Ghazal 283x, Verse 5

Asi:

The people of the world are destroyed through their unawareness, and they are singing the melody of existence and nonexistence! What can one say? These unaware ones have a complaint-- they have a complaint against this world and the people of this world, and it's a major complaint.

== Asi, p. 116

Zamin:

That is, there are many thousands of complaints against the people of the world, and against the world itself, that their unawareness and unfeelingness has confounded the thought of the peace or trouble of both existence and nonexistence. Neither is their 'living' living, nor is their 'dying' dying. And jahaa;N jahaa;N is the measure of an immeasurable complaint.

== Zamin, p. 163

Gyan Chand:

jahaa;N jahaa;N faryaad = extremely much complaint. In one other verse too, Ghalib has given for the condition of the world the simile of a melody: {13,1}.

The realities of existence have become a melody and are revealed, but the people of the world, because of their unawareness and unacquaintance, cannot hear them. With the world, and with the people of the world, there are many hundreds of thousands of complaints.

== Gyan Chand, pp. 193-194

FWP:

SETS == REPETITION
EXISTENCE/NONEXISTENCE: {5,3}
MUSIC: {10,3}
SOUND EFFECTS: {26,7}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.

Here's a verse that becomes so obsessed with repetition that it remains almost terminally cryptic. There's not a single verb in the whole verse; if we want even an 'is', we have to insert it for ourselves.

In the first line, the word halaak (see the definition above) opens up a range of possibilities, since it can be either a participial adjective ('lost, destroyed'), as in (1a), or a noun ('destruction, ruin'), as in (1b).

Then in the second line, the clever deployment of jahaa;N jahaa;N makes it readable either as 'world after world' (2a), or else as 'wherever' (2b). And of course the 'complaint' itself remains entirely free-floating-- we have to decide for ourselves who might be making the complaint (the speaker? God? 'unaware' ones? the 'melody of existence and nonexistence' itself?); and what might be the grounds-- and legitimacy-- of the complaint.

My own feeling is that Ghalib just loved fitting all those four jahaa;N words into the same line. The verse keeps reminding me of {96,1} in its exclamatory repetitions, and its clever use of jahaa;N .