The Urdu Ghazal

The Urdu ghazal is a marvel of the magnetic dynamism of husn o i’shq filled with innovative imagery. It is a celebration of life and love in an ambiance of pure ecstasy. It has a profound capacity for joy as well as pain. It is the soul of Urdu verse and the play of creativity at its peak. No other poetic genre is as innately musical as the ghazal. The book presents unique flowering of the Urdu ghazal as a by-product of India’s composite culture that evolved from intermixing of Indian and foreign value systems. This never-before narrated story of the evolution of the Urdu ghazal is documented in eight chapters divided into three parts. It explores a variety of influences, including Sufism, Bhakti movement, and infusion of Rekhta and Persian languages and culture. The book explains classical ghazal forms that blossomed from the seeds sown by Amir Khusrau in the fourteenth century to great heights of literary excellence achieved during the next 300, notably in the works of great poets like Mir and Ghalib. Different socio-political and cultural demands of changing times are expounded towards the end, primarily how the ghazal provided new creative models to deal with literary movements like progressivism, modernism, and postmodernism. This book includes samples of works of thematically related poets. It also covers works of twentieth-century pioneering innovators like Firaq Gorakhpuri and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and postmoderns like Gulzar and Javed Akhtar.