About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of fifty-two *ghazals* (lyric poems) by Bahadur Shah Zafar (d. 1862), the last Mughal emperor of Delhi, who wrote under the pen name Zafar. They are all the poems listed under him on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Bahadur Shah Zafar ka Kalam* ("Poems of Bahadur Shah Zafar"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the fifty-two pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. In a few places a word seems corrupt, a line is unclear, or a line is repeated; 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 *ghazals* are given in the order of the source, which is alphabetical by first line, and divided into two chapters. Each is headed by its first line. Two well-known poems, "My heart finds no peace in this ruined land" and the lament for Delhi beginning "Suddenly the wind turned", are often printed under Zafar's name, but their authorship has been questioned; they are kept as the source gives them, with a note.

Copyright: Bahadur Shah Zafar died in 1862, so his poems are in the public domain everywhere. 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 Zafar is kept as a name; the poet addresses himself by it in the last couplet of nearly every *ghazal*.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Delhi, Hind, the Kaaba, Iram, Paradise; Fakhr-ud-Din (Fakhr-e Din), Shakar Ganj, Bedil; Qais (Majnun), Laila, Farhad (the Mountain-digger), Shirin, Wamiq, Azra, Joseph, Zulaikha, Khizr, Jamshid, Qarun.

Introduction

Abu Zafar Bahadur Shah II, who died in 1862, was the last of the Mughal emperors. He wrote Urdu poetry under the pen name Zafar, and these *ghazals* are those of his that Urdu Wikisource holds. A king's voice is heard in them only rarely, and then most often to set the crown aside: "Either You should have made me a royal crown, or You should have made my crown a beggar's", and "I want neither the dervish's patched cloak nor the royal crown."

Many of the poems turn inward, to a Sufi faith. "When we raised and gave away our selfhood, that which was like a veil between was gone"; "What you are seeking, Zafar, is within you." Zafar names with reverence one Fakhr-ud-Din, through whose "kind eye" he says he has become something, and asks for the dust of his feet as collyrium for his eyes. Again and again the poems return to change and loss: "Neither grief lasts forever nor pleasure: sometimes it is this way, sometimes that."

Most of all these are *ghazals* of love, in the full Delhi manner: the cruel and playful beloved, the madman in the wilderness, the moth and the candle, the tavern and the ascetic. Zafar enjoys long runs of wordplay, as in a *ghazal* built on "four or five" and another on the many senses of "to draw", and he praises his own art: "with a pen that rains pearls we are scattering gems now." The collection closes with the poet asking to be heard in his own words: "hear the story of my grief from my own tongue."