Before I started writing this article, I thought several times if I had the knowledge and expertise to dwell on a subject as vast and complex as ‘shaa’iri’. After all, I have taken only the first step towards learning this great art. But then I thought that my experience might help those who are yet to take that first step. So here I am, with my explanation of ‘bah’r’, the most important technical aspect of shaa’iri.

The purpose of this article is to give the readers a general idea of what bah’r means and how it is used to construct a misra’a (line) of Urdu shaa’iri. I am sharing with you some of my limited knowledge of shaa’iri that my Ustaad ‘Mazaq’ Charkhariwi has graciously given to me. He belongs to Ustaad Daag Dehlwi’s school of shaa’iri. Everything written here conforms to that school and its teachings. There are areas where schools differ in opinion, but that happens only in the case of very fine details. The scope covered here is very basic and should not pose any such issue. However, I wanted to post the disclaimer, just in case.

‘Bah’r or ‘Meter’ is the structure over which the words of a misra’a (line) of a she’r (verse) are arranged. Bah’r itself is made of ‘arkaan’ (plural of ‘rukn’ which means ‘pillar’ or ‘important part’). Arkaan are also referred to as ‘feet’. Whosoever coined this term was perhaps trying to relate it to the bigger unit ‘meter’, without realizing that ‘meter’ and ‘foot’ are units of length in two different systems of measurement. However, the ‘meter’ and ‘feet’ combination may be justified by the fact that one meter is roughly equal to three and a quarter feet, and most of the bah’rs do have three or four arkaan in one misra’a. Arkaan are meaningless dummy words, the basic purpose of which is to specify the places of long and short syllables in an actual word. The eight arkaan, broken down into syllables, used in Urdu shaa’iri are as follows.

‘fa-uu-lun’,
‘faa-i-lun’,
‘ma-faa-ii-lun’,
‘mus-taf-i-lun’,
‘faa-i-laa-tun’,
‘mu-ta-faa-i-lun’,
‘ma-faa-i-la-tun’
and
‘maf-uu-laat’

Perhaps this is a good place to add a note on transliteration, that is the process of writing Urdu words in Roman script, so that they are pronounced correctly. We will treat ‘a’ as in ‘akbar’, ‘i’ as in ‘ishq’, ‘u’ as in ‘uljhan’, ‘e’ as in ‘ek’ (‘ai’ and ‘ei’ should be treated as ‘e’), ‘o’ as in ‘bahaaro’, ‘aa’ as in ‘aaraam’, ‘ii’ as in ‘merii’ and ‘uu’ as in ‘juutaa’ (other Roman letters used are self explanatory and are not as important as these vowels).