S. R. Faruqi:

The word ḥāl means 'state, condition', and also 'the present age'. With pareshānī , to have majmūʿah is also fine, especially because a divan of poetry is also called a 'collection'.

This is a verse of 'mood' [kaifiyat], but there's also a great deal of meaning. This is Mir's special style, and wasn't bestowed on anyone else. Consider the aspects of meaning given below. They are in addition to those aspects of 'iham' [īhām] that I have mentioned above (that is, between the word majmūʿah and the word ḥāl there's an iham).

(1) Addressing the beloved or the reader, he has said that if you want to look at the conditions of the time, then look at my divan.

(2) All my topsy-turviness (whether of the heart, or external) is enclosed within this divan.

(3) Other people do look at this divan. You (the beloved) too, please just look at it.

(4) Despite all the topsy-turviness this book is worth looking through; that is, there's also a kind of pleasure in it.

Mus'hafi has also composed this theme, but not with such excellence, although his use of the word aḥvāl is very fresh:

dekhe jo koʾī ġhor se dīvāñ mire to hāñ
har bait hai zamāne kī aḥvāl kī kitāb

[if anyone would look attentively at my divan then, indeed,
every verse is a book-- of conditions, of the age]

Both these verses refute, in any case, the point of view that says that our poets live in an imaginary world. Indeed, it's true that with us the style of expressing reality is not that in Western representations of events.

FWP:

SETS == POETRY
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == DIVAN; IHAM; MOOD

I'm not sure how strictly SRF means to use the term 'iham' here. I don't really see that the term can be applied, in its technical sense defined by Mir himself. For discussion of iham problems, see {178,1}.

The real delight of the verse is of course Mir's elegantly calling his divan a 'collection of scatteredness'. For similar wordplay with 'scatteredness', see

{2,1}.