GHAZAL

The ghazal is a form of lyrical poetry. It is originally exotic to South Asia, as is

indicated by the very sounds of the name itself when properly pronounced as ġazal,

with its very un-Indian initial rolled ‘g’. But like many exotics which have long been

transplanted into a new environment, over the centuries of its life in South Asia the

ghazal was successfully adapted and developed, first in Persian, then in Urdu, now

also in other South Asian languages. The continuing popularity of this adaptable form

is testimony to its enduring significance as one of the major poetic and musical forms

of modern Indo-Pakistani culture.

Origins and Earlier Development

While it has close analogies in Arabic poetry, the ghazal is of Persian origin. Formally

a short lyric composed in a single metre with a single rhyme throughout, in its style

and content it is a genre which has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of

expression around its central theme of love. The ghazal is thus itself one of the most

striking examples of those successful cultural artefacts, consisting of a seemingly

infinitely adaptable combination of essentially simple elements, which are so

characteristic of the Persianate civilization of the eastern Islamic world. Immensely

popular over many centuries and across a huge geographical area, the ghazal was

cultivated over the whole of this world, at least from quite early in the second

millennium CE. Besides the vast numbers of ghazals composed in Persian itself, the

genre was later also intensively cultivated in the other literatures which were heavily

shaped by Persian, notably those composed in Ottoman Turkish and in Urdu.1

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 In the early mediaeval period the most prestigious form of courtly Persian

poetry was the qasida, a lengthy formal ode taken over from Arabic.2 The ghazal thus

seems first to have been seriously cultivated not in the courts of the sultans but at the

centres of the Sufis, and one of the first and greatest collections (divan) of mystical

ghazals was that composed by Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) of Konya. The ghazal soon

came also to be cultivated by court poets who evolved an ingeniously ambiguous

combination of human romance with mystical love for the divine. The greatest master

of the ghazal in this, its classic form was Hafiz (d. 1399) of Shiraz.3

The form was also cultivated in India during the period of the Delhi Sultanate,

most notably by Amir Khusrau (d. 1325) of Delhi, nowadays celebrated as a national

icon retrospectively credited with a huge variety of cultural achievements, but whose

classical reputation as the ‘parrot of India’ (tuti-ye hind) rested on his Persian ghazals,

which are typically more direct than those of Hafiz. Under lavish Mughal patronage,

India later became the most important centre for the cultivation of the courtly Persian

ghazal by both émigré and native-born poets. The fashion was now for the baroque

expression of the ‘Indian style’ (sabk-e hindi) with its marked rhetorical and

conceptual elaboration of the ghazal, which reached its apogee in India with Sa’ib (d.

1677) of Tabriz and Bedil (d. 1721) of Patna.

Although the divan of Hafiz continues to be sold in Pakistan with Urdu

glosses as a fortune-telling oracle, local knowledge of vast heritage of the Indo-

Persian ghazal has been lost with the disappearance of Persian from South Asia.4 The

ghazal is nowadays associated in India and Pakistan primarily with Urdu, although

this connection is itself a relatively recent one. Urdu ghazals were written in the

seventeenth century in the Muslim courts of the Deccan, typically in an attractively

simple style which included some elements of indigenous Indian romantic poetry. But

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it was the elaborate rhetoric of the courtly Persian ghazal which was transplanted into

the mainstream Urdu poetic tradition which was thereby enabled rapidly to emerge in

fully-fledged form in the eighteenth century courts of Delhi and Lucknow in the work

of such masters as Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810). It is Ghalib (d. 1869) who is now regarded

as the greatest of all classical Urdu poets,5 although he professed to set greater store

by his more abundant compositions in Persian. Since the classical Urdu ghazal6 is the

key reference point for all later developments in South Asia, its typical formal and

rhetorical features need now to be outlined.

Formal Features

The ghazal is defined as a poetic genre by its formal features, for whose description

there is a traditional set of technical terms of mostly Arabic origin,7 quite distinct

from the traditional vocabulary of Indian poetics. These features may be illustrated by

reference to the short early nineteenth-century ghazal8 by the Urdu poet Atish (d.

1847) which is transcribed and translated below.

Like all ghazals, it consists of a series of rhymed verses (shi’r), each

symmetrically divided into two half-verses (misra’). This ghazal has five verses,

usually reckoned the minimum number needed to make up a complete ghazal, with

about a dozen being the normal maximum. (The verses of the ghazal are quite often

described in English as ‘couplets’, but the implied analogy with English poetry is

somewhat misleading.)

The formal structure (tarah, zamin) of a ghazal is defined by its metre (bahr)

and its rhyme, which are both maintained consistently throughout the poem. Thus

each half-verse is written in the same metrical pattern of alternating short (S) and long

(L) syllables. There are about half a dozen Persian-derived ghazal metres in standard

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use. The metre used here is called mujtas, where each half-verse has the metrical

pattern SLSL SSLL SLSL LL, denoted in the traditional mnemonic system of

meaningless syllables (afaa’iil) as mafaa’ilun fa’ilaatun mafaa’ilun fi’lun.

Each full verse is end-stopped, with the ending marked by a highly defined

rhyme, in this case the polysyllabic -u karte, which would be divided by the

traditional rhetoric into the qafiya or ‘rhyme proper’ –u and the radif or ‘end-rhyme’

karte. The prominence of the rhyme is underlined by its repetition at the end of both

halves of the opening verse (matla’). The ending of the poem is marked by the

inclusion in the final verse (maqta’) of the poet’s pen-name (takhallus), a Persian

word adopted as signature.

yih arzu thi tujhe gul ke rubaru karte

ham aur bulbul-e betab guftagu karte.

payambar na muyassar hua to khub hua

zaban-e ghair se kya sharh-e arzu karte.

meri tarah se mah-o mihr bhi hain avara

kisi habib ki yih bhi hain justaju karte.

jo dekhte tere zanjir-e zulf ka alam

asir hone ki azad arzu karte.

na puch alam-e bargashta-tali’i Atish

barasti ag jo baran ki arzu karte.

(‘My desire was to set you opposite the rose

so I might discuss you with the pining nightingale.

It was good that no messenger was available:

how could another’s tongue have set out my desire?

Like me, the sun and moon are wandering:

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 they too are searching for someone that they love.

Those who see what the chain of your long hair is like

freely desire their own imprisonment.

Do not ask about my ill-starred condition, Atish:

it is a raining fire which desires the rain.’)

Rhetoric and Performance of the Classical Ghazal

The classical ghazal in Urdu is a highly wrought art form collectively defined by its

language, which is highly Persianized in register with frequent use of the izafats –e

‘of’ and –o ‘and’, and the complex imagery and rhetoric previously evolved over

many centuries in Persian. All these elements go together with a tension between the

formal strictness of the ghazal as a poem with monometre and monorhyme and the

discontinuity of the individual verses. Famously described by Sir William Jones as

‘Orient pearls at random strung’, these are normally united only in their ability to

draw separately upon an immense store of well established imagery whose elements

interlock with one another, and which in the style favoured by the classical Urdu

masters are given a top spin of rhetorical polish.9

In this ghazal, the state of the poet as ardent lover in distress is successively

likened to a variety of traditional images in verses given point by the ingenuity with

which the conceits are handled. The opening verse with its double rhyme illustrates

the typical juxtaposition of the rose (gul) with its lover the nightingale (bulbul), here

paralleled by the poet and the beloved, whom the rules of the ghazal dictate should

generally be portrayed in quite abstract terms, and who should be referred to in Urdu

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in the masculine gender by mechanical preservation of the ambiguity inherent in the

lack of grammatical gender in Persian.

The next verse plays with the familiar conceit of the morning breeze in the

garden which acts as the poet’s messenger, while the following one represents a

familiar aggrandizement of the poetic persona through comparison of his state with

those of the heavenly bodies. The fourth verse moves to the celebration of one of the

principal features of the beloved’s beauty, those long tresses which may be described

as overpowering with their scent, as enfolding in their coils like serpents, or with this

image of their imprisoning lovers in their chains. In the final couplet, the literal

meaning ‘fire’ of poet’s pen-name Atish is exploited to yield an image which

combines two of the natural elements in an evocation of the lover’s state of yearning

for the fulfilment of his unrequited passion.

This, then, is a characteristic example of a highly aristocratic art form, which

was intimately associated with the Urdu culture which flourished in the late Mughal

period, where ghazal verses were an integral part of the education and the

conversation of the nawabi class.10 More formally, the ghazal was an important

performance art in several different settings, reflecting the ambiguities typical of the

ghazal’s expression.11 The voice of the serious male poet was heard in the competitive

poetic symposium (musha’ira), which favoured recitation either as rhythmic speech

(taht ul lafz) or in the chanting style called tarannum.12 Musical performance by

professionals was also important. Ghazals of a mystical inspiration were suited to the

rhythmic performance at Sufi shrines called qawwali, while romantic feelings of a

more human type were evoked in all-male audiences at the salon performances

(mahfil, mujra) by professional courtesans (tawa’if).13 The memory of all these and

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the more elaborate settings of performance at royal courts has itself come to form a

part of the romantic mystique of the ghazal.14

The Modern Ghazal

While this remembered association with the old Urdu culture has continued to

underpin its subsequent appeal, the ghazal has also proved capable of remarkable

adjustments to the major cultural shifts characteristic of the colonial period and of

contemporary India and Pakistan and their overseas diasporas.

Following the substantial destruction of the old aristocratic order after the

suppression of the uprising of 1857, the ghazal became increasingly associated with

the new middle class. The values of this class, which were substantially influenced by

those typical of the late nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie, dictated the

modification of many features of the classical ghazal, whose elaborate rhetoric came

to be seen as false and artificial, and whose seductive openness to extra-marital

infatuation in all its varieties came to be regarded as somehow shameful. During the

colonial period, it was the Urdu poet Hali (d. 1914) who provided the most sustained

critique along these lines, and it was the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938)

who provided the most memorable demonstration of the serious possibilities of the

ghazal. Although now challenged by the nazm, the thematic poem strongly influenced

by nineteenth-century English models which became the chief vehicle for the

expression in Urdu of the ideals of nationalism for the expression of serious ideas, the

ghazal too adaptable to conveying the message of nationalist poets.15

The remarkable resilience of the Urdu ghazal was nevertheless mainly

demonstrated by its continuing dominant position as a medium for the expression of

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that private romantic sensibility which is everywhere so closely identified with the

values of the middle class. A short early poem by the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz

(d. 1984),16 by far the most popular Urdu poet of the later twentieth century, gives a

good idea of the modern ghazal, which is traditional in form, Persianized in language,

and delicately modern in feeling. The metre is the common muzari’, scanning LLS

LSLS SLLS LSL (maf’uulu faa’ilaatu mafaa’iilu faa’ilun), with the rhyme –ar ke:

donon jahan teri muhabbat men har ke

voh ja raha hai koi shab-e gham guzar ke.

viran hai maikada khum-o saghar udas hain

tum kya gae ki ruth gae din bahar ke.

ik fursat-e gunah mili voh bhi char din

dekhe hain ham ne hausale parvardagar ke.

dunya ne teri yad se begana kar diya

tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham rozgar ke.

bhule se muskara to diye the voh aj Faiz

mat puch valvale dil-e nakardakar ke.

(‘With both worlds forfeited through loving you

there goes someone after a night spent in pain.

The tavern is in ruins, the wine-jar and the goblet are sad:

what a walk-out you staged to make the springtime sulk!

I got one opportunity for sin, but only for a few days:

I have seen the Provider’s plans for me.

The world has alienated me from memories of you,

Even you are outcharmed by the world’s suffering.

It was by mistake that she smiled today, Faiz,

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 Do not ask about the feelings of this clumsy heart.’)

The first and last verses use their paired halves to explore the chaste passion of

the helpless lover, while the intervening verses each evoke different parts of the

genre’s vastly suggestive history. The second verse draws on the drinking imagery,

always a prominent theme in the ghazal, to suggest the work of the classical Persian

and Urdu masters, while the provocative address to the Deity in the third recalls the

Nietzschean persona favoured by Iqbal, and the tension expressed in the fourth verse

between private romance and painful public involvement is a twentieth-century theme

very characteristic of Faiz, who was personally committed to the Left. So, rather than

intellectually exploiting the conceits of the traditional imagery in the classical manner,

this ghazal exploits the associations of that imagery in a style which is at once readily

comprehensible and immensely evocative.

The successful stylistic transition of the poetic ghazal from an aristocratic to a

bourgeois environment has been paralleled by its adaptation as performance art

diffused on a previously unprecedented scale by the new media of the twentieth

century, rather than by texts published in a script which has itself become largely

unfamiliar in India. The classical style of ghazal singing, as practised by the

courtesans, was brought to a wider public through the radio and recordings in the

work of such artistes as the ‘Queen of Ghazal’ Begum Akhtar (d. 1974). The inherent

suitability for musical setting of the ghazal’s tightly regular formal structure was also

exploited in a more simplified form to the needs of the movie industry as the filmi

ghazal, with its pared down lyrics sung by playback artists to composed orchestral

backing, while new kinds of semi-classical ghazal performance on cassette and

compact disc have developed a large cross-national public of their own, which is also

receptive to modern recordings of the different style of ghazal performance in

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qawwali. To stimulate and to respond to this large market, new kinds of singer have

emerged, notably including both male singers and husband-and-wife duos.17

While the ghazal has necessarily been discussed to this point in terms of Urdu,

the twentieth century expansion of the genre also saw a further blurring of boundaries

as it was taken up by poets in other South Asian languages. Earlier experiments were

conducted by linguistic pioneers intent on raising their languages to the prestigious

standard of Urdu by the painstaking production of vernacular divans.18 Subsequent

decades have seen the copious production of ghazals in several languages.19

While these often fall short of the standards successfully maintained by the

finer Urdu poets, their typical cross-over into other genres like the popular song (git)

is itself witness to the ways in which the ghazal has adjusted to the composite culture

of modern India. A modern Panjabi ghazal20 may be cited to show the transmutation

of the genre. The monorhyme, including double rhyme in the opening verse, and the

poet’s signature in the last verse are maintained, but the monometre is a four-beat

Panjabi metre in place of a prescribed Perso-Urdu bahr:

ik dukh ae ik dukh jae

jad de us nal nain larae.

tane mihne te rusvaian

mere ghar a dere lae.

dil laina te mukkar jana

aj kal lokan shugal banae.

dil vich teri yad da chanan

nhere de vich rah rushnae.

roz tere nainan chon pinda

Mittar hun kiun theke jae.

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 (‘Some pains come while others go

since our eyes became engaged.

Taunts, curses and disgrace

have come and settled in my house.

To steal the heart and then deny

have been made a sport by people nowadays.

Memories of you are a light in my heart

lighting the roads in the darkness.

Now that he drinks daily from your eyes,

why should Mittar go to the wine shop?’)

Here the style is reduced to its simplest, keeping only the easiest of Persian

vocabulary while accommodating unpoetic everyday words like theka ‘wine shop’,

rather than the maikada ‘tavern’ of Faiz’s ghazal, and the overall effect owes as much

to the folksong as it does to the ghazal.

For purists, such neo-ghazals are of course anathema. But they show how the

name ‘ghazal’ continues to inspire so many versifiers and practising poets in Pakistan

and India today, along with that large public of avid listeners and would-be

connoisseurs who are drawn to ghazal as a cultural icon underpinned by that nostalgia

for the glorious past of Urdu culture as it is variously experienced by a significant

section of the modern Hindu and Sikh middle class of India21 as well as by the Indian

Muslims and Pakistanis who are its most direct heirs.

Christopher Shackle

Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia

Department of South Asia, SOAS, University of London (cs2@soas.ac.uk)

11
1
See the articles ‘Ghazal’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. II, Leiden, 1965, pp. 1028-

1036, and ‘Ġazal’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. X, New York, 2001, pp. 354-358.
2
See further Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, eds, Qasida Poetry in Islamic

Asia and Africa, 2 vols, Leiden, 1996.

3
The spirit of Rumi’s ghazals has been widely spread in America and Britain through

the very free versions by Coleman Barks, trans., The Essential Rumi, London, 1995.

For more faithful versions of Hafiz, cf. A.J. Arberry, ed., Fifty Poems of Hafiz,

Cambridge, 1962.
4
For a general survey of Indo-Persian literature with ample bibliography see

Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, in

Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History, Berkeley, 2003, pp. 131-198.
5
For a composite self-portrait of the great poet, see Ralph Russell and Khurshidul

Islam, ed. and trans., Ghalib 1797-1869, Volume I: Life and Letters, London, 1969.
6
Anthologies with translations include D.J. Matthews and C. Shackle, An Anthology

of Classical Urdu Love Lyrics, London, 1972; K.C. Kanda, Masterpieces of Urdu

Ghazal from 17th to 20th Century, New Delhi, 1992.

7
For the best account of traditional system common to all the Persianate literatures,

see Walter G. Andrews, An Introduction to Ottoman Poetry, Minneapolis, 1976; cf.

also F. Thiesen, A Manual of Classical Prosody, with Chapters on Urdu,

Karakhanidic and Ottoman Prosody, Wiesbaden, 1982.

8
Text in Muhammad Tufail, ed., Nuqush Ghazal Nambar, Lahore, 1960, p. 95.
9
Cf. Francis W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics, Berkeley,

1994, especially pp. 77-122; and the fine study of a related literature in Walter G.

Andrews, Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle, 1985.

12
10
Cf. Khurshidul Islam and Ralph Russell, Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda, Mir

Hasan, London, 1969; Muhammad Umar Memon, ed., Studies in the Urdu Ġazal and

Prose Fiction, Madison, 1979; D.J. Matthews, C. Shackle and Shahrukh Husain, Urdu

Literature, London, 1985, especially pp. 16-27; C. Shackle, ed., Urdu and Muslim

South Asia, London, 1989; idem, ‘Urdu: Language and Literature’, Encyclopaedia of

Islam, Vol. IX, Leiden, 2000, pp. 873-881; Shams ur Rahman Faruqi and Frances W.

Pritchett, ‘A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture’, in Sheldon Pollock, Literary

Cultures, pp. 805-863, 864-911.

11
Cf. Ralph Russell, ‘Understanding the Urdu Ghazal’, in The Pursuit of Urdu

Literature: A Select History, London, 1992, pp. 26-53.

12
For the ghazal in recited performance, cf. Regula B. Qureshi, ‘Tarannum: The

Chanting of Urdu Poetry’, Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Vol. 13, No. 3,

1969, pp. 425-468; C.M. Naim, ‘Poet-Audience Interaction at Urdu Musha’iras’, in

Shackle, Urdu and Muslim South Asia, pp. 167-173.

13
For the ghazal in musical performance, cf. Regula B. Qureshi, ‘The Urdu Ghazal in

Performance’, in Shackle, Urdu and Muslim South Asia, pp. 175-189; Peter L.

Manuel, ‘The Relationship between Prosodic and Musical Rhythms in Urdu Ghazal-

singing’, in Memon, Studies in the Urdu Ġazal, pp. 101-119; idem, ‘A Historical

Survey of the Urdu Gazal-Song in India’, Asian Music, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1988, pp. 93-

113.
14
Notable evocations by Urdu writers include Muhammad Husain Azad, Ab-e Hayat:

Shaping the Canon of Urdu Poetry, trans. Frances Pritchett, New Delhi, 2001; the

wonderful re-creation by Farhatullah Beg, The Last Mushai’irah of Delhi, trans.

Akhtar Qamber, New Delhi, 1979; and Muhammad Hadi Rusva’s classic novel

13
Umrao Jan Ada, trans. by Khushwant Singh and M.A. Husaini as The Courtesan of

Lucknow, Delhi, 1961.

15
For Hali’s programme for the ghazal, cf. A. Bausani, ‘Altaf Husain Hali’s ideas on

ghazal’, in F. Tauer et al., eds, Charisteria Orientalia, Prague, 1956, pp. 38-55; for

fine versions of Iqbal’s ghazals, see V.G. Kiernan, trans., Poems from Iqbal, London,

1955, pp. 24-36.

16
Text (from Naqsh-e Firyadi) in Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Nuskhaha-e Vafa, Lahore, n.d., p.

63. See further V.G. Kiernan, trans., Poems by Faiz, London, 1971.
17
Cf. Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India,

Chicago, 1993, especially pp. 89-104; for a widely ranging study of one of the most

famous 20th exponents of classical ghazal singing, cf. Robert Charles Ollikalla,

‘Concerning Begum Akhtar, “Queen of Ghazal”’, PhD thesis, University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign, 1997.
18
E.g. in Sindhi by Qalich Beg (d. 1929), cf. A. Schimmel, Sindhi Literature,

Wiesbaden, 1974, pp. 29-31; in Panjabi by Maula Bakhsh Kushta (d. 1954), cf. C.

Shackle et al., eds, Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity, Richmond, 2001, pp. 104-

108.
19
For the Hindi (!) ghazal, cf. Sardar Mujavar, Hindi Gazal ke Vividh Ayam, New

Delhi, 1993; for Gujarati, Dayabhai A. Patel ‘Dinesh’, ed., Ghazals from Gujarati,

Ahmedabad, 1997; and for Panjabi, Chanan Gobindpuri, ed. Panjabi Gazal, Amritsar,

1985.
20
Text in Gobindpuri, Panjabi Gazal, p. 491.
21
For the ghazal as cultural icon, cf. the lavishly produced seven volumes of Raj

Nigam, ed. The Ghazalnama, New Delhi, 1999 (www.ghazalnama.com).

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