Verse 1after 1821ardthaa
G3
1
he died in the [initial] threatening-- he who was not a gateway/subject of battle
2
Passion, a professional at battle, was a seeker of men/heroes
'Threatening, threat, menace, reprimand, snubbing'.
'Door, gate; chapter, section, division (of a book), head, heading; subject, affair, business, topic, matter'.
'Battle, engagement, war, contest'.
'A man; a male; a husband; —a brave or valiant man, a hero'.
| References | |
|---|---|
| Arshi, Imtiyaz Ali | Ghazal# 33 |
| Raza, Kalidas Gupta | 354 |
| Hamid Ali Khan | Open Image |
That person who was not a hero of the battlefield of passion died even during a threat. (7)
== Nazm page 7
Urdu text: Vajid 1902 {7}
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)
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)
[See his discussion of Mir's M 126,1 .]
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 and , which goes deeper than mere rhyme. Otherwise, I can't see what else is going on here. Another meditation on : 167,8 .
For more examples of , see 15,7 and 15,13 . 'Gateway' is not an ideal translation for , 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, is such a piquant word that it's easy to see how it might have appealed to Ghalib.
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