Amir Khusrau served under a remarkable succession of Delhi Sultanate rulers across more than four decades, surviving multiple changes of dynasty and court faction as a favored poet at a time when court poets who fell out of favor could lose far more than a patron. His enormous Persian language output includes historical verse narratives commissioned by his royal patrons, lyric poetry, and prose works, and he is also widely credited, though the historical evidence for the specific attribution is thinner than the tradition surrounding it, with composing riddles, proverbs and popular verse in Hindavi, an early form of the vernacular that would eventually develop into Hindi and Urdu, work that if genuinely his places him unusually early among elite Muslim poets writing seriously in an Indian vernacular register.
Alongside his court career, Khusrau maintained a lifelong devotion to Nizamuddin Auliya, the leading Chishti Sufi shaykh of Delhi, becoming one of his closest disciples and, according to widely repeated hagiographic tradition, dying within months of his master in 1325, reportedly of grief, and being buried beside him in the same Delhi shrine complex, where both tombs remain major pilgrimage sites today. Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence's study of the Chishti order treats the Khusrau-Nizamuddin relationship as one of the most fully documented master-disciple bonds in South Asian Sufi history, precisely because Khusrau's own considerable literary output gives it a written record most such relationships lack.