Mirza Ghalib - Discovery of Soul Through Poetry Versus Riches


I found this sher by Mirza Ghalib in a katha by Maskeen ji, and it made me think of Kabir:

Sukhan kya keh nahi sakte ke joya hoon jawahir ka
Jigar kya hum nahi rakhte jo khoden hum maidan Ko

सुख़न क्या कह नहीं सकते कि जूया हूँ जवाहिर के 
जिगर क्या हम नहीं रखते कि खोदें जा के मादन को 

Translation
Can't we just say verses instead of seeking jewels?
Don't we have a soul? Why do we need to dig mines?

Reflection: 
Why do we need
to dig mountains when 
we have a soul to dig deeper

Why do we 
need to seek jewels
when we can write verses

Weaving the Soul’s Wealth: Kabir’s Legacy (and Ours)


The Loom of Kabir’s Life

Sant Kabir Das was born in the 15th century to a family of weavers in Varanasi, his hands calloused by thread long before they spun verses. He never learned to read, yet he rewrote the spiritual imagination of India. Kings and clerics scorned him; he answered in couplets that cut deeper than swords. When he died, legend says his body dissolved into flowers—a fitting end for a man who turned the raw fabric of existence into something holy.

Poverty as a Sacred Craft

Kabir worked his loom by day, his poetry by night. He refused patronage, preferring the honesty of blistered hands and an empty bowl. To the world, he was a poor weaver. To those who listened, he was richer than emperors—because he understood a truth we often forget: what looks like lack can be the sharpest tool for carving meaning.

I slowly transitioned from work to music and poetry. Not for fame or money, but because music poetry began to hum in me louder than any other song. There’s a strange kinship in abandoning one art for another, in walking away from applause to sit alone with words. Kabir would’ve laughed at my hesitation. What’s a career, he’d say, when the soul is hungry?

Mining the Invisible

Kabir’s poems are full of grinding stones, tangled thread, and marketplace dust—the stuff of ordinary life. Yet in his hands, these became mirrors for the divine. His famous lines:

"The way of the Hindu and Muslim is one,
this the Sat-guru has shown me."

…aren’t just theology. They’re the manifesto of an artist who refused to dig where others told him to. Why chase gold, he asks, when the real treasure is the act of seeing itself?

When I slowly transitioned, people called it a sacrifice. But Kabir whispers: What did you lose? Only what was never yours. The poems that come now are rougher, truer. They don’t pay the bills. But they glow in the dark.

The Wealth That Outlives Us

Kabir’s physical works—the Bijak, the Adi Granth—are only shadows of what he actually gave: a way to stand naked before the world and call it holy. Five centuries later, farmers still sing his verses in fields. Scholars dissect them in classrooms. Why? Because he proved that real art isn’t measured in coin, but in how long it keeps breathing after you’re gone.

Rilke wrote: "For the creator, there is no poverty." Emily Dickinson called her small room "Possibility." These aren’t platitudes. They’re maps left by those who traded safety for depth.

A Letter to My Younger Self (and Anyone Else Who’s Afraid to Begin Again)

Dear musician who worries he’s too old to change:
Kabir wove cloth until his fingers ached, then wove the universe into poems.
You don’t abandon one thing for another.
You follow the thread deeper.

You need no gold when your breath glows with light.
You need no mountains when your heart holds galaxies.

Even kings and emperors, with all their wealth and dominion, cannot compare to an ant filled with the love of God.
— Guru Nanak 


Found on Maskeen Ji's lecture: https://shivpreetsingh.blogspot.com/2020/09/mirza-ghalib-discovery-of-soul-through.html


suḳhan kyā kah nahīñ sakte kih jūyā hoñ javāhir ke
jigar kyā ham nahīñ rakhte kih khodeñ jā ke maʿdan ko

1a) can we not compose/say poetry-- that we would be a seeker of jewels [instead]?
1b) what's the idea?! you can't say that we would be a seeker of jewels!
1c) it's hardly [mere] poetry/speech!-- can we not say that we would would be a seeker of jewels?

2a) don't we have a liver-- that we would go and dig in a mine/quarry [instead]?
2b) don't we have the guts/courage to go and dig in a mine/quarry?

Notes:
suḳhan : 'Speech, language, discourse, word, words; --thing, business affair (syn. bāt )'. (Platts p.645)

 

jigar : 'The liver; the vitals; the heart; mind; spirit, courage'. (Platts p.384)

*PLATTS DICTIONARY ONLINE*

Nazm:
That is, to abrade the liver and bring out damp/fresh [tar] verse is better than to dig in a mine and bring out jewels. (129)

== Nazm page 129

Bekhud Dihlavi:
He says, to make metrical verses through trouble/anxiety [jigar-kārī] is of a higher rank than to dig in a mine and bring out jewels. (183)

Bekhud Mohani:
He has beautifully said that verses are better than jewels and trouble/anxiety [jigar-kārī] is better than digging in a mine. (244)

FWP:
SETS == KIH; KYA; PARALLELISM; POETRY; SUBJECT?
JIGAR: {2,1}
SPEAKING: {14,4}

The parallelism of structure suggests the obvious meanings (1a) and (2a), two indignant rhetorical questions that are hard to translate both accurately and lucidly in English. 'Can't we compose poetry?! (Of course we can!) So why would we do an inferior thing like seeking jewels?' Similarly: 'Don't we have a liver?! (Of course we do!) So why would we do an inferior thing like digging in a mine?' The commentators all paraphrase the implication: that composing poetry is better than seeking jewels, and digging into one's liver (for poetic emotions or effects) is better than digging in a mine (for jewels).

But surely no one who knows Ghalib expects the verse to stop with anything so one-dimensional. The first line begins after all with the doubly multivalent suḳhan kyā , which is open to at least a couple of alternative readings. If the expression is taken to be like kyā bāt [hai] (1b), then it marks an exclamation of astonishment or even indignation: 'What's this that you say?!', 'What an idea!'. And it's then very plausible to imagine the rest of the utterance addressed to someone else, since no subject is present in the verse, and the masculine plural verb could easily apply to some āp -- someone who has insulted the speaker, perhaps, by suggesting that he was merely a jewel-miner. Alternatively, the phrase can suggest that what is being called 'poetry' is not really a mere form of words at all (1c), but in fact is something much more valuable-- something like jewels, mined with trouble and pain from deep within. (For a comparable usage see {20,6}.)

Similarly, in the second line the obvious first interpretation can be reimagined so as to yield another possibility: jigar rakhnā can mean 'to have heart/courage/guts' (for something). So the speaker might also be indignantly rejecting the idea that he didn't have the guts to go dig in a mine (2b), perhaps in order to wrest from the depths the real 'jewels' of poetry (1c).

In short, the search for poetry either isn't, or is, like the search for jewels. (And even if it is, the search for jewels itself at once becomes a metaphor for the search for poetry.) More permutations could be devised, but the ones I've outlined at least suffice to show the complexity of the possibilities. Here's Ghalib being Ghalib, and in excellent form. Which means that we're left to mix and match to our own (lack of) satisfaction, every time we encounter the verse.

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