Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi : Building an Ark

Writing in the eighteenth century, the Persian-language litterateurs of late Mughal Delhi were aware that they could no longer take for granted the relations of Persian with Islamic imperial power, relations that had enabled Persian literary life to flourish in India since the tenth century C.E.

situates the diverse textual projects of ‘Abd al-Qadir “Bidil” and his students within the context of politically threatened but poetically prestigious Delhi, exploring the writers’ use of the Perso-Arabic and Hindavi literary canons to fashion their authorship. Breaking with the tendency to categorize and characterize Persian literature according to the dynasty in power, this book argues for the indirectness and complexity of the relations between poetics and politics. Among its original contributions is an interpretation of Bidil’s Sufi adaptation of a Braj-Avadhi tale of utopian Hindu kingship, a novel hypothesis on the historicism of Siraj al-Din ‘Ali Khan “Arzu”s oeuvre and a study of how Bindraban Das “Khvushgu" entwined the contrasting models of authorship in Bidil and Arzu to formulate his voice as a Sufi historian of the Persian poetic tradition.

The first book-length work in English on ‘Abd al-Qadir “Bidil” and his circle of Persian literati, this is a valuable resource for students and scholars of both South Asian and Iranian studies, as well as Persian literature and Sufism.