Person · Mughal commander & poet · India
Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan
Also known as Rahim, Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khana, Khan-i-Khanan, Rahim ke dohe
Son of Bairam Khan, Akbar's regent, and himself the empire's commander-in-chief, governor of Gujarat and of the Deccan. He translated Babur's Chagatai memoirs into Persian as the Baburnama, and wrote couplets in Braj and Awadhi that are still learned by heart across north India.
- Date
- 1556–1627
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 28.590, 77.250
Worth knowing
His dohas are Vaishnava in idiom and are quoted as freely as Kabir's or Tulsidas's, which makes the Mughal commander-in-chief a canonical Hindi poet. His tomb at Nizamuddin, built for his wife in 1598, was stripped of its marble and sandstone in the 1750s to face Safdarjung's tomb, and was restored only after 2014.
About the place
Placed at his tomb in Nizamuddin, Delhi, which he built for his wife in 1598 and was himself buried in; he served across Gujarat, the Deccan and the north.
Connections (3)
- Court associationTansen
Rahim's dohas and Tansen's dhrupads are both Braj-language work produced at a Persianate court by men at the top of it, one the commander-in-chief and the other the court musician. Mughal high culture was bilingual in practice long before Urdu existed as a literary language, and the Hindi canon has two Mughal grandees in it as a result.
- Monument relocationHumayun's Tomb
Rahim built a tomb for his wife at Nizamuddin in 1598, on the model of Humayun's Tomb next door, and was buried in it himself in 1627. In the 1750s its marble and sandstone facing was stripped to build Safdarjung's tomb, which is why the last great Mughal garden tomb is partly made of an earlier one. It was refaced only after 2014.
- ServedAkbar
Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan served Akbar and later Jahangir as commander-in-chief, governor of Gujarat and of the Deccan, and as one of the navaratna from Akbar's inner circle. He translated Babur's Chagatai memoirs into Persian as the Baburnama, and wrote couplets in Braj and Awadhi that are still learned by heart across north India. His dohas are Vaishnava in idiom and are quoted as freely as Kabir's or Tulsidas's, which makes the Mughal commander-in-chief a canonical Hindi poet.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Abdul Rahim Khan-I-Khan”. Rahim's dohas in the standard Hindi anthologies; Aga Khan Trust for Culture conservation report on the Khan-i-Khanan tomb (2020).
Open Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan in the repository →