Mughal commander Aghar-Khan Dida and his Turkic divan

The article is devoted to a previously unexplored written monument from the Mughal Empire – the Turkic divan of the commander Muhammad Ali Aghar Khan Dida. Based on published historical sources in Persian, their translations into European languages and researchworks on the history of India of the late Mughal era, the main dates of the author's life and work are established, his place in Mughal society and his role in the military and political processes of that time are determined. Special attention is paid to the nature of his Turkic identity and its role in shaping the social status of Aghar Khan. Based on references in literary anthologies of the XVIII — early XX centuries, the range of literary interests and the place of Aghar Khan Dida in the Persian-language literature of India is determined. It is established that the commander wrote two poetry collections of different volumes – in Persian (over 300 folios of manuscript) and in Turkic (8 folios). The article contains a detailed archaeographic description of the Turki-151 manuscript from the collection of the Rampur Raza Library (India), containing the Turkic divan of Aghar Khan Dida. In the course of the literary research, the genre characteristics of Dida's work, the key features of his poetic technique were established, and their specificity was determined in comparison with the Ottoman and Chagatai literary samples. It is suggested that the works of ultra-small forms (single verses and ruba'i) are written fixations of the author's impromptu. Linguistic methods have established that the literary language used by the poet belongs to the Qarluq (Chagatai) type, and specific features have been identified that combine the language of the manuscript with the language of later Turkic-language written monuments from India.