The collection of poems Fughān-i Dihlī (The Lament for Delhi) was compiled in 1863 by Tafazzul Husain Kaukab. Its poems reference the turbulent events of 1857 and their aftermath in Delhi. The shahr-āshob genre of poetry, which began as a catalogue of ravishing male youths in Persian, took on a different meaning in later Urdu literature. Ge…[Read more]

This article considers the reception and genre of the Shāhnāmah in India. It takes as its starting-point comments made by the poet Mirza Asad Allah Khan Ghalib in 1866, moving on to look at a Mughal Shāhnāmah adaptation, the Tarikh-i dil-gusha-i Shamsher-Khani, and its Urdu translations, as well as other Persian, Urdu and Arabic texts. It inv…[Read more]