DISSENTING voices are few and far between when it comes to Ghalib’s poetic genius. But such voices, albeit rare, were quite loud about a century ago and Yagana Changezi was the loudest of them all.
Hakeem Agha Jan Aish Dehlvi, a contemporary of Ghalib, was the first to have rejected Ghalib’s poetry, calling it in his couple of verses “beyond comprehension”. Yagana Changezi (1883-1956) thought Ghalib was a poet way too overrated and was in fact, so he thought, below the average even.
Aside from hostile views, appreciation for Ghalib’s poetry began quite late and till he died in 1869, just a few critical works had mentioned him. Umda-i-Muntakhaba, also known as Tazkira-i-Suroor, a work written circa 1821 in Persian by Mir Muhammad Khan Suroor, was the first book that briefly introduced Ghalib’s poetry. At that time Ghalib was a 24-year-old poet who took pride in his Persian poetry rather than his Urdu verses. Another work that made a mention of Ghalib’s poetry in his early literary career is Iyaar-ush-Shuara, a tazkira penned in Persian in or around 1832 by Khoob Chand Zaka. Zaka only briefly discusses Ghalib. Tazkira-i-Gulshan-i-Bekhaar (1837) a Persian work, was the first one that eulogised Ghalib with sincerity as the author was Mustafa Khan Shaifta, a disciple and friend of Ghalib.
But Shaifta’s work infuriated Qutbuddin Baatin who in his Gulistaan-i-Bekhizaan (1845), also known as Naghma-i-Andaleeb, severely criticised both Ghalib and Shaifta. Though Sir Syed Ahmed Khan in his Aasaar-us-Sanadeed (1848) and Mirza Qadir Bakhsh Sabir in his Tazkira-i-Gulistan-i-Sukhan (1855) had much appreciated Ghalib, Ghalib had to bear with much criticism for his Qaat’e-i-Burhan (1862), a critical review of Burhan-i-Qaat’e, a Persian dictionary by Muhammad Husain Tabrezi. Muhammad Husain Azad in his Aab-i-Hayat (1880) intentionally tried to tarnish Ghalib’s image to raise Ibrahim Zauq’s standing among poets, since Zauq was Azad’s mentor and a friend of Azad’s father Moulvi Muhammad Baqar.
Ghalib and his poetry caught the fancy of readers and critics alike in the early 20th century, soon turning into a fascination bordering on adoration and veneration. This sparked a reaction, too, and many began writing against Ghalib, declaring that Ghalib’s poetry was nonsensical and meaningless. The most vocal of them was Yagana Changezi indeed, says Mushfiq Khwaja. According to Khwaja Sahib, Valah Hyderabadi’s Vusooq-i-Sarahat (1896), Altaf Husain Hali’s Yadgar-i-Ghalib (1897) and Shaukat Meruthi’s Hall-i-Kulliyaat-i-Urdu (1899), a commentary on Ghalib’s poetry, paved the way for understanding and appreciating Ghalib’s poetry.
In the early decades of the 20th century, however, a reaction against Ghalib’s blind following outpoured. Yagana Changezi in foreword to Nishtar-i-Yaas (1914), a collection of his poetry, and then in his Chiragh-i-Sukhan, a book on prosody, gave some negative remarks against Ghalib that shocked the literary circles. But it was only a beginning and Yagana became obsessed with writing against Ghalib. As mentioned by Khwaja Sahib, Yagana had published a booklet titled Ghalib Shikan (1933), severely criticising Ghalib. In 1927, when Yagana’s poetic collection Ayaat-i-Vijdaani appeared, he wrote a commentary on it himself, though published under the pseudonym Mirza Murad Baig Sherazi. In it Yagana had declared that he was a much better poet than Ghalib.
Yagana wrote a number of articles against Ghalib in literary magazines. This naturally sparked a flurry of sharp replies and Yagana penned rejoinders, too. Khwaja Sahib says that in the wake of this controversy, an article titled ‘Muhmalaat-i-Mirza Ghalib’ appeared in February 1921 issue of Shabaab-i-Urdu, a literary magazine published from Lahore. The article, written by Muhammad Abdul Malik — who was later to become maternal grandfather of Muhammad Khalid Akhter, an accomplished satirist — said that the meanings of many couplets of Ghalib, as explained by Ghalib himself, did not match with the text of the couplets and those couplets were meaningless and, hence, must be expunged from Ghalib’s divan. This evoked further debate and many writers and critics took part in it, some defending Ghalib and others siding with those who thought Ghalib’s many verses do not make sense.
Since Mushfiq Khwaja was an authority on Yagana Changezi, he collected all those articles that criticised or defended Ghalib in the course of debate, written either by Yagana or others, and published them in the year 2000 under the title Muhmalaat-i-Ghalib in issue 19 of Ghalib, a biannual magazine published by Idara-i-Yadgar-i-Ghalib (IYG), Karachi. Now these articles have been collected in a volume and published by IYG under the same title. ‘Muhmal’ is an Arabic word meaning: senseless, meaningless, absurd. Muhmalaat is the plural form. Mushfiq Khwaja’s intro to these articles has also been reproduced.
Ghalib Library, working under the aegis of IYG, has been refurbished and reactivated with a helping hand from the Sindh government and is now serving readers with a new commitment, free of charge, as ever before.
Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2024
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