The manuscripts of Ghalib's Urdu diwans
Your questions answered
We start the Q&A section of the newsletter with this post. Here I will attempt to answer, to the best of my ability, readers’ queries on Indian literature. At present, this feature is available only for paying subscribers.
Q: “Have any of Ghalib's own manuscripts survived? Would you happen to know? I would love to see his handwriting.”
The short answer:
Yes. There are surviving manuscripts of Ghalib’s poetry, some of them in his own hand. There are also letters, written and signed by him that have survived.
For the long answer — read on!
Mirza Ghalib (December 27, 1797 – February 15, 1869)
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib is today acknowledged as Urdu’s foremost poet. But his life was one of struggle and penury. He lived and wrote during the turbulent reign of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. He came from a noble but impoverished family, and, considering himself a member of the aristocracy, never worked for a living but survived on royal patronage and the generosity of friends. The emperor, himself a poet, appointed him tutor to himself and his eldest son. He also appointed him historian of the Mughal court and bestowed many titles upon him including Dabir-ul-Mulk ('secretary of state') and Najm-ud-daula ( 'star of the state'). Despite these royal favours, Ghalib’s life remained one of hardship and financial struggle. It was only after his death in 1869 that he received the recognition he deserves.
Ghalib wrote in both Persian and Urdu. His Persian diwan or body of work is almost five times the size of his Urdu diwan, and he himself wished to be judged by his Persian poetry rather than his Urdu verse. Ironically, he is today loved and remembered for the latter.
Interest in his poetry grew steadily in the years following his death, particularly after the publication, in 1897, of his biography Yadgar-e Ghalib by his shagird, or pupil, the litterateur Altaf Hussain Hali. Ghalib’s often subversive and iconoclastic verses, his flouting of poetic convention, his heady mix of the intellectual with the spiritual appeals greatly to the modern reader. As a result, his popularity has grown enormously in recent times, not only amongst Urdu readers, but across the subcontinent. The Diwan-e Ghalib is now available not only in Urdu but also in the Devanagari script. It has also been translated several times.
GHALIB’S DIWANS AND THEIR MANUSCRIPTS
Ghalib was his own severest critic. While compiling his Urdu diwan in 1832, he left out a large number of verses he considered unsuitable, and when his Diwan was published in 1841, it did not include the discarded verses. During his lifetime, in addition to the 1841 edition, four more editions of his Urdu diwan were published — in 1847, 1861, 1862, and 1863. The first three are exact reproductions of the 1841 Diwan, and the fourth a rearrangement. The selection of his poetry that is commonly available these days is also the 1841 Diwan.
After his death, scholars of Ghalib continued to search for his discarded verses. Libraries in Delhi had been looted and burnt after the 1857 uprising. So some of his diwans were found quite far from in Delhi, in places such as Bhopal, Rampur, and Lahore.
A number of different manuscripts of his Urdu diwan were found, but each differed in the number and selection of verses.
The more interesting of these include the 1821 diwan, the 1826 diwan, the Gul-e Ra’na manuscript, and the 1816 diwan. We discuss these briefly below.
THE 1821 DIWAN
In 1917, a handwritten manuscript of Ghalib’s 1821 diwan was found in the Hamidiyyah Library of the Nawab of Bhopal. This contained most of his discarded verses and is variously known as the Nuskha-e Bhopal and Nuskha-e Hamiddiyah. It was published in 1921 under the title Diwan-e Jadid. The actual manuscript disappeared from the library in 1946.
In 2015, Ghalib scholar Mehr Afshan Farooqi was contact by someone claiming to have a copy of the 1821 manuscript. Upon examination, the manuscript seemed authentic, and in fact tallied with existing descriptions of the missing 1821 manuscript. Farooqi notes that there were many notations in the margins in various hands, including Ghalib’s own. The diwan, says Farooqi, was scanned at high resolution and published in January 2016.
THE 1826 DIWAN
This manuscript was revealed in the 1940s, in Lahore, by Hafiz Mahmud Sherani as part of his private collection. It is thus also called the Nuskha-e Sherani. This diwan was acquired by Punjab University, Lahore, after Sherani’s death. It was published in facsimile in 1969.
THE GUL-E-RA’NA MANUSCRIPT
This is, strictly speaking, not a manuscript of Ghalib’s Urdu diwan, but a selection of his Urdu and Persian verses which he compiled in c.1828.
In February 1828, he visited Calcutta to present his pension case to the British Governor General and stayed there till November 1829. There he met and became friends with Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmed, the editor of Ainah-e-Sikander, a Persian weekly published from Calcutta. It was at his request that Ghalib compiled a selection of his Urdu and Persian poetry. He called this selection Gul-e-Ra’na — a two-hued flower that has been described as ‘andarunash surkh-o birun zard bashad’, i.e., red on the inside and yellow on the outside.1 Ghalib split his selection of verses evenly between Urdu and Persian: Gul-e-Ra’na contains 455 verses in Urdu and 455 in Persian. It was never published in its entirety — only its preface and conclusion were published in a collection of Ghalib’s prose works. A few pages of the original manuscript were later discovered by Maulana Hasrat Mohani; these were lost after his death in 1951.
In 1957, the Ghalib scholar, Malik Ram was given a complete manuscript of Gul-e-Ra’na by his friend and mentor, Saiyyid Naqi Bilgrami.
During his stay in Calcutta, Ghalib was introduced to and became good friends with one Saiyyid Karam Husain Bilgrami, a nobleman from Bilgram in present-day Uttar Pradesh. When Ghalib completed the Gul-e Ra’na, Saiyyid Karam Husain asked for a copy and arranged a scribe to copy it for him. The copied manuscript stayed in his library and was passed down through generations — till Saiyyid Naqi Bilgrami presented it to Malik Ram, in 1957. Malik Ram published this in 1970.
Another manuscript of Gul-e-Ra’na had been discovered in Lahore; this one was in Ghalib’s own hand. This was published in 1969.
OTHER MANUSCRIPTS INCLUDE:
Rampur manuscript, Rampur, circa 1832
Karachi manuscript now part of the Karachi Museum collection, circa 1838; footnotes written circa 1841
Kareemuddin’s manuscript, also part of the Karachi Museum collection, 1845
Lahore manuscript, also part of the Punjab University collection, circa 1845
Second Rampur manuscript, Rampur, circa 1855
Intikhab-i-Ghalib, Rampur, circa 1862.
All of these manuscripts are handwritten, but as per my understanding, none are in Ghalib’s hand.
THE 1816 DIWAN
In 1969, also in Bhopal, was found Ghalib’s 1816 Urdu diwan. This was momentous —this Urdu diwan is the oldest so far discovered; it is also in Ghalib’s own hand.
The diwan consists of 126 pages. On its last page is the note:
Completed on Tuesday afternoon, the 14th of Rajab, in the Hijri calendar.
The year is not given. But it has been calculated that it was completed on June 11, 1816. It contains 25 ghazals not found in any other diwan. All the ghazals bear the takhallus (the poet’s nom de plume), ‘Asad’.
The discovery of this manuscript is quite a convoluted tale. I paraphrase Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s telling of its recovery here:
The manuscript of this diwan was originally held by a shagird of Ghalib’s, Yaar Muhammad Khan Shaukat Bhopali. It found its way into the possession of one Mujahid Muhammed Khan, and was then sold, along with other bits of scrap paper to a kabari, a scrap dealer, called Haider Sher Khan. The kabari sold it for two and a half rupees to Shafiqul Hasan, a dealer of rare books.
In April 1969, Hasan met Taufiq Ahmad Shahid Chishti, an old books dealer from Amroha, who was visiting Bhopal in search of rare manuscripts. Hasan showed him the manuscript, claiming that it was in Ghalib’s own hand. He wanted the princely sum of Rs 25 for it. Taufiq Ahmad finally bought it for Rs 11. He brought the manuscript to Delhi and advertised it for sale for Rs. 6000. Not surprisingly, there were no buyers. He then showed it to the Ghalib scholar Nisar Ahmad Faruqi who confirmed that it was authentic, and probably in Ghalib’s own writing. Meanwhile, Malik Ram heard of it, and offered Rs 10,000 for it. But Taufiq Ahmad learnt that the British Library had acquired two original letters of Ghalib and paid a very large amount of money for them. So he raised the price. But we do not know who bought the manuscript and we now lose its trail.
However, in the interim, the manuscript had been published, not once but twice, first in Lahore by the Urdu journal Nuqush and the second as a special edition from Rampur titled Diwan-e Ghalib ba Khatt-e Ghalib. Both were facsimiles. The Nuqush edition was illustrated; it also had the nasta’liq rendering of Ghalib’s shikastah style of Urdu script on the facing page thus making it accessible to more readers. The Rampur edition had reproductions of Ghalib’s seal as watermark for the pages. The publication of this manuscript led to controversies over its ownership and authenticity.
Meanwhile the manuscript disappeared.
It was rediscovered, also by Mehr Afshan Farooqi, amidst the manuscript collection of the Ghalib Institute in Delhi in June 2016, almost exactly two hundred years after Ghalib wrote it down.
GHALIB’S LETTERS
The British Library does hold two of Ghalib’s signed letters. However, at the time of writing, the letters have not been digitised and there are no scans or images available in the public domain. One of the letters was photographed in 2016, probably by a curator, and put up on the Library’s Facebook page. I am still awaiting permission to use it in this newsletter. Meanwhile, though, I do have permission to use the photograph on social media! So readers, you can see a sample of Ghalib’s handwriting in the photograph HERE, on the ‘Eaten by a Fish’ Facebook page.
The letter is dated October 19, 1866 and is postmarked ‘Dehlie’. In it, Ghalib discusses the controversy aroused by his book, Qati-i Burhan, a criticism of the 17th century well-know Persian dictionary Burhan-i Qati. The letter is signed and addressed to Maulvi Nu’man Ahmed.
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SOURCES and FURTHER READING
I have drawn heavily on two articles by Mehr Afshan Farooqi in answering this question. These are:
Mehr Afshan Farooqi, “My journey with Ghalib’s divans,” Dawn, July 17, 2016.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1270787Mehr Afshan Farooqi, “Ghalib’s first intikhab” https://www.academia.edu/11108537/Gul_e_Rana_Ghalibs_first_intikhab
For the list of manuscripts of Ghalib’s Urdu diwans, I have relied upon the following article by Rauf Parekh:
Rauf Parekh, “Literary Notes: Ghalib’s rejected Urdu verses and different versions of his deewan,” Dawn, July 14, 2014.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1118990
Additionally, I have also looked at the following article by Gopi Chand Narang:
Gopi Chand Narang, “Ghalib: Some Questions, Resolved/Unresolved,” Indian Literature, Vol. 61, No. 1 (297), 21st Century Indian Poetry in English (January/February 2017), pp. 154-170 (17 pages). Sahitya Akademi.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26791192
Any mistakes or gaps in information are mine.
Mehr Afshan Farooqi, “Ghalib’s first intikhab” https://www.academia.edu/11108537/Gul_e_Rana_Ghalibs_first_intikhab
How absolutely marvellous!! Such a comprehensive reply. I’m going to check the FB entry as well. Well done 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽