Amir Khusrau
Quick answer: Amir Khusrau craft guide: bilingual wordplay, riddles and refrains built for music. Learn technique from the father of qawwali and the Hindavi ghazal.
Seven centuries after his death, Amir Khusrau is still sung every Thursday night at Sufi shrines across South Asia. Born in 1253, he served as court poet to a succession of Delhi sultans while remaining the devoted disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and that double life, palace by day, shrine by heart, shaped everything he wrote. He composed vast amounts of polished Persian verse, and tradition also credits him with playful, tender poems in Hindavi, the early ancestor of Hindi and Urdu.
Tradition calls him the father of qawwali, and whatever the precise history, his practice holds a masterclass for modern poets: he wrote for music, for memory and for two languages at once, and he made scholarly craft feel like play.
Who he was
Khusrau was a professional poet in the fullest sense, producing court panegyrics, historical masnavis and a Khamsa, a set of five long narrative poems written in response to the Persian master Nizami. That side of his work displays formidable formal training.
The side that survives in living performance is different: songs of longing addressed to his spiritual teacher, wedding songs, seasonal songs for the rains, and riddles that village children could trade. Few poets in any tradition have worked so successfully at both the elite and popular ends of the art.
The signature moves
Four techniques stand out for a writer studying him today.
What you can learn
If you speak two languages, stop keeping them apart. Draft a poem that lets your second language enter at the moments of greatest intimacy, the way Hindavi enters Khusrau's Persian, and notice how code-switching itself becomes an emotional event.
Build a refrain worth repeating: write a single line you would happily hear twenty times, then construct verses that change its meaning on each return. And write one riddle poem about an ordinary object without naming it; the discipline of indirect description will sharpen every image you make afterwards.
Where to start reading
Start with the songs still performed: Chhaap Tilak, the macaronic Zehal-e-Miskin, and the wedding and separation songs gathered in modern anthologies of qawwali texts. For the courtly side, look at translations of selections from his Persian ghazals and the Khamsa. Better yet, listen: recordings by qawwali ensembles such as the Sabri Brothers or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan show how his refrains behave in performance.
What poets can take from this
- Let both your languages into one poem and place the switch at the emotional peak.
- Write a refrain you could hear twenty times, then make each verse change its meaning.
- Voice devotion, to a person, a place, a calling, in the vocabulary of romance.
- Compose one riddle poem that never names its subject.
- Test your lyric by singing it to any tune; if the stresses fight the melody, revise.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of longing addressed to a teacher or mentor, using the imagery of a wedding: veil, procession, threshold, dye on the hands. Repeat one refrain line at least three times, letting its meaning deepen with each return.
Questions
Why is Amir Khusrau called the father of qawwali?
Tradition credits him with shaping the devotional music performed at Sufi shrines, blending Persian, Arabic and Indian elements, and many core qawwali texts are attributed to him. The exact history is debated, but his songs remain the heart of the repertoire.
What language did Amir Khusrau write in?
His documented literary output is mainly Persian, the court language of the Delhi Sultanate. A rich body of Hindavi songs and riddles is attributed to him by tradition, and some famous pieces weave the two languages together.
What is a paheli?
A paheli is a riddle poem, a form Khusrau made famous, describing an everyday object through wordplay and paradox so the listener must guess it. It is still a living folk form in North India.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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