Introduction

Introduction Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India Allison Busch Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199765928 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199765928.001.0001 Introduction A Forgetting of Things Past Allison Busch DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199765928.003.0001 Abstract and Keywords This chapter introduces literature in Brajbhasha and outlines the premises of the book. One aim is to expose some of the fault lines in the historiography of premodern Hindi literature. One reason that Brajbhasha court literature has not attracted the kind of deep, sympathetic study it merits is because literary historians have been too quick to stamp the stigma of decadence on late precolonial traditions. The study of literature has been trapped in stale paradigms of Mughal decline that have long been discredited in other disciplines. This chapter proposes a new approach to classical Hindi literature that recognizes the value of this early modern archive both as literature and for Keywords: , Brajbhasha, historiography, court literature, Mughal, early modern Literature and its Discontents Imagine an English-literature classroom in which Milton was derided for retelling a story using the classical epic form. The remonstrating teacher would shake her head and scold the poet for imitating Virgil, dismiss his Latinate vocabulary and style as pure pedantry, and wonder why he did not derive his subject matter from personal observation, writing poems that expressed his inner feelings in the language of everyday speech. Or imagine reading a history of French literature that privileged fourteenth- and fifteenth-century hymnals or Page 1 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 15 January 2020 Introduction Racine, and Molière on the grounds that their work is inadequately spiritual, too elaborate and contrived in its classical allusions, and morally reprehensible because it is the product of a dissolute aristocratic milieu. Whereas these scenarios are scarcely possible to envision in the context of European literary history, it is an actual and alarming fact that Indian courtly literature from the same period exhibiting similar classicizing tendencies has been shunned by modern Hindi scholars. An astonishing number of discussions of classical Hindi literature, by which I mean the (high-style) texts produced in Indian courts from the late sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth, center on the that it fails to live up to the standards of a literature composed in another (p.4) England. with Urdu literary historiography. The gist of his complaint closely mirrors my sentiments about the modern reception of classical Hindi literature: writing a history of it. You are under no obligation to do so, and it would be much better for all concerned if you spared yourself the labour and your readers the disappointment.1 Like Russell, I began the study of my subject with an acute bout of disappointment. As a graduate student with a keen interest in both Hindi and Sanskrit, I was excited to learn of the existence of a classical courtly Hindi literary tradition. I remember the dismay I felt when I began to learn more about it. No one, it seemed, could recommend the subject to a prospective researcher. The scholars to whom I turned, first in English and later in Hindi, proclaimed that was a decadent literature. It was completely unnatural. It was mannered. It was derivative. It was shockingly sensual and thus morally suspect. It was, above all (or so the line of reasoning generally went), the product of a declining late-medieval culture. This decline was variously attributed to a generalized Indian cultural fatigue in the lead up to colonialism; feudal social conditions; the supposed depredations of Mughal rule, particularly from the time religious sentiments after the glorious bhakti (devotional) period had played itself out. The reasons varied somewhat, but the story was largely uniform: a tale of literary disaster. It is difficult to forget my first impressions of Keshavdas (fl. 1600), Hindi literature's preeminent classicist, afforded by K. B. Jindal's A History of Hindi Literature, the first source I happened to consult. Sanskrit, the classical literature par excellence, provided a defining frame of reference for virtually all Page 2 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 15 January 2020 Introduction early South Asian vernaculars,2 and had become foundational to courtly Hindi literature in particular from the late sixteenth century. Here is how Jindal views this legacy: In vain one seeks for originality in Keshav[das]. We can always find Sanskrit parallels for Keshav's verses, while most of them are verbatim (p.5) down by is almost a vernacular rendering of Dandin's Sanskrit work Thirteen chapters are devoted to hairsplitting differences between the himself from the trammels of scholastic training, he can be very would have ranked among the greatest. As it is, his poetry lacks that genuine religious glow which took Sur and Tulsi far beyond their contemporary.3 In the following chapters, a less judgmental reading of Keshavdas and other poets, engaging seriously with their preference for classicism and trying to make sense of it for their literary world, will prove these statements to be false. But it is not a simple question of correcting a few inaccuracies in the scholarly record. If only such extremes of expository tactlessness could be dismissed as the cantankerousness of a single unsympathetic literary historian. Instead, Jindal's discussion of Keshavdas epitomizes a constellation of larger hermeneutic problems in the field of Hindi studies. Consider for a moment the judgment that established this measure, and when? Nobody would dispute that religious genres are an important component of the premodern Hindi canon, but this vast, and vastly interesting, canon encompasses far more than devotional songs. I share the frustration of an anonymous colleague at a conference on Keshavdas in Tulsidas, a revered bhakti poet, recycled classical materials himself.) In the very same century in which Keshavdas (and Tulsi) mined Sanskrit poetry and literary theory for subject matter and stylistic protocols, French poets, too, returned to the classics and experimented with creating modern vernacular versions. It was quickly understood that vernacular writing need not be just a rustic idiom, a paltry substitute for Latin texts. Just as the North Indian poet Keshavdas felt emboldened to leave behind the Sanskrit of his forefathers to develop a beautifully, sophisticated form of Hindi writing, early modern French writers moved out from under the shadow of their own classical tradition and realized that its cultural dominance could now be challenged. Sophisticated Page 3 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 15 January 2020 Introduction vernacular literatures became not only possible but also much acclaimed in courtly circles in both Europe and India. The point is not that the trajectories of French and classical Hindi literary history should be (p.6) unreflectingly assumed to be analogous, although tracing cross-regional parallels in the early modern period is instructive. But it is cause for consternation that whereas Corneille and Racine were and remain celebrated in the French literary canon, Keshavdas and his fellow poets, once similarly celebrated, have become objects of routine denigration in modern Hindi literary criticism and what went right. It is unthinkable that European literary historians could subject seventeenth-century French poets to the treatment that Jindal and others have meted out to Keshavdas. A French department where new research on Racine or Corneille was not encouraged would be acknowledged as deficient; a library that possessed unpublished manuscripts of theirs and left them to molder would be denounced. What are the peculiar historical conditions that enable one culture to despise and largely forget their literary heritage while others embrace theirs? This book is, in part, an exploration of this question but it is, more centrally, an act of memory. I seek to recover the story of literature and to understand the vital cultural economy that gave rise to it. I want my readers to understand the rich aesthetic worlds of classical Hindi, as well as the vibrant scholarly lives and dynamic social histories of the poets who dignified the courts of early modern India with their literary achievements. Introducing Literature in Brajbhasha Khari Boli (current speech) that would much later be enshrined alongside English as one of independent India's two official languages. In the early modern period examined here, Hindi looked altogether different. Absent the standardizing imperatives of the modern nation-state, the linguistic terrain of old Hindi was populated by many dialects, and the poets who cultivated vernacular literature did not as a rule write the same language they spoke. Literature, particularly of the type composed in courtly settings, was considered a special arena of culture: it was formal, often tradition-bound, and could only be written in languages that, by a complex process, earned the dignity of being considered literary. poets, regardless of their birthplace or native idiom, wrote their Hindi texts in a specific literary dialect today called Brajbhasha (language of Braj) or, more informally, Braj, which has a story of its own in need of telling. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, a convenient if not absolute beginning point for literature, Brajbhasha was a newly ascendant form of (p. 7) Hindi. The social and religious processes, however, that would give rise to both the literary language and its name had been underway for more than fifty Page 4 of 22 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com).

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