In the rhythmic verses of Amir Khusro, one can hear echoes of a civilization where Persian and Indian cultures pulsed in unison–a time when India and Pakistan were collectively known as Hindūstān. Today, despite the seemingly timeless divide between India and Pakistan, whose Islamic bonafides are as suspect as India’s secular ones, an Islamic figure heretofore neglected in Arab-Muslim memory finds adoration on both sides of the border in South Asia.
Born in Mominabad (current day Patiala in India) to a Turkic father and an Indian mother, Amir Khusro’s poetry–especially in the form of Qawwali music–still echoes through the streets of South and Central Asia. Whether it is Sakal Ban in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi, or Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s Aaj Rang Hai on Pakistan’s Coke Studio, Khusro’s legacy transcends the allegedly impenetrable nationalistic boundaries of India and Pakistan.
Khusro left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of South Asia and beyond, influencing generations of poets, musicians, and writers. His innovative work in Persian and Hindavi languages, his poetic inventions, and his contributions to the development of Indian classical music left a legacy that resonates even after 700 years. In a recent conversation during his visit to the United States, the prominent Pakistan qawwal Fareed Ayaz referred to Khusro as an ustad to whom he owes a great debt. Ayaz sang qawwalis associated with Khusro, such as ‘Chaap Tilak, to a room full of South Asians who sang right along with him. He is one of many major South Asian musicians past and present, such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parvin, Tansen, Baiju Bawra, Prabhha Bharti, and Runa Laila, who would not be who they are without Khusro. His imprints can be found in the works of countless iconic South Asian poets and writers, such as Jami, Fayzi, Bedil, Ghalib, and Mir.
What is especially noteworthy about Khusros oeuvre is that it is claimed by a diverse cross-section of society, who are often at odds with one another politically, socially, and economically. Khusros poetry appeals to religious ulema, Sufi groups, as well as to an aspirational (and burgeoning) secular class in India and Pakistan. Remarkably, even as Hindu nationalism seems to have swept the ‘Hindi belt’ in Northern India, the genre of qawwali, of which Amir Khusro’s lyrics are an integral part, remains intensely popular amongst Hindus.
Regarded as one of the most prolific poets with approximately 500,000 couplets in Persian and Hindavi, Khusro’s self-moniker of ‘the parrot of India’ (Tuti-yi Hind) continues to be used as an honorific to celebrate his contributions.
Writing from Delhi, the heart of Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century, Amir Khusro weaved together threads of knowledge as wide-ranging as literature, philosophy, theology, music, logic, and astronomy into an oeuvre that exceeds over 90 works and spans over 25 years. In a world where borders divide more than they unite, Khusraw’s poetry is reminiscent of a time where art transcended national borders and identities a subcontinent that was not divided along reified projections of religion, language, or culture.
Lay beliefs would suggest that the Indic and the Islamic have been perennially adversarial, perhaps even ‘civilizational foes.’ While recent scholarship is now beginning to shed light on the rich and extensive history of Hindu-Muslim (Perso-Indic) encounters, it is remarkable that this cross-cultural fertilization was in the works as early as the 13th century. One of Khusro’s most substantive contributions was to synthesize local Indian (Hindustani) culture within an Islamic ethos, giving rise to a distinctive Indian Islamic literary culture.
Khusro synthesized the two by developing a unique Indian poetic style known as Sabk-i Hindi– a novel poetic style that integrates words, phrases, and ideas from the Indo-Sanskritic world into the Persian literary milieu. It was a result of the intermingling of the literary culture of India with Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. As an immigrant Turk in India, Khusro was at the nexus of these distinct cultures that allowed him to weave Indian literary motifs, topoi, and diction with Persian literary styles.
Khusro could only bring forth a synthesis due to his deep familiarity with Indo-Sanskrit and Perso-Islamic literature and culture. His works exhibit a deep intimacy with the Arabic and Persian literary canon, and creatively deploys from the literary and religious tradition(s) preceding him, such as Persian and Arabic poetry, Islamic philosophy, logic, Qur’an, and rhetoric/eloquence (‘ilm al-balagha). Similarly, Khusro’s familiarity with the Indo-Sanskritic literary world can be gleaned from his imitation of the metrical formation of Sanskrit court poetry, allusions to Indian aesthetic theory (especially rasa), and his contributions to Indian classical music.
However, our protagonist was not a mere poet, poetizing without concern for imperial pomp. On the contrary, Khusro’s positionality as a court poet of the Delhi Sultanate offered him a powerful position to bring forth this synthesis of Indian culture with Islamic ethos. While Khusro wrote in Persian, which was the language of the intellectual elite, he incorporated Indian themes, diction, imagery, and references to Indian customs and traditions in his poetry. His inclusion of vernacular Hindi words in his Persian corpus was a feat due to the fact that the ruling intellectual and cultural elite in India – the ashraf class that Khusro belonged to – wrote primarily in classical languages of Persian and Arabic, and considered writing in the Indian vernacular to be a disgrace. Khusro’s contributions fostered a shared literary heritage between Persian-speaking elites and indigenous Indian communities.
Khusro deployed Indian folk traditions of storytelling, employing distinctly Indian motifs, especially in Hindavi poetry, including pun-inflected riddles that painted scenes of local life. Images of peacocks, monsoon, ripe mangoes, paan, and descriptions of Indian women, plants, and animals are scattered throughout his Persian corpus and Hindavi poetry attributed to him. Furthermore, he incorporated Indian stories such as Hasht Bahisht (Eight Paradises) and Nuh Siphir (Nine Skies), referencing distinctly Indian customs, traditions, and local imagery. Khusraw penned a historical Persian narrative poem (masnavi) that not only paints the Delhi Sultanate conquests, but showcases a romance between a Hindu princess and a Muslim crown prince – Duval Rani and Khizr Khan.
Through this romance, Khusro offers a vignette into thirteenth-century India, where Hindu-Muslim relations were a nuanced and complex tapestry, as opposed to a reified, oppositional relationship premised on unbridgeable ‘religious’ essences. Khusro’s India speaks of a time when the possibility of engaging with the ‘other’ existed, both in the intellectual and the personal terrain.
Khusro’s example of synthesizing local Indian and Hindu culture within an Islamic ethos is noteworthy for modern readers for several reasons. For one, Khusro’s life and oeuvre attest to a pre-modern ‘moment’ that goes beyond mere ‘coexistence’ and strives, instead, for a mutual understanding and enrichment between religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions. Secondly, his life adds yet another data point to a growing mountain of evidence that suggests that Muslims in premodern South Asia not only tolerated Hindus, but engaged with Hindu-Sanskritic philosophical, literary, and theological traditions meaningfully and sincerely, as a source of genuine knowledge and enrichment.
Beyond a simple corrective of our historical archive, Khusrow’s ‘intervention’ is important for contemporary readers, given contemporary concerns. As nationalism and populism become the lingua franca within South Asia, readers would be remiss not to pay due attention to a figure such as Amir Khusro, not only for his literary genius, but for offering us a model, albeit eight hundred years ago, for how to meaningfully and honestly engage with the religious, social, political, cultural ‘other.’
Ilma Qureshi is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, specializing in South Asian religions, Sufism, and Persian literature. A poet, fiction writer, and translator, her work spans Persian, Urdu, and English, and has been featured in numerous literary and academic journals.
