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.

S.R Faruqi on marginalisation of Muslims

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, though a peerless ornament of our Republic of Letters;  nevertheless, like many of his generation, made a mistake in considering a facile sort of Left Liberalism more profound than his own ancestral religion and literary tradition.

This means that, though Faruqi is an extraordinarily erudite and cultured man, he fails to appreciate the philosophical depth of his favourite poets.

 Faruqi also has an exemplary record of public service- unfortunately, it was at at time when the public was being very poorly served by Civil Servants.

Still, Faruqi is head and shoulders above the sort of retired bureaucrat or man of letters who dashes off an op-ed in five minutes and so we should pay attention when he speaks.

This is what he has to say-

Harsh Mander is right: Muslims are being relentlessly marginalised in this country.

Faruqi comes from a part of India which had a large highly educated Muslim elite. Whether they went to Pakistan or remained in India or emigrated, many of them did very well purely because of their outstanding ability and sterling character. However, in countries or regions where corruption was rife, the ethos of this elite was compromised. Consider the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce. Its founder and many of its staff belonged to Faruqi's class. Most were honest and excellent at their job. But the Bank operated in a corrupt region and was revealed to have been thoroughly criminal itself.

By contrast, elite Urdu speaking Muslims who went into STEM type fields did extremely well without endangering their ethos in any way. They were also more willing to see merit in their ancestral religion and less swayed by an infantile Left-Liberalism predicated on an all-powerful, utterly benevolent, State.

It is true that elite Muslims tainted by a connection with the administration or a corrupt and infantile Academy or a wholly meretricious Media are 'relentlessly marginalised'. But, so are elite Hindus of the same description- even if their name happens to be Rahul Gandhi.

Faruqi is respected for his achievements in Urdu and English. His mistake is to think that the socio-economic elite, he adorns, actually did either language- or any language, save that of stupidity- any favours at all. Nehru's English was good and he relished Urdu poetry. Mrs. Gandhi, when stirred, could acquit herself quite well on the stump. Even Rajiv could read out a speech if it was typed in Roman letters. Rahul Baba's Hindi and English are good and he seems to be speaking his own mind- but it is the mind of a moon-calf.

I would like to add that marginalisation of Muslims has been an ongoing project since shortly after Partition, though not with such venomous intensity as now.

Muslim marginalisation began much earlier. What could have reversed it? Well, if people of Faruqi's class had not felt compelled to concentrate so exclusively on upward mobility in the 'Civil Lines'  or  liberal professions, but rather risen in Commerce or even returned to their ancestral land and improved it in the manner of the Nawab of Chhatari (who had to interrupt his studies and look after his land because of the death of his father) then they would have retained, or indeed gained, in salience. Instead, the educated elite bought into the myth that the State had some magical power to transform a rural country just by drafting memos and writing speeches for Ministers. The Left raised the bogeyman of Hindutva to terrify them into paying lip-service to a shallow and stupid Secularism greatly inferior to Islam's own grand juristic and social-political vision and practice.

How can Muslim marginalisation be reversed? The answer is that Muslims need to continue to move into higher value added skills based manufacturing and trust based services. A lot of them are doing it already. Long run, political marginalisation means the disintermediation of their own gangster class- a good thing. In that sense, the future of Muslims is bright.

Consider the Bohras. Asghar Ali Engineer has been fulmining against their leadership for many years while himself peddling a deeply dated Liberation theology of the (admittedly, more discredited) Swami Agnivesh sort. Yet, as the Bohras have grown orthodox, their prosperity and security has gone from strength to strength.  Faruqi may not like the 'costly signals' the Bohra community requires but those signals have created a separating equilibrium such that the Bohras have soared upwards- Prime Minister Modi will take a call from their leadership any time of day or night- while the jhollawallah type Muslim intellectual can scarcely get the time of day even from the Minorities Commission.

Abul Kalam Azad opposed Partition for many reasons; one of them was that a predominantly Hindu India will be majoritarian and oppressive to non-Hindus.

Azad had once dreamed of being the Imam ul Hind. Being traditionally educated, he hated the Western educated Aligarh Muslim and this did give him a brief salience.  But that's all it could do. Azad had no following in the countryside- nor, indeed, any comprehension of it. Unlike Kidwai, who served Nehru well in this matter, Azad was bringing little to the table.

Bihari Muslims had been oppressed and forced to give up cow slaughter in 1917. The Muslim landlord may have felt that 'majoritarianism' was being held in check in the Twenties and Thirties but the situation of the ground was quite different.

Apoorvanand is also right when he says that everyone wants the Muslim to be liberal, that is to say, more Hindu than Muslim. This is the prophecy of Azad coming true in spades.

 There was a time when politicians would say 'the people will not tolerate the elite speaking English and wearing Savile Row suits and sipping cocktails'. That time has long gone. Why? Governance matters- Gandhian topis don't. Navin Patnaik said he'd learn Oriya when he was first elected C.M. He stopped saying it once he realised that voters did not want high flown speeches in their ornate native language. They trusted Patnaik precisely because they thought that if he remained  untutored in his own mother tongue, the sycophants and intriguers would find it an uphill task to manipulate him.

In India, Muslims are valued for their labour power. They don't have any great riches we can plunder and share out amongst ourselves. No doubt, if Muslims have higher sobriety, better hygiene (e.g. re open defecation), and a stronger work ethic, their rise will cause jealousy and some of them will be attacked by losers just as 'Paki' grocers were attacked by mindless skinheads in the U.K.

 Personally, I am against burka, hijab, skull cap, unkempt beard, the whole works. If possible, I never lose an opportunity to berate the wearer of any of the above appendages.

 This is the crux of the problem. A non-Muslim may be against the outward marks of the Islamic faith. But this gives rise to no entitlement to berate individual Muslims. Faruqi may believe that Islam itself condemns beards and skull caps and so on. He is welcome to try to make that argument. But that would destroy his own credibility as a scholar.

But I do admire every attempt by a minority in a democracy to make a statement of its identity.

Faruqi is making an extraordinary claim about Indian Muslims. He is saying they- unlike their Hindu neighbours- don't take their Religion seriously. It is not genuine piety and deep spiritual hunger and desire to serve the Lord selflessly which causes them to be observant of the precepts and practice of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Rather they are just 'making a statement of identity'- like wearing an ear-stud in one ear rather than another to indicate sexual orientation.

So long as such attempts are not outlawed, they should be understood for what they are — an individual’s attempts at assertion of her right to be what she is. I remember, during the years of Sikh extremism, how comfortably, even insouciantly, the average Sikh bore his identity markers. And why not? It was his right to be Sikh if he chose to be one.

Once again, this is a rather peculiar view. There may be some deracinated keshadari Sikhs who are just asserting their identity, not affirming their faith, by wearing the turban. However, it is quite false to suggest that the vast majority of Sikhs are acting out of 'insouciance'.

I feel that to be affirm one's faith- whether it be an ancestral faith or one which one has been 'born again' into- is to feel one has been chosen to suffer and bear witness. This is not an economic or idiosyncratic choice. It is about the Divine Substance not some ephemeral Style.

That the Sikh was handed a horrendous punishment for asserting his right is another story.

Innocent Sikhs were killed by the minions of the Dynasty because two Sikhs had shot the Empress. Why does Faruqi think Sikhs were killed for asserting the right to wear a turban? The President, at the time, was a Sikh. But he was only President because he was loyal to the Dynasty.

Perhaps Ramachandra Guha is warning the Muslims against precisely the same denouement when he denounces the burka, and by implication, the hijab, the skull cap and the beard?

Guha is a Tambram. He knows that it is dangerous to display the sacred thread at certain times and in certain places in Tamil Nadu. But, in this instance, I don't believe he is issuing a covert warning to anybody.

There should be something for us to pause when we hear the term “love jihad” bruited about as a valid way of describing a legal social act.

In law, a marriage entered to for an improper purpose is not a 'legal social act'. If one party is acting in bad faith, there may be grounds for dissolving the marriage and punishing the liable party.

There is more for us to pause when a high court chooses to dissolve a marriage because it seemed like love jihad, or a prelude to terrorist acts.

Sheer nonsense! Courts have to decide on the validity of all sorts of marriages. For example if an elderly widow who owns some property marries a young man of known bad character, the Court may step in. Similarly if the intention of the groom is to force his bride into prostitution or some other criminal enterprise, the Court may intervene.

There is time to stop and think where we are going when another high court grants bail to a principal accused in the murder of a Muslim youth in Pune because it was provocation enough for the accused to be a murderer if the victim belonged to another religion.

The wording of the relevant judgement could indeed bear this interpretation. This is the objectionable passage- '"The meeting was held half an hour prior to the assault. The accused otherwise had no other motive such as personal enmity against the innocent deceased Mohsin. The fault of the deceased was only that he belonged to another religion. I consider this factor in favour of the accused. Moreover, the accused do not have criminal record and it appears that in the name of the religion, they were provoked and have committed the murder."

What is the true scandal here? It is that the Maharashtra High Court- like many others has declined greatly in quality. But, in fairness, we must also admit that it was a terrible mistake to retain English as the language for higher courts.
No doubt, the Judge thought the accused were simple men- not genuine members of a political party who would receive support from Party funds. Giving them bail would enable them to feed their families. The case was bound to drag on for years.

We are lucky to have a Supreme Court which ultimately strikes down the dissolution of the marriage and pronounces strictures against the high court judge who granted bail to the accused in the Pune murder case.

Luck? People of Faruqi's class did nothing when the District Courts slid downwards, they said nothing when High Courts turned septic, why are they trusting to luck that the Supreme Court might not go down the pan as well?

But the question to ask is: Did we, as an independent, secular nation need to be lucky in such matters? Does not the lawful culture of the land ensure that such “lucky occasions” never arise?

The 'lawful culture' means the ethos of the legal profession. Clearly, it declined. Why? Well, the lawyer-politicians who inherited power couldn't be bothered with reforming the legal system- though they well knew it was not fit for purpose. Instead, even the right to jury trial was abolished.

 The Left-Liberals dismissed the Judiciary as the creature of the Exploiters. Like Amartya Sen, they believed Justice was something to be achieved directly, by administrative fiat, not the 'due process' of the Courts.
Caste based criminalisation of politics meant that the lower judiciary itself became corrupt or casteist. Naturally, this filtered upwards. The Dynasty was pleased. It viewed the Judiciary as an enemy.

No doubt, there was a time when there was a 'Structuralist' theory which held 'Cultures' to be above incentive systems. But that sort of stupidity died a death in the Seventies and survives only as a counter-productive trope for gesture politics.

Many years ago, I was in Karachi, and the writers there held a reception for me. In his welcoming remarks, a very senior writer praised what he described as my moral courage. He said that our guest of the evening made a public protest against the demolition in Ahmedabad of the mausoleum of the Urdu poet Wali Gujarati. In my reply, I stated that my “moral courage”, such as it was, was possible because there exists in India a very sizable body of liberal Hindu opinion whose support and weight permits the Indian Muslim to survive and even thrive.

I am sorry, but I cannot make this statement today.

There has never been a 'very sizable body of liberal opinion' in India because it is a very poor segmentary society. So is Pakistan. No doubt, efficient public servants and cultured savants were cocooned from reality so that they could remain productive. But they were 'useful idiots' merely.

I am no admirer of the Congress. I know that much of what I see today is to be laid firmly and unequivocally at the door of the Congress. It was during a Congress regime, led by a venerated Congressman, that idols were placed (miraculously appeared?) inside the Babri Masjid (1949). The district magistrate refused to carry out the order of the chief minister to have the idols removed. The premises were locked down. From a mosque built in 1528-1529, the Babri Masjid became a “disputed structure”. It was during another Congress regime (1986) that the “disputed structure” was unlocked to freely admit worship of the idols. It was during another Congress regime that the Babri Masjid was demolished (1992). As the day of the smashing and tearing down of the “disputed structure” decayed into night, I was a witness to the atmosphere of the terror and sorrow among Muslims in the “Nawabi” city of Lucknow, famed for its ganga-jamni culture.I was in Patna when the Bhagalpur “riots” occurred in 1989. It was actually a massacre, almost a dress rehearsal for what happened in Gujarat in 2002. Officially, there were 1,074 deaths, a vast majority of them were Muslims. More than 11,000 homes were destroyed; an overwhelming number of them were Muslims’ homes. More than 65 mosques and 20 Muslim mausoleums were destroyed. The culpability of the police chief was so glaringly evident that Rajiv Gandhi, when he visited, had him summarily transferred. I still remember my bitter chagrin when he tamely succumbed to the pressure from the VHP and its allies and the transfer was rescinded the next day.If the Congress was not the perpetrator of these and countless similar large-scale crimes against the Muslims, it was certainly a brazen accessory, direct or indirect. The organised attempts to suppress if not eliminate Urdu, the tacit affirmation of “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani”, the alienation and demonisation of the Muslim, the list goes on and on. The Congress may have forgotten, but the world remembers. Still, I would vote for the Congress today, for if nothing else, it pays lip service to pluralism and tolerance in society and openly decries the BJP and the sangh parivar as communal and Hindu supremacist entities.Unfortunately, the poison of the Hindu supremacist idea has spread so wide and so deep in our political life that Sonia Gandhi blames the BJP for blackening the face of the Congress as “pro-Muslim”. All that Sonia Gandhi needed to say was that the Congress is pro-India, and not just pro-Muslim.

Sonia Gandhi could see with her own eyes that Indians don't care about caste or creed. They care about the price of onions and want their kids to have a good education. People of every caste and creed dream of a son or daughter getting into Medical College or IIT.

She has made one or two maladroit statements- but then neither Hindi nor English is her first language. She is perfectly Indian in that she harbours no animosity against anybody but rather, as a pativrata widow, is simply trying to preserve the ancestral legacy. It must be said that she has done a spectacular job.
Rajiv Gandhi, however, was directly responsible for the killing of innocents. He had cynically calculated that this sort of blood-letting was simply something that happened on the ground he flew over in his plane.
By contrast, Modi put an end to the political instrumentalisation of communal riots in Gujarat which began in 1969. The issue here is not whether it is the Wahhabis or the Mahasabha who smash up the tomb of Wali Deccani, but whether gangsters like 'Raees' are to rule the roost.
Muslims don't prosper if a bootlegger prospers. They do prosper when they set up businesses and are protected from harassment by bribe-seeking Government inspectors.

Faruqi Sahib, a former Post Master general who never took a bribe but who presided over a vast network of post-men who always insisted on their tip when delivering a money order, is foolish in believing that what some dynast says matters in the slightest. Most Muslims are working class. They need to be protected from a predatory 'stationary bandit' of a State.

Faruqi however has no fear on that score. Why?

In spite of this, I have hope. Rahul Gandhi seems to have tried to correct the pernicious slant that his mother apparently prefers for her party.

WTF? Sonia, with Ahmed Patel by her side, has a 'pernicious slant' does she? And Rahul, who has no Muslim advisers, isn't reinventing himself as some sort of janeo wearing celibate constantly popping into temples while his sycophants make out that Amit Shah is a dirty Jain and Modi himself some low sort of atheist?

Maybe Rahul Gandhi was only performing a formal genuflection at the shrine of multiculturalism and liberalism. But at least he professes to be for India, and not for Hindus alone.The Congress never did much to reassure the Muslims that India is their home. The Muslims, lacking sane and far-sighted leadership, spend their energies on non-issues, fighting among themselves on petty questions of religious practice.

Are Indian Muslims really so crazy? No. It is just that the 'Secular' parties pick up the gangster and the nutjob for 'vote-bank' purposes. The reality of Muslim life in India is that people are turning their backs on politics to get on with constructive work. They are lifting themselves up by their bootstraps. But then every community which enjoyed a brief period of political dominance suffered greatly as a result. The only way to prosper is to disintermediate the netas and concentrate on building trust and goodwill through hard-work and enterprise.

Is Poetry Universal?- a gristly verse of Mir

Is poetry Universal?

Stupidity, we know, is universal and poetry, we have been taught, is what stupid people now go in for to make believe they are smart.

Over the last 40 years, Translations, of the best American Academic type- and 22,000 new M.F.A's add more to the pool every decade- have indeed made poetry Universal in this special sense. Great energy and enterprise has been devoted to this end. Suppose the Jodrell Bank radio telescope detects a transmission of alien poetry from some distant Galaxy. It will be seamlessly translated into shit long before it is even deciphered. The same thing will happen after it is deciphered. Thus, a Globalized translation industry has already yielded us a Universalized poetry. Advanced Galactic Civilizations have banned contact with less developed planets precisely for this reason. They too have Academic poetry translators just itching for something 'primitive' to vomit all over.

Theology was once the Universal form of Stupidity and that was cool because, if you think about it, God makes us stupid.

But, Poetry?

It used to be the thing that knit the people of an oikumene together.

I guess that's more profitably done by S.U.V's and Shopping Malls.

Since India now has plenty of both, what is the point of Poetry? One answer, I think, is that with the aid of distinguished Globalised academics, people belonging to different Religions from different parts of India can at last come to despise everything venerable possessed by each other as worthless shite .

How? Why? Academic translations of and commentaries on great vernacular poets focus entirely on proving not just the poets themselves, but their entire intellectual milieu, to have been utterly stupid. 

In the past, we had to take the savants at their word when they assured us that our great poets were incorrigible fuckwits. Now, thanks to Google search, we can find things out for ourselves and discover that the reverse is the case. The great poets of other religions, other times, other languages were just so-oooo much smarter, wiser, more sophisticated in their thinking than we can ever hope to be.

Look at this ghazal of Mir Taqi Mir's-
                                      - 'vājib kā ho nah mumkin maṣdar ṣifat ṡanā kā/
                                           qudrat se us kī lab par nām āve hai ḳhudā kā 
The first line is difficult to make sense of because there is a word-play involvng Arabic grammatical terminology- but it means something like-  Though necessary (for salvation), finding the source of ecstatic praise of the name and attributes of God is highly improbable.

The second line is limpid-  'By the power of Nature, the name of God has come upon her lips'- which is what happens in my erotic reveries featuring hotties like Angela Merkel & Nancy Pelosi who, notwithstanding the Satanic origin of their Socialist beliefs, nevertheless cry out the name of Our Saviour in the throes of passion.
The second couplet of the ghazal is-

sab rom rom tan me;N zardii-e ;Gam bharii hai;

xaak-e jasad hai merii kis kaan-e zar kaa ;xaakaa

Every hair of my body is horripilated by the jaundice of Grief. The dust print on my shroud is the map of which gold mine? - i.e. Grief has turned me into the Gold mine sought by Mystical Alchemy but rather than my gaining immortality or the status of the perfect man, I am a sort of reverse Midas, deadened by what most touches me.

A gold mine is similar to 'masdar'- which means 'source' and, in grammar, is the basic verbal noun from which everything else is derived. God, of course, is the source of all things and it is our duty to praise Him both formally and ecstatically. However, to experience ecstasy while calling out the name of God is not a duty we can discharge simply out of a sense of obligation. It is a halachah vein morin kein. The knowledge that it is necessary for us forecloses the path to its fulfilment. This isn't a case of 'fake it till you make it'. What's totally unfair is that Tyrannical hotties, though thoroughgoing Satanic Socialists, like Merkel & Pelosi, nevertheless are saved, at least in our wet dreams of them, coz they're all like thrashing about screaming 'O God, O God, O God, O GOD!'

In Arabic, I'm guessing, this would be 'Subhan-allah!' which is interesting because there is a doubt as to whether the word Subhan (Glory) is a verbal noun derived from a 3 letter root in the typical way, or if it is 'ismul masdar' without such a root.

Q: Is Subhān (Glory) a Masdar or Ismul-Masdar? In other words is this word a state of something in and of itself, or is it extracted from an actual verb?

A: The learned sages inclined towards both options, some said Subhānallāh (Glory for Allah) is Masdar a verbal noun extracted from the verb Sabaha and some others said Subhānallāh (Glory for Allah) is an Ismul-Masdar again a verbal noun though it is not extracted from any verb i.e. Subhān (Praise) is a Hāla (State) of Wujud (Being) and has no verbal equivalent. 

This shows that the 'sana' in the first line of the couplet (which means praise not necessarily directed at the Deity but which might focus on His attributes) gives us a clue as to in what form the 'name of God has come upon her lips'. If she has said 'Subhanallah!' then she has, in a sense, achieved a mystical station (Hala) within the hidden hierarchy of Being (Wujud) which is, wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi, by itself necessarily Existent but only by reason of al lawh ul mahfuz's- all Scription's sykophántēs ascription to a thereby fig-leaf contingent- bi-ghairihi God.

However, our contemplation of her Subhanallah, far from pleasing us sensually by allowing us to glimpse 'the lineaments of gratified desire' has had the opposite effect- we have become the reverse Midas of what most touches us and perish of that Grief whose alchemy impoverishes the slave while permitting the tyrant to climb higher in the chain of Being.

Which is like toooootally unfair.

The Tetragrammaton, to me taunt,  upon her wanton lips

 Appears Salvation's font in Oneiric apocalypse

So jaundiced by what most touches me

I am the Midas of Grief's alchemy

Okay, mebbe that's a bit crap, still it's an attempt to highlight what is interesting here- viz. a dry as dust deontological issue of a substantivist Theological type being re-cast in highly wrought relationist terms, that too within a wholly transgressive erotic mise en scene.

But what I have written above is quite worthless. It is not Academic. It is not Universal. 

Prof. Pritchett & Prof.S.R. Faruqi's commentary on this 'gristly verse of Mir's'.
The salient points are
1) vajib is taken to be 'a thing without which something else cannot exist'- i.e. something necessary rather than contingent.
On this reading, Faruqi treats this couplet as straightforward speculative Metaphysics of a Universal kind. Following him, albeit with some reservations, Pritchett gives us this-

1) the necessary wouldn't [be able to] be contingent, like praise of the origin/source,

2) through that one's nature/Power, on the lip the name of the Lord comes

This may be meaningful- precisely because it is 'Universal'- to Academic or American translators- they write worse everyday- but, to me, it is not intelligible,or indeed recognizable as being related to Mir's couplet.
Vajib, for a cultured and devout Muslim from a Hanafi majority country- or indeed a Hindu from that country- must mean something more than 'necessary'. It is that type of duty which isn't made absolutely clear and unambiguous and which thus requires some hermeneutic effort or imaginative engagement on our part. 

'If there is a binding demand from the lawgiver to do something, it is wazib. However, the Hanafi's consider the demand Fard when both text and the meaning are definitive (qati) and wazib when either the text or meaning is speculative (Zanni - because liable to interpretation of meaning or investigation of authenticity). Difference between Fard and Wazib has important consequence. Denial of binding nature of a command established by definitive proof (Fard by Qati evidence) leads to unbelief. However, denial of Wazib (according to Hanafi's) or 2nd category of Fard (according to the majority) lead to transgression (Fisq).'
(Shah Abdul Hannan, quoted from 'Usul al-Fiqh') 
An Urdu speaking Muslim, I'm guessing, wouldn't even need to look up Google, the way I had to, to clarify this. He'd already know about the farz/ vajib distinction. Still, if he is an academic, he will still write shite by way of translation or commentary because that is more 'Universal' and smart people can't be bothered with what is merely local and particular. Instead, they have to show that Indian poets were primitive and incapable of reasoning properly and thus truly Universal. It gives a frisson of self-recognition- Caliban glimpsing himself in the looking glass- to the truly primitive fuckwits of the American Academy.
Still, they are only doing their vajib duty. Yet, might there not be a better way?

Suppose you work for McDonalds. A crystal clear duty (farz) is a statement like 'wash your hands after going to the bathroom'. There's no scope for quibbling because there are no two ways about it. If you deny that this duty is obligatory, you will be sacked. However, a duty like 'greet the customers in a cheerful and friendly way', leaves scope for interpretation and imagination and hence can be called 'vajib'.
 An employee of McDonalds who is passionate about her job may greet an elderly office worker like myself with a degree of archness vastly agreeable to me personally but which gives offence when directed at young, cross dressing, prostitutes like Ramachandra or Ranajit Guha. Clearly, duty of the wajib type is something one should be so passionate about that even more or less perilous experimentation in its discharge amounts to trespass merely- not malicious treachery or outright treason.
To take a case in point; the first time the young lady at the local McD greeted me with 'Look what the cat dragged in! Busy night dear?'- I might have resented the implication that I was a broken down lady of the night driven from the streets by Dawn's unforgiving light- more especially as, in dispensing me the extra sachets of butter I'd requested, she shuddered with revulsion and said 'I know what you use those for!'  Ramachandra & Ranajit Guha, on the other hand, precisely because they genuinely are cross-dressing prostitutes, greatly object to such treatment which, BTW, explains their animus against 'Globalised Capitalism'.
2) Faruqi takes 'sifat' as 'likeness' rather than a metonymy for the theology of Tawhid asma wa sifat- i.e. uniqueness of God's name and attributes- as expressed in ecstatic sifat sanaa- 'praise of the attributes' which can form part of the Sama Musical repertoire of a devout Sufi and serve as a preparation for recognizing the true haqiqa Muhammadi of the age.
Currently, there is some controversy as to whether such practices are permissible or whether they shade into a polytheistic cult of miracle working Saints.
However, for the poet, there can be no doubt that the duty to praise the Lord includes an artistic licence for passionate hermeneutic investigation and semantic experimentation.
3)  Faruqi reads 'masdar' in a univocal and universalist manner. God is the source and return of everything. However, in Islamic philosophy, there is a distinction between 'haqiqi' and 'majazi' such that only what is essential and inerrant in a duty performed returns to the source. Thus, the girl at McD who wordlessly passes me extra napkins with a gesture indicating I should use them to bulk out my cleavage in the hope of at last attracting a customer, is neither the source nor place of return of this sympathetic and friendly gesture because, having no other concern but to correctly discharge her duty, it is only McD's own corporate ethos and success in training its staff which originates, i.e. inculcates, the gesture and, tipping being prohibited, which gathers in the entirety of the continuing stream of profit which that repeated gesture gives rise to every morning.

Pritchett writes 'ṡanā kā maṣdar ṣifat = like the source/origin/ground of praise. Apparently the ṣifat has to apply to the whole phrase ṣanā kā maṣdar , because if we try anything else that annoying kā is left just sticking out impossibly. Faruqi Sahib says- 'The idea is that just as the maṣdar of all substances (that is, their origin, the place to which they all have to return-- that is, the place beyond which there's nothing-- that is, the Lord) is necessary, in the same way praise of the maṣdar (that is, praise of the Lord) too is necessary (that is, necessary in its own essence, not dependent for its existence on any other thing). And when that is necessary, then we cannot express it by means of words (which are only contingent, because their existence is dependent on something else).'
My response is- '' sana ka masdar sifat' is illiterate- i.e. corresponds to no collocation. In any case, is it really true that sana (praise not necessarily restricted to the Deity) has a masdar in God? Does God do sana of anything?
Mir wasn't illiterate. Nor was he a dark Theologian.  What he is talking about is sana-e-sifat- which, for euphony, becomes 'sifat sana'- praise, or ecstatic contemplation, of the attributes, a stage in Sufi mystical praxis.
Pritchett's commentary draws attention to the two ka's in the first line. One way of applying her 'meaning-machine' method is to think of the ka in 'Vajib ka' as an example of what Pierce calls 'hypostatic abstraction' by which an adjective or predicate- 'honey is sweet' - turns into an extra subject- sweetness is possessed by honey-, thus increasing by one the number of "subject" slots -- called the arity or adicity -- of the main predicate.
'In this case an izafati construction- namely vajib-e-namumkin- has been broken up into vajib ka nah mumkin which by itself does sound awkward. The meaning however is clear. What is being denominated is the class of acts which, though necessary to Salvation, are not univocally obligatory such that failure to perform them can be recognized without ambiguity. In other words, something necessary is also multiply realizable such that entailment becomes ambiguous because the Piercian arity is either impredicative, fractal or impredicatively fractal but in any case inexact. For acts which are 'farz' but not vajib, not only is it the case that the acts are possible but those acts must necessarily come to be for those who are Saved and thus God is their source and place of return (masdar). Let us suppose it is necessary to say 'Allah hu' to be Saved. Clearly, Frances Pritchett is predestined to be Saved. Hence, during the course of her Doctoral viva voce (what? Jus' coz the Rector of the LSE personally altered my diploma certificate to read 'Confirmed Bachelor of Arts' don't mean I iz totally ignorant of what PhD types get up to) when the examiner said 'Knock Knock' and l'il Franny Pritchett replied 'Who's there?' and the examiner said 'Allah' what happened next was predestined and as such its source and return was with God alone. However, notice that li'l Fran (whom I picture in a pinafore and pig-tails so as not to give way to lubricious thoughts) is not saying 'Allah hu' such that the sifat ('Hu') agrees with the mausuf (subject) derived from the ism masdar (derived noun) 'Allah'. 

'Rather, she is saying 'Allah who?' in which statement there is no sifat at all. By no stretch of the imagination can she be said to have completed a vajib-e-mumkin type of action. The intentionality is lacking, hence her utterance does not have the grammatical property of correct deployment of sifat. Yet, equally clearly, if not more so, l'il Fran is nonetheless saved precisely because God has not merely commanded (amr) but also provided the material ground for the requisite action to be completed (khalq). This is a case where God is both the source and place of return of the occurrence.'
'Prof. Farqui appears to be making a mistake- pardonable because he actually studied Arabic instead of reading Archie Comics in the back row with the cool kids; the Mullah having been either bribed or intimidated to look the other way- by thinking that masdar can be the mausuf of sifat in this context. It can't. That's shirk. It's the doctrine of hypostatic union by which the Christians worked their own damnation at Ephesus.'

Faruqi, by neglecting the specifically Islamic meaning of Mir's words has ended up talking nonsense.
IF God taught Adam the names of things and in any case the Quran is uncreated, why should words be only contingent?
I had a hazy sort of idea that Faruqi Sahib follows Al Jurjani- as opposed to Al Rummani- because he insists on strict compositionality whereas Rummani allows tazmin w.r.t. Revelation - i.e. use of a Quranic word- to be endophorically unrestricted by the rest of the sentence it appears in. In other words, the Quranic word occurring in a secular text yet continues to participate in its own 'masdar' such that the latter proves increasingly more real (haqiqi) while the former's trajectory becomes more and more phantasmal and spectral (majazi) in the same manner that this dervish's all cloaking mist of a winter's morning turns abruptly into the choking collar of a lice ridden khirka with the flinging of the baksheesh of a single, solar, Rupee of Light.
Or doesn't, coz I'm still in bed with a hangover brought on by drinking up my settlement from McD.
Be that as it may, what is of salience here, irrespective of the precise chirality of my spiritual squalor, there is nothing in Jurjani, or indeed any other authority, to license what Faruqi has written.
Excluding the Hanafi meaning of vajib, let us look again at the couplet.
vājib kā ho nah mumkin maṣdar ṣifat ṡanā kā
qudrat se us kī lab par nām āve hai ḳhudā kā
Regarding 'sifat sana ka masdar'- that 'masdar' praised in sifat sana- i.e. the ecstatic practice of praising God as the source and return of the devotee's own piety (which is passionate Love) - it is not possible to say it is part of vajib (i.e. what is necessarily entailed in the manner of a crystal clear duty), yet we see that 'by Nature' the name of the Lord has come upon the lips of the Beloved.
Suppose Mayor McCheese receives a complaint against the girl who serves me my Big Breakfast.
Angrily he upbraids her- 'Why are you pretending that an elderly Tambram office worker is actually a low class prostitute? It is against Company policy. What you are supposed to say is 'Thank you. Have a nice day' not 'Now get the fuck out of here, you diseased old ho-bag.'
'Did I say that?' the tear-stricken girl plaintively replies, 'I have no memory of it. Filled with the spirit of McD what I uttered I know not. Greatly have I sinned. I shall go and commit suicide by eating a whole bucket full of KFC.'
'Wait!' says Mcburglar, 'All these years I have been lurking in the shadows trying to steal cheese burgers. Yet, by the intercession of, the Blessed Thief. McDysmas, this Grace has been vouchsafed me- I saw with my own eyes the McAngel of the Lord descend into this humble vessel you see before you. It was McAngel who spoke through the lips of this handmaiden of the Corporation.'
'But,' says Mayor McCheese, 'How is it possible (mumkin)? Something which is vajib (a necessary duty) must surely be univocal?'
'Nay' spake the McAngel through the lips of a seated customer, 'univocity can be multiply realizable, indeed must be so- otherwise not only is deontics empty but so is alethics as a Globalizable brand. Just as 'Have a nice day' means 'Get the fuck out of here you ugly old ho-bag' when applied to a middle aged Tambram cross-dressing prostitutes like Ramachandra Guha or Sanjay Subhramanyam, so too does the opposite hold when addressing elderly, not cross-dressing at all, Tambram office workers. 'Everybody knows this. Now just Mckindly fuck off and let me finish my Big Breakfast while availing of your free wi-fi to update my blog.'

If not for McDonald's, then certainly for Islam, granted that what we know to be necessary (vajib) does not entail praise of the source of attributes, nevertheless, by nature rather than pious reason, we constantly observe that the name of God has come to the Beloved's lips.
Mumkin, in the philosophical sense, means that which is possible but which carries no entailment properties. A mountain of gold is possible but its actual existence is not entailed nor is anything from us with respect to it demanded or required. I am not religiously obligated to deny it exists or to go looking for it or to buy bonds issued by its prospector.
Mumkin in the ordinary sense would give us- 'Just from what we know to be necessary for our salvation it is not probable that the ecstatic practice of praise of the name and attributes could take its origin or find its completion in God (i.e. the attributes are more like prosopoi and thus no hesychastic practice is essential for Salvation for the reason given by Barlaam of Calabria) .'
 In other words, the devotional practice under discussion is supererogatory. In the second line, the proof is given- The name of God came upon her lips- how? Not from what she considers necessary for her salvation, but because Nature itself, when in ecstasy, cries out the name of God.

True, Faruqi Sahib reads masdar and sifat as having a grammatical meaning and holds that we can't change the necessary into the contingent.
However, the conventional view is
1) It is shirk to say masdar of all substances is necessary.
Piercian hypostatic abstraction is a feature of all languages, formal or otherwise. No entailment of prosopoi or hypostases arises- indeed it is specifically guarded against in Hanafi Islam.
2) It is bida to say praise of masdar is necessary.
When did Caliph Omar do praise of masdar? Show the grounds of likelihood that any significant percentage of the Sahiban did so. Why is it not mentioned in the Sahih hadith of Bukhari?
3) It is ridda to say that words- including those found in the Quran- are only contingent.
In the Quran, unlike the Bible, Allah reveals the names of things to Adam. Even the Mutazilites didn't consider tazmin of Quranic words to suffer the defect of contingency.
Nevertheless, Faruqi Sahib says- 'The simple meaning is that praise of the Lord is impossible/non-contingent [naa-mumkin]. The interpretation of vaajib kaa mumkin nah ho is that vaajib kaa mumkin nahii;N ho saktaa . Here kaa has been used in an extremely fine way. For example, they say aadhe kaa puuraa nahii;N ho saktaa ; that is, the thing that is half cannot become whole.'
So- let's see if we understand you right, Faruqi Sahib. Mir's 'simple meaning' is, just as half can't become whole, so too Religious duty is impossible to perform. Why? Because God is a bastard/ Gimme pork with  mustard.
What is the fucking point of reading a fucking Urdu poet from North fucking India if that's the level of his thought?
Is it really impossible to perform namaz, keep roza, go for Hajj? Maybe for stupid North Indian Urdu speakers. Tamil Muslims face no such difficulty.
But, it is a fact that a pious young Tamil Muslim, A.R. Rehman, shows great veneration for great Urdu poets like Mir. So, I think the simpler explanation is that Faruqi is wrong about this couplet which means- granted, the ecstatic Sufi practice of 'praise of the attributes' is not a supererogatory religious duty or hallmark of Salvation such as God has to exert himself to bring about to fulfill His plan of predestination- nevertheless, as if to prove the contrary, such and such has occurred.
What precisely?
qudrat se us kii lab par naam aave hai khudaa kaa
By the power of Nature (which was Created by God) the name of God has come on that person's lips.
Faruqi Sahib says next-
'In the second line he has said that if the name of the Lord comes to our lips, then this too is through the power of the Lord.'
But Mir hasn't said 'if the name of the Lord comes to our lips'. I'm no scholar but 'us ki' means 'to that person' not 'to us'. But who is 'that person' in the context of the Ghazal? It is the tyrant/beloved. When does the word 'God' come to the lips quite spontaneously or as if from Nature itself? The answer, of course- if you will pardon my coarseness- is in the throes of ecstasy.

Prof Faruqi says- Without the power of the Lord it is not possible that His name comes to the lips. If the Lord would not so wish, or the Lord would not exert his power, then what capacity does mankind have to invoke His name? The meaning of lab par naam aanaa can also be, in addition to 'to mention', 'to remember'. Now the interpretation emerges that if we remember the Lord, then this is His power. For khudaa ki qudrat there are three meanings. One is the one that has been mentioned above, that this is an expression of the Lord's power. Reference has also been made to the second meaning, that if the Lord so wills, only then can we bring his name to our lips. The third meaning is exclamatory, that if his name comes upon our lips, then that is his power. That is, that if even deaf-mutes like us, or even sinners like us, remember him and mention him, then if this isn't the power of the Lord, then what is it?
Moreover, in the whole line is hidden the meaning that if the Lord's name comes to our lips only through the will of the Lord himself, then if we don't remember him, what sin do we commit? To encompass so many meanings within a verse of praise [;hamd] is a difficulty fit for Mir alone. On the basis of its fineness of meaning, the troublesome entanglement of the first line (or rather its weakness of poetic structure [na:zm], which is very rare in Mir) becomes acceptable.
The problem here is that Faruqi is missing out all the philosophical subtlety in Islam and thus reducing Mir's couplet to imbecility and antinomianism of a cliched, Orientalist, Omar Khayyam type. It is sheer imbecility for a Muslim to say 'if we don't remember the Lord (i.e. pray regularly) then we don't commit any sin'. This is like saying 'If I don't wash my hands after going to the toilet, I don't breach McD's code of conduct. They have no right to sack me. Why? Because they have the power to force their employees to wash their hands after taking a dump. Yet, I was an employee when I took the dump. I was still an employee when I failed to wash my hands. Only after I emerged from the bathroom with shit stained hands was I sacked. No failure of mine occurred. The failure was McDonald's. They didn't use their power to make me wash my hands while I was still in the bathroom.'
Faruqi's reading of this couplet cashes out as
1) Mir was stupid. If he thought he was a Muslim it was only because he was a stupid Indian donkey.
2) Mir wasn't a Muslim. He was just too cowardly to come out and say so.

Faruqi also misses out what is poetic about the second line- thus, on his reading, not only is Mir stupid and not Muslim, he is also not a poet.
The fact is people who cry out 'Jesus Christ!' or 'Sarah Palin!' while in the throes of passion- pace Faruqi- aren't actually 'remembering' God, nor is it a type of prayer which the Lord himself must exert his omnipotence to specifically bring about. This is because, though 'remembering God' even at the moment of orgasm may indeed be a necessary part of one's self surrender to the Deity it is 'vajib-e-mumkin' something possible and perhaps deontically enjoined but carrying no entailment property such that God necessarily causes it to occur.
Pritchett writes- The first half of the first line is in fact doubly confusing because the normal, least-marked meaning of mumkin is not 'contingent' (in a philosophical sense) but 'possible', in a plain everyday sense, so that nah mumkin readily suggests naa-mumkin , 'impossible'. The reader's mind plays with ways that some necessary thing might prove also to be impossible, a (Ghalib-like) paradox so enjoyable that it's hard to let go of it. But that kaa does do what SRF says-- it makes the expression idiomatic, since normally an adjective like vaajib simply won't have a kaa after it. It forces the expression to become, 'to make OF the necessary, the contingent' and denies us the chance to read 'the necessary would not be possible'.
This is quite foolish. A necessary thing which proves impossible is simply an instance of an axiom system being shown to be inconsistent. It is something a priori known to be wrong. There is no question of 'the mind playing about' in this arena. If you do the sum 5 plus 10 on your calculator and you get back 'battery low' on the screen your mind does not play around with stuff. No gorgeous Ghalibian paradoxes arise. You just put in new batteries.
Why is Pritchett compelled to utter such idiocy? It is because she does not understand that vajib can mean something highly specific in the poetry of a Hanafi majority country- viz. a type of duty which is essentially poetic. With respect to that type of duty, granted there is no necessary entailment of a particular ecstatic Sufi practice founded upon something which, in Christendom, we might link with prosopoi and hesychasm, yet nevertheless, is it not remarkable that, in reverie, we see Nature itself wringing from her lips the cry 'O God!'

What's wrong with saying Mir or Ghalib or whoever was a Muslim? What's wrong with saying Urdu is a proper Muslim language? Are you worried that this hands an easy victory to illiterate, N.R.I, Hindutva nutjobs like me?  If so, it still behooves you to give the hate-mongers a walkover every-time on those questions where they are logically in the right. Not to do so damages the ethos of what you seek to defend. Moreover, our nature, of itself, is brisk to beat anyone who thinks being Right creates Might- so that's entirely forgivable.
What is unforgivable is treating dead Brown Men as illiterate imbeciles unable to profit by the philosophical hermeneutics of the very traditions they enriched.  Why? Because them Dead Brown Chaps were good poets- at least in comparison with the merely brain-dead Brown person who is writing this-

If prayer & fasting is to our back a rod

Must Nature in ecstasy cry out 'God!'?

Upon Men, Mercy, Mystics explain

 Love is the crutch of Tamburlane