Given the puritanism and political correctness that has so overtaken the Urdu poet, one looks back with a certain nostalgia to the glorification of all manner of vices and sins and the abundant references to drinking, straying from the straight and narrow and the frequent slips into all forms of heresies and sacrilege.
Questioning, probing, intent on investing new meanings into old, time-worn images and metaphors, the Urdu poet has traditionally enjoyed working within the time-honoured template of the ghazal and the compact brevity of the sher, reveling in the freedom of pouring new wine in old bottles. For instance, with each fresh catastrophe, the Urdu poet evolved a vocabulary to express his angst, clothing his sorrow in a time-honoured repertoire of images and metaphors. Some favourite synonyms for the Beloved — sitamgar, but, kafir, yaar — began to be used mockingly for the British in the decades after 1857, the First War of Independence.