A new era dawned in the history of India with the birth of Ab'ul Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau better known as Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī , who was a famous Sufi musician, Poet, Historian and scholar of late 13 th and early 14 th century. He is one of the leading figure who have focused on the cultural history, language, flora and fauna of the Indian subcontinent. Amīr Khusrau has stood for a major cultural icon in the history of Indian civilization for almost seven hundred years. When Amir Khusrau was in his twenties, he began his career early as a professional writer and later as a Historian. For the next fifty years, until his death in 1325, Khusrau was initially in the court of smaller nobles and princes, then later permanently at the court of the Sultans of Delhi. He witnessed the rule of seven sultans and managed to survive the political intrigues of the various factions and individuals at work in the court of Delhi Sultans.
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This is a report of a research/documentation project conducted under the Asia Fellowship in 2005-06 in Pakistan by an Indian researcher, Yousuf Saeed. It looks at how the 14th-century poet-composer Amir Khusrau's name and heritage has been used to consolidate the cultural identity of Pakistan after 1947.
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Abdul Hassan Yamin-ud-din Khusrau, better known as Amir Khusrau was born at Patiali in district Etah of U.P. in 1252. He was the disciple of famous sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Khusrau is regarded as one of the greatest Persian poet and historian of his age and is said to have written four lakh couplets. He was a prolific writer of prose, poetry and music and was the first Muslim to write in Hindi. His reputation among the historians of his time seems to have been mainly due to his good taste and balanced criticism and patronage of poets. He was also a great singer and enjoyed the title of "Tuti-Hind" or Parrot of India. Amir-Khusrau saw the rise and fall of many kingdoms in Delhi, yet he maintained his association with each successive monarch. The Khilji and Tuglaq rulers treated him with honour and he lived in the court of prince Mohmad, son of Balban. He wrote many books. His famous historical works are: Qiran-us-Saadian, Miftah-ul-Futuh, TuglaqNama, Tarakh-i-Alia etc.
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In this age when people have got their companions in technologies like cell-phones and portable computers, it is increasingly becoming unknown that once upon a time children grew up by listening to the fascinating stories, fairy tales preferably from their grandmothers. With growth and development in technology and capitalism, the families as institutions are getting redefined-undergoing transformations and disintegration characterized by Francis Fukuyama as 'great disruptions'. [The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order. New York: Free Press, 1999] In the midst of too busy parents, the children suffer from the feelings of loneliness and alienation. They become stale with the burdens of back-breaking homeworks of schools. Quite 'leisurely', lending ears to the perpetual suspense in the gripping stories of the grandparents are becoming the practices of bygone era. Many feel that loss of such tradition is adversely affecting the creative potentials of the children. This loss of human touch caused by replacement of grandmothers' stories with certain handy technologies have their own implications whereby many traditions of story-telling, as well as the traditional ways of inculcating moral values among the children, look threatened. The new technologies carry some inherent values of consumerism, ostentatious display of wealth and status, and other attendant ills which have their own influences on the impressionistic minds of the children and adolescents. In the Eastern worlds' 'Oriental' societies, Daastaangoi, has been one such strong tradition. In the social and literary traditions of Persian-Arabic-Urdu the genre of Daastaan has got unique place which subsequently gave rise to other forms of creative prose including novel, short stories (not to say of versified long stories of Masnavi). The genre of Daastaan is seen as such a strong tool of knowing and understanding and preserving the cultural details that the British colonial project of what Michell Focault said, 'governmentality'-knowing the India and its people-took recourse to getting rewritten the Daastaan in early nineteenth century. Thus in the Fort William College of Calcutta, the Bagh o Bahaar of Mir Umman Dehlvi emerged as most outstanding model of Urdu prose, besides becoming a text of repository of sub-continental cultures. [A greatest living scholar of Urdu language and literature, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, researched on Daastaan-e-Amir Hamza in 1998 and elaborated upon the relationship between the storyteller and the listener. Qamrul Hoda Faridi also brought out an abridged version with informative introductory essay in 1999, Tilism-e-Hosh Ruba:
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