The exquisite journey of love passes through numerous twists and turns, bringing varying experiences to each individual.

In Urdu poetry, poets have expressed these diverse experiences with an eloquence that brings alive the relationship between the lover and the beloved. Meer, Ghalib, Momin, Dagh, Faiz and thousands of Urdu poets have given voice to the emotions of lovers going through stages such as longing. loving, possessiveness, rivalry, separation, breaking-up and frenzy.

This eloquence makes every reader share this thought, as was inimitably expressed by Mirza Ghalib: dekhna taqrir ki lazzat ki jo us ne kaha main ne ye jänä ki goya ye bhi mere dil men hai "Love Longing Loss in Urdu Poetry" offers a lyrical English transcreation of these she'rs woven in the web of an enchanting tale that includes the subtle nuances of Urdu poetry in all its beauty.

Sanjiv Saraf an Industrialist, investor and social entrepreneur Sanjiv Saraf juggles many roles, but his passion for Urdu poetry is what is closest to his heart. He set up Rekhta Foundation-which hosts the world's largest and most popular resource for Urdu language and literature-apart from doing extensive work for preservation of texts and propagation of the language among youth through festivals and events.

An alumnus of the Scindia School (1975) and a graduate from IIT Kharagpur (1980), Sanjiv was involved in business and industry for over thirty years during which he founded Polyplex Corpn. Ltd., an Indian multinational, Manupatra, India's leading legal database, and other ventures in the green energy space. Thereafter, he turned his energies towards Urdu literature and is now fully involved in what he considers 'the most satisfying work of my life, so far.

Sanjiv is a recipient of several awards and honours, including the distinguished Doctor of Letters (D. Litt.) degree by Maulana Azad National Urdu University Hyderabad in 2016, the National Sir Syed Excellence Award 2018 by Aligarh Muslim University for his contribution to the cause of preserving and promoting Urdu and the Madhav Award as an Old Boy of Eminence for the year 2020 by the Scindia School for his outstanding work through Rekhta Foundation.

Universally desired and uniquely experienced, love has an immense power to bring goodness and joy, evil and sorrow and everything in between Its amorphous world is the realm which every lover yearns to explore in their own way. Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits- and then Re-mould it nearer to the Hearts Desire!"

Edward FitzGerald's English translation of Umar Khayyam's Rubai (circa 1000 AD) Love, as depicted in the poetry of oriental languages like Arabic and Persian from which it seeped quite naturally into the Urdu language, became a subject of Urdu's sublime poetry. The metaphorical language and imagery in poetry of the Arabic and Persian languages pre-dates Shakespeare by about one thousand years.

In his influential book 'Love in the Western World, the French scholar Denis De Rougemont wrote that the first country in Europe to have endorsed the idea of love was France and that this exalted idea came to France via Muslim Spain.

The story of love cannot be told without Rumi, who claimed love stole my prayer beads and gave me poetry and song' This points to the fact that these influences on him had their roots in the Arab world where Islam took shape. Rumi, who coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion with both the human and the divine forms of his beloved, the Shams of Tabriz, who was a pious Muslim preacher. His transformation into a Sufi mystic and poet, whirling and dancing at the disappearance of Shams of Tabriz is the world's greatest spiritual love story. The connect between teacher and pupil, friend and beloved as early as 1240's, explored so vividly in the Persian language became a base for composing poetry in many other languages of the world.

There are large number of collections of shers by topic in Urdu, Devanagri and Roman but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted to weave together love related shers in a narrative such as this one.

This is a collection of some of the most famous as well as the most evocative she'rs related to love and its many facets, which have been transcreated into English rhyme and strung together to make a sequential connection between she'rs on each theme. I would like to make a disclaimer here: Urdu vocabulary. grammar and syntax are flexible but in she'rs, each line is required to scan or be metrical, Urdu has a much greater flexibility of thymes than English and provides the facility of lengthening or shortening words based on poetic necessity. The syntax and sequence of words-subject, object, verb etc is also far more flexible than in English This places considerable limitations on the trans creator. Maintaining a rhythm and cadence in the trans creation often produces sentence constructions which do not accord with today's English diction, though the process often results in lines which recall English poetic diction of earlier (pre-1900) periods.

She'rs have been written on almost every subject related to human emotions. However, the predominance of she'rs about love and longing is indisputable. Whether be in praise of the beloved, in pleading for love, pining and yearning for the beloved, in joy for meeting the beloved, in rejection, dejection and despair at being neglected, there are millions of she'rs on love and the attendant consequences of unrequited love.

Unlike many other languages, Urdu has a variety of words for Love, infatuation, and love frenzy. The commonly known ones, aside from pyar, mohabbat and 'ishq are ulfat, shauq, unsiyat, qurbat and shanäsä.i. Then for love-frenzy there are divängi, junûn, fareftagi and saudă. I am, for sure, missing out quite a few. The sheer multiplicity of love-related words is an indicator of the volume of love poetry in Urdu.

Entrenched in love, the lyrical and sensual quality of these couplets enable the poet to express his emotions with a cultured and artistic care. The art of Ghazal or she'r-go.i isn't a frivolous pursuit meant for an idle lover.

**Contents and Sample Pages**