Court poet of Delhi; pioneer of Indo-Persian literature and music.
Poets & Literature · Mughal India & the Deccan · d. 725/1325
Poet
One of the greatest poets writing in Persian in medieval India, Amīr Ḫusraw Dihlawī was born in 651/1253 at Paṭiyālī in the district of Etah, Uttar Pradesh, India. He spent the duration of his life in the service of different sultans and rulers, having attached himself to no less than a half dozen different patrons, the longest service to any one being that of ʿAlā al-Dīn Ḫaljī, under whose reign (695/1295 to 715/1315) Amīr Ḫusraw was his most prolific. In addition to the political patronage he sought out and received, Amīr Ḫusraw was a disciple of the Čištī saint Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyā of Ğiyāthpūr, at whose feet the great poet was buried a few months following his death in 725/1325.
Amīr Ḫusraw’s varied style and splendid rhetorical ability led to many contributions in the development of Persian poetry in India as well as unmatched depictions of the Indo-Muslim culture in medieval times. He maintained an immense talent for philology and his knowledge of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hindī, allowed him to produce “exotic puns, wordplays, and stunning literary tricks”. The ease with which he wrote and his versatility of style is displayed in that he not only helped in developing the ğazal, until then little used in India, but also in developing the historical epic as a new genre of poetry. While he was not a historian, his poems “provide the fullest single expression extant of medieval Indo-Muslim civilization” and reveal “the religious, ethical, cultural and aesthetic ideas of courtly, educated and wealthy Indian Muslims of the 8th/14th and 9th/15th centuries”. Certain traditions also cite Amīr Ḫusraw as having made original contributions to music in India and others count him as a saint.