Sarmad Kashani

Delhi's naked faqir — the Persian mystic of the rubai, martyred for refusing to bend. Sarmad Kashani (c. 1590–1661), whose full name was Muhammad Sa'id, was a Persian-speaking Armenian mystic and poet who made India his home. Born around 1590, in Kashan or Armenia, into a Jewish Persian-speaking Armenian merchant family, he was educated in philosophy and the sacred texts, and studied under the great thinkers of Isfahan. As a wealthy trader he sailed to India and landed at Thatta in Sind in the early 1630s, where he fell in love with a young Hindu, Abhai Chand — a love that turned him from merchant to wandering dervish. The two travelled together through Lahore and Hyderabad to Delhi, where the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh welcomed him and became his disciple. Sarmad wrote some three hundred Persian quatrains, the rubaiyat on which his fame rests, with a small number of ghazals and fragments besides; with Abhai Chand he also carried part of the Torah into Persian, and he supplied the account of Judaism in the great comparative survey of religions written in India in his lifetime. He went about Delhi as a naked faqir, owning nothing, speaking plainly against priestcraft and cant, and refusing to bend. After Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shikoh, Sarmad was tried for heresy and beheaded outside the Jama Masjid in Delhi in 1661. His tomb still stands beside the mosque, a place of pilgrimage, and he is remembered as the second Hallaj — the martyr who would not unsay what he believed.