The life and life of Afzal Shāh

Almost everything that is known about the life of Afzal Shāh Biyābānī (d. 1273/1856), a nineteenth-century Muslim faqīr attached to the sepoys of the Hyderabad Contingent, is found in an Urdu biography entitled Afzal al-karāmāt that was completed in 1331/1913 and published shortly afterwards. Afzal al-karāmāt was written by Muhyī al-dīn Darwēsh Qādirī (d. 1362/1943), the son-in-law of Afzal Shāh's son and heir Sarwar Biyābānī (d. 1331/1913). In a very real sense, what Muhyī al-dīn was writing was not folklore but history, albeit a history constructed on its own epistemological foundations. The main focus of Afzal al-karāmāt was a holy man who had died almost sixty years before its completion, so its main sources of information were Afzal Shāh's surviving sepoy disciples and his son Sarwar Biyābānī (d. 1331/1912). Even in his use of such oral sources, Muhyī al-dīn only relayed stories concerning figures whose families were known to his local readership, a selective use of oral tradition that offered both a mechanism and rhetoric of authentication by relying (in the spirit of Hadīth scholarship) on ‘respectable’ informants belonging to Hyderabad's military and landowning classes.