by Sunil Sharma
The political situation in Delhi was unstable at this time and Khusrau went east to Avadh for a brief stint in the service of the new governor, the freedman ‘Alī Sarjāndār Hātim Khān. He returned to Delhi in 1289, and as though to celebrate his return to the city, Khusrau wrote:
Dehli:
Refuge of religion!
Refuge and paradise of justice!
Long may it endure!
Since it is a heavenly paradise
in every essential quality,
may God keep it free from calamity.
This verse appears in the work Qirān al-sa‘dain (Conjunction of Two Stars) that he was commissioned to write by the new sultan, Kaiqubād (r. 1287–90), to commemorate the reunion between the sultan and his father Bughrā Khān, Khursau’s one-time patron. This work was the first narrative poem on a theme from the history of his own times and an innovative step in his growth as a court poet. Sultan Kaiqubād did not survive long and died the following year at the age of twenty-two in 1290.
One year later, Amīr Khusrau joined the court of the new sultan, Jalāluddīn Khaljī (r. 1290–96), and from then until his death he was continuously connected with the court of Delhi, having progressed from serving provincial officials to being the chief poet at the imperial court. Under Jalāluddīn Khaljī and ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī (r. 1296–1316), both of whom were of Afghan background, Khusrau was at his peak as a professional poet. When Sultan Jalāluddīn began his short reign, he was a man of advanced years but had a great zeal for the arts and was an ardent admirer of Amīr Khusrau’s poetry. The contemporary historian Ziyāuddīn Barnī describes the monarch’s fondness for Khusrau:
Sultan Jalāluddīn was a connoisseur and patron of the arts. He had an elegant disposition and could compose quatrains and ghazals. What clearer proof could there have been of his refined nature and connoisseurship than the fact that just when he had become the war minister he extolled Amīr Khusrau, who was the chief of the court poets from first to last, and held him in great esteem … and fixed upon him a stipend of 1200 tankas which had been his father’s, and gave him horses, vestments and his own slaves. When he became king, Amīr Khusrau became one of his intimates at court and served as keeper of the Qur’ān.
In the pleasure assemblies (mahfil), there was a great deal of drinking, jesting and exchange of poetry, accompanied by music, singing and dancing by women and young boys who would also serve wine. In fact, the figure of the sāqī or cupbearer is a stock character in Khusrau’s ghazals. These assemblies provide the implied setting for much of his lyric poetry, and Barnī states, ‘Amīr Khusrau would bring new ghazals daily to those assemblies and the sultan became enamoured of his poems and rewarded him handsomely.’ The reign of ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī, Jalāluddīn’s nephew and successor, witnessed a cultural renaissance, exceeding even the standards of other Delhi sultans for patronage of literature and the arts. Architecture and building activities flourished and all sorts of historical, poetic and scientific works were written in Persian.
In the last decade of his life, Amīr Khusrau served the new sultan, Mubārak Shāh (r. 1316–20), the young and handsome son of ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī, who had come to the throne as the result of a bloody coup. Mubārak Shāh was not well disposed towards Nizāmuddīn Auliyā because his brother Khizr Khān, whom he had killed in his bid for the throne, had been a disciple of the pīr. This must have been the cause of some tension between the sultan and Khusrau, but since the latter was a senior and established poet by this time, he probably was able to maintain a neutral ground. What followed was a particularly turbulent period of history, and it must have taken all of Khusrau’s diplomatic skills and spiritual fortitude to maintain a presence at court and celebrate the deeds of his patrons. The promising young monarch Mubārak Shāh had become slavishly attached to his male lover, Khusrau Khān, a recent convert to Islam who eventually usurped the throne after having had Mubārak Shāh murdered. A few months later, the usurper was removed by Ghiyāsuddīn Tughlaq (r. 1320–25). The events of this period have all the drama, debauchery and violence of ancient Rome in its period of decline, and it was up to the poet to spin all this into an epic. Sultan Ghiyāsuddīn was a pious and orthodox individual who looked askance at the musical gatherings at the khānaqāh of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā. Khusrau’s last patron was Muhammad Shāh (r. 1325–51), the son and successor of Ghiyāsuddīn.
Nizāmuddīn Auliyā passed away in 1325 while Amīr Khusrau was with the sultan on a military campaign in the east. It is said that when he heard the news about his pīr’s death, he recited the following couplet in Hindavi (see poem 73) that has become a core part of the qawwālīs’ repertoire:
gorī sove sej par mukh par dāre kes
chal Khusrau ghar apne sānjh bhain sau des
Amīr Khusrau himself died a few months later in Delhi and was buried near Nizāmuddīn Auliya’s grave. His tomb, which dates from the Mughal period, has been added to and decorated at various times over the centuries. The site is a place of pilgrimage and gatherings for devout pilgrims and Sufis. The ‘urs or death anniversaries of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā (18 Rabī’ al-sānī) and Amīr Khusrau (17 Shawwāl) are both occasions on which Sufis from all over South Asia come together.
Amīr Khusrau’s Indian Cultural Legacy
Communities of Muslims were already established in India in the early years of Islam, primarily in the trading communities on the Malabar coast and in the regions of Sindh and Gujarat. It was the conquest of northern India by Sultan Mahmūd of Ghazni (d. 1030), the ruler of a vast empire, that brought about the inclusion of India in the world of Islam. Although Turkish-speaking, the Ghaznavids were the cultural and political heirs of the earlier Persian dynasty of the Samanids in Bukhara. The Samanids had established themselves in the early ninth century and their institutions and courtly culture had a Persian orientation, as was true of the eastern Islamic world in general. As the Turks of Central Asia converted to Islam and served as slaves in the courts and armies of the Muslim rulers, they in turn became empowered and founded new dynasties.
By the latter part of the eleventh century, the rule of the Ghaznavids had been established in north-western India, and it became a thriving cultural centre. At this time, Lahore was home to court poets such as Abū al-Faraj Rūnī (d. ca 1102) and Mas‘ūd Sa’d Salmān (d. 1121), and the Sufi Shaikh Hujvīrī ‘Dātā Ganj Bakhsh’ (d. 1071), who wrote the first Persian Sufi manual, Kashf al-mahjūb (Unveiling of the Veiled), and whose shrine in the city is a centre for mystics and pilgrims to this day. The Ghaznavids increasingly turned eastwards as they lost their Iranian possessions to another Turkish dynasty, the Seljuqs, but even here they eventually lost out to a ruling house known as the Ghurids, based in Ghur, in the hilly regions of western Afghanistan. As successors to the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids shifted the centres of power and culture closer to the Indian heartlands and away from the frontier, to the cities of Uchh, Multan and Delhi.
At the Battle of Tarain under the leadership of Mu‘izzuddīn Muhammad, the Ghurids won a decisive victory over the Hindu rulers, the Chauhans, and the Turkish slave Qutbuddīn Aibek was appointed as deputy in Delhi, which became the seat of a new polity. In the next few decades, Muslims began to consolidate their power under the rule of sultans such as Iltutmish, who was succeeded by his formidable daughter, Raziya (r. 1236–40), one of the few women rulers in medieval Islam, Nāsiruddīn (r. 1246–66) and Balban (r. 1266–87). These rulers of slave origin were followed by the Khaljī and Tughlaq dynasties whose rule lasted until the fourteenth century.
Meanwhile, the Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Iran in the early thirteenth century led many scholars, poets, artisans and religious figures to migrate to India and settle in and around Delhi, since as a place of refuge it had come to be known as the Dome of Islam (qubbat al-Islām). These émigrés brought their skills, institutions and religious and literary traditions with them, and as these came into contact with local cultural practices a uniquely Indian form of Islamic civilization was bor
n. Thirteenth-century Delhi was an amalgamation of several cities whose traces have not completely disappeared from the city’s topography. Its foundations were laid near the Hindu citadel of Lalkot, in the present-day area of Mehrauli, and soon the villages of Kilokhri, Siri (modern-day Shahpur), Ghiyaspur, Jahanpanah, were all integrated into this thriving metropolis. The architectural monuments built over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as the tombs of the early rulers, the victory tower Qutb Minār, Qubbat al-Islām Mosque, the water reservoirs Hauz Shamsī and the Hauz Khās, and the city of Tughlaqābād, attest to the existence of powerful and centralized ruling houses that were conscious of the city’s unique position in the world of Islam and South Asia.
By the time of Amīr Khusrau’s birth in 1253, in half a century under a succession of Turkish rulers, Delhi had become a cosmopolitan city renowned throughout the Islamic world for its institutions of learning and as a haven for wandering scholars and poets. In the early days of the slave rulers, the city was administered by an elite corps of Turkish nobles known as the chihilgān (The Forty) whose power declined over time as Indians began to participate in the government. The indigenous population consisted chiefly of Hindus, Jains, and two broad categories of Muslims: Indian converts and immigrants from Central Asia who had settled there as refugees or were attracted by the centres of learning, such as the Mu‘izzī madrasa, and by the generous patronage of the rulers. Such institutions also attracted Sufis, and Delhi’s thriving markets brought in merchants and traders. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battūta reached Delhi in 1333, a few years after Amīr Khusrau’s death, and describes the society in great detail. According to him Delhi was the metropolis of India that combined beauty with strength, even calling it the largest city in the eastern Muslim world.
Despite its rapid rise to prominence, the capital city of the sultanate was beset with political upheavals and instability throughout the thirteenth century, due, on the one hand, to the repeated Mongol raids in the north-west (sometimes right into the environs of Delhi), and on the other, to the ruthless battles of succession for the throne and the years of short-lived and unstable rule of usurpers. Nevertheless, there were prolonged periods of stability during which many artistic and cultural endeavours were undertaken and creative energies allowed to flower, as the surviving architectural and literary monuments testify.
Arabic was the language of the religious sciences and technical disciplines, while Persian was more widely used both in speech and writing. Persian was the literary and cultural language of the eastern Islamic world and of a cosmopolitan literary world that at this time extended from Anatolia and the Caucasus to Bengal. The Samanid and Ghaznavids had been the earliest patrons of Persian court literature, and even though the Ghaznavid sultan, Mahmūd, and some of the Muslim rulers of India were of Turkish origin, Turkish never became a literary language in India, nor did it receive courtly patronage. Hindavi was the language of the people around Delhi, but being in a formative stage it still had not achieved high cultural status. Its development into a full-fledged literary medium was the result of the impetus given by poets like Khusrau and the Sufis who had more direct contact with the populace.
In the history of the spread of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, the role of the Sufis cannot be overestimated. It was due to the tireless efforts of these mystics who wandered off into every corner of the land and made contact with people at all levels of society that Islam became part of the local religious landscape. It was also due to the medieval Sufis and Hindu mystics of the bhakti movement that vernacular languages came into their own and took their place next to the more prestigious languages of India, Persian and Sanskrit. There were two primary Sufi orders (silsila) in India at this time and they varied fundamentally in their practices as well as their relationship to the state and to the populace. Originating in Iraq, the Suhravardi Sufi order was established in Multan, on the western frontier of the Delhi sultanate, in the thirteenth century by Shaikh Bahāuddīn Zakariyā; it was about the same time that the Chishti order became prominent in the capital city. The Chishti presence in Delhi dated from the time of the visit of the great master Shaikh Mu‘īnuddīn Chishtī, who came there in 1193 but moved on to Ajmer (Rajasthan) in the heart of the Hindu dominions, and his disciple Qutbuddīn Bakhtiyār Kākī, who settled in Delhi, where his tomb is situated. The towering figure among them and the most influential pīr (spiritual leader) was Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, who had inherited the leadership (khilāfat) of the order from Shaikh Farīuddīn in 1266.
No study of the social or literary history of the times can ignore the presence of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā in the city and his influence on the lives of so many of his contemporaries. By all accounts, he had a charismatic personality and led a life steadfastly devoted to providing for the spiritual needs of his community. Although the Chishtis preferred to have nothing to do with the sultan and his court in Delhi, they had an influence on the populace, and this created tensions with both the ruling powers and the religious clergy (‘ulamā), neither of whom were favourably disposed to this order. The Suhravardis, for their part, generally maintained friendly relations with the Delhi sultans and, unlike the Chishtis, belonged to an affluent and landowning institution. The Chishtis did not accept any grants from the sultans and emphasized poverty and austerity as essential to spiritual realization, and consequently they exerted an abiding spiritual power over the hearts of the people of Delhi. Generous throughout his lifetime, Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, who never married, is said to have given away all his belongings before he died.
Early biographers of Amīr Khusrau corroborate his deep interest in and involvement with the world of music. Although details about his exact contribution to this field—in the way of theoretical writings on musicology or innovations with instruments—are lacking in the sources of his time and may never be known to us, there is ample evidence in Amīr Khusrau’s own writings that he had more than a cursory interest in music. Each art enhances the other but one is demonstrably more powerful and effective than the other (see poem 51). Poetry can stand on its own, but the music accompanying it is like an ornament on a bride. Just as there is an apocryphal anecdote about Rūmī passing through the bazaar of the goldsmiths and being inspired by the rhythmic sound of their tools to compose a poem, so there is one about Amīr Khusrau replicating the sound of the cotton carder’s bow in a verse.
References to music and musical instruments abound in Amīr Khusrau’s poetry, but this is not surprising since Persian poets used a broad range of imagery in their poems (see, for example, poems 12, 30 and 36). However, the details he provides demonstrate that he had technical knowledge of the musical arts. Since Khusrau’s poems were put to music and performed in his own time, he may even have played an active role in setting the lyrics to music. It is regrettable that no theoretical writings on music by Amīr Khusrau survive although they were believed to exist at one time. Scattered references in his works provide some clues regarding the state of music back then. In Nuh sipihr (Nine Heavens), he claims that foreign musicians visiting India have introduced new features to Indian music but have not added anything to the basic principles. He says that the sound of Indian music captivates the wild deer, even in the face of the hunter’s arrow: it is pierced and dies, not by the arrow but by the music. In his work I‘jāz-i Khusravī, Khusrau describes various musical instruments, mentions the accomplished musicians of his day and recounts the arrival of a group of musicians from Central Asia who competed with Indian artistes.
The investigations of the late Indian scholar Shahab Sarmadee have done much to add to our understanding of Khusrau’s place in Indian music. One of the many apocryphal stories about Amīr Khusrau describes his victory in a contest with a famous Indian musician Gopāl and his wresting of the title nāyak (the leader of a musical troupe) for himself. It is also clear that Amīr Khusrau was familiar with both the Indian and Persian musical systems of his day. The exact nature of his experiments with combining the rāgas of I
ndian music with the maqām and pardah system of Arabic and Persian music cannot be ascertained. He is said to have introduced variations of melody and tempo and come up with over a dozen new modes in Indian music, some of which—such as sāzgīrī, shāhāna, and zilāf—are still known today. The introduction of the khayāl genre of music, which is the main vocal form performed today, is often attributed to Amīr Khusrau or to the fifteenth-century Sultan Husain Sharqī of Jaunpur. Another type of composition that he authored is the tarāna, an onomatopoeic string of meaningless syllables interspersed with other bits of poetic lines and sung in any rāga. With so many attributions to his name, perhaps it is safe to use the term current among musicologists, Khusravī style, to describe compositions that may have been influenced by Amīr Khusrau or whose core can be traced to him. His greatest innovations are said to be the instruments sitār and tablā, now an essential part of Hindustani music, but there is no historical basis to the claim.
Amīr Khusrau’s connections to music continue to be a dynamic part of the living traditions of not only North Indian classical music but also the now universally popular form of qawwālī. Music is an essential component of qawwālī which is the ecstatic and hypnotic performance of Sufi verses, often accompanied by dance. The use of the term qawwālī equally signifies the lyrics of the poems that are employed in the performance, the singing, and the whole presentation itself. The word is derived from the Arabic qawl (utterance, speech) and the form is actually a mixture of the Arabic qawl and the Persian ghazal. The Sufi practice of listening to music (samā) as part of their spiritual exercises has been a controversial topic throughout history, but the Chishtis were and are particularly inclined to it, and the art of qawwālī has been fostered at the their shrine complexes from Delhi and Ajmer to Lahore and Karachi. The invention of this form of dance music and the training of the first generation of singers (qawwāl bachche) is often ascribed to Amīr Khusrau. But it is likely that some form of qawwālī formed part of the devotional practices of Sufis before Amīr Khusrau. In its present state, it is a uniquely South Asian development that emerged from the universal Sufi practice of dance music and over time has taken on distinct styles according to particular regional influences and schools of music. It is a constantly evolving form and the earliest recordings of qawwālī from the turn of the last century are different from the current style of performance, but the core has always been Amīr Khusrau’s poetry.