Ghazal 21, Verse 1

Hali:

This seems to be a new thought; and not merely a thought, but rather a fact [faik;T], because whatever activity there is in the world, it is only thanks to the belief that there is very little time to stay here.
==Urdu text: p. 121 in Hali, Yadgar-e Ghalib

Nazm:

The lustful Rival has obtained his desire-- that is, the joy of action and the pleasure of union with the beautiful one. Now what relish is there in my life?... A second aspect is also that in the world human beings find no release from lust and desire. If it were not necessary to die, then there would be no relish in this kind of a life. That is, the fruit of life is death. (21-22)

== Nazm page 22

Vajid:

Urdu text: Vajid 1902 {21}

Bekhud Dihlavi:

Here 'joy' means 'longing'. He says, the longing to do work has arisen in hearts only because the time for staying in the world is short. (42)

FWP:

SETS == A,B; GENERATORS; KYA
LIFE/DEATH: {7,2}

Ghalib originally composed a ghazal of thirteen verses (Hamid p. 20); he chose to include all of them in his published divan. More on this topic: S. R. Faruqi's choices.

This ghazal is in a 'short meter'; multivalent exclamations and other such phrases are especially convenient when the poet has such a relatively tight space to work in. (Enjambement is the exception rather than the rule in the ghazal.) Another 'short meter' example: {51}.

This verse-- like many of the verses in this ghazal-- is an example of extreme inshaa))iyah techniques. This is the kind of verse that's radically untranslatable; see {20,10} for further discussion.

Above all, this verse, like many of the verses in this ghazal, relies on the astonishing, unparallelled (in English and probably most other languages as well) flexibility of kyaa ; for more on this, see {15,10}. It should be noted, however, that kyaa is not some cheap-thrills device that always generates wildly proliferating meanings all over the place. On the contrary: Ghalib uses it with complete control: for a counterexample in which kyaa stays in the background and behaves like a lamb, generating exactly one meaning, see {22,4}.

As usual, the commentators concentrate on sorting out their favorite one (or at the most two) of the numerous possible interpretations. Yet each of the two lines unquestionably gives us three meanings to work with (an enthusiastically affirmative exclamation, a scornfully negative exclamation, and a genuine question), and thus a (theoretical) total of nine when multiplied together, though of course they don't all work equally well.

In this case, line two can even be read in four ways, since there can be a yes-or-no question as well. Let me just illustrate the implicit arrangements of the grammar on which these readings are based: (2a) is based on kyaa , jiine kaa mazaa hai ? ; (2b) is based on jiine kaa mazaa kyaa hai ? ; (2c) is based on jiine kaa mazaa kyaa ! ; and (2c) is based on jiine kaa mazaa-- kyaa ! . The hai can of course always be omitted in a 'copulative construction' but remains implicitly present.

There's also the 'A,B' question of the relationship of the two lines to each other. Is the verse a reflection on the nature and scope of desire, with an illustration or 'proof' drawn from the knowledge of death? Or is it a reflection on life and death, with an illustration or 'proof' drawn from the nature and scope of desire?

I won't take the space here to diagram out all these permutations, or to repeat my spiel about 'meaning generators' (see {15,10} for more). But I do want to point out one possibility that no commentator has, as far as I am aware, even considered: that maybe the only thing that makes life pleasant is not the sad certainty of losing it before too long, but the joyous certainty of getting out of it before too long. I've discussed a very similar verse by Mir-- with three interpretations, based on kyaa, and concerning the pleasurableness(?) of life-- in Nets of Awareness, Chapter 8, p. 107.

Basing the verse on a word like havas , rather than ;zauq or shauq or one of the other usual suspects, is also a good tactic, because the range of havas specifically includes lust and desire of low-class sorts, rather than merely the high-flown lover's repertoire. The person with havas doesn't necessarily want to sacrifice himself in some tortuous or rarefied way for his beloved, or for passion itself, as the lover does. The person with havas , the buu))l-havas , probably wants whatever he wants and he wants it now. Such a person is really all of us, of course. So we are all fed into the guts of this little 'meaning generator', and forced into realizations that, though varied, are mostly painful. But in {21,5} we revisit the nature of havas , and it's quite possible for it to acquire a surprising dignity. For a clearer example of a positively valued usage, see {112,6}.