COLUMN: FATHER, GHALIB AND MIR.

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I was maybe nine when introduced to Ghalib. Father presented me some verses that I noted in my squiggly handwriting. Correcting me as I read them aloud, he asked me to memorise them, casually adding that the ghazal was from Ghalib's mustarad kalam [poetry he excluded from his Divan]. Father also told me it was a hamd [in praise of Allah].

I liked this bit of extra information and never forgot what mustarad meant. I enjoyed the rhythms of poetry, taking pride in my natural ability to read Urdu poems metrically. As a child, I relished poetry without understanding any of it, feeling important as I smoothly glided over the Persian-peppered verses of Ghalib's mustarad ghazal:

Gadaa-i-taaqat-i-taqreer hai zaban tujh se

Ke khamoshi ko hai pairaya-i-bayan tujh se

[The tongue begs You for strength to speak;

Because silence is as eloquent as speech for You]

In April 1968, Father initiated the monthly feature, 'Tafheem-i-Ghalib' [Interpreting Ghalib], for his journal Shabkhoon [Night Ambush], and wrote it for 20 years. In 1989, at a request from the Ghalib Institute, Father's exegesis of 138 verses was published as a 375-page book.

For a hundred years, Ghalib's poetry had stimulated multiple interpretations of abstruse individual verses. In the 1880s, Hilm Dihlavi published a book of detailed commentaries on 54 verses from the Urdu Divan. There are maybe close to a hundred or more such commentaries. Once, in ignorance, I asked Father how his tafheem differed. Father replied that he had selected well-known verses whose nuance previous commentators had missed.

Sometimes commentators declared a verse muhmal [meaningless] because they misunderstood certain unusual words and usages of Ghalib. Father said a weakness in the early commentators' approach was that they shied from consulting dictionaries; his tafheem showed the way - not only for reading Ghalib, but for the classical ghazal as a whole.

I'd never thought of writing a tafheem of Ghalib. No one ever asked me to, either. Then I found myself toying with the idea of commenting on the mustarad kalam. Ghalib's so-called 'rejected' verses are laden with heavy, far-fetched metaphors and unfamiliar vocabulary. I was unaware this mustarad corpus was more substantial than Ghalib's mutadavil [the authorised, current Divan]! Gyan Chand Jain's invaluable Tafseer-i-Ghalib is the only complete exegesis of the 'rejected' verses, but he is terse, dispassionate and almost never appreciative of even the most...

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