S. R. Faruqi:

Sauda too has versified the theme of the 'face toward fate/death' and the 'street of the beloved':

ḍarte ḍarte jo tire kūche meñ ā jātā hūñ
ṣaid-e ḳhāʿif kī t̤araḥ rū bah qafā jātā hūñ

[when I come, very fearfully, into your street
like a timid prey, I go with my face turned backward]

The difference is that Sauda's verse speaks of going into the beloved's street, and Mir's verse speaks of coming out of it. With regard to the beloved's being a hunter and the lover's being a prey or murdered one, ṣaid-e ḳhāʾif is very fine; but taken as a whole Sauda's theme is slight, and he also wasn't able to bring all its possibilities into play. Because of ḍarte ḍarte in the first line, ṣaid-e ḳhāʾif in the second line is, if not entirely useless, certainly at least to a large extent without effect.

Zalali Badayuni has adopted the spirit of Mir's theme with such excellence that his verse has deservedly become immortal:

maiñ ne jab vādī-e ġhurbat meñ qadam rakkhā thā
dūr tak yād-e vat̤an āʾī thī samjhāne ko

[when I set foot in the valley of foreignness
for a long distance memory of the homeland came along to cajole/dissuade me]

Zalali Badayuni has made use of 'stripping down, isolating' [tajrīd], and Mir has, according to his style, versified the theme with regard to daily life. When a person leaves any beloved individual or place, then for a long time he keeps turning around to look that way. Mir has very excellently made this observation the foundation of his verse.

In this opening-verse the rhyme is vafā and qafā ; that is, both of them have the restriction to f . Nowadays some 'Ustads' will say that in all the verses the restriction to f ought to have been maintained-- while Mir did not consider this necessary, and made the 'error' [ġhalat̤ī] of using rhymes like lagā and rakhā and so on. The response to this complaint is that if later people have confined the verse within unnecessary bonds, then why is Mir at fault?

From the days of early Urdu to the eighteenth century, our poets were particularly free. In the nineteenth century the restrictions began, and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Lakhnavis tightened these restrictions even further, and declared that the excellence of a poet lay in being bound by these restrictions. The name used was that of Nasikh, but the actual work was done by others-- for example, ʿalī ausat̤ rashk , mīr ʿishq , and others. Those people said whatever they said, and passed away. But in our era some 'Ustads' have taken those restrictions as bulwarks of their life and faith.

[See also {293,1}; {302,1}; {1882,1}.]

FWP:

SETS == JO; MULTIVALENT WORDS
MOTIFS == GAZE; ROAD
NAMES
TERMS == RHYME

We should also notice the prominent placing of the multivalent kām . Even though the official meaning is certainly kām karnā as 'to do work', how can we fail to enjoy the fact that in looking back as long as possible the gaze is also 'doing' its desire?

The criticism by the modern 'Ustads' to which SRF refers is that the actual rhyme in the ghazal consists only of the ā syllable: after this opening-verse the rhyme-words are lagā , sunā , dikhā, khā , uṭhā , ā , gadā . But by using vafā and qafā , the opening-verse gives the false impression that the rhyme would be afā . Obviously, this was not something that Mir bothered about. Other such instances: {293,1}; {302,1}; {1882,1}.