Making the War Come Alive

Abstract

Dalpat Rajpurohit demonstrates that although the late eighteenth-century poet Padmakar Bhatt composed in Brajbhasha, he incorporated metric and stylistic conventions from martial poetry found in multiple traditions. Certainly Padmakar drew on the rāso and Diṅgaḷ poetry of Rajasthan, but he worked on the basis of a knowledge of texts one might not expect, for example, the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas. Rajpurohit describes how techniques of martial poetry drawn from various sources made their way into the Brajbhasha poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows how this range provided Padmakar with the tools to construct a didactic account of war so that he could present Anupgir Gosain as an ideal Kshatriya warrior.