Persian Language

The news from Iran continues to be distressing. In Delhi, we are geographically removed from the war’s direct reach. Yet Iran is never far. Something of its cultural spirit lingers in this city, including in the work of Delhi’s great poet. To Mirza Ghalib, the Irani bhasha was the language of ambition. In the 19th century Delhi of his time, Persian commanded elite status, like the English in post-independent India or French in Tsarist Russia. Ghalib started by writing poems in both homegrown Urdu and Persian. Over time, he was drawn to the exactness and range of Persian—qualities he apparently didn’t find in Urdu. In all, Ghalib wrote about 2,000 couplets in Urdu, and a whopping 10,000 in Persian. These details are being told by poetry critic Aqil Ahmad as he walks through a Delhi museum devoted to Ghalib. At one point, the mild-mannered scholar quotes two lines by Ghalib: “Urdu shayari hai berang, Farsi shayari hai rangarang.” (Urdu poetry is without colour; Persian poetry is richly coloured.) The critic nevertheless emphasises that Ghalib acquired his lasting fame not for his “rangarang” Persian poetry, considered too difficult by most people, but for his “berang” Urdu poetry. Whatever, the following Ghalib couplet more explicitly reveals his partiality for Persian: “As long as rust remains, the mirror cannot shine. I am the polish of the mirror. My Persian poetry is the brilliance; my Urdu verses are the rust.” Indeed, the aficionados of Indo-Persian literature should forever be indebted to legendary Lucknow publisher Munshi Nawal Kishore, who first published Ghalib’s entire Persian poetry. See photo, in which critic Aqil Ahmad is holding the first volume of that book, Kulliyat-e-Ghalib Farsi. Ghalib attachment to Persian is also discerned in a letter he wrote to Urdu poet Maulvi Abdul Ghafoor Nassakh: “I am a lover of Persian poetry and prose, and though I live in Hindustan, I have been struck by the sword of Isfahan.” That Iranian city has lately been targeted in the ongoing U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. Persian is as intensely embedded in Ghalib’s prose books, one of which, Dastanboo, was on the 1857 uprising against the British. That said, our famously immodest poet was as cocky about his Urdu oeuvre. Consider this couplet: “Jo yih kahe ki ‘rekhta kyun ke ho rashk-e-farsi?’ Gufta-e-Ghalib ek bar parh ke use suna ki yun.” (If people say, “Can Urdu then put Persian verse to shame?” Recite a line of Ghalib’s verse and tell them, “Yes! Like this!”) As for us Hindi-speaking Delhiwale, we might not comprehend Persian, but many of us are familiar with an iconic Persian phrase first uttered by Delhi’s great mystic Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya—Hunuz Dilli dur ast, meaning Delhi is still far. For Ghalib, we may safely say: Hunuz Persian not dur ast.