Metrical Patterning in Khawaja Ghulam Farid’s Saraiki Kafi “Musāg Malendī Dā Gujar Gayā Denh Sārā”: An Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology Analysis

Abstract

Saraiki, an Indo-Aryan language spoken across all four provinces of Pakistan, remains comparatively understudied at the level of metrical phonology despite a substantial body of devotional Sufi poetry, or Kafi, composed in the language. This study examines the metrical organization of a single Kafi, “Musāg Malendī Dā Gujar Gayā Denh Sārā,” composed by the Saraiki Sufi poet Khawaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901). Using a qualitative descriptive case-study design grounded in Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology (Goldsmith, 1990), the nine couplets of the poem were analyzed along four parameters: foot-headedness, directionality of foot construction, quantity sensitivity, and boundedness. Findings indicate that eight of the nine couplets exhibit a predominantly right-headed, quantity-sensitive, and unbounded metrical structure consistent with the classical Perso-Arabic Bahr Mutaqarib and Bahr Mutadarak meters, while one couplet departs from this pattern and displays free-verse characteristics. The poem’s reliance on vowel length rather than strict syllable count to organize rhythm parallels, in general terms, the role of quantity sensitivity documented in some English metrical traditions, although the two systems differ substantially in directionality and foot type. The study contributes a documented case of metrical regularity in Saraiki Sufi poetry and outlines directions for corpus-based and cross-linguistic extensions of this analysis.