Asif Khan

Asif Khan, Mirza Ja'far b. Badi' al-Zaman b. Aqa Mulla-yi (Dawlatdar) Qazwini (1551-1612), bearing the titles Qawam al-Din and Asif Khan, an Indian poet composing in Persian, as well as being a historian, and a dignitary of the Mughal court under the rulers Akbar  and Jahangir. His grandfather was a scribe attached to the Safavid court in Iran, and his father, Mirza Badi' al-Zaman, was governor  of Kashan under the Safavid Shah Tahmasb. In his youth Mirza Ja'far accompanied his grandfather and father to the Safavid court, where he came to associate with poets and belletrists, the noted poet Mir Haydar Mu'amma'i, in particular being his intimate friend. At the age of 26 he went on to India in 1577, where his paternal uncle, Mirza Ghiyas al-Din 'Ali Asif Khan, a dignitary in the administration of Akbar, introduced him to the court, where he was appointed diwisti (commander of a troop of 200). Soon, however, Asif Khan resigned from office and retired from the court, whereupon Akbar had Mirza Ja’far soon dispatched  to Bengal. However, due to the turbulence prevailing there, he returned to the capital, Fatehpur Sikri, where he served as a courtier. When his uncle died in 1581, he was vested with the offices of mirbakhshi (royal treasurer of the Mughal court) and du-hazari (commander of a troop of 2000) and was awarded the title Asif Khan. In the period 1597-1599 he served as governor of Kashmir, being elevated at the same time to the Diwan-i Kull, the highest juridical authority in the land. It was in the reign of Akbar Shah (1597-1599) that he was appointed as the governor of Kashmir. When Jahangir, as commander of his father’s forces, liberated Bihar and Allahabad in 1604, he was made governor of Bihar. When Jahangir (1605-1627) acceded to the throne the folloiwng year upon Akbar’s death, he summoned Mirza Ja’far to the court and consigned to him the guardianship (atabeygi, ataliq) of Prince Parwiz. He was promoted to the office of panj-hazari (commander of a troop of 5000) in 1606 and was awarded the bejeweled pen case, an emblem of ministership. In 1609  Accompanying Prince Parwiz as his guardian, he was dispatched to the Deccan to suppress an insurgency, taking along Prince Parwiz as his ward. However, the prince's inclination to debauchery and disputes among dignitaries prevented completion of the mission. Ultimately Asif Khan died in Burhanpur in 1612 at the age of 61 . His poetic noms de plume are Ja'far and Ja'fari, and the collection of his ghazals, qasidas and mathnawis runs to some 3000 verses. Selections of his ghazals have been included in contemporaneous historical and biographical sources, including eulogies of the Prophet and 'Ali. He also composed panegyrics to Akbar Shah and Jahangir. His ghazals, principally love poems, tend towards the Indian genre (sabk-i hindi) of Persian poetry in style, though in his masnawi of Khusraw u Shirin he has followed Nizami [] in theme and design, originally entitled Farhad u Shirin, then revised late in his life, he revised and re-named in honour of his royal patron Jahangir, to whom he dedicated it. It is also known as the Nur-nama (‘The Book of Light’). Numerous manuscripts of this work are extant, the earliest and most accurate of which is the one copied for Jahangir, preserved in the Bodelian Library. He also contributed to the compilation of the Tarikh-i Alifi (‘The History in the Name of ‘A’ [meaning ‘Akbar’]), commissioned by Akbar in 1585  marking the end of the first Islamic millennium. Mulla Ahmad Tatawi, Naqib Khan and 'Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni began its compilation, but after the death of Mulla Ahmad in 1588, Asif Khan was assigned to continue the work, recording events up to 1589. Then 'Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni made the final revision of the first two volumes and Asif Khan completed the third, which came to be known as the Asif Khani to serve as one of the sources used by Mirza Amir Beyg Banarisi, with the nom de plume of Amir, in his compendium of the biographies of poets, Tadhkira hada'iq al-shu'ara', compiled over the years between 1796 and 1845. The poet’s grandson, Mirza Ja'far b. Mirza Zayn al-'Abidin, with his grandfather's nom de plume of Ja'far, was a poet in the reign of Shah Jahan, while his great grandson, Mirza Izadbakhsh, with the nome de plume of Rasa, was a poet and scholar in the reign of Aurangzeb. 

Da'irat al-Ma'arif-i Buzurg-i Islami (1, 418-422).