ABSTRACT
Among the remarkable aspects of the Persianate literary culture of late Mughal India is the widely divergent character of the responses to the crises of sovereignty. 1 Poetry and polity were twinned here as they arguably had been throughout Persian literary history. But in eighteenth-century North India they were related in ways perhaps more diverse than ever before. The last three chapters studied the mystical appropriations of Persian and Indic literary history by which ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil, responding to the crisis in the Mughal polity of his time, fashioned his authorial authority. This chapter studies the historicist and philological uses of Persian literary history by one of Bīdil’s students, Sirāj al-Dīn ‘Alī Khān “Ārzū” (1687–1756), showing how his project of self-fashioning was distinct to that of his teacher.
