry. Later on he used Ghalib for both Urdu and Persian.

In those days it was customary to get a katib or a calligrapher and have authored texts, particularly poetry, beautifully inscribed and bound into a book manuscript for presentation and circulation among the lettered elite of society. With the popularity of the printing press at the turn of the 19th century, poets had to negotiate with the challenge of publishing their work for a wider, even unknown audience. Ghalib may have been among the earliest of Urdu poets to navigate this unfamiliar path.

On an extended visit to Calcutta, the colonial metropolis with a different cultural-literary ambiance than Delhi in the late 1820s, Ghalib was persuaded by Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad to make selections of his poetry for publication. He prepared the manuscript for Gul-i Rana, a collection primarily of his choicest Persian and some Urdu poetry in 1828. During the course of preparing Gul-i Rana, Ghalib may have decided to produce an intikhab of his Urdu verse as well. The manuscript was ready by 1833. Ghalib also wrote a dibachah, or a foreword in Persian for his Urdu divaan, but quite a number of years elapsed between the preparation of the manuscript and its eventual publication in 1841 (Delhi). Ghalib revised the dibachah, adding the famous paragraph stating that this was his authorised divaan and any stray ghazals found outside of this should not be attributed to him. Nawab Ziauddin Ahmad Khan wrote the taqriz (critical introduction).

The 1833 selection had a total of 1,070 verses; when it was published in 1841, the number of verses was 1,095, which meant an addition of only 25 new she’rs in eight years! This is partly because Ghalib was writing mostly in Persian in those years, but we must remember that he had already composed 1,800 verses by 1816. So he disregarded some 700 verses and chose what he regarded worthy of publication. Subsequently, the divaan went through four more editions in Ghalib’s lifetime. The fifth and last one has 1,795 she’rs.

It is obvious that Ghalib made a definitive selection or intikhab of his poetry. But what happened to the verses that he did not deem worthy of publication? Ghalib was not careful in keeping all his verses together. Fortunately, a few copies of his bayaz were made periodically by the poet for his use and for gifting, and many of them survived, despite the great upheaval of 1857. The first of such nuskhas to surface was the one discovered in the Bhopal library in 1918. It was calligraphed in 1821 by Hafiz Mueenuddin when Ghalib was 24 years old. According to Maulana Imtiaz Ali Arshi, this nuskha remained with Ghalib for a large part of life because he made corrections on the margins, added and deleted she’rs. It contains 1,900 verses of which 1,833 are from ghazals.

The Bhopal nuskha was first alluded to by Saiyyed Sulaiman Nadvi who saw it in the possession of Abdurrahman Bijnori who was preparing it for publication. Bijnori’s untimely death left the task unfinished. It was published by Mufti Anwarul Haq, director of education of the Riyasat of Bhopal, as the Nuskha-i Hamidiyya in 1921. A second nuskha, known as the Nuskha-i Sherani, was in the personal library of the renowned scholar and manuscript collector, Hafiz Mahmud Sherani. This nuskha is assumed to be of a later date, probably 1827 (a photo offset was published from Lahore in 1969). There is a debate among Ghalib scholars as to which of the two manuscripts, Bhopal or Sherani, was the older one, or the kernel for the copy.

Noted Ghalib scholar Gyan Chand Jain does not agree with Maulana Arshi’s conclusion that the Bhopal manuscript is the older of the two. According to Jain, the corrections in the Bhopal manuscript are not in Ghalib’s hand; they were done by someone else after copies of the Sherani manuscript were circulated. Professor Jain’s observation is authenticated by the fact that the new she’rs added to the older ghazals were written in the margins. New ghazals were added on in the margins too. There were some blank pages at the end of the Bhopal manuscript that were used to inscribe seven ghazals in the radif of “ye” (two were inscribed in the margins). The copyists were careless; they re-copied some ghazals that were already included in the body of the Bhopal manuscript. According to Jain, the copyists did not, or could not, include some ghazals that were in the Sherani manuscript, but not in the Bhopal manuscript, because the copy they had was corrupted and missing those ghazals (Jain, Ramuz-i Ghalib).

The first published edition of the Bhopal manuscript was error ridden. A second more careful edition produced by Hamid Ali Khan is considered the standard text although it is not entirely free of disputed readings. It is fortunate that the nuskha was edited and published when it was because it mysteriously disappeared from the library during Partition.

A historic but controversial landmark in Ghalibian studies was the unearthing or unveiling of a nuskha claimed to be written in Ghalib’s own hand! The manuscript surfaced in Bhopal in 1969, coinciding with the centenary of Ghalib’s death that was being commemorated across the subcontinent. The uncanny coincidence produced some skepticism regarding its authenticity. The nuskha is known as Nuskha-i Amroha or Nuskha-i Arshizadah (depending on the edition one looks at) and is the earliest of all nuskhas. I have narrated the story of its remarkable discovery in my preceding column. Here I want to draw attention to the controversy regarding its authenticity.

While specialists such as Maulana Arshi, Nisar Ahmad Farooqi, Malik Ram and Ale-Ahmad Suroor agreed that the nuskha was indeed in Ghalib’s hand, a few scholars, notably Kamal Ahmad Siddiqi, Khwaja Ahmad Farooqi and Nurul Hasan, were not convinced. Siddiqi, a learned Ghalib scholar, published Bayaz-i Ghalib, Tahqiqi Jaizah (Srinagar, 1970) in which he strongly contended the authenticity of the newly uncovered nuskha. He argued that the manuscript was a fake and that someone had cleverly imitated the hallmarks of Ghalib’s handwriting to lend it credibility. He claimed to have been approached by someone who could produce such a nuskha for him at a price. In his book he attached a sample of Ghalib’s handwriting produced by that anonymous calligrapher. Siddiqi does not consider the 25 additional ghazals in the nuskha to be Ghalib’s. The backbone of Siddiqi’s argument, published more recently in Ghalib ki Shinakht (New Delhi, 1997), is that the Nuskha-i Amroha follows the text of Nuskha-i Sherani, which he regards to be later than Bhopali. The problem with this argument is that the date of the Sherani nuskha is disputed. I have mentioned above that Gyan Chand Jain considers Sherani to be the older text.

Once again the mystery is deepened by the disappearance of the original manuscript. We do have two facsimile editions: the 1969 Nuqush Ghalib Numbar edited by Nisar Ahmad Farooqi and the second, a limited edition Divaan-i Ghalib, edited by Akbar Ali Khan Arshizadah, from Rampur (September 1969).

The drastic editorial excisions made by Ghalib in the intikhab of his poetry have puzzled Ghalib scholars. Ale Ahmad Suroor has perceptively remarked that Ghalib was an extremely accomplished poet, but he has not been able to select his best verses. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in the introduction to his intikhab of Ghalib, has included some of the mustarad verses but holds that most of the better verses are in the current divaan. Muhammad Mujeeb is of the opinion that Ghalib’s best and most serious poetry is in the Nuskha-i Hamidiyya. Mujeeb’s intikhab of Ghalib (in Urdu and English translation) gives a fair representation of the mustarad verses. In my opinion, Ghalib’s exclusions were prompted by the exigencies of his situation: a cultural preference for the aural in poetry rather than the opaque, cerebral, embedded meaning that could not be understood even in repeated recitation of a verse. There are a good number of excellent verses in the mustarad divaan that need to be re-circulated and brought to readers and listeners of Ghalib.

At the head of the Urdu section of his second intikhab (1866), Ghalib placed the following she’r:

                           ![enter image description here][3]

Why would anyone have known the affair of my heart; My selection of verses disgraced/revealed me.

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