Khvushgū's dream of Ḥāfiẓ

When, sometime during the tumultuous years between 1724 and 1735 in Delhi, the Persian-language littérateur Bindrāban Dās “Khvushgū” composed most of his taẕkirah or biographical compendium of Persian-language poets, Safīnah-i Khvushgū (“Khvushgū’s Ark” or “Khvushgū’s Notebook of Poems” or, punning on his own pen-name, “The Well-Spoken Notebook/Ark of Poems”), he decided to assign three separate volumes respectively to the old, intermediate and recent poets and further subdivided each volume into the old, intermediate and recent, the recent masters of the last volume being his contemporaries. ³ This was a tripartite chronological schema that was conventional in Persian literary history and that he therefore inherited from certain earlier biographical compendia. Into the first volume which was devoted to the old masters he inserted, unsurprisingly, a notice on Ḥāfiẓ (d. 1390, Shiraz), canonized in Khvushgū’s time as in ours as the greatest master of the classical ghazal. However, in a digression characteristic of eighteenth-century biographical compendia, he gave a part of this notice to reflections apparently only tangential to a biography of Ḥāfiẓ but bespeaking his own investment in the questions they were responding to. At the center of these digressive reflections was his childhood dream vision of Ḥāfiẓ. This chapter reads Khvushgū’s dream of Ḥāfiẓ as a manifold response to three analytically distinct needs that may be formulated in terms of the following questions: what were the social functions of Khvushgū’s memory of his vision of the poet when he was twelve years old? What relations did this dream vision bear to his multiply periodized temporality in the Safīnah of Persian literary 152history? And how were both these questions co-implicated in the question of his relations with Sirāj al-Dīn ‘Alī Khān “Ārzū” (d. 1756) and ‘Abd al-Qādir Khān “Bīdil” (d. 1720), his two most revered teachers and among the greatest Persian littérateurs of the age? Rather than answering these questions by turn, this chapter weaves together its responses to them in reflecting on distinct aspects of Khvushgū’s dream.