# Reorienting Rīti: Bihārī as a Persianate Poet **Presenter**: [[Ravi Prakash]] **Session**: [[Session 11. Bhāṣā-Persianate Interactions]] **Abstract**: Writing about the early seventeenth century poet Bihārī, Ramchandra Shukla remarked that the colorful descriptions of the pangs of viraha in his poetry display a leap of imagination (dūr kī sūjh) and a subtlety of thought (nāzuk ḳhayālī) akin to those of Persian poets. Shukla was not the only one making such a comparison. Mishrabandhu and Upendranath Ashk, too, noted the Persianate style as a marker of Bihārī’s poetry. But what does it mean for a Braj poet to write in a Persianate style? Style goes beyond the use of a certain poetic lexicon or motif or genre. This presentation is an attempt to delineate an analytic category of style. I will do so by focusing on two themes: a) verses which deploy the trope of blending of colors and b) the set of city-verses by Bihārī (and its comparison with other examples of nagaravarṇana, especially, that by Rahīm). However, the interlocutor in my reading will not be any text on Sanskrit poetics, but rather, the chapter on alaṃkāras in Mirza Khan’s Tuḥfat al-Hind and a nineteenth century Persian commentary titled Safrang-e Satasaʾī. Such an exercise, I propose, generates a different orientation for approaching Rīti poetry. It allows one to map out and characterize the shadowy Persianate influence in a poetic practice which was consciously in conversation with Sanskrit models.