azad bilgrami

As is generally known, Saraapaa is a Persian literary genre in which the poet or the author strives mainly and primarily to describe the beauties of the beloved from head to toe, generally according to the literary traditions and in a creative and imaginary manner. The main subject of Saraapaa is only the description of the beloved in all her existential dimensions; it is the sole purpose of its creator to write such a description; and it is written completely in a literary language, in the framework of traditional rhetoric, adorned with imagery and poetic exaggerations. These three are necessary and intertwined characteristics of original Saraapaas. This classification is emphasized upon in order to differentiate between Saraapaa and those collections of poems and scattered writings which contain such a subject, but their authors have not had prior intentions and have not envisioned independent forms for them.One of the most significant subgenres of Persian Saraapaa is compiled Saraapaanameh, commonly known as Merat-ol-Jamal (literary, mirror to beauty), which is itself divided into several types. Compiled Saraapaanamehs are extracted from among verse or prose works which are not originally Saraapaa but contain subjects of Saraapaa; therefore, as the name implies, they are not written but collected and the collector is usually someone other than the poet or the author. However, Merat-ol-Jamal by Saeb Tabrizi is one of the most famous examples of compiled Saraapaas, the author and the collector of which is Tabrizi himself, a remarkable poet who has a distinguished place in Persian literature for creating novel subject matters and anthologies.

One of the most fruitful periods of literary criticism in the history of Persian literature is the era of Indian-style poetry, in which treatises were composed specifically on literary criticism. In some tazkiras and treatises on rhetoric, there are detailed scientific criticisms and opinions, which indicate the height of literary criticism in terms of quantity and quality. Especially in the Indian subcontinent, scholarly critics like Khan Arzu and Azad Bilgrami created valuable works in rhetoric and literary criticism. Khan Arzu authored independent treatises on literary criticism, but Bilgrami’s criticisms should be searched for in his tazkiras (especially Khizanah-i Amirah) and rhetorical treatise (Ghizlan ul-Hind). Azad Bilgrami has looked at Persian poems from different perspectives such as linguistics, rhetoric, prosody, and stylistics and has expressed pioneering opinions in these areas. Azad should be considered one of the prominent rhetoricians of the eighteenth century due to his original treatises in the field of rhetoric, Ghizlan ul-Hind and Subhat al-Marjan. Therefore, his rhetorical approach to literary criticism is of particular importance. In this paper, Azad’s rhetorical criticisms have been collected and explained, then his aesthetic viewpoints have been extracted, analyzed, and categorized through the criticisms. Most of his rhetorical perspectives aim to create semantic congruence and correlations, expand the association network of words, and increase their connection. His criteria for literary beauty include escaping from the constraints of the real world and distancing imagination from the limits of nature laws and the conventions of the mind. Azad considers “applicability by native speakers” to be one of the essential criteria for the correctness of unfamiliar language constructions and strange metaphors and similes. He also considers the expansion of the aspects of similarity to be the criteria of the excellence of similes. The beauty of poetry in his opinion is based on the three pillars of aesthetic astonishment, congruence, and objectivity.

Mir Gholam-Ali Azad Bilgrami (1704-1786 A. D.), the great author and poet of India in the 12th century, is considered as one of the prominent men in the Subcontinent in the period of Mughal Empire. Azad has written many works in Persian and Arabic. He has shown his passion for events recording and historical analysis in these works and depending on the circumstances, he has explained the history of Iran and India and other places. His family origins, experience of event recording, his presence at governmental organization and his role in some historical occurrence, convert him to one of the direct chroniclers of the history of India, especially the history of Deccan. This article is dedicated to the share of Azad Bilgerami in recording and analyzing the history of Deccan.

One of the main points in text research is detection of the age of the manuscripts, the origin of the quoted copies from the original manuscripts, and knowledge of their authenticity. Due to the multiplicity of its manuscripts and the added notes and dropped parts of the author after its writing, Khazanah-i Amirah by Mir Ghulam-Ali Azad Bilgrami (1704-1786 A.D.) is a good example to show how to identify the origin of the copies according to additional notes and dropped parts. In the present paper, after mentioning the added notes and dropped parts, the method of comparing the copies of the book has been explained.