Alam

Shreekant Chandan shows how the seventeenth-century poet Alam projected Princāmā-e Muazzam as a rightful heir to Aurangzeb’s Mughal throne in his Shyāmsnehī by borrowing notions of ideal kingship from akhlāqī discourses current at the time. He considers general questions of agency and historical consciousness in the context of courtly society before exploring Dakhani influences on Alam’s religious thought and literary production, especially as found in his Sudāmā-carit. Alam lived in the Deccan during the closing decades of seventeenth century.

The Poetics of History in Padmakar’s Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī

Allison Busch places Padmakar Bhatt and his Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī in the context of the literary and political imaginary of the eighteenth century. She shows how Padmakar inherits the genre of the virudāvalī (itself a multi-faceted tradition) from Sanskrit, but also a rich lexicon from the vernacular, Arabic, and Persian. The form and language of his work thus reflect the changed political and cultural realities of his time. The seamless movement between modes of versified poetic description in the Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī reflects Padmakar’s simultaneous function as both historian and poet.

War and Succession

William Pinch explores Padmakar Bhatt’s Himmatbahādurvirudāvalī, an account of the ascetic warlord Anupgir Gosain’s victory over the Bundelkhandi prince Arjun Singh Parmar in 1792. Acknowledging that Padmakar occasionally subordinates historical fact to considerations of genre and politics, he asks whether realism is necessarily the best mode to represent the enormity that such a battle represents, its polysemous and elusive ‘truth.’ As Pinch posits, truth-telling is more than mere attention to factual detail. He explains how political theory and sociological transformation are implicit in Padmakar complex political and moral yet ever literary manoeuvres

Hindi Bārahmāsā Tradition

Teiji Sakata compares various poems of the bārahmāsā or ‘twelve-month’ form, showing how they form a piece of shared literary heritage between languages that in the modern period have usually been considered to be quite separate. Sakata surveys several poems composed according to the stylistic conventions of this ‘twelve-month’ form, showing that each one has a distinct narrative, religious, and performative context that informed its reception and shaped its meaning. The bārahmāsā contained within Jayasi’s Padmāvat dramatizes the emotional states of characters implicated in a longer narrative. The bārahmāsā attributed to Mirabai expresses longing for the Divine in the form of Krishna. ‘Folk’ versions of the bārahmāsā in Avadhi and Bundeli express more worldly concerns like longing for a distant beloved or the fear of moneylenders.

Religious Syncretism and Literary Innovation

Stefania Cavaliere shows that the Vijñānagītā of Keshavdas is much more than a translation of an allegorical Sanskrit drama, the Prabodhacandrodaya of Krishnamishra. The allegorical battle between aspects of the mind in Krishnamishra’s text becomes in Keshavdas’s hands a platform for a much broader discussion of metaphysics, theology and religious aesthetics, incorporating such diverse influences as the Yogavāsiṣṭha, the Purāṇas, the Dharmaśāstras, and the Bhagavad Gītā. In this way the Vijñānagītā reads more like a scientific treatise (śāstra) than a work of allegorical poetry, and reflects Keshavdas’s erudition and innovation in weaving together strands of bhakti, Advaita Vedānta and rasa aesthetic theory.

Poetry in Ragas or Ragas in Poetry?

In this chapter Raman P. Sinha makes a bold effort to uncover broad correlations between the verbal content of poetry that is typically set to music and the ragas in which these poems are performed—not at the level of specific compositions but in regard to a poet’s entire oeuvre. Using standard editions as his base, he deals with padas attributed to four leading Hindi poets of the early modern period: Kabir, Surdas, Mirabai, and Tulsidas. Correlating the life stories of these poets with the musical dimensions of their poetic output, Sinha comes to a number of thought-provoking conclusions. Chief among them is his observation of a reverse relationship between the variety of ragas used and the variety of life situations out of which they arise. In music as in life, finds Sinha, Mirabai and Kabir stand at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The Emergence of Hindi Literature: From Transregional Maru-Gurjar to Madhyadeśī Narratives

Imre Bangha locates the source of what would later become the literary idioms associated with the Hindi heartland—Brajbhasha, Avadhi, Khari Boli, and so on—in Maru-Gurjar, an idiom originating not in the Gangetic plain but in western India, particularly the lands of modern Gujarat and western Rajasthan. Bangha argues that it was this literary language, originally cultivated by Jains beginning in the late twelfth century, that eventually spread to the lands known as madhyadeś, where in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it developed into the forms that we now associate with Brajbhasha and Avadhi. Bangha also reveals that the linguistic and literary evidence for this connection has been apparent for some time, but modern Hindi literary historiography, taking nationalism as its organizing principle and embracing a strict sense of religion as one of the significant boundaries of literary culture, has been largely unable to see it.

‘Why Do We Still Sift the Husk-Like Upaniṣads?’

Examining the Padyāvalī of the preeminent Gaudiya theologian Rupa Gosvami, Lutjeharms examines how Rupa creatively arranges both religious and non-religious verses by numerous poets into a dissertation that evinces intimate familiarity with Vedanta (particularly Advaita Vedanta), but ultimately establishes bhakti as being superior to Vedanta’s primary object, liberation. Redrawing the lines between Vedanta and Vaishnavism also affords Rupa the opportunity to distinguish Chaitanyaite theology from that of other Vaishnava sects like the Sri Vaishnava Sampraday, which had also wrestled with Vedanta in its own theological literature.

Commentary as Translation

Tyler Williams examines how the monk-poet Bhagvandas, although ostensibly writing a vernacular commentary (ṭīkā) on the Sanskrit Vairāgya Śataka (Hundred Verses on Non-Attachment) of Bhartrihari, in fact adapts the genre of the commentary so as to transform Bhartrihari’s poetic anthology into a religious treatise. In doing so, Bhagvandas gives his audience—the monastic and householder members of the Niranjani Sampraday, as well as members of other devotional sects and even courtly elites—not only access to the Sanskrit original, but also radically transforms that source text in the process.

Urdu as Persian

Focusing on the writings of Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan ‘Arzu’ (d. 1756), a critic of Persian literature and early theorist of what would come to be known as Urdu, Arthur Dudney shows how the sociolinguistic concept of ‘language planning’ can be used to understand the historical process through which a literary language is delineated and defined as such. Defining a new literary idiom involves identifying what that idiom is but also specifying what it is not. In the writings of Arzu and others, Dudney finds that the concept of rozmarrah (colloquial or ‘everyday’ language) was essential to defining what Urdu was, just as the exclusion of lexical items and forms of speech from Persian and Brajbhasha established what Urdu was not.