Mehr Afshan Farooqi's new Ghalib book

Mehr Afshan Farooqi, the distinguished daughter of the great S.R Faruqi, has produced a second book on Ghalib. She writes

The title I selected, Flowers In A Mirror, is drawn from Ghalib’s hamdiya ghazal (poem in praise of God). This ghazal was my first introduction to Ghalib’s mustarad kalam.

Chaman chaman gul-i-ainah dar kinar-i-havas
Umeed-i-mahv-i-tamasha-i-gulsitan tujh se

 The gul-i-ainah is the flower of the mirror which becomes gardens upon gardens if desire is embraced. However, whereas such mirror flowers have 'color' they lack 'scent'- i.e. they have form but lack essence or being. Thus, the first line is saying that 'speculation' (which in European languages also has the meaning of a type of mystical meditation done in front of a mirror- a practice which came from the East) can show you the different 'colors' which represent the hierarchy of mystical states but can't endow or incarnate Love itself which is a fragrance. This is the 'claim' ( دَعْوَى) or 'dava' while the next line supplies the 'dalil' (proof). It is 'The hope of enchantment (but also 'erasure', i.e. the gaining of 'fana' or Sufi obliteration/enlightenment) in the grand spectacle of the flower garden is from Thou. In other words, Ghalib is confirming the orthodox Sufi position that the Rose from whose fragrance all other roses smile and laugh is indeed the Holy Prophet. Though we remain caught in a world of illusions- being fallible creatures- yet the existence of the impeccable One communicates itself to us as Hope. 

I offer this translation-

The mirror's flower erects garden upon garden, embracing Desire

For by Thy fragrance, tho' speculative, Hope's Rose takes fire.

Prof. Faruqi takes a different view. She translates the couplet as 

'There is an abundance of mirror-flowers in desire’s embrace

Do any of us believe that some horny guy sating his lust upon a bored prostitute is gaining a big fat bouquet of 'mirror-flowers'? No. Don't the silly. It is a different matter that while gazing in a mirror, or engaging in metaphysical or mystical speculation, we might embrace, or wish to embrace, a particular Desire- viz. that of gaining Union with One beyond all Duality and illusion. 

Hope is a spectator engrossed in the colourful garden, because of You

This is a possible reading. It takes one sense of 'mahv'- viz. being engrossed- but ignores another which is being erased (i.e. gaining fana). It is possible that Ghalib was saying God is a trickster who puts Hope into our hearts so we will remain engrossed in an illusory spectacle and thus never gain union with the All High. In that case the Holy Prophet wasted his perfume on those foredoomed to misread His Message. In this case, Sacred Religion is actually the deceitful trick of a devilish Demiurge who deludes us with a sinful type of hope- viz. that of gaining super-powers rather than a humble but secure path to salvation. 

In this verse, Ġhālib has crafted a unique image of illusions.

No. He has represented the orthodox, simple and decent, message of the Sufis who have helped countless sinful or, deeply distressed, or very simple people to traverse the path of piety and self-lessness which alone makes one worthy of giving and receiving Love.  

Gardens with mirror-flowers means an illusory garden,

No. A garden may have some mirrors so as to artfully increase the number of flowers. But there must be a real flower somewhere near by for there to be the image of a flower in a mirror.  

signifying that there are illusions within illusions.

A flower is not an illusion.  

A subtle irony is at play here.

Stupidity is not subtle. That is what is at play in this Professor's translation.  

‘Mirror-flower’ may mean ‘the mirror which is like a flower’,

I suppose a craftsman could take a ductile reflecting surface and shape it like a flower. But that is not what Ghalib is referring to.  

or it may mean ‘a mirror in which a flower is reflected.’

In the context of an artfully constructed garden- sure. But that is not the present context. Instead we have the notion of something blossoming within the depths of the mirror. Since this is ghazal is in a devotional, Sufi, register, the context is mystical meditative practices like 'mirror gazing'. I should mention Islamic 'color and scent' is different from Hindu 'name and form'. However, Hindus too have a notion of 'gandh' and the Hindu barzakh- which is the antarabhava or Tibetan bardo- is ruled by the Gandharvas and has to do with rebirth.  

In both cases, there is a profusion of illusions: mirrors in which flowers are reflected,

flowers are not illusions.  

or mirrors which are beautiful like flowers.

Flowers have a fragrance.  

Both ways, the havas or intense passionate desire (not necessarily lust or carnal desire, as is generally assumed) keeps itself happy by having in its embrace the illusion of flowers.

I suppose one could 'keep oneself happy' by masturbating. If you think Ghalib was an atheist satirizing Islamic devotional practices, then you will be happy with this interpretation. But pious Muslim savants and spiritual preceptors quote Ghalib because they KNOW he was, as he himself says, a devout man. True, he had some of the blameworthy (malamati) aristocratic traits of his times, but plenty of great saints, who lived austere lives, wrote in the 'malamati' Sufi vein. But the 'wine' and the 'Tavern' they refer to are merely metaphors. They were meditating in the khanqah, not carousing in the brothel.  

The flowers now become the pleasures of union, with God or with a human beloved.

This is horrible. The 'pleasures of union' with the beloved have to do with having children and thus fulfilling God's plan. We seek to return to our Creator in the same way that a small child, who is lost, craves to be reunited with her parents. There is nothing 'sexual' about this though, no doubt, when two people unite to fulfill God's plan, they come closer to Him.  

Hope is never stilled.

Yes it is. I no longer hope to be crowned Miss Teen Tamil Nadu. This is because evil Iyengars have poisoned the minds of the pageant judges against me.  

It enjoys the spectacle of a colourful garden, even though there is nothing but illusions in front of it.

In which case it will be happy enough imagining itself to be God- the creator and sustainer of the Universe. If illusions are so great, everybody should take drugs and live in their own make believe universe.  

Maulana Abdul Bari, an early commentator on Ghalib’s mustarad kalam,

which means 'rejected verses'- i.e. ones excluded from the published 'Divan'.  

and Wajahat Ali Sandilvi, who comes much later and has commented on a very limited number of verses, have taken havas to mean ‘lust or carnal desire.’ According to them, there is satire here on the divine scheme of things: the lustful have all the colourful things at their command, but the hopeful one gets nothing but illusions.

Perhaps this was because the new Imperial masters, confounded by Charles Darwin, had lost their own pious religious faith. To be 'modern' meant scoffing at Religion and pretending that all the Mullahs were pederasts- more particularly if they were known to be poor, pious, and more concerned with charity than sucking up to the Brits or the Bolsheviks or some 'Secular Socialist' Dynasty.  

The true lover watches this spectacle but does not give up hope.

True lover keeps masturbating but does not give up hope that suddenly a whole bunch of Super-Models will form an orderly queue outside his bedroom door.  

Gyan Chand Jain, in his remarkable commentary, Tafsir-i-Ghalib, seems to concur, more or less.

Some Hindus or Jains may be too ignorant of Islam to make a sensible comment. But Prof. Farooqi is from a learned, pious, highly educated and intelligent, Muslim family. I suppose, being an academic, she has to pretend to be a stupid Islamophobic bigot. After all, she teaches in a country which has just spent a lot of money killing 1.3 million Muslims and displacing tens of millions more.  

But all these commentators ignore the possible meanings of havas.

Why? That is the question. The answer is that, in England, Fitzgerald's translation of Khayyam had become popular at just the time when faith in Scripture had received a tremendous shock from new scientific discoveries. Islam, however, had a workaround for this. There is a distinction between the 'realm of command' and the 'realm of creation'. Since Scripture is wholly imperative (insha) rather than alethic (khabar) Faith, being founded upon the mystery that is the 'realm of command', stood in no danger from Scientific or Socio-political advances- or pseudo-advances.  

One can push the interpretation towards the principle of maya, which signifies the world as an illusion, with God as the only reality.

This is the Majazi/Haqiqi distinction. In reality, God is the only efficient cause though things appear otherwise. Nothing wrong with being an Occasionalist like Ghazalli, Leibniz, etc. 

Thus, the desirer and the spectator both are under their own illusions.

In this verse, the spectator is the desirer. We are not speaking of a voyeur jerking off while some other dude ploughs his wife. 

The mirror in Persian and Urdu poetry is a symbol or image (paikaar)

she means 'paikar'. Paikaar (پیکار ) means war. A mirror, in the poetry of any nation, can be either just a mirror or symbolize something else. 

loaded with multitudes of meaning.

But the context ensures only one predominates though it may be arrived at through another which is 'sublated'.  Ghalib's poetry relies heavily on meta-metaphors. But when we keep in mind that he was a pious and quite erudite Muslim who has written beautiful theistic verses, then we can easily find the right meaning- provided we consult the local kasai or cobbler rather than some Professor at a fancy-schmancy American University. 

A common meaning is that the heart is a mirror in which the beauty of God, or the beloved, is reflected. Conversely, a mirror is like the heart. It reflects whoever cares to come in front of it. Since the mirror remains silent, it means that it is wonderstruck. The cleaner the surface of the mirror, the sharper the image. The sharper the image, the greater the wonder of the mirror.

Professor Faruqi knows well the connection between Bedil and Ghalib and should have taken advantage of that knowledge to give a better, more Islamic, account of such verses. Sadly, like her late father, she feels obliged to genuflect to 'Secular, Socialist' ideology and pretend Ghalib was an antinomian who hated and derided his own ancestral religion. Also, because he was a fucking towel-head, sand-nigger, he was even stupider than the sort of cretins who get MFAs at pricey Liberal Arts Colleges. 

Again, when we look in the mirror, we can see ourselves as we are. The mirror doesn’t lie.

Unless it is misshapen.  

Then, the mirror produces illusions which can be magical even. What one sees in the mirror is intangible and, yet, it looks indistinguishable from the reality that it reflects.

At this point, Professor Sahiba should explain to her students that they should not start fighting with the person they see in the mirror because it has obviously stolen their clothes and is looking at them in a menacing manner. Also, she should issue 'trigger warnings'. White peeps may sometimes see White peeps in mirrors. This is not due to the University's failure to promote Diversity and Inclusivity. All is the fault of Neo-Liberalism. Also dicks cause rape and must be banned immediately. 

Another way of looking at the ‘mirror’ trope is that, since pre-modern mirrors were made of steel or bronze or similar metal, they could be affected by scratches, or rusting, or dust and so on.

Modern mirrors can get scratched or become dusty. Also if you punch the evil dude in the mirror who has stolen your clothes, the mirror may shatter and you may cut your hand.  

Thus, the mirrors always needed to be polished.

They still need to be cleaned- even in Amrika.  

This symbolism of the dust or blemish in the mirror is that the heart too can become diseased or corrupt and may need purification.

Why stop there? Why not say 'the symbolism of the heart is that our impulses too may require purification. Don't keep stabbing teechur just because teechur may have a dick even though dicks cause rape. The true fault lies with Neo-Liberalism. '

Ghalib always had a penchant for the mirror as a trope, or a symbol, or a metaphor.

Why? Part of the answer has to do with the Islam has a notion that God ordained that Alexander invent the mirror so he could see the one realm he could not conquer. Ghalib prided himself on being descended from Turks who had conquered vast territories though some now preferred to get a pension from the Brits who, not content to rule the waves, had created a larger Empire in India than even the Moghuls. There was some comfort in knowing that al-Khidr got the better of Alexander when it came to gaining the elixir of life. 

His early poetry especially abounds with the mirror in one or more of its many meanings. It has to do with his perception of the nature of things.

That perception was perfectly Islamic. That's why in explaining Ghalib, you need to quote relevant passages from Scripture, Hadith, etc.  

Individual perception of objects can be different. The objects themselves can be illusory. The reflection, the ‘aks’ in the mirror, is open to transformation or interpretation. We cannot see God,

if there is perfect agreement among us, He will be seen like the full moon in the night sky.  Such is the hadith. 

but we can see his reflection in objects around us.

only by His Grace because whatever be His Will it must, most indefeasibly, come to pass. However, Ghalib may have subscribed, at one time, to a 'possible worlds' ontology and thus his 'claims' may be supported by proofs from modal logic. There is nothing wrong with offering this alternative reading before giving the orthodox interpretation which, so far as I can see, is always superior. In other words, why not read 'malamati' verse in the manner intended? The aim, after all, was to bring people to the the true path by means of something entertaining or even risque. 

I hope this book which I have expressly written in English so that it can reach a wider audience, will bring into prominence some of Ghalib’s neglected poetry. It would have been easier to write such a book in Urdu, but it would have deprived many readers who are drawn to Ghalib’s poetry.

The problem here is that Urdu speakers generally have very good access to Sacred Scripture and commentary. However, English speakers are often wholly ignorant of the glories of Islamic thought and spiritual practice. By kowtowing to 'Secular, Socialist' ideology, people like Prof. Faruqi are doing ignorant kaffirs like me a great disservice.  

Satyanarayana Hedge on Ghalib 39.1

Veritas est Adaequatio intellectus et rei, is a grievous but gravid truth- it imposes a heavy labor but it may gestate something novel and uniquely invaluable- at least when it comes to hermeneutics. The intellect of the knower must be adequate to the thing known. But how are things known? One answer is that they are known through sense perception which directly establishes truth or falsity. What of things which are knowable but which are, as Aquinas puts it, 'deficient in truth' (propter defectum veritatis)?  Perhaps, this is a poetic type of knowledge, too connotatively concrete to be captured by a manifold of intuition. Alternatively, it may be that, as Shelley said, 'Poetry subdues under its light yoke all irreconcilable things.' In other words, Poetry is deficient of either denotative or analytical truth. Why then should we bother with it? C.S Pierce coined two terms- Tychism (the notion that Chance rules everything) and Synechism (the illusion of continuity and mirage of analytical truths in a discrete, quantized, world governed by Chance)- which explain why, for Pragmatics, the aleatory magic of metre and rhyme assume a mantic aspect. Yet, learned, lucubrated, 'ritigranth' poetry- baroque variations on classical themes- though far from mantic, nevertheless possess a romantic appeal. Why is this? For my generation, Umberto Eco's 'Name of the Rose', wonderfully translated by William Weaver and paperbacked in 1984- when I was 21 and honeymooning in Piedmont- answered the question canonically. Love is Tyche as Syneche in a manner which beggars all adolescent silliness and semiotics and sehnsucht for a sexless Eden. True, I resented my wife's ostentatious slimness and athletic prowess. But, soon enough, her belly swelled to my own TamBrahminical proportions and she suddenly turned into a good cook and splendid stretcher of my exiguous pay-packet such that I'd never been better off. Then, for some reason, the good lady returned from a visit to the hospital with a little fellow who- truth be told- took some quite scandalous liberties with her person. Still, I tolerated the intruder- he was born within earshot of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, and thus was the sort of Cockney destined to be a Chimney Sweep or something utile of that sort. It does no good for a Westernized Oriental Gentleman, or WOG for short, to get into a slanging match with a sooty faced prole- and, anyway, I'm sure we could have peacefully co-existed till the fellow was big enough to crawl up chimneys, or trawl the shores of the Thames as a 'mudlark', or attend Westminster & turn into some sort of shill for a crooked Hedge Fund; what I mean is, I bore the little fellow no real ill will.

Then his Mother left me alone with him so she could 'pop down to the shops' and that miscreant, pretending to sleep peacefully in his crib, suddenly leapt upon me and tried to bite off my nose! I used ancient Kung Fu techniques to protect myself. Bastard! He responded with sneaky Ninja maneuvers which everybody knows can lay even Shao Lin Masters like myself low. What was I to do? Obviously, I had to use Mr. Spock's 'Vulcan neck pinch' to incapacitate my assailant. Sadly, he used it too. That is why when his Mum came back she cooed 'Daddy sleeping the Baby! How cute!' I tried to explain to her that there had been an epic Martial Arts battle in the course of which I could have been very badly injured. It was highly irresponsible of her to leave me alone with such a savage creature! Since all noises made by the Baby Daddy are pleas for food, she swiftly fed both her Men without any further Semiotic investigation. This was because, at the time, the lady was innocent of Eco's Semiotics, Barthes's idiotics, Kristeva's Chora etc. Indeed, one thing every new wife/mother immediately learns is that Baby and Daddy mirror each other long before Lacan's plagiarized 'mirror stage'.

C.S Pierce, sadly, had no baby to instruct him. Eco- a brawny, brainy, philoprogenitive, Piedmontese- could move from the sad stupidity of his primer on Semiotics to penning the most perfect novel Borges couldn't- well summarizes the sterility that, around the same time Lyotard (this is French for Jane Fonda's leotard after it got real stinky from all the aerobics Barberella had to do on Planet Reagan) spoke of a deeply anachronistic 'Post Modernism'.

What drove Eco to write a good novel? It was the abysmal stupidity of his own textbook. Himself his own Cavour, he'd lose the plot of Romance's Risorgimento to some formless Trasformismo that could be anything at all, save, in flashes, Piedmontese.

In his 'Theory of Semiotics' (1974) Eco takes the example of a cave man picking up a stone and using it for some purpose. He says, a single use of that stone is not culture. Culture begins when information regarding the function performed by the stone, and which could also be performed by a similar stone, is passed on- if only by Robinson Crusoe to his future self. Eco quote Pierce 'even ideas are signs' but forgets that signs don't matter. Ideas are dime a dozen. Only successful, of otherwise reinforced, Mimetics matters even if the Mimetic target is occluded or fictional. Evolution is essentially a process by which mimetic effects get 'canalized' without any signs or consciousnesses to interpret those signs. C.S Pierce's 'Boscovichian' atoms, yet constitute a 'Field Theory' like that of the Vimalakriti- and whether one calls it 'Magnetism' or 'Mimetics' matters not a jot.

Consider the manner in which aposematic traits are subject to Mullerian Mimicry. C.S Pierce may be forgiven for not knowing Muller's work- one of the earliest instances of the application of mathematics to biology- and it is tempting to speculate on what Tardean twist it might have given to Pierce's 'Tychism' (viz. the notion that natural laws evolve out of mere chance). The problem here is that the fitness landscape for our species- which is a mere speck in our galaxy, which is itself but a speck in the knowable Universe- imposes itself upon us as grim necessity and such fractal scarcity as forces our signals, if not our signs, to 'pay for themselves', or else cancel each other out as noise. Thus 'pragmatics' must be parsimonious, multiply realizable (i.e. 'robust'), and feature evolutionary capacitance. Creodes- developmental pathways- exist. This may create the illusion of 'Synechism'- i.e. analytical continuity though all that exists is discrete and quantized- but that illusion can't really pay for itself. It is merely noise, not signal. Names may denote a function- Eco's stone may be named 'head-breaker' to instruct some other as to how it can be used-  but only if there is already a 'culture' of pedagogy. Otherwise, mimetics suffices. It is only if we don't want the function to be performed that we deign to name it.

Obviously, this is the solution to that most Catholic paradox, and hence beyond Chesterton's facile paranoia's pen, which we name for Bertrand Russell, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature, and was, perhaps, the first of the genus naturaliter irritabile to see why the 'axiom of abstraction' (or 'unrestricted comprehension) could not always 'lay hold of' a class- i.e. there must be some 'extension' which escapes intensional denotation.

At a later point, with the work of Godel, Tarski & Turing, it became clear that the language of Reason itself would always be deficient of truth in that its 'adequate definition' would be relegated to its meta-language. However, Type structure can be seen as a 'syntactical discipline for enforcing levels of abstraction'. This reconciles Truth's lemma of extensionality with Reason's dilemma regarding its own impredicative intensionality. Alternatively, we could say, with Grothendieck, that a 'Yoga' exists such that seeming 'irreconcilables' are united at a higher level of generality. That which is heteroclite and purely extensional may, submit to a 'light yoke' that is essentially poetic precisely because Mathematics is not akrebia, it is an economia- and several may coexist.

I may mention that Ghalib- whose nom de plume, and passion for gambling suggests the search for the Victor of its own necessary Randomness- Ibn Arabi's Brownian motion as the Alhambra's motto- wa la ghalib illa Allah-  is, so to speak, on one side of the isthmus between the sweet waters of Martin Lof's test for that quality and the bitter brine of what is but unknowably pseudo-random. I shall return to this theme, with rebarbative unctuousness, towards the end of this post.

My own, ignorant, impression is that it currently seems that though the 'univalent foundations' project is feasible and highly utile, it will remain the case that there will be different mathematics, as there are different poetics, and though inter-translatability will be maintained, truth will always be deficient not because the intellect is inadequate but because the spirit seeks surfeit by but a method of forfeit. Thus, contra Russell, Logic is merely the long shadow of Mathematics mounting to the sunlit Parnassus of the Poets, but doing so in second childhood.

In Islam, the Akbhari notion of 'barzakh' as a limit which unites rather than divides, has not, to my knowledge, found a logical or mathematical expression. Yet, though deficient in truth, it is certainly 'poetic' to read a ghazal as if this were actually the case.

Of course, instead of maths one could substitute any other protocol bound ratiocinative system- for example that of the Law- in order to glean 'apoorvata', novelty, or 'taza gui'- freshness of speech- and thus arrive at a new hermeneutic merging of horizons.

Is this what Satyanarayana Hegde- a professional lawyer, but passionate amateur philologist- does in his paper titled The Semiotics of nāyikābheda in Ghālib Urdu dīwān 39.1?

The couplet in question is

shab kih vuh majlis-furoz-e ḳhalvat-e nāmūs thā
rishtah-e har shamʿa ḳhār-e kisvat-e fānūs thā

I read in Rajeev Kinra's 'Writing Self, Writing Empire', the following couplet of Abu Talib, who flourished in the Seventeenth Century- majlis-furoz-i gabr-o-musalmān yak ātish ast / dar sang-i dair-o-ka‘ba ba-juz yak sharār nīst  which equates the 'radiant one' of the congregation as univocal despite difference in creed. The same spark is in the Ka'ba as in the idol of stone. It is easy to extend this to a profane context of 'mimetic desire'. The lover is the 'korban' or 'pharmakos' such that Helen's face launches no ships, bequeathing but texts for scholarship.

Like Abu Talib, Ghalib was writing in a courtly tradition with Sufi overtones. A Semiotic analysis of this ghazal is either another ghazal or it is an exercise in hermeneutics of some more or less theological or historicist type. The first step in making such an analysis is to identify the 'sign system' which contains this ghazal. This is not something internal to the ghazal or deducible from what we know of the author or his geographical location. Why? An Urdu ghazal is itself a sign that something lyrically Persian is being foreshadowed, just as a Persian ghazal is a sign that something lyrical in Arabic is being foreshadowed, while a Ghazal in the Arabic may or may not be a foreshadowing of something in the Holy Quran, though God alone knows best. Sadly, this means the secular project of assimilating Ghalib to a 'Hindu' context has limited scope.

Taking the first line, what, if not 'majlis-furoz'  is the Arabic 'mot theme'? The answer is 'khalwa'- which denotes either the 40 day Sufi spiritual retreat, or else, by metonymy, for jurisprudence, an illicit tryst or even an accidental 'close proximity' without benefit of chaperone, which violates Islamic rules re. modesty.

One may also mention the correspondence between 'khalwa'- where a Sufi Master is still consulted- and ''uzla' (like that of Ghazzali Snr) which more sharply contrasts with majlis (assembly). 

Semiotic analysis, unlike pure hermeneutics, must concern itself with subsequent couplets. The next of which is

mashhad-e ʿāshiq se kosoñ tak jo ugtī hai ḥinā

                                             kis qadar yā rab halāk-e ḥasrat-e pā-būs thā

Here we have mention of Love's, 'Udhri',  'martyr' or 'shaheed'- both terms mean 'witness'. The tomb of the doomed lover- or Monist Pir- is itself a field of battle for Girardian mimetic desire which itself requires its 'korban' sacrifice. This is martyrdom piling up upon martyrdom like Ossa upon Pelion till Olympian re-ligio is overtopped and cast into shade. 

I've translated this couplet as 

'Whom has not, Lord, the longing to kiss bridal feet, with a martyr’s zeal fired?

'For miles, the Lover’s tomb, by not rolling wheat but green henna is gyred

Since nobody but a fetishist wants to kiss any type of feet, the meaning is- which piece of ground is hostile to hosting the tomb of a Pir, or Martyr in Love? I provide the image of devotees doing 'tawaf' circumambulation around the Lover's tomb and that their own soles become marked by henna.

Apart from the sign system of 'Udhri' Monistic Sufism, Ghalib's abstraction has a philosophical valency which has a universal expression. This militates for increased degrees of freedom in ascribing a sign system to it. My translation of the ghazal, made some ten years ago, is as follows-

Last night, when the radiance of our assembly to her abashed chamber retired
Each candle wick, became a thorny prick at its shade from the desired

Whom has not, Lord, the longing to kiss bridal feet, with a martyr’s zeal fired?
For miles, the Lover’s tomb, by not rolling wheat but green henna is gyred

Against Sorrow's sorites, the Brain, this Stoic armor, in vain, thus acquired
Trysts, hearts crush hearts to gain, are the thin lips of pain- it required.

Knew I respite from this wretchedness- I'd recite much to be admired
But, Oh!- eating my own heart out- my very bile has grown tired!

My version of the first couplet is a bit naughty. But then, Ghalib was 19 when he wrote it.  However, there is a possible Islamic meaning of a pious kind. The Prophet Muhammad's body shone by its own light. The simple and innocent people of Medina would wish to follow him even into his own chamber where his modest and virtuous spouses slept. We can imagine the devotees waiting anxiously, burning the candle through the mid-night hours, yearning to be reunited with their Prophet at the, pre-dawn, Fajr prayer. In this reading, Eros has been completely sublimated. 

By contrast, Prof Pritchett, following S.R Faruqi considers this line to mean- last night {when / since / while} she was a gathering-illuminator of the seclusion of honor/dignity / the wick of every candle was a thorn in the clothing of the glass-shade

This makes no sense. Either there is a gathering or there isn't. Seclusion may be attended by honor. Dignity too may turn up. But that still is not a 'majlis'- a gathering. If this person has never been seen, why would every candle 'have a thorn in its clothing'? Who would know of her? Why work yourself up over some unknown person getting cozy with seclusion while Honor and Dignity stand around uselessly?

'Majlis', at that time, meant male assembly- it related to the 'biruni' not the 'andaroon'- i.e. the male part of the house, as distinct from the gynaeceum. The Sufi Pir- or the Prophet Himself (s.a.w)- must seclude himself just as women are secluded. This enables a reversal of gender roles whereby the devotee from being the female 'Viyogini' or simply a deflowered and abandoned lass, takes the male- but merely adolescent, or impotent- part. The essentially romantic and optimistic aspect of this arises out of the Sufi practice of 'rabita'- a 'heart connection' to the preceptor- whose 'talqin' inculcation can continue to occur from behind the veil of occultation or, vulgarly, beyond the grave in the limbo of 'barzakh'. The note of unbearable Grief, in this context, is struck by reason of the nature of Monism which bereaves Love of its idol so what is perishable hold no place in it.

Professor Pritchett, Post Master General Faruqi & this Hon'ble Hegde- exalted savants all- choosing to remain ignorant of the Theistic, Indic, context, have written nonsense. They are 'sexing up' their dossier. Why? What is wrong with them? The answer is they won't admit that Ghalib was Muslim. The Ghazal derives it grace from that much greater Grace promised by that Prophet whose hadith are as a river in Paradise which yet can spring from the lips of one's darban or khidmatgar, thus opening a door, kindling a thirst, for what is unseen, yet certain Good.

By contrast, for even the wretchedest poetaster, grasping the truth of Ghalib's couplet presents no difficulty at all. The light of the assembly has the virtue of modesty which enhances her beauty but also sequesters it in purity. The sentiment is familiar to, not just the Faith community, but those whose values arise out of Families, and if its expression varies it is only because such variance is the soul of Art. 

Let us now see what Hegde makes of 39.1. Before doing so, I should explain that Nayikabheda, which taxonomizes women in their abjectness as predestined sex objects, is a development of an erotic genre in Indic poetry in which the charms of different types of samanya, common hussies, are dwelt upon. I don't know what this has to do with Ghalib- who did once run a gambling den but wasn't a pimp- or how 'Semiotics' might figure,  but perhaps things will become clearer by and by. 

Hegde's  translation is-

 At night when the beloved

 was resplendent

in privacy’s seclusion

 Every candle’s wick 

 was a thorn in

the lantern's robe. 

Hegde omits mention of the fact that the fair one in question was 'majlis-furoz'- i.e. one who illuminates an assembly. That is why every candle's wick was horny. Otherwise only the lover would have this problem with his lantern. 

Hegde immediately quotes S.R Faruqi, and thus must be aware of his own error- 

'The real reason of the candle's agitation is hidden in the second distich's phrase 'assembly-illuminer...which is also the candle's function.  The candle, seeing its brightness and sparkle dimmed and its power of illumining the assembly reduced, was burning in envy and was therefore agitated... The candle wanted to throw off its dress which was pricking its body like a thorn, so as to divest itself of its dress and be nude in front of the beloved, so that the beauty of the unveiled beloved and the lantern-less candle could confront each other... the candle detested this obstruction, and was eager to throw off the lantern so as to be able to freely visit the radiant beloved.'

All this is quite mad. The Assembly has dispersed and everybody has returned to their own bedchamber. Those who can't sleep- being troubled by the thoughts of her (actually his- because the beloved is conventionally male in this sort of poetry) beauty- have lit a candle which leaps up restlessly. But this candle was not present at the Assembly. It couldn't have got naked and challenged the beloved to a dance off or mud wrestling or a twerking competition. Also the notion of fire wanting to visit the fair one and get it on with her is not poetic. It is the fantasy of pyromaniac.

Hegde, by profession a lawyer', finds great profundity in the following-

The arguments as to why the candle’s wick pricks the lantern’s robe like a thorn are as follows: the candle’s flame spills out of the lantern and reddens it. The lantern becomes hot and dry due to the candle’s heat. Redness, heat and dryness are symbols of agitation. The lantern in which redness and acrimony are radiating is in this state due to the candle’s wick and hence, it’s proved that the candle’s wick is pricking like a thorn in the lantern’s robe and because the lantern is the candle’s robe, the candle has “a thorn in its robe” (that is, it’s agitated)

This is sheer nonsense. It is the opposite of 'husn-e-talil'- beauty in poetic aetiology. This is a case of straightforward 'transference'- the distrait lover imagines an inanimate object as being in the same plight as himself. This 'pathetic fallacy' is poetic because there is pathos in the poet's plight. Verbose lawyerese like the above is utterly Philistine. It is to take a spade to a souffle.

Hegde next shows why he earns big bucks as a lawyer. He has uncovered new evidence-

The second hemistich was originally sham‘a sey yak khār dar pairāhan-e fānūs thā. 7 The Persian hypotext8 for 39.1 (not noted by any commentator) is Mūṣawī Khān “Fit̤rat’s” 9 distich: The candle-wick’s a thorn in the lantern’s robe in every assembly illumined by his fiery radiance.

Hegde then employs his extraordinary erudition to prove that the ugliest possible interpretation of the image of a lantern with a thorn in its robe- viz. that women should be secluded not just from the Sun's virile gaze but also denied even a teeny tiny night light- is what is canonical for Urdu. This fits well with the notion that a Muslim man's idea of showing his gal a good time is to lock her up in some dark shed where not even a lantern can gaze at her.

But Urdu isn't English, thank Goodness, where candles have a quite different size and shape- so much so that by the Seventeenth Century, everyone knew the story of the 'Apothecary's wife, who never loved her husband all of her life, and being averse to his handle, availed herself of a candle.'

The word 'fanus'- lantern- could also mean 'tattle-tale' and Hegde latches on to it. The problem is that we understand why a man may want to put out the lantern so as to be in the dark with a woman. We also understand why he may claim that it is only to protect her reputation that he does this. Someone seeing them together by its light might suspect they weren't actually stock-taking or filling out tax returns or completing whatever task it is the lecher required her to stay behind after work for. Thus the safer thing would be to proceed with these needful chores entirely in the dark. Who knows? Perhaps some fair one has been taken in by such claims. In my case, all I've received is a swift knee to the groin.

My point is that Semiotics, unlike Philology, is context bound. Signs arising in  one situation- lots of people (at least in the imagination of the lover) feeling horny for one particular person who is secluded and beyond reach- have no connection at all with the same signs arising in another situation- viz. a guy who wants to turn the lights off so as to get jiggy with a lady. For Philology, however, the fact that the same signs may be used in both situations is a matter of great interest. The Philologist will want to know about how semantics and pragmatics and syntax change when the situation changes. This may make a great deal of difference to hermeneutic reception of fragmentary texts from cultures remote in time or manners from our own.

Suppose a blushing virgin like myself is invited to dinner by Beyonce. She dims the lights while snuggling up to me on the sofa. This is a sign that she wants to deflower me. On the other hand, when Mum- annoyed by my tapping away at the keyboard- barges into my room and turns off the lights, the meaning is quite different. She wants me to go to sleep coz tomorrow's a School Day.

Semiotics is about stuff like dimming or turning off the lights. It has a logic. But that logic is context bound. Thus what Hegde is doing is not Semiotic analysis. He is not looking at the context of Ghalib's couplet. He is relying on some nonsense which he terms 'Semiotics' to turn what Ghalib said into something Ghalib didn't say, would never say, because it is stupid, ugly and false.

Thus he writes- ' The candle-wicks are a thorn in the fānūs’ robes;
But fānūs is tattler
Therefore, the candle-wicks are a thorn in the tattler’s robes;
 But tattler semiotically signifies candle
Therefore, the candle-wicks are a thorn in the candle’s robes;
But the candle’s robe semiotically signifies its own wax body
Therefore, the candle-wicks are a thorn in the candle
 After resignifying 39.1’s key lexemes, I’ll translate it anew:

At night when the beloved made love bashfully
Every candle’s wick pricked the candle like a thorn

Using Hegde's own method, let us see what we can come up with-

Tattler, semoticially, signifies someone who communicates things which perhaps ought not to be communicated.
Hegde is a tattler.
Therefore candle-wicks are a thorn in Hedge's robes
But candle-wicks are crowned by flame
Therefore Hegde's robes are getting burned
But, semiotically, robes could mean pants
Thus Hegde's pants are on fire.


After resignifying 39.1's key lexemes, let us translate it anew
At night when the beloved made love bashfully
Every Hegde's pants were on fire causing his prick to shrivel up like a thorn

Hegde draws on Faruqi. Is Faruqi an imbecile? Does he not get that context is everything?

No. Hegde quotes Faruqi as saying-

'We know that meaning’s impossible without context. The context of any text’s the genre that it’s a part of (for example, lyric, encomium, story, novel etc.), and then the rules and regulations (conventions and poetics) that determine the genre-identity that we placed it in.

True enough. Ghalib was writing in the Hubb al Udhri tradition where love is not consummated. The beloved may be the Sufi Pir. Not just Eros, Thanatos itself, is sublimated though Monism seems a doomed project save for Madness.

Finally, a text’s context is other similar texts…the best commentary on any poetic text is another poetic text, i.e., the meaning and valuation of a particular text is determined in comparison with another text. As far as the lyric’s concerned, this principle is: How has the topos of the particular distich under consideration been used in some other distich? For example, the discussion on Ghalib’s distich under consideration becomes deeper and sharper when we’re aware of the poetry of his precursors, contemporaries and successors, and when we can look for this topos in other poets as well. 

This is perfectly reasonable. Poems relate to poems and only a poem can translate a poem. But this does not mean you can throw away whatever the poem itself says. After all, that is what determines its context. If a collocation used in one context is also used in another, this does not mean the context is the same.

Hegde writes- ' I’ll read codes in the sense of the Barthesian semic and cultural codes. 
Sadly, Barthes was a nitwit. He misread Sarassine as I have shown. To deploy a 'semic code' you actually have to know how connotation works in the discipline you are appealing to. Barthes didn't know Econ. I do. So I am able to understand why he wrote utter bollocks.

 These codes are the context that translate texts and render them meaningful. 
Nonsense! Meaning is 'artha'- use value- nothing more. Codes don't matter unless you are a lawyer paid to pretend otherwise. But sensible people jurisdiction shop so at the margin, legal codes are economic.
Though texts are linked to definite contexts, context’s indefinite, and “we do not have an agreed normative principle for deciding what a context is.” 
Rubbish! If the thing matters, then there is a Schelling focal solution to the underlying coordination or discoordination game.
 I’ll posit context as polysemic, heterogenous, and fluid. 
In which case your pants are on fire. Fuck are you positing shite for? Your dick is literally being roasted right at this moment! Pour a lota of water on your undercarriage my dear Hegde!
 Inferring which literary-socio-cultural context to blow up/narcotize for a given text is a paradigmatic macro-abduction, 
What does that mean? The answer is that the cognitively simplest theory is Schelling focal provided the cost of getting things wrong aint too high. It's the reason we still have Arrow-Debreu securities though we know this means there's a bigger crash heading our way.

If I were teaching Ghalib to gormless meatheads for a pittance, sure, I'd just use Pritchett & Conway's drivel. But, to get something out of reading him for myself, I've got to mathematize him. Fuck! I sound like the idiot Badiou saying 'Mathematics is Ontology'! Still, for what it is worth, this couplet could be represented as a description of a 'strongly inaccessible cardinal number', whose existence is equivalent to being inside a Grothendieck Universe- i.e. a 'topos' where all Maths can be done. Obviously this has to do with the continuum hypothesis, which however we could 'bracket' as 'barzakh'. In other words, this couplet of Ghalib's is an epitome of Akhbari Islam. No doubt, a smart guy who knew from Math, or Islam for that matter, would consider me to be babbling nonsense. But if so, it is nonsense of this order-
 just like inferring which semantic property of a polysemic lexeme to blow up/narcotize is a syntagmatic micro-abduction. 
No it isn't- unless you are Alexa or the predictive software which helps you compose texts on your smartphone. Anyway, this isn't how you approach poetry. Why not use a sword to trim your nose-hair?
 Recoding a text is decoding it anew by recontextualizing it.
In other words, abandoning the text to talk about anything that takes your fancy.

For some reason, Hegde- whom I imagine to be an upright and decent man- has a liking for a particular genre of courtly poetry which, truth be told, better befits the pimp's profession- viz. tabulating the different types of sex object which human beings can be reduced to, by shitheads.

How does he manage to link that sort of dehumanizing shite to Ghalib?

He writes- I’ve seen as a Model Reader the semiotic strategy of 39.1, its mens operis by focussing “on the things themselves,” i.e., the lexemes khalwat (lovemaking),
But khalwat does not mean lovemaking. In this context, it refers to the Saint withdrawing into seclusion in a monastic cell or else a lady retiring to her chamber.
 embarrassment (nāmūs) 
Namus means honor and dignity. It does not mean embarrassment.
and candle (sham‘a). 
that is correct.

I’ve inferred by modus ponendo ponens a Law/Rule that can explain this text’s Result: If lovemaking, embarassment and a candle (oil-lamp) are present, 
But they aren't. Nobody is getting jiggy here.

the topos is the lajjāprāyarati mugdhā nāyikā (Rule/Major Premise); lovemaking, embarassment and a candle are present here (Minor Premise), hence, (Conclusion) the topos is the lajjāprāyarati mugdhā. 

Let us try this modus ponens stuff ourselves. If Hegde's pants are on fire then the topos is Sati Mahima. 

39.1’s recoded genre is thus nāyikābheda, its sub-genre poems about love-in-union (sambhoga śṛṅgāra) and its sub-sub genre the topos of the ingénue embarrassed about lovemaking (lajjāprāyarati mugdhā). 

We are now in a position to translate Ghalib's 39.1 into Indglish.

Last night only Hon'ble Hegde is retiring due to his farts are so firing

His lungi burning up! It is true, I'm telling you, not gupshup.

Hegde ends- after an astonishing display of erudition in a number of classical languages- by asking-

Haven’t I indulged in hermeneutic nihilism and violated the habitus and literary field of Ghalib studies by aberrantly decoding 39.1 in the context of nāyikābheda?

No. The erotic genre among courtier poets is a semiotic field because the context is the same- more especially where polygamy prevails, or slavery obtains, and primogeniture is not firmly established. Now, from the time of Amir Khusrau, the eroticization of the Pir/Avatar has had its subgenres. Ghalib's is in the Udhri/Viyogini tradition. I can think of one or two instances of apparently 'nayikabheda' verses which asymptotically approach that barzakh. It is certainly not impossible to populate it felicitously. But it is that quality this lucubration of Hegde's lacks. I believe it has been published in a book.

But of books and candles and 'nayikabheda', and amor adaequat intellectūs suī, early Seventeenth Century English had made an Orient discovery- viz.  a two leav'd book is best to handle;  all's as daylight there to who spare the candle. 



N.B- I feel I've been a trifle harsh on Hegde. Perhaps the reason his paper is so bad is because of the editorial intervention of 'Brill Publishers' based in Leiden who it may be, demand submissions to be written predominantly in double Dutch.

Hegde invokes Borges's Pierre Menard, whose signal virtue consisted of leaving texts alone, not subjecting them to supposedly 'Semiotic' vandalism. But, I feel, he is a good man and I want to look again at his patchwork of quotations which, sadly, he has failed to stitch together.

Prof. Shamsur Rehman Faruqi & how to read Ghalib

Prof. Shamsur Rehman Faruqi & how to read Ghalib

Perhaps one of the most admired man of letters in India today, Prof. Shamsur Rehman Faruqi has some enlightening things to say about his method of close reading a poem. He holds meaning to be contextual, and thus subject to an inherent degree of instability arising out of semiotic slippage. Close syntagmatic and paradigmatic reading of the text generates a set of meanings- subjective projections freely arrived at- which, so to speak, then taking a canonical form, become accessible for intersubjective reception in such a manner as (or so it appears to me) fulfills the wider purpose of poetry.

My own, perhaps naive, approach was to regard the poem as an axiom system and the set of meanings, or projections by the readers- as models of that axiom system. Thus, a subjective projection on my part that makes a poem meaningful to me could be called my model of the poem. If I find that the poem captures features of my real life situation and suggests an optimal action schema to me, I may say 'this poem has real truth- it works-'. This would be equivalent to finding that a model of a system is concrete- i.e. relates to real world objects- rather than merely abstract entities- and thus the axioms, or truths, of the poem are mutually consistent.

Since I am speaking metaphorically, drawing an analogy rather than positing a one to one correspondence, and since moreover Dialethia is so closely related to dialog- the highest function, surely, of natural language- it follows that logical paradoxes, emergent properties of systems vaster than can be envisioned and beyond the scope of volition, or puzzles about infinity do not represent a foundational problematic though bound to arise within this field of reference.

Perhaps, for this same reason, Prof. Faruqi is careful to limit the meaning of the poem to itself and its reception rather than turning it into a seismograph  tracing the chthonic tectonics of some abstraction like History, or Being, or Identity. However, he notes, quoting the authority of al Jurjani, that metaphorical, or so to speak, symbolic language does have this property of excess or surplus meaning which, it may be, can not be exhausted by any finite individual or social process .

He quotes both Jurjani and Bhartrhari to show that the occurrence of  two or more meanings, two perhaps inconsistent Truths, was not a source of scandal, or an 'aporia' in Derrida's sense, nor evidence that some great Metaphysical Original Sin had occurred at some point in History which must now be expiated by literary scholars to the neglect of their more obvious function of illumining texts for lesser minds.

Prof. Frances Pritchett's web-site- a desertful of roses- is a textbook example of how Literary Scholars can render a truly invaluable service to the general reader by a close and sympathetic reading of the text. Reading her comments, the lover of Ghalib starts to see how greatly  performativity and dialogic  underly our reception of the ghazal. (This is because, she invites us to imagine ourselves as part of the mehfil, listening to the sher, trying to anticipate the next line, and taking a sort of rueful delight in the manner in which the poet makes fools of us with his wizardry). But the performative aspect of the Ghazal's stock set of imagery is radically Dialethic- pointing to the incompossibilty (in Leibniz's sense) of the two Truths that might make Existence bearable. This is a context in which exaggeration is a poetic virtue- as Prof. Faruqi maintains- rather than a sign of degeneracy as perhaps Victorian taste might have judged it.

Prof. Faruqi stresses clarity of image over clarity of meaning- and pays great attention to the logical consistency of poetic aetiology. This seems reasonable when we consider that if metaphors are properly derived from other metaphors and the regulative principle of that derivation is itself applicable, or adds piquancy, to what follows then, clearly, a condition for meaning- namely mindfulness on the part of the author- is met.  Furthermore, so long as the poetic aetiology is consistent- and Prof. Farqui is a rigorous constructivist-  at least we don't get, Ex falso quodlibet, an explosion of nonsense! This is not to say that the operation of the metaphor rules out incompossible states, on the contrary, Prof. Faruqi's courage is to grasp that nettle, and his great insight to show how 'Meaning production' is enhanced rather than rendered a nullity in such a 'six dimensional' world.

Still, the remaining problem is decidedly nontrivial. How are we to separate the poet's meaning from the continuum of its echoing associations and dialogic divagations?

In this context, L.E.J. Brouwer, champion of intuitionism in Mathematics and member of the 'Significs' circle, held that pure mathematics consists primarily in the act of making certain mental constructions . The point of departure for these constructions is the intuition of the flow of time.^[5] This intuition, when divested from all sensuous content, allows us to perceive the form “one thing and again a thing, and a continuum in between”. Brouwer calls this form, which unites the discrete and the continuous, “the empty two-ity”. It is the basic intuition of mathematics; the discrete cannot be reduced to the continuous, nor the continuous to the discrete.

As time flows on, an empty two-ity can be taken as one part of a new two-ity, and so on. The development of intuitionistic mathematics consists in the exploration of which specific constructions the empty two-ity and its self-unfolding or iteration allows and which not.

Similarly, Ethical Intuitionism might posit the essential undefinability of its terms while leaving a continuum between their apprehension of a 'two-ity'. In other words, bijective analysis does not necessarily subordinate the subject to a 'Structure' above and beyond it, which becomes the proper locus for Meaning rendering the subject relatively voiceless.

 This continuum tends to disappear- to be cut as by an axe- if certain sorts of infinite objects- in particular those hypothesized but never actually constructed, are admitted as having equal reality with what can be constructed and experienced by the mind.
A wholly different approach- based on the concept of barzakh (the isthmus between 2 seas, the boundary, the limit- but also purgatory) as used by Ibn Arabi- who influenced Jami and Bedil- and refined by Mulla Sadr- would be to look not at the continuum between a 'two-ity' but to focus on the margin, the boundary, the limit which divides them. However, given the imaginal rather than real aspect of life in the barzakh, it follows that this boundary or isthmus tends to vanish and thus becomes  a unifier in the sense of being the asymptotic limit of both sides of the 'two-ity'.
Whereas, the Stoic continuum is underpinned by the pneuma which inflates things to their tensility, so to speak, while also pervading the plenum, thus preserving a steady state, the system of Arabi and Sadr focuses on the liminal, imaginal, aspects of consciousness as this feather light barzakh which is not fixed in place but blown forward as by a great wind.
However, within Islam, it is by no means unanimous that the barzakh really does represent a place of creative, imaginal, activity. The plain reading would be that nothing happens in the grave prior to the resurrection. Not even the greatest prophet or Saint feels anything, knows anything, hears anything or imagines anything.
 Thus rigor in poetic aetiology or the derivation of fresh metaphors or themes on the basis of logical operations has a double significance- on the one hand it is an imitation of what the dead Awlia or Saint is doing in the barzakh which, in a sense, is transforming the Universe- on the other hand it is neither life nor resurrection but that oblivion which lies between.
In the Indo-Islamic context, perhaps, syncretic traditions highlighting constructible, experiential, mental states where access is gained to supernatural powers, thus creating links in the chain between mortal creation and the all powerful creator, modified the reception of Arabi's barzakh on an anaology with the Yogi's samadhi.  (The belief being that a Yogi who has achieved this highest of states can come back to life at will- which is why he is buried rather than cremated)
If this was the case then perhaps a plethora of these apparently constructible objects  became part and parcel of an intuitionistic praxis guarding a refinement in philosophy- of obvious instrumental value- such that antinomianism is avoided and the refinement of polysemy does not tip into schizoid pansemy.  A parallel development, arising out of homogenizing and consolidating maneuvers by Legal, Administrative and Diplomatic practitioners, might have reinforced this Mannerist trend.

In contrast, the sloughing off of the intuitionistic aspect of Kant- we may even speak of the abandonment of what we might now term Cognitive Science as having a regulatory role as the phenomenological project was undermined by suspicions about its philosophical origins- could lead to the reappearance of logic puzzles and futile antinomies in discourse which, in any case, gained a fresh lease of life from the notion that perhaps Language uttered Man, or that he was conditioned in some other way by the Society to which he belonged- in which case intuitionism founded on rigorous constructivism would be an intensification of cognitive activity as futile- from the point of view of significance- as the relentless buzzing of a bee, or a monkey attacking the bars of its cage.
An example is Deriddan 'differAnce' which introduces an infinite operator into what can only be a finite activity- viz. reading. The consequence is that, so to speak, the continuum between minds gets clogged up by paradoxes generated for no good reason and the capacity of the language user to signify is pronounced diminished by a spectral Alienist utterly alien to the Heimat of Human Agency.
By contrast, Ibn al Arabi's concept of barzakh- as a dimensionless divider/unifier not fixed but impelled by a wind (actually self generated by its own imaginal activity)- could in some sense underpin a notion of iterative reading such that the meaning received ought never to be the same thing twice but, somehow,  illumine more and more.

A further point about the manner in which insistence on intuitionistic imaginal constructivity might yield grounds for the belief that the consciousness is not trapped like a fly in amber, follows from the fact that the affirmation that, for example, mathematics is a languageless activity utterly short circuits the argument from conditioning, linguistic or otherwise, and restores 'Meaning production' to the field of Human volition and cognitive freedom.
Thus close reading, intense mental application to reduplicate the cognitive processes of the producer of the text, has a paradoxical result- it shows how poetry, at its best, too is a languageless activity. The juxtaposition of images and their mutual dialectic is something that can be separated out from other important aspects of the poem- for example its sound pattern, its 'mood', the philosophical questions it raises and so on.
No doubt, the bad poet- like the bad craftsman, or bad entrepreneur- is surrendering to that which a novel instrumentality makes facile- be that instrumentality linguistic or technological or arising out of colonial or other contact with a different culture. Here, indeed, we might say behavior is determined by the tool it has grasped. Experimentation, it may be, is constrained along facile paths. The obverse, using the new in an old way- for e.g. a laptop as paperweight- points again to a heteronomy arising from the cognitive failure to merge horizons. Indeed, bad poetry has both these qualities. Why? One way to frame an answer  is to say that the continuum- in this case between a new tool and an old mode of production- has not been properly grasped by the foundational  intuition of 'two-ity'. There is here a failure of thought.
The question however remains, without recourse to the authority of some genius's intuition or a Mystic's illumination, why is it difficult to establish a continuum  between objects apprehended as a 'two-ity'? The Stoics were already aware of this problem which is linked to the Sorites paradox and arises out of the danger of applying infinite operators to what can but be apprehended vaguely. The result is to undermine the principle of Identity based on non contradiction. It can engender an extreme reaction. If there is confusion as to where to draw the dividing line perhaps we need to retreat to one pole or the other, burning our bridges so as to kill off all those laggard in the stampede thus occasioned. That way, surely, there will be clear blue water between us and those clustering around the other pole of the two-ity. Thus by a razing of the continuum, Identity at each pole is safeguarded.
But what then is to prevent, the splitting up of the continuum into more and more separate parts- whose most benign possible result would be a doctrine that everything is true and no two truths are commensurable or connected in any useful way?

Great piety, as that of Mulla Sadr and Ibn Arabi, might be one way out. In the shadow of the Saints, anxiety about Identity might be stilled. A doctrine of two truths, one fundamental the other merely instrumental or hueristic in nature, night be seen as linked by a continuum of sublation that actually, by the operation of Grace, works like an escalator.
However, since it is by no means clear that Ghalib- at least in his poetic practice- accepted this view, the problem remains of finding the right point to cut his meaning out of the continuum of its echoing associations. What makes the task poignant is the notion that Ghalib may have seen himself as mediating every word he wrote precisely as this 2 sided barzakh- both the grave's oblivion and its posited imaginal leavening power- except he was uniting the 2 notions without the assuarance that the Gravitational pull, so to speak, of the Awlia Saints would raise him up to a position where the result was not a bitter futility.

It appears quite suggestive to me that Brouwer hoped to repair the continuum by choice sequences- something produced by free choice rather than a mere algorithm- but is this the barzakh?- and perhaps we might say that the school of Prof. S.R Faruqi, exercising free choice rather than blindly following an ideology, are doing just that thus permitting the ordinary man access not just to Ghalib's melody but his meaning.


Is there a danger in Prof. Faruqi's method?
What meta-semantic commitments, if any, are involved in the Professor's literary praxis? At first glance we might say that meaning must be constrained by the historical facts as given and literary traditions as received. Thus, to take the example of 'Naqsh fariyaadi'- a reader such as myself might immediately jump to the conclusion that 'khagazi pairahan' refers to the Book of Job- which I imagine to be the earliest source of the image. In this case the entire meaning of the verse, not to mention its significance for Universal Culture is utterly changed.
Indeed, given that his Divan begins with this matla, our perception of Ghalib's entire ouevre might be altered.
But did Ghalib know the story of Job? The evidence weighed up by Faruqi & Pritchett suggests that for Ghalib this was a Persian idiom with no connection to the story of Job- who, in Islam, is a symbol for patience and forbearance rather than the utterer of the most passionate complaint against God in ancient literature.
But what if someone finds a line in some book Ghalib is known to have read which links the phrase khagazi pairahan to the story of Job? What if the diary of some Nineteenth Century Missionary is discovered which shows Ghalib had read a translation of the book?
But, once one starts on the path of counter-factuals where is one to end? Perhaps, Ghalib as a boy in Agra met a garrulous Jain grocer-a Banarsidas wannabe- who explains syadvad logic and the distinction between countable and uncountable and so on to the young Ghalib? Indeed, what can one actually rule out? Perhaps Ghalib really did correspond with Karl Marx!

A different approach, one compatible with Prof. Faruqi's commitment to close reading, would consist of taking up 'khagazi pairahan' as a symbol and to imaginatively enter into why it appealed both to the author of  the Book of Job and to Ghalib. In this case, though less can be predicated of Ghalib the man, the meaning of the poetry is enhanced. The trade off here is really between tendentious mythologizing about a hero and gaining a better appreciation of his acknowledged achievements.

In this context, I may mention that I have had the privilege to read 2 essays by Satyanarayan Hegde which focus precisely on the Borgesian task of tracing metaphorical images, such as the 'paper clad plaintiff', through the literatures of West and East. This approach,, requiring immense erudition, is one all can profit by but few pursue.


What is Prof. Faruqi's unique contribution to our appreciation of Ghalib?
The application of exacting intelligence, scholarship and professional integrity to the study of a professional poet who possessed precisely those qualities dispelled a rather foolish notion of Ghalib- or the poet in general- as being like a human juke-box, pour in some wine, present the image of some long eye'd one- and out comes a melody.
Guru Dutt's film, employing a simplified version of Sahir Ludhianvi's lyrics, was meant to satirize this situation. But, somehow the audience drew the reverse conclusion and even 20 years later little had changed. The tragic tale of Shiv Kumar Batalvi is still remembered here in London.
This was bad for poets, bad for literature, but a catastrophe for people's ability to think rationally, or indeed think at all. In an era of scarcity, itself the product of bad planning, the signifier had come to stand for the signified- advertisements for impossible objects had created their own cargo cult- mention of wine was a potent intoxication when potable water itself was in short supply.

The danger was that, precisely because of its earlier precision, Indian poetry was becoming degeneratively performative, self deafeningly dialogic, in obedience to some notion that Democracy demanded it, Socialism was predicated on it.
Perhaps, it was necessary for the country to suffer every cultural refinement, productive as it might be of social distinction, to be pitilessly erased. Perhaps, now lacking foreign masters, the Indians had to forget their own system of heremeneutic/poeisis and redact their languages  on Orwellian lines.
Here, Prof. Faruqi's erudition and cogency of thought helped reverse a calamitous situation. The close connection between his ideas and method of exposition and those sciences and industries based on mathematical logic have given his view of Ghalib a compelling interest to a new type of middle class which draws its income from Knowledge based industries.
However, whereas it may be that little will change in our picture of Ghalib's historicity and literary sources, there are new developments everyday in logic and the manner in which fundamental concepts are envisioned and applied.
In this sense, it is from mathematics perhaps-rather than Politics or Subaltern Studies or post-queer Colonial theory- that something like Ibn Arabi's iterative reading,- an Apoorvata in meaning reception- will become possible as a project for the fan of Ghalib. That is, of course, if courageous critics, like Prof. Faruqi, and selfless scholars, like Prof. Pritchett, continue to pave and illumine the way.