Urdu lovers, mourning the death of the great Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, will be delighted to get their hands on his daughter's new book- 'Ghalib- A Wilderness at my Door'- a work of painstaking scholarship which highlights the role of bilingualism on creativity. This may seem strange. After all, most Indians who write in English are bilingual. Their English style may, at points, be correct- albeit reliant on cliches. But, because the purpose is pedestrian, it is seldom creative. The opposite point may be made about writing, in the vernacular, by people who studied English at the College level. The purpose may be very elevated indeed. But what is perpetrated is devoid of life. Why? Imitation is not Creation. Mere juxtaposition, padded out with some empty talk of jetzteit- i.e. time detached from history when something stupendous might happen coz...urm... like the Angel of Aeon gets a b.j from the Prophet of the Pleroma or something of that sort- is not even critical, let alone creative, thinking. It is just bullshit of an adolescent or addled sort. In the short run, we may speak of 'Schools' or 'Movements' and peruse 'Manifestos' but that shite wasn't Modern or even Modernist. It was mad. It was stupid. It was shitting higher than one's arsehole. Having admitted this, what is left of the project of a universal literature? Only literature- writing well. Serving your market in a manner that it endows it with a value chain. This has nothing to do with bilingualism or cunnilingualism. It involves mere craftsmanship of a thoughtful and conscientious sort.
Recent research suggests that where a bilingual person has a 'knowledge representation' of the second language of a utilitarian but deficient type this will relate to lower creativity- which makes intuitive sense. After all, people seldom become bilingual for a creative purpose. More often, it is simply to 'pass' as a good enough speaker. To be creative is to call attention to one self and that may carry risks.
More generally, where a person acquires a second epistemic frame of reference the likelihood is they will do so in a pro-forma manner. Shoddy thinking is the result. Citation cartels may turn this into academic availability cascades. The result is that a Professor reflexively affirms stupid lies while supplying factual information which contradicts them utterly. This isn't a 'double bind'. It is stupidity and laziness at best, but cowardice at worst.
Mehr Afshan Farooqi, is a Professor at an American University. Thus she feels obliged to say silly things about Ghalib
Modern modes of conceptualizing belonging are based on pre-modern modes of doing so. First generation Muslim immigrants- like the great Reza Khan of Bengal- knew they were foreign and had a scruple of accepting land grants as opposed to money payment. Those born in the country accepted the designation 'Hindi' or Indian. But this was the norm in Britain itself. Karl Marx was a resident alien. Eleanor Marx was as British as the Queen.
It is simply untrue that the 'British categorized Muslims as foreigners'. They made a careful distinction between foreign born Muslims who were sojourners in India but who retained their Nationality of birth and Muslims born in India who were as much 'natives' as Hindus or Buddhists or Sikhs.
The British understood that some Muslim families were descended from Turkish or Iranian or even Ethiopian notables. But many others were of Rajput or Jat or other indigenous origin.
Mughal India maintained a 'binary' between sons of the soil and immigrants from culturally prestigious countries. There was an assumption that those brought up speaking Persian in Persian lands would have superior taste and judgment in literary matters. A savant like Abu Fazl may have bitterly contested this presumption but it remained a fact that could not be gainsaid.
Ghalib's ancestors were Turkish, not Persian. The Shahnameh could be said to affirm a deep connection between Iranian and Turanian. But there is also a philosophical angle to this which has to do with Ishraqi mysticism and the 'Dasatir' invented language and scripture which intrigued many at that time . Thus, there was an esoteric, rather than 'vague cultural-biological' aspect to the heritage Ghalib was claiming.
It is ignorant to say 'Persian was a classical language by (the end of the Nineteenth century). In the tenth century Persian was already classical- which is why the Shahnameh is important. It had been the language of administration over large parts of India for hundreds of years. Urdu, on the other hand, was much younger. Like 'Chancery English', it was an elite version of the vernacular which you picked up while studying Latin and Greek and preparing for employment in one of the learned professions. What the writer should have said was 'The Brits required civil servants working in Muslim districts to pass exams in Persian as well as Urdu or some other vernacular language.' Indeed, college students had to pass an exam in either Sanskrit or Persian in addition to exams in English and the mother tongue. Many lawyers- like 'Mullah' Sapru- learned both Persian and Sanskrit. Indeed, many Kayasthas and Kauls prided themselves on mastery of both.
Ghalib's relationship with Persian is easy to understand. He was like Celan or Kafka who were self conscious about their German because it was not the vernacular language of their native towns. However, Yiddish is a German dialect. Goethe himself studied it. Similarly, Persian was not exactly a foreigner to the soil of Delhi. It had been there long before the Mughals arrived.
Prof. Farooqi takes a different view-
It seems Faruqi is herself struggling with a 'double bind' of some sort- but no 'linguistic paradox' is involved because though what is written is absurd, it has no truth value whatsoever. What I have quoted above looks like English but is actually nonsense. How can something be 'edifyingly trivial' more particularly when it is 'ineffable'?
The relationship between 'circumstance' and 'choice' is not 'fraught'. Either, under such and such circumstances, a choice exists, or it does not. A biography is itself a biographical history. If it does not explain a person's choices then it is a crap biography. In this case, there is no great puzzle. Writing in Persian was prestigious just as composing Latin or Greek verse was prestigious in Europe at that time. It mightn't make you any money- save in the case of specially commissioned work- but it boosted your reputation. But writing in the vernacular could bring you money & patronage. Ghalib's Urdu was polished. It was Persianate, as Dr. Johnson's diction was Latinate, but it was not bloodless and abstract precisely because the virility of vernacular idiom gave it much needed bite.
The couplet Prof Faruqi quotes utilizes Sufi terminology and relies upon our background knowledge of relevant collocations. Indeed, it is over reliant on Sufi terminology. Ghalib is throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the wall. If something sticks, it is shayari. If nothing sticks it is tawhid.
But this sort of Sufi mystagogy is not concerned with cogitation. It deals with a type of soteriological anxiety too inchoate to crystalize as thought. It seems Faruqi uses the word Thought so as to rhyme with 'Hot' though Indians did not drink any type of hot alcoholic drink. Gudaz means 'melting' but ice too melts. One may say that the redness of wine usurps its fragile container so that it has melted into what it mirrors. We can't say this is about the difficulty of putting 'thought' into words because, obviously, the thing has been put into words- that too of a poetic sort. The fact that the couplet is a bit shit is explained by the fact that Ghalib was a bit shit as a Sufi.
Even when writing about a somewhat shit Sufi poet, the greatest challenge is not to write nonsense. Faruqi fails at the first hurdle because she isn't interested in Ghalib's brand of esoteric Sufism however shite it might have been. The rest of us are interested coz we be equally shite ersatz Sufis with pretensions to literary culture and mebbe a teensy bit of a drinking problem.
Why should a bilingual person- like Faruqi- face any such difficulty? The answer is because she does not understand and is not interested in understanding Ghalib. She has to write a book about him because he is important and she is important and important people have to do important things. But, she is obviously just phoning it in. Translatability is not an assumption. It is a fact about the world. If a thing can be understood it can be translated by a sufficiently competent speaker. Others may cavil but the fact that translation is multiply realizable does not mean it is deficient in any way. One may say 'I don't understand this. It is nonsense as far as I am concerned'. One can't say 'this is untranslatable'. If it is nonsense in a made up language translate it as nonsense in a made up language. Better still, leave the thing alone. Consider the 'Asmani zaban' of the Dasatir. One can't say this invented language is wholly meaningless. One could convey its meaning well enough by inventing something analogous. But one would have to engage with Ishraqi mysticism- which is something Ghalib himself did. Consider the Babi and the later Ba'hai movements in Iran. There were similar syncretic revolutionary movements in China and later on in Vietnam etc. But in Europe and America, too, there were curious developments- Mormonism, Theosophy, the mania for seances- indicative of a wider spiritual thirst for a Religion of Man in a Cosmos now known to be more full of wonders and possibilities. In many ways the foundation of the University of Virginia, where Faruqi teaches, reflected these new stirrings and sought to harness them to a work which Ghalib, for one, would have greeted with acclaim.
Our use of Language can be lazy. It can be stupid. We often speak so as not to think. But silence too has these properties. Where, however, cognitive work has been properly done, everything turns out to be effable. Research Scholars of Literature, and Farooqi is a painstaking scholar, have no business whining about the inadequacy of Language. It is their job to identify who has overcome whatever inadequacies they themselves labor under.
This is sheer nonsense. The ineffable can't have 'dimensions' because nothing topological can be predicated of it. Language does not have an 'authentic reality' separate from itself. It does not live 'in perpetual combat' any more than does any other faculty. The stupendous reality that is mathematics can't be understood unless we are smart and prepared to work really hard at difficult stuff. But anything in maths is also in language and vice versa. There is no 'equation' between 'manifestations' and 'silences'. Phonology is not Language and even in phonology no such formulae obtain. People speak in order to serve their own interests not because they are desperate to cover up something that should not be said.
It may be that the sort of English language spoken by savants like Faruqi wishes to pass over in silence the fact that I just farted but my Tamil language has no such well bred inhibition. But the challenge of translating Ghalib into English, for me, does not lie in transcending the silences of English with respect to my farting. It lies in the fact that as I grow older and my anal sphincter less reliable, I am not just farting, I am sharting. This means I have to get up and change my underwear. This is very challenging and the reason I translate less and less Ghalib.
Faruqi's book is well researched and Ghalib lovers will definitely buy it. However, probably because she is a Professor, she does say something remarkably silly things. But this is because her profession has made her stupid. Still, like her father, no one can doubt her integrity and capacity for work- albeit in a vineyard not much to her taste.
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