Well, I think in some sense the answer to
@Qureshpor jii's original question has already been answered in this thread and the other one, but perhaps I can distill some elements of other people's responses to clarify this. There are a number of uses of
apnaa, but the two that are most relevant here are:
(1) As a
reflexive possessive pronoun (referring to the subject of the matrix verb).
(2) As a
first-person possessive pronoun (referring to the speaker/writer).
For example:
(1) If I say
aasif apne ghar gayaa, the house belongs to Asif (the subject[*] of the matrix verb). If I instead said
raam apne ghar gayaa, now the house now belongs to Ram. The reference of
apnaa changes as the subject changes.
(2) If I say
ye apnaa ghar hai, the house belongs to me (the speaker), plus possibly other people I associate with myself (this usage of
apnaa is first-person, but is agnostic about singular vs plural). It does not refer to the subject of the matrix verb (which is
ye). If this same sentence was said by
@marrish jii instead, the house would then belong to
@marrish jii (and possibly other people that
@marrish jii associates with himself). The reference of
apnaa changes as the speaker changes, not as the subject changes.
Now sometimes (1) and (2) can be hard to tell apart (when the subject of the matrix verb is itself a first-person pronoun), but in any case, it should be clear that these are both of these usages of
apnaa exist. I think that (2) is the type of usage that
@Dib jii refers to in
this post.
I haven't pored through standard Urdu-Hindi grammars to see what they say about
apnaa, but based on the quote from Platts (and also
this comment), it may be that usages of type (2) are regarded as less "correct" than those of type (1). But this seems to me to be entirely a prescriptivist injunction. From a descriptive perspective, usages of type (2) are by no means uncommon (in my experience, at least).
I believe that usages of type (2) are also what is happening in the shers that
@Qureshpor jii shared with us in the opening post. Let's look at them more closely to see this. First up, Ghalib:
manzar ik bulandii par aur ham banaa sakte
'arsh se udhar hotaa kaashke makaaN apnaa
The verbal clause in which the word
apnaa appears (after reordering into a more "neutral" order) is
apnaa makaan 'arsh se udhar hotaa. In fact, the phrase
apnaa makaan is itself the subject of this clause. Interpreting
apnaa here as a usage of type (1) would cause a circular reference (it would be a house that belongs to a house that belongs to a house that belongs to...!), so it only makes sense to interpret this as a usage of type (2). In other words,
apnaa must refer back to the speaker/writer, ie, to Ghalib.
Next up, Faiz:
in kaa dam saaz apne sivaa kaun hai?
shahr-i-jaanaaN meN ab baa-safaa kaun hai?
The verbal clause in which apnaa appears (again, after reordering into a more "neutral" order) is
apne sivaa kaun inkaa dam saaz hai. The subject of this clause is
kaun. The
apne sivaa in this clause does not mean "except for who," it means "except for me/us." Again, this is a usage of type (2).
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[*]: Identifying the "subject" of an Hindi-Urdu clause is not always so clear-cut (since different subjecthood criteria might disagree), but I think subjecthood seems fairly clear-cut in all of the examples above. Also, it may be that saying "subject of matrix verb" is not precisely the right thing (words like "c-command" might be important here), but it's perhaps enough for all of the examples above.
