Amīr Khusrau

Delhi, the autumn of 1325. In the settlement of Ghiyaspur, where the last chapter ended, a mound of earth has barely settled over the grave of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, and a man in black sits beside it. Six months ago this man was the most celebrated poet in the empire, riding east with the army of Sultan Ghiyāsuddīn Tughluq, seventy-two years old and still producing verse the way the mint at Delhi produced coin. Then, somewhere in Bengal — the sources that knew him say this much, and tradition supplies the rest — word reached the camp that the old shaikh of Ghiyaspur was dead. The poet turned back. Tradition says he dressed in mourning black, gave away his wealth to the poor, and came to sit at this grave; and that when he first saw it he said a couplet — not in Persian, the language of his fifty years of fame, but in Hindavī, the language of the lanes:

Gorī sove sej par, mukh par ḍāre kes;

chal Khusrau ghar āpne, rain bhaī chahu des.

"The fair one sleeps on her couch, dark hair fallen across her face. Come away home, Khusrau — night has fallen over the four corners of the land."

Hold that couplet a moment, because it holds the whole chapter. It is perfect: the beloved asleep, the lover dismissed, the dark coming down on an entire country — grief scaled up from a bedside to a civilization without one word of strain. Every qawwāl in South Asia knows it. And no one can show you a manuscript of it within four hundred years of that autumn. That is this chapter's problem, and its subject: a man whose Persian survives in dated, copied, catalogued volumes, and whose most beloved lines survive the way a family remembers a grandfather's jokes — perfectly, passionately, and without a scrap of paper.

Within months — by October — the man in black was dead too. They buried him a few steps from his master, at his feet, where he had spent his evenings for decades; and Delhi has kept the two graves together ever since, the saint and the poet, like a text and its music. His name was Abu'l Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau — Amīr Khusrau, the Ṭūṭī-e-Hind, "Parrot of India" — and his story is the strangest bargain in this book: poet of seven sultans by day, servant of one penniless faqīr by night, and, in the end, ancestor claimed by nearly everything North India sings.

The Life

For once in this book's medieval stretch the sources are good — and their goodness is the punchline. Khusrau wrote autobiographical prefaces to his own collections, above all the long preface to the Ghurrat ul-Kamāl; his court poems carry dates and patrons like invoices; the chronicler Ziyāuddīn Baranī, who prayed beside him at the khānqāh, wrote about him; Amīr Khurd's Siyar al-Auliyāʾ records his place in the shaikh's circle. Almost nothing in this section is tradition. Keep that in mind, because at the chapter's centre we will hit the opposite: the songs, riddles and instruments India loves him for come with no such paper trail. The paradox — best-attested life, least-attested legacy — is the key that unlocks him.

He was born in 1253 at Patiyali, a small Ganga-side town in the Doab, and his parentage is the first thing he ever brags about. His father, Amīr Sayf ud-Dīn Maḥmūd, was a Turkic military man of the Lāchīn tribe — the family's exact Central Asian origins are debated — who, like thousands of others, had fled the Mongol wreckage of Transoxiana and taken service in the Delhi Sultanate, the Muslim empire then two generations old. His mother was Indian: the daughter of ʿImād ul-Mulk, a Delhi grandee — by origin a Hindu convert — who served as war-minister in the government of Sultan Ghiyāsuddīn Balban. Turk on one side, Hindustani on the other; Persian in the study, Hindavī in the kitchen. Many men of his class played down their Indian ancestry. Khusrau spent a lifetime writing it up.

The father died when the boy was around eight, and he was raised in Delhi in his maternal grandfather's great household, inside the machinery of Balban's grim, efficient state. The talent showed early and he knew it; he later boasted that he had filled volumes before his beard came in. At twenty he assembled his first dīwān — a poet's collected shorter poems, mostly ghazals, the lyric of love and longing in couplets. He would eventually gather five, spaced across his life like tree rings: the Tuḥfat uṣ-Ṣighar ("Gift of Youth," c. 1273), the Wasaṭ ul-Ḥayāt ("Middle of Life," c. 1284), the Ghurrat ul-Kamāl ("Dawn of Perfection," c. 1294), the Baqiya Naqiya ("The Choice Remainder," 1316) and the Nihāyat ul-Kamāl ("Perfection's End"), closed just before his death.

A poet in that world ate what patrons served, and Khusrau climbed the patron ladder rung by rung: Balban's nephew Malik Chhajjū first; then the sultan's son Bughra Khān; then, from 1281, the heir himself — Prince Muhammad, governor at Multan, a genuine connoisseur whose circle was the brightest in the empire. It ended in catastrophe. In 1285 the Mongols came down on the Punjab, and the prince died fighting them — remembered ever after as the Khan-i Shahid, the Martyr Prince. Khusrau was there. By his own account he was carried off a prisoner by the Mongols and got free — the details vary with the telling, and historians handle them gently — and the elegies he wrote for his dead patron made his name; the chroniclers say old Balban wept aloud when he heard one. It was formative training: a court is a place where the man who feeds you can be dead by spring.

The ladder resumed, because it had to. For the young sultan Kaiqubād he produced his first verse-chronicle, the Qirān us-Saʿdain ("Conjunction of the Two Auspicious Stars," 1289), on the reconciliation of Kaiqubād with his father Bughra Khān. When the Khaljī family seized the throne in 1290, the new dynasty inherited him like the palace furniture: Jalāluddīn Khaljī gave him the title Amīr and a court appointment; his nephew and murderer Alāuddīn Khaljī — conqueror, price-fixer, the Sultanate at maximum wattage — presided over Khusrau's peak, two decades in which the poet produced a five-part answer to the great Persian romancer Niẓāmī and the prose celebration of Alāuddīn's conquests called the Khazāʾin ul-Futūḥ. Under Alāuddīn's son Mubārak Shāh came the Nuh Sipihr; under Ghiyāsuddīn Tughluq, founder of the next dynasty, the Tughluq-nāma. Count the thrones he sang for and you can reach the traditional seven sultans several ways — the usual tally runs Balban, Kaiqubād, Jalāluddīn, Alāuddīn, Mubārak Shāh, the usurper Khusrau Khān, Ghiyāsuddīn Tughluq, though some lists start lower or skip the usurper. The count is folklore; the fact under it is harder than any number. Delhi's throne in his lifetime changed hands by murder more often than not — Kaiqubād killed, Jalāluddīn beheaded by his own nephew, Mubārak Shāh murdered by his favourite, the favourite cut down within the year — and through all of it, every faction's first act of culture was to keep Khusrau. Nobody kills the poet. In an empire where nothing else compounded, his reputation did.

But the court was only half the ledger. The other half sat in Ghiyaspur. From young manhood Khusrau was attached to Nizāmuddīn Auliyā (chapter 107) — formally his disciple, in practice something rarer, a friendship between the empire's most worldly man and its least. The shaikh, who addressed emperors as interruptions, called Khusrau Turkullāh, "God's Turk," and made no secret of the favouritism; the tradition gives him the saying that, had the law allowed it, he would have willed that the two of them share one grave. Khusrau came to the khānqāh in the evenings with the dust of the court still on him; his poems for the shaikh are the least commissioned things he ever wrote. It was for that circle — the samāʿ, the Chishtī practice of devotional listening — that his musical gifts were exercised; and it was there, tradition says, that he pulled a Hindu spring festival inside a Sufi lodge, dressing in yellow and singing mustard-flower songs to break the shaikh's grief — the Basant that the dargāh, as the last chapter told, keeps to this day.

The end you know, because this chapter opened with it. In April 1325 the shaikh died while Khusrau was in Bengal with Tughluq's army; the poet returned, put off his wealth and his colours — so the tradition runs, and the sources that knew him confirm at least the timing — and was dead by October, within six months of his master. They buried him beside the shaikh, where his tomb stands now inside the dargāh complex; his ʿurs, his death-anniversary, is still kept there with days of qawwāli. Of his own household the record says almost nothing. What he left was two languages, a chronicle of an empire, and a sound.

The Great Work

The Persian ocean. Start with what is solidly, manuscript-attested his, because it alone would justify the chapter. Khusrau wrote more first-rank Persian than any poet India ever produced — the five dīwāns, thousands of ghazals, plus the set-piece masterworks — and Persian was then the English of half of Asia, the language of power and polish from Anatolia to Bengal. His ghazals are built for the ear — refrains that return like a drum-stroke, long vowels placed where a singer can lean on them — and singers have never let go of them. Between 1298 and 1302, in his mid-forties, he answered the supreme technical challenge in the tradition: a Khamsa, a matched set of five long romances on the same themes the Persian master Niẓāmī had made canonical — answering the tradition's acknowledged master measure for measure, in about three years. Persia noticed. The honorific that stuck to him, Ṭūṭī-e-Hind, "Parrot of India," concedes the point with a smile: in Persian imagery the parrot is the sweet-tongued reciter, and the compliment means that the best Persian in the world was now being spoken in Delhi.

"I am a Turk of Hindustan": the two tongues. Now the hinge of his importance. In the preface to the Ghurrat ul-Kamāl — his own prose, his own claim — Khusrau tells us that besides his Persian he has scattered among friends compositions in Hindavī: the unwritten street speech of the Delhi region, the mixed bazaar tongue of a garrison city where Turkic soldiers, Persian secretaries and Indian everybody-else had to make one another understood. And he plants his flag in the couplet this chapter's front page carries: I am a Turk of Hindustan; I answer in Hindavī. The most decorated Persian poet alive is saying, in about 1294, that the language of the lanes of Delhi is worth a great poet's mouth. Hardly any of that Hindavī survives in early manuscripts — we will come to the gap — but the claim itself is genuine, dated, and enormous, because the speech he named would grow up to be Hindi and Urdu, the two-named language that some six hundred million people now carry. Both traditions claim him as founder, and both are right in the way that matters: he is the first great name to treat their common ancestor as literature. The fountainhead framing is not a modern invention; it is his own preface, taken at its word.

The India poem. In 1318, for Mubārak Shāh, Khusrau finished the Nuh Sipihr — "Nine Skies," a poem in nine spheres — and in its third sphere he did something with no real precedent in Persian letters: he wrote a sustained, argued, delighted celebration of India. He argues — flat out — that Hindustan is paradise: when Adam fell from Eden, where else could he have landed but here; and is not the peacock, paradise's own bird, at home in these gardens? He defends the climate against grumbling immigrants. He inventories Indian learning with a courtier's precision and a patriot's relish: the numerals the world calculates with; the Panchatantra's fables, translated westward as Kalīla wa Dimna; the game of chess — Indian, all of it, he insists, and the world's debt. He praises the brahmins' learning, and Sanskrit as a language of science and scripture that yields nothing to Arabic's prestige. And he lists the spoken languages of the land, a dozen or so in his spellings: Sindhi, Lahori, Kashmiri, the tongues of Bengal and Awadh, Gujar for Gujarat, Tilangi for Telugu country, Dhur-Samundri for the Kannada south, Maʿbari for the Tamil coast, and the rest — every one, he says, good for every use — with Hindavī, his own, among them. Be careful and be proud in the right order: this is a court poem, written to flatter a Delhi sultan's realm, and one famous "India is paradise" verse quoted everywhere today has been traced by recent scholarship to a much later poet. But the third sphere itself is manuscript-attested, seven hundred years old, and unmistakable: an Indian, born of a Turkish father, writing in Persian, telling the world that his country's languages, sciences and birds need no one's permission to be first-rate. The purpose of this book, stated in 1318.

The historian in verse — and the panegyrist's bargain. Khusrau's court commissions — the Qirān us-Saʿdain, the Miftāḥ ul-Futūḥ on Jalāluddīn's victories, the ʿĀshiqa (the tragic romance of prince Khizr Khan and the Gujarati princess Duval Rānī, which real events forced him to end with the prince's blinding and murder), the Nuh Sipihr, the Tughluq-nāma, and the prose Khazāʾin ul-Futūḥ — are, collectively, the nearest thing the early Sultanate has to a newsroom: historians still mine them for prices, campaigns, ceremonies, even engineering. And here the book must keep its own accounts honest. The Khazāʾin ul-Futūḥ is a victory book. It celebrates, in gorgeous prose, Malik Kāfūr's southern campaigns — Devagiri, then Warangal, where the grandson of Rudramadevi (chapter 105) was squeezed for tribute, then Dwarasamudra and the deep Tamil south, the temple country this book walked with the Cholas (chapter 87), where the raiders stripped Chidambaram itself. Pages this book has mourned from one side, Khusrau wrote from the other, and was paid for. That is the panegyrist's bargain, and it will not be prettified here: the empire's best witness was on the empire's payroll, and safety and salary both depended on applause. Say what is also true — he was no minister, ordered no campaign, and his hymns to India sit in the same volumes as his hymns to its conquerors — and then let the discomfort stand. Seven centuries later, every journalist embedded with an army, every consultant writing the client's version of the story, is standing where Khusrau stood, and would do well to feel the floor.

The music: what is attested, and what is remembered. Tradition makes Khusrau the father of Hindustani music outright: inventor of the sitar and the tabla, creator of the khayāl (the genre that now dominates North Indian classical singing) and the tarāna (the rapid song of dancing syllables), blender of Persian and Indian modes into new rāgas, founder of qawwāli entire. The scholarship is blunter. The sitar and tabla cannot be traced anywhere near his century — the evidence for both begins in the eighteenth; the khayāl's documented rise is centuries later; the rāga attributions rest on collections compiled long after his death; and the near-contemporary sources, while they praise his musicianship in the highest terms, preserve not one note of his. What is attested is still remarkable: that he was steeped in the samāʿ of the khānqāh; that men who knew him ranked him a master of music theory and performance as well as poetry; and that the hereditary singers of the Delhi dargāhs — the qawwāl-bachche, "children of the qawwāls," whose lineages run unbroken into today's gharānās, the family schools of Hindustani music — have claimed descent from singers he trained for as long as anyone can check. Set beside him the book this music stands on: a generation before, at the Yādava court of Devagiri — the very city Kāfūr later plundered — the theorist Śārṅgadeva had written the Saṅgīta Ratnākara, the "Ocean of Music," the thirteenth-century treatise that both of India's classical systems, Hindustani and Carnatic, still cite as their common bedrock. The music of India did not need a Delhi courtier to invent it. What the tradition is remembering, in its extravagant way, is something subtler and probably true: that in Khusrau's Delhi, in the space between the court and the khānqāh, Persian and Indian music sat down together with unusual seriousness — and that when the northern style later grew apart from the southern, India named the parting after the most vivid man in the room.

The songbook with a four-century gap. Last, the beloved corpus. "Chhāp tilak sab chhīnī re mose nainā milāike" — with one meeting of eyes you took my tilak-mark and everything that made me mine — sung at every qawwāli night in the subcontinent. "Kāhe ko byāhī bides" — the bride's reproach, why did you marry me away to a far country? — sung at weddings when the daughter leaves. "Amma mere bābā ko bhejo" — the season-song of a girl asking for her father. The Hindavī riddles and trick-verses schoolchildren still trade. The macaronic tour de force "Zehāl-e-miskīn," alternating Persian and Hindavī line by line like a man switching languages mid-heartbreak. All of it travels under Khusrau's name; none of it can be documented within roughly four hundred years of his death — the earliest anthologies attributing these songs to him are eighteenth-century or later, and the language itself has been reworked by centuries of singing mouths. The honest verdict is not "forgery"; it is that an oral tradition composed, polished and preserved a songbook in his name, exactly as earlier India had composed in the name of Vālmīki or Vyāsa. And here the chapter asks you to hold two true things at once. As attribution, the corpus is unverifiable. As history, it is a hard fact of a different kind: for hundreds of years, whenever North India's qawwāls and grandmothers produced a Hindavī song too good to lose, the name they reached for — the name that meant ours, both of ours, from the beginning — was Khusrau's. Legends are evidence too; not of what a man did, but of what a civilization decided he meant.

Before & After

Backward, the nearest debt is one chapter old: this is the friendship of chapter 107 told from the other chair — the courtier who kept, through seven reigns of purchased loyalty, one loyalty that was never for sale, and the Chishtī chain of chapter 101 gave him the master to spend it on. The longer thread is the book's oldest bilingual argument. India has always run on two registers — a prestige language of learning and a mother tongue at the door — and its greatest makers keep choosing both: Kambar (chapter 100) giving the Tamil country its own Rāmāyaṇa in the shadow of Sanskrit; Tikkana (chapter 104) calling himself "friend of both languages" and building Telugu with Sanskrit's tools. Khusrau is that same choice made in Delhi, with Persian as the prestige tongue and Hindavī at the door — proof that the pattern crosses religions as easily as rivers. And behind his music stands the south-facing theory he never cites but his legend leans on: Śārṅgadeva's Saṅgīta Ratnākara, named above, the last treatise both halves of Indian classical music call an ancestor.

Forward, the wires run four ways. The Hindavī he legitimized finds its next great voice in Kabīr (chapter 123), the Banaras weaver who took the street tongue Khusrau had flirted with and made it a whip and a lamp. The Persian-and-Delhi line runs to its far summit in Ghālib (chapter 168), who lies buried in the same basti, a lane from the two graves this chapter began at. The music runs two ways at once: north, through the qawwāl-bachche lineages and the Gwalior court, toward Tānsen (chapter 133), in whom the Delhi-Agra synthesis Khusrau's legend personifies becomes documented, datable art; and south, past the fork, to the other pillar of this book's pre-Mughal music, Purandara Dāsa (chapter 129), who did for Carnatic music's pedagogy what tradition credits Khusrau with doing for the north — and whose chapter will show what the same greatness looks like with better paperwork. (The mint-master Ṭhakkura Pherū, chapter 111, will soon show this Delhi from inside the treasury.) The global rhyme is exact and eerie: Khusrau's working life overlaps Dante's almost year for year, and each man, master of the empire's high language, made the scandalous bet that the speech of his own streets could carry literature — Italian won its bet in one generation; Hindavī's took three centuries longer, and paid off in two languages instead of one.

Why It Still Matters

Because you have heard him this year, whether you knew it or not. "Chhāp tilak" has been recorded by nearly every qawwāli and Sufi-pop act alive — the Sabri Brothers, Abida Parveen, Coke Studio — and rises nightly at the Nizāmuddīn dargāh a hundred metres from his grave; "Kāhe ko byāhī bides" still gets sung when brides leave home. Attribution aside, the performance tradition is unbroken, alive and enormous — a seven-hundred-year-old startup still shipping.

Because Hindi and Urdu — one grammar, two scripts, two flags, and a border of barbed wire between them — have long been pulled apart by history and politics, and Khusrau is the name that keeps recalling their common root. Indian Hindi textbooks claim him as Hindi's first poet; Pakistani anthologies claim him as Urdu's; and both claims point back to the same shared ancestor, because what he actually named, praised and wrote was the undivided ancestor. Every time a Bollywood lyric slides from Sanskritic Hindi into Persianate Urdu inside one line, the language is doing what Khusrau did, and the audience, on both sides of the border, understands every word.

And because of the Nuh Sipihr's third sphere. Modern Indians are sometimes told that pride in India was invented in the nineteenth century as a reflex against colonial contempt. Here is a manuscript from 1318 — written by a Muslim, in Persian, for a sultan — arguing with dates and examples that India's languages, sciences, birds and climate lead the world. The pride this book exists to pass on is not a recent import; it is at least seven centuries old, and one of its first great documents was written by a man who called himself, in the same breath, a Turk and a Hindustani and saw no contradiction to explain. In a century that keeps demanding people choose one ancestry and defend it, the Parrot of India sits on his branch saying the disallowed thing: both. Obviously both.

Over to You

Khusrau applauded, in professional prose, campaigns this book has mourned from the victims' side. Is the panegyrist's bargain — access and survival in exchange for applause — ever honourable? Is the embedded witness who flatters worth more or less to history than the honest witness who was never in the room?

If "Chhāp tilak" cannot be traced within four centuries of his death, in what sense is it "his"? When a tradition composes for generations in a master's name, is the attribution a lie, a courtesy, or a truer kind of authorship — and would you feel the same about a modern brand ghost-writing under a founder's name?

The Nuh Sipihr praises India in Persian, for a sultan's glory. Can patriotism commissioned by power still count as patriotism? Does the motive stain the document, or does the document outgrow the motive?

India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, mosque and concert hall all claim Khusrau. When one man is ancestor to traditions now set against each other, should each side's claim be resisted as appropriation — or encouraged, on the theory that a shared ancestor is the last bridge left?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau, translated by Paul E. Losensky and Sunil Sharma (Penguin, 2011) — the standard modern selection, with the Persian ghazals and the attributed Hindavī pieces clearly separated and a superb introduction; reading it is like walking from the court to the shrine and hearing the language change on the way.

A modern way in: Sunil Sharma's Amir Khusraw: The Poet of Sultans and Sufis (Oneworld, 2005) — a short, scholarly, readable life that handles the attribution tangles honestly. Then listen: Abida Parveen's or the Sabri Brothers' "Chhāp Tilak," and any Thursday-night recording from the Nizāmuddīn dargāh, is the living archive.

The thread forward: From the most famous poet in the empire to a woman the empire never noticed: chapter 109 belongs to Janābāī, the low-caste maidservant of Pandharpur who ground grain, swept floors, and signed some of Marathi's most beloved poems "Janī, the dāsī" — the mother-tongue revolution Khusrau glimpsed from the court, seen from the bottom of the household.