S. R. Faruqi:

The poverty of our dictionary-writing is such that in many dictionaries be-ḍhang doesn't appear. Although Platts and Fallon have indeed included it, and have given meanings of 'improper, rustic, uneducated', etc. Barkati too has entered it, and given almost the same meaning as I have noted. Then, aġhlāl meaning 'the chains that are put on the necks of criminals and madmen' is masculine, but its singular ġhul is not used alone in this sense. (See

{17,1}.)

And salāsil is the plural of silsilah , meaning 'chains', but in Urdu it is used as singular. This word is feminine; keeping this in mind, in the second line everybody has adopted the reading of apnī bhī instead of apne bhī .

The opening-verse is apparently commonplace; whatever freshness it has is in be-ḍhang . Otherwise, Mir has already used this theme excellently in

{1319,9}.

If we reflect a bit, then we realize that the opening-verse and the second verse [ḥusn-e mat̤laʿ] are connected. Without being brought together with the opening-verse, the ḥusn-e mat̤laʿ (or zeb-e mat̤laʿ ; both terms mean the same thing) does not have a complete meaning, because in it there's no agent. If we don't take the madman from the opening verse to be the agent in the second verse, then the second verse has no agent and remains incomprehensible. Thus we ought to consider both verses together. (For a detailed discussion of the ḥusn-e mat̤laʿ , see

{930,1}.)

When both verses are read together, the very world of the theme changes.

[In {1781,2}], this whole world is a house of bondage, and all its inhabitants are madmen. For this very reason they have been imprisoned in the prison of the world. But these restraints and bonds are not only on hands and feet, heads and necks; rather, they are also on tongues. Here, the prisoners have no permission to speak. Or again, these prisoners have now become so dismal and moribund, the trouble and constraint of imprisonment have made them so low in spirits, that they neither speak with their mouths nor gesture with their heads.

Over the whole prison-house, a silence like that of death prevails. This is not the silence of the 'amazement of passion', which we have already seen in

{292,6}.

It is also not the silence of having been worn down and defeated, as in Mir Dard's peerless, 'dramatic' verse:

uṭhtī nahīñ hai ḳhānah-e zanjīr se ṣadā
dekho to kyā sabhī yih giriftār so gaʾe

[it does not arise from the chain-room, the voice/cry
if you look, then have all these captives gone to sleep?]

In Mir's present verses there's a kind of moribund, death-like silence that can be sought to be broken not by conversation or sighing and moaning, but by shaking and rattling one's chains. These prisoners are in such a state of fear and dread that when they say that they will not remain silent, what they mean is that they are praying that some rude/crude kind of madman would come and set their neck-collars and chains to jangling.

Now the meaningfulness of saying be-ḍhang sā dīvānah becomes clear-- that an experienced madman, who would be aware of the rules and constraints of that prison-house, would not have the courage to speak, or to rattle his chains. If there would be some awkward/unmannerly, rustic new prisoner, who would know nothing about the conditions there-- if he would come, then he would have the courage to jangle the chains.

Now let's pay additional attention to the second line of the second verse. [For discussion of this see {1781,2}.]

If we consider these two verses to illustrate human existence and life in the world (and this is entirely fitting too, because {1781,2} speaks of the 'prison of the world'), then they can be taken as criticism of the whole arrangement of the universe and of life-- and also as the story of human melancholy, since we are obliged to live in this world and we don't have the power/right, or the courage, to raise a cry of need.

We are like those madmen who have been bound with neck-collars and chains and flung into prison, and whose condition is now so abject that in order even to jangle their chains (that is, to make the usual expression of madness) they are waiting for a newly-imprisoned madman.

FWP:

SETS == EXCLAMATION
MOTIFS == BONDAGE; MADNESS
NAMES
TERMS == OPENING-VERSE; VERSE-SET

In his discussion of {930,1} SRF says that a ḥusn-e mat̤laʿ is like a verse-set, except that a verse-set cannot contain an opening-verse. So we might think of the term as referring to a verse-set located at the beginning of a ghazal. Whatever the terminology, this verse and {1781,2} are clearly linked. This one can stand on its own, but {1781,2} cannot, as SRF points out.

Whose chains is the longed-for new madman begged to rattle? The apnī of course means basically 'own', officially with reference to the subject of the sentence. SRF takes it colloquially as the speaker's own (short for hamārī apnī ) chains, but it could with even greater grammatical plausibility refer to the newcomer's own chains. The newcomer would thus be begged to come in and make a noise in that silent prison, by rattling his chains. This possibility is surely at least as plausible as that he would somehow, and for some unknown reason, rattle someone else's chains. It also works very well with {1781,2}: by loudly rattling his chains he would perhaps inspire the speaker (and others?) to similarly rattle their own chains.

Note for grammar fans: In the second line hilā jāve looks as if it ought to be, grammatically speaking, short for hilā kar jāve , 'having caused to move, would go'. But in this particular case, it's probably not. Here are some other things that it's not:

= hil jāve , 'would move', a colloquial form of the intransitive hile , from hilnā (parallel to ā jāve , 'would come')

= hilāyā jāve , 'would be caused to move', the passive, from hilānā

= hilātā jāve , 'would go on causing to move', a continuative, from hilānā

I mention these because many of my students used to find this kind of thing confusing. We who learn the language in a kitābī way need to know the grammar, so we tend to value it. But it's always possible that some special idiomatic thing may have been going on with Mir's usage, so it's good to be flexible as well, and stay alert for colloquial subtleties.

In this case I had doubts, so I consulted my teacher, C. M. Naim. He said (January 2018) that he considers hilā jāve to be not kar -deletion but a kind of idiomatic 'intensifier'. He offered the same view about uṭhā jāve in {1781,2} and pā jāve in {1781,12}. In all three cases these are transitive verbs used with intransitive auxiliary verbs, so they don't fit easily into regular compound-verb paradigms. But the only way we can tell that such cases do not represent kar -deletion is through the semantic context. More examples: {722,10}; {1807x,1}; {1871,7}.