Amir Khusrau

Overview

Biography

Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) was a Persian-Indian Sufi poet, musician, and scholar who is one of the most significant figures in the cultural history of the Indian subcontinent. Born Abul Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau in Patiyali (in present-day Uttar Pradesh) to a Turkic father and an Indian mother, he served at the courts of seven successive Delhi Sultanate rulers and was a devoted disciple of the Sufi mystic Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, whose dargah (shrine) in Delhi he is buried beside.

Khusrau is credited — though with varying degrees of historical certainty — with an extraordinary range of inventions and innovations in Indian music and language. He is traditionally held to be the originator of qawwali, the devotional musical form of the Chishti Sufi order that remains among the most powerful musical traditions in the world. He is also associated with the invention of the sitar (a modification of the veena) and the tabla (twin drums), and with the development of the khayal vocal form, though these attributions are debated among scholars.

His synthesis of Persian poetic forms with Indian musical structures created a bridge between the two great cultural spheres that met on the subcontinent, and his compositions in Braj Bhasha (an early form of Hindi) are considered among the earliest examples of literary Hindi. The tarana form — a rapid vocal composition using meaningless syllables — is attributed to him and remains a distinctive feature of Hindustani classical performance. Every year on the occasion of Basant (spring), qawwals gather at the Nizamuddin dargah in Delhi to sing his compositions in a tradition unbroken for seven centuries.