Writing in the eighteenth century, the Persian-language litterateurs of late Mughal Delhi were aware that they could no longer take for granted the relations of Persian with Islamic imperial power, relations that had enabled Persian literary life to flourish in India since the tenth century C.E.

Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi situates the diverse textual projects of Abd al-Q dir B dil and his students within the context of politically threatened but poetically prestigious Delhi, exploring the writers use of the Perso-Arabic and Hindavi literary...