What Is a Ghazal? The Urdu Ghazal Explained

Sher (couplet). A ghazal is a chain of couplets, usually five to fifteen. Each sher is a complete poem in two lines; a ghazal can move from love to death to God from one couplet to the next.

Radif (refrain) and qafiya (rhyme). Every couplet ends with the same word or phrase, the radif, and just before it comes a rhyming word, the qafiya. In Ghalib's famous ghazal the radif is nikle and the rhymes are dam, kam and so on.

Matla and maqta. The first couplet, the matla, has the rhyme and refrain in both lines. The last, the maqta, usually contains the poet's pen-name, the takhallus.

Bahr (metre). All the lines share one metre, built from patterns of long and short syllables, which gives the ghazal its music when recited or sung.

The matla and maqta of one of Ghalib's best-known ghazals. Both lines of the matla end with the radif nikle, after the qafiya dam and kam; every later couplet ends its second line the same way (ham nikle, khaam nikle). In the maqta Ghalib names himself.

The takhallus (تخلص) is the short pen-name an Urdu poet takes and writes into the maqta, often addressing himself: Mirza Asadullah Khan wrote as Ghalib (and early on as Asad), Mir Taqi as Mir, Muhammad Iqbal as Iqbal. Printed texts often set a small sign, ؔ, over the name, as in غالبؔ, so the reader sees that the poet is speaking of himself. A couplet with the takhallus is how a ghazal signs off.

This ghazal is in bahr-e-hazaj musamman salim, one of the commonest Urdu metres: four feet of mafaa.iilun, a short syllable and three long ones (u – – –). Scanning a line, taqti, means dividing it into these feet. The first line falls into them exactly:

Paste any Urdu line into our free metre checker to see it scanned, browse the common metres, or open Intikhab-e-Ghalib and turn on the reader's Learner view, which marks the radif, qafiya, matla, maqta and takhallus in every ghazal. The Learn Urdu Poetry course teaches all of this step by step.

The ghazal speaks of love, almost always unfulfilled: the lover's longing, the beloved's cruelty, the rival, the night of separation. Around this it builds a world of symbols: the nightingale and the rose, the moth and the candle, the wine-bearer (saqi) and the tavern, the preacher and the mystic. Because the beloved can be human or divine, the same couplet can be read as a love poem, a mystical poem or, in the twentieth century, a political one.

Wali Dakhni brought the Urdu ghazal from the Deccan to Delhi around 1700. The eighteenth century belongs to Mir, Sauda and Dard; the nineteenth to Ghalib, Zauq, Momin and Dagh, and to the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The twentieth century renewed the form through Hasrat Mohani, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Faiz, Nasir Kazmi, Ahmad Faraz, Parveen Shakir and Jaun Elia. See our list of great Urdu poets.

Ghazals are performed as well as read. Begum Akhtar, Mehdi Hassan, Iqbal Bano, Ghulam Ali, Farida Khanum, Abida Parveen and Jagjit Singh made the sung ghazal one of the great musical traditions of South Asia, and for many listeners it is their first meeting with Urdu poetry.