Abstract
The fifteenth century in North India was a period marked by incredible dynamism: falling between the sacking of Delhi by Timur in 1398 and the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century, the ‘long’ fifteenth century was characterised by political decentralisation and the burgeoning of regional states with diverse political and literary cultures. Consequently, this period witnessed literary production flourish in several languages including Persian, Sanskrit, Apabhramsha (including its regional variants), and the constellation of literary vernaculars collectively termed bhāṣā. Yet these political formations, literary cultures and the relationships between them have remained largely neglected by scholars, at least until recently. The past several years have seen a resurgence of interest in the period, as reflected in edited volumes (like Orsini and Sheikh’s After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, Oxford University Press, 2014) and journal issues (such as the special issue on ‘Vernacular Performance, Memory Construction, and Emotions: Warrior Epics, Akhārās, and Giant Jinas in Gwalior’ in South Asian History and Culture 11, no. 1, 2020). Pankaj Jha’s A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century makes a substantial contribution to this emerging body of scholarship. Vidyapati (fl. 1400–30) was a Brahman poet and scholar in the region of Mithila, which today straddles the borders of Nepal and the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Although Vidyapati has long been a beloved figure for connoisseurs of Hindi, Bengali and Maithili literature (all three languages claim him as their own), relatively little is known about the poet and the body of serious scholarly work on his multilingual oeuvre is surprisingly small. A Political History of Literature thus takes on an important but neglected figure from an important but neglected time and place. The book is a revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis, reflecting the development of his thought over the past several years as he has continued to engage with questions of language, power and polity in various articles and book chapters.
Jha uses a close reading and analysis of Vidyapati’s works in Sanskrit and Apabhramsha to argue for a new historiographical approach to understanding the fifteenth century specifically and pre-colonial literary sources more generally. He argues first that there is still a need for historians to move beyond an uncritical focus on Persian sources and large political formations and pay greater attention to sources in other languages (especially Sanskrit and the literary vernaculars) and to smaller states like the principalities of Mithila if they wish to understand how political and cultural power worked during the latter days of the sultanate period. Second, he argues that historians need to pay attention not only to the content of literary sources but also to their texture—in other words, to the formal, generic and linguistic aspects of texts that undergird their ideological projects and make those projects legible. The book is consequently divided into two parts: The first, consisting of two chapters, addresses the broad historiographical and methodological concerns that confront scholars undertaking work on fifteenth-century North India. The second part consists of three chapters, each of which deals with one of Vidyapati’s works.
The first chapter surveys the geographical, temporal and cultural ‘terrain’ of Vidyapati and his compositions: this includes an overview of the linguistic and cultural zone known as Mithila, a sketch of Vidyapati as a figure in popular memory and scholarship, and an assessment of the general character of historiographical writing on the fifteenth century—a field that has so far neglected the role that poets and scholars like Vidyapati played in shaping political commonsense and state institutions. The second chapter surveys the current state of scholarship on language, literature, politics, and power during the sultanate period. Here, Jha lays out what he believes would constitute a properly political history of literature: put succinctly, a political history of literature means examining literary sources in terms of the ways in which they structure and encode our apprehension of things in the world, our understanding of what those things ‘mean’ and our convictions about how to act in that world. For Jha, literature is a gradual and inter-generational project of establishing and re-establishing the terms through which the ‘subjects of state power’ understand their world and its power relations, and it does so in such a way as to make those terms and relations seem natural and inevitable. Though this may initially sound like a restatement of the ideological function of literature, Jha makes an important intervention by urging historians to shift their focus away from textual content to language and literary form: drawing from the work of both Sheldon Pollock and Terry Eagleton, he argues that literary works do not legitimise particular regimes but rather naturalise power relations at the level of language itself. He therefore argues for a philologically oriented method of reading literature as a way of recovering historical relations of power.
In the second part of the book, Jha tests out this approach on three works by Vidyapati. He begins in the third chapter with a study of the Likhanāvalī (‘Compendium of Writing’), a handbook for drafting correspondence and legal documents in Sanskrit. Jha compares the Likhanāvalī with a similar work in Sanskrit from the same century, the Lekhapaddhati (1476) and looks for conceptual and lexical antecedents in the Arthaśāstra and in surviving political inscriptions. He also finds reason to suspect the influence of the Persianate paper state and the Persian discourses of inshā’ (composition of formal documents) and rasāʼil (epistolary writing) on Vidyapati’s impetus to compose the Likhanāvalī as well as on the structure of the treatise. Jha makes the interesting observation that the ‘world’ of the Likhanāvalī is simultaneously fictional and historical. The ‘model’ documents presented in the work reflect and frame hypothetical persons and situations in an imagined state that is the product of Vidyapati’s imagination and, at the same time, they respond to the documentary and political exigencies of a fifteenth-century ‘state’. The Likhanāvalī (and Jha’s analysis) thus shed considerable light on how states were brought into being ‘through paper’ and on myriad social and economic relations like slavery, marriage, and money lending.
The fourth chapter takes up another work in Sanskrit, but from a very different genre: the Purṣaparīkṣā or ‘Assessment of a Man’. The work is ostensibly a compendium of udāharaṇakathā or didactic stories illustrating the different virtues that make a ‘true man’ but, as Jha points out, this necessarily implicates a broader imagining of social and political order. Jha finds sources for Vidyapati’s ethics in contemporary philosophical debates (e.g., between nyāya, cārvāka and Buddhist traditions) and roughly contemporary political treatises (e.g., the fourteenth-century Rājanītiratnākara). He also notes the possible influence of Persianate notions and tales of manliness (jawān-mardī). Jha’s main contribution in this chapter is his explanation of the importance of genre in determining the discursive strategies through which normative ideas of conduct and morality were constructed, affirmed and challenged. In contrast to earlier prescriptive treatises (like those of nītiśāstra and dharmaśāstra traditions), Vidyapati’s adoption of the narrative genre for the Puruṣaparīkṣa allowed him to explore the complexities of ethical behaviour in the ‘real world’, leaving some apparent contradictions and ambiguities unresolved. Jha also suggests that by focusing on exemplary men of the present or kali age, Vidyapati demonstrates a historical consciousness that accords importance to laukika (worldly) human experience as opposed to alaukika (other-worldly) ideals and concepts, and that the poet employs a somewhat novel epistemological approach by privileging empirical evidence and the testimony of learned men to demonstrate the authority of the Vedas as the basis for a pan-sectarian ethical system. These last two arguments could use further explanation and evidence, but Jha’s contention that the kathā genre makes Vidyapati’s particular formulations possible and persuasive (as well as entertaining) is convincing. This chapter also makes clear how the poet could formulate prescriptions for ethical manhood in ostensibly the most inclusive terms possible while still excluding the very possibility that women and individuals from ‘lower’ castes could constitute ethical political subjects. There is a perennial need for more and more sophisticated investigations of how gender and caste ‘worked’ during the medieval period, and Jha’s chapters on the Likhanāvalī and Puruṣaparīkṣa make an important contribution in this regard.
In the fifth chapter, Jha takes the reader on a journey through Vidyapati’s Kīrttilatā (‘Entangled Vines of Glory’) which itself follows the journey of the poet’s patron, the prince Kirtī Siṁha, and his brother as they try to regain the prince’s stolen kingdom. Jha vividly conveys the rich geographical, ethnographical and political detail contained in Vidyapati’s text and introduces several critical questions regarding the work’s linguistic character, generic structure, and political valence. Jha contextualises Vidyapati’s literary register (Avahaṭṭa) in the language continuum of the fifteenth century and attempts to trace the generic conventions of the work to contemporary genres in Sanskrit, Apabhramsha, and Persian. The central contribution of this chapter lies in Jha’s discussion of how even literary works produced in and for the courts of small political formations (in this case the tiny principality of Tirhut) can and do imagine imperial formations and in doing so set the linguistic, conceptual, and aesthetic groundwork that later actors (in this case, the Mughals) mobilise in order to realise empire. Jha demonstrates that even though Vidyapati’s patron may only have been the dispossessed prince of a small principality, the poet located his patron-protagonist in the broader world of the Sharqi Sultanate, a world vividly articulated by the poet in imperial terms. In this regard, there may be more to say: Jha suggests that Vidyapati and his work would have been largely invisible to the Sharqi Sultan, despite the fact that praise for his sultanate constitutes a substantial part of the Kīrttīlatā. Yet, given the geographical reach of works composed in the literary language that Vidyapati used for the Kīrttīlatā, not to mention the recently-inaugurated tradition of vernacular romances within Sharqi lands (beginning with the Candāyan in 1379), there is reason to consider whether the poet imagined an audience for his panegyric in the very sultanate that he praised at such length. This is a question for future research; the present chapter makes good on its primary goal of explaining how Vidyapati gave his audience in Mithila a sense of where they fit into a larger imperium.
A Political History of Literature is a sensitive and nuanced attempt to synthesise the recent methodological and theoretical insights produced by literary studies of second-millennium North India and apply them to a historiographical question: what role did literature play in the imagining, consolidation, and quotidian functioning of political regimes large and small in Hindustan after Timur? Some of Jha’s suggestions regarding the workings of multilingual culture and the relationship between literature and political praxis are open to further debate. For example, his contention (à la Eagleton) that any text can be read as literature would seem to be odds with his assertion that genre and generic codes matter. Nevertheless, he is definitely asking the right questions about the relationships between language, literature, and power in this time and place. This book is a welcome contribution to the expanding discussion on the fifteenth century and would make a fine addition to syllabi on medieval Indian history and literature.