Siraj Aurangabadi

The Deccan's Sufi ascetic — one immortal ghazal that dissolves lover, beloved, and self into pure unknowing. Siraj Aurangabadi (1715–1763), born Syed Sirajuddin in Aurangabad, is the Deccan's great Sufi ghazal-voice. He began in Persian, under the spell of Hafiz, then turned to Urdu and wrote over five thousand shers — a bridge between the old Deccani style and the new idiom taking shape in the north. In 1734, at about twenty, he took bai'at with Shah Abdul Rahman Chishti; on his murshid's order he renounced poetry after 1740 and lived as an ascetic — younger poets still gathered at his house for instruction. His youth had its own wandering: he left home as a mendicant and was brought back and kept under guard. His fame rests on one ghazal, "Khabar-e-tahayyur-e-ishq" — hear the wonder-tale of love, where neither madness nor the beloved remains — sung in our own time by Abida Parveen and others. His *Kulliyat-e-Siraj* gathers ghazals, qasidas and rubais, and his masnavi *Bostan-e-Khayal* is a long narrative in verse. Divine love is the centre of everything he wrote. He died in Aurangabad in 1763.