Taqti
Quick answer: Taqti is scansion in Urdu poetry: learn to break a ghazal line into its arkan, test the bahr, and hear whether your metre holds together on the page.
Taqti is the act of scanning a line of Urdu verse, breaking it into its rhythmic building blocks so you can hear whether the metre holds. The word comes from qat, meaning to cut, and that is exactly what you do: you cut a misra into arkan, the feet that make up a bahr, and match each one against a fixed pattern of short and long syllables. Every ghazal you admire was tested this way, whether the poet worked it out on paper or simply trusted a very well trained ear.
Think of it as tuning rather than composing. Taqti will not tell you what to say, but it will tell you if a line can be sung in the same breath as the rest of the poem. For beginners it feels like arithmetic; for seasoned poets it settles into instinct, a quiet check running under the pen.
Sound, not spelling
The first surprise is that taqti ignores how a word is written and listens to how it is spoken. Urdu prosody, called aruz, counts each syllable as either short or long. A short syllable is a consonant carrying a light vowel; a long one carries a stretched vowel or closes on a silent consonant. A soft letter may drop away, and a trailing vowel may lean into the word that follows. You are transcribing speech, not print, which is why reading aloud matters so much.
Arkan: the feet of the line
Once you have your run of shorts and longs, you group them into arkan, the standard feet that Urdu inherited from Arabic and Persian verse. Common ones include faailun, faoolun, mafaeelun and mustafilun, each a small fixed shape of syllables. A bahr, or metre, is simply an agreed sequence of these feet repeated across the misra. When your scanned line matches the feet of a known bahr from start to finish, the line is sound. When a syllable spills over or falls short, taqti has caught a fault your ear might otherwise have forgiven.
A working method
Practising taqti is less forbidding than it first looks. Work slowly, out loud, and one syllable at a time.
Licence, not loophole
Classical poets did not scan in a straitjacket. Within accepted limits you may lengthen or shorten certain syllables, a freedom Ghalib and Mir used constantly to fit sense to sound. The rule is that you may bend a syllable, never break the bahr. A clean scan is also a courtesy to your reader: if you enter Writory's monthly contest, where entries open from the 1st to the 25th and every entrant sees their score on the 30th, a line that sits squarely on its metre is one less thing standing between your poem and a fair reading.
What poets can take from this
- Always scan by ear first, reading the line aloud twice before you reach for pen and paper.
- Mark short and long syllables above the words so the pattern is visible at a glance.
- Learn three or four common bahrs by heart so you can recognise them without counting.
- Check that both misras of a sher scan to the same bahr, not just the first.
- When a foot refuses to fit, suspect a real metrical fault before blaming poetic licence.
- Scan a favourite classical ghazal line by line to train your instinct on proven work.
Try it yourself
Take a single misra you have written, scan it into shorts and longs, name its bahr, then write a matching second line so the whole sher scans to one metre.
Questions
Do I really need taqti if my ear is good?
A trained ear will carry you a long way, and many poets compose almost entirely by sound. Taqti simply gives you a way to check that instinct and to explain, or repair, a line that feels slightly off. Treat it as a proofreading tool for rhythm rather than a substitute for listening.
Is taqti the same as syllable counting in English metre?
They are cousins, not twins. English scansion tracks stressed and unstressed beats, while taqti tracks short and long syllables grouped into named feet called arkan. The idea of testing a line against a fixed pattern is shared, but the units and the rules differ.
Where should a beginner start?
Start with one or two simple bahrs and scan existing couplets rather than your own drafts. Reading known, well made lines teaches your eye what a correct pattern looks like, so that faults in your own verse begin to stand out on their own.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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