Ghazal 7, Verse 1

Nazm:

That person who was not a hero of the battlefield of passion died even during a threat. (7)

== Nazm page 7

Vajid:

Urdu text: Vajid 1902 {7}

Bekhud Dihlavi:

The allusion is to Farhad ... I did not, as did Farhad, die of the threat of passion; rather, my whole life long I kept confronting the difficulties of passion in a manly way. (18)

Bekhud Mohani:

He has established Passion as a hero of the battlefield. And he says that whichever person couldn't endure to confront Passion died at the sight of Passion, and in the [initial] threatening. To take the field and confront Passion is a task for those with heart. (13)

Faruqi:

[See his discussion of Mir's M{126,1}.]

FWP:

SETS == REPETITION

Only the most seasoned and practiced warrior-heroes have the honor of grappling directly with Passion itself; the combat is so terrifying that lesser mortals die in the preliminaries, from the mere exchange of threats. A bout of boasting about yourself (and your ancestry, etc.) and sneering at your opponent used to be a standard prologue to any episode of single combat; the dastan world is full of examples.

Surely Ghalib was intrigued by the interplay between mard and nabard , which goes deeper than mere rhyme. Otherwise, I can't see what else is going on here. Another meditation on nabard : {167,8}.

For more examples of baab , see {15,7} and {15,13}. 'Gateway' is not an ideal translation for baab , nor is 'subject', but it's hard to think of anything better (see the definition above). In fact in the context of the first line, baab is such a piquant word that it's easy to see how it might have appealed to Ghalib.