Sarmad Kashani

Sarmad was born around 1590 to a family of Armenian Jewish merchants, most likely in or near the trading networks that connected the Armenian Highlands with the Safavid commercial hub of Kashan in central Iran. The name by which history knows him, Sarmad Kashani, records that association with Kashan, a city famous for silk and long-distance trade ^[1]. His given name appears in some sources as Sa'id, and the pen name Sarmad, meaning eternal or everlasting in Persian, was the signature he later attached to his poetry ^[2].

Any Sarmad Kashani biography must begin with the problem of sources. Almost everything known about his early decades comes from later Persian chronicles and from the Dabistan-i Mazahib, a seventeenth-century survey of religions whose author knew Sarmad personally in India ^[3]. These accounts agree that he received a serious education. He is said to have studied rabbinic learning within his own community before turning to Islamic texts, and traditions preserved in Mughal-era writing name the philosophers Mulla Sadra and Mir Findiriski among his teachers in Iran ^[1]. Whether or not every detail of that schooling can be confirmed, his later writings show a man fluent in Persian poetic convention and comfortable moving among Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu ideas.

At some point in early adulthood he professed Islam. The conversion did not end his engagement with his native tradition: contemporaries record that he could still discuss the Hebrew scriptures with authority, and the Dabistan credits him with helping to explain Jewish belief to its author ^[3].

Trade first carried Sarmad eastward. Hearing that precious goods and curiosities commanded high prices in Mughal India, he assembled merchandise and sailed to Thatta, the prosperous port city of Sindh on the lower Indus, probably in the early 1630s ^[2]. The journey was an ordinary one for a Kashani merchant. What happened in Thatta was not.

In Sindh, Sarmad met a Hindu youth named Abhai Chand, and the attachment that formed between them changed the course of his life. The Dabistan-i Mazahib, written by an author who met both men, describes Sarmad's overwhelming love for Abhai Chand, the initial alarm of the young man's family, and their eventual acceptance of the mystic into their circle ^[3]. Sarmad abandoned commerce entirely. Persian tradition holds that in the intensity of this experience he gave up wearing clothes, adopting the naked state he would maintain, with brief interruptions, for the rest of his life ^[1].

Abhai Chand became his lifelong disciple and companion. Under Sarmad's direction the young man learned Persian and Hebrew, and the two collaborated on a Persian rendering of portions of the Hebrew Bible, a translation project quoted in the Dabistan ^[3]. The scholar Nathan Katz has treated this partnership as a rare documented case of Jewish, Sufi, and Hindu identities meeting in a single Mughal life ^[4]. From Sindh the pair traveled through the Deccan, with stays reported at Hyderabad and Golconda, before moving north toward the imperial capitals ^[2].

By the 1650s Sarmad had settled in Shahjahanabad, the new Delhi built by Shah Jahan, where he lived as a mendicant on the steps and streets around the Jama Masjid ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Sarmad Kashani in his own lifetime would have received a divided answer. To admirers he was a saint drunk on divine love, indifferent to the body and to social rank. To critics he was a public scandal, a man who ignored the ritual obligations of Islam and answered legal scholars with verses instead of apologies ^[1].

His nakedness was the most visible provocation, but not the only one. Observers reported that he declined to fast or perform the prescribed prayers, and a famous story preserved in later hagiography has him reciting only the opening negation of the Islamic profession of faith, the words meaning there is no god, while refusing to complete the affirmation. He reportedly explained that he was still absorbed in negation and had not yet arrived at the truth he could honestly affirm ^[2].

It was in Delhi that Sarmad attracted his most consequential admirer. Dara Shikoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan and heir apparent to the Mughal throne, was a scholar-prince deeply engaged with Sufism and Hindu philosophy, and he sought out unconventional mystics across the capital. Dara corresponded with Sarmad and visited him, and the historian Supriya Gandhi has documented the place of this friendship within the prince's wider circle of religious inquiry ^[5]. The association gave the naked faqir a measure of protection while Dara's star rose. It became a liability the moment it fell.

Sarmad's literary reputation rests on his Persian quatrains, the four-line rubaiyat in which he compressed his ideas about love, God, and the emptiness of religious formalism ^[1]. Several hundred quatrains circulate under his name, though as with much premodern Persian verse the boundaries of the authentic corpus are uncertain. The poems that can be reliably attributed to him are direct and often confrontational. They mock outward piety, celebrate the beloved as a window onto the divine, and return again and again to the image of the lover who has staked everything and fears nothing ^[4].

Annemarie Schimmel, the historian of Sufism, placed Sarmad within the antinomian current of Islamic mysticism: the tradition of God-intoxicated figures who deliberately courted blame and treated social disgrace as a badge of sincerity ^[6]. His verses invoke Mansur al-Hallaj, the tenth-century mystic executed in Baghdad for his ecstatic utterances, and Sarmad's readers have long noticed how closely his own end mirrored that model.

Among Sarmad Kashani achievements, the Persian Torah translation undertaken with Abhai Chand deserves separate mention. Surviving only in the extracts quoted by the Dabistan-i Mazahib, it is one of very few premodern attempts to carry Hebrew scripture into Persian from within India, and it makes Sarmad a small but genuine figure in the history of translation as well as of poetry ^[3].

The Mughal war of succession destroyed the world in which Sarmad had flourished. When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657, his sons fought for the throne, and by 1659 Aurangzeb had defeated, captured, and executed Dara Shikoh on charges that included apostasy from Islam ^[5]. The new emperor then moved against the late prince's associates, and the naked poet of the Jama Masjid was an obvious target.

Sarmad was brought before the court on charges arising from his public nudity, his neglect of Islamic ritual, and his refusal to recite the full profession of faith ^[2]. Later accounts add a political edge: he was said to have prophesied in verse that Dara would gain the throne, a prediction that now read as sedition. Tradition holds that the court's scholars pressed him to complete the shahada and cover himself, and that he declined both demands. He was condemned and beheaded in 1661 near the steps of the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, in front of the crowds among whom he had lived ^[1].

Historians differ over how to weigh the charges. Audrey Truschke, in her study of Aurangzeb, notes that the execution served the emperor's need to punish Dara's circle as much as any purely doctrinal concern, and most modern scholars read the trial as a case where theology and dynastic politics reinforced each other ^[7]. Popular memory settled the question more simply. Almost immediately, Delhi's storytellers began recounting that the severed head had continued to recite, and Sarmad entered the ranks of the martyrs of love ^[2].

Sarmad's grave lies a few steps from the eastern gate of the Jama Masjid, painted a deep red and known as the dargah of Hare Bhare Shah Sarmad Shaheed. It remains an active shrine where Muslims, Hindus, and visitors of no fixed persuasion light incense side by side, an afterlife entirely in keeping with the man's refusal of religious boundaries ^[8].

His modern reputation owes much to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the scholar and Indian independence leader, who published an admiring essay on Sarmad in 1910. Azad presented the executed poet as a hero of conscience against state power, and the essay, later translated into English as an account of Sarmad the martyr, fixed him in the imagination of twentieth-century India ^[9]. Since then Sarmad has appeared in Urdu and Persian scholarship, in Nathan Katz's study of his layered religious identity, and in histories of Dara Shikoh's circle, while his quatrains continue to be recited at his shrine and set to music by qawwali performers ^[4].

The basic Sarmad Kashani facts, a Jewish birth around 1590, a merchant's voyage, a transforming love in Sindh, a naked life outside every orthodoxy, and a public beheading in 1661, would sound like legend if the documentary trail were thinner. Because a contemporary recorded him and a court condemned him, historians can treat Sarmad as more than a story. He endures as one of early modern India's clearest examples of a life lived, and lost, entirely on its own terms ^[3].