About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of fifty-eight *ghazals* (lyric poems) and one *naat* (poem in praise of the Prophet) by Bekhud Dehlavi (d. 1955), pupil of Daagh. They are all the poems by Bekhud Dehlavi on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Bekhud Dehlavi ka Kalam* ("Poems of Bekhud Dehlavi"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the fifty-nine 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 stands in its place among the ghazals.

Copyright: Bekhud Dehlavi died in 1955, 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 Bekhud is kept as a name; it means "beside oneself", and the poet often plays on it.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Delhi, Egypt, Sinai, Lanka; Daagh, Ghalib, Shad, Naziri; Moses, Joseph, Zulaikha, Khizr, Farhad, Laila, Majnun; Munkar and Nakir.

Introduction

Syed Wahiduddin Ahmad, who wrote as Bekhud, was born in the second half of the nineteenth century and died in 1955. He was the pupil of Daagh Dehlavi (d. 1905), the last great master of the old Delhi ghazal, and was counted among his foremost heirs. He says so himself: "After the master, the ghazal ends with Bekhud: call it a miracle, not a God-given talent."

His ghazals keep Daagh's manner: plain, idiomatic Delhi speech, quick exchanges between lover and beloved, and a teasing wit in which the beloved scolds, sulks and flirts in the same breath. "She is sulking, yet the teasing goes on: now a message comes, now betel." He plays constantly on his pen name, "beside oneself", against words for sense and sobriety, and he is not shy of his own worth: "I am the Naziri of Urdu; what did you take me for?"

Beside the ghazals stands a single *naat*, in which the same voice turns to devotion: "Let me see God, and visit the Messenger: I have no concern with Paradise, no business with houris." Across the whole, the drinker, the preacher and the cruel beauty of the classical ghazal live on into the twentieth century with undiminished ease.