FWP:
SETS == DOUBLE ACTIVATION
There's a marked disagreement over man:zuur , with Nazm insisting it has only its more literal meaning (2b), and Bekhud Mohani (with his usual desire to contradict Nazm) insisting it has only its more commonly used meaning (2a). The controvery itself reveals the centrality of the word; its doubly activated meanings are one of the verse's chief pleasures, since the grammar of the second line is carefully arranged to elicit, and use, both meanings.
Faruqi does a good job of explicating the pro-waist view (held by 'ordinary people') and the anti-waist view (held by the true lover). (For more on the beloved's classic lack of a waist, see {99,4}.) As he points out, both views are consistent with the existence of God.
Other word choices in the verse also work well with its mystical inclinations. The word used for 'beloved' is the philosophically fertile term shaahid (for a reminder of its resonances, see {98,6}). And the word ma:tlaq has both the sense of absoluteness proper to God, and the meaning of 'free, unconfined'-- which at once calls into question the idea that such a God could ever have a 'waist', even (or especially?) one like the world.
This is a verse in which there is clearly a divine, not a human, beloved; for other such verses, see {20,10}.
In the first line, God is credited with absolute 'existence'. Then in the second line, people say the cleverly unqualified hai , meaning 'it is'-- or, of course, 'it exists' (or even 'He exists'), so that we are reminded of the first line. But then, what is the (unstated) 'it'? I see three possibilities: (1) the proposition expressed in the first line (which the 'people' are affirming); (2) the idea that the waist exists; and (3) as a corollary, the idea that the world exists.
The three verses that Arshi suggests for comparison are well chosen, and show the lines along which Ghalib's poetic thought processes move when he's in these abstract domains. Needless to say, they don't resolve any questions. But surely we don't expect them to. A ghazal verse is not, after all, a philosophical disquisition. The idea that the world is God's tiny, almost invisible waist is so strange and fascinating (and amusing) that two piquant little lines seem hardly enough to pose and also complexly explore it. Yet here they are, and pose and explore it they do.
Compare Mir's similarly deft and enjoyable use of heavy-duty Sufistic concepts for the beloved's body: M{1421,2}.
Nazm:
That is, the world has just such a relationship with being, as the waist does with the beloved-- we hear only its name, and it's not visible. The author has here used the word man:zuur in its meaning of 'seen', not in its idiomatic sense of 'favored'. (105)
== Nazm page 105