The ghazal evolved as a highly formalized poetic form with rhyming couplets, and a refrain. The origins of Urdu have been well documented as first emerging as a pidgin โ a negotiation between Hindi, Persian and Arabic, and evolving to establish itself as one of the most spoken languages in the world. Historians broadly agree…
Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the coupletโs rhyming…
Sri Aurobindo, in his seminal essay The Future of Poetry, observes that “Truth of poetry is not truth of philosophy or truth of science or truth of religion only because it is another way of self-expression of infinite Truth so distinct that it appears to give quite another face of things and reveal quite another…