S. R. Faruqi:

Whether with regard to harmony or with regard to meaning and mood, this ghazal is in a class by itself. To search out such novel rhymes, and then to draw out from them this verse, was a task that Mir alone could achieve. Mir has composed very few refrain-less [;Gair-muraddif] ghazals, probably because he so skilfully searched out many new refrains.

In the present verse, if the pen-name is taken as an address, then the meaning emerges that 'Oh Mir, if the beloved doesn't know the custom/practice of desire, then it's not surprising'. And if we suppose 'Mir' to be a third-person singular, then the meaning becomes, 'If Mir doesn't know the custom/practice of desire, then how is it strange?'. In the light of the first meaning the beloved herself seems to be a yogi, and we are reminded of Najm un-Nisa's becoming a yogin in Mir Hasan's masnavi [si;hr ul-bayaan]. In the light of the second meaning, Mir himself is seen as a yogi.

FWP:

SETS == IDIOMS; MAGAR; SUBJECT?
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == PEN-NAME; REFRAIN; RHYME

This ghazal is unusual, though not at all unique, in using the poet's pen-name in the opening-verse as well as the closing-verse.

This ghazal also has no refrain, and its rhyme is the very unusual iit . This rhyme lends itself to Hindi-side words, since there are so many with that ending, while there are very few Perso-Arabic ones. Every verse in the ghazal ends in such a Hindi-side, and often rustic-sounding, word. Mir might have chosen the 'ground' deliberately, to add freshness and stir things up, or to show what he could do when he was in the mood.

Several forms of the proverb cited in the verse appear in *'A Dictionary of Hindustani Proverbs'*, by S. W. Fallon (London, 1886), p. 122:

The uncertainty of the subject in the first line is not entirely remedied in the second. For although we perhaps do feel that the addressee in the insha'iyah second line should be Mir himself (who is either being scolded by a friend for his folly, or scolding himself), the grammar is fully as open-ended as that of the first line. Excellent use is made of magar , which can mean either 'but' (2a) or 'perhaps' (2b).

This open-ended ambiguity is no more than appropriate, because both the beloved (with her fickleness, frivolity, and self-absorption) and the lover (with his madness and desert-roaming) can be imagined to be always wandering and to have no fixed abode, so that either of them could be seen as a yogi, as SRF observes. The Fallon entries make it perfectly clear that yogi-ness is construed in terms of wandering and has no particular religious connotations; the first Fallon example even conflates the yogi and the qalandar as similar emblems of nomadic unreliability.

In fact the very structure of jogii kis ke miit is itself enjoyably open-ended, since it takes advantage of the 'kya effect'. It can be taken as a warning to someone who might love a yogi ('Beware, yogis will always leave you!'), as a rueful lament by a yogi ('Alas, as a wanderer I can never claim a friend or lover'), or even as a neutral query about the social landscape ('Do yogis have any friends/lovers?').