(b Patiyali, Etah District [now in Uttar Pradesh], India, 1253; d Delhi, 27 Sept 1325). Indian poet, scholar and musician. He was the son of a Turk who entered India under the early Delhi Sultanate as a military officer. Named Dehlavi (‘of Delhi’) and given the honorific title Hazrat (‘excellence’), his Persian and Hindavi poems made him one of the most hallowed names in Indian literary history. The origin of Hindustani music has traditionally been attributed to him, but this is an exaggeration; he has also been credited with a number of more specific musical innovations in the field of instruments, genres and rāga. Among the most famous of these attributions are the invention of the sitār, which appears to be due to a confusion with an 18th-century musician of the same name, and of the vocal genre khayāl, which is almost certainly a misunderstanding over terminology. But there is evidence both from his own writings and in other historical sources that he was musically gifted and accomplished. He served as a high-ranking officer and poet at the courts of a number of successive rulers of the Khilji and Tughluq dynasties in the Delhi Sultanate; his writings have provided a great quantity of valuable primary source material for the history of this period. He became a disciple of the Sufi saint Nizām-ud-Dīn Auliyā, and many religious qavvālī texts and ghazal attributed to him have survived and are still sung.
See also India, §II, 1(ii)(6).
M. Habib: Life and Works of Hazrat Amir Khusrau of Delhi (Aligarh, 1928)
M.W. Mirza: The Life and Works of Amir Khusrau (Delhi, 1935/R)
C.A. Storey: Persian Literature, a Bio-Bibliographical Survey, ii/3 (London, 1939), 495–505
S. Sarmadee: ‘Musical Genius of Amir Khusrau’, Amir Khusrau: Memorial Volume (New Delhi, 1975), 33–41 [pubn of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India]
A. Miner: Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Wilhelmshaven, 1993), 17–21
F. Delvoye: ‘Indio-Persian Literature on Art-Music: some Historical and Technical Aspects’, Confluence of Cultures: French Contributions to the Indio-Persian Studies, ed. F. Delvoye (New Delhi, 1994), 93–130
JONATHAN KATZ