Wine in Urdu poetry is almost never only wine. It stands for divine love. The tavern is where you go looking for it. And the preacher denouncing both is reliably the man who has tasted neither. Akbar wrote for readers who knew all of this, so his defence of a small drink was never really about drinking, and everybody scandalised by it was being laughed at twice.
The wine never fully dissolves into a metaphor. He comes out and says it in the third couplet: he means the kind distilled inside the heart, and then carries on writing as though the other kind still counted. Both readings stay alive right to the last line. The poem refuses to settle down.
It refuses to stay on one subject too. One couplet is open metaphysics: every particle alight with God, and our own breath offered as the proof. Another takes aim at colonial India reforming itself out loud, so much noise about education and civilisation, so little good to show for it. That was Akbar's lifelong target and the reason he gets filed under satire rather than devotion. He was doing both at once, and the ghazal, where no couplet owes anything to the next, is the one form that lets a poet do that without ever having to explain himself.
Most people meet the poem through Ghulam Ali, who set it in Raag Darbari Kanada and made it inseparable from his voice. It had reached film before that, in the Pakistani film Aap Ka Khadim, sung by Mehdi Hassan to Khalil Ahmed's composition. There the words were credited to Tasleem Fazli, an error copied across the internet ever since. They are Akbar Allahabadi's, and he died in 1921.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — ہے
, hai. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The long -i sound: li, ki, pi, khinchti, tajalli, ji, bhi, marzi, kharabi, buzurgi.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
