The coming December 27 will mark the 227th birth anniversary of one of the greatest Urdu poets, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. Born in Agra in 1797, he moved to Delhi as a child, where he lived until his death on February 15, 1869. In Delhi, his home for the longest period was a haveli in Gali Qasim Jaan, Ballimaran, just off Chandni Chowk.
The first book I wrote was a biography of Mirza Ghalib. Titled Ghalib: The Man, The Times, it was published by Penguin in 1989. The book was well received, has gone into countless editions, and has been published in every major Indian language by the Sahitya Akademi. But when the book first came out, no one, except a few old denizens of old Delhi — Shahjahanabad — even knew where Ghalib lived. His haveli, or what remained of it, had become a decrepit, crumbling relic, occupied by a brickmaker and a dealer in iron scrap.
In the late 1990s, Uma Sharma, the well-known kathak artist, spearheaded a movement to restore the haveli. She, along with a few of us — veteran bureaucrat Abid Hussain, writer Firoz Bakht Ahmed, corporate leader Vinay Bharat Ram, the classical vocalist Iqbal Hussain, entrepreneur and aesthete Kamal Modi, and some others got together to form the Ghalib Memorial Movement, aimed at reviving and preserving Ghalib’s legacy. Within this broader objective, our first project was to restore his haveli. It was an uphill task. We needed the support of the Delhi government, which fortunately we received from both the then lieutenant governor and chief minister, Shiela Dixit. Finally, its current occupants were persuaded to vacate it and given alternative land elsewhere. The vacated haveli was renovated, and a small museum was built in its place, as a yaadgaar or remembrance of this great poet.
For several years after that, Uma Sharma, myself, the chief minister, and other admirers of Ghalib and poetry would gather at Chandni Chowk on the evening of December 27. Then with mashals and traditional drum players in tandem, we would lead a procession down the short walk through Ballimaran to the poet’s haveli in Gali Qasim Jaan. Here, apart from some speeches, an impromptu mushaira was also held. On one occasion, Gulzar Saheb flew down from Mumbai to be a part of the procession. This homage, accompanied by a two-day festival to remember Ghalib through poetry, music and dance, has since been an annual affair, and full credit must be given to Uma Sharma for her unflagging zeal and enthusiasm in organizing it. This year too it was organized last week, and I gave a short lecture on Ghalib’s life, relevance, and, of course, his remarkable poetic genius.
Ghalib was the quintessential Sufi. Interestingly, one sign of his transcendence of conventional religion, was that when he died there was confusion as to whether the funeral rites should follow Shia or Sunni rituals! Nobody was quite sure, and, frankly, it is my belief that he would have been equally happy if he was cremated as per Hindu rites. The ode he paid to Kashi, its temples and spiritual aura, even expressing the desire to settle there permanently, is enough proof of his innate spiritual eclecticism, and so much of his writings reflect this sentiment:
God is one, that is our faith;
All rituals we abjure.
‘Tis when the symbols vanish
That belief is pure.
Or, sample this couplet:
Steadfast devotion
Is the foundation of all faith;
If the Brahmin dies in the temple
Bury him in the Kaaba.
Or again:
In the rosary or the sacred thread
No special grasp is threaded;
It is the devotion of the Sheikh and Brahmin
Those are to be tested.
Not surprisingly, Ghalib mocked religious pundits and mullahs, and other self-anointed guardians of religious orthodoxy. And he did so both relentlessly and fearlessly. One of his oft-quoted couplets is this:
The tavern door and the preacher
Are truly poles apart
All I know is I saw him enter
As I left to depart.
Or this gem:
Preacher, you do not drink
Nor to others, you can offer
How pure indeed is the wine
Of paradise you proffer.
In my view, Ghalib’s spirituality was Vedantic in tone. How else could he write: ‘When except You, none else exists; then, O God, what is all this tumult about?’. In line with the Vedantic concept of Maya, he writes:
Asad, do not fall a victim
To existence’s deception;
The world is a snare
Of thought’s conception.
‘You who tangle with Ghalib—remember; inwardly he is a saint if outwardly a sinner’, laughed Ghalib. And then, like the truly spiritually enlightened, he says:
When nothing was, God was;
God would still be if nothing had been;
Being born, I was damned;
What loss would it have been
Had I not been?
Pavan K Varma is an author, diplomat, and former member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). The views expressed are personal
