For example,
Chupke Chupke Raat Din, Aansoon Bahana Yaad Hai
Humko Ab Tak Aashiqui ka Wo Zamana Yaad Hai..
Now that's a beautiful couplet and each line sounds beautiful , and more importantly , similar! i.e they are in the same 'meter' of poetry.
Now to know what Ghazals are, we need to know just one more term .. a 'refrain'.
A 'refrain' is a line that is repeated throughout a piece of poetry, the summary of emotions that a poet wants to convey put in one line and repeated after most or some of the couplets for stressing the inner feeling the poet wants to lay bare to his audience.
For example, in the above Ghazal, the line
Humko Ab Tak Aashiqui ka Wo Zamana Yaad Hai..
is the refrain used throughout the ghazal.
So what is a Ghazal! A Ghazal is simply a piece of poetry consisting of 5 or more couplets that share the same meter and have a refrain. And a ghazal is not really a ghazal unless it conveys the absolute spiritual beauty felt by the poet, despite the loss of love. It is also used to convey unrequited love and the beauty of memories that always stays behind.
So it is important to note , that while most people consider Ghazals as 'sad' songs. .they really are not! The lines convey the heartfelt beauty of the pain felt by the poet, an ode to the days gone by that can only be reminisced, never relived. The lines convey the perennial hope of romance that lurks in the poet, and the eventual spiritual route to seeking that love.
Ghazals trickled down from 6th century Arabic verse, and were made popular by the persian poets Rumi and Hafez, amongst others.
More well-known poets like Mirza Ghalib made the form reach its peak popularity in Urdu verse.
Modern greats like Mohsin Naqvi have made the form famous through ghazals sung by legends like Ghulam Ali, Abida Parveen, etc.
Indian singers like Jagjit Singh have only added to this poetic form's ever growing audience.
Through this blog, I hope to interpret and find deep meanings in some of my favorite ghazals!
Of course, most of them may be popular ones, but I hope to discover some hidden gems along the way!
Gazal is much more mature form and it requires a great sense of conceptual elavation and alonwith an aspiaration of mind to think deepr and bigger and higher. Wordly widsom will not do justice to the poet and his poetry. Many poetries are alarming, sensational and expansive. Aawargi is one them. The poetry is about politic of physics ans metaphysics and the poet is referring to the the soul as the aawara, and the body as the unknown. Once you understand the plot, the rest of gazal is easy to understand. For example, 'kal shab mujhe....' lines mean the soul tried to remind me of my past existence, but the poet refused to identify himself it. Similarly, 'is dasht me ek sheher tha ' means now that the poet is reduced to an ash, non-existence, but once there was a beautiful body that encased his soul. Musically the composition does not do justice to the poetry. This is set in Raag Bhariavi but the laya is too fast to create an impact of a 'soulful ' rendition. That is where it misleads the poetry. As a poet-composer- singer I must say that like poetry, there is also a musical paragraphing possible. However, since indan music has a fixed concept of mukhda and antara, the music returns to the first musical expression again and again and antaras are more or less set in same musical notes. Look at classical renditions where the paragraphing effect is vast and the musical poetry could be set in enhanced form because each para acts as a stepping stone to developing the musical thought. www.gazalking.com
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