What is commonly known about Valī Dakhanī ?

At the outset it is useful to revisit the scholarly arguments about the origins and transmission of Dakhanī and Reḳhtah. Scholars such as Faruqi note that these vernacular literary forms had flourished in the Deccan under different names such as “Gujrī” and “Dakhanī”Footnote ¹³ for two and a half centuries by Valī's time. Arguments vary about the exact nature of the northern dialects that were transmitted to the Indian peninsular. However most scholars trace the presence of this northern dialect in the Deccan to the southward migration of Delhi noble families that went back to the early fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ Gradually, it had developed into a poetic idiom sponsored by the ruling elite as well as Sufis.Footnote ¹⁵ By Valī's time, this idiom had been recently revitalised by a new immigration wave from Delhi. Aurangzeb's re-establishment of Mughal authority in the Deccan around 1687 brought an influx of northern immigrants, especially to the new imperial city named for him, Aurangābād.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, ironically, Valī's poems, in their journey north brought back to Delhi poetry in a language that ultimately originated from the North.

There is a big debate about whether Valī was originally from Gujarat or from the Deccan. What is significant is that Valī was closely connected with the new political and cultural centre in Aurangābād during the seventeenth century as well as with Gujarat. The diffusion of Valī's poetry all over the Mughal Empire was part of the traffic of people and goods back and forth from the Deccan to the North and back again through multiple centres in between. Thus the question of locating a point of origin for Reḳhtah is perhaps a somewhat quixotic quest. Yet, it is important that in the mind of the early tażkirah writers Valī became the catalyst in the coalescing of Reḳhtah from the diverse spoken and literary versions that had flourished in regional courts or Sufi ḳhānqāhs. While Valī himself was associated (according to some, as we shall see) with the imperial Deccani capital, Aurangābād, by the time his dīvān becomes a success in Delhi, that city was once again the seat of the Mughal empire, but now quickly losing political clout and resources.

The popularity of Valī must have been immense, as is witnessed by the great number of manuscripts of his poetry.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite the political fragmentation of the period, this manuscript record indicates a brisk and vital interaction among emerging centres of Reḳhtah production. Around this time in the Deccan, the powerful noble, Ni m al-Mulk, had become firmly entrenched, establishing his own state there soon after his victory in the Battle of Shakar Kheṛā in 1724.Footnote ¹⁸ Other regional states were also quickly established. Delhi's literary scene continued to exercise a position of prestige, where activity in the emerging vernacular literary culture of Reḳhtah became particularly energetic in the mid-eighteenth century. However, the subsequent sacks of the capital and the political decline of the Mughal nobility diminished the material support that could be offered to the emerging Reḳhtah poets. By the mid-eighteenth century, within a few years of authoring the tażkirahs, Mīr, Qāʼim Chāndpūrī, and Gardezī, each had left the city and departed for other courts. Thus, indirectly the fluctuation in material resources of courts and patrons also fuelled the dispersal and transmission of Reḳhtah.

A lot of our common-place understanding about Valī's role in all this goes back to Āb-e Ḥayāt, the now canonical tażkirah of Muḥammad Ḥusain Āzād, which was among the first to find wide print circulation in 1880. This work gives Valī a central role as “Adam of the race of Urdu poetry” who “brought all the meters of Persian into Urdu”, and was the first to “match Persian stride for stride”. When his dīvān arrived, “eagerness took it with the hand of respect and Judgement regarded it with the eyes of attention: Pleasure read it aloud”.Footnote ¹⁹ Āzād was dependent on the narratives crafted by the first tażkirahs. Yet, he questioned the earlier tażkirahs’ crediting Valī's prominence in Reḳhtah composition to guidance by Shāh Gulshan, a highly respectecd Sufi from Burhānpur. Instead Āzād emphasised Valī's poetic genius as self-taught.Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless the story of the meeting between Valī and Shāh Gulshan, and its transformative effect on Valī's poetry continued to be given wide credence, chiefly due to the literary prominence of the poet Mīr who first reported it.

Mīr's version of the encounter between Valī and Shāh Gulshan in Delhi has been foregrounded by later commentators. However other eighteenth-century tażkirahs appear not to be as influenced by this argument, although they show an awareness of the claims Mīr makes in his text, they actually take pains to downplay it. It is only in the nineteenth century, as Mīr's fame as one of the masters of literary Urdu grew, that the Nikāt-al Shu`arā became foundational. It is useful to review in chronological order how the story of Valī's impact was told in the earliest tażkirahs.

Mīr Taqī Mīr's Nikāt al-Shu`arā “Subtleties about Poets” (ca. 1752)

We start with the influential tażkirah that is most quoted in studies of Urdu and also considered the first and canonic tażkirah of Urdu poets, namely the Urdu poet Mīr Taqī Mīr's (1722?-1810) Nikāt al-Shu`arā “Subtleties about Poets”.Footnote ²¹ This tażkirah is undated, but has been placed by experts on the basis of internal evidence ca. 1752 ce (1165–66 ah).Footnote ²² Mīr Taqī Mīr is now well known as one of the finest poets of his generation. At the time he wrote this work Mīr had already emerged as a young and active member of Delhi's Reḳhtah scene, having been in Delhi for thirteen years.Footnote ²³ He belonged to the circle of Mīr Dard, and he mentions taking over the majlis for Reḳhtah poets organised by Mīr Dard and his father.Footnote ²⁴ He based his information for the older generation of North Indian Reḳhtah poets on Ārzū's tażkirah of Persian poets, Majma‘ al-Nafā’is (“An Assembly of Delicacies”), which was finished in 1750–51 (ah 1164).Footnote ²⁵ Many Persian poets also had Reḳhtah dīvāns. For his information on Dakhanī poets he used the notes of ‘Abd-al Valī ‘Uzlat, a Dakhanī poet from Gujarat who visited Delhi shortly before Mīr wrote his work. Here is what he has to say about Valī:

Mīr's report has been interpreted as his grudging admission, notwithstanding his Delhi bias, of the Southerner Valī's importance for the development of Urdu.Footnote ²⁷ Rather than focus on the influence of Valī in Delhi, Mīr chooses to focus of “Delhi’s” influence on Valī, foregrounding the Delhi location of the Sufi Shāh Gulshan. The story about the meeting with Shāh Gulshan perhaps indicates some mediation was felt appropriate before the poetry of a Dakhanī poet could be brought to an audience that was steeped in Persian traditions.

Where does this story come from? It may well have been an oral tradition from Mīr Dard's family, since the historical Shāh Gulshan was a close associate of Mīr Dard's father, the poet ‘Andalīb, and frequently stayed at his house in Delhi. However, if Mīr's primary purpose was to foreground a Delhi influence on Valī, Shāh Gulshan was a poor choice, since he was familiar to most Delhi poets and tażkirah writers as a Dakhanī from Burhānpūr.Footnote ²⁸ Surely the better choice would have been Shāh Gulshan's host, ‘Andalīb, who had fostered other poets of Persian and Reḳhtah. Mīr quotes ‘Andalīb as having fortold his own rise to fame earlier in his tażkirah.Footnote ²⁹ This incident speaks more to Mīr's disinterest in excavating literary history, Footnote ³⁰ and his reliance on oral history and memory, rather than the investigative techniques other contemporary tażkirah writers such as Ᾱzād Bilgrāmī followed, who often would write directly to poets to verify details or cross-check with reliable witnesses who had personal knowledge of incidents.Footnote ³¹ Also, while Mīr selects verses of Valī that speak to his own aesthetic judgements, he does not comment on the quality of this verse or offer corrections. In fact, Mīr is content to move on to discussing ‘Uzlat, the only Deccani poet whom he knew personally, and whose poetry he admired.Footnote ³²

There may be more going on, though. The position that one should model Reḳhtah verse on Persian, is one that is usually credited to Mīr's uncle, the famous lexicographer and tażkirah writer, Sirāj al-dīn ‘Alī Ḳhān Ᾱrzū (1689/90–1757).Footnote ³³ The wording of Gulshan's advice to Valī is reminiscent of what the famous Urdu poet Saudā recalls to have received as advice from Ᾱrzū (without mentioning him by name, just calling him “the expert in Persian”): “No matter what the language, excellence lies in what is said (ḳhūbī-ye maẓmūn, literally: “the excellence of themes”)”.Footnote ³⁴ As is well-known, Mīr stayed in Ᾱrzū's house for a while when he first came to Delhi, as the latter was his “uncle” (brother of his father's first wife). Thus, Ᾱrzū was his mentor, and he effusively praises him in his entry on Ᾱrzū in Nikāt al-Shu‘arā, and calls him ustād of all Reḳhtah poets.Footnote ³⁵ However, that entry was written while Ᾱrzū was still alive. In his later Żikr-e Mīr, Mīr reports a painful falling out with his erstwhile mentor, and does not show much gratefulness.Footnote ³⁶ The Nikāt is, in fact, Mīr's first attempt to stake out a professional reputation apart from his famous mentor’s: it was composed while Ᾱrzū was composing a tażkirah of Persian poets, seemingly as a way of saying the Reḳhtah world is as important as the Persian one. He also has some negative comments about Ᾱrzū's friends and disciples.Footnote ³⁷ These literary judgments occur in the first third of Mīr's tażkirah, where much of the literary criticism of other poets’ work, which Mīr offers, is to be found. One wonders whether in this entry on Valī, Mīr is already manoeuvring Ᾱrzū out of the prominent position as unrivalled ustād of Reḳhtah-poets by first noting his own literary judgements on the renowned Reḳhtah poets of the day and then foregrounding the influence of Gulshan and his Delhi circle on Valī?

But why Gulshan? Shāh Saʻad Allāh Gulshan was known primarily as a Naqshbandī Sufi from Burhānpūr, who had also lived briefly in Ahmedābād and Delhi. Extant tażkirahs mention his composition in Persian, not Reḳhtah.Footnote ³⁸ The Burhānpūr and Ahmedābād background of Gulshan gives him a plausible geographical position in the Deccan from where to connect with Valī. Mīr Dard's father, ‘Andalīb, was one of Gulshan's known associates and pupils, thus in an attenuated way, Valī was approximated into the lineage of ‘Andalīb's and Mīr Dard's ustād.Footnote ³⁹ Mīr also tells a humorous anecdote about him at the end of his Żikr-e Mīr, but this incident is fairly respectful, emphasising the sober demeanour of this respected mystic.Footnote ⁴⁰ Linking Shāh Gulshan with Valī may have set in motion a tendency to interpret Valī as a Sufi poet in some later tażkirahs. Still, it is to be remembered that Mīr distances himself somewhat from what he reports, casting doubt on the authenticity of the incident of the meeting of the two, by prefacing it with “they say”.

What about the Persianising influence of the Shāh on Dakhanī? As noted by other scholars, Valī's poetry already included maẓmūn or themes found in Persian poetry.Footnote ⁴¹ Schimmel notes “the main source of his inspiration was Persian poetry” and “Walī consciously used the rich Persian tradition”. Footnote ⁴² There is indeed a poem where he refers to several famous Persian poets, which seems ready-made to assert such claims.Footnote ⁴³ However, Schimmel also grants “The author looked at the realities of everyday life, an attitude rarely found in classical Persian poetry. . . with the names of Indian legendary heroes, or deities, like Rama, Lakshmi, or Arjuna”.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, the use of Persian themes, meters, and literary conventions was not new. Valī's Golkonḍa contemporary, Fā’iz, who worked under the last Qutb Shāhī ruler wrote a masnavī in 1683 that is replete with many Arabic and Persian compounds.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was shortly before Aurangzeb's conquest of Golkonda in 1687. So Valī was hardly a pioneer in the move towards using Persian themes, vocabulary, or meters for Reḳhtah poetry. More likely he was viewed as an exemplar and populariser of this trend.

What then was perceived to be such a watershed in Valī's poetry? Certainly, the fact that his Reḳhtah corpus was not only a few scattered verses, but compiled into a formal dīvān appears to have been significant not only to Mīr, but also to other tażkirah writers. Further, even a superficial perusal of Valī's dīvān indicates that the ġhazal, not the longer narrative forms such as the masnavī or qasīdah, was his preferred poetic form. This is unlike that of many of his Dakhanī contemporaries and predecessors.Footnote ⁴⁶ The demands of this shorter, condensed, poetic form were grounded in the conventions of classical Arabic and Persian meters and imagery, thus to excel with the ġhazal, Valī already had to be deeply immersed in its literary and linguistic conventions.

Mīr's relative silence on Valī's literary merits should be read within the larger frameworks that Mīr establishes in his tażkirah: the qualities of good poetry generally and the deficits of Dakhanī specifically. What has been little commented on is that in some editions (based on one manuscript), there is a little foreword to Mīr's entry on Valī:

What unites all those mentioned as notable Dakhanī poets, with the exception of Valī, is that all were, as Mīr himself notes, ‘Uzlat's companions and disciples. Since ‘Uzlat had lent his bayāẓ to Mīr for his tażkirah, and would also request a copy of Mīr's tażkirah himself in 1758 (1172 ah), Mīr's acknowledgement of these exceptions to his generally poor regard of Dakhanī poets could be seen as diplomacy towards ‘Uzlat. Footnote ⁴⁸ Notably, despite the negative view of Dakhanī poets which Mīr expresses in the introduction of the book and the passage quoted above, the few Dakhanī poets he does provide biographical notes for are only evaluated if Mīr had met them himself (‘Uzlat very positively, and ‘Ᾱjiz to a more mixed judgement), or he admits to not knowing much about them and offers selections of their verses with little critical commentary (Valī, Ᾱzād). The more stinging critiques, such as the ones he offered of his own peers in Delhi, are noticeably missing from the individual notices of Dakhanī poets despite his sweeping dismissal of them as a group. Mīr seems less interested in evaluating poets of an earlier era, whether from the South or North, but offers evaluations only of those he had met and interacted with himself. Seen from this perspective, the short summation of Valī exemplifies this presentist trend in Mīr's work. It is similar to the even shorter extracts he gives for Bedil and Ḳhusrau—the ancestral giants of Delhi's Reḳhtah community — respectful but brief.Footnote ⁴⁹

Valī is acknowledged as “formidable (zabardast),” his poetry is “marbū ”, but Mīr does not explain why or how he came to this conclusion. The oral account of the meeting with Shāh Gulshan is reported, but not interpreted or questioned. The entry on Valī does not evoke in any way the long passage on what constitutes literary merit in Reḳhtah that occurs at the end of Mīr's work.Footnote ⁵⁰ When we compare this absence of literary or historical evaluation on Valī's work with that of contemporary Dakhani poets, this pattern becomes clearer—‘Uzlat is praised fulsomely, while ‘Ᾱjiz is noted for having used a very regional idiom which led to defects in rhyme (qāfiyehā-ye nāmarbū ).Footnote ⁵¹ Mīr clearly has judgements about literary aesthetics, but they are usually applied to poets of his own time. He seems disinterested in literary history, even the comparatively recent one of Reḳhtah. His own aesthetic tastes may have been informed by historical shifts or regional influences, but Mīr shows little interest in acknowledging or evaluating them. Significantly, Mīr's words examined in the full context of the tażkirah hint that the quality of being “marbū ” essentially also stands in for a literary quality in which meter, rhetorical devices, and metaphors are so tightly integrated into a polished composition that the literary merits of the verse are universally evident to all connoisseurs, even those outside of the poet's immediate cultural or regional milieu — it is in a word, cosmopolitan. Just as there are poets in Delhi that do not match up to this standard in Mīr's opinion, there are also those in the Deccan that do. Mīr's prejudices might apply to groups wholesale, but his assessments of individuals appear to be a little more nuanced.

Ḳhvājah Ḳhān “Ḥamīd ” Aurangābādī's Gulshan-e Guftār “Garden of Speech” (1752)

Ḳhvājah Ḳhān ibn Turktāz Ḳhān Ḥamīd Aurangābādi's work, contemporary with that of Mīr (ah 1165), has not received much scholarly attention. Little is known about the author other than what he offers in the work. He was originally from Aurangābād, but resident in Burhānpūr, another important trading hub in the Deccan, where he compiled this tażkirah in 1752 ce.Footnote ⁵² He was a pupil of ‘Ᾱrif ‘Ali Ḳhān “‘Ᾱjiz” of Burhānpūr, who as Mīr notes, had visited Delhi a dozen years prior to Mīr's authoring of his own tażkirah. Mīr had not met ‘Ᾱjiz himself, and reports him as alive and resident at Burhānpūr on the authority of ‘Uzlat.Footnote ⁵³ Ḥamīd Aurangābādī's tażkirah can be dated through a chronogram to the same year as Mīr, although he does not appear to be aware of Mīr's work, just as Mīr was not aware of his.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ḥamīd had collected his ustād, ‘Ᾱjiz’s, Persian and Reḳhtah dīvān and it is likely that his knowledge of Delhi poets was derived from his teacher’s. The Northern poets he mentions are all of a generation older than Mīr, the youngest of these being Saudā, who was slightly older than Mīr. While the work is almost equally divided among Northern and Southern poets, it is the first Dakhanī tażkirah to mention Valī. It also mentions several lesser-known poets from Burhānpūr, Gujarat, and Aurangābād, each of which was on important trade routes. Another unique feature of this tażkirah is that Ḥamīd quotes full ġhazals, not just excerpts. Nothwithstanding his being from Aurangābād, he does not confirm Valī's links with that city. Here is what he says:

Gulshan-e Guftār is the first source to call Valī “Ahmedābādī” and give us the information that he is buried in Gujarat. He is also said to have spent quite a bit of time in Burhānpūr, also the homeland of Shāh Gulshan. Surprising for a resident of Burhānpūr, Ḥamīd does not mention Valī's connection with Shāh Gulshan, although several other poets from Burhānpūr are mentioned in the tażkirah. Ḥamīd Aurangābādī is also the first source to mention Valī's close friend, Miyān Sayyid Maʻālī, who is referenced in Valī's dīvān.Footnote ⁵⁶

While the notice on Valī is brief, it invites us to rethink how Mīr's words about Valī have been interpreted. For one, the specification that Valī's friend Ma‘ālī was offspring of a Gujarati saintly lineage, shows an ancestory similar to that of Valī and Shāh Gulshan. Thus it becomes clear that Valī, his lover Ma‘ālī, and Shāh Gulshan, all had close connections with Sufi lineages from Gujarat. All three had resided for at least a period in Burhānpūr. Some later sources, as we shall see, mention Valī making a trip to Delhi in Ma‘ālī's company. Here, perhaps is a clue to the apocryphal story about Valī and Shāh Gulshan meeting in Delhi, it seems that the sober figure of Shāh Gulshan in some memories was substituted for Ma‘āli in stories about Valī's visit to Delhi. If the historical Valī had indeed known Shāh Gulshan, the more likely setting for such a meeting would be in Burhānpūr, not Delhi. The fact that Burhānpūr, on the banks of the Taptī was a common resting spot for travel between Aurangābād and Delhi may play a role in this conflation. Ḥamīd appears knowledgeable about other factors related to Valī's life, including some of Valī's students in his work.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ḥamīd Aurangābādī's entry draws attention to the mobility of the Reḳhtah and Dakhanī poets of the time, something that was true for early pioneers such as Valī, but also for the generation of Ḥamīd and his ustād, ‘Ᾱjiz. Interestingly, Ḥamīd's understanding of what constitutes “Reḳhtah” is also capacious. He uses “Hindī” and “Reḳhtah” interchangeably.Footnote ⁵⁸ Many of the poets he mentions compose in both Persian and Reḳhtah. He also offers a description of a central Asian poet who mastered composition in both “Reḳhtah” and “Hindī” verse.Footnote ⁵⁹ In other words, he makes it quite clear that at least in sub-imperial towns such as Burhānpūr, the practitioners and audience of Reḳhtah were multi-lingual in their literary practices and consumption. Ḥamīd confirms the popularity of Valī's dīvān and he also suggests that the audience and admirers of such works were present all over the subcontinent. Situated in a town in the middle of trade routes that connected Delhi in the north, to Aurangābād and Ḥyderābād in the South, and Ahmedābād and Sūrat in the West, Ḥamīd reveals a network of poets and patrons for whom the worlds of Persian, Reḳhtah, and Dakhanī, had already been tightly connected for three generations. His emphasis, like Mīr’s, is on poets of his own contemporary period, but he claims a noticeably wider geographical domain for this emerging literary medium.

Fateḥ ‘Alī Ḥusainī Gardezī's Tażkirah-e Reḳhtah Gūyān “Biographical Anthology of Reḳhtah Poets” (1752)

Gardezī had long been at work on his own tażkirah of Reḳhtah poets: since 1739 (ah 1152), more than a decade before Mīr.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, he must have completed it some months after Mīr in 1752 (ah 1166), since he put in phrases praising poets Mīr had criticised.Footnote ⁶¹ That Gardezī felt that Mīr's work needed a corrective response is clear from his introduction where he explicitly notes the bias of earlier works.Footnote ⁶² Gardezī was widely respected; he was slightly older than Mir and a descendent of a Sayyid family. Comparing his description of Valī to that of Mīr is instructive, as this is the first tażkirah to respond directly to Mir's work:

What is stressed in this account is Valī's originality (“from the beginning”), range, and poetic prowess. No mention is made of Shāh Gulshan, indeed, Gardezī conveys an image of an autodidact, one that would be deeply influential for later tażkirah writers of the colonial period, such as Ᾱzād in his Ᾱb-e Hayāt.

Qāʼim Chāndpūrī's Maḳhzan-e Nikāt “Treasurehouse of Subtleties” (1754–55)

The earliest dated tażkirah, Maḳhzan-e Nikāt “Storehouse of Subtleties”, Footnote ⁶⁴ is often overlooked in scholarship about Valī.Footnote ⁶⁵ Qāʼim Chāndpūrī's (1724/25–1794) work was completed in 1754–55 (ah 1168).Footnote ⁶⁶ The author was a daroġha of royal armory in Delhi. Unlike Mīr, he never found secure employment after he left Delhi around 1756–57 (1170 ah). His search for a patron would take him to the regional courts that emerged as Mughal power waned: Barelī, Rāmpūr, Basaulī, Thānḍā, and Lucknow.Footnote ⁶⁷

Qāʼim himself had a dīvān of Urdu poems to his name. He reportedly studied with Mīr Dard, but later he became Saudā's pupil.Footnote ⁶⁸ For the Dakhanī poets, he used the notebook (bayāẓ) of Mīrzā Abū lib, who himself was from a small village called Balanḍa near Aurangābād and who had campaigned in the Deccan with Saudā's uncle and had come to stay with Saudā's family in Delhi in 1710. He left a notebook about Dakhanī poets that Saudā gave to Chāndpūrī.Footnote ⁶⁹ Qāʼim's tażkirah is clearly written in response to Mīr, who has only muted praise for Qāʼim in his entry on the young Chāndpūrī.Footnote ⁷⁰ Qāʼim responded to Mīr's characterisations and omissions.

Qāʼim Chāndpūrī's work stands out as the first substantial literary assessment of Valī's legacy. Interestingly, the author introduces Valī under the heading “Valī and Bedil”. This is what he has to say:

This version ingeniously combines elements of Mīr's story with that of Ḥamīd and adds some new information. From Ḥamīd, the author takes the information that Valī had Gujarati connections, here specified as being a descendent of Shāh Vajīh al-Dīn. Indeed some editions of Valī's Dīvān include praise poems in honour of this pīr.Footnote ⁷³ Modern scholarship has revealed several documents confirming this lineage, including a genealogical table tracing Valī's descent from a brother of Shāh Vajīh al-Dīn Alvī of Ahmedābād.Footnote ⁷⁴

Like Mīr, Qāʼim reports the transformative meeting with Shaiḳh Gulshan either in or en route to Shāhjahānābād, which is here precisely dated as 1700. Chāndpūrī was a disciple of Ḳhvājah Mīr Dard, who in turn was influenced by Gulshan, as we have seen.Footnote ⁷⁵ It should not surprise us then that like Mīr he reports the meeting of Shāh Gulshan and Valī. Again, following Ḥamīd, he mentions Valī's close friend Sayyid Abu’l-Maʻālī, with whom he was infatuated, but here he is said to have accompanied him on the Delhi trip. In this account, Shāh Gulshan does, one could say, the opposite of what Mīr said: steering him away from Persian towards the vernacular. Here Shāh Gulshan gives Valī the ma lā’ of a poem, providing Valī with an opportunity to impress all with his innate mastery of the Reḳhtah form. In other words the Sufi lets the poet shine, rather than mentor him in the way Mīr had suggested.

The poem in question is also attested in Valī's dīvān.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Qāʼim's framing of this poem a spiritual reading is suggested, but without this narrative and interpretive scaffolding, it may just as easily be read as amorous verse. Notably, however, in the actual poem addressed to Maʻāli by Valī (see note 56 above), the claim that worldly love inspired the poet to more spiritual heights is prominently expressed. This suggests that Qāʼim had made a close study of Valī's dīvān.

Qā’im ascribes Valī's popularity to his balanced style of eloquence (faṣāḥat) and rhetorics (balāġhat). This, in fact, is a crucially different reading from Mīr, since what Qā’im is suggesting is very much in line with the qualities of elegant composition in Persian and Reḳhtah championed by Ᾱrzū.Footnote ⁷⁷ The comparison with Mirzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bedil (1644–1720) likewise upgrades Valī's legacy in the Reḳhtah canon to the highest level. Bedil was famously a master of both these arts (faṣāḥat and balāġhat).

Bedil extended the semantic range of Persian by coining new terms in a way that frustrated native speakers of Persian such as Hazīn, but was very influential for both Urdu and Persian poets in India.Footnote ⁷⁸ One of the raging debates in Qāʼim's own time was the merit of adopting Indic words and concepts into Persian poetry and the rules by which Indic words could be integrated into a Persianate literary culture in both orthography (critical for its effect on meter and rhyme) and semantic range. This made it possible to read a word in multiple linguistic registers, as Bedil's verse does here.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mīr's scorn for the older group of poets, later described as īhām-gūī poets, those “employing word play” in multiple languages has been much discussed by critics, but this was a debate also noted in contemporary lexicons and literary essays.Footnote ⁸⁰ Qāʼim here offers not only a new reading of Valī, much different from Mīr, but interestingly does so with a verse that ties his work with that of Bedil, perhaps the most admired Persian poet of his own contemporary period. Amusingly, the first verse of Bedil's poem mirrors the opening words of a poem by Valī quoted by Mīr and also included in Qāʼim's tażkirah.Footnote ⁸¹

At first the pairing of Valī Dakhanī with Bedil in Chāndpūrī's text seems wildly inappropriate, particularly since it follows the anecdote of Valī's meeting with Shāh Gulshan which appears to downplay Valī's innovations and accomplishments in Urdu. By the time Chāndpūrī was writing his tażkirah, Bedil had already acquired the reputation of being both a skilled scholar of Persian literature as well as a widely venerated Sufi figure.Footnote ⁸² By contrast, Valī's reputation had not and would not reach that level of universal acclaim–so this pairing seems unlikely. However, this incident, which in Mīr's tażkirah had attempted to underplay Valī's influence, reads quite differently here.

Qāʻim's account reframes the meeting of Valī with Shāh Gulshan in two important ways that completely upset the implication of Mīr's patronising description of the same event. First, Qāʼim claims that Valī's accomplishments as a poet of literary merit and philosophical subtlety was as great as any recognised master, most notably Bedil. Second, he suggests that Valī's poetry, rather than being a part of an alien regional literary tradition, was fully engaged with the core of Persian and Reḳhtah literary debates in mid-eighteenth century Delhi.

The first seemingly innocent innovation in Chāndpūrī's narrative is his statement that Valī came to Delhi in the 44^th regnal year of Aurangzeb in the company of Sayyid Abu’l-Maʻāli, “with whom he was enchanted.” Along the way Valī recites poetry in Persian (emphasis ours) on the downy cheek and mole (ḳha -o ḳhāl). The cognoscenti among Chāndpūrī's readers would already have been aware of numerous playful readings of the ḳha -o ḳhāl by classical Persian masters such as the poet Jāmī both as calligraphy and the scriptural rendering of miracles.Footnote ⁸³ This association is strengthened by Chāndpūrī's second addition to the narrative—Shāh Gulshan commands Valī to recite poetry in Reḳhtah (zabān-e Reḳhtah) and offers an opening ma laʻ or verse to which Valī responds with a seemingly conventional love poem.

Now the pale face of the beloved, is not merely the beautiful setting of the ḳha -o ḳhāl of the young boy, but indeed brings to mind the miracles associated with Moses, at the Pharaoh's court (Sura 20 and 27 of the Qurān). These verses reference Moses’ competition with the sorcerer Sāmirī, whom he bests by withdrawing his hand from his chest and revealing it to be dazzling white. The pairing of the miracles of Moses with the calligraphic allusions to the cheek and mole of the beloved is no accident — it affirmed the skills of the poet with words even as it praised the miraculous power of the prophet Moses, as Annemarie Schimmel's work reminds us.Footnote ⁸⁴ Qāʼim also now employs the well-worked trope that the very mastery over poetic themes that can praise the bodily beauty of an earthly lover, may just as felicitously evoke prophetic miracles and the divine love of Sufis, a theme that is as we noted above, also found in Valī's poetry.

Qāʼim thus attempts to bring an entirely different interpretive meaning to Valī's encounter with Shāh Gulshan. That these complex sets of allusions and linkages are the same contexts through which Persian poetry conveyed a multiplicity of meanings, but which would also be successfully incorporated into the world of Reḳhtah, should not surprise us. In sum, this short entry clearly displays Qāʼim Chāndpūrī's wide-ranging knowledge of both Persian and Reḳhtah masters and his grasp on the literary debates of his own time. His attempts to historicise and place Valī within a particularly illustrious literary trajectory not so subtly elevate both Valī's claim to a place in the Reḳhtah canon, and Qāʼim Chāndpūrī's own place within it as well.

Chāndpūrī's meditations on Valī's place in the emerging Reḳhtah canon also replicates the larger organisation of his tażkirah, which divides poets into three chronological eras of the ancient (from the Sultanate period to that of Aurangzeb's reign), middle (roughly analogous to the reign of Muḥammad Shāh), and later period (poets of his own generation). Significantly, Valī and Bedil occupy the 26^th and 27^th entry in the section on the ancient poets, preceeding them are a number of poets from the north, Gujarat, and Deccan.

Certainly, Qāʼim is unique among the early tażkirah writers in including among the early creators of Reḳhtah verse non-elite poets such as Muḥammad Afẓal, the author of Bikaṭ Kahānī whom Ᾱrzū had criticised for employing a rustic register. In this entry Qāʼim appears to stress the merits of judging verse by the standards of their own time rather than by a seemingly universal but ultimately anachronistic standard.Footnote ⁸⁵ Qāʼim Chāndpūrī's tażkirah, read closely is the first substantial and scholarly analysis of the roots of Reḳhtah, based less on the accurate pursuit of historical detail, but more on the careful analysis of the poetry of the past masters of the art. Through this historicised approach Qā‘im argues that the courtly Reḳhtah that became popular within his own lifetime owed as much to the earlier experiments of Sultanate-era masters such as Amīr Ḳhusrau, as to the numerous regional, even non-elite practitioners such as Afẓal. In other words, Reḳhtah had multiple points of origin, socially and geographically. Valī, however, is credited in this work as the originator of a form of Reḳhtah that was much-emulated, as Qāʼim claims above, “often the masters of that age followed his path of balanced rhyme in the composition of Reḳhtah poetry”. If Valī's Reḳhtah is a step closer to the style that became popular in Qāʼim's own time, Qā’im argues that one further historical re-working of Reḳhtah occurs during the reign of Muḥammad Shāh, when Ᾱrzū and Ᾱbrū, the elders who would mentor poets such as Mīr and Qāʼim in Delhi, further encouraged their circle to adopt the speech patterns of the Mughal elite in Delhi.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus, in this account, Valī is the mediating figure between the poets of Reḳhtah's first age and those that followed; he anticipates the further sophistication of the poetic form by Delhi's master poets.

Shafīq Aurangābādī's Chamanistān-e Shuʻarā “Garden of Poets” (1761)

It is not till 1761 that we get a defensive response from the Deccan in the form of the Chamanistān-e Shuʻarā by Shafīq Lacchmī Narāyan Aurangābādī.Footnote ⁸⁷ The real name of the author was Rāi Lacchmī Narāyaṇ, but his taḳhallus was ‘Shafīq’ in his Persian and ‘Ṣāḥib ’ in his Reḳhtah poetry. He was a Khatri, whose family had come from Lāhore to Aurangābād in Aurangzeb's army. In the service of Ni m al-Dīn al-Mulk Ᾱṣaf Jāh, he later authored chronicles of the latter's rule.Footnote ⁸⁸ In poetry, he was a student of Shaiḳh ‘Abd al-Qādir Ṣaḥib ‘Meḥarbān’ and Mīr Ġhulām ‘Alī ‘Ᾱzād’ Bilgrāmī.Footnote ⁸⁹ He acknowledges Mīr and Gardezī in his introduction, he had also met ‘Uzlat and accessed his documents,Footnote ⁹⁰ but as we shall see Shafīq's account is very different from his sources:

This is a remarkable passage. As in the account of Ḥamīd and Gardezī, in Shafīq's work, the episode with Gulshan is absent, notwithstanding the fact that the author had access to Mīr's account, and thus should have known about this iconic incident. Valī's originality and poetic range is emphasised, and his place as the crafter of the first Reḳhtah dīvān is once again made clear. It is perhaps not surprising that the poet of Aurangābād can proudly assert his countryman's reputation without recourse to the Gulshan-Delhi stamp of approval. Also unsurprising is that he feels the need to defend Valī's Aurangābādī origin. Yet he grants that Valī felt a special attachment to Gujarat. This is in fact the first source to quote the popular extended poem “Upon separation from Gujarat” and the one in praise of Sūrat. Yet his connection with Sūrat is somewhat downplayed as merely his stop on the way to Mecca and Medina. Valī's family connections with the dargāh of Shāh Vajīh are confirmed. So while the author's agenda may have been to deny the Gujarat connection, he inadvertently gives us early evidence for it. Here again we get a different version of a regional competitiveness to claim a connection with Valī, but it is not a rivalry between Delhi and Aurangābād, but Aurangābād and Sūrat.

More interesting perhaps is that Shafīq gives evidence for Valī's importance as an original poetic voice even in the Deccan. He is careful to set up this entry on Valī by remarking that he was not the first to compose in Reḳhtah, but that he is the first to do it so eloquently and complete a dīvān. He quotes Valī's own verse to that effect. The anecdote about the drunken poet reviling Valī and proclaiming the superiority of his own dīvān seems to confirm there was envy among some in the Deccani community about Valī's success, as this is specifically said to have taken place among a group of Dakhanī poets. The story seems humourous, but may also have a serious message, as it involves a miracle and subsequent conversion of the reviler of Valī's verse. The author emphasises the authenticity of the anecdote, asserting that in his notebook, the teller of the story had certified the truth of the events. Again this bespeaks a need to assert Valī's popular poetry's quality even in the Deccan, not just in the North.