About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

Gulzar-e-Naseem ("Naseem's Rose Garden") is a masnavi, a long poem in rhymed couplets, by Pandit Dayashankar Kaul Naseem (1811–1845) of Lucknow, completed in 1838. The poet died in 1845, so the poem is in the public domain everywhere.

The Urdu text was transcribed for this library, page by page, from the edition printed at the Tej Kumar Press, Lucknow, in 1941 (Kashmir Research Institute copy, digitised by eGangotri, archive.org). That edition's footnotes, which gloss hard words, are not included. The part of the poem typed on Urdu Wikisource was used to check readings, and the 1929 Naami Press edition is a second copy for doubtful places. Section headings are the poem's own; the poem is divided into chapters at those headings for easier reading.

The English is a new translation, couplet by couplet, two lines for each couplet, aiming at accuracy rather than rhyme. Where a couplet turns on a pun, a short gloss in brackets gives the double meaning.

Introduction

Naseem was a Kashmiri Pandit of Lucknow and a pupil of the poet Atish. Gulzar-e-Naseem retells the story of Gul-e-Bakavali, already known in Urdu prose: the blind king Zain-ul-Muluk can be cured only by the rose of the fairy Bakavali, and his youngest son, Taj-ul-Muluk, banished from his sight at birth, sets out to find it. He wins the rose from Bakavali's garden; she follows him to the world of men, and through magic, separation, the curse of Raja Indar and rebirth, the two are united at last.

What made the poem famous is its style: Naseem tells a long story in a short metre with extraordinary compression, packing images, puns and the idiom of Lucknow into every line. It has been taught in schools and universities for more than a century and set off a celebrated literary quarrel in 1905 between the critics Chakbast and Sharar over its language. It is on the Urdu syllabus of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan.