Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India

The early modern Persiantazkiracan be thought of as an attempt to catalogue and archive, in a narrative-fictional way, specific individual personalities and the internal dynamics of the Persian-writing poetic community, and thus to describe (in terms that are also prescriptive) its protocols with regards to poetic education, poetic production, reception, and criticism. In other words, the genre of literarytazkirascan be understood as a kind of autobiography or, even better, auto-hagiography of Persian literature by its own protagonists.¹ “Hagiography” can then be read here as the institutionalisation of reference figures, a powerful device for modelling lives within