'The Somnath of My Imagination' The Indo-Persian Pluralistic and Cosmopolitan Urbanity of Mirza Ghalib's Banaras

Abstract

Banaras is often recognized today through popular media and even scholarly discourse as a metonym for Hindu India, ignoring its substantial Muslim presence and socio-cultural contributions to the city. My translation of Mirza Ghalib’s (1797–1869) Persian long poem in praise of Banaras, Chiragh-e-Dair (1826), as Temple Lamp in 2022 represents an attempt to showcase a 19th-century Turkic-Indian Muslim poet’s representation of the Hindu holy city. In this close reading of the poem, alongside historical contextualization, I elucidate how Ghalib’s Banaras is both real and symbolic, and transcends the shahr-ashob tradition of Persianate poetry on the city. Ghalib is shown to present readers an outward looking view of the city, linking it to the Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans to Bengal, as well as the Silk route—drawing connections to China—connecting Hinduism to Islam and the Hebraic, and seeing the city of Kashi/Banaras as comparable to the Kaaba and Paradise. Ghalib also uses vocabulary that emphasises the city as one’s country or locus of cosmopolitan belonging and as the place for civilisation, society, and friendship. The city’s close connections to river/ water, forests, spirituality, and the vivacity of its people’s bodies and lives are all highlighted. Ghalib thus provides us with a unique Indo-Persian, composite view of this singular city, albeit from a largely elite perspective. The cross-religious translation of concepts works almost like a kind of conversion, giving this distinctive Hindustani cosmopolitanism a most interesting gloss.