Geometrical frustration in the Ghazals of Ghalib
Ghalib,
the great Urdu poet, was born in Agra. What he had at his doorstep was the Taj
Mahal. He wrote nothing about it. Though living his life in the fertile and
densely populated Indo-Gangetic plain, it was desert wastes he incessantly invoked in his Urdu poetry. Perhaps, some incompossible, fractally infolded, dimension of his mind required vast unpeopled spaces to, if only imaginally, unpack itself of its slithering arabesques & self-poisoning patterns. Or perhaps, what frustrated his genius was the decline of Mughal power. What was of marble was now of mud- that too unfired. Worse yet, creditors might collar you if you stepped out of doors.
In ‘Ghalib- a wilderness at my doorstep’ Prof. Mehr Afshan Farooqi writes-
‘The
Persianized literary system in which Ghalib functioned was circular.
Paideia is always circular. What matters is whether its circles are expanding or drawing inward and becoming so adversely selective as to collapse under the weight of a collective imbecility.
Mughal Paideia, at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, wasn't that different to England's literary culture as inculcated in Public and Grammar
Schools and at the two Universities. Thomas Coryat, educated at Winchester & Oxford, was James I's jester. He mastered all the languages of Europe during his peregrinations there and did the same on arriving in India. He was received at the Court of Jehangir in 1615 but died of a surfeit of sack in Surat a couple of years later. We find his 'Crudities' heavy going. Jacobean sermons or plays, perhaps because greater pains were taken in writing them or because a wider audience was intended, are more digestible to us than the learned drolleries of the period. But, for a Nation which had to choose between rising in productivity and power or being conquered, as Ireland had been conquered, what was vital was that vernacular prose should attain clarity and uniformity. It needed to become more objective and informative even at the price of appearing less imaginative or entertaining. Its authors, however erudite or eccentric, needed to take pains to efface more of themselves so what they produced could be perused without much pain or labour.
Thanks to the Guttenberg revolution, perhaps reinforced by the Protestant Reformation, there was an expanding, increasingly entrepreneurial, publishing industry in Western Europe. This militated for the refinement and streamlining of prose which in turn served as a template for rational thought and objective speech. This is the 'disassociation of sensibility' T.S Eliot deplores. Yet, for productivity, and thus prosperity, to rise, language must become more, not less, functional. It must rid itself of a highly correlated world-view or a 'doctrine of signatures' such that everything is magically linked to everything else by metaphor or even meta-metaphor. In other words, Language must grow out of its swaddling clothes of subjectively rather than slip from them seamlessly into senility's adult diapers.
Education can spread rapidly in a self-sustaining manner where textbooks can be mechanically reproduced and commercially distributed more and more cheaply thanks to economies of scope and scale. But this is not the only reason that the British project of promoting vernacular languages succeeded in India. The fact is, it is sensible to 'carve up reality along its joints'. People really do benefit if their mother tongue gains in breadth and depth so as to more accurately mirror a fast developing world.
Prof. Farooqi remarks 'Ghalib's literary world was in a state of rapid transition from
the courtly culture that had nurtured talents from across the Persianate
what sort of talents? Western Europe had fostered maritime, mercantile and industrial talents. It had sought to reduce despotism in Government and arbitrary methods in the Judicial sphere. It had greatly encouraged the talents of the polyglot and incentivized them to translate useful information or wondrous literary productions from any country or any historical epoch. Most of all, it had encouraged specialization and the division of epistemic labour. Nobody was expected to know everything. Everybody was expected to specialize in and seek to incrementally advance his own narrow field.
to a
utilitarian, colonial one
Mughal India was already a colony. But the utility of the Ashraf or immigrant Muslim had declined relative even to indigenous people- not to speak of the Europeans from a distant Ocean.
where cosmopolitan languages were making space for
the modern vernaculars. Ghalib, a bilingual poet, was at a crossroads.'
This is misleading. Islamic colonization of India had only been sustainable when the administration was utilitarian. Persian, as a lingua franca, had been useful. It was the easiest language to learn and had affinities with North Indian languages which, in any case, its own savants and seers soon enriched with romances which built upon and enriched indigenous folk-tales or bardic traditions. This did mean that the mother tongue competed with the lingua franca and, speaking generally, won out in the long run. There is one oddity. Pakistani Punjab appears to prefer Urdu to its own flavourful dialects. Thus Urdu- a winsome Deccani lass- has found its throne a thousand miles from its humble home.
It should be emphasized that Mughal Paideia was never merely 'Persianate'. Even outside the realm of law or religion, Sanskrit Pundits and Arabic speaking Maulvis were patronized and consulted on Medical or Mathematical or other such matters. Sadly, such stock of learning as they preserved proved less and less competitive with the European article.
The 'great divergence' in productivity between 'the West & the Rest', which some historians date as early as the time of Genghis Khan, gathered pace over the course of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century with the result that, by the time Ghalib was born, the fate of Persian in India was in British hands. Would they choose to revive it? After all, they were foreigners and Persian was easy to learn. Sadly, Iran was in decline. The 'Persianate world' had lost its anchor.
Prof. Farooqi quotes her father to ask a foolish question- 'Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in his erudite and widely read essay on nineteenth-century literary culture, asked why users of Indian Persian began to privilege all Iran-born writers above the Indo-Iranians and Indian Persianists. It seemed to be a strange case of ‘unprivileged power'.' When speakers of Persian lost power in India, they had less incentive to support excellence in that language. The same thing happened when the Brits departed. Niradh Chaudhuri's English might please the taste of such exacting critics as Douglas Jerrold or Sir John Squires- indeed even Winston Churchill relished his style!- but excellence in English had ceased to matter in India. If the English liked Niradh so much, let them take and keep him.
Farsi, unlike English, had passed its literary zenith in the Thirteenth Century. Nevertheless, under martial, Turkic speaking, Sultans, it could function as a Great Power. At the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, it still made sense for William of Orange to send an embassy to Iran in the hope that an alliance with the 'Grand Sophy' would counterbalance the power of, France's ally, Ottoman Turkey. Not so, by its end. Perhaps, if Safavid Iran had embraced print culture with the avidity of the Armenians, this would not have been the case.
Of equal importance to print technology, is competitive entrepreneurialism in the field of publishing. It is this which militates for qualitative improvement and the building up of 'authorial brands' and particular genres of literature.
Moreover, if people are spending good money to acquire classic texts, money will become available for objective certification- i.e. the industry has an incentive to provide 'quality assurance'. Furthermore, because print editions are uniform, greater weight can be placed on accuracy. You could not pretend- as Idries Shah did, some fifty years ago- that you had been faithful to the manuscript of Khayyam you consulted which, for some reason, was different and superior to the one everyone else relied on. This was because it was in the interest of the industry to observe protocols regarding textual accuracy. However, it was equally important to retain readership. Thus, in Europe, as the market broadened and deepened, elegant and urbane, rather than crabbed or pedantic, translations from the
Greek and Latin Masters gained wider and wider currency.
This meant that what was previously esoteric became exoteric. True, this was a 'letting in of daylight on magic', but what replaced fairies and goblins was Physics and Geometry.
Enlightenment isn't and oughtn't to be an annihilating lightning flash. It is a steady and spreading illumination uniting the world's far corners. It is not the case that 'sensibility is disassociated'. Rather, 'general purpose productivity' burgeons as lessons learned from one type of functioning are applied in a different field. This is what militates for Kantian autonomy rather than an abject fatalism punctuated by superstition.
In England, by the second half or the Seventeenth Century, literature became a paying profession in which financial independence, or even fame, could be gained, that too by a woman like Aphra Behn, by the cultivation of a lively, yet correct, prose style, which focussed
on descriptive clarity, chastened speculation, and sound construction. This meant that the self-indulgent ‘Mannerism’ or
‘Euphuism’ of an earlier courtly culture faded away as did idiosyncratic
variation in orthography or syntax.
Chancery
English was evolving into a clear and precise language fit for every
Scientific, Artistic, or Commercial purpose. Over the course of the Eighteenth
Century, sociable and even intimate communication- at least among the upwardly
mobile- acquired the same polish and lucidity as the prose of Addison's Spectator. The
novels of Jane Austen show young women displaying as much sense and sensibility
in their private conversations as we would expect from Members of Parliament
deliberating on great matters of State.
By
contrast, Ghalib's Persianate culture was utterly degenerate. Finding no munificent patron, poets took to praising themselves. This was an involuted, febrile, walking corpse of a culture where hyperbolic self-ostentation
claimed that, for a risible theological reason, it was actually a salutary
praise of God! This was an adolescent Narcissism masquerading as Monist
'Tawhid'. What gave it piquancy, or, indeed, pathos, was that Ghalib was a pitiable pensioner of the British. India's new rulers were mastering the Natural Sciences and powering
iron ships with wisps of steam while Ghalib, laureate to the last Mughal,
displayed the but imitational artificiality of Urdu's plundered word-horde and
the Pantomime, or paste-board, quality of its once voluptuous mise en scene.
In 1817, Tom Moore- a friend of Byron and as famous in his time- had published his best-selling 'Lalla Rookh', with its tale of the villainous Veiled Prophet of Khorasan. It was based on a translation of a popular Seventeenth Century compendium of wondrous & romantic tales penned by a senior Mughal official. Had there been a Guttenberg revolution in the East, it may be that Persian would have acquired wide currency and a life of its own on Indian soil. But, this did not happen. By the time the Europeans set up printing presses or ensured a market for their produce, it was too late for any type of literary culture which was neither indigenous nor contributed to raising productivity. But this meant 'carving up reality along its joints'. It involved noticing what was on your actual doorstep rather than pretending it stood upon the 'lab-e-kisht', or 'lip-o-the-tilth', of the Bedouin poet.
Still, for Ghalib in Calcutta, it may have appeared that, since England has made itself India's master, it could afford to scatter, with Oriental prodigality, pearls not of paste. The fact was, if the British promised you a pension, they had the means to pay it punctually. Seeing as the 'Sahibs' appeared to have acquired a taste for Persian literature, might they reward sycophantic Mughal poets? Sadly, the answer was no. The British in India decided that accurate information was of greater value than lapidary encomiums. Useful information was better acquired from the horse's mouth- i.e. in the vernacular language. Fables and allegories served no utilitarian purpose. In any case, a poet back home, like Southey or Moore, could always work up an Oriental Romance, if such was the public taste, while sitting in the library of his Club.
It is notable that Britishers living in India were able to earn money and gain some measure of acclaim by accurately reflecting the conditions of the country. Meadows Taylor, who was in the service of the Nizam, published 'Confessions of a Thug' in 1839. It was a best-seller. Queen Victoria herself demanded that its broadsheets be brought to her hot of the presses.
In the literature of a language, as elsewhere, the law of increasing functional information applies. Persian was losing more and more of its functions as its speakers lost more and more power or, indeed, functional efficiency. Persianate culture was doomed to involution and a bitter type of abstraction. Mention of Jamshed's cup or Alexander's mirror, made mock of the literati's own miserabilist mise en abyme. The heirs of those who had flattered the Lords of the World, now had a mental life like that of Doestoevsky's underground man.
It put
a lot of weight on the assimilation of earlier poetry through a thorough
apprenticeship that involved memorizing the verses of the masters.
The ready
availability of printed texts meant that memorization, in England, though less and less necessary, had to, in part for that very reason, become more and more accurate since it was easy for interlocutors to verify any errors, omissions,
or misattributions that arose. No doubt, a gentleman might mangle a particular quotation. If this were pointed out, he would consult his library and accept such authority as he found there. There was no shame in admitting this. Rather, it served a good purpose- that of establishing an objective and independent arbiter such as had been found so useful in the Law and the exact Sciences.
Scrupulousness in such matters is not a
characteristic of oral cultures however courtly or pious. Consider the famous
qawwal singer, Farid Ayaz. He has memorized countless verses and has an
encyclopaedic knowledge of the Divans of the major poets. But he would consider
the misattribution of a verse in a public performance to be a trivial matter.
The cognoscenti do not quibble about things of concern only to College
Professors cramming information into would-be clerks who will have to sit for
competitive examinations.
Classical
Persian poetry, as represented by Rumi, Hafiz, Sa’di and Jami, was a part of
the education of elite north Indian Muslim men.
No. It was
part of the studies of those who hoped to improve their financial position by
gaining clerical employment or securing a wealthy patron. If a particular
Prince was a patron of a particular type of poetry, the ‘power elite’ might
simulate appreciation of it. However, ‘Mimetic’ (imitative) behaviour wasn’t
always ‘Tardean’ (i.e. focused on emulating those of superior station). At
times, the fashion might be for the style of poetry current amongst coxcombs
and courtesans.
It is
important to emphasize that ‘Persianate’ culture was not confined to Muslims.
Hindu Khattris, Kaulas & Kayasthas were, if anything, more eager to advance in the bureaucracy through their knowledge of Persian. But, even amongst them, only some liked
light verse. Many did not. Taken too far, it was unmanly and undermined
Religious faith. By contrast, when the Hindu 'Educationally Forward' castes took up English, they did not let it go. Why? It opened the door to Mathematics and Physics and better Commercial and Industrial and Administrative techniques. True, the Indian might prefer the mournful lyrics of the poet's of his mother tongue. But, functional English- often this means the jargon of his specialization- is what he cultivates most assiduously.
Initiates
in the field of poetry showed their prowess by writing verses on themes that
had been used by the masters, but tried to go beyond the earlier verse by
bringing in new colour, hyperbole or wit.
This was
not true of English poets. A great gulf in time separated them from the
Classical Masters. An Italian might not feel any insuperable hiatus valde
deflendum between himself and Ciceronian Latin but such was not the
case for the Englishman. There could be pious emulation. There could be
clarification and condensation. There could not be competition.
Urdu
poetry’s rhetoric and poetics were organically connected to Persian.
No. There was an organic connection to Sanskrit and its Prakrits. Persian was an import but, it must be said, it is easy to learn and could serve as an administrative and diplomatic lingua franca. Indeed, Persian remained the language of administration and diplomacy till, as Prof. Farooqi points
out, the British- for both Utilitarian & Evangelical reasons- decided to encourage the Vernacular languages. This in turn
meant that Indian writers were asked by their foreign masters to write in
an increasingly standardized version of the vernacular so that passages from
their work could be included in textbooks to be used in the new schools that were being set up. One consequence was the demand for 'naturalism' in literature. Fairy tales infantilize their readers. Indians needed to grow up if they were to take a hand in governing themselves.
The nascent Vernacular Printing and
Publishing industry benefitted by gaining a steady market of a scholastic kind.
Professor Farooqi says ‘One reason why Ghalib towers over his contemporaries,
as well as famous eighteenth-century poets such as Mir Taqi Mir, could be due
to the power of curated publishing’. In other words, reliable editions of his work became available.
Perhaps, if Ghalib had accepted the offer
of a Persian Professorship from the British in 1840, he would be remembered for
his Persian Divan because it would have been taught in Schools and Colleges. But that would be a memory confined to fewer and fewer scholars because smart Indian students gravitated to STEM subjects. Perhaps, if Qajar Iran had been able to revive economically and militarily, things would have been different. The fact is, though Ghalib had been heartened by the encouraging reception accorded him by Persian diplomats in Calcutta, Iran was spiralling ever downward. It too needed to look to the West to revive.
Prof. Farooqi draws attention to the manner in which the burgeoning of Farsi publishing in British India led to Iranian nationalism recruiting itself from the supposedly purer, pre-Islamic, Persian championed by the heterodox Dasatir movement which had received toleration in India at the time of Emperor Akbar.
She says 'Notwithstanding the animosity of Iranian poets, the development of print culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial India did provide a strong textual resource for the formation of authoritative canons as well as the dissemination of seminal texts in Persian. Printed copies of the Dasatiri texts were also widely circulated and contributed to the vernacularization of the Persian language. Directly, or indirectly, Dasatiri texts were instrumental in privileging the pre-Islamic usages in Persian. Obsolete Persian words were reintroduced and neologisms found their way into dictionaries. The Burhan-e Qati embraced Dasatiri words which then got disseminated among poets and literati, many of whom owned personal copies of the dictionary.12 The proliferation of these words, despite their suspect origin, signifies the passion for the pure PersianThe displacement of Persian as the official language in India in 1837 did not go unnoticed in Iran. It in fact intensified the need for model lexical resources. Persian dictionaries published in India served as models for lexicographers. Iranian neologists like Ismail Tuysirkani, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani and Ahmad Kasravi didn’t shy from incorporating many of the controversial terms from Burhan-e Qati (which was written in the middle of the seventeenth century in central India)
Calcutta was publishing books in Frasi some 35 years before this happened in Iran. Still, only about 50 books had been published by 1820. The problem was, some of these sold well and had an established market. Moreover, the publisher based in India enjoyed security and access to a superb distribution network. Let nobody think there was any incapacity amongst the Iranians on this, or any other, score.
I don't suppose it greatly mattered what neologisms or corrupt forms are introduced into a language. What matters is that people use it for some useful purpose. What Iranians needed was security of life and property. Granted that bare minimum- which, it must be said, the Brits did extend to a fair portion of India- their own talent and enterprise could raise up their homeland to any height of culture or affluence.
Traditionally,
the archetypal themes of the ghazal were love, wine and beauty.
These were
interpreted in a mystical sense. The prestige of the Ghazal derives from its
association with Sufi spirituality. English has Greek-derived ‘Anacreontic’
wine poetry- but that’s just about celebrating wine. Arabic-derived
‘Khamriyat’, however, isn’t about wine at all. The wine is just a metaphor. If
an Ayatollah writes a poem describing himself as an idolator who has taken up
residence in a Tavern, the meaning is that he has retreated to the ‘khanqah’
monastic cell and is engaged in prayer and fasting.
The one attractive thing about Ghalib is that he genuinely liked Wine. Moreover, during the Mutiny, when French wine was unavailable, he switched to Indian Rum- perhaps produced by Dyer's distillery in Kasauli- which he praised as that veritable 'water of life' which Alexander sought for but Khizr drank up.
The
ghazal had to be musical, or at least rhythmic, since its structure was tied to
metre, rhyme and refrain. It was meant to be recited or sung, not read silently
in a corner. Pre-modern Urdu literary culture was almost entirely oral in terms
of the general communication of poetry, and it largely remained that way well
into the twentieth century. As Urdu poetry individuated itself from Persian,
Which had
transformed itself through emulation of Arabic poetic form- not to mention the
great Religion they introduced.
it
still retained the rules of composition, adornment, and so on, which were its
inheritance.
I think
this is misleading. There wasn’t much difference between a ‘geet’ (a song) and
a ‘ghazal’. One could be turned into the other easily enough. One should not underplay the role of the singing courtesan in spreading the taste for a genre of poetry which takes its name from the old Arabic word for 'flirting' or 'talking to women'. It is also associated with weaving- a task then performed by women who, naturally, would engage in lively conversation.
The
ghazal in the so-called Indian style endeavoured to bring new types of artistic
imagery to supplement the time-worn descriptions.
If so, it
failed. There is more of India in Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’- where a Kabirpanti 'bhishti' is depicted as the 'saqi-e-kausar' - then in the whole of
Iqbal.
It is interesting that in seventeenth and even the eighteenth century, Sufi poets would take up indigenous folk-tales- e.g. Sohni/Mahiwal- and give them the Laila/Majnoon treatment. Nothing of the sort happened in the Nineteenth Century. It wasn't till Sharat Chandra's 'Devdas' which came out at about the time of the Great War, that any similar romance was produced by the new class of educated- or semi-educated- Indians.
These
innovations passed from Persian into Urdu and strongly influenced the poetics
of the youthful Ghalib.
His
father-in-law was a poet some of whose light verse might have a second, erotic,
meaning likely to be useful to courtesans plying their trade. Ghalib, quite
naturally, wanted to go in the opposite direction. But indoctrination in Sufi
ritual too was not to his taste. What came naturally to him,
however, was lapidary word-play. The meaning may be obscure, but what does
Beauty mean other than itself?
Ultimately,
it is the Indian mass market which has put its imprimatur on Ghalib. The plain
fact is, some of his couplets are genuinely romantic or even witty.
It may be
that for scholars of Urdu, what has elevated Ghalib above all others is that
his texts lend themselves to academic commentary and quite horrible
translations. In a previous book, published a dozen years ago- ‘Ghalib, Gandhi
& the Gita’- I parodied a bogus type of hermeneutic or semiotic analysis
which some have applied to his oeuvre. That may have been otiose on my part. My broader
complaint, however, still stands. Ghalib was Muslim. Why not highlight
allusions easily, even unconsciously, apprehended by those brought up in that
Faith so as to help non-Muslims? Would that be a crime against ‘Secularism’? No. It would be a crime against ‘Socialism’ probably procured in some occult
manner by the sinister forces of ‘Neo-Liberalism’.
It might
with some justice be said that, for the newer residents of Delhi, the cult of Ghalib
really only took off after the ethnic cleansing of Muslims (their share
of the population fell from 33 percent to 5 percent) under Pundit Nehru. Since
there was no longer any prospect of Urdu being imposed, Hindus could feel
nostalgia for it more particularly because the ‘shuddh Hindi’ that had replaced
it was incomprehensible in its bureaucratic incarnation. Ironically, Ghalib himself had retreated to a supposedly pure Persian as a reaction to the 1857 Mutiny. Thus, he replaced the 'Munshi' in Munshi Hargopal's name with 'sheva zaban' because Munshi is an Arabic word!
How did
Ghalib himself view his poetic practice? Perhaps, apart from his social and financial anxieties, he feared that his younger brother's fate would befall him and he might lapse into gibbering lunacy.
Thus he may well have seen the practice of poetry as therapeutic and a matter of what
in Unani System of Medicine (which is derived from the ancient Greek) is termed
‘tabiyat’ and which means ‘the body's inherent self-healing power and ability
to maintain balance and health. It is considered the primary force that
regulates bodily functions, defends against illness, and restores health.’
Different temperaments will have different methods of self-regulation and the
Poet in giving expression to his own ‘tabiyat’ may help others of like
disposition. The problem here is that some ‘tabiyats’ don’t have a unique or
stable ‘ground state’. They may cycle through different ground states. This is
like the phenomenon of ‘geometrical frustration’ in Physics. As the rising
generation of Indians devote less time to literature and more to STEM subjects,
it may be that reconsidering Ghalib’s poems in this light might link them to
‘open problems’ in maths or physics and thus give his characteristic themes a
new, philosophical, lease of life.
Consider the manner in which technologists are currently harnessing 'geometrical frustration' to create materials with unique mechanical behaviour or novel optical or magnetic properties. Moreover 'programmable surfaces', which change their shape or properties in response to external stimuli, have many applications which are particularly relevant in combatting the effects of climate change in poor countries.
An earlier, left wing, view of Ghalib's own 'geometrical frustration' was that, in a Hegelian manner, it paved the path to a rejection of Bourgeois Idealism and the acceptance of Atheistic Socialism. Surely this is what the law of increasing functional information militates for? Sadly, it is difficult to centralize or otherwise aggregate information because of problems of concurrency, complexity and computability. The problem of 'Knightian Uncertainty' means that 'naturality' is far to seek because there is always a subjective element in what is to be minimized (e.g. 'regret') or an arbitrary element in what is to be maximised (e.g. 'utility'). In other words, 'functionality' is itself plastic and multiply realisable. It may be that, in epistemic matters, we must content ourselves with a type of frustration which maximises the number of new ideas or ways of looking at things. As Hemsturhuis put it in 1769, the Beautiful is that which gives rise to the greatest number of new ideas in the shortest possible time. George Moore dismissed this view 120 years later. What is a new idea? A thing fit for a Member of Parliament! Artists should have nothing to do with anything so banal. To my mind, Ghalib oscillates between both positions. Does this make him 'modern'? No. It merely suggests that my mind is full of shit.
Consider
this early verse, translated by Prof. Farooqi, in the style of Bedil, which
Ghalib chose not to include his Diwan.
رفتار
سے شیرازۃ اجزائے قدم باندھ
اے
آبلے محمل پئے صحرائے عدم باندھ
[Stitch
together the elements of your footprints with your speed;
O
blisters, prepare for travel to the desert of non-existence]
My
understanding is that people who walk a lot don’t get blisters. A greenhorn or
‘tenderfoot’ may well be advised to pick up his pace even if this means that
the whole sole of his foot becomes one big inter-connected blister. Why?
Because by focussing on completing your journey expeditiously, rather than
dwelling incessantly on your own pain and discomfort, those blisters will
disappear on their own.
This, I
suppose, is the poet's ‘proposition’ or dava and it is conventional
enough. What of the ‘proof’ or dalil?
It is that
the blisters- those red prints left by desert sands upon the feet of the
neophyte- have outpaced the feet they once disfigured, on the path
to the Sufi goal of ‘fa’na’ or annihilation!
A
disappointment in love, or a public humiliation makes us hyper-aware of our
blemishes. We may well desire to follow the path prescribed by a Sufi ‘silsila’ (the word means chain or
genealogical thread) to be rid of what wounds us. But, what if the
outward blemishes or injuries heal faster than you can make
inward progress? Might, the 'cure' not defeat its own higher purpose? Perhaps it is as well to take a ‘malamati’ (blameworthy) or
‘felix culpa’ approach and to cherish one’s own frailties. The true path of
‘Tabiyat’ is ‘tautochrone’- i.e. everything arrives at the destination at the
same time so hysteresis or ‘cycling’ is avoided. Sadly, there is a more appealing, but degenerate, solution. Do nothing. Go nowhere. Stew in the juices of your own bursting
bed-sores.
Prof.
Farooqi, no doubt, for sound scholarly reasons, focuses on the young Ghalib’s
‘… new,
almost-grotesque twist on the long-standing theme of blisters and journeys. The
blisters will work like bookbinding thread to string together the footprints,
Footprints
aren’t strung together. They are separated by the walker’s stride.
which
are never too clear and almost always disappear quickly.
I suppose
an expert tracker might be able to follow them even if the wind or the rain
have done much to efface them.
The
fluid from the blisters will be like the thread that binds the footprints to
each other.
No fluid
binds footprints to each other. They are separated. We look at their size and
shape to decide whose foot left which print.
As the
fluid leaks, the blisters will disappear, they will go away into the realm of
non-being.
Calluses
may form. Perhaps a great walker would not have such things. They would have
worn away.
Blisters
appear suddenly and burst quickly; the speaker warns the blisters to keep pace
with the traveller.
Why? The
tenderfoot understands that his feet will harden up by themselves and be free
of blisters provided he stops being such a cry-baby and focusses on covering
distances at speed.
The
poignant shirazah (binding thread) of blisters will perhaps hold together the
narrative of the journey into non-existence.
There may
be a narrative up to it. There can’t be a narrative in to
it.
I suppose,
what tropes of this sort cash out as is the bromide that on Love’s journey you
will receive many wounds but the goal is not attained till there is no you.
There is only one big gaping wound. No doubt, it will soon produce enough pus to become the new Sun which burns up the entire starry firmament. If that isn't a good enough reason to increase my pension, I don't know what is.
If Ghalib
is saying something new, perhaps it has to do with impossibly impredicative
dynamics or ‘geometrical frustration’ or whatever graph theoretic quirk lies at
the heart of what Schlegel called ‘romantic irony’.
It is
tempting to link this with the Marxist notion of crisis. If England was turning
India into a country with an indigenous capitalist class, it too would have a
geometrically frustrated economic sub-structure. Indeed, some scholars have
sought to make Marx and Ghalib interlocutors! - at least in their reactions to
the Mutiny. Perhaps, from the perspective of the higher mathematics, something
could be said for this project. What is certain is that I am not the man to say
it.
On the
other hand, it would be sensible to accept that, as the indigenous publishing industry
started to take off mid-Century, within the span of two or three decades,
Indian vernacular languages were indeed crystalizing into what ‘Chancery English’ had more
gradually become over the course of centuries. In the case of Ghalib, we have
the paradox, that his epistolatory prose- which was well-bred and lucid- helped
secure his status even after the vogue for ‘naturalism’ took hold.
Why was
this? Ghalib’s letters firmly established the nature of his ‘tabiyat’ or
temperament and since pathology too is ‘natural’, his oeuvre could be
assimilated under that rubric.
Prof Farooqi quotes the verse with which
Ghalib ends his 1821 Divan.
Mushkil
hai kalam mera ay dil
Sun sun
keh use sukhanvaran-e kamil
Asan
kahne ki karte hain farma’ish
Goyam
mushkil va gar na goyam mushkil
[O heart!
My poetry is difficult.
Accomplished
literary critics, having heard it,
Ask me to compose simpler verses.
I say, ‘It
is difficult. If I don’t, it is difficult too’
In
category theory, ‘naturality’ refers to a property of transformations
between functors, ensuring that the transformation is consistent across the
entire category without relying on arbitrary choices. Where a writer
observes a ‘least action principle’ or seeks to maximize ‘clarity’, the effect
is of a ‘natural’ and harmonious style. What is lucid is limpid. It is readily,
indeed canonically, translatable- i.e. can flow across barriers of language or
class or modes of social organization. English had attained this property. Must
Ind’s vernacular languages, entering the era of what Benedict Anderson would
call ‘print capitalism’ (which, to be truthful, had been kickstarted by
Government sponsored Educational Curriculums), mirror minds of a transparently
English type? No. There was something in the ‘tabiyat’ of Urdu corresponding to
geometrical frustration. There was no unique ground state or canonical
hermeneutic. Naturality- as indeed we increasingly find in Mathematics- is far
to seek. Arbitrariness supervenes at some point or the other.
For at
least a century- one that stretched into my youth and early manhood- there was
the notion that the ‘tabiyat’, the temperament, of vernacular literary culture-at least in North India- militated for a sullen anti-modernism or sly subversion of its
project. Consider Gandhi’s complaint about the Indian
revolutionaries. They may desire to boycott British cloth or even chop off
British heads. But, if they succeed, they would turn India into England. No
doubt, it is difficult to live as slaves. But, what is more difficult yet is
for slaves to live on lamenting their chains when there are no
masters and your wife long ago pawned any chains you might have owned to buy groceries.
In British
India, because an aristocratic aesthetic culture remained alive though,
perhaps, in reduced circumstances, there was no cult of Ivory Tower
artificiality. None aspired to the hot-house life of an aestheticized orchid.
Thus, there was nothing similar in India to Ruskin or Morris or the Decadent movement of the 1890s. Why? If you wanted medievalism, you need just take a train into the interior and then hire an elephant to cross a jungle till you arrived at the Court of a Princeling living in the Tenth Century A.D. If that was too modern for your tastes, you could travel further and end up living with naked head-hunters- till they consigned you to the stew pot.
Thus, for the Indian 'bildungsburgertum'- i.e. the upwardly mobile 'Educationally Forward' classes- there was the troubling intuition that arbitrary abjectness was the condition of,
not authenticity- because that was mere atavism and could be acceded to easily
enough- but indigenous ipseity. Remarkably, it was in America that the fate of Ind’s
literati was most expressively limned. This happens in Melville’s ‘Bartleby the
Scrivener’ where the Transcendentalist notion of solitude, as permitting a
deeper alignment with nature, is linked to a Secular ‘non serviam’, disruptive
of the cooperative work-ethic which upholds, if not the hierarchy of the
Heavens, then the Bourse’s great chain of Being.
In this
manner, the ‘tabiyat’ of Ghalib converges to that of Gandhi. What is
foreshadowed is a sundering of ties, a snapping of threads, brought about not by
some revolutionary convulsion but involuted self-revulsion & an endemic
sulking intense enough to, in Delhi, unravel England’s irenic web. Fortunately, England’s language,
and such representative institutions as it had managed to transplant, continued to burgeon in
a manner, not perhaps elegant, but useful enough.
I may mention, my ancestors are from Tanjore where, in 1784, the Maharaja endowed an 'European School' which, it is believed, burgeoned and began itself commissioning translations. By 1825, Thanjavur Subha Rao, later the Dewan of Travancore, had written a play in English on the tragic fate of a Princess of Udaipur who had been forced to kill herself to prevent a war between Princely suitors for her hand. There were other English versions of this tragedy- which had occurred some fifteen years previously- but what is interesting is that Subha Rao produced his version for the instruction of his Princely charges. His aim was to show that indigenous aristocratic codes of honour were the opposite of chivalrous. English was not being cultivated for its own sake. It was merely a language it was useful to know. 'English' Subha Rao is remembered not for this play but for his great contribution to the Carnatic Music tradition. It is clear that what mattered to him was not English qua English but rather that proper moral, ethical and practical lessons be drawn from its corpus. Tamils like myself feel that to be praised for euphuism in English is no praise at all. If you really have something to say in that language do it with as few words and as little ornamentation as possible. As for the politics and the administration of the Province, let that be wholly in Tamil. If that means that the scriptwriters and actors of the Tamil Cinema take over the government of the State- so be it. Let the mother tongue be adorned by every variety of gem or web of wondrous weaving. But to earn the money to pay for it, Mathematics not Mantic or Romantic poetry is what we must turn to. Sadly, the three South Indian origin poets who have translated Ghalib and who I mention in this volume, were too stupid to make much headway in Math. Perhaps for that reason they are fully equal to erudite Udru-wallahs who perpetuate the impression that Ghalib was a witless cry-baby of a fashionably 'secular' sort.
