All of them contributed together in constructing a larger and comprehensive tradition of ghazal writing which has kept growing ever since. While prominent literary centres like the Deccan, Delhi and Lucknow created competitive conditions for the development of the ghazal, several others spread over the length and breadth of the country championed their own features of style. Looking back, one may clearly notice that it has passed through several stages of development in form, content and language, ever since its first flowering in the Deccan and its subsequent branching out in various directions of India. Even though the ghazal in India is sometimes traced back to the 13th century in the works of Amir Khusrau, its Urdu incarnation is rightly identified in Mohammad Quli Qutub Shah towards the latter half of the 16th century, and Vali Deccani in the succeeding century. Outside Arabia where it originated, and Persia where it matured, it was in India that the ghazal found its most hospitable destination.
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Turkey, for example, being another destination of the ghazal, offered yet another variation on the Persian ghazal.Īli Shir Navai of Afghan descent, who was supposed to be the founder of Uzbek literature, brought it closer to new linguistic habits and exposed it to the extinct Chagatai language of Turkey in the mid-15th century, and Fuzuli brought the ghazal to Azerbaijani Turkish in tone and tenor at the beginning of the 16th century. Even the poets who wrote in other languages looked towards Persia for mature models.
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The ghazal written in Persian, the dominant literary language of central Asia and India, made remarkable impact and proved quite consequential in the development of the ghazal as an archetypal form of poetic expression in the East. The Persian ghazal matured further after the classical models in the subsequent centuries but it always distinguished itself for two of its most distinctive qualities: its acute mystical preoccupations and its keen philosophical concerns. It also defined the length of the ghazal from seven to 15 shers, and made way for the poets to use their signature in maqta, the last sher of the composition.Ībdullah Jafar Rudaki, the first canonical ghazal writer of Persia towards the end of the 9th century, was followed in chronological order by other major poets like Sanai Ghaznavi and Fariduddin Attar in the 12th century, Sadi Shirazi and Jalaluddin Rumi in the 13th and Hafiz Shirazi in the 14th century. Later, the Persian ghazal acquired its definite character when it developed its own stylistic marks in refurbishing the matla, the first sher of the ghazal, and evolving a pattern of refrains ( radeef) as the last unit of expression in the second line of each sher. It was only when the ghazal reached Persia in the middle of the 8th century that it started developing its own contours even while it did not entirely disengage from the formal patterns of the Arabic ghazals. In yet another instance, we have the ghazal reaching out to west African languages like Hausa and Fulfulde.Įven while these ghazals developed their own marks, they also kept close to the Arabic model by retaining the traditional Arabic metres and forms. When the ghazal moved out of the Arabian Peninsula, it found a hospitable space in medieval Spain where it was written both in the Arabic and the Hebrew languages. A brief tour through the passages of this poetic form and its diverse routes would reveal both its uniqueness and universal appeal. The trajectory of the ghazal is unlike that of any other literary form that has had a history of traversing beyond its spatial confines.
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#Famous ghazals movie