Ghazal 219, Verse 1

Ghalib:

[In an 1865 letter, he cites {219,1}: {70,3}.]

Ghalib:

[1859:] Someone recited this opening-verse before me, and said, 'Your honor, what a fine opening-verse you've composed:

asad us jafaa par buto;N se vafaa kii
mire sher shaabaash ra;hmat ;xudaa kii

[Asad, despite that tyranny, you were faithful to idols--
my lion, bravo! the Lord's mercy be upon you!]'

I said this to him: 'If this opening-verse would be mine, then a curse be upon me!' The fact is that a person has gone around calling himself Mir Amani 'Asad'. This opening-verse and this ghazal are from his revered and honored poetry, and are recorded as such in anthologies [tazkirah]. For three or four years at the beginning I used the pen-name of Asad, otherwise I've been using only 'Ghalib'. And don't you look also at the style of the writing [:tarz-e ta;hriir], and the path of the thought [ravish-e fikr]? My poetry-- and so 'ornamented, varnished, deceitful' [muza;xraf]! This story is at an end.
==Urdu text: Khaliz Anjum, vol. 1, pp. 1072-73

Arshi:

This ghazal too was for the royal mushairah, and was printed in the Dihli Urdu Akhbar of 19 June 1853, with other ghazals. (334)

Hali:

For breath to leave at a longing, is to hasten to fulfill it. Accordingly he says, Why does the breath leave, or why do you go on dying? That is, why are you in such a hurry? In the first line, because of the constraints of the situation, the words 'remain in the heart' ought to be understood to be there. The rest of the meaning of the verse is clear. (164)

Nazm:

The gist is that however many wishes are fulfilled, more than that many are created. Rather than this, it's better that one would renounce longings beforehand. A glimmer of this lofty theme shows itself in this verse, and this is the reason for the excellence of the verse. (249)

Bekhud Mohani:

In my heart are all the thousands of longings, and the longings too are such that their price is life. That is, every single longing is such that if in order to achieve it it would be necessary to give one's life, then there's be no harm/loss.... thus for even one such longing to be fulfilled would be equal to the fulfillment of many longings....

[Disagreeing with Nazm:] This is not the meaning of the verse. (449-50)

FWP:

SETS == GENERATORS; REPETITION; WORD

Here's one of the brilliant and famous verses of the divan, the kind that is known by anybody who knows any Ghalib at all.

The verse plays lavishly and enjoyably with the common verb nikalnaa , 'to come out, to emerge'. In the first line, the usage is relatively straightforward: the breath would 'emerge' from the body, in death. The speaker's longings are such that he would die for every one of them, or die over them, or die at the very thought of them, or die to have them fulfilled, or die in the process of their fulfillment-- but in any case, he'd die.

The use of hazaaro;N emphasizes the inclusiveness: not just 'thousands of longings', but 'all the thousands of longings', every longing he's got. It's the same difference as between 'two' [do] and 'two out of two', or 'both' [dono;N], and 'all three' [tiino;N], so on. The longings may be all those thousands, but the breath is one, so nikle is clearly a singular subjunctive.

When we come to the second line, however, the seemingly repeated nikle is cleverly, and enjoyably, different, for it has now morphed into a masculine plural perfect form: many of my longings 'emerged' (or the longings 'emerged' as many), but nevertheless few of them 'emerged' (or they 'emerged' as few). And here, the many idiomatic senses of the remarkably fertile and colloquially productive nikalnaa come into play; see the definition above for the full range of possibilities. For longings to 'emerge' can mean, among other, things:

=to appear, to be produced (to 'emerge' from nonexistence into existence)
=to be expressed or uttered (to 'emerge' from silence into speech)
=to be accomplished or effected (to 'emerge' from hope into fulfillment); see {6,4}
=to go away, to depart (to 'emerge' from their previous dwelling and move on)
=to turn out to be, to be discovered or revealed as (to 'emerge' from unclearness into full comprehensibility; see {219,7})

Isn't this mind-boggling? Really, what else could happen to a longing (or regret), other than perhaps to appear, and/or to be expressed, and/or to be accomplished, and/or to disappear? It might of course also be thwarted or denied-- which can be conveyed in the idea that the above-mentioned things happened to only 'a few' of the longings. Or perhaps the longings don't act at all, but are acted upon, as in (2c)-- they are discovered (by someone) to be something, they 'turn out' (a parallel usage in English) to be something.

Moreover, these are all real, solid, genuine meanings of nikalnaa , not far-fetched or archaic ones. I don't know how in the world anybody could conceive of translating the second line of this verse. Would you choose one of the five possibilities and stick with it both times, or would you mix and match, thus finding something like twenty permutations? Whatever you did would have to be arbitrary in the extreme, and you'd have a crowd of other equally plausible choices always tugging at your sleeve and demanding their own day in the sun.

AN APOCRYPHAL VERSE: Over the course of time, this ghazal has had attached to it an extremely well-known and popular apocryphal verse. I'm not sure how old the verse is, but the minimum figure is several decades, as I know from personal experience. Here's the verse:

;xudaa ke vaas:te pardah nah ka((bah se u;Thaa vaa((i:z
kahii;N aisaa nah ho yaa;N bhii vuhii kaafir .sanam nikle

[for the Lord's sake, don't lift the curtain from the Ka'bah, Preacher!
may it not somehow be that here too that same infidel idol would emerge]

Please note: this verse is NOT by Ghalib. Even if you have heard it recited as such, even if in your heart you think it is, it's just not. Ghalib published his own divan four times, and we do know what he composed, and this verse is not his. In fact I think he would have shuddered at the thought having it attached to his name; see the letter above in which he fiercely repudiates another second-rate verse that had been wrongly attributed to him. In the letter he reproachfully asks his friend Aram to look, in making such judgments, at the 'style of the writing' and the 'path of the thought'.

Nevertheless, many people do nevertheless think the verse is Ghalib's, and they like it, and they want it to be his. People sometimes give me suspicious stares, or even quite dirty looks, if I say it's not. Jagjit Singh includes it in his sung versions for 'Mirza Ghalib'. One modern commentator, Yusuf Salim Chishti, not only inserts it into the ghazal (as the penultimate verse) without question, but actually discusses it at unusual length and considers it 'the high point of the ghazal and one of Ghalib's best verses' (p. 815).

The case of Ghulam Rasul Mihr is more complex, for he quite properly comments only on the standard nine verses. But someone (maybe a helpful calligrapher?) has inserted two extra verses into the ghazal as calligraphed (p. 695) in his commentary: this apocryphal verse appears as the penultimate verse; and right before it appears the one verse of {219} that Ghalib did compose but chose not to publish in his divan (for more on such unpublished verses, see {4,8x}). Just for the record, here's that one deliberately-omitted verse, which originally appeared in the manuscript version as an extra opening-verse preceding the present {219,1} (Raza p. 326):

zara kar zor siine par kih tiir-e pur-sitam nikle
jo vuh nikle to dil nikle jo dil nikle to dam nikle

[please just put a bit of pressure on my breast, so that the tyranny-filled arrow would emerge
if that would emerge, then the heart would emerge; if the heart would emerge, then the breath/life would emerge].

I don't blame Ghalib for omitting it; some of his unpublished verses are masterful, but this isn't one of them.

Anyway, let's take one more moment to consider the implications of the Case of the Apocryphal Verse. There's one more such widely quoted apocryphal verse that I know of: for discussion of it, see {6,1}. And here's a related, though more minor, instance: a Pakistani stamp that misquotes {43,3}. (In addition, some famous verses wrongly attributed to Zafar are discussed in {49,5}.) In all these cases, people obviously trusted their memory, and their knowledge of the verses through oral circulation, so implicitly that they felt no need to check the verses in a divan. One could certainly call this carelessness or sloppiness. But if we look at it more thoughtfully, isn't it also kind of a perverse compliment to Ghalib, that people are so sure they know his poetry by heart-- even when they don't? They feel possessive about him, as English speakers do about Shakespeare-- even when, in both cases, they mostly don't read him very much, or very carefully. Ghalib might even be somewhat pleased by this admiring cultural embrace.

But if it's an embrace that's merely warm and fuzzy, and doesn't include serious attention to the poetry on which he so prided himself, how deep would his pleasure be? Just think of all the energy that went into buying, clearing out, and setting up for visitors (part of) the last house that Ghalib lived in-- and then after all that, there was nothing of his to put into it, so it's a mere shell with only some calligraphed verses on the walls, and a wax model of Ghalib, sitting behind glass in a niche, engaged in composition. Really Ghalib has left us nothing except his poetry (and his letters of course). To be represented primarily by his poetry, and secondarily by his letters, is a fate that he would gladly accept. But he would certainly demand to be represented only by his OWN poetry, and he would HATE to have the second-rate verses of others foisted upon him. In fact he would hate to have even the first-rate verses of others foisted upon him; for discussion of his emphasis on self-reliance at all costs, see {9,1}.