dhamkii me;N mar gayaa jo nah baab-e nabard
thaa
((ishq-e nabard-peshah :talabgaar-e
mard thaa
1) he died in the [initial] threatening-- he who was
not an encyclopedia/gate of battle
2) Passion, the professional at battle, was a seeker of men/heroes
dhamki : 'Threatening, threat, menace, reprimand, snubbing'. (Platts p.546)
baab : 'Door, gate; chapter, section, division (of a book), head, heading; subject, affair, business, topic, matter'. (Platts p.117)
Urdu text: Vajid 1902 {7}
The allusion is to Farhad.... I did not, as did Farhad, die of the threat of passion; rather, my whole life long I kept confronting the difficulties of passion in a manly way. (18)
He has established passion as a hero of the battlefield. And he says that whichever person couldn't endure to confront passion died at the sight of passion, and in the [initial] threatening. To take the field and confront passion is a task for those with heart. (13)
SETS == REPETITION
Ghalib originally composed a ghazal of seven verses (Hamid p. 6), and chose to include them all in his published divan. More on this topic: S. R. Faruqi's choices.
Only the most seasoned and practiced warrior-heroes have the honor of grappling directly with Passion itself; the combat is so terrifying that lesser mortals die in the preliminaries, from the mere exchange of threats. I think Ghalib was intrigued by the interplay between mard and nabard . Otherwise, I can't see what else is going on here. Another meditation on nabard : {167,8}.
For more examples of baab , see {15,7} and {15,13}. 'Encyclopedia' is not an ideal translation for baab , nor is 'gate', but it's hard to think of anything better. It's such a versatile word, and metrically so ideal in the present situation.
Nazm:
That person who was not a hero of the battlefield of passion died even during a threat. (7)
== Nazm page 7