The Ghazal Eros studies the movement of language and society in the old ghazal, i.e. the poetry of eros in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. It revisits scenes from the millennium-long literary history of the ghazal as an expression of masculine passion (ishq) for the masculine beloved which the author calls ‘lyric queerness’. The neglect of this movement of lyric queerness in not only mainstream cultural history but also LGBTQ history, the book argues, screens from us a lyric corpus that was historically aware, linguistically evolving and suspicious of mystical interpretation.

This corpus is represented here by the ghazal of the Indian subcontinent: its major poets from the eighteenth century, Vali, Abru, Naji, Siraj and Mir; the antecedent figures of lyric queerness, al-Hallaj and Ibn Davud from tenth-century Baghdad and Sarmad from seventeenth-century Delhi; and, finally, Altaf Husain Hali, Muhammad Husain Azad and Abul Kalam Azad, our first modern writers to recognize the true significance of the ghazal’s lyric queerness.