Joshish Azimabadi

Joshish Azimabadi (1737–1801) was a classical Urdu poet of Azimabad — the 18th-century name for Patna in Bihar — and a prominent contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir. He wrote "at far-off Azimabad in Delhi style," proof that the Delhi ghazal had travelled well beyond the capital by the mid-1700s and found a serious practitioner in the east. Little else about his life is preserved: no given name, teacher or court attachment is reliably recorded, and his work survives principally through his diwan, Deewan-e-Joshish, in a 1976 Bihar Urdu Academy edition. What the couplets show is a poet equally at home in love's dishevelled complaint and in Sufi argument. He turns the beloved's tress into a mirror of his own distraught state, blesses a cruel beloved with ironic courtesy, and, in his most philosophical verses, dissolves the quarrel of temple and sanctuary into one truth: the Kaaba and the idol-house are one, and the only road worth taking leads to the house of the heart.