Poetry as Chronicle: The Case of Iyani Shirazi
The persistence of Tennyson’s poem as the lasting chronicle of war reveals something fundamental about human nature. History usually comes dressed in armour: the chronicle, the decree, the tax roll—all carefully curated records of power and order. Yet it is poetry that preserves what the ledger neglects: complex trails of allegiance, inescapable tremors of fear, and fragile gestures of hope. A poem is among the most human of expressions, a way of saying: “I was here, and I stuck around for long enough to create.”
The Bahmanid Deccan
To see this truth beyond the familiar Anglophone canon, one might look to a very different place and time: the Bahmanid Deccan. This sultanate, founded in 1347, stretched across the high tableland of south-central India, ruling from Gulbarga and later Bidar until its dissolution in 1528. It was the first sovereign Muslim kingdom to ever be established in India. Though based in the Deccan plateau, the Bahmanid court was a thoroughly Persianate world. Persian was the language of government and high culture; scholars, soldiers, and poets poured in from Iran and Central Asia, mingling with Deccani elites and powerful Abyssinian (i.e. East African) commanders. Figures like Mahmud Gawan, a merchant from northern Iran who rose to become vizier and patron of scholars, turned Bidar into one of the most luminous centres of Persian letters in India.2
At its height, the Bahmanid kingdom was not only a political force but also a major centre of Persian literature, philosophy, and Sufi devotion. But the court was never stable. Its politics hardened into rival “houses.” On one side stood the Ghariban (Per. “foreigners”), mostly Turko-Iranian grandees. On the other side were the Dakanis, indigenous elites whose ranks included long-established migrant clans. The split was institutionalised, with each faction seated on opposite sides of the audience hall. Periodically it flared into violence. Efforts at compromise—most famously by Gawan—ended in bloodshed, and over time the fragile balance of this Persianate kingdom collapsed into successor states.3
Iyani of Shiraz
Amid this contested landscape arrived Iyani, an obscure poet from Shiraz who made his career in Bidar in the late fifteenth century. His chief patron was Habib al-Din Muhibballah, a descendant of the Sufi saint Shah Ni'matallah Wali of Kirman. His collected works—and any trace of Iyani himself—survive only in a single manuscript now housed in Chennai. The compositions housed there include his odes of praise, quatrains of reflection, love-lyrics in the Persian ghazal form, and two long narrative poems. The manuscript is finely copied, with gilded margins and careful script, and bears traces of later readers who erased certain lines with blue paint, uncomfortable with the politics of his praise. The manuscript’s scars tell us as much about the afterlife of Iyani’s words as about their original composition.4
Iyani, whose given name was Saad, proudly styled himself a gharib throughout his poetry. The term was biographical: his verses reveal that he had left Iran in the late 1430s, and even after decades in India he confessed to the “burning in my soul” for his homeland.5 Yet the word was also a form of political participation. To call oneself gharib in the Bahmanid court was to declare allegiance to the migrant elite in its struggle against the Dakanis. With a single word, Iyani inscribed himself as both a victim of exile and an indispensable cog in a political machine. Though forgotten today, his poetry was a living testimony of imperial collapse.
In one poem, Iyani laments the aftermath of factional violence in Bidar, where much of his work was lost to looting: “My heart does burn in sorrow for my books and papers.”6 Any creator who has seen their work damaged or destroyed can still sympathise with his grief. In yet another poem, Iyani likened his compositions to the legendary Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran written four centuries earlier by the poet Ferdowsi.7 Delusions of grandeur, reduced to shattered dreams—a tune most artists and writers could hum in their sleep.
The Fath-nama
His most important work, the Fath-nama-yi Mahmud Shahi, narrates the suppression of a rebellion in the early 1490s. The poem recounts the Bahmanid defeat of Malik Dastur Dinar, an Abyssinian slave who tried to establish his own rule in Gulbarga. Under Mahmud Shah, the factional struggles that had long plagued the dynasty became endemic and eventually fractured the sultanate. From these divisions emerged new states, most founded by former slave-soldiers. Iyani’s Fath-nama is a rare first-hand account of Dastur Dinar’s revolt, and one of only two historical works from the Bahmanid sultanate to survive its disntegration.8
On the surface, the poem is pure eulogy. The sultan is likened to King Solomon and the great rulers of Iran, while Muhibballah appears as the saviour of the realm. Dastur Dinar is defeated and captured, only to be spared at the last moment by a merciful monarch. With the rebellion crushed, Bidar is imagined as a fragment of Paradise.9 All of this is, of course, carefully polished for effect. Yet the poem’s very excess is a kind of evidence. When institutions faltered, legitimacy was patched together with miracle and genealogy. Later prose historians, writing at a safer distance, smoothed the story—crediting other figures with the rebel’s pardon or shifting blame away from the throne. It is in these divergences that the reality emerges: a state so fragile it relied on poets and storytellers to shield it from the harsher scrutiny of historians and chroniclers.
The Human Cadence
Albert Memmi, reflecting on the twentieth-century plight of Jews in Arabic-speaking lands, observed: “In our recollections and our imagination, it was a marvelous life, whereas our own newspapers of the times bear witness to the contrary.”10 It was a powerful, timeless insight into human nature. Memory endures not despite its distortions but because of them. It is sustained by nostalgia, coloured by embellishment, and sweetened by longing. At times, the poem and the song outlast reality precisely because they are sweeter than the truth.
Whatever else one might say of Iyani of Shiraz, he was a man marked by sorrow and bound by longing for his homeland. He was a man of exile and displacement, of devotion and reverence for the grandeur of his patrons—yet also of ambition, hoping one day to stand among them. History assures us that Iyani once lived; his poems remind us that, amid chaos and ruin, he was a human soul striving—like us—to wrest meaning from the wreckage.
References
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade, accessed 10 September 2025.
[2] https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bahmanid-dynasty-a-dynasty-founded-in-748-1347-in-the-deccan-sanskrit-daksia-lit/, accessed 10 September 2025.
[3] A.C.S. Peacock, “‘ʿIyānī, A Shirazi Poet and Historian in the Bahmani Deccan”, Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 59:2 (2021), p.173.
[4] Ibid., pp.170-71.
[5] Ibid., pp.172-73.
[6] Ibid., p.174.
[7] Ibid., p.176.
[8] Ibid., p.178.
[9] Ibid., pp.180-81.
[10] Albert Memmi (trans. Eleanor Levieux), Jews and Arabs (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara Inc., 1975), p.28.
