Ghazal: Structure, radif-qafiya, and writing tashreeh that scores
Anatomy of the ghazal
A ghazal is a string of shers in one behr (metre); each sher is complete in itself, and the shers are bound by a repeated radif with a rhyming qafiya before it. Every second line of every sher carries the radif. The matla is the opening sher where both lines rhyme; the maqta is the closing sher carrying the poet's takhallus. Radif, qafiya, matla and maqta are what the examiner checks before reading your prose.
Tashreeh in four moves
- Word meaning: gloss the difficult words in one line.
- Zahiri ma'ni: what the sher literally says.
- Batini ma'ni: the deeper claim - ishq, gham, tasavvuf, insaniyat, watan.
- San'at: name the device and say what it achieves (tashbeeh, isti'ara, husn-e-ta'lil, mubaligha, talmeeh, tajnis).
Worked example
Sher: 'Dil-e-nadaan tujhe hua kya hai / Aakhir is dard ki dawa kya hai' (Ghalib).
- Radif: 'kya hai', repeated at the end of both lines.
- Qafiya: 'hua' and 'dawa', the rhyming words immediately before the radif.
- Meaning: the poet addresses his own heart, asking what has befallen it and what cure exists for this pain.
- San'at: the repeated radif plus istifham (rhetorical question) turns private complaint into self-interrogation.
Note the order of work: metre and radif first, meaning second, device last. Writing the device before the meaning reads as guesswork and is marked as such.
Traps
Calling the radif the qafiya; treating the whole ghazal as one continuous argument; ignoring the maqta and the takhallus; writing the poet's biography where a tashreeh was asked; forgetting a sher has exactly two misras; mislabelling mubaligha as husn-e-ta'lil.