The bard as we don’t know him

Rana Siddiqui Zaman

The other day I got a lowly Urdu couplet in Roman Hindi, attributed to Mirza Ghalib, from a retired colonel. And when I Googled to find out whose lines these were, I was shocked to see numerous sites attributing the same verse to Ghalib!

Such fake Urdu ashar are a common phenomenon in times of WhatsApp. But why is a poet of his calibre being trivialised in such a way? Sayeed Alam, an expert on Ghalib who has done countless plays on the poet with the rich and dignified content through his theatre group, Pierrot’s Troupe, says, “We honour Ghalib today, but we don’t know him. The reason is, people who know the language that Ghalib wrote, are few.  So what we know about him is hearsay, which carries the possibility of wrong information.”

He says a few years before the onslaught of social media, people would read only authentic books on poets, so publishers had to be more responsible in printing the matter. “With the advent of social media, you can publish everything, even your own two lines as Ghalib’s, hence the trivialisation,” said Alam.

Urdu poet Azhar Iqbal says, “Urdu speaking has become a fashion now. People who have no knowledge of Urdu try to connect with the language to be a part of the literati and poetic circles and to boast of a refined taste.” He, interestingly, notes that the trivialisation is done by both the innocent and clever.

Amid this depressing scenario, Delhi saw two programmes recently that reassured people that some serious and authentic work was still happening on Ghalib. The first was a play by the Dilli Gharana of classical music, a legacy carried by Ustad Iqbal Khan. The play, Ghalib, Begum Umrao Ki Nazar Sey, was a musical dastangoi on the poet as seen from his wife’s eyes. The story put across her plight, the struggle and tribulations she faced in her married life and offered a peek into the social, personal, professional and even political life of the poet.

What made the two-hour play extraordinary was Mirza Ghalib’s poetry, composed in traditional ghazal gayaki style. Khan’s daughter, Vusat Iqbal Khan, narrated the story as Umrao, often slipping into singing his ghazals in a trained, velvety and mellifluous voice. Other members of the gharana, too, sang his ghazals, taking the tale forward. Such was the magic of the play that Doordarshan Urdu telecast the whole play numerous times, and still does it.

The second programme, Zikr-E-Ghlaib, presented by Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, was a heady session with rich content, responsibly taken up by Urdu scholars such as Prof Asghar Wajahat and Saif Mahmood. 

There was Khutoot-e-Ghalib, a session on Ghalib’s letters, by Urdu scholar Sohail Hashmi and Valentina Trivedi, and a dastangoi on lesser-known aspects of the poet, penned by Prof Danish Iqbal, an expert on Ghalib. It was performed by India’s first-ever woman dastango, Fouzia Dastango. The programme broke away from the tradition. 

“My study of Ghalib was only limited to the tele-serial Mirza Ghalib (Doordarshan, 1988) by Gulzar sahib,” said Fouzia. “In this dastangoi, we presented Ghalib as a principled man who never sought favours from rich patrons; a man whose several children died but he would smile and blame only himself for his miseries.  And in this situation, he wrote the best of his couplets,” she added.