Early Modern India Literatures and Images, Texts and Languages Maya Burger, Nadia Cattoni (Eds.) Early Modern India EARLY MODERN INDIA Literatures and Images, Texts and Languages Edited by Maya Burger and Nadia Cattoni Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This book is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). The cover is subject to the Creative Commons License CC-BY-ND 4.0. Published at CrossAsia-eBooks, Heidelberg University Library 2019. The electronic open access version of this work is permanently available on the website of CrossAsia-eBooks: https://crossasia-books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/xasia urn: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-xabooks-387-2 doi: https://doi.org/10.11588/xabooks.387 Text © 2019 by the authors. Cover illustration: Tulasidasa, Rama-carita-manasa. Miniature, Sita presenting the garland to Rama. Hindi Manuscript 395. Wellcome Collection. Published under CC BY 4.0; https://wellcomecollection.org/works/r7at9dme ISBN 978-3-946742-45-6 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-3-946742-46-3 (PDF) Contents Acknowledgements ix Note on Transliteration xi List of Tables xiii List of Figures xv Maya Burger and Nadia Cattoni General Introduction xvii PART I LITERATURE AND VISUALITY Nadia Cattoni How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts? 3 John S. Hawley 1. When Blindness Makes for Sight 19 Heidi Pauwels 2. Reading Pictures: Towards a Synoptic Reading Combining Textual and Art Historical Approaches 39 Raman Sinha 3. Iconography of Tulsīdās 55 PART II PERSIAN ENCOUNTERS Allison Busch Reflections on Culture and Circulation in Early Modern India 73 Arthur Dudney 4. Persian-Language Education in Mughal India from Qaṣbah to Capital 79 Marc Tiefenauer 5. Upanikhat-i Garbha: A Mughal Translation into Persian of a Small Sanskrit Treatise on Embryology 93 v Contents PART III AROUND NĀTHS AND SANTS Maya Burger On the Nāth and Sant Traditions: Transmission, Yoga and Translationality 113 Imre Bangha 6. Shifts in Kabīr Contexts and Texts from Mughal to Modern Times 125 Minyu Zhang 7. The Making of Kabīr’s Rasa: A Case Study of North Indian Bhakti Intellectual History 173 Galina Rousseva-Sokolova 8. Female Voices and Gender Construction in North Indian Sant Poetry 191 Susanne Kempe-Weber 9. The Sabadavāṇī and its Relation to the Gorakhabāṇī: Establishing Jāmbhojī as the Supreme Yogi 205 Monika Horstmann 10. Nāthyoga in the Dādūpanth: The Ādibodhasiddhāntagrantha- yogaśāstra Attributed to Mohan Mevāṛau 219 Daniel Gold 11. To Go to Vrindavan—or Not: Refashioning Sant Tradition in the Eighteenth Century 239 PART IV JAINA AUTHORITATIVE FIGURES John E. Cort 12. ‘No one gives like the guru’: Devotion to the True Guru in Digambara Hindi Literature 255 Tillo Detige 13. ‘Guṇa kahūṃ śrī guru’: Bhaṭṭāraka Gītas and the Early Modern Digambara Jaina Saṅgha 271 vi Contents PART V QUESTIONS OF METRICS AND LOCAL LITERATURES Hiroko Nagasaki 14. The Metrical Style of Tulsīdās 289 Anne Murphy 15. Punjabi in the (Late) Vernacular Millennium 305 About the Editors and Contributors 329 vii Acknowledgements The University of Lausanne accepted to host and support the 12th International Conference on Early Modern Literatures in North India (ICEMLNI) and we are very grateful to our Alma Mater for its generous support. We also thank the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW) for their substantial help. The Foundation Dragon Bleu from Neuchâtel provided some bursaries to help young people to travel. We also thank the Département Interfacultaire d’Histoire et Sciences des Religions (DIHSR) for its financial contributions. Special thanks go to Jon Wilcox who harmonized the English throughout the volume and made valuable editorial comments, as well as to Rosina Pastore who assisted in the preparation of the volume. It goes without saying that the editors remain responsible for all remaining shortcomings. ix Note on Transliteration The contributions stem from different backgrounds, language horizons and scholarly approaches. We have decided to respect the different modes of trans- literation from one article to another. Though we have encouraged scholars to adhere to a unified system, preferences are strong, as well as habits. The diversity of languages also explains differences and specificity of each contribution. Most of the presentations (original script, transliteration, formatting) are proper to each article. A certain amount of standardization however seemed useful and the edi- tors chose to write Indian words that are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary without diacritics. We write for instance Upanishad, yogi instead of yogī; how- ever, if the word occurs in a compound with a word that is not in the dictionary, we use the diacritics, e. g., Nāthyogī. The English spelling rule is not applied to proper names which retain diacritics (Kṛṣṇa, Kabīr, etc.). xi List of Tables Marc Tiefenauer, Upanikhat-i Garbha: A Mughal Translation into Persian of a Small Sanskrit Treatise on Embryology Table 5.1 Translation procedures 97 Table 5.2 Combined translation procedures 98 Imre Bangha, Shifts in Kabīr Contexts and Texts from Mughal to Modern Times Table 6.1 Kumar Gandharva (Singing Emptiness) 163 Hiroko Nagasaki, Metrical Style of Tulsīdās Table 14.1 Metrical forms of major works 291 Table 14.2 Metrical forms of minor works 292 Table 14.3 Irregular stanzas in each chapter based on the Kāśīrāja edition 293 Table 14.4 Metrical forms under the category of śloka in the Rāmacaritamānasa 294 Table 14.5 The dohā by Tulsīdās according to the traditional mora grouping 298 Table 14.6 The mora grouping of dohā by ‘Bhānu’ 298 xiii List of Figures Nadia Cattoni, How to Think Pictures, How to Visualize Texts? Figure 1 ‘Asavari ragini, from a Ragamala series’ 14 John S. Hawley, When Blindness Makes for Sight Figure 1.1 ‘Just give me Gopāl for a second, my friend!’ 21 Figure 1.2 ‘I bow in praise before your lotus feet’ 23 Figure 1.3 ‘Everyone’s drenched in the mood of Govardhan Pūjā’ 26 Figure 1.4 ‘Hari—how I love, love my little Mādhav’ 27 Figure 1.5 ‘I just can’t wake him up, good woman’ 30 Figure 1.6 ‘Why, why go off to somebody else?’ 33 Figure 1.7 ‘His tiny little feet—she supports them, helps him walk’ 35 Figure 1.8 Sūrdās singing 37 Raman Sinha, Iconography of Tulsīdās Figure 3.1 Tulsīdās: A young Vaishnava Saint 57 Figure 3.2 Tulsīdās: An old Vaishnava Saint 57 Figure 3.3 Young Tulsīdās 58 Figure 3.4 Tulsīdās reciting Rāmcaritmānas in an audience 58 Figure 3.5 Tulsīdās with his disciples 59 Figure 3.6 Tulsīdās with a disciple 59 Figure 3.7 Tulsīdās on the river bank I 60 Figure 3.8 Tulsīdās on the river bank II 60 Figure 3.9 Tulsīdās in trance 62 Figure 3.10 Tulsīdās in Manikarnika Ghat 63 Figure 3.11 Tulsīdās with Rahīm 63 Minyu Zhang, The making of Kabīr’s Rasa: A Case Study of North Indian Bhakti Intellectual History Figure 7.1 An oblique type of still 177 Figure 7.2 A vertical type of still 177 xv Maya Burger and Nadia Cattoni General Introduction ‘The study of another culture must not be like the analysis and description of a piece of stone, but like listening in to a conversation.’ – F. Hardy Thinking research, delineating periods This book brings together a revised selection of the papers given at the 12th International Conference on Early Modern Literatures in North In­ dia (ICEMLNI) held at the University of Lausanne in the summer of 2015. As such, it continues the series of proceedings previously named Bhakti in Current Research (1982–2006) now referred to as Current Re- search on Early Modern Literatures in North India (since 2013). We speak of early modern in the sense adopted by the editors of the pre­ vious volume (Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India, 2018, see Introduction, p. xxvii–xxix), as a period with distinct and specific characteristics. Scholarship on the early modern period has emerged as one of the most aston­ ishing fields of research in recent years. Research interests have expanded to include as a characteristic the increasing complexity of circulation, mobility, and transcultural fertilization, responding to the notion of ‘connected histories’ coined by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others. Larger projects, such as Sheldon Pollock’s Literary Cultures in History, invite us to connect specific and spe­ cialized research situated in the period to larger pictures of the literary and intellectual histories of India in a dynamic and interactive process. Looking even briefly at the historiography of research in the field reveals many drastic changes over the years, some of which have turned out to be very productive and stimulating. This volume, like the previous ones, is testimony to research conducted in a field best seen as a mosaic of cultures and languages. Between the ancient world and modern idioms, the early modern creates research perspectives by looking back at Sanskrit and previous literatures and constructing comparative issues, as well as looking forward into modern literary productions. This is, of course, not to introduce a mere historical development, since literatures relate past and pre­ xvii Maya Burger and Nadia Cattoni sent in more intricate ways than linear development.1 The research in the field has expanded to include more investigations into connected histories, especially, but not only, with Islamicate cultures. The expansion of the field’s horizons, and the inclusion of new questions that go with that, account for the growing interest in the period and demand more collaboration among specialists.2 Bhakti, manuscript search, editing, and philology were among the keywords of the early publications of the research group (starting in 1979).