Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia

Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia: Introduction
SHELDON POLLOCK
The study of the impact of colonialism on culture and power has been the dominant arena of inquiry in the past two decades in South Asian studies. A large body of scholarship has been produced in the colonialism-and-X mode: colonialism and economy, colonialism and caste, colonialism and religious categories ... and the nation, masculinity, science, literature, art, law, historicality, empiricism, numeracy, and almost everything else. Much of this scholarship has been both substantively and theoretically exciting and provocative, and has changed the way we understand the transformative interactions between India and Europe from 1800 on.1 Yet, as many of its practitioners would be the first to admit, colonial studies has often been skating on the thinnest ice, given how much it depends on a knowledge of the precolonial realities that colonialism encountered, and how little such knowledge we actually possess. As I have tried to argue in various forums for some fifteen years though it will seem breathtakingly banal to frame the issue in the only way it can be framed we cannot know how colonialism changed South Asia if we do not know what was there to be changed.2 In the domain of culture viewed broadly, and more specifically with respect to systematic forms of thought, understanding how Western knowledge and imagination won the day presupposes a comprehension more deeply grounded in social and epistemological facts than we now possess of how Indian knowledge and imagination lost which in turn requires a better understanding of what exactly these were, how they worked, and who produced them. To date, hypotheses on the demise of Indian science and scholarship with the advent of colonialism seem largely dependent on interpretations dominant since the time of Max Weber, which take for granted the presumed uniqueness of Western rationality, technology, forms of citizenship, or capacity for capitalism, and the inevitability of their eventual conquest. These interpretations, however, were derived more from assumptions than from actual assessments of data, as Weber would likely have been the first to acknowledge,
and were based on now-discredited notions about the character and history of precolonial Indian economy and society.3 But then, as recent work shows all too clearly, our grasp of Western modernity itself shows the same kinds of epistemic and empirical gaps. Thinkers, especially sociological thinkers (for whom, as one wry observer has put it, History tends to be the mildly annoy ing stuff which happens between one sociological model and another), are far more inclined simply to imagine premodernity than to bother with the boring task of excavating it and indeed, to imagine it purely as a counterpositive to their preconceptions about modernity. This criticism applies almost without exception to Gellner, Giddens, Habermas, Luhmann, and so on down the alphabet. Its not as if we dont have the materials to make some serious sense of culture and power in early modern India (understood here as the period from about 1500 to 1800, after which British colonial power consolidated itself in the subcontinent and changed the rules of the knowledge game). In the sphere of imagination and its written expression, South Asia boasts a literary record far denser, in terms of sheer number of texts and centuries of unbroken multilingual literacy, than all of Greek and Latin and medieval European culture combined. In recognition of this richness, an international collaborative research project completed in 2003 undertook a remapping of the literary field across southern Asia especially during the late precolonial period and in relationship to larger cultural and political processes.4 With respect to science and scholarship, however, especially during this critical early modern period, in-depth research on most disciplines is virtually nonexistent. Again, the requisite materials exist in abundance. In fact, it can be argued that, with the coming of the Pax Mughalana from the latter half of the sixteenth century, a new and dynamic era of intellectual inquiry was inaugurated in many parts of the subcontinent. But whole libraries of the manuscripts produced over the following three centuries remain unread today. The factors contrib-
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24:2 (2004)
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uting to this indifference would be worth weighing with care. One is certainly the diminished capacity of scholars today to actually read these materials, one of the most disturbing if little-remarked legacies of colonialism and modernization. But there are other factors. These include the old Orientalist-Romanticist credo that the importance of any Indian artifact or text or form of thought is directly proportional to its antiquity: the older it was, or such was the belief, the closer it would bring us to some Indo-Germanic Urzeit and the cradle of European life. Equally important is the colonial-era narrative of an Indian decline and fall before 1800, so central to the ideology of British imperialism and its civilizingmodernizing mission, which devalued the late precolonial period as an object of study. One salient example, noted by Allison Busch in the essay included in this volume, is the disdain with which the remarkable achievements of Hindi literature and literary science of the period of neoclassicism the so-called ritikal, or Era of High Style, c. 16501850, a completely new cultural formation were dismissed by colonized Indian intellectuals no less than by their colonial masters. As a result, many of the most important works of the period lie unedited to this day, and most of the fundamental questions, whether internal to the cultural history of India or external and comparative, remain unasked. (Why, for example, did both north India and France see the rise of powerful neoclassical movements of astonishing similarity at precisely the same period?) And this is true across the board. Our intellectual and cultural histories of the period accordingly remain grossly stunted.5 To gain some understanding of the style and substance of Indian thought during these centuries, a new collaborative research project, Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism, was initiated in 2001, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. This project aims to examine eight disciplines in their bibliographical, prosopographical, and substantive dimensions, in order to understand better how scholars in the fields of language analysis, logic and epistemology, hermeneutics, poetics, moral-political thought, life science, astral science, and ritual understood their objects of study, what knowledge they produced, and in what specific social contexts.6 Restricting this research program to Sanskrit materials had at once pragmatic and historical justification. If the project was to remain historically responsible as well as manageable, it was as necessary to narrow the scope to a core language as it was to narrow it to core disciplines. But Sanskrit was not the only language of science and scholarship in early modern South Asia, and those who communicated in Sanskrit did not constitute the only community that generated systematic knowledge, though we are just beginning to understand how the division of
language-labor functioned and to clarify who used which languages for which purposes.7 Persian and vernacular intellectuals produced no less sophisticated work, sometimes in conversation with their Sanskrit-using colleagues a conversation that seems to have taken place principally in the fields of astronomy and mathematics but more often, it seems, segregated from them. (Precisely how and to what extent interaction occurred between these different communities now designated by their linguistic or religious preferences are problems in need of serious investigation.) Yet again, despite the quality and quantity and cultural-historical significance of these materials, very little scholarly attention is currently being devoted to them. While the comparative religion industry, in the United States at least, continues to claim everlarger market share in the academy, it is almost impossible to find scholars who understand the importance of research on any aspect of precolonial science and scholarship in Persian, Arabic, or the regional languages. In Indo-Persian studies, for example, only in the last several years has any new research been undertaken on early modern aesthetics, historiography, philology, philosophy, or political thought.8 The same must be said of most regional-language traditions, with the notable exception of Telugu and Tamil, thanks to the remarkable collaborative efforts of Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.9 In the hopes of stimulating new interest in the works of systematic thought in precolonial India, a seminar on Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia was organized at the University of Chicago in the academic year 20023. We were singularly fortunate to be able to call upon the talents of several of the leading scholars working in this area. Considerations of space prohibit a detailed review of their individual papers. It must suffice to note that most of the most important issues any account of our topic would be expected to address are present in the following collection either in elaborated form or in nuce: the development of new forms of language and ethnic self-identification (Guha); the scientificization of vernacular cultural sensibilities (Busch); the actual practices of text editing and text circulation in the preprint era (Bangha); pedagogy and the production of bureaucrats in the Persianate sphere (Alam and Subrahmanyam); the intersection of imagination and information, what amounts to a kind of protoethnography (Sharma); and the development of science in relationship to empiricism outside of the usual European framework, where experience and religion seem to have come newly, even modernly, into tension with each other (Gyatso). Readers are unlikely to have heard of any of the fascinating characters who appear in the following pages: Jayarama Pindye, the multilingual poet at the Maratha court; Cintamani Tripathi, the poetician of riti; Nik Rai, the clerk-autobiographist; the Iranian migr poet Nu-
Pollock: Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia: Introduction
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ruddin Muhammad Zuhuri, ethnographer of Indian city life; or Dar-mo sMan-rams-pa, one of an inner group of physicians close to the Fifth Dalai Lama. Yet they will now enter the historical record for what they tell us about the creative reinvention of the world of South Asian thought in the late precolonial period what I believe we will one day come to understand was an iceberg of creativity, of which the voices we hear in the following pages represent the merest tip. The papers gathered together in this collection were either presented at the Chicago seminar itself, or solicited from colleagues who knew of and followed its progress. It is the first such collection in South Asian studies, and like all firsts, it is tentative and experimental. Plans are under way among the contributors to deepen and broaden their work on these themes for future collective publication. I would like to thank all participants, both presenters and audience members, for their spirited engagement with the theme of the seminar, as well as the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, which generously provided the funding, and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, which graciously offered a venue for publication.
NOTES 1 For a recent review see D. A. Washbrook, Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5, Historiography, ed. Robin W. Winks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2 See for example my Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj, in Orientalism and the PostColonial Predicament, ed. Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 3 Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid; rational chemistry has been absent from all areas of culture except the West; all Indian political thought was lacking in a systematic method comparable to that of Aristotle, and so on. See Max Weber, Vorbemerkung, in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904-5; repr., Tbingen: Mohr, 1934). Notable attempts at revision in economic history, to take only that dimension, include C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Sugata Bose, ed., South Asia and World Capitalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); David Washbrook, From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 40:4 (1997): 41043. 4 Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a new account specifically of political formations in early modern India, though concentrating on the eighteenth century and using much colonial archival material, see
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 5 Despite a growing interest in the early modern as a conceptual problematic, long-standing tendencies in Indian historiography have drastically narrowed the scope of inquiry. Edited volumes assessing the state of the field of research for the last century of our period, like Seema Alavis The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), or P. J. Marshalls The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), resolutely exclude all questions of late precolonial scientific, literary, or intellectual culture. Even where the transformation of the latter is directly thematized, precolonial history is ignored; see Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6 Some preliminary results of this project are available in Working Papers on Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism I, special issue, Journal of Indian Philosophy 30:5 (2002); Working Papers on Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism II, special issue, Journal of Indian Philosophy 32:3 (2005); Theory and Method in Indian Intellectual History, special issue, J ournal of Indian Philosophy (forthcoming). 7 A first pass through this question is made in my The Languages of Science in Early-Modern India, in Halbfass Commemoration Volume, ed. K. Preisendanz (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). 8 Exemplary work includes Muzaffar Alam, The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan, in Pollock, Literary Cultures in History; Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 12001800 (London: Hurst and Co., 2004); Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 9 See for instance Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 16001800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), and A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century: Krishadevaraya and his Political Theory of Vijayanagara, in South-Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for Franois Gros, e d . Jean-Luc Chevillard (Pondicherry: Institut franais de Pondichry/Ecole franaise dextrme-orient, 2004).
Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 15001800
SUMIT GUHA
The theoretical underpinnings of reductionist understandings of literary culture were seriously eroded through the 1970s, and its analysis turned largely hermeneutic. This approach has indeed produced dramatic breakthroughs in our understanding of literary creation and its forms. But I suggest that is also useful to try and connect (but not reduce) discourses which were after all exercises in communication with other features of the communities that formed around them. This context is, I feel, especially significant in the early modern period, when new forms of belonging increasingly centered on and created speech communities that, in short order, became nations or races; and so the AngloSaxon, Slavic, Teutonic, Latin, and other races took the stage. The establishment of these identities often involved the self-conscious creation and propagation of a national literary culture. Sheldon Pollock has pointed out that the process of vernacularization began with the conscious decisions of writers to reshape the boundaries of their cultural universe by renouncing the larger world for a smaller place New local ways of making culture with their wholly historical and factitious local identities and, concomitantly, ordering society and polity came into being, replacing the older translocalism.1 Implicit in this formulation is that agency resides in the author, the communicator whose choice of medium demarcates its sphere of intelligibility. But the communicator's choice may not be unconstrained: language is ever-changing and he or she risks miscommunication or noncommunication.2 In this look at literary change, I shall therefore attempt to widen the range of linguistic materials studied beyond those that were avowedly literary. Second, Pollock's formulation implicitly suggests that the process of vernacularization was somehow irreversible. This was certainly so in the West: the generally reactionary Congress of Vienna (181415) did not negotiate in Latin. But in South Asia, an effort at reviving the old cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit was actually made in the late seventeenth century. I shall examine the paradoxical fate of this effort through the eighteenth century. But still, how is the author's choice made? Given how deeply the grammatical structures of many languages are marked by hierarchies of power that shape the forms of appropriate utterance, could the choice of medium have been unconnected with the power of patronage? Other questions also arise: how were the communicants visualized by the communicators? How were they changed by that communication? What energized the pre-formative processes that, like contours of the earth, channeled the rivulets that flowed into the larger historic speech communities of the early modern period? And finally, how did some of these communities become the dialects with armies that we called official languages in the century gone by?3 I shall approach these questions by attempting so far as my skills permit to delineate the main features of the polyglot milieu that was the matrix of these processes in South Asia. A Co-evolution of Identity and Language? A significant body of regional studies exists in the field of early modern language. The beginnings of the Telugu in Andhra have been examined by Cynthia Talbot in Pre-Colonial India in Practice; she notes astutely how the find-spots of Telugu inscriptions mirror the political power of the Kakatiya dynasty, which used this language to assert its authority vis--vis the Kannada-preferring Calukyas of Kalyani.4 In Maharashtra the spread of Marathi inscriptions was associated with the Kakatiyas contemporaries and rivals, the Yadavas of Devagiri.5 In Recovering Babel Sanjay Subrahmanyam notes, among other things, the unacknowledged dialogue across linguistic boundaries among Persian histories, Tamil and Telugu narratives, and Tamil folk epics.6 Looking at Mughal north India, Shantanu Phukan recently proposed a demanding agenda: that adamantly heteroglot literary communities should be approached by looking at an entire literary area with its multiple
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literary voices and the manner in which these interacted with each other.7 He goes on to suggest that embedding eastern Hindi dialects in Persian or Persianate Urdu texts was a choice that aristocratic men of letters made to invoke intimate domains of affection and loss.8 This line of thought diverges from the major current among historians who have looked at the phenomenon of polyglossia and hybridization. As Phukan points out, most scholars, influenced by the idea of popular language as the primitive core of nationhood, have tended to identify language choice in terms of its teleological contribution to some as yet inchoate integrative project.9 In 1978 Richard Eaton published an important contribution to the study of the social role of Dakhani Hindi and argued that its adoption by the Sufi lineages he studied was instrumental in the spread of Islam beyond the Persianate elite in the city of Bijapur.10 A similar integrationist analysis of the Mughal decision to adopt Persian as its administrative and literary language was proposed by Muzaffar Alam, who wrote in 1998: The non-sectarian and liberal feature of Persian made it an ideal forum through which the Mughals could effectively negotiate the diversities of the Indian society. The culture and ethos of the language matched with their vision of an over-arching empire.11 The evidence that Alam provides for this is, however, a select anthology of ecumenical statements in Persian. These would be available to someone who had learned the language, but that evidence does not address the issue of how Persian was viewed by the millions who did not know it, and certainly could not read the liberal scholars he cites. Alam, after all, describes how even the liberal Persian syllabus was ultimately imposed by imperial fiat under Akbar, and most students simply wanted to learn enough to qualify for government employment. By implication, though, the adoption of Persian had in fact excluded many. Hence, Alam continues, when the empire was challenged by regionally based ethnicities, the Mughals came to realize that the increasing cultural affirmation of the region expressed in its linguistic diversity had to be accommodated in more meaningful ways. They recognized the need to culturally integrate and accommodate with, and not simply dominate, the regions. This could be illustrated from the interest they showed in Hindavi.12 Implicitly, therefore, Alam admits that the choice of Persian over some Hindavi language did exclude the numerous users of those regional tongues, who then had to be conciliated. In his 2003 revision of this essay, he ends by noting that the coup de grace for Indo-Persian came when Persian, the language of power par excellence, was divorced from power by the British government of India.13 Let me develop this important observation. Another aspect of language choice is that language and accent, like other hard-to-acquire identity markers, can be used
not merely to include but also to exclude. Consider, for example, the role of English in twentieth-century India: retained because it belongs to no one geographically bounded ethnicity, it has worked as a language of power and the marker of the power-elite. This use of English is challenged, however, by the nationalist idea of authenticity residing in the mother tongue: the resulting compromise has usually been to impose a vernacular on the poor while reserving the choice of English to the affluent and powerful.14 Mughal India was unaffected by nationalism and the monolingual ideal that has often accompanied it. Insofar as power was to be centralized in the hands of the ruling family and its associates, the language of power should not tie the emerging imperial state to any specific ethnicity. The major threat to Akbar could come from his Turki kin at Kabul and the Turkic Uzbeks who loomed behind them, which ruled out Turkish. Then again, Akbar was a ruler with expansive ambitions: the regional connotations of northern Hindavi or its southern equivalent, Dakhani, would have tied the empire too closely to regional elites who, in turn, were identified with the regimes that he had just superseded or was still subverting. It is noteworthy that these weaker powers had increasingly sought to embed themselves in the emerging regional tongues.15 I now turn to a region where this process was active. Language Competition in Western India The Marathi language is attested from at least the eighth century CE, but its major efflorescence coincided with the rule of the Yadavas of Devagiri in the thirteenth century. This culminated in the famous Jnyanesvari (or Dnyanesvari, completed in 1290). As Tulpule and Feldhaus observe, Such great literary achievements were made in this period that it has come to be known as the Golden Age in the history of the Marathi language. This period saw the rise and development of the Varkaris and the Mahanubhavas, the two sects that produced the bulk of Old and Middle Marathi literature.16 The Yadavas were supplanted in 1318 by governors sent from Delhi, who in turn set up the Bahmani sultanate from c.1350. The sultanate disintegrated at the end of the fifteenth century, being succeeded by the Nizam Shahis in western Maharashtra. Important works of Middle Marathi literature continued to be produced. Furthermore, Marathi remained the language of administration and government at the local level, where hereditary officials maintained their grip on authority. As Chatrapati Sivaji's minister, Krishnaji Ananta Sabhasad, wrote in 1694, Lands held by the Idalshahi, Nizamshahi, Mughalai were conquered [by Sivaji]. In those lands, the farmers had been until then completely in the hands of the hereditary headmen, accountants and district officers.17 These officials maintained records (and probably spoke) in a variant of Middle Marathi modified
Guha: Transitions and Translations
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by a significant infusion (as we shall see below) of Persian and Arabic loan-words. Elsewhere, I have argued that the centralizing authority of early modern states in the peninsula operated significantly through the exploitation of extant fissures and cleavages in local society.18 One of these points of entry was via the adjudication of local disputes, as Andre Wink pointed out in his path-breaking book almost two decades ago.19 These conflicts were most often settled at assemblies gotsabha, majlis, etc. essentially according to the common sense of the country. These judicial processes, in turn, generated a discourse of entitlement by inheritance and the bakhar (historical narrative) was therefore well adapted to discourses of ethnic pride and the consequent claims to regional dominance by autochthonous landholders. A growing body of research suggests the importance of such gentry communities in the politics of early modern India. Muzaffar Alam pointed this out in 1986: in resistance to the Mughal empire, the rebels and 'disturbers' had been identified in terms of either their class, namely, zamindars, or their caste, clan and region.20 Furthermore, in a polyglot milieu, familiarity is signaled by using common speech inaccessible to others; exclusion or dominance by using an official language of power (in contemporary north India, this pattern is exhibited in the use of regional language or dialect versus English). Regional names reflected dominant ethnic communities: Kolvan, Marathwada, Jhalawad, Kathiawad, Baiswada, Gondwana, Hadauti, Mhairwada, Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand. It will be evident that I am moving towards a speech-community definition of ethnicity, while admitting such additional limiting markers as the evidence sustains.21 But my use of ethnicity is not spatially bounded in the way that nationality is assumed to be. In fact, ethnicities in hierarchical societies cannot escape ranking, and are often formed by the intrusion of plebeian or elite minorities into areas where they were previously unknown.22 Was Dakhani also taking shape as the language of an incipient southern Turk ethnicity? The sixteenth century saw the sultanates of southern India increasingly thrown back on local resources by the rise of Portuguese power in the Indian Ocean and the Mughal empire in north India. The cores of three long-lived sultanates were centered in different language zones: the Adil Shahi in the Kannada-speaking area, the Nizam Shahi in west Maharashtra, and the Qutb Shahi in Andhra. The same period saw a rise in the patronage of Dakhani as well as the use of regional languages like Marathi and Telugu. Richard Eaton noted the turn to Dakhani composition among some Sufi pirs from the late fifteenth century onward. He suggested that part of the reason for its adoption was that
it was evidently the only vernacular of Bijapur with which both Muslims and Hindus at least those integrated with the city were familiar ... Dakhani could reach more people than could the elitist Persian language. Of course, the use of Marathi or Kannada would have reached many more than even Dakhani. But Dakhani had the advantage of being written in the Perso-Arabic script, which would permit, when necessary, the easy importation of Islamic vocabulary.23 Was the choice as strictly functional as Eaton suggests? The idea that literacy should build towards the ability to read the Koran, and therefore start with the Arabic script, was widespread in the Islamic world. But the obstacles to rendering Marathi or Kannada into the PersoArabic script are no more serious than those encountered in rendering Turkish, Panjabi, Swahili, Malay, or indeed Dakhani into it. Furthermore, because oral transmission initiated by lectors reading aloud would be a major form of propagation, the phonetic corruption of Arabic religious terms would creep in regardless of the language of composition. As the simple technical explanation is insufficient, I would suggest that Dakhani may have been the only vernacular that the Sufis knew, and that they saw no need to go beyond the circle of Dakhani-knowing plebeians (which would include the women and retainers of their Persian-knowing patrons). Hence they needed no rustic languages. As Eaton pointed out, at their most activist they were no more than passive proselytizers or reformers of the established community;24 unlike, say, the ferociously proselytizing Jesuits, who not only learned local vernaculars worldwide but also took steps to bring them into the world of print. The Dakhani language then became an aspect of a dominant urban elite, and was perceived as such. Thus the famous Marathi bhakta poet, Tukaram, in depicting the modern age of decay (kaliyuga), points to the use of avindhavani the speech of those who have unpierced ears, i.e., Muslims by even Brahmans as one of its features.25 In the 1650s, Jayarama Pindye claimed to compose freely in twelve languages including daksinatya yavani.26 Yavana was by then a common term for Muslim, and Jayarama clearly recognized that the southern or daksinatya yavanas had a language distinct from Persian, which he simply termed yavani. The Dakhani language thus became expressive of a regional religious identity. The sixteenth-century bhakta poet Eknaths Hindu-Turk samvad illustrates among other things the power-relation involved. The Turk is actually a Muslim who gets into a wrangle with a Brahman. The Muslim speaks something close to Dakhani with many Arabic loan-words, while the Brahman does not choose to display his knowledge of Sanskrit although he quotes a Sanskrit sloka). He uses a Marathi
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very close to Eknaths own but shares significant vocabulary with his antagonist. For example, after the Turk has used the Bali-Vamana legend to attack Hindu belief, the Brahman replies, Bali khudaca khasa banda (Bali was a favored slave of the Lord). The casemarker is Marathi but three out of four words are Persian. He then goes on to assimilate the story of Adam and Eve with that of Rama and Sita, Ravana being identified with Satan.27 So Dakhani, like Urdu in north India, was a language of the urban centers and the elite. It was perhaps an errant aspiration to urbanity that led Tukarams sinful kaliyugina Brahman to pop a pan-vida into his mouth and then use avindha speech.28 Furthermore, as already mentioned, over time central authority developed a more intrusive presence in the localities. In such a setting, official languages and the power to prescribe them would impact deeply upon the formation of speech communities. Superiors are truly such only in the presence of inferiors; elites, only if they dominate over subalterns. So the court officials that ambitious leaders of gentry clusters invoked, resisted, and emulated were (particularly after the fall of Vijayanagara), Persianized rather than Sanskritized. It was important for local potentates, proprietors of all sorts, and even humble peasant plaintiffs to get some understanding of officialese and polite usage. But on the other hand, the strength of the gentry lay in local followings and extended kin networks. These would be reinforced, as we shall see in the case of the Chatrapatis Sivaji and Sambhaji, by the invocation of a shared ethnic rootedness in a sense, an expanded sense of kinship whereby all speakers of a given language were akin. Superiority would then be signaled by the use of a higher register indicating access to but not assimilation into a high language. Total assimilation to the glorious imperial court was dangerous, if tempting.29 So the high languages of the royal courts gradually infiltrated the various regional tongues, and multiple linguistic registers had to be mastered by great and small alike. This changed the way they spoke. Indeed, if we take even a cursory look at the volume of records, orders, summons, and warnings surviving through the troubled sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems likely that the form of written document that a commoner would most frequently hear or see would be an official document such as a zahirnama, katba, mucalka, dospatra, hakikata, takidpatra, izarpata, dastak, karina, or mahzar. How common an understanding of the structure and function of such documents became is shown by the fact that the immensely popular Eknath (153399) and Tukaram (160850) both composed devotional poems that played upon these formats. For example, Eknath wrote an arz beginning: Arzdast arzdar bandgi bandenawaz
Alekam salam Sahebance sevesi bande sarirakar Jivaci sekdar Budhaji karkun Prgane Sarirabad Kille Kayapuri Sarkar Sahebanci ajna gheun svar jahlon Ton pargane mazkuri yeun sarkar kam suru karavayas laglo ton pargane majkurce jamadar Dambhaji sete .... [A petition from the slave to the cherisher of slaves, on whom be peace: the writer has the form of the Body, which is bailiff-custodian of Life, together with the clerk who is its Intellect, situated in the subdivision of the Living (follows) Having received the Lord's command at the Fort of the Body, I set off for the aforementioned subdivision and began conducting government business. The tax-farmer of the subdivision is Dambhaji ...] This poem ingeniously mimics the structure and tone of reports from touring subordinates to central ministers, down to descriptions of malfeasance and accounts of the writers efforts to remedy the situation as a parable for the frail human body beset by evil desires and impending death. So affairs of the pargana (body) on which Budhaji (the consciousness) is reporting are represented as being in disorder, with Kamaji (Desire) as the mahajan (head of the merchants), covetousness as the (female) despandina (hereditary registrar) and Krodhaji (Rage) as the nayakvadi (chief of police), etc. Then Jarasandha, a mace-bearer, brings news that Death in the form of a Brahman auditor (Yamaji Pant) is about to take charge. At this terror the pargana almost empties of life; Kesganv (Hair-ville) turns white; Kanganv (the Earvilles) close their gates; Nakapur (Noseham) begins to run, Gandapur (Anuston) begins to flow,30 and so on. It ends: Eka Janardanaka banda bandgi roshan hoya he arzdast.31 Read as Hindustani, which the genitive case-marker ka suggests, it means: Eka (Eknath) is (solely) the slave of Janardana. So that this servitude may be illuminated [by the divine presence] this petition is in the hand. Janardana of course refers to Krishna; but Eknath's guru was also named Janardana and is said to have been a fort commandant under the Nizam Shahi sultans of Ahmadnagar. The devotional poets may of course have wished to display their linguistic virtuosity as well as devotion; but an example of how deeply these official processes imprinted ordinary Marathi can be seen from a deposition by one Babaji Krishna Kulkarni in 1650 (with PersoArabic derivates highlighted): arz kela ki aple kulkarnapanaci nivad karkirdi Malik Ambar Saheb jala hota tenhepramane aple vadile khat hote yavari aple vadile baphat jaleyavar darmyane Ataji Tan-
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prabhu apla varisdar Marhateyace nivadiyasi kusur karun ghetla hota.32 [Submitted a petition that a decision on our hereditary village accountant's office was made in the administration of Malik Ambar Saheb, and our father had exercised the office in conformity with that decision. Then after our father's demise Ataji Tanprabhu our co-heir got a fraudulent decision in his favor from the Marhata administration.] Languages were marked by a tension between hybridization and identity. The resulting mixed idiom, with an interesting infusion of Sanskrit tatsamas (loan words) is found, for example, in Sivaji's letter to Dadaji Naras Prabhu, deshpande of the Rohida valley, where the major appeal is to a territorial rootedness in the valley as well as putative wider subcontinental identity (again, PersoArabic is highlighted): shahasi bemangiri tumhi va amhi karit nahi Srirohidesvara tumce khoriyatil adi kuladeva tumca dongarmatha patharavar sendrilagat svayambhu ahe tyani amhas yas dilhe va pudhe sarva manoratha Hindvi svarajya karun puravinar ahe tyas bavas haval hou naye khamakha sangava.33 [You and I are not being disloyal to the Shah. Srirohidesvara, the original presiding deity of your valley, exists in self-created form next to the sendri tree on the plateau at the crest of your mountain: he has given me success and will in future fulfill the desire of creating a Hindavi kingdom. So say to the Bava (addressee's father): Do not be unnecessarily downcast.] But while such local knowledge and identity could be valuable to the head of a small principality, a subcontinental imperial system could benefit from a high language that favored no specific ethnicity the role played by Persian in the Mughal Empire. In later years, Sivaji and his son and successor Sambhaji seem to have considered the possibility of Sanskrit playing such a role. Thus the Rajavyavaharakosa a thesaurus of official usage was prepared shortly after Sivaji's coronation as Chatrapati. This has sometimes been presented as an effort at the triumphant return of Sanskrit with the end of Muslim rule. S. B. Varnekar, for example, claims that the author was commissioned to write this text in order to save the language of the gods (devabhasa).34 The text itself is much more modest: Having completely uprooted the barbarians (mleccha), by the best of kings a learned man was appointed ... to replace the overvalued Yavana words (atyartham yavanavacanair) with educated speech (vibudhabhasam).35 There is, for a period, a significant change in register in official documents, with a new prominence given to Sanskritic terminology, even though Marathi remained the official language. I shall return to this theme later in this essay. The early emergence of regional vernaculars had been associated to some degree with the translation, or more
precisely adaptation, of Sanskrit works: the most famous example in early Marathi literature is the Jnyanesvari/Dnyanesvari of 1290. The sixteenth-century scholar Eknath also composed some major transcreations, paralleling the slightly later work of Tulsidas in north India. We may get some insights into the polyglot milieu of a seventeenth-century court via the Radhamadhavavilasacampu.36 Its author, Jayarama Pindye, exemplifies the multiple skills possessed by the seventeenthcentury literatus. He clearly had some training in the Sanskrit poetic tradition and quotes both Bhamaha and Bhoja at the outset and acknowledges the Amarakosa. But he accords a high status to the various vernaculars, and there are few indications of language hierarchy in his text. The text presents itself as narrating the literary feats of the poet Jayarama Pindye at the court of Sahaji Bhonsle in Karnataka when the latter was an Adil Shahi general, carving out a new domain in the remains of the Vijayanagara empire.37 Jayarama states that Sahaji himself listened to the play of twelve languages that it contained.38 The text opens with a prose introduction discussing the opinions of different literary critics on the poet's choice of his theme, and then follow five cantos on what I would judge conventional themes: waterfrolics, the flowery bed, the description of the heroine from head to toe, the six seasons, and so on. The sixth canto, however, presents something altogether new. It reverts to prose and describes how the assembly of connoisseurs was amazed by the cantos and asked the reader who the author was. The answer is that he is associated with a maharaja; the audience then asks who that latter is, which occasions several ingeniously crafted lines in praise of the Bhonsle king.39 Next the arrival of the poet, who comes from Maharashtra to Sahaji's court, is described. Entering, Jayarama takes his appointed place and makes an offering of twelve coconuts. The king is intrigued and asked why: the poet responds that they symbolize the twelve languages in which he composes: Sanskrit, Prakrit, Gopacaliya, Gurjara, Vaktara, Dhundhar, Panjab, Hindusthan, Baggul, Yavani, Daksinatya Yavani, Karnataka.40 I have to postpone a complete analysis of these language names, which would have to be accompanied by an analysis of the actual poems presented (occasionally under different language-names) in the eleventh canto. Briefly, however, I suggest that Prakrit refers to Marathi, which may suggest a link to classical Prakrit and the understanding that it was a literary language with a grammatical traditions of its own, and Gopacaliya to Braj or Gwaleri. (Gwaliyar has obviously the same meaning as Gopacal, the land of the cowherds [gval- or goval-] or perhaps the Cowherd, i.e., Krishna.) Vaktara is clearly Bundeli: the name may refer to the accoutrements of war, or it may be a Sanskritization of bhasa (vaktra as mouth, by extension, speech or bhasa/bhakha). Dhundhar refers to northern
28
Rajasthani, and Hindusthan is what is subsequently labeled Rekhta. Baggul is northwestern Marathi or Ahirani. (The Baghul vamsa ruled in the eponymous province of Baglana to the 1640s. In 1596 they invited the Southern poet Rudrakavi to compose a Sanskrit family history in twenty cantos.)41 Yavani is Persian, and Daksinatya (southern) Yavani is Dakhani. (Panjab and Karnatak are self-evident.) Clearly, as suggested above, Dakhani was viewed as the tongue of a regional ethnicity that happened to share a broader religious identity with the northern Yavanas, but was nonetheless distinct from their tongue. The next canto represents a literary competition in which various learned men of the court challenge each other with lines from verses that have to be completed in conformity with meter and meaning. Then a canto occasioned by the appearance of Sahaji armed and accoutered and so on. Then, interestingly, Sahaji asks the poet to respond extempore to themes (samasya) in the vernaculars. Jayarama agrees if the contest is conducted in the presence of the young prince. The jealous vernacular poets see this as an opportunity, and rush to offer difficult themes. Jayarama utters a sloka saying that the Sanskrit lion advances roaring to seize the unattainable bright and bashful word, while the others sit concealed in the many-branched languages like monkeys (sakhamrga).42 This angers the bhasa poets who resolved to set him the most difficult lines when they get the chance. Jayarama then exhibits his virtuosity at another session by completing verses using lines thrown him in different Hindavi languages. The first is clearly in Bundeli and the theme heroic. It celebrates the conquest of Karnatak by Sahaji, and ends with an ingenious play on ber (wild fruit) and bairi (enemy) to boast that the womenfolk of his enemies were forced to flee into the woodlands. bajat karnatak bhajan karnatuk batanmen kangde hatak setanmen balamki bat lakhen barbar bavarisi bairanki vadhu phire bairanki banme [Conquering Karnatak cleaving the Karnatakis, the Kangdas who recoiled from the spears and the exiled wives of the enemy roam in the jungles where the wild fruit grows.] This is then followed by an amorous image of Krishna (Kanha) in Braj, then a heroic verse in Khari Boli, with a pun on firang (sword), firangi (Portuguese?), and phir rang gayo hai. (Roughly translated, the couplet suggests that Portuguese women lose color or blench when Sahaji takes up his sword.) These feats pleased the worthy, but now both the Sanskrit and vernacular poets present were offended. A linguistically interesting poem is labeled Rekhta and written in the feminine voice: akal curai meri kamakal pithare ne mahabali maharaja dilgir kare hai
jilhe sa duniye ke ganim sab kati kadhe jake sat sattar hazar svar khare hai [My small wit is stolen [I am infatuated] by the great lord, the mighty maharaja has made me heavyhearted. He who slays all enemies, in whose service seven and seventy thousand horsemen stand ready.] One of the more striking aspects of the Campu is the prominence given to Bundeli. One is strongly tempted to link this with Kolff's work on the Bondiliyas, and that of Subrahmanyam on their role as auxiliaries of the Mughals in southern India.43 The Mughal connection is explicitly suggested in a verse addressed to Narayana (Vishnu) by his envoy after surveying the earth: tum soye raho sirsindhu maha aru uttar dachan rachan ko it Sahju hai ut Sahijaha. [Continue to repose in the sea of milk: the north and south are protected here is Sahju and there is Sahijaha.] Did ethnic gentry power determine the panoply of languages on display? Marathi is introduced very late in the sequence of poems, and then at the request of the court jester (vidusaka), and the response is punning verse on the defeat of Mir Jumla, the capture of the fort of Guti, and eating shit. (Later more heroic Marathi verse is introduced, including a series of poems exhibiting different meters in the same language, and significantly concluding with a series of Marathi dohas.) In poem 30 Durg Thakur asks the poet to compose in Marathi: kavi thor yas bhasa apra (Poet, great is this our language). Poem 31 then renders the theme of the wives of Sahaji's enemies hiding in the forest and seeking to conceal themselves among the Bhil women. In 1618, several decades prior to the composition of Jayaramas poem, Thomas Stevens, S.J., in order to popularize his rendering of Christian doctrines into Marathi/Konkani, introduced several verses in praise of the Marathi language into the first chapter of his work, and wrote it in the traditional ovi meter. The language is declared to be the diamond and turquoise among gems, the peacock among birds, the kalpataru (fabulous wishgranting tree) among trees, the noblest of tongues, the Sunday and Monday among days, etc.44 I would suggest that this prefatory material was inserted in order to mobilize embryonic language-pride to reinforce the acceptance of the text. But a return to Sanskrit is also visible at the close of the seventeenth century, perhaps reflecting the new ambitions of regional satraps in the wide vistas opened by the evident collapse of the Mughals. Consider the career of the Vivekacintamani, an encyclopedic Virashaiva Kannada prose text of the thirteenth or fourteenth century translated into Marathi ovi verse in 1604. Portions of the Kannada text were then rendered into Tamil later that
29
century and into Sanskrit c. 1725. The Sanskrit translation was by Nirvanamantri, minister at the court of the Keladi nayaka, Somashekhara.45 Sanskrit scholarship was active and innovative at this time. Multiple sources of patronage had also opened up: most notably, the Mughal emperor himself.46 Sheldon Pollock has described how the Imperial court generated unparalleled cross-cultural interactions from the sixteenth century onward.47 Great expectations were current among the literati. A widely circulated sloka attributed to the great Sanskrit scholar Jagannatha ran: dillisvaro va jagadisvaro va manorathan purayitum samarthah anyair nripalair bahu diyamanam sakaya va syallavanaya va syat [(My) desires can be fulfilled by either the lord of Delhi or the lord of the world What is an abundant gift for other kings will merely supply me vegetables or just the salt to flavor them.]48 Pollock also suggests that some of Jagannathas Sanskrit verse was modeled on the well-established Persian theme of a lamentation over the unattainable beloved.49 The northern Bhonsle kingdom established by Sahujis son Sivaji seems, in the last years of Sivaji, and more vigorously under Sambhaji, to have aimed at a reinstatement of Sanskrit as a language of history and even of diplomacy. We have the well-known Sivabharata,50 as well as several lesser-known Sanskrit kavyas. Sivaji patronized the important Rajavyavaharakosa, a thesaurus of Sanskrit official terms. There was also a certain effort to correspond with the Rajput courts of Rajasthan in Sanskrit.51 In part, this may have been a counter to the increasingly Islamic tone of Aurangzeb after 1678. In the last years of Sivaji's reign, and throughout that of Sambhaji, titles were Sanskritized to a considerable degree and we find significantly more Sanskrit words in official documents. This continued with the succession of Rajaram (1689) and the desperate guerilla struggle of the ensuing years, when every ideological appeal was thrown into the scales, with routine use of jihad by the Mughals, and appeals such as this from the Maratha ruler: svamice rajya mhanaje deva-brhamanaci bhumi. Ya rajyaci abhivrddhi vhavi ani Maharashtradharma rahava.52 (That the Lord [Rajaram] holds this kingdom is equivalent to the Gods and Brahmans holding it. This kingdom must be sustained and the dharma pertinent to Maharashtra survive.) We also have a return to a stronger emphasis under Rajaram and Tarabai on the ethnic Maratha character of the kingdom. In a letter likely one of many sent in the desperate year 1690 Rajaram wrote to Baji Sarjerao Jedhe, he Marasta rajya ahe (this is a Maratha kingdom).53 Writing in 1693, the experienced minister Krishnaji Ananta Sabhasad nostalgically read ethnic assertion into Sivaji's coronation as Chatrapati in 1674. In this epoch all the great kings have been barbarian (mlec-
cha); now a Marast padshah became chatrapati. This was no ordinary event.54 In fact, the copious contemporary documentation surviving from that event suggests that it was designed to be much more pan-Indian and Sanskritic than Marathi in character. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Maharashtradharma was invoked in various contexts, without requiring further definition. It is interesting that the Peshwas who took effective control of the Maratha state in the early eighteenth century, while lavishly patronizing the traditions of Sanskrit learning, did not promote it seriously in the sphere of government and diplomacy. Some Sanskrit correspondence continued, as for example in a letter sent with two emissaries to Jodhpur in 1736. But the text is a word-for-word translation of a Marathi official text with all the conventions of that genre. It also bears a great formal resemblance to Rajasthani letters in the same collection. I surmise that scribes all three languages were modeling themselves on well-established Persian epistolary convention. The letter ends with the conventional Why should I write much? in Sanskrit.55 Meanwhile, back in Maharashtra, the language of the administrative documents of the era reflects, if anything, the strong legacy of sultanate/Mughal statecraft and eighteenthcentury Hindustani usage. When foreign authorities were to be impressed it was done by incorporating large amounts of Persian. So for example around 1775, the minister Nana Phadnis wrote to the king of England on behalf of the infant peshwa explaining recent events in the kingdom (Persian words are printed in bold): Tyas Madhavraosaheb vaikunthavasi jaliyavar kiblegah Narayanarao Saheb daulat karu lagle. Te vakhti Raghunatharao gharantila biradar yani daga karun apla daulat karavi ha irada kela kiblegah yans phamd karun marile. Hi gosta Hinduce mahzabat bahut na-munasab 56 [Then after the noble Madhavrao took up his heavenly abode, the auspicious and noble Narayanrao began to rule. At that time, Raghunathrao, a close relative, decided to take over the kingdom by treachery and killed the auspicious one by a devious stratagem. According to Hindu orthodoxy, this action is deeply impermissible ...] On the other hand, the Marathi language was tenaciously retained, even though Persian was, at the time, the major language of diplomacy in South and West Asia. This contrasts with the Mughal abandonment of Turkish after Babur (d. 1530). The Marathi language, much changed by loanwords, was still retained even as Mahadaji Sinde secured from his protg, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam, the title of plenipotentiary deputy for the Peshwa and governed from Delhi in the latter's name. It is significant, therefore, that unlike the Sanskrit Sivabharata/Sivacarita, when a verse history of the peshwai was composed around 1772, it was in Mara-
30
thi in the ovi meter, though evidently written by a Sanskrit-knowing literatus, deeply immersed in the traditions of the purana and kavya literature.57 Clearly, that linguistic identity had assumed a new significance in the politics of South Asia. This new significance of Marathi was also in evidence twenty years later when the English East India Company stripped the southern branch of Sahaji Bhonsle's descendants of the last fig leaf of sovereign authority that remained to them in Thanjavur. Sarfoji Bhonsle read the writing on the wall and added some of his own. The great patron of Sanskrit learning and Karnataka music had a long narrative history of the family written and carved on the walls of the Sri Brihadisvarasvami temple in their former capital. Surrounded with examples of literary Sanskrit and Tamil epigraphs, the last Choladesadhipati Srimant Rajsri Maharaja Kshatrapati Sarfoji Raje Saheb (Overlord of the Chola country, the glorious great king sovereign monarch, the worthy king Sarfoji) had his personal [secretary], Baburaya, compose and inscribe a family history in unadorned Marathi prose.58 This text stands at the very cusp of the time when power and patronage in one of the great centers of Indian learning was slipping from the Bhonsle court to the new men rising in the port cities under colonial auspices. Does Sarfoji's choice of language offer us a hint of the connection between the worlds of language politics before and after the colonial deluge? I hope I have demonstrated that this question is worth asking.
NOTES
The research embodied in this article was made possible by my tenure of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I am indebted to Sheldon Pollock for close reading of an earlier draft, and the editorial staff of this journal for their painstaking work on a difficult manuscript. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1Sheldon Pollock, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History, Public Culture 12 (2000), 592. 2Pollock has, of course, already warned us against unthinkingly adopting a conceptual style that typically reduces language to power and precludes even asking what may be different about their interaction in the past. Sheldon Pollock, The Cosmopolitan Vernacular, Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998), 32. 3The oft-cited and much-critiqued work of Benedict Anderson on print capitalism and its structuring effects may be cited as an example of such analysis on a macro-scale. 4Cynthia Talbot, Pre-Colonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 347. 5A. S. Altekar, The Yadavas of Seunadesa, part 8 in The Early History of the Deccan (1960; repr. ed. Ghulam Yazdani [Delhi: Oriental Book Co., 1982]), 56971.
Subrahmanyam, Recovering Babel, in Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1999), 280321. 7Shantanu Phukan, Through Throats Where Many Rivers Meet: The Ecology of Hindi in the World of Persian, Indian Economic and Social History Review 38:1 (2001), 3358. 8I venture to suggest that the rustic speech of the unlettered wet-nurses and attendants in the women's quarters might recall to aristocratic men a blissful period when they were cocooned in deferential affection a period that ended with their induction into a world of slaps from tutors and snubs from grandees (if nothing worse). 9This instability is highlighted by Sheldon Pollock when he condemns a History of French Literature as teleological to the core and unhistorical except in its brute linearity. Pollock, Introduction, in Literary Cultures in History, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11 (hereafter cited as LCIH). 10Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 13001700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 914, 13574. By the late eighteenth century we have a poet complaining in five languages that only Shiva patronized Tamil, that Coastal Muslims rejected him, saying, Arabi bat tumko malum nai nikal ja (You do not know Arabic! Get out!). Cited in Indira V. Peterson, Speaking in Tongues: The Cultural Discourses of Literary Multilingualism in EighteenthCentury India (paper presented at Columbia University, 2 December 2003). 11Muzaffar Alam, The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics, Modern Asian Studies 32:2 (1998), 349. 12Alam, Pursuit of Persian, 349, and the revised version of this paper, Persian in Pre-colonial Hindustan, in LCIH, 1623. 13Alam, Persian in Pre-colonial Hindustan, 188. 14As Harish Trivedi elegantly puts it, India remains a nation effectively without a national language, but at least and perhaps precisely for that reason it remains a nation. Harish Trivedi, The Progress of Hindi, in LCIH, 981. 15Noted by Alam, Persian in Pre-colonial Hindustan, 1578. 16S. G. Tulpule and Anne Feldhaus, A Dictionary of Old Marathi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xi. 17 Cited in Bhimrao Kulkarni, ed., Sabhasad Bakhar (Pune: Anmol Prakashan, 1987), 25. 18Sumit Guha, Indigenous Historical Traditions and Colonial Histories: The Maratha Case (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, 36 January 2002). 19Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India (1985; Indian ed., Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1986). 20Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 17071748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2 and n. 2. 21Max Weber is still important for this concept: Ethnic membership differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity, not a group with concrete social action, like the latter. In our sense, ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere. Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 ), vol. 1, 38990. A few years ago, D.
6Sanjay
31
H. A. Kolff suggested that identities such as Afghan or Rajput were soldier's identities rather than ethnic or genealogical denotations, but the evidence advanced for this sweeping statement is scanty. Furthermore, even by his own account, leaders had ethnic identities which were then donned and doffed by their followers as expedient. See D. H. A Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 14501850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 568. 22So, for example, writing from Senji (Jinji) in the 1690s, hundreds of miles from significant concentrations of Marathi speakers, Chatrapati Rajaram could still say, This is a Maratha kingdom. Cited in Setumadhavarao Pagdi, Hindvi Svarajya ani Mogal (Pune: Venus Prakashan, 1966), 17. 23Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 141. 24Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 133. 25R. R. Gosavi, ed., Srisakalasantagatha (Pune: Sarathi Press, 2000), vol. 2, 1023. 26Jayarama Pindye, Radhamadhavavilasacampu, ed. V. K. Rajwade (Pune: Varda Books reprint, 1996), 227. 27Gosavi, Sakalasantagatha, vol. 2, 583-6. 28Gosavi, Sakalasantagatha, vol. 2, 1023. 29Close assimilation with the Mughal court led to the demise of the long-established Baghul kingdom in north Maharashtra. See Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India c.1200-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62-80. 30This refers to dysentery. 31Gosavi, Sakalasantagatha, vol. 2, 5278. 32S. N. Joshi and G. H. Khare, eds., Sivacaritrasahitya (Pune: Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala 1930), vol. 3, 22. 33V. K. Rajwade, Marathyancya Itihasanci Sadhanen (Dhule, 1912), part 15, 272. 34S. B. Varnekar, Shivaji's Patronage to Sanskrit Learning, in Chhatrapti Shivaji Coronation Tercentenary Commemoration Volume, ed. B. K. Apte (Bombay: University of Bombay, 19745), 85. 35K. N. Sane has printed the Rajavyavaharakosa, and cites the sloka in his epilogue to it; Sivacaritrapradipa (Pune: Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala 1925), 14477. 36 Pindye, Radhamadhavavilasacampu. 37To be exact, the poems are reported in the text as composed on various occasions at the court of Sahaji Bhonsle, who is praised in every part of the text. But there may be interpolations as well: the Marathi poem Bhujangaprayaga goes on to praise Sivaji, who will wage war against four patshahs (Radhamadhavavilasacampu, text, 267). 38 dvadasabhasalalita Shahanaresvarane akarnile, R adhamadhavavilasacampu text, 3. 39Radhamadhavavilasacampu, text, 226. 40Radhamadhavavilasacampu, text, 227. 41Rudrakavi, Rashtraudhavamsamahakavya, ed. C. D. Dalal (Baroda: Gaikwad Oriental Series V, 1917). 42Radhamadhavavilasacampu, text, 245. 43Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, 12058; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Friday's Child: How Tej Singh became Tecinkurajan, Indian Economic and Social History Review 36:1 (1999): 69113. 44Joseph L. Saldanha, ed., The Christian Puranna of Father Thomas Stephens (Mangalore: Simon Alvares, 1907), 7.
Avlikara, ed., Shrinijgunashivayogi krita Vivekacintamani (Dharwad: Karnataka University; Pune: Pune University, 1963). The modern edition of this work was itself a statement in the cultural politics of Nehruvian India: it was being edited and jointly published by state universities in Dharwad and Pune just as violent demonstrations erupted over the allocation of Belgaum district to Karnataka rather than Maharashtra. 46This had begun with Akbar: see M. Athar Ali, Translation of Sanskrit Works at Akbar's Court, in Akbar and His Age, ed. Iqtidar Alam Khan (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1999), 17180. 47Sheldon Pollock, New Intellectuals in SeventeenthCentury India, Indian Economic and Social History Review 38:1 (2001), 20. 48The proverbial nature this sloka came to acquire is shown by Ramacandra Pants quotation of its first two words when composing the introduction to the Ajnapatra in 1717. S. N. Banhatti, the editor of the text, was able trace the allusion. S. N. Banhatti, ed., Ajnapatra (Pune and Nagpur: Suvicar Prakasana Mandala, 1986), 58, 121. 49Pollock, New Intellectuals, 20. 50Parmananda, Sivabharata (Pune: Anandasrama Press, 1930). For an English translation see James W. Laine and S. S. Bahulkar, trans., The Epic of Shivaji (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001). 51Akshayakirti Vyasa and G. H. Khare, Udepurcya Vyasa gharanayakadila kahi patren, Bharata Itihasa Samsodhaka Mandala Traimasika 33 (19523), 80. 52Pagdi, Hindvi Svaraj ani Mogal, 17. 53Rajwade, Marathyancya Itihasanci Sadhanen, part 15, 3778. 54Cited in Kulkarni, Sabhasad Bakhar, 76. 55Vyasa and Khare, Udepurcya Vyasa gharanayakadila kahi patren, 80. 56Cited in M. T. Patwardhan, introduction to Farsi-Marathi Kosa, 2nd ed. (Pune: Varda Books, 1996), 6. 57Narendra Wagle and A. R. Kulkarni, ed. and trans., Vallabha's Parasrama caritra (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1976). 58T. Sambamurti Row, transcribed and ed., The Marathi Historical Inscription at the Sri Brihadeeswaraswami Temple at Tanjore (Tanjore: Sri Krishna Vilasa Press, 1907), passim and 119.
45Pandita
Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India: The Kavitavali of Tulsidas

IMRE BANGHA
Large literary masterpieces often secure fame for their authors but at the same time shorter compositions by them may enjoy similar popularity. Shakespeares sonnets are as much read as any of his great plays. Brevity, making the poem more accessible for immediate appreciation, disciplined metrical form, and a hint of a more personal voice largely contributed to the success of Shakespeares 154 sonnets, collected by his friends and published in 1609 towards the end of his literary career. The textual legacy of Tulsidas (1532?1623?), a contemporary of Shakespeare, whose standing in Hindi literature matches that of the English author, presents a similar phenomenon. His Kavitavali, a series of some 350 loosely connected quatrains in stricter meters and with a more individual approach than found in the authors other works, was compiled probably around the 1610s. Tulsis favorite themes are collected here, and although arranged into seven cantos (kandas) according to the Ramayana tradition, it does not always follow the linear epic structure. The collection has enjoyed immense popularity. Initially it was transmitted in handwritten books, and although no autograph copy survives, about sixty copied manuscripts have been traced in the past hundred years. Several hundreds, however, must have been prepared over the centuries. Since its first printed edition in 1815 the Kavitavali has been published about 120 times; the Gita Press alone, its most popular publisher, had issued 632,500 copies by 2001 according to the flyleaf of the edition. Apart from Tulsis Ramcaritmanas, only his Vinay Patrika, a compilation of devotional padas (songs with refrain set to a certain rhythm, tala, and in a dominating mood, raga), and Hanumanbahuk, have sold more copies. (The latter, however, was originally part of the Kavitavali.)1 The Kabitt Form The force that keeps the distinct parts of the collection together is not that of a linear narrative but rather
the poetic form: the entire Kavitavali is written in kabitts (quatrains). The early bhakti poets conveyed their message most effectively in padas, which normally have a loose moraic meter suitable for emotional expression through singing. The Kavitavali is a devotional work written not in padas but in the kabitt form. The importance of the form can be judged by the fact that in many manuscripts and early editions this collection is called Kabitt-Ramayan (Ramayana in Quatrains), using the word kabitt in its broad sense of self-contained poem. This sense includes the four-line syllabic kavitt (often called ghanaksari after the name of its most widely used subgroup), which relies on sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables, the anapestic or dactylic savaiya, and the rare moraic jhulna and chappay; the latter are broken into six lines in modern editions. While the syllabic kavitts were especially suited to dhrupad singing, to which their emergence can be linked, the savaiyas were meant to be recited or written down. With their somewhat strict meter kabitts had a closer link with the written and courtly than with the oral world. Tradition holds that the Kabitt-Ramayan is Tulsis effort to present the Rama story in a courtly style.2 While padas, written in various dialects, were the main form of devotional singing, kabitts were products of Brajbhasa. Although their early usage was linked to Krishna literature and they never ceased to be vehicles of devotional messages, along with the couplet doha they became the major meters in court poetry. The quatrain form, especially the syllabic kavitt, survived into twentieth-century Hindi poetry. Kabitts are a somewhat more recent form than padas, which date to the beginnings of devotional Hindi literature. Although some chappays and savaiyas are attributed to Hit Harivamsh (?150252),3 the kabitt forms did not become popular until the late sixteenth century. Both poets at Akbars court, such as Rahim, Tansen, and Gang,4 and Krishna devotees in Vrindaban, such as Kalyan, Biharinidas, and Gadadhar Bhatt,5 used this
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form. While for most of them the main literary activity was in other meters, Gang and Kalyan wrote chiefly in kavitt, savaiya, and chappay, and the mixing of these three forms was imitated by poets of the following two centuries. It was also at that time that Narottamdas (b. 1545?) wrote a Sudamacarit entirely in kabitt,6 and kabitts were further popularized by influential poets such as Raskhan and Tulsidas. The adoption of this form by Kesavdas in his Kavipriya and Rasikpriya set an example, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries kabitts were the most important vehicles of mannerist literature, often detached from a devotional message although making ample use of Krishna mythology. The Transmission While the old manuscripts, composed with a varying degree of textual corruption, show a complex interrelationship, all modern redactions and commentaries of Tulsis minor works, including the edited Gita Press volumes as well as the huge number of critical studies, directly or indirectly rely on the texts of their exemplar, the Tulsi-granthavali published in in 1923.7 This is, how ever, not a critical edition: the editors do not indicate the source for the text of an individual composition and give variants only occasionally. Only the Ramcaritmanas has a critical edition based on a consistent collation of the most important manuscripts,8 and since the still authoritative book of Mataprasad Gupta on Tulsidas,9 first published in 1942, only a few scholars have touched textual problems. No history of the transmission of the Kavitavali has so far been undertaken. The material collected for a forthcoming critical edition by the Tulsidas Textual Study Group, a group of students and academics in Budapest, Oxford and Miercurea Ciuc in Romania, how ever, can serve as a basis for studying its spread.10 With a large number of manuscripts lost and with the available material only partially processed, the reconstruction of the history of the text is only fragmentary. This paper will present only some ideas and problems contributing to the better understanding of the dynamics of textual transmission of a widely read premodern text. In the case of devotional literature, the popularity of the poet can expand a collection of a few hundred independent poems into thousands during a phase of oral transmission. For example, from the inflated corpuses that we have at our disposal we cannot determine what poets like Kabir, Surdas, or Mira Bai wrote. We expect that the Tulsi corpus, which was no less popular, was also prone to being expanded. While at least one instance of amplification can be documented, it did not occur on a scale similar to Kabir or Surdas.11 As far as the Kavitavali is concerned, the use of the kabitt form connected with the written tradition, the almost uniform sequence of poems, as well as the na-
ture and the relatively small number of the variant readings show that the extant texts stem from written versions and no phase of oral transmission was involved, although oral tradition must have influenced it. (Even today many people know several of Tulsis quatrains by heart.) The transmitted text must be very close to that of the first edition(s) prepared in all probability by the poet himself. During the period of written transmission the text has either been corrupted by mistakes or changed tendentiously by its scribes. Apart from the collector tendency towards expanding a literary corpus we can observe another that is more difficult to detect in the case of oral transmission: a purist tendency to purge the corpus of metrically or aesthetically weak poems or of variations on the same theme conceived as redundancy. This phenomenon, called athetisation in textual criticism, can also shed light on some aspects of scribal manipulation. The authenticity of the poems was questioned by some scribes and, following them, by the early editors in cases of sectarian appropriation, stylistic weakness, incompleteness, or suspected samasyapurti, the widespread poetic practice of writing a new poem on a given phrase or line. (In other words, if two poems contained the same line or phrase, one of them became suspicious.) India is a country of infinite sectarian debates and Tulsidas is considered one of its most prominent religious poets. One would therefore expect that theological problems had the most prominent effect on scribal argumentation, the force working behind deliberate changes in the transmitted text, documented through omitted, inserted, or changed poems. However, questions relating to style seem to have played a role at least as important as those relating to theology. The Range of Poems The arrangement of the first six kandas of the collection follows the Rama story, providing us with glimpses at some of its most enchanting points, while the Uttarakanda discards the linear structure and comprises poems celebrating Ramas name, virtues, or grace, descriptions of the dark Kali age, of places of pilgrimage, of the gopis love for Krishna, or descriptions of Shiva, prayers for release from calamities such as the pestilence in Benares, and so forth. Several poems expound Ramas grace with reference to Tulsi himself. Even the first part of the Kavitavali is not strictly linear but rather like a series of miniature illustrations to an epic tale with which everyone is familiar. F. R. Allchin, the English translator, rightly observes, In some cases we may feel that the episodes were onessuch as the encounter with the boatmanfor which Tulsi felt particular affection, in others that they were ones which he felt, after the completion of the Rama-carita-manasa, might be rendered more ef-
Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India
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fectively in these meters. An example of the latter kind is the burning of Lanka which Rama-caritamanasa passes over in four short verses but which Kavitavali expands to greater size (VI.3-25). But in the second half we can have no such clues to the composition . . . There are numerous traditions which associate verses in this part with special occasions, mainly in the latter days of Tulsis life.12 Some passages can indeed be accepted as references to Tulsis life and to his circumstances rather than as literary topoi. Tulsi's childhood story is widely known in present-day north India and popularized by influential media. For example, the Amar Citra Katha comic books Tulsi biography rely heavily on a few poems from the Kavitavali. The poems sometimes show a style full of figures of sound and sense of which any poet of the mannerist era, the ritikal, could be proud. The selection of the poetic meter also suits the themes. The kavitt form with its reliance on sequences of stressed and indifferent syllables is especially suitable for conveying a sense of violence, heroism, or fear. The whole of the Sundarakanda, with its description of the burning of Lanka, and the major part of the Lankakanda is written in kavitts. The array of emotions evoked in the collection is, however, wider and ranges from the fearful to the erotic or to the humorous.
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pendent circulation. A similar distinction can be observed in the case of the padas of Tulsis Gitavali and Vinay Patrika. Those in the former compilation retell the Rama story and those of the Vinay Patrika are sort of personal prayers. According to Mataprasad Gupta, this is the result of a later editorial process and the original collection(s) of the padas did not have such a clear distinction.15 The independent Uttarakanda in the case of the Kavitavali indicates an attempt to impose a similar distinction. This separation, however, did not take root and no later manuscripts consist of only this portion. There was, however, another separation here. Although somewhat mixed up with the last quatrains of the Uttarakanda, the poems related to Hanuman acquired an independent existence at some time. The earliest dated independent Hanumanbahuk manuscript is from 1744 (VS 1803).16 The emergence of the Bahuk as an independent collection may be attributable to the growing cult of Hanuman.17 The Two Recensions Already in 1941 Mataprasad Gupta observed that the text of the collection differs largely in some manuscripts and expressed the need for a critical edition. For this purpose I collected copies of thirty-three complete or fragmentary manuscripts from Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, the United Kingdom, and the United States. References to about thirty more have been found, but some of them have disappeared and some are kept locked by their custodians. (The twenty-four substantially long manuscripts available to us at the time of the computerized statistical analyis and examined in this paper are listed in Appendix A.) An examination of the number of poems in the manuscripts available in complete form shows a variation of about ninety poems. On the basis of this we can distribute the manuscripts into two groups of similar sizes. The first group comprises those that reach Uttarakanda 180 and normally include the Hanumanbahuk, and the second group those ones that reach at most Uttarakanda 161 and do not include the Hanumanbahuk. We call the former the Longer Recension and the latter the Shorter Recension. The sequence of poems in the manuscripts of the two recensions shows further peculiarities that justify their grouping together. Six poems in the middle of the Uttarakanda (vv. 7.916) are missing from all representatives of the Shorter Recension but are present in all of the Longer one. In a similar way three or four more poems of the modern published version up to v. 7.161 are missing from the Shorter Recension,18 but five apocrypha (i.e., poems missing from the vulgate) are present in almost all manuscripts of this recension and one (after v. 2.21) in three of them.19 In this way the archetype
The Structure The structure of the Kavitavali is uniform in the modern editions, where it is a collection of 325 independent quatrains. We can refer to this as the vulgate text, within which the only variation is that the Tulsi-granthavali gives an extra savaiya in a footnote but immediately rejects it as inauthentic. The collection is structured according to the seven kandas of the Ramayana but the distribution of the poems is rather uneven. There are altogether 142 quatrains in the first six kandas, with only one poem in the Aranyakanda and one in the Kiskindhakanda; 183, more than half of the total, are in the Uttarakanda. Certain editions give the 44 kabitts of the Hanumanbahuk as an appendix to the Kavitavali. The oldest available manuscript, from 1691,13 comprises only the Uttarakanda together with the Hanumanbahuk, which shows that at an early time the quatrains that did not relate directly to the Rama story were in independent circulation.14 There is, however, no manu script evidence for the independent existence of the story portion, that is, of the first six kandas. Therefore, the present form of the Kavitavali is probably not the result of putting together two collections of quatrains, one with the Rama story and the other the independent poems that became the Uttarakanda. On the contrary, the Uttarakanda was an original part of the Kavitavali that some time in the seventeenth century came into inde-
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of the Shorter Recension contains 288 to 290 quatrains. Manuscripts of the Longer Recension contain all kabitts that found their way into the modern published versions, as well as eleven or thirteen apocrypha, out of which three always and another three occasionally correspond to the apocrypha of the Shorter Recension.20 Seven of them are found only in manuscripts of the Longer Recension.21 In this way the archetype of the Longer Recension contains 382 or 380 kabitts. Most manuscripts of the Longer Recension contain the Hanumanbahuk, which some time before 1744 became an independent collection, and the popularity of which today overshadows even that of the Kavitavali. Within the Longer Recension (L) two slightly different groups can be further differentiated that I will call L1 and L2. In the group L2, which contains some of the oldest dated manuscripts, the first six poems of the Bahuk are intermixed with the last kabitts of the vulgate Kavitavali. In the evidently more recent L1 group, the forty-four quatrains of the Bahuk are already grouped together.22 The distribution of the manuscripts into two recensions is further supported by an examination of the variant readings. Since our earliest manuscript dates to about seventy years after the poets death, it is probable that the text had already undergone several changes by the time it was copied. On the whole, however, the manuscripts show a relatively small number of variant readings. By far most of them arose from nonstandardized orthography and from scribal errors, such as confusing similar-looking characters. The major variants, considerably fewer in number, include synonyms such as priti (love) instead of neha (affection) or tapa (heat) instead of daha (burning), confusion over difficult readings, correction of metrical licenses such as omitting the word jaga (world) from the beginning of a line in a dactylic savaiya, and the replacement of some compromise words. For example, in a quatrain making fun of ascetics longing for women, in the phrase bindhi ke basi udasi tapi bratadhari maha (executors of great vows, indifferent ascetics, dwelling in the Vindhya mountains) the expression bindhi ke basi ( d wellers of the Vindhya mountains) was changed into puri ke basi, saving the face of the ascetics but creating the muddled meaning executors of great vows, indifferent city-dwellers. Manuscripts belonging to the same recension are also likely to share the same major variants. On the basis of the non-orthographic variants from fifteen poems in different parts of the twenty-four substantially long manuscripts, a cluster analysis on a computer distributes the manuscripts into two groups with two subgroups each. On the two-dimensional distance model in Figure 1, manuscripts that share more variants are closer to each other. (The manuscripts are labeled according to the place of their copying or, when that is not known,
according to the place where they were found.23 The eccentric Patna2 manuscript is omitted.) Figure 1: Euclidean distance model (prepared by Dniel Balogh)
The distribution of the manuscripts is far from random; rather, they tend to converge into two major galaxies, which correspond to the two recensions. The group on the left represents the Longer Recension, the one on the right the Shorter Recension. There are variants within a recension, too, but their weight is usually less than that of the variants that define the two recensions. This shows that the authority of either recension was not questioned apart from some stray eccentric manuscripts. It can also be observed that manuscripts of the Longer Recension come mainly from Rajasthan, while those of the shorter one are chiefly from the central and eastern Hindi areas. Clearly, the manuscripts were circulated widely in north India. That is why, for example, our Dhaka manuscript is now found in Vrindaban. The regional distribution of the recensions, how ever, suggests that manuscript circulation on a large scale was within a limited region: people in Rajasthan were more likely to copy another manuscript from Rajasthan, while people in the east would rather copy a book from their area. As has been seen the Longer Recension can further be divided into L1 and L2 groups on the basis of the sequence of the last poems (177 to 183) in the vulgate Uttarakanda. These two groups show further structural differences. The L1 cluster as well as the eccentric Udaipur1 includes two apocryphal quatrains after the single poem of the Aranyakanda, and two others after v. 148 of the Uttarakanda. Those of the L2 cluster do not, although some of them include one. This division is also present in the textual variants, since in our graph manuscripts belonging to the L1 cluster are in the upper part of the group and those belonging to the L2 one are in the lower part. (The eccentricity of Udaipur1 on the basis of textual variants is apparent on the graph, and it
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can also be observed that it really belongs to the L1 cluster and not to L2.) On the basis of similar structural peculiarities, the Shorter Recension also can be divided into two groups. The S1 manuscripts tend to include the apocryphal 2.21+ quatrain while the S2 ones omit it. (The + sign indicates an apocryphal poem following the one from the vulgate indicated by number.) Our S1 manuscripts (Bharatpur2, Patna1, Patna3) are in the lower part of the diagram, while the S2 ones are in the upper. An examination of the sequence of poems divides the L2, S 1, and S 2 clusters into further versions and sub-versions. This, however, is not reflected clearly in the distribution of the textual variants. On the basis of twenty sample places already processed, it can be observed that either the variant readings of the two recensions show insignificant differences (e.g., soca versus soka) or those of the Longer Recension are better but sometimes more difficult. Variants within the Shorter Recension tend to be more simplistic or nonsensical. For example, v. 89 in the Uttarakanda is about Ramas name, which is more powerful than Rama himself. In the first line it is illustrated by the case of the poet Valmiki: rama bihaya mara japate bigari sudhari kabi-kokila hu ki [Having abandoned Rama, simply by repeating the word mara, it is dead, even the corrupted fate of the poet-cuckoo came right.] The third line refers to Draupadis calling on Gods name when Duryodhana tried to strip her naked, nama pratapa bade kusamaja bajai rahi pati padubadhu ki [Through the great power of the name the honor of the Pandavas wife was saved openly in a wicked assembly.] This is, however, the reading only of the Longer Recension. The Shorter reads rama instead of nama (name), not only producing punarukti dosa, the error of repeating the same word in the same sense, but also creating contradiction with the first line emphasizing the greatness of Gods name. It is a generally accepted philological rule that a more difficult but still meaningful reading, the lectio difficilior, tends to be more authentic than a simpler one, which is normally the result of the scribes not understanding the complexity of the text. The more sensible nature of the more difficult reading is illustrated by the third line in v. 100 in the Uttarakanda, in a reference to Ramas taking the side of a dog against a Brahman mendicant. Since Brahmans cannot be punished physically, Rama cleverly made him the abbot of an extremely corrupt monastery, a position the dog had held in his previous life. sahiba sujana jana svana hu ko paksa kiyo [The clever lord knowingly took the side even of the dog.] Again, this is the reading only of the Longer Recension. The shorter one reads jinha (who) instead of jana
(knowingly), destroying the internal rhyming and taking away one shade of the meaning, the emphasis on Ramas cleverness. The Shorter Recension seems to also show less diversity in its variants, which suggests that its text was edited after the longer one by an editor less sophisticated than Tulsi. Another case of a better lectio difficilior can be observed in the first line of the apocryphal v. 2.11+, which is a description of Sitas languor: sukhi gaye ratanadhara manjula kanja se locana caru cucvai [The jewels of her lips went dry and her lovely eyes, which are like charming lotuses, are dropping tears.] Here the Longer Recension has more difficult readings than the somewhat clumsily rhyming versions of the shorter one. The readings of the Shorter Recension also do not show as much variation among different manu scripts as those of the longer one, where the scribes were at odds. The scribes of the Longer Recension seem to have felt uncomfortable with the word cucvai, a present singular third-person form of the verb cucana (to drip, to ooze) slightly distorted for the sake of rhyme. The fourteen manuscripts of this recension I consulted have nine variant readings to it, either breaking the rhyme or with further distortions. The Shorter Recension simplifies the case and puts citai (she looks up) resulting in the flaw of repeating the same word in the same sense, since citai also figures in the third line. Nevertheless, nine out of eleven manuscripts give this reading. The two rhymes that follow in the same verse are similarly problematic and present several variants. It is not only the textual variants shared within a recension that point to the authority of the editor. No kabitt of Tulsi is found in the other collections of his works, although the syllabic line-pattern of the kavitt was frequently used in the padas of his Gitavali and Vinay Patrika. In these collections, however, there are no quatrains and the songs with the kavitt-type lines have a refrain and five or more lines. I was not able to find any kabitt claimed to be Tulsis but not present in the Kavitavali. This fact suggests that towards the end of his life Tulsi himself, or maybe someone else with an authority to respect his text, collected all the kabitts not present in earlier collections and edited them. This inference is further supported by the content of the poems themselves. The last twenty-two poems of the Longer Recension refer to astrological events and an epidemic (mahamari) in Benares, indicating a mid-1610s date for this section.24 Many of these twenty-two quatrains as well as the Hanumanbahuk note that their poet is highly respected, and others refer to old age and suffering from diseases. A celebration of recovery would have been a good opportunity to show the working of Gods grace, as the poet did in the case of his childhood deprivations. The lack of any reference to recovery in any work suggests that the Kavitavali, together with the Ha-
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numanbahuk, is among the poets last works. Indeed, tradition holds that the Kavitavali contains Tulsis last poem, a quatrain (v. 7.180) about glimpsing a kite (ksemkari), an auspicious bird at the time of setting out for a journey.26 The style of these last twenty-two poems is so consistent with that of the previous quatrains that no one has ever questioned their authenticity. The most obvious explanation for the emergence of the two recensions is therefore that the Shorter Recension is based on an earlier version of the Kavitavali prepared before the poets illness. Tulsi edited his works several times, as Mataprasad Gupta has demonstrated in the case of the Gitavali and the Vinay Patrika as well as the Manas. The Gitavali, a retelling of the Rama story in padas, and the Vinay Pa trika, a collection of devotional songs, developed from two collections called in manuscript colophons Padavali Ramayan and Ramgitavali respectively, of which Gupta saw two related manuscripts written apparently by the same hand in VS 1666 (AD 1609).27 The interrelationship of the two is illustrated by the fact that five songs of the Ramgitavali related to the Rama story but not present in the Padavali Ramayan found their way into the Gitavali. Gupta also observes that five padas relating to the same theme, i.e., the dialogue between Trijata and Sita, are in different places in the Padavali Ramayan but grouped together in the Gitavali. From the absence of other Padavali Ramayan and Ramgitavali manuscripts Gupta inferred that Tulsi himself had edited the texts and these edited versions spread. On examining the Manas, Gupta found that its first version might have been the second half of the Balakanda (from v. 184, that is, without the initial frame of the story) and the Ayodhyakanda. This section shows unity in form (eight ardhalis in each caupai) and theme: the speaker is the poet himself and the story is linear, starting with the causes of Ramas birth. In a verse from the Uttarakanda, Tulsi claims that his work contains 500 caupais. This may refer exactly to this original core of 506 caupais. The second version contained Balakanda 36183 and the remaining kandas with Yajnavalkya, Shiva, and Bhusundi as speakers. In a third and last phase Tulsi prepared the high-soaring introductory part (Balakanda 135) and finished the poem.28 A close look at Tulsis other works shows that he not only reedited his earlier works but also kept developing his ideas. Preoccupations of an earlier work can recur in later poems in a more refined way as was for example the case with some ideas present in the Ramcaritmanas, which returned in the Gitavali.29 It would be easy to assume that the two recensions of the Kavitavali are two editions, but as we are going to see, the situation is more complicated. The study of transmission is made more difficult and more interesting by the process of contamination resulting in the fact that
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some manuscripts are not copies of one single source but rather composite versions. In a few manuscripts a second hand executed corrections on the basis of a third manuscript. In the case of the Kavitavali, the most spectacular example of contamination is the Tijara manuscript, which in its form before the corrections shows similarities with a cluster within the S2 group of the Shorter Recension containing the Alvar, the Harvard, and the Jaipur5 manuscripts. A second hand, how ever, added to its wide margins all the poems that were missing from the Shorter but present in the L1 group of the Longer Recension, and whenever possible changed its readings to be similar to those of the Longer Recension. The Problematic Poems and Scribal Argumentation: The Collector and the Purist Tendencies As discussed above, the Longer Recension in all probability came into being by adding twenty-two more poems together with the Hanumanbahuk, all written in Tulsis last years, to an original Uttarakanda that ended at v. 7.161. This theory, however, does not explain how the corrupted readings became authoritative in the Shorter Recension and how the Longer Recension came to include some twenty other poems at different points of the collection. While the authenticity of the twenty-two poems after Uttarakanda 161 cannot be questioned and they are rightly included in modern editions, the cases of another twenty-two, namely the nine poems omitted from the Shorter Recension and the thirteen apocrypha omitted from the vulgate and at least two manuscripts, should be examined individually. The chart in Appendix B gives the details of the suspected poems. Let us first look at four individual cases that illustrate different types of omission. The easiest one is the omission of Uttarakanda 113 from among several similar sounding chappays full of the exclamation jaya jaya Victory! Victory! which is clearly a scribal error called homoeoarcta loss of lines between two lines that begin similarly in textual criticism and no conscious argumentation is involved. The omission, how ever, was carried over in six inspected manuscripts of the Shorter Recension. Amplification: the Collector Tendency The two apocryphal poems that are included after Uttarakanda 148 show a different picture. At that point the section praising various places of pilgrimage (vv. 7.13848) ends, and at v. 7.149 poems to or about Shiva start. These two apocryphal poems are out of context here. The first one is about how to reach the attributeless niranjan (stainless) God, the second about the vanity of sacrifice without devotion to Rama. This second savaiya mentioning the woman, who is pleasing to the body, which might be embarrassing, has a phrase in
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the last line that already occurs in two earlier poems. It suggests samasyapurti, a popular form of poetic contest in which the poet is given a samasya (problem), a last line, a phrase, or a rhyme, and is asked to write a poem on it. In this case the last line starts with the words ete taje to kaha tulasi jo pai (What is the point in abandoning all this, Tulsi, if), which is similar to the last line of vv. 7.43 and 7.44, (aise bhae) to kaha tulasi jo pai ( What is the point in this, Tulsi, if). The problem may have been to kaha tulasi jo pai (What is the point, Tulsi, if). The samasya determines the form and the style of the poem, and it may not have been difficult for someone to write a savaiya similar to Tulsi's. The case of the first savaiya is even more interesting. It propagates the nirgun (attributeless) aspect of God instead of the sagun (that with attributes) adopted by Tulsi. Nor is the fully developed metaphor, the sanga rupaka, a figure that Tulsi was much in favor of using. In all probability the verse is by Tursidas (Tulsidas) of Sherpur in Rajasthan, the leading poet of the Niranjani sect. Tursidas may have been active in the second half of the seventeenth century and worshipped the attributeless untainted (niranjan) deity.30 kanana ki patuki kari kai guru ki batiya suni dudha duhavai; ya ghata ki matuki kari kai taba sadhu ki samgati javana lavai; dhiraja khambha dhare tulasi taham auguna tina ko jari bahavai; jnana rai lai mathai mana takra ko tau navanita niranjana pavai. (v. 7.148+) [Making a vessel of your ear, listen to the gurus words and get the milk; Then making an earthen pot of this body take the coagulator, the company of sadhus; Grabbing there the pole of steadfastnesssays Tulsilet the three defects burn and flow away; Taking the staff of wisdom, churn the souls buttermilk, and then get the fresh butter, the Untainted One.] (trans. Mria Ngyesi and Imre Bangha) Poem 7.148+ originated from Rajasthan, but it traveled all around the Hindi belt and even the purist Short Recension did not find it suspicious. Its insertion into most manuscripts supports the idea that the theological content of the poem was of relatively little importance, although for the reasons mentioned above, this is a poem that one would expect the scribes to leave out. It is present in almost all manuscripts except the bulk of the oldest L2 group, where only two of the seven handwritten books give it. This suggests that this poem was not present in the earliest versions of the collection but became unanimously accepted later. (It should, however, be mentioned that its omission from Prayag1, however, is not due to scribal argumentation, since this manu-
script is eccentric at this point with the omission of a block of seven poems, vv. 7.14955). Two manuscripts come to our help: one of the oldest dated ones, Prayag2 (1772), and another one written in Dhaka in 1830. Both of them include these two poems and end at this point with a proper colophon, thus forming the shortest complete text of the Kavitavali. It is tempting to speculate that Prayag2 and Dhaka without these extras represent the earliest version of the collection, to which the closing sections were later added. The other manuscripts ending at v. 7.148 include these two poems, while other scribes instead attached to the collection the closing sections (vv. 7.14983) together with the Hanumanbahuk. The breach, however, seems to have been soon healed and most manuscripts available today include both the apocrypha and then the closing section. The quick healing of the breach is indicative of a strong collector tendency in textual transmission. It should be mentioned while speaking about the collector tendency that not only poems were collected but also contexts. Although many quatrains have been contextualized over the centuries, we do not have much clue as to when. There is, however, an early instance of contextualization that can be dated. It is a variant of savaiya 128 from the Uttarakanda, which figures on a Mewar miniature painting from around 172530. The quatrain is introduced as Tulsis reply to Emperor Akbar, who asked him why Hindus worshipped stones. The poem and the painting evoke the story of the Manlion incarnation of Vishnu who became manifest from a stone pillar to save his devotee and to kill the skeptical and cruel king Hiranyakashipu.31 Athetisation: the Purist Tendency The case of the embarrassing apocryphal v. 2.11+ about Sitas languor shows a different picture: sukhi gaye ratanadhara manjula kanja se locana caru cucvai; karunanidhi kanta turanta kahyau kita duri mahabana bhuri jo svai; sarasiruha locana nira hi dekhi citai raghunayaka siya pai hvai; abahim bana bhamini bujhati hau taji kosalaraja puri dina dvai. [The jewels of her lips went dry and her lovely eyes, which are like charming lotuses, dropped tears. Suddenly she asked her beloved, the Treasury of Compassion, How far is the Great Forest, which is so huge? Observing tears in her lotus-eyes the Lord of the Raghus looked at Sita (compassionately). Oh, passionate woman, we have left the city of Koshalas king only two days ago and you already ask for the forest?]
40
The poem is awkward because Ramas answer can be taken as impolite and suggests his irritation with Sita. It is omitted from three manuscripts of the L2 cluster and surprisingly from one of the Shorter Recension as well. It is, however, present in the rigorous Sitapur1. Its text is sometimes obscure and, as has been discussed above, the rhymes of the Longer Recension fit better into the overall context but are more difficult to understand than those of the shorter one. Shall this poem be discarded as inauthentic, not suiting the generally noble approach of Rama and of Tulsi? Or, on the contrary, can anything similar be found in Tulsis other works? From an examination of the songs of the Gitavali, a clear relationship can be detected between the text of its songs and the quatrains of the Kavitavali. Tulsi often recycled the same themes, even using the same phrases in his quatrains. The following one and a quarter song from the Gitavali, for example, are recycled in Ayodhyakanda 11 and 12. Tell me how far is the forest grove Where we set forth, oh son of Koshalas Lord, asks Sita in distress, Oh, Lord of my Life, you go barefoot to a foreign land having abandoned and broken connection with all pleasure. Stop for a while under a tree, let me fan you and sweep away the dust from your feet. When the Lord of Tulsidas heard the words of his beloved, his lotus-eyes filled with water. Where is the forest now!? Listen, oh beautiful woman! Then the Lord of the Raghus looked at her full of love. (Gitavali, v. 2.13) Rama looks at Sita again and again. Knowing that she was thirsty, Lakshmana went to fetch some water... (Gitavali, v. 2.14) When from the city came forth Raghuviras lady she set but two paces on the road with courage, On her forehead glistened drops of perspiration and her sweet lips went dry. Then she enquired, How much further must we go now? when can we put up a little shelter made of leaves? Seeing his wife thus sadly discomforted, from her husbands eyes most beautiful tears flowed forth. (Kavitavali, v. 2.11, trans. F. R. Allchin) Lakshmana has gone for water, hes just a boy,
dear, Let us stand in the shade an hour to await him, I will wipe your sweat and fan you, and wash those feet scorched by the burning sand... (Kavitavali, v. 2.12, trans. F. R. Allchin) While the middle section of Gitavali v. 2.13 has equiva lents in Kavitavali v. 2.11, the beginning and the end rather reflect the idea of our apocryphal quatrain above, with some irritation in Ramas words. Therefore this kabitt should be considered a weak but authentic product of the great poet. It is quite understandable that some scribes and the modern editors felt uneasy about including it among the works of Tulsidas. It can also be considered that Tulsi did not always produce work of the highest quality. One of his earliest and weakest works, the Ramlala Nahachu (Ramas Nail Paring) puts Ramas wedding in Ayodhya rather than in Mithila, showing that even the greatest poet is not free from contradictions. Scholars are at odds in discarding this short composition as inauthentic, since Tulsis name figures in it already in a manuscript dated from 1608 (VS 1665). Arguments for Omission The table in Appendix B lists the suspected poems and the possible reasons for their omission, whether authentic or not. A poem becomes suspect for various possible reasons. Arguments relating to syntax, metrics, and structure figure more often than the contents of the poems. Although the reason given by me for suspicion is arbitrary, there is an obvious indication that no theological reasoning was involved in the argumentation, since the scribes did not suspect even the clearly apocryphal v. 7.148+. We can further observe that many of the suspicious poems show some kind of metrical, stylistic, or structural weakness in the eyes of the copying scribes. It is difficult to imagine how these poems found their way into a popular collection if they were not there originally, and in most of the cases we can presume omission rather than insertion. The concept of weakness, however, is relative, since it seems that Tulsis poetic licenses were regarded as flaws only by later generations. Similarly, in the case of Kalidasas Raghuvamsa, later editors changed verses that contained the Sanskrit word aha (he/she says) in the past sense even though Kalidasa repeatedly made use of this device in his Kumarasambhava.32 A major poetic license Tulsi took was the freedom to add or omit one or two syllables in the beginning of a line in a savaiya. Five out of the twenty-two apocryphal poems have such unmetrical lines, which occur in several other places as well.33
41
Four suspect cases are due to a supposed samasyapurti or variation. It is however, not necessary to assume that another poet wrote a quatrain on the same line. It may have been the original poet himself, and a similar process was not questioned in several other cases within the Kavitavali.34 Yet another argument for omission is structural looseness or obscurity. A later editor, or perhaps Tulsi himself, may have discarded the poems that he found aesthetically weak. The case of a kavitt from the Hanumanbahuk strongly suggests that it was a later editor who discarded the lame poems. The third line of the vulgate of Hanumanbahuk v. 40 is present only in the manu scripts of the L1 group; an entirely different reading is given in the L2 manuscripts, and the whole poem is omitted from the extremely purist Sitapur1. What picture does the oldest (Prayag1) manuscript present? It has only three lines and the suspicious third line is missing. There is, however, some deliberate lacuna at the end to indicate a missing line. We may suspect that incomplete poems were originally also part of the collection, especially when we take into consideration that we are dealing with Tulsis last poems and the dying poet may not have been able to revise and complete them all. Later copyists, however, did not accept the fact that the poet-saint may have written unfinished quatrains and either completed Hanumanbahuk v. 40 or simply omitted it. Here the idea that the poet-saint must have produced only perfect poems was at work. The case of the apocryphal v. 7.106++ is similar. The second line is missing from Prayag1 and there is some empty space at the end. The quatrain is omitted from Sitapur1 and from many other manuscripts including those of the Shorter Re cension.35
-
Conclusion The relatively small number of variant readings and the more or less unquestioned structure of the collection suggest that the Kavitavali goes back to a written source and that there has never been a period of oral transmission as there has in the case of Kabir, Mira Bai, or Surdas. The use of the quatrain form also hints at a written tradition. The fact that early kabitts appear at least as much in a courtly context as in bhakti poetry indicates that the form was perhaps more aristocratic than the song, pada, used almost exclusively for devo tional purposes. On the basis of our previous observations we can attempt to reconstruct some phases of the textual history, although this may hardly be more than speculation. As has been mentioned, the Shorter Recension includes neither Tulsis last poems nor several apocrypha, while most manuscripts of the Longer Recension contain both. We have also seen that the readings of the Longer Recension are often more difficult but better. In all
probability several suspicious poems were present in the collection but were discarded later by the editor of the Shorter Recension. It may well be the case that somebody observed the fact that apocrypha, such as the one about the indescribable, untainted God by Tursidas, were creeping into the collection. Making use of a version up to Uttarakanda 148 or 161 he purged the text of many poems and maybe also inserted some quatrains both at the end and in the Kiskindhakanda to fill the gap created by the small number of poems in this canto. The emergence of the Shorter Recension did not suppress the tradition initiated by the Longer Recension, and both had their sometimes independent, sometimes intertwining histories and came to include other apocryphal quatrains. Naturally there was contamination between the two recensions resulting in occasional purging of the Longer Recension, as may be the case with the Sitapur1 and Hoshiarpur1 manuscripts, or inclusion of omitted poems into the shorter one, as in the Tijara manuscript. The two recensions also determined the publication history of this work. The first published edition of the Kavitavali from Calcutta in 181536 was based on the Shorter Recension, the later Benares and Lucknow versions, such as the one edited by Durga Misra in 1858, on the Longer Recension.37 The modern vulgate text is a composite version of the two that gradually developed during the nineteenth century. We have seen that the two standardized recensions were copied for more than two centuries. Several poems were added to them and some others, even though in all probability written by Tulsi, were omitted. While in the case of Kabir or Surdas collections the collector tendency was overwhelming and resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of poems, in the Kavitavali the written tradition did not permit many outside quatrains to be included, and the purging tendency of a purist editor kept the number of poems down. Most of the poems excluded from about half of the manuscripts show poetic failings rather than ideological digression, indicating that the elimination of aesthetic or structural deficiencies was a more important editorial preoccupation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than faithfulness to the received text. In contrast to the more pedestrian purist selection, the weaknesses shown both in the earliest extant manuscript and in the suspected poems present a brighter and more human poet with flaws and imperfections. Appendix A: Manuscript Sources
The manuscripts examined in this paper and their date of copying
Alvar 1877 Harvard Tijara 1891 Jaipur5 1899 Bharatpur2 Patna1 1894
42
Sitapur2 1893 Patna3 1985? Dhaka 1944 Prayag2 1829 Patna2 1933 Bharatpur3 Jodhpur1 1847 Bikaner 1919 Jaipur4 1858 Jaipur7 Udaipur2 Bharatpur1 1888 Vrindaban2 1897 Udaipur1 Uniyara 1912 Prayag1 1749 Sitapur1 1890 Jaipur6
7.96 7.106+
7.106 ++
Appendix B: The Apocrypha and the Poems Omitted from the Shorter Recension
Poem 2.3 2.4 Theme Possible Reason for Omission Omitted from S+Sitapur1, Hoshiarpur 1 S+Sitapur1, Hoshiarpur 1 Alvar, Bharatpur3, Jaipur3, Jaipur6 S2+Jaipur3, Bharatpur3, Jaipur6 Bharatpur3, Jaipur6, Sitapur1 Present in L L
7.109+
Kaushalya com- Complaint against plains to Sumitra. Kaikeyi (?). Sumitras answer: No happiness is without sorrow. Sitas languor and Ramas reproachful words. Sita explains that Rama is her husband. The whole kanda retold in only four lines. Similar digest as in the case of Parashuram in 1.22. or the first six poems of the Uttarakanda. The greatness of Ramas name illustrated on Candraprabha and Sampati. What is all wealth worth without love for Rama? A variation on 7.43 and 7.148 ++. I do not have Rama in my heart, only my tongue declares it. Tulsi is yours, o Rama! Complaint against Kaikeyi (?). Obscure rhymes and unmetrical first line. Rama is presented as less noble. It is rude to point directly to ones own husband. No devotion expressed. Apocryphal, written to fill the gap (?).
7.113
the lowly. Everyone works for the fire of the stomach. Different opinions about Tulsis caste. A variation on 7.106 and 7.108. Whatever Tulsi has is because of Rama. (The line with signature may be a later addition since it is absent from Prayag1.) A reproach to men giving up the singing of Ramas name. Praise of Rama. One among several c h a p p a y s starting with jaya jaya.
last line (?). Obscure second line. Weak last line.
S S+Hoshiarpur1, Sitapur1
L L
Originally incomplete (?).
S+Hoshiarpur1, Jodhpur1, Sitapur1
Broken rhythm.
Omitted by mistake.
7.127+ (L)+S 7.127 ++ (L)+ S1 (L)+S
2.11+
Salvation is pos- ? sible by Rama. Salvation is possible by Rama, who is the way of the Vedas and of the Agamas. The virtues of the river Mandakini. ?
S+ Jodhpur1, Prayag1, Sitapur1 Alvar, Bikaner, Harvard, Prayag2, Sitapur2, Tijara S+Hoshiarp ur1, Sitapur1 S+ Sitapur1, Hoshiarpur 1 S+ Bharatpur3, Hoshiarpur 1, Sitapur1 Bharatpur3, Hoshiarpur 1, Prayag1, Sitapur1 Bharatpur3, Jodhpur1, Prayag1, Sitapur1, Varanasi2 S+ Hoshiarpur 1, Sitapur1
L+ (S)
L L
2.21+ 3.1+
7.141+
7.148+
4.1++
Obscure and loose. Apocryphal, written to fill the gap (?). Samasyapurti to 7.43
7.44
Bharatpur3, Hoshiarpur1, Jaipur6, Sitapur1, S+Sitapur1, Hoshiarpur 1
(L)+S
7.148 ++
7.158+
How to get the fresh butter, the untainted (niranjan) God. What if one renounces the world but does not love Rama? A variation on 7.43 and 7.44. Description of Samasyapurti. Shiva. A variation on the last line and the rhymes of 7.158.
Confusing mathematics in the last line. (Alternative line introduced in some manuscripts.) Out of context. (Probably by the Niranjani Tursi Das.) Out of context. Samasyapurti. Mentions woman, who is pleasing to the body. (?)
S+ (L) S+ (L)
7.91
Obscure and hy permetrical last line.
The letters L and S stand for the Longer and Shorter Recensions respectively. When in paranthesis they refer to only a part of the recension.
NOTES 1 As we are going to see, in the recension to which three (Prayag1, Pratapgarh, Jodhpur1) of our four pre-nineteenthcentury complete manuscripts belong, the Bahuk follows the Uttarakanda. The quatrains of the Hanumanbahuk in printed editions are sometimes presented as an appendix to the Kavitavali, but more often as a short independent collection. 2 Personal communication of Prof. Govind Sharma (March 2003)
7.92
7.93 7.94
7.95
Two unmetrical lines. Obscure syntax. Ramas grace is Hypermetrical gratuitous. third line. Pe o p l e a r e Loose structure. haughty but Tulsi is yours, o Rama. Rama is a great Hypermetrical giver but he ac- third line. Too cepted the gift of much Persian in the the lowly. last line (?).
S S
L L
43
3 Ronald Stuart McGregor, Hindi Literature from Its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), 89. 4 McGregor, Hindi Literature, 120. 5 McGregor, Hindi Literature, 92, 93, and 95. 6 McGregor, Hindi Literature, 91, 100. 7 Tulsi-granthavali II: Manasetar ekadas granth, ed. Ramcandra Shukla and Bhagavandin and Brajratnadas, 2nd ed. (Benares: Nagaripracarini Sabha, 1974). 8 Tulsidas, Ramcaritmanas, ed. Vishvanath Prasad Mishra, (Benares: Kashiraj, 1962). 9 Mataprasad Gupta, Tulsidas: Ek samalocnatmak adhyayan, 6th ed. (Allahabad: Lokbharti, 2002). 10 At present the Tulsidas Textual Study Group is working on developing the edition into a project of the Society for South Asian Studies (British Academy). The publication is expected around 2007. 11 Only one case of insertion can be documented with certainty. The presence of an apocryphal Niranjani poem, discussed below, may be due to an effort of sectarian appropriation. The fact, however, that it was an isolated case suggests that simply the popularity of the poem helped its ascension to the Kavitavali-corpus. 12 F. R. Allchin, introduction to Kavitavali, by Tulsidas, trans. F. R. Allchin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), 65. Some people consider Tulsis witnessing the burning of Benares some time after the completion of the Manas as a motive behind writing the long description of the burning of Lanka (personal communication of Prof. Siyaram Tiwari, November 1996). 13 Manuscript nr. 39 / 5264 at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Allahabad. 14 The first eighteen folios of the manuscript are missing and fol. 19 starts with the end of v. 7.55. A calculation shows that there was no space for the entire Kavitavali in it. There are about 380 syllables on one folio, and the some 5,500 syllables of the Uttarakanda up to 7.55 would occupy about fourteen and a half folios. 15 Gupta, Tulsidas, 21219. 16 Nagaripracarini Sabha, Benares, Ms Nr. 2970. 17 About the growth of the cult see Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman (forthcoming). 18 Poems 2.3-4 and 7.44 are missing in all cases; in addition, poem 7.113 is missing from six manuscripts. 19 Poems 2.11+, 3.1+, 3.1++, 7.148+, 7.148++. (The + sign indicates an apocryphal poem following the one from the vulgate indicated by number; the double + sign indicates the second of two sequential apocryphal poems.) 20 Poems 2.11+, 3.1+, 3.1++, 7.148+, 7.148++. (The + sign indicates an apocryphal poem following the one from the vulgate indicated by number; the double + sign indicates the second of two sequential apocryphal poems.) 21 Poems 7.106+, 7.106++, 7.109+, 7.127+, 7.127++, 7.141++, and 7.158+. There are also four poems that are omitted from two manuscripts and three apocrypha that figure in one or two, but these are not relevant to our investiga-
tion, since they represent relatively isolated cases and the manuscripts involved are more or less recent ones. 22 2 L =176180, Bahuk 16, 1813, Bahuk 744; L1 = 176, 1813, 177180, Bahuk 144. In the L2 group Hanumanbahuk is thus interrupted by the three last poems of the Uttarakanda, but in L1 those referring to Hanuman are uninterrupted and the three poems are put after 176. We should also note at this point that 7.180 is believed to be Tulsis last poem. In fact, it is the last poem before the Bahuk in most of the manuscripts, although not in modern editions. Its theme of departure may have predestined it to be the last in the collection. 23 For full details of the manuscripts, see the critical edition in progress. 24 The Rudrabisi, or Twenty years of Rudra (7.170 and poem nr. 240 in another work, the Dohavali) refers either to 156685 (according to Kannu Pillai, Indian Ephemeries) or to 15981618 (according to Sudhakar Dvivedi). See Gupta, Tulsidas, 183. The Min ki sanicari, or Saturn in Pisces (7.177) took place from March 1583 (Caitra Sukla 5 VS 1640) till May-June 1585 (Jyestha VS 1642) and again from March 1612 (Caitra Sukla 2 VS 1669) till May-June 1614 (Jyestha VS 1671), according to Sudhakar Dvivedi. See Gupta, Tulsidas, 186 and 5048. There were three major epidemics during Tulsis lifetime. The famines of 15556 and of 15958 are supposed to have been followed by pestilence, and a new disease, bubonic plague, appeared in 1616. See Vincent A. Smith, Akbar the Great Mogul, 15421605 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), 3978; and Jahangir, The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri or Memoirs of Jahangir, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), 330, 442. 25 Tulsis most influential biographer, Mataprasad Gupta, considered the Kavitavali, together with the Hanumanbahuk, as dating from the period 161023 (Gupta, Tulsidas, 2514). Several scholars, including the English translator F. R. Allchin, followed his ideas (introduction to Kavitavali, 636). Shyamsundar Das and Pitambardatt Barthwal, however, relying on the Mul gosaim-carit (claimed to have been preserved in a manuscript from 1791), argue that the Barvai Ramayan, the Hanumanbahuk, the Vairagya-sandipani, and the Ramayana-prauna are Tulsis last works (see Gupta, Tulsidas, 69) while Madanlal Sharma and Gitarani Sharma consider the Vinay Patrika to be his swan song although they do not provide any argument for this supposition (Kavitavali: bhakti darsan aur kavya [Delhi: Rajesh, 1990], 56). 26 Allchin, introduction to Kavitavali, 66. 27 The Padavali Ramayan manuscript was incomplete, containing only thirty-five padas of the Sundarakanda and nineteen of the Uttarakanda. The order of padas is different in the beginning of each kanda. The Ramgitavali manuscript was complete, though with some serious lacunae, containing 158 padas in an order largely different from that of the Vinay Patrika. Gupta, Tulsidas, 21219. 28 The Padavali Ramayan manuscript was incomplete, containing only thirty-five padas of the Sundarakanda and nineteen of the Uttarakanda. The order of padas is different in the beginning of each kanda. The Ramgitavali manuscript was complete, though with some serious lacunae, containing 158 padas in an order largely different from that of the Vinay Patrika.
44
Gupta, Tulsidas, 21219. 29 Gupta, Tulsidas, 23741. 30 McGregor, Hindi Literature, 140. My attribution is merely hypothetical based on the use of the term niranjan and on the strong propagation of the attributeless god. Although the nirgun aspect of God is occasionally present in Tulsis works, its propagation even in the most prominent places such as Manas 1,108.4109.1 or 1,116.1 is much milder than in Tursidas. Unfortunately Tursidass poetry has never been edited and the only monograph I was able to find, oddly enough, does not seem to know about any savaiya in its survey of the poetic forms the Niranjani poet used. See Satyanarayan Misra, Santakavi Tursidasa Niranjani sahitya aura siddhanta (Kanpur: Sahitya Niketan, 1974), 134-8. 31 Andrew Topsfield, Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar (Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 2001), Illustration 125 (on p. 150), prepared under Maharana Sangram Singh and probably commissioned by Pancoli Kishan Das. The introductory lines and the savaiya are as follows: sriramji / patsajinem bhagata tulasidasaji nava betham thakam puchyo / so hinduam re patharahem kyom pujem hem / jini uparem tulasidasaji kabitta kahyo he karhi kara bamna karapam nigahi pitu kala karala bilokana bhage / ramma kaham saba thamma he ham suni ha ka tiham narakehari jage / beri bidara bhaye kirapala kahe pehalada hi kem anuragem / prita pratita barhi turasi taba tem saba pahamna pujana lage// 32 Dominic Goodall, Bhute aha iti pramadat: Firm Evidence for the Direction of Change Where Certain Verses of the Raghuva m s h a Are Variously Transmitted, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlnd Gesellschaft 151:1 (2001): 10324. 33 Vv. 1.20, 2.5, 2.7, 6.5, 6.13, 6.33, 7.1, 7.12, 7.34, 7.43, 7.47, 7.49, 7.51, 7.52, 7.88, 7.103, 7.106, 7.132, 7.147, 7.153, 7.154. 34 Vv. 1.2 and 1.6, 1.3 and 1.4, 2.1 and 2.2, 7.40 and 7.41, 7.43 and 7.44, 7.1127.114 share the same last line. Partial similarity can be observed in the cases of 5.11 and 5.12 (only the last word is shared), 6.1 and 6.2 (parallel construction),. The last word is similar in 6.44 and 45, in 7.75 and 83, and in 7.88-7.90. 35 This is, however, not an overall model, and the cases of omission are more complex. Prayag1 omits one or more lines in three more cases in the Uttarakanda (107 111, 123), when all later manuscripts give the vulgate reading. The apocryphal savaiya 7.141+ is missing from the handwritten books of the Shorter Recension. The fourth line is absent in the Jodhpur1 and in Udaipur1 manuscripts, while in Jaipur4 the last line of the poem is erased and a new first line is added. The same structure with the same four lines is followed in three more manuscripts (Jaipur7, Tijara [marginalia], Uniyara). Lines can also be omitted on purpose, as was done with the embarrassing last line of v. 2.11+ in two manuscripts (Vrindaban1 and Patna2). 36 Tulsidas, Kavitta Ramayana, ed. Baburam Sarasvat (Khidirpur: Sanskrit Press, 1815). 37 Tulsidas, Kavitta Ramayana, ed. Durga Misra (Benares: Divakar Chapekhana, 1858). The editor mentions that the text is based on the manuscript of Pandit Raghunathdas Gosvami.
The Anxiety of Innovation: The Practice of Literary Science in the Hindi/Riti Tradition
Kesavdas has described the various gestures of Radha and her lover according to his understanding of them. May master poets forgive his audacity. Rasikpriya
ALLISON BUSCH
In conjunction with the extension of Mughal and subimperial courtly patronage networks in seventeenthcentury north India, the literary and intellectual ambitions of Hindi writers underwent unprecedented expansion. The Hindi dialect of Brajbhasa, once predominantly a vehicle for devotional lyrics about Krishna, achieved new prominence in the more secular spheres of elite courtly discourse.1 The traditional knowledge system of literary science (alankarasastra) in particular, one of the core disciplines of Indian scholarship before the advent of colonialism and a cultural space long monopolized by Sanskrit intellectuals, emerged as a fertile site for the development of both vernacular poetics and poetry. Brajbhasa renditions of Sanskrit treatises on literary topics were commissioned at dozens of courts spanning all the way from north India to the Dakhan. In fact, so central was this genre often termed the ritigranth (book of systems) to the literary life of late precolonial India that modern Hindi literary historians routinely term the entire period from 1650 to 1850 the ritikal (period of literary systems).2 The Brajbhasa ritigranths possess an unusual status as both theoretical and literary documents. They consist of sequences of definitions of Sanskrit poetics topics (lakshan) alternating with verses that illustrate variations on those topics (udaharan). Typical of the ritigranth in both Sanskrit-derived content and classificatory style is the following eightfold analysis of female characters (ashtanayikabheda) excerpted from Kesavdass Rasikpriya (Handbook for Poetry Connoisseurs, 1591), one of the earliest vernacular works on literary systems: All female characters may be described in keeping with an eightfold system. These are called the one with her lover under control, the anxious, the one who has decorated her bed, the stubborn, the angry, the woman whose lover has gone far away, she whose lover did not keep the tryst, and the one who goes out boldly to meet her lover. Know all these to be the eight types of nayikas [heroines].3 After outlining his overarching system the poet proceeds to delineate each of the eight subtypes of female characters individually, augmenting each with example verses. An illustration of how the complementary system of definitions and example verses works is as follows: A definition of the anxious Kesavdas says that the anxious is a woman whose lover doesnt show up for some reason, causing her heart to fill with sorrow. An example of the hidden type of the anxious Said the anxious woman to herself Is it some business, Or did his cowherd friends detain him? Is this a day of fasting for him? Did he fail to pay a debt? Did he get into a fight? Has he suddenly taken a religious turn? Perhaps he is unwell? Or his love for me is false? Is it the rain clouds that have scared him off In the middle of the night? Or is he testing my love? Again today he hasnt come! What could be the matter? (vv. 7.78) Employing this style of classification and illustration early authors of the ritigranths undertook the wholesale systematization of both vernacular poetics and poetry. The genre spread quickly, and it came to serve as a major vehicle for Brajbhasa textual expression, affording the language a new status in courtly circles, and eventually enabling it to pose a formidable challenge to Sanskrit.
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In striking contrast to its extensive cultural reach in early modern times, the Hindi riti tradition is today little studied and poorly understood. Modern readers tend to feel bewildered by the hypertaxonomical style of riti authors, whose works catalogue dozens, even hundreds of types of nayikas or alankaras (figures of speech), complete with subtypes. In contrast to the simplicity and naturalism celebrated as characteristic of premodern Hindis better-known corpus, bhakti literature, the riti poets use of a high register of vernacular diction and preoccupation with time-worn themes from Sanskrit have come to be viewed as representative of the decadent and mannerist tendencies of a tired feudal age. Whereas bhakti poetry has been embraced by modern scholars, who seem especially to value its forms of demotic expressivity, riti literature by virtue of its association with late medieval courtly life has been dismissed as stilted, retrograde, and reactionary. This explanatory model, which seems to stem partly from a generalized post-Romantic distaste for courtly literature, and partly from now-outdated theories about Indias late precolonial decline, completely misconstrues the valence of literary classicism in the riti world.4 As I shall demonstrate in detail below, the unfavorable reactions to riti that predominate in modern Hindi scholarship were not even remotely shared by members of the literary public in early modern times. For Braj writers and connoisseurs alankarasastra was a crucial complex of literary modalities upon which the very existence of poetry and literary criticism depended. Riti literary protocols follow a very different logic from the styles of modernity (or bhakti), and it is perfectly reasonable that this should be the case. What is astonishing, however, is how little of an attempt has been made to identify and understand those protocols and logic. Dismissive attitudes towards the courtly styles of Hindi literature have long served as an obstacle to serious scholarship on the subject.5 But if we suspend judgment and try to think outside the narrow constraints of modern literary biases, which deem courtly literature stilted and insincere, or which expect of poetry or intellectual practices something other than what premodern Indians expected, it may be possible to develop an appreciation for riti literary trends from the perspective of their own cultural milieu. This is my primary goal here. One crucial factor to understand is that practitioners of the Hindi riti style began under the shadow of Sanskrit, and forging connections to classical traditions was a sine qua non of early vernacular literary and intellectual life, particularly in courtly circles. Although more bhakti-oriented sixteenth-century Brajbhasa writers such as Kriparam (fl. 1540) and Nanddas (fl. 1570) already evince some interest in the classical alankarasastra themes that would become the defining feature of riti literature, later court poets such as Kesavdas (fl. 1600)
and his successors put riti styles and methods on the intellectual-historical map. During the seventeenth century more than ever before, Sanskrit poets and literary theorists were compelled to share the prestige and patronage they had so long monopolized, as vernacular writing expanded in scope and met with increasing acceptance. Tracing how this new acceptance of Brajbhasa came about, particularly the processes of cultural and intellectual fortification that were required for the elevation of a vernacular with formerly modest aspirations to an elite status, offers one starting point for a reevaluation of the history of riti literary culture. In examining this subject I consider how Sanskrit intellectuals responded to the growing popularity of the vernacular style, as well as how Brajbhasa poet-intellectuals reflected upon both the constraints and new creative potential of their medium during a moment of intense growth for Hindi writing. I explore the methodologies that underpinned the developing field of Brajbhasa alankarasastra, with a focus on the intellectual and poetic contexts in which courtly styles flourished. I conclude with some remarks on the meaning and value of riti literary systems for Hindi poets and scholars of the late precolonial world. Vernacular Incompetence? Both in South Asia and elsewhere early modern literary cultures typically insisted on a strong distinction between the status of local and prestige languages, and emergent vernacular writers often faced an uphill battle for symbolic capital. In South Asia, an otherwise common enough linguistic chain of command was further entrenched by several Sanskrit ideologies that seemingly ruled out any hope for the acceptance of vernacular writing.6 From the perspective of one firmly rooted in a Sanskrit worldview, the movement between classical and vernacular languages was unidirectional, and that direction could only be downward. To be a vernacular writer was to exhibit both a linguistic and an intellectual failing. The hierarchies involved are implicit at the most basic lexical level. Vernaculars were by definition corrupted (apabhrashta) languages, and their low status may be divined from the fact that they apparently did not even merit their own names: they were usually just called language (bhasa). The very word Sanskrit, in contrast, denotes (and connotes) the height of dignity: it means perfectly formed. Sanskrit was also widely venerated as the language of the gods (devavani/suravani). It is hard to know how one could even begin to compete with a language that claimed not only perfect but divine status. Traditional hierarchies concerning the inferior intellectual status of vernacular writing were doubtless enshrined in theory; nonetheless, actual practice during the riti period reveals a far more complex picture, in which
Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation
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the relational dynamics of Sanskrit and Brajbhasa were being renegotiated particularly in the disciplines of literature and literary science. If hardly a much-vaunted fact in Sanskrit circles, it was not uncommon for Sanskrit poets to borrow their themes from vernacular languages. For instance, Brajbhasa poetry is widely held to have influenced Jagannatha Panditaraja (d. c. 1670), who is often hailed as the last great Sanskrit poet-intellectual before the vernacular wave began to erode the oncesolid embankments of classical textual authority.7 Furthermore, although the reverse process was certainly more widespread, the existence of Sanskrit commentaries on and translations of Brajbhasa works from this period suggests a new degree of credibility and acceptance for vernacular writing.8 Striking testimony to a new sense of the validity of vernacular scholarship is offered by Akbar Shahs Sringara-manjari (Bouquet of Passion, c. 1660), a Sanskrit alankarasastra text written at the Golconda court. The Sringaramanjari is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in its citing of Brajbhasa authors as sources alongside Sanskrit literary authorities as though they were newly perceived as intellectual equals. In the opening to the Sringaramanjari two of the earliest Braj ritigranths, Kesavdass Rasikpriya and Sundars Sundarsringar (Beautiful Adornments, 1631), share the designation principal text (pramukhagrantha) with such illustrious Sanskrit works as Dhananjayas Dasarupaka (Ten Genres, late tenth century), Mammatas Kavyaprakasa (Light on Literature, mid-eleventh century), and Bhanudattas Rasamanjari (Bouquet of Emotion, probably c. 1500).9 No less remarkable for what it articulates about new perceptions of vernacular authority is the Sringaramanjaris own textual history: the work had originally been composed in Telugu, from which it was translated into both Brajbhasa10 and Sanskrit. That Brajbhasa was now functioning alongside Sanskrit as a major transregional language of letters at a Dakhani court is another telling index of its new cultural status. Nor was its literary presence at Golconda particularly exceptional. Compositions in Braj and other dialects of Hindi were also routinely sponsored by the Maratha courts.11 The name Brajbhasa (language of Braj) may have once marked the languages cultural and linguistic ties to the Braj/Mathura area of north India, which was celebrated as the center of Krishna lore, but by the second half of the seventeenth century Brajbhasa had clearly moved far beyond its original parameters both geographically and expressively. Although there is evidence that Brajbhasa writing was acquiring an unprecedented degree of circulation and intellectual cachet, it was not always readily embraced. There is indeed much evidence of profound ambivalence towards its literary and scholarly potentialities. Kavindracarya Sarasvati, for instance, one of the most
reputed intellectuals of the mid-seventeenth century, spoke of his sense of shame (laj) at writing in the vernacular, and this sentiment was echoed by many anxious vernacular-using pandits and poets of the day.12 And yet for all this pandits disclaimers, there are strong tensions between his professions of vernacular inferiority and the actual strength of his vernacular writerly persona. Kavindra may have expressed shame at using bhasa, but he nonetheless wrote in both Braj and Sanskrit and, judging from his extant works, he did so to almost an equal extent. In fact, the very contours of Kavindracaryas life work appear to illustrate a newer pattern of vernacularclassical parity, hardly the older paradigm of vernacular inferiority.13 The Radha-madhava-vilasa-campu (The Love-Play of Radha and Krishna, henceforth Campu) of Jayarama Pindye, Kavindras fellow Maharashtrian and contemporary, is similarly contradictory in its unease about vernacularity while simultaneously endorsing it. At first glance, Jayaramas Campu would appear to be a veritable paean to polyglossia: the work is composed in a combination of Sanskrit and eleven regional languages (desabhasa), and the author boldly proclaims himself to be a master of poetry in twelve languages.14 But upon closer scrutiny the reader remains confused about the relative status of Sanskrit and bhasa in this text. The division of linguistic labor is unequal: the first ten cantos are written exclusively in Sanskrit, and it is only in the last chapter that the other languages appear all lumped together as though the very structure of the work were designed to cast the vernaculars in the role of dilettantish pretenders. Heightening the tension surrounding the status of Sanskrit versus other languages is Jayaramas own apparent confusion about how to handle the multilinguality of his Campu: he vacillates on several occasions about whether he has actually written a Sanskrit work or a bhasa one.15 The stated reason for keeping the single desabhasa canto separate from the ten Sanskrit ones further attests to Jayaramas perception of linguistic hierarchies. He repeatedly asserts that it would be inappropriate to include vernacular poems in the Sanskrit section of his Campu.16 And yet while Jayaramas insistence on keeping the Sanskrit and vernacular domains of expression absolutely separate appears to shore up traditional notions of Sanskrit purity and supremacy, we know that such a stance conflicts radically with the actual practices of the poets own day. Jayaramas narrative makes clear that Sanskrit and vernacular poets were simultaneously present at a real-life poetry contest that was sponsored by the court of Sahaji Bhonsle (father of the famous Maratha Sivaji), the poets patron. Vernacular and Sanskrit poets may have shared the same cultural arena in his lived experience, but Jayarama somehow could not allow them to do so in his textual world.17 Whereas relegating the
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vernacular compositions to a final appendix-like chapter (pranta) may suggest that Jayarama intended readers to view them as inferior to the weightier themes inspired by his Sanskrit muse, ultimately the actual execution of the work belies such a proposition. The eleventh canto of Jayaramaas Campu is almost as long as all the Sanskrit cantos put together, and it contains dozens of vernacular poems of breathtaking vibrancy in a range of different dialects (including Brajbhasa and other variants of premodern Hindi).18 If anything it is the vernacular poetry that shows real originality in the work, for at least five of the ten Sanskrit cantos are almost lifeless hyperliterary tableaus: conventional descriptions of Radha and Krishna (nakhasikha), the seasons (shadritu-varnanam), and renditions of other tired motifs like the lovers waterplay (jalakrida) or their flower-strewn bed (pushpasayya). This Campu serves as a metaphor for one of the most important phenomena of seventeenth-century courtly life: despite the earlier doctrines that denied its expressive validity, bhasa had begun to impinge upon the traditional dominance of Sanskrit. If concerns about vernacular legitimacy loomed large in the consciousness of Sanskrit writers and occasionally engendered uncomfortable emotions, they were bound to be equally, if not more, pressing for Hindi writers, who were in a far weaker cultural position. The status of vernacular writing was certainly a central concern for Kesavdas, by general scholarly consensus the first riti poet. Kesavdas made an indelible mark on literary history when he steered the once homely language of Hindi into new expressive domains by producing several foundational poetics treatises in the ritigranth style. In addition to the Rasikpriya, Kesavdas wrote the Kavipriya, Handbook for Poets, 1601), as well as the first formal work on Braj metrics, the Chandamala (Garland of Metrics, 1602). With highly elaborate literary compositions such as Ramcandracandrika (Moonlight of Ramcandra, 1601) and Jahangirjascandrika (Moonlight of the Fame of Jahangir, 1612) he also imparted a new vernacular shape to Sanskrit genres like the courtly epic (mahakavya) and panegyric (prasasti), respectively. Kesavdass personal profile no less than his intellectual and literary one points toward the major cultural shift that the early riti tradition represents. He came from a lineage of Sanskrit pandits who had served the courts of Orcha and nearby Gwalior. His father, Kasinatha Misra, had authored an astrological treatise in Sanskrit, the Sighrabodha (Quick Understanding). The vocation of his elder brother Balabhadra was to recite the Sanskrit Puranas for the Orcha king Madhukar Shah (r. 155492).19 Thus, by turning his attention exclusively to vernacular compositions, Kesavdas made a significant break with family tradition. Profoundly aware of the literary frontier he was crossing, he stated in a now famous verse: In his family even the servants
Did not use the vernacular. But the slow-witted [mandamati] Kesavdas Became a bhasa poet. (Kavipriya, v. 2.17) The self-description mandamati, like Kavindras laj, or Jayaramas peculiar procedure for handling non-Sanskrit poetry in his Campu, appears to signal a feeling of apprehension about vernacularity, and a deferential attitude towards classical authority. But aside from the obvious fact that the slow-witted do not know they are and do not declare it, other indications in Kesavdass oeuvre prompt us to be wary of taking this slow-witted poetic persona completely at face value. The opening to his Ramcandracandrika, for instance, initially reads as a reprise of the self-deprecating sentiments from the Kavipriya verse, but the overall effect of this passage suggests that he is toying with his readers. Kesavdas starts out in a humble enough manner: There was a Sanadhya Brahman by name of Krishnadatta Misra. He had an exemplary character, and he was famous throughout the land. He held the title king among pandits, and was endowed with every virtue. Krishnadatta had a son named Kasinatha, who had boundless wisdom like Lord Ganesa. Kasinatha studied all the Sanskrit scholarly texts, and synthesized many different theories. To Kasinatha was born a slow-witted son, the poet Kesavdas. He wrote The Moonlight of Ramcandra in the vernacular [bhasa]. (vv. 1.45) Complicating Kesavdass tone of ostensible vernacular humility here is his paradoxical appropriation of Sanskrit literary prestige in a series of subsequent verses. In a scene well-suited to Kesavdass own poetry of vernacular beginnings, Valmiki, venerated as the first poet of Sanskrit literature (adikavi), appears to Kesavdas in a dream, and inspires the fledgling Brajbhasa author to write his own version of the Ramayana (vv. 1.721). Valmikis presence at the very outset of Kesavdass story evokes a complicated metatextual resonance about literary beginnings, but it also has the effect of tapping into Sanskrit textual authority and rescripting it to shore up the claims of vernacular writing. For if seeking blessings from a hallowed Sanskrit predecessor appears to suggest humility, its opposite is also in evidence: the usurping of Sanskrit cultural space by the suggestion that a bhasa Ramayana can take its place. If the epic Ramcandracandrika is ambiguous in its stance towards the status of Brajbhasa writing, several stylistic features of Kesavdass scholarly works invite us to view his professed diffidence as a mere literary convention, perhaps one ironically intended to bring precisely his cleverness into sharper focus. For instance, in many of the definition verses in his ritigranths Kesavdas ingeniously capitalizes on two special features of Hindi composition, the chap (poetic signature), and the struc-
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tural dynamics of the doha (couplet) meter, to imply that he is anything but lacking in competence as a vernacular scholar. Typical is his definition of the sentiment of quiescence (santarasa) from the Rasikpriya: Saba te hoya udasa-mana, basai eka hi thaura, Tahi so samarasa kahata, kesava kabi-siramaura. (v. 14.37) There are two possible translations of this verse, the first of which construes the chap (a variant of the poets name, kesava, which is indicated by quotation marks in the fourth quarter) as a mere statement of the poet: Kesavdas says, When the heart remains still, Indifferent to worldly things, The best poets define that as The sentiment of quiescence. Another possible translation semantically incorporates the poetic signature: When the heart remains still, Indifferent to worldly things, Kesavdas, best of poets, defines that as The sentiment of quiescence. The way the doha is structured in the original Braj, with kesava juxtaposed to best of poets (kabi-siramaura) and the grouping conveniently filling out a discrete verse quarter of eleven metrical counts, strongly encourages the second interpretation. This surreptitious form of self-praise in fact turns out to be a common feature of Kesavdass lakshan verses (and those of many other riti authors as well).20 The persona of the slow-witted vernacular poet may have constituted a placating gesture towards Sanskrit literary authority (albeit deployed in the very act of transgressing that authority), but it would be a serious mistake to interpret it too literally as a reflection of true vernacular incompetence.21 The Paradox of Vernacular Newness Unfortunately, this point seems to have been lost on many scholars who, perhaps taking Kesavdas too much at his word, have failed to read him or later riti writers with the care they deserve. The near-universal assessment of modern Hindi criticism is that the field of Braj alankarasastra lacks the scholarly merits of its Sanskrit counterpart, a claim that warrants more careful exploration. Consider first the illogicality of Hindi literary criticisms two widely divergent constructions of what it meant to make the transition from Sanskrit to vernacular authorship: forgoing any attempt at a coherent account of linguistic and cultural processes, the sole consideration seems to be whether the text under scrutiny is a bhakti or riti work.22 In a bhakti context vernacularization is hailed as liberation from the classical language, where the homely dialects of (supposedly) everyday speech fought for and were accorded representation in the field of the literary.23 When it comes to riti poets use
of the vernacular, however, and their strong reliance on Sanskrit models and method, modern critics have not emphasized the new, creative aspects of the transformation. When compared with their Sanskrit-using forebears, riti writers are frequently dismissed a priori by reason of the very linguistic medium they employed: the choice to use Braj instead of Sanskrit apparently suffices in itself to prove that riti scholars are men of diminished intellectual powers and that their works are paltry imitations of more authoritative classical studies.24 The inadequacy of these assumptions becomes obvious if we look closely at the theoretical works of riti authors and try to make sense of their methodologies. An analysis of the processes at work in early vernacular alankarasastra texts will elucidate the more subtle features of Brajbhasa literary science with particular reference to how riti authors posited new knowledge formulations. In some cases it is true that riti authors do not exhibit much interest in developing bold new theories. It is often possible to identify one or more classical sources for the definition portion of any given riti text, and doubtless some lakshans of Brajbhasa ritigranths are indeed simply paraphrases of Sanskrit models. But no matter what the intellectual aspirations of a riti author, the accompanying example verses the actual literary practice almost invariably consists of original poetry.25 In cases where the theoretical apparatus is largely derived from Sanskrit the ritigranth genre would be more accurately characterized as a poetry anthology rather than a scholarly work. Here the definition verses merely supply a framework upon which the writer can erect his larger poetic edifice. Many riti authors, however, did show considerable interest in alankarasastra as a theoretical, and not just a poetical, enterprise. And yet there is a curious contradiction in their practice. For all their apparent radicalism in eschewing the time-honored language of courtly intellectual life, and the trumpeting of their vernacular works as new theorizations, many early Brajbhasa scholars also insist that they have not departed from existing Sanskrit traditions. How can we reconcile both claims? The paradoxical nature of vernacular newness is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in chapter 3 of Kesavdass Kavipriya. After preliminary chapters on his court, his king, and himself, the author embarks upon his treatment of vernacular literary theory in earnest with the classical subject of doshas, literary flaws that mar the aesthetic beauty of poetry. In composing this constellation of introductory literary principles Kesavdas does not strictly follow Dandins Kavyadarsa (Mirror of Literature, seventh century) otherwise a major Sanskrit source book for the Kavipriya).26 Rather, he begins by adducing several unprecedented categories of literary flaws, which at first makes the work appear refreshingly new. Yet this innovation ultimately proves to be very
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measured. The first flaw that Kesavdas defines for his readers is the flaw of blindness (andhadosha), an entirely new category, but one intended precisely to proscribe poems that violate tradition!27 On the one hand, the poet is questioning the authority of Sanskrit, forging a new vernacular style, and engaged in writing one of the first treatises on Brajbhasa poetics. On the other, he tells his readers that they should under no circumstances contravene literary tradition. Since a developed tradition of alankarasastra did not yet exist for Braj, it is difficult to see how the inviolable poetic path (pantha) to which he refers could be anything other than a Sanskrit one. As is the standard procedure in a ritigranth, Kesavdas reinforces his definition of the andhadosha with an example verse that develops his point. Here the example verse is presented in the form of a parody, which serves as a humorous warning about the potential aesthetic disaster that lies in wait for an inexperienced poet striking out on his own: Seeing her soft lotus-like breasts in bloom, The moon face of her lover beams in delight. Her eyes dart quickly like monkeys, The corners red like Sindur powder. Her lower lip is sweet like butter, Seeking metaphors for her beauty Kesavdas despairs. There she stands, that desirable woman, Like lightning or a roaming deer She moves slowly like an elephant. (v. 3.8) The mixed metaphors and infelicities in this verse are innumerable, but the most egregious errors concern the poets flagrant disregard for tradition. First of all, a womans breasts should be firm like lotus buds, not soft like blooming lotuses. The images in the next line are a precarious combination because according to poetic convention (kavisamaya) the moon causes certain lotuses to wither. In line three Kesavdass imaginary clumsy poet gets the part about womens eyes darting quickly right, but when it comes to the standard of comparison (upamana), he makes a serious blunder in choosing the animal. In Sanskrit poetry beautiful women are doe-eyed (mrigakshi), not monkey-eyed! Furthermore, when it is a question of the movement of eyes, fish (mina) or wagtails (khanjana) are preferable images because they are consecrated by tradition as metaphors for speedily moving objects. In line five the hapless poet has bungled things again. Lower lips are indeed soft and sweet, but they should be compared to the red bimba fruit not to pale yellow butter. The message any would-be poet takes away from this opening passage of the Kavipriya is that vernacular composition must be rooted in classical imagery. For Kesavdas the foundational premise of vernacular poetics seemingly automatically constrains its newness. This ambivalence between innovation and adherence to tradition is not peculiar to Kesavdas; it would con-
tinue to reverberate among later Brajbhasa scholarpoets. Cintamani Tripathi, one of the major riti intellectuals to emerge after Kesavdas, expresses a similarly contradictory logic about the nature of vernacular newness in the opening to his magnum opus, the Kavikulkalptaru (Wish-Fulfilling Tree for the Brotherhood of Poets, c. 1670): I, Cintamani, have carefully considered the precepts of books written in the language of the gods [i.e., Sanskrit], and I am expounding a theory of vernacular literature I describe the system of vernacular literature according to my intellectual ability.28 If his lexical choices have the significance I think they do, Cintamani viewed himself not so much as a translator of his Sanskrit source texts, but as someone engaged in a new theorization (vicara) of vernacular literature (bhasa kavita). The statement according to my intellectual ability (budha anusara) further suggests that the poet is providing his own perspective. But clearly the question of what it meant to write new literary theory in Brajbhasa was complicated. The very fact that one can apparently develop such a theory only upon consulting Sanskrit precepts reveals a core dependency on the classical language. According to My Own Understanding Despite the frequently overpowering demand for compliance with Sanskrit literary norms, the corpus of Brajbhasa ritigranths does contain much that is unmistakably new. To pinpoint the exact nature of this newness can seem an elusive prospect. Given the longstanding primacy of Sanskrit as the medium of intellectual expression, perhaps we need to begin by asking what arenas of innovation were even open to riti writers for creating new theorizations of the classical themes of alankarasastra. Newness particularly its premodern manifestations can exist in a range of subtle forms, in which case finely calibrated interpretive tools are needed to identify it.29 We will almost certainly fail to see alternative forms of newness if we adhere too closely to the paradigm of how change looks from the viewpoint of Western modernity, and this is in my view one major failing of modern approaches to the intellectual life of the riti period. As one of the cornerstone works of the Hindi riti tradition, Kesavdass Rasikpriya is a particularly useful exemplar of the styles of newness that manifest themselves in early vernacular scholarship. At first glance the Rasikpriya appears to be a very close adaptation of the Sringaratilaka (Ornament of Passion) by the Sanskrit rhetorician Rudrabhatta (ninth century?). Kesavdas follows virtually the same order of treatment of the subject matter as his source, and significant lexical borrowings in the definition verses show his reliance on Rudrabhatta to be beyond doubt. Looking no further than
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these obvious similarities, one would erroneously conclude, as so many modern Hindi critics have concluded in the case of riti writers across the board, that Kesavdas simply plagiarized from his Sanskrit predecessor. The reality is much more interesting; the Rasikpriya is both new and not new in complex ways. The Sringaratilaka may well be Kesavdass guide through the principles of alankarasastra, but as often as not he veers off on his own detours. One such detour is to invent variations on his predecessors organizing categories, particularly in places where the original Sanskrit text provides only a cursory treatment of the subject. A good example of how the Rasikpriya expands upon the Sringaratilakas classificatory scheme is the treatment of lovers meeting places (milana-sthana) in chapter 5. Rudrabhatta lists the possible occasions for lovers rendezvous only in a single verse, not furnishing even one example. Kesavdas, seizing this opportunity for creative ramification, develops the kernel of Rudrabhattas idea into a major theme of an entirely new chapter on the various aspects of falling in love. He gives a complete example of nearly every occasion for the meeting of lovers mentioned in passing in the Sringaratilaka, and he also proposes new categories of his own.30 As though to hold up a signboard marking out his vernacular innovations, Kesavdas closes this particular chapter with a statement that was to become the refrain of riti poet-intellectuals: I have composed this passage according to my own understanding (kahe apni mati anusara, v. 5.41). However else he may think of his relationship to tradition, in the writers own estimation, he was often intending to create new knowledge. If Sanskrit alankarasastra constituted the main wellspring of intellectual heritage for Kesavdas, earlier Hindi poetry of the bhakti style also contributed in significant ways to the shaping of his scholarly profile. Among all of Kesavdass works the Rasikpriya in particular is steeped in a bhakti worldview, which serves, too, to differentiate the work markedly from its Sanskrit source text. Perhaps the most obvious point of departure is that the nayakas and nayikas, the heroes and heroines, who people Rudrabhattas poems are generic, whereas the main actors in Kesavdass verses are not just any handsome man or woman, but objects of veneration to him: the deities Krishna and Radha.31 Kesavdass reverential stance towards Krishna and Radha underpins numerous points of theoretical divergence. For instance, neither Kesavdas nor Rudrabhatta endorses literary representations of lovers who pine so much for their beloved as to reach the point of death (marana-avastha), but whereas Rudrabhatta gives the reason that such poems lack beauty (asaundaryat), for Kesavdas the crucial point is that his poems are about god, and he could not possibly describe the death of someone immortal and indestructible.32 Or when it comes to
the three broad types of nayika, Kesavdas entirely omits one of the categories in his Sanskrit source, the samanya nayika, the public woman or courtesan: And as for the third type of nayika, why should I describe her here? The best poets have said that one should not ruin good poetry by including tasteless [birasa] subjects. Here I have described all the nayikas according to my own understanding of them (vv. 5.3940).33 The omission of the samanya nayika a popular literary character in Sanskrit poetry makes perfect sense in terms of the specificities of Kesavdass more bhakti-oriented textual universe: how could Radha, the primary nayika of the Rasikpriya, ever be cast in the questionable role of the courtesan? A devotional orientation towards Krishna and Radha also colors Kesavdass treatment of the theory of rasa, or emotion in literature. The sentiment of passion (sringara rasa), given priority of place by all literary theorists both Sanskrit and Braj, is in Kesavdass formulation further defined as being the specific purview of Krishna.34 When it comes to his treatment of the various affective responses and physical gestures (bhavas/havas) that interact to contribute to the full complement of sringara rasa, the love of Radha and Krishna is posited as the main substratum: Passion [sringara] arises from the love of Radha and Krishna.From the force of their emotion arises my theory [bicara] about the physical gestures [havas] of love. (v. 6.15) In this case, too, Kesavdass new formulations of his subject matter are nothing if not absolutely deliberate, as evident from the way he concludes the discussion: Kesavdas has described the various gestures of Radha and her lover according to his understanding of them. May master poets forgive his audacity (v. 6.57). Kesavdas again foregrounds his new approach, although in this case (if we are to take him at his word) the poets otherwise bold assertion of independence from the Sanskrit source material is tempered by a qualm about whether he is being too audacious. Whether the request for forgiveness is wholly ingenuous or not, perhaps it was obligatory, given the power of the vernaculars rival. The intellectual processes and attitudes that we are observing here were by no means limited to Kesavdass writings. Cintamanis detailed treatment of the classical subject of phonological principles (gunas) in his opening to Kavikulkalptaru is another good example of the technique of postulating vernacular difference without departing radically from the rubric of Sanskrit sastra. At first glance Cintamanis ideas like those of Kesavdas may appear mostly to mimic a Sanskrit source (in this case Mammatas Kavyaprakasa). There are certainly many demonstrable lexical borrowings; the order in which he treats the various gunas is also identical to that of Mammata, as is the framework for understanding them.35
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Nonetheless, closer scrutiny reveals a new orientation to the subject matter. First of all, Cintamani does not merely repeat verbatim Mammatas viewpoint on the subject of gunas; he elaborates considerably on competing systems, laying out the basic tenets, and writing original poetry to illustrate the categories omitted by Mammata. More significantly, he also puts forward a radically new conception of one of the primary categories, madhurya-guna, the phonological mode of sweetness: In the case of lovein-union a pleasurable experience melts the heart. This is called madhurya the very essence of poetry. (v. 1.14) Cintamanis definition of madhurya certainly resembles Mammatas exposition in most respects,36 but the last quarter of the doha unexpectedly proclaims that madhurya is the very essence (tattva) of poetry. No Sanskrit theorist, to my knowledge, singles out any one guna as superior to the others certainly not to declare it poetrys essential feature. In isolating madhurya as a special poetic property Cintamani subtly, yet tellingly, offers a new assessment of vernacular literature.37 As is frequently the case with Kesavdass reformulations, it seems possible to relate the subtle theoretical shift to a specifically bhakti context because in its less technical sense m adhurya, the quality of sweetness, had both aesthetic and theological associations with the love of Radha and Krishna, and Radha-Krishna motifs had constituted the primary heritage of Braj literature until the riti period.38 In what we can now recognize as a larger trend among riti intellectuals, Cintamani does not allow his revised treatment of the Sanskrit guna systems to go unremarked. He proclaims, There are certain categories of gunas that were theorized by the ancients, and I am writing about all of them here according to my own understanding (v. 1.30). As Brajbhasa began to encroach on some of the cultural space that Sanskrit had always occupied, the question of how the relationship between these two languages would be renegotiated naturally arose. For instance, was Brajbhasa an appropriate linguistic medium for all subjects, or did it have a more limited scope than Sanskrit? Perhaps Cintamanis historical positioning at a later stage in the development of riti intellectual life than Kesavdas afforded him a clearer perspective on this question. At first glance his bifurcation of literature into the categories of prose and poetry in the opening lines of the Kavikulkalptaru seems almost banal, a mechanical reiteration of one of the most basic tenets of Sanskrit literary thinking: Literature is defined as expression replete with sentiment. In Sanskrit, literature is twofold: prose and poetry. A composition in meter is called verse, and prose is without meter. Hearing a vernacular verse composition, good poets derive pleasure. (vv. 1.4-5)
In the unassuming manner seemingly characteristic of the Braj intellectual, Cintamani is actually saying something of great significance. It is Sanskrit that comprises the two categories of poetry and prose; although prose is not entirely beyond the scope of bhasa, the special purview of vernacular writing is considered versified (chandanibaddha) literary discourse. Another significant conceptualization of Brajbhasas relationship to Sanskrit is found in Cintamanis treatment of doshas. In formulating his new category of the flaw of rawness (kacidosha), that is, unpolished language, Cintamani states: Language that does not follow the usage of good poets is known as raw. [The language of] the area around Mathura and Gwalior is considered fully ripe. And some even say the [language of the] Mathura/Gwalior region is the language of the gods (vv. 4.6, 4.9).39 Of interest here is Cintamanis recognition that whereas Sanskrit is not a language that could be localized, Brajbhasa partook of greater geographic specificity. Of even greater moment is Cintamanis unprecedented idea that the term language of the gods (suravani) may be used to designate Brajbhasa. Perhaps this appropriation of the classical languages terminology is intended to convey Cintamanis sense that Brajbhasa with a growing body of alankarasastra to support it was now just as capable of refined expression as Sanskrit. And yet if the confidence levels of Brajbhasa intellectuals increased over time, as the vernacular embodiment of alankarasastra not only took hold but eventually supplanted that of Sanskrit, most riti writers continued to express deference to their classical predecessors, and voiced anxieties about their own abilities to contribute new theorizations. As late as 1746, after dozens (perhaps hundreds)40 of ritigranths had been written in Brajbhasa, Bhikharidas, one of the greatest vernacular rhetoricians, is still compelled to say: I studied the Sanskrit texts Candraloka and Kavyaprakasa. I understood them, And made their ideas beautiful in the vernacular. From other sources, too, I adopted the path of poets. But even though I may express my own opinions, I still feel anxiety about that which I have created myself [rahai svakalpita sanka]. Therefore, I have mixed my own opinions With classical precepts May poets forgive any faults. The wise will understand that which is felicitous, May they correct that which is not.41 A century and a half after Kesavdas had shown scholars of systematic literary thought that such systematicity was not only necessary but possible in the vernacular, the
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very execution of the project apparently remained a source of anxiety. Or was it simply anxiety? Mixing older Sanskrit ideas with newer vernacular ones innovation through renovation was obviously the modus operandi of riti intellectuals, and this dual process of simultaneously reprising and reconfiguring the dominant tradition may need to be seen as far more than an act of deference. It was also a self-promoting self-affiliation with the dignity and power of a literary culture of the past that proclaimed Brajbhasas intellectual and aesthetic merits in the contemporary world. The simultaneous advocacy of both vernacular newness and conformity to Sanskrit tradition may far from being the puzzle it first seemed when we were confronted with Kesavdass theories about blindness to tradition from the Kavipriya actually be emblematic of a more complex power play on the part of Brajbhasa literary culture. Colonized Epistemological and Literary Spaces Perhaps it is not easy to understand the significance of what may seem like mere microrefinements of preexisting theories, when our own conceptual instruments are attuned to far less subtle gradations of newness. Clouding our vision further is a colonial-period legacy of ridiculing traditional Indian epistemological methods. As has been insightfully discussed by Bernard Cohn, Brahmanical intellectual practices were regularly dismissed by colonial administrators as being focused on memory, repetition, and long, taxonomical lists that appeared to befuddle rather than clarify matters through their sheer amplitude. Implicit in such a construction was the criticism that only unintelligent or intellectually depleted people could possibly confine their analysis to the minutiae of type and subtype rather than larger issues of substance. British patterns of knowing were, in contrast, presented as based on reasoned argument analytical and discriminating.42 Such (mis)characterizations of Indian epistemology and unfavorable comparisons with Western modes of scholarship were but one arm of a larger body of colonial discourse that tended to characterize the cultural terrain of late-medieval India as exhausted and therefore in need of the restorative influence of British rule. If Indian knowledge practices in general were thus dismissed, a culturally generous approach to Indian literary styles was hardly likely to be forthcoming.43 Even early Western scholars who did avow the merits of Indian literature frequently complained that it was stilted and overly elaborate; following rigid literary systems was thought to stifle creative spirit, impeding access to the more natural forms of expression favored by Europeans since the heyday of Romanticism.44 Although Indian rasa theory has attracted the attention of some modern intellectuals, for the most part canonical Indian systems have never been taken seriously in academic writing.45
Depreciatory terms like mannerist or its Hindi equivalent, ritibaddh (bound by convention) foreclose rather than enable discussion of the creativity and power of traditional poetics theory. And since the late nineteenth century a nationalist preoccupation with newer themes of reform, social justice, and political independence, combined with the assimilation of modern Western genres like the novel, has contributed to an almost total repudiation of earlier poetic modes. Although nowadays the principal riti literary systems such as nayikabheda and manifold classifications of alankaras are dismissed as half-baked and silly tired relics from a feudal courtly culture I believe it is incumbent on us, as modern students of this premodern literature, to be wary of simply rejecting the traditional categories out of hand. That is easy enough to do. Far more challenging, however, is to try to understand what these categories meant to the people who used them, and why they mattered so much. Surely there are more intelligent (not to mention historically sound and culturally sensitive) ways to understand this massive commitment to cultivating a form of knowledge on the part of serious intellectuals than to dismiss the ritigranth as the decadent failure of a moribund literary culture. We have already come some way towards understanding the riti phenomenon as a set of vernacular intellectual practices, but other dimensions also need to be considered, such as how riti methodologies served as an axis for the functioning of courtly literary communities, and what the actual uses of the popular ritigranth genre were. In the final section of this article I invite readers to step away from modern prejudices about riti to consider evidence from a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources that will bring greater complexity into the picture. The Ritigranth in Practice A useful point of departure for better understanding the function of literary systems in Indias premodern cultural circles is a passage from the unpublished Sarasasara (Essence of the Aesthetically Endowed) of Ray Sivdas, which portrays with great liveliness a gathering of Brajbhasa poets that took place in Agra in 1737: In Agra there was once A meeting of the poets community [kavi-samaja]. Those who had a penchant for poetry came And met with glad hearts. All the well-known poets met. They decided to create a new book, Having established new categories And expressive modes [rasa]. Thus, the poets met and shared their ideas, Each according to his ability, With deference to literary systems [riti]. All who were present listed
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The possible categories with pleasure: According to the extent of their intellect They set out the extensive range of categories, With the idea that other poets Would correct any shortcomings. The poets were of differing opinions, But wise authorities were present In keeping with whose opinions This new book was composed.46 This vignette of a premodern literary conference affords access to an intellectual vista replete with concerns certainly very different from our own, but no less valid for being so. There are several points to note. First, the passage is infused with a sense of the dynamism of the riti literary environment, belying the British historiographical proposition that the late precolonial period (particularly the eighteenth century) constituted a waning cultural climate. Second, understanding the intricacies of specific categories in the literary system was clearly a primary intellectual pursuit. This corroborates much of what we have already observed in the works of Kesavdas and Cintamani: new knowledge was fashioned within the confines of the existing literary system by assessing the continuing viability of older bhedas, or classificatory distinctions, reconfiguring them as necessary, and occasionally proposing new ones. And each poet brought his own understanding into play.47 A final point to consider is what the Sarasasara suggests about the functioning of the Brajbhasa literary community. A detailed awareness of the plethora of literary types and subtypes formed the substratum of core knowledge that allowed a group of intellectuals to be in dialogue with one another, and to participate in a network of meanings that were intelligible to all. This point merits further investigation, for it constitutes one of the fundamental, if undertheorized, dimensions of riti literary culture. In the case of the Agra conference recorded with such enthusiasm in the Sarasasara, a group of Brajbhasa intellectuals was present at the same assembly, allowing us a glimpse of how the classical literary systems were, quite literally, a focal point around which scholars converged. But the actual physical co-presence of scholars was not necessary for the constitution of a larger intellectual community. The community and national formations that, it has been argued, later became possible through the technology of print culture, have been well documented in modern scholarship. Beginning in the modern period according to the now-classic image two readers of the same newspaper, living in separate parts of a country, could find themselves participating in a shared cultural space across great distances without ever physically meeting.48 But clearly the stimulus of print culture, albeit strong, is not a prerequisite for the development of such notional, or imagined, communities, for the ritigranth seems to have enabled a strong
sense of literary brotherhood (kavikul) from within the confines of a manuscript culture. The riti poets constituted a large preprint network of poet-intellectuals who traveled to various courts throughout India, creating and nurturing a particular way of literary being, and the primary way of indicating their shared participation in this community was to write a ritigranth. In the case of the Agra conference the fashioning of the ritigranth was a collective enterprise, but in most cases individual poets contributed their own understanding to the larger literary and intellectual community in a single-author work. Clearly the riti authors themselves were aware of participating in a larger cultural world, as evident from frequent references to their intended audience in the colophons of their works. In some cases the literary community is implied, as in King Jaswant Singhs Bhasabhushan (Ornament to the Vernacular, c. 1660), which he closes by stating: Looking at the Sanskrit texts, I have given shape to their ideas in the vernacular I have written this innovative work for the kind of person who is scholarly, skilled in the vernacular, and clever with the literary arts.49 The very existence (and future popularity) of this work was a factor of the audience that existed to appreciate it, here defined as a type of person (tahi nara ke heta) who could be considered both a vernacular intellectual (jo pandita, bhasa-nipuna) and a master of poetry (kavita bishai pravina): the exact profile of the riti courtly intellectual. Matiram Tripathi, probably the brother of the poet Cintamani, and an approximate contemporary of Jaswant Singh, speaks of his literary community more directly in the colophon to his Rasraj (The Principal Rasa): I have composed this new work, Rasraj, for the delectation of connoisseurs. May the community of master poets understand my work, and take pleasure from it.50 It would be difficult to find bolder statements of the riti poets sense of their works as conduits for ideas that were destined to circulate in a larger literary public. But how did this literary public function, and what was the role of the ritigranth in enabling it? In addition to being works of alankarasastra filled with beautiful poetry, riti texts clearly played a major role in the most critical domains of cultural and intellectual practice: in the performance and interpretation of poetry, in pedagogy, and in literary criticism. Each of these will be considered briefly in turn. One fundamental dimension of the ritigranth genre was its role in underwriting the courtly culture of performed poetry. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the riti works that come down to scholars today as inert, arcane entities had a more eclectic, multimedia literary life during their heyday. Brajbhasa poetry was
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not just read in private: it was sung; it was danced; in courts it was the focal point of competitions such as samasyapurti, in which the patron or pandit overseeing the event would propose a point of departure (samasya) for the creation of a set of poems. This samasya might be the last word or phrase or line of a poem, or perhaps a poetic theme such as a particular type of nayika.51 Poets would then be evaluated on the quality of the poem that they spontaneously completed (purti). Success in this kind of competition clearly required a solid background in the various domains of alankarasastra encompassed by scholarly writings in the ritigranth style. What of the audiences who read or listened to poetry being declaimed? In order to achieve the necessary interpretive skills, they too had to be versed in the riti system. This was particularly crucial when you consider that the most popular Brajbhasa verse form in courtly settings was the muktak (independent) poem. As its name suggests, the muktak is not part of a larger narrative structure. The charm of this verse style is that the reader or listener (rasika) steps into the middle of a story. The full story is never told in the poem itself, especially in the case of a short couplet, where there is room only for the sparsest of narrative details. Consider the complex literary infrastructure that must be in place for even a short Brajbhasa muktak, like the following one by Bihari (fl. c. 1650), to generate meaning: Why do you drive me crazy with all your lies? You cant hide the truth. Your eyes, dripping with redness, Tell the tale of last nights pleasures.52 How is it that a short poem such as this where the speaker, the addressee and the subject of the conversation are never directly revealed is readily comprehensible to its audience? As far as the minimal narrative content of the poem goes, we are simply told that upon seeing somebodys red eyes a woman gets angry. But the metadiscourse of riti poetics allows us easily to fill in the rest of the story. In the case of this particular poem we need above all to ascertain the characters. A reader familiar with the basics of nayikabheda will readily surmise that Bihari has depicted an encounter between an angry female character (khandita nayika) and an unfaithful lover (satha nayaka). According to the conventions of riti literature red eyes in a man are a clue that he has been up all night making love to someone else. His eyes may be red either from lack of sleep, or because during the heat of passion things got a little messy and betel juice (the proper location of which is the mouth) got into his eyes. Biharis dohas have frequently been celebrated for their quality of being a small pot that contains the ocean (gagar me sagar). The reason this riti poet can say so much in so few words, however, is because the complex of literary
systems provides the context in which to interpret his poetry.53 How did an aspiring poet or poetry connoisseur learn these systems the price of entrance into the learned courtly circles of early modern India? By studying a ritigranth, often with the help of a teacher or pandit. Court pandits Sanskrit and, in later periods, Braj were instrumental in the education of young princes and children of the nobility, and some ritigranth texts, like the Kavipriya, seem to have served as companions to teaching.54 In addition to teaching younger students, court pandits also served as mentors to kings, for whom literary connoisseurship was de rigueur and original literary composition strongly encouraged. Many ritigranths were written explicitly at the request of royal patrons, and kings commissioned copies of the most authoritative works produced at other courts for their personal libraries.55 Reading and learning the principles of alankarasastra alone did not transform one into a scholar of this subject. Perhaps yet another way to account for the proliferation of the ritigranth genre was that in some cases the writing of such texts itself was part of the learning process (perhaps like a PhD in Hindi literature in modern times?).56 Creating a new treatise on alankaras or nayikabheda demonstrated that a pandit was fit to carry out various tasks: performing in a courtly assembly, educating others, and composing further poetic or scholarly works, such as commentaries an important, if still largely neglected, domain of riti cultural practice. Brajbhasa commentaries on ritigranth texts provide further clues as to how literary systems functioned in premodernity. An extensive treatment of Braj commentarial style is of necessity beyond the scope of the present study (not the least reason is that scarcely any such commentaries have been published); nonetheless, a brief outline of the main concerns of one of Kesavdass commentators, the poet-scholar Surati Misra (fl. 1740), affords a window on some of the formal interpretive protocols for Brajbhasa literary criticism, and may well be suggestive of larger trends in the genre. Numerous issues are of interest to Surati Misra in his analysis of Kesavdass verses: the poets lexical and grammatical choices, the relationship of Rasikpriya themes to those of other Brajbhasa writers, as well as textual precedents from Sanskrit. But clearly one of the most pressing sets of questions that engaged this commentator concerns the canonical literary systems, such as identifying the predominant alankara of a given verse. In a mirroring of the riti qualities of the source text, this pandit often augments his alankara analysis by citing a Brajbhasa lakshan of the rhetorical figure in question.57 He also frequently raises points (and contributes yet more definitions) that pertain to the nayikabheda system. Does a given verse feature the nayikas words to Krishna, or is it
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a conversation between Krishna and her friend (sakhi)? What are the criteria for establishing the identity of the nayika? The very taxonomical specificities that are so decried by modern critics are crucial determinants of meaning for Surati Misra, as evident from his expatiating on issues such as the difference between a woman who makes bold amorous overtures to a man (svayamduta) or one who is merely being clever (vagvidagdha); or his analytical distinction between a woman who longs for an absent lover (virahini), and the pining of a woman stricken by loves first infatuation (purvanuraga).58 Kesavdass refinements of earlier Sanskrit categorizations are yet another topic of great importance to Surati Misra. Some he is in agreement with; others he disputes.59 In either case, the critical questions for this prominent early modern intellectual are grounded in the traditional categories of literary analysis, which, far from being pointless interpretive modes, were a matter for careful investigation and vigorous debate. Conclusion Exploring in some detail the thought world and cultural practices of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers of the riti style prompts us to reconsider current constructions of the intellectual life of late precolonial India. Failure to examine in sufficient depth the modalities of courtly writers has led to many unfortunate and inaccurate representations of riti literary culture. The profusion of the ritigranth genre in particular has stimulated confusion, bemusement, or downright scorn amongst modern Hindi scholars, but rarely much analysis. The trend in Hindi scholarship is to give courtly literature a wide berth, directing attention towards the more spiritually oriented writings of bhakti poets. In seeking to understand the logic and function of Brajbhasa literary science we not only deepen our awareness of the epistemological domains of precolonial Indian life; we also enrich the field of Hindi studies by encouraging scholarly analysis of literary realms beyond the confines of the bhakti field. Riti authors have frequently been criticized for their narrow focus on the minute details of the various bhedas of classical literary science. Although in the modern literary landscape (still imbued with Romanticisms legacy) this deep concern with precise categorization is generally viewed as both artistically and intellectually stilted, during the riti period it constituted a vibrant and, indeed, indispensable compositional approach. The ritigranth genre should also be appreciated for its role in enabling the production and interpretation of courtly poetry. Intelligibility and literary success in courtly venues depended on poets and audiences being conversant with literary systems, and the ritigranth was a primary tool for enabling these social and communicative processes. The writing of ritigranths also had a largely overlooked sym-
bolic value insofar as it betokened membership in a widespread community of Brajbhasa poets and intellectuals. The knowledge system of vernacular alankarasastra constituted a literary consensus that was continually being renegotiated by riti authors through their participation in assemblies and their contributions to scholarship. The assessment of the Brajbhasa ritigranth as largely derivative of Sanskrit sources, and therefore intellectually insignificant, is inaccurate. Many riti works of alankarasastra exhibit a complex weaving together of classical ideas with fascinating innovations upon them. The newness that we see in riti texts is not earth shaking at least not by contemporary measurements. But it is a newness we should take seriously, by attempting to comprehend the logic and functioning of a fledgling branch of vernacular knowledge as it began to put forward increasingly strong claims to a separate existence from Sanskrit. Carving out a new domain of vernacular writing from a Sanskrit mold was not a process undertaken lightly; it engendered a range of anxieties about transgressing age-old language hierarchies. But alongside the uncertainties we hear an unmistakable voice of strength: an excitement about new literary and intellectual possibilities evident in the oft-repeated phrase of the riti poet-scholar, I have composed this passage according to my own understanding. The major differences frequently lie at the level of detail rather than at the level of overarching theory. Sanskrit traditions were a respected foundation upon which to draw and improve, and forging a new arena of vernacular literary culture did not require wholly reinventing the wheel. Nonetheless, the embedding of Sanskrit theory into the emerging Brajbhasa literary genres should be understood as far more than a mere imitative gesture. It was also an appropriation of Sanskrit discursive space by an increasingly powerful vernacular intellectual community. And in the end it was Hindi not Sanskrit that became the ascendant language for poetic and intellectual expression in the modern period.
NOTES I am grateful to colleagues from the University of Chicago, the Triangle South Asia Consortium (particularly Pika Ghosh and Shantanu Phukan), and those who attended the May 2004 Sanskrit poetry conference at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for feedback on earlier drafts of this article. 1Brajbhasa was the primary dialect of written Hindi prior to c. 1900, at which point Modern Standard Hindi (Khari Boli) began to achieve cultural dominance. Because I am dealing exclusively with early modern texts in this article, I use the terms Hindi and Brajbhasa synonymously. 2The term ritikal was coined by Ramcandra Sukla in 1929, and it has remained in wide circulation ever since. Ramcandra Sukla, Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas (1929; repr. Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1994), 1. 3Kesavdas, Rasikpriya, vv. 7.13, in Kesavgranthavali, e d .
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Visvanath Prasad Misra, 3 vols. (Allahabad: Hindustani Academy, 1954). All Kesavdas citations refer to this edition. All translations from Brajbhasa and Sanskrit are my own. 4For a welcome attempt to counter modern biases against courtly literature in the case of Persian, see Julie Scott Meisami, The Poetry of Praise: The Qasida and Its Uses, ch. 2 in Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). A particularly unhelpful, if regrettably typical, analysis of classicism as reflecting a decline from the simplicity of bhakti and a simultaneous fall from the intellectual grace of Sanskrit is the treatment of Kesavdas in Kailash Bhushan Jindal, A History of Hindi Literature, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993), 1428. 5The anti-riti biases of modern scholars are as evident from publishing tendencies as from explicit arguments. Whereas hundreds of articles and books have been written about bhakti authors, aside from a few translations and a couple of stray articles, no scholarship on riti literature has been published outside of India. Indian scholarship, for its part, tends to frame riti literary practices in a narrative of courtly decadence and medieval decline. One influential account in this vein is Nagendra, ed., Ritibaddh Kavya, Hindi Sahitya ka Brihat Itihas, vol. 6 (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1974). 6For a discussion of some of the complex ideas concerning innate limitations on vernacular expression from a Sanskrit point of reference, see Sheldon Pollock, The Languages of Science in Early Modern India, in Halbfass Commemoration Volume, ed. K. Preisendanz (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). 7For recent work on Jagannatha, see Sheldon Pollock, The Death of Sanskrit, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43:2 (2001): 40412. For some remarks on interchanges between Sanskrit and the regional languages of South India, see Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, A Poem at the Right Moment (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 187. 8The very first commentary on Kesavdass Rasikpriya, Samarthas Prabodhini, was a Sanskrit work. See V. P. Misra, Tikaen aur Tikakar, in Kesavdas, ed. Vijaypal Singh (Delhi, Radhakrishna Prakasan, 1970), 230. King Jaswant Singhs Anandvilas was translated into Sanskrit in 1664, the same year it first appeared in Brajbhasa. The dating of the two versions is discussed in Visvanath Prasad Misra, introduction to Jasvantsimhagranthavali (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1972), 323. 9Although Sundar is only mentioned, Kesavdass theorization of the premabhisarika nayika (lovelorn woman who ventures out to meet her lover) is actually discussed in the Sanskrit text. In the end, Kesavdass proposed new category is not endorsed, but this intellectual rebuff has nothing to do with the fact of its vernacularity. See Akbar Shah, Sringaramanjari, ed. V. Raghavan (Hyderabad: Hyderabad Archaeological Department, 1951), 2, 37. 10The Braj translation of Akbar Shahs Sanskrit version of the original Telugu Sringaramanjari was by Cintamani Tripathi (more on whom below). See Sringaramanjari, ed. Bhagirath Misra (Lucknow: Lucknow University Press, 1956). 11On the importance of Hindi literature at Sivajis court, see Rajmal Bora, Bhushan aur unka Sahitya (Kanpur: Sahitya Ratnalaya, 1987), 35. Krishna Divakar, Bhonsla Rajdarbar ke Hindi Kavi (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1969), is an im-
portant study of Hindis popularity at a wide range of early modern Dakhani courts. 12On Kavindras sense of shame see Kavindracarya Sarasvati, Kavindrakalpalata, ed. Jinavijaya Muni (Jaipur: Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, 1958), v. 13, quoted in Krishna Divakar, introduction to Kavindracandrika (Pune: Maharashtra Rashtrabhasha Sabha, 1966), 34. 13Vernacular-Sanskrit parity, or at least parallelism, is no less evident in the surprising existence of not one, but two mid-seventeenth-century Kavindracarya festschrift volumes, the Kavindracandrodaya (in Sanskrit) and the Kavindracandrika (in Braj), which honored Kavindra for his role in persuading Shah Jahan to rescind the discriminatory poll tax on Hindus. 14Jayarama Pindye, Radhamadhavavilasacampu, ed. V. K. Rajvade (1922; repr. Pune: Varda Books, 1989), 227. 15Such vacillations between terming his Campu a Sanskrit work and a dvadasabhasakavya are especially evident on pages 2446. 16Jayarama, Campu, 233, 237, 243. 17In his description of the poetry contest in canto 6, the simultaneous presence of vernacular and Sanskrit poets appears to have created a compositional dilemma for Jayarama, causing him to invent the idea that the vernacular poets performed at a separate poetry contest, which he records later in the work: Then the vernacular poets put forward themes for composition, each eager to participate. There were compositions on those themes, too [at the poetry contest], but since it is inappropriate to write about them in the context of Sanskrit compositions, I will describe them in a subsequent chapter. Campu, 233. 18The first ten cantos occupy forty-three printed pages, whereas the last canto alone comprises thirty-three. For further remarks on some of the vernacular poems in this text, see Sumit Guha, Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan c.15001800 in this volume. 19Chapter 2 of the Kavipriya details Kesavdass family history. The linguistic proclivities of Balabhadra Misra are ambiguous. If Sanskrit recitation was his occupation (Kavipriya, v. 2.16), he certainly did not eschew vernacular composition, because he wrote both a sikhnakh (head-to-toe description) and a short work in Hindi on Rasa theory (Rasvilas, or Pleasure of Aesthetics). But the elder Misra brother somehow never attained the fame of his more prolific younger brother. The little-known Balabhadra Misra works were first published in Sudhakar Pandey, ed., Balabhadrakrit Rasvilas evam Sikhnakh (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1992). 20Many Brajbhasa definitions of Sanskrit poetics terminology devote at least one-quarter of the doha to invoking poetic authorities with variations on the phrase best of poets, such as king among poets (kavi-bhupa/kavi-raja), wise people (sayane loi/sujana), and established poets (kavi-dhira). Owing to the compositional necessity of filling in either eleven-count or thirteen-count verse quadrants, the poets own name is frequently conjoined with these expressions of praise. 21I am indebted to R. S. McGregor for his suggestions on how to interpret Kesavdass poetic stance of slowwittedness. For a useful caution against overly literal interpretations of poetic voice in Mughal-period texts from a dif-
58
ferent sociocultural milieu, see Paul Losensky, Poetry as Biography and the Modern Fighanis: Problems of Defining the Poetic Voice, ch. 2 in W elcoming Fighani (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998). 22The very distinction posited by Hindi critics between bhakti and riti texts rarely withstands close scrutiny. An excellent discussion of this issue is Rupert Snell, Bhakti versus Riti? The Satsai of Biharilal, Journal of Vaishnava Studies 3:1 (1994): 15370. Also note the centrality of bhakti to Ke savdass Rasikpriya, discussed below. 23A typical formulation is Jindal, History of Hindi Literature, 64. 24An example of this theoretical approach is Sukla, Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas, 12933. 25This is actually in notable contrast to most works of Sanskrit alankarasastra, in which literary principles were illustrated by excerpting existing Sanskrit poems from famous classics. 26The other two are the Kavyakalpalatavritti, a thirteenthcentury poets manual by Amaracandra Yati, and the Alankarasekhara of Kesava Misra, written in Delhi in the generation preceding Kesavdas. 27The andhadosha is defined as birodhi pantha ko. The other new categories set out here are the literary flaws of being deaf, lame, naked and dead. See Kavipriya, vv. 3.6ff. 28Cintamani Tripathi, Kavikulkalptaru (lithograph, Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1875), vv. 1.3, 1.6. 29Kaviraj has usefully distinguished between modern and premodern modes of cultural change: Modern rebellions announce themselves even before they are wholly successful; revolutions in traditional cultures tended to hide the facts of their being revolts. Sudipta Kaviraj, "Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India, in Nationalstaat und Sprachkonflikt in Sud- und Sudostasien, ed. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 35. 30Compare Rasikpriya, vv. 24ff, with Rudrabhattas original discussion in Sringaratilaka, ed. R. Pischel and trans. Kapildev Pandey (Varanasi: Pracya Prakasan, 1968), v. 2.38. 31In fact, except when an undesirable trait is being exemplified, Krishna and Radha are the nayaka and nayika of virtually every poem in the work. 32Compare the arguments in Sringaratilaka, v. 2.28, with those of Rasikpriya, v. 8.54. 33The three classical types of nayika are ones own (sva kiya), the wife of another (parakiya), and the public woman (samanyavanita). 34See the opening chapter to the Rasikpriya, particularly v.1.16: navahu rasa ke bhava bahu, tinake bhinna bicara / sabako kesavadasa, hari nayaka hai sringara. The word nayaka creates a slight punning effect, meaning both hero and leading rasa. 35The comparable passages on the subject of gunas are from Kavikulkalptaru, vv. 1.1228, and Mammata, Kavyaprakasa (1936; reprint, Delhi: Parimal Publications, 1985), 421ff. Broadly speaking, Cintamani follows Mammata closely in endorsing the threefold set of gunas, and not the tenfold set espoused by early Sanskrit theorists such as Vamana. 36Much of the Braj terminology reprises the Sanskrit origi-
nal and Cintamani even coins a Braj verb (dravavai = melts) to capture the sense of Mammatas druti (melting). Compare Kavikulkalptaru, v.1.14, with Kavyaprakasa, 421. 37On this particular innovation of Cintamanis see Vidyadhar Misra, Cintamani: Kavi aur Acarya (Allahabad: Vidya Sahitya Sansthan, 1990), 152, 161. 38The word madhurya remained closely tied to Brajbhasa right into the modern period, when this sweetness began to be seen as a flaw rather than a virtue. How could a language that was dripping in sweetness be a suitable vehicle for expressing the more serious concerns of the nation? Increasingly it was felt that only the poetically clumsy but workaday Khari Boli, not Braj, should serve these modern aims. See Heidi Pauwels, Diptych in Verse: Gender Hybridity, Language Consciousness, and National Identity in Niralas Jago phir ek Bar, Journal of the American Oriental Society 121:3 (2001): 4559. 39The language of both the Mathura and Gwalior regions was also praised by the contemporary Mughal munshi Nik Rai. See Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Making of a Munshi, in this volume. 40The full extent of the riti tradition is yet to be fully understood since so many primary works remain unpublished. 41Excerpted from Kavyanirnay, in Bhikaridasgranthavali, ed. Visvanath Prasad Misra, vol. 2 (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1957), vv. 1.57. 42See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 51ff. 43Macaulays infamous characterization of the native literature of India is too well known to need quoting. 44A. B. Keith, who apparently esteemed Sanskrit literature enough to write an entire book on the subject, decried its obscurity of style, taint of artificiality, and several other literary tendencies that he considered indicators of a defect of the Indian mind. A. B. Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (1900; repr. New York: Haskell, 1968), 910. 45A welcome exception is Rakesa Gupta, Studies in NayakaNayika-Bheda (1967; repr. Aligarh: Granthayan, 1995). 46This quotation from Ray Sivdass unpublished Sarasasara is excerpted in Chotelal Gupta, Surati Misra aur unka Kavya (Allahabad: Smriti Prakasan, 1982), 212. 47Note in particular the phrases each according to his ability(jatha jog) and according to the extent of their intellect (apni mati paramana so) from the Sarasasara passage. 48Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 32ff. 49Jaswant Singh, Bhasabhushan, in Jasvantsimhagranthavali, ed. Visvanath Prasad Misra (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1972), vv. 207, 209. 50Matiram Tripathi, R a s r a j , in Matiramgranthavali, ed. Krishna-bihari Misra and Brajkisor Misra (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1964), v. 427. 51For instance, one poetic challenge for pandits in Sahaji Bhonsles assembly concerned the elucidation of the difference between nayikas both conscious and unconscious of the arrival of puberty (jnatayauvana and ajnatayauvana) according to Bhanudattas classical description of them. Jayarama, Campu, 233.
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52Biharisatsai, ed. Sudhakar Pandey (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1999), v. 11. 53Bihari was one of the rare riti poets who did not write a ritigranth. But the interpretation of his work is often dependent on the system. Such poets are known as based on system (ritisiddh) in Hindi criticism. See Visvanath Prasad Misra, Bihari (1950; repr. Varanasi: Sanjay Book Center, 1998), 445. 54That Kesavdas intended his handbook on basic principles of composition and literary topoi to be used in an educational context is stated unambiguously in Kavipriya, v. 3.1: Kesav wrote the Kavipriya so that boys and girls would understand the subtle ways of poetry. May scholars look leniently upon any mistakes. 55Alankarasastra works comprise a major portion of vernacular holdings in most north Indian royal manuscript collections. 56The Mughal soldier Ghulam Nabi Raslin, for instance, taught himself Brajbhasa poetics through writing a ritigranth. Raslin, Angdarpan, in Raslingranthavali, ed. Sudhakar Pandey (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1987), v. 179. 57The lakshans are not attributed, which suggests that they may be the authors original compositions a prospect that seems the likelier for the fact that Surati Misra is himself known to have composed several (mostly still unpublished) ritigranths. 58Surati Misra, Joravarprakas, ed. Yogendrapratap Singh (Allahabad: Sahitya Sammelan, 1992), 139, 210. 59For plus and minus points, respectively, concerning Ke savdass new theorizations about bhavas see Misra, Joravarprakas, 160, 157.
The Making of a Munshi

MUZAFFAR ALAM & SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
The difficult transition between the information and knowledge regimes of the precolonial and colonial political systems of South Asia was largely, though not exclusively, mediated by scribes, writers, statesmen, and accountants possessing a grasp of the chief language of power in that time, namely Persian. More than any vernacular language or Sanskrit, it was in Persian that the officials of the English East India Company conducted its early rule, administration, and even diplomacy in the years around the seizure of the revenues of Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century. Hence they naturally had to come to terms with the social group that was regarded as most proficient in this regard.1 To be sure, the Mughal aristocracy and its regional offshoots provided them with certain models of etiquette and statecraft, and various Mirror of Princes texts attracted the attention of Company officials. But the pragmatic realities of political economy that had to be dealt with could not be comprehended within the adab of the aristocrat, and the representatives of Company Bahadur were, in any event, scarcely qualified themselves to claim such an unambiguous status. The real interlocutor for the Company official thus was the munshi, who was mediator and spokesman (vakil), but also a key personage who could both read and draft materials in Persian, and who had a grasp over the realities of politics that men such as Warren Hastings, Antoine Polier, and Claude Martin found altogether indispensable.2 Though the term munshi is recognizable even today, it has shifted semantically over the years. Aficionados of Hindi films since the 1960s will recognize the character of the munshi as the accountant and henchman of the cruel and grasping zamindar, greasily rubbing his hands and usually unable to protest the immoral demands of his master.3 Specialists on colonial surveying operations in the Himalayas and Central Asia will recall that some of those sent out on such ventures were already called pundits and moonshees in the mid-nineteenth century.4 But the latter set of meanings is not our concern in this brief essay. Rather, we shall look at how, in the high Mughal period, one became a munshi, what attributes were principally called for, and what the chief educational demands were. The sources with which we approach this problem fall broadly into two categories. Relatively rare are the first-person accounts or autobiographical narratives that will be our principal concern here. More common are normative texts, corresponding to the Mirror of Princes type, but which we may term the Mirror for Scribes. Thus, in the reign of Aurangzeb, just as Mirza Khan could pen the Tuhfat al-Hind (Gift of India), in which he set out the key elements in the education of a well-brought-up Mughal prince,5 others wrote works such as the Nigarnamah-i Munshi (Munshis Letterbook), which were primarily concerned with how a munshi was to be properly trained, and which technical branches of knowledge he ought rightfully to claim a mastery of.6 Earlier still, from the reign of Ja hangir (r. 160528), we have a classic text entitled Insha-i Harkaran, the author of which, Harkaran Das Kambuh of Multan, claimed to have served with his family as scribes in the high Mughal administration. The significance of this text was such that the East India Company produced an edition and translation of it in the late eighteenth century, so that it could serve as a model text for its own early administrators when they dealt with the knotty problems of inherited Mughal administrative practice and terminology.7 The munshi was thus the equivalent in the Mughal domains of the south Indian karanams, whose careers and worldview have recently been the object of an extensive treatment.8 Since such materials fell into a branch of knowledge that was regarded as secular, in the sense of being distinctly this-worldly and largely devoid of religious or theological connotations, we are not entirely surprised to find that many of their authors, including Harkaran himself, were Hindus, usually Khatris, Kayasthas, or Brahmans. It has long been recognized that over the centuries of Muslim rule in northern India, the frontiers of Persian came to extend far beyond the narrow circle of the emperor, the princes, and high nobles.9 Akbar
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was the first of the Indo-Islamic kings of northern India formally to declare Persian the language of administration at all levels, which had not been the case under the Afghan sultans. The proclamation to this effect was apparently issued by his famous Khatri revenue minister, Todar Mal. It was accompanied by a reorganization of the revenue department as well as the other administrative departments by the equally famous Iranian noble Mir Fath-Allah Shirazi. An eighteenth-century historian, Ghulam Husain Tabatabai, remembered and recorded this change thus: Earlier in India the government accounts were written in Hindavi according to the Hindu rule. Raja Todar Mal acquired new regulations [zavabit] from the scribes [navisindagan] of Iran, and the government offices then were reorganized as they were there in vilayat [Iran].10 Persian was thereafter on the ascendant, and it was not simply the royal household and the court which came to bear the Iranian impress. As mutasaddis and minor functionaries, Iranians could be seen everywhere in government offices, even though they were not in exclusive control of these positions. A substantial part of the administration was still carried out by members of the indigenous Hindu communities who had hitherto worked in Hindavi: importantly, these communities soon learned Persian and joined the Iranians as clerks, scribes, and secretaries (muharrirs and munshis). Their achievements in the new language were soon recognized as extraordinary. To this development, Akbars reform in the prevailing madrasah education again planned and executed by the Iranian Mir Fath-Allah Shirazi contributed considerably. Hindus had already begun to learn Persian in Sikandar Lodis time, and Abdul Qadir Badayuni even mentions a Brahman who taught Arabic and Persian in this period.11 Akbars enlightened policy and the introduction of secular themes in the syllabi at middle levels had stimulated a wide interest in Persian studies. Hindus Kayasthas and Khatris in particularjoined madrasahs in large numbers to acquire excellence in Persian language and literature, which now promised a good career in the imperial service.12 From the middle of the seventeenth century, the departments of accountancy (siyaq), draftsmanship (insha), and the office of revenue minister (divan) were mostly filled by these Kayastha and Khatri munshis and muharrirs. As noted above, Harkaran Das is the first known Hindu munshi whose writings were taken as models by later members of the fraternity.13 The celebrated Chandrabhan Brahman was another influential member of this group, rated second only to the mir munshi himself, Sheikh Abul Fazl ibn Mubarak (15511602). Chandrabhan was a man of versatile skills, and also wrote poetry of high merit.14 They were followed by a large number of other Kayastha and Khatri munshis, including the well-known Madho Ram, Sujan Rai,
Malikzadah, Bhupat Rai, Khushhal Chand, Anand Ram Mukhlis, Bindraban Khwushgu, and a number of others who made substantive contributions to IndoPersian language and literature.15 Selections and specimens of their writings formed part of the syllabi of Persian studies at madrasahs. Certain areas hitherto unexplored or neglected found skilled investigators, chiefly among Kayasthas and Khatris. They produced excellent works in the eighteenth century in the philological sciences: the Mirat al-Istilah of Anand Ram Mukhlis, the Bahar-i Ajam of Tek Chand Bahar, and the Mustalahat al-Shuara of Siyalkoti Mal Varasta are among the most exhaustive lexicons compiled in India. Persian grammars and commentaries on idioms, phrases, and poetical proverbs show their authors keen interest, extensive research, and unprecedented engagement in the development of Persian in India.16 Underpinning these developments was undoubtedly the figure of the ideal or perfect munshi, which many of these men aspired to be. Yet what did this mean in concrete terms? A passage from a celebrated letter written by Chandrabhan Brahman to his son Khvajah Tej Bhan is worth quoting in this context. He writes: Initially, it is necessary for one to acquire a training in the [Mughal] system of norms [akhlaq]. It is appropriate to listen always to the advice of elders and act accordingly. By studying the Akhlaq-i Nasiri, Akhlaq-i Jalali, Gulistan, and Bustan, one should accumulate ones own capital and gain the virtue of knowledge. When you practice what you have learned, your code of conduct too will become firm. The main thing is to be able to draft in a coherent manner, but at the same time good calligraphy possesses its own virtues and it earns you a place in the assembly of those of high stature. O dear son! Try to excel in these skills. And together with this, if you manage to learn accountancy [siyaq], and scribal skill [navisindagi], that would be even better. For scribes who know accountancy as well are rare. A man who knows how to write good prose as well as accountancy is a bright light even among lights. Besides, a munshi should be discreet and virtuous. I, who am among the munshis of the court that is the symbol of the Caliphate, even though I am subject to the usual errors, am still as an unopened bud though possessing hundreds of tongues. Chandrabhan then goes on to set out the details of a rather full cultural curriculum, showing that the letter was clearly destined for a larger readership than his son alone. He writes: Although the science of Persian is vast, and almost beyond human grasp, in order to open the gates of language one should read the Gulistan, Bustan, and the letters of Mulla Jami, to start with. When one has ad-
Alam & Subrahmanyam: The Making of a Munshi
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vanced somewhat, one should read key books on norms and ethics, as well as history books such as the Habib al-Siyar, Rawzat al-Safa, Rawzat al-Salatin, Tarikhi Guzidah, Tarikh-i Tabari, Zafar-namah, Akbar-namah, and some books like these that are absolutely necessary. The benefits of these will be to render your language elegant, also to provide you knowledge of the world and its inhabitants. These will be of use when you are in the assemblies of the learned. Of the master-poets, here are some whose collections I read in my youth, and the names of which I am writing down. When you have some leisure, read them, and they will give you both pleasure and relief, increase your abilities, and improve your language. They are Hakim Sanai, Mulla Rum, Shams-i Tabriz, Sheikh Farid al-Din Attar, Sheikh Sadi, Khvajah Hafiz, Sheikh Kirmani, Mulla Jami, and Unsuri, Firdawsi, Jamal al-Din Abd al-Razzaq, Kamal Ismail, Khaqani, Anvari, Amir Khusraw, Hasan Dehlavi, Zahir Faryabi, Kamal Khujandi, Amiq Bukhari, Nizami Aruzi Samarqandi, Abd al-Wasi Jabali, Rukn Sain, Muhyi alDin, Masud Bek, Farid al-Din, Usman Mukhtari, Nasir Bukhari, Ibn Yamin, Hakim Suzani, Farid Katib, Abul Ala Ganjavi, Azraqi, Falaki, Saudai, Baba Fighani, Khvajah Kirmani, Asafi, Mulla Banai, Mulla Imad Khvajah, Ubaid Zakani, Bisati, Lutf-Allah Halavi, Rashid Vatvat, Asir Akhshikati, and Asir Umami. May my good and virtuous son understand that, when I had finished reading these earlier works, I then desired to turn my attention to the later poets and writers and started collecting their poems and masnavis. I acquired several copies of their works, and when I had finished them I gave some of them to some of my disciples. Some of these are as follows: Ahli, Hilali, Muhtasham, Vahshi, Qazi Nur, Nargis, Makhfi Ummidi, Mirza Qasim Gunai, Partavi, Jabrani, Hisabi, Sabri, Zamiri Rasikhi, Hasani, Halaki, Naziri, Naui, Nazim Yaghma, Mir Haydar, Mir Masum, Nazir, Mashhadi, Vali Dasht Bayazi, and many others who had their collections [divans] and masnavis, and whose names are too numerous to be listed in this succinct letter.17 The extensive list cited here is remarkable both for its diversity and programmatic coherence. The list begins with texts on statecraft and moralia, touches on the question of accountancy and epistolography, then moves quickly to a set of histories and chronicles, before ending with an extensive list of poets both old and new. The masters of the Iranian classics obviously found an appreciative audience even among the middleorder literati in big and small towns, as well among village-based revenue officials and other hereditary functionaries and intermediaries. All Mughal government papers, from imperial orders (farmans) to bonds and acceptance letters (muchalkah, tamassuk qabuliyat) that a vil-
lage intermediary (chaudhuri) wrote were in Persian.18 Likewise, there was no bookseller in the bazaars and streets of Agra, Delhi, and Lahore who did not sell manuscript anthologies of Persian poetry. Madrasah pupils were in general familiar with the Persian classics, and Persian had practically become the first language of culture in north India.19 Those steeped in Persian appropriated and used Perso-Islamic expressions such as Bismillah (in the name of Allah), lab-bagur (at the door of the grave), and ba jahannam rasid (damned in hell) just as often as their Iranian and non-Iranian Muslim counterparts did. They would also look for, and appreciate, Persian renderings of local texts and traditions. Indeed, many Hindu scriptures and other Indic texts were rendered into Persian, and these too joined the cultural accessories of the typical Kayastha or Khatri.20 While we cannot present a detailed analysis of each of these texts, at least some of these translations clearly enjoyed circulation outside the relatively rarefied milieu of the court.21 Yet the core of the technical curriculum for a munshi lay elsewhere, notably in epistolography, accountancy, and methods of fiscal management. The Nigarnamah-i Munshi, cited briefly above, shows this clearly enough. It was written by an anonymous author who used the pennames Munshi and Malikzadah, and who had been a member of the entourage of Lashkar Khan, mir bakhshi in 16701. The author then seems to have entered the service of the prince Shah Alam, and gone on to hold a series of other posts into the mid-1680s. Around the age of seventy, having accumulated considerable experience, he thought to pen this didactic text. The Nigarnamah itself is made up of two sections (daftars), which follow an introduction largely devoted to the subject of insha or draftsmanship and epistolography, and the work of prominent munshis of the past. The first part is subdivided into four chapters, dealing with the drafting of different kinds of letters: those for princes of the royal blood, those written for nobles, those for divans, and orders and letters of appointment. The examples seem to be authored by the writer, Munshi himself. The second daftar then surveys examples of the work of other prominent munshis, including royal orders, orders written on behalf of Prince Shah Alam, other letters, and reports and includes a particular section devoted to one prominent m u n s h i , Uday Raj Rustamkhani. Clearly a pantheon of munshis existed, and the great exemplars of style were never arbitrarily chosen. Thus, this particular work includes besides Uday Raj letters and orders drafted by men like Sheikh Abd al-Samad Jaunpuri, Mir Muhammad Raza, and SaadAllah Khan. The last personage, a prominent divan of Shah Jahans reign, was obviously viewed as one of the heroes of the munshi tradition, for one version of the manuscript also reproduces his Manual of the Divan
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in its first daftar.22 In a complementary vein to the text cited above is the Khulasat al-Siyaq, written by Indar Sen, probably a Kayastha, in AH 1115 (17034), late in Aurangzebs reign.23 This work is mostly concerned with fiscal management: its three central chapters concern key institutions that dealt with accounting, fiscality, and supplies, that is the Divan-i Ala, the Khan-i Saman, and the Bakhshi, and the conclusion includes examples of arithmetic formulae that would be of use for the munshi in his accounting (siyaq) practice. The introduction sets out the transition from Hindavi accountancy to Persian in the time of Akbar, and emphasizes the need for the munshi class to move with the times. Yet, even more than the Nigarnamah text, this presents a rather narrow conception of the role of the munshi. A rather more comprehensive view can be found in the autobiographical materials from the same broad period, insisting as they do on the formation of the moral universe of the munshi. Nik Rais Premature Autobiography The fate of the munshi was to wander, since his type of employment required him to travel with a peripatetic patron of the elite class. It is thus no coincidence that the text that we shall discuss here, though largely autobiographical in nature, uses the word travel (safar) in its title. The work comes from the pen of a seventeenthcentury member of a scribal group (probably a Kayastha, though we cannot entirely rule out the possibility he was a Khatri), Nik Rai by name, and seems to emerge from a context in which Persian scribal skills were being ever more widely disseminated and available in increasing numbers to Khatris, Kayasthas, and even some Brahmans. We have noted above that as early as the reign of Akbar, Khatris such as Todar Mal had featured in a prominent place in the revenue administration, but the seventeenth century saw their numbers growing apace, before a veritable explosion in their ranks after 1700. Earlier historians have noted this fact while surveying the writings of Kayastha authors such as Bhimsen (author of the Tarikh-i Dilkusha), who accompanied the Mughal armies into the Dakhan in the latter decades of the seventeenth century.24 However, Nik Rai whose text is a Bildungsroman of sorts with a thread of travel running through it has thus far escaped the attention of historians of the Mughal period. Our discussion is based on a single manuscript of his work; the text is entitled Tazkirat al-Safar va Tuhfat al-Zafar (Account of Travels and the Gift of Success), and it was copied by a certain Ram Singh, at the behest of Lala Hazari Mal, who may have been from the authors own family, on 10 Zi-qada AH 1146 (April 1734) in Hyderabad.25 Our discussion will follow the thread of the narrative very closely, paraphrasing and commenting on it.
First-person prose narratives, while less common perhaps in Mughal India than in the Ottoman domains, still had a respectable place in Mughal belles-lettres.26 The Mughal emperors themselves had shown the way, for Babur had authored one such text (in Chaghatay Turkish) arguably the first autobiography in the Islamic world while Jahangir too had distinguished himself as an author in this genre. In the course of the seventeenth century, some other examples may be found, by authors such as Abdul Latif Gujarati, though the real efflorescence comes only in the eighteenth century and the phase of Mughal decline. At the same time, the autobiographical account was also known in the north Indian vernacular tradition, as the celebrated Ardhakathanak of Banarasi Das demonstrates. In this panorama, the text by Nik Rai must count as an early example of an Indian first-person account in Persian, unusual for its time perhaps, but not quite unique. It shares a feature with Banarasi Dass text, namely its concern with the authors childhood and youth, rather than with his mature years. In fact, Nik Rais account is even more half a tale than the Ardhakathanak (whose author stopped in about his fiftieth year), for it ends when its author has barely reached his early to mid-twenties. We should note at the outset that Nik Rais text is written in a deliberately difficult and flowery Persian, and begins with the praise of God and of the pen. The initial theme that is treated is not travel, as might be suggested by the title, but rather speech (sukhan). The first page and a half of the manuscript are devoted to an elucidation of the invocatory term Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim, including the construction of its letters, the idea of justice that it embodies, and so on. Nik Rais model here seems to be the prose of Abul Fazl, and some verses follow with allusions to the ancients and other prestigious figures. We then move from speech (sukhan) to the pen (qalam) in the space of some lines, as well as to the subject of the craftsmanship of God. As with Abul Fazl, the use of Arabic phrases here is quite limited. Once the initial framing in terms of the wonders of Gods creation has been established, the proper text of his narrative begins. This prefatory hamd section is extremely artful and clever, and even manages to incorporate the name of the reigning monarch, Alamgir . A sample of it runs as follows. The account of the disturbed conditions of this sinful faqir, who with the help of fortune and the support of thoughtfulness has entered the alley of the pen, and the field of paper, to venture a description, is on account of the grace of God. May this account be able to apply the kohl of experience to the eye. It is like a light-giving lamp in the night of thought. Just as the movement of the pen brings light onto the blank page, may this account bring light to the night in the city of transitory being. This is a pious account
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[zikr-i khayr]: Even if I am not pious, I am the dust of the feet of the pious. [Agarchih Nik niyam Khak-i pa-i Nik anam] The play here is obviously on the authors own name, Nik Rai. This is followed by another verse, perhaps more indicative of his own (non-Muslim) identity: No wonder I am not thirsty I am an earthen pot of basil. Nik Rai then explains his title, Tazkirat al-Safar va Tuhfat al-Zafar, which mentions both travel and Dar al-Zafar (or Bijapur). We then move at last to the beginning of his account proper, or the aghaz-i dastan (fol. 3b). In the thirteenth regnal year of Aurangzeb, on 14 Zil-Hijja 1080 (4 May 1670), a Thursday (here we find some astrological details), Nik Rai was born, so he tells us, in the city of Amanabad-Allahabad; this corresponds, he states, to the year 1726 Samvat of Raja Bikramajit, the calendar that is preferred by the Indian Brahmans (ba nazdik-i barahmanan-i Hind). His birthplace, he takes care to note, is also called Prayag; the town has excellent buildings, and is on the banks of the river Ganges. A Brahman astrologer, Debi Dutt, was summoned at his birth by his father and grandfather, and on his advice the child was called Nik Rai Pious or Fortunate and the name had some effect, in the sense of allowing him access to science and culture (ilm va adab) as well as honor, distinction, and a good rank (mansab) already in his youth. He reproduces the zaichah or astrological chart made at his birth faithfully in the text; it is in the Indian style, though it contains Persian names and terms. He then proceeds at some length to explain the chart and the extent to which it has in fact influenced his life, as well as things that might have happened but which in fact did not. We return then to a description of Allahabad itself (tawsif-i savad-i baldah-i Ilahabad). Nik Rai tells us that he will provide a view of the town that will show his command over the art of description. It is not just a town located on a river but one that brings salvation to all of Hindustan. Its lanes and bazaars are wonderful, and in their description, the metaphors all relate to water: the lanes are like rivers, the walls like waves, and so on. The town has a fort made of stone, both powerful and beautiful, and built by the monarch Jalal al-Din Akbar. It reaches up to the sky, but its reflections plumb the wa ter. Its walls are as strong as the sadd-i Sikandari, Alexanders wall against Gog and Magog. Inside it is a building called the Chihil Sutun, with buildings of marble that seem to emerge from the water itself. There follows a long aside on storms on the Ganges, which happen every hundred years or so; they are apparently as power-
ful as the storm of the time of Noah, and bring destruction, uprooting trees, and flooding water everywhere. The town has many gardens such as the Jahanara Bagh. His own description of the town, writes the immodest Nik Rai, is as if he were weaving silk, even as his pen moves on silken paper. We become quickly aware in the course of these initial pages that the entire family of Nik Rai is made up of munshis. When Ilahwardi Khan Jafar became governor of Allahabad, the authors grandfather and father were employed by him, the former as divan and the latter as bakhshi.27 But unfortunately, the khan died a month before Nik Rais birth, which caused numerous problems for the father and grandfather. This suggests the ultimate dependence of these service gentry on an elite class of patrons, to the extent that they sometimes took the name of their patron as a sort of surname. Amanullah Khan, the son of the deceased, did provide employment to them for a little over two years. Then Nik Rais grandfather died at the end of three years, like a fruit-giving tree that had outlived its time. This grandfather is portrayed as a formidable and rather wealthy man. When Ilahwardi Khan had been governor of Shahjahanabad, the grandfather had built a fine house (imarat-i ali) in that city. Then, Ilahwardi was transferred to Akbarabad (Agra), and the grandfather followed him there and built another house (kakh-i ayvan), with fine decorations. The grandfather also had a house in Mathura, described as a haveli-i dilkusha. Since the grandfather had a number of friends, he even built a house in the city of Benares, where people in India come on pilgrimage (mataf); he also had a garden in Gorakhpur. This leads Nik Rai to cite a verse from Sadi: Whoever came [to the world], built a new house. He then left, and another took care of it. The grandfathers death was a major blow to the family and an occasion of great mourning. Soon after, Husain Ali Khan, brother of Ilahwardi Khan, was sent as governor to Allahabad and gave employment to Nik Rais father; this was in the eighteenth regnal year of Aurangzeb, when Nik Rai was five years old. This implies incidentally that his father, Lal Bihari, had no employment for some two or three years, but that attach ments to a particular patrons extended family remained strong. As for the young Nik Rai, he began his formal education at the beginning of his sixth year, in keeping with tradition (az ru-i rasm va adat), with the first Persian letters on a tablet (l a wh-i abjadkhvani). Soon enough, Husain Ali was called back to the Mughal capital, and Lal Bihari accompanied him to Delhi. Since he had some relatives in Agra, Nik Rai was sent off to stay with them for a time. His teacher there was Durvesh Muhammad Jaunpuri, and Nik Rai tells us that the light of understanding thus began to dawn within him under the tutelage of this first master. Two years were thus
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spent gaining an initial training in reading, writing and the rudiments of Persian. At about seven years of age, he began to enter into Persian literature, and had his first readings of Sheikh Sadi; he also moved to Delhi. It was at this stage that he was married off to the daughter of Daya Ram, son of Bhagwan Das Shujai; a brief and rather conventional description of the marriage follows, and we are told that we are now in the twentieth regnal year. At this time, Lal Bihari decided to change patrons, and became attached to a certain Tahir Khan, who was given the fawjdari of sarkar Muazzamabad or Gorakhpur (this was a powerful post, in view of the economic expansion in the area at this time). Lal Bihari was given the posts of pishdast and mushrif (or overseer) in charge of the lands and commons (kharabah). Nik Rai moved there as well shortly thereafter, with the rest of his family. He mentions Gorakhpur as an open and spacious place, and pleasant to live in. But soon after he moved there, Tahir Khan was transferred from the spot, and moved back to Delhi via Jaunpur and Allahabad, since the alternative route through Awadh and Lucknow was considered more difficult. On the way was the holy site of Kachauchha, where they went in pilgrimage to the tomb of the Chishti saint Shah Ashraf Jahangir. The central story about Kachauchha recounted in the text is as follows. When Shah Ashraf arrived there, only a few Muslims were in residence, and these lived in fear of a certain pandit-jogi. When Shah Ashraf came through there, people complained to him, and he made inquiries about the jogi. It was found that he was a great practitioner of magic (sihr va fusun), and like the master of Harut and Marut (two fallen angels, who were great magicians). But the Shah with a glance began to burn the jogi, who was obliged to beg for mercy and admit defeat. There is no doubt that the shrine has great power, writes Nik Rai. It is a place where diseases that are reputed to be incurable can be cured. During his lifetime Shah Ashraf had told the merchants (baqqalan) of the town that the expenses of those who came to the shrine would be defrayed from his own familys resources. The merchants would therefore advance the visitors grain in the knowledge that their payment was secure. Nik Rais own paternal uncle, Pratap Mal, had an alcohol problem and had become dry like a stick. No doctor could cure him, and finally he was brought to Kachauchha. After three months of ceremonies (involving offerings of milk, etc.), he recovered his health. Near the shrine was a garden, inhabited by djinns and spirits (asibzadah) whose conversations could be heard by mortals. They would climb on trees and generally create a ruckus. But those who were possessed by spirits, especially women, could be cured by coming to the garden. The wonder of the place was that even if women were hung upside down, their clothes remained more or less in place; no indecent exposure occurred. This, Nik Rai assures us, is
a true story and not some fantasy on his part; he also makes it clear that he has a personal devotion to certain Sufi shrines, especially those of the Chishti order. The familys return to Delhi occurs in the text after this digression in Kachauchha, and the absence from the Mughal capital seems to have lasted no more than seven months. Delhi itself now merits brief mention, as a wonderful place with excellent buildings and beautiful women. It seems that Nik Rai had entered a new phase of awareness, since he begins to speak now of the sensual pleasures of the town. Shahjahanabad is a place, he writes, where hundreds of handsome Yusufs pursue their Zulaykhas. It is a place where the air is like the breath of Jesus, bringing the dead back to life. This is another set of passages with allusions and comparisons, another moment where Nik Rai shows his mastery of, among other things, Old Testament metaphors. Thus, the dabirs of the town wield their pens like the staff of Moses and the trees on the bank of the river are like pearls in beard of the Pharaoh. He mentions the canal made in the time of Shah Jahan by the great Iranian noble Ali Mardan Khan, whose waters are so sweet (shirin) as to be the envy of Farhad himself (fol. 13b). The great fort had been made there by the second Sahib-Qiran (that is, Shah Jahan), and was hence called Shahjahanabad. There are also old forts here such as Tughlaqabad which touch the very sky. If Amir Khusraw, emperor of the land of speech, were alive today, writes Nik Rai, he would have taken his mastery of the word to the sky (the idea being that the objects of this time are so much better than those of Khusraws time). Delhi is thus called Little Mecca (Khvurd Makka) by people of the day. Every year, pilgrims go to the shrine of Hazrat Khvajah Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki (another Chishti saint) to prostrate themselves there, and attain what they want. Verses follow in praise of Qutb al-Din, taken from Amir Khusraw and other authors. Nik Rai also recounts an incident involving the great Chishti Sufi Nizam al-Din Awliya and a verse of his disciple Amir Khusraw, the recitation of which had occasioned the death of Mulla Ahmad Mimar. Despite these digressions, the central thread continues to be the education of the author. Nik Rai begins now to reside in the town and study with Sheikh KhayrAllah, nephew of Durvesh Muhammad, his earlier teacher. He studies the Gulistan and Bustan of Sadi, the Tutinamah, and the Sikandar Namah of Nizami, but soon the sheikh has to leave town, as he is given a post in the Lucknow area, in haveli Selak. So Nik Rai begins to study instead with Sayyid Abdul Qadir Lahauri, to whom he is introduced by his father. He praises this new teacher, who was in his view one of the best-educated men of his time. At this time, Masum Khan, son of Shahnawaz Khan, was made fawjdar of Gorakhpur, and Nik Rais father (who already knew him) went with him as divan
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and bakhshi, advancing in his career as Yusuf had in his time. Instead of going back to Gorakhpur, Nik Rai and his family were left behind, this time in Mathura, still another praiseworthy town that steals the hearts of people, as noted by the poet Mulla Ali. The metaphor Nik Rai uses now is to compare the town and its people to a text written in nastaliq or in naskh. He even praises the style of speech here (probably Brajbhasa), as more beautiful than elsewhere. The river plays a prominent role in this town, with extensive steps (the ghats) of stone. Sacred-thread wearing Brahmans (zunnardaran-i Hind) come from afar to reside here, some two thousand in number. The sweets of this town are so famous that people carry them away as gifts; they are made of milk and sugar, and can be preserved for a number of days without going bad. The town is apparently particularly beautiful during the rainy season. Nik Rai then enters into less savory aspects of the town of Mathura. It is said that Bir Singh Dev Bundela, at the time of Akbar, had killed Allami Sheikh Abul Fazl near Gwalior at the behest of Prince Salim, and that in appreciation for this Salim (when he came to the throne) gave all the property of Sheikh Abul Fazl to the raja. The raja requested permission from the sultan to use this large sum of money to make an impressive place of worship (mabad) reaching up to the sky in Mathura. This he declared was in the interests of the pursuit of the spiritual. Thousands of people would come there in pilgrimage, and festivals and fairs were held there. This went on until the time when the Emperor Aurangzeb, in consideration of matters external to spirituality decided to tear it down. The act was carried out by Husayn Ali Khan, the fawjdar of Mathura, who made a mosque from the temple (az mabad masjid tartib yaft). Nik Rai is disapproving of this act, and cites a verse in this context of the seventeenth-century poet Chandrabhan Brahman, mentioning him by name: Bibin karamat-i butkhanah-i mara ay Shaykh Kih chun kharab shavad khanah-i Khuda gardad. [Look at the miracle of my idol-house, o Sheikh. That when it was ruined, it became the House of God.] So, although devoted to Chishti saints and a member of a family with an extensive tradition of service to the Mughals, Nik Rai sees the times in which he lives with a certain irony. This digression on the temple-turnedmosque leads him into a rather extended discussion of vahdat al-vujud and vahdat-i adyan, the Unity of Being and the Unity of All Religion, which must be read as an implicit criticism of these acts during the time of Mughal rule. Remove the dust of bigotry from the cheek of the Beloved, he remonstrates; dont trust what you see, which is mere appearance (zahir-bini). What is the difference after all between stone and glass, though one may break the other? The religion of Isa and the religion of
Musa seem to be different, but when you really look into it, they are the same. The appearance of each letter may be different, but when you combine them in a word, they acquire a different sense. The wave, the drop, and the bubble seem different, of course, but are they really so (fol. 18b )? The possibility of reconciliation between apparent opposites is also suggested by him through a verse from Rumi: those who are prisoners of color will make even Moses fight with himself, while those who have gone beyond color (bi-rangi) can reconcile even Moses and the Pharaoh. This further digression being completed, Nik Rai returns to the matter of his own education. In Mathura he completes his study of the Tutinamah and the Sikandarnamah; he next begins to read Abul Fazls letters, the writings of Jami and the Muammiyat-i Husayni. However, he has been in Mathura barely a year when his father calls him and the rest of the family to Gorakhpur. This leads him to describe Qasbah Gorakhpur; this place and Mathura do not qualify in his view for the more dignified term baldah. From a distance it appears large, but when one approaches one realizes that the population is small but widely dispersed, like the inflated hearts of lovers. Here is a shrine of Sayyid Ghalib Shahid, which is so miraculous that lions frequent it without harming the humans, as in the proverb where the lion lies down with the lamb. The Ruhin river goes by the town. This brings him to a description of the residence made there by his grandfather, less than half a kos from the river, and even closer in the rainy season. These are clearly pleasurable memories for Nik Rai, of boat rides on the river and other leisure activities in the rainy season. The bananas, pineapples, and other fruits of the town come in for special praise. This would seem to be linked to the garden the family has there: its plants and their special vegetables and fruits are listed in some detail. In the bazaar, one finds excellent fish, and the rice is available at the cheap price of two man-i shahjahani (each 33.5 kg) for a rupee. The lemons and mangoes too are truly delicious, juicy and (in the case of the latter) extraordinarily sweet. By now, Nik Rai has grown to the age of ten years, and he reads the Qiran al-Sadayn of Amir Khusraw and other texts of greater complexity. These one or two years were truly happy ones, he states, but like all good things they had to come to an end. People grew jealous of his father and complained about him to the fawjdar, so that the family was obliged to return to Delhi, this time via Awadh, crossing the Ghaggar and Saryu, a difficult journey. A description follows of the banks of the Saryu, with its beautiful trees and scenic qualities. A boat ride is taken on the bow-like bend in the river, and its undulating waves bring out more poetry in him. Nik Rai loves to compare everything to the Persian letters; if something is like a be, something else is like a qaf, and so
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on. They thus arrive in the town of Awadh, which he takes time to describe, linking it once more to obvious religious themes. For this is the place where Rama and Lakshmana were born, he notes, and we people (ma mardum) are attached to the faith of these gods. He feels obliged to give a rapid version of the story of Ramachandra, noting that at the age of ten, this prince had learnt the sacred sciences from Bishvamitra, and began to bring out a hundred meanings from his pen. Then, he went to the court of Raja Janaka, and won the hand of Sita at her svyamvar by bending the bow. Throughout this passage, the characteristic obsession with the letters of the Persian alphabet pursues Nik Rai. The marriage of Rama and Sita takes place, and they return to Awadh, meeting Parashurama on the way. But once in Awadh, problems begin with his stepmother. Rama is obliged to leave the town and go into the forest in exile (bishagardi) with Lakshmana and Sita, heading towards the Dakhan. Nik Rai recounts the incident of the golden deer, leading to the futile chase by first Rama and then Lakshmana, and Sitas kidnapping by Ravana to Lanka. The figure of Hanuman is now brought in rapidly, who leaps over the sea (darya-i shor) to go and find her. Hanuman sets fire to the town and returns. With his army of monkeys, Rama then builds a bridge over the sea, and reaches the island of Lanka. The battle begins, and Ravanas son Indrajit wounds Lakshmana. Hanuman then flies off to find the Sanjivani, and brings back the mountain a thousand leagues in the wink of an eye. Eventually, Rama kills Ravana and sends him to hell (vasil-i jahannam) with an arrow, and Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita return to Awadh. Rama begins to rule, as his father has died in the meanwhile. When his end approaches, it is written in the history books (kih chunachih dar tavarikh-i Hind), he gathered together some persons and left the town, in the direction of the Sarais of Eternity. Even today, writes Nik Rai, when one comes to Awadh, one feels an unseen presence here, and the people of his own party too felt it. Four days later, the party covered the forty leagues to the town of Lucknow. The stone fort and bazaars of this town strike our author favorably, to say nothing of the excellent bridge with high arches on the Gomti river, which passes below the town flowing towards Jaunpur. The town itself is highly populated, and the matchlockmen (banduqchis) of the area are well-known in all of India. But this competence also causes problems for the fawjdars of the area, as there is much potential rebelliousness here. From Lucknow, the party moves on to Qannauj, and Nik Rai makes some snide remarks on the miserly nature of the people there. Near there is Makanpur, where one finds the shrine of the mystic Badi al-Din Madar, known as Shah Madar, of the silsilah of Abd al-Qadir Jilani. This is a relatively brief mention with some praise, but no
stories of his prowess are added. In fact, it is not even clear whether Nik Rai actually visits Makanpur, since it seems to be a bit out of the way. The party is then quickly on its way to Agra. The experiment with new patrons has clearly failed, ending in jealousy and unhappiness. The father of Nik Rai now goes to Gwalior, to enter once more into the service of an old employer, Amanullah Khan, son of Ilahwardi Khan. The khan sends him as amin of his own jagir at Jalesar. Jalesar is described as place with a mud fort, which is however as strong as one made of stone. Here too is a dargah of one Sayyid Ibrahim, which is a place that is frequented by pilgrims, especially on Thursday evenings (fol. 27a). The town is noted for its enamel workers (minagaran), who are known for embedding pieces into pots and dishes, including calligraphy with enamel. There are several furnaces in which special stones that are found in the region are treated. There seems to be some link between the enamel workers and the dargah of Ibrahim, who may have been some sort of founder-pir of the settlement. The enamel work is described as being done as wax was melted in the hands of the Biblical David. Nik Rai even describes his visit to one of the workshops (karkhanah) to inspect the works there. He remains in Jalesar for about a year in all. In this period, he continues his education with the letters of Abul Fazl, as well as completing the other texts that he has mentioned earlier. His knowledge of Abul Fazl becomes deeper, and he even cites some crucial passages and aphorisms from his letters (az qalam-i Allami Shaykh Abul Fazl in nikat-i chand), including reflections on the question of religion (mazhab). There is clearly a continu ity between this and the earlier passage on vahdat al-vujud. The continuing influence of Abul Fazl on the munshi class is evident here, not only in terms of his political philosophy but also his understanding of the working of a bureaucracy, the seven key principles for the functioning of a state, and so on. In a similar vein, Nik Rai quotes from the Muammiyat-i Husayni, and from Jami, but these are less significant in the text than his quotations from Abul Fazl. Among other new texts he studies at this time are the Divan-i Urfi Shirazi, Kulliyat-i Hakim Awhad al-Din Anvari, Tuhfat al-Iraqayn, Divan-i Afzal al-Din Khaqani, and others, all of which are briefly mentioned and commented upon. Khaqani struck him, for example, for his profound use of words. He also cites some verses from some of these books. This is also the time when he begins to read contemporary Mughal poets (tazah guyan, or fresh speakers), which as their name suggests gave him a sense of freshness. Amongst these are Saib Tabrizi and Mirza Jalal Asir, of whom the latter comes in for particular praise; verses from both poets are cited in the text. He also quotes some of his own
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verses, which follow the style of Tabrizi. Similarly, he reads the poems of Ghani Kashmiri, whose use of ambiguity (sanat-i iham) is noted, and those of Vahid Tahir. The list continues with Haji Muhammad Jan Qudsi, the malik al-shuara of the time of Shah Jahan, and Abul Barakat Munir, Talib Amuli, Kalim, and Muhammad Quli Salim. In each case, Nik Rai gives us a few examples and his own appreciation of their particular skills. He also reads the Majalis al-Ushshaq of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the section on poets in Khvandmirs Habib alSiyar, and Mawlana Arif al-Din Ali Yazdis Zafar Namah. The list is an extensive one and would seem to make up the complete education of the munshi. This is also the occasion for him to point out the crucial differences between Iranian and Indian poets. These include Munir Lahauris critique of the style of the tazah guyan (the innovative Mughal-Safavid poets), as well as the comments of Mulla Shayda, with a brief mention of who these authors were. Nik Rai also mentions several less noted Indian poets, such as Mulla Anvar Lahauri, Mulla Atai Jaunpuri, and Mulla Tufayli Fathpuri, and offers his own praise of them, thus locating his own position in the debate squarely on the side of the tazah guyan. These are presented in the context of various debates (munazarat), including one between Mulla Firuz and Talib. At issue is the capacity both to utter verses and to understand them (shir gui versus shir fahmi). Here, Nik Rai seems to anticipate in some respects of the position taken by the grammarian and critic Khan-i Arzu in the eighteenth century. All this literary training occupied Nik Rai up to the age of fourteen, the remaining time having been spent in Jalesar and then perhaps Agra. He now returns briefly to his familys residence in Mathura (fol. 34b). Although it is finally time to move towards the Dakhan, in which direction the emperor himself has already set out, he spends further a six months in Mathura. His first son is born there, with the chronogram for his birth date given as miva-i bagh-i dil (the fruit of the hearts garden). Extensive celebrations are held on the occasion, with music and other signs of joy. But this happiness is about to be diminished, for Nik Rais father dies in AH 1097. His passing is recorded with a large number of verses of mourning. The chronogram of his fathers death is given as Lal Bihari left the world like a sigh. This was the end of his carefree youth, writes Nik Rai, and the beginning of serious responsibilities. Thus, a new phase is marked by his fathers death, coinciding with his own passage to fatherhood. The time of my early youth had passed And the time of frolicking too had gone. The moment has come for him to find employment, and some six months later after long reflections on this subject he moves on the matter. At this time, the routes from Delhi to Agra were disturbed by bandits
and trouble makers. So the powerful noble of Iranian origin (and uncle of Aurangzeb), Shayista Khan, was brought there from Bengal as governor in place of Khan Jahan Bahadur. In view of the uncertain conditions, Nik Rai decided to leave Mathura for Agra with his mother and other relatives for more safety. A brief description of Agra follows, including its impressive buildings, gardens (a number of which are mentioned by name), and sarais, the marble tomb of Mumtaz Mahal the Taj Mahal and the fact that the town was founded shortly after AH 900. The site of Sikandra and Akbars tomb there are also mentioned in passing. By now, we are in the latter half of the 1680s. It is known, Nik Rai notes, that the Dakhani cities of Dar alZafar Bijapur and Dar al-Jihad Hyderabad were conquered in the thirty-second regnal year, creating a number of new opportunities. Nik Rais older brother, Sobha Chand, who was both competent and courageous, had already obtained a job in Bijapur as intendant of the topkhanah (artillery) and the dagh va tashihah (branding of horses and recruitment of men). Sobha Chand was the head of the family and at the time about forty years old. It was hence time for Nik Rai to seek his fortune there too, and on 18 Shawwal of the thirty-third regnal year, he and his family reached Bijapur, accompanying his brothers party. A brief account follows of the journey between Agra and Bijapur, in the course of which Nik Rai himself fell rather ill. The travel is compared to the Sufis penance (chillah) as the journey was not easy, passing through jungles, and mountainous territories, with rains also impeding their progress. The itinerary is then detailed (fol. 44b). After Agra, the next large town is Gwalior, at a distance of three manzil. There were beautiful women to be seen all along the way, as Nik Rais roving eye notes. On reaching Gwalior, he refers to the excellent and high fort there, considered to be one of the largest in Hindustan. Those who were imprisoned by the emperors direct order are kept there. Inside the fort is a large pond. The speech (here perhaps a form of Braj or Madhyadeshi, identified by Khan-i Arzu in the eighteenth century as Gwaliyari) in the place is very sweet, and there are also lots of chameli flowers to be seen. The betel-leaf (pan) in the area is of high quality. From Gwalior, the party makes its way to Narwar, where too the pan leaves catch his attention, as do the birds. A large step-well (baoli) is to be seen outside the town of Narwar, where people gather in the evening. The women who come to get water from the baoli with a rope are described as marvelous, capable of giving even those magical creatures Harut and Marut lessons in sorcery. The people in general are of an excellent temperament, and wear colorful clothes; to wear white in the place is taken as a sign of mourning. If one were to spend time looking at the women here all day long, one would lose ones heart several times. But one
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is not allowed to even touch them with ones hand. Here too is a river that flows below the fort. Nik Rai believes that this is the fort of Raja Nal, about whom that great poet, the malik al-shuara Abul Faiz Fayzi, had written in his masnavi on Nal-Daman. From Narwar, they move on to Sironj, a place with excellent air and a good bazaar with quality grapes. Here too, the language is sweet to hear, and people wear attractive clothes and are attractive to look at. A small river is crossed, and then they move on to Sarangpur. All these places seem to please our traveler, who praises them in poetic terms quite unstintingly, noting that this part of the journey is full of pleasure (aysh). Presently they reach Shahjahanpur, a qasbah with royal buildings, where they prepare to cross a major hurdle in the form of a river. Having reached the other side, they find both sides of it prosperous and well populated. The bridge on the river too is excellent in terms of its arches. They find that they are now in Dar al-Fath Ujjain, a town which is remarkable for its prosperous character, a paradise-like city that is among the most ancient of Hindustan. It was here according to the Hindus (bi itiqad-i mardum-i Hunud) that the famous and generous Raja Bikramajit (Vikramaditya) had his throne (takhtgah), and it is also a sacred city. Stories of this monarch circulate extensively in Hindustan, writes Nik Rai. The artisans of the area are remarkable for their skills, in particularly in making jewelry. From this place on, Sobha Chand is given an imperial escort. Among the excellent places in the vicinity of the town is a waterfall (called abshar-i Kaliyadah). This inspires a verse to say that in all of Hindustan Nik Rai had seen no place more beautiful than Kaliyadah. Four manzils later, they come to the banks of the river Narbada, which is considered to be the frontier of Hindustan and the Dakhan (sarhad-i Hindustan ast va Dakan). The waters flow so rapidly in the river that it could be dangerous for boats. Crossing the river, they reach a place called Baqirpur, saying farewell at last to Hindustan proper. The travel from now on is far more unpleasant, largely on camel-back, including the crossing of a pass which leads them to Jahangirpur. The passage is very picturesque however, and they next traverse an extensive plain to reach Burhanpur. They also pass by the great fort of Asir, a league to the north of Burhanpur; this is located on a high hill, and reminds the author of Daulatabad. Here too, imperial prisoners are kept. Burhanpur for its part is described as a town with good waters, excellent and handsome people, and a popular bazaar. Through the Fardapur Pass, they go on to Au rangabad. This is a rougher and more mountainous route, with dry and rocky ground, and many mules are to be seen in these areas carrying goods from one spot to the other. Eventually, with some difficulty, they reach Aurangabad, some distance from the fort of Daulata-
bad, a formidable and high spot. Some people in Mughal service come from Bijapur to meet the party there. Two weeks later, with these others, they set out and think of going via Parinda fort, and from there to Sholapur, which was in the region of Bijapur. This was a pleasant spot, reminiscent in many respects of Hindustan, which Nik Rai has already begun to feel homesick for. Crossing the Bhima river, they eventually reach the city of Bijapur. A few verses celebrate their arrival, where with the help of his older brother (and the grace of the emperor) Nik Rai too is given a job. In this work Nik Rai spends four years, to the time of the completion of his account, when he is still in his early twenties. By way of conclusion, he writes: In sum, having completed the journey, the town of Dar al-Zafar was reached. With the aid and intercession of my older brother, who was full of high virtues and ethics, and who held me in affection and benevolence, I was given the honor of the service of the assessment of the expenses of the parganas of sarkar Haveli Dar al-Zafar and Nusratabad. Until, on account of the convergence of good fortune and the gift of God (ata-i vahib al-atiyat), in the beginning of fortunate Zi-qada of the thirty-eighth regnal year, my brother was honored by being appointed the pishdast of the Mir Atish, and this smallest of slaves [of God] in his place was appointed to the intendancy of the topkhanah and the dagh va tashihah of Bijapur. And a very appropriate mansab, in keeping my present stature, was granted. Nik Rai thanks God for this bounty and ends the text with appropriate verses. The copyists colophon follows, suggesting that the text and its authors family continued to have a connection with the Dakhan.28 Conclusion As we suggested at the outset, the text of the Tazkirat al-Safar falls into a larger category of materials, wherein notables and literati from Mughal India wrote firstperson accounts in which travel played a more or less important role. We have already mentioned the case of Abdul Latif Gujarati from the early seventeenth century, and we could add other near-contemporary texts such as those of Mirza Nathan and Shihab al-Din Talish to our list, though these last authors also insert wider historical materials into their accounts. Later in the eighteenth century, writers such as Anand Ram Mukhlis then raised this form to an ever higher level of subtlety, since it permitted them to be ironic about their own communities, the political system, and even the monarchy. In each of these writings, elements of the ethnographic are quite strongly present, as are ekphrastic aspects including in the case of Nik Rai, the description of towns, sites, buildings, and the like. Such
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descriptions are perhaps characteristic of individuals who inhabited the fringes of the Mughal state, since they borrow from the vocabulary of the state (with its own drive to produce gazetteer-like dastur al-amal texts in the seventeenth century). It would probably not be too abusive to see in these materials the formation of a north Indian class that was similar to the Chinese literati class, even though the existence of the examination system and its curriculum in imperial China somewhat skewed the nature of that knowledge formation.29 We are unable at present to follow the later career of Nik Rai, or to determine the extent of success he eventually enjoyed as a munshi in the latter decades of Au rangzebs reign. In any event, his trajectory as an individual interests us less than his exemplary character, as a member of the Persianized Hindu scribal groups that came increasingly to serve the Mughals in the seventeenth century. We have seen how comfortably he straddles a diversity of cultural and literary heritages, and this is a comfort that we shall find in later characters of the eighteenth century such as Anand Ram Mukhlis.30 Nik Rai is of course aware that he is not a Muslim, and that the story of Rama is a part of his own heritage, but he is equally comfortable with Chishti saints and their shrines. The term composite culture has been much used and abused in recent years, but arguably one can find it in the life and education of such a munshi. Four key features of his education as suggested in Nik Rais text immediately spring to mind. The first is an absence, for it is noticeable that he does not speak of the technical aspects that other texts (like the Nigarnamah-i Munshi) insist upon. In view of the post that he eventually came to hold in the Dakhan, Nik Rai must have learned siyaq, and had a course in fiscal literacy (as it were); the affairs of the divan must have been no mystery to him. Yet nowhere in his account of his education does he even speak of it, as if such banal details were beneath mention. A second aspect is the close relationship between the curriculum of texts that he sets out, and that defined for his own son by Chandrabhan Brahman, which makes it clear that the latters view was no idealized normative template but a rather practical piece of advice. No doubt different teachers took different routes to these texts, and each student too must have developed his own tastes and preferences. Nik Rais own fondness for writers such as Vahid Tahir, Ghani Kashmiri, Saib Tabrizi, and Mirza Jalal Asir has already been noted. A third aspect, in our judgment a crucial one, is the fulcral role of Sheikh Abul Fazl in the world of the seventeenth-century munshi. Nik Rai admires and imitates the style and also the attitudes of the great Mir Munshi, and he was surely not alone in this matter. For Abul Fazl had come by this time to stand for a point of view in which ecumenical learning and religious plural-
ism were given a high standing, besides the fact that he (together with his brother, the poet Fayzi) also embodied a self-confident Indian claim to the use of the Persian language. A specifically Mughal political and literary tradition thus had come to exist by the mid-seventeenth century, one that differed from its Central Asian and Iranian counterparts, and we must trace this back in part to the late sixteenth century and its usages, when Abul Fazl was the great ideologue of the remembered Akbari dispensation. A fourth aspect is the broader cultural framework within which Nik Rai places the issue of his Bildung. If he eschews narrowly technical questions regarding his training and education, it is also clear time and again that the Persian language itself plays a key role in his view of the world. It is through this language, its metaphors and possibilities, that he accedes to and imagines the world around him. The philosophical universe within which he conceives of all matters including issues of social and religious conflict is impregnated with Persian, and with all the richness of the secular tradition that Indo-Persian represented by the seventeenth century. It is in this sense that we must understand what it meant to become, and to be, a munshi in the later Mughal world.
NOTES 1C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 17801870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 738; Michael Fisher, The Office of Akhbar Nawis: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms, Modern Asian Studies 27:1 (1993): 4582. 2On one such munshi, Kishan Sahay from Bihar, who served Antoine Polier, see Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Ijaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773-1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1314. 3A similar figure is the munim, on whom see C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 17701870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3778. 4Kapil Raj, When Humans Become Instruments: The Indo-British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, in Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Marie-Nolle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and Hans Otto Sibum (London: Routledge, 2002). 5Mirza Khan ibn Fakhr al-Din Muhammad, Tuhfat al-Hind, ed. Nur al-Hasan Ansari (Tehran: Bunyad-i Farhang-i Iran, 1975). 6On this text, see S. Nurul Hasan, Nigar Nama-i-Munshi: A valuable collection of documents of Aurangzebs Reign, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 15th Session (Gwalior: Indian History Congress, 1952), 25863. 7Francis Balfour, ed. and trans., Insha-i Harkaran (Calcutta: Charles Wilson, 1781); also see Francis Gladwin, The Persian Moonshee (Calcutta: Chronicle Press, 1795), which includes a
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translation of the Qavaid-i Saltanat-i Shah Ja h a n , by Chandrabhan Brahman. 8See Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 16001800 (New York: Other Books, 2003). 9The following paragraphs draw heavily on Muzaffar Alam, The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan, in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 15971. 10Ghulam Husain Tabatabai, Siyar al-Mutaakhkhirin, vol. 1 (Lucknow: Nawalkishor Press, 1876), 200. 11Abd al-Qadir Badayuni, Muntakhab al-Tavarikh, vols. 1 and 3 ed. Maulavi Ahmad Ali, and vol. 2 ed. Munshi Ahmad Ali and N. Lees (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 18658), 323. 12Balkrishan, Arzdasht (London: British Library, Addn. Ms. 16859), cited in Momin Mohiuddin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals: From Babur to Shahjahan, 15261658 (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971), 41; Syed Muhammad Abdullah, Adabiyat-i Farsi mein Hinduvon ka Hissah, (Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-yi Adab, 1967), 2403. 13For an analysis, see Mohiuddin, Chancellery, 21520. 14Muhammad Abdul Hamid Faruqui, Chandra Bhan Brahman: Life and Works with a Critical Edition of his Diwan (Ahmadabad: Khalid Shahin Faruqi, 1966); for his prose see Mohiuddin, Chancellery, 22834. 15Cf. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 17071748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 16975, 23740. 16Abdullah, Adabiyat, 12168. 17 Cited in Abdullah, Adabiyat, 2413. Our translation. 18Even in Bengal, the administrative papers prepared and issued in the name of the local Hindu intermediaries were in Persian. Persian insha even succeeded in influencing Bengali prose; cf. Promesh Acharya, Pedagogy and Social Learning: Tol and Pathsala in Bengal, Studies in History 10:2 (1994): 25572. 19Badayuni, Muntakhab al-Tavarikh, vol. 2, 285 ; also see Nicole Grandin and Marc Gaborieau, eds., Madrasa: La transmission du savoir dans le monde musulman (Paris: Argument, 1997). 20Compare Gopal bin Govinds preface to his Persian translation of the Ramayana, Bibliothque Nationale de France, Paris, Ms. Blochet, I, 22. 21See M. Athar Ali, Translation of Sanskrit Works at Akbars Court, in Akbar and His Age, ed. Iqtidar Alam Khan (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1999), 17180. It would seem that in Mughal India, besides the aqliyah and naqliyah traditions of Islamic sciences (ulum), we should also note the rise of a third category around the texts of so-called hikmat-i amali, or practical wisdom, in which such materials were included in madrasah education. 22Shaikh Abdur Rashid, Some Documents on Revenue Administration during Aurangzebs Reign, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 15th Session (Gwalior: Indian History Congress, 1952), 2638. 23Noman Ahmad Siddiqui, Khulasat-us-Siyaq, Proceedings
of the Indian History Congress, 22nd Session (Gauhati: Indian History Congress, 1959), 2827. This is only one of several similar texts; for another example, see Munshi Nandram Kayasth Srivastav, Siya q n a m a h (lithograph; Lucknow: Nawalkishor Press, 1879), and for a survey of such administrative and accountancy manuals, Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 15561707, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4701. 24Bhimsen, Nuskha-i Dilkusha, ed. and trans. Jadunath Sarkar and V. G. Khobrekar (Bombay: Maharashtra Department of Archives, 1971); compare Satish Chandra, Letters of a Kingmaker of the Eighteenth Century (Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1972), for the letters of Mehta Balmukund. 25Salar Jang Museum and Library, Hyderabad, Accession no. 4519, Mss. No. 7. All references are to this manuscript. 26Cemal Kafadar, Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul and First-Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature, Studia Islamica 69 (1989): 12150. 27On this Mughal amir, see M. Athar Ali, The Apparatus of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices, and Titles to the Mughal Nobility (15741658) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), entry S. 7374, passim. 28On Kayasthas and Khatris in the eighteenth-century Dakhan, see Karen Isaksen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2335. 29There is a vast literature on this subject, but see the useful overview in Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 16001900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 30Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Discovering the Familiar: Notes on the Travel-Account of Anand Ram Mukhlis, South Asia Research 26:2 (1996): 13154.
The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape

SUNIL SHARMA
Premodern Persian poetry was largely produced in an urban environment, and poets, whether associated with a royal court or of a mystical bent, had a special relationship with the city in which they practiced their craft. In prosperous times the city was the location of patronage networks and a cosmopolitan center of cultural life, as well as being a macrocosm of the narrower spaces that provided the context for the performance of Persianate poetry, i.e., the private mahfil (assembly) or the majlis (session) of courtiers or Sufis. The opinion of Gustave E. von Grunebaum concerning Arab poets can equally be applied to those of other Islamic traditions: The poets have set reasons when they praise life in the city They take pride in the presence of a pow erful prince, of men learned and pious, without exhibiting as a rule much interest in the glories of the citys past. They have an open eye for its scenic beauties, and like their less articulate fellows identify strongly with their place of residence yielding only too often to the impulse to turn on other cities and their inhabitants if some disappointment does not even provoke them into an attack on the place which they had praised to the sky only a short while before.1 As a result, the large corpus of topographical literature in Persian is often the only documentation of places and people that have otherwise vanished without a trace from historical memory. In the Indo-Persian context, poets affiliated with patrons who had commissioned grand building projects, such as Amir Khusraws (d. 1325) description of the architectural projects of the Delhi sultans and the poems of Mughal poets active at Shah Jahans court, had a prescribed role in translating the vision of a new building or city into the discursive realm of poetry.2 Along with the buildings and gardens of a city, a Persian poets amorous gaze would often settle on the beautiful inhabitants of the place, who embodied a citys vigor and vitality. Working within a narrow system of poetics, but one that did not exclude the potential for innovation, poets described relationships between poet and patron or poet and city in the metaphoric language of love. Given the power-based and often mercenary nature of such relationships, it is not surprising to find the dalliance of the lover and beloved set in the commercial world of a thriving city. In this paper, I would like to explore the rhetorical connections between love lyric, commerce, and the city at one level, and at another level, read Indo-Persian city poetry (and Urdu to the extent that it drew its inspiration from Persian, with which it had a paradoxically complementary yet competitive relationship) as a medium for the transmission of knowledge about various modes of cultural and social interaction in urban centers of power, described in a special poetic language embedded in tradition, but at the same time reflective of a new historical mode of thought. The chronological framework of this study is from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, which happens to correspond to a period of Persian literary innovation and experimentation known as the sabk-i Hindi (the Indian style). I shall take into account the works of selected Iranian migr poets writing for Indian patrons, as well as Indian poets who wrote in Persian and Urdu. A useful term that is often employed in the discussion of Persian poetry about cities is shahrashub or shahrangiz (city disturber), which is more often a topos than a literary genre.3 The shahrashub was originally an appellation for a beautiful beloved in a lyric poem, but also a short bawdy lyric addressed to a young boy who is engaged in a trade or craft and coquettishly offers his wares to the love-struck poet. One of the earliest instances of this kind of poetry is found in the divan of Masud Sad Salman (d. 1121), whose shahrashub poems, although replete with useful information on the crafts and trades preva lent during his times, represent a metaphorical city and are not localized.4 Also included in his versifying of the multifarious fabric of a utopian metropolis are beloveds who are distinguished not only by a trade or craft but also by their membership in a religious community (Hindu, Christian, etc.) or by a distinctive physical characteristic (curly hair, a squint, etc.). With the rise of major urban centers of Persianate culture from the fifteenth century onwards, this kind of poem became a
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unified work specifically written for a city and ruler who are named therein. By providing a catalogue of young boys who are cheerfully engaged in their sundry professions, the poet attempts to convey a sense of the dynamic and complex structure of the society in which everyone, including the poet himself, has an assigned role. After Masud Sad Salman, the earliest surviving long poems of this kind were written by the Timurid poet Sayfi of Bukhara (d. 1504) in the form of independent ghazals praising the beauty and skill of different youthful professionals, but like his predecessor he did not provide a social context or unifying device by linking them to any particular city.5 Beginning in the sixteenth century, a poem in this genre came to be written about every major urban center in the Iranian, Central Asian, and Ottoman regions, sometimes as a single narrative in the masnavi form or as short unconnected poems. The poems of Lisani (d. 1534) about Tabriz, Vahidi (d. 1700) about Isfahan, and Sayyida (d. 1707) about Bukhara describe the public spaces of their respective empires and are catalogues of craftsmen and professionals, often using the particular idiom connected with their metiers. In the Indo-Persian tradition, i.e., from the Mughal and Dakhani poets of Persian, there are no works of this genre in an independent form; rather, we come across hybrid texts where the shahrashub tends to be used as a topos in the context of a larger work. This may reflect the tastes of the Indo-Persian patrons or poets themselves and is an interesting example challenging the toofrequent monolithic view of Persianate poetry. With the end of the great empires, poets no longer privileged this genre, but again there were peculiar transformations to it in the Indo-Persian context, as will be seen below. A pronounced characteristic of shahrashub poems is a homoerotic tone, but the issue of gender in these poems has not been the focus of any serious study, perhaps because the subject has already been dealt with in the context of Persian lyric poetry as a whole.6 Rather, most scholars have emphasized the socio-historical value of the shahrashub. Such poems provide information on a multitude of professions and crafts in various cities and times in history, as evidenced by Mehdi Keyvanis statement, For knowledge of the technical and social affairs of crafts and trades in the Timurid and Safavid periods, the shahr-ashub literature is a valuable source because it mentions tools and technical terms used in different crafts and the traditions and characteristic customs of particular guilds.7 However, this poetry was not composed to represent the commercial world realistically or as a technical treatise of any trade or guild. The vastness of the cultural region, which extended from Turkey to India, was obviously one reason different aspects of the genre were emphasized in such
poems, which were produced in response to local demands and tastes as well as the abilities of the poet. An increase in the participation of working-class people in producing poetry after the fifteenth century was a noticeable social phenomenon that has led modern Soviet scholars to describe these poetic efforts as anti-feudal trends. In connection with Sayyida, the poet who wrote shahrashub poems about Bukhara in the late seventeenth century, it is stated that the poetry of these authors is permeated with the ideology of the middle-urban classes, which determines such stylistic qualities as a trend towards a realistic reflection of the world in the themes and poetic images, abandonment of the rhetorical verse of the court poets, and simplicity of language.8 This does not apply wholesale to all poets and poems, since the ones dealt with in this paper were active in an elite courtly milieu, and in some cases were outsiders looking in wonder into a world that was at once exotic and paradisiacal. The first Indo-Persian poet of note writing in this genre was the Iranian migr Nuruddin Muhammad Zuhuri (d. 1616), who was active at the Nizam Shahi and Adil Shahi courts at Ahmadnagar and Bijapur. Zuhuri wrote an ambitious work called the Saqinamah (Book of the Cup Bearer), a genre that was in vogue for poets of the sabk-i Hindi style in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the entire Persianate world.9 At this time, almost every poet of any standing composed a saqinamah, which is not just an address to a saqi but a full-fledged narrative poem in masnavi form, often running to thousands of lines. Zuhuri took up a genre that dealt with issues of Iranian kingship and mysticism by way of addressing the saqi and mutrib (minstrel) and transformed it into a complex work of about 4,500 lines that deals with all aspects of courtly life, in a remarkable tour de force of poetic talent. The shahrashub and saqinamah are technically separate genres of Persian poetry, but Zuhuris work innovatively combines images and topoi from both to produce a verbal panorama of the new city (Nawshahr) on the outskirts of Ahmadnagar. Like other saqinamahs, this work includes addresses to a wine server and minstrel and describes various accoutrements of a royal assembly, such as dancers, candles, wine, and pan, interspersed with panegyric utterances to the senior poet and mentor, Malik Qummi (d. 1616), and his patron, Sultan Burhan II (r. 15915). Zuhuris tour of the city begins with the private spaces of the assembly (majlis) and tavern (maykhanah), both places where wine drinking takes place, then moves out to public sites in the city such as the fort, baths, gardens, and bazaars. While passing through the bazaar, in a section comprising 135 lines, Zuhuri rapturously lapses into the shahrashub mode in order to describe the flourishing and active marketplace. He begins:
Sharma: The City of Beauties in the Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape
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chih guyam zi ain-i bazarha na bazarha tazah gulzarha siyah-chashm-i sabzan-i rangin nigah bi-shur-i namak az shikar baj-khvah khirad dar kham-i turrahha mubtila dil az said u saq bi dast u pa bi-hizb-i dil u jan ahl-i vafa dil-i ahani rashk-i ahan-ruba10 [What can I say of the ways of the bazaars? They are not bazaars, but fresh rose gardens. The dark-eyed beauties with flirtatious glances Possess a cuteness/saltiness that seeks tribute from sugar. The intellect is afflicted with their curly tresses The heart is paralyzed by their limbs With heart and soul, they are faithful, With a heart of iron, (they are) the envy of magnets.] He goes on to boast that the city is bejeweled by groups of skilled ones (zi il-i hunar shahr dar zivar ast), whose mannerisms and actions can result in sawda (both business transaction and the madness of love). Included in his catalogue are Hindu boys and professionals such as kamangar (archer), bazzaz (grocer), sabbagh (dyer), attar (druggist), talagar (goldsmith), javahirfurush (jeweler), and sarraf (money changer). With the trades that are directly connected with gold and money, Zuhuri indulges in a poetic conceit by focusing on a single gold coin that represents the economic superiority of the Dakhan over other places. The imperial design underlying the composition of this work becomes clear during his excursus on this subject: chira sikkah az khandah bandad dahan shud az nam-i shah rushinas-i jahan chira din nabalad kih zad dar Dakan zar-i butshikan shah-i dushmanshikan nayayad zar-i digaran dar hisab nadarad suha partaw-i aftab.11 [Why should the coin close its mouth from laughing? The name of the king has made it familiar in the world. Why should the religion (of Islam) not be proud that in the Dakhan, The enemy-breaking king struck gold coins without images. The gold of others is not worth anything, A small star does not have the suns radiance ] He then moves on to a higher echelon of inhabitants of that city: the ahl-i ilm (men of learning), hakiman (physicians), and ahl-i nujum (astronomers), ending this portion with the high status of poets in that city. Zuhuri dwells much less on the amorous qualities of the professionals
and more on the commercial aspects of their activities, resulting in a more direct praise of his patrons achievements, which other poets allude to metaphorically.12 A couple of decades after Zuhuri wrote his influential work in the Dakhan, poets in the North were also busy versifying the accomplishments of their patrons, the Mughals, the Maecenas of them all being Shah Jahan. As part of a large corpus of Mughal poetry about buildings and gardens, Shah Jahans poet laureate Abu Talib Kalim Kashani (d. 1650) composed a masnavi of 237 lines on Akbarabad (Agra) that includes some lines in the shahrashub mode. The work is a veritable panoramic tour of the city of Akbarabad in verse, with descriptions of the magnificent building complexes sponsored by the emperor Shah Jahan, the verbal equivalent of what painters of this time were doing in miniatures. The work ends with a description of the garden of Princess Jahanara and a dedication to the empress, Mumtaz Mahal. Kalim begins his poem by praising the land of Hindustan and the city of Akbarabad, in which all seven climes of the world have come together and people of every country reside. He then leads the reader through the bazaars of Akbarabad: the professional boys encountered are an attar (druggist), bazzaz (cloth seller), sarraf (money changer), jawharfurush (jeweler), khayyat (tailor), zargar (goldsmith), shaykhzadah (sheikhs son), and sipahzadah (soldier boy). In addition, there are local and non-Iranian professionals such as mahajan (merchant), tanboli (pan seller), and dobi (washerman), as well as handsome Rajput and Pathan lads, who particularize the work to an Indian context. This context is described by the outsider Kalim, an Iranian migr poet looking into the composition of an Indian metropolis. His report on this new and exciting world would have been read by an audience composed of both Indians and non-Indians from all parts of the Persianate world. Kalims gaze directed at the beautiful boys engaged in their work is an important indicator of the economy of the city: khiyabanha-yi bazarash dilafruz bi-kasb-i aish, ahl-i hirfah har ruz fitadah dar dukan-i yak mahajan hame-yi sarmayah-yi darya vu madan burun ayad, agar bashad khariddar zi yak dukkan-i u sad karvan bar.13 [The streets of its bazaars are charming. Every day the skilled ones (are occupied) in the procurement of pleasure. The entire capital from the seas and mines Is put in the shop of one merchant; If there is a buyer, a hundred caravan-loads Come out of one shop of his.]
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Then he moves on to describe a money-changer, depicting him in the amorous language of the ghazal but cleverly bringing in images of money: but-i sarraf ba sad ishvah u naz bi-naqd-i qalb-i ma kay bingarad baz? bi-pish-i ru-yi u az khirman-i zar nayayad mushtari andar barabar bi-in maghrur zar-i ashiq chih sazad? bi-in pur fan kudamin hilah bazad? bi-dastash naqd-i dil az harkih uftad durust az vay girift u khurdah pas dad.14 [When will the money-changer idol, with a hundred coquetries, Look again at the cash of our hearts. Before his face, a customers pile of gold Cannot measure up. What can a lovers gold do for this haughty one? What trick can work on this skilled one? Whoevers hearts cash fell into his hands, he grabbed it, And returned the change.] In the discourse of love, the dealings between lover and beloved are usually one-on-one, and characterized by any number of metaphors, the most usual being powerbased relationships such as kingslave/Sufi, but rarely does a poet come across a whole city of beloveds. Before moving on to the other monuments of the empire that he is eulogizing, Kalim concludes that the excess of beauty in this city has robbed lovers of all their patience. It was not solely in verse but also in the prose literature of this period that the felicitous celebration of public life, including the presence of lovers and beauties, the means of making merry, and an overall air of reckless abandon, became the established mode of glorifying a city. The Mughal ambassador to the Dakhan, an Iranian by the name of Asad Beg, while visiting the court of Ibrahim Adilshah at Bijapur in 16036, describes the bazaars of the city of Nauraspur in his unpublished text, Vaqai-i Asad Beg, as filled with wine and beauty, dancers, perfumes, jewels of all sorts and viands. In one street were a thousand bands of people drinking, and dancers, lovers and pleasure-seekers assembled; none quarreled or disputed with another, and this state of things was perpetual. Perhaps no place in the wide world could present a more wonderful spectacle to the eye of the traveler.15 Another text, the Haft Iqlim (Seven Climes), was completed in 1594 by the Iranian author Amin Ahmad Razi at the Mughal court of Akbar. This work celebrates the regions of the world in a combination of historygeographyliterary biography, and the author introduces each major city with a description of its architectural beauties. In the case of
Delhi, which lies in the third clime, he mentions only its architectural monuments, but in the case of Ahmedabad in the second clime, he rhapsodizes over the beauties in its bazaars: It is the capital of Gujarat Its bazaar, in contrast to those of other Indian cities, is extremely vast and neat, where perfectly decorated shops of two or three stories have been constructed, and all its inhabitants, both female and male, are so cute and lovely that they take the life of one who looks at them and bestow life when they speak.16 This is followed by a short lyrical description of the beauties. The fact that Amin Ahmad Razi resorts to the shahrashub mode of describing a city suggests that this type of coded language is the normative discourse both in poetry and prose to convey positive characteristics of a place and paint a verbal picture in a style familiar to the audience.17 A prose work that more closely bridges the gap between verse and prose shahrashub descriptions is the popular Mina Bazar, which was widely used as a reader for students of Persian in India. This Indo-Persian text, which bears no dedication or authorship, has been attributed both to Zuhuri and to Mirza Muhammad Iradat Khan Vazih (d. 1716).18 Set in an undisclosed city, the Mina Bazar includes thirteen short chapters in florid rhymed prose that begin with a description of the womens bazaar (zananah bazar) and nine beautiful young shopkeepers (jeweler, cloth seller, flower seller, sweet seller, druggist, fruit seller, tobacconist, pan seller), who are not distinguished by gender but are presumably female. On a stylistic and structural level, the text reveals an awareness of the verse shahrashubs, but its emphasis is less on the poetics of love, interplay between writer and beloved, and more on the physical description of the beautiful shopkeepers and their commerce. What is unique about it apart from its form is the use of the womens bazaar as an entry point into a selfcontained and private world, unlike the exclusively male public spaces in the poems, and the absence of any attempt by the author to link his work to a larger project of eulogizing an empire. The use of the catalogue device in the shahrashubs, both in poetry and prose, appears to be an indirect precursor to the ethnographic surveys of the colonial period that mapped out the complex fabric of Indian society into a detailed typology according to castes and communities. The Tashrih al-Aqvam (Concise Account of Peoples) is such an illustrated work in Persian, written by the Eurasian Colonel James Skinner (17781841) and completed in Hansi in 1825 with a dedication to Sir John Malcolm.19 This work is a survey of the occupational groups and religious mendicants under the headings of four castes of the Hindus (the four original castes, mixed castes, castes derived from Vishvakarma, and miscellaneous castes), plus a section on Muslim
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families and tribes including qavvals and faqirs. The headings are reminiscent of the more pure Safavid shahrashubs in the wide range of occupations covered and also in that many Persian words are used, such as rismansaz (rope maker), khishtpaz (brick maker), and zargar (goldsmith), along with Indic ones such as bhangi (sweeper), kumhar (potter), and baid (physician). The work opens with an account of the history of the house of Timur, from the conqueror down to the time of Akbar II (r. 180637); the section on Muslims with the kings of Awadh and the Afghans of the Panjab. Thus, like the other Persian poems of this genre, it sets a panorama of the commercial world against the back drop of a ruling polity, here the late Mughals, in order to represent the complex fabric of that society. The difference is that here in its scientific objectivity the emphasis is on the origins of the groups described rather than on the poetics of the tradition, and a single metropolis is not the focus of the poets vision but a larger sociogeographic region. Actually, the Tashrih al-Aqvam is more like the Ottoman Turkish version of this genre, which is a mapping of the cities and peoples of the empire.20 Returning to the realm of poetry, Kalims emphasis on the diversity of the population of Akbarabad was echoed a few decades later in a remarkable poem about the important port city Surat, in Gujarat, written by the poet Vali (d. 1720). In the histories of Urdu literature, Valis name stands first in the canon of classical poetry. He is credited with bridging the gap between an older indigenous Dakhani Hindavi with the high Persianized rekhtah (early Urdu) poetry of the North, which resulted in the flowering of classical Urdu. Vali is claimed both as Dakhani and Gujarati but his register of Hindavi was the language of a cultural continuum that included both regions. He showed a partiality for Gujarat, which is the subject of a short masnavi. His forty-seven line poem on Surat celebrates the citys beauties and its bustling commercial life in a new language, but is inspired by the Indo-Persian shahrashub tradition. His amorous sweep of the demography of the city results in a catalogue of beautiful and industrious beloveds among whom are Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and also Europeans, each contributing to the citys overall prosperity.21 Vali is effusive in his praise for the city: Agar dekhe hain logan Sham o Tabrez Na dekha koi aisa mulk-e zarkhez Ke is bhitar kai aise hain tujjar Ke Qarun kon nahin un ke nazik bar Bhari hai sirat o surat se Surat Har ik surat hai vahan anmol murat Khatm hai amradan upar safai Vali hai bishtar husn-e nisai.22
[People may have seen Syria and Tabriz, But no one has seen such a prosperous place. For in it, there are such merchants To whom Croesus could not measure up Surat is filled with (fine) reputations and faces, Every face there is a priceless idol. Purity reaches its perfection in the beardless boys (here), But Vali, the beauty of the women is (even) greater!] He goes on to boast that all Krishnas legendary gopis are actually mere imitations of the beauties that exist here! Since both Urdu grammar and Valis Dakhani poetic background, unlike Persian, permit gender differentiation, he includes women in his catalogue of beauties, celebrating the demographic diversity of the city in an inclusive fashion. But this poem may not have found many fans in the fastidious literary circles in north India. According to the biographical traditions, Vali was deemed worthy to be read only after he brought his language in conformity with the dictates of the Delhi literati, such as Shah Gulshan and Khan-e Arzu, by purging it of vernacular Indic elements, including the presence of women, as in the Surat masnavi. But Vali had most certainly introduced something new into the Urdu poetic landscape, for, according to Shamsur Rahman Fa ruqi, his most important contribution was to infuse among Rekhtah [Urdu] poets the sense of a new poeticsa poetics that owed as much to the Indian-style Persian poetry, and through it to Sanskrit too, as it did to his Dakani predecessors.23 The remarkable poem on Surat was composed at a charged moment in the history of Indo-Persian literary culture, when Urdu was primed to claim and eventually occupy the space left by the closing of the literary border between the Iranian lands and India, as the larger Persian world fragmented into separate cultural regions dominated by local traditions. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, historical and political changes led poets to redefine the function of the city poem: the exuberant city poem of Persian with shahrashub elements became the shahrashob (the disturbed city), a lament for a declining city in classical Urdu poetry.24 The correspondence of type of poem and language is not as neat as it might appear; there were a few Persian poets who wrote satirical poems on the decline of the times in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as Nimat Khan Ali (d. 1710), but these poems did not attain the popularity that the Urdu ones did. Conversely, some Urdu poets like Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810) also wrote a few homoerotic verses in the older Persian style, as well as, astonishingly, poems on women engaged in various professions, as with Faiz Dihlavi (d. 1738), but these were isolated instances that did not develop into full-fledged genres.
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Poets such as Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda (d. 1781), Qaim Chandpuri (d. 1793), Mir Taqi Mir, Nazir Akbarabadi (d. 1830) and others wrote shahrashobs in a satirical mode, portraying a bleak picture of urban society and the collapse of commerce and social hierarchies.25 The weakening of Mughal power and Nadir Shahs invasion of Delhi are considered to be the historical factors for this shift in a worldview that finds a voice in poetry of nostalgia and pessimism. Since the complex networks of patronage had broken down, these poems mock the professions that are in decline: the charming and competent professionals have turned into pathetic caricatures of their former selves who will stop at nothing to make a bit of money. Most of the Urdu shahrashobs allude only in a general way to the political events of the time and do not explicitly mention the ruler, to whom Persian shahrashubs were usually dedicated. One exception is the poem (mukhammas) by Qaim, which begins with a scathing denunciation of the badshah, in this case Shah Alam II after the battle of Sakartal in 1772, when the Rohilla chief Zabita Khan was defeated with the help of the Marathas: Kaisa ye shah ke zulm par uski nigah hai Hathon se uske ek jahan dadkhah hai Luchcha ik ap sath luteri sipah hai Namus-e khalq sae men uske tabah hai Shaitan ka ye zill hai na zill-e ilahi26 [What kind of a king is this who is intent on injustice? An entire world is protesting against him. A lout himself, he has a brigand army, The honor of the people is defiled by his rule. He is the shadow of Satan, not the shadow of God.] Qaim also decries the pitiable condition of the empty markets and listless lovers and beloveds of Rohilkhand. In Agra, the poet Nazir lamented the depressed state of commerce there: Mare hain hath, hath pe, sab yan ke dastkar Aur jitne peshavar hain, so rote hain zar zar.27 [All the artisans here twiddle their thumbs, All the professionals weep bitterly.] While Sauda mourns the loveless state of Delhi: Jahanabad tu kab is sitam ke qabil tha Magar kabhu kisi ashiq ka ye nagar dil tha Ke yun utha dia goya ke naqsh-e batil tha. 28 [Delhi, did you deserve all this? Perhaps at one time, this city was the heart of a lover, It was wiped out as if it had been an ephemeral drawing.] The betrayal of the poet/lover by his beloved has thrown the entire social order out of balance. The focus
of these poems is not merely a reflection of the realities of the social life of a people who are floundering in an economic recession, but a deeper crisis concerning the language and practice of poetry as well as the poets relation to the past. Carla Petievich writes, Though the narrator is not the frustrated lover of the ghazal, the poet imbues him with the self-pity, emotionality, and tendency to exaggeration which characterizes not only the ashiq of the ghazal, but also the narrator of other genres of Urdu poetry. The shahr ashob poet has not abandoned the poetic tradition by any means, but he has been affected by his experiences profoundly enough to be moved to depart from the standard modes of poetic expression.29 A subtext of these poems is nostalgia for a vanished Persian culture with links to the larger cosmopolitan world of Persian beyond India, as expressed in the city poems previously, which Urdu could never have. The literary battles over linguistic purity and canonization of Persian poetry that were waged during this time between Indian Persian writers such as Khan-i Arzu (d. 1756), who was also promoting a Persianized Urdu, and the last of the major Iranian migr poets, Hazin (d. 1756), resulted in a persistent gloom in the works of the IndoPersian/Urdu poet. With the decreased status of Persian in the nineteenth century, the manifestation of the anxiety over the Persian literary past is most dramatically worked out in the writings of the poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib (d. 1869).30 Ghalib is perhaps better known for his Urdu poetry, since in his time Persian had already attained the status of a classical language, but his writings and views constitute a historically critical crossroads of several linguistic and cultural traditions: Indo-Persian and Urdu, as well as classical and modern. Although through his Urdu poetry and prose, he was a pioneer in adapting the language for a modern world, at heart he had not let go of the Persian past. Eager to flaunt his Iranian Persian credentials, he valorized migr poets like Naziri, Zuhuri, and Hazin over those of Indian origin such as Fayzi and Bedil. His Persian oeuvre is at least three times the size of his Urdu, but his choice of language and the nature of his bilingual oeuvre have not been systematically studied. A landmark event in Ghalibs life, and one that is made much of by his biographers, was an extended journey he took from Delhi to Calcutta in 1828 in order to present an appeal to the British authorities over the matter of a pension that was due to him from his uncles estate. On this trip, which lasted almost two years, he halted in Banaras for three months, during which time he wrote a poem in Persian about the city, called Chiragh-i Dayr (The Temple Lamp). The poem is a mas-
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navi of 109 lines and tripartite in its structure. It opens with Ghalib feeling homesick for Delhi and missing his friends, whom he calls bi-vafa, the usual appellation for beloveds who are faithless by nature. The second part is a rhapsodic description of the city of Banaras/Kashi, which appears as a veritable paradise to the poet, and every Hindu object and act becomes material for a display of his rhetorical skills. There is a whole cluster of images connected with the Hindu and his world (the submissive Hindu slave, the Hindu adoration of his idol, the steadfastness of a Hindu lover as exemplified by a sati, etc.) that formed an integral part of the repertoire of the Persian poet, especially in the Indo-Persian context where this was a means to relate his poem to his social milieu. As we can expect, Ghalib praises the beauties of the city, exploiting the meanings of idol as beloved and the Hindu idol-worshipper: Savadash paytakht-i butparastan Sarapayash ziya r a t gah-i mastan Butanash ra hiyula shulah-yi Tur Sarapa nur-i izad, chashm-i bad dur Miyanha nazuk u dilha tavana Zi nadani bi-kar-i khvish dana.31 [Its land is the capital of idol-worshippers, From one end to the other, it is a pilgrimage site of the intoxicated. In essence, the beauties are ablaze like Mt. Sinai. From head to toe, divine luminescence, May the evil eye be far. (They have) narrow waists and strong hearts, They are innocently skilled in their work.] There is no attempt to present a typology of beloveds or their professions as in the earlier Persian shahrashubs but the spirit of this part of the poem is the same. The poet seems to find a strange liberation in the city of Hindu beauties, all of whom are worthy objects of love, as the ones in Surat were for Vali. As a home of beauty and creative energy, Banaras bypasses Delhi and is actually closer to Iran; playing with the Hindu name of the city, Ghalib says it is but half a step from Kashi to Kashan in Iran! In the third part of the poem, he gloomily lapses back into ruminating over the depressed state of Delhi, using the imagery and mood of the Urdu shahrashob. He describes the lamentable situation to an enlightened friend: Kih bini nikuiha az jahan raft Vafa u mihr u azarm az miyan raft Zi imanha bi-juz nami namandah Bi-ghayr az danah u dami namandah Pidarha tishnah-i khun-i pisarha Pisarha dushman-i jan-i pidarha.32 [See how goodness has gone from the world,
Fidelity, affection and modesty have all gone. Faith exists only in name, Nothing is left but baits and snares. Fathers are thirsty for their sons blood, Sons are enemies of their fathers.] He wonders why the day of resurrection does not appear and put an end to this inequity, to which his companion responds with a smile that its appearance would mean the end of the beautiful city of Banaras! Surveying the picturesque sites of Banaras exhilarates Ghalib and he pens only positive things about it,while a contemplation of his past and the state of Delhi fills him with gloom; however, at the same time there is a charged anticipation regarding a new city that lies ahead. When Ghalib finally reached his destination, he communicated his views about the city of Calcutta in several letters to friends and poems in Persian and Urdu. In this short poem, written in the question-answer genre, the poet reports a conversation with an imaginary companion. The poet enquires about the three cities that form part of his poetic imagination: the friend says that Delhi is the soul and the world is the body, Banaras is a beautiful beloved, and as for Calcutta: Hal-i Kalkattah baz justam, guft Bayad iqlim-i hashtumash guft Guftam, adam bi-ham rasad dar vay? Guft, az har diyar u az har fan Guftam, inja chih shughl sud dihad? Guft, az har kih hast tarsidan Guftam, inja chih kar bayad kard? Guft, qat-i nazar zi shir u sukhan Guftam, in mahpaykaran chih kas and? Guft, khuban-i kishvar-i Landan. Guftam, inan magar dili darand? Guft, darand, likan az ahan.33 [I asked about Calcutta. He said, It should be considered the eighth clime of the world. I asked, What kinds of people does one encounter in it? He said, From every land and of every vocation. I asked, What profession is profitable here? He said, To be afraid of everything there is. I asked, What work should one do here? He said, Everything except poetry and writing. I asked, Who are these fair creatures? He said, The beauties of the country of London. I asked, Dont they have hearts? He said, They do, but [made] of iron.] This poem has several elements that are familiar from the Indo-Persian poetic tradition of city poems, such as
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his fixation on the beauties and occupations, but its form and treatment of the subject is entirely new and remarkably modern. Ghalib does not describe the city through his own eyes although he is physically present there, but mediates through a secondary voice. The beauties in Calcutta, though belonging to a new and foreign world are, in fact, in complete harmony with the past, for the beloved in the Persian (and Urdu) poetic world is always heartless and cold and never deigns to return the affections of the poet/lover. Ghalib came away from Calcutta with his worldview changed by his experience but his mission unaccomplished. He was so charmed by the capital of British India, especially its beautiful women and mangoes, that he declared in a Persian letter to a friend, By God, had I not been a family man, with regard for the honour of my wife and children, I would have cut myself free and made my way there. There I would have lived till I died, in that heav enly city, free from all cares.34 With him, we come full circle, and this new metropolis is the heir to the utopian Indo-Persian city that is peopled with beautiful beloveds. In this paper I have attempted to trace the intricate genealogy of the city poem in the Indo-Persian textual tradition by identifying the poetic imagery, tropes, and topoi employed, as an initial step in integrating poetic knowledge systems from parallel and overlapping geographic and linguistic regions that can be amplified with the discovery of other relevant texts. Although each poets response to his environment is novel in its own way, being informed by choice of language and reception of the tradition, we need to better our understanding of the development of the aesthetic principles that lent a particular perspective to the Indo-Persian poets vision. The existence of valuable historical data in shahrashub poems is certainly a reason to pay attention to these poems, but one must not be unmindful of the complex ways in which the poets skillfully manipulated these facts to present their kaleidoscopic view of a social landscape that combined material and metaphorical vistas. Whereas early poets like Zuhuri and Kalim inserted shahrashub elements into their poems, the structure and purpose of their works differed from that of the Safavid and Central Asian poems of this genre. What they share and pass on to Urdu poets like Vali and Ghalib is the exuberant tone and specialized register of the language of love lyric, an essential element of which is to view all the beautiful people of a city in continual dalliance with the poet-narrator. Other Urdu poets like Mir and Sauda chose to articulate their feelings about the city by lamenting or lampooning the state of cultural decline and an absence of commerce and love in a darker mode of expression, thus working within the same tradition by reversing it. With Ghalib, the situation becomes more complex, since he is the recipient of
both the shahrashub and shahrashob traditions, and negotiates his own position at the intersection of the two while perched at the
NOTES 1Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Aspects of Arabic Urban Literature Mostly in Ninth and Tenth Centuries, Islamic Studies 8 (1969), 282. 2The Iranian side of this phenomenon has been explored by Paul Losensky, The Palace of Praise and the Melons of Time: Descriptive Patterns in Abdi Bayk Sirazis Garden of Eden, Eurasian Studies 2 (2003): 129. 3For an overview, see J. T. P. de Bruijn, Shahrangiz, 1. In Persian, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. A comparative perspective with European literature is provided by Michele Bernardini, The masnavi-shahrashubs as Town Panegyrics: An International Genre in Islamic Mashriq, in Narrated Space in the Literature of the Islamic World, ed. Roxane Haag-Higuchi and Christian Szyska (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 8194. 4These poems are discussed in Sunil Sharma, Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Masud Sad Salman of Lahore (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), 10716. 5There is also a small collection of quatrains of this genre attributed to Amir Khusraw, some of which are marked by his characteristic puns in Persian and Hindavi, but they are not part of a unified poem and could date from any period. For Sayfis poems, see Sunil Sharma, Generic Innovation in Sayfi Bukharais Shahrashub Ghazals, in Ghazal as a Genre of World Literature: The Ottoman Ghazal in Its Historical Context (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft, forthcoming). 6This subject is treated by C. M. Naim in The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry, in Studies in the Urdu Gazal and Prose Fiction, ed. Muhammad Umar Memon (Madison: South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1979), 12042. 7Mehdi Keyvani, Artisans and Guild Life in the Later Safavid Period (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1982), 197. 8A. Mirzoev, quoted by Jan Rypka, Iranian Literature (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1968), 508. 9For the origins of this genre, see Sunil Sharma, Hafizs Saqinamah: The Genesis and Transformation of a Classical Poetic Genre, Persica 18 (2002): 7583. 10Saqinamah-i Zuhuri (Kanpur: Naval Kishore, 1890), 1212. All translations of poems are mine. 11Saqinamah-i Zuhuri, 125. In a comparative vein, the link between a new cash economy and the appearance of a new poetics is also found in Telugu poetry of the same period. See A. K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and David Shulman, ed. and trans., When God Is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 24. In recent times, Orhan Pamuks work of historical fiction, My Name Is Red (in the English translation; the original is in Turkish), is set in Ottoman Istanbul in the year 1591, around the same time as Zuhuris poem was written and in a similar cultural milieu. Each chapter of the novel is narrated by an individual or object central to the tale, one of
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which is a coin. 12Zuhuris Saqinamah circulated widely and inspired imitations by various poets. One such work is by Mulla Tughra (d. c. 1667) who wrote a Saqinamah for the Safavid Shah Abbas I (r. 15871629) before he immigrated to India. In his poem, there is a catalogue of the different professionals in the bazaar who are shown playfully interacting with the villainous figure of the market inspector (muhtasib). Ahmad GulchinMaani, Shahrashub dar shir-e Farsi, 2nd ed. by Parviz GulchinMaani (Tehran: Rivayat, 2001), 2036. 13Divan-i Abu Talib Kalim Hamadani, ed. Muhammad Qahraman (Mashhad: Astan-i Quds-i Razavi, 1990), 143. 14Divan-i Abu Talib Kalim Hamadani, 143. 15Quoted in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Discovering the Familiar: Notes on the Travel-Account of Anand Ram Mukhlis, 1745, South Asia Research 16:2 (1996), 136. 16Amin Ahmad Razi, Haft Iqlim, ed. Javad Fazil (Tehran: Ali Akbar Ilmi, 1961), vol. 1, 801. Also see his description of Qustantaniyah (Istanbul) in the sixth clime, From the palace to the city limits there are bazaars and shops, among which there are seven thousand coffeehouses. In every shop, a number of delicate and pretty youths are seated who have tresses and moles that are snares, and who act as magnets to attract hearts, v. 3, 499. 17This mode of writing, using the beauty/commerce/crafts matrix to write about a city, was also used conversely, as in Baburs negative description of Hindustan, There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. The art and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. He adds a few lines later, The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots of money Another nice thing is the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and practitioners of every trade. The Baburnama: Memories of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3501. 18 Zuhuri had started a trend in the composition of rhymed prose with his rhetorical work Sih Nasr (Three Prose Pieces) and Mina Bazar was most likely written in response to that by Vazih or another poet. The problem of the authorship of this work is discussed in the introduction to the edition by Muhammad Ahmad Siddiqi, ed., Mina Bazar (Allahabad: I. Karimi Press, 1954), 1824. 19This work is discussed by Cedric Dover, The Cultural Significance of Col. James Skinner, Calcutta Review 134:1 (1955): 1723; also see Jeremiah P. Losty, The Art of the Book in India (London: British Library, 1982), 148, 152. I am grateful to Amanda Hamilton for drawing my attention to this material and providing copies of the unpublished manuscript. We plan to present this text in a joint project. 20In Ottoman Turkish this genre is known as sehrengiz and the number of such poems is far greater than in Persian. For more information, see Talat Sait Halman, Shahrangiz, 2. In Turkish, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; also see J. StewartRobinson, A Neglected Ottoman Poem: The Sehrengiz, in Studies in Near Eastern Culture and History: In Memory of Ernest
T. Abdel-Massih, ed. James A. Bellamy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies, 1990), 20111. 21Eric Beverley, Representing Cosmopolitanism: Surat City in Three Early Modern Literary Texts, unpublished paper. 22Kulliyat-e Vali, ed. Nur al-Hasan Hashmi (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1981), 378. 23Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 141. 24The semantic difference between shahrashub and shahrashob is of course only valid if examined from todays perspective, accounting for the differences in the Iranian and Indian pronunciation and interpretation of the Persian term. This also points to a larger problem of the academic and cultural distance that has been created between the Persian and classical Urdu literatures (the same can be said of Persian and Ottoman). The Urdu poets probably saw their poems as belonging to the same tradition as the happier ones, but with a large dose of irony in the new form. In retrospect, Persian scholars also use the term shahrashub for any satire on a city even if the poem lacks the agents of the disturbance. 25See Munibur Rahmans statement, One of the major conventions of the shahr-ashob is to name a series of professions and to describe the state of affairs governing the individuals associated with each of them. The shahr-ashobs are determined by the nature of their content, rather than by any separate form, and many of them appear in the works of the poets under titles other than shahr-ashob. They could be found in any of the traditional verse forms employed in Urdu poetry, though it is possible that some forms might have been favoured more than others during a particular period. Characteristic of the genre, at least during its pre-1857 phase, is the use of satire and ridicule as weapons of criticism, a feature that makes it difficult sometimes to draw a line between a shahr-ashob and a hadjw ("insult poem"), Shahrangiz, 3. In Urdu, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. 26Kulliyat-e Qaim, vol. 2, ed. Iqtida Hasan (Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adab, 1965), 56. 27Kulliyat-e Nazir Akbarabadi, ed. Mawlana Abd al-Bari Sahib (Lucknow: Ram Kumar Press, 1951), 466. 28Kulliyat-e Sauda, vol. 2 (Allahabad: Ram Narain Lal Beni Prasad, 1971), 266. 29Carla Petievich, Poetry of the Declining Mughals: The Shahr Ashob, Journal of South Asian Literature 25:1 (1990): 104. 30Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Unprivileged Power: The Strange Case of Persian (and Urdu) in Nineteenth-Century India, Annual of Urdu Studies 13 (1998): 330. 31Divan-i Ghalib Dihlavi, ed. Muhsin Kiyani (Tehran: Raw zanah, 1997), 317. 32Divan-i Ghalib Dihlavi, 317. 33Divan-i Ghalib Dihlavi, 389. 34Quoted in Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Ghalib, Life and Letters (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48.
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The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority: Medicine and Buddhism in Tibet on the Eve of Modernity
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JANET GYATSO
Somewhere around 1670, Dar-mo sMan-rams-pa, one of an inner group of physicians close to the Fifth Dalai Lama, set up a laboratory in a park in Lhasa. He and his students proceeded to dissect four human corpsestwo male, two female, two old, two youngin order to count their bones. He wrote briefly of the event in an anatomical treatise, after surveying received tradition on how to count the bones in the body, which were classically said to add up to 360. The number 360, Dar-mo notes, is explained in the texts as based on counting four sections of the skull. But, he says, I and my students based ourselves instead on there being nine sections of the skull, and thus [we came up with] 365. We have to admire Dar-mos deftness. The number of bones that the physician and his acolytes determined with precision, through naked illustration, confirmed the canonical number of 360, albeit with a suggestion of variability, as when one finds a different number of sections in the skull. But in the very next line Dar-mo goes on to call into question the notion of definitive count altogether, suggesting a horizon of undecidability if, instead of counting, as he and his students did, only the bones that measure between the span between fingertip and elbow, and the width of a finger, one also reck ons the numerous small bones that are merely the size of a roasted bean.1 If the idea that properties of the physical world cannot be represented definitively by canonical doctrine reminds us of issues germane to the birth of Western empiricism, Dar-mos experiment may also strike us for its simultaneity with the public anatomy lessons of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, especially memorable from a famous painting by Rembrandt. But Tibet had no part in the European Enlightenment; it saw no radical revolution in science, no salient notion of innova tion, no widespread and publicly touted recourse to repeated dissection and further experimentation.2 Still, Dar-mos corpse dismemberment in the Tibetan capital encapsulates a climactic moment in the history of medicine in Tibet. Part and parcel of a series of momentous social changes which culminated in the consolidation of a centralized Tibetan state under the rule of the Dalai Lamaswas that medicine came into its own as a system of knowledge distinct from mainstream Buddhism. In fact the process by which this coming into its own unfolded involved kinds of arguments and practices that we often associate with the birth of modernity. Participants in a growing network of physicians flourishing under the patronage of the Dalai Lamas court, medical theorists and historians like Dar-mo were caught up in debates about what represented authoritative sources for medical knowledge, and how to constitute and construe the history of that knowledge. A notable part of these debates was a distinctively medical empiricism, with far-reaching implications for the prestige of medicine and its practitioners, as well as for the momentous issue of how medicine relates to Buddhism. To consider these developments in light of how we think about the emergence of modernity promises to enhance both our understanding of modernity and of Tibetan history. On the one hand, to recognize featuresand note that I am arguing that some features can be so identified, not all or exactly the same onesof what is defined as modernity in a variety of historical contexts helps us to realize that modernity is a general process that, while by no means universal, is not in its broad outlines unique to a single time and place. Such a realization stands apart from anything we might say about actual influence or interaction; although it is an intriguing question, we have yet to track an influence of European modernity upon the culture of the Ching dynasty, let alone the Ganden Phodrang government of seventeenth-century Tibet. It is also not to claim that seventeenth-century Tibetan society was modern, only to say that, again, some aspects of that society bear com-
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parison with modernity. What this paper will do, then, is to examine attitudes and values associated with modernityamong them, a questioning of religious authority, a valuing of empirical evidence, a probative attitude to texts and practices, and a recognition of cultural differencein the particular ways they developed in specifically Tibetan conditions. To recognize the variety of circumstances that can give rise to such attitudes is both to discover the broad descriptive power of the category of modernity, and to appreciate the rich range of its instances. And on the other hand, to take a category like modernity and use it heuristically to study a time and place where no such indigenous category can be identified is not necessarily to force our interests upon an incommensurate object. Rather, if the category is both apropos and general enoughgender would be another example; so would culture or religionit can help us to recognize connections and identify patterns that we might not have otherwise seen.3 This essay will focus on a few inflections of what empiricism entailed in the shifting camps of Tibetan medical science from around the end of the fifteenth century through the momentous events of the seventeenth century and their legacy in the following years. In brief, I find two salient clusters of ideas that contributed to such empiricism, both of which fell under the larger Tibetan rubric of experience.4 One had to do with the special kind of knowledge that is acquired only in practice, guided by a teacher, and involving daily immersion in the particularities and idiosyncrasies of individual patients. The other concerned the particular type of knowledge that comes from direct perception, that is, from contact between the mind and sense organs of the researcher and something in the material world. These two senses of experience overlapped, but the second was more specific and pointed. Importantly, it had a special authority of its own; in the polemical rhetoric of the medical writers under discussion, it could trump what was predicted by ideology or system. Germane to this entire investigation will be a troubling of the boundaries of science vs. religion in Tibet, that is, between medicine and mainstream Buddhist modes of writing and thinking, during the period under discussion. Buddhism and medicine grew up together in Tibet in a shared universe of institutions, conceptions, and modes of discourse. Buddhist texts certainly also were concerned with versions of both of the kinds of experience just mentioned. Still, there is a telling difference in the way that medicine came to construe the value of direct perception and hands-on practice. And so even if, in discerning by the sixteenth century a medical mentality distinct from Buddhism, we are already begging the question of whether medicine in its full-blown form was something distinct from Buddhism in the same period, the juxtaposition allows us to
glimpse the special center of gravity that medical tradition came to constitute in Tibet, with its necessary appreciation of materiality, expectations about accountability, desire for autonomy, and, yes, sense of a separate truth of the empirical. Background: Institutions and Literature The emergence in Tibet of professional medicine as distinct from the dominant knowledge systems of IndoTibetan Buddhism was a gradual process that began with the kings of the Yarlung dynasty.5 From everything we can tell from Tibetan historiography, the early Tibetan kings sponsored the visits of a stream of physicians from India, Nepal, Kashmir, China, Persia, Greece, and other areas. The process started in earnest at the court of Srong-btsan sGam-po (seventh century). An astonishing number of titles of medical works are recorded from this period that were either translated from other languages, or were new works composed in Tibetan that integrated the various medical traditions represented at the court. The kings avid interest in such activity is said to have been motivated both by their concern for the welfare of the state and their desire to obtain superior medical care for their own families; contests testing medical efficacy were carried out. By the time of Khri-lde Srong-btsan (late eighth century), there are reports of the title of court physician (bla-sman) in the royal court, a position that remained through the twentieth century, along with the granting of land and inherited rights to medical clan lineages, including the releasing of such clans from military duty.6 After the fall of the dynasty (ninth century), patronage for medical learning was taken up by the emerging Buddhist monastic centers. The premier translator of Buddhist works in the new period, Rin-chen-bzangpo, translated in the eleventh century the Indian work Astangahrdaya, whose presentation of Ayurvedic tradition was especially influential for medicine in Tibet. It was probably during the next century that gYu-thog Yon-tan-mgon-po (11261202) and his students codified the work known as Four Tantras, although they attributed its authorship to the Buddha.7 The Four Tantras became the principal root medical work in Tibet. Already major Buddhist teachers and writers, such as sGam-po-pa (10791153) and rJe-btsun Grags-pa-rgyalmtshan (11471216), had been serving as physicians and composing medical works, and special schools for medical learning, sometimes conjoined with curricula in astrological calculation, began to be established at the major monasteries in central and southwestern Tibet: at Sa-skya sMan-grong during the twelfth century; at Zhvalu, which specialized in the Astanga system, and at mTshur-phu, which saw much eclectic medical scholarship, in the fourteenth century; and at Ei Chos-grva at Bo-dong in the early fifteenth century. By the time that
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the Byang line of physicians was consolidating at Byang Ngam-ring, the old Tibetan capital, in the fifteenth century, there were oral medical examinations and regimes of memorization. There was also much medical learning at Lhun-grub sDings Monastery in western Tibet during the same period, and then at La-thog Zurmkhar, which attracted students from throughout the region and became the home of the other major line of Tibetan medicine, the Zur. The Bri-gung bKa-brgyud developed its own medical tradition, branching off from the Zur. By the early seventeenth century several key medical centers were thriving in the Lhasa area, at Bras-spungs Monastery, gZhis-ka bSam-grub-rtse, and rTse Lhadbang-lcog, where more formal methods of examination were established, and woodblocks were carved for several seminal medical works, including the Four Tantras. This was the springboard for the momentous nurturing of medical learning under the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama and the establishment by his regent sDe-srid Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho of lCags-po-ri on a hill in the middle of Lhasa, which served as the center for the medical academy in Tibet until the Cultural Revolution. Other medical schools continued to appear at monastic centers, now in eastern Tibet, including at sDe-dge at the end of the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth century at sPal-spungs under the direction of the polymath Situ Chos-kyi-byung-gnas, as well as at Kah-thog, sKu-bum, and Bla-brang bKra-shis-khyil. Some of these institutions developed curricula that were at odds with the medical orthodoxy at lCags-po-ri, creating the conditions for debate and dissent. In fact medical practice in Tibet was far from limited to these monastic learning centers; healing traditions also abounded in tantric circles, and oracle mediums were involved with healing as well. But even for the medicine fostered by the monastic schools, we know little of the sociology of practice, regarding, for example, what percentage of practicing physicians were actually trained in those schools, what the lay-monastic breakdown was, what the rate of literacy was among physicians, to what extent physicians actually used medical writings, let alone all the questions one might raise about the economics and daily practice of medicine. Moreover, there is every reason to expect that the answers to such questions would vary widely from area to area and period to period. For the moment, we are stuck mostly with generalities. We can only venture, for example, that the degree of professionalization for Tibetan medicine, even during its apogee around the seventeenth century, probably does not approach that achieved in Chinese medicine, due to the centralized bureaucratization there of qualifying examinations for physicians, and, by the Song dynasty, regulations that physicians keep standardized case records.8 On another note, we
can also observe that there seems to have been a unusually widespread familiarity among Tibetans with dissected bodies, due to the long-standing practice of dismembering human corpses to feed vultures; such charnel grounds were used to gather stray body parts for the making of certain ritual instruments, and they also served as sites for Buddhist meditations on death. Lacking at this point detailed sociological knowledge, I will restrict my attention in this article to insights we can glean from the literature produced by the scholars of the medical colleges. This already provides, however, a huge and rich body of data, with many indications of tensions, debates, and changing mentalities and practices. I already mentioned the Four Tantras, a work in four parts that was probably compiled in the twelfth century in Tibet. Some parts of it are closely related to Vagbhatas Astangahrdayasamhita,9 also mentioned above, and the entire Four Tantras system is clearly indebted to the Ayurvedic physiology of the three main humors of wind, bile, and phlegm, among other things. The work also preserves medical knowledge from other systems, one obvious example being its pulse diagnostics, which bears similarity to Chinese medicine. But at this point scholars are far from having identified all of the sources for the Four Tantras embryology, anatomy, pathology, diagnostics, therapeutics, pharmacology, and notions of the optimal lifestyle. Although it may emerge that the Four Tantras was not the undisputed principal or root text for Tibetan medicine from the start, it was by the fourteenth century. By the fifteenth century, writing a commentary to the Four Tantras had become a major way for leading medical scholars to demonstrate their learning and debate points of controversy. Other common literary genres included instructions that supplemented the root text, manuals for the preparation of medicines, manuals for medicinal plant recognition, and manuals of therapeutic techniques.10 Another key genre that provides clear evidence of a conscious effort to identify medicine as a separate tradition is the historical overview of medical personalities, literature, and institutions. Two very influential examples of this special medical history were written at the height of the consolidation of medical tradition, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 Writing from Experience One other distinctive, if curious, medical genre that may be traced to the sixteenth century is the nyams-yig, literally, a writing from experience. This genre serves especially well as a flashpoint for the emerging empiricist dimensions of the medical mentality, and this is so not only because of its name. The very manner in which the genre is constituted alerts us to the fact that it has a special function. For one, the label only infrequently
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actually appears in a texts title.12 One is immediately led to ask how it is known that a text is a nyams-yig. Beyond the occasional specification that a given text was written on the basis of the authors experience,13 being a nyamsyig appears to be a matter more of reader reception than of authorial intention. Frequently the term is only retrospectively applied, as is the case for the famous but oddly titled Bye ba ring srel (Relic of Ten Million), a work describing a variety of medical practices written in the fifteenth century.14 It may well be that the term was only used after the sixteenth century, with the explicitly labeled collection of one hundred n yams-yig by Gongsman-pa.15 The entire conception of it as a prestigious genre written by an elite expert class may be the product of the very period we are looking at. One of the main purposes of the nyams-yig seems to be to convey the special kind of knowledge that comes from hands-on practice: in short, the first sense of experience sketched above. In general the content of the nyams-yig seems to be construed as superior to the results of mere book learning. sDe-srid even ventures in his own nyams-yig that the Four Tantras are of little use for actually treating patients, other than to provide information on recognizing medicinal plants, laying out the basic structures of medical knowledge, and locating the channels in the body. Even previous nyams-yigs didnt support actual treatment sufficiently, he claims, prescribing one medicine for one hundred diseases, and failing to describe the course of an illness fully from beginning to end.16 That is what sDe-srid implies his own nyams-yig will provide, and thoroughness based on hands-on experience becomes the signal virtue of the nyams-yig. In the eighteenth century sDe-dge-bla-sman maintains, I wrote this nyams-yig from my own experience and what I have become familiar with; this would be equivalent to a vast textbook of what has been heard of the kind actions [of former teachers].17 The point is developed further in the nineteenth century, with the influential nyams-yig of Kong-sprul, who chastises physicians who never had oral teachings from an experienced teacher and experience based on a long period of familiarization, and stresses that merely checking the pulse and urine (the basic diagnostic tools of the Four Tantras) are not sufficient to diagnose disease. He insists instead upon asking a set of detailed, particular questions to the patient and listening carefully to the response.18 sDe-srid labels his work a supplement to the Four Tantras, but the ineluctable trend is that the n yams-yigs were beginning to supplant the root text. The upshot was that the Four Tantras fell out of use, even if the medical colleges still compelled students to memorize it.19 At least by the nineteenth century, authors of nyamsyigs could speak directly of the Four Tantras limitations, as when Kong-sprul describes the many sources to
which he had to resort for information that was lacking in the root text, while Mi-pham can distinguish the way he found to read pulse based on his own experience from an array of authoritative precedents in Tibet and China alike.20 Innovation if not actual deviation from the authoritative was always a risky business in Tibetan literary culture. What was gained, in the face of the risks, from bringing forth ones own experience as valuable can be seen in the rhetoric surrounding the fact that so-and-so wrote a nyams-yig.21 Equally, the information that a nyamsyig conveyed became valuable property. In that sixteenth-century collection of one hundred, each nyams-yig was dedicated to one of the authors students, whose name and often clan or toponyms were specified. Here the nyams-yig would be a kind of patrimony, a possession to be guarded against competitors. The Weight of Experience Both to the extent that the nyams-yigs described what was learnt idiosyncratically in the clinic, and that they recorded information not known in the Four Tantras, the genre reflected an important direction in which medical practice was moving by the sixteenth century, one that left open the possibility of newness and innovation. There can be no question that in tandem with this move was a recurring insistence on the value of textual study and the learning of system.22 Certainly such a value is evident in the perduring popularity of writing commentaries to the Four Tantras, and it reminds us once again of the shared universe of values between medicine and Buddhist scholasticism. Part of this popularity had to do with the prestige accompanying scholarship in Tibet by this point, not to mention the rhetorical potential of displaying such learning as a way of disqualifying other physicians who lacked academic pedigree. We often find three principal sources of valid knowledgescriptural authority, logic, and experienceinvoked in the medical commentaries of the period;23 empirical examination and critical analysis are also valorized.24 But the medical writers very frequently emphasized experience in particular, and denigrated the barrenness and even dangerousness of a physician with only book learning.25 A critique of book learning alone and a valuing of experience are also encountered in Buddhist rhetoric, especially with regard to meditative practice and spiritual advancement. We also know that doctrinal innovation was common in Buddhist scholasticism; in Tibet, new doctrinal manuals frequently supplanted earlier ones in monastic curricula. But differences can be detected. Tibetan Buddhist writers display a decided ambivalence about experience as a valid source of knowledge, unless it has been thoroughly informed by right view on key points of doctrine.26 The issues involved might be com-
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pared to debates about empiricism and the relation between mind, matter, and divine design in early modern Europe.27 In Tibet neither Buddhist nor medical writers considered experience ever to be entirely free of ideational content. Hence their presumption that it is necessary to educate experience in the right way; left uneducated, experience is subject to emotional prejudice and error. But while medical writers worried about physicians who practiced only on the basis of their experience, we find far less suspicion of experience as a category as such than we do in Buddhist epistemology and meditation theory. Experience appears to have been unambiguously a good thing in medical learning, even if it could not suffice on its own. I would suggest there was a fundamental disparity in basic orientation that really overdetermined this difference. The goal of medical practice, the orienting horizon of what constitutes success, was the patients recov ery. The ascertainability of this telosits empirical demonstrabilityis of an entirely different order than that of the Buddhist summum bonum of enlightenment. The success of the latter was determined by a far more socially complex set of criteria than the pretty indisputable fact of whether or not a patient died.28 I suspect that the very different ways in which these goals were ascertained affected the mentalities of their respective traditions in far-reaching ways. But we can also note more generally a greater respect for the realities of the physical world in medicine than in Buddhism, particularly in the substantial medical commentaries that were being written by the sixteenth century, and whose debates we will consider below. One finds there sometimes an openness to the physical world revealing itself in ways that no discursive knowledge can fully anticipate, in a confidence that there is something out there that has its own integritythe number of bones in the body, saythat stands fully apart from what any text might say, and that one can consult and find new information from. This becomes particularly clear in the second, more specific notion of experience at play in medical tradition by this point, namely, the authority of direct observation. In the following sections we will consider arguments that sometimes turned on what can be seen in actuality or what is known through direct perception as a way to prove someone elses theory wrong.29 While we might find some analogue in classical Buddhist epistemology regarding the role of direct perception in moments of meditative breakthrough, that is a very different matter, since what is perceived then is not everyday reality. And on those few occasions when Buddhist polemicists did invoke some obvious fact in the everyday world, it was more a rhetorical ploy than a precise argument, since for Buddhist theory what appears to direct perception in the conventional world will on close analysis prove to be but an illusion.30 Again, the
contrast is instructive. The medical tradition had no interest in arguing that the physical death of a patient is an illusion. With their ultimate goals so disparate (and despite the frequent characterization of the Buddha himself as healer par excellence), we find medicine in Tibet struggling with classical Buddhist doctrine throughout its history. Some of these struggles issue simply from a discrepancy of system: is illness to be understood as bad karma, or more physicalistically, an imbalance in the humours of the body? Although the Four Tantras sometimes allows syncretically for both kinds of explanation, they are usually offered in different places. For example, are the three humors and their imbalances the physical product of the seminal substances and influences of ones parents, or are they produced by the three poisons of ignorance, greed, and anger, the principal causes of all suffering according to Buddhism?31 Or again: Is a child born a female because of bad karma, or is it a result of physiological factors like the parents pulse rhythms, or the relative dominance of their seminal substances, or even the day of the mothers menstrual cycle on which conception occurred?32 Although these very different kinds of etiology coexist in one text, and one tradition, they do so sometimes in an uneasy mix. For our purposes here, a truly weighty implication emerged in those moments that the physical world started to be perceived as having a reality of its owna reality that can best be apprehended via sensory experience, as when Dar-mo resorted to the body itself to determine the number of its bones. We begin to recognize in some quarters of the emerging medical academy (and remember, its learning was housed in a monastic community) both the suspicion, and then an unease with that suspicion, that the word of the Buddha itself could be subject to correction. When Systems Collide: The Channels of the Body Empirical evidence in its most overtly physicalistic sense posed on several occasions an estimable challenge to Buddhist revelation. How this challenge was mounted, and then fielded, is illustrated well by the debate around the anatomy of the channels. The Four Tantras describes four kinds of channels that transmit substances and energies through the body: 1) initial growth channels, which give rise to the fetuss body; 2) channels of being, matrices of channels at the brain, heart, navel, and genitals responsible for perception, memory, and reproduction; 3) connecting channels, which consist in two main soul channels, one white and one black, that control the nervous and the cardiovascular systems, along with the smaller channels branching out from them; and 4) life channels through which a life force moves around the body. There was considerable debate in the commentaries
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about what these categories actually refer to, and exactly where in the body they are. But the discussion took a new turn entirely when, in the fifteenth century, a medical writer casually remarked that the life channels follow along the path of lalana and rasana.33 This writer was referring to the tantric conception of the central channel, a straight tube that runs between the crown of the head and the genitals, and two others, lalana and rasana, that run along its sides; the three are well known in Indic and Tibetan Buddhist tantras as the basis for yogic cultivation. In the centuries that followed there developed a sustained effort to locate this tantric system within the medical system of channels in the Four Tantras. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Byang-pa bKra-shis-dpal-bzang found the tantric channels not only in the life channels, which in any case had always been viewed as derivative of tantric system, but also in the more properly medical growth channels, and especially now in the connecting channels.34 Byang-pa called the medical white soul channel, often understood to be the spinal column, the outer lalana, while he labeled the black soul channel, which is something like the vena cava, the outer rasana. This seems to be the first time a medical writer equated the nervous and cardiovascular systems with the two side tantric channels, but we already see a device to make it palatablea distinction between an outer version and an inner one, which presumably would be the actual yogic channels described in the tantras. This device mirrors a larger tendency to distinguish the average human bodyin this case, the medical bodyfrom the body of the meditator or indeed a Buddha. And it serves to avoid a very large problem: the central channel, lalana, and rasana are simply not visible in the average body in the way they are described in the tantras. Clearly, people had been looking inside corpses to find them, and the discrepancy had already been noted several centuries before by Buddhist writers.35 What is new now is the increasing attention to the problem on the part of the medical commu nity. And yet it has not really been solved: in Byang-pas solution, the real, or correctthe innerlalana and rasana are still invisible, although by sleight of hand it may look like they have been accounted for in the empirical. In the spate of increasingly detailed Four Tantras commentaries written from the fifteenth century onward, different writers try different schemes. The brilliant sKyem-pa is more interested in locating the most important tantric channel, the central one, than the two on its sides. He finds it in the channel matrices around the brain and the genitals, but he also, controversially, locates it in the spinal column itself.36 This would seem promising, since like the central channel, the spinal column is a single straight channel running from the top of the torso to the bottom. It took the master commenta-
tor Zur-mkhar-ba Blo-gros-rgyal-po (b. 1509) to disqualify this attractive solutionlargely because it fails to respect the signal characteristics of the central channel on its own tantric terms.37 The deft solution he proposes instead is emblematic of where medicine was headed by the latter part of the sixteenth century. Like other participants in this fray, Zur-mkhar-ba lets the embryonic growth channels be the tantric channels.38 In a way, this is a safe solution; those initial channels disappear once the childs body is fully formed, so, although he does not say this, there is no chance to disprove their existence later by investigation. But apparently, finding the tantric channels in the first weeks of life did not satisfy the quest to locate them in the adult body. So Zur-mkhar-ba also has recourse to the earlier suggestion that lined up the two side tantric channels with the white soul channel (the spinal column) and the black soul channel (the vena cava) in the adult body. However, a close reading of his language reveals that he doesnt actually equate them. At one point, he says that rasana gives rise to the black soul channel,39 but this seems to have only the general sense that, as he says elsewhere, all of the wind channels in the body are the central channel, all of the blood channels in the body are rasana, and all of the liquid channels are lalana.40 As for the central channel itself, he does seem to display his agreement with a variety of tantric passages that describe it, but he does so in the context of the growth channels. The upshot is that he actually locates the central channel only in the general channel (srog-rtsa) that grows in the embryos body;41 he rejects the views of those who argue that the central channel always exists, i.e., in the adult body.42 He certainly never pinpoints any of the tantric channels the way he does the medical channels, whose location with respect to the spine, for example, he can specify by digit. Zur-mkhar-ba is quite conscious of larger questions of incommensurability.43 But when he raises the possibility that it could be inappropriate to introduce material into medicine from what is clearly another systemthat of the tantrashe doesnt jump at the chance to disqualify the effort to find the tantric channels once and for all. He almost sounds like a modern historian when he argues instead that in fact it is appropriate to bring in tantric ideas into medical description, for the medical system has always had multiple sources, which included the Vedas and disparate Buddhist sources like the Vinaya, the Suvarnaprabhasottama, and the Kalacakra. But the signature of his complex polemics is all too evident when he maintains that while the Four Tantras system roughly accords with the tantric one, it is important to separate the terminology, for the Four Tantras is not talking about the same thing, i.e., the fruits of meditation. Whatever is tantric about the anatomy of the Four Tantras is hidden.44 Note that in the process Zur-
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mkhar-ba has sustained his allegiance to tantric truths. Indeed, Zur-mkhar-ba rejects as invalid the argument of previous writers that the tantric channels are merely matters of meditation, existing in the imagination but not present in the average body, since if they were, they would be visible in corpses.45 Others came up with the theory that the tantric channels do exist concretely in the body but evaporate at death, just as the mind does. Zur-mkhar-bas reason for rejecting these views is telling: If the tantric channels were only a matter of the imagination, the fruits of tantric yoga would not be obtained. The next major Four Tantras commentator, sDe-srid Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho (b. 1653), makes a similar argument for the physicality of the tantric channels: yogis can attain immortality by holding the winds in the central channel.46 In arguing for the concrete efficacy of exercises involving the tantric channels, Zur-mkhar-ba and sDe-srid would probably say (if they were reading this essay) that they were taking recourse in another kind of empirical truth: the evident efficacy of tantric practice. It is significant that they are committed to this efficacy being physically based. That already says a lot about the ambitions of the period to establish tantric ideology in some sort of physical reality, and I will return to this below. Note for now that while the influential sDe-srid repeats most of Zur-mkhar-bas solution verbatim,47 the subtlety of the ambiguation is such that the question continues to dog the medical commentators, and we find major nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers still at pains to demonstrate that what Zur-mkhar-ba and sDesrid established was the validity of the tantric system.48 But that perduring ambiguity also meant that the door had been opened for dissent. Gling-sman bKra-shis (b. 1726), close student of the polymath Situ Chos-kyibyung-gnas at the outlying medical center at sPalspungs, might have been far enough from the dominion of sDe-srids lCags-po-ri to offer a more rigorously empirical account. He is willing to concede that the soul channel is sometimes called an outer central channel and so on; this distinction lines up with his general approach to treat the human body differently from that of a Buddha.49 But regarding that human body, Gling-sman has little patience for anything that is not directly observable. He can declare categorically that that the tantric channels are out of court in an anatomy of the medical, i.e., material, body; the tantric system is meant solely as a map for meditation.50
The Weight of Textual Authority: The Heart-Tip Debate
Gling-sman provides evidence of a remaining axis of dispute regarding the status of the physical. While we can see him as carving out a separate space for human anatomy qua human anatomyand indeed, a separate space for human medical science qua human medical
sciencethe world of tantric discourse, imagination, and even soteriology remained fundamental to the conceptual universe of virtually all of the Tibetan medical writers. Tantric discourse in the scriptures also carries the weight of revealed authority as such, and this spreads via analogy to buttress other textual authorities. An exemplary debate that aspires to reconcile the tantric vision of the world, contravening empirical evidence, and textual authority (in this case, that of the medical text the Four Tantras) comes up in another section of Zur-mkhar-bas commentary: why do doctors perform parts of the pulse diagnosis on opposite arms of male and female patients? Zur-mkhar-ba zeroes in on a rival of his forefathers, the same Byang-pa bKra-shis-dpalbzang already mentioned, who claimed that the reason the pulse of males and females is read using opposite arms has to do with certain gendered oppositions: between the classic tantric pair of wisdom and means; between what he claims are the opposite positions of lalana and rasana in males and females; between the hollow and solid organs; and between the Tibetan equiva lents of the Chinese yin and yang.51 Zur-mkhar-bas refutation richly illustrates the problems that eventuate when ideal pairs and empirical science collide. In brief, Zur-mkhar-ba ridicules Byang-pa for his mindless adherence to lining up sets of oppositessystemand limits the gender difference only to the position of something the Four Tantras calls the heart-tip, which it says faces in opposite directions in male and female.52 Byang-pa attributes this difference to the fact that the two tantric channels are on different sides of the body in males and females: since the hearttip always faces the rasana channel, the heart tip will face in different directions in males and females. Zur-mkharba rejects the idea that the two tantric channels are on different sides in the two sexes, saying it contradicts both the evidence of medical examination and the tantric texts themselves.53 But his key move is to explain that heart-tip really refers to a hole (he doesnt specify where it is) through which the mind moves in and out of the heart. It is that which, due to gender differences, faces to the left in males and the right in females. He attributes this difference to tantric teachings, and then goes on quickly to assert that other than this one case, everything in pulse examination is the same for male and females.54 What is at stake here becomes clearer in Gling-sman, who ferociously labels as a commentary of fools talk the idea that the tip of the heart faces in different directions in males and females.55 He continues by averring specifically to his own medical examinations, the many autopsies of both males and females he has witnessed, and his own direct experience of holding in his hand the heart of people murdered by sword, when he ascertained that the top of the heart in fact faces slightly to
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the left in both men and women.56 We see now what Zurmkhar-ba accomplished in specifying that the heart-tip is actually a hole somewhere on the heart. He protected the Four Tantras from saying that the top of the heartwhat tip (rtse) would seem to implyfaces in different directions, a claim that is clearly contradicted by empirical evidence. Still, note a n umber of things. Zur-mkhar-ba does accept the tantric system of gender difference as being method or wisdominfluenced, which means that he accepts that womens minds leave the heart to the right towards the rasana channel and mens minds leave the heart to the left towards the lalana channel. Zur-mkhar-ba also implies in this case that the tantric channels exist empirically in the body. I think the reason he grants these pointsand note how quickly he moves away from them and back to emphasizing the overarch ing similarity in pulse diagnosis for males and femalesis that he needs to support the authority of the Four Tantras, which did institute a gender difference for pulse diagnostics and for the direction in which this heart-tip faces. But still, he reinterprets the heart-tip so that the heart does not have to face in different directions. Moreover, the mind-hole image with which he has replaced the heart-tip is elusive and nonlocatable: unavailable for empirical observation. In short Zur-mkharba has managed to hold on to a thread of systematic gender difference from the tantrasand in the same stroke the authority of the medical root textwhile rendering those empirically dubious claims toothless nonetheless. The Seventeenth Century, Medicine, and the Word of the Buddha The complicated positions and rhetorical strategies of a figure like Zur-mkhar-ba become apparent only through a reading that pays close attention to nuance. In the debates just seen, and in many others, we find him at once exceedingly cautious and intently determined. This is a man caught in a struggle whose stakes are high. There can be no question that we are looking at a knotty set of issues about authority. While we can find examples of commentators overtly correcting the Four Tantras statements, these tend to be cautious and minor. More commonly, the Four Tantras is upheld, in a display of loyalty that is more important for what it says socially than what it actually means for the practice and theory of medicine, which was evolving. The impulse to show loyalty also has something to do with reticence to dismiss tantric anatomy, even when there was really no way to make its extravagant claims empirically plausible. A twentieth-century commentators warning probably reflects a long-standing sentiment: If [the channels are] explained other than this, that is, if one makes a claim that goes against the theories of the subtle meaning of
the tantras that explains the natural condition of the bodys channels, then a thesis that invalidates the scriptures would be established. Therefore it is best to abandon personal arrogance and follow the experts.57 Both display of intellectual compliance to system, and the urge to distance medicine from it, make eminent sense in the momentous period leading to the centralization of the Tibetan state in the seventeenth century. The patrons of Byang-pa, Zur-mkhar-ba, and their contemporarieswarring factions such as the Rinpungs-pa clan lords and the Karmapa lamas, jockeying for power during the sixteenth centurymade for much political insecurity. The final hegemony of the Fifth Dalai Lamas government in the Potala in the seventeenth century coincided with the aspirations of the Ching dynasty in Tibet, which meant serious vulnerability for renegade monasteries and intellectuals.58 We are only beginning to appreciate the extent of the impact of cultural contact between Tibetans and Chinese empire during this period.59 But one undoubted effect of the consolidation of a centralized government in Tibet was a consolidation of the fortunes of the medical academy. The combination of increased bureaucratization of the Tibetan state and the highly rationalized apparatus of Chinese empire created a climate that conferred status on public accountability and empirical testing.60 A principal agent in creating that status was the Great Fifth himself, who actively sought out medical experts from abroad, for his own well-being but also clearly with a view of broadening the professions repertoire of diagnostic, therapeutic, surgical, and pharmacological tools. Again, the signal is that the Four Tantras do not contain everything one needs to know to practice medicine successfully. The Dalai Lamas search for supplements, both foreign and indigenous, to medical knowledge in Tibet was wide-ranging. He brought an Indian physician to his court in 1675 for that physicians expertise in cataract operation, a technique that he induced Dar-mo to master, and which the latter performed successfully on the Dalai Lama himself.61 The Dalai Lama also invited a Chinese expert in eye treatments, along with other physicians from South Asia whose reputation he had heard of, and for whom he sent emissaries to India. He put his own court physicians and other medical personalities in contact with these foreign experts, encouraging them to study the new techniques; new medical works were also translated into Tibetan. His catholic vision extended to the past as well. Old works of Tibetan medicine were sought in archives, recognized as important sources of knowledge, edited, and carved for block printing; biographies were codified of the founders of medical tradition in Tibet; several scholars attempted to codify a definitive edition of the Four Tantras.62
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We also read repeatedly of the granting of lands and income to monastic medical schools. State support of medical learning reached its climax with the Dalai Lamas commission in 1694 of his key administrator sDe-srid to set up a new medical school in the wake of the deterioration of the school at Bras-spungs; perhaps for the first time in medical academia, the new school would admit both monk and lay students.63 The granting of tax monks for assuring student enrollment, the degree of trans-Tibetan enrollment, and the standardization of medical examinations, degrees, and sites for plant collection in central Tibet all reached new specificity. sDe-srids other great accomplishment for medicine was overseeing the production of a spectacular set of medical paintings illustrating anatomy, pharmacology, therapeutics, and other vignettes of medical theory, practice, and learning, and preserving an exquisite record of an unimaginable array of cultural practices.64 In striking ratification of our thesis about empiricism during this period, sDe-srid records how artists such as Lho-brag-sku-skye bsTan-dzin-nor-bu executed the anatomical drawings by looking at real corpses.65 sDesrid is aware of the fact that drawing from lifeit is also reported that he employed artists to draw plants based on their local knowledge of particular specimensproduced new knowledge that surpassed the Four Tantras,66 and whose precise images constituted unprecedented paintings which provide direct instruction that can introduce [medical learning] as if pointing to it with the finger.67 Yet the revelatory visions that lay at the base of sDesrids agendaseeing lCags-po-ri mountain as the heaven of the medicine Buddha, glorifying the tomb of the Great Fifth and its place in Lhasa68show that we must also remain alert to other dimensions of this moment. Yes, the consolidation had much to do with power, with the demolition of rival religious groups, with a sealing of libraries of monasteries with opposing philosophical views to the Dalai Lamass own school. But to reduce the Gelugpa hegemony to a power grab would be to fail to come to grips with a far more fundamental culture making. In short, in their actions with state, religion, and medicine alike, agents like the Great Fifth and sDe-srid were creating what is now loosely called the Tibetan theocracy, a state whose very essence was founded overtly upon the entire edifice of the Tibetan Buddhist universe of imaginationtantric and otherwise.69 It is not too much to say that a stridently authoritative political climate also infected intellectual life in the monastery as well as the practical sciences. Ironically, this political climate fostered conservatism at the very time of the sweeping moves towards rationalization. This conservatism is not the same as censorship, how ever; rather, when we see prominent medical scholars of
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the period protecting the root text or looking for the tantric channels in the empirical body, we understand that they are simply part and parcel of the same worldview that was being built into the whole political and cultural basis of Tibet. Tantric meditation is efficacious in the real world; the words of the Buddha are true. The upshot, then, is a dual movement. The same medical colleges that are being given fiscal autonomy and experimental license are also ordered to conduct prayer ceremonies every day for the health of government officials. Nowhere do we see this twofold urge better than in a long-running debate in Tibet about which Zur-mkhar-ba quips, whenever three or more people gather, it gets discussed.70 The debate is none other than the very grave question of whether or not the Four Tantras is the word of the Buddha. If it is, it is a sacred revelation on par with the other canonical teachings of the Buddha, a work that was translated into Tibetan from the holy language of Sanskrit. If not, it would have been composed by Tibetans in Tibetan.71 This is a familiar issue in Tibet: demonstrating a text to be an authentic translation from an Indic original had long been the dividing line between a true Buddhist teaching and debased apocrypha. The liability of claiming Tibetan, rather than Indic, origins of a root text was overdetermined by the imputation of impudence to any individual who would claim composition of an authoritative scripture. Evidence for Tibetan composition of the Four Tantras had already been noticed as early as the thirteenth century, but this opinion was not frequently defended.72 Zur-mkhar-ba appears to have once again taken the lead in working out the argument for Tibetan authorship most explicitly. He seems to draw on arguments devised in some Buddhist sects for a quite parallel debate, also at issue by the thirteenth century, regarding the authorship of the so-called Treasure scriptures and the nature of the word of the Buddha.73 Again, the contrast is stark: where the advocates of the Treasure scriptures always concealed their Tibetan composition and constructed elaborate conceptions of lineage to keep authorship attributed to the Buddha, the medical Zur-mkhar-ba is driven in one of his essays to finally blurt it out: If [the Four Tantras] were not made to appear as if it were Buddha-word, Tibetanswise, dumb, and middling alikewould have a hard time believing it.74 Zur-mkhar-ba makes the Four Tantras a sastra, a wellknown genre that in Buddhism denotes highly regarded writings by realized masters, but not the work of the Buddha himself.75 In one essay he builds three positionson the outside the Four Tantras is Buddha-word, on the inside it is a sastra written by an Indian scholar, and secretly (this always connotes the deepest truth) it is a sastra written by a Tibetan. Then he shows the first two to be untenable. The text mentions tea, not typically
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mentioned in Indian sastras; it describes diagnostic methods using pulse and urine, not known in Indian medicine: these and other facts show the text must be a Tibetan composition. This kind of evidence, noted even prior to Zur-mkhar-ba,76 is emblematic of the empiricist mentality and historical sense that the medical writers could muster. And once again Gling-sman, writing in eastern Tibet in the eighteenth century, illustrates this mentality even more clearly: Indian medical texts like the Astangahrdaya consider goat meat to be good, while the Four Tantras considers it to be one of the worst kinds of meat; this shows the Tibetan character of the Four Tantras, a work that accords with the cold climate of Tibet.77 What illustrates the tension surrounding such empiricism is the striking fact that sDe-srid himself accedes to so many of the same arguments about the Tibetan character of the Four Tantras, but still makes it Buddha-word: the medicine Buddha granted the text to the Tibetan compiler gYu-thog, who then fixed it in a few spots for the Tibetan context.78 We cannot read this position without thinking about sDe-srids political investment in the power of the word of the Buddha. But the risks in making the medical root text anything but the word of the Buddha are already evident a century earlier in Zurmkhar-bas obvious caution: how he saves his most radical statement for a separate essay;79 how in his more widely known commentary he is oblique, avoiding overt discussion of Tibetanness and focusing rather on the status of kinds of sastra;80 and how in a third work he bemoans the delicacy of the question, insisting that in the end it is undecidable and what is really important is to realize that the Four Tantras is highly valuable and should be respected as if it were Buddha-word.81 It is hard to say what the real dangers were in terms of concrete resources or political favor; surely the actors at the time didnt know either, even if they felt a risk. But when figures like Zur-mkhar-ba and even Glingsman made moves to carve out a space for the critical and physicalistic emphasis of medical science, they cov ered their trail (and tails) at as many bends in the road as they could, maintaining the appearance of orthodoxy and the status of Buddhist verities all the while. sDe-srid for his part seems to have been less nervous, if more bifurcated, arguing authoritatively both for Buddhist authority and greater empirical precision and accountability without much indication of a tension. A curious footnote, however, and one that perhaps shows sDesrids own tension after all, is his evident distaste for his predecessor Zur-mkhar-ba. It is striking how sDe-srid at one point overtly claims to have fleshed out what was just a rough account by Zur-mkhar-ba when in fact he has copied Zur-mkhar-bas words exactly.82 He also takes the very odd step of attacking Zur-mkhar-ba in the course of recounting his biographyfor being vain to think he knows it all and for criticizing others too
much. In the etiquette of Tibetan literary culture this is unheard of. Contemporary medical scholars see it as a sign of sDe-srids dispute with Zur-mkhar-bas Karmapa patrons, who were anathema to the Dalai Lamas government. But sDe-srid himself makes it very clear that much of his displeasure is with Zur-mkhar-bas unacceptable opinion about the Tibetan authorship of the Four Tantras, an unacceptability that he characterizes as disrespect for ones own medical forbears.83 The Alternate Space of Medicine The high stakes of empiricist leanings for the learned centers of medicine in Tibet have as their background the larger debate about the value of an individuals direct experience vis--vis doctrinal system. We have seen how that larger issue had specific valences for medicine: personal experience was sometimes construed as more valid than system and as capable of producing innova tion. But personal experience also fleshes out system, and even owes its existence to systemas when foreign physicians, invited by the Dalai Lama, teach new tech niques that Tibetan physicians then practice. It has been instructive to compare the salience of experience in medicine with its status in scholastic Buddhist discussions, a comparison which has suggested, for one thing, that medicine seems to have had more tolerance for the innovation that direct experience sometimes fosters. Much of that difference is doubtless attributable to the higher investment that the Tibetan state, beginning with the Sakya period and culminating in the establishment of the government in the Potala, had in Buddhismits ethics, its institutions, its imagery, its ritual regalia, the status of its scholastic doctrine. But once we take stock of how fundamental the entire universesymbolic and actualof Buddhism had become to the society that that government represented, we confront the limitations of the heuristic distinction between Buddhism and medicine. With much mutual indebtedness, both participated in the larger mix that constituted the texture of Tibetan life, especially in the very cosmopolitan context of the Tibetan capital during the centuries we are considering here. Medicine had some very special things, symbolic and otherwise, to offer to that mix, a mix that we would still do well to consider under the banner of Buddhism in this more expansive sense, even if medicine sometimes represented a dissent from Buddhist authority. In essence medicine provided a special spin to experience, even if it shared an interest in it with mainstream Buddhist scholasticism. For both of the kinds of experience identified in this paper, the medical versions were distinctively all about the physical. The thick world of practice that informed nyams-yig writing, for example, had for the physician everything to do with the idiosyncrasy of the material worldthe texture of daily rou-
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tine; the cultivation of intimacy with the teacher; the development of dexterity, an often-cited virtue; the trek into the mountains; familiarity with plants; and most of all, the variability and indeed unpredictability of the course of illness itself. Even more so, the force of the second, more specific sense we have identified for experiencedirect contact with the empiricalwas about the authority of the physical world. Here especially, the evidence that polemicists like Zur-mkhar-ba and Gling-sman could cite to decide a dispute was there to be seen by the eye: unpredictable again, it had a reality of its own, of a different order beyond the grasp of system. The case par excellence of the recalcitrant physical fact that exceeds system is the death of the patient. I speculated above that its possibility on the horizon defined the field of medicine in fundamental ways. I would add now that this special allegiance to materiality conjoined, in the particular historical circumstances of seventeenth-century Tibet, with a recognition on the part of the Dalai Lamas government that medicine a special service in a Buddhist society. The externality of the physical world became, as it were, the rare case of a reality standing outside the system, and it therefore could serve as a checkpoint, an independent confirmation of an otherwise all-encompassing Buddhist world. I suspect that these are the stakes in the channel debate: medicine offered a vehicle by which to confirm the truth of the systems of tantric yoga, in turn a very key ingredient of the reincarnation system that founded, for example, the office of the Dalai Lama. Even if empirical evidence was not actually forthcoming to prove the physical existence of the tantric channels, the medical thinkers almost made it so. But however the debate came to be decided (and it was decided differently by each of the commentators) the important point is that the in/visibility of the channelsand the question of what could be seen, or proven through dissectionhad been put on the table, forever to be reckoned with. One of the things that the Lhasa government did was to create a special institutional space for medical learning, a place apart, to a degree not seen before. But we also see that medicine had already created a place apart for itself by virtue of its distinctive kinds of arguments and practices. Still, in the volatile case of the authorship of the Four Tantras, the limits and risks of such a separation can be seen, and so an argument against the Buddhas authorship could only be advanced with extreme caution and some amount of dissimulation. But it would be wrong to conceive of these medical thinkers as thoroughgoing empiricists who only had to stay out of the punishing way of the Church. Buddhist ideology and tantric truths were as basic to the medical writers worldviews as their interest in saving patients from death. What remains interesting is how the dynamic also
went in the other direction: something like tantra could also serve to legitimize the medical. We saw this in the debate on the heart-tip, where tantra-generated gender tropes provided a level of meaning behind the physical, thereby making sense of an otherwise inexplicable assertion of the root text. In fact, tantric theorizations of subtle matter helped medical description on a number of occasions to talk about imperceptible functions in the body.84 If, then, we find an uneasy tension remaining between the claims of perceptibility and the claims of soteriological transformation, the tension may turn out to be mainly in our eyes. In the particular circumstance of seventeenth-century Buddhist Tibet, medicine helped provide the government with the grounds for an episteme in which the ideals and images of religion could coexist with the everyday practices of governance and power to display a coherent universe.
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NOTES I am grateful to Charles Hallisey for conversations on this essay, and to Yangga Trarong of the Tibetan Medical College in Lhasa and Thupten Phuntsok of the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing for much information on medicine in Tibet. Space constraints have limited the documentation I could provide for this article. 1Dar-mo sMan-rams-pa Blo-bzang-chos-grags (b. 1638), Rus pai dum bu sum brgya drug cui skor bshad pa, in Bod lugs gso rig sman rtsis ched rtsom phyogs bsdus (Lhasa: sMan-rtsis Khang, 1996), 224, excerpted from his unpublished gSer mchan rnam bkra glegs bam gan mdzod. 2The degree of the revolution in European science in the early modern period is itself subject to question: see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 3I took a similar approach to the issues of individualized selfhood, the writing of autobiography in Tibet, and modernity in Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 4The common Tibetan terms are myong-ba and nyams, or some combination thereof. See Janet Gyatso, Healing Burns with Fire: The Facilitations of Experience in Tibetan Buddhism, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67:1 (1999): 11347. 5The following is based largely on Zur-mkhar-ba Blo-gros rGyal-po (b. 1509), sMan pa rnams kyis mi shes su mi rung bai shes bya spyii khog dbubs (Chengdu: Si-khron Mi-rigs-dpe-skrunkhang, 2001), 287321; and modern surveys such as dKonmchog-rin-chen, Bod kyi gso rig chos byung baiduryai phreng ba (Lanzhou: Kansuu Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1992); and Khro-ru Tshe-rnam, Bod lugs gso rig slob grva rim byung gi lo rgyus gsal bai gtam dngul dkar me long, in Bod sman slob gso dang zhib jug 1996.1: 1-11. See also Christopher Beckwith, The Introduction of Greek Medicine into Tibet in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries, in Journal of the American Oriental Society 99:2 (1979): 297313, and Fernand Meyer, Gso-ba Rigpa: Le systme mdical tibtain (Paris: Centre National de la Re
94
cherche Scientifique, 1981). 6Zur-mkhar-ba, sMan pa rnams, 2919. 7[gYu-thog Yon-tan mgon-po], bDud rtsi snying po yan lag brgyad pa gsang ba man ngag gi rgyud (Lhasa: Bod-ljongs Midmangs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1992) (hereafter cited as Four Tantras). 8See Christopher Cullen, Yian: The Origins of a Genre of Chinese Medical Literature, in Innovation in Chinese Medicine, ed. Elizabeth Hsu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 297323. 9See Claus Vogel, ed., Vagbhata's Astangahrdayasamhita, the First Five Chapters of its Tibetan Version (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1965); Vagbhata, Vagbhata's Astangahrdayasamhita, ed. Rahul Peter Das and Ronald Eric Emmerick (Groningen: Forsten, 1998); and R. E. Emmerick, Sources of the Four Tantras, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlndischen Gesellschaft (Wiesbaden) 3:2 (1977): 113542. 10The Tibetan labels are lhan-thabs, sman-sbyor, khrungs-dpe, and lag-len. 11Zur-mkhar-ba, sMan pa rnams, and sDe-srid Sangs-rgyasrgya-mtsho, dPal ldan gso ba rig pai khog bugs legs bshad baiduryai me long drang srong dgyes pai dga ston (Lanzhou: Kansuu Mirigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1982) (hereafter cited as Khog bugs). There are earlier examples from at least the fourteenth century, yet to be studied by modern scholars. 12Sometimes a work self-identifies as a nyams-yig, e.g., Kongsprul Yon-tan-rgya-mtsho (181399), Tsho byed las dang po la nye bar mkhor bai zin tig gces par btus pa bdud rtsii thigs pa, in gSo rig skor gyi rgyun mkho gal che ba bdam sgrigs, ed. Yon-tan-rgyamtsho et al. (Beijing: Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1988), 2. 13E.g., sDe-dge-bla-sman Chos-grags-rgya-mtsho (eighteenth century) Nad sman sprod pai nyams yig, in gSo rig skor gyi rgyun mkho gal che ba bdam sgrigs, ed. Yon-tan-rgya-mtsho et al. (Beijing: Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1988), 41718. 14See sDe-srid Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho, T echniques of Lamaist Medical Practice, Being the Text of Man ngag yon tan rgyud kyi lhan thabs zug rngui tsha gdung sel ba i katpu ra dus min chi zhags gcod pai ral gri (Leh: S. W. Tashigangpa, 1970), 566 and 5689. 15Gong-sman dKon-mchog-phan-dar (151177), Nyams yig rgya rtsa: The Smallest Collection of Gong-sman Dkon-mchog-phandars Medical Instructions to the Students (Leh: Lharje Tashi Yangphel Tashigang, 1969). Cf. the sources listed by sDe-srid, Techniques, 5669. 16sDe-srid, Techniques, 5667. 17sDe-dge-bla-sman, Nad sman, 401. 18Kong-sprul, Tsho byed, 13. 19Zur-mkhar-ba Blo-gros-rgyal-po already notes that the Four Tantras bShad brgyud is rarely read: rGyud bzhi'i 'grel pa mes po'i zhal lung (Beijing: Krung-go'i Bod-kyi-shes-rig-dpe-skrunkhang, 1989), vol. 1, 95 (hereafter cited as Mes poi). Cf. sDesrid, Techniques, 566. Certainly by the twentieth century, physicians almost always use recent nyams-yigs as their actual handbooks, usually Kong-sprul, Tsho byed, or one of those by mKhyen-rab-nor-bu (18831962). 20Kong-sprul, Tsho byed, 323; Ju Mi-pham, bDud rtsi snying poi rgyud kyi grel pa drang srong zhal lung las dum bu bzhi pa phyi ma rgyud kyi rtsa mdo chu mdoi tika, in gSo rig skor gyi rgyun mkho gal che ba bdam sgrigs, ed. Yon-tan-rgya-mtsho et al. (Beijing:
Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1988), 2602. 21See dKon-mchog-rin-chen, Bod kyi gso rig, 187 and 188. 22Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Textual Scholarship, Medical Tradition, and Mahayana Buddhist Ideals in Tibet, Journal of Indian Philosophy 31 (2003): 62141. Cf. sDe-srid, Techniques, 569, emphasizing his own recourse to authoritative works (lung) and reasoning (rigs), even after arguing that experience is most essential. 23I.e., lung (Skt. agama); rigs (Skt. yukti); and myong-ba (Skt. not standard). See, e.g., Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 3; sDe-srid, Techniques, 569.5. 24(rTag)-dpyad (Skt.vicara) is sometimes a synonym for myongba: Byams-pa-phrin-las [quoting sDe-srid], sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi khrungs rabs dang mdzad rjes dad brgyai padma rnam par bzhad pai phreng ba, in Byams pa phrin las kyi gsung rtsom phyogs bsgrigs (Beijing: Krung-goi Bod-kyi-shesrig-dpe-skrun-khang, 1997), 415. 25E.g., sDe-srid, Techniques, 566, railing against nyams-len byed-mi mi-dug (those who are not people who practice), even while also insisting on the need for learning. Cf. sMingling Ngag-dbang-sangs-rgyas-dpal-bzangs criticism of Darmo and others who are attached to the words of the Great Tantra (Four Tantras) but fail to do practice; leaving behind clinical examination, they murder patients. Quoted by Byams-pa-phrin-las, Gangs ljongs gso rig bstan pai nyin byed rim byon gyi rnam thar phyogs bsgrigs (Beijing: Mi-rigs-dpe-skrunkhang, 2000), 318. 26Gyatso, Healing Burns with Fire. 27Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 16501750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2526, 47785, 53540. 28For an early example of death as a key issue in medical ethics, see Sum-ston-pa Ye-shes-gzungs (twelfth century), 'Grel ba 'bum chung gsal sgron nor bu'i 'phreng mdzes, in gYu thog cha lag bco brgyad (Lanzhou: Kansu'u Mi-rigsdpeskrun-khang, 1999), vol. 1, especially 297 seq. 29Tib. dngos-su-mthong-zhing or mngon-sum-du. 30Cf., for example,Candrakirtis arcane analysis of the status of things that are directly perceived: Mervyn Sprung, trans., Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 60-63. 31[gYu-thog], Four Tantras, 27 and 35. 32[gYu-thog], Four Tantras, 375, 560, and 17. The last two explanations for the sex of a child are standard in Indic Ayurveda. 33Byang-pa rNam-rgyal-dpal-bzang (13951475), bShad rgyud kyi grel chen bdud rtsii chu rgyun (Chengdu: Si-khron Mirigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 2001), 90. 34Byang-pa bKra-shis-dpal-bzang, dPal ldan bshad pai rgyud kyi grel pa bklag pa don tham chad grub pa (photocopy of ms.), 63a82a. 35Yan-dgon-pa rGyal-mtshan-dpal (121358), rDo rje lus kyi sbas bshad, in The Collected Works (Gsun 'bum) of Yan-dgon-pa Rgyal-mtshan-dpal (Thimphu: Kunsang Topgey, 1976), vol. 2, 4345. 36sKyem-pa Tshe-dbang (fifteenth century), rGyud bzhii rnam bshad (Xining: mTsho-sngon Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 2000), 129.
95
Mes poi, 133, 152, and 159. Mes poi, 152 seq. 39Tib. bskyed cing. Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 162. He also says that lalana and rasana are the basis (gzhi) of the white and black soul channels (133); or exist in connection (dang brelba) with them (165). 40Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 155. 41Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 133.1012. This srog-rtsa is different from the black and white srog-rtsa specified under the heading of the connecting channels in the mature body. See also Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 166.2022 seq. Zur-mkhar-ba and others also consider the Four Tantras fourth kind of channel, the life channel, as a place to juxtapose the tantric system of channels, but these discussions largely quote tantric sources and avoid specific medical anatomy: Mes poi, 16674. I will examine the interesting details of this debate in a longer publication. 42Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 133. 43Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi , 154. 44Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi , 133 and 154. 45Mi-thad-pa. Cf. sDe-srid Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho, gSo ba rig pai bstan bcos sman blai dgongs rgyan rgyud bzhii gsal byed bai dur sngon poi ma lli ka (Leh: D. L. Tashigang, 1981), vol. 2 [ck], 152 (hereafter cited as Blue Beryl). He calls this view stupid. 46sDe-srid, Blue Beryl, vol. 2, 1734. 47Compare sDe-srid, Blue Beryl, vol. 2, 151 seq., and Zurmkhar-ba, Mes poi, 153 seq. 48See, e.g., Kong-sprul Blo-gros-mtha-yas, rNal byor bla na med pai rgyud sde rgya mtshoi snying po bsdus pa zab mo nang di don nyung ngui tshig gis rnam par grol ba sab don snang byed, in Zam mo nang gi don zhes bya bai gzhung gi rtsa grel, ed. Karma Rang-byung-rdo-rje and Kong-sprul Yontan-rgya-mtsho (Xining: mTsho-sngon Bod-lugs-gso-rig-slobgrva-chen-mo, 1999), 57333. This is reportedly also the position of a Four Tantras commentary by Ju Mi-pham. For a recent example by the twentieth-century scholar Tsultrim Gyaltsen, see Francis Garrett and Vincanne Adams, The Three Channels in Tibetan Medicine, Traditional South Asian Medicine, forthcoming 2004. 49Gling-sman bKra-shis, gSo ba rig pai gzhung rgyud bzhii dka grel (Chengdu: Si-khron Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1988), 445. 50Gling-sman, gSo ba rig pai gzhung, 46; material = gdos bcas. 51Cited in Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 6967. Cf. Byang-pa bKra-shis-dpal-bzang, dPal ldan phyi ma brgyud kyi grel pa rin po chei bang mdzod dgos dod byung ba (incomplete photocopy of ms.), 2939. 52[gYu-thog], Four Tantras, 560: ci phyi glo snying g.yas g.yon phyogs med kyang / snying gi rtse mo de ltar bstan pai phyir. 53Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 697. 54Zur-mkhar-ba, Mes poi, 698. 55Gling-sman, gSo ba rig pai gzhung, 4778. 56Gling-sman, gSo ba rig pai gzhung, 478: bDag gis ni pho mo mang poi ro bshas pa mthong / Rang gis kyang gri snying blangs pas pho mo thams cad snying rtse cung zad g.yon phyogs brang ngos la bsten pa mthong.
38Zur-mkhar-ba,
37Zur-mkhar-ba,
and Adams, Three Channels, 19. an overview of the period, see Tsipon Shakabpa, A Political History of Tibet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); and Luciano Petech, China and Tibet in the Early XVIIIth Century: History of the Establishment of Chinese Protectorate in Tibet (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972). 59An admirable beginning is Franoise Pommaret, ed., Lhasa in the Seventeenth Century: The Capital of the Dalai Lamas (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 60The archival sources for this period are substantial, but our information depends for the moment largely on the secondary work of contemporary Tibetan scholars who are systematically combing the lengthy auto/biographies of the key figures in the period; examples include dKon-mchog Rinchen, Bod kyi gso rig, and some of the essays in Byams-paphrin-las, Byams pa phrin las kyi gsung rtsom. 61The physician is styled (R)manaho. dKon-mchog-rinchen, Bod kyi gso rig, 99; Byams-pa-phrin-las, Gangs ljongs gso rig bstan pai nyin byed, 315, quoting the Fifths autobiography, Dukulai gos bzang. 62dKon-mchog-rin-chen, Bod kyi gso rig, 1004; Byams-paphrin-las, sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi, 41417. 63Byams-pa-phrin-las, sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi, 417 seq. 64Yuri Parfionovitch, Gyurme Dorje, and Fernand Meyer, eds., Tibetan Medical Paintings: Illustrations to the Blue Beryl Treatise of Sangye Gyamtso (16531705), 2 vols. (London: Serindia Publications, 1992). For a history of the set, see Byams-pa-phrinlas, Bod kyi g so rig rgyud bzhii nang don mtshon pai sman thang bris chai skor la rags tsam dpyad pa, in Byams pa phrin las kyi gsung rtsom, 37081. 65Byams-pa-phrin-las, sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi, 4256, quoting sDe-srids Blue Beryl. 66For example, he notes that when you look at an actual body you see that the heart tip faces left in both male and female: Byams-pa-phrin-las, sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi, 4256. 67dmar khrid mdzub tshugs su ngo sprod sngon med kyi bris cha... Byams-pa-phrin-las, sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi, 424, quoting sDe-srids mChod sdong dzam gling rgyan gcig rten gtsug lag khang dang bcas pai dkar chag, f. 281. 68Byams-pa-phrin-las, sDe srid sangs rgyas rgya mtshoi, 419, quoting sDe-srids Baidurya Ser po. sDe-srids mChod sdong is also a key source here: it has been studied by Kurtis Schaeffer, Controlling Time and Space in Lhasa, paper delivered to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Toronto, November 2002. 69For striking images of the rituals of the Tibetan state by the mid-twentieth century, see Hugh Richardson, Ceremonies of the Lhasa Year, ed. Michael Aris (London: Serindia, 1993). 70Zur-mkhar-ba, rGyud bzhi bka dang bstan bcos rnam par dbye ba mun sel sgron me, in Bod kyi sman rtsis ched r tsom phyogs bsdus, ed. Bod Rang-skyong-ljongs sMan-rtsis-khang (Lhasa: Bod-ljongs Mi-dmangs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1986), 64. 71See also Samten Karmay, The Four Tibetan Medical Treatises and their Critics, reprinted in The Arrow and the Spindle: Studies in History, Myths, Rituals and Beliefs in Tibet (Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 1998), 22837. When Karmay first published this article in 1990, many key sources,
58For
57Garrett
96
including those by Zur-mkhar-ba, were not accessible. 72Karmay, Four Tibetan Medical Treatises, 230, n. 15. Others who argued for gYu-thogs authorship included Bodong Phyogs-las-rnam-rgyal (13761451) and sTag-tshang Shes-rab rin-chen (b. 1405). 73See Janet Gyatso, "The Logic of Legitimation in the Tibetan Treasure Tradition," History of Religions 33:1 (1993): 97134. 74Zur-mkhar-ba, rGyud bzhi bka, 70. 75Cf. Zur-mkhar-bas detailed discussion in Mes poi, 4 seq. 76See list in Karmay, Four Tibetan Medical Treatises, 2347. 77See Gling-sman, gSo ba rig pai gzhung, 48. 78sDe-srid, Khog bugs, 2746. 79See n. 70 above. 80Mes poi, 212. Here he vacillates between calling Four Tantras sastra and a category of scriptures composed by figures other than the Buddha but which in some sense were inspired by the Buddha (rjes-su-gnang-bai bka) and which therefore still count as canonical . I am saving the details of this intricate argument for a longer study. 81Zur-mkhar-ba, sMan pa rnams, 31113. 82sDe-srid, Blue Beryl, vol. 2, 151.4; he only says Zur, which could refer to Zur-mkhar-bas predecessor, but I think the ambiguity is disingenuous. See n. 47 above. Other sections in Blue Beryl are also closely dependent upon Mes poi. 83sDe-srid, Khog bugs, 34955; see especially 3523. 84An example would be the invocation of the invisibility of the tantric central channel as a model for the imperceptibility of certain fine channels connected to the liver: Bri-gung dKon-mchog-gro-phan-dbang-po (b. 1631), gSo ba rig pai gzhung lugs chenpo dpal ldan rgyud bzhii dka gnad dogs sel gyi zin bris mdo, in Bri gung gso rig gces bsdus, ed. Bri-gung Chos-grags et al. (Beijing: Mi-rigs-dpe-skrun-khang, 1999), 1348.
German Orientalism: Introduction

Jennifer Jenkins
Edward Said famously claimed that Germany did not have a protracted sustained national interest in the Orient and thus no Orientalism of a politically motivated sort.1 With this statement he omitted Germany and German scholarship from his exploration of the power/knowledge nexus that legitimated and sustained the project of European colonial empire. There is a possibly misleading aspect to my study, he writes, where, aside from an occasional reference, I do not exhaustively discuss the German developments after the inaugural period dominated by [the Arabist Silvestre de] Sacy. Any work that seeks to provide an understanding of academic Orientalism and pays little attention to scholars like Steinthal, Mller, Becker, Goldziher, Brockelmann, Nldeke to mention only a handfulneeds to be reproached, and I freely reproach my self.2 Said writes that German Orientalism was interested in the professional study of texts rather than in the exercise of colonial power. Lacking a direct national interest, Germanys Orientalist scholarship existed at one remove from colonial practice and administration. Germany had in common with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism ... a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient, Said writes; yet there was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval.3 In short, Saids definition of Orientalism seems to leave no room for an exploration of the German case, which has consequently remained both underexplored and undertheorized until recently.4 The question, however, can and should be posed: Did Germany develop an Orientalist tradition of the sort described by Said? As the articles in this issue demonstrate, the answer is yes and no. In Saids own words, Germany shared a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient, and it is well known that German Orientalists filled prominent university positions in a number of European countries where they engaged directly in the work of empire building.5 Tuska Beness article in this issue, for example, sets out the case for German Orientalists in Russia. The presence and international reputation of German philologists, linguists, historians, philosophers, and archaeologists in the world of nineteenth-century Oriental studies is also beyond dispute.6 So how can this tradition of scholarship be assessed in a way that productively connects it to histories of imperialism and the exercise of power? Possible approaches include an inquiry into the flexibility of Saids definition on the one hand, and an exploration of the distinctive characteristics of German Orientalism on the other.7 Can Saids definition of Orientalism be thought through in a way that allows for an analysis of German developments? Alternatively, which aspects of Orientalism become visible if the German case is analyzed? As scholarship has recently highlighted the presence of a variety of OrientalismsPolish, Ottoman, Persian, and Japanesea general broadening and rethinking of the topic seems to be in order.8 Saids definition of Orientalism is conceptually broad but historically specific. Orientalism is the corporate institution for dealing with the Orientdealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.9 Said ties this definition to the creation and maintenance of a colonial empire on the model of the British and French. Beginning with the work of Sacy, Said outlines a structure of thought and feeling in which scholarship aided and abetted territorial acquisition and provided crucial service to the creation of European hegemony over the East. Representations of the Orient gained currency through their portrayal of non-European realities and from their role in colonial policies. Clichs about the manifestly different ... world of Arabic culture and religion also acquired legitimacy and popularity through their constant circulation. With Orientalism, writes Said, knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently,

Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia

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Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia: Introduction

Pollock: Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia: Introduction

Guha: Transitions and Translations

Guha: Transitions and Translations

Guha: Transitions and Translations

Guha: Transitions and Translations

Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India: The Kavitavali of Tulsidas

Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India

Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India

Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India

Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India

last line (?). Obscure second line. Weak last line.

Originally incomplete (?).

S+Hoshiarpur1, Jodhpur1, Sitapur1

7.127+ (L)+S 7.127 ++ (L)+ S1 (L)+S

Bharatpur3, Hoshiarpur1, Jaipur6, Sitapur1, S+Sitapur1, Hoshiarpur 1

Obscure and hy permetrical last line.

Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

Busch: The Anxiety of Innovation

The Making of a Munshi

Alam & Subrahmanyam: The Making of a Munshi

Alam & Subrahmanyam: The Making of a Munshi

Alam & Subrahmanyam: The Making of a Munshi

Alam & Subrahmanyam: The Making of a Munshi

Alam & Subrahmanyam: The Making of a Munshi

The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape

Sharma: The City of Beauties in the Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape

Sharma: The City of Beauties in the Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape

Sharma: The City of Beauties in the Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape

Sharma: The City of Beauties in the Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape

Gyatso: The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority

Gyatso: The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority

Gyatso: The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority

Gyatso: The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority

Gyatso: The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority

Gyatso: The Authority of Empiricism and the Empiricism of Authority

German Orientalism: Introduction

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