Abstract
Pankaj Jha’s Political History of Literature makes a comprehensive attempt to break the silences of the ‘long fifteenth century’ by contextualising the voice of Vidyapati—the polyglot, polyvocal and politically sensitive poet bard of fifteenth-century Mithila, the cultural niche of north Bihar. Primarily an exploration through Vidyapati, the book at hand opens windows to connect various realms, realities and their ruptures and relevance for fifteenth-century Mithila and beyond. With great empathy, it analyses the unique regional formation called Mithila with its secludedness and connectedness vis-à-vis many other cultural and political regions.
Jha places and probes Vidyapati, his life, literature and times within the larger context of inherited, shared and contested crosscurrents of knowledge formation through the emergence and efflorescence of multilinguality. Needless to say, this shaped the politics of the language and landscape of Mithila and various other regions and impacted the craft and poetics of the poet and various genres of his literary output. In order to historicise Vidyapati and to redeem, rediscover and reconfigure the lost fifteenth century, the author focuses on three select key texts and juxtaposes them to numerous other texts and treatises. The idea is to work out the criss-crossing of the genealogies of these texts to understand the essence of knowledge formation in fifteenth-century North India. Among the three selected interesting texts are Likhanavali, a Sanskrit treatise on scribing, documenting and archiving; Kirttilata, a biographical rendition in Apabhramsa; and Purusapariksa, a mytho-historical rendition in Sanskrit. These three texts in dialogue with myriad literary cultures and traditions serve as the springboard to access the multilingual accomplishments of fifteenth-century North India. The arrival of Persian after the eleventh century and its open-ended dialogue as an enduring contribution to multilingualism has been beautifully captured. This anticipates the visions of the Mughal state and order that emerged after the fifteenth century. The fifteenth century as demonstrated by the author is the crucible of creativity and not a barren gap languishing in the twilight of the Delhi Sultanate. It is in this context that the poet bard and many other protagonists who preceded and followed him in the then flowering milieu of multilinguality have been brought to the fore. The book maps the subtle and suffused impact of the myriad knowledge formations imbued and mediated by the dense and precipitating multilingualism.
The author’s engagement with literature and its historicisation underline the limiting and ossifying tendencies of conventional historiography, thus providing the creative context for historiographical departures that would help to understand and appreciate the accomplishments of the fifteenth century. Methodologically speaking, the book makes an attempt to steer clear of and navigate through many essentialised and burdensome binaries of Medieval Indian historical scholarship.
Underlining the lopsidedness of the overemphasis on Persian sources and authorities, the author hints at the perils of neglecting sources from other languages and literature. It is against this vice and embedded malady that Jha argues for the use of multilingual parallel archives in the then thriving milieu of multilingualism. Jha is particularly against the binaries created by ‘two neat archives (Sanskritic and Persianate) corresponding broadly to two parallel historiographies’ (p. xxvi). The author’s debt to and departure from Sheldon Pollock is more than evident. Apart from this classic and canonical binary, Jha navigates through a range of binaries like Persian versus Sanskrit, state-centric Persian chronicles versus non chronicle Persian literature at large. Further, the binaries of imperium versus region or trans-regional polities versus regional polities, cosmopolitan Sanskrit versus vernacular are discussed and analysed to break the mould of received historiography. While negotiating these binaries and their ramifications for conventional historiography, Jha argues that the non-existence of the imperium did not indicate stagnation or fragmentation and decline as is generally assumed. For Jha, at the level of political and cultural ideas and thought, several aspects of anticipated imperial visions were soaked, seasoned and shaped in the crucible of the fifteenth century.
Jha points out that after the glories of Magadha, the region congruous to Bihar remained largely forgotten from the histories of Medieval India. The author’s area of study, Mithila—the secluded backwaters of north Bihar and a region that did not fall on any trade route—was doubly neglected. In the given circumstances, the focus on the writings of Vidyapati, the Sanskrit poet-scholar of the fifteenth century becomes a compelling context to revise the lopsidedness of the prevailing Medieval historiography to delineate the salience and resilience of the fifteenth century.
Despite the erudite exposition on fifteenth-century literature through Vidyapati and his contemporaries and despite the analytical expatiation of several canonical texts and the urge to forge historiographical departures, the enduring folk elements of fifteenth-century Mithila could not be accessed and analysed in a comprehensive manner. This has not been realised, notwithstanding the intense and intimate engagement with the poet bard that the book indulges in. In all, the book is a welcome addition to scholarship on Medieval India and a befitting tribute to Late Professor Sunil Kumar whose historiographical concerns have been so ably and aptly reflected and argued through the deployment of alternative sources to chart out alternative pathways to access the past.