Person · Persianate poet & musician · India

Amīr Khusrau

Also known as Amir Khusrau in Delhi

Date

1253–1325

Function

Arts & performance

Patron dynasty

Delhi Sultanate

Condition

historical person + living tradition

Confidence

Mixed / layered — established biography; some musical attributions traditional

Location

28.590, 77.250

About the place

Placed at Nizamuddin in Delhi, where he was a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya and where he is buried at the shaikh's feet — the arrangement he is said to have asked for.

Connections (6)

• Disciple ofHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

  Amīr Khusrau was Nizāmuddīn's disciple for forty years and is buried at his feet, having died six months after him. He gave qawwali its musical form, wrote the earliest literary Hindavi, and served seven sultans without either man's standing suffering for it — the saint who refused courts, and the courtier who never left his.

• Teaching lineageNizāmuddīn Auliyā

  Amīr Khusrau was Nizāmuddīn's disciple for forty years and died six months after him; he is buried at the shaikh's feet. He gave qawwali its musical shape, wrote the earliest literary Hindavi, and served seven sultans — the courtier and the saint who refused courts, inseparable for a lifetime. Khusrau wrote in Persian and in Hindavi and is credited with the qawwali form, the tarana, and several rāgas, so India's most consequential musician was a Sufi disciple and a court poet at once.

• Teaching lineageLucknow Kathak gharana

  Kathak's Lucknow gharana grew at a Muslim court, took its poetic material from Urdu and Braj alike, and shares a repertoire and a rhythmic vocabulary with the qawwali and thumri traditions that run back to Amīr Khusrau's Delhi. The twentieth-century revival was uncomfortable with that and reached for temple origins instead, which is why the form now has two competing origin stories in circulation.

• Craft tradition ofQawwālī

  Chishti tradition makes Amīr Khusrau the founder of qawwālī: he is credited with the qaul that names the form, with the hereditary qawwāl bachche of the Delhi shrine, and by later accounts with the sitar and tabla as well. Musicologists accept the first two as lineage claims with real institutional weight and reject the instruments as anachronism. What is documented is that Khusrau wrote Persian and Hindavi verse for the assembly, and that a hereditary singing family has been attached to his master's tomb ever since.

• Teaching lineageBahādur Shāh Zafar

  Zafar was the last patron of the Delhi Persian and Urdu tradition that runs back through Amir Khusrau, with Ghalib and Zauq at his court and his own ghazals still sung — the line about not getting two yards of earth in the beloved's lane is the most quoted of them. The 1857 reprisals scattered that literary world: Ghalib's letters describe a city emptied, and Urdu's centre of gravity moved to Lucknow and then to Hyderabad.

• Teaching lineageDakhnī

  Dakhni descends from the Hindavi that Amir Khusrau was writing in at Delhi in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, carried south by the Chishti migration to Gulbarga and by Muhammad bin Tughlaq's forced removal of Delhi's population to Daulatabad in 1327. It then developed for two hundred years on its own, absorbing Marathi and Telugu, and was a written literary language with a divan tradition before northern Urdu was written at all.

Sources

Amir Khusrau’s works; Sunil Sharma and Persian literary scholarship; Chishti sources. Musical invention claims should be treated selectively.

• Wikipedia