Abstract
This book is truly a life’s work. When Aditya Behl died at the young age of forty-three in 2009, already a mature and fine scholar, indeed a dazzling one, he had been working on the genre of Sufi romances in Avadhi, a form of eastern Hindi, for twenty years. The four main works in this genre were already famous and admired within Hindi literary history, but he rightly felt that their enigmatic depths/qualities, their literary sophistication that drew on traditions in multiple languages, and their social and political setting in the context of the north Indian sultanates had not been adequately understood. For the next two decades Aditya worked away at each of the romances, drawing out its specific conceptual referents/references, narrative structures, use of tropes and historical and theological implications. Listening closely to the texts while he translated them allowed him to capture the resonances and density of allusions as no one had before him. Deeper meanings do not map onto a simple allegory, he was at pains to clarify. We heard various versions of his arguments in conferences and lecture series, and finally in his last year he had all the pieces worked out, he said.
We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Wendy Doniger, Aditya’s literary executor, for actually putting all the pieces together in a lucid and readable way and letting us see in this book all that Aditya had worked out (She has also brought out his unpublished translation of one of the poems, Qutban’s Mirigāvatī, also with Oxford University Press, New York).
The book consists of nine chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter, ‘Studying the Sultanate Period’, sets out the problems and issues involved. Claiming the genre—because of language and subject matter—as part of the Hindi tradition (and not of Urdu), early Hindi scholars were nonetheless uncertain about its ‘Indianness’ because of the Islamic elements, while the obvious knowledge and sophistication of its authors made them uneasy representatives of ‘Sufis writing in the simple language of the people’. Despite only fragmentary textual and contextual evidence, what is needed, the chapter argues, is a different historical imagination for these Sufi authors, their Sultanate elite patrons, and their works that inaugurated ‘a new literary and devotional culture in a local language’. The pioneering work by Simon Digby on Sultanate Sufis and by Dirk Kolff on local military groups, their political alliances, values and narratives, provides a better guide, and Digby’s insights in particular pervade the book.
Chapter 2, ‘Inaugurating Hindavi’ uses the prologue to each romance as a key into the conceptual toolkit of the genre (rasa, form or embodiment/rupa, etc.) and its work of mediation between Persian models (masnavis, but also mirrors for princes) and local language and poetic forms, between Islamic theology and local religious terms and concepts, and between Arabo-Persian and Sanskritic aesthetics. Chapter 3, ‘Creating a New Genre’, illuminates the way in which, in the provincial garrison of Dalmau in Awadh, Mulla Da’ud in his Candāyan (1379), reworked the idea of rasa to indicate not just aesthetic pleasure but also the remedy for viraha, the pain of love, and the relationship of longing and circulation of desire between God and the visible world. Here as elsewhere, Aditya brings in quotes and comments on relevant and comparative textual and generic examples/referents, and gradually we begin to see the vast literary and intellectual resources that the romance poets drew upon, and how they differed from other contemporaries, like Nath ascetics or Bhakti devotional poets. Their resources included the Persian romances of Nizami and Amir Khusrau (a more direct Indian precursor) and Sanskrit(ic) aesthetics, Sufi theologies and their readings of Qur’anic and prophetic utterings but also the languages of yoga and alchemy, Sanskritic and oral literary tropes and conventions, Arabo-Persian travel/marvel literature, all originally and creatively and cleverly reworked: Candāyan drew upon an existing (and still current) oral epic, Mirigāvatī, Padmāvat and Madhumālatī used existing characters and narrative tropes but were original stories, though Padmāvat in particular spawned its own tradition. Why was the romance form so attractive for these Sufi poets? Narrative is important for them because of the possibilities it offered for the deferment necessary for the idea ‘ordinate love’, a love that, while overwhelming, needs to be purified, trained, tested, and directed to its proper object.
The chapters, like the rest of the book, proceed chronologically, from the first romance, the (partly fragmentary) Candāyan by Mulla Da’ud of Dalmau (1379), to Manjhan Shattari’s Madhumālatī (1545), showing both the obvious continuities and mutual awareness among the authors of the genre, but also the ways in which each author partly reworks the conventions, largely in accordance with his particular generic inclination and/or theological stance (Chishti, Mahdavi or Shattari). While in every romance the hero has to undergo a transformation as a yogi in his quest for the heroine whose beauty he has heard of or caught a glimpse of, the trials, obstacles and helpers change. Usually he marries another woman along the way (and the two heroines fight in the end), but in Madhumālatī he does not. In Chapter 4, the Prince’s trials in Qutban’s Mirigāvatī (1503) lead into a sweeping comparative exploration of the story/motif of the herdsman cannibal and the cave in the Persian and Arabic repertoire of Sindbad’s tales, in Homer, in Arab mariner’s tales and in a Nepali recension of the Kathāsaritsāgara! The methodological point is that while the contemporary world of trade does not enter the narrative of Mirigāvatī, the generic choice itself is a clue that we should read this work against the backdrop of the circulation of tales in the interconnected world of Indian Ocean trade. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmāvat (1540). Chapter 5 explores the various notions of space: the heroine’s island as a figure of Paradise, her city and fortress as the (microcosmic) stages of the interior journey towards spiritual realisation and lastly space as territory over which the narrative claims authority. Chapter 6 discusses the controversial plotting of the second half of the poem, in which ‘Alauddin Khalji demands Padmavati from the hero and plays the villain to the Rajput king. While Jayasi was the first to combine the persona of Padmavati with ‘Alauddin’s siege and destruction of Chittaur, another useful comparative excursus among Persian, Jain, and early Rajasthani texts shows that Jayasi reworked elements of emerging Rajput narratives that plotted their anxieties over subordination, the preservation of honour, and the symbolic value of one’s harem. Together, Aditya reads the Padmāvat (which comes to stand for the whole genre) as a ‘fictional image of Indian landscape with the eroticized body of an Indian woman as its centerpiece’—in a word as a narrative of conquest (again). Chapter 7 maps the stock description of the heroine’s beauty in Manjhan’s Madhumālatī onto the Shattari theology of Muhammad Ghaus, on which we are given an illuminating doctrinal and political exposition, while Chapter 8 gives us a close reading of the stock element of the heroine’s ‘lament for twelve months’ in the same text. Chapter 9 brings together many different types of evidence on the kinds of musical-poetic gatherings at which these romances would have been recited in both courtly and Sufi circles, internal clues on the preferred ways of reading (scriptural exegesis and the elucidation of hidden meanings in poetry), and theories of language and meaning and discussions regarding the power of poetry and music that bore upon contemporary understandings of these texts. The epilogue goes back to the idea of the ‘ocean of stories’, the value given to the fantastic, the logic of formulaic structures and the further life of the genre, with epigones and translations.
‘The Sufi shaikhs and their disciples who composed the Hindavi romances also constructed a hierarchy of responses in which the Sufi novice was the most ideal reader for their sensuous poems’ (p. 287), and there is no doubt that Aditya’s grasp of the depths and subtleties of this enigmatic genre is that of an ideal reader. In terms of a historical and contextual reading, this book shows that even the limited clues we have for each author, when integrated with other historical evidence and close attention to the material aspects of the book (often illustrated, and circulating in Persian, Kaithi and Devanagari scripts, and ‘translated’ into Persian), can go a long way towards revealing to us their social location, reception and circulation in what Aditya prefers to call the ‘Turkish sultanates’. And the impressive array of texts, genres and languages that are called into play show the resources required in order to do justice to this kind of vernacular textual production.
There are only two points on which I disagree with Aditya’s formulation. First, in his understandable effort to move away from some current understandings of Sufis and their literary production as either entirely vernacular or entirely spiritual, he is at pains to depict the context of production of the genre as one of ‘dazzling provincial courts’. But what kind of court was there in Dalmau, or in Jais, or in the peripatetic circle of Islam Shah or the exiled one of Husain Shah Sharqi in Kahalganv, Bihar? To stress the provisional, small-scale—and yet brilliant!— literary production within these circles would be, to my mind, even more effective in questioning the Delhi- and/or imperial-court-centric view of the Sultanate and Mughal periods than to insist that these small garrison towns or courts-on-the-move were splendid affairs.
The second point regards the argument that ‘the poets of the Delhi Sultanate and the regional Afghan kingdoms represented Hindustan as a stage for triumphant narratives of conquest, a landscape to be conquered as well as eroticized’ (p. 141). André Wink and Richard Eaton’s work on the ‘moving frontier’ of Islam in India, notions of ‘contact zone’, and Simon Digby’s work Sufi vilayat and competitive encounters between Sufis and yogis are all influential here. But while Aditya argues that ‘the dualist rhetoric of conquest concealed a much subtler process of cultural and linguistic assimilation and internalization’, it seems odd to think of Indian-born Hindavi-writing Sufi poets writing centuries after the coming of Islam to the region through the lens of conquest. The argument runs through the book but most explicitly in Chapters 5 and 6 on Jayasi’s Padmāvat with its theme of Rajput valour. For one thing, if the heroines are ‘Hindu women’, so are all the heroes ‘Hindu men’ (and all natural references local ones)! The choice of ‘Alauddin Khalaji as the villain lusting after the Rajput queen is indeed striking and demands consideration. But other explanations are possible, too. Just like Mirigāvatī brought into the romance narrative the genre of sailors’ adventures, so did Padmāvat bring in the genre of martial-historical ‘Rajput’ conflicts, with all the values and anxieties over subordination, over the preservation of honour and of one’s harem that were mentioned above. As Kolff teaches us, the ‘spurious’ Rajputs in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Awadh who were intimately implicated in the politics of the Sultanates still worried about (relative) autonomy and honour. These are the values and conflicts that their narratives embody and that are refracted in Jayasi’s poem, which as is the case with Jayasi speaks to the multiple audiences around him. To set his narrative, and all the Sufi romances, within a framework of Islamic conquest and control over territory through the eroticized body of the Hindu heroine seems forced. After all, in Padmāvat it is a fellow Rajput who mortally wounds Prince Ratansen after trying to snatch his wife, and when ‘Alauddin finally conquers Chittaur after Padmavati and the other women have thrown themselves into the fire, he can only pick up a handful of ashes and throw it in the air exclaiming ‘Earth is vanity!’ (p. 215). So much for conquest!