Scanning Urdu Meter

Before anyone explains Urdu meter to you, you have usually already heard it.

A ghazal sung at a gathering has a pulse that does not come from the harmonium. The singer can stretch a word or rush it, but under the stretching there is a fixed pattern of long and short beats, the same in every line, and a listener who has never been taught a single rule will wince when a line falls off it. Scanning, taqtīʿ, is the art of making that pulse visible: saying a line slowly, tapping it out, and writing down which beats are long and which are short.

The system is called ʿarūz. It came into Urdu from Persian, and into Persian from Arabic, and it has a beautiful way of teaching itself.

Short and long#

Tap a line on the table with one finger and you will find two kinds of beat. A short one is a quick tap, da. A long one is a held tap, DUM, roughly twice as long. Write the short as ‿ and the long as –.

What makes a syllable long is how much of the mouth's time it takes.

Short vowels are a, i, u. Long ones are ā, ī, ū, ai, au, and also e and o, which in Urdu are always long. The last row is the strange one: a syllable that is already long, with one more consonant left over, spills that consonant into a short beat of its own. Naqsh, a picture, is not one beat but two, naq · sh, – ‿. At the very end of a line the spill is forgiven and the extra consonant counts for nothing.

The drum syllables#

Students of ʿarūz do not learn the patterns as strings of marks. They learn them as words, nonsense words built from the root f-ʿ-l, and chant them the way a tabla student chants dhā dhin dhin dhā. Each word sounds like the pattern it names.

A meter, a bahr, is a row of these feet. Say mafāʿīlun four times without stopping and you are speaking the skeleton of one of the most loved meters in Urdu, hazaj:

ma-FĀ-ʿĪ-LUN ma-FĀ-ʿĪ-LUN ma-FĀ-ʿĪ-LUN ma-FĀ-ʿĪ-LUN

da-DUM-DUM-DUM, four times. Now put a line over it.

One misra, tapped out#

Ghalib, the opening of the ghazal whose page on rekhta.org gives:

ہزاروں خواہشیں ایسی کہ ہر خواہش پہ دم نکلے بہت نکلے مرے ارمان لیکن پھر بھی کم نکلے

hazāroñ ḳhvāhisheñ aisī ki har ḳhvāhish pe dam nikle bahut nikle mire armān lekin phir bhī kam nikle

A thousand longings, each one worth dying for; many of my hopes came true, and still too few.

Say it as it is said. Two spellings mislead the eye. خواہش is written with a vāo that nobody pronounces: the word is ḳhāhish. And the ñ of hazāroñ and ḳhvāhisheñ is only nasalisation, the vowel hummed through the nose. It adds colour and no time.

Cut it into beats. Between two vowels, the last consonant goes forward to start the next syllable, and anything before it stays behind to close the one in hand.

Mark each beat, then chant.

 ha  zā  roñ  ḳhā │ hi  sheñ  ai  sī │ ki  har  ḳhā  hish │ pe  dam  nik  le
 ‿   –   –    –   │ ‿   –     –   –  │ ‿   –    –    –    │ ‿   –    –    –
 ma  fā  ʿī   lun │ ma  fā    ʿī  lun│ ma  fā   ʿī   lun  │ ma  fā   ʿī   lun

Four times da-DUM-DUM-DUM. The line is in hazaj, all four feet whole.

Notice where the bars fall. The first foot ends in the middle of a word, after the ḳhā of ḳhāhisheñ; the third foot swallows ki, har and half of the second ḳhāhish. The feet do not care where words begin. The meter is laid over speech like a rhythm on a drum, not cut along the joints of grammar.

One beat needed a choice. Pe, "on", is written with a final he that can be said long or short, and the drum wants it short. Little words like pe, ke, se, hai, bhī bend this way all through Urdu verse. Scanning is never only marking. It is marking, and noticing which beats were allowed to give.

The second misra asks for two of these allowances at once:

 ba  hut  nik  le │ mi  re  ar  mā │ n   le  kin  phir │ bhī  kam  nik  le
 ‿   –    –    –  │ ‿   –   –   –  │ ‿   –   –    –    │ ‿    –    –    –

Armān, hopes, is the overlong kind: long ā and a final n. In the middle of a line that n spills into a short beat of its own and becomes the first da of the third foot. And bhī, long on the page, is tapped short to open the fourth. Neither is a trick. Every reader of Ghalib makes both moves without noticing, which is exactly what it means to have an ear for the meter.

Other tunes#

Different feet, different music. Ramal runs on fāʿilātun, DUM-da-DUM-DUM, and closes on a shorter fāʿilun. Ghalib opens his whole dīvān with it:

نقش فریادی ہے کس کی شوخیٔ تحریر کا

naqsh faryādī hai kis kī shoḳhī-e tahrīr kā

Whose playful hand drew this picture, that it stands there complaining?

 naq  sh  far  yā │ dī  hai  kis  kī │ sho  ḳhi  ye  tah │ rī  r  kā
 –    ‿   –    –  │ –   ‿    –    –  │ –    ‿    –   –   │ –   ‿  –

Naqsh spills, as promised. Hai goes short. And the little mark under شوخیٔ is the izāfat, the linking "of": shoḳhī-e tahrīr, the playfulness of the writing. Said aloud, the long ī shortens and a y glides in to carry the link, sho · ḳhi · ye, and that new syllable lands exactly where the drum wants a DUM.

Khafīf mixes its feet, fāʿilātun mafāʿilun faʿlun, and has a gentler, conversational lilt. Mir:

دیکھ تو دل کہ جاں سے اٹھتا ہے

dekh to dil ki jāñ se uThtā hai

Look: is it from the heart or from the soul that it rises?

 de  kh  to  dil │ ki  jāñ  se  uTh │ tā  hai
 –   ‿   –   –   │ ‿   –    ‿   –   │ –   –

And Ghalib, in the same meter, beginning with an izāfat that rekhta prints with no mark at all, دل ناداں, though every reader says dil-e nādāñ:

دل ناداں تجھے ہوا کیا ہے

dil-e nādāñ tujhe huā kyā hai

Foolish heart, what has happened to you?

 di  le  nā  dāñ │ tu  jhe  hu  ā │ kyā  hai
 ‿   ‿   –   –   │ ‿   –    ‿   – │ –    –

The l of dil moves across to sit on the e, di · le, and the opening foot comes out as faʿilātun, da-da-DUM-DUM, a permitted lighter cousin of the first foot of khafīf. The unwritten vowel is the one that makes the line scan. A reader who did not hear it would find the line a beat short.

Mutaqārib is faʿūlun over and over, da-DUM-DUM, a marching beat, and it is the meter of Ferdowsi's Shāhnāma. From its opening, on ganjoor.net:

توانا بود هر که دانا بود

tavānā buvad har ki dānā buvad

Whoever knows is strong.

 ta  vā  nā │ bu  vad  har │ ki  dā  nā │ bu  vad
 ‿   –   –  │ ‿   –    –  │ ‿   –   –  │ ‿   –

And then there is Mir's other music, the meter readers call bahr-e-mīr:

الٹی ہو گئیں سب تدبیریں کچھ نہ دوا نے کام کیا

ulTī ho gaīñ sab tadbīreñ kuchh na davā ne kām kiyā

All my plans turned upside down; no medicine did any good.

None of the tables above fits it. It comes from Hindi song rather than Persian learning: a row of long beats, any one of which may break into two quick shorts, so the line keeps a steady count of time while the syllables underneath it shift. Try tapping it with the mafāʿīlun hand and it slips away. Tap it as a walking pulse, DUM DUM DUM DUM, letting some beats split, and it settles. The plainness of that tune against Ghalib's Persian one is part of what Mir and the Broken Heart is about.

Where the ear decides#

Every example above needed a choice that the page did not make.

• Elision. A word ending in a consonant, before a word that begins with a vowel, often hands the consonant across: dil ab is tapped di · lab. Sometimes it is not. The meter, and only the meter, says which.
• Izāfat. Sometimes marked, often not, and when it is spoken it creates a beat out of nothing.
• Nasalisation. ñ adds no time. But the n of meñ before a vowel is sometimes said as a full consonant, and then it does.
• Bending words. Hai, bhī, se, pe, ko, mire: long or short as the line needs.
• Spelling against sound. The silent vāo of ḳhvāhish. The extra i that rekhta's romanization puts in fariyādī, which helps a learner say the word and would wreck the scansion if tapped: the meter needs far · yā, two beats, not three. Urdu script, which does not write short vowels at all, leaves even more to the reader.

This is why scansion is taught aloud. A list of rules gets you most of the way to ma-FĀ-ʿĪ-LUN. The last step is a reader saying the line until it stops resisting, and hearing, from inside the language, which syllable was always meant to be light.