The Palace as Locus and Emanation of Royal Virtue in the Sāqi-nāma of Ẓuhūrī Turshīzī

Before emigrating to India at the age of forty in 1580, Ẓuhūrī Turshīzī (d. 1025/1616) honed his poetic skills in literary circles throughout Iran, from his native Khorasan to Yazd and Shiraz. He was fully cognizant of all the latest fashions in early Safavid poetry, including the new genre of the sāqi-nāma (cupbearer’s song). Adapting the thematic structure of the traditional panegyric qaṣīda, the sāqi-nāma depicts the speaker’s struggle against mortality and search for self-identity, ending with the declaration of a new doctrinal or political allegiance. But when Ẓuhūrī came to write his own sāqī-nāma, he drastically reshaped the genre. Earlier sāqī-nāmas seldom exceeded 300 verses in rhymed couplets, but Ẓuhūrī’s unfolds luxuriously over 4,600 lines. This expansion results in large part from an elaboration of the final panegyric portion of the poem. Ẓuhūrī praises the Niẓāmshāhī ruler Burhān II (r. 999-1003/1591-95) by way of lengthy descriptions of the ceremonies, attendants, accoutrements, and buildings of his court at Ahmednagar. This paper will investigate precisely how the palace and its residents, furnishings, and rituals manifest the virtues and power of the royal mamdūḥ. Is the palace complex a metonymic extension of the royal body; is it a material realization of abstract attributes of his character; or is it a self-standing metaphor for his rule, the projection of a social order which the king governs, but which simultaneously governs his values, behavior, and representation? These relationships between the king and his self-constructed environment give nuanced articulation to the nature of power and authority in the political and poetic realm of Ẓuhūrī’s sāqī-nāma.