About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of forty-two *ghazals* (lyric poems) by Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Nasikh of Lucknow (d. 1838). They are all the poems by Nasikh on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Nasikh ka Kalam* ("Poems of Nasikh"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the forty-two 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.

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 are headed by their first line. A few ghazals on Wikisource lack a closing couplet with the pen name; they are printed as found.

Copyright: Nasikh died in 1838, 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 Nasikh is kept as a name.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Lucknow; Joseph, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, Solomon, Khizr, Cain, Azar, Alexander; Laila, Qais (Majnun), Shirin, Farhad; Ali (Haidar), Karbala; Nausherwan; Dard.

Introduction

Shaikh Imam Bakhsh, who wrote as Nasikh, was born in the second half of the eighteenth century, probably at Faizabad, and was brought up in the house of a wealthy Lucknow merchant who left him his fortune. He spent his life in Lucknow, then the richest court in India after the decline of Delhi, apart from periods of exile when he fell out of favour with the court and lived at Allahabad and elsewhere; one ghazal here celebrates his return, when "all the lanes and bazaars of Lucknow have turned white". He never took service with a patron and lived as an independent man of means. He died in Lucknow in 1838.

Nasikh is remembered above all as a reformer of the Urdu language. With his circle of pupils he set rules for correct usage, dropped many old Hindi words and forms, and fixed the genders and spellings that later writers followed; the very name "Nasikh" means "one who abrogates". His great rival was Khwaja Haidar Ali Atish, and the contest between their schools shaped the Lucknow manner: a poetry of wit, ingenious comparison and difficult refrain, in which every image is pressed to its limit.

The ghazals here show that manner at full stretch. Paper, colour, gait, "of its own accord", "in the veil of" and "turned white" each serve as a refrain that the poet turns every possible way. Beside the beloved's tresses and the lover's scars stand a Holi ghazal, couplets in praise of the Prophet and of Ali, and a prayer to be laid in the dust of Karbala, for Nasikh, like the Lucknow court, was a Shia.