{"title":"Muslim Mahākāvyas","authors":"Luther Obrock","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"In his essay on Muslim mahākāvyas, Luther Obrock studies exchanges between the cosmopolitan idioms of Sanskrit and Persian at pre-Mughal Sultanate courts. He introduces three remarkable texts: Udayaraja’s Rājavinoda, an encomium that praises the Muzaffarid Sultan Mahmud Begada of Gujarat using terms adapted from idealized representations of Hindu kingship; Kalyana Malla’s Sulamaccarita, a retelling of both the Biblical narrative of David and Bathsheba and the story of the jinn and the fisherman that appears in the Thousand and One Nights; and finally Shrivara’s Kathākautuka, a translation of Jami’s Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā that effectively transforms the Persian, Sufi-influenced masnavī into a Sanskrit kāvya of Shaivite devotion. These works can be understood as sites of cultural and literary encounter where poets and intellectuals experimented creatively to secure Sanskrit’s continuing relevance in the changing literary ecology of the regional sultanates.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"66 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114215488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Urdu as Persian","authors":"A. Dudney","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on the writings of Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan ‘Arzu’ (d. 1756), a critic of Persian literature and early theorist of what would come to be known as Urdu, Arthur Dudney shows how the sociolinguistic concept of ‘language planning’ can be used to understand the historical process through which a literary language is delineated and defined as such. Defining a new literary idiom involves identifying what that idiom is but also specifying what it is not. In the writings of Arzu and others, Dudney finds that the concept of rozmarrah (colloquial or ‘everyday’ language) was essential to defining what Urdu was, just as the exclusion of lexical items and forms of speech from Persian and Brajbhasha established what Urdu was not.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117245771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hindi Bārahmāsā Tradition","authors":"Teiji Sakata","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Teiji Sakata compares various poems of the bārahmāsā or ‘twelve-month’ form, showing how they form a piece of shared literary heritage between languages that in the modern period have usually been considered to be quite separate. Sakata surveys several poems composed according to the stylistic conventions of this ‘twelve-month’ form, showing that each one has a distinct narrative, religious, and performative context that informed its reception and shaped its meaning. The bārahmāsā contained within Jayasi’s Padmāvat dramatizes the emotional states of characters implicated in a longer narrative. The bārahmāsā attributed to Mirabai expresses longing for the Divine in the form of Krishna. ‘Folk’ versions of the bārahmāsā in Avadhi and Bundeli express more worldly concerns like longing for a distant beloved or the fear of moneylenders.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131545090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Searching for the Source or Mapping the Stream?","authors":"J. Strnad","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Jaroslav Strnad recognizes that the existing body of Kabir’s poetry was produced by the interplay of both oral and written traditions. He analyses the internal structure of individual poems as well as the organizational structure of manuscripts to show how we might trace the growth of this poetry along thematic and stylistic lines, and through the efforts of multiple performers and composers. He consequently argues that the study of poets in the early modern period—many of whose ‘original’ oeuvres are as elusive as that of Kabir—might be more fruitfully pursued as the mapping of such ‘streams’ of poetic development, rather than as a hunt for ur-texts.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127704801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pursuit of Pilgrimage, Pleasure, and Military Alliances","authors":"Heidi Pauwels","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Nagaridas’s Tīrthānand (1753) is the memoir of a two-year pilgrimage to Braj composed by Nagaridas, also known as Savant Singh, the deposed king of Kishangarh in Rajasthan. Pauwels delineates how the ‘culturally mediated category’ of pilgrimage structures Nagaridas’s experience and its narratological reconstruction in the versified memoir. Just as pilgrimage itself is a polysemous experience that satisfies multiple goals and needs, so the Tīrthānand too works at multiple levels. As Nagaridas narrates events in the mundane world—visits to temples, devotional singing, religious plays, and the like—he frequently elevates these happenings onto the mythological plane of Radha and Krishna’s eternal Braj. Yet contemporary political circumstances and errands of royal necessity intrude at critical junctures of the narrative. The Tīrthānand is thus a tribute to mythical Braj, a travelogue, and a chronicle of contemporary political and social developments.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126789456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making the War Come Alive","authors":"Dalpat S. Rajpurohit","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0014","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128113268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Duality in the Language and Literary Style of Raskhan’s Poetry","authors":"H. Nagasaki","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780199478866.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Hiroko Nagasaki looks closely at the poet Raskhan’s signature chands, that is, the metrical forms in which he most frequently composed, focusing in particular on the savaiyā. What she finds is a metrical structure that combined Persian and Indic systems of prosody, allowing different methods of scansion and therefore different stylistic options. This discovery in turn reveals a connection between Raskhan’s poems of Vaishnava bhakti and the highly stylized world of the Persian ghazzal, a form heavily influenced by the idiom of Sufi devotion. These insights into stylistic crossover are especially significant in light of the hagiographical tradition surrounding Raskhan, which claims he was a Muslim who took up devotion to Krishna at some point in adulthood.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133200922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gadadhar Bhatt and His Family","authors":"Swapna Sharma","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0018","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter, Swapna Sharma brings to light the special contributions of Gadādhar Bhaṭṭ and his family to the constitution of Vrindavan’s distinctive spiritual culture, relating these especially to the family’s Telangana origins and in their distinctive position as a bridge between Vallabhite, Chaitanyite, Haridasi, and Radhavallabhi religious communities (sampradāya). Among other things, Sharma draws attention to Gadādhar’s close relationship to Jīva Gosvāmī and his reputation as a practitioner of bhāgavata kathā, but it is the appeal of his Brajbhāṣā poetry that stands out above all.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125060382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religious Syncretism and Literary Innovation","authors":"S. Cavaliere","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199478866.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Stefania Cavaliere shows that the Vijñānagītā of Keshavdas is much more than a translation of an allegorical Sanskrit drama, the Prabodhacandrodaya of Krishnamishra. The allegorical battle between aspects of the mind in Krishnamishra’s text becomes in Keshavdas’s hands a platform for a much broader discussion of metaphysics, theology and religious aesthetics, incorporating such diverse influences as the Yogavāsiṣṭha, the Purāṇas, the Dharmaśāstras, and the Bhagavad Gītā. In this way the Vijñānagītā reads more like a scientific treatise (śāstra) than a work of allegorical poetry, and reflects Keshavdas’s erudition and innovation in weaving together strands of bhakti, Advaita Vedānta and rasa aesthetic theory.","PeriodicalId":417009,"journal":{"name":"Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124654953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}