Ghazal 285x, Verse 1

Asi:

You are low-natured, and your thoughts are so lofty that they have no limit or end. Oh selfish child, on this low-naturedness these thoughts seem to be as though someone takes up a staff that seems to be extremely unharmonious and bad.

== Asi, p. 111

Zamin:

Here, ;xvud-mu((aamalah means wilful and opinionated. He sought only to versify the idiom qad se ((a.saa buland , of which the meaning is 'to do work beyond one's courage and strength'. The word 'child' he brought in only for its wordplay with 'low-natured', and from this the verse went off into lowness of meaning. Because the beloved is addressed as 'child', and for the lover to call the beloved 'low-natured' and to satiririze her is, in the religion of lover-ship, heresy.... If in place of 'child' there were 'Shaikh', then in every way it would have been harmonious, because it's this very 'Shaikh' who is desirous of turning from man into the Lord.

== Zamin, p. 160

Gyan Chand:

;xvud-mu((aamalah = one who would want to complete all his work without the help of anyone else. The addressee can be any low-natured person at all. 'You are a person of small/minor temperament, and you think of such very grand ideas! Your case is like that of a headstrong, self-willed, erroneous child who would go walking with a staff longer than his stature. Obviously he will not manage to handle it.'

== Gyan Chand, p. 197

FWP:

SETS == IDIOMS
INDEPENDENCE: {9,1}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.

Even on first reading qad se ((a.saa buland sounds as if it ought to be a proverb, and fortunately Zamin confirms it as such; though Asi and Gyan Chand don't seem to recognize it, so perhaps it was not so widely known. A staff might be used as a weapon, or more commonly as a walking stick; but in either case, a staff longer than the user's height would be almost impossible to manipulate, and thus would not be functional.

Moreover, buland has conspicuously lofty associations: 'high, lofty, tall; elevated, exalted, sublime'. Thus the proverb might envision the staff as a 'sceptre' (see the definition above), so that the idea might be that of a king or ruler who's unable to 'measure up' to the position.

In either case, a 'child' makes a very suitable addressee, because a child would be too short or 'low' in stature to carry a long staff, and too immature to be able to wield a sceptre. And by calling the child 'low-natured', the verse makes it clear that there's a moral problem as well, for pastii is exactly the opposite of bulandii (see the definitions above). Thus the pair made an elegant title for a novel by Aziz Ahmad: aisii bulandii aisii pastii (translated by Ralph Russell under the title 'The shore and the wave').

But why ;xvud-mu((aamalah ? The commentators provide plausible and negative-sounding guesses, but guesses they remain. The only thing we can be sure of is that the child is 'self-dealing' in some sense; presumably he is heedless of others, and is guided only by his own desires and opinions and thoughts. But of course, we also know from the first line that his thoughts are 'very lofty'! So is he really wrong to be guided by them? (On Ghalib's cult of 'independence', see {9,1}.) Perhaps the child is fighting against his own 'low' nature, and stubbornly trying to rise above it. Perhaps the speaker is warning the child, or even commiserating with him, about the difficulty of what he is undertaking. Perhaps the whole verse is even a back-handed compliment-- even if the child's effort is doomed to fail, might it not be admirable?