Nusrati

Muḥammad Nuṣrat (died 1674), called Nuṣratī ('victorious'),^[1] was a Deccani Urdu poet.^[2]

Nusrati writing the Gulshan-i ʿishq, from a manuscript of 1743

Life

Nuṣratī was born in the Carnatic region into an elite Muslim family of Brahmin origin.^[3] He lived as a Sufi dervish before moving to Bijapur.^[2] There he was made a mansabdar under Sultan ʿAlī II (r. 1656–1672) of the ʿĀdil-Shāhī dynasty.^[4] For his poem ʿAlī-nāma (c. 1665), he was named poet laureate (malik al-shuʿarāʾ).^[5] He died at an old age in 1674^[6] or 1683.^[7]

Works

Nuṣratī wrote in the Deccani variety of Urdu and Persian.^[8] His poetry uses archaic language and a complex style.^[2] He was a prominent practitioner of the qaṣīda, ghazal and especially mathnawī forms.^[9] One of his earliest works, Miʿrāj-nāma, was written for Sultan Muḥammad ʿĀdil Shāh (r. 1627–1656).^[10]

His most original work is the ʿAlī-nāma, an epic celebration of ʿAlī II's wars against the Mughals and Marathas.^[11] It is the earliest panegyric of a ruler in Deccani.^[4] Nuṣratī himself claimed to have invented a new poetic form with this work, which is "the only thing of its kind in Urdu".^[12] It is patterned on the Persian Shāh-nāma.^[13] Grahame Bailey calls it the greatest poem ever written at Bijapur.^[10]

Nuṣratī's final poem, written in a similar vein, is Taʾrīkh-i Sikandarī (also called the Taʾrīkh-i Bahlol Khani), a celebration of Bahlol Khan's victory over Shivaji at the battle of Umrani in 1672. It was written for ʿAlī II's successor, Sikandar.^[14] Unlike the ʿAlīnāma, written at the height of Bijapur's power, it is "largely in a minor key".^[12] Other works of Nuṣratī's include Gulshan-i ʿishq (1658), a collection of odes and the lyric collection Guldasta-yi ʿishq.^[15] Gulshan-i ʿishq is a highly conventional romance.^[16]