About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of twenty-six poems by Mir Mehdi Majrooh of Delhi (d. 1903), the pupil of Ghalib: nineteen *ghazals* (lyric poems), six *rubais* (quatrains) and a two-couplet fragment. They are all the poems by Majrooh on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Majrooh ka Kalam* ("Poems of Majrooh"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the twenty-six pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. Where the source has an evident misprint, the text is printed as found and the translation follows the evident sense, with a note; where a reading is obscure, the note says so.

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 broadly alphabetical by first line, in two chapters; the quatrains and the fragment, which are scattered among them in the source, are gathered in a third. Each poem is headed by its first line.

Copyright: Majrooh died in 1903, 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 Majrooh is kept as a name.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Delhi, Sinai; Ghalib, Nayyar, Alai, Anwar, Maikash, Hali; Joseph, Zulaikha, Moses, Khizr, Alexander, Jamshid, Caesar; Qais; Mansur.

Introduction

Mir Mehdi Hasan, who wrote as Majrooh ("the wounded"), was born in Delhi in the 1830s and grew up in the city's last brilliant years under the Mughals. He became the favourite pupil of Mirza Ghalib, who corrected his verse and wrote him many of his most famous letters, full of affection and teasing, addressed to "Mir Mehdi". After the uprising of 1857 and the ruin of Delhi he had to leave the city and seek a living in the service of princely courts, at Alwar and later at Rampur. He died in 1903.

Two of the poems here belong to the literature of the fall of Delhi. In one, every couplet ends with "never": never mention the ruin of Delhi, never hope it will be peopled again, never be deceived by its name, since "those who made Delhi what it was are left no more"; the poet names the lost patrons and friends of Ghalib's circle. In the other, written while Ghalib was still alive, he prays: "O God, keep the revered Ghalib safe: it is in his name alone that a trace of Delhi now remains." Another ghazal ends by calling for wine and rosewater because Ghalib has come.

The rest are ghazals in the Delhi manner of Ghalib's school: clear, idiomatic and quick, full of everyday turns of speech ("she rolled up her sleeves", "a mosque of a brick and a half") and of the lover's banter with the beloved, the counsellor and the shaikh. The quatrains are religious, praising God who "made this straw appear a mountain" and is sought by monk and Brahmin, shaikh and lover alike.