The ghazal always opens with a rhyming couplet called matla. The rhyme of the opening couplet is repeated at the end of second line in each succeeding verse, so that the rhyming pattern may be represented as aa,ba,ca,da etc., and so on. In addition to the restriction of rhyme, the ghazal also observes the convention of radif. Radif demands that a portion of the first line , comprising not more than two or three words, immediately preceding the rhyme-word at the end, should rhyme with its counterpart in the second line of the opening couplet, and afterwards alternately throughout the poem. The opening couplet of the ghazal is always a representative couplet: it sets the mood and tone of the poem and prepares us for its proper appreciation. The last couplet of the ghazal called makta often includes the pen-name of the poet, and is more personal than general in its tone and intent. Here the poet may express his own state of mind, or describe his religious faith, or pray for his beloved, or indulge in poetic self-praise.

The couplets are united only by meter and rhyme, rather than by content; thus each couplet is intended to constitute a discrete entity - like a pearl in a necklace or a flower in a garland, to use familiar metaphors. The different couplets of the ghazal are not bound by unity and consistency of thought. Each couplet is a self-sufficient unit, detachable and quotable, generally containing the complete expression of an idea.

Because of its comparative brevity and concentration, its thematic variety and rich suggestiveness, the ghazal soon eclipsed the qasida and became the most popular form of poetry in Iran. It was cultivated with great zeal by the Persians, and became the single most important genre of Persian literature. Reaching a classical zenith in the works of Sadi and Hafiz, the Persian ghazal acquired formal and athestic characteristics which persist to this day, in the ghazal as cultivated in other languages as well.

These features include a set of closely related themes: unrequited love, mystical devotion, philosophical rumination, ridicule of religious orthodoxy, symbolic celebration of madness and intoxication, and a sort of self-abnegating, sometimes masochistic immersion in the pangs of longing and frustration. The reliance on these set themes, together with the usage of a set of standardised symbols and metaphors, compensates for the fragmentary nature of the ghazal as a poem, and facilitates epigrammatic condensation for which, among other things, individual couplets are prized.

Some poets including Hasrat, Iqbal and Josh have written ghazals in the style of a nazm, based on a single theme, properly developed and concluded. But such ghazals are an exception rather than a rule, and the traditional ghazal still holds sway. However, it is not uncommon to find, even amongst the works of classical poets, ghazals exhibiting continuity of theme or, more often, a set of verses connected in theme and thought. Such a thematic group is called a qita, and is presumably resorted to when a poet is confronted with an elaborate thought difficult to be condensed in a single verse. Although the ghazal deals with the whole spectrum of human experience, its central concern is love. The ghazal came to India with the advent and extension of the Muslim influence from the 12th century onwards. The Moghuls brought with them Iranian culture and civilization, including Iranian poetry and literature. By the 18th century, when Persian gave way to Urdu as the language of poetry and culture in India, the ghazal found its opportunity to grow and develop.

The Urdu ghazal still adhered largely to the form, imagery, and content of its ancestor. Evidence suggests that the ghazal as musical genre has thrived for several centuries in North India. Ghazal could be chanted in a semi-melodic tarannum style by poets at poetry readings, or it could be used as a text for Muslim devotional qawwali performed by professional groups in shrines. Most commonly and importantly, however, ghazal was performed by courtesans and other trained vocalists as a genteel light-classical music style, which stressed interpretive melodic improvisation--bol banao--on the nonrhyming, first line of each couplet. Classical rags (modes) and accompanying instruments (tabla drum-pair, sarangi fiddle) were used, and a sophisticated aesthetic developed which evaluated ghazal songs on the basis of the poetry itself, the precomposed tune used for refrains (especially of the rhyming lines), and, above all, the singer's skillful, improvised bol banao.

Ghazal as a musical genre became particularly popular in the nineteenth century, when a proto-capitalist, incipient bourgeoisie began to replace the declining feudal Mughal nobility as patrons of the fine arts. In the first half of the twentieth century, the light-classical ghazal continued to enjoy popular appeal among music aficionados and middle-class enthusiasts, although it was to some extent stigmatized by its association with the declining courtesan culture. On the whole, however, the light-classical ghazal successfully effected the transition from court and courtesan salon to the public concert hall, and from feudal to bourgeoisie patronage.

The ghazal's popularity was aided by the advent of the recording industry in India in 1901. From the very start, ghazals constituted a significant part, and perhaps a plurality of commercial recordings, largely because ghazal was the most popular music genre in Urdu, the lingua franca of North India. The recording industry naturally promoted ghazal as one of the few genres with a pan-regional, potentially mass common-denominator market, unlike, for example, classical music or regional folkstyles. With the advent of sound cinema, ghazals came to account for a large portion of the music of Hindi cinema, especially in the early decades. In the process of being transformed into a commercially popular music with mass appeal, however, the film ghazal underwent predictable changes which brought it stylistically in line with mainstream film music as a whole. Thus the improvisatory bol banao was eliminated, so that the genre became, essentially, a precomposed song, accompanied, like most film music, by varied ensembles of Western and Indian instruments.

The film ghazal, as popularized by Talat Mahmood, Lata Mangeshkar, and others, retained some of the exotic and romantic associations of the courtesan world and of Urdu verse in general, while aiming at a contemporary and less sophisticated audience. The Urdu lyrics cohered well with the diction of so-called Hindi films, most which were in fact in Urdu, in accordance with that language's "sweet" and romantic ethos, as opposed to standard Hindi, which is perceived as a more utilitarian tongue. Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, the light-classical ghazal, particularly as sung by Begum Akhtar, continued to enjoy a stable, if limited degree of popularity among connoisseurs of classical music and Urdu poetry.

By the early 1970s the film ghazal, although still relatively common, was undergoing a marked decline. Aside from the retirement of Talat Mahmood in 1970, a primary factor was the reorientation of film music in general, toward fast, rhythmic songs influenced by Western rock and disco, in place of the traditional melodic, sentimental styles like ghazal.

Another cause was the increasing trend toward action-oriented masala (lit. spice) films, rather than sentimental melodramas and costume-drama mythologicals. Although the ghazal's versatile formal structure could conceivably have been adapted even to disco styles, the genre has remained too closely associated with its traditional subject matter of broken hearts, weepy lovers, and the stylized refinement of Urdu culture in general. The other development that contributed to the gradual eclipse of the ghazal, in both its film and light-classical styles has been the marked decline of the Urdu language in India, with Independence in 1947 and the subsequent partition of India and Pakistan.

The decline of the ghazal, in both its commercial film and light-classical varieties, was an inevitable concomitant. Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s, certain broad social, aesthetic, and technological developments had emerged which paved the way for the revival of a modernized form of the ghazal. As we have noted, the action-oriented masala films, while satisfying cinema audiences, took film music in a direction contrary to the tastes of the many middle-class listeners, who continued to prefer tuneful, sentimental crooning to the disco-influenced modern film music. One may hypothesize that as the consumerist urban bourgeoisie grew in strength, numbers, and self-identity, a demand arose for a music which reflected its own self-image and aesthetic values. Such a music would have to be more genteel than the raucous and lowest-common-denominator film music, and yet it needed to be simpler and more accessible than classical music, constituting, in Birmingham School terms, a "rearticulation" of the elite semi classical ghazal. As more middle class consumers were able to afford phonographs, the potential began to emerge for a new pan-regional popular music which could be, for the first time, independent of films. A modernized, simplified pop ghazal was the ideal genre for such an audience, and it correspondingly began to flourish as such around 1977.

In order to achieve a genuinely mass audience, however, it required a mass medium which was cheaper and more accessible than records, and yet still distinct from cinema. The spread of cassette players among the upper and middle classes in the late 1970s provided the essential catalyst for the flowering of the modern ghazal as the first pan-regional commercial genre to challenge the dominance of film music and its coterie of stars and producers.

The modern ghazal, as befits the composition and tastes of its audience, retains a distinctly aristocratic, courtly image (or, one might say, pretension). Singers appear on stage and on cassette covers dressed in fine Muslim-style kurtas and sherwanis. Cassettes often feature canned (artificially inserted) exclamations of "wah wah!" (bravo!) intended to suggest the ambiance of the genteel courtesan salon ormusha'ra (poetry reading). In the use of tabla (as opposed to bongos, or folk barrel drum), occasional tame improvisations, ghazal form, and the Urdu language itself, the modern ghazal retains some of the mannerisms, if not the substantive content, of the traditional light-classical ghazal enjoyed by the Urdu-speaking nobility of previous generations. Thus the entire identity and core audience of the modern ghazal are quite distinct from those of the mainstream film song. Journalistic critics, for their part, are quick to deplore the occasional presence of film elements in the contemporary ghazal, such as the usage of borrowed film melodies. At the same time, the modern ghazal is clearly more accessible, in style, diction, and patterns of dissemination, than was its highbrow predecessor, the audience of which consisted primarily (though not exclusively) of aristocrats steeped in refined Urdu culture. Thus, for example, whereas the aesthetic substance of the light-classical ghazal was the process of textual-melodic improvisation (bol banao), cassettes of modern ghazals are aimed at musically less-educated consumers who expect lyrical, fixed tunes.

The absence of improvisation renders the modern ghazal fundamentally different in aesthetic content and import from its light-classical antecedent, and more akin to a git (geet)--literally "song," but, implicitly, a precomposed commercial song. Journalist critics tend to disparage this development, as in the following excerpt from a concert review: Gone are the days of the expansive, free ghazal. Its difference from the circumscribed and hide-bound geet is fast obliterated. Vocalist Sonali Jalota is one of the few singers to openly acknowledge this development, such that in concert she invariably announces such songs gitnuma-ghazal (git-style ghazal). Modern vocalists, like their predecessors, tend to sing the works of contemporary poets as well as old favorites by past masters. Rather than indicating a decline, the preference for contemporary verses, even if often inferior to the classics, can be regarded as an indication of the continued vitality and evolution of the ghazal as poetry. As has often been observed, mediocre poems may make effective song texts, just as much great poetry lends itself poorly to musical rendering.

Nevertheless, aficionados of Urdu verse tend to regard the majority of verse sung by modern singers as markedly inferior when judged by past standards. While traditional themes, metaphors, and imagery are retained, many modern ghazals seem more sentimental than classical Urdu verse, which treats lover and beloved more as archetypes. Much of what is popularized by the contemporary stars consists of shallow, inconsequential, and hackneyed verse, reiterating tired clichs whose triviality, for annoyed connoisseurs, is only heightened by the artificiality of the canned "wah-wahs" following them on cassettes. Of course, there have always been dozens of ordinary poets for each talented one--especially in a genre so widely cultivated as the Urdu ghazal. Perhaps what invites the purists' scorn is the modern ghazal's unprecedented mass dissemination, which popularizes otherwise forgettable verse among vast audiences. Connoisseurs of high Urdu also lament the extent to which Urdu diction has been simplified, or replace with Hindi, in order to reach a broader, Hindi-speaking audience. As popular knowledge of Urdu declines, singers of pop ghazals increasingly avoid verse with unfamiliar Persia-Arabic diction, including many of the most famous ghazals of great classical poets like Ghalib. Critics also point out that some modern singers--including some of the top stars--pronounce Urdu phonemes incorrectly, substituting Hindi phonemes for Urdu counterparts and misplacing unwritten elisions (ezafet). A few vocalists have been known to confess in private that they themselves are unsure of the meaning of some of the couplets they sing. Some of the most popular modern ghazals employ distinctively Hindi diction which would never be encountered in traditional Urdu verse. The the popularity of this and other Hindi-oriented ghazals clearly coheres with the general dilution of Urdu in the modern ghazal.

In North India and Pakistan, the Urdu ghazal continues to enjoy prodigious popularity, indeed, incomparably greater than that of any poetic form in the West. Although Urdu is, on the whole, a product of Indo-Muslim culture, in the last decade, the ghazal has been commercially produced in different regional languages, especially Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Pashtu, and Hindi itself. While these ghazals often use the standard imagery, rhyme scheme, and, to some extent, meters of their Urdu models, what distinguishes them more clearly as ghazals is their style, which imitates that of the contemporary mainstream ghazal. The appearance of regional-language ghazals is directly related to the rise of cassettes, with their crucial role in the ghazal boom in general, and in the emergence of commercial regional music.

based on extracts from:

i) Masterpieces of Urdu Ghazal - From 17th to 20th Century by K.C. Kanda.
ii) Cassette Culture by Peter Manuel, The University of Chicago Press, 1993.