Book review: Aparna Kapadia,In Praise of Kings: Rajputs,Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-century Gujarat

This book is an attempt to rehabilitate the fifteenth century in the larger historical narrative as an important and dynamic period of north Indian history. The author uses the example of Gujarat to draw the argument home. As such, it is an important contribution to the steadily gathering corpus of studies on medieval Gujarat.

The bulk of the book deals with the history of local warrior chieftains of the fifteenth-century Gujarat. Kapadia argues that these chieftains had been actively participating in the politics of this region from the twelfth century to thirteenth century and continued to hold significant positions either as independent chieftains or as collaborators of regional rulers, including that of the sultanate of Gujarat during the fifteenth century. In this period, argues Kapadia, emerged a strong warrior ethos, which became an important marker of the still inchoate category of the ‘Rajputs’.

The book systematically develops its layered arguments over five chapters. The first chapter sets up the historical stage spanning the Chaulukya-Vaghela era (940–1304) as a context to study the ‘long fifteenth century’. It was during these centuries that many local chieftains gained political prominence in the ‘interstices of a large empire’ as allies and trusted subordinates of the Chaulukyas and later on of the Vaghelas (p. 39). They, however, did not disappear with the decline of the Vaghelas and continued to hold sway over large parts of the territories that they had acquired with their military prowess and political acumen under the previous regimes. As Gujarat slowly slipped into the hands of the Delhi Sultanate, these chieftains did not lose their political potential. They continued to collaborate with, or offer resistance to, the distant sovereign, the sultans of Delhi first and those of Gujarat later. These local chieftains often expressed their political standing through literary narratives in the form of poems, plays and inscriptions composed by their court poets. Kapadia uses three such narratives of the fifteenth century to argue her case about the continued political vitality of these warrior chieftains. It is through a reading of these that she opens up the exciting and dynamic politico-cultural world of the local polities. As these ‘sources’ were not considered ‘hard evidence’, they escaped the attention of historians. This is a lacuna that the book aims to repair.

Thus, the second and third chapters of the book analyse Raṇmallachanda of Sridhara Vyasa (written in Sanskrit and Dimgal), Gaṅgadāsapratāpavilāsanāṭaka and Māṇḍalīkanṛpacarita of Gangadhara (both in Sanskrit). Raṇmallachanda is a poem that records the superhuman encounters of its protagonist, Ranmal (a chieftain of Idar), with Zafar Khan (later Muzaffar Shah), the governor deputed by the Delhi Sultanate. Kapadia notes that Raṇmallachanda denotes an interesting case of literary innovation in combining elements of classical Sanskrit kavya traditions with the oral traditions of Dimgal virakavya, the heroic poetry, popular amongst the warrior clans of western India. Raṇmallachanda helps its protagonist articulate his newfound political status as a strong kshatriya warrior. Thus, Raṇmallachanda represents ‘the early manifestation of what was to emerge as a pan-Indian warrior identity in the form of the category of “Rajput”’ (p. 47).

Drawing on the ideas of B.D. Chattopadhyaya (and to some extent Dirk H. Kolff), Kapadia notes how the political rise of the local Rajput chieftains such as Rathod chief Ranmal of Idar, the Chauhans of Champaner and the Chudasamas of Junagadh was closely linked to the processes of local state formation and ‘kshatriyayisation’. In this sense, the book locates the fifteenth century as one of continuity with the previous era. This continuity is also visible in the unrelenting importance of Sanskrit for the political elites of Gujarat in the fifteenth century. Making a departure from Pollock’s famous formulation whereby ‘languages of place’ eclipsed Sanskrit in political usages during the ‘vernacular millennium’, Kapadia argues that Sanskrit was put to creative usage by poets of the fifteenth century for articulating the political aspirations of their patrons. Gaṅgadāsapratāpavilāsanāṭaka and Māṇḍalīkanṛpacarita of Gangadhara clearly attest to this trend. These texts depict the Rajput patrons from ‘regional’ kingdoms of Champaner and Junagadh ‘as universalised kshatriya kings’ while situating ‘them within their very localised political and geographical context’ (p. 100). Kapadia calls it an ‘interplay of cosmopolitan and local’ (p. 98).

By foregrounding these accounts, the author manages to recover an important aspect of Gujarat’s ‘heroic Rajput past’ which was long considered lost with the establishment of Turkic rule in the thirteenth century itself. The book thus argues in favour of ‘political and cultural continuities—not ruptures’ in the fifteenth century (p. 16).

Even more interesting is the author’s assertion, in the fourth chapter, that the vibrant culture of Sanskrit kavya (with its attendant focus on warrior ethos and Puranic ways of imagining universal Kingship) was not an exclusive reserve of the local chiefs in the fifteenth century. Here, the book analyses yet another Sanskrit composition, Rājavinoda, composed by Udayaraja for his patron Mahmud Begada, a Muzaffarid Sultan, ruler of Gujarat between 1459 and 1511. Kapadia argues that Udayaraja made extensive use of ‘the stock imaginary of kavya’ and joined ‘Gaṅgadāsapratāpavilāsanāṭaka and the Māṇḍalīkanṛpacarita in projecting its protagonist as an ideal Indic monarch’ (p. 127). While Kapadia makes a persuasive case about Udayaraja’s imagining of a universal kingship, it is possible to ask, vis-à-vis her use of the term ‘Indic’, if there weren’t multiple ways of imagining an Indic ideal of kingship. The book makes a very strong case for the shared politicocultural universe amongst the fifteenth century political elites of Gujarat irrespective of their religious associations. The vitality of the shared literary culture is evident in Udayaraja’s assertion that ‘Sarasvati, the goddess of learning has chosen to leave the heavens and move to Mahmud’s court’ (p. 127). Fifteenth century was a century of multilingualism (a point that Kapadia hints at only briefly) which was reflected in the ways in which the language of a poem like Raṇmallachanda was ‘freely interspersed with vernacularised forms of Persian and Arabic words’ (p. 50). By drawing our attention to such layers of literary and linguistic complexity, the book helps in challenging many stereotypes about the alleged Hindu–Muslim and Sanskrit–Persian divide in the middle ages.

In its last chapter, the book takes a leap from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Through her discussion of Rās Mālā of Alexander Forbes, the first colonial history of Gujarat, Kapadia reiterates the larger argument about the centrality of local chieftains in the politics of Gujarat over the centuries. She finds great value in a text like Rās Mālā for it helps to take the focus away from ‘imperial rulers like the Mughals and the Marathas’ (p. 131). While this might be an interesting observation on the part of the author, it is important to understand the politics of the colonial histories like Rās Mālā that portrayed the ‘Rajputs’ as perpetual power wielders. Tod’s magnum opus is another case in point. To be fair to the author, she does hint towards this but does not work out its historical implications for her own study.

The book is very loaded in terms of its arguments. In many ways, its novelty lies in the manner in which it deals with its ‘sources’ both as sources of information and as subjects of study in themselves. For this reason, readers might be excused for wishing that the book provided closer glimpses of the ‘sources’ in the form of more frequent and extended excerpts. For that would have provided the reader with a better view of the texture of the literary canvas in the fifteenth century.

Inconsistent spelling of certain non-English words and the more than occasional typographical errors are minor irritants in a book that should be a must read for those interested in historical studies of Gujarat, the literary cultures of the medieval period, cultural iconographies in a multilingual world and most certainly north India in the fifteenth century.