Frances W. Pritchett, a well-known critic of Urdu and professor at Columbia University, writes: “To me ghazal’s reliance on its wonderful networks of images and conventions makes it very clear that ...

I first encountered Ghalib in the early 1970s. I was in graduate school, studying poetry. Then, as now, I had no Urdu. The medium of transmission—translation—was Aijaz Ahmad’s Ghazals of Ghalib, from ...

A session on 'Urdu Ghazal New Formations' was held at the 14th International Urdu Conference at the Arts Council of Pakistan Karachi, which was moderated by Nasira Zuberi. On this occasion, Ambreen ...

Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Baker of Tarifa based on the history of interfaith tolerance in Al-Andalus won the 2011 San Diego Book Award for poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize ...

Shad Naved’s The Ghazal Eros: Lyric Queerness in History is a long-awaited study. This book has been anticipated not only as an important scholarly intervention but also as a distillation of Naved’s ...

Canonised as one of Urdu’s greatest poets, Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir” of Delhi, who died in 1810, also authored a collection of verse in Persian. He composed verse in genres other than the ghazal, in ...

An apparently very personal statement about how to live extends into much wider politics Ghazal: Myself by Marilyn Hacker They say the rules are: be forgotten, or proclaim myself. I’m reasonably tired ...

My discovery of contemporary world literature and Afzal Ahmed Syed’s poetry happened around the same time, 25 years ago. The two seemed of a piece: novel and indispensable. Dazzled by one’s first ...

India is home to great pieces of poetry by maestros like Amir Khusrau, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Mirza Ghalib and Meer Taqi Meer among others. And now ghazal singer Pankaj Udhas is set to bring the works of ...

The English poetic "set forms" are all imports, if you discount count Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre, which hardly constitutes a form, and, I suppose, the Clerihew - fun, but hardly a likely vehicle ...