Pilgrim Clouds: The Polymorphous Sacred in Indo-Muslim Imagination‪.‬

This article explores one Urdu poem of the early twentieth century, by the Indian poet Sayyid Muhammad "Muhsin" Kakorvi. "In Praise of the Best of Messengers" includes imagery of shape-shifting clouds that the poet skillfully uses to evoke the sacred and to describe his own relationship to the Prophet Muhammad from his locale as a Muslim in colonial India. He does this by invoking multiple geographic, cultural, and religious references in juxtaposition, as he moves from Qur'anic to Indic religious motifs through cloud images. His sense of the sacred is rooted in Indian imagery even as it embraces a wider Islamic identity that is also Persianate and Arabian. Muhsin's poetry seeks to reassert a multi-dimensional Islamic identity in India, anchored in Sufi theo-erotic mysticism and "oneness of being" philosophy. This is in stark contrast to other colonial Urdu poets, like Hali and Iqbal, whose use of religious imagery is more ideological and who saw poetry as a vehicle for nascent nationalism and communal separatism in a self-consciously "modernist" movement. **********