How Many Kinds of Ghazal?

I first learned about the ghazal over ten years ago, from a short note in a little magazine. The only information was that a ghazal is a series of couplets that are independent of each other. Not long after that, a friend sent me a copy of Poetry Pilot, with Agha Shahid Ali's advocacy of the "real" ghazal. As it turned out, Shahid advocated the Persian ghazal. We who try to write ghazals in English owe him a real debt: he clarified and focused our understanding of the ghazal form.

We English speaking and writing still don't know enough about the ghazal's form in the various cultures in which it developed and flourished. David Jalajel's presentations of Arabic forms are a valuable addition to our knowledge. There's surely more to learn about the ghazal in other languages and cultures. The Urdu ghazal seems very close to the Persian, with an exception that a ghazal can develop a single theme. Harsangeet Kaur Bullar's essay on the ghazal in India and Pakistan defines the nazm and qita for that tradition. A nazm is a ghazal that develops a single theme, and a qita is a group of couplets within a ghazal that is thematically unified. Her essay also discusses the place of the ghazal in Indian cinema.

So what's the answer to the question that titles this post? I cannot answer it definitively. Bullar mentions several other Indian languages in which the ghazal as found a form. For instance, Sukhdarshan Dhaliwal, who has two ghazals in the August 2007 issue of The Ghazal Page, has published collections of ghazals in Punjabi. (The August issue will be online by August 1 GMT.)

My tentative answer at this point: we English ghazalkars may benefit from thinking of two distinct ghazal forms, the Persian and the Arabic. I'm convinced that, if the ghazal becomes a truly English form of poetry, it will have features that distinguish it from any of the traditions for which it derives.