A rhyming couplet form of North Indian vernacular poetry, self-contained and aphoristic, used across Hindi, Braj, Awadhi, Punjabi and related languages for proverbial wisdom, devotional address and moral instruction, and the primary vehicle of the medieval Bhakti and Sant poets.
Facts
Place of OriginNorth India, attested from the Apabhramsha literature of the early medieval period onward. 1 StructureA self-contained rhyming couplet, each line built on a fixed count of metrical instants (matras) rather than syllables, commonly 13 plus 11. 1 Notable ExampleKabir's dohas, among the most widely quoted couplets in North Indian devotional literature; Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas also uses doha stanzas. 1 Connections
Form Of Genre
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Sources
1. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Press
Doha (Indian Literature) (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Background sectionQuote, Background section
the Doha verse-format was popularly used in Gujarati, Rajasthani (Duha), Maithili, Marathi and Hindi folk and modern literature of North India and in Sindhi (Doho) literature of Pakistan.
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