When Poetry Learns to Sing: The Ghazal Tradition

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A ghazal is a poem with no plot, no argument and no through line, and that is its defining feature rather than a defect. It is a sequence of couplets, usually between five and fifteen, each of which is a complete and self sufficient poem. A couplet may be lifted out of its ghazal and quoted alone without loss. The form is therefore closer to a string of separately cut stones set on one wire than to a narrative, and it is why a singer can drop couplets, reorder them or import one from another poet without damaging anything.

What holds the string together is sound. The opening couplet, the matla, rhymes in both its lines and establishes two elements that then govern the whole poem. The qafia is the rhyming syllable. The radif is a word or phrase repeated verbatim after the rhyme. Every subsequent couplet leaves its first line free and ends its second line with the same qafia and the same radif. The effect on a listener is a repeated arrival at an identical destination by different routes, and it explains why ghazal audiences respond audibly at the end of each couplet: they know exactly what word is coming and are waiting to hear how the poet gets there.

The closing couplet is the maqta, and by convention it contains the poet's pen name, the takhallus, so the poem signs itself from inside. Ghalib addresses himself in the third person; Mir does the same. The device lets a poet step out of the poem's voice and comment on it, which is one of the form's more sophisticated pleasures. A ghazal is also normally written in a single strict quantitative metre, called bahr, which must be sustained across every line.

From Arabia to Delhi

The word ghazal is Arabic and the form's earliest life is in Arabic poetry of the seventh century, where it emerged from the amatory prelude of the longer qasida. It moved into Persian, where poets including Hafez and Rumi made it the central lyric vehicle of Persian literature, and it entered South Asia with Persian, which served as an administrative and literary language across much of the subcontinent under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. Persian ghazal was written in India for centuries before Urdu ghazal existed, and Urdu poets continued to write in Persian long after Urdu was established. Mirza Ghalib, who lived from 1797 to 1869, regarded his Persian work as his major achievement and left roughly eleven thousand Persian verses against fewer than two thousand in Urdu, yet his reputation now rests almost entirely on the Urdu.

The Urdu ghazal's classical period runs through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mir Taqi Mir, who died in 1810, is generally placed at the head of the tradition for a plainness and emotional directness that later poets found impossible to imitate. Ghalib brought a dense, philosophically restless idiom that is famously difficult and famously rewarding. Two stylistic centres are usually distinguished, Delhi and Lucknow, with Delhi associated with metaphysical seriousness and Lucknow with technical elaboration and courtly refinement, though the contrast is a critical convenience and both cities produced poets who fit neither description.

The form was performed as well as written. The mushaira is a gathering at which poets recite in turn, often on a set radif and qafia announced in advance, and the audience responds line by line. It is a competitive, oral and immediate context, and it shaped the poetry: couplets are built to land, with the punch held to the very end of the second line.

The Beloved Who May Be God

Reading a ghazal requires accepting a deliberate ambiguity. The beloved is grammatically masculine in Urdu convention, is usually cruel or indifferent, and may be a human lover, a patron, a spiritual master or God. The wine, the tavern, the moth and flame, the caged bird, the physician who cannot cure, the rival, the messenger: these are a shared stock of images that every reader recognises and every poet is expected to renew. A mystical and an erotic reading of the same couplet are often both fully available, and the tradition does not require a choice. Sufi poetry exploited this directly, and qawwali performance draws on ghazal for exactly that reason.

The convention has costs as well as riches. Because the imagery is shared, weak ghazal is very weak, collapsing into recognisable furniture arranged without pressure. The measure of a good couplet is whether it does something new inside a set of constraints that everyone else is also working under.

When the Poem Is Sung

Ghazal singing is a separate art with its own history. It draws on Hindustani classical technique but subordinates elaboration to the words, since the point is that the text be heard. Begum Akhtar, who lived from 1914 to 1974 and was known as Mallika-e-Ghazal, was among the first women to move ghazal, thumri and dadra out of private gatherings and onto the public concert stage, composing many of her own settings on classical raga frameworks. She received the Padma Shri in 1968, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for vocal music in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan posthumously in 1975.

In Pakistan, Mehdi Hassan, who lived from 1927 to 2012, was trained in dhrupad by his father and uncle and brought a classical vocalist's control to the film and concert ghazal. His 1964 recording of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Gulon mein rang bharay became so identified with him that Faiz himself is reported to have told audiences the ghazal now belonged to Hassan. Farida Khanum, Ghulam Ali, Jagjit Singh and others carried the form into the second half of the twentieth century, with Jagjit Singh in particular simplifying the accompaniment and the melodic language to reach listeners who had no classical training and, in some critics' view, thinning the tradition in the process. Both readings of that shift are defensible.

The ghazal has since travelled into other languages. It is written in Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Pashto and Turkish, and English language poets have adopted it, with Agha Shahid Ali arguing forcefully that the English ghazal should keep the radif, the qafia and the autonomy of the couplet rather than borrowing only a mood. That argument is still going on, which is a reasonable sign that a poetic form roughly fourteen centuries old is not finished.

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