Ghazal 398x, Verse 2

Zamin:

Whether you would call the going-round of the prayer-beads the tenor and the two worlds the vehicle [of the simile], or the other way around, the gist is the same. That is, that the two worlds, and night and day in the world, are going round like prayer-beads, so that in the court of the Creator we would present a petition/prayer; and for that, the hearts of the world have become prayer-beads. 'A hundred' is only for an abundance of meaning, and for wordplay with prayer-beads.

== Zamin, p. 443

Gyan Chand:

asraar-e niyaaz = those words/ideas of secrecy and petition that the lover expresses to the beloved. Since for the secrecy-filled words/ideas of petition the simile of prayer-beads has been given, in the second line for the sake of wordplay a hundred hearts have been mentioned. In a string of prayer-beads there are a hundred beads. The hundred hearts are lovers' hearts that are filled with petition/prayer. What are the two worlds? The going-round of a single string of prayer-beads of lovers' petition/prayer.

Accordingly, the dawn keeps in its neck-opening-- that is, robe-- the cash of a hundred hearts that are to be offered in the presence of the beloved. The point is that except for the expression of petition/prayer in the presene of the True Beloved, the world is nothing at all.

== Gyan Chand, p. 463

FWP:

SETS
CHAK-E GAREBAN: {17,9}
ISLAMIC: {10,2}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}.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

Several sets of imagery are made to converge in this verse. Some (unmentioned) lover has a 'petition/prayer'; he desires so ardently to present it that the 'two worlds' (on 'two worlds' constructions, see {18,2}) are like beads in his set of prayer-beads-- beads that 'go round' as they pass through his fingers to keep track of the repetitions of his secret, inward prayers. Alternatively, the two worlds themselves act as a lover, and spontaneously behave like prayer-beads.

A na;zraanah (or na;zr ) is 'a gift, or present (offered or received, when people of rank meet, or pay their respects to, a prince)' (Platts p.1128). Such an offering is very proper for the occasion when a petitioner comes into the presence of one who could grant his petition. (See for example {25,4}.) In this case, the offering consists not of gold coins but of the 'cash/money of a hundred hearts'. As Zamin and Gyan Chand note, the number is 'one hundred' because that's how many beads there generally are on a string of prayer-beads; it also joins the 'two' worlds and the 'single' or 'one' string of prayer-beads, for a nice touch of wordplay.

These hundred hearts must be kept both hidden and available, for the longed-for audience with the beloved. A suitable place to keep them is the 'neck-opening' of the lover's garment. Of course, the neck-opening leads to the chest, where the heart in fact really is. But also, one of the lover's classic mad actions is the tearing open of this neck-opening, chaak-e garebaan ; for discussion and examples see {17,9}. If something is 'hidden' beneath the neck-opening, then the lover's mad destructiveness is exactly what will reveal it-- by making it visible, and/or by somehow manifesting the power of passion.

The neck-opening belongs to the dawn because of a well-established ghazal convention that dawn first appears as a thin line of light along the horizon (thus, in English, 'the crack of dawn'). This line can be imagined as the neck-opening of a collar. For discussion of this imagery, see {67,1}. Thus the connection between the lines: the two worlds act as prayer-beads, and the dawn acts as a collar.

They act so autonomously that we don't have to involve a human lover at all. For the verse contains no reference to the lover. It could well be read as a mystical expression of the way the whole cosmos longs for God.