DR Syed Taqi Abedi started out as a researcher in the field of marsiya. Soon after, he extended his area of study to other kinds of poetry. So he chose to study Ghalib and Faiz and presented some valuable compilations. Now, Abedi is back to his original field of study and has brought out the Diwan-i-Rubaiyat-i-Anees. Previously he had published Rubaiyat-i-Dabir.

In the case of both Dabir and Anees, their rubaiyats have been treated as supplements to their marsiyas and are almost always accommodated in various volumes of their marsiyas. However, their rubaiyats are not always related to the theme of Karbala and deal with a variety of subjects; only a part of them are thematically in agreement with the marsiyas.

It appears that in Urdu, only Anees and Dabir have employed this genre seriously for their poetic expression. The other poets have treated it rather casually. They usually seem to write a few rubaiyat just for the sake of variety, or what we call in Urdu munh ka maza badalnai kay leyai.

In the Persian poetic tradition, a rubai stands as an independent genre, self-sufficient in its four lines. There have been poets in Persian who only expressed themselves in this form. Omar Khayyam may be cited as an example. He was a purely rubai writer. And he never suffered from the feeling that much of what he wanted to say remained unsaid because of the inadequacy of this genre as a mode of expression. The wisdom he carried with him found its full expression in this short form.

But the martyrdom in Karbala demanded a full-length expression. It was left for Mirza Sauda to discover the form of musaddas which possessed the capability to cope with such an epic. Dabir and Anees were the two marsiya writers who understood well the possibility of expression in musaddas and utilised it to the full.

But at the same time, both these writers also wanted to exercise their poetic talents on themes other than the central one of Karbala in some other form. The short form of rubai suited this purpose the most and they took it seriously and explored possibilities in it. And Abedi is the one critic and researcher who has understood the significance of their rubaiyat in addition to their marsiyas.

Abedi first researched the rubaiyat of Mirza Dabir. He retrieved most of what appeared lost and brought out the collection Rubaiyat-i-Dabir along with a detailed preface in which he discussed the origin of this genre and Dabir’s achievements in this field. And his  collection of the rubaiyat of Mir Anees runs to about 500 pages.

Abedi tells us that the most prolific writer of rubaiyat in Urdu was Shah Ghamgin who has almost 1,900 rubaiyat to his credit. But he chose not to publish his work. As for the collection of Mir Anees’s rubaiyat, this volume contains 504 rubaiyat. The have been divided into sections in accordance with their themes and have been titled hamdiya, natiya, munqabati, samaji and aitqadi. Of course, there is also one section devoted to the rubaiyat written on subjects related to Karbala. But we see a variety of subjects in the collection. In fact, rubai is a form of expression through which poets like to offer pearls of wisdom or the sum total of their experiences.