Shayari is the art of Urdu and Hindi poetry. The sher, the ghazal and the nazm are forms of it. A sher is a two-line couplet that stands on its own. A ghazal is a set of shers sharing a rhyme and a refrain. A nazm is one continuous poem on a single subject.
So you can't compare shayari to a ghazal, any more than you can compare poetry to a sonnet. The useful comparison is between the forms.
Sher: two lines that finish the thought
A sher is two lines, each called a misra. The first sets something up and the second turns it, and the pair needs nothing around it. That's why it's the form that fits a phone: it's complete in a status, a caption or a message.
तेरा नाम लिखा है हर उस पन्ने पर,
जिसे मैंने कभी किसी को पढ़ने नहीं दिया।Everything is there. The first line makes a claim, the second explains why it matters.
Ghazal: shers with a shared ending
A ghazal is a chain of shers that share a metre and the same ending. The rhyme sits just before a refrain, the rhyme being the qafiya and the refrain the radif. Each sher can be about something different, and the shers don't have to follow each other. That's why one can be quoted alone.
Here is the opening sher of a famous Ghalib ghazal, public domain for over a century. Its qafiya is dam and kam. Its radif is nikle.
हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले,
बहुत निकले मिरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले।Both lines end in a rhyme (dam, kam) followed by the same word, "nikle". The shers that follow keep that ending. The opening sher with both lines rhyming is called the matla. A closing sher that includes the poet's pen name is the maqta.
Nazm: one poem, one subject
A nazm has no fixed structure. It's one poem that follows one subject from start to finish, often in verses, and its lines depend on each other. Quote a single line and you lose most of it.
This is the opening of Iqbal's "Lab pe aati hai dua", a nazm, also long out of copyright:
लब पे आती है दुआ बन के तमन्ना मेरी,
ज़िंदगी शम्अ की सूरत हो ख़ुदाया मेरी।The poem continues on the same subject, a prayer, for every verse after.
How to tell which one you have
- Two lines, finished? A sher.
- Several shers with the same ending sound and the same repeated word? A ghazal.
- One subject from the first line to the last? A nazm.
A few others you'll see
A doha is a Hindi couplet with a fixed count of beats. A rubai is a four-line verse with its own rhyme pattern. They show up less in messages, but they're what people mean when they say a verse is "not a ghazal".
Which one to send
For a message, a status or a caption, a sher. It finishes in two lines and doesn't need its neighbours. A full ghazal or nazm belongs in a card or a letter, where the reader has the time.
Where to go from here
- Shayari two-line couplets for a status or a message
- Love shayari to see the sher form at work
- How to write a message that sounds like you the method, in three moves