Although the past decade has seen an explosion of scholarship on Indo-Persian literature and literary culture in the early-modern period, the history of Persian literature in India in the colonial and postcolonial periods seems to be just revving up now. On the whole, scholars have argued that the colonial period witnessed the erosion and disappearance of Persian and Persian literary selfhood from all but the most elite literary and scholarly circles. The present article begins a critical discussion of this position with reference to a Persian qavvālī performance by the great Murlī (d. ca. 2000). It transcribes and translates a hitherto unstudied Performance, annotates the poetry with information about the three authors, and offers a preliminary sketch of Murlī’s life and relationship to Persian literature and Sufism (to my knowledge, for the first time). In taking the present qavvāli performance and its performer as case studies, it excavates a connected history of colonial-era (pre-1947) Persian and postcolonial (post-1947) Persian and Urdu poetic production that has hitherto escaped the attention of scholars. As such, it preliminarily argues for the persistence of Persian literary and poetic selfhood long into the postcolonial period, but also reveals implied alternative networks of poetic and literary-critical authority at play in the transmission of literary texts and sensibilities.