Did Surdas perform the Bhagavata-purana? What was required in Mughal India for a patron who did not belong to the Indian aesthetic tradition to become a true rasika of North Indian music? How was raga viewed and understood in the early 16th Century? How did epic-puranic kathas were translated, transmuted and performed in vernacular languages in the 15th and 16th Centuries? These and many other important questions concerning the cultural history of the so-called Hindi belt have been discussed in great detail in “Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India” that offers us a fabulous reading of 17 high-quality research papers written by eminent scholars and researchers like Muzaffar Alam, Allyn Miner, Allison Busch and John Stratton Hawley among others. The book has been edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield and published by Open Book Publishers. All the papers can be freely accessed at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/98781783741021#resources.
Muzaffar Alam is one of those front-ranking historians of medieval India who is highly regarded for his phenomenal mastery over primary sources and insightful analysis. In these troubled times when conscious political and intellectual attempts are being made to underestimate as well as undermine the process of cultural interaction between the Hindus and the Muslims and to underscore and highlight the hiatus between the two, Alam’s essay “World Enough and Time: Religious Strategy and Historical Imagination in an Indian Sufi Tale” comes as an eye opener. It deals with the Persian treatise “Mir’ at al-Makhluqat (Mirror of the Creatures) written in 1631-32 by eminent Mughal Sufi Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, who was a descendant of Shaikh ‘Abd al-Haqq of Rudauli, a town in the Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh. The Sufi saint draws upon a variety of Islamic and Puranic materials and tells or, rather re-tells the stories weaving them into a complex web of Islamic traditions and Hindu legends. He supposedly translates and comments upon a hoary Hindu text and offers his own version as a conversation between Mahadev, Parvati, and the sage Vasishtha, making a plea for them to be adapted to Muslim ideas and beliefs.
While Alam’s interest is primarily focused on showing how stories of this nature are “particularly amenable to reworking, experiments of combination, substitution, etc”, he also brings out the “generic resemblance” between this treatise and Bhavishya-purana – particularly in Mahadev’s prophecy about Adam and Prophet Muhammad. He also underlines how Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, while trying to reconciling the Hindu and Muslim traditions, manipulated them in such a way as to “give the Muslim tradition the upper hand.” Chishti establishes that while in Mahadev and Krishna, the eternal and divine truth manifested themselves in the earlier yugas (eras), they assumed finality only in the personality and teachings of Prophet Muhammad. Alam has also dealt with this treatise in his book “The Languages of Political Islam in India” while bringing out the political aspect of such endeavours.
John Stratton Hawley, whose translation of Surdas’s poetry features in the Murty Classical Library of India as “Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition” edited by Kenneth E. Bryant, has contributed a wonderful essay “Did Surdas Perform the Bhagavata-purana?” to this volume. Hawley informs us that “nowhere does Surdas come out and say that he is either translating or performing the Bhagavata”. As he makes it clear in his introduction to “Sur’s Ocean” and also reiterates in this essay, Surdas lived in the 16th Century but a large number of other poets composed padas in his name, thus turning his work into a veritable ocean –“Sur Sagar”. There was a conscious attempt in the 17th and 18th centuries to establish that Surdas modelled his “Sur Sagar” on the Bhagavata-purana and virtually translated it into Braj in a systematic fashion, replicating the great Sanskrit work. The essay also offers us this interesting piece of information that the Chaube Brahmins of Mathura complained to Vitthalnath, head of the Vallabhacharya’s Pushtimarg sect, against Nanddas, disciple of Vitthal and a major poet of the Pushtimarg, asking him to stop his disciple from translating the tenth book of the Bhagavata into Braj as it would ultimately cut into their own storytellers’ (kathavachak) business. Although in Hawley’s opinion, Surdas was not bound to Vallabha “in the same way” as Nanddas was, yet by the 17th Century they had come to be regarded as guru-brothers.
In “Raga in the Early Sixteenth Century” Allyn Miner bases his study of the ragas, ragamalikas and ragadhyanas on Qutban’s “Mirigavati” (1503) that contains a list of six male ragas and thirty-six female raginis. This gives us an idea about the ragas and raginis that were in vogue at that time and were being performed at royal court or musical soirees. While ragas were performed melodies, raga-raginis were basically the lists and ragadhyanas were visualisations of individual ragas and raginis. Qutban’s patron Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi himself was an accomplished musician and is credited with the creation of raga Jaunpuri. While dhrupad is generally associated with Man Singh Tomar of Gwalior, Qutban too mentions it, thus indicating a pre-history of this form.
Katherine Butler Schofield’s essay “Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika” offers an original insight into the making of a Mughal connoisseur who could literally “taste” the rasa, a highly complex concept of Sanskrit aesthetics, both intellectually and emotionally. She comes to the conclusion that these connoisseurs were more at ease with the shringar (erotic) rasa as compared with other esoteric rasas.
