Rasul Mir

Rasul Mir, also called Rasul Mir Shahabadi, was a Kashmiri romantic poet of Doru Shahabad in Anantnag, born into a family of zamindars who were the village heads of Mir Maidan.¹ Conventionally dated 1840–1870 — the years carried by Wikidata and stated by the Kashmir Times — his birth and death remain, in the English biography's own words, a debatable subject: the same account places him alive about 1855 yet reports a revenue document of 5 April 1889 that still acknowledged him as a serving muqdam, or village headman.¹²³

Called Imam-e-Ishqiya Shairi, the epitome of romantic poetry, and the John Keats of Kashmir, he formally inaugurated the ghazal in Kashmiri poetry and led a singing party that performed his work from village to village.¹⁴ His surviving kalaam is small — seventy-nine poems in Taing's standard edition of the Kulliyat, four of doubtful authorship, among them a poem on the death of Muhammad and the beloved lyric Rind Posh Maal.¹⁵ The biography notes that in later life he became a disciple of Sheikh Ahmad Tarabali, yet stresses that he was no mystic and had turned his back on Tasavvuf; his grave lies at the Khanqah Faiz Panah in Dooru, beneath the window where he used to sit.¹