Ghazal 233, Verse 16

Nazm:

That is, that night and day we would remain engaged in the imagining of curls and face. (256)

== Nazm page 265

Bekhud Dihlavi:

He says, again the inner-self wants, as in time past, to have such leisure that night and day we would sit silent, having imagined the beloved. (323)

Bekhud Mohani:

Formerly there was a time when we not only abandoned the work of the whole world, but rather completely forgot it, and for all eight watches, all twenty-four hours, we used to sit contemplating an imagining of the beloved. Now again there's a longing for that same night-and-day leisure. (501)

FWP:

SETS

On the structure of this ghazal as a kind of loosely 'continuous' one, see {233,1}.

This verse points up a conspicuous feature of this ghazal: how autonomously active all the lover's different faculties are shown to be. In some verses the agent is 'I', the lover himself; but mostly it's not. The active party is 'breath' in {233,4}; 'passion' in {233,5}; 'heart and eye' in {233,7}; 'heart' in {233,8}; 'ardor' in {233,9}; 'thought' in {233,10}; 'desire' in {233,12}; 'longing' in {233,13}; 'sight' in {233,14}. And now once more, in the present verse, we see how much of the lover's nostalgic passion for renewal is an entirely internal affair, generated not by any 'real' beloved but by deliberate, private actions of his own faculties.

For it almost seems that to sit night and day lost in visions and fantasies would in itself be sufficient. If the lover has a ta.savvur of 'beautiful ones' (in the plural), might not that be enough? Does he really need one particular, actual beloved? Might he not use his imagination as a kind of drug?

A textual error: Jiya Jale: The Stories of Songs (2018), by Gulzar, p. 95, contains this passage (and I thank Sundeep Dougal for pointing it out):

In the edition of 'Diwan-e Ghalib' that Madanji [Mohan] owned, the word at the start of the couplet was 'dil.' And in my edition it was 'ji.' Both editions were authentic. It was also known that Ghalib himself would change words. When we finally came to recording the song, Madanji asked me to keep 'dil' because it ended with a 'l,' and that created a resonating sound like 'dhaa' on the tabla. I liked the idea. So the song is 'Dil dhoondta hai.'

The song may be dil ;Dhuu;N;Dhtaa hai , but please note that the verse is not. The textual history of the verse is clear, and the word jii was the one that Ghalib chose to use.