Recently, I came across a book that exhaustively deals with the cultural history of the North in the 15th Century and is a veritable treasure trove of information, interpretation and analyses. Edited by Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, “After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India” was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. This book is one of the two products of a project on “North Indian Literary Culture (1450-1650)” that Francesca Orsini, Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, had led and Samira Sheikh, Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Katherine Butler Schofield, a well-regarded historian of music associated with King’s College London, were actively involved with.
The other book titled “Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India” has been edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield and published by Open Book Publishers. Its digital edition is freely available on the publishers’ website. As both the books run into more than a thousand pages, I will presently confine myself to discussing only the first one.
In addition to an excellent and long introduction by Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, “After Timur Left” contains 14 well-researched papers spread over nearly 500 pages. In the introduction, the editors emphasise the need to look at the 15th Century afresh because historians have focused their attention on the centralising activities of the Mughal, colonial and post colonial bureaucracies while largely ignoring the decentralising tendencies that expressed themselves in this pre-Mughal Century when politics and culture underwent considerable diversification and “democratisation of written culture” took place. New vernaculars arose and crystallised into literary languages. It also witnessed the rise of the strong Bhakti movement and the emergence of powerful voices of Ramanand (whose historicity is not beyond doubt), Kabir, Nanak, Raidas and Mira. Similarly, assertive regional polities too raised their heads during this Century. Simon Digby describes this phenomenon as “multi-locational nature of power” and informs us that because of the general disintegration and disorder, this period witnessed a large-scale destruction of Persian manuscripts that would have offered us a historical narrative of the times.
The book has been divided into four sections – States, Subjects, and Networks; Public Languages; Tellings of Kings, Sufis, Warriors; and Cultural Spaces and Literary Transactions. The first section contains only two papers – Simon Digby’s “After Timur Left: North India in the Fifteenth Century” and Sunil Kumar’s “Bandagi and Naukari: Studying Transitions in Political Culture and Service under the North Indian Sultanates, Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries”.
In the second section are included Richard M. Eaton’s “The Rise of Written Vernaculars: The Deccan 1450-1650”, Dilorom Karomat’s “Turki and Hindavi in the World of Persian: Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century”, Stefano Pellò’s “Local Lexis? Provincialising Persian in Fifteenth-Century North India”, and Samira Sheikh’s “Languages of Public Piety: Bilingual Inscriptions from Sultanate Gujarat. c. 1390-1538”. There are three papers in the third section. They include Aparna Kapadia’s “Universal Poet, Local Kings: Sanskrit, the Rhetoric of Kingship, and Local Kingdoms in Gujarat”, Ramya Sreenivasan’s “Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts in North India, c. 1370-1550” and Aditya Behl’s “Emotion and Meaning in Mirigavati: Strategies of Spiritual Signification in Hindavi Sufi Romances”. Éloïse Brac de la Perrière’s “The Art of the Book in India under the Sultanates”, Eva De Clercq’s “Apabhransha as a Literary Medium in Fifteenth-Century North India”, Imre Bangha’s “Early Hindi Epic Poetry in Gwalior: Beginnings and Continuities in the Ramayan of Vishnudas” and Francesca Orsini’s “Traces of a Multilingual World: Hindavi in Persian Texts” form the fourth and final section.
From Imre Bangha, a Hungarian lecturer in Hindi at Oxford University, we come to know about the first extant of Hindi Mahabharat that Vishnudas started writing in 1435 when his patron, the Gwalior ruler Dungarendra Singh, challenged him in his court to answer how five Pandavas were able to defeat one hundred Kauravas. He followed it up in 1442 with the first Hindi version of the other epic Ramayan. It was Dungarendra Singh’s successor Man Singh Tomar who emerged as a great patron of literature and music and is generally credited with shaping up of dhrupad as a well-defined form of North Indian music. Although Bangha does not mention dhrupad at all, one is tempted to hazard a guess. It is believed that before dhrupad came into vogue, Vishnupad was the prevalent form of highbrow singing, presently known as classical vocal music. Was Vishnudas the composer of these Vishnupads too? Only music historians can answer.
Éloïse Brac de la Perrière ponders over the question as to why no dated illuminated manuscript is known prior to the Gwalior Quaran of 1399 despite available historical evidence belonging to the early 14th Century attesting to the patronage extended to book production by the Indo-Islamic rulers. Aditya Behl shows that two countervailing forces were operating in the Sufi domain. On one hand, Qutban’s Hindavi Sufi romance “Mirigavati” offers the “perfect instance of the Sufis’ use of the Sanskritic technology of the sublimation of desire into divine love” in order to express their own ideology of Islamic monotheism and shows “their level of indigenisation”, and on the other the distinctive Sufi slant, the Persianate model of the masnavi, shows the integration of even a provincial sultanate like Jaunpur into the larger world of Islam. This leads Francesca Orsini to wonder why so few Hindavi words were used in the Persian Sufi texts.
