The Local Lives of a Transregional Poet: ʿAbd al-Qāder Bidel and the Writing of Persianate Literary History

Abstract

This article focuses on the different ways in which the personality and poetry of the Indian-born poet ʿAbd al-Qāder Bidel (d. 1721) has been interpreted and deployed in a variety of contexts across the Persianate sphere of West, Central, and South Asia, particularly in the nineteenth century. By highlighting different interpretations of Bidel as an obscurantist poet, agent of change, progressive voice, unabashed innovator, and canonic master, I present a more complicated historiography of the poet than the way he is typically presented in Persian literary history. An exploration of the ways in which different peoples and places in the Persianate world have interpreted Bidel reveals a larger complex historiography, which identifies transregional similarities among West, Central, and South Asia and contributes towards a more integrative literary history of the Persianate world.