THIS BOOK is about the lives of two noblemen in Mughal India: Bairam Khan Khan-i-Khanan (c. 1497–1561) and his son Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan (1556–1626). In any period and in any country, these would have been extraordinary men. Bairam was a Persian Turkmen, scion of a distinguished clan that was influential in Persia and Central Asia in the fifteenth century. He stands out in Mughal history as the regent of the empire for five years after the premature death of Emperor Humayun, when Akbar was still a child and too young to rule. Bairam’s son, Abdur Rahim, became one of the great generals of the Mughal empire and a premier noble during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir. Abdur Rahim’s political and military achievements surpass his father’s, but he is best remembered for his literary prowess. He was one of the great patrons of Persian literature of his time; in the history of Hindi literature, he has an even greater reputation as an outstanding poet in a century of literary achievement. Between them, the father and
son straddled some hundred years of Mughal history in India, living through the reigns of four emperors, and their spectacular and turbulent trajectories reflect both the grand designs and the destructive courtly intrigues of Mughal politics.

In Attendant Lords, T.C.A. Raghavan chronicles the life of Abdur Rahim and Bairam Khan – two noblemen during a turbulent period in Mughal history. More significantly, the book shed light on the trajectory of Rahim's poetry and analyses the surprisingly Hindu devotional aspect of a Muslim poet. Attendants Lords spans the reigns of four emperors - Babur, Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir - and covers over a hundred years of Mughal history, a time when these two noblemen were at the very heart of the court's labyrinthine politics.