“To What Song Does the Vein of Poetry’s Lute Throb?” The Hypotactic Poetics of Bīdil’s Persian ghazals in Sanskrit-Hindi-Arabic Meters

Abstract How, despite the non-specificity of the ghazal’s semantics, can its rhythms contribute to intellectual history? This essay proposes an answer to this question with reference to sixty of the almost three thousand Persian ghazals composed by ʿAbd al-Qādir “Bīdil” (1644–1720) of Delhi. These sixty are distinguished by the fact that their meters are rare or unprecedented in Persian but common in either Arabic or Sanskrit-Hindi or both. Building on the rare aural commonalities between these sixty Persian ghazals and Arabic and Sanskritic poetry in corresponding rhythms, this essay argues that Bīdil used them to multiply and complicate relations between the ghazal’s speakers and its addressees by amplifying hypotaxis; and to subsume the devotional mood of prosodically identical but paratactically simple Hindi hymns to a monist imagination. It concludes by suggesting that his Sanskrit-Hindi-enabled hypotaxis and rhythms in Persian were stylistic imitations of God’s hierarchized self-disclosures.