Beyond imitation: A case for the hermeneutic agency of Persianate literary retellings

Niẓāmī Ganjavi’s Khusrau u Shīrīn is one of the most widely retold narrative poems in classical Persian literature and its legacy far exceeds the contextual confines of medieval Persian courtly culture. Yet, despite the poem’s wide-ranging resonance across the multilingual premodern world, existing scholarship has yet to extend the study of the poem’s reception beyond the confines of the Persian-speaking world, which includes regions from Iran to Central Asia. To address this gap, this article engages the literary reception of Khusrau u Shīrīn in North India, specifically focusing on its Indo-Persian and Punjabi retellings within a comparative framework. It offers an innovative model for understanding the enduring resonance of Khusrau u Shīrīn beyond the conventional approaches of imitation and fidelity criticism. In doing so, it argues that the cluster of North Indian retellings of Niẓāmī’s Khusrau u Shīrīn, which are often disparaged as poor imitations of the classical poem, are in fact a valuable archive, one that is especially important for exploring the under-researched evolution of love poetry from a uniquely Indo-Islamic perspective. Informed by dynamic cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds of later North Indian poets, these retellings exercise a remarkable hermeneutic agency: in the dual motion of adopting the classical text by adapting it to the expectations of contemporary audiences, they play a formative role in perpetuating the legacy of the Persian poem beyond the Persian-speaking world.