Ten Poets of Pre-Mughal India
translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould
Translators’ Introduction
The most famous poet of pre-Mughal Delhi is indisputably Amir Khusrow, followed by Hasan Dehlevi. These two poets were far from the only ones to produce Persian poetry in Delhi before the Mughals, however. In what follows, we have translated some short verses by the lesser known Persian poets of pre-Mughal India, many of whom were based in Delhi. Although simpler in style and diction than the Persian poetry produced in West Asia during this period by Hafez, Ubayd Zakani, Afzal al-Din Kashani, and ‘Attar, the poetry of Persianate India is also marked by striking imagery, religious insight, and a unique sense of the numinous.
Little is known about the biographies of the poets translated here, but the Persian style they cultivated laid a foundation for the better-known compositions of Amir Khusrow in the centuries that followed. Shams-i Dabir in particular is known to have been a friend of Amir Khusrow; Bu Ali Shah Qalandar died within two years of Amir Khusrow’s death.
We have taken these selections from Maria Bilquis’s Persian-language study of Indo-Persian literature: Collection and Edition of Scattered Persian Verses in India till 1290-A.D. (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, 1970). Perhaps because study is in Persian, it has escaped the attention of Anglophone and European readers to date. We hope with these brief translations to draw the attention of poetry lovers to the significant contributions made by Persian poets of the subcontinent, centuries before Mughal rule, many of whom captured the distinctiveness of Indo-Persian literary culture long before it acquired a name.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of Writers and Rebels (Yale University Press, 2017) and the poetry collection Cityscapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2019). She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian. rrgould.hcommons.org - Twitter @rrgould - Instagram: @r.r.gould
Kayvan Tahmasebian is a poet, critic, and the author of Isfahan’s Mold (Goman, 2016), Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (Radical Paper Press, 2019), and co-translator (with Rebecca Ruth Gould) of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019).