some reflections on ghalib's modernity

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REFLECTIONS: 'I Think of the Ends of Things': Some Reflections on Ghalib's ModernityA Bi-Centenary Tribute Author(s): K. Satchidanandan Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 42, No. 6 (188) (Nov.-Dec., 1998), pp. 10-18Published by: Sahitya AkademiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23342308Accessed: 05-08-2015 08:08 UTC

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REFLECTIONS

'I Think of the Ends of

[H Things': Some Reflections : on Ghalib's Modernity A Bi-Centenaiy Tribute

'I am neither the loosening of song nor the close-drawn tent of music; I'am the sound, simply, of my own breaking'

(Mirza Ghalib, Tr. Adrienne Rich)

These lines full of 'intense moral loneliness' to borrow

a phrase from Aijaz Ahmed who has edited a

fascinating volume of Ghalib's ghazals in English versions

by different poets, could very well have come from a

Baudelaire, a Mallarme, a Rimbaud, a T.S. Eliot, a Nelly Sachs or a Sylvia Plath or any of the modern poets of

India, especially of the solipsistic Sixties. Ghalib's times were traumatic : it was a time of.

fragmentation and despair when the intellectuals felt 'the centre cannot hold,' when a whole civilization appeared to be breaking up leaving a cultural and spiritual vacuum that was not easy to fill. Life that was so far intelligible though challenging suddenly grew unintelligible; the tradition that had given the poet a secure framework within which he could encounter, evaluate and contain

experience was crumbling. In Ghalib's own words, 'a

strange time has come upon us like a shadow.' Ghalib seldom observed the rituals of Islam; yet the religion was

there, a looming luminous presence that filled him with a sense of the cosmic, made God available to him in moments of crisis. There was too a sense of sharing, there were common experiences, concerns and concepts, of love,

anxiety, friendship, brotherhood, equality, giving the poet the secure feeling of being part of a collectivity and a sense of relationship, of harmony with the society even in times of acute anguish and suffering. But by the beginning of

REFLECTIONS

'I Think of the Ends of

Things': Some Reflections on Ghalib's Modernity A Bi-Centenary Tribute


the nineteenth century, things began to fall apart : order was giving way to disorder, self-doubt began to assail civilization. The entry of the British commercial interests expedited the break-down of the

system. The subconscious of the subcontinent was haunted by a crisis of confidence that soon gave way to disillusionment. Mirza Ghalib

(1797-1869) lived at a time when relationships were becoming more and more difficult to sustain and the irrational was beginning to dominate society. The utter sense of waste and the desperate longing for lost relationships gave his poetry a tone different from those of Omar

Khayyam with his sensuous wisdom and Hafiz with his moral

grandeur. Ghalib's Delhi, much like Baudelaire's Paris, Pushkin's

St.Petersburg, Lorca's New York, Brecht's Berlin or Eliot's London, was a city of crises and carnage, full of the intensities of cultural friction, the frontiers of experience. The relationship between the metropolises and the experience of modernity has been explored time and again in

contemporary literary criticism. Writers and intellectuals have long abhorred the city and dreamt of escaping from its sprawl and speed, its vices and noises. Cultural stability has often been seen as being outside the urban order. And yet the city has fascinated them with its

experience of modern history, its turbulent artistic activity, its verve, drive and vivacity. The city has been a metaphor for all that is modern, and modernism itself has been more or less an urban form of art, both in India and abroad. City, both as a museum of culture and a novel

environment, as the foci of migration from the countryside and as centres of political action, as the dissolver of the feudal order and the

harbinger of capitalistic relations, has always attracted and repelled artists and writers at the same time. It is here that artists have

experienced that modern phenomenon called alienation, that

paradoxical position of independence coupled with social

indeterminacy. Cities with their vast agglomerations of people of different origins in different roles and situations have always been

places of conflict, transformation and novel consciousness that stimulate cultural innovation along with a feeling of moral and communicative crisis. Chaos, contingency, diversity, heteroglossia : these storm-centres of civilization have been characterised by these

pluralizing and surrealizing forces of modernism. Exile, disconnection, loss: these experiences of the 'unhoused' writer in the city appear again and again in Ghalib's poetry. 'Dropped like a used light bulb, I won't be shocked' he says in one of his ghazals,

K. Satchidanandan/11


There's no way to fix what's happened inside me. Even with a door, I probably shouldn't go back in.

He comes to love not the beloved herself, but the spaces between them.

What can you get watching a life run like clockwork? It is time to go when you don't even want loyalty.

He ends the ghazal with the tragic confession,

I've nothing to be proud of.

Ghalib was literally 'unhoused' in both Delhi and Calcutta. He

always rented a house or accepted the use of a house from his patron. He had no books of his own, nor children except the two he adopted in 1852. Ghalib always wished to have a regular income but it never materialised. His marriage was not happy; his relations with his wife were tentative and indifferent. Deprived of both material and moral certainties Ghalib remained ever vulnerable, ever on the brink of

breaking up. He was horrified by the wholsale violence practised by the British rulers in spite of his admiration for the rationality and the

sophistication of the West that he contrasted with the intellectual

poverty and the redundancy of the Moghal court. He expressed his horror at the British attrocities in his private letters though in the public document, 'Dast-Ambooh' his diary of 1857 he was generally appreciative of the British despite occassional remarks against their excesses. It was the onslaught of 1857 that really brought about a transformation in his attitude to the British; he had witnessed the

hanging of at least 27,000 patriotic rebels in Delhi itself. In the same

year his brother Yusuf, who had been mad since 1826, passed away. Many of Ghalib's friends were among those hanged by the British. His attitude to the British was indeed ambivalent: he admired their liberal ideas while he was also disgusted with their cruelty and denial of

human rights to the Indian subjects.

Nothing comes very easy to you, human creature

least of all the skill to live humanely. Time after time ahead of time, you fool,

standing in panic at the meeting place

These lines reflect Ghalib's general attitude to man's inhumanity that left even his body in the grave 'scarred with its disappointments.' (Tr. Adrienne Rich).

12/Indian Literature : 188


Ghalib's is essentially a poetry of contemplation. His atttempt is to draw the subtlest and the most precise distinctions between one

experience and another and between one shade of an experience and another shade. The questions Ghalib asks are not different from the traditional questions of Persian-Urdu poetry what is love? What is God? What is the place of man in this universe? However, Ghalib is no

mystic; even metaphysics attains an earthy character in his poems. Like

Baudelaire, he brings together the metaphysical and the temporal to invent a poetics of sudden 'correspondences', of moments when the

rapid passage of forms is suddenly illuminated by an intuition of the

atemporal or spiritual:

Our time of awareness is a lightning-flash a blinding interval in which to know and suffer.

(Tr. Adrienne Rich)

Roland Barthes once observed that around 1850 classical writing disintegrated, and the whole of literature became the problematics of

language. This was the result of the pluralization of world views

deriving from the evolution of new classes and communications. In Ghalib's poetry we begin to feel the 'great divide' between the past and the present, the beginning of that break-up, a devolution or a dissolution that characterises modern art. Like all modern artists Ghalib too confronts a crisis of culture and is under historical strain. His is a

poetic art consequent to the collapsing of the conventional notions of

casuality and traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character. When realities become subjective fictions, the public notions of language become discredited. The dis-establishing of communal

reality must have been a great shock to a writer like Ghalib who always longed for a meaningful relationship with the community. He is aware of contingency as a disaster in the world of time. The panorama of

futility was an immediate experience to him. 'I am a pinched out candle, no longer good for the banquet-table/ he says. He feels he has lost all the campaigns; he is unable to find the truth since 'the world reflects crooked, or the crystal ball distorts.' 'The seer turns blind.... So it's dead in my breast, the zeal, the principle its only reward was the gleam while it vanished.' (Tr. William Stafford). Even in nature he found the force of pain, 'Spring cloud thinning after rain : Dying into its own

weeping.' (Tr. Thomas Fitzimmons). Virginia Woolf thought that human nature changed in or about

December 1910; D.H. Lawrance thought that the old world ended in 1915; Richard Ellman took it back to 1900; but Mirza Ghalib had seen



the end of the old world much earlier, in his own youth in the nineteenth

century. 'Images of death piled up everywhere, that's what the world fastens around us,' he wrote in one of his ghazals. He could no more live on the great promise : Well, you can believe it, I'd have died of joy had the Great One proved the Word.' He says he would never have had heavenly bliss even if he had lived longer.

Exiled, how can I rejoice, forced here from home, and even my letters torn open?'

(Tr. William Stafford)

'Be, or be lost', that was what he felt about life :

Either one enters the drift, bast and whole as one, or life is a mere game.

Ghalib found the words of his grief 'fall like a shower of sparks' so that 'out in the world they call me a disciple of fire.' The market

place surrounds even the nuanced art of poetry, 'We and the poems we

make get bought and sold together.' Nietzsche declared in November

1888, 'I swear that in two years' time the whole world will be in convulsions. I am sheer destiny.' In December he wrote to August

Strindberg, that he now felt possessed of the strength 'to cleave the

history of mankind in two.' Ghalib, Nietzsche's contemporary, seems

to share this apocalyptic vision, that man is at the terminus of a long era of civilization, that history had arrived at a point of destiny, that all human values are going to be subjected to total revision. Ghalib appears at times to use a metalanguage that fuses workaday contraries in a

new universe of discourse. One feels that Ghalib's ultimate theme is

language, the break-down of language that signifies the breakdown of

relationships. His inwardness is different from Romantic subjectivity, it comes from the isolation of the poet in the city's commercial chaos; it

is a desperate search for a private sense of belonging and of order created

out of the cultural fragments strewn around him. He feels spiritually

crippled and sterile, subjected to an entropic anarchy :

They are foolish who wonder why I am still living: I am doomed to live, wanting death, a little longer.

Ghalib is one of the first masters to bring about that radical

transformation in the nature of the lyric that is typical of modernism.

He very often abandons the traditional subject position of the lyric poet as the lover, the courtier, the patriot and the sage. The aspiration for an



inaccessible order, a feeling of doubt, disbelief in the divine promise, the possibility of error, confession of sin, meanness and misfortune : all these characteristics of the modern lyric are discernible in Ghalib's verses. The poet here is no more the celebrant of the culture to which he belongs : he understands the squalor and baseness of urban living as does Baudelaire, and like Rimbaud he often writes a poetry of unorthodox celebrations and chance epiphanies. This is in keeping with the spirit of the modern age, where the epic poem that expresses an ethical choice and the sustained long poem with fully worked-out

conceptual schemes appear out-of-tune with the time and the lyric that

expresses a transitory mood, or a momentary illusion seems apt and relevant. Ghalib's poetry is like a spiritual diary that follows the contours of his individual experience where 'every attempt is a wholly new start.' In this attempt the poet is also confronted with the

inadequacy of language, its aridity and plenitude. The surface of

language seems to grow opaque as the sensibility becomes disassociated. Poetry becomes an attempt to discover 'what flowers

might grow amid the ruins of language,' to listen to 'the rattle of pebbles on the shore under the receding wave.' I am too old for an inner wildness, Ghalib/when the violence of the world is all around me,' these lines of Ghalib express the feeling of exhaustion and frustration that comes from the confrontation with a world of destruction and ruin. Ghalib's lines 'Anyone who still can hope is seeing visions' reminds one of what Bertolt Brecht wrote in our own times, 'Those who laugh have not yet heard the terrible tidings.' He too felt that the forehead without wrinkles is the sign of stupidity.

Even love finally left him in a state of disillusionment, and so too wine : 'The walls and doors of the tavern are blank with silence. I am ashamed of the destroying genius of my love;/this crumbling house contains nothing but my wish to have been a builder.' Even creativity is only the expression of a failure : 'Today, Asad, our poems are just the

pastime of empty hours;/clearly our virtuosity has brought us nowhere'. (Tr. Adrienne Rich). Here 'The images of collective failure are.... fully assimilated in an image of personal lack of worth and effectiveness, and of the irrelevance of the creative act itself,' to quote Aijaz Ahmed's comment on this ghazal. Ghalib identifies the totalization of knowledge in the Hegelian sense with the totalization of the community itself:

We make new our life is an overthrowing



the great faith gathers to itself deaths even of its worshippers.

1

(Tr. W.S. Merwin)

He felt that if the poet went on mourning, the cities men inhabit will drift back into the wild.

Ghalib desperately wanted to share his anxieties with others; but he was living in an age when others were beginning to be perceived as

hell, as did the existentialists more than a century later.

I'd like to crumple this love, this shame into the fire; What is this need to share what can't be shared?

(Tr. Adrienne Rich)

He felt he was constantly behind bars and yet did not want others to think that it was his nest that the lightning had shrivelled. The agony of living was insufferable: 'What I'm living through now could smash

my house in pieces.' He felt love left no children; it always hid itself

under the veil of dust. Love, he found, did not have the colour of

madness. The heart fails even while it courts disgrace. A sense of

impotence seemed frequently to overpower the poet, the heart was in an autumnal state, incapable of registering the meaning of events. 'Without a meaning to perceive, what is perception?', he asks, 'Tears

sting my eyes, I'm leaving/lest the other guests see my weakness.' He

knew the bitter aftertaste of all sweetness and was aware that the Paradise was but 'a long hangover.' He felt like a runner in a desert whose frontiers seemed to be farther and farther away :

Where I'm going is farther at every step the desert runs from me with my own feet. In the lonely night because of my anguish Of the fire in my heart the shadow slipped from me like smoke.

The bleeding blisters on the soles of his feet leave a red trail across

the desert:

The trail of my madness crosses the desert

red pearls on a page of manuscript (Tr. W.S. Merwin)

The eye was bleeding fire, and the earth and the dried leaves of

the garden were being lit up because of him. Even spring comes to him



like a storm. The arrival of God amazes him. 'The mirror has turned to a six-tiered ground of waiting.' The world is a net and the desert is its

prey. 'The nights of Spring are finished, nightingale.' When his love is

thinking of her hair, he thinks of the ends of things. His cry is a charred

dove, a burning nightingale.

Worse than any fire fed by what was Was the fire of longing for what was not

nothing was left of the spirit but the heart's suffering.

(Tr. W.S. Merwin)

Even when sun shines and turns everything into day, he only sees the shadow : 'A strange time/has come upon us like a shadow.' Man appears to be condemned to live and to love and then to be

estranged from everything he loves.

Asad, my shadow pours out of me like smoke

My soul is on fire; nothing is mine for long. (Tr. Mark Strand)

Ghalib observes lovers fast turning into 'fascimiles of grief.' Poets

go on writing the histories of this madness until their fingers bleed. 'Even as beggars we were bent on failure' he says, since even patrons gave them only compassionate smiles. At the end of all sensual joys, revellers depart leaving a candle, ravaged for the carousing and gutted out, silent and flameless. The wild nights vanish as the poet laments:

I am nothing but dust being blown around in her street; O wind, let me down, I have no wish to be bird again.

(Tr. Mark Strand)

At times he tries to be detached, indifferent: 'Ghalib! Why expect to know where to turn?/ Hopes die. You know that. How can you complain?' Love, he found, 'was a fire that lights itself/and dies out of

itself, beyond our wills.' Ghalib was tormented by the fear that no one else could ever share his pain:

Just when you think someone may feel your plight. It turns out he's worst offeven calloused, may be.

He asks the preacher not to raise the Kaa'ba's curtain: 'It may hide one more idol in which there can be no belief.'

Mirza Ghalib's poems are personal interpretations of an age of

anxiety. He is the historiographer of the spiritual agony of a faithless



time when language seemed to be breaking down and relationships growing inane. Ghalib was a poet of crisis and this is what makes him our immediate contemporary. He understands us even better than we understand him.

U U[ t-* K. Satchidanandan

Publisher


-J- jL--ej. i-* K. Satchidanandan

Publisher


Article Contentsp. [10]p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18

Issue Table of ContentsIndian Literature, Vol. 42, No. 6 (188) (Nov.-Dec., 1998) pp. 1-200Front MatterHERE AND NOW: Fiesta and Mourning [pp. 5-9]REFLECTIONS: 'I Think of the Ends of Things': Some Reflections on Ghalib's ModernityA Bi-Centenary Tribute [pp. 10-18]POETRYA Fling With God [pp. 19-21]Translation [pp. 21-22]The Guest [pp. 23-24]Absolutely My Own [pp. 24-25]Standing on Your Shore [pp. 26-28]Villages Surrounded by Scarce Dour Trees [pp. 28-29]When the Sunlight of My Heart Sets [pp. 29-30]Photo [pp. 31-31]Empty Space [pp. 32-32]On the Banks of Un-Pacific Ocean [pp. 32-34]Video-Death [pp. 35-36]Hooghly [pp. 36-39]The Player King and the Clown [pp. 40-41]Mao-tse-tung [pp. 41-43]Poetry [pp. 44-45]Mallika-Like [pp. 45-46]Some Notes on Absence: Walking in a Bhikhu's Absence [pp. 47-54]Again They [pp. 55-56]The Crow [pp. 57-58]Camel [pp. 59-60]Monoimage Poems [pp. 60-61]After an Earthquake [pp. 61-62]To the Hands Destroying the Wall of the City of Berlin [pp. 62-62]Meaning of Poetry [pp. 63-65]Mask [pp. 65-66]Kalahandi [pp. 66-68]Constantly [pp. 69-69]Let the River Sound [pp. 69-69]As If Never [pp. 70-70]Up to the Inner Depths [pp. 70-70]The Door [pp. 71-71]Of Sages [pp. 72-73]Finalities [pp. 73-74]Living on Hyphens [pp. 74-75]Old Age [pp. 76-77]On the Naked Earth [pp. 78-79]

SHORT STORYBonsai [pp. 80-86]Surgical Ward [pp. 87-95]

IN FOCUSGhalib : A Poet of the People [pp. 96-119]Charles Philip Brown (1798-1884) [pp. 120-127]

IN MEMORIAMP.T. Narasimhachar [pp. 128-131]PoemTemple on the Hill [pp. 132-139]

Baba Nagarjun [pp. 140-144]PoemPink Glass Bangles [pp. 145-145]My Newborn Friend [pp. 146-146]The Baby Chinar [pp. 146-147]Twelve Brave Warriors....Sentenced to Death [pp. 147-148]You had said [pp. 148-149]Ji hanh, I am writing [pp. 149-150]

INTERVIEWS.L. Bhyrappa: in Conversation with Deshakulkarni [pp. 151-161]

LITERARY CRITICISMTarasankar Banerjee's "Ganadevta" : A Novel of Progressive Realism [pp. 162-171]

BOOK REVIEWSReview: untitled [pp. 172-174]Review: untitled [pp. 174-177]

Our Contributors [pp. 197-200]Back Matter

some reflections on ghalib's modernity

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