Rebel with a Poetic Cause

Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib breathed his last on February 15, 1869. Here’s a tribute by Sumit Paul.

- Sumit Paul

“Bandagi mein bhi woh aazaad - o khudbeen hain ke hum; ulte phir aayein dar-eKa’aba agar waa na hua” (Even in worship, I am so free and emancipated that I will come back if the doors of Ka’aba don’t open for me!). Yaas Yagana Changezi, Mirza Ghalib’s bitterest critic and himself a poet of great repute, termed Ghalib’s aforementioned couplet as his only worthwhile couplet that remarkably illustrated the maverick poet’s “audacious faith” (gustaakh aqeeda). Ghalib wasn’t a believer in the usual sense of the word. He was an iconoclast, but certainly not an atheist. Altaaf Hussain Haali ‘Panipati’, who was Ghalib’s shaagird (student) and later his friend, wrote in his biography of Ghalib, ‘Yaadgaar-e-Ghalib; that he (Ghalib) completely repudiated the idea of tasawwuf (spirituality, particularly, Islamic philosophy) as ‘dimaghi fitoor’ (an idiosyncrasy of the mind).