Geet
Quick answer: Geet explained for poets: the Hindi song-poem built on a mukhda refrain and antara verses, its folk and literary history, and how to write one that sings.
A geet is a lyric song-poem in Hindi and its sister languages, shaped for melody and built around a recurring opening line, the mukhda, to which each verse, or antara, returns. The word simply means song, but as a literary form the geet names something specific: a short emotional lyric whose architecture assumes it will be sung, even when it never leaves the page.
Geet flows through three channels at once. Folk geets mark weddings, seasons, departures and harvests across North India. Literary poets of the early twentieth century, including Mahadevi Varma and Nirala, refined the form into serious lyric art, and the navgeet movement later pushed it toward modern imagery. Meanwhile film lyricists carried the geet to the largest poetry audience on earth, several times a day, on every radio in South Asia.
How It Works
The mukhda is the poem's face, a line or couplet that states the feeling and returns after every verse. Each antara develops the theme, often ending on a line engineered to slide back into the mukhda's melody and rhyme. This creates a wheel-like motion: departure, return, departure, return. An original English sketch of the mechanism:
The craft lies in making each return feel earned rather than mechanical, so the refrain deepens as the verses accumulate around it.
Where You Will See It
Mahadevi Varma's geets of longing and quiet suffering made her a central figure of Chhayavaad, Hindi's romantic movement. Folk geets survive at full strength in wedding songs and seasonal songs such as kajri and chaiti. And the Hindi film geet, in the hands of lyricists like Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra and Gulzar, proved that a three-minute song could hold real poetry. Many working poets in North India still publish collections of geets and perform them at kavi sammelans, gatherings where a good mukhda can bring a thousand people in on the second repetition.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Start with the mukhda and get it singable: short clauses, open vowels, an image that survives repetition. Then write two to four antaras, each ending with a rhyme or cadence that hands the poem back to the refrain. Keep one emotional key throughout; the geet is a single mood examined in the round, not an argument. If you want an external test of whether the mood lands, Writory's monthly contest scores emotion and language directly, and every entrant sees their marks.
What poets can take from this
- Write the mukhda first and make it strong enough to open and close the poem.
- End every antara on a sound that leads naturally back into the refrain.
- Hold one mood; a geet is a single feeling turned in the light, not a debate.
- Favour open vowels and short clauses, the raw material of singable lines.
- Hum a simple tune while revising; anything the tune rejects, the poem should too.
Try it yourself
Write a geet about a monsoon arriving in a city that has been waiting too long for it. Compose a one-line mukhda, three antaras of three lines each, and let the refrain mean something different after the final verse.
Questions
What is the difference between a geet and a ghazal?
A ghazal is a chain of independent couplets sharing rhyme and refrain, with each couplet complete in itself. A geet is a unified song on one theme, organised around a returning mukhda, so its verses depend on each other and on the refrain.
What is a mukhda and an antara?
The mukhda is the opening refrain line or couplet of a geet, the part listeners remember first. Antaras are the verses in between, each returning to the mukhda's melody and rhyme at its close.
Is a film song a geet?
Structurally, yes: most Hindi film songs use the mukhda-antara design inherited from folk and literary geet. Quality varies, but the best film lyricists are genuine poets working within the form.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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