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On the Road: The Life and Verse of Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq, a Forgotten Eighteenth-Century Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2022

James White Open the ORCID record for James White [Opens in a new window]
James White*
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Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University, UK
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Abstract

Using newly discovered materials, this article introduces readers to the career and poetry of Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq, a now forgotten poet who was connected to many prominent political and literary figures in India during the eighteenth century. The primary source for the research is John Rylands Library, Persian MS. 219, a holograph copy of the poet’s divān, which he presented to John Macpherson, acting Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William, in May 1785. The divān contains a considerable amount of contextual commentary which allows us to reconstruct Mir Zeyn al-Din’s biography and working practices, casting light on how his verse was produced and consumed. An Iranian émigré, he circulated throughout the Punjab, North India and Bengal, accompanying the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shāh Dorrāni on his Indian campaigns, participating in professional symposia with some of the leading literary personages of Delhi, Lucknow and Patna, and entering the ambit of colonialist British patrons in Kolkata.

Keywords

Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshqBook HistoryMigrationPicture Poems (Carmina FigurataMovashshahāt)Poetic Symposia (moshāʿerāt)Ahmad Shāh DorrāniJohn MacphersonSir William Jones
Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 5-6 , December 2020 , pp. 789 - 820
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2020

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Footnotes

This article was written within the framework of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Oriental Poetry, Latin Scholarship and the European Enlightenment: The Case of William Jones’ (grant number RPG-2016-266), which is based at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University, UK. Exploratory research on Persian MS. 219 was conducted while the author was Soudavar Memorial Trust fellow at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, in 2018. The author would like to thank John T. Gilmore for reading a draft of this article; John Hodgson and Elizabeth Gow for their help with practical matters at the John Rylands Library; Julia Bray for sharing two articles on picture poems prior to their publication; and the readers at Iranian Studies for their detailed feedback on this submission. Images of Persian MS. 219 are reproduced with the permission of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

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