ʿEŠQĪ, MOLLĀ BĀBOR b. Hedāyat-Allāh, Central Asian poet writing in Persian. Born into a farmer’s family in 1792 in Vārū-ye Panjakent, he attended maktab in his native village and later studied in Bukhara and Samarkand. Returning to his village, he made his living as a farmer. He sometimes supplied wood to craftsmen manufacturing spindles and rolling-pins in Samarkand and Urgut. He died in his native village in 1863. Frequent themes of his poetry are spring, nature, flowers, and love as well as complaints about fate and the difficulties of life in the mountains. He wrote ḡazals, robāʾīs, and qeṭʿas, following the styles of Ḥāfeẓ, Jāmī, Šawkat Boḵārāʾī, and Sayyedā Samarqandī; he also wrote moḵammases containing (tażmīn) their ḡazals. His style is simple, drawing upon the local dialect. Two years before his death, he collected his own poems in a dīvān containing some 3,500 bayts.
Bibliography:
A. Afsahzod in Entsiklopediyai sovetii tojik III, Dushanbe, 1981, p. 151.
Idem, in Entsiklopediyai adabiyot va sanʿati tojik I, Dushanbe, 1988, p. 538.
(Jirí Bečka)
Originally Published: December 15, 1998
Last Updated: January 19, 2012
This article is available in print.
Vol. VIII, Fasc. 6, pp. 640-641
