This is English translation of the Third Chapter (Sipihr) of Amir Khusrau's Persian Mathnawi, the Nuh-Sipihr(also known as the Sultan-Namah) which is the most important and the most famous of his works. It was written in the year A.H. 718/1318 A.D. at the instance of the ruling Khalji Sultan Qutbu'd-Din Mubarak Shah, to whom it is dedicated. The Nuh-Sipihr was composed when Khusrau was 65, and a matured and accomplished poet, and this work is, undoubtedly, an excellent piece of Persian literature. Though designed to record, in the spirit of history. The principal events of the reign of Mubarak Shah, upon whom he showers extra-lavish eulogies, the Nuh-Sipihr is more important for its description of India and its people, their knowledge and learning, arts and sciences, its fauna and flora, and almost all good points which make India the Paradise on earth. Khusrau was patriot to the core and his personality is most brilliantly reflected in this work. He sings a thousand songs in praise of his motherland (watan) and exerts his wits to prove India's superiority to all other countries of the world.The Nuh-Sipihr is divided into nine chapters, each dedicated to a sky; thus the first chapter is dedicated to the Ninth and the highest sky, the second to the Eighth, third to the Seventh, and so on, in a descending order. Hence, the title of the work: Nuh-Sipihr (Nine Skies). Title of each chapter is given in a beautiful couplet; thus there are nine chapter- couplets. Sub-headings have also been given in each chapter, each sub-heading also being a couplet. In all, there are 52 topics in the Nuh-Sipihr. The figure 52 is considered auspicious in India and the distribution of the work into 52 headings is symbolic. It is the third Chapter which mostly deals with India and the things Indian and, by far, this is the most important chapter of this composition. The present work is, essentially, a translation of this chapter. The Persian text of the Nuh-Sipihr edited by Muhammad Wahid Mirza (OUP Calcutta 1950) has been used for this translation. It has been referred to, hereinafter, in this work, as NS. It excludes the last two sub-headings of the Third Chapter which are related to the military campaigns of Deogiri and Telingana. Thus, it is translation of the NS pp. 147-195 (49 pages). Besides, 14 couplets of the Ninth Chapter (Topic No.51 NS, pp.442-43) have also been translated here under chapter-VIII. Important material, not covered by the main text (NS, 147-195) which was lying scattered in the whole work has also been collected and arranged in three Appendices C, D and E, e.g. 'To the Hindu Singer'; 'Khusrau's Description of the Buildings of Delhi'; and 'Khusrau's Vindication of India's Sovereignity'. These would be immensely useful in the present context. This work has been divided into eight chapters, each with a suitable heading in accordance with its subject-matter. Comprehensive explanatory notes have been given side by side. Page numbers in the margin refer to Wahid Mirza's Persian edition of the Nuh-Siphir (i.e. the NS), to facilitate checking with the original text. This is not a literal translation. The spirit of the text has been followed and attempt has been made to express the real meaning of a statement which the poet had intended to convey to his readers through poetic hyberboles, symbols and riddles. This is an attempt, in fact, to bring to light Khusrau'smarvellous experiment in the thought, now called Nationalism, which is as good a piece of Cultural History of Medieval India, as it is of Persian literature. This is, pure and simple, a historical writing and, at times, the literary aspect, not being feasible in the present context, has been superseded. This is how, 'literature' can be used as a source of History.

Literary criticism produced by Indian scholars from the earliest times to the present age is represented in this book. These include Bharatamuni, Tholkappiyar, Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Jnaneshwara, Amir Khusrau, Mirza Ghalib, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, B.S. Mardhekar, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and A.K. Ramanujam and Sudhir Kakar among others. Their statements have been translated into English by specialists from Sanskrit, Persian and other languages.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book traces the development of philology (the study of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth-century was Sirāj al-Dīn 'Alī Khān, (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose Intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-go'ī [literally, fresh-speaking] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native-speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative fresh-speaking poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early modern Europe. Ārzū used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation or be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. Ārzū also shaped attitudes about reokhtah, the Persianized form of vernacular poetry that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, helping the vernacular to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India. This study puts to rest the persistent misconception that Indians started writing the vernacular because they were ashamed of their poor grasp of Persian at the twilight of the Mughal Empire.

Amir Khusrau, one of the greatest poets of medieval India, helped forge a distinctive synthesis of Muslim and Hindu cultures. Written in Persian and Hindavi, his poems and ghazals were appreciated across a cosmopolitan Persianate world that stretched from Turkey to Bengal. Having thrived for centuries, Khusrau’s poetry continues to be read and recited to this day. In the Bazaar of Love is the first comprehensive selection of Khusrau’s work, offering new translations of mystical and romantic poems and fresh renditions of old favourites. Covering a wide range of genres and forms, it evokes the magic of one of the best-loved poets of the Indian subcontinent.

This book studies an important icon of medieval South Asian culture, Indian courtier, poet, musician and Sufi, Amir Khusraw (1253-1325), chiefly remembered for his poetry in Persian and Hindi, today an integral part of the performative qawwali tradition.

This study on India shows that the medieval era was a period of dynamic change during which the regional societies that characterize India today began to take recognizable shape. It focuses on the region of Andhra Pradesh.

Persian Tughras,Cloth Bound: Amir Khusrau'S Patriotic Observations Of India, Translated Into English From His Persian Mathnawi The Nuh-Sipihr

For a period of nearly eight hundred years, Perso-Islamic kingship was the source for the dominant social and cultural paradigms organising Indian political life. In the medieval world of South Asia, Persian kingship took the form of a hybridized and adaptive political expression. The Persian king embodied the values of justice, military heroics, and honor, ideals valorized historically and transculturally, yet the influence of the pre-Islamic Persian past and Persian forms of kingship has not yet been fully recognised. In this book, Blain Auer demonstrates how Persian kingship was a transcultural phenomenon. Describing the contributions made by kings, poets, historians, political and moral philosophers, he reveals how and why the image of the Persian king played such a prominent role in the political history of Islamicate societies, in general, and in India, in particular. By tracing the historical thread of this influence from Samanid, Ghaznavid, and Ghurid empires, Auer demonstrates how that legacy had an impact on the establishment of Delhi as a capital of Muslim rulers who made claims to a broad symbolic and ideological inheritance from the Persian kings of legend.

An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCE. When the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander's army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world. They knew a few legends and travelers' tales, but their categories of thought were inadequate to encompass what they witnessed. The plants were unrecognizable, their properties unknown. The customs of the people were various and puzzling. While Alexander's conquest was brief, ending with his death in 323 BCE, the Greeks would settle in the Indian region for the next two centuries, forging an era of productive interactions between the two cultures. The Greek Experience of India explores the various ways that the Greeks reacted to and constructed life in India during this fruitful period. From observations about botany and mythology to social customs, Richard Stoneman examines the surviving evidence of those who traveled to India. Most particularly, he offers a full and valuable look at Megasthenes, ambassador of the Seleucid king Seleucus to Chandragupta Maurya, and provides a detailed discussion of Megasthenes's now-fragmentary book Indica. Stoneman considers the art, literature, and philosophy of the Indo-Greek kingdom and how cultural influences crossed in both directions, with the Greeks introducing their writing, coinage, and sculptural and architectural forms, while Greek craftsmen learned to work with new materials such as ivory and stucco and to probe the ideas of Buddhists and other ascetics.