Literary Responses to the Mughal Imperium: The Historical Poems of Keśavdās

South Asia Research

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 31-54

  Busch, Allison ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

Brajbhasha; early modern India; Hindi literature; historical poems; Indian historiography; Keshavdas; Mughal empire

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992838892     PISSN: 02627280     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0262728005051606     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Keśavdās's poetry is famously difficult. Modern critics have been known to refer to him as the ‘devil of difficult poetry’ (‘kaṭhin kāvya kā pret’, quoted in Vijaypāl Singh, Keśav kā Ācāryatva, reprinted, New Delhi, 1998, p. 10).
2. Some pre-modern readers apparently felt the same way, however, as is evident from Sūrati Miśra's introduction to the Jorāvarprakāś (Light of Jorāvar, 1739), commissioned by his patron King Jorāvar Singh of Bikaner, who reportedly approached him with a request for a commentary on the Rasikpriyā, saying ‘Keśavdās's works are famous for being difficult, and out of all of them, the Rasikpriyā is particularly deep. Write a commentary on it so that it will make sense to one and all’. (Sūrati Miśra, Jorāvarprakāś, ed. Yogendrapratāp Singh, Allahabad, 1992, vv. 1.7–8.)
3. A brief discussion of Bir Singh's status and numerous accomplishments is Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 127–31.
4. A couple of recent publications do offer hope that more attention will now be directed to this field. Kiśorīlāl has produced new editions of both the Vīrsiṁhdevcarit (Allahabad, 1997)
5. and the Jahāngīrjascandrikā (Allahabad, 1994);
6. Bhagvāndās Gupta provides a sketch of some of the key literary sources for Bundelkhand history in Muġhalõ ke antargat Bundelkhaṇḍ ke Itihās-saṃskṛti ke Hindī Sāhityik Srotõ kā Mūlyā̃kan (Jhansi, 2001).
7. The subaltern studies movement is an obvious example, as is work in the area of ‘ethnohistory’ such as Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, Cambridge, 1987
8. and Phillip B. Wagoner, Tidings of the King, Honolulu, 1993.
9. Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, Princeton, 2000, alerts us to the limitations of relying on exclusively European modes of historicism for theorizing non-European life-worlds.
10. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, New York, 2003, constitutes a lively new approach to South Indian history, which skillfully incorporates a variety of literary and folk genres.
11. The linkage between literary expressivity and political will in Sanskrit inscriptional practices is made in Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology’, in Jan E.M. Houben, ed., Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, Leiden, 1996.
12. Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Baltimore, 1987.
13. Wagoner, Tidings of the King
14. and Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, are excellent models for a more sensitive practice that allows literary and historical analysis to coexist.
15. Keśavdās, Ratnabāvanī, Keśavgranthāvalī, Vol. 3, ed. Viśvanāthprasād Miśra, Allahabad, 1954, vv. 2–3.
16. On the self-conscious adoption of rāso style in the Bāvanī see Vijaypāl Singh, Keśav aur Unkā Sāhitya, reprinted, Delhi, 1993, p. 64. The heavy emphasis on consonant clusters in particular marks an utter contrast to the generalized trend linguistic towards svarabhakti or insertion of vowels between consonants in Brajbhasha.
17. Aziz Ahmad, ‘Epic and Counter-Epic in Medieval India’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 83, 1964, pp. 470–6.
18. This unpublished longer recension is mentioned in Singh, Keśav aur Unkā Sāhitya, p. 64.
19. See Keśavdās, Vīrsiṁhdevcarit, Keśavgranthāvallī, Vol. 3, vv. 2.42–43;
20. entry for Raja Madhukar Shah Bundela in Navāb Samsām ud daulā Śāh Navāz Khān Śahīd Khavāfī Aurangābadī, Ma'āsir ul Umrā, Vol. 1, Braj Ratna Das, trans. (into Hindi), Varanasi, 1984, p. 145.
21. Bhagvāndās Gupta argues that the Bāvanī's perspective is the ‘historically true’ one (Mugalõ ke antargat Bundelkhaṇḍ, pp. 19–22).
22. Ronald Stuart McGregor, Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Jan Gonda, ed. A History of Indian Literature, Vol. VIII, fasc. 6, 1984, p. 129.
23. Julie Meisami has usefully called attention to the didactic, and not just sycophantic, intentions of court poets from an adjacent cultural world in Medieval Persian Court Poetry, Princeton, 1987, chap. 2.
24. The passages by Muhammad Hadi and Jahangir are found in Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāmā, trans., Wheeler M. Thackston, New York, 1999, pp. 10–11, 32–3.
25. There is a long tradition of this literary-excursory practice in Sanskrit mahākāvyas. For an overview of common motifs see Prabha, Historical Mahākāvyas in Sanskrit. The convention, to my mind, persists even today in the mountain and meadow backdrops of the song interludes of modern Hindi films.
26. I find this text confirms the analysis of Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam that different modes of discourse have different ‘textures’, which can coexist unproblematically in one and the same text precisely because audiences are able to make sense of shifts in register and meaning, and decode some parts as primarily factual, and others as more embellished, less realist in tenor. See Textures of Time, pp. 4–5, 99–100.
27. Two 19th-century Bundela clan histories also mention it as one of Bir Singh Deo's large scale construction projects. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, p. 129.
28. Jahālngīirjascandrikā, Keśavgranthāvalī, Vol. 3, ed. Viśvanāthprasād Miśra, Allahabad, 1954, v. 32.
29. Compare Jahālngīirjascandrikā, v. 35, with the only slight variant in Keśavdās, Kavipriyā, Keśavgranthāvalī, Vol. 1, ed. Viśvanāthprasād Miśra, Allahabad, 1954, v. 8.5. The change from ‘Raghubīra’ to ‘Jahā̃gīra’ in this verse (along with a few other minor word substitutions) is simple to execute without affecting the integrity of the Kavitt structure, for which it is the total count of (31 or 32) syllables rather than syllable weight that is of the essence.
30. The importance of historicizing new cultural trends in Indian intellectual history is eloquently discussed in Sheldon Pollock, ‘Literary Newness Enters the World’, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Berkeley, in press, opening to chap. 8.