Shakespeare and Ghālib: Beauty, Desires and Love

 

Shakespeare and Ghālib: Beauty,  Desires and  Love

Shakespeare aur Ghālib: Husn, Khvāhisheñ aur Ishq

Shakespeare’s deals various angles, aspects and situations of love, like tenderness and yearning in his plays but it comes out more beautifully in his sonnets. Poets before him articulated the lover’s sincerity and depth almost as if in supplication, or worship, building up their case based on the core emotion and ardour of true love. Shakespeare broke free from this mould and his expression and delivery were not merely persuasive but also argumentative, often a proposition which overcomes all objections. Given a situation, a colourful argument is also presented to reverse the proposition, highlighting the contrast, even as doubts and questions about the lover’s own disposition also abound, building a truly enjoyable synthesis. 

The word “love” appears thousands of times in his collected works, besides hundreds of “loves”, “loved” “loving” and “beloved” which makes for a lot of love. But equivalent love words in Ghālib’s works perhaps excel the bard’s.

Ghālib was immensely fond of, and elegantly capable of, the abstruse in his poetry by presenting an argument which would be very scattered due to imaginative thoughts; he would take a reader from simple emotions to far-fetched metaphorical arguments in respect of affiliations, but also, more often than not, discord, contrition and compromise. A master of contradictions and paradoxes. Many of these diffused similes and metaphors in various contexts connected with love are at times akin to that of the bard. Add to that some beautiful play of words, ideas, dialogues, latitude, conversation, rhetoric, satire and wit and an uncomplicated human emotion is elevated to something sublime which would usually be beyond a lesser mortal. 

In weaving together, a blend of various angles and thoughts of a lover, like self-pity, self-deprecation, lurking pride, self-assurance, sequestered doubts and so on, both the bard and Ghālib present to the reader such angles in love which  would defy human imagination. 

Both Shakespeare and Ghālib were extremely innovative when it came to expressing love, even as they did retain the traditional forms and thoughts. Like musicality and melody is inherent in their poetry, Shakespeare managed it with subjectivity while Ghālib brought about baffling abstraction. While Shakespeare created dramatic expressions as lines for characters in his plays, Ghālib also generated  an element of drama in lovers’ speak.  What a heady mix of feelings! The readers are drawn to getting into the character, or the lover, to experience the rise and fall of the passion, desire and affection at conscious and subconscious planes. 

Briefly, and simplifying, feeling of love can leave you jubilant, ecstatic, joyful, befuddled, bemused, exhilarated, dizzy and speechless, making you incapable of capturing your emotions. The nuances of the content and the temperament is not easy to capture. Mere mortals cannot do with any conviction, let alone elegance, poets just about manage it and it takes eternal poets like granduncle Shakespeare and chachā Ghālib to do justice to the emotion and feelings they deserve. After all, nearly all the poets and writers have weighed in on the subject of love but the bard wrote the most famous love story of all (Romeo and Juliet) , and much more and I need not even say anything specific about our own chachā. 

I have tried to look for similarities between Shakespeare and Ghālib in respect of their coverage of the emotion of human relationship of love, its expression and its responses. Since a systematic analysis was beyond my capabilities, I started with, sort of random ash.ār, for there are so many,  and lines of the bards that seemed parallel in either form or content or both. 

As expected, a very keen dexterity to revel in life, observation of temporal and the divine, involved here and detached there, kept emerging with undertones of ego, pride, independence, conviction, despair and above all human values. I then started to find the same in Shakespeare  one by one and there again, it was not easy for one is hit by a plethora of eminently readable material. 

In this 4^th blog in the series, a simple analysis of the poetry of the two greats which have an approximate parallelism in form and content.  Ghālib’s poetry resounds with revelling in love and life as well as keen but detached observation of the man and the divine. All this with a fiercely individualistic conviction and rectitude with disdain for superficial propriety. We are sure to find similarities in Shakespeare’s thoughts. 

Mining through so much of their works, I would not call what I reproduce here, with some interpretations, as similarities. They are what I would simply call abutment and some nearness, as on the face of it, one is certain to sense a lot of diversity. In any case, comparison of what Shakespearean characters speak in a play, or the speaker’s expressions in his sonnets with what Ghālib write in ghazals, usually in first person, is an exercise calling for greater scholarly acumen which I lack. And, therefore, the effort would be to present the content and temperament. 

Nukta-chīñ hai ġham-e-dil us ko sunā.e na  bane

kyā   bane   baat   jahāñ   baat   banā.e  na  bane

(nukta-chīñ: nitpickingly critical)

In the first misra, Ghālib says that the beloved is a nitpicking cavalier so his sufferings due to his love for her is very difficult to recount in a conversation with her. The second misra, presents some interesting possibilities as there is an elegant play of the phrases, and indeed the sound, bāt banana and na bane. One, Ghālib cannot succeed in spite of all his expression of agonies in love because the beloved dismisses all his talk with some observation, objection or interjection as a cavilling person would. Two, all my narrative, presumably interspersed with pretentious falsehoods, are detected and unravelled by her nullifying my voluble attempts. Or that she is only interested in insincere bombast and rhetoric and artificially-bedecked verbiage and since my sincere utterings can hardly match that, I would come a cropper. Or my ġham-e-dil itself is the finical one refusing to dress up my story of grief with any fake rhetoric to please the beloved and therefore I make no headway with her. 

In sharp contrast, the bard’s lover is the glib one in sonnet 18 in which he builds up the theme how brief and transient a summer's day is in the three quatrains. He then loses himself while clarifying that beauty is fleeting and everyone grows old but adds pretty pretentiously that his lover’s beauty and fame are significant as he writes about it (I am not getting into the gender and sexuality issues as it was addressed to the “fair youth”, a man, but about love and poetry); beloved’s beauty may fade but his words will live on. Sample this: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:…

…When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(Because in my eternal verse you will live forever, so long as there are people on this earth, so long will this poem live on, making you immortal.) 

The bard is all rhetoric here on the significance of his poem and therefore also the speaker’s love; contrasted with a summer’s day, his love's beauty and his love, is eternal. We will soon see many examples of Ghālib saying similar lines about his elegant poetry and his sublime love, separately or together. 

Ghair phirtā hai liye yuuñ tire ḳhat ko ki  agar

koī pūchhe ki ye kyā hai to chhupā.e na bane

(ghair stranger, rival) 

The tradition of love-poetry in Urdu labels a rival in love as ghair or raqeeb. Ghālib is taunting the beloved here by informing her that his rival in love is strutting around carrying your letter openly and if someone enquires him about it, he would hardly be able to hide and therefore in his foolish excitement, he will end up disgracing you. The sense is that such a careless flaky fellow does not deserve your affections. To my mind, the phrase na bane has no special play in this sher, it is a plain usage with minimal complications but I am sure it sends some scholars scurrying to find hidden meanings. 

Well, here is the rival making a fool of himself but look at the ploy used by the beloved herself in misuse of a public place: 

Samajh ke karte haiñ bāzār meñ vo pursish-e-hāl

ki   ye   kahe   ki   sar-e-rahguzar  hai  kyā  kahiye

(pursish-e-hāl: enquiry about welfare, sar-e-rahguzar: spang on the thoroughfare)

Shakespeare on rivalry in love. And jealousy, because of it or otherwise. I will try to bring more but for the nonce, enjoy what the artful villain Iago tells Othello in Othello to manipulate him into thinking of a non-existent rival who had stolen his love, telling him to be beware of his own jealousy, even as he does all he can to feed it. 

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls…

…Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy!

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss

Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger,

But, oh, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er

Who dotes, yet doubts— suspects, yet soundly loves!” 

In the bard’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he brings out this simple emotion rather simply with Valentine speaking to Proteus that, because the beloved was his, he is rich but he must follow her and his rival as love was prone to jealousy.

“…My foolish rival, that her father likes

Only for his possessions are so huge,

Is gone with her along, and I must after,

For love, thou know’st, is full of jealousy.”

Is nazākat kā  burā  ho vo bhale haiñ to  kyā

haath aaveñ to unheñ  haath lagā.e na bane

(nazākat: delicacy, softness, bhale; nice, good)

 

She may have a noble temperament but curse her superlative daintiness!  If she falls into my hands (of an ardent lover), it is of no use because her ethereal softness would deter anyone from even touching her, (let alone leading to any consummation in a union). The beloved, unlike in so many other creations of Ghālib, is blameless or at least not complicit; Fate seems to have played a cruel joke on the lover that she is so delicate. For example, in this famous sher, Ghālib’s sarcasm plays on her tenderness, which is also the reason for the lack of strength, physically, and more importantly, in her promises: “Tirī nāzukī se jaanā ki bañdhā thā ahd  bodā, kabhī  tū  na  toḌ  saktā  agar  ustuvār  hotā” (explained when we take up the next ghazal).

 

Ishq par zor nahīñ hai ye vo  ātish Ghālib

ki   lagā.e  na  lage  aur  bujhā.e  na bane

(ātish: fire, flame) 

The passion is love is something which cannot be controlled, it is that fire, which is not lit up easily even when I try to light it up labouriously, or, if put out, would not be extinguished. The sense is that you may wish that your love be reciprocated by the beloved on the strength of your desire and passion for her but it is not a fire that would be kindled so easily as there is no power which can ignite it coercively. At the same time, once you are deeply in love, the fire of your longing and passion cannot be curbed, howsoever you may try to extinguish it. A sublime interpretation can be added that true love is a heavenly benefaction and its creation or elimination is in divine hands. The sher is a quintessential Ghālib with energetic rhythm, coherence and limited complication, elegant, engaging and thought-provoking  and is amenable for paraphrasing in many ways. Paraphrasing? Enjoy this one from the poet Aatish: 

Ye   daulat  hai  usī    ke  ḥaq  kī  ho  jis  ke  muqaddar  meñ
mai-e-ulfat na ḳhum meñ hai na shīsha meñ na sāġhar meñ

(khum: decanter, shisha: glass, saghar: flagon)

 

Reverting to the bard, the glib one in sonnet 18 is replaced by perhaps a true lover with love which would not diminish, in sonnet 130 (and once again, like in case of the ‘fair youth’, I keep away from any misadventure to demystify the subject, the “dark lady”). Shakespeare unfolds the peculiarity of love, the true love, saying that the physical appearance and other outward signs of beauty and elegance, or lack of it, does not matter. And on being loved, despite all the blots and blotches is what makes the beloved truly beautiful.

 

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks…
.…And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare. 

Shakespeare spoke on love through a multitude of the characters in his plays as well as the lover in his sonnets and poems. Sonnet 116 is an oft-repeated choice for a quote on love so let us put it away right away. The bard here sees between minds as the truest and strongest and that it if it be true and strong, it is unceasing and eternal. 

…Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken… 

Love is simply love, uncomplicated, and you may well say that it is easy as pie. Yet, who would deny that it is extremely subjective and complex. It is all about chemistry between two people, embracing elements of emotions and behaviours, overseen by passion, affection, intimacy and commitment. It may also be argumentative but not logical. It may not be measurable, it is infinite. Only a charlatan would claim that he had worked it out, there is no device, arithmetic or formula. In the bard’s Antony and Cleopatra, the former replies to the latter, “There’s beggary in love that can be reckoned” when she asks, “If it be love indeed, tell me how much.” It would be a pretty stingy love if it could be counted and calculated and therefore, if there is a love that can be fully deciphered, then it perhaps is not love at all. 

Let me end it today with this immortal sher: 

Ye na thī hamārī qismat ki visāl-e-yār hotā

agar   aur   jiite   rahte    yah ī intizār   hotā

(visāl-e-yār: consummation of love with the beloved

It was not my good fortune to have cherished union with my beloved in my lifetime, but then, had I lived longer, I would still remain expectant in waiting for this rendezvous.)

(to be continued…)

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