February 19, 2002

Though born in princely affluence and honour, life for Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, alias Mirza Nausha, had seldom been a bed of roses. He certainly had his moments of bliss, recognition and pleasure. Also some ecstatic love affairs. But, it would seem that he was destined to witness and become deeply involved in the most tumultuous phase of India’s history. This catastrophic phase began with the Mutiny, the Sepoy Revolt or the war of independence that was lost with calamitous results.

The last twelve years of Ghalib’s eventful and agonized life began in the shattering aftermath of the 1857 upheaval. Being an inseparable part of the core of life in Delhi, he had to endure the unendurable. His entire world disappeared within a few weeks, indeed a few days. He lost everything of value. The worst was the loss of many loyal and intimate friends, as the triumphant British went about crushing the Muslim aristocracy. What added to the heart-rending troubles was the twin disaster of diminishing finances and failing health.

Ghalib’s torment began on May 11, 1857 when the Mutiny broke out. Thereafter, he was destined to move from crisis to crisis, calamity to calamity, till the last moment of his life. He was already past sixty. It was the worst cataclysm in the history of Delhi. Ghalib was to see Delhi destroyed brick by brick as it were. What collapsed was not only an empire but a whole world as he knew it. He wrote: “at noon on Monday...the walls and ramparts of the Red Fort shook with such force that vibrations were felt in the four corners of the city. Swarming through the opened gates of Delhi, the intoxicated horsemen and rough foot soldiers (from Meerut) ravished and killed ...Shut up in my room, I listened to the noise and tumult...”

That was virtually the beginning of the ultimate phase of the great poet’s life. Three months after the revolt broke out he wrote, “My friends, my brothers, have all been killed or have disappeared without trace. I have a thousand friends to mourn, grieving alone and comforting myself alone. More than ruined and destitute; my life is ending...”

This tide did turn. Not for the better. On September 13, the British recaptured the city. As Ghalib saw, “The victors killed all whom they found on the streets. Those of noble birth and position, in order to protect their honour, which was all that remained with them, stayed inside their locked houses...” In less than a week the British had under their control all that mattered. “The horror of mass arrests, assassinations and slaughter now reached our lane and the people shook with fear...Beyond the Chandni Chowk (the heart of Delhi), mass slaughter was rampant...”

Ghalib was distraught over the loss of some of his loyal and intimate friends. Many were killed. Those not killed were harmed and humiliated in a hundred different ways. For him, “the light has gone out of India. The land is lampless. Lakhs have died. Among the survivors hundreds are in jail...” Noble men and great scholars fell from grace. Their place was taken by what Ghalib saw to his horror and dismay, “lowly ones, who have never known wealth or honour. One whose father wandered dust-stained through the streets now proclaims himself the ruler of the wind...”

To add to his misery was the plight of his mentally deranged younger brother Mirza Yusuf who was only 30 then. When everything was in turmoil came the news on October 19, 1857 that he had died. He was killed in the street firing which he had apparently come out of the house to see. No shop was open to buy the cloth for the shroud; no gravediggers were available. To cap this terrible situation, there was no way to get four men to carry the funeral to the graveyard. Imagine what hell must have raged in the heart of a man of Ghalib’s refined sentiments.

Another heart-rending shock was in store. Ghalib had been a tutor to Prince Fakhru who had meticulously maintained a record of Ghalib’s writings. For his part, Ghalib felt assured that the record was being maintained in a royal manner. It was now learned that, as the British troops ransacked the fort, this record was lost. Another set of Ghalib’s works was maintained by his relation, Nawab Ziyauddin Khan. His house, too, was looted and among so much else, Ghalib’s writings were lost. How the loss of this treasure would have smitten the poet can better be imagined than described.

Ghalib never had an easy time in respect of money and resources. During the post-Mutiny disturbances, his pecuniary position worsened considerably. His pension from the British stopped with the revolt. He had no money. Borrowing was all but impossible. The disturbances had created all manner of shortages and inflation was very high. Ghalib was reduced to selling household effects, even bedding and clothes. To a friend he wrote with some wry humour that while others ate bread he ate clothes. What must have caused him deep anguish was to see his two grandchildren, raised in comfort, “receive only silence when they expected milk and fruit.”

Although the British declared amnesty in November 1858, the victors’ vendetta against the Muslim aristocracy knew no limit. Within a few years, as Ghalib records in 1862, “The only Muslims here (in Delhi) are artisans or servants of the British authorities. All the rest are Hindus. The male descendants of the deposed King — such as survived the sword — draw allowances of five rupees a month. The female descendants, if old, are bawds, and if young, prostitutes...” The level of life in Delhi in 1863 (six years after the Mutiny) was far beneath what it was in 1857.

Nature joined hands with the new rulers in adding wretchedness to a life that was already miserable. During the monsoon in 1862 it rained and rained in Delhi. Thousands of buildings collapsed. Hundreds were buried beneath the ruins. Earlier, failure of rains had caused famine. Now excess of rain was playing havoc. The law and order situation was appalling. The dark nights were a boon to the thieves. Living through this would have unsettled the hardest heart. Terrible thoughts crossed his restless mind. “I am at a loss to know why I live on when I lack all the requisites of life...My soul swells in my body as a restless bird in a cage. I find no joy in any pursuit, nor in any man’s company, nor in any gathering or assembly. Books I hate, poetry I hate, my body I hate, my soul I hate...”

To the poet’s unbearable heartaches, failing health added bodily pain. His hearing was weakening, eyesight fading, physical strength ebbing. There was an epidemic of some strange skin disease that was named ‘Delhi sore’. Aging and feeble, Ghalib caught the contagion. “Between my head and my feet,” he wrote to a friend (February 1864), “I had twelve boils — and every boil became a wound, every wound a cavity...I needed twelve to thirteen plasters...for nine to ten months I could neither eat, nor sleep and was in pain both day and night...If I am dead, then only half dead, if alive, only half alive...”

After an achingly long spell of bad health, Ghalib recovered, only to be overwhelmed by financial woes. He had been cash-strapped all his life. But to be in penury in old age is twice as agonizing. In the autumn of 1865 he travelled to Rampur, the one place in the world where he was assured of a warm welcome and a responsive royal ear. That was some relief, but temporary and fleeting. His health had been on the decline. By summer 1867 it had gone down badly. In his letters he is frequently complaining: “my condition now is past description. My old ailments have increased, and three new ones — vertigo, trembling, and failing sight — have come to join them...It is no more a matter of years; only weeks or months of life remain.”

On June 11 the same year he paints a grave picture of his condition. “I sleep in the courtyard at night. In the morning two servants take me up in their arms and bring me through the hall into a small dark cell where they set me down. I lie all day in this gloomy corner. Then in the evening, the two servants again take me as usual to my bed in the courtyard...” This is a pathetic condition. And to be in this condition without a friend to console can be a fearsome mix of sheer sorrow and pain.

There was to be no respite for Ghalib. His health already past description, there came a terrible shock. Ghalib took no nonsense. During his stay in Calcutta (1828) he had become involved in a literary controversy over the Persian verses of Qatil Dehlvi. In the dusk of his life he became the centre of another storm over his views on Persian language and lexicography, as expressed in his book Qate-i-Burhan and in a second and more emphatic book Dirafsh-i-Kawiani. A thick crop of pamphlets appeared attacking Ghalib. Every third-rater was out to take a pot shot at him.

Now Ghalib was old, sick and almost friendless. Authority forgets even the dying king. Seeing the lion was too weak to fight, the jackals got into their act. The upshot was a brazen attack mounted on him by a Mian Aminuddin of Patiala in a pamphlet that was particularly galling. Late in 1867 Ghalib brought an action for defamation against him. The case went badly for Ghalib. He felt obliged to withdraw it. The humiliation of this episode was heartbreaking. But even that was not the end of his troubles.

A great change had come over the Muslims. Perhaps Ghalib was not aware of this fact of life, or he just did not care to note. Persecuted, frustrated and humiliated, Muslims had opted for a refuge into the dark shell of the irrational orthodoxy, dogma and bigotry. Hali has expressed the view that since 1860 the mullahs were attracting more responsive audiences among the forlorn and benighted Muslims. On the other side was Ghalib, the most rational and emancipated of intellectuals and artists of the nineteenth century. He had also been a candid critic of the dogmatic religious establishment. The rigid conservative lobby took advantage of the controversy and launched a virulent and vindictive onslaught on Ghalib. Defeated and weak-willed people do recoil into the deceptive security of established ritual and fundamentalism. Here the mullahs got into action. This development produced a nasty barrage of obscenity that was addressed to Ghalib by mail. Anonymous writers hurled the most vitriolic obscenities on Ghalib.

(It will be noted that soon after this, the same was to be the case with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan when he set out to lead the Muslims out of their malignant stagnation, mired as they were in misery and misdirected resort to dogma as their possible redemption. Sir Syed was subjected to similarly virulent attacks on religious grounds. Less than a century later, the same mullah brigade was to target Mohammad Ali Jinnah, questioning his faith and calling him a Kafir.)

In old age and declining health, life becomes a burden. A man needs the support of his children and friends. Ghalib’s wife bore him seven children, boys and girls. It was Ghalib’s misfortune to bury them all with his own hands, before anyone of them was past fifteen months. How wounded that father’s heart would be is hard to put in words. Ghalib never mentioned this tragedy of his life, except once in a letter. Ghalib’s wife borrowed a baby son from her sister. They brought him up with deep love and the utmost care. He grew into a bright young man, and a poet of considerable merit. He died when in the prime of youth at 28, leaving behind two little sons. The Ghalibs were once again plunged in a sea of unmitigated sorrow.

Now the poet was old, weak, ill and forlorn. His last desire and concern was to provide for his grandsons. The elder boy was about to get married. All preparation were in place — except cash. He wrote letter after letter to his patron, the Nawab of Rampur, making three requests: clearing his outstanding debts, provision for the wedding of the elder grandson and a regular stipend for the younger. Ghalib waited and waited for a gift from Rampur — and for death, often crooning to himself....

My dying breath is ready to depart...

And now, my friends, God, only God, exists Maulana Altaf Husain Hali records his last meeting with Ghalib. That was the day before he died. Ghalib would frequently recede into a coma. This day, when he came to, he dictated a letter to Nawab Allauddin Khan, one of his dearest friends. The Nawab had inquired about his health. Ghalib’s reply was: “Ask my neighbours after a day or two.” There was no second day. On February 15, 1869, Ghalib died. He was 73 years and four months. His wife died exactly a year later.

Ghalib’s burial witnessed a significant episode. Hali, who was present, has noted that most nobles and eminent men of Delhi were present — a large number of people, both Sunnis and Shias. Sayyad Safdar Sultan approached Nawab Ziyauddin Ahmad Khan and said, “Mirza Sahib (Ghalib) was a Shia. If you permit us, we will conduct his funeral in our own style.” The Nawab Sahib did not agree.

Two points are worthy of note. First, both the Sunnis and Shias considered Ghalib as theirs; second, the issue was decided in the most sensible manner, by the sense of the majority.

Many Ghalib verses come to mind as one closes this profoundly moving account. What would Ghalib himself have said? Probably...

Do you ask about the existence of the people of love? They became the straws for their own fire.

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