rau maiN hay raksh e umar..

Rau maiN hay raksh e umar..

Evocation rather than description is the rule in the ghazal. This is also true of all other characteristics, circumstances, transactions of the lover and the beloved. The only items somewhat firmly anchored in quotidian, recognizable reality are the other. Others--friends, advisors, preachers, censors, the devout and the priestly – that is, all those in principle not in favor of the lover throwing his life away, or destroying his faith by following the course of love rather than that of the world, and of God, as seen by contempt regarding them as benighted, materialistic and mundane, having no understanding of the inner life. The phrase ahle zahir (the people of the obvious and the apparent) sums it all up. The world of the ghazal is one world where the Outsider is the Hero, where non-conformism is the creed, and where prosperity is poverty.

Shamsur Rehman Faruqi

Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions:
Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century

The Annual of Urdu Studies
Number 14