Arthur Dudney - Delhi: Pages From a Forgotten History

T HIS IS NOT A BOOK OF HISTORY, BUT IT TELLS IN SOME MEASURE THE story of a language, an alien language which became the medium through which countless men and women who made history lived their lives and their thoughts. Persian came to India more than a thousand years ago. It was the language of foreign conquerors who brought with them soldiers as well as poets and men of letters. Many of them stayed back and infused their being into the being that was India. In the process, they coloured their own beings and infused themselves with the sights and sounds and scents of India. Its not an accident that the word ustd(Master) often precedes the name of the first known Indian Persian poet Abl Faraj Rn (d. 1091). Rn was a village near Lahore. It no longer exists, but Lahore has lived through the din and turmoil of history. Lahore was the home of Mas d Sa d Salmn (10461121), whose poems about the city are some of the most poignant and passionate poems that anyone wrote about a city. E. G. Browne quotes Ni m Ar to the effect that some of Mas ds prison poems lamenting his separation from Lahore made his skin creep and filled his eyes with tears. In Mas ds times the city was also called Lahvr.Mas d often in playful lovingness changed the citys name to the Arabic Lahnr(for her there is light). Mas d also wrote a series of poems much like the indigenous brahmssomething like The Shepherds Calendar, but spoken by a lovelorn individual.

According to Mu ammad Auf, writing a century later, Mas