Harsimran Kaur ON Sep 13, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW,GHALIB: A WILDERNESS AT MY DOORSTEP BY MEHR AFSHAN FAROOQI-FICTION
Rating: 5/5
Poetry emerges from the rigid mysteries of life combed through memories, inordinate lapses; austere yet piquant in its revelation. The arabesque falls as pearls of soignee craft however, it’s the reluctance of the beads to be stringed that the poet reflects on; an inward turmoil that breeds under the nonchalant percepts of fondness to live it.
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib was no different!
The evolutionist Ghalib! A solipsistic because of his unsettlement with the world and its ways. It led him to believe in the artistry of thoughts to finally leather it into poetry and ghazals siphoning self-indulgent percipience.
Ghalib’s poetry is not only about ‘blood-miracles’ or the ‘exothermic wounds’ or just the ‘atherosclerosis of the troubled heart’—it goes beyond the prescriptive to create an affinity with the multifarious impulses and acoustic of a language that hold no barriers. Language; felicitated by an oeuvre of rationales and emotions—one pardons the other in case the slugfest of life becomes overbearing. Ghalib invoked this language, to be heard and read by his admirers, with metaphors that breathed existentiality of every object as anthropomorphic.
‘The charred pieces of the heart could be the ablaze crust of paper’.
‘The belonging to a milieu rafts a stream of river purloining the naked fear from the Sun to cover its restlessness’.
The noble acceptance to be heard became Ghalib’s endurance fanning the oblivity of the less wise, and thus be preferential to his au fact.
We know Ghalib through his heart-wrenching poetry but during his life he came across numerous animadversions creating an eddy of complex refutations of his work. ‘Persian’ gradually became his benchmark from ‘Urdu’. The book ‘Ghalib: A Wilderness at my Doorstep’ by Mehr Afshan Farooqi critically analyses this transition, and how it affected Ghalib’s journey of acclaimed niche. He celebrates ‘Persian Poetry’ as a carnivalesque of different shades, offering thereby a touch of bemusement to his ‘Urdu credentials’.
One of the verses from the book protuberate his penchant for ‘Persian Language’:
Go look at my Persian, so that you may find
Paintings of many hues & colors
Pass over my Urdu collection, for it is only
An initial drawing devoid of color
From 1826-29, Calcutta greeted him with an anemone of conflict for his Persian poetry. His verses were stiffened with a lot of recalcitrance; critics called it puerile and vouched Ghalib to a pernickety. Sometimes, I ask why it is so easy to bedevil the mind of a poet when the incongruity to your own emotions devours on the feast of rationale? Did this happen with Ghalib? Many accused him for his style and the esoteric words but he remained an expositor fuelling his mind with obscurity that is invisible to many.
The author also incorporates the festivity of the ‘Divan of 1821’ and the ‘Divan of 1826’; this goes beyond the verses to present the dressing of the manuscript, annotate and the scurry of scribbles at the margins. And then auld lang syne, the vibrancy of ‘Urdu’ and ‘Persian’ came together to brew a classical work of poetry called ‘Gul-e-Rana’ in 1828. A poignant touch to the solace, one wonders if it could be, and the ambiguous heart falling into the charade of beleaguered emotions—this is all the poet feels, and says Ghalib for ‘Gul-e-Rana’:
“I have sprinkled it with dust of the nuances of words, and with the meaning of the dark”.
‘Ghalib: A Wilderness at the Doorstep’ is a critical analysis of the poet’s work but also elaborates on his peculiar mind to be extraordinary. His poetry, an El Dorado, tempestuously stalks the hubris self, desolated often by dystopic prolificacy. The ‘Dibachahs’ extrapolated in the book provide a chiaroscuro of words and thoughts; a prognosis of untiring words enmeshed by prodigal thoughts that free the mind of dubious closures. What more? Look at the glory of the beads that ripen in the powdered nest to make the eyes flaunt the shimmer of perception.
How I envisage his poetry; a very reluctant tongue stiffens because ‘Ghalib’ undressed his verbiage with a profundity to be reasoned and accepted. His negotiation with life was a whataboutery; he took precincts of life as a liability; its better you create your own heaven and hell, a misjudgment would after all grieve at your doorstep. Whats others have to do with the heart that beats in you; the loathe is yours as is the longing!
Moving on to the publishing era, Ghalib was the first Urdu poet to get his ‘intikhab’ of poetry published. His oeuvre of Urdu and Persian poetry is huge but in his heart of heart, his inclination to Persian is evident in the book; it’s like to deliberately create a mind that explores complicated choices in context with cultural amusements. Finally, he has three intikhabs to his credit; ‘Gul-e-Rana’, ‘Divan-e Ghalib’ and the last one which was published in 1942. The dibachah of Gul-e-Rana ends with something metamorphic:
‘God alone is enough; the rest have lost their path’.
TAKE AWAY
An illuminating journey of an amusing poet, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib….