Ghalib's biographer finds it difficult to identify any event that could be called significant in his life; it was so much a life of the mind. We cannot be sure even of the external circumstances that could have influenced him. He came of what was then considered a good family, and his own statement could be quoted to prove that he was proud of his family and his aristocratic connections. As against this we have the verse, hitherto overlooked, it seems, of his earlier period:

I cannot tell you how perverse they are:
Disgrace itself now shuns the nobly born.

This was written before an overzealous kotwal of Delhi had sent him to jail for gambling and before a desperate liquor merchant had prosecuted him for failure to pay his debts, an event commemorated in his verse:

'Tis true I drank on credit, but always knew for sure
My spendthrift poverty one day my ruin would procure.

If his statement about the nobly born has any biographical significance, it would show what he really felt about the young men among whom he moved as a blithe and charming figure.

He was always in financial difficulties and spent well over fifteen years in fruitless prosecution of his claim to a larger share in the income of the Firozpur Jhirka estate. But would he have really benefited if his claim had been accepted? He was by nature thriftless and incapable of controlling his generous instincts. It is true that poverty and such sensitiveness and imagination as he possessed would make a man more conscious of his humanity, of that dignity of which man is deprived by being too poor to think of anything except what he is to eat and how he is to cover his nakedness. There is a ghazal of Ghalib which begins:

Stark destitution: beggar's hand outstretched
For something to erase the crushing lines of want,

but this is a ghazal of his earlier period, written before he was twenty-five years old, and comparatively well off, able to pay for his liquor and to help out his friends. Later verses, where he complains directly or indirectly of his poverty, do reflect an actual condition of utter wretchedness. But it is only in the last ten years of his life that he felt crushed, and then he had given up writing poetry. Lack of means was a limitation on the play of his instincts which he would have felt acutely under any circumstances, and we should not try to establish a too direct connection between his poverty and his poetic lament over it. We must also remember that the resentment and bitterness he feels is not against the social order in which some are affluent and some poor, but against the very conditions of human existence.

Ghalib was pampered in his boyhood by the ladies of his family, and not subjected to any kind of discipline. He was married at the age of about fourteen to a girl of eleven. Neither his elders nor he himself took interest in his education; his literary talent became apparent very early, and it does not seem that lack of systematic study made much difference. He was fond of company, of games, of conversation. We do not know when he began to drink; but though drinking became a habit, he seems generally to have kept within self-imposed limits. Respectable people of his class would have considered his habits and his way of life improper. Ghalib was, however, anxious not to offend. Once, in an angry mood, he wrote:

I have man's nature, I am born of man
And proud that I commit the sins I can….
My worship of the vine I'll ne'er abandon
In stormy whirlpools I shall always dive,

and we could regard this as a bold statement of a concept of sin which was an integral part of his philosophy of life. But we cannot say that he felt oppressed by adverse public opinion, or that there was any element of retaliation in what he said about piety and the pious. In practice, he never failed to show reverence where it was due.

But Ghalib did not have a pronounced mystical tendency. Certain doctrines, like the unity of existence, had become a part of culture, and Ghalib seems to have taken them for granted. A disparagement of the externals of religion had for centuries been the fashion among Muslim poets and intellectuals, and though this attitude had its origin in sufi thought, it could not, in Ghalib's time, be regarded as an indication of any positive mystical leanings. Ghalib did not follow the Muslim practice of praying. Very late in life he said, 'I am no Muslim if I prayed even once in my life.' He was, no doubt, being flippant, but it is true that his belittling of religious practices was not because of a preference for some other form of religiosity.

The sufi view of life had created certain symbols, around which poetry revolved for centuries. The attraction of these symbols was such that they became the distinctive feature, indeed, the essence of poetry. Love, beloved, lover, wine, tavern, saqi, intoxication, madness, garden, wilderness and other images were the warp and woof of poetry. The symbols were, inevitably, taken from the physical world, but they could also be given a transcendent spiritual quality. However, there always remained an element of intoxicating doubt. The physical and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane could never be clearly distinguished, and the symbols could be interpreted by the spiritual and the sensuous to mean what they wanted them to mean. The quality of poetry would be judged according to the manner in which the two aspects had been blended. An exclusive or a too obvious emphasis on the spiritual or religious aspect would lead to the poetry being classed as religious, and to that extent less of true poetry. A concentration on the gross and physical would be frowned upon as vulgar. The poetic image was a creation of light and shade, and the light did not come from a spiritual beyond, but from the human heart.

The traditional symbols were all used by Ghalib in the composition of his poetic images. They had their basis also in the facts of his life. He admired and was admired by beautiful women, he once fell in love and his love was returned in what seemed to him an excessive and ultimately embarrassing measure. In one of his later verses he says:

I long for that release from care when I could lose
Myself in thoughts of my beloved—and no day or night,

but, except in an elegy, love for a woman hardly ever appears as an overpowering passion. Love has, however, another and philosophically and symbolically more significant aspect. The terms Ghalib uses for such love can be translated as ardour, longing, irresistible urge, uncontrollable desire, a power, a daemonic force within man which takes complete possession of his being, which may destroy him or lead him to freedom and ecstasy.

The best starting point for an appraisal of Ghalib would be to begin where he himself began—with the will to live free from care and restraints, guided by an instinct that was itself thoroughly imbued with gentleness and goodwill. His intelligence, sensitivity and the interest and encouragement of some of his elders gradually drew him away from kite-flying and other youthful games to poetry, till he was seized with a passion for it. The kind of poetry that was written and admired in his time did not appeal to him. It was too elementary, too obvious for him, and leaned too heavily on the spoken idiom and play of words. No doubt it was not lacking in sincerity; sometimes there was evidence of deep feeling, but it was intellectually too shallow and reduced the poet, who should be a man and something more, to a lover defeated and mauled as it were by his own love. Ghalib was attracted and impressed most by the poet Bedil, who wrote in Persian and lived about a century before him. Some critics attribute the involved language of the first phase of Ghalib's poetry to a desire to imitate Bedil. Ghalib himself expresses his profound admiration for his predecessor with an astonishing frankness and zeal. Possibly it was Bedil who made Ghalib aware of his own potentialities and induced him to abandon the beaten tracks in order to break new ground in unexplored regions of thought and feeling, or, as Ghalib put it, to create new meaning in old forms.

Ghalib began his career as a poet by forging a medium of his own, a mixture of Urdu and Persian, startling in its terseness and sheer novelty. In the perspective of history, this does not appear as a mere fad or an idiosyncrasy. The Urdu of Ghalib's days was a language in the making. It was following the healthy tendency of refining itself while drawing sustenance from the spoken idiom, but the spoken idiom would by itself have kept expression at a low intellectual level. Something had to be done to increase its capacity. This was ultimately the result of Ghalib's bold experiments because, though he began by disregarding current idiom, he returned later to enrich it with the treasure he had collected during his wanderings. The reason for his disregard was that the current idiom could not take him to the heights he wanted to scale, to a poetry beyond the poetry of his days. He had all the shortcomings of the pioneer, but there is a vigour, a grandeur, even I would say a fascination in his earlier poetry which one misses in his later work.

Ghalib, the man, who demanded of life that it should let him be himself, matured as a creator of poetic images. 'Being himself had now vastly different implications. The satisfaction of living as he liked was no longer possible because satisfaction itself had come to have a different meaning. But it is still Ghalib the man who looks at life and who asks why he cannot be himself, whatever the implications of that might be. He is not, like the legendary Dr Faustus, willing to sell his soul in return for an experience of all that the world of mind and matter holds within itself. Ghalib's humanity is not divisible into body and soul; there is nothing he can bargain with, the devil does not enter into the picture because he does not have an independent existence, and God has a way of giving with which Ghalib is not at all satisfied.

It would not perhaps be demonstrably correct to say that Ghalib had a concept of man which can be deduced from his verses. He would have found it irksome to commit himself to any idea that would obstruct the free expression of his mood. He does not seem willing to accept the restraints of belief; he looks at love from all sides, and finds that it brings joy and misery, that it creates and destroys, and though its full realisation is not possible without surrender, man must not only maintain his identity but exercise his right to judge. And so, though the beloved is adorable, Ghalib is a lover who cannot discard his cultivated playfulness, and in any confrontation the lover seems to have the best of it.

Every thoughtful reader will make his own selection of the typical verses representing Ghalib's various moods. Here are a few which, taken together, would make a rough outline of the personality of the poet, and, therefore, indicate his concept of man.

A song that dwells within the singer's throat,
An ecstasy that needs no wine:
Be sinful charm incarnate, and your head
Before the pious multitude incline.

Like the commotion of the judgement Day I roam
Across the worlds seeking myself;
My dust whirls on the other side
Of non-being's barren waste.
Shy not at sight of me, you who've imbibed the illusion
Of streamlined sense and knowledge;
Dust of the road is all I am, my twists and twirls
Have no intent, no meaning.

At least once in my life I must
Let flesh be on its mettle—Ardour of love,
Give me to drink such wine
As only a full man can hold!

Walking the common road brought blisters on my feet:
Now. I rejoice the way leads into thorny bushes
For now I feel there must be a beyond.

I long to break my chains, but then I fear
My madness will but add to my disgrace
Better let prudence be my guide
To ways of momentary, small relief.

If I look out upon the world I see
The common faith blaming all ills on fate;
I think it's better far to let my mind
Create insensibility with the stuff
Of selfishness and cautious circumspection.
But still I would not that my heart became
Cold or inert; much rather should my life
Reflect the image of the futile sigh.
But then I am, God, from head to heart,
Embodiment of pain that knowledge brings;
Better my world became a dream sea at whose shore
I stand in endless wonder.

Ghalib believed too much in his humanity to believe in anything else. There are verses that reveal a degree of religiosity, such as

Shame at unworthiness in my offering God's grace to win
And claims to pious living dyed a hundred times in sin.

In mosque and church and temple I seek only the Friend:
Wherever my forehead kisses the ground, His threshold responds to the kiss.

How long, O God, this begging for fulfilment of desire?
Grant me the grace to raise my hands aloft in prayer for all.

Mostly there is a touch of irony or a suspicion of banter when he addresses himself to God. There is an ode which has been surprisingly neglected by literary critics.

The tongue must beg Thee for the power of speech,
For silence has its way to catch Thy ear.
In days of gloom the stricken cry to Thee,
For Thine the lamp faint in the morning light.
Thine the despondent autumn flower.
Wondrous and colourful for the sight what man endures—
Thy work the henna'ed feet of death, in blood of lovers dipped….
Aside from spell cast by the prayer that's granted,
Thou givest piquancy to cry of pain,
And lamentation becomes music for Thy ear.
Meadow on meadow lush within
The mirror of desire is Thine,
And hope lost in delight of gardens yet to be.
Our worship is a veil, Thou dost adore Thyself—
For Thine the suppliant forehead, Thine
The threshold where it rests.
Resourceful in excuses, Mercy lies in wait
To bring us near to Thee;
To Thee we owe fulfilment and the pain
Of trials by Thee ordained.
Sad and beyond belief
Asad should be as in a magic cage confined,
When grace of movement, garden, morning breeze
Are Thine to give.

Here is an example of mild sarcasm:

More thrilling than wild dreams of pastures green
Is resignation to the will of God:
His are the fields thirsting for rain and His
The carefree rain-clouds floating gracefully away.

And then there is the impudence of the lover:

The ardour of our love reveals Thy glory; Thy world
Would be but a poor mirror for Thy face.

Ghalib's portrayal of lover, love and beloved tends to be rather conventional in the later period, that is, from 1850 to 57, when he had to make allowances for the senile romanticism of his royal patron, Bahadur Shah Zafar, and the taste of his audience. He was more imaginative and original in the earlier phase. Here are a few examples:

I marvel at my musk-anointed wound of love: a taper's flame
Clothed with the perfumed darkness of the night.

'Tis a scarred evening where I make
A darker shadow; though I'm meeting her
The time will pass too soon, my taper's flame
Already has the blossoming glow of dawn.

She strikes me speechless and yet speech expects,
When only silence can reveal the passion in my heart.

Awareness should be enemy of sight, sight of the eye;
Come in such splendour that neither you know it nor I.

I have deliberately tried to give as few translations as possible of ghazals or verses for which Ghalib is most admired, because it is impossible to reproduce the symmetry of the language or the epigrammatic delicacy of the images. Closer study has also made me partial to the youthful Ghalib, who tried to squeeze out of language more than it could possibly give. None the less, it is clear why the later poetry of Ghalib has made such a wide and profound appeal. It is intensely personal, but at a level where the intensely personal becomes the universal. The lover, the man of the world, the agitator, the man of frustrated ambition, the common man whose only source of intellectual satisfaction is to repeat at an appropriate moment what everyone knows or feels, the divers after pearls of meaning whose aspiration is to fathom the deepest waters, all have their separate reasons for looking upon Ghalib as an exalted genius as well as a kindred spirit. And Ghalib himself can well ask,

Because of me each particle with longing overflows,
Whose heart am I that I am so immersed in heaven and earth?