Built to Last: Amir Khusraw Dehlavi's Praise for Delhi and Its Monuments

There was much to praise in the city of Delhi that the medieval poet Amir Khusraw (d. 1325) lived in: the military exploits and magnanimity of the successive sultans he served, his Sufi master whose blessed presence illumined the city, the geography and culture of the city and Indic world, as well as the city's many imposing monuments that survive to this day. Amir Khusraw's earliest panegyrics to Delhi appeared in his masnavi, Qiran al-sa‘dain, and throughout his later writings he continued to employ topographical images to inscribe the city in the annals of Perso-Islamic history. Poems on places are interspersed as vignettes to enhance and break up the flow of the narrative of some of his masnavis. These verses had such a compelling connection to place that selections were quoted in various texts through the centuries after him, sometimes quoted in the context of other buildings. From their appearance in the Timurid period history, Rawzat al-jannat fi awsaf madinat-i Harat, where lines about Delhi are quoted in the context of Herat to Mughal prose works by authors such as Amin Ahmad Razi's Haft Iqlim and 'Abd al-Baqi Nihavandi's Ma'asir-i Rahimi, the reuse of Amir Khusraw’s verses by successive generations of Persian(ate) men of letters has been largely unnoticed. The endurance of his poetry and the places themselves over time ensured their mutual fame, without any reference to a past or future, only the present. This paper will explore how the poet's use of generic verses to describe buildings and places in the framework of a specific historical narrative allowed his poetry to be read as documentary evidence of his own times but also to be constantly reused by other authors in subsequent centuries.