From Nuskha-e Hamidiyya, composed in 1816:

The longing for silence cannot be expressed through speech; but She, the wrecker of life and home, knows only words

Khanah bar andaz means one who wrecks or destroys the house, hence, the beloved.

One of the great pleasures of reading Ghalib is relishing his fascination with words, but also with silence, or absence of words. Often in these early verses he gives precedence to the complexity of words and novelty of idiom, instead of emotional experience. But his preoccupation with words also pushes him to think about the power or inadequacy of language.

For example, in the she’r under consideration, the poet wants to explore the speech of silence. The grammar of the first line supports two readings: 1) The desire to be silent; and 2) silence as a means of communication of desire. Both these states of mind cannot be expressed to the beloved because she is khanah bar andaz, a careless, light-hearted person who loves to talk.

The she’r presents a beautiful paradox: the expression of silent desires or the desire to be silent are both liable to be broken by speech. Speech is not the only form of communication; silence has its own language.

The protagonist desires silence because he wants to be lost in contemplation; it could be contemplation of the beloved’s beauty, as expressed in a she’r by Jigar:

Tere jalvon mein gum ho kar khudi se be khabar ho kar

Tamanna hai keh rah jaun ze sar ta pa nazar ho kar

Or, as Firaq Gorakhpuri says:

Tum mukhatib bhi ho qarib bhi ho

Tum ko dekhein keh tum se baat karein

But Ghalib’s she’r is a cut above these because of the ambiguity of tamanna-e khamoshi and the implied assertion that silence is superior to speech. Note the unusualness of the mazmun (the desire to be silent) and the beloved’s fascination with just the reverse: the need to talk. Now the beloved becomes the symbol of the ordinary people of the world and the speaker seems to be coming from a higher state of being where words wither away and pure communication remains. As Bedil said:

Sukhan agar hama ma’nist nist be kam o besh

Ibaratest khamoshi kih intikhab na darad

Speech, even if it’s entirely full of content and meaning

Would still admit of addition or subtraction;

Silence is a text, from which no selection is possible

Ghalib, like all poets of the Indian style, was much taken with the problem of failure of communication, or the failure of words to communicate. Such themes were never touched by the classical poets.

The writer 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.