When I heard of the publication of Maaz Bin Bilal’s Temple Lamp on social media, I was crestfallen.
When I saw Ranjit Hoskote has endorsed the book, I was even more crestfallen.
Just a few months ago, giving finishing touches to my book on Nehru, I decided to dedicate a paragraph in the chapter on culture to Ghalib’s Chirag-e-Dair to situate (and illustrate) the defining idea of India’s cultural history in the encounter. I desperately looked for a good, English translation of Ghalib’s lyric masnavi of epic proportions, for my purpose.
I wasn’t satisfied with the translations I discovered, but ultimately settled for Qurratulain Haider’s compact, short version of the poem. I wished an able translator had translated this poem for us. Little did I know, my wish was being fulfilled and put to perfection at that very moment, without my knowledge. I wish Maaz or Ranjit had mentioned it to me in passing, by divine accident. I would have requested for the advance proofs. But I was most happy to learn that, despite my missing its fruits, the book is now out there in the world to provide its grace and craftsmanship to readers.
‘Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras by Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan’, Mirza Ghalib (author) and Maaz Bin Bilal (translator), Penguin, 2022.
To repeat: the English translation of Ghalib’s Persian work, Temple Lamp is a work of grace and fine craftsmanship. It speaks and breathes of a deep labour of love.
The many contexts (described with precision in the introduction) that directly and indirectly lead to the encounter between Ghalib and Banaras provide significant clues. Because the masnavi is predominantly in lyric mode despite its narrative potential (Ghalib never exploited the possibilities of narrative poetry, Maaz informs us), the subjective elements involved in the writing become important to consider.
The fact that Ghalib gained courtly recognition as a poet by the Mughal king Bahadur Shah Zafar much later – after a mediocre poet like Ibrahim Zauq passed away – had never received enough state patronage, lived the life of a tenant, of “residential dislocation”, of being forever in debt, hiding from his creditors, a man robbed of his share of inheritance by family members, and perpetually fighting for his pension, are facts that accentuate his state of instability and exasperation before he was forced to undertake the journey from Delhi to (then) Calcutta.
A poet swindled by family and fate and with his pride unfairly humbled by power was looking for spiritual and existential respite. The charms of Banaras turned out to be the name of that momentarily intense respite.
Ghalib was also fiercely proud of his Turko-Indian identity and his poetic and linguistic prowess. This led him to bitter rivalries and a lifelong sense of envy with other poets that included those he despised (like his contemporary, Qatil, in Calcutta), and even those he revered (like his predecessor, Bedil). He had an unorthodox lifestyle, and enjoyed his Old Tom whisky from the cantonment. That led him to welcome the cosmopolitanism he witnessed in Calcutta. We learn that he travelled 1,500 kilometres, alternately on foot, horseback, bullock cart and boat. It was Ghalib’s long, arduous, and only, pilgrimage, and it contributed to the sensibility of the poet-traveller that he displayed in verse in Chirag-e-Dair.
Also read: When Ghalib Too Was Locked Down and Missed His Favourite Tipple
Before I move to the poem, there is an interesting aspect that Maaz mentions about Ghalib’s legacy and reception that opens up an interesting point of debate. He writes: “Ghalib’s Persian and Urdu poetry has had a remarkable impact across the world, even as he had a fraught relationship with the contemporary Indo-Persian public sphere.” Maaz also mentions how Ghalib, despite himself being part of the Indo-Persian tradition of poetry, often spoke deridingly about poets from that tradition, thus partly undermining the status of the tradition he belonged to.
This is a doubly remarkable situation.
Ghalib was compared to European poets and philosophers (from Goethe and Rimbaud to Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel) by his commentators, thus universalising the scope of reading his work. At the same time, he became removed from the specific world of his own tradition.
Ghalib’s concerns were turned into observations on the principles of life and human existence. Maaz informs us that an impressive litterateur, Abdul Rehman Bijnori, claimed that Ghalib’s poetic concerns on “existence, reality, nature” made it possible for reading the poet alongside European modernists. Once you derive “principles” from a poetic work, it opens up possibilities of cross-cultural readings, and is immediately universalisable. Did Ghalib’s work open itself up to that possibility? Or was it a literary critic’s intellectual skills on multiple traditions of thought that generalised Ghalib’s cultural, or locational, ideas?
The point is not whether it is possible to read or study a poet belonging to a particular linguistic and cultural tradition in universal terms. The point is what the terms of that universalisability are.
Let us focus on the poem itself. Maaz tells us of “Ghalib’s awareness of Dharmic traditions” that keeps the number of verses in the poem to 108, a number considered auspicious in various Hindu traditions across geographical regions. It is the first sign of respect for inter-cultural faith. Ghalib, as Maaz reminds us, is a “Hindustani Muslim”, who is deeply invested, if I may argue, in culture more than in religion. The poet is aware of the sacred nature of his task, delving into the spiritual roots of Hindu culture in Banaras. The fact that he is doing it in Persian forms the kernel of the cultural encounter, where the spirit/language of one religion meets the language/spirit of another religion.
Not just that. It is also about a place. Banaras, the site of this translation/conversion, is itself getting translated by Ghalib’s love. Every encounter inspires, tempts, grounds the possibility of translation, of the self-in-translation, and if I may use the phrase: of cultural conversions. To translate is to convert oneself in the movement from one language to another. Translation is an experience of conversion.
The Ghalib we encounter in Temple Lamp is not the Ghalib we know from his ghazals. This is a different Ghalib, who is registering a sacred moment in his profane journey undertaken to petition his pension case to the British Governor General in colonial Calcutta. It is also a historical moment in many ways, one being a poetic testament of love between two cultural traditions that became part of Indian history at different moments. Ghalib is of course well aware of the violence and persecution that separated the two traditions in political terms. Unlike (and against) the monuments of history that are signs of conquest, Ghalib erects a monument of love, writing, Temple Lamp.
The translation of the masnavi is deft and lucid. The words of traditional import are either retained, or explained below, to give the reader a flavour of their translatable possibilities. My most favourite verse in translation is verse 93. The beauty of its movement and repetition is worthy of envy:
“Its forest after forest
is filled with beds of tulips,
its garden after garden
blooms with perpetual spring.”
I shall not quote much from the little gems and give them away here. They should be read from page to page as pearls on a long string, the way Ghalib intended to write them.
One pauses at the stunning image, “like a flute, / my bones are filled with fire”. The cremation ghats of Banaras enter Ghalib’s being, as ghat and poet burn together. In Ghalib’s imagination the city and its inhabitants are blissfully lost in themselves, with “the Ganga as a mirror in their hand”.
Ghalib is entranced by the beauty of the women in the city. He writes, “their youth flows faster than blood / in a lover’s vein”. The description of women are not a sensual counterpoise to the sacred. The beauty of their material presence blends with the spiritual in a city that represents eternal spring.
Also read: ‘I Doubt, Therefore I Am’: Revisiting Mirza Ghalib’s Poetry
Ghalib contrasts the bliss of Banaras to the moral decay of the Mughal Empire overcome by patricide and filicide. The idea of Banaras as a holy site where life is reconciled with death is symbolic of the (eternal) postponement of Doomsday. Ghalib calls the city the “Kaaba / of Hindustan”, what (as Maaz mentions in the introduction) Khushwant Singh brilliantly noted is not the same as calling it “Kaa’ba-e-Hinood (the Mecca of Hindus)”. Banaras represents the holy centre of a culture rather than religion. A culture is porous, thus, easily translatable, unlike religion.
I end with a note on friendship that has a significant presence in the masnavi. We hear Ghalib in verses 16 and 17 despairing his distant friendships, as he writes, “what burns is/the inconsideration of my friends.” We lose the comforts of a family, to seek the world of friends. Ghalib’s sense of abandonment is personal in an expansive way. To lose the intimacy of friends is to lose the world.
We learn from Maaz that Ghalib did not meet literary figures in Banaras. It was probably to stay away from the heartburn and controversies he got embroiled in during his stay in Lucknow. Ghalib did not want the pure nearness between him and Banaras disturbed by acrimony. He was better lonely, grieving the absence and forgetting of friendships.
But great poet that he is, Ghalib will register the names of friends he is fond of: Fazl-e-Haq, Hisamuddin Haider Khan and Aminuddin Ahmed Khan. The presence of friendship is always the presence of proper names. These names enter the poem as Ghalib’s lamps of memory, lighting the darkness of his uncertain future.
Translating Chirag-e-Dair, Maaz has reminded us what makes us Hindustani.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India (Penguin Viking, 2022), The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown (Copper Coin, 2021), and Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018).
