 While the length of elegy initially had no more than forty or fifty stanzas, he pushed it beyond one hundred fifty or even longer than two hundred stanzas or "band"s, as each unit of marsiya in the "musaddas" format is known.Mir Anis drew upon the vocabulary of Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Awadhi to a great degree.He has become an essential element of Muharram among the Urdu-speakers of the Indian subcontinent.