Bedil

Mirza Abdul-Qadir Bedil was born in 1644 in Azimabad (present-day Patna) in the Indian province of Bihar. His ancestors came from Central Asia, from the Arlat (Barlas) tribe of the Chagatai, and had settled in India in the Mughal period, serving in its army. His father, Mirza Abdul-Khaliq, belonged to the Qadiriyya Sufi order and named his son after its founder, Abd al-Qadir Gilani. Bedil’s mother tongue was Bengali; he also knew Urdu (then called Rekhta), Sanskrit and Turkic, and learned Persian and Arabic at elementary school.

His father died when he was about four and a half, around 1648. He was raised first by Mirza Qalandar, his father’s disciple and a distant relative, and later by his maternal uncle Mirza Zarif, a merchant and jurist. He wrote his first poem at ten. He began under the pen name Ramzi and, on the advice of his spiritual guide Mawlana Kamal, took the name Bedil. In 1659–60 he travelled through the cities of Bengal and spent three years in Orissa (Cuttack), where he came to know the Sufi Shah Qasim Huwallahi.

In 1664 Bedil moved to Delhi, then called Shahjahanabad. For the next twenty years he travelled between Delhi, Agra, Mathura, Lahore and Attock. For a time he served in the army of Aurangzeb’s son Prince Muhammad Azam, but left rather than compose panegyrics to the prince. The Mughal nobleman Nawab Shukrullah Khan became his lasting patron and close friend; in 1687–88, while staying with him in the Bairat hills, Bedil wrote the poem “Tur-i marifat”.

Bedil wrote in Persian. His poetic legacy runs to some 147,000 couplets: ghazals, quatrains, qasidas and four Sufi mathnawis — “Muhit-i azam”, “Tilism-i hayrat”, “Tur-i marifat” and “Irfan”. His prose includes the autobiographical “Chahar unsur”, the philosophical “Nukat” and the collected letters “Ruqaat”. His work was shaped by the Sufi doctrine of the unity of being and by Indian philosophy.

The death of his son Abdul-Khaliq in 1711 shook him deeply, and he wrote an elegy for him. In 1712 he finished the mathnawi “Irfan”, on which he had worked for many years. He spent his last years in Delhi and died there on 5 December 1720 (4 Safar 1133 AH); he was buried in the courtyard of his own house. The grave was destroyed during Nadir Shah’s invasion and later incursions, and the tomb known today is of recent date.

Bedil found his widest audience in Afghanistan and Transoxiana: by the end of the 18th century imitating him had become commonplace among the poets of the region, his works entered school curricula and his verses passed into folk song. In Afghanistan the tradition of “Bedil-khani”, reading and discussing his poems in groups, survives to this day. Sadriddin Ayni wrote ghazals in Bedil’s manner at the start of his career and later devoted a book to him; his influence is visible in Mirza Ghalib and Muhammad Iqbal.