Ghazal

The ghazal (Urdu and Persian غزل, Hindi ग़ज़ल, pronounced roughly ghuzzle) is the supreme lyric form of Persian, Urdu and many other poetic traditions of the Islamic world and South Asia, and one of the most beloved poetic forms anywhere. A ghazal is a short poem — usually five to fifteen couplets — in which every couplet (sher) is complete in itself, often a little poem of its own, yet all are bound together by a strict pattern of rhyme and refrain and by a shared mood. Its subjects are love — above all love unfulfilled, the lover’s longing for an indifferent or cruel beloved — and, through love, wine, the tavern, the garden, the nightingale and the rose, the moth and the candle, separation, death and the mystical longing of the soul for God. In Urdu, from Mīr and Ghālib to Faiz and Faraz, the ghazal has been the heart of poetry, and through ghazal-gāyakī — the singing of ghazals by Begum Akhtar, Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali and Jagjit Singh — it became the popular music of South Asia.

Origins

The word ghazal is Arabic and is related to talking amorously with women; it may also evoke the cry of a wounded gazelle (ghazāl). The form began in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as the amorous prelude (nasīb) of the long ode (qaṣīda), and became an independent genre in Arabic and then, decisively, in Persian, where from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries it reached its classical perfection in Rūmī (whose ghazals are mystical), Saʿdī and above all Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz (1315–90), whose Dīvān is still consulted in Iran like an oracle. It travelled with Persian culture to India, where Amīr Khusrau wrote ghazals in Persian and, it is said, in Hindavi; and from the late seventeenth century it became the central form of Urdu poetry, perfected by Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Ghalib.

The form

A ghazal is built of couplets (sher, plural ash’ār), each of two lines (misra) in the same metre (bahr), drawn from the elaborate Arabic-Persian system of quantitative metres.

• Radīf — the refrain: a word or phrase that ends both lines of the first couplet and the second line of every following couplet.
• Qāfiya — the rhyme: a rhyming word that comes immediately before the radif.
• Maṭla’ — the opening couplet, in which both lines carry the qafiya and radif, setting the pattern.
• Maqṭa’ — the closing couplet, in which the poet usually names himself by his pen name (takhalluṣ), often addressing himself in the third person.

Ghālib’s famous ghazal shows the pattern. Its maṭla’:

Hazārõ khwāhishẽ aisī ki har khwāhish pe dam nikle Bahut nikle mire armān lekin phir bhī kam nikle

Thousands of desires, each one worth dying for — Many of my longings were fulfilled, and yet so few.

Here the radif is nikle (“came out”, “were fulfilled”) and the qafiya is dam / kam. Every later couplet ends its second line with “-am nikle”. The maqṭa’ names the poet:

Kahā̃ maikhāne kā darvāza Ghālib aur kahā̃ vāiz Par itnā jānte hãĩ kal vo jātā thā ki ham nikle

Where is the tavern door, Ghalib, and where the preacher? But this much I know — yesterday he was going in as I came out.

The couplet as a world

The most distinctive feature of the ghazal is the independence of its couplets. A ghazal need not have a single theme or narrative; each sher is a self-contained statement — a thought, an image, an epigram, a paradox — that can be quoted alone, and listeners at a mushā’ira (poetry gathering) cry “Vāh! Vāh!” and ask for it to be repeated. Unity comes from the formal pattern and a shared emotional atmosphere, and from the conventional world of images that every couplet draws on.

The world of the ghazal

The ghazal’s imagery is a code shared by poets and listeners across centuries:

• The lover (‘āshiq) — suffering, sleepless, wasting away, mad with longing, mocked by the world.
• The beloved (ma’shūq) — indifferent, cruel, capricious, of unspecified gender (often grammatically masculine), who may be a human, a patron or God.
• The rival (raqīb), who enjoys the beloved’s favour.
• The preacher (vāiz, shaikh), the hypocrite of conventional piety, set against the honest drinker.
• The tavern (maikhāna) and wine (mai, sharāb), the cupbearer (sāqī) — intoxication as ecstasy and as the love of God.
• The garden, the rose (gul) and the nightingale (bulbul); the candle (sham’a) and the moth (parvāna), who burns himself in it; the cage and the hunter.
• Separation (hijr, firāq) and the rare union (visāl).

This double language lets the ghazal speak at once of human love and divine, of wine and ecstasy, and later of politics: under Faiz, the beloved became the revolution and the cage a prison, and censors could not object to a love poem.

Mysticism

Through the influence of Sufism, the ghazal’s love became also the love of the soul for God, who is the Beloved, hidden, cruel in his absence, glimpsed in beauty; the lover’s annihilation in love mirrors the Sufi’s annihilation (fanā) in God. Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ, Khusrau and Mīr Dard wrote ghazals that can be read both ways, and the ambiguity is the point.

In Hindi and beyond

From the 1970s, poets such as Dushyant Kumar (Sāye mẽ Dhūp) adapted the ghazal to Hindi and political protest — “Ho gaī hai pīr parvat-sī pighalnī cāhie” (“The pain has grown mountain-high; it must melt now”). In the twentieth century the ghazal also entered English through Agha Shahid Ali, whose Ravishing DisUnities (2000) collected “real ghazals in English”.

In conversation

• “Har khwāhish pe dam nikle” — Ghalib’s “every desire worth dying for”.
• A sher — a single couplet, quoted on its own; “Vāh! Vāh!” — the listeners’ cry of praise.
• The moth and the candle — love that destroys the lover.