Basatin al-Uns (The Gardens of Fondness, c. 1325-26) is the sole surviving work of an erudite courtier named Akhsitan Dihlavi (1301-1351), who spent most of his adult life in the service of Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq (1320-1324) and his son Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq Shah (r. 1324-1351). This book was conceived when Akhsitan accompanied Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq on the latter’s military expedition to Sunargoan, Lakhauti, and Tirhut in east India. On their return journey, he fell sick due to the extreme heat of Tirhut. While he was convalescing under the watchful eyes of the famed physician Muhammad Khujandi, his friends narrated several Sanskrit love stories for his amusement. Although their stories had moved him profoundly, he was quite disappointed by the literary style of their Persian translation and narration. Consequently, he decided to recast these romances in an elegant and charming style in his Bas?t?n al-Uns. Alongside the fictional tales of kings and queens from Kalyan, Sarandip (Ceylon), Ujjain, Kashmir, Kannauj and China, Akhsitan Dihlavi narrates the political events and military campaigns of his Tughluq patrons and portrays the social and cultural conditions prevailing in early modern India. Thus, Basatin al-Uns exemplifies one of the earliest efforts by an Indian writer to interweave history (tarikh), autobiography (zindaginama), eulogy (qasida) and folklore (qissa) in the form of Persian prose (nasr). My paper reexamines the fictional stories of Basatin al-Uns with the aim of elucidating Akhsitan’s engagement with South Asian literary cultures and folklore, on the one hand, and Persian literary genres on the other hand. It reflects on the modalities of literary translation and cultural exchange, which underscored the emergence of Persian prose writing in South Asia. Through a critical appraisal of Akhsitan’s pathbreaking work, I argue that early modern Persian genres acquired a global profile primarily because they facilitated a cross-regional exchange of ideas, narratives, and ethoi. In doing so, I critique various Iranocentric models of literary history and propose cultural resonance as a more inclusive and ethical basis for exploring the history of Persian literature.