Ghulam Rasul Alampuri

Ghulam Rasool Alampuri (29 January 1849 – 7 March 1892) was a 19th-century Punjabi Muslim Sufi poet and author; he authored a rendition of the Yusuf-Zulaikha folktale in 1873.¹ The Urdu article gives his death on 5 March 1892 instead, and records that he became a student of the gaddi nashin of Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya's shrine.²

Ghulam Rasul was born on 29 January 1849 into a Gujjar family from the village of Alampur in Hoshiarpur district; he was six months old when his mother died and twelve when his father died, and he received his primary education from Maulvi Hamid Sahib of his village.¹ He worked as a school teacher in Meerpur from 1864 to 1878, and his formal teaching profession ended in 1882 with his resignation from his last school in Mahesar.¹ Unlike many other Punjabi poets, Ghulam Rasool was not affiliated with any Sufi order.¹

Several minor works of his were collected as Satt phull ("Seven flowers"); his fame rests chiefly on two major works: Dastan-i Amir Hamza, a lengthy epic on the life of Hamza completed in 1869 when he was twenty, and Ahsan al-Qasas, based on the romance of Yusuf and Zulaikha, completed in 1873.¹

He died young, at the age of 43, on 7 March 1892.¹ Doctoral theses on his life and works have been awarded at Patiala in India and twice in Punjab, Pakistan, and seminars marked his 119th death anniversary in both Punjabs; in 2014 his shrine drew media attention when the leaseholder of the adjoining land refused passage to his grandson visiting from Pakistan.¹

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