Had Ghalib foreseen that his lifelong lament over neglect would one day transmute into posthumous immortality, he might have refrained from writing the very couplet whose first line is partly used as this title. Yet destiny, that inscrutable arbiter, had reserved for him a fame unimagined in his lifetime. If there was one discerning mind who lent architecture to Ghalib’s Taj Mahal of Urdu poetry, it was Dr Abdur Rahman Bijnori — a name as luminous as it is tragic. His seminal treatise, Mahāsin-e-Kalām-e-Ghalib, published in 1918, became the watershed that restored Ghalib to the exalted place he so rightfully deserved.
Alas, the architect of this critical edifice himself succumbed to the cruel irony of fate. At merely thirty-three, Bijnori fell to the raging Spanish Flu in Bhopal — the same year his masterpiece appeared after his departure. Thus, the scholar who turned the tide of posterity in Ghalib’s favour became, in turn, a victim of time’s own ruthless brevity. He rode, as it were, the steed of recognition into eternity before his dawn had fully broken.
But by then the tide had changed. The brilliance of Bijnori’s pen had carried Ghalib’s name across the subcontinent and beyond, toward the very hall of fame the poet had once thought forever barred to him. Yet somewhere deep within his soul, Ghalib must have sensed the faint tremor of that coming acknowledgment — else how could he have written with such haunting irony:
Ho ga koi aisa bhi jo Ghalib ko na jaane;
Sha’er to woh achha hai, pah badnam bohat hai
Indeed, the “Ghalib-e-khasta” whom his age misunderstood became, through the eyes of one gone too soon, the eternal emblem of Urdu’s grandeur.
Haroon Rashid Siddiqi
Karachi
