Mirza Ghalib Published His First Urdu Divan in Delhi in 1841, Held the Titles Dabir-ul-Mulk and Najm-ud-Daula at Bahadur Shah Zafar's Court, and Kept a Persian Diary Through the Fall of Delhi in 1857

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, who wrote as Ghalib, was born in Agra on 27 December 1797 and died in Delhi on 15 February 1869, according to the Rekhta chronology of his life. In 1841 a first edition of his Urdu divan (the collected poems) was published in Delhi, and in October of that year his Persian divan, Maikhana-e-Arzu, was printed there too. The same biography says he wrote more in Persian than in Urdu and wanted the Persian work judged first. Readers decided otherwise, and he is “more loved and remembered for his Urdu works.”

A boy from Agra who chose the name Asad

His father, Abdullah Beg Khan, was killed in action when the boy was less than five, Rekhta’s biography says. An uncle raised him until the uncle died, when Ghalib was nine, and he then lived with his maternal grandparents. The family were of Seljuq Turk descent, and its men had served in Mughal and East India Company armies. It adds that he “did not receive any systematic education.”

By the Rekhta chronology he wrote under the pen name Asad from about 1808 and took the name Ghalib in 1816. Frances Pritchett of Columbia University, who has published a commentary on the whole of his Urdu verse, writes that he claimed to be writing prose and poetry at twelve.

On 9 August 1810 he married Umrao Begum of Delhi, who was 11 (he was 13), and in 1812 he moved to Delhi for good. Seven children were born to them and all died in infancy, the biography records. Ghalib later adopted her nephew, Zainul Abedin Arif, who was very dear to him and who died in 1852.

Two divans in one year

His Urdu poems are mostly ghazals, each a run of self-contained couplets that share a rhyme and a refrain. Pritchett has put the 1841 edition online in sections, grouped by the refrain. Her summary is that the poems created a sensation from his teenage years. Admirers praised them lavishly and critics attacked them as fine-sounding but overwrought, even meaningless. Donne and the other English Metaphysical poets are her point of comparison, and she writes that during his own lifetime he received much less praise than he deserved.

One verse shows what the fuss was about. Ghazal 32 is dated by Pritchett to after 1847, so it is not in the 1841 volume. It opens with the line nah thaa kuchh to khudaa thaa kuchh nah hotaa to khudaa hotaa. In tuput’s own paraphrase, the line says that when nothing existed, God existed, and that if nothing had existed, God still would.

His letters are a second body of work. He kept up a lifelong correspondence with Muslim, Hindu and English friends, Pritchett notes, and the first collection of his Urdu letters, Ud-e-Hindi, was published on 27 October 1868, per Rekhta’s chronology.

The pension that took him to Calcutta

Ghalib never owned books, a house or property, Pritchett writes. He lived on his share of a pension from the East India Company, which his uncle had earned through military service, together with stipends from patrons. A Rekhta article on his Calcutta years says the pension was fixed after the death of his uncle Nasrullah Beg and was not paid regularly.

In 1827 he set out to argue the case in person at the Company’s capital. That article puts the distance at more than 3,000 km, covered by horse, carriage, bullock cart and boat through Kanpur, Lucknow, Banda, Allahabad and Banaras. He reached Calcutta on 20 February 1828, aged 31. The chronology records the first hearing of the case on 28 April 1828 and the rejection of his appeal on 27 January 1831.

The city also gave him a literary quarrel, which he answered with a long Persian poem, Baad-e Mukhaalif. Even so, he liked the place. In letters quoted by the article he urged Sir Syed Ahmad Khan to go and see the ships there, and told another correspondent he would have settled for good had he gone in his youth, before he married. He left in August 1829 and was back in Delhi that November. On his return, the article says, he was told his claims were baseless and the case was closed.

Arrested in 1847, employed in 1850

Police arrested Ghalib on 25 May 1847 for facilitating gambling at his house, the Rekhta chronology says. A book on Ghalib by Gulzar, reviewed in The Tribune in 2005, puts the jail term at three months. Among the anecdotes from Hali’s biography Yadgar-e Ghalib that Pritchett lists, a visitor congratulated him on his release and he answered that he had been in the white man’s prison and was now in the black man’s.

The break came at court. On 4 July 1850, the chronology records, Bahadur Shah Zafar employed Ghalib on an income of 600 rupees to write the history of the Timur dynasty. Sufinama, the Rekhta Foundation’s sister site, lists Najmuddaulah (Najm-ud-Daula, literally star of the state), Dabeerulmulk (Dabir-ul-Mulk, literally secretary of the kingdom) and Mirza Nausha among his titles. Delhi Walks, a heritage-walk company, says Zafar conferred Dabir-ul-Mulk in 1850 and added Najm-ud-Daula, and that Ghalib was made poet tutor to the emperor in 1854. Rekhta gives 1 November 1854 as the date of death of Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq, the court’s poet laureate and a well-known rival of Ghalib’s.

Sources differ on the post that followed. Rekhta’s biography says Ghalib became poet laureate in 1854, and the Herald, the magazine of Pakistan’s Dawn group, gives the years 1854 to 1857. Sahapedia, a heritage encyclopaedia, writes that his wish to become poet laureate was never fulfilled. Every account has him at Zafar’s court. One of Hali’s stories has Ghalib walking with the emperor in a mango garden and studying a fruit closely. Asked why, he said he was looking for his and his ancestors’ names written on it. The king sent him some fine mangoes that day.

He also gained a patron outside Delhi. On 5 February 1857, per the chronology, Ghalib became ustad (teacher) to Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan of Rampur.

Delhi in 1857, in Persian

His account of 1857 is Dastanbuy, Persian for a bouquet or nosegay. He kept it from May 1857 to July 1858, Sahapedia says. Its entry for 11 May 1857 describes rebel soldiers from Meerut entering Delhi, and it goes on to the British recapture in September.

The diary is also a petition. In it Ghalib wrote that he had “eaten the bread and salt of the British” since childhood, and Sahapedia reports that he wanted three things from the authorities: a title, a robe of honour and a pension. An August 1858 letter to Munshi Hargopal Tafta says he wanted the book published at once so that a copy could go to the Governor General and, through him, to the Queen. After the recapture, Sahapedia adds, many Muslims in Delhi including Ghalib were arrested on suspicion of backing the rebels, and the diary was in part a plea against that.

How much of it he meant is argued. The scholar G. C. Narang, quoted by Sahapedia, says the diary alone does not show Ghalib’s true attitude to the revolt, and that his letters, which are harsher on the British, must be read beside it. In one letter Ghalib counted five attacks on the city, the sepoys’ first and the British army’s second. For Pritchett, “the Rebellion of 1857 was the most painful time of his life.”

The losses were concrete. Many of his friends were killed or ruined, Dawn reports, and the libraries of two kinsmen, Nawab Ziauddin Ahmad Khan Nayyar and Nawab Husain Mirza, were destroyed, with many of his writings. Our account of the British revenge for 1857 covers the reprisals, and the Mangal Pandey article covers the rising’s first spark. Awadh’s side of it is in the piece on Begum Hazrat Mahal.

Zafar’s trial opened on 27 January 1858 in the Diwan-i-Khas of the Red Fort, The Daily Star reports. Judges found him guilty on 9 March, and on 7 October 1858 he left Delhi by ox-cart for Rangoon. He died there in captivity in 1862.

Rampur, Gali Qasim Jan and the last years

After the revolt Rampur became his greatest financial support, Herald says, with Rs 100 a month from July 1859 until his death. He reached Rampur in January 1860 and stayed two to three months, depending on whether Herald or Dawn is read, and Dawn says his stipend was raised to Rs 200.

His British pension was restored in 1860, according to Dawn, and Herald adds that a robe of honour and a place in the Governor General’s durbar (court) came back with it. The Tribune review says some researchers hold that the pension was restored, though Gulzar’s book does not mention it.

In 1860 Ghalib and Umrao Begum moved into a house on Gali Qasim Jan in Ballimaran, where he lived until his death in 1869, Homegrown reports. Debts and illness followed him to the end, Herald says. Rampur’s Nawab helped settle them and paid for a wedding in Ghalib’s family only after the poet had died, Dawn says.

The tomb and the institute

Ghalib died on 15 February 1869. The Rekhta chronology says he was buried in the Loharu family graveyard near the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin, and Pritchett writes that his wife did not long survive him. Working in the Nizamuddin renewal project with the Archaeological Survey of India and other partners, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture landscaped the tomb’s courtyard and put up a Delhi quartzite enclosure wall. Vice-President Hamid Ansari inaugurated the forecourt in February 2010, and the courtyard holds an occasional mushaira (poetry gathering).

New Delhi’s Ghalib Institute grew out of a committee formed for the 1969 centenary, with Indira Gandhi as president and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed as secretary. Founded in 1971, the Institute works from the Aiwan-e-Ghalib building, which has a research library, a museum and an auditorium, and it publishes the journal Ghalib Nama.

The house in Ballimaran survives only in part. Homegrown says just the courtyard and two rooms of the original residence remain, and that the memorial displays couplets on canvases, a family tree tracing his line to Samarkand and a life-size figure of him with a hookah. In recent years a mushaira has been held there on 27 December, his birth anniversary.