About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of twenty-four poems by Brij Narain Chakbast (1882–1926): twelve *nazms* (poems on a single theme), among them "The Dust of Hind", "The Song of the Homeland", "A Scene from the Ramayana" and his elegies on Tilak and Gokhale, and twelve *ghazals* (lyric poems). The title, *Chakbast ki Nazmen* ("Poems of Chakbast"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the twenty-five pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026 and marked {{PD-India}}. Wikisource gives two versions of "The Rains"; the shorter is wholly contained in the longer, so only the longer is printed here.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing has been left out, and the source pages carry no modern editorial matter. The poems are grouped by kind. Poems in stanzas (*musaddas*, six-line stanzas) are printed in their stanzas; Wikisource sometimes breaks them after every couplet. Ghazals are printed a couplet to a block and are headed by their first line. A few doubtful readings of the source are kept and explained in notes.

Copyright: Chakbast died in 1926, 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.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Hind, India, Kashmir, Lucknow, Poona, Maharashtra, the Deccan, the Punjab, the Himalaya, the Ganges, the Jumna; Gautama (the Buddha), Sarmad, Akbar, Rana (Rana Pratap), Tilak, Gokhale, Gandhi, Mrs Besant, Asaf-ud-Daula, Rama, Bhishma, Joseph, Zulaikha, Majnun.

Introduction

Brij Narain Chakbast was born in 1882 at Faizabad, in a family of Kashmiri Pandits settled in Lucknow, and grew up and worked in Lucknow, where he practised as a lawyer. He belonged to the old Urdu culture of the city, which Kashmiri Pandits shared fully with their Muslim neighbours, and he wrote Urdu verse from his schooldays. His collected poems, *Subh-e-Watan* ("Dawn of the Homeland"), made him known as the poet of Indian nationalism in Urdu. He died suddenly in 1926, on a railway platform at Rae Bareli, at the age of forty-four.

Chakbast's subject is the homeland. "The Dust of Hind" praises India's past, from Gautama to Akbar and Rana Pratap, and mourns its present sleep; "Our Homeland" is a simple song of its trees, rains and rivers; "The Song of the Homeland" is a marching song of the Home Rule movement of Mrs Annie Besant, with the refrain "we would not take even paradise in place of Home Rule". "The Vedas" finds in the ancient hymns a lesson of the one light in all things. His elegies on Gopal Krishna Gokhale (d. 1915) and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (d. 1920) are among the finest Urdu poems on public men; the Tilak elegy ends by asking that the hero of the nation be laid, like Bhishma in the Mahabharata, on a pyre of arrows.

"A Scene from the Ramayana" is his best-known poem: in twenty-two six-line stanzas, Rama, sent into exile, takes leave of his mother Kaushalya, who pours out her grief, and he comforts her with patience and trust in God. The stanza and the diction are those of the Urdu *marsiya* of Lucknow, the elegy on the martyrs of Karbala, here turned to a Hindu story. "The Pain of the Heart" seems to have been written for the anniversary of a society of young men that the poet helped to found. The ghazals are in the Lucknow manner, but often carry the same themes of the nation, of faith beyond Sheikh and Brahmin, and of the dust of the homeland.