Person · Mughal poet laureate · India
Abu'l-Faiz Faizi
Also known as Faizi, Abul Faiz Faizi, Fayzi, malik-ush-shuara
Abu'l-Fazl's elder brother, made Akbar's malik-ush-shu'ara — poet laureate — in 1588, and the court's chief translator from Sanskrit. He rendered the Lilavati, Bhaskara's twelfth-century mathematics, into Persian, and the Nala-Damayanti episode of the Mahabharata as the Nal-Daman.
- Date
- 1547–1595
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 27.095, 77.671
Worth knowing
He also wrote a Persian commentary on the Quran using only undotted letters, which is a technical feat of no religious consequence and much quoted. Akbar is recorded as having carried him on his own shoulders when he was dying, and his death in 1595 is one of the few occasions the Akbarnama records the emperor weeping.
About the place
Placed at Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, the courts he served at; he was born at Agra and died there in 1595.
Connections (3)
- In the same set asAbu’l-Fazl
Faizi and Abu'l-Fazl were brothers and sons of Shaikh Mubarak, a scholar twice in trouble with the orthodox ulama, and between them they ran Akbar's literary and historical establishment: the poet laureate and chief Sanskrit translator on one side, the official chronicler and gazetteer-writer on the other. The intellectual character of the reign is substantially one family's.
- TransmissionPānini
Faizi's Persian version of the Lilavati, Bhaskara's twelfth-century treatise on arithmetic and mensuration, is part of the same programme that produced Persian Mahabharata and Ramayana, and it is how Sanskrit mathematics entered the Islamic scholarly world a second time — six centuries after the Indian numerals had gone the other way through Baghdad.
- ServedAkbar
Faizi served Akbar as malik-ush-shu'ara, poet laureate, from 1588 and was the court's chief translator from Sanskrit. He rendered Bhaskara's twelfth-century mathematics into Persian as the Lilavati and the Mahabharata's Nala-Damayanti episode as the Nal-Daman, among other translations. Akbar is recorded as having carried him on his own shoulders when he was dying, and his death in 1595 is one of the few occasions the Akbarnama records the emperor weeping.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Faizi”. Abu'l-Fazl, Akbarnāma, vol. III, on Faizi's death; Faizi, Nal-Daman; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Mughal Persian translation.
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