1

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 !azal,
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

2
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 migr 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 Saib (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
3
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 ghazal
6
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 ghazal
8
by the Urdu poet Atish (d.
1847) which is transcribed and translated below.
Like all ghazals, it consists of a series of rhymed verses (shir), 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
4
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 (afaaiil) as mafaailun failaatun mafaailun filun.
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 poets 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-talii 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 anothers tongue have set out my desire?
Like me, the sun and moon are wandering:
5
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
6
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 poets 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 beloveds 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 poets pen-name Atish is exploited to yield an image which
combines two of the natural elements in an evocation of the lovers 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
ghazals expression.
11
The voice of the serious male poet was heard in the competitive
poetic symposium (mushaira), 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 (tawaif).
13
The memory of all these and
7
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
8
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 (mafuulu faailaatu mafaaiilu faailun), 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 Providers plans for me.
The world has alienated me from memories of you,
Even you are outcharmed by the worlds suffering.
It was by mistake that she smiled today, Faiz,
9
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
genres 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 ghazals 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
10
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 ghazal
20
may be cited to show the transmutation
of the genre. The monorhyme, including double rhyme in the opening verse, and the
poets 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.
11
(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 Faizs 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 India
21
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)
12


1
See the articles Ghazal, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. II, Leiden, 1965, pp. 1028-
1036, and !azal, 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 Rumis 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 17
th
to 20
th
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, Poetrys Voice, Societys Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle, 1985.
13

10
Cf. Khurshidul Islam and Ralph Russell, Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda, Mir
Hasan, London, 1969; Muhammad Umar Memon, ed., Studies in the Urdu "azal 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 Mushairas, 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 "azal, 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 Mushaiirah of Delhi, trans.
Akhtar Qamber, New Delhi, 1979; and Muhammad Hadi Rusvas classic novel
14

Umrao Jan Ada, trans. by Khushwant Singh and M.A. Husaini as The Courtesan of
Lucknow, Delhi, 1961.
15
For Halis programme for the ghazal, cf. A. Bausani, Altaf Husain Halis ideas on
ghazal, in F. Tauer et al., eds, Charisteria Orientalia, Prague, 1956, pp. 38-55; for
fine versions of Iqbals 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 20
th
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).