Six years ago, the nationwide lockdown gave us the rare gift of time in abundance. We employed this time towards building hobbies, following fitness routines, acquiring skills, or something as niche as learning a new language. For Satya Prabhakar and his wife Sangeeta, it sparked an unlikely journey into the world of Urdu poetry when they stumbled upon an Urdu sitcom Taana Baana on YouTube.
This drew Satya into the richness of the language. “The sound of Urdu — just the sound — drew me powerfully. Musical. Warm. Evocative. Courteous. Poetic. Magical. I started learning a few words a day,” recalls Satya during a conversation with CE on the sidelines of an event in the city on Wednesday.
That evening at the Madras Book Club, Satya presented an audio-visual session on Urdu poetry inspired by his recently released book, Alfaaz ki Mehfil. The book containing shers (coplets) and ghazals — selected, edited, and translated to English by himself — is not an academic canon; it’s a curated bouquet, he says. “I wanted flowers of different hues: love poetry, poetry of rebellion, poetry that is naughty and lighthearted, poetry that questions God, poetry that lifts you up when you’re broken,” notes Satya.
While the book’s journey started almost four years ago, the pages started getting filled in 2024. Satya translated a couplet a day, one sher after another, for 15 minutes a day. In that process, he understood that some of “these poets — some of them dead for 200 years — were saying things about life that just gripped me with their philosophical insight and lyrical beauty,” he explains. Hence, Satya was conscious of giving space to lesser-known poets alongside the great names.
Choosing the shers was no easy task, given the breadth of Urdu poetry spanning centuries. Satya narrowed it down to resonance — the shers should land to people with zero Urdu background. The collection then captures the wide range — couplets on love, loss, resistance, remembrance, courage, doubt, irreverence, the divine. “Honestly, I brought the ones that moved me most personally. When you have spent years with a poet’s work — and the book spans over 300 years, from Mir Taqi Mir to contemporary voices — you develop a relationship with certain shers,” notes Satya.
After the shers were selected, Satya moved to the next stage, translation. There are Urdu words that simply have no English equivalent. He cites examples, ‘irfan’ is not just awareness, ‘intezaar’ is not equivalent to waiting, ‘dard’ does not just mean pain. These words have centuries of usage behind them; they carry specific emotional weather. “My approach has been to go for honest prose rather than forced rhyme, and to preserve simplicity over adornment,” says Satya.
Despite spending over three years curating and translating the anthology, Satya insists the book is not meant for scholars. “I designed it for someone exactly like I was. As I like to say, Urdu poetry has remarkably high ROIC — Return On Invested Capital. You put in fifteen minutes, you get back something life-changing,” he comments.
Satya goes on to talk about the nature of Urdu poetry and the poets, who are fundamentally observers of life. “They looked at human beings — what we yearn for, what we fear, what breaks us open, what makes us feel alive — and they compressed that observation into two lines. The themes are just human emotions, universal feelings that can strike a chord. Every generation has loved and lost and waited and dreamed, struggled and survived. What the sher does — and this is its particular gift — is make the familiar suddenly vivid again,” he explains.
With this book, the author wants Urdu poetry to reach thinking minds and feeling souls that might never otherwise encounter it. “My hope is that the book is a door. What’s behind it belongs to the poets,” concludes Satya.