Banjaranama

The Banjaranama (بنجارانامہ, बंजारानामा, Chronicle of the Nomad) is a satirical Urdu poem, written by the eighteenth-century Indian poet Nazeer Akbarabadi.

[1] The poem's essential message is that pride in worldly success is foolish, because human circumstances can change in a flash, material wealth and splendor is always transient, and death is the only certainty for all men.

Critics have observed that, despite the deliberate simplicity of its language, the poem's idioms and imagery were dazzling in their span, and portrayed lives of wealth and power as ultimately subject to a nomad's whims (an allusion to death).

"[4] All verses in the poem end on the same refrain: Sab thaath para reh javega, Jab laad chalega banjara (All your splendor will lie useless, when the nomad packs-up and leaves).

Though the poem as a whole is largely comprehensible to native Hindustani speakers in the modern-day, some words are considered archaic today, such as dakh (داکھ, दाख, grape, from the Sanskrit द्राक्ष, draksh) which has been completely replaced by the Persian-derived term angoor in modern Hindi.