About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of sixty-three *ghazals* (lyric poems), one *naat* (poem in praise of the Prophet), one national song and five *rubais* (quatrains) by Arzoo Lucknavi (d. 1951). They are all the poems by Arzoo Lucknavi on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Arzoo Lucknavi ka Kalam* ("Poems of Arzoo Lucknavi"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the seventy pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. Where a line is obscure, the text is printed as found and the translation follows the likeliest sense, with a note.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing has been left out. The poems are given in the order of the source, which is broadly alphabetical by first line, and each is headed by its first line; the naat and the national song stand in their places among the ghazals, and the quatrains are gathered in a chapter of their own.

Copyright: Arzoo Lucknavi died in 1951, so his poems are in the public domain in Pakistan and India. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. The translation keeps each line of verse as a line, and puts accuracy before rhyme. The pen name Arzoo is kept as a name; it means "longing", and the poet often plays on it.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Lucknow, India, the Ganges, Khotan, Eden; Muhammad, Khizr, Laila, Majnun, Alexander, Darius, Rustam.

Introduction

Syed Anwar Husain, who wrote as Arzoo, was a poet of Lucknow and a pupil of Jalal Lucknavi, and he died in 1951. He belongs to the generation that carried the classical ghazal of Lucknow into the twentieth century, and many of the poems here keep its familiar figures: the candle and the moth, the cupbearer, the counsellor, the cruel beauty and the madman of love.

What sets his voice apart is its plain, spoken Urdu. Many of these ghazals lean on everyday Hindustani words and turns of speech rather than Persian ones: the koel calls, "home and abroad are one", and the lover asks, "Why sit idle and pass the days? Come, my soul, let us do something." Long refrains carry whole conversations, as in the ghazal whose every couplet ends, "you somewhere else, I somewhere else". The pen name, "longing", runs through the poems: "I am the Arzoo that is not in your heart."

Beside the ghazals stand a *naat*, five quatrains of reflection and prayer ("I am lost in the feeling of my own needs, and You go on giving without being asked"), and a national song to Mother India in which mosque and temple are two waves of one ocean and "Allah" and "Ishwar" echo equally.