About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of eighty *ghazals* (lyric poems) by Shaikh Qalandar Bakhsh Jurat (d. 1810), who wrote under the pen name Jurat. They are all the poems listed under him on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Jurat ka Kalam* ("Poems of Jurat"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the eighty 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 or the sense is obscure; the text is printed as found and the translation follows the likeliest sense, with a note. One short page holds only two couplets, a fragment; it is kept as it stands.

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. Where several couplets run on as one sentence, as in a long description of a garden in the rains, the English keeps them as separate couplets and lets the sentence run on. Some poems are frankly sensual; they are translated as they stand.

Copyright: Jurat died in 1810, 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 Jurat, which means "courage", is kept as a name; where the poet plays on its meaning, a note says so.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: the Kaaba, Paradise, Iram; Mir, Sauda, Soz, Naziri, Mani, Bihzad; Qais (Majnun), Laila, Farhad (the Mountain-digger), Shirin, Khizr, Mansur, Abu Turab (Ali).

Introduction

Shaikh Qalandar Bakhsh Jurat, who died in 1810, was a poet of the generation of Mir, and he measures himself against the masters of his day. "Those who think the style of the ghazal ended with Mir," he writes, "I, Jurat, will go and recite this ghazal to them"; he means to carry another ghazal "to the tomb of Sauda", quotes "the words of Soz", and calls one poem a reply to the Persian poet Naziri.

His poems are, above all, poems of love as it is lived: of meetings and quarrels, of messages, sulks and making up. Whole *ghazals* are built from talk, as in the one where every request is met with the beloved's "Uh-uh", or the one in which she says "What is it to you?" Others are full of longing for what has gone: "Such were the nights, and such the talk: how those days used to pass!" One long *ghazal* imagines a garden by the river in the rains, with peacocks on the parapets and herons against the cloud.

Jurat enjoys the play of words, and his own name, which means "courage", gives him a pun he returns to: "What fear have we for our life? Our very name is Jurat." He can write a *ghazal* of curses on the rival who parted him from his love, and another in which every line ends in a ringing echo of sound. Beneath the wit there is a quieter note: "Your whole creation lies within the heart; the heart lives by You, and Your Being is within the heart."