The ghazal is a short, lyrical genre of poetry that has been widely embraced from Syria to Sumatra as a privileged form of emotional, artistic, and devotional expression. It originated in Arabic, but made its home further east in the languages of the Persianate ecumene, or what Shahab Ahmed has called the “Balkans to Bengal complex”. With its lilting metres and musical rhymes, the ghazal was purpose-built for recitation; but it also lends itself irresistably to being set to melody, and the ghazal has long enjoyed a second life throughout this region as a major song form.

Focussing on the period of the Mughal empire (1526–1858), I will address the live musical performance of Persian and Urdu ghazals in three different, but ultimately linked, Muslim spaces in South Asia: the ‘secular’ courtly mehfil, the Shi‘i mourning majlis, and the Chishti Sufi shrine. I will suggest that on these occasions, music, or devotionally significant sound-art, creates a liminal spacetime in which the veil between heaven and earth, the dead and the living, momentarily becomes diaphanous in a highly charged, supernatural way. The quotation that forms my title is a Persian couplet attributed to the famous Indian ghazal poet Amir Khusrau: ‘If there is a heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.’ It is said to refer to Kashmir, or to the city of Delhi, or any number of other beautiful places built upon the Islamic idea of paradise as a garden. In this lecture I will explore how the ghazal as song works upon the listening body to create a heightened, in-the-moment experience of dwelling with the beloved within that garden that never dies—and in so doing, serves to underline the listener’s sense of mortality: of life in the face of death.