About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of sixty *ghazals* (lyric poems) and twelve *nazms* (poems on a single subject) by Seemab Akbarabadi (d. 1951). They are all the poems by Seemab on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Seemab Akbarabadi ka Kalam* ("Poems of Seemab Akbarabadi"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the seventy-three pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. Where a line is obscure, the text is printed as found and the translation follows the likeliest sense, with a note.

What is left out and what was changed: Wikisource gives the poem on Krishna twice, under two spellings of its title, and it is printed once. The two versions of "The Rains" differ and are both given. Nothing else has been left out. The ghazals are given in the order of the source, which is broadly alphabetical by first line, each headed by its first line; the nazms are gathered in a chapter of their own under their own titles.

Copyright: Seemab Akbarabadi died in 1951, 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. The pen name Seemab is kept as a name; it means "quicksilver".

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Agra, India, the Ganges, the Jamuna, Braj, Gokul, Najd, Sinai; Moses, Joseph, Zulaikha, Qais, Laila, Mansur, Jamshed, Korah; Krishna, Gautam Buddha.

Introduction

Ashiq Husain, who wrote as Seemab, was a poet of Agra, the city of the Taj on the Jamuna, and a pupil of Daagh Dehlavi; he died in 1951. One ghazal closes with a lament for the poets of his city who had gone before him, "little by little, Seemab, Agra has become empty", and another tells of putting the Holy Quran into verse.

His ghazals keep the classical figures, the moth and the candle, the cage and the nest, Sinai and the White Hand, but they turn them toward questions of the self: "I found the goal, I found my wish, I found my purpose: I found everything when I found your footprint," and "When I passed beyond the bounds of the self, I found God." Unity behind difference is a recurring theme, as in the couplet where the Brahmin says "Brahm", the shaikh says "Ahad", and a quarrel arises from a twist of one word.

The nazms show a wider range: verses for children on the rains, the firefly and the evening prayer; a mother's lullaby; songs of the homeland; poems on Krishna, on Gautam Buddha and on Holi; and a stark picture of a labourer bent under his load, ending, "Look, you blind serpent of wealth, this is the labourer."