I am the nightingale of a garden, that has yet to bloom (Ghalib; misra of a rejected she’r)

The great Urdu and Persian poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s (1797–1869) current divaan (poetry collection) contains less than half of the verses he composed, as he was an exacting and selective editor. Much of the discarded work belongs to his early period, when his poetic language was closer to Persian (not his native language) than Urdu, and his themes were quite abstruse.

Ghalib began composing verses at the early age of 10 or 12, and had written many of his best known ghazals by the time he was 19. He wrote first in Persianised Urdu and then for a long period only in Persian, and returned to Urdu later in life when he was appointed royal tutor to the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Besides writing poetry in Urdu and Persian, Ghalib was a remarkable prose stylist; one of the earliest for Urdu, since literary prose made a late entry in Urdu’s development. Ghalib’s introduction to his Urdu poetry divaan was in Persian.

While five editions of Ghalib’s Urdu divaan were published in his lifetime, starting with the first edition in 1841 and the last in 1863, the editions offer a mere 1,800 of the 4,209 couplets composed by Ghalib. Most of the early work seemed to have disappeared, until a manuscript was discovered in 1918, nearly 50 years after the great poet’s death. This manuscript can be dated to 1821 and is known as the Bhopal nuskha. An edition of this early poetry was first published in 1921 from Bhopal, India. Although the edition created a ripple in the Urdu literary world, it produced only one commentary, Abdul Bari Asi’s Sharh-e-Kalam-e Ghalib (Commentary on Ghalib’s Poetry, Lucknow, 1931). Most scholars were of the opinion that the discarded poetry was too obscure, even meaningless, to merit deeper analysis; besides, it had already been bypassed by the poet himself.

In 1969, the centenary of Ghalib’s death was celebrated with enthusiasm across the subcontinent, and a flurry of scholarly conferences and publications followed. An unforeseen, serendipitous moment was the unveiling of a manuscript in Ghalib’s own hand that included nearly all his poetry composed before 1816 (the date on the colophon of this early divaan).

The story of this invaluable manuscript’s discovery is so fascinating that I must mention it briefly here. Taufiq Ahmad Chishti, an antique books dealer from Amroha, was touring cities in search for rare books. In April 1969 he was in Bhopal and met Shafiqul Hasan who showed him a rare manuscript, a divaan of Ghalib which he claimed was in the poet’s own hand. His asking price was Rs25! Taufiq Ahmad bargained with him and bought the divaan for a mere Rs11. This discovery led to two quick facsimile publications. The renowned Urdu journal Nuqush brought out a Ghalib number in September of the same year with superb illustrations by Sadequain and a sensitive portrait of Ghalib by Abdur Rahman Chughtai. The issue is a Ghalib collector’s dream. The buyer of the manuscript, Maulana Imtiaz Ali Khan Arshi, director of the Raza Library of Rampur whose authoritative edition of Divaan-e-Ghalib is well known, published a beautiful edition on high-quality art paper (1969) and named the manuscript Nuskha-e-Arshizadah, giving credit to his son for acquiring it.

While the 1816 divaan was published and feted, once again, the rejected verses did not draw commentaries or formal analysis. The only tashrih (explication) of the poetry not included by Ghalib in his mutadavil or current divaan is Gyan Chand Jain’s laconic, though useful, commentary published in 1971. Fortunately, two recent scholarly works on Ghalib have made the daunting task of addressing the mustarad or rejected poetry easier. Saiyyed Muhammad Zamin Kantoori’s Sharh-e-Divaan-e-Ghalib (Educational Publishing House, Delhi, 2012), edited by Ashraf Rafi, is a comprehensive commentary on Ghalib’s poetry that was completed in 1944 but remained unpublished because of Kantoori’s passing. Muhammad Khan Ashraf and Azmat Rubab’s Urdu Kulliyat-e-Ghalib (Lahore, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2012) is a much needed edition of Ghalib’s complete Urdu poetry. Ashraf and Rubab have performed the valuable task of collating the important manuscripts and putting in the rejected verses into the ghazals where they originally belonged. They have arranged the ghazals according to the radif in an accurate, impeccable sequence. An index of ghazals affords greater accessibility to the poetry. It is a bit shocking to not have ‘Naqsh Faryadi Hai Kis Ki Shokhi-e-Tahreer Ka’ as the first ghazal; instead, we have an unfamiliar, immature ghazal from the 1816 divaan. In the Kulliyat, we find ‘Naqsh Faryadi’ at number 15 in the order of radif.

I was drawn to taking a closer look at Ghalib’s mustarad divaan when I was invited to write a paper for a panel in honour of Professor Frances Pritchett who retired from Columbia University this year. Pritchett’s erudite, online commentary on Ghalib’s current divaan, A Desertful of Roses, is undoubtedly the best known and most accessed of the 50 or more commentaries on the Urdu divaan of Ghalib. In my paper, I present an overview of the so-called discarded poetry, and also examine how posterity responded to the self-imposed editorial excisions of Ghalib. In my forthcoming book I will address central and vital exegetical aspects of the rejected verses by providing original readings, supported by extensive notes authenticating my preferred interpretation, and use the inquiry as an approach to larger questions, such as the importance of the printed word in the process of canonisation, the changing values of critical practice from the perspective of South Asian and Western readers, and the literary choices Ghalib made as a corollary of the cultural context of his times.

In the 19th century Urdu milieu, a poem had to be read aloud to an audience for instant comprehension and response. Ghalib’s poetry was full of complex allusions and metaphors, further complicated by use of esoteric Persian lexis that could not easily be decoded in an aural setting. It is the kind of poetry that demands greater focus. Reading the same verses now (albeit with a Persian dictionary or a special glossary) is a different experience altogether. Urdu literary critics, notably Shibli Nomani, were skeptical of this style of poetry known technically as khiyal bandi that Ghalib favoured. Khiyal band poets compress ideas through metaphor. The ideas are farfetched and convoluted, but startling, once decoded. Adverse criticism compelled later poets to abandon this style of poetry. Perhaps Ghalib, the last and greatest stylist of this form, also felt constrained to weed out many of the verses that seemed difficult or obscure.

Examining Ghalib’s choices in including or excluding she’rs from his published divaan (which is basically an intikhab) is a fascinating process. It is generally assumed that most of the excisions were from the early period because Ghalib acquired a reputation for mushkil pasandi or writing difficult poetry in his early career. However, an examination of a chronologically arranged divaan such Kali Das Gupta Raza’s (Mumbai, 1988) will show that Ghalib composed both difficult and deceptively easy she’rs throughout his poetic career. For example, the famous ghazal cited below was composed before 1816:

What is more puzzling, though, is to find logic behind a number of really masterful she’rs that were not included in the intikhab and are not well-known. For example, I will quote one of my favorites that is not included in the current divaan:

The world is an illusion; A city of ghosts from end to end, Or, I am a stranger, Unfamiliar with the language.

I am not convinced that the so-called rejected verses ought to be rejected by us because Ghalib excluded them from his published divaan. Poetry, even the ghazal, which transcends time, can be read in different ways at other times and across cultures. The large number of sharahs of Ghalib’s divaan has already shown that diverse readings are possible. A difficult, perhaps impossible, question to answer is whether Ghalib’s reputation as the greatest of Urdu poets would not be quite as absolute if he had not pruned his verses.

Drawing attention to the rejected corpus will not only corroborate my arguments involving the brilliance of Ghalib’s early compositions but also serve as examples of my hermeneutic approach to solving the “mystery” of the discarded verses.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi is Associate Professor of Urdu and South Asian literature at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Urdu Literary Culture: Vernacular Modernity in the Writing of Muhammad Hasan Askari