SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The dissertation has been divided into the following three principal divisions: I. The Introduction, which presents a general survey of the origin and history of the development of Indo-Persian literature proceeding the age of Hasan. II. The life of the poet: Amir Hasan Dihlavi, the son of a Persian emigrant to India, named 'Ala-u'd-Din Sanjari, was one of the greatest Indo-Persian poets who flourished during the late seventh and early eight centuries of the Hijra. He was born at Delhi in A.H. 651 (A.D. 1253), during the reign of Nasir-u'd-Din Mahmud. He began to compose verse whe he was a child of thirteen, and devoted himself to the art of poesy for a period of fifty years. In the prime of his youth he attached himself to the court of Ghiyas-u'd-Din Balban and his son Prince Muhammad, in whose service he spent five years at Multan, together with his contemporary Amir Khusraw. After the fall of the House of Balban he lived under the patronage of the Khalji Kings, and at the age of fifty-six he became a disciple of Nizam-u'd-Din Awliya. He died in A.H. 729 (A.D. 1328) at Dawlatabad when Sultan Muhammad Tughlaq transferred the capital from Delhi and forced its population to migrate there. III. His works: His extant political works are contained in a Divan, which comprises about ten thousand couplets, containing Qasidas, Ghazals, Qita's, Rubayis, and a romantic Masnani called Hikayat-i-Ashiq-i-Naguri. His prose works that have survived to us are a short piece of Marsiza written on the occasion of the death of Prince Muhammad, and the Fawaid-u'l-Fu'ad, a collection of discourses made by his spiritual guide at a number of successive meetings held during the years A.H. 707-722 (A.D. 307-22). None of his works has yet been published. This is the first systematic attempt that has ever been made to bring him to the notice of the modern world.