Mirza Ghalib and his Age

At the time Mirza Ghalib was born (1797), the Mughal Empire was hastening to its decline. The Mughal royal family had suffered humiliation at the hands of the Rohillas and then by the Marathas, who occupied the city for a brief period. The British entered Delhi in 1803 as victors after defeating the Marathas. Very quickly the infrastructure of British control was established. The Mughal ruler was made British pensioner and though the Empire lingered for another 50 years, it was shorn of all its power and authority. Theoretically however, the Mughal Emperor was still the sovereign ruler and the Jats, Rohillas, Marathas as well as the British needed the Mughal Emperor’s name to give political legitimacy to their de facto power. The court etiquettes and rituals continued as before, even though the grandeur of the past was missing. The transformation of power to the British was imminent but the survival of the Empire was crucial for the sustenance of arts and literature.

Mirza Muhammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869 A.D), who was born in this political background, had an aristocratic lineage. His father, Abdullah Beg Khan, was an officer in the Rampur army. After his death, Ghalib came under the ward ship of his uncle, Nasrullah Khan, who was a cavalry officer in the British army. After his death, when Ghalib was just nine, the latter’s childhood was spent in his maternal grandparents home in Agra in comfort and shelter. He started writing Persian poetry at an early age, showing his preference to linguistics and literature over traditional sciences. His guide, Abdus Samad, who was addressed as ustad by Ghalib, was a noted scholar of Persian and Arabic. Ghalib started writing in Persian at a young age. But Ghalib’s earliest biographer, Altaf Husain Hali, in his Yadgar-i-Ghalib (Memoir of Ghalib, 1897), tells us that even at this young age he wrote in Urdu as well. It was sometime during 1813-1815 (some say 1810) that Ghalib decided to move to Delhi, determined to take his place among the aristocracy and get his rightful due as a poet. The move perhaps, was also guided by the fact that the untimely death of his father and uncle had deprived him of an assured niche in the Mughal capital. Besides, Delhi, the seat of the Mughal court, was a more appropriate setting for Ghalib than Agra. This aspect needs a little elaboration.

The political turmoil of the 18^th century had forced great poets like Mir and Sauda to leave Delhi and seek patronage at Lucknow, the capital of the British allied state of Oudh. But at the beginning of the 19^th century, the British colonial presence in Delhi had imposed a relative political calm and a sense of security in and around Delhi by suppressing lawlessness and brigandage. This went a long way in providing an atmosphere in which intellectual flowering could take place. Ralph Russell, another modern biographer, opines that in the half a century of internal peace, that followed the British political control, Delhi experienced something like a renaissance, a flowering of literature and learning. This renaissance was manifested in various ways, one of which was the radical Muslim religious reform movement, led by the family of Shah Waliullah, one of the most important thinkers in the history of Indian Islam. This resulted in a long-drawn out conflict between the traditionalists and the radical reformers. As a corollary to this, Delhi developed as a famous centre of Persian and Arabic studies related to theology, attracting students from as far as Balkh and Bukhara in central Asia. The exodus of the poetic talent to Lucknow was also halted and Delhi again became the centre of a group of distinguished poets. Urdu too received a new impetus. Shah Waliullah’s son, Shah Rafiuddin produced in 1803, an Urdu translation of Quran, a significant event not only in the history of religious movements but also in the history of modern Urdu prose, of which it was a pioneer work.

This revival of poetry also owed a great deal to the encouragement of the Mughal court which, deprived of all far-reaching political power, turned more and more to cultural interests. It patronized Urdu poetry just as its predecessors had patronized Persian. Under the reign of Bahadur Shah, who himself was a great Urdu poet and wrote under the title of Zafar, the Mughal court became the pivot, guiding the efflorescence in Urdu writing. Regular poetic symposiums (mushairahs) were held at the palace as well as other places in the city. Gradually, the writing and appreciation of Urdu poetry became essential learning for any aspirant to the cultural life of the city. Ghalib took his place among the city aristocracy on equal terms and was fully involved in the intellectual life of Delhi. Prominent contemporaries of Ghalib in the Urdu literary circle were Momin and Zauq, latter being the officially appointed poet laureate of the Mughal court and personal ustad of Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Since patronage was still a major pre-requisite for the growth of literature and the Mughal Empire seemed capable of providing semblance of it even in the face of its obvious decline, poets still hankered for the king’s attention. However, one important point to note about patronage in the Mughal period is that patronage of learning and letters was one of the expected social functions of the nobility and the established poet could look to receive patronage simply because he was an accomplished poet. An occasional panegyric of his patron and odes on special occasions was expected of him, but this was not the basis of this ‘patron-client’ relationship. Thus, Ghalib never considered writing occasional panegyrics for, both his Mughal and later British masters, as injurious to his self respect. But the biggest irony facing the leading poets of the times, including Ghalib, was that despite Bahadur Shah’s patronage, the political condition had only left the Mughals with the sensitivity to appreciate poetry, but not much resources to financially reward those who wrote it. Ibrahim Zauq was the royal tutor and did receive financial remuneration for his services but it was not possible for the court to extend its largesse to many others. The rivalry between Ghalib (poet laureate of the city) and Zauq (poet laureate of the Mughal court) can be explained in this background.

It is not surprising to see Ghalib, invoking past in his writings, which was in sharp contrast to his own financial difficulties in the present. Ghalib’s publicly stated preference for Persian over Urdu has also been explained in the background of the above phenomenon. It has been argued that, even though Urdu was the popular living language of the time, it was a product of political chaos and decline and was also not the lingua franca of the surviving imperial order. Thus, Hali noted that Ghalib did not consider writing in Urdu as an accomplishment. One of his frequent lament was that while there were admirers enough of his Urdu ghazal, there were none to appreciate his Persian odes. Pavan Varma opines that Ghalib’s reaction was in keeping with the times: an attempt to glorify his past and assert his continued relevance in order to escape the unpalatibility of the present. But unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, whose thoughts were dominated by bitter awareness of the decline of the Mughal Empire and yearning for the return of the former glory, Ghalib did not feel this loss and was prepared to come to terms with the British dominance. He was fascinated by the material achievements, on which British power was based and the possibilities for the future, which these achievements opened up.