Introduction
In May 2018, the present writer came across a previously unstudied volume of verse in Persian (705 ff., 29 × 20.5 cm), composed by a poet with the pen name ʿEshq (“Passion”), in the collections of the John Rylands Library, Manchester (Persian MS. 219).Footnote 1 Although the volume lacks a title and a colophon, an inscription in English on f.1a, annotated as being in the hand of Sir William Jones (d. 1794), the Orientalist and puisne judge of the supreme court of Bengal, names the book as the divān of a certain Mirzā Zeyn al-Din Khān, and states that the poet himself presented it to the Governor-General—then John Macpherson (d. 1821)—on 21 May 1785.Footnote 2
The manuscript is highly unusual. It is written in the poet’s own hand, providing us with an unrivaled insight into how he composed and edited his verse. Furthermore, the divān is full of rubrications which state when and where many of the poems were first composed or drafted, which name the people who commissioned them or who collaborated with Zeyn al-Din in their composition, and which mark intertextual connections with the work of other poets.
Generally, such contextual comments are not included in manuscript copies of poets’ collected works, even in autographs and holographs.Footnote 3 These annotations therefore provide a far greater level of detail than one could normally hope to find about the poet’s methods of composition and the social contexts in which he performed, as well as the intended audiences for his verse. As much of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s output consists of allusive ghazal poetry, in which erotic, panegyric and mystical themes are amalgamated, the contextual rubrics also provide some assistance in clarifying how his verses were intended to be interpreted in the primary contexts of their reception. For these reasons, Persian MS. 219 should be considered a rare and valuable source for reconstructing the working practices of an eighteenth-century poet. More broadly, the manuscript provides a detailed illustration of how poetic activity in Persian in eighteenth-century north India was rooted in the phenomena of migration between cities, towns and villages, and circulation between moshāʿerāt (public and semi-private competitive poetic symposia) and majāles (public or private gatherings).
What follows is a conjoined study of ʿEshq’s life, his verse and the contexts in which he composed. In addition to studying Persian MS. 219, I have utilized a series of other narrative and documentary sources, including tazāker of eighteenth-century Persian and Rekhta poets, and papers written by Sir William Jones. I have found it necessary to use these materials, not simply in order to identify Mir Zeyn al-Din as a historical figure, but also to reconstruct the web of social interactions in which his literary activities took place. He had a varied career, during the course of which he went from writing highly intertextual ghazal poetry to authoring a verse epic for the British. Consequently, he disappears from sight in the tazkereh literature, which is concerned with the lyric verse of moshāʿereh culture, only to reappear in the correspondence and notes of colonialist patrons. These sources are not particularly concerned with understanding his development as a poet, but that is precisely the interest of his ego-document, the divān. It is only by reading across the different kinds of source that we can hope to understand how much of his verse functions. Indeed, the proliferation of competing centers of poetic activity and forms of patronage in eighteenth-century India make it essential that we investigate differing kinds of source if we are to reconstruct the careers of many poets in full.
1. Towards a Biography of Mir Zeyn al-Din
Glimpses of a life: Mir Zeyn al-Din in the Tazkereh literature.
In his handwritten catalogue of the Earl of Crawford’s Persian collections,Footnote 4 Michael Kerney tentatively identified the author of Persian MS. 219 as Sheykh Gholām Mohyi al-Din Qoreyshi Miruthi, a poet and literary biographer who went by the pen-names ʿEshq and Mobtalā (“Sorely Tried”), and who was attached to the court of the Mughal emperor Shāh ʿĀlam II (d. 1806) in Delhi during the latter part of his life.Footnote 5 This identification cannot be correct, primarily because Miruthi’s laqab was Mohyi al-Din, rather than Zeyn al-Din.Footnote 6 In fact, Miruthi was only one of at least eight poets active in Persian and Rekhta in India during the eighteenth century who adopted the takhallos ʿEshq or ʿEshqi.Footnote 7
A positive identification of Mir Zeyn al-Din can be made if we examine a series of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century tazāker of Persian and Rekhta poets.Footnote 8 There was only one poet active during the second half of the eighteenth century who was called Mir (or Mirzā) Zeyn al-Din and who also bore the takhallos ʿEshq. The shortest entry on him, which is simultaneously one of the richest in terms of factual data, is to be found in Gholām Hamdāni Moshafi’s (d. ca. 1243/1827) ʿEqd-e sorayyāʾ (The Necklace of the Pleiades), which was completed in 1199/1784‒85. Moshafi calls the poet Mirzā Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq and states that he was born in Jām (modern Torbat-e Jām, Khorāsān, Iran), but emigrated to India at the age of eight.Footnote 9 He received his education under Shāh Mohammad Panāh,Footnote 10 who can be identified as an influential Sufi and poet who lived in Delhi.Footnote 11 By the time that ʿEqd-e sorayyāʾ was drafted, ʿEshq was an “elderly and experienced man.”Footnote 12
Tazkereh-ye Masarrat-afzā (The Biographical Anthology Which Promotes Delight), a Persian anthology of Rekhta poets written in 1193/1779, has an entry on the poet under the name Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq.Footnote 13 It states that he had lived in Delhi, and that he was a poet of amorous disposition who possessed the temperament of a dervish, a characterization which concords with the representation of him in ʿEqd-e sorayyāʾ. From Delhi he had moved to Bengal, spending time in ʿAzimābād (Patna) and Morshedābād. He composed in both Persian and Rekhta. Amr Allāh Allāhābādi, the author of Tazkereh-ye Masarrat-afzā, states that Mir Zeyn al-Din’s present whereabouts were unknown to him at the time that he was compiling his anthology.
The information that we glean from Tazkereh-ye Masarrat-afzā can be supplemented by Tazkereh-ye Shuresh (The Biographical Anthology by Shuresh), another tazkereh of Rekhta poets, which was written in 1195/1780. Here the poet is named as Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq.Footnote 14 It is stated that he was a poet of Persian who had written a divān, and that he also composed in Rekhta.Footnote 15 He had been resident in Delhi, but poverty and want had forced him to migrate to ʿAzimābād (Patna), where he moved into the house of the poet Mirzā Ghasitā.Footnote 16 Mirzā Ghasitā, who also went by the pen-name ʿEshq, was a Sufi and poet from Delhi, whose title was Shāh Rokn al-Din ʿĀref (or ʿErf);Footnote 17 Persian MS. 219 demonstrates that Mir Zeyn al-Din composed poems in Patna “at [Mirzā Ghasitā’s] suggestion” (be-hasb al-imāʾ).Footnote 18 Given this information, it seems possible that the two men’s common takhallos (pen name) should be regarded as a maker of intellectual and emotional affiliation, rather than as a confusing coincidence.
In short, the tazāker develop the following composite portrait of the poet: Mir Zeyn al-Din was an Iranian émigré who arrived in India as a child. He was educated in Sufi circles in North India and was for some time resident in Delhi. He was forced to leave the capital because he was unable to earn a living there, and so he began to migrate eastward, spending time in Bengal from the late 1770s. In the course of his travels he stayed with acquaintances who were Sufis and poets, and who had also left Delhi.
From Moshāʿerāt to an army camp: the travels of Mir Zeyn al-Din.
The tazāker present fragmentary, though complementary, portraits of Mir Zeyn al-Din as he was known to the compilers in the latter part of his life, and they testify to his involvement in the overlapping Persian and Rekhta literary networks of the 1770s and 1780s. In order to fill in the details of the poet’s youth and middle age, we can turn to the contextual rubrics in Persian MS. 219. Some of the earliest poems in the divān, dating from 1141/1728 and 1146/1736, were composed in Shāhjahānābād (i.e. Delhi), supporting the biographers’ comments that Mir Zeyn al-Din had been resident in Delhi early in his life.Footnote 19 During his time there, he often participated in poetic gatherings (moshāʿerāt) hosted by different luminaries.Footnote 20 Simultaneously sociable and competitive events, these symposia seem to have been one of the principal fora in which the poet honed his work. For example, we learn that one poem was “formed” (tabʿ shodeh) in the moshāʿereh of Hāfez Halīm in Shāhjahānābād,Footnote 21 while another was composed in the symposium run by Mir Zeyn al-Din’s paternal uncle (ʿammu), Mohammad Qobād Khān Ahmad.Footnote 22
Mir Zeyn al-Din’s biographers make no mention of his extensive travels north of Delhi, to Haryana and the Punjab. While the intermittent use of dates in the divān makes it difficult to develop a precise chronology for these journeys, it appears that the poet traveled back and forth between Delhi and the north between the mid-1740s and the late 1760s. In 1158/1745, he was in Sirhind.Footnote 23 It is possible that his stay in the nearby town of Sarwali should also be dated to this year.Footnote 24 He was back in Delhi by 1159/1746.Footnote 25 Subsequently, he began to participate in the Indian campaign of the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shāh Dorrāni (d. 1184/1773).Footnote 26 He returned to Sirhind, and composed poems for Ahmad Shāh there, perhaps in 1161/1748, when the Dorrāni army sacked the city.Footnote 27 He also wrote lyric ghazals and a devotional poem in praise of the theologian and Sufi Mohyi al-Din Jilāni (d. 561/1166) while encamped with Ahmad Shāh in Jalandhar,Footnote 28 and Jalālābād,Footnote 29 in the Punjab.Footnote 30 The use of the word “commission” or “order” (farmāyesh) implies that Mir Zeyn al-Din was patronized by Ahmad Shāh as a professional poet. At an unknown date, Mir Zeyn al-Din was also patronized by Ahmad Shāh’s chief vizier, the highly influential Shāh Wali Khān.Footnote 31
Having returned to Delhi by 1167/1753,Footnote 32 the poet subsequently moved north again, this time to Karnal in Haryana in 1171/1757‒58,Footnote 33 then to Samana in the Punjab in 1172/1758‒59.Footnote 34 He reappears among the army of Ahmad Shāh in 1175/1761‒62, when ʿAli Verdi Khān Shāmlu, known as Heyrat (“Astonishment”), gave him an opening verse (tarh)Footnote 35 to work up into a poem.Footnote 36 The next dated poems in the divān were composed in the region around Delhi. They were written in the fort at Jhansi (Jānsi Hesār) in 1176/1762‒63;Footnote 37 in Delhi itself in 1179/1765‒66;Footnote 38 and in Anwali in 1181/1767‒68.Footnote 39
Mir Zeyn al-Din may have left Delhi for good as early as 1185/1771, when he travelled to Bareilly,Footnote 40 and the fortified village (qasbeh) at Kaithal.Footnote 41 It seems that he subsequently spent an extended period of time in and around Lucknow.Footnote 42 One dated ghazal which was composed in Lucknow was written in 1189/1775‒76.Footnote 43 As in Delhi, Mir Zeyn al-Din appears to have used moshāʿerāt as his way into the local poetic scene in Awadh. In Lucknow, he attended a symposium run by Mirzā Mohammad Fākher Makin,Footnote 44 a well-known master of poetry who had established a “school” of Muslim and Hindu poets of Persian around him.Footnote 45
Corroborating the biographies given in the tazāker, the divān demonstrates that a third phase of travel in Mir Zeyn al-Din’s life took the poet eastward in the direction of Bengal. It is clear that he spent some time in Patna from at least as early as 1192/1778, and that he participated in moshāʿerāt there. Footnote 46 Many of his poems were composed in Morshedābād, the seat of the Nuwwāb of Bengal, or were conceived as responses to other poets of that town. For example, he composed one poem at the request of Mir ʿAli Naqi Razavi, reader of the imam of Morshedābād;Footnote 47 and he wrote a ghazal in Morshedābād at the combined request of the Nawwāb Asad Allāh and the Mirzā Dāvud, who entrusted him with the commission in order to test his talent.Footnote 48 Yet another poem, conceived as a response to a ghazal by Naʿim,Footnote 49 was extemporized in the majles of Rāja Dowlat Rāy in Morshedābād.Footnote 50 Mir Zeyn al-Din was also commissioned to write a monāzareh (competitive response poem) to the collected poets of the town.Footnote 51
The Kolkata years: Mir Zeyn al-Din and the British.
At a point which can be dated to around late 1782, the poet wound up in Kolkata.Footnote 52 In order to discover what happened to him subsequently, we must turn to the papers of Sir William Jones, the author of the inscription on f. 1a of Persian MS. 219. Jones mentions Mir Zeyn al-Din repeatedly in his notes and correspondence, first discussing him in Beinecke Library MS. Osborn c400, an unpublished notebook in which he began to compile memoranda on the scholars and poets of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit whom he started to meet after his arrival in Bengal in 1783. Mir Zeyn al-Din is named at the very beginning of the manuscript as “a poet who has written 100,000 couplets,”Footnote 53 and is subsequently discussed, under the heading “Learned Men of Calcutta,” in the following terms: “Poetry. Pleasant old man. Distinct, good pronunciation.”Footnote 54 These brief comments reinforce the impression given by the tazāker that the poet was advanced in years by the early 1780s, which would perhaps place his birth somewhere between 1705 and 1715. It is not entirely clear how Mir Zeyn al-Din was introduced to Jones, but the two men had at least three acquaintances in common.Footnote 55
Three letters written by Jones provide more detailed information about the poet’s time in Bengal. The first two, which were composed in May 1785, demonstrate that Jones arranged for Mir Zeyn al-Din to have an audience in Kolkata with John Macpherson, who had taken over as acting Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William that February, in the wake of Warren Hastings’ resignation.Footnote 56 In advance of the meeting, Jones sent two autographed volumes of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s poetry to Macpherson, writing:
It was my intention to present to you, in the Author’s name, the books [sic]Footnote 57 which I now send. The poet Zainu’ddein was recommended to me soon after I came to India, as a worthy ingenious old man. I enclose his verses to you, with a hasty translation, on the back of the paper, of the best couplets. The smaller volume contains part of the Epick poem, which is written with enthusiasm; and the other volume is filled with pleasing Odes and Elegies, all in the old man’s handwriting.Footnote 58
By cross-checking the evidence provided in this letter with the inscription on Persian MS. 219, f. 1a, we can conclude that John Rylands Library Persian MS. 219 is the “other volume … filled with pleasing Odes and Elegies, all in the old man’s handwriting,” which Jones presented to John Macpherson on behalf of Mir Zeyn al-Din on 22 May 1785.Footnote 59
Joshua Ehrlich’s recent discovery of the original of the abovementioned letter in the British Library also uncovered the Persian text of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s verse petition to Macpherson, of which only Jones’ English paraphrase had been published previously.Footnote 60 In this poem, Mir Zeyn al-Din is concerned with securing continued patronage for his work on a Persian verse epic on British military activity in India, the “smaller volume” containing “part of the Epick poem” that is mentioned in Jones’ letter. Mir Zeyn al-Din asks Macpherson to pay him through the divān (here meaning the revenue tribunal or council meeting), and to continue the patronage which had been extended to him by Warren Hastings, Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William between 1773 and ca. 1785, who had commissioned the epic.
As the Persian text of this petition is not examined in Ehrlich’s article, and as it contains some additional lines, left untranslated by Jones in his letter, which cast light on the poet’s biography, I offer the first transcription, edition and full translation of this masnavi here:Footnote 61
A copy of the preface to the Angriznāmeh Footnote 62in the felicitous speech of Mir Zeyn al-Din Khān ʿEshq.
Macpherson—he of heavenly power who attains his desires * And who, like the sun, magnifies motes of dust.
You are the judge of the present age * It is in your name that NushirvānFootnote 63 has been revived.
With the aid of JesusFootnote 64—upon whom be peace * Rule has been resurrected in your person.
Now, treat my case with justice * For I have suffered terribly in India.
My dear, I came to this land from the country * Of IranFootnote 65 many years ago.
Prosperous one, my craft is in verse * I have compiled a book about the British.
On the orders of the honorable HastingsFootnote 66 * I wrote about the victory at Varanasi.Footnote 67
With careful preparation I made my speech truthful * I began by praising the Company.Footnote 68
In the course of the poem I represented * The battles of the British with the brush of most eloquent depiction.
In its grandeur, I made [the work] an equal to the Shāhnāmeh * For the story of the British has become as lofty as a mountain.
Behold the image of the battles of the British * For this tale will be expressed marvelously.
On the command of Hastings, the lord of generosity, * Major Dinbes Footnote 69 said this to me:
“If you tell this story * I will use the revenue tribunal to make you prosperous;”
“With grace and magnanimity, I will entrust to * You the deeds of the powerful British.”
Yet before the story could be finished * That renowned man returned to England.
This tale was completed in your age * For the British have gained renown from your arrival.
O prosperous lord, I have inked * The preface to this book in your name.
Now I hope that you will endow * Me with news of the British,
So that I might versify that prose * And paint the cheek of every page in gold.
By your command I will brighten this book * Thanks to your kindness, I will prosper in the revenue tribunal.
If I should tell this story in the manner of the Shāhnāmeh * In the good name of the king of the British,
This book will travel as far as Iran and Turan * Like the sun, I will illuminate the state of things.
I will excite a great clamor about the battles of the British * I will write a book which travels widely in this age.
Should I write about the battles of the British * No-one will mention Parviz.Footnote 70
Should I begin to compose this tale * Afrāsiāb will tremble beneath the earth.Footnote 71
Rostam’s horse Rakhsh will be hobbled * By the gallop of my musky brush.
Read my compositions and show me preferment * For my brush has become a royal falcon in its flight.
Following the custom of the noble Mahmud * Unite me, like Ferdowsi, with dignity.Footnote 72
From now on, ennoble [me] in the revenue tribunal * For every hair [of my brush] sings like a nightingale.
Many fine tales have been told * By the poets of yesteryear.
Anecdotes surviveFootnote 73 * About every people in the age of created beings.
All the better, then, that laudatory tales * Should be told about the majestic British in your age.
It is most fitting, * Serene lord, that I end my speech with a prayer.
As long as the world spins on its axis * May your rule flow like the sea.
May the heads of the mighty lie in your snare * May the seal-ring of government be engraved in your name.
Lines 4‒6, 9‒15, 20, and 23 of this masnavi do not feature in Jones’ English paraphrase, which amplifies the panegyric quality of the poem and plays down Mir Zeyn al-Din’s complaint regarding the unfulfilled promises made to him by Hastings. In addition to corroborating the claim made by Gholām Hamdāni Moshafi that Mir Zeyn al-Din was an Iranian émigré, the previously untranslated lines also provide new information about the poet’s interactions with the British during the 1780s. The first major British patron with whom the poet seems to have come into contact is Hastings, who is well known as a scholar of Arabic and Persian and as a collector of manuscripts.Footnote 74 He also had precedent as a patron of poetry in Persian.Footnote 75 Through a major in the service of the East India Company, Hastings commissioned Mir Zeyn al-Din to rhapsodize on his defeat of Raja Chait Singh and the incorporation of Varanasi into British territory, an event which had taken place in 1781. The episode was widely seen at the time as an example of Hastings’ “ruthless high-handedness,”Footnote 76 and it is generally understood to have been one of the catalysts of his political downfall.Footnote 77 Perhaps Hastings believed that a literary representation of his actions in Persian, based on the model of the Shāhnāmeh, would provide him with another, oblique means of intellectual engagement with North Indian and Bengali political elites.Footnote 78 This is certainly the implication made by Mir Zeyn al-Din in his masnavi, where it is insinuated that Hastings’ representative took a close interest in coordinating the themes and subjects which were to appear in the poem, thereby ensuring that Mir Zeyn al-Din promulgated an “authorized” representation of the Governor-General.
One final letter by Jones, written to Colonel Allan Macpherson on 6 January 1786, suggests that, following Mir Zeyn al-Din’s meeting with the acting Governor-General in May 1785, the poet did receive a sum of money for his divān, but it was insufficient to support him for very long, and he continued to be beset by money worries.Footnote 79 Jones writes that the poet “has been so poor that he has been forced to sell his darling books,”Footnote 80 and says:Footnote 81
[Mir Zeyn al-Din’s] son in law, who is in the service of the Vizier’s Minister, has now invited him to settle at Lucknow. It would be very honorable to him if the Governor would favor him with a recommendatory letter to the Nabob Vizier.Footnote 82
From 1786 onwards, no references to Mir Zeyn al-Din appear in the notes and correspondence of William Jones, suggesting that the poet may indeed have left Kolkata. As the evidence which I have encountered in the tazkereh literature dates from no later than 1199/1784‒85, we are left to speculate about the end of the poet’s life. It is possible that he moved to Lucknow and subsequently died there; he is not mentioned in Naghmeh-ye ʿAndalib (The Song of the Nightingale), a tazkereh which includes a section on past poets of the court of Awadh, and which was compiled in 1261/1845.
2. Mir Zeyn al-Din’s Poetry
Collaborative authorship and patronage: how Mir Zeyn al-Din composed.
One of the most significant aspects of the divān of Mir Zeyn al-Din is that it provides us with a window onto poetic production in a way that only narrative sources normally can. It underscores the extent to which one poet active in eighteenth-century India migrated in his search for employment, and it shows how he circulated between different working environments. In addition to moving between patrons, he also appears to have used urban poetic symposia as a way of finding clients willing to subsidize his work, and the divān contains numerous examples of figures that each commissioned only one poem as a test of the poet’s mettle.Footnote 83 There are obvious macro-historical reasons which may have encouraged Mir Zeyn al-Din to travel, such as the instability in Delhi caused by the Afghan invasions, and the increasing control of the British, both of which phenomena affected him directly, and it is possible that he was simply unlucky in failing to secure a permanent source of patronage. However, it seems equally likely that he was operating within a system where poetic activity was characterized by movement, both between places and between different social environments.
The contextual comments in the divān suggest that one factor which may have encouraged Mir Zeyn al-Din to circulate was the collective manner in which he composed. As indicated above, a number of his ghazals are based on a tarh, an opening verse or pattern line issued to poets taking part in competitive moshāʿerāt.Footnote 84 While participants would compose and then perform their own poems on the basis of the tarh, the environment fostered by moshāʿerāt encouraged them to critique one another’s work and to offer suggestions for its improvement. When poets subsequently came to fix recensions of their performed texts in writing, it was perhaps inevitable that they would draw on what they had heard from the other participants. For example, in 1145/1732‒33, Mir Zeyn al-Din composed a poem in response to a tarh which the participants in a moshāʿereh had developed through studying the early modern Indo-Persian poets Salim (1057/1647 or 1648), Kalim (d. 1061/1651), Sāʾeb (d. ca. 1080/1669 or 1670) and Qodsi (d. 1056/1646‒47).Footnote 85 The response poem is also designed to engage with the styles of these four poets, and hence it is grounded in the proceedings of the moshāʿereh.
Another poem arose out of a commission that had been set for Mir Zeyn al-Din as a practice piece (dar estedʿāʾ-ye rotbeh-ye mashāqi) by Mohammad Anvar, a pupil of the poet Rashid Khalifeh.Footnote 86 Mir Zeyn al-Din turns his response poem into a narrative of the commission, writing that Mohammad Anvar had said: “Do not abstain from answering me / And do not disappoint me in my desire / I wish to see the full merit / Of the bounty of your refreshing eloquence.”Footnote 87 This suggests that Mir Zeyn al-Din used moshāʿerāt as a forum for honing his talent, and as a way of making connections with more established poets. Within this system, exposure to as many different critical opinions as possible—and hence migration—would have been vital to ensuring that the quality of the poet’s verse improved.
There are also indications that Mir Zeyn al-Din composed in direct collaboration with other poets, and even in partnership with some of his patrons. Sometimes, poems appear to have been half formed through conversations; one was composed when he was in the company (dar sohbat) of Nawwāb Mahabbat Khān Bahādor in Bareilly.Footnote 88 This is the same Nawwāb Mahabbat Khān who also commissioned Mir Zeyn al-Din to write verse, and who can therefore be considered a patron.Footnote 89 Another poem was written with Miyān Sāneʿ Belgrāmi in Farrokhābād, implying that it was a truly collaborative composition.Footnote 90 There is also one noteworthy example of a commission from a patron on which Mir Zeyn al-Din worked as part of a group. ʿAli Ebrāhim Khān, most probably none other than the chief magistrate of Varanasi, biographer and historian of Persian and Rekhta poetry (d. 1208/1793 or 1794), entrusted the poet to compose a response poem to NaziriFootnote 91 (d. 1023/1614 or 1615).Footnote 92 Mir Zeyn al-Din formed the poem (tabʿ nemudeh) along with the poets of Morshedābād.Footnote 93
Other cases give an equally nuanced picture of how patronage worked. We are told that the poet and politician Qezelbāsh Khān Ommid (d. 1159/1746)Footnote 94 requested that Mir Zeyn al-Din compose poems,Footnote 95 but it seems probable that these commissions had a pedagogical aspect, particularly because there is one poem in the divān in which Mir Zeyn al-Din set out to emulate (tatabboʿ kardan) Qezelbāsh Khān Ommid’s poetic style.Footnote 96 In other words, the critical opinion of Ommid and his patronage of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s work were intended to improve the quality of the Mir Zeyn al-Din’s verse. A different vocabulary is used to describe those compositions which were prompted by the suggestions of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s friends and his earliest teachers. Ārzu KhānFootnote 97—by whom the poet may well mean the influential lexicographer and literary historian Serāj al-Din ʿAli Khān Ārzu (d. 1179/1756)—the poet Mirzā Jān-e Jānān (d. 1195/1781),Footnote 98 Mirzā Ghasitā,Footnote 99 and Mir Zeyn al-Din’s teacher, Shāh Mohammad Panāh,Footnote 100 all appear to have given Mir Zeyn al-Din “suggestions” (imāʾ) on the basis of which he constructed poems, but they do not seem to have commissioned work from him.
In short, the divān highlights the importance of collaborative fora such as moshāʿerāt to Mir Zeyn al-Din’s working practices. Cases in which his friends and teachers suggested themes for him to develop into full poems should be distinguished from the more formal types of interaction which were practiced in public symposia and majāles, where Mir Zeyn al-Din was actively commissioned to compose. Within these contexts, discussions with other poets and critically minded patrons were crucial to ensuring that the poet developed forms and themes which were in dialogue with contemporary trends in poetic fashion, and which corresponded with the particular tastes of his interlocutors. This evidence suggests that patronage could often have collective aspects, in which patrons came together with more than one poet. It also reinforces the understanding that the investment of patrons in poets often possessed both a pecuniary and an aesthetic aspect. By the same token, when Mir Zeyn al-Din responded to a commission, he was not hoping to gain the approval of a patron alone; he also needed the validation of the poets with whom he composed.
A survey of the divān.
The divān of Mir Zeyn al-Din is arranged partly alphabetically, and partly by form and genre. It begins with devotional poetry in praise of God, the Prophet and then the four rightly guided caliphs, of whom ʿAli ebn Abi Tāleb features most prominently.Footnote 101 The poet’s self-identification as a twelver Shiʿite receives its most explicit expression in poems such as a tarjiʿ-band in mourning for Hasan and Hoseyn,Footnote 102 as well as in a masnavi which is a mock debate (monāqasheh) between Sunnis and Shiʿites.Footnote 103 The religious poems are followed by a section of versified letters (makāteb-e manzum) which are concerned with calligraphy, writing implements and the letters of the alphabet.Footnote 104
Mir Zeyn al-Din was particularly adept at condensing panegyric and devotional themes within lyric forms, and consequently the majority of his divān consists of ghazals.Footnote 105 As we shall see, the poet used the ghazal form when composing for his most illustrious patrons, allowing him to combine praise with eroticism and mysticism. As the section of ghazals progresses, the reader is faced with an increasing number of poems which reflect Mir Zeyn al-Din’s marked interest in technically unusual types of verse; there is even one poem which is partly in words and partly in numbers.Footnote 106 A brief section of pentastichic poems (mokhammasāt) is followed by an introduction to metrical issues arising in the composition of robāʿiyyāt, with which the divān closes.Footnote 107
The value that participants in moshāʿerāt attributed to poetic interplay, both among themselves and with their predecessors in the corpus, may have spurred Mir Zeyn al-Din to make the intertextual connections in his work as evident as possible, and he introduces many poems in the divān by naming the poets he is attempting to emulate (tatabboʿ kardan), or to whose style he is attempting to respond (javāb kardan). His response poems demonstrate his familiarity with the work of canonical medieval and early modern poets, including Zahir Fāryābi (d. 598/1201 or 1202), Rumi (d. 672/1273), Saʿdi (d. 691/1292), Amir Khosrow (d. 725/1325), Hāfez (d. 792/1390), Jāmi (d. 898/1492), Bābā Feghāni (d. 925/1519), ʿOrfi (d. 999/1591), Kalim (d. 1061/1651), and Sāʾeb (d. ca. 1080/1669 or 1670).Footnote 108 The divān opens with a combined response to the styles of Hāfez and Ahmad-e Jām (d. 536/1141), the latter perhaps chosen because Mir Zeyn al-Din’s place of birth, Torbat-e Jām, takes its name from his tomb, which lies on the outskirts of the town.
Mir Zeyn al-Din’s poetic style is perhaps best exemplified by a ghazal which he composed for Ahmad Shāh Dorrāni. A commission, written in Sirhind, which fuses panegyric themes together with lyric and mystical ones, this is a piece designed for performance. It is simultaneously intimate in its tone and expansive in its sweep, developing a representation of Ahmad Shāh which could be propagated widely. Lines such as ll. 1, 2 and 7 would have been brought alive in recitation, taking on a more acute meaning from the visual interaction of the poet with his patron (meter: mozāreʿ-e mosamman-e akhrab-e makfuf).Footnote 109
Your nature seems to me alchemical * Whoever sits beside you is immediately turned to gold.
See yourself reflected in my eyes, my proud beloved, * My penitent heart is more polished than a mirror.
My heart only beats on account of your Christ-like speech * Your ruby lips are fine, your words—pleasant.
Sovereign of the cocked-cap band since time immemorial! * Your beauty holds sway in the kingdom of the soul.
Fairer than Anatolia, Syria, Rey, Russia and Isfahan, * The land of Kabul gains luster from your generosity.
Given the lofty nature of your beauty * There is continual shelter for me in your noble presence.
My love is ensnared by your locks and cheek * Prayers for your well-being are on my lips morning and night.
Any essence possessed of a soul cannot be made unfamiliar * My heart knows your subtle essence.
I fish the pearls of your virtue from the waves one by one * My nature is an endless, supreme ocean.Footnote 110
ʿEshq, why do you grieve over time’s cruelty * When you possess the good fortune of ʿAli Mortezā?
The representation of the king as part ruler, part beloved and part gnostic “pearl”—a punning reference to his sobriquet, “the pearl of pearls” (dorr-e dorrān) which is developed here through repetition of the cognate words gowhar and jowhar—largely conforms with the picture of Ahmad Shāh’s political theology as sketched in recent scholarship.Footnote 111 Playing with the king’s purported interest in the philosopher’s stone,Footnote 112 Mir Zeyn al-Din answers the questioning first line of Hāfez’s celebrated ghazal, “Might those whose glance turns dust into gold glimpse at us?”Footnote 113 with the assertion that Ahmad Shāh is a master of the occult. Part of the joke is the insinuation that the king will undoubtedly reward the poet for his work with payment in gold. The subsequent lines construct a representation of Ahmad Shāh through a combined appeal to the auditor’s intellect and sense of sight. Physical beauty is equated with spiritual authority and the right to rule (ll. 4 and 7), and it is the king’s aura which brings luster to Kabul, rendering the city peerless (l. 5). The poet casts himself as the interpreter, or the mirror (l. 2) who can make the king’s unseen qualities familiar (l. 8) to an audience, yet, despite this intimacy, he is dependent on the ruler’s magnanimity and protection (l. 6). The final assertion that Mir Zeyn al-Din possesses the good fortune of ʿAli ebn Abi Tāleb unites the concept that the ruler is blessed with the idea that he in turn will bless the poet.Footnote 114
A different poem shows the extent to which Mir Zeyn al-Din’s verse constructed dialogues with the corpus of contemporary poetry.Footnote 115 The following ghazal was composed early on in the poet’s career, in 1155/1742 or 1743, in imitation (tatabboʿ) of Qezelbāsh Khān Ommid (d. 1159/1746), who, like Mir Zeyn al-Din, had emigrated from Iran to India.Footnote 116 The date of composition makes it likely that the poem was written in Delhi, since both Ommid and Mir Zeyn al-Din were in the city around this time, and both were participating in moshāʿereh culture (meter: ramal-e mosamman-e maqsur).Footnote 117
My beloved caught my eye, took fright, and was lost * The meadow deer flew from me and the game was lost.
The phantom of his musky locks lassoed my throat * And the opportunity of pining the dark nights away was lost.
My friends, I am not to blame if I have lost my senses * Whoever saw his face was utterly lost.
He showed his locks and cheek, and morning and evening were hidden from me * Like the vanished years, night and day were lost.
Before the mirror-like sun could shine, spinning in astonishment at him, * The keeper of the mirror was lost in the blaze of his beauty.
My aid would render an experienced man useless * When his glance set to work in my chest, all was lost.
My companion, do not ask how my heart felt on meeting him * That madman went, yet he was lost trembling.
My unsated appetite found few opportunities in this world * Before I could raise the goblet to my lips, spring was lost.
The poem which Mir Zeyn al-Din’s ghazal answers can be traced in Ommid’s divān. Footnote 118 It too is a ghazal, and it too has the radif-ār az dast raft. The response poem expands the original from six lines to eight and develops its imagery and rhetoric. Both are nostalgic pieces about lost love, but Mir Zeyn al-Din turns Ommid’s condensed series of connected images into a coherent narrative about unfulfilled desire. A portrait of the speakers’ lovesickness (ll. 3, 6, 7) is balanced with a description of the beloved (ll. 1, 2, 4, 5) which is absent in the original. The engagement with Ommid’s text is partly semantic and partly syntactic. The jenās-e tāmm on the word kār which is to be found in l. 3 of the original is expanded and complicated with the introduction of compounds in l. 6 of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s poem. In other cases, the engagement is confined to poetic image (maʿni): only the basic concept of the beloved stealing the speaker’s heart, seen in l. 5 of Ommid’s poem, is preserved in l. 7 of the response.
Those lines of Mir Zeyn al-Din’s poem which expand on, and digress from, Ommid’s original appear to be intended to demonstrate his mastery of rhetorical technique. For example, l. 4 is constructed around an antithesis (tebāq) between darkness (signified by the words zolf, “lock of hair”; shām, “dusk”; and leyl, “night”) and light (signified by the words rokh, “cheek”; sobh, “morning”; and nahār, “day”). Line 5 is dominated by the technique of jenās, partly through the repetition of the word āyineh, and also through the sound -owr- in dowrān and howr.
These sorts of expansions reinforce the understanding that response poetry is not simply about demonstrating knowledge of the corpus; it is also about innovation and the desire to define oneself in contrast to the model.Footnote 119 Mir Zeyn al-Din’s answer consciously aims to outdo Ommid’s poem in rhetorical complexity, and to create a more intimate psychological portrayal of a narrative persona. It is noteworthy that Mir Zeyn al-Din still terms his poem an “imitation” (tatabboʿ). Perhaps this is partly because he conserves the formal features of the model,Footnote 120 and partly because he recognizes that Ommid is—in the social hierarchy at least—the more senior poet. However, his response is not really a homage to Ommid, but a competitive attempt to outflank him. This possibly antagonistic approach may have been encouraged by the nature of moshāʿereh culture. When Mir Zeyn al-Din is not developing forms and themes used by other poets, he often describes his ghazaliyyāt as ijādi (“innovative” or “contrived”) and momtaneʿ al-javāb (“impossible to answer”), the implication being that, while he demonstrated his mastery of the corpus through mimicking and developing the styles of others, his own work was inimitable.Footnote 121
The picture poems
Two inventive poems in the divān deserve close scholarly attention, because they are unusual and they raise questions about how the book was supposed to be used. Both are picture poems, known in Persian as movashshahāt (“adorned” or “garbed” poems).Footnote 122 The first is a long and complex piece in the shape of the double-bladed sword, Zu l-faqār, which the Prophet purportedly presented to ʿAli ebn Abi Tāleb before the Battle of Uhud (Figure 1); the second is a ghazal copied within the form of a flower (Figure 2). Although picture poems are mentioned as a type of verse by medieval and early modern writers concerned with literary theory and rhetoric in Persian,Footnote 123 they do not appear to have attracted attention from modern historians of Persian literature. However, there is a body of research on Arabic and Sanskrit picture poems, to which we can refer for some comparison.Footnote 124
Zu l-faqār. John Rylands Library, Persian MS. 219, ff. 65b‒67b. Courtesy of the University of Manchester.
Flower. John Rylands Library, Persian MS. 219, f. 449a. Courtesy of the University of Manchester.
Picture poems in Arabic and Persian generally consist of lines of verse which are woven in interlocking structures. These structures can be geometrical, vegetal or representative of birds and animals. They are puzzles which must be decoded in order to produce meaningful literary works, and their artifice lies in the fact that several complete poems, each one sound in rhyme and meter, can normally be derived from a single structure.Footnote 125 They are often accompanied by verse or prose instructions for their decipherment. The basic definition of the movashshah proposed by Shams-e Qeys (d. after 627/1230) is that it is a poetic form consisting of sections based “on several different meters, which together form a single qasideh, but whose sections each form other qasidehs when they are read separately.”Footnote 126 The Arabic equivalent of the movashshah is on some occasions called the mudabbaja (“brocaded” piece).Footnote 127 It is worth remarking on the similar concepts, connected to clothes and fabric, which connect these words, and we may speculate that the idea of interweaving small pieces within a larger text—just as decorative patterns or striped bands of color are woven into clothing—is behind this nomenclature.Footnote 128
One additional, noteworthy aspect of Arabic and Persian picture poems as a type of verse is that quite a few of them appear to have been copied onto scrolls or particularly large sheets of paper.Footnote 129 There seem to be two reasons behind this. The first is practical, and is connected to the fact that picture poems may have appealed to small groups of viewers, because they can generally be decoded in several different ways and therefore exert the attraction of a game. If a group is to engage with a picture poem, the poem has to be copied onto a surface that is large enough for the viewers to see it. The second reason is that some picture poems are quite clearly intended to mimic or to double as talismans and amulets, which were block printed onto scrolls from the early medieval period onwards.Footnote 130
Mir Zeyn al-Din’s picture poems broadly conform to the contours of the Arabic and Persian types as described above. However, it is worth emphasizing the point that they are also formally in dialogue with some picture poems in Sanskrit, as the sword (khaḍga) and the eight-petaled lotus (padma) are among two of the most common types of Sanskrit carmina figurata.Footnote 131 The picture poems in the divān are another testament to the dominant role that circulation between different social and cultural spheres played in Mir Zeyn al-Din’s life.
The poem the shape of Zu-l faqār consists of parallel sets of verses inscribed on the dual blades of the sword, one in the meter sariʿ-e mosaddas, the other in the meter motaqāreb-e mosamman. The parallel poems split off from the eleven lines of verse inscribed on the sword’s hilt, which can be read in both meters, and which consist of the epithets of God (asmā-ye hosnā). The artifice of the piece lies in the fact that the parallel poems are part of the same “macro”-structure. Having described God, the poem given on the right-hand blade moves on the praise of the Prophet, and ʿAli ebn Abi Tālib, who “gave me this Zu l-faqār in a dream / So that the hearts of the enemy might be split in two.”Footnote 132 Only one line of verse is provided on the left-hand blade; the reader must complete it by following the author’s instructions, feeding the epithets of God into a blank table of 144 cells, which can be divided into magic squares in order to produce sixteen lines of verse.Footnote 133
The poem extends across several folios, with the hilt occupying f. 65b, the blades ff. 66a‒67a, and the tips f. 67b. Although it is possible to view and to decode the poem by turning the pages of the book, the segments make more visual sense if they are joined to create a single scroll, and indeed, in his opening remarks, the poet refers to the piece as a manshur (diploma), a kind of document which often took the form of a scroll.Footnote 134 The sword can be stitched together as shown in Figure 1.
The poem mimics the appearance of some early modern and modern talismanic scrolls and amulets (known variously in the singular as tahviteh, herz and hejāb) containing the motif of Zu l-faqār.Footnote 135 It can, for example, be compared with a metal printing block constructed for the production of amulets and dated 1322/1904‒5, which is now in the collections of the Tareq Rajab Museum in Kuwait.Footnote 136 The design of this block consists of Zu l-faqār surrounded by a written description of the amulet’s protective function and the methods for its employment. Interlocking geometrical shapes, which are connected to one another by linkages, and which contain text, feature on the sword itself. Some of the writing on the sword consists of Qurʾānic āyāt which are arranged so as to sound like a prayer,Footnote 137 but the names of the Prophet and the People of the House also appear, as do a number of the epithets of God.
The similarities between the poem and the talismanic scroll in Kuwait extend to aspects of function. In the introductory comments to his poem, Mir Zeyn al-Din describes his vision of ʿAli ebn Abi Tāleb:
[ʿAli] said: “Take this Zu l-faqār from my palm / And unfurl the standardFootnote 138 in majāles.”
When I touched the hilt / A sea of milk boiled out of my chest.
These words contain the miracle of Heydar / Whoever understands them will become a perfect man.Footnote 139
In magicking lines of verse out of the table and completing the poem, the reader renders the talisman effective, and gains the protection of ʿAli ebn Abi Tāleb.
The second picture poem in Persian MS. 219 is altogether simpler. It is a ghazal in the form of a flower, where the lines of each beyt are copied onto a petal, and a separate line sits on the sepals.Footnote 140 The rhyme word nadidam (“I did not see”) sits on the stigma. The poet explains in his introductory comments that in every beyt, the inversion of the phrases of the first mesrāʿ creates the second mesrāʿ. In fact, this is not quite what happens, as it is each syntactic unit, rather than each word, which is inverted. The poem does qualify as a movashshah, since there is play with meter, and the final line is not part of the main ghazal. However, the reader is not required to magic new verses to complete the poem, and the inversions do not produce new meanings. Indeed, it would be redundant to translate the second mesrāʿ in ll. 2‒8:
In the name of God, the merciful and the compassionate * Passion guides a sound nature.
I have not seen a heart free from sorrow in this world.
I have not seen but a little cruelty from the beautiful.
Nor have I seen people behave nobly.
I have not seen anyone exhibit pride without grief.
I have not seen fear in anyone entranced by a sweetheart.
I have not seen tears in the eyes of ignorant men.
Nor have I seen my equal in the preferment of passion
My tortured heart has a wish * To which, in hope, my desire is consigned.
It is worth noting that there is a close correlation between the visual form of this poem and its intellectual content. It is a lyric poem, and hence the flower is an appropriate shape, just as the sword is a fitting form for a talismanic poem. Similarly close pairings between form and genre are to be found in earlier picture poems.Footnote 141
Conclusion
This paper has had two purposes. The first has been to resuscitate Mir Zeyn al-Din, whose poetry appears to have remained unexamined since Persian MS. 219 was consigned to John Macpherson’s bookshelves. Mir Zeyn al-Din ought to be better known, both because he was a competent and prolific poet, and because he traveled so widely. His career testifies to the catholic contexts in which poetry in Persian was consumed in eighteenth-century India, from the army camp of Ahmad Shāh Dorrāni to the homes of British bureaucrats in Kolkata. The poet adapted himself and his work to each of these markets, and, when it was required, he played to the ideological prerogatives of his patrons. He also made the intertextual connections of his verse as obvious as possible when producing work for moshāʿerāt, in order to fulfil the expectations of his peers.
The second purpose of this paper has been to demonstrate the extent to which paratextual material in manuscripts, such as rubrics, can help us in reconstructing the histories of literary circulation. Evidence culled from manuscripts can be used in conjunction with information derived from narrative and documentary sources: without the contextual comments in Persian MS. 219, we would have no clue that Mir Zeyn al-Din had ever performed for Ahmad Shāh Dorrāni. More than this, however, the rubrics also show how Mir Zeyn al-Din’s poetry was connected to the place, time, and context of its composition. Not only do they mark a series of choices concerning form, theme and rhetoric, which the poet made in order to complement the different environments in which he was writing, but they also show that he did not compose alone. He collaborated constantly with his colleagues and his patrons in creating texts. It is the background of inherent sociability against which Mir Zeyn al-Din wrote which most probably inspired him to make his rubrications in the first place. He recognized that each poem was the product of a particular set of circumstances and interactions.
