About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of fifty-five *ghazals* (lyric poems) and twenty-four *rubais* (quatrains) by Shad Azimabadi of Patna (d. 1927). They are all the poems by Shad on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Shad Azimabadi ka Kalam* ("Poems of Shad Azimabadi"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the seventy-nine pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. Where the source has an evident misprint or an obscure line, the text is printed as found and the translation follows the likeliest 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 broadly alphabetical by first line, and are followed by the quatrains in the same order; each poem is headed by its first line. Where the source repeats a line or a couplet, or gives more than one closing couplet, the repetition is kept and noted.

Copyright: Shad died in 1927, so his poems are in the public domain in Pakistan and India; they were first published before 1931. 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 Shad is kept as a name; it means "happy", and the poet sometimes plays on it.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Patna (Azimabad), Delhi, Aligarh, Karbala, Najd, Sinai; Anees, Hali, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Rasikh; Moses, Jesus, Joseph, Zulaikha, David, Khizr, Gabriel; Qais (Majnun); Darius, Alexander.

Introduction

Syed Ali Muhammad, who wrote as Shad, was born in Azimabad, the old name of Patna, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and died there in 1927. He was the leading Urdu poet of Bihar in his day and a writer of prose as well as verse. In one closing couplet he counts his years, "Shad, are fifty-eight years so few? My heart has had its fill of life," and in another he claims the place of an earlier Patna poet: "I am a worthy successor to Rasikh, God rest him."

Shad belongs to the generation that saw the old Urdu world give way to the new. He mourns the elegist Anees, "Without Anees, Shad, the garden of verse is desolate," yet his quatrains praise Sir Syed's college at Aligarh, thank Hali for the kindness of a meeting with Sir Syed and a sight of the college, mock the half-educated editors of the Urdu newspapers, and urge poets to write "in one's own tongue" without borrowing. One quatrain sums up his place: "The rays will surely spread and reach the West: I am the shining star of the East."

His ghazals keep the classical themes of the cupbearer, the tavern, the preacher and the cruel beloved, but their tone is grave and inward. Again and again he turns to the shortness of life, the vanity of display and the call to wake before it is too late: "Wake, traveller, it is not night." His best-known lines speak with a plain sadness rare in his time: "Hundreds of thousands of travellers set out; one or two reach the stage: people of the age, value us; we are not lost yet, but we are rare."