Book Review: Allison Busch,Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India

This book is centred on pre-modern Hindi poetry and prose stream known as rīti, and hence there is a possibility, a very unfortunate indeed, for it to be missed by historians, especially by those who still regard literary sources on Mughal India as ‘untrustworthy’. The research undertaken by Allison Busch is, on the contrary, equally valuable for historians and for specialists in literature or language. As far as history is concerned, it not only brings to light hitherto neglected sources but successfully contributes to liberation of Mughal India studies from, in the author’s own expression, ‘tyrannies of orientalism and nationalism’ (p. 14).

In modern scholarship, the rīti poetry in Braj has had a rather negative record of neglect and misunderstanding. It has become a tradition to label this literature as ‘decadent’, ‘conservative’, ‘courtly and elitist’ and therefore a reactionary opposition to the ‘democratic’ Bhakti poetry. The very emergence of the rīti that drew extensively from classical Sanskrit literature has been viewed as a manifestation of decline—of pre-modern Hindi literature and, more widely, of Indian society as a whole. At the very beginning of the Introduction to the book Busch convincingly employs world literary history against these clichés:

Imagine an English-literature classroom in which Milton was derided for retelling a story using the classical epic form. The remonstrating teacher would shake her head scolding the poet for imitating Virgil, dismiss his Latin vocabulary and style as pure pedantry, and wonder why he did not derive his subject matter from personal observation…

In a similar vein, we are invited to imagine a history of French literature ‘decrying great seventeenth-century playwrights like Corneille, Racine and Moliére on the ground that their work is inadequately spiritual, too elaborate and contrived in its classical allusions, and morally reprehensible because it is a product of a dissolute aristocratic milieu’ (p. 3). Unfortunately, Indian history and culture are seldom viewed as inseparable parts of global socio-cultural evolution, and the available comparative studies aim, in a majority, at highlighting India’s ‘lagging behind’ the ‘progressive West’ or, in a more recent trend, being unique and comparable to nothing—thus making it possible to denigrate Keshavdas for the same features for which Milton or Racine are being glorified.

Busch forcefully discards many a cliché like late medieval India’s ‘cultural decline’ (a textbook matter since Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Tara Chand and others, ¹ reconsidered only recently) or what she styles as ‘discomfort with courtliness’—a prejudiced attitude of some modern scholarship, especially those in quest for the ‘subaltern’, against court culture as ‘aristocratic’ and ‘elitist’ and totally alien to ‘people’s own’ culture. ² Fortunately, this prejudice has been successfully challenged in a number of modern works, ³ and Busch’s research is a valuable addition to them.

Chapter I of the book, ‘Keshavdas of Orcha’, may be an eye-opener for those who follow the traditional view of this founder of the rīti poetry as ‘elitist’ and ‘mannerist’, even ‘heartless’. Busch offers a fresh analysis of his literary works to convincingly depict Keshavdas as an original and innovative author, whose epic poems like Ratnābavanī and especially Vīrsimṃhdevcarit are extremely valuable sources on both Mughal history per se and its ‘reconstruction’ by contemporary authors—after all, those who know the tragic story of Abu-l Fazl’s assassination by Bir Singh of Orchha at the instigation of crown prince Salim from Mughal sources would benefit from finding ‘the other side of the story’ in Keshavdas’ poem (p. 46). The problem of historical consciousness as gleaned from the rīti poetry acquires its well-deserved centrality throughout the whole of the book. Starting with Keshavdas, Busch offers her readers in almost every chapter (Chapter II has a special paragraph on ‘Braj Historiography’) an extremely well-substantiated research of historical and political writings in Braj. These texts produced both at and off the Mughal court offer a mine of information which historians lamentably neglect in favour of the more ‘comfortable’ Mughal chronicles. History and personal history (autobiography) were, as the book demonstrates, one of the most important motifs of not only epic poems but also rīti works on literary styles, aesthetics, prosody, metrology and so on. They all desperately long for a historical assessment.

Chapter II, ‘The Aesthetic World of Rīti Poetry’, and Chapter III, ‘Brajbhasha Intellectuals’, deal with mental perceptions of the rīti authors, their aesthetic and literary values. The result of this research is significant as well: despite their being ‘critically in dialogue with tradition’ and ‘sometimes circumscribed by it’ the rīti authors were ‘demonstrably innovative’ in their literary techniques, aesthetic values and world outlook (p. 66). Here the author again turns to comparison to show that ‘reliance on poetic models from the ancient world’ was no obstacle for innovation, as demonstrated by the whole development of world literature (p. 68). This broad historical and literary outlook facilitates the author’s daring suggestion to denote rīti as ‘the birth of Hindi classicism’ (pp. 32–36). Some colleagues adhering to India’s ‘uniqueness’ and denying the existence of any common laws for historical and cultural development in different societies may object to this suggestion or criticise the author for ‘euro-centrism’. In my opinion, Busch’s attempt to discuss Indian literary and cultural developments against the global background is commendable and thought-provoking. One may present counter-arguments to her suggestion, but it is worth thinking why the seventeenth-century India, like some other countries, witnessed the strong process of revisiting classical traditions and re-assessing them, sometimes in a new, critical and innovative vein—in the telling expression of Keshavdas, ‘according to my own understanding’ (pp. 110–11)? ⁴

Chapter IV, ‘Rīti Literature at the Mughal Court’, discusses the destinies of the Hindi poets at the courts of the Mughal emperors, starting from Akbar. For those accustomed to view Mughal culture only through Persian eyes it would be a great surprise to know that Braj literature enjoyed great royal patronage and claimed court status as lawfully as its Persian counterpart. Of course, the author could not analyse the views and works of all Braj-writing court poets in detail; some of them, only briefly mentioned, deserve a bulky volume. Nevertheless, this chapter is a valuable contribution to the study of composite culture of Mughal India. The theme of literary patronage is continued in Chapter V, ‘Rīti Literature in Greater Hindustan’, but the research is centred on Rajput principalities. Apart from very interesting facts on poets and their princely sponsors, this chapter is valuable for the study of Rajput polities, Rajput–Mughal relations and cultural interaction. Here the author makes another daring hypothesis, that rīti court literature was ‘first seriously cultivated largely in Mughal circles and only afterward radiated out to subimperial courts across India, even those hostile to the Mughals’ (p. 187). This suggestion is thought-provoking indeed and, if substantially proven, will be a powerful argument in favour of composite culture in India.

The last chapter of the book, titled ‘The Fate of Rīti Literature in Colonial India’, is a tragic story of how, as the author has stated in a preceding chapter, ‘colonialism brought not only political but also aesthetic tyranny to India from distant shores’ (p. 67). Busch convincingly shows how this tyranny (to me, a correctly chosen word), the imposition of alien values and literary aesthetics, destroyed Braj literature and the whole socio-cultural milieu associated with it, how Western-educated Indian intellectuals became estranged from a valuable part of their literary tradition. When the author decries the archival and academic neglect of this treasure-house of texts in present-day India, her otherwise calm and balanced tone becomes passionate, and, to my mind, quite justly so. It has to be hoped that collective efforts of scholars will succeed in recovering ‘Hindi’s lost pasts’ (p. 242) and restoring its deserved place in India’s literary, cultural and social history.

The work under review is, to summarise, a very rewarding blend of ‘philology’ and ‘history’; the author’s equally masterful command of both provides for the success. Unfortunately, Busch’s laudable attempts to juxtapose rīti tradition with contemporary trends in other countries were not matched by similar approaches to history. The author doubts the applicability of the term ‘medieval’, let alone ‘feudal’, to seventeenth-century India. The former, in her opinion, is inadequate since ‘the expiration date for anything that could reasonably be called “medieval” had long passed in the West…’ (p. 16). Further on ‘medieval’ is flatly rejected as ‘an unreflective import from European intellectual history’ (p. 126). As for the ‘feudal’, it is associated by the author with nothing more than ‘unrelenting orthodoxy of vulgar Marxism’ (p. 16) or condemnatory attitude of Indian modernists to everything ‘feudal’ as reactionary. Not venturing here into the evergreen debate of ‘Indian feudalism’, I may only wonder why ‘classicism’ could be imported from European intellectual history while ‘medieval’ and ‘feudal’ could not, and why was it so wrong to suppose that one and the same stage of historical development could take different periods of time in various societies: in the times of Keshavdas, for example, not all European countries were ‘early modern’, and even in the eighteenth century some witnessed a ‘second edition of serfdom’. If the author opines that rīti tradition flourished in the post-medieval and early modern, not medieval India of the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries, this hypothesis needs a more thorough historical substantiation. These questions, however, by no means diminish the high academic quality, credibility and innovation of Allison Busch’s research, making her book a valuable contribution to pre-colonial India studies.