The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry Read Online Free PDF

zuban Urdu ki tarah
’ (‘It is a friend who appears like fragrance / And whose language is [sweet] like Urdu’), we have no problem. I am counting on my great-great-grandchildren wringing their hands and lamenting the eventual demise of Urdu in 2150. And I won’t be surprised if the language continues to prevail nevertheless, for Urdu poetry is, after all, written by angels. In Chicha’s words:
    Aate hain ghaib se ye mazaameen khayaal mein
    Ghalib, sareer-e khaama navaa-e sarosh hai
    These rare ideas I dare invent
    A zephyr from paradise brings,
    Ghalib’s sounds of pen on parchment
    Are the flutter of angel wings
.

A Note on Poetic Form
    Mir Anees, the great marsiya poet, and arguably one of the finest exponents of the art of Urdu poetry, was reputed to have composed his first sher when he was a child of five. Having watched his pet goat die, he apparently ran weeping to his father and said:
    Afsos ke duniya se safar kar gayi bakri
    Aankhen to khuli reh gaeen, par mar gayi bakri
    Alas the goat’s soul departed for heaven
    It is truly dead, though the goat’s eyes are open
    I am struck by the rhythmic quality of this couplet, fashioned so beautifully by the young Anees. The tyke seems to have had perfect rhyme and metre from the start, and as he grew older, content must have fed technique in a harmonious cycle that peaked in his extraordinary prowess, where the most complex of emotions and situations were rendered in metred verse with not an ounce of effort showing. Such are the ways in which the poets of Urdu sharpened their technique—through countless repetitions of poems, a craft practised over and over again, tested in the furnace of mushairas, where jealous contemporaries and, occasionally, gentle teachers separated the wheat from the chaff. It was not enough to be solely an exponent of form or a purveyor of content in those rarefied circles. One needed to be both.
    Over time, as poets tested their craft among peers and the listening public, a protocol of sorts emerged regarding the form poetry would take. Much like the way Indian classical musicians were trained within the boundaries of specific ragas, Urdu poets learned the protocols of the ghazal and other poetic forms, which they either adhered to or tweaked. Here, I briefly discuss five forms that are relatively common in Urdu poetry, namely the ghazal, the
qataa
, the
rubaai
, the musaddas, and the nazm (along with its variant, the aazad nazm)
.
I should say at the outset that such a discussion of poetic conventions need not necessarily get between the reader and the enjoyment of poetry (just as you do not need to know the difference between a backward short leg and a leg slip to enjoy cricket). But such nuances are nonetheless interesting to know.
Ghazal
    The ghazal is the dominant form of the Urdu poem. It is structured relatively strictly, with a string of shers (couplets), common in metre (i.e. the first and second lines have the same number of syllables). Every second line of a couplet in a ghazal shares a rhythmic continuity with every other second line, through two artefacts known as the
qafiya
and the
radif
. The qafiya primarily refers to a convention of using certain rhyming words in the course of a verse. The radif is the refrain at the end of a certain line that gives the verse a consistent rhythm.
    To explain these in concrete terms, let us take an example of three shers from a popular ghazal, such as Hasrat Mohani’s ghazal ‘
Chupke chupke
’, which was used in the 1982 film
Nikaah.
The lines go thus:
    Chupke chupke raat din aansoo bahaana yaad hai
    Hum ko ab tak aashiqui ka vo zamaana yaad hai
    Khainch lena vo mera parde ka kona daf’atan
    Aur dupatte mein tera vo moonh chhupaana yaad hai
    Dopahar ki dhoop mein mere bulaane ke liye
    Vo tera kothe pe nange paaon aana yaad hai
    Nights, days of quiet tear-shedding, I still remember
    That era of intense loving, I still remember
    Suddenly, I pulled away the curtain between us
    Your veiled