Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200–1550 A.D.) c4.s2.t2.3.3

c4.s2.t2.3.3

This has led me to examine not only his history and historical poems but also his complete Diwan, his Kulliyat (collected poems) particularly his Matl'a-ul-anwar exposing the manners and the morals of his day, and even his voluminous and rather abstruse book on epistolography, the I'jaz-i-Khusravi. As a 'high-brow' artist or chronicler, Khusrau could have confined himself to courtly environment and association with a few cultured men of letters ; even as a social historian he could have written with the detachment of an academician like Abu'l Fazl. But Khusrau came from the people and feels at his best only when he moves among the crowd. When behaving as a courtier or as a man of letters, he is conscious of playing a part : his ascetic and puritan moods are decidedly morbid and only temporary, and he avails himself of the first opportunity to throw away these masks and morbid gloom and to start laughing and pleasing himself like other people. Nay, to assure the crowd that no amount of intellectual attainments and secular elevation can stop him from being congenial to them, he even borrows sometimes the vulgarity of the undeveloped mind, and the unrefined taste of the illiterate. When he is among common people he takes a detached view of his previous stately environments and spiritual heights and gives an honest and frank opinion about men and things, not excluding himself.