Eastern literature in the middle ages

South Asia
With the emergence of the Ghaznavids and their successors such as the Ghurids, Timurids and Mughal Empire, Persian culture and its literature gradually moved into South Asia too. In general, from its earliest days, Persian literature and language was imported into the subcontinent by culturally Persianised Turkic and Afghan dynasties. Persian became the language of the nobility, literary circles, and the royal Mughal courts for hundreds of years. In the early 19th century, Hindustani replaced it.
Under the Mughal Empire during the 16th century, the official language of the Indian subcontinent became Persian. Only in 1832 did the British army force the South Asia to begin conducting business in English. (Clawson, p. 6) Persian poetry in fact flourished in these regions while post-Safavid Iranian literature stagnated. Dehkhoda and other scholars of the 20th century, for example, largely based their works on the detailed lexicography produced in India, using compilations such as Ghazi khan Badr Muhammad Dehlavi's Adat al-Fudhala (اداة الفضلا), Ibrahim Ghavamuddin Farughi's Farhang-i Ibrahimi (فرهنگ ابراهیمی), and particularly Muhammad Padshah's Farhang-i Anandraj (فرهنگ آنندراج).
Rudaki (c. 858 – 940/41) was a poet, singer, and musician who is regarded as the first major poet to write in New Persian. A court poet under the Samanids, he reportedly composed more than 180,000 verses, yet only a small portion of his work has survived, most notably a small part of his versification of the Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of Indian fables.
Little information is available about Rudaki's life, much which has been reconstructed from his poems. He lived during the era of the Samanid Empire (819–999), under which New Persian literature began to develop and flourish. Of Persian stock, Rudaki was born in c. 858, in the village of Banoj (Panjrud), located in the Rudak area between Samarqand and Bukhara. The most important part of Rudaki's career was spent at the court of the Samanids. While biographical information connects him to the Samanid amir (ruler) Nasr II (r. 914–943), he may have already joined the court under the latter's predecessor, Ahmad Samani (r. 907–914).
Rudaki's success was largely due to the support of his primary patron, the vizier Abu'l-Fadl al-Bal'ami (died 940), who played an important role in the blooming of New Persian literature in the 10th-century. Following the downfall of Bal'ami in 937, Rudaki's career deteriorated, eventually being dismissed from the court. He thereafter lived his last years in poverty, dying blind and alone in his hometown.
In Iran, Rudaki is acknowledged as the "founder of New Persian poetry" and in Tajikistan as the "father of Tajik literature".
Rudaki's blindness is implied by the writings of early poets such as Daqiqi (died 977), Ferdowsi (died 1020/25), Abu Zura'ah al-Mu'ammari (fl. 10th-century) and Nasir Khusraw (died after 1070). The historian Awfi (died 1242), even says that Rudaki was born blind, but this has been questioned by some modern scholars, due to the expressive picture of nature given by Rudaki in his writings.
According to Asadi Tusi, the divan (collection of short poems) of Rudaki consisted of more than 180,000 verses, but most of it has been lost. What little remains of Rudaki's writings, mostly single verses, can be found in Persian dictionaries, particularly the Lughat-i Furs of Asadi Tusi. A few complete poems have also survived, most notably a qasida (eulogy or ode) consisting of almost 100 verses quoted in the anonymous Tarikh-i Sistan. The qasida was dedicated to Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Muhammad, who ruled the region of Sistan as a Samanid governor from 923 to 963. In it, Rudaki calls Abu Ja'far an aristocrat of Sasanian ancestry and "pride of Iran", thus indicating a sense of continuity in Iranian identity from the Sasanian to the Samanid period. For this poem, Abu Ja'far rewarded Rudaki with 10,000 dinars.
Rudaki's best known work is his versification of the Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of Indian fables. Nasr II had ordered Bal'ami to translate the book from Arabic to Persian, and then appointed "interpreters" to read it out loud, so that Rudaki, who was blind, could versify it. Only a few of the verses made by Rudaki have survived. Some of them have been identified in the Lughat-i Furs. Rudaki's surviving poetry is generally easy for literate native Persian readers to understand despite variations in terminology, word forms, and phrase and sentence patterns.
Although Rudaki displayed pro-Isma'ili sympathies in his writings, his poetry is fully secular in nature. Islam was firmly established by the 10th-century, however, Persians still remembered their deep-rooted Zoroastrian history. Rudaki was more prone to evoke ancient Iranian and Zoroastrian notions instead of Muslim ones. Some of Rudaki's poems were written in the pre-Islamic andarz style, i.e. ethical teachings, friendly criticism and advice for correct behavior in both private and public.