Of Parrots and Crows: Bīdil and Ḥazīn in Their Own Words

“We Move from Garden to Garden, Like Flowing Water”

This article is an exploration of the intertwined conceptions of poetic style and geography that had currency in the early modern Persianate world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a world that spanned the regions of modern-day Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia. Given the frequent historical reality of travel, emigration, and exile in this period,¹ it is hardly surprising that the very idea of place should loom large in the works of the poets considered here. One of the central arguments of this article is that the three poets considered here—Ṣā’ib, Bīdil, and Ḥazīn—were themselves distinctly aware of the degree to which debates surrounding style were informed by various metaphors of geography and place, metaphors that were often articulated decisively in these poets’ own lyric poetry. A further claim is that close analysis of how these poets reflected imaginatively upon geography and style can also disclose what we might call a geography of their imagination.

In order to think with these poets about geography, exile, and style, and about what it could mean to recover such concepts from lyric poetry, several historical circumstances ought to be borne in mind, especially regarding travel, mobility, and exile in the early modern Persianate world. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Persianate world of the gunpowder empires came under an entirely new matrix of pressures that, in turn, generated new patterns of mobility. When the political and cultural climate of Mughal India proved seasonable, Iranian émigrés began to flock there in hope of warmer reception at courts ranging from Lahore to the Deccan. The result was the continued and deepening flow of creative minds from Ṣafavid territories into Mughal South Asia, the latest chapter in a long narrative of Iranian, Central Asian, and other foreign peoples migrating to the subcontinent.²

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273), himself no stranger to exile,³ opens a quatrain with the following line: “Bulbul āmad bi bāgh u rastīm zi zāgh” (“The nightingale entered the garden, and we were saved from the crows”), invoking the conventional contrast between the crow, zāgh, the archetypal gloomy, cacophanous tenant of vacant and withered autumnal gardens, and the nightingale, bulbul, that famously melodious lead singer of the Persian ghazal whose song brings the garden back to life and marks the return of verdant spring and creative flourishing.⁴ The concluding line of the quatrain, “Chūn āb-i ravān ravīm az bāgh bi bāgh” (“We move from garden to garden, like flowing water”),⁵ touches upon a less frequently emphasized feature of these avian stock characters of the Persian lyric: namely, that nightingales are migratory birds and move from place to place according to exigencies of seasonal change.⁶ The political climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similarly ensured the continuous circulation of intellectual elites between Ṣafavid Iran and Mughal India, contributing to the atmosphere of intense debate that characterized this period. Arguments revolved, among other things, around the problem of what could constitute acceptable innovation—in poetry, politics, religion, and language alike. These debates were necessarily connected with a variety of critical perspectives on newness, cultural difference, and aesthetic sensibility, and while such concerns were certainly present prior to the early modern period, it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that these disputations found their pivot around a central point: the matter of “sabk-i Hindī,” or the “Indian style” of Persian poetry.

Long before modern scholarship became concerned with the validity and efficacy of terminology like sabk-i hindī, these questions were being heatedly debated in the Persianate world of the eighteenth century, when two poets in particular, Ḥazīn and Bīdil, came to be held up as a binary of opposing points, a polarity of style and sensibility. Bīdil represented the apex (or, for some, the nadir) of the Indian style, while Ḥazīn, the mordant expatriate forced into a life of exile in India, was...