Mirza Ghalib
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Ghalib
Fascination with Ghalib refuses to wane
By Rauf Parekh
IT is quite surprising that scholars keep on working on Ghalib and despite the fact that almost every aspect of his life and works has been done to death, new books on Ghalib keep on piling up with clockwork regularity. One wonders why these scholars don’t let Ghalib go or, rather, why Ghalib refuses to go away.
One of the reasons why Ghalib lives on is that his poetry remains relevant even today. Some of his couplets and letters are so fresh as though they had been written only recently. His Urdu, though written some 150 years ago and laden with Persian phrases, is strikingly closer to today’s parlance. In addition to his ability to see the eternal traits of human nature, his wit and gift for repartee make Ghalib’s poetry stand head and shoulder above his contemporaries’. His personality, his poetry and his letters have created an appeal that has not waned with the passage of time.
The fascination with Ghalib began with the publication of Altaf Hussain Haali’s Yaadgaar-i-Ghalib in 1897. Abdur Rehman Bijnauri’s famous tribute to Ghalib, originally written in 1921 as an introduction to Ghalib’s dewan, only whipped up that enthusiasm. After that a galaxy of Ghalib scholars, Ghulam Rasool Mehr, Imtiaz Ali Khan Arshi, Shaikh Muhammad Ikram, Qazi Abdul Wadood and Malik Ram being a few of them, established a tradition of thorough research on the poet who is ranked as one of the best in Urdu and, arguably, in Persian, too.
Probably their passion for Ghalib and his works, one feels, was a bit too much. But the scholars of the next generation such as Muslim Ziai, Rasheed Ahmed Siddiqi, Shaukat Sabzwari, Gian Chand Jain, Kalidas Gupta Raza, Qudrat Naqvi, Farman Fatehpuri, Rasheed Hasan Khan, Pir Hussamuddin Rashdie, Khaleeq Anjum, Abdur Rauf Urooj, Hanif Naqvi and Shams-ur-Rehman Farooqi are equally enchanted by him. And the tradition of fascination for Ghalib by no means ends here and Ghalib’s admirers are easily spotted in the new generation of Urdu scholars too.
Dr Shakeel Pitafi is one of them . He has done a great deal of research on the literature written about Ghalib --- known as Ghalibiyat or Ghalib Shanasi in Urdu. Dr Pitafi has surveyed the entire critical, research and creative literature written about Ghalib in Urdu in Sindh since 1947. No research, criticism, translation, compilation, annotation, dramatization, interpretation or commentary written about Ghalib in Sindh after independence has escaped his watchful eyes. Published in the 15th issue of Sindh University’s research journal Tehqiq, this 200-page research paper thrashes the topic of Ghalibiyat in Sindh. In addition to enlisting the literary magazines’ special issues on Ghalib, the paper provides the reader with an index that gives the details of published articles about Ghalib.
Dr Pitafi teaches Urdu at the Government College, Rajanpur. It is a pleasant surprise to see a scholar from a rural area doing such meticulous research. It also dispels the impression that only scholars belonging to big cities can carry out quality research.
The 15th issue of Tehqiq includes an entire section on Ghalib and other scholars who have contributed their research articles on Ghalib are Dr Anwaar Ahmed, Dr Aqeela Basheer and Muhammad Saeed. Jamshoro’s Sindh University’s Urdu department has been quite active since its inception and its former chairman Dr Najm-ul-Islam had launched Tehqiq, a quality research journal that set the standard for university research journals in Pakistan. Now Dr Syed Javed Iqbal is carrying this torch further and has brought out some issues of Tehqiq that are worth reading and preserving.
Critics agree that Ghalib’s letters are samples of elegant Urdu prose. But Ghalib took pride in his Persian not Urdu, though it is Urdu that has reserved a seat for him in the hall of fame. His Urdu letters have been edited and published but his Persian letters, though compiled in five volumes by different scholars, did not get the attention they deserved. With the decline of Persian in the sub-continent, it has become very difficult for a large segment of our literate population to benefit from these letters. It was imperative that these letters be translated into Urdu as they not only have invaluable biographical details about Ghalib but also provide us with a commentary on political, social and literary trends of an era living in the history books only.
Mushfiq Khwaja once asked Parto Roheela, another scholar who remains in Ghalib’s thrall, to render the letters into Urdu. A civil servant by profession, a poet by nature and a Raja by mood, Parto Roheela himself did not believe that he could finish the translation of even one volume of Ghalib’s translation, though he had an awe-inspiring command over Persian. But the unbelievable has happened and with the publication of ‘Kulliyaat-i-Maktoobaat-i-Farsi-i-Ghalib’ he now has the unique distinction of translating all the five collections of Ghalib’s Persian letters into Urdu.
Parto Roheela has been amply rewarded for burning the proverbial midnight oil as the National Book Foundation has published the book in a befitting manner and Dr Jameel Jalibi has paid glowing tribute to Parto Roheela in his preface. In his forward, Roheela has described some of the troubles he had to go through while carrying out this, as he puts it, ‘thankless’ job. Well, it is not a thankless job, as the entire Urdu world is thankful to him and all those who have had a lifelong affair with Ghalib will be eternally grateful to him and will salute him as has done by Dr Jalibi in his preface.
