Preface

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Preface

In the thirteenth century of the Hijra, when the decline of the Muslims had reached its utmost limit, and learning, excellence and accomplishment had departed along with their wealth, honour and rule, by a happy chance a few men of genius had gathered in the capital, Delhi, whose company and assemblies recalled the company and assemblies of the age of Akbar and Shah Jahan; and of some of whom the late Mirza Ghalib says:

India has poets of such sweet breath that,
in their private gatherings, the very breeze scatters musk from their breath:

Momin, and Nayyar, and Sahba'i, and 'Alawi, and then
Hasrati and Ashraf; and Azurda is the greatest of them.

When the present writer first went to Delhi, autumn had already begun in this garden; some had left Delhi and some had departed from the world. Yet those who remained, and whom I shall always be proud to have seen, were such that no one like them is seen to rise again, not only from Delhi but from the whole soil of India; for the mould in which they were cast has changed, and the air in which they grew up has turned.

The age has laid down a different custom;
gone is the bird that laid the golden egg.

Above all Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, whose greatness and glory were too high for him to be counted among the poets or prose writers of the twelfth or thirteenth century of the Hijra.

In his book *Mihr-e Nimroz* the Mirza, at one point addressing Bahadur Shah, has said that "in the reign of Shah Jahan the poet Kalim was weighed against silver and gold; but I ask only this much, that if nothing else, my verse at least should once be weighed against the verse of Kalim." Those who do not know the Mirza's rank will perhaps take this as self-praise and boasting; but in our view the Mirza did not exaggerate in it at all, and said exactly what the discerning and judicious men of his time thought of him.

It is true that the age, according to its means, gave the Mirza no little recognition. All his work, Urdu and Persian, verse and prose, had spread through the regions of India in his own lifetime; his admirers, eulogists and praisers were found in every corner of the country, and are found to this day; for his panegyric odes (*qasida*s) he received rewards, robes of honour and gifts, more or less; the late Bahadur Shah too valued him handsomely according to his own means; and from the State of Rampur a reasonable pension was paid to him up to his last breath. All this happened. But when the high rank that the Mirza had in fact attained in poetry and prose is rightly assessed, one is forced to say that all this appreciation by the age was at most the appreciation of that old woman who came to the market of Egypt with a hank of yarn to buy Joseph [TN: a proverbial story: an old woman offered a skein of yarn as her bid for Joseph when he was sold in Egypt]. The truth is that the Mirza could have been valued as he deserved only by Jalal-ud-Din Akbar, or by Jahangir and Shah Jahan; but such recognition as he received in this last age should also be counted a great blessing.

We were sold here for nothing at the hands of the age;
yet seeing this, even that was too high a price.

Although in the whole of the Mirza's life no great deed is seen apart from his poetry and prose, this one deed alone has made his life a momentous event of the last period of the capital; and it is my belief that in this country Persian verse and prose came to an end with the Mirza, while Urdu verse and prose too owe him no small debt. For this reason the thought used to come to me from time to time that I should set down, in my own manner, the general circumstances of the Mirza's life, so far as they could be learned from reliable sources, and such matters concerning his poetry and prose as could be put into words and were not beyond the understanding of the people of the day.

In past years, when I was living in Delhi, this idea was further strengthened at the urging of some friends. I borrowed the Mirza's works from friends and collected them, and wrote down whatever traces of his life, character and habits I found in them; and I also put into writing the things that were preserved in my memory or that I learned from friends. But before I could arrange the material I became occupied with other work, and for several years all those notes lay tied up in bundles of paper.

In these days my friends pressed me again, and very hard; and although I was engaged in a most important and necessary piece of work, their pressure compelled me so far that I had to put that necessary work aside for a few days; and it was thought that the notes on the Mirza's life, which had been collected with great effort and could be arranged with a little attention, ought not to be kept waiting any longer.

I opened those bundles and set about arranging the notes; but on looking at them I found that it would be necessary to look through the Mirza's works once more, and that some other books would also be needed. I wrote to some elders and friends[1] in Delhi, and they kindly sent me all the books I had asked for, together with whatever they could learn of the Mirza's life, written down; and in this way the Mirza's life was completed, so far as it could be completed.

I have written above that no momentous event is seen in the Mirza's life apart from his poetry and prose. So all the events of his life mentioned in this book should be regarded as incidental and digressive. The real purpose of writing this book is to make known to people that wonderful gift for poetry which God Most High had placed in the Mirza's nature, and which showed itself sometimes in the dress of verse and prose, sometimes in the form of wit and repartee, sometimes in the garb of love and libertine freedom (*rind-mashrabi*), and sometimes in the shape of mysticism and love for the Family of the Prophet (*Ahl-e Bait*). So any mention that has no connection with these four things should be considered outside the subject of the book.

In the literary world many men of genius have passed whose worth and standing were not fully recognised in their own time; but in the end their excellence did not fail to become manifest. In Sa'di's time most of his contemporaries preferred Imami of Herat to him; but no very long time had passed before Sa'di's name and verse spread to every quarter of the world, and Imami's verse remained only in the biographical anthologies (*tazkira*s). In Shakespeare's age he was given no higher rank than that of an actor, but today the works of that same Shakespeare are considered on a par with the Bible. The Mirza himself held the same view of his own verse. Thus in a Persian *ghazal* (lyric poem) he says:

Until my *diwan* (collected poems) becomes something that makes men drunk with poetry,
this wine, for want of buyers, will go on growing old.

My star had its zenith of acceptance in non-existence;
the fame of my verse in the world will come after me.

Considering that the taste for Asian poetry is daily being absorbed into European civilisation, and that Persian literature has so departed from India that there is apparently no hope of its return, it is idle to hope that the Mirza's Persian verse and prose will become popular with high and low, now or in the future; but the layer upon layer of veils that lay over the Mirza's poetry and subtlety in his lifetime, and that have not been lifted to this day, may well, who knows, be removed by our efforts or by those of someone else after us.

The best way of introducing the Mirza to the public as a poet, and of displaying the rank of his poetry before people's eyes, would have been this: a considerable portion of each kind of his verse should have been quoted; the features that are peculiar to the Mirza in each kind should have been described; the beauties of word and meaning, the delicacies and subtleties of the verse quoted should have been brought out; the Mirza's verse should have been compared with the verse of the poets of the class in which he ought to be placed, his *ghazal* set against their *ghazal*, *qasida* against *qasida*, and so each kind against the same kind; and in this way our countrymen should have been informed of the rank of the Mirza's poetry and the true nature of his verse. But this method, difficult as it was for the author, was just as unprofitable for the public, especially in this age; even if we had succeeded in crossing this difficult stage, it would have been with us as in the proverb, "The hen lost her life, and those who ate her found no taste in it."

So instead of the method described, which in present circumstances is unprofitable as well as difficult, we have adopted here a method that seems easier for us and more useful for the public. In the second part we have divided the whole of the Mirza's work into four kinds: Urdu verse, Urdu prose, Persian verse and Persian prose; and in this order we have given a small selection of each kind in four separate sections. On each kind we have first made some brief remarks, and then the selection of that kind is given. The verses or phrases that we thought needed explanation have been explained here and there, and in places the beauties of the verse have also been pointed out. And at the end, especially for those who have a true taste for Persian literature, we have compared, by way of example, some of the Mirza's Persian verse with the verse of the acknowledged masters of Iran, to show to what degree of excellence the Mirza had attained in Persian literature.

By the selection mentioned above we do not mean that all the lofty and pure thoughts in the Mirza's verse have been taken, and those of a lower degree left out. No; the meaning is that, as far as the scope and size of this treatise allow, so far as was possible such verse has been taken from each kind, more or less, as is not alien to the taste of the people of this age nor too far from their understanding, and is at the same time, in one way or another, worthy of selection in the compiler's view as well.

Several benefits are expected from this selection, which should be regarded as a sample of all the Mirza's work. One is that those who have an understanding of poetry and good taste in it will find the Mirza's best work of every kind collected in one place, without needing to look through his whole collected works (*kulliyat*). Second, those who cannot understand the Mirza's verse well will be able to become well acquainted with his thoughts, because the meaning of every difficult verse or phrase has been explained. And both classes will learn what degree of imaginative power and poetic gift the Mirza possessed, and with what excellence and refinement he was able to express the most delicate and subtle thoughts in both Urdu and Persian.

In short, this treatise has been divided into two parts. The first part contains the events of the Mirza's life, so far as they could be learned, and an account of his character, habits and opinions. In the course of this account, particular poems or verses of his that are connected with some event, and his witticisms and rare sayings, through which the true essence of the Mirza's nature and the power of his imagination appear most clearly, have been mentioned in their proper places. The second part contains a selection of all the Mirza's work, Urdu and Persian, verse and prose, with a separate review of each kind; and at the end some of the Mirza's verse has been compared with the verse of some acknowledged masters of Iran. At the close of the book a short review has been written of the Mirza's whole life and of his style in poetry and prose, which should be regarded as the essence of the entire book.

Although the Mirza's life, as we shall explain on some later occasion, is not without the benefits that a biography ought to give, yet even if those benefits are set aside, the account of a life in which there was nothing but a particular kind of liveliness and cheerfulness is no less necessary for our withered and dispirited society. Besides, in every nation generally, and in fallen nations especially, men of such lofty nature are born only rarely, through whom (even if the nation has received no considerable direct benefit, yet) some real addition, more or less, has been made to some science, art or literature, and some new capital added to the store of the ancients. To reflect on the lives of such people, to search through their works, and to profit from their rare thoughts is among those duties of a nation which it is most regrettable for a nation to neglect. As the Mirza himself writes in one place: "Alas that the people of the age did not recognise the beauty of my speech. My own heart burns for those who did not succeed in recognising the divine splendour, and who passed by, indifferent, these eye-delighting displays that I have set forth in verse and prose." [TN: Persian in the original.]

Notes

[1] Hali's note: That is, Nawab Sa'id-ud-Din Ahmad Khan, worthy son of the late Nawab Ziya-ud-Din Ahmad Khan; Sayyid Akbar Mirza and Sayyid Muzaffar Mirza, grandsons of the late Nawab Husam-ud-Din Haidar Khan; Mir Mahdi Husain Majruh; and Lala Bihari Lal Mushtaq.