To speak of gender and sexuality in premodern Indo-Muslim literatures is to navigate shifts emerging over the course of time. The locus of composition moved from grassroots to Sufi khān-aqāh (monastery) and then to royal courts. On the surface this literature tells stories of heterosexual love, usually doomed, between humans, in genres mostly borrowed from Persian (mas̲navī, qiṣṣa, and ghazal), imported to India from Iran by Sufi mystics from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. In Sufi h…