"Anna Suvorova takes a look at the romantic masnavi, the classical genre of Urdu literature. Her focus is love-adventure poems written in northern India in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as genre related narratives in Hindi, Punjabi, and Sindhi. For her study the author focuses on the most renowned classical masnavis in Urdu written by Mir Taqi Mir, Mir Hasan Dihlawi, Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi, Dayashankar Nasim, and Nawab Mirza Shauq." "The book analyses the concept of love - both mundane and divine - in Urdu classical masnavi, the reflections in it of manners and customs within the family, wedding ceremonies, secular rites of Indian Muslims during that period, and the historical and cultural milieu which generated this genre of Urdu love poems. Urdu masnavi has never before been analysed as a symbolic code of divine love in terms of sufism."--BOOK JACKET.