Additional information
by T. Raghavan (Author)
Bairam Khan and his son, Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan were soldiers, poets and courtiers whose lives reflected the turbulent times they lived in. In telling their stories, Attendant Lords spans the reigns of four emperors - Babur, Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir - and covers over a hundred years of Mughal history, a time when these two noblemen were at the very heart of the court's labyrinthine politics.
After Humayun's untimely death, Bairam Khan was regent to the young Emperor Akbar for four critical years. Bairam's own son, Abdur Rahim, became one of the most important generals of the Mughal Empire, but he is best remembered for his literary prowess, most particularly for his famous 'dohas'.
Literature plays a large part in this story. This unusual dual biography traces the lives of these two noblemen against the backdrop of the courtly intrigues, brutal power struggles and the grand literary endeavours of the Mughal court.
And it looks at their afterlives - how politics and the Hindi-Urdu debate reincarnated them as national heroes; how both men came to be seen as standing at the confluence of Hinduism and Islam; how their life stories have undergone subtle transformations; and how history, religion and literature combine in the broader context of nationalism and nation building.
Author Biography
T.C.A. Raghavan has a PhD in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been High Commissioner of India to Singapore and to Pakistan. He retired from the Indian Foreign Service in 2015. His first book, Attendant Lords: Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim, Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India, was awarded the Mohammad Habib Memorial Prize for the best book on medieval Indian history by the Indian History Congress in 2017. He is also the author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India's Relations with Pakistan (2017). He is currently Director-General of the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi.
