FWP:
Here is a verse of outright royal flattery; the next verse in this ghazal, {218,2}, is another such. (For others, check out some of the references to the King.) It's not the kind of verse we read Ghalib for. But still, its tank isn't quite empty either; there's a small amount of literary juice in it.
From the first line, we expect that something feminine will be humiliated, crushed, perhaps suffering. That something will of course be a noun, rather than a woman-- since the beloved, who is the only woman in the ghazal world (if she's in fact a woman at all), is always grammatically masculine. Under mushairah performance conditions, of course, we are made to wait as long as can conveniently be managed before we can hope to find out more of the story.
The second line is indeed, as Bekhud Dihlavi notes, clear in its meaning. But it's rendered less prosy and ho-hum by some enjoyable word- and meaning-play. For we know that dust is humble by definition, with usually nothing special about it; and the dust at the edge of the road has no claim to fame whatsoever. Moreover, that particular dust has just been 'trampled down' and 'crushed' and 'laid waste' by the King's entourage.
Thus it's all the more remarkable and amusing that this dust, far from complaining or groveling or suffering, engages in a kind of strutting or swaggering. And its attitude has a clever physical correlate: we notice that the dust in question is beside or, literally, by the 'head' [sar], of the roadway. For raising one's head is a classic idiomatic sign of pride or self-assertion: the meanings of sar-kash , literally 'head-pulling-up', include 'proud, arrogant, insolent' (Platts p.648); the meanings of sar u;Thaanaa , literally 'to raise the head', include 'to rise up; to look up; to exalt oneself' (Platts p.649). The behavior of the dust is paradoxical not only in an abstract sense (upon being humiliated, it gives itself airs), but in a literal, physical sense (upon being trampled down underfoot, it lifts up its head).
It's true that technically the 'head' doesn't belong to the dust, but to the side of the road. But the verse is so arranged that we can't help but make the strong association. Indeed, this association is a large part of whatever limited poetic pleasure the verse affords; and the fact that it's a do-it-yourself connection adds to the enjoyment. And there's also an 'elegance in assigning a cause' aspect-- next time we see a cloud of roadside dust floating up, or 'raising its head', or 'swaggering', after being trampled (and thus of course stirred up) by a procession, we'll know the real reason.
The commentators realize that their own readers won't know the word kaukabah , and they are careful to explain it. They follow Nazm in defining kaukabah as ardalii (used as a plural noun), which according to Platts is derived from the English 'orderly' (in the sense in which senior military officers have orderlies as messengers and servants). According to Platts, an ardalii is 'An orderly; a peon in regular attendance on an official; an attendant who runs before his master's conveyance' (p.40). An ardalii is thus a very humble functionary. This is quite a shift of nuance from kaukabah , with its overtones of grandeur and pageantry ('royal train, retinue, cavalcade; splendour'). Maybe it's also the shift from an imperially Persianized model of hierarchy to a (semi-militarized) colonial one?
Here (from wikimedia) is a truly enjoyable panorama of Bahadur Shah (Zafar) and his retinue (1843). Click on the image for a huge scan:
Nazm:
kaukabah are those people who remain in the king's ardalii [from 'orderly': servants who run before the royal conveyance]. (249)
== Nazm page 249