About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of ninety-seven poems by Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta of Delhi (1809–1869): ninety-five *ghazals* (lyric poems), one *naat* (poem in praise of the Prophet) and a two-couplet fragment on his own *diwan* (collected poems). They are all the poems under Shefta's name on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Shefta ka Kalam* ("Poems of Shefta"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the ninety-seven 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 poems are given in the order of the source, which is broadly alphabetical by first line, and are headed by their first line. A few ghazals on Wikisource lack a closing couplet with the pen name, and one ("That rose-coloured idol came to my grave") ends with a stray couplet in the rhyme of the ghazal before it; they are printed as found. The *naat* ("When God created the light of Muhammad") is plainer in style than the rest, but it stands under Shefta's name in the source and is given as found.

Copyright: Shefta died in 1869, so his poems are in the public domain everywhere. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Arabic lines in the poems are translated, with the original in a note. The translation keeps each line of verse as a line, and puts accuracy before rhyme. The pen name Shefta is kept as a name.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Delhi, India, Medina, Najd, Egypt, Babylon, Sinai; Joseph, Jacob, Jesus, Khizr, Alexander, Darius, Jamshid, Hatim; Laila, Qais (Majnun), Shirin, Farhad, Khusrau (Parvez); Mani, Kalim, Hali.

Introduction

Nawab Muhammad Mustafa Khan, who wrote as Shefta in Urdu and Hasrati in Persian, was born in 1809 into a family of Afghan nobles who held the estate of Jahangirabad near Delhi. He lived in Delhi in the last brilliant years of the Mughal court, a rich, learned and generous man, and went on the pilgrimage to Mecca in his youth; one couplet here turns on the distance between Delhi and Arabia. He lost much in the upheaval of 1857 and spent his last years largely at Jahangirabad, where he died in 1869.

Shefta was a poet of the circle of Momin, whom he took as his master in Urdu verse, and a close friend of Ghalib, who valued his judgement. He is best known as a critic: his Persian *tazkira* (anthology of poets with comments), *Gulshan-e-Bekhar* (1835), was famous for its strict taste. The young Altaf Husain Hali spent some years in his household and later said that he learned from Shefta to prefer simple truth to exaggeration.

The ghazals here show that taste. They are polished, ironic and often conversational: the lover argues with the beloved, the messenger, the counsellor and the rival, and the refrain carries the argument ("when were you not", "for nothing", "all night long"). Behind the play stand the Sufi ideas of the age, the tavern as the place of truth and the self lost in the Friend. Among them is one of the most quoted couplets in Urdu, on the tales of love: "we do embellish them, to adorn the story".