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Lalla Rookh is a romantic work by Irish poet Thomas Moore, first published in 1817. The title refers to the fictional heroine of the frame tale, depicted as the daughter of the 17th-century Mughal Empire emperor Aurangzeb. It consists of four Narrative poetry with a connecting tale in prose. The work was a resounding success, and its popularity gave rise to many ships being named "Lalla Rookh" during the 19th century. It also played an instrumental role in making Kashmir (called Cashmere in the poem) a household name in the English-speaking world. The poem remains one of the great works of Orientalism poetry and has been regularly adapted into films, musicals, operas, and other media.
Moore is believed to have drawn inspiration from The Garden of Knowledge by Inayatullah Kamboh (1608–1671). He set his poem in a sumptuous oriental setting on the advice of Lord Byron. The work was completed in 1817 while Moore was living in a house in the countryside of Hornsey, Middlesex, and the house was renamed, possibly by Moore himself, after the poem. Lalla Rookh is a fictional daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb; he had no daughter of this name.
The Fire-Worshippers is a 1892 "dramatic cantata" by Granville Bantock based on one of the tales, and Bantock also wrote a 6-part adaptation of the whole poem for piano solo in 1919.
It is also the basis of the operas Lalla-Rûkh, festival pageant (1821) by Gaspare Spontini, partly reworked into Nurmahal oder das Rosenfest von Caschmir (1822), Lalla-Roukh by Félicien David (1862), Feramors by Anton Rubinstein (1863), and The Veiled Prophet by Charles Villiers Stanford (1879). One of the interpolated tales, Paradise and the Peri, was set as a choral-orchestral work by Robert Schumann (1843). Lines from the poem form the lyrics of the song "Bendemeer Stream".
The poem was translated into German in 1846 as Laleh-Rukh. Eine romantische Dichtung aus dem Morgenlande, by Anton Edmund Wollheim da Fonseca, was possibly the most translated poem of its time.
Lala Rookh, a 1958 Indian Hindi-language romantic-drama film by Akhtar Siraj, was based on Moore's poem.
The popularity of the poem and its subsequent adaptations gave rise to many ships being named Lalla Rookh during the 19th century.
Alfred Joseph Woolmer painted "Lalla Rookh" in 1861, depicting Hinda, daughter of the Emir of Arabia, in a tower overlooking the Persian Gulf, based on the story called "The Fire-Worshippers" in the poem. It is now housed in the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery.
It is also credited with having made Kashmir (spelt Cashmere in the poem) "a household term in Anglophone societies", conveying the idea that it was a kind of paradise (an old idea going back to Hindu and Buddhist texts in Sanskrit.
The Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm (founded 1889), often known as "the Grotto", a Side Degrees with membership restricted to Freemasonry, and its female auxiliary, the Daughters of Mokanna (founded 1919), also take their names from Thomas Moore's poem.
The Veiled Prophet Organization of St. Louis, Missouri, founded in 1878 by Charles and Alonzo Slayback created a mythology for a secret society and borrowed the name "The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan".
A tomb in Hassanabdal, Pakistan, dating from the Mughal Empire, is known as the tomb of Princess Lalarukh. Some historians and others say that there is a woman called Lalarukh from the household of Emperor Humayun buried here after dying on a journey from Kashmir, while others claim that she was the daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb. The tomb was first recorded as the Tomb of Lady Lalarukh in 1905, which historians suggest was derived from Moore's popular work and named by British officers in the time of British India.
In George Eliot's 1871/1872 novel Middlemarch, it is said of the character Rosamond Vincy, "Her favourite poem was 'Lalla Rookh'" (Chapter 16).
Legacy
The poem, which earned the highest price ever thus far for a poem (£3,000), enhanced Moore's reputation considerably at the time.
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