About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of sixteen *ghazals* (lyric poems) by Ameerullah Tasleem of Lucknow (d. 1911). They are all the poems by Tasleem on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Tasleem ka Kalam* ("Poems of Tasleem"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the sixteen 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 broadly alphabetical by first line, and are headed by their first line.

Copyright: Tasleem died in 1911, 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 Tasleem is kept as a name.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Lucknow, Delhi, Najaf; Naseem Dehlavi; Farhad, Qais; Khizr, Mansur, Mani; Ali.

Introduction

Ameerullah, who wrote as Tasleem ("submission"), was born in Awadh early in the nineteenth century and lived a very long life, through the last years of the court of Lucknow, the upheaval of 1857 and the decades after it. Like many poets of Lucknow he served at the court of Wajid Ali Shah and, after the fall of Awadh, found a place at Rampur. He died in 1911.

In poetry Tasleem was the pupil of Naseem Dehlavi, himself a pupil of Momin, and one ghazal here ends with that proud claim: "I am the pupil of Naseem Dehlavi: I ought to create my master's manner of expression." He in turn was the teacher of Hasrat Mohani, so that through him the line of Momin reached the twentieth century.

His ghazals are short, neat and witty, in the Lucknow manner. The lover pleads, sulks and jokes; the preacher is mocked in a long ghazal whose every couplet ends with "preacher"; the tresses, the cupbearer and the cruel sword all have their turn. Beneath the play lies a quieter note of faith and of the shortness of life, in a prayer to see the shrine of Ali at Najaf and in the counsel: "Do not linger in the world; go on beyond the world."