A Sultan in the Realm of Passion: Coffee in Eighteenth-Century Delhi

The Urdu poet Shāh “Ḥātim” (1699–1783) enjoyed a long career, interacting with several generations of Urdu poets in Delhi and observing firsthand the massive upheavals that accompanied the Mughal Empire’s rapid political decline. He is remembered today primarily for his claim, made some twenty years after he composed poems in praise of coffee and tobacco, to have purged his earlier collections of poetry containing unliterary vocabulary and outdated puns. Ḥātim’s choice to retain the poem on coffee, despite what he acknowledged to be its outdated style, provides insights into modes of elite connoisseurship practiced in late Mughal society.