avī In the autumn of 1314, Prince Khiẓr Khān summoned Amīr Khusraw and requested the poet to compose a work on the prince's courtship and marriage to a Hindu princess. Khiẓr Khān presented a draft of his romance in hindī to Khusraw, who read the work and used it as the basis for his Persian text. The request probably appealed to Khusraw on a number of levels. Khiẓr Khān and Amīr Khusraw both followed the Delhi Sufi Ni
m al-dīn ʿAwliyāʾ, suggesting that they knew each other outside of the royal court and shared similar views. Khusraw spent a quarter century before this meeting in the Delhi Sultanate court where he wrote a series of poems that pleased and praised Delhi sultans. Since the reigning sultan, ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī (r. 1296–1316), designated Khiẓr Khān as his heir-apparent, writing a poem for the prince would ensure Khusraw's place in the future sultan's court. Lastly, it provided Khusraw with an opportunity to combine two forms of ma
avī (narrative poetry) in one text, the historical ma
avī that praised Delhi sultans with the romantic ma
avī such as Ni
mī Ganjavī's Khamsa that Khusraw rewrote a decade earlier.Footnote
2
Informally discussing the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān over the last decade, I have noticed a tendency of referring to the text in two parts: the historical and the romantic. The first third of the text is the historical part containing narrative on the reign of the Delhi sultans and their conquests. The remaining two-thirds of the text, the romantic part, narrates Khiẓr Khān's courtship and marriage to Deval Rānī according to the tradition of romantic ma
avī. Reading the form, the structure of the text, rather than the content inverts these historical and literary divisions. The historical part becomes a panegyric invented by Khusraw, while the romantic part describing courtship and marriage is biography based upon a textual source, Khiẓr Khān's dībācha.
This article examines the form rather than the content in order to analyze how Khusraw differentiates his created verses from the versified dībācha of Khiẓr Khān. A complete translation of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān does not exist and summaries by Khaliq Ahmad Nizami as well as Paul Losensky and Sunil Sharma focus on the romance in the latter half of the text.Footnote 3 These summaries begin with Deval Rānī's capture and her first meeting with Khiẓr Khān before describing the couple's courtship, marriage, and demise upon Khiẓr Khān's execution. While this article contains a considerable number of translated passages from the first third of the text, the objective is an analysis of the text's form rather than a translation or summary.
The First Part of the Text
Amīr Khusraw opened the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān with an epigraph on love followed by a standard preface found in many Persian works.
These pages of love, in which their every letter moves like the curls of Layla and the chains of Majnūn, and in which their every word is like Shīrīn in breaking the hardhearted like the axe of Farhād, is known by the name Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān.Footnote 4
The epigraph refers to an Arabic tale about the lovers Layla and Majnūn and a Persian tale about Shīrīn and Farhād. Ni
mī Ganjavī incorporated these stories into his Khamsa, which Amīr Khusraw reworked from 1298 to 1302. The opening words of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān, therefore, connect Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī to the traditions of these lovers. The preface, spanning 193 verses, conforms to an established pattern that includes Praises to Allah (ḥamd), the Prophet Muḥammad (naʾat), and the Companions of the Prophet (manqabat). Persian authors generally followed this standard preface with praises to the poet's patron, but Khusraw used the preface to praise his Sufi master and his royal patron.Footnote
5
Khusraw belonged to the spiritual community of Sufi Ni
m al-dīn ʿAwliyāʾ and the royal court of Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī. Khusraw negotiated his allegiance to these two polities by linking praises to Ni
m al-dīn ʿAwliyāʾ as a continuation of the preface on the Prophet and the Companions.
Praises to that shaykh who is an example of the pious mirror
with a nature that is exactly the same as Muhammad.
m al-dīn is the right and happiest name of him.
m [ruler] who seized the religion of truth.
a) exactly. Khusraw praised Ni
m al-dīn for another seventeen verses before turning to a longer section dedicated to Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī. Just as Khusraw linked Ni
m al-dīn to spiritual authority, he similarly connected ʿAlāʾ al-dīn to regal authority.
Praises to ʿAlāʾ al-dīn inscribed as the worthy caliph for
the religion of Allah and Muḥammad (Peace be Upon Him).
Amīr Khusraw linked Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn to pre-Islamic Iranian rulers who became symbols of kingship such as Jamshīd and Khusraw, but also to Alexander the Great through ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's title as Second Alexander (sikandar al-sānī) found in texts and inscriptions.Footnote
9
While Khusraw referred to ʿAlāʾ al-dīn as the caliph (khalīfa) in the section heading, he used khalīfa as a title instead of an attempt to claim ʿAlāʾ al-dīn as the caliph.Footnote
10
Khusraw continued to praise ʿAlāʾ al-dīn for an additional thirty-eight verses, about twice the number of verses as Ni
m al-dīn, before turning to a lengthy section on moral advice.
Khusraw wrote over 442 verses, thirty pages of printed text, containing panegyric and moral advice. The first forty-four verses of this section praise ʿAlāʾ al-dīn in the same style as the previously quoted passage. Khusraw cautiously offered his moral advice.
Khusraw displayed a great degree of caution in offering his views on the sultan's duties and the role of good fortune. At other times, he became rather blunt and critical.
Khusraw included another admonition a dozen verses later, writing “You are a mote of dust from the earth, that imagines itself in a dream as a mountain”.Footnote 13
Khusraw inserted his first story (ḥikāyat) into this long narrative on moral advice.
Poets could celebrate or slander the achievements, character, and generosity of their patrons. Khusraw spent a significant number of verses, approximately a tenth of the entire text, praising and critiquing the sultan through a series of lessons on just rule and moral life. He may have mitigated any fallout through a strategic use of the text. As mentioned above, Khusraw blurred the line between the preface to the prophets and introduction of the patron in order to acknowledge both Ni
m al-dīn and ʿAlāʾ al-dīn at the beginning of the text. The verses offering moral advice occur in a similar liminal zone, following panegyric to Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn, but preceding Khusraw's introduction of the text's patron and ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's son, Prince Khiẓr Khān. These verses, therefore, could critique the sultan or instruct the young prince in a fashion similar to the Mirrors for Princes literature.Footnote
15
Manan Ahmed offered another interpretation by shifting the focus from Amīr Khusraw to Khiẓr Khān. Instead of praising the reigning Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn and securing future patronage from the heir-apparent Prince Khiẓr Khān, these passages could show Khiẓr Khān reinventing his political genealogy. The romantic tale of Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān would— and based on manuscript copies did—have a wide circulation and readership. The theme of a romance culminating in Hindu-Muslim union signals a move away from the decades of conquest initiated by previous Delhi sultans including his own father. Such a shift in policy, if it had occurred, would have aligned Khiẓr Khān with others who advocated for a Hindu-Muslim union such as Ni
m al-dīn ʿAwliyāʾ, the spiritual mentor for both Khiẓr Khān and Amīr Khusraw. This reading makes the Mouse's Tale both a rebuke of Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's policies and moral advice for the prince who would be king.
Regardless of the intention behind the Mouse's Tale, Khusraw introduced Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī with descriptions about life, language, and customs in India. This passage plays a key role in understanding the structure of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān. As noted earlier, Khiẓr Khān approached Khusraw about composing a text describing his courtship and marriage to the Hindu princess Deval Rānī.
This passage indicates that Khiẓr Khān already composed a draft (the dībācha) of his courtship and marriage to Deval Rānī in hindī, most likely a reference to both the Hindavī language and the text's poetic style.Footnote
17
Khusraw returned, presumably to his home, with the booklet in hand (namūdam rajʿat ān dībācha bar dast), where he transformed Khiẓr Khān's dībācha into a Persian narrative poem (ma
avī), grafting his (Persian) silk onto Khiẓr Khān's (Hindavī) course cloth.Footnote
18
Another passage, a couple pages later, confirms this interpretation.
These verses introduce Deval Rānī for the first time in the text. Subsequent verses continue this introduction, although they also change her Hindavī name from Deval to Dadal, only to revert back to Deval (Pers., Duval, “fortunes”) later in the text.
Although it may seem counter intuitive to a modern audience, the introduction of the beloved Deval Rānī, who was captured during the second Gujarat campaign, also served as a transition to the Delhi Sultans and their campaigns across India.
The most historical part of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān describes the Delhi sultans and their victories throughout India. ʿIṣāmī traced the ideological and military origins of the Delhi and Bahmanid Sultanates back to Maḥmūd Ghaznavī (d. 1030), while Ẓiyāʾ al-dīn Baranī referred to the Delhi sultans as the “children of Maḥmūd” (farzandān-i maḥmūd).Footnote 21 Khusraw also linked Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn to Maḥmūd in the Khazāʾin al-Futūḥ,Footnote 22 but credited the Ghurid dynasty with the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān.
b al-dīn.
b set like the sun in the west,Two additional examples should convey the general tone of this versified history on the Delhi sultans.
Khusraw penned a fair number of verses on the reign of Sultan Raẓiyya. Sultan Shams al-dīn Iltutmish, mentioned in the last line of the previous passage, ruled from 1210–1236. His son, Rukn al-dīn Fīrūz Shāh (r. 1236), became the next Delhi sultan for a brief six-month reign characterised by numerous pleasures and a powerful mother. Khusraw disapprovingly summarised this brief reign by writing, “While the son ruled over the kingdom for six months, he died like an eight-month old child”.Footnote 24 Iltutmish's daughter, Raẓiyya (r. 1236–40), ascended the Delhi throne upon her brother's death.
Khusraw wrote about twice as many verses on Sultan Raẓiyya as any other sultan of the Shamsid line, including Sultan Shams al-dīn Iltutmish. She ranks third in the total number of verses about a former Delhi sultan, surpassed only by Ghiyās al-dīn Balban and Jalāl al-dīn Khaljī.
The longest passage about any former sultan described Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī's predecessor and uncle, Jalāl al-dīn Fīrūz Shāh Khaljī (r. 1290–1296). Amīr Khusraw served in Jalāl al-dīn's royal court and wrote a short narrative poem, Miftāḥ al-Futūḥ (The Key to Victories) in 1296 commemorating the sultan's rule. Khusraw composed thirty-seven verses in the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān praising Sultan Jalāl al-dīn Khaljī and emphasising his victories, justice, and generosity.
Khusraw mentioned neither Jalāl al-dīn Khaljī's death nor the role that his nephew and successor, Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī, played in a regicide-cum-parricide.
Khusraw closed this section with another description of ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī, focusing on ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's achievements before he became sultan. He began with ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's campaign against Dēōgīr on the Deccan Plateau, which ʿAlāʾ al-dīn embarked upon while governor of Kara. Once again, Khusraw skipped over Sultan Jalāl al-dīn's death as well as the coronation of Jalāl al-dīn's young son as the next sultan. The closest Khusraw came to mentioning a succession crisis occurs in the verse, “Two pearls were worthy for the shah's crown: one from the rain, and one from the fish's ear”.Footnote 27 The pearl conceived as a drop of rain represents ʿAlāʾ al-dīn, who descended from the heavens, but who also descended from Shihāb (meteor, bright flame) al-dīn Masʿūd Khaljī.Footnote 28 Khusraw, however, presented a fairly lengthy description of ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's march toward Delhi after Jalāl al-dīn's murder and included ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's stratagem of winning the populace over by showering gold and jewels obtained from his Dēōgīr victory upon the gathering crowds.Footnote 29
Khusraw finished this section of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān with general statements on the welfare of the Delhi Sultanate. Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī's reign signalled such era of peace and justice that even the animals lived in harmony. The Mongols interrupted this tranquility. Khusraw rarely missed an opportunity to disparage the Mongols, and the remaining sixty-five verses of this section describe the Mongol campaigns in India. He finished his description with the following verses on the defeat of the Mongol generals Taybū, Iqbāl, and Köpek:
The passage concludes with ten verses describing Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn once again restoring peace and tranquility after the Mongol attacks.
The Second Part of the Text
The second part of the text usually begins with capture of the Hindu princess, Deval Rānī, and her first meeting with Khiẓr Khān. K.A. Nizami's introduction as well as Paul Losensky and Sunil Sharma's synopsis of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān both begin at this point.Footnote 32 This choice is based on the content rather than the form. The meeting of the lovers marks the beginning of their romance, culminates in their marriage and ends tragically with their imprisonment and Khiẓr Khān's execution. While cultural historians may seek information on customs, festivals and marriages a bit further into the text, they generally focus on the third chapter of Amīr Khusraw's later Nuh Sipihr (Nine Heavens).Footnote 33 An alternate reading emerges by focusing on the form rather than the content.
The form of the text changes with the introduction of ghazal passages. Beginning about a third into the text, Khusraw began to write sections of narrative verse (ma
avī) followed by two sections of romantic verse, “A ghazal from the lover's mouth” and “A response from the beloved's lip.” Khusraw previously broke the ma
avī narrative in the first sixty-two pages of text with stories (ḥikāyat) such as the Mouse's Tale, but never used ghazal in the first third of the text. The use of ma
avī and ghazal provides important markers on how to read the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān.
Ma
avī and ghazal are two distinct styles of poetic composition in Persian literature. Khusraw wrote most of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān as ma
avī, a form of narrative poetry that many commonly—and erroneously—refer to as epic poetry. Persian meter divides each couplet (bayt) into two hemistiches or half-verses (miṣrāʿ). The Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān follows the hexametric meter (hazaj-i musaddas-i mahzūf) consisting of metrically short and long syllables.Footnote
34
The ma
avī and ghazal both contain hemistiches, but the end-rhymes differ. End-rhyme in the ma
avī follows the pattern AA/BB/CC/DD. . ., while the ghazal follows a pattern of AA/BA/CA/DA. . ..Footnote
35
This shows a fundamental difference between ma
avī and ghazal: end-rhyme occurs in each hemistich for the ma
avī, but in each couplet for the ghazal. Hemistiches in the ghazal do not need to rhyme with each other with the exception of the first hemistich, which ends with the same end-rhyme as the rest of the poem. The AA/BA/CA/DA end-rhyme in the ghazal is one of its most distinctive features. The ghazal includes one other common practice, not found in ma
avī, in which the poet incorporates his penname (takhalus) in the final verse.
Khusraw clearly knew the difference between both styles of poetry as demonstrated by his collection of nearly two thousand ghazal poems;Footnote
36
yet, he consistently labelled sections of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān as ghazal while writing the verses in ma
avī form. The sections labelled as ghazal follow the ma
avī end-rhyme scheme of AA/BB/CC/DD instead of the ghazal end-rhyme of AA/BA/CA/DA. Khusraw composed these ghazal passages in the same hexametric meter (hazaj-i musaddas-i mahzūf) as the rest of the ma
avī. The ghazal verses in the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān generally contain fifteen to twenty verses. However, each section of ghazal contains two ghazal poems, one from the lover and another from the beloved. This pushes the ghazal to thirty or forty total verses, a length more common in shorter ma
avī poetry.
Manuscript copies of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān confirm this as an intentional mislabelling rather than scribal error. Maulānā Rashīd Aḥmad Sālīm Anṣārī, who compiled the first edition of the text reprinted later by K.A. Nizami, uniformly titled these passages as “A ghazal from the lover's tongue” (ghazal az zabān-i ʿāshiq) and “A response from the beloved's lip” (pāsukh az lab-i maʿshawq). The fourth oldest manuscript of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān, the British Library manuscript Add. 21104 copied in 1517, also uses these headings as well as manuscripts copied in 1526–27, 1574, and 1599.Footnote
37
Manuscripts from the modern period frequently attach gūyad to the end of the phrase, such as “A ghazal composed from the lover's mouth” (ghazal az zabān-i ʿāshiq gūyad).Footnote
38
Other variations occur, but the manuscripts retain the word ghazal in the section titles.Footnote
39
Although textual variants exist between manuscripts, none of the variants in these twelve manuscripts drop the term ghazal. The presence of ghazal, in the earliest known copies of the text, suggests that Khusraw himself chose the term rather than a later copyist. Since Khusraw clearly knew the difference between ghazal and ma
avī, it seems that he intentionally mislabelled these verses as ghazal.
The alternating ma
avī and ghazal passages begin in a section where Khusraw explicitly states that he is now following the dībācha presented to him by Khiẓr Khān.
A story in which the shah's sword removes the image of the infidel across Hindustan and relates, in many ways, Khiẓr Khan's dībācha of love that was the soul of souls.Footnote 40
Khusraw unfortunately provided few details about the dībācha—whether it was an outline or a complete text, whether it was written in verse or in prose. The first reference to the dībācha occurs when Khusraw recalled meeting Khiẓr Khān and being asked to compose the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān. Khusraw wrote, “I returned [from meeting Khiẓr Khān] with that dībācha in hand” (namūdam rajʿat ān dībācha bar dast) and a few lines later, “It often appeared inelegant in its imagery, so I grafted fine silk onto its course cloth”.Footnote
41
Khusraw did note that the dībācha was written in Hindi (hindī), which he rewrote into Persian (pārsī) with a few Hindi loanwords. I concur with Nizami that if Khiẓr Khān, the text's patron and heir-apparent to the Delhi throne, handed Khusraw a dībācha, then Khusraw would use this text as a framework in composing the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān.Footnote
42
This explains why Khusraw intentionally mislabels verses as ghazal. Khusraw follows Khiẓr Khān's dībācha and rewrites the text in romantic ma
avī form, but marks his invented verses, which are mostly romantic interpretations of Khiẓr Khān's narrative, as ghazal in spite of the verses also being in ma
avī form.
This section of text mostly recounts Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī's victories and corresponds to similar passages from Khusraw's prose description in the Khazāʾin al-Futūḥ. The section begins with a narration of Dēōgīr/Dēvgīri's conquest by [ʿAlī] Garhāsp, Khiẓr Khān's father, who later took the regal name ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī. Khusraw included a reference to the Somnāth raid of 1299,Footnote 43 he then proceeded to a long description of Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's victory over Ranthanbōr and Chitōr (renamed as Khiẓrābād and bestowed upon Khiẓr Khān). The Delhi Sultanate army defeated Malwa and subjugated Dēōgīr for a second time before campaigning against Māndū and Samāna. Malik Kāfūr's southern campaigns began with the conquest of Telingana and Arangal, followed by the army's victories against the Hoysalas and Maʿbar, the Pāṇḍyas, and finally the dismantling of the golden Hindu temple.Footnote 44
Khusraw closed the section with a second introduction of Khiẓr Khān. Although untested in battle, Khiẓr Khān inherited Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's victories and reign.
Since Khusraw already introduced Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī (DR 44.7–16) as discussed above, I believe that Khusraw invented the first introduction, and that this second introduction came from Khiẓr Khān's draft (dībācha).
These verses on conquest are followed by the first ghazal verses. The ghazal verses excerpted below, as in other ghazal passages, function a number of ways within the text. At first glance, the verses provide a break in the ma
avī narrative with interludes of love poetry, such as the Mouse's Tale discussed earlier.
These verses, as well as other ghazal passages throughout the text, summarise the preceding section (on ʿAlāʾ al-dīn's conquests) and foreshadow the next section (the conquest of Gujarat and capture of Deval Rānī). Khusraw also utilises these ghazal verses as a means of inserting his own voice and poetry into Khiẓr Khān's dībācha.
Khusraw returned to the narrative on Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rāni, perhaps unsurprisingly, with the theme of conquest and the capture of Kanval Dī. Focusing on the Gujarat raid of 1299, Khusraw again described the Delhi Sultanate victory at the Somnāth temple.Footnote 48 Although this is Khusraw's third passage on Somnāth within the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān, it is the first passage to mention the Gujarati king Karn Rāʾī (Hind. karaṇ or karan from Skt., karṇa).Footnote 49 Karn Rāʾī fled from the advancing Delhi Sultanate army, but the army captured both the king's treasure and elephants along with his wife, Kanval Dī (Hind. from Skt., kamala-dēvī), and her attendants. Kanval Dī entered the Delhi Sultanate harem where she came to love Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn, according to Khusraw, but missed the daughter that she bore with Karn Rāʾī. She raised the subject of her daughter a few years later when Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn began contemplating a marriage for Khiẓr Khan. The sultan agreed that Kanval Dī's daughter would make an excellent wife and ordered a new campaign to conquer Gujarat and capture the princess.
Another set of ghazals, excerpted below, show more of a relation between each other and the ma
avī text.
Once again, the ghazal passages break the ma
avī narrative with a romantic interlude and provide an interpretation of the previous (ma
avī) narrative. The “Response from the beloved's lip” ends almost a dozen verses later with a set of verses that transition to the next topic.
These verses also foreshadow the next section of text in which Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī meet for the first time. Since Nizami as well as Losensky and Sharma have summarised text, I will provide a synopsis of the remaining story.Footnote 53
Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī quickly fell in love but went through a series of trials before being married. Khiẓr Khān's mother decided that the prince should marry the daughter of Alp Khān, her brother and the governor of Gujarat. The cancellation of the wedding did not diminish Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī's love and they continued to meet clandestinely. The queen, learning of their continued love, briefly thought about sending Deval Rānī out of the royal palace, but Khiẓr Khān became so distraught that she changed her mind. Khusraw wrote pages about the meeting between Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī. Khusraw infused one passage, in which they secretly met in a garden, with Hindustani images of native customs, plants and animals. These passages bear a striking similarity to the well-known third chapter of Amīr Khusraw's Nuh Sipihr (Nine Heavens) completed in 1318.Footnote
54
Khusraw vividly described the festivities and celebrations surrounding Khiẓr Khān's wedding to Alp Khān's daughter. A dejected Deval Rānī sent a series of messages to Khiẓr Khān in which her suffering parallels Khiẓr Khān earlier lamentations about their separation. Khiẓr Khān assuaged her with a description of his own suffering. The queen eventually relented and Khiẓr Khān married Deval Rānī. Khusraw described all of these events using alternating sections of ma
avī and ghazal verse.
Khusraw wrote about the wedding between Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī in surprisingly few verses. One would expect the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān to culminate with their marriage, but Khusraw only gave a brief description of their ceremony. Perhaps he concluded the original text with a description of the wedding but dropped the conclusion when he rewrote the ending on Khiẓr Khān imprisonment and execution a few years later. Alternatively, Khiẓr Khān's second marriage may have lacked the festivities of his first marriage and Khusraw may have accurately conveyed the wedding's subdued tone. Regardless, this section marks the end of the original version of the text.
Khusraw wrote a new ending to the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān sometime after 1320 on the deaths of Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī and Khiẓr Khān. Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn became ill soon after Khiẓr Khān's marriage to Deval Rānī. Khiẓr Khān vowed to conduct a pilgrimage if the sultan should recover. When the sultan's condition improved, Khiẓr Khān left Delhi. Malik Kāfūr, the general who successfully led the victories in southern India, began to poison the sultan's ear and possibly his body. Khiẓr Khān misjudged both the sultan's condition and Kāfūr's plot. Using the sultan's deteriorating condition, Kāfūr ordered Khiẓr Khān's arrest and imprisoned Khiẓr Khān and his brothers, accompanied by Deval Rānī, in the Gwalior fort. He eventually sent a slave to blind the princes, an act that eliminated their ability to rule. Alp Khān, meanwhile, arrived in Delhi and attempted to intervene on his son-in-law's behalf but was quickly killed by the palace guards. Malik Kāfūr's power behind the throne ended a few months later when the palace guards murdered him and reinstalled the Khaljī line. Another of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn's sons, ruling as Sultan Qu
b al-dīn Mubārak Shāh, ascended the throne and quickly ordered the execution of Khiẓr Khān and his brothers. Khusraw wrote that Deval Rānī mourned for Khiẓr Khān, but failed to relate her fate after Khiẓr Khān's death. Although Khusraw added a new conclusion to the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān years later, he continued to use alternating passages of ma
avī and ghazal found in the latter half of the text.
Conclusion
Reading the form over the content challenges the traditional division of the historical and the literary in the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān. A reading of the text based on content leads to the traditional division between history and literature. The first third of the text on Ni
m al-dīn ʿAwliyāʾ, ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī, the Delhi sultans and their victories (as well as the amended conclusion) relates historical information, while the remainder of the text provides a story of romance. Reading the form inverts the historical and romantic sections of the text. The first third of the text becomes literary panegyric created by Khusraw in praise of his patrons and the Delhi Sultanate. The remainder of the text describing the romance between Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī is biography using Khiẓr Khān's dībācha as a historical source. Khusraw textually marks where he begins following Khiẓr Khān's dībācha in a section heading; furthermore, he (mis)labels verses as ghazal in order to mark his invented composition from Khiẓr Khān's dībācha outline.
This explains why ghazal passages do not appear in the earlier sections of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān. Khusraw did not mark his invented passages in the earlier part of the text because invention was implicit in panegyric. The first part of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān contains Khusraw's panegyric praising Ni
m al-dīn ʿAwliyāʾ, Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-dīn Khaljī, the previous Delhi Sultans and their conquests. This first part also includes Khusraw recounting Khiẓr Khān's request to rework the Hindi dībācha into a Persian poem, the first introduction about Khiẓr Khān as well as the first introduction of Deval Rānī, and Khusraw's playful reworking of her name into duval and dadal. The section ends with Khusraw's narrative on the Delhi Sultanate victories over the Mongols. While these verses may provide historical information, they are ultimately a form of historical panegyric.
The conjecture that Khusraw marks his invented verses as ghazal also explains why the ghazal passages continue when Khusraw adds a new ending to the text. The original text ended on page 254 and the new ending begins on page 257 (line 1) of Nizami's/Anṣārī's printed text.Footnote 55 Khusraw wrote this new ending sometime in the 1320s after the Khaljī dynasty collapsed; yet, he continued writing ghazals from the lover and beloved even though he no longer followed Khiẓr Khān's dībācha. Khusraw once again inserted the ghazal label in order to distinguish factual narrative on Khiẓr Khān's imprisonment, blinding, and execution from his invented verses of these events.
Alternate interpretations emerge depending on whether one reads the text as history or historiography. Peter Hardy, who remains the dominant voice in Delhi Sultanate historiography, regarded Amīr Khusraw as a poet rather than a historian. “Throughout a long life [Amīr Khusraw] wrote, judging in terms of bulk alone, more works of imagination than of fact (‘fact’ here conceived as ‘what human beings have actually done’). . .. He wrote not in order that man should know what man has done. . . but that he should be diverted and amused”.Footnote
56
Hardy's comments stem from reading the content of the text, the bulk of which celebrates the romance and union between Khiẓr Khān and Deval Rānī. Amīr Khusraw clearly wrote with an aesthetic aim to elicit an affective and emotive response from his reader. The beginning of the text contains affective elements through moral guidance and didactic tales such as the Mouse's Tale. Khusraw's ghazal passages, in particular, attempt to evoke an emotive response on love similar to the Khamsa of Ni
mī Ganjavī (d. 1209). Approaching the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān as history leads to the conclusion that “Amīr Khusrau did not write history—he wrote poetry”.Footnote
57
I agree with Hardy that Amīr Khusraw utilised a series of aesthetics aimed foremost at producing an affective or emotive response; however, I do not agree that these aesthetics negate or undermine the text as history. Amīr Khusraw could have composed his romance based on a legendary couple, as Ni
mī Ganjavī did in his Khamsa, but chose instead to write a Khamsa-like romance based on a living couple.Footnote
58
Khusraw, contrary to Hardy, chose fact rather than imagination. Khusraw not only utilised a textual source, Khiẓr Khān's dībācha, he also demarcated his invented verses by labelling them as ghazal although they occur in ma
avī form. This indicates a fidelity to the source text and an attempt to report Khiẓr Khān's courtship and romance as (to use Hardy's phrasing) “what Khiẓr Khān has actually done”. The revised conclusion on Khiẓr Khān's imprisonment, blinding and execution reinforces Khusraw's attempt to report these events “the way it actually was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Reading the form rather than the content in the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān blurs the line between literature and history, aesthetics and fact, and demonstrates how both may exist in a single text.
Abbreviations
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