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 canons to fashion their authorship. Breaking with the tendency to categorize and characterize Persian literature according to the dynasty in power, this book argues for the indirectness and complexity of the relations between poetics and politics. Among its original contributions is an interpretation of B¿dil¿s Sufi adaptation of a Braj-Avadhi tale of utopian Hindu kingship, a novel hypothesis on the historicism of Sir¿j al-Din `Al¿ Kh¿n ¿¿rz¿¿s oeuvre and a study of how Bindr¿ban D¿s ¿Khvushg¿" entwined the contrasting models of authorship in B¿dil and ¿rz¿ to formulate his voice as a Sufi historian of the Persian poetic tradition.