Vocabulary and Indian Culture in the Persian Poems of Mukhlis Lahori

Rai Rayan Anand Ram Lahori (1107-1164 A.H.), known as ‘Mukhlis’, is one of India's great Hindu poets and writers. Apart from Diwan poems, his important writings in various fields of lexicography, biography writing, chronicle writing, memoir writing, and travelogue writing have been left by him. Mukhlis’ Diwan is a collection of his Persian poems and Rekhta, manuscripts of which are kept in Reza Library (Rampur, India), Moulana Azad Library (Aligarh, India), and British Museum Library (London), and the authors have corrected it and added notes on it. In his Diwan, there is the use of some Indian words that are less common in other people's poems, as well as the use of some Persian and Arabic words with a meaning other than what is common in Iranian Persian, and the reflection of some Indian customs. In the present study, an attempt has been made to investigate and report the reflection of such words and rituals in the Mukhlis’ poems and to answer the question of how much India and the Indian culture is reflected in the Persian poems of this Persian-speaking Indian Hindu poet. This research is applied in the direction of lexicography, cultural research, and lexicology in the Indian and Persian languages and literature.