The Literary and the Political in the Fifteenth Century

Historians rarely write about the fifteenth century in north India. When they do, it is within certain set frames, for instance, as an interregnum, or as part of ‘regional’ histories. Occasionally, they write about the ferment of the bhakti ‘movement’ during the period. Tracing the narrow lanes of this historiography, the chapter also points to recent researches that raise some interesting questions. These relate to military labour, literary cultures, vernacularization, multilingualism, and so on. Apart from taking a critical stock of this historiography, the chapter explores how literary history might be fruitfully linked to ‘mainstream’ political history. It analyses meanings of, and the relationship between, literature, history, and power. Texts are not just innocent sources and repository of information. They are also seen as interventions in an ongoing conversation with other texts in the same and related themes and areas.

Vidyapati and Mithila

Vidyapati was a polyglot poet and scholar, attached at different moments to courts of different chieftaincies of north Bihar and the terrain of Nepal. The chapter introduces his scholarly profile and provides the details of all his known compositions. The diversity of their themes, genres and languages is marked. Available information indicates how vibrant the intellectual milieu of Mithila was as a hub of Sanskrit learning during the 14th–16th centuries. The chapter traces the geographical background of the region. It also outlines the political setting with reference to the genealogies of the local rulers. These rulers were mostly ‘autonomous’ but ruled over a relatively tiny principality. Few historians have studied the region during the ‘medieval’ period, most of them local enthusiasts of Maithil culture and pride. The chapter provides a brief account of this historiography and its limitations.

Entangled Vines of Glory

This chapter focuses on Kīrttilatā, a political biography of a Mithila prince, composed in Avahaṭṭha, a register of Apabhraṃśa. It locates the text within the larger literary traditions of Sanskrit, Persian, and Apabhraṃśa vis-à-vis language, genre, narrative structure as well as political ideals. Its language is marked by a large number of both Sanskrit and Persian words, a practice that signals a deeper, if less visible, move towards a politico-ideological mutation. The chapter demonstrates that at the core of the ideals of Kīrttilatā was the aspiration for an imperial formation with universal claims, majestic courts and supreme authority. Clearly, the age-old Sanskritic ideal of rājyam was not forsaken in the middle of the ‘vernacular’ century. Rather, it found a renewed articulation in a reworked form in a language that was, according to Vidyapati ‘sweet to all’.

Writing State and Order

Careful documentation is an integral part of modern state system today. This development in medieval India is most visibly associated with Persian language and its patrons: Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal state. This chapter focuses on Likhanāvalī, a first of its kind text in Sanskrit that provided exemplary models of letters and documents for different official (and intimate) communications, occasions, and transactions. An attempt is made to trace the history of epistolary traditions in India both in Sanskrit and in Persian. The chapter historicizes the text to reveal how it drew on Persian traditions more than it did from the Sanskrit traditions. A close look at the imagined world of Likhanāvalī also reveals interesting perceptions of state, ethics, and the very craft of writing. How important was the cultivation of the skill of writing for the emergence of imperial states like the Mughal’s in the 16th century?

Political Ethics or the Art of Being a Man

Turning to Vidyapati’s famous treatise on masculinity, Puruṣaparīkṣā, this chapter explores its framing and genre, its ideas and stories. This Sanskrit text sought to entertain and to educate young men about state building and ideal forms of manliness. The world of Sanskrit political thought found a contemporarized as well as classicized articulation in the text. The text attempted to weave discriminatory regimes of gender and caste into notions of ideal state and ethical conduct. Yet it is done through complex and entertaining stories, deriving its authority from history, common sense, and occasionally the Vedas. Again, the author is seen to be playing upon a conjunction of comparable features of Persian and Sanskrit literary tradition especially where articulations of exemplary masculinity (jawanmardi/paurusa) is concerned. The chapter also shows how a discourse on nīti (political ethics) was actually undergirded by precepts of dharma.