Nava-e-Sarosh

Delhi has shaped the people who lived in it for centuries. A city built on cultural mingling and long periods of creative exchange, it became fertile ground for poets who blended traditions, and it left behind a line of writers whose verses went on stirring readers long after their own time. Nava-e-Sarosh gathers a selection of ghazals from these classic Delhi poets.

Love runs through the collection, in all its intoxicated passion and its aching longing. The poems explore desire and the complications of the heart as the city's early masters understood them. Each ghazal appears with a rhymed English transcreation, so that readers can enjoy the rhythm and musicality that the original Urdu carries, and not only the meaning.

The book comes from Sanjiv Saraf, a Delhi resident and patron of Urdu poetry who is personally invested in preserving and advancing the arts in the Urdu world. He chose the poems and made the transcreations himself, with newcomers to classic Urdu poetry in mind. It suits readers who want a glimpse of Delhi's past, those drawn to the sound of rhymed verse, and above all those who want to explore love as the classic poets imagined it.