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Who Wrote “If There Is Paradise on Earth, It Is This, It Is This, It Is This”?

The famous couplet is traditionally attributed to Amir Khusrau, while another account names Sa’adullah Khan. The evidence does not conclusively settle its authorship or original setting.
Opened Runtime3 min Written byDocumentaryTube Team
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The lines are traditionally attributed to Amir Khusrau, but the evidence Rana Safvi discusses does not establish that he wrote them. Her account also reports an alternative attribution to Sa’adullah Khan for the Red Fort inscription. The safest answer is that Khusrau is the familiar attribution, Khan is a plausible alternative, and the couplet’s original authorship remains unsettled.

The couplet and its famous setting

The Persian couplet is commonly rendered: “If there is Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” Safvi gives the transliteration as “Agar firdaus bar ru-ye zamin ast / Hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast.” It is inscribed above the inner corner arches of the Diwan-e Khas, the Hall of Private Audience, at Delhi’s Red Fort.

Drawing on the account by Begley and Desai, Safvi says Shah Jahan ordered the verse inscribed after his first state entry into the completed fort. Its imagery of paradise suited the court complex’s gardens and water features. The setting helps explain the couplet’s enduring association with the Red Fort, but where a verse was displayed does not by itself establish who composed it.

What supports the attribution to Amir Khusrau?

In Safvi’s account, Professor Sunil Sharma said that the couplet appears in neither a diwan nor a masnawi of Khusrau. Safvi and Professor Jameel-ur Rahman report finding it instead in a manuscript of Mirza Muhammad Tahir Aashna’s Diwan-e Aashna at New Delhi’s National Museum. The manuscript is identified as accession number 62.999; the couplet appears on page 88 in the long poem Masnawi-ye Saqi Nama.

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A passage immediately before the lines, in Safvi’s translation, says: “Since Khusrau composed meaningful verses, / You’d say he wrote this [verse] for here [this garden], / If there is a paradise on earth…” Aashna’s poem therefore attributes the famous couplet to Khusrau. But that is evidence that the attribution was in circulation, not proof that Khusrau was the original author. Safvi notes that verses were attributed to Khusrau even in the seventeenth century, reflecting his stature as a classical poet.

Why Sa’adullah Khan is another possibility

Safvi cites historian Bashiruddin Ahmad Dehlvi’s Waqiaat-e-Darul Hukumat Dehli, which identifies the verse as Sa’adullah Khan’s famous inscription. In that account, calligrapher Rashid placed it on marble below the Diwan-e Khas cornice. Safvi also points to Khan’s literary work and other verses as context for the attribution.

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This makes Khan a plausible alternative, not a conclusively established author. The two accounts do not resolve the question: Aashna’s poem credits Khusrau, while Dehlvi’s history reports Khan as the author of the inscription. Neither report, as presented by Safvi, settles who first composed the lines.

Was the couplet originally written for Kashmir?

A common story places the original inscription at Shalimar Bagh in Srinagar. Safvi says she searched the Black Pavilion and other pavilions there and found neither the inscription nor a reference to it in the garden books she consulted. That search is a reason not to repeat the Kashmir story as established fact; it does not prove the lines were never associated with the garden.

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Safvi’s conclusion is that the verse was not written for Kashmir because Khusrau never visited it. That statement addresses the proposed setting on the premise that Khusrau wrote the couplet; it does not settle whether he composed it for Delhi. The question of the original site is related to, but distinct from, the question of authorship.

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What can be said with confidence?

  • The familiar credit is Amir Khusrau, but Safvi reports that the couplet is absent from his collected works.
  • Aashna’s manuscript preserves the lines and attributes them to Khusrau, showing that the attribution circulated in a later literary account.
  • Dehlvi’s history reports Sa’adullah Khan as the author of the Red Fort inscription; that attribution remains unconfirmed by the evidence described here.
  • The prominent inscription is at the Red Fort’s Diwan-e Khas. Safvi reports finding no corresponding inscription at Shalimar Bagh.
  • The couplet is connected to a seventeenth-century Delhi literary and architectural context, but the available accounts do not identify its original author or first setting conclusively.

Safvi gives 18 April 1648 as the inauguration date of Qila-e Mubarak, the Red Fort, and says poets composed verses and chronograms for the occasion. That context places the couplet within the world of Shah Jahan’s Delhi, but it does not prove whether it originated then or was already being credited to Khusrau.

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For further reading, see Rana Safvi’s 2019 Scroll.in account, excerpted from Shahjahanabad: The Living City of Old Delhi.

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