Behl, Aditya - Doniger, Wendy - Love's Subtle Magic
Behl, Aditya - Doniger, Wendy - Love's Subtle Magic
Behl, Aditya - Doniger, Wendy - Love's Subtle Magic
Edited by
WENDY DONIGER
1
3
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
2. Inaugurating Hindavī 30
Notes 339
Index 383
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The Reconstruction of the Text
In editing this book, my basic principle has been to follow his final plan for
the book and to include the latest available version of each of the ten chapters
that he sketched in that plan. So I have taken six of the 2004–05 Paris lec-
tures as my basic text (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7) and added to that core the
two unpublished 2008 London lectures, “The Landscape of Paradise and the
Embodied City” (Chapter 5) and “The Seasons of Madhumalati’s Separation”
(Chapter 8). Following Aditya’s intentions as expressed his final draft of the
introductory chapter and his final outline, I constructed Chapters 9 and 10 out
of portions of the 2004 draft of Chapters 4 and 2, respectively.
Because Aditya kept coming back to the book over the years and never
edited the final copy, there were a number of duplications, not only between
different versions but between chapters in a single version, and on the level
of both phrases and whole paragraphs. In order to minimize such repetitions,
I cut words, sentences, sometimes paragraphs, and to clarify the structure of
the arguments within each chapter I moved paragraphs, sometimes sentences,
sometimes words, sometimes whole sections. I added nothing but subhead-
ings and a few explanatory parenthetical paraphrases. How often I longed to
ask Aditya what he meant by a certain puzzling phrase, and since he could not
answer I usually left it in enigmatic form, hoping that other readers would be
able to tease out the meaning better than I had; and rarely, when I thought I
did know what he was getting at I rearranged clauses to clarify the passage.
The result is, as I am painfully aware, not the book he intended to write,
but it is not a patchwork. Eight of the ten chapters are taken from one text
(the 2004–05 Paris lectures), and the other two are from a draft made four
years later. Moreover, the basic materials and ideas remained consistent in
tone and substance between the earliest and latest versions; what he added
were new interpretations and insights that enriched but did not cancel out his
earlier understandings.
I think he would have gone on finding new meanings in these texts for
years to come; the process was cut short only by his death. As I edited his text,
I found myself falling under the spell of his perfectionist ghost, going over
the chapters again and again to trim the excess, fit the pieces together more
snugly, smooth the transitions. It was hard to stop, in part because it was
hard for me to end our collaborative effort, first begun when Aditya was my
student twenty years ago. The result is still unfinished, imperfect. But what he
was writing is a book of stunning originality, scholarly depth, and intellectual
excitement, of great importance for our understanding of Sufism as well as of
the relationship between Hindus and Muslims during a marvelously fruitful
period of Indian history. It is his legacy to us, and a very precious one.
Wendy Doniger
Acknowledgments
aditya did not get around to writing a file of acknowledgment of the many
people who helped him write his book, and I cannot construct such a file, but
I am sure they know who they are, and I hope they will take pride in this
book. For my part, I acknowledge, with gratitude, the generous and expert
help of John Stratton Hawley, Philip Lutgendorf, Aradhna Behl, Ayesha Irani,
A. Sean Pue, Francesca Orsini, Carl Ernst, Thibaut d’Hubert, and Vasudha
Paramasivan in assembling and editing this text. Thanks to Katherine Ulrich
for making the index. And I believe that Aditya would have wanted to dedicate
this book to his parents, Colonel S. K. Behl and Mrs. Purnima Behl, to his
sister, Aradhna, and his nephew, Anhad, and his niece and namesake, Aditi.
And so we dedicate it to them.
Wendy Doniger
exceptions, including titles and proper names. For Hindi, the system followed
is the one laid out in R. S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary
(Delhi: OUP, 1993).
Transliterated terms and names in Persian follow the transliteration scheme
for the Arabo-Persian letters laid out in F. I. Steingass’ A Comprehensive
Persian-English Dictionary (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1892). In the case
of consonants, we have made a few substitutions to reflect Behl’s choices.
For ث, where Steingass uses “s ”' , we have used “s.” For غ, Steingass’ “gh,” we
have used “ġh”, and for the letter وin its consonantal form, we have replaced
Steingass’ “w” with “v.” For vowels and diphthongs, we have used a, ā, i, ī,
u, ū, a´, o, e, ai, and au. For the sake of consistency, the transliteration of
the occasional Arabic or Urdu name, book-title, term, and quotation also fol-
lows the same transliteration scheme for the Arabo-Persian letters laid out
for Persian above. In the case of Urdu, e is used to indicate the final in
words like banāe, and the letters common to Urdu and Hindi are romanized
according to the conventions for Hindi. Throughout, we have retained Behl’s
preference for the final “h” in terms like silsilah. We have indicated elision of
the Arabic definite article when preceded by a vowel. Izāfah is indicated, in
Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, according to the Library of Congress’s conventions
for each of these languages.
Love’s Subtle Magic
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1
love’s subtle magic can change nature, and even tame that most intractable
beast, human nature. This is the simple mystery (sahaja bheda) that the Sufis
(Islamic mystics) of sultanate India taught through their spiritual and worldly
practice, the principle they illustrated through composition and recitation of
their verse romances, written in Hindavī and sung in courts, salons, and Sufi
shrines from the fourteenth century onward. Their challenge was to make
their spiritual agenda comprehensible and appealing in an Indian cultural
landscape, using local terms, symbols, concepts, techniques, and gods. The
poets were members of the Persian-speaking courtly élite of the Delhi sultan-
ate and the regional kingdoms that followed in its wake, as well as disciples
of the Sufi masters who sanctified the landscape of north India through their
austerities. Written and performed in Delhi, Jaunpur, and the eastern prov-
inces of the Indo-Gangetic doab, the Hindavī Sufi romances (prema-kahānī,
“love stories”) mark the inauguration of a new literary and devotional culture
in a local language. The major romances of the genre date from the four-
teenth century till the middle of the sixteenth, when the Mughals took over
the rulership of north India. This is a book about those fictional narratives
and the cultures of performance and reception that produced them, aristocratic
local courts and the hospices of Sufi shaikhs.
using local terms and concepts—are central to understanding the Hindavī love
stories. Although characterizations of the period emphasize the rhetoric of
war, the Islamic conquest of northern India prompted a much subtler process
of competitive cultural assimilation. No matter how strident the triumphalist
rhetoric of conquest, the courts of the Delhi sultanate were situated in a land-
scape not entirely under their control, a contact zone of cultures and languages.
Not only was desire frequently expressed over frontiers of war, but once the
incomers were settled in India they reimagined community, polity, and reli-
gious belief and practice within an Indian landscape. Conquest also entails
setting mutual terms of understanding, styles of accommodation that allow
people to live together, interact, be transformed by one another. Encounters,
battles, erotic desire, political rapprochements, and competitive expressions of
cultural or religious supremacy are marks of such a diverse, contested, and
multilingual world. The authors of this particular élite-sponsored Hindavī liter-
ary tradition were operating in a world in which many groups of people occu-
pied the same cultural landscape, in constant dialogue with one another and
with their own perceived and real pasts and presents.
Creation of new literary languages has to be understood within this com-
plex cultural landscape, in which Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit were the “clas-
sical” or cosmopolitan tongues that predefined generic and poetic expression
in Hindustan in the fourteenth century. These languages were not the sole
means of expression, however, and across the subcontinent a range of new
literary languages and cultures were created in the first part of what Sheldon
Pollock has memorably termed “the vernacular millennium.”1 By expressing
themselves in these newly emergent media and thereby shaping them deci-
sively, Sufis and aristocrats participated in the literary and linguistic transfor-
mation of their world. The poets of the genre created a sophisticated Indian
Islamic literary tradition, a genre containing a set of desī or indigenous literary
and religious terms, and a narrative universe to express the distinctive Sufi
agenda within the local landscape in which the Chishtis and Shattaris worked
hard to establish themselves. (The Chishtis were an order of Sufis who came
from Afghanistan to India in the twelfth century c.e.; the Shattaris, whose
name means “lightning-fast,” were a Sufi order that originated in Persia in the
fifteenth century but became codified in India.) Explicating the Hindavī Sufi
romances entails understanding the genre’s form and content, its place in the
social relations and lived experience of a past time, the conditions of its recep-
tion and transmission, and its links to larger processes of linguistic choice and
canon formation during the period of the Delhi sultanate.
Understanding these historical transformations, however, involves us in a
host of conceptual and interpretative problems. On one side lies the philo-
logical direction of specifying how something new is created out of an older,
Studying the Sultanate Period 3
mixed repertory of literary and religious sources, breaking it down into its
component parts: Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, as well as regional poetic
forms and spoken languages. By doing this, one is refusing it the status of the
new, showing that it is old after all and not distinctive and novel. Moreover,
one falls into the trap of using the fragmentary remains of one of the least-
understood periods of Indian cultural history, the age of the Delhi sultanate
and the regional Afghan and Turkish kingdoms that followed in its wake, to
constitute philological objects floating free in time and space, the ur-texts of
classical Indology or Oriental studies. Even a genre of fantasy as seemingly
liberated from everyday experience as the Sufi romance betrays the marks of
historical process, time, and place. One has to set even the most fantastic nar-
rative against the cultural horizons of its production.
The other tendency, into which cultural historians of the period have
mostly fallen, is to list events, kings, battles, and literary and religious texts
in chronological order, neatly divided into separate compartments such as
Hindu and Muslim, subdivided in each case into art, architecture, languages,
and history.2 This compartmentalized history, based on the tendency to list,
a Listenwissenschaft posing as cultural history, has made it difficult to account
for, or even to discern, larger cultural processes or smaller episodes of inter-
action and assimilation: creation of new literatures, growth of material culture
and technology, the clearly joint production of what is now called Hindustani
classical music, changes in cuisine and eating habits with the adoption of new
foodstuffs, what constituted aesthetic pleasure, common stereotypes—in short,
the everyday culture of the area Indian Muslims called Hindustan, the Indo-
Gangetic doab north of the Vindhyas.3 A stage play of essentialisms substitutes
for any understanding of the feel of cultural life in the period.
There are also real difficulties in drawing linguistic boundaries between the
various dialects and languages prevalent in northern India. As Colin Masica
has indicated in a discussion of the development of the new Indo-Aryan lan-
guages, the historical situation in South Asia is shaped differently from Europe
and involves a slippery distinction between dialect and language:
Shaikḥ Nizām-ud-din ‘Auliyā of Delhi, who lived to see more than half a
dozen rulers occupy the throne of Delhi, never visited the court of any
Sultan. He even refused to grant interviews to them. . . . However great
the Sultan may be and however insistent his requests, the Shaikh ̣ would
̣ refused to see Sultan ‘Alā-ud-
never deviate from his principle. The Shaikh
din Khiljī and when he insisted, his reply was: “My house has two doors.
If the Sultan enters by one, I shall make my exit by the other one.”9
This attitude persisted as a prescriptive ideal in the Chishti silsilah until at least
the seventeenth century and was prevalent among latter-day Sufis. However,
the relation of precept to practice is a difficult one, and a number of scholars
have suggested that over time the central organization of the Chishti silsilah
broke down into “a conglomerate of smaller and bigger autonomous principal-
ities.”10 Many of the Chishti Sufis accepted royal patronage and even expected
sultans to provide tax-free land grants for them.11
With these facts in mind, the insightful studies of another scholar of
Indian Sufism, Simon Digby, have pointed the way to a different sort of
answer: that the sources mark a complex, contradictory relationship between
kings and Sufis. On the one hand the Sufis admit their dependence on the
structures of political authority; yet on the other, they assert a superior claim
to authority because kings frequently gain their power from the blessings of a
Sufi shaikh.12 The Chishti strategy of holding on to a public rhetoric of tark-i
duniyā or abandonment of the world while accepting economic support and
even playing at kingmaking embodies the social tension between political and
spiritual claims to authority13 that is apparent in the literature of the period.
The Sufi shaikhs of Delhi and the provincial vilāyahs (territorial jurisdic-
tions) of Hindustan created a male-centered ascetic culture. Within the lands
conquered by the armies of the Delhi sultanate, the great shaikhs of the Chishti
silsilah were able to command a following and set up hospices where they gave
spiritual instruction and trained disciples. Several aspects of the Chishti social
and spiritual agenda are noteworthy: their relations with rulers and the flow of
material gifts, their belief in cultivating consciousness of God and of the invis-
ible world of saints and adepts that surrounds the visible order of things, their
regimen of ascesis and prayer, and their musical practice, which was aimed at
transforming the novice into a man with a taste for things spiritual (ẕauq).
The first of these aspects, their relation with rulers and the new landed aris-
tocracy, is intrinsically linked with the carving up of Hindustan into provinces by a
class of Turkish military aristocrats. Sufi shaikhs often pressed superior claims of
spiritual authority over territory, using the idea of their divine jurisdiction over land
Studying the Sultanate Period 7
and reminding kings that they were on their thrones because of the blessing of a
holy man.14 Such holy men were special because they lived in two realms at once,
the visible and the invisible, and could interpret signs from the invisible world
for the select disciples and the throngs who frequented the Sufi khānaqāh (the
Sufi lodge, cloister, or hospice): “Above the authority of mundane rulers there is
ordained a hierarchy of those with supernatural powers, perpetually watchful over
the welfare of all regions of the world . . . such claims to the wilāyat of a specific
territory were actively and vigourously pursued by Shaikhs in Khurasan . . . and the
concept is very common in fourteenth-century and later Indian Sufi literature.”15
This notion of territorial jurisdiction (vilāyah), and the superior relationship
of the shaikh to the world of material affairs (duniyā), coexisted with a con-
tradictory notion. In order for the Sufi hospices to function, they were depen-
dent on the economic largesse of rulers, in the form of tax-free land grants
(madad-i ma‘āsh), as well as on the regular flow of alms or futūḥāt.
The distinctive way in which the Chishtis handled this inflow of mate-
rial goods was to insist on a spiritual principle of redistribution. Thus, for
instance, Shaikh Niz" ām al-dīn Auliyā’ had the following to say about amassing
and dispensing worldly goods:
“One must not collect worldly goods except that which is necessary, such as
the cloak that resembles a woman’s veil. That much is legitimate, but no
more than that. Everything else that one receives should be dispensed with
rather than hoarded.” Then on his blessed lips came the following couplet:
Gold is there just for giving, my son.
For keeping, what’s the difference between gold and stone?16
Spiritual merit is connected, in this system, only with giving up the goods
and cash that flow into the khānaqāh. The discourses of Chishti shaikhs
are full of stories in which wealth proved an impediment to worship and
spiritual practice. Any regular expectation of money was a hindrance in the
sense that the Sufi then expected to be paid for his mystical practice. Along
with this explicit devaluation of material goods, the Chishtis took a distinc-
tive view of the concrete world: it was only an overlay for the invisible world,
whose spiritual principles could be seen here at work in visible ways.
The invisible world and its hierarchy of adepts and saints was, for the Chishti
shaikhs and their disciples, a source of guidance as well as an explanatory factor
for concrete occurrences. For instance, there are numerous references to figures
from the invisible world (mardān-i ġhaib) intervening in the visible world:
The conversation turned to men of the invisible world, who, when they
see someone is capable and of high resolve in acts of devotion and
8 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
striving, carry them off. The master then told the story of a young
man named Nasir in Badayun. “I heard about him that he said that
his father was united with God. One night they called him before the
door of his house. He came out, and from inside I heard salutations
and greetings, and then heard my father say, ‘I will just say farewell
to my son and to the people of my house.’ They said, ‘The moment
is passing.’ After that I knew nothing of them, nor where my father
went!”17
The intervention of the voice from the Unseen was only to exhort Abū Sa‘īd
to throw away all his books, even the books about Sufis of the past. As the
Persian verse puts it, even thought is an obstacle to the direct experience of
being constantly mindful of Allah, the divine presence with which the Sufis
sought to sanctify the landscape of Hindustan.
Such asceticism also involved transformation of all the physical drives such
as sex and hunger. In this anecdote, which Nizami discusses as an example
of the Chishti principle of living only for God, the attitude of the dervishes
who are engrossed in God changes the physical experience of being in the
world:20
A saint lived on the bank of a river. One day this saint asked his
wife to give food to a darwesh residing on the other side of the river.
His wife protested that crossing the water would be difficult. He
said: “When you go to the bank of the river tell the water to pro-
vide a way for you due to respect for your husband who never slept
with his wife.” His wife was perplexed at these words and said to
herself: “How many children have I borne this man! Yet how can
I challenge this directive from my husband?” She took the food to
the bank of the river, spoke the message to the water, and the water
gave way for her passage. Having crossed, she put food before the
darwesh, and the darwesh took it in her presence. After he had eaten,
the woman asked, “How shall I recross the river?” “How did you
come?” asked the darwesh. The woman repeated the words of her
husband. On hearing this, the darwesh said: “Go to the river and tell
it to make way for you out of respect for the darwesh who never ate
for thirty years.” The woman, bewildered at these words, came to the
river, repeated the message, and the water again gave way for her
passage. On returning home, the woman fell at her husband’s feet
and implored him: “Tell me the secret of those directives which you
and the other darwesh uttered.” “Look,” said the saint, “I never slept
with you to satisfy the passions of my lower self. I slept with you
only to provide you what was your due. In reality, I never slept with
you, and similarly, that other man never ate for thirty years to satisfy
his appetite or to fill his stomach. He ate only to have the strength
to do God’s will.”21
10 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
models of literary history to classify the Hindi canon, placing the Hindavī Sufi
romances within a teleological scheme of the evolution of modern standard
Hindi. Shukla also edited Jāyasī’s texts but attacked Dwivedi’s gloss as spread-
ing darkness (andhakāra) rather than the nectar of illumination. Shukla sub-
sumed the five major literary languages25 of premodern Hindi poetry into a
new nationalist construction of the canon, and he collected and edited texts
that would fit within this canon. These nationalist critics invented modern
standard Hindi on the model of the European nation-states with their own
national languages and literary canons, classifying earlier literary and linguistic
forms in conformity with primordialist notions of national identity.
When Shukla published his landmark Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās in 1929, he
prefaced his account of the Hindi canon by linking language, national con-
sciousness, and history in an evolutionary scheme: “If every nation’s literature
is a collective reflection of the consciousness of its people, then it is necessar-
ily true that as there are changes in the people’s consciousness, the form of
their literature changes also.”26
Although the spoken tongues that emerged as vehicles of literary expres-
sion after 1200 did develop into the various regional languages of South Asia,
reading the newly constituted discourses of Hindu nationalism back to consti-
tute a unified and linear history for modern standard Hindi creates a telos for
the earlier languages that is unjustified. Moreover, given the links between the
movement for propagation of Hindi and Hindu revivalism, where do Muslim
Sufis fit into an account of the development of modern standard Hindi? What
is the precise relation of the literary traditions of Arabic and Persian to the for-
mulation of a Hindavī Sufi poetics? If Hindi and Urdu were historically linked
with the formation of separate “Hindu” and “Muslim” literary and social iden-
tities, how does one begin to understand a major body of premodern literature
that is both “Muslim” and in “Hindi”?
This difficult crux led Shukla to propose that the Hindavī Sufi poetic tradi-
tion was derived from Persian mas̱navīs or verse narratives and was therefore
“un-Indian” in inspiration and in the kind of love depicted in the stories. As a
later critic, Ganapatichandra Gupta, put it, “In Acharya Ramchandra Shukla’s
opinion, the Indian tradition of love takes as its ideal the marital love of Rāma
and Sītā, whereas in the premākhyāns premarital, socially unstigmatized, spon-
taneous love is depicted. Therefore this [argument] cannot be accepted against
the Indian tradition of love.”27
The embarrassment with the Islamic identity of a major genre of Hindi
poetry, as well as with its lush eroticism, led Shukla to ignore the specifics of the
Sufi romances. Although the Sufi poets depicted the heroine’s body as a sensu-
ous shadow of divinity, Shukla chose to classify the premākhyāns as narratives
of love for an unqualified or formless divine essence (nirguna-prema-mārga).
12 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
that beset any attempt to shed light on what unfortunately still remains a
“dark period” in Indian history.
To begin with, the colonial notion of the despotic rule that the British sought
to displace in India30 centered all effective power in the person of the tyran-
nical ruler. Removing him allowed the imperium to be reconstituted around
the supposed “mildness and equity” of British rule rather than the savage and
pointless actions of previous rulers. In addition to the untenable focus on élite
history, there is another noteworthy assumption in Sir Henry Elliot’s words,
representing a colonialist attitude that has generated much misunderstanding
and politically motivated scholarship.31 In the same preface, he anachronisti-
cally divides the populace into Hindu and Muslim nations, corresponding to
nineteenth-century views of nationalism based on race, religion, and language:
Two points are central here: the change in cultural forms and conventions
after the change in polity, and the idea of Hindus and Muslims as two nations
divided by race and religion.
The adoption of Persianate literary forms by a “Hindu” author is part of the
same process of cultural assimilation and interaction that causes a “Muslim”
author to use the conventions of a local Indian language to express his mes-
sage. In either case, the religious identity of the author serves as no guaran-
tor of ideological position. It is only when groups of people share the same
cultural landscape that we have mixed or boundary-crossing literary and devo-
tional traditions of poetry. It is entirely congruent, on such a cultural scene,
to have a range of competitive attitudes toward conquest, religion, and the
politics of cultural change. The formation of creolized or mixed literary genres
implies a world of conversion and conflict, dialogue and intermingling.
14 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Moreover, the idea of Hindus and Muslims as two nations33 sets up an over-
drawn opposition between religious communities in a history in which class,
caste, occupation, language, and sectarian affiliation have always also deter-
mined social position and attitude. As Gyanendra Pandey has noted about the
colonialist construction of Hindu and Muslim communalism, it “captured for
the colonialists what they had conceptualized as a basic feature of Indian soci-
ety—its religious bigotry and its fundamentally irrational character. . . . ‘History’
happens to these people; it can hardly be a process in which they play a con-
scious and significant part.”34 Pandey’s analysis is exemplary in that he distin-
guishes a range of colonialist positions, from the liberal or rationalistic to the
more racist and essentialistic.35 The colonialist construction of a communally
divided past, as Pandey points out, shared many elements with subsequent
nationalist critiques of colonialism.
Competing nationalist historians have taken these positions to the
extreme, as for instance the distinguished Pakistani historian of the Delhi
sultanate, Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi: “How could two people with such diver-
gence in their outlook, beliefs, mores, tastes, and inclinations be moulded
into one [without sacrificing] something that had entered into the innermost
recesses of their souls?”36 According to this view, Indian history has been
an armed struggle between Hindus and Muslims in the interests of their
separate identities. On the other hand, secular Indian historians such as
Tara Chand characterize the cultural life of premodern India as exemplify-
ing the modern Indian nation’s idea of religious harmony and unity: “The
effort to seek a new life led to the development of a new culture which
was neither exclusively Hindu nor purely Muslim. It was indeed a Muslim-
Hindu culture.”37 This joint culture is often also characterized as hybrid or
syncretistic, denoting an indiscriminate mingling of elements in new cul-
tural forms.
These visions of history have had a real impact on our understandings of
the cultural monuments of the past and their links with polity and religion.
Thus, Aziz Ahmad places his treatment of the premodern texts that deal with
the Turkish conquest of northern India within a radically dualist view of the
division between “Hindu” and “Muslim” literatures:
This separatist view of genre and history, between groups of people who over-
lap significantly in both cultural and physical space, simplifies complex identi-
ties into a static, unchanging opposition. The highly questionable assumption
of “mutual ignorance” leaves unasked all the questions about how people
interact; how genre, history, and imaginative geography shape one another;
and how emergent literary canons in the new Indo-Aryan languages are impli-
cated in this moment of transition in Indian history.
On the other hand, studies of the new literatures in the regional Indian
languages commonly contrast Sufis with narratives of Islamic conquest and
military brutality and portray them as populists preaching universal love and
brotherhood. For example, Annemarie Schimmel characterizes the users of
bhākhā, the spoken language of north India, as follows:
The Sufi poets of the premākhyāns do not fit simply or easily into the schol-
arly stereotype of populist syncretic religion. In the small and select reading
communities of court and khānaqāh, they redefined Indian notions of the
sympathetic response to poetry (rasa) in order to translate Sufi cosmology and
metaphysics into narratives in a local language. The social implications of this
act can best be understood within the formation and expansion of the Delhi
sultanate, which generated romances as well as stories of conquest. This twin
impulse, of subjugating the local population and eroticizing the landscape,
poetry, and music of India, is apparent also among the Chishti Sufis who were
carving out their own territories of spiritual jurisdiction. The public rhetoric
of these territorial takeovers tended to be dualistic, positing an ineradicable
gap between the Turkish and Afghan Muslim élite and the local population.
Such a public rhetoric of polity formation concealed a much subtler process of
indigenization and cultural assimilation, exemplified in the adaptation of local
literary and artistic forms to express new poetic and religious agendas within
a complex multilingualism of religious and symbolic vocabularies.
Since it was a composite or mixed world, culturally and linguistically, we
should expect to find connected records among the different languages of the
period. We find, however, that scholars of Islamic India have focused largely
on the Persian and Arabic historical and linguistic record. They have produced
groundbreaking studies of the establishment and institutional history of Sufi
silsilahs, exploring the social and political roles of Sufis in the conquest of new
territories,43 the institutional and historiographical traditions shaping transmis-
sion of Sufi teachings,44 the individual biographies of Sufi holy men45 and the
Persian literature that they left.46 But the writings of Sufis in the emerging
new Indo-Aryan languages have been little examined. The situation is com-
plicated by the refusal of the early Chishti Sufis to write books, and it is not
Studying the Sultanate Period 17
until the fourteenth century that there is an explosion of Persian and new
Indo-Aryan Chishti mystical literature.47 Literary critics and historians such as
Mahmud Shirani and Abdul Haqq48 have been quick to list the genres and
languages that the Sufis used, but without explaining fully how they interacted
with the political establishment of Turkish and Afghan sultanates in India and
with preexisting literary and religious traditions. As Carl Ernst has pointed
out, “the Indian environment was the world in which these Sufis lived. From
it they took attractive materials, whether pān leaves or poems, which in this
way became ancillary to Sufi teaching and practice.”49 People living together
within the same environment continually define and redefine themselves and
others, and these processes in turn reshape their larger social narratives and
contexts.
But present-day Hindus and Muslims see themselves as separate religious
communities, divided by nationality, religion, and language. In a groundbreak-
ing analysis of attitudes toward Hindu-Muslim differences, Cynthia Talbot
points to the difficulty: “No one would deny that modernization has led to
the sharper articulation of identities encompassing broad communities or
that such identities have been ‘imagined’ and ‘invented’ to a large extent. Nor
can we uncritically accept the primordialist view that postulates the inherent
and natural roots of national and ethnic identity.”50 Today’s public narratives
are based on sources that have been twisted to meet a communalist constitu-
tion of India’s past and present. These biases also frame our readings of the
sources and chronicles from the past that necessarily recognize religious dif-
ference and attempt to shape particular collective identities. Our attempt must
be to disaggregate the unified readings, the two-nation theory writ large on the
Delhi sultanate, or the secular liberalism of Indian historians who wish away
the oppositional others and expressions of prejudice, hostility, or disgust.
Modern scholars often employ primordialist notions of identity to explain
the polities and symbolic forms of premodern India. In my view, any attempt
to link particular genres to particular communities must refuse to begin with
primordialist notions; it must take seriously the evidence of cultural mixing
and interaction on the ground. In the case of the Hindavī Sufi romances,
written by local Muslim poets, this definitional issue is complicated by the
fact that all the characters in every story are ostensibly “Hindu” in name and
cultural and religious practice. These distinctive literary forms have been an
awkward embarrassment because they do not fit neatly into the little boxes
of “Hindu” or “Muslim” tradition, or “Hindi” and “Urdu” defined as separate,
standardized languages. As Phukan has pointed out, this fact has led scholars
such as Aziz Ahmad, in his study of the Padmāvat, to ascribe to the poet
Jāyasī a “rural lack of sophistication which inclined [Ahmad] to accept ‘in all
simplicity, at a non-sectarian level, the bardic legends of Rajput heroism . . . ’”51
18 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
It is only when one reads these sophisticated romances that one finds that, far
from being nonsectarian, they use local mythologies, narratives, and religious
practices to express their competitive and distinctive agenda of Sufi love. But
their presence in the world of Indian myth and ascetic practice leads them to
use local imagery and aesthetics to express their own distinctive local tradition,
in what was by then an Indian Islamic literature.
Interpreting the Hindavī Sufi romances, therefore, is complicated by his-
toriographical perspectives that characterize the cultural world of sultanate
India as divided between élite and masses or Hindus and Muslims, as well
as perspectives that emphasize the syncretic or separatist tendencies of the
Sufis in order to create a genealogy for present-day nationalisms. Separating a
particular historical moment from the overdetermined trajectory of the unfold-
ing of “Islam”52 allows us to focus, as I have done in this book, on a local
language and idiom of self-fashioning and cultural expression. In his discus-
sion of what he calls Indian Islamic traditions, Richard Eaton has given us
this supple formulation:
The traditions . . . were discursive traditions, in the sense that they were
rooted in written or oral genres that had sufficient historical depth to
lend them the weight of authority. And they were Islamic traditions
inasmuch as they all related themselves in some way to the Qur’ān or
the Traditions of the Prophet. Thus, when a writer of a compendium
of Sufi biographies sat down to do his work, there would already have
existed in his mind an established model of what such a work should
be like, and that model would in turn have had its roots in formula-
tions and explications of piety traceable to the foundational texts of the
religion. The same was true of visual arts, such as miniature paintings,
or mosque architecture, inasmuch as their creators, too, had inherited
models for their endeavors, though of course there was always room
for innovation within the framework of these models.53
Through their use of generic conventions, the Hindavī Sufi poets linked the
genre to the Persian prototype of the mas̱navī, the long romantic, martial, or
didactic poem in rhyming couplets. However, they also felt free to take con-
cepts, models of praxis, generic conventions, imagery, poetic techniques, and
themes from local universes of discourse to create their desī Muslim literary
tradition. The poetic universes of their romances had their own specific logics
of use and understanding, distinct from their various literary sources.
But these genealogies do not begin to address other questions: How are
texts linked with larger ideological formations that are not necessarily nation-
ally or even linguistically defined? How are literary genres formed at particular
moments? How do they come to embody wider social concerns and attitudes?
As Pollock notes, what is required is a situated study of the formation of liter-
ary language and its links with particular social and political forms: “To study
vernacularization is to study not the emergence into history of primeval and
natural communities and cultures, but rather the historical inauguration of
their naturalization. For it was during the course of the vernacular millen-
nium (ca. 1000–2000) that cultures and communities were ideationally and
discursively invented, or at least provided with a more self-conscious voice.”56
The discursive invention of community or literary culture is difficult to under-
stand without clarifying the thematic and formal links of genres with particu-
lar places, languages, and social agendas.
As for the language of the Sufi romances, modern linguists often classify it as
Avadhi or eastern Hindavī, but we need to set the term within a larger dialectal con-
tinuum. Avadhi was spoken in the area around Ayodhya, Allahabad, and Jaunpur,
and its features have been traced to Ardhamāgadhī, itself classified as a point on a
spectrum between Śaurasenī Prakrit and the Bihari dialects that developed out of
Māgadhī.57 However, in the usage of the poets of the sultanate period, Hindavī can
be seen as an umbrella term that carries a broader range of associations:
Hindī, Hinduī, and Hindavī were the terms used for the language of
the country as against Persian during the rule of the Delhi Sultans and
later in the Mughal period: thus the usage of the term by Amīr Khusrau
(1253–1325) in the thirteenth century who is traditionally regarded as the
first writer of distinction in Hindi/Hindavī. . . . [Hindavī] was the collec-
tive designation for the indigenous group of northern Indian languages,
and it was used to demarcate it from Persian. However, when its dis-
tinction from Sanskrit was to be emphasized, the poets who composed
in the language spoke of it as bhāṣā [the spoken tongue].58
The Sufi use of Hindavī as a literary language was thus a double inaugura-
tion: the definition of a particular colloquial or spoken literary idiom (bhāṣā/
Studying the Sultanate Period 21
exotic landscapes, and the conventional set pieces like the head-to-foot descrip-
tion of the beloved and the song of the worldly heroine’s twelve months of
separation from her Lord.
The historical agents who formed this Indian Islamic literary culture were
not just courtiers and kings of the Delhi sultanate and the Afghan regional
polities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were also disciples in
Sufi orders, guided by shaikhs who set themselves up as commanding spiri-
tual jurisdiction (vilāyah) over different parts of the territory of Hindustan. The
army of prayer (lashkar-i du‘ā’), as it is sometimes called, led by these shaikhs,
formed one dominant cultural force during the period. Sufi shaikhs played
at being kingmakers and established themselves in hospices (khānaqāhs) at
a calculated distance from royal courts. Here they trained disciples to attain
nearness to Allah by teaching them spiritual exercises and cultivating their
taste for things spiritual (–zauq) through ritually controlled exposure to music
and poetry. They recreated their own Persian and Arabic models of poetry and
ascetic praxis in an effort to communicate within their Indian cultural context.
They reimagined these models in terms of local religious and poetic practice,
“going desī” by creating outwardly Hindu or Indian characters and narrative
universes, yet maintaining a mystical interpretation in which the suggested
referents of plot and character were distinctively and competitively linked to
Sufi asceticism. If the Chishtis or the other silsilahs promoted a surface liberal-
ism of outlook, they also “asserted the finality and supremacy of their faith”70
vis-à-vis other ascetics and the various orders of Sufis.
continued to compose romances on this model until the early twentieth cen-
tury, they did not, by and large, reproduce the formula of the two heroines or
the elaborate Sufi ideology of the earlier works.74
The main lines of the argument in this book are organized around the
different facets of a common generic logic. This logic, of the love triangle of
the hero and his divine and earthly wives and the final self-immolation of the
three major characters, must have appealed to some cultural longing, some
perceived tension of the day. An upper-class Muslim consciousness or subjec-
tivity for which this was important must have informed the mind of the ideal
reader or listener, who would have been excited by the romances of the genre,
alert to its nuances. Many critics have pointed to the tendency of romance
genres to resolve larger social and ideological contradictions and oppositions,
whether they personify these oppositions as denizens of superhuman and sub-
human worlds or as the principles of dialectical materialism.75 Our sensibility
inclines us to adopt a rigid dualistic division between the things of this world
and the hereafter. But we can think of this general contrast between dīn and
duniyā as one among a series of rhetorical dualisms such as Turk and Hindu,
conqueror and conquered that were important to the cultural world of sultan-
ate India. As in many situations created by acts of conquest, the poets used
these dualisms as rhetorical figures to make a point about identity or collective
notions of honor.
Since the Hindavī Sufi romances are only fragments of the entertain-
ment, spiritual and literary, of a past age, the picture they give us is only
a partial and slanted one. Trying to understand the sultanate world through
these romances is like trying to understand contemporary India by watching
Bombay films, inspiring the curious spectator in a later century to ask, “But
didn’t people do dance routines in the street, to the sound of playback music?”
In some places the Hindavī documentation is thicker, as in the case of the
Shattari materials that we will consider in Chapter 7. Here, we can discern
not only the poetic form (the allegorical centerpiece of Madhumālatī’s body)
but also the larger cosmological, political, and mystical world of the poem.
We have to read the texts through categories of interpretation that would not
have sounded strange to the historical agents who produced and enjoyed the
Hindavī Sufi romances.
Although the authors of the Sufi romances used the inflated rhetoric of the
conquest narratives of Hindustan, they reimagined themselves as the “natives,”
the Rajputs who defended their forts to the last and created narratives such as
the fictive sacrifice of Padminī at Chittaur (see Chapter 6). In these stories
of the sacrifice of Rajput women, the ultimate preservation of their women
from the enemy functions as a palliative for their loss of symbolic honor after
they were forced to admit the suzerainty of the Delhi sultans. It is remarkable
Studying the Sultanate Period 25
that within two centuries of the conquest the conquerors should take on the
opposing viewpoint, that of the conquered, and use it to create their own local
literary tradition. The victors were vanquished by the seductive charm of the
languages and literatures of India, by the culture that contained exquisite
bārah-māsās and folk songs as well as a cultivated Sanskrit aesthetics and nar-
rative poetics. These poets’ mixture of Persianate literary notions, Sufi ideol-
ogy, and desī symbolic and literary forms fits well within the cosmopolitan
and cultured literary world of sultanate India, a world that was predominantly
rural but dotted with forts controlled by aristocrats and crisscrossed by fighting
armies as well as by wandering Sufis and minstrels.
The distinctive narrative logic of the Hindavī Sufi romances linked bodily
discipline to stereotypes of gender to express a male-centered mystical agenda
as well as the resolution of uneasy political relationships with rulers and other
religious communities. Gavin Hambly, the editor of a volume of essays on
women in Islam, has remarked on “the stereotypical assumption that in tra-
ditional Islamic society women were somehow ‘invisible.’”76 The difficulty of
making women visible through fictional sources such as the ones analyzed in
this book are evident. As Hambly remarks, the representation of women in lit-
erature “raises questions of great complexity: the extent to which fiction reflects
some kind of reality; the authenticity of different voices; and the imposition by
male authors of a particular point of view.”77 We have to set the élitist Indian
Muslim male-authored narratives of the Sufi romances against other narratives
from the period, to see if we can begin to isolate a larger cultural logic of
gender relations. One pattern that is distinctly observed is the general assump-
tion of male superiority to women, and of women’s complete subservience in
some idealized domestic realm.78 To what extent this is idealized, we cannot
say, but what else can we expect from the fantasy literature of a male aristo-
cratic élite? Tentative and slanted as such a reconstruction may be, at least it
helps us understand the authors’ assumptions about gender, understand deeper
misogynies that run through the stories that people told during the sultanate
period, and understand how eroticism is powerfully shaped socially and cultur-
ally, even in the moment of renouncing the world to become an ascetic.
These fictional narratives demonstrate that alterity, desire, opposition,
mutual understanding, material and symbolic competition, and sexual fan-
tasy were very much part of the historical interaction between ethnic and
religious groups during the period of the Delhi sultanate. The genre exempli-
fies the gradual transformation of conquerors and conquered as they met on
the landscape of the soul, defining its pleasures and possibilities. The literary
past of modern standard Hindi was a shared past, to which the Sufis contrib-
uted a major literary tradition, reinventing themselves as desī Muslims in the
process.
26 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Enigmatic texts conceal within them multiple layers of meaning and inten-
tion, as well as an architectonics of form that governs their use, allowing the
producers and performers of the text to control access and understanding but
confounding attempts to systematize or map them. Thus the pluralism of
readings has also a limit condition, which is set by the makers of these texts.
One can identify specific contexts and conditions of reception that show quite
clearly how the contact between text and audience works in each case, trigger-
ing and shaping a spiritual process behind closed shrine doors and presenting
lovely romantic narratives in musical salons, bazaars, courts, and the public or
outer spaces of the shrines. In other words, one cannot just derive any ran-
dom meaning from the text, and it is the interplay between pluralism and its
limiting that the genre allows us to explore.
an Apabhraṃśa text from one of the Rajput kingdoms that fell to the superior
cavalry and military might of the Turkish army of Delhi. These texts interweave
conquest and romance, spelling out a wider cultural politics in which posses-
sion, rejection, or sacrifice of women marked the negotiations of opposed ide-
ologies and notions of male honor.
The next two chapters, 7 and 8, are about the Madhumālatī of the Shattari
Sufi Mīr Sayyid Mañjhan Rājgīrī, the final text of the four romances under
discussion. The seventh chapter presents a detailed reading of the allegorical
centerpiece of the Madhumālatī, the head-to-foot description of the heroine’s
body as it unfolds in front of the enraptured gaze of the seeker. My aim is
to understand the poetics of embodiment and erotic union in the context of
Shattari cosmology, politics, and spiritual practice, which I reconstruct in this
chapter from rare manuscript materials. I link the lush eroticism of the alle-
gorical set piece to the ascetic culture that produced it, the regimen of the
author’s group of Sufis, the Shattari silsilah.
Chapter 8 turns this knowledge of the Shattari mystical context to an exe-
gesis of certain key passages in the romance, set within a complete reading of
Mañjhan’s text. The Madhumālatī differs from the other romances of the genre
in that the hero does not have two wives; nor is there a final annihilation.
Instead, Mañjhan structures his story around a double plot: two couples come
together in the end, and the poetic description of marriage and the journey
to the beloved’s land signifies the ascent to a paradise of eternal love. There
is a poetic play between the secret mysteries of divine presence and what can
be publicly told. The hero and heroine swear a binding oath of silence, and
Mañjhan exploits this to hint at the greatest mystery of all: the dissolution
of boundaries between God and human beings at the higher levels of spiri-
tual perfection. My reading focuses on the way in which poetic personification
suggests spiritual mysteries, showing how the hero’s meeting with Pemā or
“Love” in a dark forest evokes spiritual macrocosms and self-transformation.
Love’s descent into this world from the paradisal mango grove of her father’s
kingdom slyly hints at larger cosmologies, and the hero’s conquest of the evil
demon who brought pemā there advances him on the quest for perfection. I
also highlight the generic set piece of the bārah-māsā, which is set here in the
voice of the divine heroine rather than the worldly wife.
The ninth chapter reconstructs the contexts of reception and performance for
these sensuous romances. Common understanding of the multiple meanings
of poetry allowed the poems to be performed in both courtly and Sufi circles,
each with its own protocol of reception and interpretation. Not all readings are
created equal, however, and in this chapter I attempt to isolate a hierarchy of
response in which the Sufi shaikhs were the most privileged interpreters of these
poems. A discussion of the Chishti practice of audition or samā‘ shows how
Studying the Sultanate Period 29
ritual manipulation of the listening self was the most valued part of the reception
of the Hindavī Sufi romances, making the Sufi novice under the guidance of a
teaching shaikh the ideal reader of the romances. The final chapter considers the
sources of the stories in the wider culture of the Indian Ocean, their translations
into Persian, and their subsequent impact on the wider world.
All in all, the various chapters delineate a number of aspects of the genre:
formation of a Hindavī poetics of multiple meanings with a distinctive slant,
creation of a generic formula, use of narrative motifs, use of landscape and
coded language to denote interior and imaginative journeys, cultural and liter-
ary understandings of the Turkish conquest of Hindustan, gender stereotypes
used to denote spiritual transformation as well as mystical love, the cosmo-
logical and ascetic context for the lush eroticism of the texts, and finally, the
audiences for whom the pleasure of listening to narrative poetry was mediated
by the Sufi practice of audition and theological interpretation.
The poets of the Hindavī Sufi romances commonly use the phrase “the
shadow of paradise on earth” ( janu kabilāsa utari bhui chāvā)80 to describe ele-
ments of their fictional landscapes. These include golden cities gleaming in the
sun or lush visions of paradisal islands with the flora and fauna of north India:
The heroine’s body sometimes flashes with the light of divine revelation:
And, when the heroes of these works run to catch these heavenly nymphs:
“I ran to fall at her feet, but she saw me coming and fl ew away.
When she left, there was a shining of light and a tinkling of bells,
and I fainted dead away!” 83
Inaugurating Hindavıˉ
Rasa
Even while they were transcreating a Persian generic model in a local lan-
guage, however, the poets of these prologues also inaugurated a Hindavī
poetics that established its distance from Persian romances by drawing on
the Indian aesthetics of rasa, the literary flavor or juice of a poem or play,
the mood or essence of a poetic or dramatic text in Indian poetics, the
aesthetic taste of a literary text. Rasa was defined famously in Bharata’s
eighth-century Sanskrit aesthetic treatise, the Nāṭya-Śāstra, as the juice or
flavor of a poem arising from “the combination of the vibhāvas (sources
of rasa), the anubhāvas (actions, experiential signs of rasa), and the transi-
tory emotions (vyabhicāribhāvas).”1 Rasa also meant the sap or semen that
runs through the natural world and the human body and was the essence
that Indian yogis sought to control through the channels of their subtle
bodies.
Rasa is “the poem’s capacity to elicit a deep response from a sensitive
reader.”2 The cultivated reader was the sahṛdaya, the “person with heart” who
could open himself up to the meanings and nuances of poetry, music, and
dance. The aim of reading or listening was to have an experience of the dom-
inant rasa that animates the poem, and the sahṛdaya feels the emotions of the
parted lovers in the poem. The sahṛdaya’s response is shaped by the sources
of rasa depicted by the poet. These include monsoon clouds indicating the
season of love, the experiential signs of love such as bodies trembling and
perspiring from desire, and the transitory emotions that attend the progress
of the main emotional mood of a poem: apprehension, envy, contentment,
shame, joy, and so on. A reader can approach the poet’s vision, the literal,
figurative, and suggested meanings of the poetic imagery, and the feelings of
the characters only because the ideal reader is a rasika or connoisseur of rasa
at heart. A reader or listener who was a rasika would understand the spiritual,
32 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
ascetic, and erotic dimensions of the poetry and appreciate the cunning inter-
weave of meaning and interlinguistic resonance in the Sufi love stories in
Hindavī.
The poets of the Hindavī romances used this concept in their own dis-
tinctive way and without the elaborate superstructure of Sanskrit literary crit-
icism. They used rasa to anchor a poetics of suggestion and secrecy, linking
ascetic practice and eroticism in particular narrative patterns. These patterns,
called rūpas, “forms,” are the basis of an aesthetic practice in which form
and beauty structure response to the poetry and imprint the consciousness
of the listener with a sequential revelation of the emotional truths embodied
in the narrative. Spectators and listeners in a poetic or dramatic performance
understood the words, music, and movements through a transsubjective com-
munication of the rasa of a performed or recited piece. By using a spoken
language, Hindavī, rather than Sanskrit, the poets distanced themselves from
the classical literary language controlled by Brahmin ritual specialists. But
at the same time, by appropriating aesthetic models and conventions from
Sanskrit and Persian, they laid claim to literary and social prestige, classiciz-
ing Hindavī and transforming it from an everyday spoken vernacular into a
courtly language.
Maulānā Dā’ūd, writing in 1379, uses the term rasa as the keystone of his
narrative poetics, the pleasure that he expects his audiences to savor in his
love story. The full extent of Dā’ūd’s indebtedness to classical Sanskrit models
of rasa or their Middle Indic approximations can be known only through the
incomplete and damaged text of the Cāndāyan, as we have hardly any contex-
tual information about the poet. There are verses in the Cāndāyan, however,
indicating that the poet was familiar not only with rasa as the “meaning” or
ma‘ānī of Hindavī music and poetry but also with a range of Sanskrit poetic
techniques such as dhvani or suggestion.3
Earlier theorists of meaning in Sanskrit distinguished abhidhā, the denota-
tive power of a word, from the secondary or figurative meanings (lakṣaṇā) that
arose when the primary denotation was blocked.4 The ninth-century Kashmiri
critic Ānandavardhana clarified the aesthetic effects of poetic utterance by
developing a third linguistic function or meaning, the dhvani, or suggested
sense of the poem. As Edwin Gerow puts it, this third sense is bound up with
“the emotional response to the work of art, the rasa”:
In other words, aside from the literal meanings of a poetic text, there are vari-
eties of implied or suggested meanings that are simultaneously apprehended
by the reader who is aware of the limits of denotative meaning in understand-
ing a poem.
In this kind of poetry, the expressed meaning (abhidhā) interacts with the
suggested meaning (vyaṅgyārtha) that resonates from the verse. An example of
such a verse, attributed to king Vikramāditya and commented on by the critics
Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, would be:
In this Sanskrit verse, the luxuriant images used to describe the river are
not completely coherent at the level of expressed meaning. Only the sensitive
reader who thinks beyond the direct imagery can grasp the hidden suggestions
of the limbs of a woman’s body: branches as arms, trunk as body, waterlil-
ies as eyes, elephant’s cranial lobes and fruit as breasts, plaintain trunks as
thighs, and so on. The poet counts on the slow dawning of the implications
of these images in the minds of sensitive readers or listeners to achieve his
aesthetic effect.
At the heart of the Hindavī love stories is a Sufi poetics of the notion of
rasa. For, aside from being a literary category, rasa in Indic religious systems
also serves to underpin yogic and Tantric ideas of spiritual practice7 and the
attainment of immortality. Within the musical and poetic culture of fourteenth-
century Delhi and the provinces under its rule, the Chishti Sufis adapted to
their own ends the imagery and sense of this mystical attainment. They used
a Hindavī poetics of rasa to compose verse that was sung during the spiritual
training and eventual transformation of novices through the practice of samā‘
or musical audition. The poets of the genre exploited the multiple referential-
ity inherent in poetry to give desire and love an extra fillip by their association
with Sufi love, linking the sensuous eroticism of their images with the rigor-
ous ascetic practice of the Sufi silsilahs.
These poets produced self-conscious reflections on language that empha-
sized its links with both the transitory world and the eternity of Allah. Images
34 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
can disappear in the twinkling of an eye, but the experience of mystical love
lives beyond the play of forms. This complex use of language and its inher-
ently multiple meanings enabled the authors of this genre to straddle the two
major institutional contexts of reading and sponsorship, court and Sufi hos-
pice. The poems also circulated in contexts outside these interpretive com-
munities, for cultivated readers appreciated the Hindavī poets for their lush
imagery and their ability to tell a good story. In the Sufi shrine, however, the
internal principle of the proliferation of endless meanings was limited by the
logocentric bias of Sufi commentators and their insistence on the training of
the self toward a monotheistic godhead.
Here the divine Name functions as the key to all difficult tasks and the anchor
of the universe. Niz" āmī uses the language of the divine attributes (ṣifāt) to
delineate the different aspects of Allah’s might and majesty. Allah, in the
metaphysic the poet sketches out, is the Keeper of the book of days.
In his Shīrīn va Khusrau, Amīr Khusrau begins each mas̱navī with a simi-
lar series of exhortations, each calling on aspects of Allah’s power and praying
to Allah to grant spiritual knowledge and grace. Thus, his prologue opens:
Amīr Khusrau follows his initial prayer with a paean to divine unity (tauḥīd)
and another long prayer (munājāt) following Niz" āmī’s model. His other masnav
̱ īs
36 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
follow the same pattern. His Deval Rānī Khizr Khān (DRKK), a story about the
love of Prince Khizr Khān and the Princess of Gujarat, opens with these lines:
Here the poet makes the ḥamd into an extended figure for the attachment of the
human heart to divine beauty. The image for humanity, the “tablet of water and
clay” (lauḥ-i āb-va gil), places the faculty of love at the center of God’s shaping
of Adam in the Qur’ān, and the second couplet links that faculty with the heart
of life. Rather than the difficult mysteries of the letters kāf and nūn, the poet
focuses on the single effulgent dot (nuqtah) that stands at the center of the let-
ter nūn and contains divine love. Lovely women are here embodied as seductive
idols (but), enchanting to the eyes, potentially leading one down the path to her-
esy, but ultimately part of Allah’s creation. Vision is the source of pleasure in life,
yet it enables one to approach invisible divinity through the layers of materiality.
In his Cāndāyan (C), Maulānā Dā’ūd translates this model into the spoken
language of Hindavī or Bhākhā and begins to develop an indigenous set of
theological terms for Allah’s might and majesty:
Dā’ūd takes a Hindavī term for the Creator, sirjanhārū, the “one who emits
or creates the world,” and uses it to describe Allah’s creative power. The
Inaugurating Hindavī 37
repeated verb sirjasi (“He made/created”) begins each line after the first cou-
plet, approximating something of the repetitive power of the openings of the
Persian mas̱navīs. In this and the following verses, Dā’ūd sings the praises of
the Creator by making all the elements of creation dependent on their Maker
to put them in place.
Dā’ūd adapts the rhymed couplets of the Persian mas̱navī into the new
form of the Hindavī caupāī-dohā, each set of five short rhymed couplets fol-
lowed by a longer summary couplet. Used before him in Jaina Apabhraṃśa
works, the four-foot caupāī-dohā becomes after Dā’ūd the standard narrative
form for Hindavī poetry.14 He also introduces into the Persianate model of
the praise poem many Indian mythological and cosmological elements: in
the verse above, the Creator is responsible for creating the cosmic mountains
Meru, Mandara, and Kailāsa. In the verses that follow, he realigns the indig-
enous cosmology around Allah:
Dā’ūd fits the Sanskritic notion of the nine continents (nava khaṇḍa), as well
as the seas of water, milk, and salt, into a string of elements of creation that
build up to a finale in the dohā, the couplet at the end. Dā’ūd makes clear to
his audience that although he is sketching out the elements of place using
commonly understood terms, his distinctive notion of divinity exists beyond
place. Allah is lā-makān, “placeless,” although he is the anchor of every place
that the poet can name.
Dā’ūd also appropriates another convention from Persian poetry: the na‘t
or the praise of the Prophet Muḥammad. The second section of Niz" āmī’s pro-
logue to the Laylī va Majnūn praises the seal of the prophets:
Niz" āmī uses the language of the Qur’ān to assert the primacy of Muḥammad in
Allah’s creation. The imagery suggests that sending Muḥammad is Allah’s lat-
est act of mercy toward humankind (ḥalvā-yi pasīn), along with the first flash
of divine beauty in a humanly accessible form (malḥ-i avval). The reference is
to the famous Sufi tradition that God’s light was first refracted in the form of
Muḥammad, an idea continued in the image of the first fruit. Earth and sky
turn toward him when they wish to worship Allah. Niz" āmī follows the na‘t with
a long section in praise of the night-journey (mi‘rāj) of the Prophet, a convention
that is frequently used by Amīr Khusrau but not by the Hindavī Sufi poets.
Amīr Khusrau’s response to Niz" āmī uses the same grand language to con-
vey many of the same ideas, as in his prologue to the Majnūn va Laylī:
Amīr Khusrau also draws on the language of the first and last things cre-
ated by Allah to praise the Prophet, and in the second line he echoes Niz"āmī
directly. Muḥammad is both the final sun (khurshīd-i pasīn) and the first efful-
gence of divine light (nūr-i avval). The figure of the lamp (chirāġh) plays on
the Verse of Light from the Qur’ān (24:35): “Allah is the light of the heavens
and the earth. The parable of his light is as if there were a Niche and within
it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass; the glass as it were a brilliant star,
lit from a blessed tree.” The Prophet’s name is the secret message on Allah’s
tablet, written there by the Creator and read out for humanity’s benefit. In
Khusrau’s Deval Rānī Khizr Khān, the na‘t on the Prophet Muḥammad praises
him as the one to whom the angels pay homage, astonished at his perfection,
and the stars are lovers of his perfect beauty (DRKK 8–9). Muḥammad’s night
ascension to heaven (mi‘rāj) is described as an extended planetary journey: the
moon rends the veil of his sleep, Mercury carries him up on the dark night
on which he witnesses divinity, the planet Venus is intoxicated with the divine
mystery, and the sun yields its place to him out of respect (DRKK 11).
Dā’ūd adapts these conventions and ideas in a way that was to form the
prototype for the Hindavī Sufi romances. He takes the language of light and
Inaugurating Hindavī 39
Dā’ūd is shorter and pithier than the long praise poems of the Persian poets.
For him Muḥammad embodies Allah’s command. According to the famous
tradition, “If you had not been, I would not have created the heavens” (laulāka
mā khalaqtu ’l-aflāka), Allah created the world for Muḥammad. The verse fol-
lows Sufi tradition in depicting the Prophet as the radiant light of the first
manifestation of God. In a phrase that recurs through the genre, the drum of
Muḥammad’s name resounds throughout creation. Further, the name of the
Prophet Muḥammad goes along with a faith and a true path (sharī‘ah) that
Muḥammad declared and the community of believers must walk.
In the next verse, Dā’ūd introduces a new item, something not always
found in the Persian mas̱navīs but certainly comprehensible within the arma-
ture that he inherits from them: the praise of the first four caliphs, the righ-
teous rulers of the first years after the death of the Prophet. Dā’ūd praises
Abū Bakr (r. 632–634), ‘Umar ibn al-Khat"t"āb (r. 634–644), ‘Usmāṉ ibn ‘Affān
(r. 643–656), and finally ‘Alī, the son-in-law of the Prophet (r. 656–661), as the
four friends or “companions” of the Prophet Muḥammad:
Although some of the readings of this verse are fragmentary, the general sense
is clear. Dā’ūd uses a structure of scriptural authority comprehensible in local
40 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
terms as his way of conveying the importance of the four righteous Caliphs.
They are the four friends to whom Muḥammad entrusted the scripture, for
which Dā’ūd uses the Sanskrit term beda purāna (= Veda Purāṇa), rather than
the Arabic word Qur’ān. By the process of instruction, the poet suggests, the
four become collectively paṇḍitas or learned men. Dā’ūd uses a biographical
fact from the life of the third Caliph, ‘Us̱mān, who commissioned the sec-
ond and final version of the Qur’ān, and collapses it into the general sense
of the four Caliphs imagined as a single entity, learned men controlling the
only righteously authorized scripture. The community of believers, then, has
access to the true path and true book only through the four “companions” of
the Prophet Muḥammad.
The terms used here for the formless, ungendered, attributeless divinity
translate Islamic theology effectively into Hindavī. The term ekoṃkāra, “the
one sound of Oṃ,” translates the Arabic word with which Allah began the
creation of the universe, for in the Qur’ān’s account of creation Allah said
“kun!” (“Be!”), and the world came into existence (“fayakun”). Absolute divinity
(parama brahma) on the highest plane does not take on a gendered form, and
Inaugurating Hindavī 41
Qut"ban transforms the Qur’ānic notions of Allah’s absolute divinity, unity, and
peerlessness into a statement that Allah has no mother, father, or kinsmen
(mātā pitā bandhu nahi koī).
The first manifestation of divine essence is in the form of light (joti sarūpa/
"
nūr). In the fourth verse of his prologue, Qutban mentions the philosopher
Ibn ‘Arabī’s16 notion of the Muḥammadan light (nūr-i Muḥammadī):
Here Qutban " expresses Ibn ‘Arabī’s idea of the “reality of Muḥammad”
(ḥaqīqat-i Muḥammadiyyah), the first refraction of light from the divine. The
world is created because Allah is a “hidden treasure” who longs to be known,
and this desire brings into existence first the “reality” of Muḥammad and
then all other things in their turn. The moving force within this metaphysic
is desire, and in the phenomenal world Allah’s desire is echoed in created
beings who wish to return to the source of their being. Śiva and Śakti are
the two genders, a statement that shears the overtly Śaivite superstructure off
an elaborate local mythology of godhead and refits it into an Indian Islamic
"
literary framework. Similarly, Qutban makes the throne of Indra, king of the
Hindu gods, the ultimate spiritual reward for reciting the words of Muslim
faith, the kalmah-yi shahādat. This proselytism is characteristic of the Hindavī
Sufi poets, who use Indian myth, religion, and literary and social convention
freely, yet with a distinctive and sometimes missionary slant.
Like Dā’ūd, Qut"ban goes on to praise the four “companions” of the Prophet,
the first four righteous caliphs. Unlike Dā’ūd, he takes care to differentiate
among their respective achievements:
All the elements declare the glory of the sole Creator. The next three verses
go through the visible cosmos in the same manner, pointing out signs of the
power and majesty of Allah.
Inaugurating Hindavī 43
Then the poet turns to forging a set of terms within Hindavī to express the
theology of Allah. Some of the tropes repeat Qut"ban’s prologue, but within a
more elaborate framework:
Here a theology is being defined by translating the Arabic Names of Allah into
Hindavī, stressing all the while God’s inability to be defined or represented in
words. Describing divinity as alakha arūpa abarana, invisible, formless, and color-
less, stresses Allah’s difference from the embodied and colorful local gods. We
see here the invention of a set of Indian Islamic theological terms, using desī
Hindavī words. Nature presents a visible, manifest face to the senses but also has
a hidden or secret side known only to God. As we shall see, the poets and audi-
ences of the Sufi romances exploit this notion of hiddenness to go beyond the
glittering surface of poetry in order to convey invisible and hidden meanings.
Jāyasī follows the remaining conventions much more briefly, using single
verses for the na‘t and the praise of the Prophet’s companions. He praises the
Prophet as the puruṣa nirmarā or radiant man of light:
Here Jāyasī is drawing on the imagery of the āyat al-nūr, the “Light Verse” of
the Qur’ān, in which God’s radiance is compared to a lamp placed in a niche,
to make Muḥammad the lamp of creation:
Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light
is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed
44 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
in Glass; the glass as it were a brilliant star: lit from a blessed Tree, an
Olive, neither of the East nor of the West, whose Oil is well-nigh lumi-
nous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! God doth guide
whom He will to His Light: God doth set forth parables for men: and
God doth know all things.18
Jāyasī goes on to specify the ideal community of believers (ummat) and the
teaching handed down from on high to the Prophet:
In these lines Jāyasī mixes terms freely, using the desī term dharmī for “righ-
teous,” and desī words to suggest the Arabic sunnat, the way of Muḥammad,
yet referring directly also to the ummat or community of believers. He implies
that those who follow the path of Muḥammad are following the true dharma,
the true religion. His verse on the four “companions” of the Prophet is very
similar to Qut"ban’s verse above. He praises the four caliphs for similar achieve-
ments, Abū Bakr for his sincerity and wisdom, ‘Umar for his justice, ‘Us-mān
for fixing the text of the Qur’ān, and ‘Alī for being the brave warrior and lion
of God (P 12.2–5). In conclusion, he upholds the Qur’ān as the only true scrip-
ture for the world (P 12.8).
Mañjhan’s praise of Allah links the Creator first with “love, the treasure-house
of joy” (prema prītī sukhanidhi), the central value of the love story. Then he
sketches out the attributes of the ruler of the universe and the four ages (juga).
As we have seen, the term ekoṃkāra, the one sound, refers to the Qur’ānic
account of creation, in which God said “Be!” and “It was.” The Hindavī Sufi
poets translate the divine command in Arabic (kun fayakun) into the local
Hindavī word for the nāda or sound that sets the universe in motion.
Mañjhan goes on to find Hindavī approximations for the widespread Sufi
theory of vaḥdat al-vujūd or the unity of all existence, playing on the Lord’s
unity (vaḥdat) and his multiplicity (kas̱rat):
The verbal structure of this verse plays with the literal Arabic attributes of Allah
and mimics them in Hindavī. Thus the fourth couplet invokes the Arabic lā-
makān, the “placeless” one, and reproduces it as bāju ṭhāṉva (also “placeless”).
The concluding couplet brings up the “Light” verse as well as the Names of
Allah. Here Mañjhan is referring to the a‘yān al-s̱ābitah, the eternal hexeities
or patterns, the divine Names, which Ibn ‘Arabī regarded as prototypes of all
things in existence. Mañjhan’s use of this term has a special referent, however,
because his Sufi order, the Shattaris, formulated an elaborate system of letter
mysticism and cosmology based on the Names of Allah, using them to incul-
cate divine qualities or attributes in the practitioner.
46 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Finally, Mañjhan uses the convention of the na‘t and the praise of the
“companions” of the Prophet to suggest Muḥammad’s true nature:
Mañjhan uses the paradoxical logic of Ibn ‘Arabī’s theory of the refraction of
divine light into the forms of this world to declare the sole substantial real-
ity of Muḥammad’s body (sarīra) and the shadowiness of the concrete, sen-
sible world: “He is the substance, and the world his shadow.” Further, he uses
the Hindavī word rūpa (“form, beauty”) to skirt, dangerously, the language of
incarnation. Allah is alakh, the invisible one, but the form that can be seen
is that of Muḥammad, which suggests the divine presence. Significantly, rūpa
is also used extensively in the erotic encounter in the romance to refer to the
divine and human aspects of the love that blossoms between the hero and
heroine. Mañjhan ends his na‘t with the standard, simple words of praise for
the first four righteous caliphs.
Mañjhan’s Hindavī poem marks the end of a long process of competitive
assimilation of the courtly culture of the Delhi sultanate and the Afghan
kingdoms into an Indian landscape. Beginning with Dā’ūd’s Cāndāyan,
which created the paradigm for the literary tradition out of the romances
of Niz āmī Ganjavī and Amīr Khusrau, we can trace the elaboration of the
¨
model in the works of the later Hindavī poets. Dā’ūd took the ḥamd and
na‘t of the Persian romance poets and used it to invent a Hindavī Islamic
theology and terminology. Qut" ban developed and embellished the formula
in his Mirigāvatī, to be followed with greater degrees of skill and elabora-
tion by Malik Muḥammad Jayāsī and Mīr Sayyid Mañjhan Rājgīrī.
But what of the politics and historical placement of these poets? Who were
their audiences, and how were their poems understood and performed? To
answer these questions, we must turn to the remainder of the prologue, pay-
ing attention to literary form, multiple linguistic and theoretical sources, and
performance contexts.
Inaugurating Hindavī 47
such works as the famous Qābūs Nāmah of Kai Kā’ūs bin Iskandar,23 Nizām "
24
al-Mulk Tūsī’s Siyāsat Nāmah, and numerous anonymous works such as the
Baḥr al-Favā’id.25 As Julie Meisami has noted in her distinguished study of
Persian court poetry, “the proliferation of mirrors for princes during the period
in which Persian romances flourished (from the advent of the Saljuqs to the
Mongol invasion) testifies to the widespread interest not only in establishing
the practical ethics of kingly conduct, but in defining the nature of kingship
and the qualifications of the ideal sovereign.”26 In Meisami’s account of genres,
panegyric poems are the ideal forms through which poets construct a prescrip-
tive poetic ethic designed to praise kings as well as to instruct them in their
duties and responsibilities. But since it was commonly accepted during the
period that poets were much given to lies, exaggeration, and hyperbole, what
was the precise discursive and political status of this poetic ethic of kingship?
The panegyric was an ideal form that set the style and laid out the content
of political authority but also created the material circumstances for its own
production. The praise of kings and noblemen, and particularly of the military
nobility of the period, gave poets access to the resources and sponsorship they
needed to compose poetry within a courtly culture that patronized skilled lit-
erary figures, calligraphers, scholars, and artists. In return, the poet composed
poetry that gave the patron pleasure and allowed him to establish his political
authority through the symbolic forms and the cultural style of the period.
The concern with establishing political authority and defining cultural style
grew especially acute as conquests of territory in the name of Islam ranged
further and further from the spheres of the near-defunct ‘Abbasid caliphate
and the Saljuqs. In his masterful history of the Delhi sultanate, Peter Jackson
has commented incisively on the problem of political authority in the regional
sultanates after the disintegration of ‘Abbasid rule from Baghdad. As Jackson
notes:
As the territories that were acquired in the name of the Caliph grew ever
more far-flung, the problem of legitimacy became more acute, especially in
view of the recently converted status of many provincial rulers. As Jackson
comments,
Inaugurating Hindavī 49
To bolster their dubious legitimacy, the provincial amirs had to act (or
pose) as champions of Sunnī Islam and its caliph against both the infi-
del and the heretic. These functions were exercised most successfully
by rulers of Turkish origin. Most of the regional dynasts imitated the
‘Abbasid Caliphs, and buttressed their own power, by maintaining regi-
ments of Turkish slave guards (Arabic sing. ghulām, mamlūk; Persian
banda) from the pagan steppelands of Central Asia. Ghulam status, it
must be emphasized, bore none of the degrading connotations associ-
ated with other kinds of slavery. The Turkish peoples enjoyed a par-
ticularly high reputation for martial skill and religious orthodoxy, and
ghulams were highly prized by their masters, receiving both instruc-
tion in the Islamic faith and a rigorous military training. Nor was such
confidence misplaced . . . [T]he forging and preservation of an indepen-
dent Muslim power in India were to be in large measure the work of
Turkish slave commanders and their own ghulams.28
The gradual expansion of Ghaznavid rule into the Punjab and, after the thir-
teenth century, the establishment and consolidation of the Delhi sultanate was
largely the work of such men. Fundamental to their system of political legit-
imation and their sense of ideological superiority were projections of the tri-
umph of Sunni Islam, to which they had recently converted, as well as the
claim to just rule according to the numerous manuals of statecraft composed
during this period.
It is against this backdrop that one has to set the inflated claims and rheto-
ric of the prologues to both the Persian and the Hindavī romances. The pro-
logues of both sets of works draw on the elaborate language of polity to wax
eloquent in praise of various courtly patrons. They praise the ruling sultan
and his noblemen as generous sponsors, as well as guarantors of justice and
stability. Their political ideology linked state, religious law, and military might
in an institutional structure that draws revenue from its subjects and in return
guarantees order and justice. The idea that the king’s justice provides the cri-
teria for determining right and wrong and for maintaining order in the land
comes from Persian definitions of kingship such as the one found in Fakhr
al-dīn Rāzī’s Jāmi‘ al-‘Ulūm, cited and translated by Richard Eaton:
Whatever the real limits of his power, in Niz" āmī’s idealized rhetoric Tuġhril
Arsalān is the moral and political center of the state as well as a generous
patron.
Niz" āmī then praises the power and munificence of the tutor Jahān Pahlavān
Abū Ja‘far Muḥammad Eldigüz and his son Qizil Arsalān:
The poet draws on the dualism of dīn and duniyā, the true religion and the
world, to suggest that Abū Ja‘far Muḥammad is the sun that illuminates the
world, comparing his status in the political realm with that of the Prophet in
the religious sphere. In light of the fact that Abū Ja‘far poisoned the Sultan’s
father in 1176 to set the Sultan up as the new king, the line about “the seal of
worldly kings” has a certain grimly ironic ring to it. The section is followed by
the khit"āb-i zamīnbūs (“address of obeisance”) to the patron, in which he asks
for his generous support and calls down blessings on him, as well as by a sec-
tion of praise dedicated to the atabeg’s son, Qizil Arsalān.
This pattern is fairly standard and varies only with the commissioning
patron of the poet. Thus, in his Haft Paikar (HP, “The Seven Beauties”),
Niz" āmī waxes eloquent in the praise of ‘Alāuddīn Körp Arsalān (fl. 1170), the
Ahmadili ruler of Maragha in southwestern Azerbaijan:
The Ahmadilis were a minor dynasty who played a role in Saljuq politics from
their power base in Maragha. Thus the generic conventions of praise extend
to provincial nobility and lesser rulers, who either are placed in a political
hierarchy with the sultan at its apex or mimic the imperial style as the central
figures in their provincial courts.
52 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
This passage brings to the fore ‘Alāuddīn’s military might and the image of
the holy warrior, as well as the insignia of royalty and power that signal his
might. Amīr Khusrau pushes this triumphalist rhetoric to unprecedented
heights, particularly in his mas̱navīs that deal directly with conquest. Thus, in
the Deval Rānī Khizr Khān, he extols the reign of ‘Alāuddīn as coterminous
with the victorious rule of Islam:
Here the king is the military power through whose prowess the sharī‘ah rules
supreme. As we know from another source in the period, jihād or holy war
was considered an obligation for a Muslim adult man,34 irksome and poten-
tially dangerous, but necessary nevertheless to ensure regular flows of booty
and revenue into the capital, Delhi. The images are militaristic and strong:
the warlike sword puts all the infidel Hindus to rest below the dust. The poet
represents the territory of India as dār al-Islām, a land of Islam. From the
inflated rhetoric, one would never guess that ‘Alāuddīn fought campaign after
Inaugurating Hindavī 53
campaign to subdue India, large parts of which would still remain dār al-harb,
the territory of war.
This generic model preshapes Dā’ūd’s panegyrics to Fīrūz Shāh Tuġhlaq,
his minister Jūnā Shāh, and Malik Mubārak, their appointed muqt"a‘ or noble
in Avadh. The Hindavī verses, though brief, establish the hierarchy that spon-
sored his poetic efforts and therefore allow us to place the composition of the
poem in the year 781/1379, at the provincial court of Dalmau:
The verse situates the poem within an oral performance in court (kabi sarasa
ubhāsī), a point to which we shall return. It praises Dalmau on the Ganges as
a provincial utopia, home to the people of the faith, a stronghold that is held
securely despite rebels and large tracts of territory that were only tenuously
controlled by its iqt"ā‘-dār.
The personages mentioned in the verse require a brief historical aside.
The scant information available about Dā’ūd from other sources indicates his
closeness to the court and his involvement in the politics of Fīrūz Shāh’s suc-
cession to royal power. At the time of Sultan Muḥammad Tuġhlaq’s death in
Sind, his minister Khvāja-i Jahān Aḥmad bin Ayāz placed a pretender on the
throne of Delhi. After his own accession to the throne, Fīrūz Shāh advanced
on Delhi with an army at his back. The Khvāja-i Jahān sent four messengers
including Maulānā Dā’ūd to reason with him. Fīrūz Shāh kept three of them
in captivity and sent Dā’ūd back with a message saying the Sultan had no son
(i.e., he did not recognize the claims of the pretender). Although the Khvāja-i
Jahān opposed Fīrūz Shāh, the future Sultan was victorious with the help of
a faction at court led by the deputy (nā’ib vazīr) to the Khvāja-i Jahān, Malik
Maqbūl,35 who also patronized literature in Telugu and was a Brahmin convert
to Islam. After Fīrūz Shāh’s accession in 1351, Maqbūl was rewarded with the
chief ministership and given the title of Khan-ī Jahān, while Aḥmad Ayāz was
put in prison in Hansi.36 At the time of Malik Maqbūl’s death in 1370, his son
Jūnā Shāh succeeded to his father’s post.37 Maulānā Dā’ūd was evidently part
54 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Jūnā Shāh is thus the guarantor of the circle of justice, the fair ruler who
treats Hindus and Turks alike and upholds the truth. The trope of the cow
and lion walking and drinking together, an ideal metaphor for his justice, is
repeated in the terms of praise of the other Hindavī prologues. Other verses
focus on the ruler’s bravery and the force of his sword (the military might that
underwrites his just rule), as well as the courage and generosity of his iqt"ā‘-dār
Malik Mubārak.
was dethroned by Bahlol Lodī’s capture of Jaunpur in 1483 and fled to a small
enclave in the town of Chunar in Bihar. The Bengali Sultan ‘Alāuddīn H.usain
Shāh later gave him Kahalganv or Colgong in Bhagalpur district in Bihar, and
he had coins bearing his name issued until his death in 1505.39
In 1503, Qut"ban, a poet attached to Sultan Ḥusain Shāh’s court in exile,
dedicated the Mirigāvatī to him as an ideal patron and ruler. The dedication
should be placed against the larger historical background of the establish-
ment of regional sultanates such as Malwa, Gujarat, Jaunpur, Bengal, and the
Deccani states. These new polities employed the languages and courtly styles
of the fourteenth-century Delhi sultans as well as local idioms and aesthetic
media. Ḥusain Shāh Sharqī himself was a poet and a noted patron of the
distinctive Sharqī style of architecture. He was also an accomplished musician,
credited with creation of Rāga Jaunpurī, the various Syāms, and four versions
of the morning Rāga Toḍī in north Indian or Hindustani classical music.40
The prologue to the Mirigāvatī places him at the center of a multilingual and
cultured court:
Here Ḥusain Shāh is the ideal patron and cultured listener, cognizant with
languages and able to comprehend subtle points and multiple meanings. The
mythological references from the Mahābhārata introduce an Indic ideal lan-
guage of kingly authority: Ḥusain Shāh is equal to Yudhiṣṭhira, as a model
of dharma or royal duty, and surpasses Karṇa as an exemplar of generosity.
As part of the context of oral performance, the poet addresses his audience
directly as the sabhā or court of Ḥusain Shāh.
These conventions are also part of Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (circa 1540), addressed
to Sher Shāh Sūrī, the Afghan king who forced Humāyūn to leave India in
1540, and Mañjhan’s Madhumālatī, written at the court of Sher Shāh’s son
56 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Islām Shāh Sūrī in 1545. For both, the elements that go to build up an ideal
polity are military might, a claim to just rule, and possession of great treasure.
Jāyasī addresses Sher Shāh Sūrī in polished verse:
Jāyasī plays on the multiple lexical meanings of sūra or “hero” in his panegyric
to the Sūrī conqueror of north India, comparing him, in the following lines,
to Alexander and to the subduer of jinns (genies), King Solomon. He wishes
eternal rule for Sher Shāh in the couplet to this verse, and he praises his
treasure and generosity, as well as his valor, in the following verses. Although
critics have taken these to be purely formulaic, a glance at the career of Sher
Shāh Sūrī and his constant jockeying to gain control of forts that contained
treasure shows that these were indeed the elements on which he based his
power and effectiveness as a military commander and ruler.41 Jāyasī is also a
poet with an unusually large range of allusions, all part of the same overlap-
ping set of discourses about the cultural symbolism of political authority in
Hindavī, in which Allah is definitely on the side of the big battalions.
Might and right similarly coincide in Mañjhan’s Madhumālatī, articulated
within the charmed circle of an Afghan court and the poets it patronized. His
romance is dedicated to Sher Shāh’s son Islām Shāh Sūrī. Mañjhan combines
the language of praise with Persianate notions of the power of Islām Shāh’s
army. He makes justice or ‘adl the moral basis of kingship:
Mañjhan uses the conventionalized tropes of the lion and cow playing together,
of lamb and wolf grazing together in peace, and describes Islām Shāh’s state
as a “garden without thorns,” echoing Fakhr al-dīn Rāzī’s closed and integrated
notion of kingship. The remaining verses repeat the mythological references
to Yudhiṣṭhira, Karṇa, and the great King Bhoja of Ujjain. They also praise
the Afghan nobleman and military commander Khizr Khān, who may have
patronized the poet and supported him at his own court.
These four poets’ addresses to their patrons are not just a prescriptive ethic
for kingship but a generic form that enables its own production through praise
of discerning, cultivated, and rich patrons. Moreover, the kings and noblemen
thus addressed were not just the material sponsors of the Hindavī poets but
also the sympathetic patrons of a courtly culture that reveled in music, poetry,
and art.
Conclusion
Our reading of the sources and structures of the prologues of the Hindavī
romances has allowed us to specify the inauguration of a distinctive desī
Muslim aesthetics on the local landscape of Hindustan in the fourteenth, fif-
teenth, and early sixteenth centuries, an Indian Islamic literary tradition. On
the one hand, these poets referred to and used important ideas, generic con-
ventions, and techniques from the Sanskrit poetics of rasa and suggestion. But
then, setting themselves against Sanskrit, they proclaimed the unique sweet-
ness of their desī spoken language. While applauding the delicately subtle
imagery of the Persian, they were mesmerized by the colorful and erotic flora
and fauna of their native Hindavī, the flowering night jasmine and lotus for
which they named their graphically described “divine” heroines.
The following chapters examine a number of aspects of the genre: the
use of Sanskrit and Persian erotologies and story motifs from multiple tradi-
tions to create a distinctive narrative pattern, the structure and sources of their
stories, the imaginary landscapes created in the romances, the links between
themes of conquest and gender, and the spiritual transformation of the male
seeker through the imagery of the erotic body of a woman. Whether in the rit-
ual context of Sufi khānaqāhs, in which audience response was controlled and
texts were made to conform to metaphysical schemes of interpretation, or at
royal courts where poets vied with one another to recite elegant and polished
58 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
poetry for their patrons, or among groups of cultivated people who met for an
evening’s entertainment, savoring the royal rasa of love and the taste of things
spiritual (ẕauq) meant understanding the multiple references of the poetry and
training one’s heart to be open to the Sufi message. All one had to do was to
learn how to listen.
3
describing any particular artistic culture, scholars have not been able to recon-
struct anything approaching a complete cultural picture of the romance or its
context. General accounts of sultanate culture operate by listing thematically
elements of food, dress, custom, and so on.2 A discussion of the various illu-
minated manuscript traditions, none of them complete, and their relation to
the printed editions of the text is outside the scope of this chapter,3 which
reads the fragments put together in the printed editions to reconstruct the
distinctive narrative pattern of the Cāndāyan.
However, the intermingled presence of painting and poetry in the first frag-
ments of the genre may be an occasion that warrants reflection on the shape
and form of the books that embodied the Sufi romances. Rulers not only
patronized authors, musicians, and dancers but also sponsored production of
illuminated and beautifully calligraphed copies of texts such as the Cāndāyan.
Books circulated as handwritten manuscripts that were read out loud in select
Sufi gatherings, recited in poetic assemblies, or enjoyed as luxurious illus-
trated objects at royal courts. One approach has been to examine the Persian
historical chronicles in conjunction with the painted and built remains.4 For
instance, from B. N. Goswamy’s incisive study of a particular illustrated man-
uscript, the so-called Jainesque Shāh Nāmah, we learn that Dā’ūd’s patron’s
overlord, Sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tuġhlaq (whom we have already noted as a patron
of music, poetry, and astrology) was hostile to painting:
As with other arts, a technique from Central Asia that was already known in the
subcontinent was transmitted to local artisans, who interpreted and recreated it
according to their native iconography and conventions. Courtly patrons were thus
responsible for the creative minglings and reformulations that flourished in the
arts of poetry, wall painting, music, architecture, and manuscript illumination.
When not interrupted by the exigencies of war, invasion, and the struggle
to keep one’s place at the court in Delhi, local aristocrats sponsored a richly
mixed set of regional artistic, spiritual, and literary cultures. There were also
related artistic and narrative traditions such as the various Jain sects and their
illustrated Kalpa-sūtras and other doctrinal texts, of which more later.7 There
are many works in Apabhraṃśa and the developing literary traditions of the
regional spoken languages, exemplified in the repertory and abilities of the
bards and professional poets who flocked to the courts of the dynasties that
called themselves Rajputs, dynasties that commissioned retrospective genealo-
gies for themselves hailing to the sun and the moon.8
Within this diverse and fragmentary set of textual and manuscript tradi-
tions, shattered fragments of a world now irretrievably lost, stands the text of
the Cāndāyan. The illuminated courtly manuscript traditions that surround it,
incomplete as they are (and the manuscripts of the Cāndāyan are all damaged),
illustrate at least two processes of artistic composition: the courtly and sophisti-
cated mingling of Persian models and Indian painting techniques exemplified in
the Prince of Wales Museum and John Rylands Library manuscripts, and the use
of indigenous painting conventions to illustrate Persian texts. The text was cop-
ied and disseminated among people who were multiliterate and multicultural.
Cāndā’s appeal invokes rasa in two senses: as a term adapted from Indian aes-
thetics into the poetics of a new genre in Hindavī, and, in conjunction with
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 65
the word prema (“love”), as the remedy for the existential condition of viraha or
separation. Just as savoring the rasa or juice of a story is what gives a reader
pleasure in a text, so savoring the rasa of love removes the burning and pain of
separation between lovers. In these two senses, rasa signifies an aesthetic rela-
tion between reader and text as well as between lovers, a relation that marks
both the circulation and reception of the text among sensitive readers and the
consummation of desire between characters in a love story. In Dā’ūd’s text,
however, prema-rasa signifies not just human love but also Chishti Sufi notions
of love for God. For instance, in Cāndā’s words to Biraspati, she uses the image
of lighting the lamp of rasa in the heart’s niche. The image suggests the verse
of the Qur’an (24:35) in which God’s radiance (nūr) is likened to a lamp placed
in a niche (mishkāt), illuminating the heavens and the earth.14
This third sense of rasa, the relationship between the invisible Allah and the
visible world, is put forward more clearly in Biraspati’s response. She plays further
on the word, using the rural mixture of jaggery and ghee (unrefined sugar and
clarified butter) as the especially sweet desī combination or taste of prema-rasa:
The nurse proposes the theological sense in which rasa signifies in the
premākhyān texts: it is the mark of the circulation of desire between Allah and
the world. As the famous tradition (ḥadīs" quds"ī) has it, Allah created the world
as a mirror for divine beauty (jamāl). It is Allah’s longing that is reflected in
human desires, just as it is Allah’s radiance that spreads from the niche in
which it is placed into the heavens and the earth. The nurse’s response to
Cāndā also contains the following observation:
The taste for rasa, then, allows the reader or listener to pass many instruc-
tive and delightful hours interpreting individual lines and sets of images for
their suggestive resonances. The genre redefines rasa as the relation of desire
between characters and transforms it into ‘ishq or love.
Jayadeva suggests that the Lord in his love play is the embodiment (mūrti) of
the erotic mood in poetics, śṛṅgāra. In this he turns the classical aesthetics
of śṛṅgāra toward prema, the pure transformative love of the gopīs for Kṛṣṇa.
In Jayadeva’s imagery, as Siegel puts it, prema is gold: “the ‘night manifests
[itself ] as a touchstone for the gold which is love for him’ (XI.12). The correla-
tion prema = gold and kāma = lead, suggests the alchemical process—the goal
of the Vaiṣṇavas was the transmutation of the baser emotion into the pure
emotion.”21
The Sanskrit poetry of Līlāśuka and Jayadeva and the padas or lyric poems
to Kṛṣṇa in the regional languages created a new aesthetics of bhakti, based on
a revaluation of the literary category of rasa.22 They elaborated the vocabulary
of kāma and prema; the mythology of Kāma-deva, god of love, with his bow
and arrows; and the celebration of moments of passion and separation in love,
and creatively mingled that erotic love with devotion, as in this poem to Kṛṣṇa
(Dāmodara) by the fifteenth-century Maithili poet Vidyāpati:
Here the jealous co-wives (sautana) are imagined in a structure different from
that of Dā’ūd’s formula of warring wives. Kṛṣṇa satisfies all sixteen thousand
wives in his love play in the paradise of Mathura, as the lovelorn gopī attests.
Her time has come after eons of prayers (japa). The god Dāmodara and she
have glanced at each other, and that first moment of vision granted her the
68 love’s subtle magic
grace of the Lord. She has attained siddhi or fulfillment (both spiritual and
physical). The symbolism of glances, of the water lily opening to the moon’s
rays, and the love play that will ensue all underscore the way that classical
erotics have here been transformed into the rasa of devotion to Kṛṣṇa.
The concept of rasa, as Siegel has indicated, links the “psychological and
physiological aspects of love—rasa is both the emotional pleasure of love and
the biological manifestation of that pleasure, i. e. semen.”24 The different sects
that sought to use rasa in their lyrics and to execute a direct and concrete
erotico-mystical practice invoked the sexual, aesthetic, spiritual, and psycho-
logical aspects of rasa simultaneously. As Edward C. Dimock has pointed out
about the Sahajiyā Vaiṣṇavas of Bengal:
To the Sahajiyās, the body is full of rasa, of the bliss of union, or, speak-
ing purely physiologically, of semen. The place of rasa at the beginning
of sādhana is in the lowest lotus, the seat of sexual passion. By sādhana,
rasa is raised from lotus to lotus along the spinal column, until it unites
with the thousand-petalled lotus in the head; there, in pure experience
and pure consciousness of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in union . . . is full and eter-
nal realization of their bliss. Here there is no longer even the seem-
ing distinction of human and divine; here man knows completely the
divine ānanda within himself.25
Here we begin to see the practical implications of the Vaiṣṇava rasa theory, as
human and divine collapse into each other at the level of ānanda or bliss.
The sects devoted to Kṛṣṇa used these notions differently, creating inter-
pretive schemes and theological commentaries around the various songs to
Kṛṣṇa and the sacred biography contained in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Although
the Sahajiyās practiced a form of Tantric mysticism, the Rādhā Vallabha sect
followed nine stages of devotion to Kṛṣṇa: listening to the deeds of Kṛṣṇa
(śravaṇa), singing his names (kīrtana), remembering the Lord (smaraṇa), wor-
shipping the feet (pāda-sevana), worshipping (arcana) and paying homage
(vandana) to the image (svarūpa) of Kṛṣṇa, servitude to Kṛṣṇa (dāsya), com-
panionship with Kṛṣṇa (sākhya), and finally, dedicating oneself completely to
Kṛṣṇa (ātma-nivedana).26 Devotees sang various padas or songs to Kṛṣṇa as
part of this nine-step program, designed to help the devotee transform his
soul (jīva) into a loving worshipper of Kṛṣṇa. The Subodhinī, Vallabhācārya’s
elaborate sixteenth-century commentary on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, supplies the
theological superstructure for this regimen of worship.27 Vallabhācārya inter-
prets the love games of Kṛṣṇa as transcendent in their very physicality, and
makes Kṛṣṇa the summation of all the aesthetic moods and concepts found in
classical rasa theory.
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 69
The image of Kabīr building his house above worldly distinctions, in the śūnya-
maṇḍala or “circle of emptiness,” expresses the difficult path of absorption in
the void. In the symbolic geography of the body, this circle lies between the
eyes and on top of the cakras along the spinal column.
Kabīr negates exterior forms of religion and places meditation on Rām’s
name at the center of his esoteric practice:
The love of Rām is the simple love in Kabīr’s devotional practice, and the
devotee repeats Rām’s Name while practicing breath control to attain the state
of absorption (sahaja).
Like the Sufis, Kabīr frequently uses the tropes of a bridal mysticism to
express his passionate love (prema) for the attributeless (nirguṇa) Rām. In a
song strikingly reminiscent of the divine heroine Cāndā’s longing for a lover,
Kabīr uses the tropes and conventions surrounding the practice of child mar-
riage. In this widespread Indian practice, it was usual for the bride to remain
with her parents after her first wedding ceremony until she reached the age
of puberty. After this there was a second ceremony, the gavana or “going,” in
which all good-byes were said and she set out for her husband’s home after
the ritual of consummation as a sexually mature woman.31 Union itself, as in
other mystical literatures, is described in terms of both mystical marriage and
sexual union:
To my Father-in-law’s house,
as a new bride I came,
But I couldn’t unite with my Lord
and my youth passed in vain!
The Five erected the wedding-canopy,
the three fixed the marriage’s date,
my girl-friends sang the wedding songs
and smeared my brow with the turmeric of Joy and Sorrow.
Clad in motley array, I circled the sacred Fire,
the knot was tied, true to my father’s pledge:
Without a Bridegroom, I entered wedlock—
on the marriage-square I stood as a widow by my Lord’s side!
My husband’s face, I’ve never seen,
yet people urge me to be the perfect wife.
Says Kabīr, I’ll raise a pyre and I’ll die on it:
clinging to my Spouse, I’ll cross over, playing the trumpet of Victory!32
Here all the signs and symbols of an Indian wedding are turned toward the
practice of absorption in the invisible Lord. The bride acquires a father-in-
law’s house (sasurāla) as a new bride, but cannot consecrate her marriage
until she has come of age. The five senses erect the canopy, while the three
strands that make up all creation (guṇas) bring the couple to the fated date
(muhūrata). But the groom remains invisible, and she circles the fire without
him. In the end the bride sacrifices herself on a funeral pyre to “cross over”
to the other side of this world of separation, union with the Beloved in the
next world.
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 71
Daˉ’u
ˉd’s Use of Islamic and Sanskritic Erotologies
Dā’ūd constructs an erotics of asceticism in which both verbal description and
vision excite desire in the anxious suitors of the divine heroine, and both lover
and beloved display conventional signs of love such as fainting and lovesick-
ness. He uses yogic imagery to suggest the Chishti novice’s ascetic quest to
savor the rasa of love. But his poetic version of desire and fulfillment draws
upon the Islamic and Sanskritic erotologies that determined the cultural and
literary representation of love and sexuality in his day.
The earliest works on love in Arabic, such as al-Jāḥiz "’s ninth-century trea-
tise the Risālah fī ’l-‘Ishq va ‘l-Nisā‘ (“Essay on Love and Women”), speak of the
excessive nature of love:
‘Ishq is the name for what exceeds that which is called ḥubb (affection)
and every ḥubb is not called ‘ishq, for ‘ishq is the name for what exceeds
that degree, just as saraf (prodigality) is the name for that degree which
is more than that which is called jūd (liberality) and bukhl (stinginess)
is the name for what falls short of the level of iqtiṣād (economy) and
jubn (cowardice) is the name for what falls short of the quality which is
termed shajā‘a (courage).33
This “love that comes from the soul” must be distinguished from ordinary
attachment and also from lust (havā), which is connected with the lower soul
(nafs), an important distinction among Sufis, who tried to promote the former
at the expense of the latter.
This definition of ‘ishq as excessive love or an excess of feeling, with
an exclusive character, was among the common topoi used to describe love.
Other themes that recur in Islamic theories of love are the characterization
of love as a divine madness that is neither fair nor foul, the ennobling power
of love, love as progressive apprehension of the stages of beauty, and the
concept of ordinate love in which each object except the last is loved for the
sake of another higher than itself. The classical Greek philosophical ques-
tion of whether the happy and self-sufficient man needs friends was adapted
in the Islamicate cultural context into the question of whether God as self-
sufficient can be described as loving. The corollary to the self-sufficiency of
God was denial of love between God and man, or the contrary assertion,
that love is the means of all intercourse between God and man. Factors that
were held to excite love included contemplation of beautiful faces, especially
those of beardless boys and women at whom it is not lawful to look. As J.
N. Bell points out, these topoi were brought into Arabic through translation
of the classical Greek sources on love.36 Moreover, as Annemarie Schimmel
indicates,
Later writers on love often discussed Muḥammad ibn Dā’ūd’s Kitāb al-Zahra,
exemplifying the concept of the martyrdom that attended chaste love. They
drew incessantly on systematic and unsystematic anthologies of maxims, anec-
dotes, and verses about love such as the Maṣāri al-‘Ushshāq of Abū Muḥammad
Ja‘far ibn Aḥmad al-Sarrāj.38 Manuals on the subject treated the physical signs
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 73
and terminology of love, as well as the progress of love affairs, and often
described desperate lovers dying of unconsummated love.39
Dā’ūd’s poem draws on these texts and on this tradition of mystical love,
as we shall see, and also on the Sanskrit tradition exemplified by Vātsyāyana’s
Kāma-sūtra and the enormous literature on erotics in Sanskrit and Prakrit.40
As the Kāma-sūtra tells us, erotic desire (kāma) “consists in engaging the ear,
skin, eye, tongue, and nose each in its own appropriate sensation, all under
the control of the mind and heart driven by the conscious self.”41 In general,
however, poets and critics frowned on explicit descriptions of lovemaking in
Sanskrit poetry:
In dealing with love, both physical and emotional, the Sanskrit poet
sought always to avoid vulgarity. This conscious effort at refinement
appears in the poet’s choice of individual words, in the speech and
gestures of the lovers he portrays, and in the selection he makes of
fact from actual sexual experience. Words that refer to bodily functions
are avoided unless they are to be used metaphorically. Clouds may spit
lightning but when humans spit the poet must turn away.42
By and large, Dā’ūd follows this prohibition against describing the actual phys-
ical details of sex in his own poem. He models his imagery on the poetry
of śṛṅgāra, both love-in-enjoyment (saṃbhoga-śṛṅgāra) and love-in-separation
(vipralambha-śṛṅgāra).
Dā’ūd’s use of Indian erotics to express a Sufi message was thus based on
a key distinction in Sanskrit poetry. Actual sexual practice, the ars amandi laid
out in the Kāma-sūtra, the Koka-śāstra, and related texts, is separate from its
emotional and aesthetic representation in poetry:
European far from poetic. To the Indian they were significant. Sweating
and bristling of the skin are involuntary actions . . . They cannot be sim-
ulated; they are criteria of the true state of the affections.43
You must know that the term “love” (maḥabbhah) is used by theolo-
gians in three senses. Firstly, as meaning restless passion for the object
of love, and inclination and passion, in which sense it refers only to
created beings and their mutual affection towards one another, but can-
not be applied to God, who is exalted far above anything of the sort.
Secondly, as meaning God’s beneficence and His conferment of special
privileges on those whom He chooses and causes to attain the perfec-
tion of saintship and peculiarly distinguishes by diverse kinds of His
miraculous grace. Thirdly, as meaning praise which God bestows on
man for a good action.45
the two: “‘Ishq is the last of the stages of muḥabbat, and muḥabbat is the first
of the stages of ‘ishq.”47
What is also clear from the Siyar al-Auliyā’ is that love was valued for its
utility in Chishti mystical practice. Muḥammad Kirmānī skillfully deploys the
idea of ordinate love:
The seeker’s path leads first to an engagement with his teacher’s vilāyah or
valāyah, a word that encompasses both the notion of spiritual jurisdiction and
the friendship of Allah, the power to dispose and to command.49 Little by lit-
tle, by applying the Chishti regimen of worship and fasting, he approaches
the real beloved, God. Finally, the invisible world is illuminated to him, and
the ways of divine providence. Though there is no exact allegorical scheme
of the stages of love that can be mapped on to Dā’ūd’s poem, the events in
his story resonate with the Chishti formulations of mystical love and ascetic
practice. These events draw the reader into the hero’s erotic/ascetic quest for
the invisible divinity that is temporarily revealed in the beautiful form of the
heroine Cāndā.
A fantastic story in Ḥamīd Qalandar’s Khair al-Majālis demonstrates the
ideological link between this ascetic regimen and Hindavī and Persian poetry.
This text contains the collected discourses of Shaikh Nasīr al-dīn Muḥmūd
Chirāġh-i Dihlī (“The Lamp of Delhi”), the spiritual preceptor of Dā’ūd’s
guide Shaikh Zain al-dīn. Even though the shaikh was known to be gener-
ally opposed to poetry and music,50 he recounted in one of his discourses the
parable of a young man who died from unrequited love. After his death an
autopsy was carried out, and a stone was extracted from his stomach. The
emperor who had ordered the autopsy had two rings made from the stone,
one to wear and the other to keep in his treasury. Once, while listening to
singers in samā‘ (ritual audition),51 the ring on his finger melted and turned
to blood. His clothes were all stained red with blood. Puzzled, the emperor
summoned wise men, who told him that the young man had been in love.
If samā‘ had been performed for him, they opined, he would have become
76 love’s subtle magic
well. For demonstration, the other ring was fetched from the treasury, and it
too melted in front of the singers and became blood. The moral of the story
is that to the people of samā‘, samā‘ is the medicine for all ills.52 The medico-
moral discourse of the Chishtis on ‘ishq represents love as both physical and
emotional, a congealed substance in the body that can be melted by the power
of music and then directed toward Allah.
How does this Chishti mystical agenda translate into Hindavī poetic con-
ventions in Dā’ūd’s poem? At this point it may be helpful to read another pas-
sage from the romance, in which a wandering singer has just seen Cāndā’s
dazzlingly lovely body at a window of her palace and has fainted in response to
it. The singer’s response to Cāndā’s revelatory beauty is widely known both in
Islamic and Sanskritic theories of love; this was how one scholar analyzed it:
Similarly, both the aesthetic theory of the Nāṭya-Śāstra and the practical pre-
scriptions of the Kāma-sūtra include fainting (jaḍatā or mūrchhā) as the pen-
ultimate stage of kāma, to be followed, if the desire is unfulfilled, by death
(maraṇa).54 Fainting as a response to a vision occurs frequently in the Hindavī
Sufi romances; lovers fall to the ground in rapture or agony, and they recover
only after they attain the object of their desire.
the king summons him to his court. In response to the king’s questions, he
replies that he has seen a vision of exquisite beauty. A restless desire (caṭpaṭī)
is aroused in the king’s heart, and he orders him to continue. The musician
depicts Cāndā in the generic set piece of the head-to-foot description:
The indication that these are fierce, jalālī attributes comes from the account of
their effect upon King Rūpcand:
According to Sufi metaphysics, God yearns to be known and loved, and human
desire is only a mirror of divine desire (shauq). The agony of desire in which
the king finds himself signifies the interaction of divine revelation with human
vision, the seductive appearance of divinity to attract human love. A later Sufi
gloss on the Hindavī images for feminine beauty, the Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī of Mīr
‘Abdul Vāḥid Bilgrāmī, indicates that the beloved’s dark locks can also signify
the dark night of sin. The lover has to escape from the night in order to follow
the mystical path, which is often represented as the shining white parting in
the hair of the beloved.56
The next part of Cāndā’s body described is her forehead, which suggests
the radiant divine manifestation in the form of light:
The poison that had rushed through the king’s arteries is arrested by this
sight, and he recovers himself:
The effect of her beautiful form on the king suggests the circulation of
desire between God, who wants to be seen, and the created being who sees in
beauty the reflection of divinity. On another level, the singer’s verses indicate
what can happen to readers or listeners in the context of reception of such
mystical poetry, if the listeners are able to appreciate the rasa of the poem.
The singer continues to describe Cāndā’s beautiful body, and the king’s
reactions fluctuate with the verses. Her teeth flash lightning, like glittering dia-
monds, and are full of juice (rasa) and perfectly formed as pomegranate seeds.
If her speech is sweet, it is because she has drunk much of the rasa of fruits.
Indeed, her mouth is described as a pool full of nectar. In response the King
cries out, “Catch her! Catch her!” But she remains elusive. Her ears shine
like golden lamps, and flashes of light from her jeweled ear studs illuminate
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 79
the heavens. The king revives and sits up, but then he sees the mole on her
face:
The Persian title for this verse is “ṣifah-i khāl-i bīmis̱āl,” a “description of the
incomparable mole.” The mole is without a mis̱āl, an allegory, exemplum, or
likeness, a word that was commonly used to suggest the process of abstrac-
tion in the literature of the period. The images the poet uses to describe the
mole suggest the sexual encounter of the male black bee and the female lotus
that the bee penetrates, intoxicated by its scent. This cruel image has a double
impact: on the singer, who lies stunned, and the king, who burns in the ter-
rible flames of separation. The singer moves on to describe Cāndā’s peerless
throat, which looks as if it has been perfectly shaped on a potter’s wheel, and
is so beautiful that all the gods have declared the impossibility of embracing
it. The king immediately declares he will embrace her lovely neck, even if he
has to conquer Govar to do so.
Throughout this entire passage, in which the poet has heightened the rasa
to suggest the multiple allegorical resonances of Cāndā’s beauty, the reader/
listener is never sure of the status of Cāndā’s embodiment. Dā’ūd’s skillful use
of imagery allows a logic of embodiment and a transcendent formless absolute
to work together in the imagery of the female body.57 The sarāpā draws to a
close with a verse that sums up Cāndā’s beauty by describing the heavenly
grace of her body, balancing her corporeal (saguṇa) and transcendent (nirguṇa)
aspects:
The coquetry and dalliance of the Beloved reach the lover, whom He
has created because the lover, before he came into existence, did not
wish for the Beloved. But the Beloved, before the existence of the lover,
was himself a lover. God wanted someone to want Him.
And again they say: when the Beloved preens himself and dallies before
the eye of the lover, He produces commotion and anxiety in the lover.
Yet for the Beloved, there is pleasure in that exchange. And when the
lover in the presence of the Beloved appears weak and submissive and
destitute, there appears world after world of delight for the Beloved,
and therein lies the happiness of the lover.60
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 81
The passage puts forward as the very reason for man’s existence his role of
lover (‘āshiq) of God as beloved (ma‘shūq). The narratives of the Hindavī love
stories are centered on awakening and transforming this basic human desire
or shauq (translated into Hindavī as kāma) into divine love.
The fragment of the Lavā’iḥ illuminates also the hidden causes for the aris-
ing of love in man:
Love appears in connection with man for two reasons. One reason is
manifest. Man is dominated by passions and desires. The seeker of
Truth, by nature, tries to hold these tendencies in check, just as he
tries to curb his hunger for bread and his thirst for water, but he suc-
ceeds only by inclining to excess toward the Possessor of all beauty. The
second reason for the appearance of love in man is hidden. It exists as
a secret in the very nature of man. It is a divine secret, expressed in
the ḥadīs̱ qudsī:
For this reason the soul of man hastens with a thousand steps toward
that other world in order to acquire a scent of its aroma.61
Women, in this misogynistic formulation, are beside the point; they are good
for marriage and procreation, or seductively arrayed to excite the ascetic on
his mystical quest for the juice of love. Although the literal application of the
traditions that Ḥamīd al-dīn Nāgaurī quotes here skirts the limits of heresy,
rasa’s capacity to refer to invisible emotional realities allows poets of this
genre to suggest the secret identity of lover and divine beloved. The seeker’s
need to die to all else on the mystical quest constitutes the central symbolic
value of prema-rasa.
The necessary journey of self-transformation points strongly to the central-
ity and importance of storytelling and narrative elaboration in Hindavī Sufi
poetry. Dā’ūd’s Sufi vision requires the long narrative, the constant deferment
of desire in order to draw the seeker into the process of self-realization. This
lures the reader or listener into the narrative, working to arouse his desire so
82 love’s subtle magic
that a spiritual mentor may guide him appropriately to transform his subjec-
tivity. Hence the emphasis in Dā’ūd’s text on viraha, the constant and nag-
ging feeling of longing for and separation from the beloved. As S. M. Pandey
points out:
Dā’ūd expresses the theology of devotion by introducing the figure of the love-
lorn yogi, Lorik, who became an ascetic for the sake of his beloved. Lorik must
be pulled out of the deep, dark waters into which he has fallen, and union
with Cāndā should be the fruit of his austerities.
The religious and poetic vision of the Cāndāyan is not of a fully embodied
divinity with whom a personal relationship is imagined by the author and his
audience, like the vision of the poets who used rasa poetics to compose lyrics
in praise of Kṛṣṇa. Dā’ūd’s poem does not try to realize the Sahajīya Vaiṣṇava
union of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa within the seeker, or, as in Kabīr, to awaken the
formless divine within man through breath control and constant repetition of
the name of Rām. The Sufi poetics of the Cāndāyan are in the narrative, the
pleasure of telling and listening to a story, through which the audience real-
izes prema rasa.
Narrative is important in this composite poetics because the Chishtis
do not believe in an absolute union between devotee and Allah, as do the
other devotional poets who use prema-rasa, but in the notion of ordinate
love. The desire of the novice is first for a beautiful woman or man as an
object of longing, then for the shaikh, and then on through stages until
Allah. The stages follow no set schema, as each poet invents ordeals for
his laboring and lovelorn yogi prince; there is only the necessity of narra-
tive elaboration, deferment, and invention. There is no absolute meeting
with Allah; rather, there are stages of desire and longing that are eventually
consummated in union with the divine heroine, who has then to be bal-
anced with the worldly wife. The Chishti notion of ordinate love requires
narrative elaboration.
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 83
stereotypically inimical and hostile to one another, and reconciling them was
as difficult for the Sufi as was the reconciliation of this world and the next.
In the masculinist poetics of the Cāndāyan, women were simultaneously ide-
alized and subordinated. The male élite reader identifies with the hero, the
seeker who is lured into becoming a yogi and reaching the distant “divine”
heroine, then bringing her back and reconciling her with the world. In the
contemporary cultural logic of gender relations, he has become transformed
through ascetic mortification into the master of his two wives and of this
world and the hereafter.
Maulānā Dā’ūd adapts a number of generic conventions from Persian and
Indic traditions into this masculinist narrative pattern. As we saw in Chapter 2,
he opens his story with a prologue that follows the model of the Persian
masnavīs. He also employs Indic literary conventions such as descriptions of
cities and landscapes (nagara-varṇana) and descriptions of the twelve months
of the year (bārah-māsā), the head-to-foot description of the heroine’s beauty
(sarāpā), the description of her palace as paradise (the locus of divine rev-
elation), and Mainā’s account of her painful separation through the twelve
months of the year, which moves Lorik to come back to her along with Cāndā.
In addition, he draws on preceding Apabhraṃśa poetic works that contained
a rich and highly developed set of narrative conventions for describing all the
stages of action in a plot as well as common motifs such as description of
towns, lakes, gardens, pavilions, and markets.65 Finally, he uses meters, fig-
ures of speech, and topoi that the local Indian traditions of kāvya or poetry
considered suitable. The story is set in four-foot Apabhraṃśa meter, in caupāīs
to which are added dohās or longer couplets, a form that remains standard for
narrative verse in Avadhi.66
The transfer of these forms into Hindavī before the Cāndāyan is attested
by an early-fourteenth-century poetic manual in Maithili or eastern Hindavī,
the Varṇa-Ratnākara (“Ocean of Descriptions”).67 The Sanskrit author
Kaviśekharācarya Jyotirīśvara Ṭhakkura composed the Varṇa-Ratnākara at the
court of the Raja of Tirhut in northern Bihar. The text, a poet’s manual in
which Jyotirīśvara translates into Maithili the Sanskrit conventions for writing
poetry, is organized in eight chapters called kallolas or waves, each dealing
with the figures of speech and words appropriate to particular poetic topoi:
describing cities (nagara-varṇana), heroes and heroines (nāyaka-nāyikā), palaces
and royal courts (āsthāna), the seasons (ṛtu), military campaigns (prayānaka),
poets (bhaṭṭa), and cremation grounds (śmaśāna). In each chapter Jyotirīśvara
gives many other topoi, such as how to describe a lake, a garden, the compan-
ions of the heroine, morning, afternoon, evening, the sleeping quarters of the
princess, a rainy night, darkness, the moon, and so on. As the only critical text
in eastern literary Hindavī available to us, the Varṇa-Ratnākara is a valuable
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 85
The Plot
To begin with the plot itself, Dā’ūd based the Cāndāyan on the Ahir story of
Lorik and Canvā, available in many versions throughout northern and central
India69 as well as Bengal.70 Oral renditions of the story are still widely recited
in public. As S. M. Pandey, the veteran collector of extant sung versions, has
pointed out, “the oral epic Loriki or Candaini is sung by the Ahir singers of
Northern India in the Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Magahi, and Chattisgarhi
dialects of Hindi . . . The singers are mostly Ahirs, who are either milkmen or
farmers. They are called Gvalas, i. e., cowherds, as they keep cows. All these
singers are male and hardly any of them can read or write. Women are gener-
ally not permitted to sing the epic.”71 The question of the continuity and shape
of the narrative is a difficult one, and Pandey has demonstrated, through
detailed comparison, the many points of difference between the oral poem and
Dā’ūd’s text.72 McGregor has suggested that an earlier folk tale may underlie
86 love’s subtle magic
both the literary Sufi romance and the oral versions: “The folk character of this
story, which served as the basis for a sūfī romance, is . . . evident. . . . [T]his story
must (to judge from modern versions) have differed considerably in style and
substance from the tales underlying the sixteenth-century sūfī romances. . . . A
comparison of the narrative of Candāyan with that of the modern story sug-
gests an early folk tale.”73 Without further information, it is impossible to spec-
ify the hypothetical ancestor of written and oral versions.
Although we do not have access to the folk tale on which Dā’ūd must have
based his courtly poem, we can identify two major extant oral performance tra-
ditions that have many elements in common with Dā’ūd’s plot, one from east-
ern Uttar Pradesh or Avadh and the other from the central Indian region of
Chhattisgarh.74 The modern Ahir versions are elaborate and episodic, since this is
an orally transmitted tale that can be adapted to many performance conditions.
The basic story75 in the two local dialects of modern standard Hindi,
Bhojpuri and the far older Avadhi, centers around the exploits of the hero
Lorik of Gaura and his step-brother Savarū, a devotee of Durgā. One day Lorik
goes to play Holi in the neighboring village of Kusumapur. He sprays colored
water on Canvā, the daughter of King Sahadeva. The angry Canvā taunts him,
“Fool, you do not know the tradition. Go and get your brother married. He is
getting old and nobody comes to him with a proposal of marriage. You can
then play Holi with your sister-in-law.” Lorik finds a bride for Savarū in the
person of Satiyā, daughter of Bamarī. But the father of the bride is opposed
and there is a great battle in which Lorik and his friend Ajai take on the forces
of Bamarī. After a series of battles, they win the bride and take her home.
In another section of the story, Lorik himself marries Majarī, the daughter
of an Ahir named Mahar who lives in the realm of a tyrant king Molagat.
Molagat demands the sexual services of all the girls of his kingdom, but when
it is Majarī’s turn she appeals to Lorik to save her honor. Lorik dispatches
Molagat and his army with his powerful sword. As Joyce Flueckiger notes,76
this episode occurs in the Bhojpuri version of the story, but not the Avadhi.
In the latter, Majarī’s father loses her in gambling to a non-Ahir Thakur war-
rior, and Lorik has to save her from an out-of-caste marriage by defeating
the Thakur in armed combat. What is common to both versions is the over-
whelming concern for the woman’s honor (‘izzat) and the honor of the Ahir
subcaste, an ideological valence of the modern story that differs from Dā’ūd’s
Sufi tale. The next episode of the story describes Lorik’s happy life in Gaura
with Majarī, until the day he meets Canvā again. She has been married to an
impotent Ahir named Sivadhar, whom she rejects. She returns home, but on
her way home she is harassed by Bātha, who tries to violate her; she cleverly
tricks him, but Bātha will not leave her alone, and she appeals to Lorik, who
beats Bātha to death.
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 87
Lorik and Canvā are overcome with desire for each other and begin meet-
ing in secret. She becomes pregnant and they run away together to the neigh-
boring kingdom of Haldī. On their way to Haldī, Canvā’s husband Sivadhar
comes to fight Lorik, but Lorik defeats him. A snake stings Canvā, but Lorik
prays for help and she is saved. They arrive in Haldī and Lorik distinguishes
himself by his invincible strength and bravery in freeing the soldiers of the
king from their enemies. In the meantime, Lorik’s mother, Khoilanī, and his
wife, Majarī, are persecuted by the village and reduced to extreme poverty.
They send a desperate appeal to Lorik. He returns secretly to Boha, a place
near Gaura, and announces that he wants to buy milk and curds at a very
high price. All the Ahir women go to him, including Majarī. On her way to
Boha, Majarī crosses a river by ferry; the boatman tries to violate her. She
invokes the goddess of chastity and prays to her: “O Goddess, if I am a chaste
and truthful woman, make this river dry up.” The river dries up. The boat-
man falls at her feet and begs for his livelihood back. She forgives him and
proceeds to Boha. Lorik recognizes her, and they are reunited. He returns to
Gaura and regains his wealth and land by fighting his enemies. In the fight-
ing, he discovers he has lost his former strength. He gives all his wealth to his
two sons and burns himself to death in Gaura.
and cowardice in decision making, the hero leaves his wife Majari, and
he and Candaini elope to Hardi Garh. In Chhattisgarh, candainī per-
formances center on and elaborate various adventures from this elope-
ment journey (urḥāī; literally, flight).78
and the new Indo-Aryan devotional poetry. Since she is as radiant as the
moon, the world experiences two nights when she assumes a body and
comes into existence:
The verbal phrase “cānda avatārā” (“the moon became incarnate”) in the first
half-line (ardhālī) of the caupāī indicates the adaptation into Hindavī of the
Islamic theological term for manifestation (z'uhūr). Cāndā’s supernatural beauty
is distinctive because it is endowed with form (saguṇa), but the revelatory
flashing of light that attends it suggests a divinity that cannot be contained
in physical form (nirguṇa). Dā’ūd’s use of form or beauty (rūpa) is expressed
through a language of incarnation but leads ultimately to the folding back of
this form into the formless.
This local revelation of stunning beauty quickly becomes known to all
the regional sultanates. Dvārasamudra, Tirhut, Avadh, Malabar, Gujarat, and
Badayun all hear of her beauty, and marriage offers begin to pour in. The
key criterion for her potential husbands is status: her father, King Sahadev,
does not count anyone as his equal. The astrologers who cast her horoscope
predict that she will go to her death in the prime of her life, but her beauty
will be so incandescent that kings and warriors will flock to her like moths
to a flame. The first type of love for Cāndā is presented to her father in the
form of a marriage offer from a neighboring king, Jaita. There are astrological
difficulties with the offer, foreshadowing a troubled marital future. In the end,
however, King Jaita’s emissaries prevail and Candā is married to Bāvan, King
Jaita’s son.
Bāvan (Sanskrit vāmana, “dwarf”) is one-eyed and impotent, a dwarf
who never washes and never comes near her even when she comes of age.
90 love’s subtle magic
Although desire moves through her body, her husband completely ignores her
and she is frustrated and angry:
Her sister-in-law hears her complaining and reports the matter to her mother.
What ensues is the stereotypical sās bahū kā jhagṛā (the fight between the
mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law), which Dā’ūd portrays skillfully as a
family quarrel:
Their dispute revolves around Cāndā’s desire, with the bride saying that she
needs to be satisfied sexually, and the mother-in-law that she is an evil wanton
who would seduce her innocent son (dūdha kī phoī):
In its cultural logic, the fight reflects a world in which mothers and wives
fight over the favors of men, who are the ideological guarantors and providers
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 91
of security for women. The theme is elaborated later on in the poem through
the misogynistic gender politics of polygamy, in which the male has the power
of choice between jealous co-wives.
Finally, her mother-in-law drives Cāndā out of her husband’s house, and
a message is sent for her brother to come and fetch her. In the internal nar-
rative logic of the plot, one attempt to transform Cāndā’s desire into love has
failed, and the ordinary structure of marriage has disintegrated. Yet the moon
requires a sun to love her, a lover who can consummate her desire. This mutual
fulfillment, the true prema-rasa, cannot be attained by those unworthy of love,
and Cāndā returns home in disappointment. After this, the second type of
love in the Cāndāyan is brought to life when one day Cāndā leans out of her
balcony in all her radiant beauty. A wandering musician (bājir) who is passing
by happens to look up and is transfixed. A glimpse of the supernatural beauty
of Cāndā makes him faint with desire and fall to the ground in what seems to
be an epileptic fit or an episode of snakebite. As we have seen, the wandering
singer uses the set piece of the sarāpā to excite desire in King Rūpcand for
Cāndā without his ever having seen her (adṛṣṭa-kāma). Dā’ūd uses the tropes
of love through description rather than direct vision and the convention of
head-to-foot descriptions to suggest the divine revelation that is temporarily
embodied in Cāndā. The singer’s description triggers the second option that is
offered to Cāndā for the transformation of her desire into prema.
King Rūpcand starts crying, calls Bānṭh, his chief minister, and orders him
to muster the army so that he can conquer Govar and obtain Cāndā’s hand
in marriage by force. Rūpcand’s grand and imposing army sets out to besiege
Govar. There are bad omens on the way: a crow cries out, a jackal howls in the
direction of the rising sun, and the path of the advancing army appears red
with blood. When they camp outside the city of Govar, they go on a rampage,
cutting down all the mango groves that make the city a paradise and destroying
all the sacred temples. There is panic in King Sahadev’s realm, and he sends
emissaries to ask what Rūpcand wants. He asks for Cāndā. The emissary asks
him not to lust after another man’s daughter (i.e., a respectable maiden); he
responds by threatening to cut off the emissary’s head and feed his flesh to
the dogs. The emissary’s response emphasizes Cāndā’s inaccessibility:
But Rūpcand persists in his intentions of forcing Cāndā to satisfy his lust,
and vows that Govar is a heaven he will destroy. His army begins to fight
Sahadev’s army, and his best warriors carry the day for him by killing Govar’s
best fighters.
Once the situation is desperate, the people of Govar go to the heroic Lorik,
who lives with his mother, Kholin (called Khoilanī in the Avadhi version), and
his wife, Mainā. At first his wife and mother will not let him go. Kholin argues
that since he does not hold his land in tenancy from the king or share his
crops with any landlord, why should he put his life at risk? But the demands
of the town are insistent, and Lorik girds himself for combat. His first guide
in the tricks of fighting is a fellow warrior called Ajay (the “Invincible”), who
shams sickness but gives Lorik instructions on shielding his body. Ajay is like
a Sufi pīr who guides the hero along on the path of spiritual perfection (sid-
dhi). Here Dā’ūd introduces a motif that becomes characteristic of the later
formulaic genre: allegorically named emblematic helpers such as nurses and
companions, who aid in resolving problematic situations.
Ajay teaches Lorik how to keep his guard up in battle. As the hero, Lorik has
to fight and vanquish illicit desire in order to gain the love of Cāndā. When he
comes into the field, he is likened to the sun that has come to save the moon.
Ranged against him is the very best warrior on Rūpcand’s side, the formidable
chief minister Bānṭh. Lorik is accompanied by his band of armored warriors, and
Bānṭh leads Rūpcand’s army. Vultures gather and call their kin for a feast, kites
fly overhead, and jackals invite their entire species (jāti) for the ritual feed that
will propitiate their dead ancestors (pitṛpakṣa). Single combat to the death ensues
between various warriors. Lorik goes after Rūpcand and brings his sword down
on his head, splitting his helmet in two. The cowardly Rūpcand runs away, and
eventually Bānṭh and Lorik face off against one another. The fight is close and
intense. Lorik strikes blow after blow, cuts off Bānṭh’s arm, and finally defeats
and kills him. Rūpcand’s army is routed and flees along with its king.
Brute armed force, the second option for winning prema-rasa within the
narrative logic of the Cāndāyan, is here defeated. Cāndā cannot be won by any-
one unworthy of her, or by violence. She needs a worthy lover who will win
her through the right means. Here the final narrative option for obtaining the
“love that comes from the soul” (maḥabbah al-rūḥ) is activated, as is Dā’ūd’s
own erotology, his description of the ideal love affair and its mystic resonances.
The ideal love affair, whether aroused through words or a dream or a vision,
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 93
sends the lover into a spasm or fainting fit, then into a prolonged and obses-
sive period of lovesickness in which he can think only of the beloved. These
are common symptoms in both Islamic and Sanskrit erotologies, where they
occur at different moments but are part of the cultural vocabulary for how
love is experienced. But Dā’ūd takes the conventional signs of love and links
them to ascetic practice and to the rigors of a climb up to heaven to meet the
divine heroine.
After Lorik’s victory, there is jubilation in Govar. Lorik, the hero of the day,
is paraded around town in procession on an elephant. Cāndā appears like the
moon on the balcony of the royal palace:
The passage gives us a sarāpā of Lorik in miniature, and reverses the earlier
situation in which Cāndā’s body was the object of the lustful singer’s gaze.
The vision of Lorik’s handsome form arouses a burning desire in Cāndā, who
insists that her nurse arrange a meeting for them. The nurse suggests a ruse:
she tells Cāndā to ask her father to give a feast celebrating the great victory,
and makes sure that Lorik is invited as the guest of honor. When the day of
the feast dawns, the entire town comes to the royal palace to be fed in grand
fashion.
is totally enslaved by love, falls into bewilderment and madness, and destroys
himself utterly out of unrequited love.82
Now that desire has been awakened on both sides, the burning pain of
separation is mutual. Lorik and Cāndā are still in the early stages of love,
where they have seen each other and conceived a passionate attachment to
each other. They will have to suffer the pangs of longing and burn in agony
until they are able to meet in bed as lovers.
Biraspati the nurse visits Lorik and recognizes that he is suffering from
the malady of desire. She speaks to him in secret, here acting as the spiritual
guide who can unite the lover and the beloved. Much like the Chishti shaikhs
instructing their disciples, she will prescribe a period of asceticism and mind-
fulness, a channeling of Lorik’s desire through a regimen of bodily mortifica-
tion. The knowledge about love she is about to impart has to remain secret,
like the mysterious Chishti Sufi ideology. If Lorik speaks out in public it will
cause their death, since Cāndā is the royal princess:
Lorik becomes a yogi, puts a basil-bead necklace around his neck, and dresses
in the saffron robes of the followers of Gorakhnāth. He serves at the temple
for one whole year, concentrating faithfully on the image of Cāndā.
The Hindavī Sufi poets use the yogic disguise of the hero to structure the
stages of a mystical journey. In using the local language of asceticism,83 they
create a narrative motif that is instantly recognizable and comprehensible to
audiences in Hindustan in the fourteenth century and afterward, yet slanted
toward expressing the Sufi ethic of practice. There are numerous instances
in the Persian hagiographic literature about competition between Sufis and
yogis.84 In the Cāndāyan, the motif also suggests identification of the hero
with the spiritual seeker:
Lorik’s ascetic practice has a different valence from that of the wandering sādhūs
of the Indian countryside. Although he has assumed the external signs of asceti-
cism, his song is about the burning pain of ‘ishq. He meditates on the image of
Cāndā’s face instead of a god or goddess. The poet goes on to say that he eats
nothing but fruits and leaves from the forest, and Cāndā’s name is his “tat sāra”
or essence of essences, the essential element or tattva on which ascetics medi-
tate. Thus the poet uses the highest spiritual value in yogic language to suggest
a Persian mystical concept, reimagining Islamic ideology in Indian dress.
Dā’ūd turns this symbolic vocabulary away from the Nāth-panth and uses it to
express the Sufi mortification of self. Peter Gaeffke has pointed out that the Sufi
adaptation of the motif of the Gorakhnāthī yogi runs counter to Indian traditions
of renunciation because it shows the renunciant reentering the world after gaining
his object.85 But Dā’ūd reuses elements from local traditions in his masnav
̱ ī, some-
times without great regard to accuracy. Thus he combines repetition of Cāndā’s
name with the technique of visualization so common among yogis. Lorik’s song
is a lover’s song, and he must go through a year of asceticism to purify himself
and burn off the impurities of his carnal or lower self (nafs-i ammārah), so often
mentioned in Sufi thought and practice. As Lois Anita Gifften has noted:
The Chishti silsilah vigorously championed the idea of this kind of jihād.
The events that ensue distinguish this ethic of asceticism from the Nāth
system of mortification. On the festival of Divali, Biraspati brings Cāndā and
her friends and maids to worship at the temple with offerings of rice and flow-
ers. Cāndā’s necklace of lustrous pearls breaks, and she is in a panic because
she cannot go home without them. The girls and Biraspati advise sheltering in
the temple while they gather the pearls. They go in to the handsome yogi:
“O moon,” said the stars, “come and have a vision of the sun.
Gazing upon such beauty burns away all your sins!” [C 167]
The heavenly manifestation ended, the temple is empty again except for the
meditative Lorik and the image of the god. The exchange with the animated
image shows the local deity acknowledging the superiority of the new Islamic
religious vision that is embodied in the flashingly beautiful form of Cāndā. At
a later point in the story, when Cāndā enters the temple again, the images run
away in terror from the splendor of her revelation.
Meanwhile, Cāndā sits at home burning in the flames of separation. She
asks Biraspati for a story full of rasa to assuage her pain, and the nurse
responds by telling her to pull out the ascetic who is sinking in a pool of rasa
98 love’s subtle magic
for her sake. Cāndā asks her nurse to bring her and Lorik together. Biraspati
goes to Lorik, who has been in the temple chanting “I die! I die!” since Cāndā’s
departure. The nurse tells him that his ascetic practice, his battle for internal
purification, has been successful. She advises him to throw off the clothes of
a yogi, to come to the palace at night, and to climb up to Cāndā’s bedchamber
if he wishes to consummate his love.
The poet uses the imagery of the path to heaven (sarag-panth) to indicate
the spiritual direction of Lorik’s quest. In the words of Biraspati:
“When you climb up to the sky, O Lorik, you could put a noose
around your neck,
or you could enjoy the moon herself; either way, you will be
in heaven!” [C 185]
The nurse’s words suggest that Lorik’s quest will involve fanā, the Sufi practice
of dying to the lower self and turning toward God:
Man should recover the state he had on the Day of the Primordial
Covenant, when he became existentialized, endowed with individual
existence by God, which, however, involved a separation from God
by the veil of createdness. . . . The Sufi experiences the return to the
moment when God was, and there was nothing else.87
The Chishti seeker “must strive in the work of Almighty God for many
years . . . (and) . . . burn his lower soul (nafs) with fasting and observance, and
worship and effort.”88 Lorik sets out on a dark and rainy night, armed with an
intricately woven rope ladder, to scale the steep height of the royal palace. The
rain pours down thick and heavy, and frogs and birds call out. A flash of light-
ning illumines the palace, and Lorik throws the iron grappling hook of his
rope ladder up. When it catches, Cāndā wakes up, and she laughingly undoes
the grappling hook and throws it back at him, testing his patience and endur-
ance. Her teasing echoes the coquetry and dalliance of the divine beloved, but
she relents when he becomes discouraged, and lets him climb up.
The palace is a wondrous structure with glittering lamps and jewel-encrusted
surfaces. These images are prescribed in the Varṇa-Ratnākara as appropriate
to the bedroom of a princess, which should be a citraśālī or painted room
similar to the house of the king of the gods (devarājagṛha tatsamāna).89 When
Lorik reaches the top, Cāndā is in bed feigning sleep:
When his vision shifts to the bed and he sees her sleeping there with her
black locks in seductive disarray, he faints again. She wakes up, grabs his hair,
and yells, “Thief! Thief!” When Lorik protests that he is merely enamored of
her beauty, she responds, “If you set one foot on my bed, you’ll lose your life!”
Lorik responds by saying he has already died in order to climb up to heaven.
The Persian title for this section in manuscript sources is “tams̱īl dādan-i
Lorik,” i.e., “Lorik’s allegory” or explanation of hidden meanings. This fram-
ing word indicates the importance of the notion of tams̱īl or exemplification,
the shorter allegorical segments that were part of a larger narrative centered
around rasa. The poets of the genre could show off their skill through these
short allegorical segments and hint at invisible spiritual realities to deepen
the audience’s understanding of the nuances of love. Thus, Cāndā contin-
ues to test Lorik by accusing him of betraying his valor, his caste, and his
lord master the king (svāmi-droha), but Lorik insists that the love he seeks
is higher than any structure of rulership. Finally she agrees to consummate
their love, but only if it is true (satya). The proof of the “true” or divinely
sanctioned love is that the seeker has to die to the world and to his self.
Thus Cāndā’s demands, and Lorik’s responses, seal a pact of fanā or annihi-
lation of self between them. But before Lorik can possess his heart’s desire,
Cāndā’s pearl necklace breaks again and they have to gather all the pearls.
Dawn breaks, and Lorik has to hide under the bed all day, keeping absolutely
silent for fear of discovery.
On the second night after his ordeal, he and Cāndā consummate their
desire:
Lorik and Cāndā feel a kinship that has existed between them since the
beginning of time, and the figure of speech of the great tree pulls together
100 love’s subtle magic
heaven and earth, love and death. Cāndā offers herself to him, and they
make love:
Vision and the gaze are central to the circulation of desire in Dā’ūd’s scheme,
but the lovers do more than look at each other. In this moment of lovemaking,
the poet links the rasika’s taste of the essence or juice of love with the erotics
of eating pān or betel and with the exchange of saliva between lovers. Saliva
or the red pān juice was also sometimes passed from the mouth of a shaikh
to the mouth of a disciple to incite a mystical vision. When morning dawns,
however, Lorik goes away down his ladder. Cāndā is left with the traditional
Indian poetic signs of love on her body: nail marks and love bites. Her serving
maids notice that she has enjoyed a secret lover, although she protests that she
was mauled by a neighbor’s cat. When people come to visit her, they adduce
two reasons for her shame: she has left her lawfully wedded husband, and
now she has taken a lover in secret.
and with the more permanent spiritual quest of ascetics and Sufis.92 As Shaikh
Nasīr al-dīn Chirāġh-i Dihlī, the spiritual preceptor of Dā’ūd’s guide Shaikh Zain
al-dīn, put it, “one must not love this perishable world in one’s heart. Whatever
one receives on the path of truth/God (ḥaqq), one should give it away.”93 This
attitude is part of a larger pattern of thought among the Chishti Sufi shaikhs
of the Delhi sultanate in which claims to authority over the holders of worldly
power and material goods were advanced on the basis of spiritual prowess:
For the Sufi khānaqāhs to function, therefore, they were dependent on the eco-
nomic largesse of rulers, in the form of tax-free land grants or madad-i ma‘āsh,
as well as on the flow of alms or futūḥāt. Thus the Sufis were dependent on
courts in practice even when their rhetoric was vigorously oriented toward pov-
erty and avoidance of worldly rulers.
The Chishti strategy of holding on to a public rhetoric of tark-i duniyā or
abandonment of the world while accepting economic support and even play-
ing at kingmaking embodies the social tension between political and spiri-
tual claims to authority95 that is apparent in the literature of the period. For
instance, there was a story extant about the Slave King Shams al-dīn Iltutmish
(r. 1211–36), who lived in straitened circumstances in Baghdad in his youth.
Every night, he would serve a group of ecstatic dervishes headed by Qāzī
Ḥamīd al-dīn Nāgaurī and weep during the assemblies of samā‘:
that glance, Almighty God, the Exalted, raised him to the rank of Sultan
(of Delhi). After an age, when he sat on the throne of empire in the
country of Hindustān, and Qāzī Ḥamīd al-dīn Nāgaurī was engaged in
instructing seekers after truth in Delhi, the dervishes always sang and
danced in his assembly.96
Challenged about the legality of this practice, Qāzī Ḥamīd al-dīn Nāgaurī justi-
fied it by saying it was illegal for men who were rationalistic (ahl-i qāl), but
legal for men of spiritual emotion (ahl-i ḥāl). He then reminded the Sultan
of the true source of his power: “It would be in the auspicious recollection of
your Majesty, that one night dervishes and men of emotional experience were
engaged in spiritual exercises, and you . . . served the people in that meeting,
and wept in the exaltation of your feelings. The dervishes cast a glance on
you, and you have reached your present high rank on account of the spiritual
power of that glance.”97 All mundane power, within this mystical ideology, lies
in the spiritual gift of holy men. Kings and the visible world are therefore sub-
ordinate to the spiritual dictates of the invisible world of the Sufis.
Dā’ūd carries this tension over into the narrative logic of the Cāndāyan,
using it to color the triangular relationship among the hero and his two wives.
His triangle reflects a masculinist fantasy in which one cannot think about the
politics and praxis of asceticism without using women as vehicles for ideology
and ultimately sacrificing them. He is interested not in actual sexual practice,
but in emotional manipulation of sexuality toward the élite Indian Muslim
male seeker’s progress on the ascetic path.
Evidence from Sufi glosses of Hindavī poetry indicates that they interpreted
the jealous co-wives vying for the hero’s love as representative of the claims of
this world and the next.98
All of Govar is gossiping about Lorik’s love of the princess, and Mainā
burns with jealousy. Any resolution of the love between Lorik and Cāndā has
to include Mainā. A festival day dawns and all the women of the town go to
the grand temple of Somnath to offer prayers. Dā’ūd reimagines the temple
of Somnath—sacked by the armies of ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī, and a symbol of the
religious strife between the Turkish invaders and the Indian defenders they
encountered—as the place where Cāndā and Mainā fight. Cāndā decks herself
out and goes to worship in a splendid palanquin. She is so beautiful that even
the images in the temple fall in love with her. She prays that she may get her
man. Mainā comes up to the temple just as Cāndā is leaving, and accuses her
of being a whore (chināl) while she herself is a chaste woman (satī). Cāndā
claims that she is the divine beauty who can entrance the world, while Mainā
responds by asserting that at least she is legally married to the man she sleeps
with. They descend to fisticuffs, and Lorik has to separate the two. Mainā goes
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 103
back home and tells Lorik’s mother, Kholin, about the incident at the temple.
Kholin sends a message to the king complaining about his daughter’s behav-
ior. Cāndā threatens to take poison and kill herself if Lorik does not help her
to run away from Govar and escape the wrath of the king and Lorik’s fam-
ily. She sends Biraspati with a message to Lorik, and Lorik prepares for the
elopement.
He goes to a Brahmin astrologer, who calculates an auspicious time for
him to run away, safe from Śukra (the planet Venus, the dwarf), and predicts
that he will gain siddhi (spiritual power and perfection) abroad. Lorik plans
and executes a midnight raid on the heavenly palace to steal the moon. The
sun and the moon escape by cover of night wearing black clothes and baskets
on their heads. The news that another man has eloped with his wife reaches
the dwarf Bāvan, and he follows them in hot pursuit. The fleeing couple come
to a river, snatch the ferryman’s boat, and ferry it across. Bāvan threatens
them angrily from the other side and shoots arrows at them. He has three
arrows in his quiver; the first one shatters Lorik’s shield, shield strap, and
arm, the second blows away the mango tree under which Lorik and Cāndā are
sheltering. The third arrow goes wide, and Cāndā taunts him: “Venus has set,
the sun has risen, and all the world knows it!” (C 294) The dwarf responds
by lamenting that he has lost them, and drowns himself in the river Gangā.
Before dying, he curses them: “You will rule the kingdom of death, Lorik, and
Cāndā will be stung by a deadly snake!” (C 296)
In another reference to the original Ahīr story, Dā’ūd has Lorik and Cāndā
flee to a place called Haldī Pāṭan. Here, the city suggests a realm of the heart
where the lovers can stay and satisfy their love for each other. They intend to pass
the spring season in the city. On the way they make a night halt and camp:
Lorik kills the snake just as it is about to go into its hole, and then begins
to grieve over Cāndā as she lies there senseless. Desperate, he loosens all her
clothes and ornaments and begins to lament her death. He starts to build
a pyre of sandalwood for her, but then a guṇī or skilled healer appears and
restores her to life.
104 love’s subtle magic
He prepares the pyre, and is just about to climb on it, when another gāruḍī
or snake venom specialist appears and restores Cāndā to life again. And so
perhaps the only male who attempts to become a satī in the history of Indian
literature is prevented from doing so.
The incident marks both the purification of Cāndā through her passage
into death and the willingness of Lorik to sacrifice his all on the path of true
love, about which Lorik says:
Clearly, Dā’ūd’s text is centered around both fanā or destruction (of the self,
of sins, of the ego) and the ability to valorize prema-rasa above all ordinary
conventions of society and the world.
Transforming desire into this kind of love can also involve absolute chastity,
as Mainā’s experiences make clear. She suffers terribly from Lorik’s absence
and his elopement with Cāndā. She sits at home, not going anywhere, not
eating properly, and not adorning herself. She spends the nights crying in bed
and her days staring at the road that will bring her beloved Lorik back home.
Kholin, her mother-in-law, is desperately worried about her and at a loss for
what to do. She knows that Lorik and Cāndā are in Haldī Pāṭan, but she does
not know how to reach them. A caravan of traders comes through town, on
their way to Haldī Pāṭan. Kholin invites Surjan, the caravan leader, home and
begs him to take a message to Lorik from Mainā.
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 105
the deer he passes become smoke-colored, and the birds are burnt as black
as coal. The sea he crosses burns up, along with all its fish, and his boat and
oars along with it. The sky incinerates spontaneously, and the clouds that form
above are represented as the smoke from the fire. Nevertheless, he perseveres.
He enters Pāṭan and seeks Lorik.
Surjan’s conclusions from the planetary positions reflect, of course, the mes-
sage he has been sent to give to Lorik, but they seem astrologically accurate.101
The seventh house is the house of marriage, and the evil aspect of Mars102
has caused a disruption in Lorik’s marriage. Now the astrologer begs him to
return to his wife, and by implication, to the path of truth. He ends by exhort-
ing him to leave the pool of sin in which he has been bathing and to return
to the pure Gangā. Lorik is stricken with remorse. He takes his leave of the
Creating a New Genre: The Cāndāyan 107
King of Haldī Pāṭan. Lorik and Cāndā set out, accompanied by a huge escort
and laden with gifts given to them by the king.
When this unknown army reaches Govar, there is some alarm, but Mainā
has a dream in which she sees her husband returning to her. The women of
Govar go out to the camp to sell milk to them. Mainā goes along with the
other women, and Lorik, disguised, devises a test for her. He asks Cāndā,
who is buying the milk, to reward the women of Govar by putting vermillion
(sindūra) and sandal on them. The entire row of women receives this honor
happily, but Mainā refuses, saying:
Through her chastity, Mainā proves herself worthy of the love of Lorik and
completes the transformation of her desire into a transcendentalized Sufi ‘ishq.
Lorik is happy with her fidelity and reveals himself, and the two women also
recognize each other. They begin to fight, but Lorik calms them down by
assuring them that he loves both of them. They all go home to Govar happily,
and he proves his love and his masculinity by sleeping with both of them and
recognizing them as his two wives.
Unfortunately, all the manuscripts of the text are incomplete, and none tells
us what happens next in Dā’ūd’s version. As the editor M. P. Gupta notes, in
some folk versions Lorik engages in a fight with another warrior and is killed.
He is then cremated and his wives become satīs by burning themselves to
death on his pyre. In other versions, Lorik wins the battle but goes to Benares
as an ascetic and immolates himself.103 Both of these possible endings under-
score the connection of prema-rasa with the ultimate annihilation (fanā) of the
seeker and this world and their absorption back into God.
Whatever the ending Maulānā Dā’ūd may have chosen for his poem, the
Cāndāyan sets a model for one of the major literary traditions of the subcon-
tinent. Incomplete and gap-ridden as it is, Dā’ūd’s text does create a generic
formula that the later poets follow in greater or lesser degrees of elaboration.
The fragments of narrative and the lines of the larger story sketched out here
proved formative for the genre. Dā’ūd used the rules of propriety creatively
to invent a new rasa, one that demonstrates the Muslim internalization of an
Indian theory of poetic response, expressing the new Sufi message in terms
of the desī prema-rasa.
108 love’s subtle magic
There is no single allegorical scheme for Sufi practice that directly maps
on to the Cāndāyan or on to the later texts of the genre. The multiple reso-
nances of each sa-rasa line of poetry are also tied to the Sufis’ internal compe-
tition with the military and aristocratic élites who sponsored their efforts and
created the material circumstances for them to write their poems of love in
Hindavī. In Dā’ūd’s distinctive formula of the two wives, the Sufis express a
claim to superior symbolic authority and hegemony over cultural and literary
production in north India. Dā’ūd himself was able to maintain his dual roles
as a poet at a provincial court and a Sufi and follower of the Chishti Shaikh
Zain al-dīn, as a Persian-speaking Turkish Muslim with a Central Asian ances-
try and a desī speaker of Hindavī and eager enthusiast of local poetry. The fan-
tasy of Lorik’s reconciliation of his two wives, like the Chishti silsilah’s claims
of independence, is part of a negotiation of social tensions between Sufis and
rulers, between Indian and Islamic identities.
Composed at a time when the centralized Turkish sultanate controlled
various provinces from Delhi, the poem constructs a social order containing
many local kingdoms with ruling aristocracies. Dā’ūd is part of a new ruling
group that establishes a power base among the kingdoms and people of this
Hindustani landscape. The poem he wrote not only redefines the local lan-
guage and traditions by translating the Perso-Arabic theory of ‘ishq into the
eastern Hindavī or Avadhi prema-rasa, but also contains a temporary embodi-
ment of Sufi divinity in the form of Cāndā, who is depicted as more powerful
than all the idols in the temples. The Cāndāyan marks the historical transfor-
mation of the canons of Indian poetry through sponsorship of an aristocratic
class that is itself being transformed by Indian culture, a far cry from the nar-
ratives of military conquest associated with the earlier phases of the Muslim
presence in India.
The chapters that follow trace four aspects of Dā’ūd’s formula through the
later romances of the genre and their contexts of articulation: the use of narra-
tive motifs, notions of landscape and technical language, the system of gender
relations implied by the genre and by comparable narratives from the period,
and the role of vision and embodiment in the self-transformation of the hero/
reader of the romance.
4
Desire for the magic doe with the heavenly form (rūpa) is an external force
that seizes him in its cruel grip. Characteristically, it is entwined with the Sufi
notion of annihilating the carnal soul, then the self itself, fanā: the prince
exclaims that he will die if he does not gain the doe. When he searches for the
beautiful shimmering form he has seen, however, he cannot find it:
Although the prince jumps into the lake to find her, she disappears completely
and he is left lamenting. The poet uses a visual technique reminiscent of min-
iature painting to depict the prince’s sense-numbing grief:
Playing with poetic opposites, the poet describes the prince as burning with
longing, yet bringing on a monsoon flood in the world through his tears. His
companions find him under a tree that glitters like a royal canopy. The shim-
mering lake by which he sits is the purifier of sins and of those who drink
from it, and many lush images are used to describe it: black bees hover over
its white lotuses, drunk with love, and lovely fragrances pervade the atmo-
sphere from its camphor- and khus-scented water. The prince will not return to
court with them, and sits by the lake meditating on the vision he has seen.
When the company returns to court and informs the prince’s father, the
entire town comes out to the forest to reason with the prince. The prince will
not return and instead wants a boon. He asks his father the king to build
him a seven-story red and gold palace around the shining lake. The king
assents, and craftsmen, painters, architects, and goldsmiths arrive to construct
114 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the fantastic gold-encrusted palace that will encompass within its painted and
sculpted form the formless absolute that has flashed in the prince’s eyes. The
palace has seven levels, with four-colored steps on all four sides. Over them
stretches a gold and red caukhaṇḍī or four-cornered pavilion that is painted
with scenes from the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. The decoration of the
pavilion, with its depictions of scenes from the epics such as Bhīma’s slaying
of Kīcaka, is indicative of the familiarity of the Hindavī poets with the range
of local mythology and custom.4 Interlaced through these mythological scenes
are depictions of the golden doe, which the prince keeps looking at and weep-
ing. His nurse (dhāī), performing the function of a Sufi pīr or guide as usual
in these narratives, comes to him to ask what is wrong.
Although at first he cannot respond to his nurse because his mind and
heart are concentrated on the golden doe, he describes his sorrow through
the seasons of the year in an abbreviated form of the bārah-māsā. In the
dark nights of the season of the rains, he cannot sleep because of the light-
ning flashing in his eyes, an elusive flickering of divine essence that he
cannot catch. In the winter, the fire of separation (viraha agni) keeps him
wailing with its intensity all night. The prince’s fire sears winter itself, the
personification of cold, and covers the season with ashes. The cold retreats
to a distance of twenty kosas from the prince, and the earth becomes green
again. Summer comes, and the month of Jeṭh, but the fire burning in the
prince’s body does not subside. He burns constantly, like a smoldering
ember, and sandal paste does not cool his agony. He stays on by the lake-
side, ignoring all human company, oblivious to all but the desire that has
him in its grip.
After a year, seven heavenly nymphs come to play in the magic lake, all
of them perfect in their beauty, each like the full moon on the fourteenth
night. Fairest among them is Mirigāvatī, and they play about in the lake like
the moon and all the constellations come down to earth. Mirigāvatī notices
that there is a new palace there, and they are all amazed because not even
the shadow of a human has ever fallen on the place. The prince is struck
dumb with their beauty, losing his fair color and turning to a blackened cin-
der. When he rushes forward to catch Mirigāvatī, the entire group of lotus-
faced nymphs flies away to heaven. He lies stricken by the lakeside, with no
one intelligent enough to give him what he needs to alleviate his condition,
“words full of rasa, a love story that would awaken him” (M 48). His nurse
comes again to him, revives him with nectar (amṛta), and makes him sit up
in her arms. She is like a mother to him, since she eases his transformation
and rebirth into a life with love. To her he confides the vision that has flashed
in his eyes like lightning.
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 115
The prince uses both the generic set piece of the sarāpā or head-to-foot
description and the language of analogy to describe, through poetic imagery,
the unrepresentable divine essence in bodily form:
water. She cannot now return with her friends. He brings her to the palace
and lives with her, feasting his eyes on her beauty but unable to consummate
his desire.
Even though he has captured her and they live in the painted palace by the
magic lake, they do not make love, for Mirigāvatī defines the rasa of love in
an interesting new way:
Mirigāvatī’s description of rasa not only stays the prince’s hand but also defines
the transformation of desire into love, through yoga (asceticism) or bhoga (sen-
sual enjoyment through divine grace).
One day the prince’s father, who dotes on the prince and has given many
gifts to Mirigāvatī as her father-in-law, sends a message to the prince asking
him to visit the royal court. Despite adverse omens, the prince rides out, and
in his absence the nurse is left to look after Mirigāvatī. Mirigāvatī confuses the
nurse by telling her far-fetched stories and sagas, and then sends her on an
errand. Mirigāvatī then finds her magic sari and puts it on. When the nurse
returns, she cannot see the nymph anywhere. Finally she happens to look up
and sees Mirigāvatī perched on a roofbeam outside the palace. Before flying
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 117
off, Mirigāvatī tells the nurse that the prince will have to work hard to earn
what he has so far enjoyed through tricking and constraining the doe. The
town over which her father rules is Kancanpur, and she instructs the nurse to
tell the prince that he can find her there. Love does not work through force or
violence, but through cultivation of a sympathetic understanding among lov-
ers, Sufis, and listeners.
The larger narrative design for the structure of the story entailed by the
generic model of Dā’ūd’s Cāndāyan involves the hero’s accomplishment of his
quest by leaving the world as a yogi and the conflict between the two wives
who represent this world and the hereafter. Here Qutban" does not disappoint
his audiences. When the prince returns to the magic lake, he is devastated, and
he and his nurse consider the future together. At this time, the poet tells us,
The prince’s period of closeness to the object of his desire is over, and now
he must work his way toward the golden city, Kancanpur. He puts on a yogi’s
guise, with all the accouterments of the Gorakhnāth panth: the matted locks,
the basil-bead rosary, the stick, the begging bowl, and the deerskin on which
to meditate. He sets off singing of his pain in separation from his love, accom-
panying himself with his stringed kingarī.
On his quest he comes to a grove with mangoes sweet as nectar hang-
ing from its trees and a matchless palace built within their shade. When the
prince goes up to the palace, he discovers in it a lovely young woman, as
beautiful as a half-opened lotus, crying like a spring cloud. The young wom-
an’s name is Rūpminī, and she tells him she is held there in captivity by
an evil demon who has terrorized the town over which her father rules. The
demon demanded the sacrifice of the young princess, and her parents agreed
in order to save the town. Rūpminī is terrified that the demon will eat her up,
but the prince tells her not to worry. He promises to save her with “a pure
mind.” Suddenly the ferocious demon appears, with fourteen arms and seven
heads, ready to fight. He attacks the prince, who shoots his cakra or steel ring
at him seven times, decapitating a head at each throw, and the demon falls
dead. Rūpminī guesses that he is no yogi but a king or prince in disguise, and
she extracts the story of his love for Mirigāvatī from him.
The prince tells her all and escorts her home, but refuses to marry her
or to touch her in a carnal way. Rūpminī’s father, however, is delighted at the
eligible bridegroom who seems to have appeared from heaven and offers him
118 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
his daughter’s hand in marriage and half his kingdom. The prince refuses, for
he is a yogi and has no desire for earthly things. He informs the king that he
has given up the path of bhoga or sensual pleasure. The king is enraged and
puts him in prison, promising him freedom on the condition that he marry
Rūpminī. Against his will, he agrees, but does not consummate the marriage
because he wishes to keep his love chaste and spiritual. Although Rūpminī is
burning with desire for him, he whiles away the nights with her in making
sweet excuses, keeping himself pure. He has a guesthouse built for wandering
ascetics and sādhūs, and asks all who pass if they know the way to Kancanpur.
A great company of ascetics comes in, bound for the banks of the Godāvarī
river, and they inform him that Kancanpur is not far from there.
The prince’s quest and his journey to Kancanpur are the subject of detailed
analysis in the next section of this chapter. Once there, he gains the love of
Mirigāvatī and lives there happily with her. In part, this represents consumma-
tion of the characters’ passion, but it is only a partial solution to the problem
of the relation of story and history. A more productive line of inquiry is sug-
gested by the next move that Qut"ban makes in his narrative, weaving smaller
formulaic motifs into the larger narrative design of the plot.
One day Mirigāvatī is called to the wedding of a friend of hers, and she
leaves the prince in her palace with the warning that he can go everywhere
in the palace except for one room. In an episode that is strikingly reminis-
cent of Bluebeard’s castle8 with gender roles reversed, the prince is unable to
resist the temptation. Inside the room is a large wooden chest, within which
there is a dānava, a fierce evil ogre. He pleads with the prince to set him free,
promising that he will serve him faithfully. The prince does so, but the ogre
once released carries the prince off and dashes him into a great gulf of the
sea in order to kill him. When Mirigāvatī returns she is distraught, and does
not know where the ogre can have cast him down. Now the roles of seeker
and sought on this quest are reversed, suggesting the Sufi interchangeability
of lover and beloved, God and man. Mirigāvatī sets out in search of the prince.
By a fortuitous chance, the wind acts as a messenger between the two. It finds
the prince clinging precariously to life and informs Mirigāvatī, who rushes to
him and rescues him. The two are compared to a bee and a lotus finally com-
ing together.
Formulaic fictions set up narrative patterns that form the generic expecta-
tions of their audiences and limit the innovations possible within the form.
"
The formula that Qutban has chosen to use is Dā’ūd’s pattern of the hero with
his two wives. Accordingly, he has to bring the plot to a close with a resolution
of the prince’s unconsummated marriage with Rūpminī. In his absence, she
burns with the pain of separation, and spends her time on the ramparts of her
palace looking for her lost love in the distance. She sees instead a caravan of
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 119
traders, and sends a tearful message in the form of a bārah-māsā through the
leader of the caravan.
The prince is full of remorse, and with Mirigāvatī and one of his two sons
by her he retraces his path to his father’s kingdom. They leave the other son
in charge of the kingdom. Finally they are reunited with Rūpminī, and the
three of them return to Candragiri where the prince’s father is king. The two
wives fight, as in the Cāndāyan, but the prince separates them and calms them
down, sleeping with both of them in turn to satisfy their jealous desire. This
happy romantic resolution, however, contains an unusual twist at the end. One
day, the prince goes out hunting in the forest, and gets into a fight with a
tiger. Although he wounds the tiger, the fierce beast is enraged and kills him
in its own death agony. The prince dies, and the whole universe is saddened
by his death. The entire kingdom mourns, and both Mirigāvatī and Rūpminī
fling themselves in anguish on his funeral pyre. The three of them burn to
ashes, with love consummated, desire satisfied, and the narrative options of
yoga and bhoga transformed into the rasa of love.
The traditional plot of the premākhyāns is static in its repetition of the
formula of the Cāndāyan. Without becoming an ascetic, no prince or king can
attain the divine heroine of the story; the hero has to have two warring wives
between whom he has to make peace. Within this larger narrative design,
"
however, Qutban’s plot in the Mirigāvatī shows a great deal of inventiveness in
reinterpreting the formula. Fantasy worlds are also linked to particular histori-
"
cal circumstances. Qutban’s restaging of the dynamics of the conflict between
Sufis and kings raises the question of the relevance of the social order to the
order of events in the narrative. There is no single key that would allow us to
posit a homology between narrative and social form. In the Sufi logic of the
story, the Sufi’s relation with God and with the world has been resolved in
this utopian ending in which two hostile co-wives have been brought into an
amicable truce and the Sufi seeker has united with his God.
who pass if they have ever heard of Mirigāvatī’s kingdom. One of a band of
wandering adepts advises him:
He takes from the adept his yogic garb, and seizes his chance to escape from
his marriage while on a hunt outside the bounds of the town. He abandons
his horse and princely attire, and puts on the adept’s clothes. He walks away
from his virgin wife and into that dark forest of death. He wanders round
and round, seeking a path out of the forest. But first he must acquire another
spiritual value, the ability to keep to the path of truth (ḥaqīqat/sat). His steps
falter in the dense shades of the trees, and he walks a long way, constantly
meditating on his love. When he finally gives up all and trusts to God (the
Sufi quality of tavakkul), he reaches the end of the forest and sees before him
the slopes of a sunlit country.
He sees flocks of goats and sheep grazing on the grassy slopes before
him, and thanks God because he has come to an inhabited land. A herdsman
grazing his flock comes up and offers hospitality to the yogi. The herdsman
leads him to the cave that is his home, and the prince follows unsuspectingly.
Once the prince is inside, the herdsman rolls a huge rock across the entrance
and traps him inside, just as Polyphemos does to the wandering Odysseus in
Homer’s Odyssey.11 The prince looks around him and sees a number of other
prisoners in the cave. They are all extremely fat, so fat that they cannot walk,
or even crawl. On questioning them he finds that they have all been fed a
druglike herb by the herdsman, which has made them so fat as to incapacitate
them. They warn him that the herdsman is a cannibal, and that the prince
should not accept the drug from him if he wishes to stay alive. The prince is
distressed, but realizes that losing his life on the path of truth will gain him
spiritual perfection. He prays and mentions the name of truth in his Sufi vird
or ẕikr, trusting to God to release him from the herdsman’s cave.
Just then the herdsman comes in, catches one of the imprisoned men,
and bangs his body against the cave floor to kill him. He roasts the man
and eats him up, chewing up even the hard parts of his body. The prince is
terrified. The herdsman belches contentedly after his meal and goes to sleep.
The prince puts a pointed pair of metal tongs in the fire to heat them. When
122 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the tongs are red hot, he takes them out and puts them into the herdsman’s
eyes, blinding him instantly. The herdsman screams in agony, but since he
is blind he cannot catch the prince. He vows revenge, however, and sits by
the mouth of the cave to prevent the prince’s escape, like the Cyclops in the
Greek epic. The deadlock continues for three days, but finally the prince
thinks of a stratagem. He kills one of the largest he-goats in the herd, skins
it, and dries the skin. Then he puts it on, and, when the cannibal herds-
man releases his herd for grazing, the prince slips out among the goats and
sheep. The herdsman feels the back of each animal to make sure it is not
a man, but does not feel underneath. When he comes to the prince he is
suspicious, but the prince runs out before he can stop him. He continues
on his way, vowing not to trust anyone but God, and praying to God to unite
him with his beloved.
How is one to read the appearance of this Homeric narrative motif in a
sixteenth-century Indian romance? Does the explanation lie in the deep struc-
ture of the unconscious, or the archetypal patterns of folklore?
In the Arabic literature of the marvelous, the sense of astonishment over
events and things with unknown reasons or causes (sabab) is encoded within
an ideological framework in which visible marvels fit into the ultimate reality of
the invisible divine creator. This totalizing frame, however, allows a very wide
latitude for the construction of fictive and geographical accounts that depend
on astonishment for their effect on the reader. Shahrāzād’s nightly revelations
of ever-more astonishing marvels to create suspense are a good example of the
variety and complexity of the uses of astonishment, as well as the containment
of such marvels within a compendious framework.12 To return to our Homeric
motifs in Hindavī, we can begin to explain their presence in two ways: first, by
tracing the motifs to see if we can establish a historical genealogy; and second,
by examining their uses and the ideological frames within which they occur in
each place. I apologize to the reader in advance; the remainder of this chap-
ter involves a considerable amount of storytelling, all extremely pertinent and
vitally important to the larger discussion.
Sindbaˉ d in Arabic
"
Qutban’s narrative of the ascetic quest of the Prince of Candragiri draws on
motifs found also in the voyages of Sindbād the Sailor.13 The adventure of the
giant serpents, the boat that drifts about, and finally the cannibalistic herdsman
who traps people in his cave and is blinded by the hero before he can make
his escape—these ordeals appear also in that rambling and copious collection
of stories, the Arabic Kitāb Alf Lailah va Lailah (“The Book of the Thousand
Nights and a Night,” widely known as the Arabian Nights) in the travels of the
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 123
Sindbād and his companions are terrified, especially since the giant cannibal
repeats his gruesome actions on the next day. They try to escape, but there is
no place to hide from the giant anywhere on the island.
124 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Mia Gerhardt has noted that the voyages of Sindbād are structured around
an initial calamity, followed by an adventure or adventures, the description of a
wonder, and a final return.15 Ferial Ghazoul has faulted her analysis for doing
violence to the text and setting up a rigid pattern that is not borne out by all
seven voyages. She prefers instead to draw parallels between structure and
psychological process in the Sindbād cycle and the frame-tale of Shahrāzād’s
nocturnal storytelling sessions.16 In the story at hand, however, what is at issue
is the very survival of the mercantile culture that Peter Molan has perceptively
identified as the context of the production and reception of these narratives.17
Significantly, the shipwrecked sailors’ motivation in their crisis is to make the
place safe for other Muslim merchants and travelers who might pass by the
island on their own voyages. One of them says, “Listen to me! Let us find a
way to kill him and rid ourselves of this affliction and relieve all Muslims of
his aggression and tyranny.”18 Guided by Sindbād, they come up with a plan to
save themselves and Muslim shipping. They will try to kill the giant, but first
they need to build a raft so that they can escape from the island and secure
passage with any ship that goes by.
In their response to a hostile situation, Sindbād and his companions tem-
per their astonishment (ta‘ajjub) with skillful action and trust in God (tavak-
kul).19 They begin to carry wood out of the castle, build a raft, and tie it to the
island shore. After putting some food on it, they return to the castle:
When it was evening, the earth trembled under us, and in came the
black creature, like a raging dog. He proceeded to turn us over and to
feel us, one after one, until he picked one of us and did to him what
he had done to his predecessors. Then he ate him and lay to sleep on
the bench, snoring like thunder. We got up, took two of the iron spits of
those set up there, and put them in the blazing fire until they became
red-hot, like burning coals. Then, gripping the spits tightly, we went to
the black creature, who was fast asleep, snoring, and, pushing the spits
with all our united strength and determination, thrust them deep into his
eyes. He uttered a great, terrifying cry. Then he got up resolutely from
the bench and began to search for us, while we fled from him to the
right and left, in unspeakable terror, sure of destruction and despairing
of escape. But being blind, he was unable to see us, and he groped his
way to the door and went out. When he went out, we followed him, as
he went searching for us. Then he returned with a female, even bigger
than he and more hideous in appearance . . . [W]e were in utmost terror.
When the female saw us, we hurried to the raft, untied it, and, embark-
ing on it, pushed it into the sea. The two stood, throwing big rocks on
us until most of us died, except for three, I and two companions.20
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 125
Dodging the rocks that the giants throw at them, they float to another island.
Here, when it is night, they fall asleep. They are barely asleep, however, before
they are aroused by an enormous serpent with a wide belly. It surrounds them,
and, approaching one of them, swallows him to his shoulders, then engulfs the
rest of him until they can hear his ribs crack in the serpent’s belly. The next night,
the same thing happens to Sindbād’s only remaining companion. Sindbād is able
to escape only by tying long pieces of wood to his limbs so that the giant snake is
unable to swallow him, and by hailing a passing ship to carry him to safety.
Scholars of Arabic literature have long known that the Sindbād cycle in
the Alf Lailah va Lailah is derived from Arab mariners’ tales of the wonders
of India. The earliest available manuscript of the Nights, which Muhsin Mahdi
reconstructed from a fourteenth-century Syrian version, is one of many no
longer extant written and oral texts from which later storytellers, writers, and
redactors drew.21 As Hussain Haddawy, the translator of this version, notes,
the story of Sindbād’s voyages is not found here and constitutes a later addi-
tion to the Nights.22 The cycle of the voyages can be traced back, instead, to a
specific genre of Arabic literature: books of the wonders and marvels of the
world (‘ajā’ib), which drew on classical Greek and Roman geographers such
as Pliny and Diodorus Siculus, as well as the sailors’ yarns told around the
coffeehouses and taverns of Basra and Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centu-
ries. Increasing Arab involvement in the profitable Indian Ocean trade meant
that sailors visited India and the islands beyond with greater frequency, and
brought back tales of the wonders they found there. In this account of travel-
ers’ tales, and tales that travel through the Indian Ocean, it is entirely fitting
that one should find a common source for the Sindbād cycle and the ordeals
of the ascetic prince of the Mirigāvatī in the stories of a frequent traveler.
Buzurg bin Shahryār, a sea captain and merchant, was based in the port of
Ramhormuz in the Persian Gulf in the tenth century. We know almost nothing
about the good captain, except that his father came from the Persian province
of Khuzistan. He did, however, leave a work entitled the Kitāb ‘Ajā’ib al-Hind,
“The Book of the Wonders of India.” Reconstructed from a unique manuscript
in the Aya Sophia mosque in Istanbul, the book contains stories and anec-
dotes of varying lengths, many of which are to be found as adventures in the
voyages of Sindbād. The mercantile interests of both texts are repeatedly sig-
naled by constant references to the products of each island or country visited:
tin, diamonds, spices, coconuts, slaves, and so on. We have the following story
in the Kitāb ‘Ajā’ib al-Hind, about a giant shepherd encountered by a sailor:
I heard a Basra man, who lived in the middle of the Street of the
Quraysh, say he left Basra for Zabaj or some nearby place, [and was
shipwrecked]. He escaped, and was thrown up on to an island.
126 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
I landed, he said, and climbed a large tree, and spent the night there.
In the morning I saw a flock of about 200 sheep arrive. They were
large as horned cattle. They were driven by an extraordinary looking
man. He was fat, tall, and had a horrible face. He had a stick in his
hand, with which he drove the sheep. . . . He wore nothing but a leaf,
like a banana leaf, but larger. He had it round his waist like a loincloth.
Then he went up to a sheep, held it by its hind legs, took its udder
in his mouth, and sucked it dry. He did the same with several others.
Then he lay down in the shade of a tree. While he was looking at the
tree, a bird settled on the one where I was. The man took a heavy
stone, and threw it at the bird. He did not miss, and the bird fell from
branch to branch, and stopped just beside me. He [saw me and] made
me a sign to come down. I was so afraid that I hurried. I trembled all
over, half dead with fear and hunger. He took the bird and threw it on
the ground. I reckon it weighed about 100 ratl. He plucked it while it
was still living. Then he took a stone that weighed a good twenty ratl,
hit it on the head, and killed it. He went on hitting until it was in bits,
and then began to bite it with his teeth, like a wild beast devouring its
prey. He ate everything, and left only the bones.
When the sun began to go down, he got up, took his stick, drove his
sheep in front of him and shouted [at them]. He took me with him.
The sheep gathered in one place. He led them to a sweet-water stream
that there is on this island, watered them, and drank himself. I drank
too, although my death seemed certain to me. Then he drove again,
to a sort of wooden enclosure, with a kind of door. I went in with the
sheep. In the middle was a kind of log hut, of the type weavers use,
about twenty cubits high. His first act was to take one of the smallest
and thinnest sheep, and hit it on the head with a stone. Then he lit a
fire, and dismembered it with his hands and teeth, like a wild beast.
He threw the pieces into the fire, still covered with skin and the wool.
He ate the entrails raw. Then he went from sheep to sheep, drinking
their milk. Then he took one of the largest ewes in the flock, seized her
around the waist, and took his pleasure with her. The ewe cried out.
He did the same with another. Then he took something to drink, and
finally fell asleep, and snored like a bull.23
In the sailor’s account, Zabaj is a reference to the island of Java. The sailor’s
most immediate reaction in this tale of cultural encounter is of shock at the
dietary and sexual habits of the man he meets. Both tend toward bestiality,
and are very far from the norms of Islamic law and diet that are familiar to
him. Moreover, the islander has other habits that seemed far from civilization
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 127
as the sailor knew it: “I noticed that he gathered the fruit of certain trees
that grew on the island, steeped them in water, strained them, and drank the
liquor. After that he was drunk all night, and lost consciousness.”24
How were the sailor and the islander to communicate across this ideolog-
ical divide, this scene of cultural encounter that could not progress beyond a
few gestures and a marveling at the other’s strange ways? They tried to speak
to each other in Arabic and the islander’s language, but with little success.
After two months, the sailor climbed up on some overhanging branches and
escaped from the enclosure. He walked as far and as fast as he could, and
came to a grassy plain that was frequented by large birds. Like Sindbād with
the giant roc, he caught one of them and flew over the sea to a mountain by
attaching himself to the bird’s claw. Then, he tells us:
I went down from the mountain, and climbed a tree and hid.
Next morning I saw smoke. I knew there is no smoke without people,
and went down towards it. I had not gone far when a group of men
came to meet me. They took hold of me, saying words I did not under-
stand. They led me to a village. There they shut me up in a house, where
they were already eight prisoners. These asked me about myself. I told
them, and asked them about themselves. They told me they had been on
board a certain ship, going from Sanf or Zabaj. They had suffered a gale,
and twenty of them escaped in a boat, and arrived at this island. The
natives had seized them, had drawn lots for them, and had already eaten
several of them. Considering that, I realised I was in greater danger than
I had been with the giant shepherd. It was some consolation to have
companions in misery. If I had to be eaten, death seemed nothing to me.
We consoled ourselves that we had hard luck in common.
Next day they brought us some sesame, or some grain that looked like
it, as well as bananas, samn (clarified butter, ghī) and honey. They put it
all in front of us.
There, the prisoners said to me, this has been our food since we fell
into their hands.
Each one ate some of it to support himself. Then the cannibals came,
and looked at us one by one, and chose the one that seemed to them to
be plumpest. We said good-bye; we had already made our final farewells
to each other. They dragged him into the middle of the house, anointed
him with samn from head to foot, and made him sit in the sun for two
hours. Then they gathered round him, cut his throat, cut him to pieces
in front of us, roasted him, and ate him. Part of him was made into a
stew, another part was eaten raw, with salt. After the meal they drank a
drink which made them drunk, and went to sleep.
128 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Some time later, they came across a shipwreck. They caulked the boat, made a
mast from a tree, laid in a stock of coconuts and sweet water, and escaped to
an inhabited island and thence to Basra.
Motifs in these two stories have been combined to create the composite fig-
ure of the cannibalistic shepherd and the enclosed house, cave, or compound
that is the scene of the cannibalistic countdown. Buzurg bin Shahryār lived in
a world in which Arab traders repeatedly crossed the Indian Ocean and sailed
the China seas in search of exotic merchandise, jewels, spices, and articles of
trade that would fetch high prices in the lands of the west. Cultural contact
called up wonder in the presence of radical difference. It is not surprising that
these sailors’ yarns of the strange encounters they had with the peoples and
marvels of the Indies should circulate through encyclopedias of marvels and
travelers’ tales. They were also used by the authors of sophisticated literary
works such as the Mirigāvatī to create a sense of wonder and mystery, a fan-
tastic landscape against which a heroic Sufi quest could be played out.
The particular tale at issue here, Sindbād’s encounter with the cannibalis-
tic herdsman, has been a subject of scholarly debate for some time. Antoine
Galland, the first eighteenth-century translator of the Nights into French,
noticed the similarities between the story and the episode in the Odyssey, and
since then scholars have tried to show that the Arabs knew Homer and the
Greek epics well. Indeed, the popularity of the Nights in the eighteenth cen-
tury was also a measure of the wholesale adaptation of this markedly “foreign”
material into the concerns of the age. The English essayist Joseph Addison, for
instance, was an advocate of anything that was popular:
It is true that Addison retold “The Story of the Graecian King and the
Physician Douban” and the story of al-Naschar’s daydreams to lecture
his readers upon the usefulness of bodily exercise and the vanity of
extravagant hopes; yet, the real significance of these and numerous
other contributions lies in the fact that he lent the tremendous prestige
of the Spectator to fiction in this mode.26
It is the ubiquity and inventiveness of this kind of fictive production that I wish
to emphasize. Thus the first fictional universe of the Hindavī Sufi romances,
the story of Lorik and Cāndā, was partially Ahīr in composition, partly drawn
from the poetry and practice of the Gorakhnāth panth, and partly from song
genres in regional dialects and local translations of Sanskrit literary theory.
This rich mix enhanced its popularity in Hindavī and the popularity of the
Persian ‘Ismat Nāmah or “Account of Chastity” that described Mainā’s suffer-
ings throughout the Persian-speaking world, in elegantly rhymed couplets.
To return to the voyages of Sindbād: G. E. von Grunebaum declared mag-
isterially in his Medieval Islam that
instances . . . culled from the first four Voyages of the adventurous mari-
ner can with certainty be assigned a Western, that is, a Greek source, at
the very least in the sense that the motives, whatever the region of their
invention, made their literary debut in Greek and were taken up and
developed by the oriental narrator from the form they had been given
by the classical author.27
Robert Irwin has contradicted this by invoking the survey made by the tenth-
century bookseller and cataloguer Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq al-Nadīm in his com-
prehensive list of literature in Arabic, the Fihrist:
The ninth-century translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, was able to recite sec-
tions of Homer by heart, presumably in Greek, yet he never translated
him into Arabic. Although there are indications in the Nights and in
the writings of al-Biruni, al-Shahrastani and others that the contents
of Homer’s epics were known to some, Homer was only a name to
the cataloguer Ibn al-Nadim, and neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was
translated into Arabic until the present century.28
The question is not as simple as these contrasted views make out, however,
and entails a brief excursus into the exceedingly complicated history of the
Arabian Nights, the Alf Lailah va Lailah.29
The work is first noticed in Murūj al-Zahab (“Meadows of Gold”), by the
geographer al-Mas‘ūdī (896–956), who mentions that there
130 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Al-Nadīm’s Fihrist also mentions The Nights, and gives a slightly longer syn-
opsis of the frame-story of the Persian Hazār Afsānah.31 His account is an
early version of the familiar frame-story, in which a king named Shahryār,
much disenchanted by the faithlessness of women, marries a fresh virgin
every night and has her beheaded in the morning. Once his marriage is
arranged to an intelligent woman named Shahrāzād, who has a helper or sis-
ter in the palace called Dīnārzād or Dunyāzād, she begins the cycle of telling
him a tale every night and breaking it off before morning. The basic narrative
anticipation on which the frame-story is built propels the reader along with
the king, in expectation of the more astonishing entertainment the next night
will bring.
The last of the books that al-Mas‘ūdī mentions, The Book of Sindbād, is
not the cycle of tales that concerns our familiar sailor. It is, rather, a cycle of
stories about the wicked wiles of women, and is available to us in multiple
versions. In the words of W. A. Clouston:
The leading story of the ‘Book of Sindibád,’ or the ‘Seven Wise Masters,’
is briefly as follows: A young prince having resisted the importunities of
one of his father’s favourite women—his stepmother in the European
versions—like the wife of Potiphar with Joseph, she accuses him to the
king of having attempted her chastity. The king condemns his son to
death; but the seven vazírs (or wise men) of the king, believing the
prince to be innocent, and knowing that he is compelled by the threat-
ening aspect of his horoscope to remain silent for seven days, resolve
to save him till the expiry of that period, by each in turn relating to
the king stories showing the depravity of women, and the danger of
acting upon their unsupported assertions. This they do accordingly, but
the woman each night counteracts the effect of their tales, by relat-
ing stories of the deceitful disposition of men; and so each day the
king alternately condemns and reprieves his son, until the end of the
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 131
seventh day, when the prince is free to speak again, and the woman’s
guilt being discovered, she is duly punished.32
Sindbaˉ d in Sanskrit
Could both versions of the Sindbād cycle have been translated from Sanskrit?35
Al-Nadīm’s Fihrist contains a tantalizing textual ambiguity about translat-
ing Sindbād’s story into Arabic from Indian sources: “There was the book
Sindbādh al-Ḥakīm (‘Sindbād the Wise’) which is in two transcriptions, one
long and one short. They disagreed about it, too, just as they disagreed about
the Kalīlah wa-Dimnah. What is most probable and the closest to the truth is
that the Indians composed it.”36 The word used in Arabic for the two forms of
the book, the larger (al-kabīrah) and the smaller (al-saġhīrah), is nuskhah. This
word can have a range of lexical meanings: an edition, a copy, a manuscript,
an example or exemplar, a transcription, and so on. Therefore one cannot say
whether two books, each named after the main character Sindbād, were extant
in ninth-century Baghdad, or merely two forms of the story of the seven wise
masters and Sindbād. Perry states in exasperation: “It is impossible to say with
any certainty what was meant by these terms, or whether either of the two
editions to which they refer can be identified with any extant version of the
book.”
If we turn to an earlier set of stories, we get some important, hitherto unno-
ticed clues to the story of Sindbād and his marvelous adventures. To follow the
trail of Sindbād before he appears in the Islamicate world of the Indian Ocean,
we must look to the history of transmission of another great compendium of
stories, the eleventh-century Somadeva Bhaṭṭa’s Kathā-sarit-sāgara (“Ocean of
the Streams of Story”), a recasting of an earlier lost original called the Bṛhat-
kathā or “Great Story.”37 Composed by Guṇāḍhya between the first and the
fourth century, it was redone twice in Kashmir, once by Somadeva Bhaṭṭa and
once by Kṣemendra in his Bṛhat-kathā-mañjarī (“A Bouquet from the Bṛhat-
kathā,” circa 1037). No one resembling Sindbād appears in these collections,
but there is also a little-known Nepali Sanskrit recension of an abridgement
of the Bṛhat-kathā called the Bṛhat-kathā-śloka-saṃgraha (“Collection of Verses
132 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
aja-patha, a path so steep and inaccessible that it can be negotiated only with
the aid of a goat. (Other kinds of paths are those that can be negotiated with
the aid of birds, the gods, and so on.)41 Coming to such a crux on one journey
led by the caravan leader Acera, Sānudāsa faces, on a narrow mountain pass,
a traveler coming from the other side on his goat. Unfortunately there is only
room for one of them to pass.
Here the larger cultural frames of the encounter are brought into play. In a
sermon as long as the Bhagavadgītā, the caravan leader Acera urges Sānudāsa
to an act of cruelty, just as Kṛṣṇa did with Arjuna. Sānudāsa is reluctant to kill
another man, but in the end he strikes the other man’s goat lightly across the
legs and both man and goat sink into the dark mountain precipice. When the
caravan reaches the other side, they come to a river and rest. The story, nar-
rated by Sānudāsa, continues:
When the leader woke us up, our eyes were still heavy from too little
sleep. “These goats,” he said, “have to be killed. We shall eat the meat;
the skins we turn inside out and sew up to form sacks. Then we wrap
ourselves in these sacks—no room for squeamishness here, it will only
delay us!—in such a way that the bloody inside is turned outside. There
are birds here as large as the winged mountains of legend, with beaks
wide as caverns. They come here from the Gold Country. They will
mistake us for lumps of meat and carry us in their beaks through the
sky all the way to the Gold Country. That is what we must do.”
I said, “It is true what people say, ‘Throw this gold away that cuts
your ears!’ How could I be so cruel as to kill my goat, this good spirit
that has saved me from peril as virtue saves a man from hell? I am
done with money and done with living if I have to kill my best friend
to save the life he gave me.”
Acera said to the travelers, “Everyone kill his own goat. And take
Sānudāsa’s goat out of the way.” One of the traders took my goat some-
where and came back with a goatskin hanging from his stick.42
The adventure that follows is played out in the Arabic Sindbād cycle with
giant birds, lumps of meat, and diamonds. Sānudāsa’s objective, however, is
the Land of Gold:
. . . Soon all the heavens were filled with huge gray birds thunder-
ing ominously like autumn clouds. Under the wind of their wings
the heavy tree trunks on the mountain were crushed to the ground
as though they were the mountain’s wings being cut by the blades
of Indra’s arrows. Seven birds swooped down and carried the seven
134 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
of us, each with his heart in his throat, to the sky. One bird was left
without its share, and, cheated out of its expectations, it started to tear
me violently away from the bird that had got me. This started a grue-
some fight between the two vultures, each greedy for its own share. . . . I
was torn between the two birds, passing from beak to beak and some-
times rolling over the ground. I prayed to Śiva. Their pointed beaks
and claws, hard as diamonds, ripped the skin until it was worn like a
sieve. I was dragged from the torn skin bag and tumbled into a pond
of astonishing beauty.
I rubbed my bloodsmeared body with lotuses and bathed. Next I
made a thanksgiving offering to the gods and the fathers, and only
then tasted the nectar of the pond. I sank down on the shore and lay
until I was rested. My eyes wandered over the woods that had been the
scene of prodigious adventures and forgot the anxieties of the battle
between the giant birds, forgot them like a man who has escaped from
the Hell of the Swordblades to stroll in Paradise. There was not a tree
with a withered or faded leaf; not one was burned by lightning and
brushfire or empty of bloom and fruit.43
After traveling through this and many other marvelous adventures, Sānudāsa
eventually comes back home a rich man, like Sindbād. He finds that his ordeals
have been planned by his family in order to teach him about the ups and downs
of life in the world, or, one might say, the Indianized world system of the mari-
time trade among India, Rome, and the islands of Southeast Asia. Within his
immediate cultural context, there are numerous other tales of cosmopolitan trav-
elers that share some of the motifs and structure of Sānudāsa’s journeys, such
as the voyages of the merchant Cārudatta in the Jain Prakrit Vāsudeva-hiṇḍī.44
As a narrative about coming of age, the travels of the dashing and well-traveled
Sānudāsa the Merchant have affinities with stories about the education of the
main character, analogues of which are found as far away from fifth-century
India as the modern Bildungsroman and the European chivalric romance.
sea, and, reaching a tree hanging to a rock, he fell deep asleep. The
cruel inhabitants of the country, who live naked without clothes and
are known for their ferociousness, discovered him and woke him with
their shouts of joy. They said, “This man has come here alone, with no
companion. His well-covered body will make us an excellent meal.”
During his journeys, Sāduvan had had the chance to learn their dia-
lect. Forthwith he spoke a few words. Surprised at hearing their tongue
spoken, the savages kept at a distance without harming him and spoke
warily.“Noble lord of rare strength, hear us! Our chief lives nearby. It is
better that you go and present yourself to him.” Accepting their invita-
tion, Sāduvan followed them to the Nāgas’ guru, whose dwelling was a
cave. He found him seated naked on a bed of boards, with his wife at
his side, as naked as he. They could have been a bear and his compan-
ion. They were surrounded by small vessels in which palm-wine was
fermenting. Other pots contained morsels of tainted meat. Whitened
bones were scattered on the ground, spreading a fetid smell. Speaking
to the chief in his own tongue, Sāduvan managed to impress him
favorably. The chief invited him to sit next to him in the shade of a
tree with dense foliage and questioned him as to why he had come.
Sāduvan explained that he had come from the sea with its mighty tides.
The chief then said, “This worthy man has undergone great tribula-
tion without food, in the midst of the sea. He is weary and deserves
our pity. Tribesmen! Give him a girl for his pleasure, some of our
strongest palm-wine, and as much meat as he desires.” Overwhelmed
by the barbarous customs of his host, Sāduvan refused his benevolent
offer. “Your words,” he said, “hurt my ears. I can accept nothing of
what you offer.”47
asks what he desires aside from sex, flesh, and intoxicating liquor. Sāduvan
explains:
The sages who have attained a higher vision of things do not use ine-
briating drink and avoid destroying life. In this world, we can see that
everything that is born has to die and whatever dies is born again. Life
and death are phenomena similar to the states of sleeping and wak-
ing. Those who have accomplished meritorious acts are reborn in a bet-
ter world and sometimes know the delights of earthly paradises, while
those that committed evil deeds descend into the infernal world where
they undergo unspeakable tortures. Such is reality, and this is why wise
men give up intoxicating liquor and refuse to feed on the flesh of living
beings. These are the facts you should consider.48
The Nāga chief is not convinced, but Sāduvan goes on to explain the
Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation to him, showing him how it is necessary
to practice nonviolence (ahiṃsā) in order not to incur harmful karma. In a
technique common to most preachers who seek to popularize their religious
doctrines (dharma), he explains how they can modify the dharma to suit their
ways. They are not to kill travelers who are washed up on their shores, or
to eat them. Even Sāduvan recognizes the futility of preaching vegetarianism
to cannibals, however, so he allows them to eat animals that have died of
old age.
In a final dialogue, the now-converted cannibal chief acknowledges the
appropriateness of the virtuous path that Sāduvan has taught them, and offers
him in exchange cargoes of aloes and sandalwood, bales of cloth, and precious
gold and gems looted from wrecked ships. The language of value and exchange
permeates this last moment of encounter. In the words of the chief,
“We will follow this virtuous path that is appropriate for us here, and
you take these precious things that are appropriate for you there. Often
in the past we have eaten shipwrecked people. We got all these valuable
things from them. Take these fragrant woods, soft clothes, piles of trea-
sure, and other things.”49
This moment of barter, the true dharma for cargoes of gold and precious goods,
encapsulates both the supposed naïveté of the peoples that Indian merchants
and Buddhist monks encountered throughout the islands of the eastern seas,
and the Indian hegemonic drive to civilize the “savages.” Sāduvan’s encounter
with the Nāgas is part of the larger narrative of Maṇimekhalai’s realization of
the ultimate value of spiritual renunciation.50 Any sense of wonder is tamed
138 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Fantastic Exchanges
Before we return to the marvels of the Mirigāvatī, one final question: Did these
cross-cultural encounters and exchanges always end in the victory of the civi-
lizers? Were the indigenous people and the marvels encountered by travelers
always subordinated to various schemes of literary representation or religious
doctrine? Were the Indian travelers and merchants ever overwhelmed by radical
cultural difference? A last example, one final story, from the Buddhist Jātakas
in Pali, a set of texts that precede both the Bṛhatkathā-śloka-samgraha and the
Maṇimekhalai, should demonstrate that the exchange was not always favorable
for the traveling merchants. In the “Valāhassa-Jātaka,” the Buddha relates a
story that is ostensibly about the magical powers of women to tempt practitio-
ners away from the path laid down by Buddhist doctrine. The story is about
the she-devils (yakkhinīs) that inhabit a certain town on the island of Lanka.
They command powers of illusion through which they can make shipwrecked
merchants imagine they are seeing a prosperous city of human beings, with
peasants tending fields and herds of cattle grazing peacefully. Whenever a ship
is wrecked on their shore, they go up to the merchants carrying food, with
their children on their hips. They make them believe that their husbands have
all gone away to sea and they have long since despaired of their return home.
Once the merchants are under their spell, they make them believe that
they would make good wives, and they take them home. The Buddha relates
the experiences of a group of five hundred merchants:
The she-devils came up to them, and enticed them, till they brought
them to their city; those whom they had caught before, they bound
with magic chains and cast into the house of torment (kāraṇaghare).
Then the chief she-devil took the chief man, and the others took the
rest, till five hundred had the five hundred traders; and they made
the men their husbands. Then in the night time, when her man was
asleep, the chief she-devil rose up, and made her way to the house of
death, slew some of the men, and ate them. The others did the same.
When the eldest she-devil returned from eating men’s flesh, her body
was cold. The eldest merchant embraced her, and perceived that she
Oceans and Stories: The Mirigāvatī 139
a mantra, and beds appear and walk up to them. The beds are made ready for
sleep without any human hands. Another mantra is spoken, and four dancing
peacocks appear. They turn into men and sit on the beds with the women, laugh-
ing and flirting and spending the night in pleasure. After four watches of the
night have gone by, a runner appears to them and reports that the herdsman has
been blinded. The prince realizes that they are connected with the evil cannibal,
and flees in terror. He runs as far and as fast as he can. Finally he reaches a
shady tree, and sits under it considering what to do next. He has passed through
five near-death experiences, and proved himself as a seeker by purifying himself
of fear and lust and holding to the path of truth and trust in God (tavakkul).
Sindbād’s voyages and the travels of the Prince as a yogi appear in many
unlikely and unexpected places, from Homer’s Odyssey to the nineteenth-cen-
tury versions of the Arabian Nights, from sailors’ yarns told in the coffeehouses
of Basra and Baghdad to the ancient Indian tales of Sānudāsa the Merchant.
This suggests not (or not just), as Roland Barthes puts it, that “narrative is
everywhere, like life itself,” but that the travels of narrative motifs mark the
many ongoing interactions between the peoples and languages along the rim
of the Indian Ocean, the global economy of the Islamicate world system.
People exchange stories as easily as trade goods, technology, food and spices,
music, craft techniques. In a global economy where there is constant move-
ment between sultanates and kingdoms, it is no surprise that we can locate
the ordeals of the Prince of Candragiri, told in a desī Hindavī romance, within
these narrative exchanges of wonder, hostility, negotiation, alterity, desire.
In examining how the formulaic fantasies of the Sufi romances are struc-
tured, and where the narrative motifs come from, my concern has not been
a merely antiquarian dissection of sources. These stories have both a motor
and an aesthetic purpose. Rather than a large schematic allegory, shorter sec-
tions of the text like the Prince’s quest are allegorically suggestive of particular
Sufi values. Narrative in the Hindavī Sufi romances comes out of and adds
to deep and long-standing storytelling traditions. The intensely local world of
the Jaunpur and Delhi sultanates and the literary genre of the eastern Hindavī
romances are thus part of the larger global pattern of exchange and cultural
encounter that characterizes the world of the Indian Ocean. The fictive, even
when constructed within an anti-mimetic poetics, indicates the historical expe-
rience of the encounters with radical otherness that characterize a world with
plural cultures, languages, and religions. The poets of the Hindavī romances
reinscribe the Arab sense of the marvelous into a concrete historical agenda as
well as a genre grounded in a transcendentalized aesthetics. The fantastic in
the Hindavī romances makes the reader hesitate between the illusory domain
of visible events and the palpable reality of Allah as the mysterious and invis-
ible essence of the world of phenomena.
5
I would term [such a] cosmology a locative map of the world and the
organizer of such a world, an imperial figure. It is a map of the world
which guarantees meaning and value through structures of congru-
ity and conformity. Students of religion have been most successful in
describing and interpreting this locative, imperial map of the world. . . . In
most cases, one cannot escape the suspicion that, in the locative map
of the world, we are encountering a self-serving ideology which ought
not to be generalized into the universal pattern of religious experience
and expression.4
You must know that the principle and foundation of Súfism and knowl-
edge of God rests on saintship, the reality of which is unanimously
affirmed by all the Shaykhs . . . . Waláyat means, etymologically, “power
to dispose” (taṣarruf) and wiláyat means “possession of command”
(imárat) . . . God has saints (awliyá) whom He has specially distinguished
by His friendship . . . . He has made the Saints the governors of the uni-
verse; they have become entirely devoted to His business, and have
ceased to follow their sensual affections. Through the blessing of their
advent the rain falls from heaven, and through the purity of their lives
the plants spring up from the earth, and through their spiritual influ-
ence the Moslems gain victories over the unbelievers.6
144 love’s subtle magic
This is a local, Hindustani landscape, and its use of words in dialect intrinsi-
cally reproduces the view from a small provincial center in Avadh or Bihar, in
this case the town of Jais. It is a crowded landscape, full of the denizens of
the Indian countryside, both natural and supernatural. The oppositional imag-
ery can be appreciated only by an inhabitant of Hindustan who has tasted
both raw juicy sugarcane and the karelā or bitter gourd that children hate to
this day. The supernatural and natural beings are all local ones; if Islamic
referents are intended they are reimagined and presented in Hindavī, hence
transformed into locally comprehensible beings. There is a larger transforma-
tion of subjectivity indicated here, in which a “foreign” religion is reimagined
in purely local terms.
As a practicing Sufi of both the Chishti and Mahdavi orders, Jāyasī tries,
as Thomas de Bruijn notes, to convey his “vision of the unseen world.”9
His major strategy is to use words and imagery with multiple resonances to
express the rasa of his story:
The poet uses the image of the lotus full of rasa to represent the poetic per-
sona as a purveyor of the subtle fragrance of meaning. Aesthetic pleasure is
connected with the scent of the unseen world, the ‘ālam-i ġhaib, which can
only be hinted at through suggestion. Those who are too close to the flower
see only its literal surface, while the fragrance of the invisible world spreads
far and wide to connoisseurs who can appreciate it.
Jāyasī’s own aesthetic purpose, his use of the Sufi poetics of rasa and
dhvani (suggestion), fits well within the literary tradition of the Hindavī Sufi
romances. How a work as a whole can suggest a rasa—the formation of an
appropriate plot, the creative freedom to change a narrative pattern in accor-
dance with the rasa, the creation of plot segments to enhance the rasa, intensi-
fying and relaxing the rasa at appropriate moments, and using suitable figures
of speech to enhance the rasa10—are all part of Jāyasī’s poetic repertory. His
use of many local symbolic vocabularies has often been read as a mark of his
vernacular populism, or, even worse, his religious tolerance, a sign that he
was, in A. G. Shirreff’s phrase, the “prophet of unity.”11 Reading the text within
the Sufi arrogation of the actual physical landscape demonstrates that Jāyasī
was a competitor within a diverse religious and literary scene, not an apostle
of religious unity. If his combination of elements constitutes a “syncretism,” it
is a competitive syncretism rather than a peaceful one.
Jāyasī’s poem can also be understood within both Persian and Arabic sys-
tems of literary understanding. But there are other, more fantastic mappings
in the Padmāvat, for Jāyasī creates a paradisal landscape on the faraway island
of Singhala-dīpa as the locus of the action. This imaginary landscape conceals
many levels of signification, since Jāyasī uses coded tantric, yogic, and bhakti
devotional terms to suggest that the imaginary landscape on which Ratansen
advances to attain Padmāvatī is also an interior landscape,12 within which
Ratansen crosses stages in the symbolic geography of the body (imagined as a
city) to reach the Sufi goal.
Jāyasī has also an acute sense of social position, of power and the politics
of social interaction in Hindustan. Of the status-ridden, male-centered, and
martial world of the Indian Muslim élite, he has this to say in his prologue,
in the section in praise of Allah:
This self-confident and dominant mapping of the cosmos and world intricately
interweaves the metaphysics of Allah, the supreme lord of the universe, with
the feel of inequality and social mastery. The verse weaves together motions
and power structures to comment on social inequality while subordinating
all to the monotheistic Creator; in other words, there is an established social
order, in which kings and men are on top, and that is the will of Allah. No
prophet of unity, our poet, but a man deeply conscious of social distinction
and struggling to make the Padmāvat the most ornately poetic and elaborate
Sufi romance in Hindavī, even through his protestations of modesty in the
prologue.
Before Ashraf Jahāngīr took final leave of his pīr, Shaikh ‘Alāuddīn
‘Ganj-i Nabāt’ Chishtī (“Treasury of Sugar”) of Pandwa in Bengal, the
latter showed him in a vision where his tomb would lie . . . [W]hen
Ashraf Jahāngīr arrived in Jaunpur, the local landholder Malik Maḥmūd
welcomed him and accompanied] him on his search for the place which
he had seen in his vision. There then came into view a circular tank,
upon seeing which the Shaikh said that this was the place that his pīr
had revealed to him. [Malik Maḥmūd] suggested that there was a diffi-
culty, in that a Jogi resided there, and the Shaikh could only settle there
if he had the power to confront him. The Shaikh said, “The Truth came
and falsehood perished: lo, falsehood perishes! What is difficult about
driving out a body of unbelievers?”
[When the Shaikh sent for his servitor Jamāl al-dīn Rāvat, he was reluc-
tant to face the Jogi.] The Shaikh called him close to him and took some
pān (betel) from his own mouth and put it in Jamāl al-dīn’s mouth with
his own hand. As Jamāl al-dīn ate the pān he was overcome by a strange
exaltation, and he bravely set out for the battle. He went to the Jogi and
said, “We do not think it becoming to display miracles (karāmāt), but we
will give an answer to each of the powers (istidrāj) which you display.”
The first trick that the Jogi displayed was that from every direction
swarms of black ants advanced towards Jamāluddīn; but they vanished
when Jamāl-aldīn looked resolutely at them. After which an army of tigers
appeared, but Jamāluddīn only said: “What harm can a tiger do to me?”
At this all the tigers fled. After various other tricks the Jogi threw his
staff into the air. Jamāluddīn then asked for the staff of the Shaikh and
sent it up after it. The Shaikh’s staff beat down that of the Jogi until it
was brought to the ground. When the Jogi had exhausted all his tricks,
he said, “Take me to the Shaikh! I will become a believer!”16
The text further refers to the newly converted ‘Shaikh’ Kamāl as a jāmi‘-i riyāz.at-i
shadīdah va s.āḥib-i mu‘āmalah-i jadīdah, which can be translated as “a combiner
150 love’s subtle magic
Jāyasī’s Shaikh “Burhānū” was the historical Sufi saint Burhān ud-dīn
Ansārī (usually called Shaikh Burhān) of Kalpi. He was quite famous; al-
Badaoni has mentioned him in Muntakhabu-t-taw
̣ ārīkḥ , as has Abu-l Faz l'
in the Ā’īn-i Akbarī. A fact which has been neglected by scholars studying
Jāyasī is that Shaikh Burhān was quite likely Jāyasī’s instructor or at least
his inspiration for writing premākhyāns and for using Awadhi . . . . Jāyasī
wrote that it was through Shaikh Burhān’s help that he “found his tal-
ent,” that his tongue was freed, and he began to compose “love poetry”
(prema kabi). The possibility of Shaikh Burhān instructing Jāyasī on
such literary matters is confirmed by what is known about the Shaikh.
According to al-Badaoni Shaikh Burhān was not schooled in Arabic, but
he did write beautiful poetry in Hindi on mystical topics . . . [S]uch verses
in Awadhi by him have been found in old manuscripts.19
and his skill in versifying and reciting it. He was also the author of the Firāq
Nāmah (“Account of Separation”), a Hindavī work that has not survived. The
qualities for which his verse was prized were, according to al-Badāyūnī, “exhor-
tation, admonition, mysticism (taṣavvuf), the longing of the human soul for
God (ẕauq), the Unity of God (tauḥīd), and withdrawal from the world.”20
Jāyasī composed the Padmāvat under instruction from and among these teach-
ers and shaikhs who were sanctifying the lush physical landscape of northern India
and using Hindavī and other local languages to express their Sufi message. For the
slow cultural transformation entailed in this process, both of the conquerors and of
the conquered, we would do well to remember what Peter Brown has remarked on
in another context, the Christianization of the late antique pagan world:
Chishti networks of spiritual authority were changed further during the estab-
lishment of local regional sultanates such as Jaunpur in the fifteenth century
and challenged by the consolidation of other Sufi silsilahs such as the Mahdavis,
the Naqshbandis, the Shattaris, and the Suhravardis.24 In 1540, when Jāyasī
was composing his romance, the Chishtis were still well established in Delhi
and much of northern India, though they were only one of the many groups
competing for disciples.
The Chishti pattern of interaction with the physical landscape and its
human and animal denizens continues to invest these living objects with
supernatural causality. As Chishti holy men and their followers in competi-
tion with other groups construct hospices and tombs, even animals get drawn
into this sanctification of the physical landscape, as the Lat"ā’if-i Ashrafī makes
clear in its account of the activities of Kamāl Jogi’s pet cat in Shaikh Ashraf
Jahāngīr’s hospice:
feet of the Shaikh and then those of its other companions. After this it
became a habit that when the Shaikh was talking upon divine myster-
ies, the cat never left the holy gathering.25
From this account, which places the cat’s spiritual perspicacity within the ped-
agogical practice of the shaikh, we learn that an animal may be a more devout
believer than hypocritical human beings, and that the shaikh’s power extends
beyond the hearts and minds of human beings to the animal and heavenly
worlds. This story echoes the famous couplets by the poet Ḥāfiz ' about the
abilities of the cat of his rival ‘Imād-i Faqīh, an animal that the jurisconsult
had trained to follow him in all his actions when he said his prayers: “The
Sufi lays his snare and opens his box of tricks; he inaugurates his deceits with
the juggling heavens. O graceful partridge, who walks so proudly and prettily,
don’t be deceived because the ascetic’s cat has said its prayers!”26 The trium-
phant “conversion” of this yogi, and the sanctity and perspicacity of his pet
cat, are emblematic of a larger process of spiritual conquest that includes the
sanctification of the animals as well as the people in the local landscape.
Further anecdotes about the power of Kamāl Jogī, and of his cat, illustrate
the ongoing work of training disciples and converting unbelievers:
When travellers were about to arrive at the ḳhānaqāh, the cat used
to indicate their numbers by mewing. From this the servitors of the
ḳhānaqāh would know for how many guests to lay the cloth for a meal.
At the time when the food was served, the cat also was given a portion
equal those of the others who were present, and sometimes it was sent
to bring members of the company who had been summoned. It would
go to the cell of the person who had been called, and by mewing insis-
tently or banging against the door would make him understand that the
Shaikh had summoned him.
One day a party of dervishes had arrived at the kh ̣ ānaqāh. The cat
mewed as usual, but when the food was brought it appeared to be short
by one portion. The Shaikh turned to the cat and said, “Why have you
made a mistake today?”
The cat immediately went around and began to sniff at each of the
dervishes of the party. When it came to the head of the band, it jumped
on his knee and pissed. When the Shaikh saw what had happened, he
said, “The poor cat has done nothing wrong: this man is a stranger [an
unbeliever]!”
The head of the band immediately cast himself at the feet of the
Shaikh and said: “I am a Dahriyya [materialist]. For twelve years I have
travelled through the world wearing the garments of Islam. It was my
154 love’s subtle magic
This fascinating and somewhat fanciful episode has several important implications.
First, historical agents are capable of multiple religious affiliations. Changes from
one system to another do not necessarily involve renunciation of all the beliefs
previously held. Rather, the convert recasts the old beliefs and practices into a new
framework, overtly Sufi and Islamic but containing important elements of other
religious systems. As Richard Eaton has demonstrated, old-fashioned theories of
force, political patronage, or the social liberation offered by Islam are simply inad-
equate to describe the mass conversions that took place.28 Instead, we have to look
at the evidence of slow growth and mutual assimilation, of generational patterns
of change that span anachronistically imagined religious divides.
Second, once converted, disciples were routinely entrusted with the task
of establishing the beliefs and spiritual practices of their silsilah in ever-more-
far-flung territories. Aside from establishing the living presence of the silsilah
in new lands and marking them as the spiritual territory of the pīr (vilāyah),
Sufis were buried in tombs that became the focus of devotional cults for local
populations. These concrete remains of holiness were perceived as reservoirs
of spiritual power or barakah to be tapped by petitioners in any exigency. All
who were associated with the cultus of the shaikh were drawn into these tomb
cults, as the account of the martyrdom of Shaikh Kamāl’s holy cat indicates:
The cat remained alive until after the death of the Shaikh. One day the
sajjādah-nashīn [successor] of the Shaikh had put a pot of milk upon
the fire in order to cook shīr-birinj [rice-pudding], and it chanced that a
snake fell into the pot. The cat saw this and prowled around the pot.
It would not budge from the place and it mewed several times, but the
cook did not understand and drove it out of the kitchen. When the cat
saw that there was no way of making the cook understand, it leapt into
the pot and surrendered its life. The rice then had to be thrown away,
and in it the black snake was discovered. The sajjādah-nashīn remarked
that the cat had sacrificed its own life for the sake of dervishes, and
a tomb should be built for it. So the cat was buried near the tomb of
Sayyid Ashraf Jahāngīr, and a structure was erected over its grave.29
Landscape of Paradise and the Embodied City 155
Along with the tombs of Shaikh Ashraf Jahāngīr and Shaikh Kamāl, the cat’s
tomb too was presumably the object of veneration for devotees. It is not known
whether the tiny structure still survives, but the account is a perfect cap for the
dynamic of contest, conversion, and the marking of spiritual territory. A similar
impulse may be seen in the drive to build aristocratic tombs near the dargahs
of Sufi shaikhs in Delhi, the medieval necropolis par excellence. Jāyasī as a his-
torical figure can be set within these larger impulses toward the competitive
arrogation of Avadh and Bihar, the eastern extremities of the local landscape of
Hindustan, and the production of a distinctive regional literary and devotional
culture. This competitive cultural landscape and its politics are an essential part
of the mystical progress of the hero in the narrative of the Padmāvat.
The language here reimagines into an Indian landscape the garden described in
the Qur’ān. As Sūrah 77, verses 41–42, makes clear, the true believers shall enjoy
the afterlife: “As to the righteous, they shall be amidst (cool) shades and foun-
tains, and (they shall have) fruits, all they desire.” The first couplet in this passage
of Jāyasī’s text, however, indirectly suggests jannah or paradise: “And if anyone
ever comes to that isle, he seems to approach paradise” (P 27.1).31 He uses the
Avadhi term kabilāsa (Sanskrit Kailāsa, Śiva’s heaven) to suggest the Qur’ānic jan-
nat, and reimagines the heavenly shade and fountains and fruits as shady mango
orchards (amarāī) blossoming and bearing fruit “in an eternal springtime.”
Jāyasī goes on to recast into Hindavī the widespread Sufi convention that
the birds of the world praise their Creator in their different tongues. The
theme is already well known in Persian poetry, as for instance in Ḥakīm
Sanā’ī’s “Litany of the Birds,”32 in which every bird has its own way of praising
Allah. Similarly, Jāyasī uses Indian birds and their special calls to suggest that
the new garden that praises Allah is in Avadh:
The doves’ cry of “One alone, only You!” and the songs of the warblers and
papīhās fit the Qur’ānic attestation that “everything was created in order to
158 love’s subtle magic
worship God. Everything praises God with its own voice.”33 Even when the
tongue is silent or lacking, the lisān al-ḥāl or “tongue of one’s state” comes into
play, a nonverbal language through which everything involuntarily and con-
stantly praises God, by means of the “state” in which He created it. Peacocks
and cuckoos, whose calls ordinarily signify the monsoons and the summer,
here join a chorus of birds proclaiming the message of Islamic monotheism.
Jāyasī goes on to place his imaginary Sufi landscape within a full range of
Indian religious renunciants, the competitors of the Chishti Sufis. The passage
that follows harnesses the cartographic impulse in Indian religions, which rei-
magines place in terms of pilgrimage sites (tīrthas), to demonstrate the supe-
riority of the holy landscape of Singhala-dīpa:
The variety and all-inclusiveness of Jāyasī’s list spans the religious spectrum
from naked Jains to devotees of the god Rāma, Nāth panthī yogis, wandering
mendicants, tantric worshippers of the goddess Śakti, and all manner of holy
men. All of them come to Singhala-dīpa in order to pray and mortify them-
selves at its holy sites, hoping to gain salvation at its fords and step wells.
Jāyasī next represents the spiritual center of Singhala as a holy lake, the
Mānasarodaka or Mānasarovara. In Sanskrit poetic convention, the Mānasa
lake near Śiva’s mountain home Kailāsa is the true home of the soul, to which
it flies from the toils and travails of this mortal world. The human soul is
Landscape of Paradise and the Embodied City 159
imagined as a migratory haṃsa bird or goose who longs to return home. But
the Mānasarovara is also an internal station in the yogic body, just below the
tenth door or dasam dvāra (the secret opening):
The geese playing on the lake, suggesting human souls in paradise, are “pictures
etched in gold” among the crimson lotuses. The flowering lotuses with a thousand
petals refer to the thousand-petaled lotus (sahasra-dala kamala) of the yogic body
where the ascetic can taste the rain of nectar through controlling and redirecting
spiritual energies. The easing of hunger and thirst is a reference to the frequently
expressed Qur’ānic idea that believers in heaven will get ample food and drink
and all their needs will be satisfied in the garden of delights (38:49–52, 79:41).
Jāyasī uses words that are loaded with resonances of the religious systems
with which his audiences were familiar. He uses technical terms freely at various
junctures to suggest invisible spiritual meanings. The birds warble the Names of
Allah, and complain of their burning desire and their separation from their loves.
All the flowers of India—the fragrant screwpine (kevṟā), the golden magnolia
(campaka), jasmines of various kinds, kadamba, marigold, dog-roses, maulasiris,
and citrons—add their color and fragrance to the enchanting island paradise and
excite both the audience and the characters in the story to anticipate the erotic
rasa (śṛṅgāra), here recast into Jāyasī’s central aesthetic of prema-rasa.
Within this imaginary landscape of paradise, Jāyasī now invokes another
symbolic plane: the interior landscape of the ascetic’s body, imagined in terms
borrowed from tantric, alchemical, and yogic practice. The most important of
these symbolic vocabularies derives from the songs of the Buddhist and tantric
160 love’s subtle magic
The Gorakhbānī greatly elaborates on the “city of the body” (deha-nagarī, kāyā
nagara), the symbolic body of the practitioner, who must master breath control
to enter within:
The nine gates are the nine openings of the body, the mouth, eyes, ears, nos-
trils, and the organs of excretion and reproduction. The tenth door is the secret
opening (brahma-randhra) between and above the eyes in the subtle body,
through which the practitioner can enter the microcosmic universe within.
Similarly, Jāyasī’s description of the city of Singhala represents both the
yogic body and a lofty fortress:
The five captains suggest the five senses that guard the body. The four days
suggest obliquely the four stages of the Sufi path, sharī‘ah (following the law),
ṭ.arīqah (the Sufi way), ma‘rifah (gnosis), and ḥaqīqah (realizing the truth).
Alternatively, they could be a reference to the four states of existence, nāsūt
(the human world), malakūt (the angelic world), jabarūt (the heavenly realm),
and lāhūt (absolute divinity).39
The next verse continues to map onto the paradisal city all of these esoteric
Sufi terms for practices. The seeker has to climb up above the nine gates of
the city/body to the secret or hidden tenth door, the brahma-randhra, through
which he can escape into the brahmāṇḍa (the mundane egg = the cosmos)
within:
The royal clock or clepsydra marks time for the fort/body. In the Gorakhbānī,
too, the clock marks the unstruck or mystic sound within:
Jāyasī uses these elements in new ways. In his text, as Millis notes, the clock’s
regular chimes suggest the regulation of the bindu, semen or nectar in the
yogi’s symbolic body, which the yogi must control in order to arrest time and
mortal decay.41
In consonance with the absence of a consistent “allegorical” scheme, the
next verse refers ambiguously to two rivers that flow in the fort. These could
refer to the Qur’ānic rivers of milk, water, wine, and honey (47: 15) at the
162 love’s subtle magic
center of the garden of paradise, which believers enjoy in the afterlife: “In
it are rivers of water incorruptible; rivers of milk of which the taste never
changes; rivers of wine, a joy to those who drink; and rivers of honey pure
and clear.” Jāyasī’s verse reads:
The lake of crushed pearls suggests the yogic amṛta-kuṇḍa or pool of nectar
that is located between the eyes in the symbolic geography of the yogic body.42
As Charlotte Vaudeville has noted,
Jāyasī’s rivers and the pool of nectar also resonate with this symbolism of the left,
right, and central mystical channels (nāḍīs) in the subtle body, the Iḍā, Piṅgalā,
and Suṣumnā. The goal of yogic and tantric practice is to channel vital fluid
(rasa or semen), breath, and heat and to move it up the central channel until
it reaches the thousand-petaled lotus between the eyes. In the words of David
White, “It is this nectar that gradually fills out the moon in the cranial vault
such that, at the conclusion of this process, the lunar orb, now brimming with
nectar, is possessed of its full complement of sixteen digits . . . [T]his transforma-
tion of semen into nectar wholly transforms the body, rendering it immortal.”44
If the body is a fort, its ruler the king is the soul (rūḥ), who can be trans-
formed through the appropriate spiritual practices. The symbolism is again trace-
able to the Gorakhbānī, in which the allegorical references are made explicit:
In Jāyasī’s text, the King is well established in his city, with vassals who are
lords of horses, elephants, forts, and men. The interlinear Persian gloss of
the Rampur manuscript interprets these as the equivalents of the four chief
Islamic angels: Jibrīl, Mikā’īl, Isrāfīl, and ‘Azrā’īl.46
Jāyasī uses this vision of orderly rule in his own symbolic geography of the
body, adding elements to the basic image. At the holy lake, the Mānasarodaka,
flowers a golden tree:
The celestial tree suggests the sidrat al-muntahá or lote tree of the furthest
extremity, the magical tree that is radiant with God’s light and is the point
of demarcation between the manifest world and the unseen. The tree is
here translated into Hindavī as the kalpataru or wishing tree of Indra’s
heaven, where the creeper of immortality (amarabeli) grows. The slender
creeper suggests also the personification of ṭ.ūbá, the tree of blessedness
in the Qur’ān (13:29): “parallel to the sidra tree . . . the wonderful tree in
Paradise, more slender and elegant than a cypress, and conveying shade to
those who draw near to it.”47 Only the Sufi who can mortify himself can
realize truth, harvest the creeper on the golden tree. Different audiences
would understand this polysemous poetic symbol either as Indra’s wishing
tree or as the Qur’ānic lote tree.
Jāyasī adapts elements from Nāth panthī notions of the body, from the
Qur’ānic idea of Paradise, and from Indian mythologies of heaven into a Sufi
ascetic body that has its own logic of transformation into immortality. As
164 love’s subtle magic
Here the poet suggests God’s light, which is incarnated in Padmāvatī, yet sepa-
rate from her as a lamp is separate from the cloth that screens it (jasa añcala
jhīne manh diyā/ tasa ujiyāra dekhāvai hiyā). The verse also hints at the mishkāt
al-anvār, the niche for lamps in the famous Light verse of the Qur’ān (24:35).49
Rather than a brilliant star, however, the poet goes on to compare Padmāvatī to
the moon in its splendor on the second day of the month (when there are no
marks on it), for the moon functions as a mystical symbol.50
The princess is a padminī or lotus woman in terms of Sanskrit erotic the-
ory, the best of the four classes of women. She personifies the ideal of beauty
described, for instance, in the Rati-mañjarī or “Bouquet of Passion”: “she is
lotus-eyed, with small nostrils, with a pair of breasts close together, with nice
hair and a slender frame; she speaks soft words and is cultured, steeped in
songs and [knowledge of ] musical instruments, dressed well on her entire
body, the lotus-woman, the lotus-scented one.”51 The poet constantly plays
on the similarity between Padminī and Padmāvatī, using both names for his
heroine and frequently inventing ingenious imagery connected with lotuses.
Her father, King Gandharvasen, keeps her in a seven-storied tower, where the
Landscape of Paradise and the Embodied City 165
golden parrot Hīrāman tutors her in all the traditional arts and sciences. He is
the Brahmin among all the birds, wise beyond compare. Gandharvasen does
not consider anyone equal to his daughter in status, and so will not accept any
marriage proposals for her. As she grows older she begins to be tormented
by longing, by desire for a lover worthy of her. Hīrāman offers to fly over all
the lands of the earth for her, to find her an acceptable husband. The king
hears of the dangerous knowledge that the parrot is imparting and threatens
to have him killed. But the princess protects him by protesting to her father
that he is but a bird who repeats what he hears others say, having no reason-
ing intelligence of his own. For the moment, Hīrāman is safe, but his days in
Singhala-dīpa are numbered.
One day the princess and her friends go to play at the fabulous lake, the
Mānasarodaka. The virgin girls are like innocent souls in paradise, and their
play suggests the divine flashes of manifestation upon the beautiful surface of
the lake. One of the games that they play is to dive for pebbles in the lake.
Unfortunately, one of the women loses her jeweled necklace, but the lake gen-
erously gives it back. Jāyasī’s description animates the landscape and makes
the lake speak out to the players as a character who has been purified by a
touch of divine beauty:
King Ratansen is immediately excited to hear of her, and asks the parrot to
describe the beauty of Padmāvatī, and what he means by love, since his heart
is now aflame with desire.
Landscape of Paradise and the Embodied City 167
Hīrāman goes on to indicate that the path of true love is a path on which
one has to annihilate oneself, a reference to the Sufi value of fanā or dying to
one’s lower self. He defines the connection between love and death:
The king protests, and says that he is willing to brave all sorrows to gain the
honey of love. He heaves a deep sigh and responds to the parrot’s instruction:
There are salt, milk, and marshy (jala) rivers, these three oceans
ever abide in the body. At the base of the tongue is a sweet river,
the ocean/jewel (ratnākāra) [sic] in the eye, much is written in the
Sind (concerning) the milk ocean. The milk ocean of semen flows
forth through the penis, the salt river as urine flows with great
force . . . . Consider now . . . the matter of the moons (maṇi), the moon
(candra) is called maṇi in Arabic. These moons, menstrual blood and
semen, are water. The same moons are spoken of in many languages.
The body, color, passion, strength and mantra are derived from the
moons, as is the length of life, as everyone knows. The lord has said,
you will find it in the Quran, “I drink the fluid lest this blessing be
poured out.” The one who expends the moons by making love, his
body becomes weak and powerless. The moons, as you know, are
an ocean, a sea of nectar, when one drinks the nectar he becomes
immortal, indestructible.55
Stressing the continuity of Indian Tantric practice with the Qur’ān (!) through
an apocryphal quote, this author emphasizes the physicality of rasa and its
links with the four elements that make up the human body. Certain Bengali
Sufi silsilahs ingested these bodily substances ritually, very much in continuity
with ordinary Bengali Tantric practice.
Other eastern Sufis chose to adopt and reimagine local terms such as rasa
for their practice. One approach was to consider prema-rasa as a psychological
process, a “means for transforming the attitude of the worshipper from sepa-
rate to being in union with the divine”:
Of the many different rasas in the three worlds the actor of love (premer
nāgara) is the essence of them all. By enjoying various rasas one dies,
(having had) an unfulfilled life, dying having enjoyed the prema rasa is
Landscape of Paradise and the Embodied City 169
the goal of a sādhu. The one who has a beginning in this rule, such a
sādhu is highest, enjoying the lord’s love (he) merges (with him).56
In these forms of Sufi practice, the adept eschews the physical consump-
tion of bodily fluids: “Yogis do not consume the physical rasas. One does not
gain perfection by the physical essences of the cakras. The precious flower of
wisdom is entrapped by the consumption of rasa, this is why yogis do not
eat them.”57 This is similar to the sublimation suggested by the Hindavī Sufi
poets, who represented prema-rasa as a process for abstracting an emotional
state and directing the soul toward God.
Jāyasī uses the ancient Indian spatial scheme of seven oceans to sug-
gest seven stages through which the seeker must pass in order to reach the
Mānasa lake, the true home of the soul. Jāyasī changes one of these oceans
to what he calls the Kilkila, a sea thirty thousand kosas wide, spanned by a
narrow bridge fine as a sword blade. To negotiate this dangerous bridge (a
suggestive reference to the Pūl-i Sirāt" across which the souls of the dead are
said to cross the abyss to paradise), one needs a guide with whom one can
travel in the path of truth. The company of saffron-clad ascetics finally lands
at Singhala-dīpa after crossing the seventh ocean, their journey fulfilled by
the glimpse of their true home, the Mānasa lake blossoming with lotuses.
Hīrāman describes this lake, alluding to the fragrance of the lotus that has
reached the bee, Ratansen:
In the lake of the sky, the lotus is the moon, and stars blossom
like night-lotuses.
You, O sun, have risen up as a bee—the breeze has brought
you its fragrance [P 160.8].
The scent of the invisible world, the fragrance of Padmāvatī, has reached
Ratansen, who has come from afar like a bee to the lotus. The imagery recalls
Jāyasī’s characterizations of his own suggestive poetics, grasping the invisible
scent of the lotus.
Hīrāman advises the king to meditate at the temple of Śiva while he goes
to tell Padmāvatī about the sun he has brought to illumine her life:
The sun, moon, and lotus suggest the yogic practice of drawing down the
moon, semen, and nectar or lunar energy through the ascetic heat of the sun.
170 love’s subtle magic
The deity then redefines prema, rasa, and viraha for Ratansen; only through
service can the seeker become a true inhabitant of the landscape of paradise
(baikuṇṭhī) and taste the joys of love and separation. This involves constant
breath control and difficult self-mortification; Ratansen practices austerities,
and Padmāvatī’s passion increases under the force of his yoga.
Padmāvatī comes to worship at Śiva’s temple on the day of the spring
festival, and wishes for a suitable bridegroom. Ratansen, meditating in one
corner of the temple, swoons away at the approach of the heavenly maidens.
She puts sandal paste on him and writes in magic letters over his heart that
he fell asleep at the wrong moment; now he will have to satisfy his desire by
climbing up, like the sun, across seven heavens to gain the moon. When he
wakes up, he is distraught to find that the object of his desire has left, and
in his desperation he builds a flaming pyre and is about to fling himself on
it. The monkey god Hanumān takes the news of his impending death to Śiva
and Pārvatī in heaven, and even the gods are astonished at his persistence.
Jāyasī’s characteristic strategy of using the symbolic vocabularies and even the
gods of different religious systems in his own fantasy landscape is much in
evidence.
Ratansen realizes the importance of a guide at the critical juncture he is
in, referring to the pīr as Gorakhnāth:
love. Śiva uses the coded word “crooked” (baṅka) to refer to a “curved duct”
(baṅka nāla)58 within the yogic body along which energy (kuṇḍalinī) flows:
Śiva thus explains the symbolism of the nine doors of the embodied city
through coded words that refer to the yogic subtle body and the practices for
transforming it. The poet characterizes Śiva’s instruction as the siddhi-guṭikā,
the magic pill of the Nāth panthīs that transforms the seeker and gives him
the eight powers or siddhis.
Śiva tells the king the method of restraining his breath and his mind in order
to get through the tenth door and reach the secret pool of nectar, the amṛta-
kuṇḍa that is within him. Śiva’s instruction also reveals that the Chishti Sufis are
not actually becoming yogis. They adapt some of the concepts and practices of
yoga, but the verse goes on to fit the yogic practices within the framework of the
Sufi destruction of the ego and purification of the lower soul (nafs):
She is afraid that Ratansen might die, and sends her old nurse to summon
the wise parrot Hīrāman to counsel her. Hīrāman tells her about the funeral
pyre that is being built. He reminds her that she and Ratansen are bound in
a reciprocal relationship of true love: now the yogi is the body and she is his
soul. Death cannot touch him now, since he has annihilated himself in the
being of his guide (fanā fi ’l-shaikh).
Throughout, Jāyasī refers to multiple religious systems; although Hīrāman
has been Ratansen’s guide, here the parrot calls Padmāvatī the guru:
Guru and disciple, lover and beloved, share the same refracted light. The iden-
tity of Padmāvatī with Ratansen thus conceals references to many layers of
mystical ideology.
Ratansen is about to be impaled when Śiva appears in the form of a singer
and intercedes for him to King Gandharvasen, Padmāvatī’s father. He reveals
the truth to the angry king, and tells him that Ratansen is a prince from Jambu-
dvīpa or India, not a yogi at all. The king relents. Ratansen throws off his
ascetic garb and puts on the clothes of a Rajput king. The wedding is carried
out with great pomp and fanfare. When they come together on their wedding
night, Jāyasī uses the language of alchemy or rasāyaṇa to describe their union:
The siddhi guṭikā or pill of immortality is, in alchemical systems, treated mer-
cury mixed with silver. Eating it reverses the flow of time, makes the body
hard and immortal. They consummate their marriage in ecstatic union:
They play the game of love, the poet says, like two besotted Sarus cranes,
or the sun and moon becoming one in the heavens. In this manner they enjoy
themselves through a whole year, an entire cycle of six seasons.
174 love’s subtle magic
Jāyasī recounts their love play in verse full of puns, double entendres, and
cunning allusions, employing vocabularies from different areas of social life.
When Padmāvatī is flirting with Ratansen on their wedding night, she coyly
refuses to believe that he is a prince at all. She uses the imagery of causar or
caupar, a game of dice played on a cross-shaped board like paccīsī:
Here Padmāvatī uses the several throws of the dice game to suggest the game
that is unfolding between the lovers. A kaccā or “raw” twelve is a simple throw
adding up to twelve, but a “pucca” twelve is a throw of six, six, and one. This
enables the player to move two pieces forward six spaces and one piece for-
ward by an additional two spaces, a significant move in the game of love,
while a kaccā twelve can improve the position of only a single playing piece,
only one step further in the erotic advance. She puns further on the word sat,
which generally refers to the true path but here refers to the throw of seven.
Finally, paired pieces cannot be killed, so it is advantageous to keep pieces
together by throwing the same number on more than one die. Padmāvatī, of
course, is also suggesting that he wishes to touch her breasts, and the prince
responds using the same vocabulary and protesting that he has already lost the
game to her. In the lovers’ final union, Jāyasī evokes the symbolic vocabular-
ies of yoga, alchemy, tantric sexual practice, and Ratansen’s quest through the
geography of Singhala-dīpa as well as through the terrain of his own body.
Padmāvatī has come down to the human realm, compelled by her lover. Now
that they are in the earthly world, her stunning beauty will have its effect on
humans. When they reach Chittaur, Nāgmatī is overjoyed to see her husband
again. But Padmāvatī is insanely jealous of Nāgmatī, and the two women fight
bitterly over Ratansen’s affections. He calms them down by sleeping with both
176 love’s subtle magic
of them in turn, and they are persuaded to live together in peace; figuratively
speaking, the demands of this world and the next are fulfilled.
Ratansen does not become a yogi; he only adopts the guise of a yogi. The
poet uses an “as-if” logic. When Ratansen takes off the yogic disguise, the
poet tells us that his earrings were only attached with wax, not hung from
pierced lobes as was the custom of the “pierced-ears” (Kānphaṭa) Nāth yogis.
And although his austerities can be understood as if they were the yogic prac-
tices familiar to audiences within a northern Indian context, they suggest
Sufi ascetic exercises intended, like the night prayers and fasts undertaken by
Chishtis, to awaken the consciousness of the seeker to spiritual reality. The
characters in the story, and by implication the Sufis, are not exactly yogis; they
are like yogis, only better, as they can use yogic practices and language framed
within a Sufi romantic poetics. Through this seeming logic Jāyasī spells out
the Chishti Sufi claim to superiority within a local religious landscape.
The use of various symbolic vocabularies, physical and imaginative, tem-
pered by their place within the Sufis’ arrogation of the physical landscape of
Hindustan, allows us a glimpse into the transformation of literary and reli-
gious categories in sixteenth-century India. The fanciful stories of cats, tombs,
and rice pudding and the revelation of unbelievers are entertaining, but they
also point to a larger process of religious competition. This desī Islamic tradi-
tion represents Islam in local dress, “as-if” imagined through local gods and
goddesses, a thorough integration of a monotheistic faith into a polytheistic
cultural landscape.
Tropes of landscape within the text narrativize place. The imaginary par-
adise of Singhala-dīpa and the subjective terrain along which Ratansen pro-
gresses to self-realization constitute an ideologically charged space. Those in
the know could interpret Jāyasī’s spatialization of internal vision through the
loaded vocabularies that expressed hidden referents, the scent of the invisible
world. Religious worlds can overlap, and agents themselves can assert notions
of selfhood and self-realization through the shared language of competing sys-
tems and through literary suggestion, the subjects’ own theory of meaning.
This phenomenon becomes even clearer in the second part of the romance,
when Jāyasī uses the motifs and themes of the Rajput martial literature and
the narratives of the Islamic conquest of Hindustan to bring his own tale to
a powerfully tragic conclusion. But that, as all storytellers say, is a story for
another day . . . .
6
It has been suggested that writers in nineteenth century Bengal were una-
ble to directly criticize the imperial domination of the British, and that they
therefore substituted another set of invaders. . . . This substitution also fitted
in neatly with the emergence of communalism with its consistent inter-
pretation of all Indian history as perennial Hindu-Muslim conflict . . . [T]he
story of the heroic queen committing jauhar also assumed significance in
the context of the prolonged and intense debates about widow-immolation,
in which gender was reconstituted as a key component of the intersecting
debates on colonialism, nationalism, and social reform.5
This radically dualist view of genre and history, between groups of people who
overlap significantly in both cultural and physical space, simplifies complex
identities into a static, unchanging opposition. It leaves unasked all the ques-
tions about how people interact; how genre, history, and imaginative geography
shape each other; and how emergent literary canons in the new Indo-Aryan
languages are implicated in wider transitions in Indian history.
A further irony is that Jāyasī’s poem is the earliest extant narrative of the
last stand of Padmāvatī and Ratansen. He based the first part of the story on
the Rajput bardic narratives of the Pṛthivīrāja Rāsāu ascribed to Cand Bardai, a
complex text that comes down to us in four variant manuscript traditions that
differ radically in length. Although the Rāsau relates events ostensibly from
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, none of the manuscripts predates the
reign of Akbar (1556–1605), so that analyzing and dating the Rāsau’s language
and component parts is a daunting task. The episode of Padmāvatī, called the
“Padmāvatī Samaya,” does not occur in the shortest versions. In outline, the
brief episode relates how Padmāvatī falls in love with Pṛthivirāja Cauhān, King
of Delhi, because her talking parrot describes him to her. When Padmāvatī’s
father arranges her marriage, she sends a letter through her pet parrot to
Pṛthivirāja, who arrives with an army at his back to win his bride. After propi-
tiating Śiva and Pārvatī, he elopes with her on his horse. On his way back to
Delhi he has to face a Turkish army from Ghazni, which he defeats. He enters
Delhi triumphantly, marries Padmāvatī, and lives happily with her. In form,
180 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the episode seems to repeat the narrative logic of Pṛthivīrāja’s much more
famous elopement with Saṃyogitā, the daughter of King Jaicand of Kannauj.7
Jāyasī may have had a bardic Rajput source (possibly a Jain one) for the
second part of the story, the conquest of Chittaur, but that is now lost. Later
versions such as the Bengali Sufi poet Ālāol’s romance Padmāvatī and the ref-
erence to the fall of Padminī and Chittaur in the seventeenth-century verse
chronicle, the Muhta Naiṇsī rī Khyāt, are based on Jāyasī’s popular and widely
circulated version of the Padmāvatī story.8 If we accept the evidence that the
story was first constituted in textual form by Jāyasī, we may ask: What is a
Chishti Sufi poet doing inventing, or at least retelling, one of the key historical
fictions of later Hindu nationalism? To answer this complex question, we need
to consider how Jāyasī brings his tale to a conclusion through his elaborate
reuse of the themes and motifs of the Rajput martial literature, and take into
account the wider contextual resonances of his narrative resolution. In effect,
Jāyasī takes up what was formulated as a literature of Rajput defeat and conso-
lation for the loss of power and adapts it into a generic form created within the
context of the consolidation of the power of the Turkish sultanate of Delhi.
Rajput martial literature is constructed around the notion of symbolic
honor (māna), in part as a palliative for the loss of power and for the necessity
of accepting Turkish overlordship and living within the new social and political
arrangements. This symbolic honor is invested in the women of the lineage,
and possession or exchange of these women becomes a key trope in the nar-
ratives of the fall of various Rajput forts to the invading armies. For Jāyasī to
express this notion through the generic form of the Hindavī romance implies
that he is taking the symbolics of defeat and reimagining them through a
formula of success, performing a balancing act between Sufi concerns and the
self-image and cultural sponsorship of the new aristocracy in the forts and gar-
risons of the Delhi sultanate.
The indigenization of this aristocracy, the Sufi sanctification of their new
landscape, and their successful reframing and adaptation of local elements
into new literary frameworks have been the subjects of previous chapters. But
if the genre of the Hindavī Sufi romance implies a spiritually justified Turkish
victory, what does the invention of a story of defeat by a poet writing for the
Afghan inheritors of the Turkish imperium imply? At the level of the narra-
tive that Jāyasī puts together, he uses the death of Padmāvati and Nāgmatī
and the jauhar of all the women of the fort to suggest the supremacy of the
Sufi values of self-annihilation ( fanā), love, and asceticism. Jāyasī appends to
the formulaic narrative of the hero and his two wives an account of Sultan
‘Alāuddīn Khaljī’s conquest of Chittaur, the city to which King Ratansen takes
his Padminī after winning her in Singhala-dīpa. To the “matter” of a Rajput
king’s quest for Padmāvatī, princess of the fabled island of Singhala-dīpa,
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 181
drawn from the bardic narratives of the Pṛthivīrāja Rāsau, Jāyasī adds the
themes of the Rajput martial literature surrounding the Hammīra Mahākāvya,
the Kānhaḍade Prabandha, and other poems that treat the resistance of various
Rajput Ranas to the Muslim invaders.9
By using Sultan ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī and his lust for Padmāvatī as the cause for
the siege of Chittaur, the second part of the Padmāvat takes up the sultanate nar-
rative of the conquest and eroticization of northern India. Scholarly readings of
this part of the text have been marked by an innocent acceptance of the dualisms
of the public rhetoric of the Turkish conquest and its reversal by Jāyasī. To get
around this we must isolate a broader cultural logic within which these represen-
tations of war make sense. Accordingly, in the first part of this chapter I lay out
three other narratives from the period that treat various conquests of India and
link war with the “traffic in women.” The first is the Jain Kālakācārya-kathā, the
story of Kālakācārya, the monk whose sister Sarasvatī was carried off by the King
of Ujjain and who in response invited the Scythians or Śakas to invade India.
Two other narratives from the period concern the erotic liaisons of the children of
‘Alāuddīn Khaljī: Amīr Khusrau’s Deval Rānī Khizr Khān and Padmanābha’s ret-
rospective account of the fall of the Rajput kingdom of Jalor. A reading of these
narratives concludes the first section of the chapter, setting the stage for Jāyasī’s
elaborate reworking of these themes. The final part of this chapter presents a
reading of the war over Chittaur and the ending of the Padmāvat, highlighting the
multiple meanings of Sufi self-identification with the brave Rajput warriors against
the wicked Turks. At issue is the Chishti Sufi claim to symbolic dominance over
political rulers, as well as the ability of the Sufi poet and his readers to adopt the
personae of Rajputs, yogis, and all the figures and concepts of the Indian cultural
landscape. Conquering a landscape may be represented as an expression of dom-
inance over a subject population, but eventually the conquerors find themselves
transformed beyond recognition by the landscape they have taken over.
cultural landscape of Hindustan, are negotiated through the taking and retak-
ing of women, of images, of sites charged with religious meaning. How did
this “traffic in women” inflect the poetics and politics of the Sufi romances?
Did control over women and control over territory intersect on the ideal plane
of the romance world? Women become poetic embodiments or symbols of
divinity in the Sufi romances; seeing them arouses the desire for ascetic
self-mortification in the hero’s heart.10 Viewed against the larger culture of
Hindustan, this embodied image is the symbol through which the poet can
evoke and address other social tensions, between conquerors and conquered,
Sufis and kings. Such a negotiation of larger social meanings is possible only
in a world in which women were understood as vehicles of ideology, a cultural
logic whose misogynistic outlines these three narratives help us to delineate.
In the first, we have Kālaka’s conversion and initiation under [his pre-
ceptor] Guṇākara and the dealings with Gardabhilla, the wicked king
of Ujjayinī, whose overthrow Kālaka effects with the help of the Sāhis
(Sanskritized as Śākhis [Scythians/Śakas]). In the second we have the
events at the city of Kings Balamitra and Bhānumitra, and the alteration
of the date of the Paryuṣaṇā festival; in the third we read of Kālaka’s
reproof to his vainglorious spiritual grandson Sāgaradatta; in the fourth
Kālaka expounds the Nigoda doctrine to Śakra.15
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 183
Brown has convincingly demonstrated that the later anecdotes are about two
latter-day Kālakas, whom he dubs Kālaka II and Kālaka III, and that they were
melded together with the episode of the Scythian conquest sometime before
the tenth century c.e. The episode of conquest has always been an embarrass-
ment for Jains because of its overt condoning of violence, so much against the
Jain ethic of ahiṃsā or nonviolence.
Our Kālaka, as he appears in the “Long Anonymous Version” (earliest
mss. copied ca. 1278 and 1279) that Brown deemed authoritative, is a young
prince of the city of Dharāvāsa (Dhar).16 Riding in the forest, he encounters a
saintly Jain Ācārya named Guṇākara with his following of monks. Guṇākara
teaches the young prince all the Jain moral teachings on right knowledge and
right action. As if anticipating the necessary violence that will be the result of
Kālaka’s actions, Guṇākara’s moral framework prohibits causes of sin such as
the taking of life and emphasizes control over mind, speech, and body. The
prince renounces the world. Guṇākara trains him and initiates him as a Jain
Suri. Kālaka the Suri goes to Ujjain to preach Jain moral principles, and his
group of monks is soon joined by a group of nuns that includes his younger
sister Sarasvatī. One day King Gardabhilla spots her going to the latrine and
forcibly abducts her into his harem (anteura, from Sanskrit antaḥ-pura, inner
quarters).
Kālaka tries to teach the king the right path and urges him strongly not to
besmirch his family and good name. Violating the wife of another is “forbid-
den like flesh of the body.” But the lustful and infatuated king will not listen,
and Kālaka swears a mighty oath to uproot him violently from his kingdom.
He goes to the “Scythian shore” (Śaka-kūla) of the River Indus and mobilizes a
group of ninety-six disaffected Śaka nobles to follow him south to the land of
Hinduka. He then advises them to take Ujjain, the “key to the splendid land
of Mālava.” They invade the city, but on the eighth day the ramparts fall silent.
Kālaka knows the secret: he reveals that the king is conjuring up a Magic
She-Ass. Asses or donkeys are notorious for their lewd nature, and the king
is also significantly named Gardabhilla or “Donkey,” from the word gardabha
(donkey). The Magic She-Ass he conjures up has “a mighty bray, and every
biped or quadruped belonging to a hostile army that shall hear it will without
fail fall down upon the ground vomiting blood from its mouth.”17
Kālaka has a military solution to neutralize the Magic She-Ass, however.
He instructs everyone in the army to retreat beyond the reach of the bray-
ing, a distance of two leagues, except for 108 sharpshooting archers. These he
instructs to shoot as soon as they see the She-Ass open her mouth to bray,
thereby preventing her from making a sound. They do so, and by her magic
art the She-Ass now turns upon the man who raised her by sorcery, King
Gardabhilla. She rained “urine and ordure upon the conjuror himself, kicked
184 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
him, and straightway left.” Kālaka attempts to follow the rout of Gardabhilla
with a sermon on the evils of lust and violence, not to mention destroying a
nun’s virtue, but the king is so hedged about with painful karma that he will
not listen and leaves the kingdom to wander in exile.
Among the Jain communities of interpretation that recited and recopied
this story, it is easy to see that this tale would be immediately susceptible to
allegorical interpretation. King Donkey can signify lust, his Magic She-Ass the
world of sensory illusion, and the 108 archers can refer to the 108 precepts
or rules with which delusion can be defeated. In the final exchange between
Kālaka and the recalcitrant king, the monk curses him in punning language:
“You are free on the spot. Go now, you, exiled from your land.” The other
meaning of this utterance is, “You are saved on the spot. Go now, you, no
longer attached to the objects of the senses.”18 The story can thus be made to
fit into a Jain moral framework of nonviolence and the overcoming of delusion
through right perception and right action, despite the narrative of the brother
who invites violent conquest because his younger sister, herself a chaste Jain
nun, has been abducted and violated by a conqueror. Similar tales of the sei-
zure or capture of women form the etiology of many other narratives from the
sultanate period. The Jain tale therefore fits into a larger cultural universe in
this period in which women are objects of exchange, trophies of war, or tokens
of symbolic honor, a stereotypic logic of gender relations in which the erotics
of sexual conquest coincide with martial conquest.
He receives a curt reply from the princess: “Look at the age we live in, how
can I do this? How can I open the doors of happiness to you?” (DRKK 89)
But passion is excited in Deval Rānī when her own youth begins to
blossom. The poet describes this as a form of madness, in which love is
expressed sometimes through the curve of an eyebrow, sometimes through
the reproachful eyelashes of the beloved. Everyone in the palace notices
the progress of the love affair as the two exchange ġhazals through con-
fidants, some of whom inform the prince’s mother, the Malikah-i Jahān.
Once she suspects the truth, she disapproves, and moves swiftly to separate
the two passionate lovers by persuading the sultan to send Deval Rānī to
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 187
the Kūshk-i La‘l, the Red Palace. Deval Rānī herself, playing on the simi-
larity of the Persian words for a tongue (zabān) and fire-ball (zabānah),
wonders:
The prince’s mother arranges his marriage with the daughter of her brother
Alp Khān. The marriage is celebrated with great pomp and ceremony,
with splendid fireworks, music, and dancing. But the two lovers are not
happy apart from each other, and Khizr Khān cannot forget his childhood
sweetheart.
Finally, some well-wishers persuade the queen not to sacrifice her son’s
happiness, and she allows the lovers to be married quietly. They are happy
at last. The story, set in the context of conquest and war between ‘Alāuddīn
and various Hindu kings and based on historical personages, works through a
simple narrative pattern of love followed by separation, resolved by love trium-
phant.24 Even though Khusrau could have exploited the common oppositional
trope of Turk and Hindu25 effectively to refer to the historical context of the
mas̱navī, he focuses instead on the simplicity and tenderness of longing and
love within a political context of war and conquest.
But the happy couple’s idyll is not destined to last. Amīr Khusrau origi-
nally ended his mas̱navī with the triumph of love and presented it to the
prince in that form, but subsequent events compelled the poet to compose a
historical epilogue bringing the story to a close. For Sultan ‘Alāuddīn fell sick
in 1315, and as he neared the end of his life he looked for a successor in his
son. In Khusrau’s narrative, the prince, rather than expressing any interest in
generalship or statecraft after his marriage, spends his days happily with his
beloved Deval Rānī. In these circumstances, the inevitable battle for succes-
sion begins between ‘Alāuddīn’s generals. One of them, the powerful Malik
Nā’ib (the title of Malik Kāfūr, the handsome slave captured from Gujarat
with Kanvalā Devī), falsely implicates Khizr Khān in a conspiracy against the
sultan and has him imprisoned in Gwalior fort. He passes his time there
tenderly with Deval Rānī, exchanging with her verses of ġhazal poetry such
as these:
In 1316, soon after the happy couple are imprisoned, Sultan ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī
dies. Mohammad Habib has summarized the ensuing events in Amīr Khusrau’s
narrative:
Alauddin died soon after and the Malik Naib placed Shihabuddin ‘Umar,
the Sultan’s youngest son, on the throne. At the same time he sent one,
Sumbul, to blind Khizr Khan at Gwalior. The ex-heir-apparent . . . accepted
his fate with a pious resignation. “He sat smiling calmly at the decree
of fate instead of attempting to run away from it like a fool. ‘Maybe,
the Emperor is dead,’ he remarked when Sumbul and his men, covered
with the dust of the road, appeared before him . . . ‘But why this hurry
with which you have come to do me honor in my prison?’ His eyes,
which were soon to be blinded, were moist with tears. ‘I have no hope
of regaining my freedom, for who will place his enemy on the throne?
But if you have an order for depriving me of my life or my eyesight, I
am ready.’ Sumbul pleaded that he was a mere instrument in the hands
of others . . . The prince willingly offered his eyes to Sumbul. They laid
him on the ground; and when his eyes were pierced by the needle, the
sockets were filled with blood like a wine-glass.” Sumbul rushed to Delhi
in haste to win the rewards promised for his deed, . . . [but] . . . within forty
days of Sultan Alauddin’s death, the Malik Naib was assassinated by
the guards of the Palace, who elevated Mubarak Shah, a son of the late
Sultan, to the Regency and, later on, to the throne.26
After his gruesome blinding, the prince lives on with Deval Rānī in the fort at
Gwalior. Malik Kāfūr Hazārdīnārī, though powerful and a favorite of ‘Alāuddīn,
does not outlive him by more than forty days.
Mubārak Shāh consolidates his power against his rivals and rules from
Delhi, until another palace conspiracy makes him determined to wipe out all
potential opposition. He sends a message to Khizr Khān asking him to send
Deval Rānī to his court, offering the prince his freedom in return. In the inter-
change between Mubārak Shāh and Khizr Khān, Deval Rānī becomes a pawn
between the two men: she embodies Khizr Khān’s life, love, and honor. Mubārak
Shāh knows that Khizr Khān cannot let her go, and the prince’s angry refusal
gives Mubārak Shāh the excuse to order the prince’s final execution. In the last
scenes, the officers dispatched to kill the doomed prince chase him around his
room, and then a low-born Indian attendant finally stabs him. The story comes
to an end with the prince’s burial in a tower in Gwalior fort, while Kanvalā
Devi and Deval Rānī spend the rest of their days there together quietly.
In this symbolic resolution, the woman who comes as the spoils of war
becomes the embodiment of tender love and the honor of a powerless and
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 189
defeated prince. The love between the two, though it does not use the common
imagery setting the fair Turk against the dark Hindu, is nevertheless articu-
lated within the disputes over territory between Islamic and Indian rulers in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thus conquest does not simply mean
brute appropriation of the spoils of war; Khusrau uses the generic logic of the
mas̱navī to play out the desire between social and religious others, setting up
a cultural model for thinking about men exchanging women as they exchange
kingdoms or provinces. Since the Persian text is spoken from the perspective
of the victors, the subordinated woman is linked with the assimilation of new
territory by conquest. As Kanwar Muhammad Ashraf notes, the “victor had a
perfectly valid right of marrying the wives of the deposed Sultān, and there are
records of such marriages against the express wishes of the wife or mistress
in question.”27 Deval Rānī is taken as a prize that signals the public triumph
of the Khaljī rule, a rule that Amīr Khusrau’s ideal representation of kingship
connects with the victory of Islam over unbelief. The woman is objectified as
property, changing hands with the political transfer of power, but she is also
the underpinning of the militaristic system of conflict over territory and booty.
Discontinuities between political territories are thus transacted over the body
of a woman, here represented as a focus of romantic desire.
Padmanābha Paṇḍita, asks them to grant him a clear intellect so that he may
recount the heroic story of Rāval Kānhaḍade (KP 1). He praises the Sonagiri
Chauhan lineage and their capital as the city of gold (kaṇayācala), named after
the local yellow rock that forms the hill and from which the fortress of Jalor is
hewn. Then he moves into a narrative of the events of 1296, when ‘Alāuddīn
Khaljī ascended the throne of Delhi after his conquest of Gujarat, and the poet
begins his story with the cause of that war. According to him, the Baghela
king of Gujarat one day insults Mādhava, his favorite minister, and Mādhava
swears vengeance upon his former master. He goes to Delhi, where ‘Alāuddīn
interrogates him about conditions in Gujarat, to which he responds:
“The kshatriya dharma has vanished from there. Rāo Karṇade has
become insane and has developed an infatuation for the pleasures of
the body. Every day he takes the aphrodisiac Vachhanāga, and struts
about with an unsheathed sword in his hand! . . . The Rāi first humili-
ated me. Then he killed my brother Keśava, and even took away his
wife and kept her in his palace. Such a provocation is beyond toler-
ation! I will wage war against Gujarat and pray you to send an army
with me for the purpose. I will attack the Hindūs, drive them into jun-
gles, killing them and enslaving them! . . . Either I will conquer Gujarat
by force or perish” [KP 3].
In this Indian view of polity, what Mādhava is advocating is the sultan’s use
of a feud in a neighboring king’s realm as an occasion to invade his kingdom.
Further, the ideology that is invoked to condemn Karṇadeva is his deviation
from the dharma of a warrior or kṣatriya, which would involve his protect-
ing the wives of other men rather than preying on them. In the poetics of
this non-Persian text, the casus belli is a woman, specifically the woman of his
brother Keśava. By killing Keśava, Karṇadeva has insulted his family’s honor,
which Mādhava will avenge. Moreover, in the classical Indian system of polity
to which Padmanābha refers, the king’s relationship to the land is that of a
pati or husband to the country, which is represented as the submissive female
awaiting domination.
‘Alāuddīn enthusiastically agrees to Mādhava’s plan and sends envoys to ask
safe conduct from all of the Rajput kings through whose territory his army would
pass on its way to Gujarat. Kānhaḍade of Jalor alone refuses, on the grounds that
allowing the Muslim army to pass would contravene the dharma of a warrior:
Kānhaḍade is thus made into the good king, the one who is a protector of
right religion, cows and Brahmins, as well as the honor and safety of the
women of his realm. The conflict between him and the forces of Islam is thus
set up at the very beginning in terms of narrative causality; the cause of the
historical quarrel will be the conflict between religious truth and evil conduct
rather than the political exigencies of control over territory. This single narra-
tive cause simultaneously legitimates rulership and introduces the events from
which the story flows.
The grand army of cavalry, elephants, and foot soldiers, equipped with
the latest technology of war—siege towers and catapults for flinging naphtha
over fortress walls—marches through Rajput territory. On his way to Gujarat,
Uluġh Khān destroys in a brutal battle the only Rajput who offers him any
resistance, the brave chief Bataḍa of Moḍāsā. When he reaches the city of
Anhilvāṛā Paṭṭan, the Baghela capital, King Karṇa flees the fort in the dead of
night. The fort is destroyed, its temples torn down and made into mosques,
and the rule of Sultan ‘Alāuddīn proclaimed everywhere. Uluġh Khān goes on
to Somnath and sacks the town, emptying the prosperous and fertile land in
the wake of his marauding army. When the Muslims come to the temple of
Śiva in the center of the town, all the priests give up their lives to defend the
image of God. The stone lingam is dispatched to Delhi to be smashed as an
object lesson in the ideological superiority of Islam. Meanwhile, in Jalor, Śiva
and Pārvatī appear to Kānhaḍade in a dream and tell him that God is being
taken from Somnath through his territory (deśa). He must rescue the image.
On his way back to Delhi, Uluġh Khān has the first of several military
encounters with the Chauhan Rajputs of Jalor. Rāval Kānhaḍade sends his
nobles as envoys to spy out the camp at Gujarat, which is described as one
of the grandest military assemblages. With the army of Gujarat are hundreds
of thousands of lamenting Hindu prisoners, being taken to Delhi as slaves.
The Rajputs muster all the Rais and Ranas from the neighboring principali-
ties and prepare to attack Uluġh Khān’s army, who are described as asuras or
demons. The goddess of the Gujarat fort, Āsāpurī Devī, gives her blessing, and
Kānhaḍade and his brother Māladeo rout the Muslims. They take alive two
prominent nobles, Sa‘dullāh Khān and Sih Malik, and recover the Śiva-lingam
from Uluġh Khān’s clutches. The poet adds a commentary on the effects of
puṇya, meritorious action:
The meritorious action of the king underpins an entire ritual economy of vir-
tue and right behavior. It is only through good actions that merit can be gath-
ered, but once one has it, then all sorts of natural and human bounty flow
from it: the kingdom works perfectly, one’s house is never empty of food, a
son is born who can perform the funeral rites that let his parents cross over
to the further shore, and the proper order or dharma of the universe is main-
tained through the 108 rituals performed daily at the house of a person who
possesses merit.
At the center of this ritual economy is God, who is embodied in the stone
image seized by the Muslims from Somnath. Rāval Kānhaḍade, the god of
flesh who keeps the ritual order working, goes to the camp and brings the
lingam into Jalor with all due reverence. He bathes it with his own hands and
adorns it with sandal paste, flowers, and vermillion. Pieces carved out of the
lingam then bless the entire territory (deśa) with embodiments of God:
Five images were carved out of the Ekalingam, which saves one from
falling into hell and from dire troubles and afflictions; there is no sixth
one like them. One of these was ceremoniously installed at Soraṭha and
another at Lohasing in Vāgaḍa. One was sent to a pleasant spot on Ābū
hill for consecration, while one was installed at Jalor where the Rāi
built a temple and one was sent to Saivāḍī. At all these five places, wor-
ship of Lord Śiva is performed [KP 28–29].
These multiple ritual centers consecrate the kingdom, making the God Śiva
present throughout Kānhaḍade’s realm. In Padmanābha’s imaginative geogra-
phy, Jalor is the land where the concrete embodiments of Śiva anchor the
ritual economy that it is Kānhaḍade’s responsibility to run. The move not only
legitimates the Rajput ruler but also establishes proper order throughout the
king’s territory and marks the land as his. Ritual and political sovereignty rein-
force each other through this politics of embodied religious devotion.
The Turkish armies return to Delhi in disarray, where ‘Alāuddīn, incensed
at the actions of the Rāval, sends the renowned Nāhar Malik and Bhoja to
lay siege to the fort of Sivānā or Sāmiyāṇā in Kānhaḍade’s kingdom. The fort
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 193
The Bhūpa (ruler) at that time was fast asleep. Sātala saw Śiva’s three
eyes, and five faces, and large brown matted locks. The Lord wore a
necklace of skulls and had in his hands an alms-bowl. Sātala also saw
the Lord’s ample forehead. He saw the Ganges in the crown of the locks
of Lord Śiva, ashes smeared on his body, a tiger skin as a mattress, and
also his trident. Sātala was wonder-struck. He thought for a moment,
happy to obtain a vision of Lord Śiva, and bowed reverently . . .. “The
Sultān has appeared in the form of Rudra! How can I strike a blow
against him?” he thought, and decided to retrace his steps [KP 42].
Supernatural agency is made into the narrative cause for a historical event,
enabling Padmanābha to explain why Sātala lost the fort of Sivānā to ‘Alāuddīn.
Indeed, events did progress badly for the Rajputs, and finally the women were
forced to commit jauhar. Meanwhile the men rode out on a suicidal raid from
which they did not return, in the customary Rajput last stand. Here again,
investing the women with the Rajputs’ symbolic honor (māna) meant that they
could not be captured alive but had to sacrifice themselves.
To return to the narrative, which has so far been an exclusively martial
and religious poem staking the Rajputs’ claim to their land, we now come
to the story of love intertwined with these political and religious battles. A
skirmish leads to further bloodshed, and the sultan is angry enough to wish
to march directly on to the fort of Jalor. But his daughter Furūzān, variously
called Piroja and Sītāi, comes to him and pleads with him against another
expedition:
Here, the narrative circle of God, territory, and rulership is closed with
Kānhaḍade identified as the tenth incarnation of Viṣṇu, the primal person or
Ādi Puruṣa for the current age. He literally becomes, in the religious causal-
ity behind events in the story, a god of flesh who cannot be attacked. Further,
the poet uses a mythic referent to represent social and religious alterity: the
reference to asuras or demons implies that the Muslims are the demons of the
historical age of Kānhaḍade.
Furūzān expresses her desire to be married to the handsome Vīramade, the
crown prince of Jalor. Sultan ‘Alāuddīn answers: “Good daughter, do not be mad
and talk like that. You are mistaken in your affection for him. You know well
that marriage between a Hindū and a Turk cannot take place. In Yogininagar
(Delhi) there are Muslim princes and distinguished Khāns. Whomsoever you
like amongst them, I will call him and you may marry him” (KP 56). But the
princess swears that she cannot marry anyone but Vīramade: “There is a great
difference between the Hindūs and Turks: Hindūs alone know how to enjoy
the good things of life, like Indra . . . I have no desire to wed a Turk . . .. Either,
my dear father, I will marry Vīramade, or else I shall end my life!” (KP 56–57).
The sultan sends an envoy to Kānhaḍade with an offer of marriage and a
grand dowry: the wealthy province of Gujarat and fifty-six crores of gold and
silver. Land, woman, and money come wrapped up in the same package—the
matrimonial proposal, in which these are the articles of exchange.
Vīramade, however, laughs to himself and spurns the Sultan’s offer
indignantly:
The Emperor has now thought of a new strategy to bring Jalor under
his sway. He has such a large army! But is this the way to conquer
countries, without any fighting? I cannot agree to this offer of mar-
riage and thereby incur dishonor! I will never unite with a Turkish
woman in wedlock. Even if the pinnacles of Mount Meru were to crash
down, Chauhan Vīramade will not sit at the sacred fire to marry the
Sultan’s daughter, nor clasp her hand in the hathlevā ceremony, or
dine in the marriage pavilion! . . . By such an act, all the thirty-six Rājpūt
clans will be shamed and the luster of all twenty-one Rājpūt kings will
be dimmed . . .. Our great ancestor, Chāchigadeva Chauhan, will be dis-
graced . . .. Such a thing has never happened in the past, nor shall it ever
happen in the future! [KP 57–58]
In rejecting the Sultan’s offer, the prince invokes his mythicized ancestor, the
honor of the thirty-six Rajput clans, and the twenty-one dynasties of the king-
doms of Rajputana. The contours of power in Vīramade’s understanding are
significantly different from the model of the Islamic state that Amīr Khusrau
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 195
described. Here, the bonds of kinship, marriage, and relations between lords
and vassals link together a loosely knit confederacy of feuding rulers, who
sometimes come together against a common enemy.30 Further, the prince con-
structs a great religious divide that can never be bridged by marriage or alli-
ance; it seems war is the only course open to Jalor.
But the princess will not have it so. When the envoy returns with news
of Vīramade’s refusal, ‘Alāuddīn at first orders another raid into Jalor. In the
course of the raid, ‘Alāuddīn for the first time sees the golden city of Jalor. By
Kānhaḍade’s orders, the city has been adorned especially to show the sultan
the grandeur and might of the Chauhan kingdom:
Broad woven silk sheets of the color of the clouds were hung up, two
on each bastion, and so also were chandovās (canopies) studded with
jewels, with pendants of pearls dangling from them. The golden triple
spires on the towers shone brightly. The earthen lamps on the battle-
ments looked like so many stars, shimmering tremulously, their light
mingling with that of the stars. A variety of minstrelsy (gītagāna), sung
in melodious tunes, could be heard. On the bastions, dances and plays
were enacted. No one knew with what to compare these spectacles!
Indeed, the fort looked like Indra’s vimāna (flying chariot), or like Lankā
perched on the Trikuṭā mountain, so it seemed to the Ġhorī Sultan
(‘Alāuddīn). Delicate gold images studded with jewels were dangling
here and there . . .. The royal palaces and temples were whitewashed
and had here and there beautiful wall paintings . . . Kānhaḍade’s fort had
many bastions on which rows of lighted earthen lamps shed golden
light around, while chāmaras (yak-tail fly whisks) were being waved
over the Chauhan ruler’s head, the protector of the clan [KP 59–60].
The Sultan marvels at this heavenly city, which is lavishly described in the
fashion of the nagara-varṇana (description of a city) of Sanskritic kāvyas. The
poet uses the convention effectively to show the Rajput resistance to ‘Alāuddīn,
constructing a golden utopia of song, dance, architecture, painting, and, at the
center of it all, the figure of the ideal king.
The Rajputs then attack a Turkish encampment and carry off Shams
Khān and his begam (queen). To prevent a military raid, the princess again
approaches her father:
The seventh time is the princess’s present birth, in which she feels she has to
join her husband again. This extraordinary account of reincarnation provides
the beginnings of the narrative resolution of the story, as well as a fascinating
reshaping of historical causality. The love that Prince Vīramade and the prin-
cess have felt for one another during their last six births must be continued
in this one, but her sins—killing a pregnant cow and usurping power—have
led her to be born as a Turk. Here the princess is being assimilated into the
structure of death and reincarnation, which explains her current political situ-
ation through karma.
Although the princess goes on an embassy in Kānhaḍade’s realm and is
received with great respect, courtesy, and royal hospitality, Prince Vīramade
refuses even to look at her. He spurns her again, and she accepts her fate for
the sake of the sins she has committed. She does, however, secure the release
of all the prisoners and returns to her father, having done the job of an envoy.
After this, preparations begin for the final assault on Jalor, which is taken by
treachery in 1311. The illustrious Kānhaḍade falls to the forces of the sultan,
and all the women of the fort commit jauhar. The princess had, however, sent
her nurse Dādā Sanāvar with the army, with instructions to save Vīramade if
she could. If she could not, she was to bring back his head to the princess.
The nurse searches through the rubble of the fallen city and comes upon the
body of Vīramade. She puts his head tenderly into a basket of flowers and
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 197
bears it to Delhi. When the head is presented to the princess on a platter, she
addresses it:
“Earlier, the Chauhan had vowed that he would never look at my face.
Now, at least today, he will have to break his word!”
Those who are brave and of good lineage do not give up their
plighted word even after death. The moment the princess came in front
of Vīramade’s face, it turned away! [KP 101–2]
The princess weeps sadly over the loss of her brave and resolute love, then
goes to enter a funeral pyre on the banks of the Yamuna, holding the head
of Vīramade in her lap. The story comes to an end with the genealogy of the
rulers who follow in the line of Vīramade.
Padmanābha and Amīr Khusrau thus set within opposing narrative frames
the historical transition of the period, the carving out of political territories
from which a new Islamic polity with its capital at Delhi could collect revenue.
Unlike the earlier Jain tale with its moral philosophy, these later romances are
framed in terms of Islamicate and classical Indian notions of the ideal polity.31
In Amīr Khusrau’s poems about Sultan ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī, the achievement of
the sultan is precisely that he has managed to make India into an Islamic
land (dār al-Islām). Padmanābha’s Kānhaḍade Prabandha sets the Rajput ruler
within a ritual economy of kingship in which political rule and legitimacy is
intrinsically bound up with saving the images of Śiva that are being smashed
by the iconoclastic Turks.32 In this tragic romance, where political and military
enmity is never bridged, the Turkish princess becomes the active go-between
who negotiates between the two sides, mediating between two systems that,
although rooted in differing religious ideologies, share a symbolic investment
in land and women.
Although the generic forms and the provenances of the Jain Mahārāṣṭrī
Prakrit tale, the Apabhraṃśa prabandha-kāvya, and the Persian mas̱navī are
quite different, together they imply a common understanding. Exchanging
women can redress political and social imbalances; it can make important
social statements about alliance or hostility, about ascetic values and symbolic
honor. Prince Khizr Khān makes a sacrifice for male honor, while Vīramade
refuses to give up the machismo of Rajput honor even after death. Both poets
use the figure of crossing over to the other side in a fantasy in which true
but tragic love transcends conflicts over political borders. The images that
Persian poetry praised as infidel seductresses (but-i kāfir) had to be smashed in
the iconoclastic logic of the conquest narratives, but this did not lessen their
allure and fascination. The stories of the children of ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī fetishize
the woman belonging to the enemy, who becomes the repository of symbolic
198 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
honor for her own side and the object of romantic desire and fascination for
the other side.
It is here that we begin to glimpse the wider political and cultural context
of Sufi attitudes toward territory and sexuality. Bruce Lawrence has empha-
sized in an important article the dual role of women for Sufis of the Delhi
sultanate, as obstacles to spiritual progress through their embodiment of the
baser instincts of the lower soul (nafs-i ammārah) and as helpers to mysti-
cal perfection through their own saintliness.33 The Persian sources give us
only partial answers to questions about Sufi self-mortification and its links
with eroticism and sexuality. But the elaborate Sufi romances in Hindavī and
the other Indo-Aryan languages reveal the degree to which the Indian Sufis
subscribed to common cultural understandings of society and sexuality. For
the Sufi poets of the Hindavī, premākhyāns created the fictional image of
an Indian landscape with the eroticized body of an Indian woman as its
centerpiece. And as we shall see presently, this figure becomes a symbol of
mystical annihilation in her final (and fictive) sacrifice on a flaming pyre in
Chittaur.
Ahmad’s effort to historicize the Padmāvat rightly refers to events that are
matched by narrative motifs in the text. But the approach is problematic
because Ahmad explains in a directly referential way a narrative pattern that
has its roots in the generic tradition of the Hindavī romances, confusing literal
and literary truths. As we shall see, the ending of the poem has more to do
with the pattern set up in Qut"ban’s Mirigāvatī than with any “actual” jauhar or
satī, and the motifs that Jāyasī uses are drawn from the Rajput martial litera-
ture. Finally, the idea of any putative “confounding in Jāisī’s mind” of the two
very different Khaljī sultans must surely be discounted.
The sacking of the fort of Raisen in 1532 by Sultan Bahādur Shāh (1526–
1537) and the jauhar of the Rajput women are, however, highly relevant to the
second half of the Padmāvat in one respect. In a discussion of Bahādur Shāh’s
sack of Raisen, Dirk Kolff has emphasized the role of women as embodi-
ments of symbolic honor and the role of Rajput warlords as power brokers
in the world of the Afghan sultanates. The presence of Muslim women as an
accepted part of Purbiya Rajput households causes theologians and ulema in
Bahādur Shāh’s realm to pester him for vengeance. Even though Silhadi, the
lord of Raisen, has converted to Islam and, after protracted negotiations, is
offered a fief as the muqt a‘ ' of Baroda, his mother Queen Durgāvatī and the
women of Raisen commit jauhar rather than give up the very real political
independence the family enjoyed in northern Malwa. Kolff points out that
The emperor is referring here to the best type of woman in the Indian sys-
tems of erotic classification, the Padminī or lotus woman. Rāghav responds by
asserting that all the other types of women in the world pale in comparison
with Padmāvatī of Chittaur: “Where is the Padminī, so like a lotus, around
whom the bees hover?” (P 462.8)
After recounting for the sultan all the erotic types of women, Rāghav
describes Padmāvatī as a woman beyond all others. He describes her beauty
in a second sarāpā or head-to-foot description, in which Jāyasī projects a lush
sensuality:
Jāyasī uses the imagery of snakes on the sandalwood trees of the Malabar
coast to portray her black tresses on her soft golden limbs. He goes on:
Padmāvatī’s shining lips suggest the sparkling gulāl powder that is mixed with
mica and thrown in red clouds at the festival of Holi. Rāghav takes his inven-
tory only down to her waist, for, as he coyly suggests to the sultan, he has
seen her only at her window lattice (jharokhā). His description works well to
arouse the sultan’s lust, in contrast with Hīrāman’s exhortations to the seeker
Ratansen in the first part of the romance. In the mystical quest, Ratansen is
excited to gain Padmāvatī through ascetic mortification; in the evil version of
mystical sarāpā and arousal, the wicked sultan hopes to capture her by force of
arms. The militaristic language of lust and conquest, Jāyasī will begin to sug-
gest, is another way of trying to gain the joys of prema-rasa; its inadequacies
will become clearer in the ensuing narrative.
The aroused sultan sends a letter to Ratansen demanding his wife and the
treasures of Chittaur on threat of siege. “No one demands the wife of another
man!” Ratansen thunders, and continues:
Padmāvatī is the one inalienable object for whom Ratansen would fight
to the death. Unlike Hammīra, he will not cut off his head in defeat. He
204 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
compares himself to Arjuna, who pierced the eye of a fish with a single
arrow even though he was blindfolded, and to other legendary heroes.
Even though his counselors remind him of the capture of Princess Chhitāī
from Devagiri39 and Hammīr’s death at Ranthambhor, he will not agree to
give up Padmāvatī. Boiling with anger, Ratansen sends back a peremptory
refusal.
But the sultan, the powerful lord of the world, is resolved to gain by
brute force what Ratansen earned through asceticism. The Turkish army
that is mustered in response is fierce and mighty. There are horses of every
breed, mighty elephants, and siege engines, and all the sultan’s vassals
join in the muster. The forts of the Rajput Rais and Ranas that surround
Delhi tremble at the sultan’s approach: Junagarh and Champaner, Mandu,
Chanderi, Kalinjar and Gwalior all quake with fear like leaves in the wind.
But ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī’s intention is to subjugate Chittaur and gain the beauti-
ful Padmāvatī.
The noisy and grand spectacle of the Rajput lineages mustering matches the
Turkish army’s show of strength. Many of the lineages that Jāyasī mentions,
such as the Gahlots and the Panvars, were significant power brokers in the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries rather than at the time of the siege of Chittaur.
Jāyasī retrospectively fits them into the topos of the muster of the armies
before the grand battle outside a Rajput fort.
Moreover, he lavishes attention on description of the martial combat and
the sultan’s cannons as they advance and are trained against the fortress walls.
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 205
Jāyasī begins to suggest that the cannons are devastatingly beautiful women,
ready to cause destruction wherever they go:
Punning on dārū, the word for wine and gunpowder, Jāyasī carries his extended
metaphor through the parts of the cannon. The double imagery eroticizes bat-
tle and the machinery of battle in terms of the Sanskrit system of aesthetics,
when Jāyasī says that cannons embody the erotic and the martial rasas in their
elaborately decorated forms.
Jāyasī does something quite different in the rest of the conclusion to the
Padmāvat, where the grand battle between the Turks and Rajputs signifies the
contest between the narrative options of love by force and love earned through
Sufi practice. The sultan’s attempt to taste the joys of prema-rasa is in stark
contrast to the approved mystical quest narrative of the genre. These warring
sides signify much more than ethnic or religious groups; they embody might
versus right on the battlefield:
The armies of Chittaur, defending the rightful and honorable Ratansen, are
not able to withstand the onslaught of the sultan’s vast army and his machin-
ery of war. Jāyasī compares the sultan to the sun, in front of whom the moon
(Ratansen) is eclipsed and withdraws into his high fortress. The sultan’s forces
advance inexorably through the passes surrounding Chittaur, leaving countless
dead behind. His archers let loose crores of arrows against the fort, thick as
constellations of stars in the sky.
Finally, the sultan’s forces are camped all around Chittaur with catapults
and siege engines at the ready, and they have dug underground mines and
tunnels to take the fort. Although it seems that Ratansen will be defeated, he
does not give up in his heart. In defiance, he orders a dance performance to
be held on the ramparts of the fort. The sequence of events that follows is
taken directly from the Rajput poetic accounts of the siege of Ranthambhor
as exemplified in texts such as Nayacandra suri’s Hammīra Mahākāvya. The
Hammīra Mahākāvya’s retelling of ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī’s siege of Ranthambhor
contains the episode of the dancing girl Rādhā Devī,40 who performs for
Hammīr on the ramparts of Ranthambhor and turns her back on the sultan as
a planned insult. Enraged, the sultan has one of his archers shoot her down.
Jāyasī introduces the motif with five dancing girls performing at Chittaur and
an elaborate typology of melodies and instruments. Then:
In both these narratives, shooting down the dancing girl functions as part of
the etiology of the conflict and siege, one of the causes for the emperor’s ire
against the Rajputs. It is not found in the Persian accounts of the conquests of
Ranthambhor or Chittaur, but within the cultural logic of the Rajput texts it is
one way to explain the conquest. Jāyasī accepts this causation and reuses the
motif in his depiction of the conflict between right and might.
The Negotiations
Now it truly appears as if Chittaur’s cause is lost, and Ratansen and his men
prepare for a suicidal last stand. They build pyres of sandalwood and aloes,
and the women make ready for jauhar in the king’s harem. The men anoint
themselves for the final battle. But before this can happen, Jāyasī introduces
another classic motif from the Rajput narratives: cessation of hostilities for
negotiations. The lustful and treacherous sultan thinks to win over Ratansen
by friendship and somehow gain his aim by trickery. So he sends an envoy to
Ratansen giving up his demand for Padmāvatī and presenting conditions for
a truce. In exchange for lifting the siege, he asks for the five objects that the
Ocean gave to Ratansen, the treasures of Chittaur: the hunting tiger and bird,
the swan, the philosopher’s stone, and the ambrosial gem that cures snake
bite. Ratansen’s response is still defiant and ready for an extended siege or the
ultimate sacrifice:
But his counselors prevail on him and he agrees to treat with the sultan. He
has the swan brought from its golden cage, as well as the ambrosial jewel, the
208 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
philosopher’s stone, the golden bird on a golden perch, and the hunting tiger
in a silver cage. Envoys bring all these to the sultan’s camp, and ‘Alāuddīn
accepts them as marks of a vassal’s homage. He sends a message to Ratansen
to tell him that he will come on the morrow to meet him in friendship and
to inspect the fort.
Here Jāyasī introduces another motif familiar to us from another Rajput
conquest narrative, Padmanābha’s Kānhaḍade Prabandha: entertaining enemy
royalty within the fort. Just as Padmanābha recounted the lavish entertainment
and feast that was prepared for Princess Furūzān in Jalor, Jāyasī devotes a long
section to the grand preparations for the emperor’s banquet in Chittaur. Fish
are caught, every sort of viand and vegetable is gathered, and fruits and sweets
of all kinds are made ready. The emperor inspects the paradisal fort before the
banquet, looking at all the lush orchards, lakes, and jewel-encrusted palaces
carefully. He remarks on the beauty of Padmāvatī’s heavenly mansion: “How
lovely must be the queen who lives in such a beautiful palace!” (P 555.8) They
sit down to eat, but all the while the sultan thinks only of Padmāvatī and how
he can make her his own. Two warriors of King Ratansen, Gorā and Bādal,
warn the king: “Do not make friends with the Turk, for in the end he will turn
out to be treacherous!” (P 558.4) But the king does not listen, for he believes
that friendship drives out baseness and that he can bring the Turk around
from evil to good by doing good himself.
At the banquet, dancing girls as beautiful as heavenly apsarases perform for
them. But the sultan is deaf and blind to all other women, and asks Rāghav:
“Where is the lotus lady among all these?” (P 560.8). When he is told that she
is not among them, he knows no peace. He cannot enjoy the feast, for his mind
is lost in thoughts of Padmāvatī. After the feast is over, he thinks of a stratagem.
He speaks sweetly to the king and offers him betel as a mark of friendship. He
then suggests a game of chess (shatranj, Sanskrit caturaṅga). The sultan has a
mirror affixed to the wall so that he may look at Padmāvatī whenever she comes
to her lattice to look down at the court. They sit down to play chess together. The
poet puns on the moves that are unfolding in the game to gain Padmāvatī:
The stalemate between the two is, however, figuratively broken by Padmāvatī.
Her serving maids tell her that the Sultan of Delhi has appeared in court, and
that he is handsome and resplendent beyond all the assembled kings and war-
riors. When Padmāvatī goes to her lattice to look at him, she appears in the
mirror in the shah’s line of vision. This is Jāyasī’s textual mirror of description,
which reflects the true form or symbol of divinity. The shah falls down uncon-
scious, blinded by the divine beauty that has granted him a fleeting vision.
Even though the sultan represents lust and brute force, his sighting of
Padmāvatī suggests a divine revelation, a temporary drawing aside of the veils
of human vision for readers and listeners who can catch the implicit sugges-
tions in his words. This is consistent throughout the genre and is as common
as, say, the wet sari scene in contemporary Bombay films. The love-struck
‘Alāuddīn calls for Rāghav Chetan and describes to him what he has seen,
using poetic suggestion to communicate the ineffable mystery of revelation
that is embodied in Padmāvatī:
The constant assertion and denial of physical form—earth, yet not a part of
earth—is a characteristic strategy of the poets of the genre. Padmāvatī is like
an image in a temple, but without the sense of immediate presence that is so
much a part of image worship. Her essence is elusive, the poet suggests, a
marvelously strange body composed of hyperbolic elements, not just a token
of material exchange. In his response, Rāghav explains each of the parts: her
breasts are elephants’ temples, her tress is a serpent, and her neck has the
grace of a peacock. The lotus is her face, and its scent is the scent of her body.
The wagtails are her lively eyes, and the parrot (whose beak often suggests a
sharply etched nose) is her nose. The crescent moon is her forehead, its bows
her eyebrows. As she revealed herself like a doe, the serpent was her braid
and the lamp was the sultan’s thought. Since he saw her image in the mirror,
this was the image in which there was no life. Now the sultan must think of
a ruse so that he may taste the rasa of Padmāvatī’s lips.
The sultan leaves, and keeps up a warm friendship with Ratansen. He
invites him to his own palace and lavishes gifts and kindnesses on him. Giving
him gems and fiefs of land, ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī lures him deeper and deeper in.
Then he treacherously has him chained and fettered and thrown into a dark
dungeon. An Abyssinian slave is Ratansen’s jailor, and he uses all the machin-
ery of torture to break Ratansen. Ratansen is asked to render loyal service to the
sultan as his vassal, but he refuses. Finally, the surrender of Padmāvatī is made
the condition of his freedom. Meanwhile, back home in Chittaur, Padmāvatī
and Nāgmatī lament and suffer greatly due to their separation from Ratansen.
Ratansen’s neighbor, King Devapāl of Kumbhalner, nurses a vendetta (baira)
against Ratansen. He decides to take advantage of Ratansen’s absence to cap-
ture Padmāvatī. Jāyasī comments, using the cultural logic of the time, that:
Devapāl asks Kumudini, an old messenger woman (dūtī) in his house, if she
can bring the fabled Padmāvatī to his house. The old woman compares her-
self to a famous witch, Lonā Chamārin, and prepares her tricks and incanta-
tions. She takes all manner of foods, sweets, and wheat cakes and savories,
and crosses over the border to Chittaur. She enters the women’s quarters of
the palace by using her charms and spells. Once inside, she insinuates herself
into Padmāvatī’s confidence by alleging that she was present at her birth in
Gandharvasen’s palace. Kumudini claims to be the daughter of Gandharvasen’s
family priest, Benī Dube. Padmāvatī welcomes her as a person from her own
natal home (naihar), embraces her, and tearfully tells her about Ratansen’s
imprisonment in Delhi. She cannot even touch any of the sweets and savories
that Kumudini has brought as gifts to cozen her, since she is so affected by
separation from her lord.
Kumudini craftily begins to suggest to her that youth is fleeting and that
she should enjoy herself while she can. Artfully she compares her to a drooping
lotus that has enjoyed the attentions of only one bee. If Padmāvatī will consent,
she could bring another bee to her, namely Prince Devapāl of Kumbhalner.
Padmāvatī angrily repudiates her as a whore and tells her to go back to her
husband’s enemy. In her eyes, no one can compare with her beloved husband
Ratansen. Following her angry eviction of Kumudini, Padmāvatī establishes a
charitable house for wandering ascetics (dharmaśālā). She hopes to hear news
of her captive husband from travelers, as well as to earn merit to release him
from captivity. Back in Delhi, ‘Alāuddīn hears of this and engages a harlot to
disguise herself as a wandering ascetic and to bring Padmāvatī to him. This
whore comes to Chittaur in the guise of a yoginī, a female ascetic, completely
equipped with the external marks of Gorakhnāth’s path: the horn whistle, the
begging bowl, the yogi’s crutch (ādhārī), and the ascetic’s viol (kiṅgarī). She
tells the queen of Ratansen’s grievous imprisonment and torture, hoping to
entice her to come back to Delhi with her. Padmāvatī is ready to become the
yoginī’s disciple and set out on a quest for her lord, but her companions dis-
suade her. They dismiss the yoginī and advise the queen to seek the help of
her husband’s preeminent warriors, Gorā and Bādal.
In desperation, Padmāvatī goes to the house of Gorā and Bādal. The war-
riors are amazed that the queen has deigned to come from her palace to
their house. Jāyasī makes much of the beautiful Padmāvatī’s descent to earth,
and Gorā and Bādal set her on a golden throne and attend her with the yak-
tail chowries due to royalty. They repeat their warning about the perfidy and
treachery of the Turks, and advise her not to become a yoginī herself. Instead,
they offer to obtain Ratansen’s release by going to Delhi and fighting with the
Turks themselves. Together, they think of a way to get Ratansen released from
the sultan’s dungeons.
212 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
They use a trick that we find also in sources contemporary with Jāyasī
or later, such as the historian Firishtah’s account of the fall of Chittaur.
Firishtah makes Padmāvatī the clever daughter of King Ratansen, and relates
that she used the stratagem of visiting the king accompanied by armed war-
riors concealed in the women’s palanquins. Once inside the fort, the war-
riors jumped out and overpowered the guards, allowing the king to make
his escape.41 As Aziz Ahmad has also noted, Sher Shāh Sūr used the same
trick during his military struggle against Humāyūn. When Humāyūn seized
the strong fort of Chunar in 1538, Sher Shāh got his men into the fortress of
Rohtas in Bihar by asking the Raja for shelter for the women of his harem
and smuggling warriors into the fort in palanquins.42 It is very probably this
contemporary event that Jāyasī recasts into a moving episode in which Gorā
and Bādal reassure the distressed Queen Padmāvatī and use the trick against
‘Alāuddīn Khalji.
Even though Bādal’s beautiful new bride has just arrived with her wed-
ding train, he goes to war rather than consummate his new marriage.
The two warriors make their way to Delhi with sixteen hundred women’s
litters. Young armed warriors are seated in all of them, ready to do battle
once they are inside the sultan’s palace. When they arrive in Delhi, Gorā
and Bādal bribe the jailor to inform the shah that Padmāvatī will make
herself and the keys of Chittaur over to him if she is allowed half an hour
alone with her husband. Jāyasī’s presentation of these events, in common
with several of the Rajput and Persian narratives, shows that Rajputs,
Turks, and Afghans understood in common the mechanisms for negoti-
ation, hostage taking, entertainment of enemy envoys, safe conducts, and
in general mutual accommodation, the whole code of warfare, siege, nego-
tiation, and parley. Despite frequent campaigns and jockeying for advan-
tage, these parties had worked out the arrangements for power sharing,
communication, tribute, and the everyday business of life in shared space.
Thus the message of Gorā and Bādal is immediately understood and acted
on; they are allowed to meet Ratansen in his dungeon. Once inside, they
overpower his jailors and escape from the palace before anyone realizes
what is going on.
delighted to see her true love again, and tells him of Devapāl’s attempt against
her virtue:
Ratansen is enraged, and his response brings up again the imagery of the bee,
the frog, and the lotus that Jāyasī has already used to indicate the mystical
significance of his poetics of rasa:
Ratansen evokes the symbolism of the fragrance of the lotus that only the true
lover or connoisseur (the bee) can grasp. Like the bee, he traversed a long
distance to Singhala-dīpa to win Padmāvatī, the lotus lady. Devapāl is merely
a frog, who lives next to the lotus but cannot appreciate the subtle scent that
wafts through the earth because of Padmāvatī’s revelatory beauty. He is just
a common rooster trying to imitate the peacock’s dance. The angry Ratansen
attacks Devapāl’s fortress of Kumbhalner, and the two kings engage in single
combat. During the fight, Devapāl treacherously uses a poisoned spear and
wounds Ratansen. And although Ratansen captures Devapāl and beheads him
214 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
for the insult he has offered his wife, he is fatally wounded. On his way back
to Chittaur, he breathes his last and is carried home on a litter.
Padmāvatī and Nāgmatī, lamenting and wailing, put on fine silken clothes
and ascend his pyre, sacrificing themselves as satīs. Love consummated, in the
generic logic of the premākhyāns, leads to a final annihilation and a return to
the divine realm. Here the stereotype of what is due from an obedient Hindu
wife, becoming a satī for the sake of the dominant male, is yoked to the
mystical value of fanā or the destruction of self. Padmāvatī and Nāgmatī are
mahāsatīs, faithful wives of great loyalty. As they mount the pyre they say:
“Today the sun has set in the day, and the moon is sinking at night.
Today let us give up our lives dancing for joy; today the fire for us is cool.”
The real violence of the act is obliterated like the bodies of the women, and
a symbolic edifice is created on the ashes. In a sense, the Sufi poets of the
romances use the misogynistic poetic symbol of the satī to assert their spirit-
ual superiority over the material and political dominance of their élite patrons.
The speech Jāyasī puts in the mouths of the burning wives, characteristically,
makes them happy to burn themselves alive for love. In dying on the pyre,
they reaffirm the ultimate value and eternity of mystical love (prema) over the
transience of this world. The knot of faith and love endures from the beginning
to the end of existence. Indeed, the speech asserts that though the world is
eventually folded back into nonbeing, love lasts forever. In a generically consist-
ent ending, all the major characters disappear from this world, demonstrating
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 215
the interconnection of love and death, the path of Sufi mysticism and final
annihilation.
The emperor, who has laid siege to the fortress again, enters the city walls
to find nothing but useless cinders. He demolishes the fort, and Chittaur is
converted to Islam. Violence is of no avail, and all that remains for the wicked
sultan in the end is ashes:
The final fanā, in which all of Chittaur is consumed and “becomes” Islam,
signifies the Sufi martyrdom of a figure such as al-Hallāj, as well as the nos-
talgic identification with the Rajputs who fought bravely and sacrificed every-
thing. By implication, only seekers on the path who give up even their lives
can achieve the symbolic goal of spiritual love. But the famous last words also
contain a pun on the word Chittaur, which can be broken down into its com-
ponent parts of citta and ura, mind and breast, or by implication, heart.43
As Shantanu Phukan has pointed out, these last words imply “the theo-
logical concept of the complete surrender of the human heart and mind to
the will of God (islam).”44 Moreover, placing this assertion of the “true” mean-
ing of Islam as submission within the imaginative and interior landscapes of
self-transformation implies that lovers and mystics who have tasted prema-rasa
survive beyond the destruction of the world, that is, they go beyond fanā (anni-
hilation of self) to baqā’, subsistence in God. As Padmāvatī and Nāgmatī cry
out on the funeral pyre, the knot that they have tied with Ratansen will last
beyond the beginning and end of all things. As for the sultan, he embodies a
“false” Islam. Although he has triumphed over Ratansen and the Rajput army,
all he gets for his trouble is ashes. The spiritually justified victory belongs to
216 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the Rajputs, who gave their all for love. The subjectivity of the conquerors is
here transformed so that they assume the roles of the defenders of the land,
an interesting contrast to the fourteenth-century narratives of the victory of
an idealized and militaristic Islam. Thus Jāyasī valorizes defeat as a spiritual
value. Externally, Chittaur has “become Islam,” but the internal victory belongs
to the martyrs of love.
Jāyasī’s depiction of the tragic fall of Chittaur implies a complex sort of
indigenization of the Chishti and Mahdavi Sufi circles among whom he com-
posed his poem. The hero Ratansen puts on a yogi’s guise before he goes
on his quest, only to shed the saffron robe and the earrings attached with
wax when he wins Padmāvatī. Ratansen is a Sufi seeker, and though he has
become just like a yogi in his appearance (bhesa), he is actually better than
a yogi because he can use yogic and alchemical language and techniques to
gain a superior goal: union with the divine Padmāvatī. The “as if” logic of
this operation implies that Jāyasī is using the generic formula established by
Maulānā Dā’ūd and Qutban " to bring local tales of the fabled Serendib and sto-
ries of Rajput resistance to the Turks into the formulaic narrative of the hero
and his two wives and the different sorts of love. But this is only a fictional
image. The Sufi reinscription of themselves as indigenous figures implies an
elaborate masquerade of going desī.
Jāyasī takes up all the classic tropes and motifs of Rajput martial literature
(the offended Brahmin minister, the impudent Turkish demand for a woman
who embodies symbolic honor [māna], its furious rejection, woman as casus
belli, the overwhelming military superiority of the Turks, and the evil sultan
in Delhi who subordinates small regional kingdoms to satisfy his greed and
his lust) but reads them within the Chishti arrogation of the physical land-
scape of Avadh. His poem can therefore also be read as a critique of political
power: although political élites proclaimed their dominance through the spon-
sorship of art and literature, the Hindavī Sufi romances concealed within them
a covert Sufi claim to spiritual superiority over the kings who supported them.
The contest between love rightfully gained and love wrested through violence
sends a clear message to political élites about the symbolic independence of
Sufi silsilahs despite their reliance on those same élites for patronage. The
relationship was one of mutual dependence, for Sufis played important roles
as guarantors of the spiritual legitimacy of rule during the period of the Delhi
sultanate and the regional Afghan kingdoms.
Padmāvatī represents a Sufi courtly poet’s erotic fetishization of India,
while the hero in his yogic disguise signifies the courtly élite “going native.”
Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī used all the tropes and figures native to India to cre-
ate a “false” or seemingly native image of an Indian romance, which is only
a front for the “true” Sufi message of the poem. And although the historical
Conquest of Chittaur: The Padmāvat, Part 2 217
Padmāvatī did not ascend the flaming pyre, and her jauhar is a historical fic-
tion, and the final martyrdom uses the theme of Rajput resistance to Turkish
invaders to convey the message of the spiritual struggle to taste prema-rasa, the
larger conflation of erotic fetishization and military subjugation makes the text
a powerful statement of the actual cultural logic of its period.
The story caught the imagination of audiences, poets, patrons, and imitators,
and became an emblem of the successful and tragic conquest of Hindustan.
Padmāvatī meant many things to many people in the centuries that followed.
For the Rajput chroniclers following Jāyasī, she was the lovely queen who died
rather than submit to the wicked Sultan ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī, thus preserving the
symbolic honor of a defeated people. For the Afghan and, later, the Mughal
courts, she was an erotic object and the centerpiece of an Indian landscape,
the crystallization of the beauty and allure of a subjugated people. Ironically,
for the nationalists she was the emblem of a heroic resistance to foreign impe-
rialism, a key figure in the narrative of the recuperation of “Hindu” honor
despite the tragic fall of the Rajput states to the sultans of Delhi.
7
Women are the topical focus for expressing attitudes on sexuality, not
only in Shaykh Nizam ad-din Awliya’s case but also in the case of
other South Asian Sufi masters. There is at once delight in women’s
beauty and fear of their power, yet there is no sense of enjoyment in
the physical dalliance or consummation of the love relationship. For
the South Asian Sufi masters, and for South Asian society as a whole,
we find scant evidence of the pleasure principle applying to or deriv-
ing from sexual experience. Sexuality therefore means something other
than coitus in our evidence. It would be more apt to say that sexuality
becomes the achievement of social expression through gender interac-
tion, while asceticism is at once the recognition of the role of sexuality
in society . . . and its partial curtailment, or . . . its outright rejection, on
the part of holy minded individuals.1
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 219
In Jaunpur, a certain person got married and took his bride to his
house in Zafarabad. He stopped the palanquin under a tree outside the
city for rest and for eating a meal. He took his seat near the palanquin
and the bride put aside the curtain to look around… . A recluse who
was resting under the same tree cast his eye on the beautiful face of
the girl and was completely captivated. He fixed his eyes on her face.
Every time the girl looked at him she found him as if in a trance and
constantly staring at her face. She guessed his condition and was sur-
prised. She inquired from the nurse: “When shall we return to this
place?” She said: “We shall come back after four days . . . . ” After four
days, the recluse continued to wait for her the whole day. At . . . sunset,
he got disappointed and began to sigh: ‘“Ah, ah, she has not come
back,” and passed away in this state. When the Muslims found him
220 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
dead, they buried him after performing religious rites. The palanquin of
the girl arrived in the evening just after his burial… . They told her that
he suddenly died, and pointed to his grave at a little distance… . They
said: “He only repeated, ‘Ah, ah, she has not come,’ and at last passed
away” . . . [D]eeply moved, she said to the nurse: “[S]how me the grave
of the recluse, so that I may visit and offer the Fātihā prayer for the
departed soul.” People created a curtain of sheets on all sides, so that
she might visit the grave without exposing her face to people. When
she visited the grave, she placed her head upon it. After some time,
the nurse thought to call her back. When she looked for her inside the
sheets, she did not find her there. She told people about it and every
one of them was surprised; they considered it a miracle of ‘ishq. They
unearthed the grave and found to their surprise the dead body of the
recluse, wrapped with the embroidered garments of the bride, and his
hands and feet dyed with henna. But there was no sign of the bride.5
The disappearance of the bride into the spiritual remains of the dervish points
both to the evanescence of ‘ishq (love6) and the fact that the erotic body of the
woman is part of the whole complex of male asceticism and sexuality. Bodily
disappearance signifies sublimation of the erotic to theology, unification with
the divine. Obsessive passion or ideal love (‘ishq), leading even to death, is
the most valued part of sexual and ascetic experience. It is the incitement of
this obsessive emotion within the seeker that allows him to progress on the
spiritual path and the narrative quest, putting ‘ishq (or, in the poetics of the
Hindavī romances, prema-rasa) at the pinnacle of theology, the goal of the nar-
rative, and the core of Sufi experience.
Regrettably, very little else is known about the poet Mañjhan, except what he
himself tells us in the prologue to the Madhumālatī. We do know that he
was attached to the Shattari Sufi master Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ Gvāliyārī
(d. 1562), and received instruction from the charismatic shaikh in Gwalior. The
mystical culture of the Shattaris is an intrinsic part of the Madhumālatī.
The heroine of the first part of the poem is a princess of the mystical
city of Mahāras, the “great rasa.” Heavenly apsarases (“nymphs” or peris)
transport Manohar, Prince of Kanaigiri, to the bedroom of the sleeping
Madhumālatī. The vision of beauty before him stuns him. The poet uses
the generic set piece of the head-to foot description (sarāpā) to detail what
Manohar sees, portraying the body of Madhumālatī as the unfolding of
divine revelation before Manohar’s eyes. The Princess awakes and they fall
instantly, completely, in love. Promising eternal love, they exchange their
rings as signs of their oath to be true to one another. Manohar falls asleep,
only to wake up in his own city of Kanaigiri. His nurse Sahajā (“absorption
in the inborn reality”) counsels him to become an ascetic to win the beau-
tiful Madhumālatī, and he sets out in the garb of a yogi to attain the love
that his vision of Madhumālatī promised him. The logic of embodiment that
runs through Mañjhan’s poetic images matches male ascetic body to female
erotic object and echoes in the various contexts of cosmology, ascetic prac-
tice, politics, and poetic literature.
Shattari cosmology hierarchically orders the stages of emergence from and
return to Allah (mabda’ va ma‘ād) in concentric circles, fitted within the larger
circular structure of emergence and return. These circles within circles are
elaborated as the stages of mystical ascent and descent for the Shattari novice.
Citing the Gulzār-i Abrār, an important Shattari hagiographical collection com-
pleted in 1612, S. A. A. Rizvi indicates that the shape of religious practice for
the Shattaris was circular:
In a pioneering article, Weightman has pointed out the similarity between this
religious practice and the plot of the Madhumālatī. The disciple’s initial state
of absorption or jaẕbah is represented as the first meeting of the hero and
heroine, Manohar and Madhumālatī. The neophyte must work his way back
to the realm of the Absolute Divine, just as Manohar’s progress describes a
circular movement from the initial moment back to the point when the lovers
can be united again.
At the first meeting of the lovers, the hero is required to fix “within his
deepest awareness the image of God and of Divine Beauty (Madhumālatī)”:
The neophyte has then to descend step by step from the realm of self-
manifestation of the Absolute to the phenomenal world. This process
is paralleled in Manohar setting out, being shipwrecked and cast up on
an unknown shore alone “save for the pain of his suffering in separa-
tion and the mercy of God.” Then he discovers love, Pemā, portrayed
as young, innocent and unawakened, but imprisoned by a demon.
Manohar kills the demon by destroying the source of its powers of
renewal, suggesting that a very radical transformation of the disciple’s
nature is here signified . . . [he] is able to have a second meeting with
[Madhumālatī]. This point can be taken as the beginning of the ascent
back to the Divine sphere.10
of the genre of the Hindavī Sufi romance. Both bodies signify, and are part
of the process of, concretizing an invisible Sufi spiritual cosmos. The Shattari
manuscripts take up cosmological and bodily structures, elaborate them, and
fit them to particular needs: interior practice or the Hindavī poetics of love.
As Pierre Bourdieu and other anthropologists remind us, practice involves a
dynamic intermeshing of structure and agency.12 Cosmology is not an essen-
tialist form that endures through the ages, but a changing structure that dif-
ferent people use differently, that they internalize and live through varying
structures of habitus, whether it is court ritual or the poetics of obsessive love
or Sufi ascetic discipline.
In the Hindavī romances, the woman as erotic object is part of the politics
of conquest of an Indian landscape, but she is also the carrier of theologi-
cal and spiritual meanings. What makes the Hindavī Sufi romances differ-
ent from, say, European colonialism and its fetishizations of native objects are
the complex interminglings of theology and politics, indigenous and foreign,
implicit in the yogic garb of the Sufi seeker and his sensuous meeting with
the divinely beautiful heroine. This chapter considers the logic of embodi-
ment in Shattari poetics, politics, and practice through a reading of the alle-
gorical centerpiece of the romance, the head-to-foot description of the heroine
Madhumālatī. It will then analyze the elaborate Shattari macrocosm and the
order’s ideology in the context of their involvement with court politics and
ascetic practices.
Madhumālatıˉ Described
The allegorically suggestive description of Madhumālatī’s body, a formal
requirement of the genre of the Hindavī Sufi premākhyān, works simultane-
ously as a Hindavī head-to-foot description (śikha-nakha varṇana) and a site for
divine self-disclosure, making visible an invisible Sufi spiritual cosmos. In the
logic of the Shattari worldview, hidden nature is more real (ḥaqīqī) than the
forms (ṣūrat) that are apparent to the senses. This distinction between ḥaqīqat
and ṣūrat or reality and appearance, neo-Platonic in origin, enables the Sufis
to interpret sensible forms literally as well as spiritually. The theory of repre-
sentation that makes possible this move is contained in the term tams̱īl, which
may mean allegory, exemplification, or embodiment, depending on its context.
The plain text (‘ibārah) may contain a reference (ishārah) or an exemplification
of an abstract concept (tams̱īl).
These principles of reading for multiple signification are signaled right at
the beginning of the story with the birth of Manohar, prince of Kanaigiri, the
Mountain of Gold. Prince Manohar is born to the childless Sūrajbhānu, king
of Kanaigiri, as the result of an ascetic’s boon. The prince is the apple of his
224 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
father’s eye. The king summons a pandit to educate him in all the classical
texts. Included in his education are the principles of interpreting texts for mul-
tiple meanings:
the princess of the city of Mahāras. So they pick up his bed and carry it to
Madhumālatī’s bedroom. Their purpose is to compare the beauty of both to
determine which is better. They are confounded when they discover that the
prince and princess are a perfectly matched pair. At this point they refer to the
allegorical significance of the meeting through a series of analogies:
The image of a lover blossoming like a lotus when he sees the beloved’s
face signifies, according to a 16th century Sufi gloss on Hindavī poetry, the
Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī, the opening up of a religious community (ummah) to the
spiritual truth taught by the Prophet Muḥammad.14 Here, the prince becomes
aware of love from a previous birth, the mystic love that is responsible for
226 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the creation of the world and that dwells within the hearts of all beings. The
words the poet uses for Manohar’s response mirror, in reverse, the description
of Madhumālatī. He is consumed with the fire of love from top-to-toe, nakha-
śikha, just as the tajallī of Madhumālatī describes her from head-to-foot. If the
body of Madhumālatī represents the jalvah or brilliant revelation of the divine,
Manohar represents the believer who witnesses this effulgent manifestation.
During the mushāhadah or witnessing, he faints and recovers. Like Lorik in
the Cāndāyan, he is blinded by a woman’s brilliance.
The text views her body through a characteristic play between denial and
affirmation:
The poet’s denial works as a way of affirming a truth that cannot be conveyed in
ordinary language. In other words, the text implies that if the beautiful descrip-
tion of Madhumālatī were to inspire someone to exclaim, “Why, she is the man-
ifestation of God!” the poet would kindly explain to the reader that no one has
seen God in this world. But the reader would not be wrong in supposing that
her disclosure mirrors the prasāra or tajallī (self-disclosure) of God, that it is the
description of a form (ṣūrat) in a world in which true reality is elusive and invis-
ible. She is simultaneously a concrete form and a shadowy mirror of a spiritual
reality that no one has ever seen except through analogy, allegory, or likeness.
Her body signifies both an accepted set of poetic topoi in Avadhi and a spiritual
cosmos, bridging the gap between ṣūrat (appearance) and ḥaqīqat (reality).
When the veil of the invisible is rent, the whole world reels before the
flash. Madhumālatī smiles slightly in her sleep and her jalvah or manifestation
is blinding:
How can one decipher the signs inscribed upon the “signifying body” of
the heroine? Some indications are given by a near-contemporary Sufi gloss
on Hindi poetry, the Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī of Mīr ‘Abdul Vāḥid Bilgrāmī, written
in 1566 and concerned precisely with interpreting the sensuous portions of
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 227
dhrupad and viṣṇu-pada poetry for Sufi readers, useful in reading the sarāpā
of Madhumālatī.
According to this text, in this parting of Madhumalati’s lips Allah’s divine
attributes or Names are manifested. These are divided into two sorts: those
related to his divine beauty and grace (asmā’-i jamālī) and those related to
his astounding might and majesty (asmā’-i jalālī). God is al-Raḥmān (“the
Beneficent”), al-Raḥīm (“the Merciful”), al-Ġhaffār (“the Forgiver”), al-Muḥyī
(“the Giver of Life”), al-Nūr (“the Light”), al-Karīm (“the Generous”). All
these qualities nourish and protect the believer. At the same time, Allah
is al-Qahhār (“the Subduer”) al-Jabbār (“the Compeller”), al-Mumīt (“the
Bringer of Death”), al-Muqtadir (“the Powerful”). These are the destructive
attributes of Allah, which excite fear in the believer and wreak vengeance for
wrongdoing.
The poetic reference or ishārah here is to the famous narrow bridge (the Pūl-i
Sirāt ") of the Qur’ān, the bridge between heaven and hell that all must pass
over after death. Only the righteous can cross the infernal abyss on this nar-
row path, so difficult of access; and it is as difficult to attain the parting in the
black locks of the beautiful Madhumālatī as it is to walk over the Pūl-i Sirāt."
Further, her shining white parting, adorned with red sindūra or vermillion,
is likened to the keen edge of a fierce sword stained with blood, which has
been used to dispatch lovers eager to walk along it. The ringlets and curls are
described as phaṉsihārā, fierce thugs who set snares for travelers and strangle
228 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
them. The killing that goes on here can also refer to the necessary annihila-
tion of the ego or self (khvudī) of the seeker ( fanā).
To this display of jalāl or ferocious cruelty, the poet adds another image in
the next verse, one specifically related to the circular structure of the Shattari
spiritual quest:
Her parting as a ray of sunlight mimics the descent of divine essence into the
world and the eventual return of all things to God.
Lest one think that the beautiful Madhumālatī was all fierce cruelty and no
jamāl or grace, the poet compares her parting to a stream of nectar:
The text goes on to describe her beautiful black tresses as poisonous serpents
that cruelly sting away the lives of lovers:
Her locks embody the vicious, sinful darkness of this world, and gather the
sorrows of lovers into themselves. They are like poisonous snakes, but snakes
who sting seekers out of all awareness of their own condition, making them
receptive to the revelation in the next verse:
For the prince, and all others who look on with the right eyes, this revelation
of light (nūr) is the first specification of divine essence. Her shining forehead,
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 229
spotless as the moon, with pearllike beads of moisture on it, signifies the site
of the first revelation (ta‘yīn). According to the Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī, her forehead
(and by extension her body) is the writing of the mysterious invisible (ġhaib)
on the surface of this world.17 This textualized embodiment works as both the
‘ibārah, the plain text, and the ishārah, or reference, to the spiritual cosmos of
the Shattaris.
There is allegory (tamsīl) in the description of Madhumālatī’s eyebrows:
The line of her eyebrow suggests the line that is drawn between the two aspects
of the revelation of the Divine, oneness and unification (aḥadiyah/vāḥidiyah).
The eyebrows are the site of the barzakh-i kubrá or intermediary state between
these two. According to the Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī, the space of the eyebrows is
the length of “two bow-lengths or less” (qāb qausain au adná), the space
between God and the Prophet on the mi‘rāj, or night journey of the Prophet
Muḥammad.18 Their embodiment suggests both the all-conquering bow of
Kāmadeva, the God of Love, and the space of revelation between God and the
believer; love is the bond that ties them together across this space.
The poet moves on to talk of her crookedly seductive eyes, large, lively, keen,
and intoxicating (capala bisāla tīkha ati bānke
̱ ), which captivate the souls of lovers
with their play. According to Bilgrāmi’s gloss, her eyes suggest the karishmah-yi
chashm-i maḥbūb,19 the deceptive glitter in the eyes of the divine beloved con-
taining within it a shadow of the invisible. They embody both the vision to see
spiritual reality and the play between ferocity and loveliness (jalāl and jamāl):
to find similes or words. Below these two lovely cheeks is a pair of red lips,
dripping with nectar, the source of the primordial grace of God (lutf" -i sābiqah),
sustainer of life and love:
Allah’s mercy (raḥmaḥ), which restores life to wounded lovers and hope to
believers, is in the nectar dripping from Madhumālatī’s lips.
Madhumālatī’s body embodies Allah but is only a weak shadow of divin-
ity, embodying the interplay between nirguṇa and saguṇa aspects of vernacular
theology. It is not merely a female body taken up as an object of the poet’s
gaze.20 The Sufi text recognizes the power of the female gaze as overwhelm-
ing the male looking at her. This interlocked set of gazes signals a mystical
ideology in which God/woman also has the power to look at man and trans-
form his being. The unfolding religiosity in which subject and object, lover
and beloved, divinity and created beings, can change places is played out in
the description of the mole on Madhumālatī’s face:
Here the very materiality, the dense blackness of the mole on her shining
white face, is imagined as the transposition of the pupil of Manohar’s eye
onto the face. If Manohar’s gaze is embodied on the mirror of her face, the
face also has the power to see him. If the world was created, in the famous
Sufi tradition, as a mirror for Allah’s beauty, here beauty becomes a mirror
for the seeing gaze. The interlocked visions suggest that divine revelation
needs a witness as much as human beings need a mirror for their desire.
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 231
According to Bilgrāmī’s gloss, the dark tips of her breasts signify divine mys-
teries (sirr-i bārīk) whose unveiling the Sharī‘ah forbids. They are mysteries
beyond the senses, contained in the words describing Allah’s power and
might, jabr (al-Jabbār, the Compeller) and qadr (al-Muqtadir, the Powerful).
The cruel black tips are ready to fight on their boundary line to prevent an
invasion into their sphere. The necklace that is trapped between them man-
ages to mediate, to separate them so that they do not fight each other. As the
embodiments of the unattainable mysteries of Allah’s being, their beauty does
not pain “her on whom they grew, but those who look on their loveliness.”
Between her titillating breasts and her lovely hips lies Madhumālatī’s waist, thin
and delicate to the point that the weight of her hips might cause it to snap. The text
refers to the inability of mortal hands to grasp her fine waist. The Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī
describes her thin waist also as a barzakh or intermediary state between Allah and
the world.21 On her waist is the fine line of her romāvalī or line of hair, which also
suggests an intermediary chord (barzakh) in the circle of manifestation:
The pool of nectar below the navel (nābhi kuṇḍa), out of which the fine line
of hair rises, suggests the amṛta kuṇḍa, the pool of nectar that, in the Shattari
mystical body, is imagined to be between the eyes (at the brahma-randhra).
This is the place where nectar rains on the seeker, where he can enjoy the
fruits of his austerities. The romāvalī combines the jalālī qualities of divinity
with this pure and sacred site of union, since it is represented as a poisonous
black snake, roaming about dangerously on her beautiful white stomach and
ready to sting the man who lays his hand on her.
232 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
The final verse in the sarāpā of Madhumālatī is the description of her thighs
and legs, as well as of her intoxicating “treasury of love” (madana bhaṇḍāra).
The poet adroitly sidesteps an exact description:
The never-perfect catching of the elusive divine that the seer attempts reduces
him to utter confusion and silence. But the passionate desire excited in the
believer’s mind was an important component of the Sufi training of the self,
which inculcated love in a novice toward any worldly object of desire and then
sought to train it toward the divine beloved, moving from love of the ṣūrat or
apparent form to the ḥaqīqat or reality behind appearances.
The embodiment of Madhumālatī is a mapping of precisely this double
step, of concentrating desire in a concrete form and then showing how the
concrete form is only a shadow of a spiritual reality. What enables the poet
to accomplish this is a theory of meaning based on likeness (upamā/tashbīh)
and reference. The head-to-foot description of Madhumālatī is a set of poetic
images that play with analogy, exemplification, and likeness to construct her
body as a field of meaning, or rather, double meaning.
The plain text (‘ibārah), reference (ishārah), and allegory/exemplification
(tamsīl) cannot be separated. As the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Ġhālib once
famously remarked in a couplet,
The sarāpā fits into the narrative logic of the text as the moment when desire
is awakened, between Manohar and Madhumālatī, Allah and the world, and
reader and text.
Macrocosmic Geometries
The Key to Hidden Treasuries
Mañjhan dedicates several verses in the prologue of his Madhumālatī to
the praise of his teacher, the renowned Shattari Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus"
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 233
Gvāliyārī (d.1562), the fourth in a line of Shattari Sufi masters,23 the dynamic
spiritual guide to the first Mughal emperors Bābur and Humāyūn and to
many nobles in the 1530s and 1540s. Shaikh Ġhaus and his brother, Shaikh
Phūl, were disciples of Shaikh Zuhūr Hājī Ḥamīd. Under him they learnt
the Shattari methods of ẕikr and meditated in the jungles around the town
of Chunar in central India. In the cosmological treatise Kalīd-i Makhāzin
(“The Key to Hidden Treasuries”), written in 1533, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus
Gvāliyārī indicates this view of the body: “Man’s body is like a book, and every
letter is the form of an allegory. You will find in it everything you seek, and
will not return empty-handed.”24 Each part of the body is a sign to be inter-
preted for a spiritual referent.
The Kalīd-i Makhāzin also works out the most fully elaborated Shattari cos-
mology. In it, Shaikh Ġhaus describes a pair of midnight visions that led him
to write his key to the spiritual cosmos:
One night in the year 932 (1523), I was thinking of the stages of descent and
ascent, and meditating on the arrangement of the manifestation and pro-
gression of the hidden and the manifest, when suddenly I found myself in
a state which was not annihilation ( fanā) nor the annihilation which is sub-
sistence ( fanā al-baqā), neither sleep nor dream, when the Eternal Friend,
the Everlasting Messenger of God, came to this faqīr and showed him all
the hidden and the manifest stages, the emergence from and the return to
God from the beginning without beginning to the end without end, and
ordered, “After you emerge from this vision, proclaim it forth… . ”25
The shaikh was able to complete the book as ordered only after a few years,
but then fell into a quandary about the right choice of name for it:
The shaikh’s key to hidden spiritual treasuries, written and named in these
nocturnal flashes of vision, reflects a well-worked-out Shattari cosmological
scheme. It forms the basis of the Shattari system of interior discipline and
letter mysticism, of the historical and social placement of the Shattari Sufis
during the reigns of the first Mughal emperors.
Shattari Sufis thematize the descent of the divine Absolute into the world
of phenomena as a succession of concentric circles (dā’irah, pl. davā’ir). To
construct their image of a spiritual cosmos, they drew heavily on Ibn ‘Arabī’s
formulation of vaḥdat al-vujūd, or unity of being,27 which can be traced back to
the neo-Platonic theory of the self-manifestation of the Absolute. Ibn ‘Arabī’s
theology set up a correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, using
the geometry of circles to order the stages of divine manifestation hierarchi-
cally. The stages map a continuum between the plane of Absolute Essence
(ẕāt) and the plane of material forms and sensible experience. In the highest
degree or circle, the divine Absolute is nondetermined (lā ta‘yīn), beyond all
attributes, specified forms, and revelations, absolutely one (al-Aḥad).28
The first determination (tajallī or ta‘yīnn) is the Absolute’s manifestation in
the form of light (nūr), unity (vāḥidiyah), or the archetypal reality of Muḥammad.
On this plane, all the Divine Names and Attributes exist in the divine presence
and are identical with it; the divine unity and the principle of multiplicity (kaṣrat)
share in the same Essence. The Divine Names contain in summary the multi-
plicity of forms, which exist as receptacles for them in more concrete planes of
existence. The second determination is the plane of the divine unity in the eternal
Names, the a‘yān al-ṣābitah, which form the prototypes for the multiple forms
of creatures in existence. This is the plane where the forms are determined and
distinguished one from the other, though they never come into concrete existence
except through their shadows on the more material planes of the divine descent.
Following these two manifestations, the divine essence is refracted through
three planes of existence, which gradually assume greater concreteness. The
third determination of the divine essence is in the world of spirits (‘ālam
al-arvāḥ), in which the spirits know each other and recognize their prototypes
(al-a‘yān) as their masters. The next determination is that of the subtle forms
(ṣūrat or amsāl) and imagination (khyāl), which exemplify within their imagi-
nal forms their prototypes on higher planes. They are not identical in being
to their prototypes, but rather combine a shadow or analogy of the spiritual
with their subtle material forms. Finally, the world of bodies (‘ālam al-ajsām) is
the plane of corporeal existence, in which the senses and sensible experience
come into play (mushāhadah). Each of these planes is bound to the higher
planes by a relationship of tams̱īl (exemplification). The processes of creating
spirits, or subtle forms, or bodies, mirror analogically the process of creation
by which the Divine Names come into existence.
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 235
A point is the secret essence, and a circle is its manifest form. The
point is the center of the circle which the pen of power draws and
makes itself into a circle . . . [T]he circle is, in summary, the point. When
you look at the point, it is the greatest mystery. When you come into
the circle, and open the door of the point, you see that the circle is
precisely the point, equal from every side.29
The Circles
For the Shattaris, the human reality is the barzakh-i ṣuġhrá or the smaller
barzakh, and they elaborated a system of interior discipline based on this
notion of the human body. The Jām-i Jahān Numā and the three Shattari com-
mentaries on it sketch out both the larger macrocosmic universe and its paral-
lel microcosm in the human body. In combination with Shaikh Muḥammad
Ġhaus Gvāliyārī’s writings, to which we now turn, these texts form the frame-
work for Shattari Sufi practice, which they termed the mashrib-i Shat"t"ār or the
Shattari way.
238 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
The third and final dā’irah or circle in Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus Gvāliyarī’s
key to hidden spiritual treasuries develops a segment of Maġhribī’s arc of man-
ifest knowledge, the nine heavens (nuh aflāk), into a set of concentric circles.
The circles of the nine heavens are matched not only with the Names of Allah,
which unlock each planetary station, but also with the human faculties in their
internal or real sense (ḥaqīqat) as well as their outer form (ṣūrat). The dā’irah
provides an important conceptualization of the Shattari body as a symbolic
field, containing within itself the planets that control the heavens. The two
outermost circles, the crystalline sphere and the sphere of the constellations,
contain the twelve signs of the zodiac and a set of twenty-eight angels, each
of whom corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. The nine concentric circles
establish the set of correspondences among Names, planets, and internal fac-
ulties, as seen in Table 7.1.
The set of correspondences outlined above adds to Maġhribī’s set of the
planetary spheres a dual set of names for unlocking and controlling the plan-
ets for specific spiritual and material goals, and they coordinate these spheres
with the human reality (ḥaqīqat-i insānī). Each bodily faculty is linked with a
planet that is supposed to rule it, and the practitioner can gain control over
these senses and planets through invoking the divine Names. The Shattaris’
practice of interiorizing the Names of Allah within their bodies and adapting
yogic practices into their ẕikr is based entirely on the circles and letters of
this cosmology, which forms the backdrop for the poetics and theology of the
Madhumālatī.
one should go outside the city to a clean place at the edge of a river, lake, or
tank and read the specified prayers and Names. Then one must look up to
the sky, walk three steps forward, three back, three right, and three left, and
keep one’s face continuously in the direction of the Ka‘ba. After the vision
of the Prophet that ensues from the correct execution of this procedure, one
can open one’s eyes and ask him to overlook one’s faults and forgive all one’s
sins.39 Shaikh Muḥammad ends the chapter by citing a Prophetic tradition
derived from Abū Hurairah: “There are Ninety-nine Names of God, that is,
one less than a hundred, and whoever remembers them and acts on them will
enter into Paradise without any accounting of sins or punishment.”40 There
follows a list of all the Names, which the disciple (and the hero Manohar) has
to internalize in order to enter the next stage of practice.
The third jauhar, the longest in the book, is about invocation of the Divine
Names. This mode of practice includes elaborate prescriptions for purity and
directions for gaining various sorts of powers. Shaikh Muḥammad’s account of
the coming into being of all created things is encoded within the twenty-eight
letters of the Arabic alphabet.41 In Shattari letter mysticism, combinations of
letters signified selected Names of Allah in sequence as well as places in the
Shattari cosmology, and each was the abbreviated code for a different Shattari
practice. In addition to interior visualization, the Shattari cosmology had
another application: to predict or influence the future by calling up the angels
or spiritual agents of each station in order to make them perform whatever task
was desired, or to make an efficacious talisman or amulet (ta‘vīz). ̱ 42 Each of the
twenty-eight letters was matched with a numerical or abjad value, a Name of
Allah, a quality, either terrible or benevolent, a perfume or incense, an element,
a zodiacal sign, a planet, a jinn, and a guardian angel. These were called up in
rituals of invocation that varied with the particular goals of the seeker.
Certain conditions had to be met for the invocation or da‘vat to be suc-
cessful: the invoker had to maintain ritual purity, eat only ḥalāl foods, wear
unsewn garments, act only under the supervision of a perfected spiritual
guide (murshīd-i kāmil), keep an open heart, control the carnal soul, and so
on. Depending on whether the invoker was using jamālī, jalālī, or compos-
ite (mushtarik) Names of Allah, he had to meet other dietary conditions. For
jalālī Names, he had to abstain from meat, fish, eggs, honey, musk, and sexual
intercourse, while jamālī invocations required avoiding butter, milk, yoghurt,
vinegar, dates, and salt. The jauhar as a whole is divided into fifteen chapters
( faṣls), on the invocations that are to be used for purposes such as satisfying
worldly or religious needs, gaining glory or happiness or money or a desired
object, getting rid of a bad temperament, finding lost objects, getting rid of
sin and iniquity (fisq va fujūr), killing one’s enemies, escaping from a tyrant’s
clutches, subduing jinns, controlling the king of the world, and bringing
242 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
animals back to life. One of the final chapters deals with procedures for wip-
ing out invocations or magic spells cast on the invoker; reading specific verses
from the Qur’ān after the maġhrib prayers cancels particular invocations that
have caused the petitioner difficulty.
The seeker now must enter the fourth jauhar, on the way of the Shattaris
(mashrib-i Shatt" ār
" ), after he has mastered the earlier stations of piety and ascetic
exercises and passed through “the mysteries of invocation.”43 This is the most
detailed evocation we have of Shattari asceticism. It begins with a genealogy of
the order and a paradigmatic initiation. Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ first quotes
Najm al-dīn Kubrá, the famous Central Asian Sufi master who formulated an
elaborate system for visualizing and internalizing divine lights. According to
the founder of the Kubrawi order, those who travel the usual road of mystical
stages (sā’irīn) chose the path to God, while those who flew along it were birds
or flyers (t"ā’irīn).44 According to Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus,̱ the Shattaris were
the people of love (ahl-i ‘ishq), superior to all these others in both intoxica-
tion (mastī) and perspicacity (hushyārī) because they achieved mystic absorption
(jazbah
̱ ) at the beginning of their quest rather than the end (as was the case for
other Sufi orders). The source of their practice was a tradition of the Prophet
Muḥammad, who said: “I am the city of knowledge and ‘Alī is its door.”45 Shaikh
Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ gives a long genealogy for the order from ‘Alī through the
first five Imams down to Ja‘far al-SI ādiq (d. 765), Bāyazīd Bistāmī " (d. 879),
Muḥammad Shīrīn Maġhribī (fl. 1385), Yazīd ‘Ishqī, Abū’l Muz"affar Maulānā
Turk-i Tūsī, Abu‘l Ḥasan al-Kharaqānī (d. 1033), Khudā Qulī Māvrā al-Naḥrī, his
son Muḥammad al-‘Āshiq, Muḥammad ibn al-‘Ārif, ‘Abdullāh Shat"tār " (d. 1485),
Qāzin Shat"tār,
" Abū’ l-Fatḥ Hidāyatullāh Sarmast, Shaikh Zuhūr Ḥājī Ḥuzūr,
and finally down to Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ himself.
There are some chronological problems with this genealogy, which follows in its
earliest links the “golden chain” (silsilat al-sI ahab) of the usual Sufi claim to physical
and spiritual descent from the Prophet to ‘Ālī through the line of Imams to Ja‘far
al-Sādiq. As Hamid Algar has noted in an essay on the Naqshbandi order, initiation
"
of Bāyazīd Bistāmī by Ja‘afar al-Sādiq has to be understood as “dispensed by the
spiritual being (rūḥāniya) of the departed preceptor.”46 This is a fortiori the case in
view of the temporal gap between Bāyazīd Bistāmī " and the fourteenth-century poet
Maġhribī, which is a good example of such a retrospective “spiritual initiation.”
Further, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ creates the sanction for the initiatic pattern of
Shattari zikr by citing a paradigmatic initiation of ‘Alī by the Prophet:
‘Alī said to the Prophet: “O Prophet! Teach me the easiest and best
path for reaching God.” The Prophet said to ‘Alī: “You have to persist
in the mentioning (zikr) of God in privacy (ḳhalvat).” ‘Alī said: How,
O Prophet of Allah?” The Prophet said: “Close your eyes and listen to
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 243
me three times!” The Prophet said, “Lā ilāha ‘illā!” three times and ‘Alī
listened and then ‘Alī said it three times and the Prophet listened.
This is presumably the ritual with which a disciple was initiated into the
mashrib-i Shat"t"ār, and it introduces a long discussion of the various kinds of
zikr that he had to learn under the direction of a Shattari master. They involve
breath control and physical exercises along with repetition of the Divine
Names, and range from “one-stroke” zikr (yak-zarbī) up through practices
involving more “strokes” or “blows” and physical manipulations.
Once he masters these aẕkār, the seeker begins letter-mystical practices
that use the cosmological and spiritual codes of the Arabic alphabet to inter-
nalize different attributes of Allah and to recreate himself in the image of
the macrocosm. A passage from a hitherto unknown Persian manuscript, the
Shajarat al-Tauḥīd (“The Tree of Unity”), a treatise on letter mysticism and on
the invocation of the Names of Allah, attributed to Hazrat ‘Abdullāh Shat" t" āri,
the founder of the Shattari silsilah, illustrates this process well:
This long quotation shows how the Sufi matched the cosmological circles with
states in his consciousness, point for point. The basic division between Divine
Essence and Attributes is signified by the alif and ṣād. The letter bā indicates
244 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the two barzakhs (intermediate states) that are the central lines on the circles
of manifestation, the reality of Muḥammad and the reality of man. The Names
of Allah represent attributes with which the Shattari attempts to imbue his
own body. The Sufi seeks to replicate the account of the self-manifestation of
Divine Being in his body, and the Shattari commentaries on the Jām-i Jahān
Numā elaborate this bodily structure. The Sufi can, after inculcating the appro-
priate powers, travel up and down on the stages of ascent and descent.
Thus these letters were used to conceptualize an elaborate system of inte-
rior discipline and visualization, and to manipulate the equation between the
microcosm and macrocosm to gain certain powers. Perhaps the most elaborate
example of how the seeker’s body becomes a microcosm for Shattari cosmol-
ogy is to be found in Shaikh Muḥammad’s use of “the niche for lights” or the
mishkāt al-anvār, the famous Qur’ānic passage in which Allah’s radiance is
compared to a lamp set within a niche (Q 24: 35).48 Introducing the diagram
that the seeker has to superimpose on himself, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱
remarks that the heavens are the macrocosm (‘ālam-i kabīr) and man is the
microcosm (‘ālam-i ṣaġhīr).49 The interior self matches the exterior cosmologi-
cal structures elaborated by the Shattaris. The seeker has to imagine the form
of a niche for lights, in which he himself is the lamp and the world is a niche.
From the perspective of the Essence, man is the niche and the Divine Essence
is the lamp. Further, he is to view the heart (qalb) as a clean glass (ābgīnah)
through which light shines like a star. Or he can imagine it as water, which
itself is colorless but can take on a hundred thousand colors. The seeker must
purify the glass of all impurities, internal and external (Figure 7.1).
In the figure, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ takes his cue from two Qur’ānic verses
describing hellfire and the nineteen guardian angels who tend it: “darkening and
changing the color of man. Over it are nineteen” (Q 74:29–30). His gloss serves as
a verbal frame for the diagram: “and concerning the nineteen, they are: the world
of man, in whose station there are nine heavens . . . and ten who were promised
good news, and these are the ten perfect ones on the human tablet.” Moving in
toward the core of the diagram, we see that the nine are matched to nine interior
organs or faculties on the esoteric side and ten exterior senses on the exoteric side
of the human body. At the center is the rope of the jugular vein, which stretches
from the brain to the heart. The brain contains within it the throne of God (‘arsh)
and is the place of the human soul. The heart or qalb is the lamp (al-miṣbāḥ), and
around it stretches the lampshade or zujājah of the carnal soul. Only if the seeker
cleans the glass shade can the light of the heart shine through. The prescription for
effecting this transformation is encapsulated in the Qur’ānic verse that is inscribed
along the jugular vein: “To Him mount up (all) words of purity: it is He who
exalts each deed of righteousness” (Q 35:10). Thus all the words and deeds that the
Shattaris prescribe are part of the Sufi’s progress toward God.
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 245
AND TEN WHO WERE PROMISED GOOD NEWS, AND THESE ARE
OF THE
MAN, IN WHOSE STATION THERE ARE NINE HEAVENS IN HIM
HUMAN
BRAIN SOUL
THIS IS THE
EACH DEED OF RIGHTEOUSNESS”
PURITY : IT IS HE WHO EXALTS
PINE FORM,
MATCHES THE LIGHT AND
COLOUR, COILED AROUND
THE JUGULAR VEIN, THAT
LIFE AND
THE NICHE FOR THE HUMAN, ANIMAL, AND NATURAL SOULS,
THE ORIGIN
OF PRECIOUS
HEAT, IN
INTELLECT WHICH THERE TOUCH
QUR’AN 35:10
ARE TEN
NATURAL SOUL
PLACE OF THE
THE HEART
AND LIVER,
REGIONS
OF THE
-
LIVER IMAGINATION
THE THE
LAMP SEAT:
PLACE
CARNAL OF THE
MASTERY
SOUL HEART ANIMAL
SOUL
MIND OPINION
THE
LAMPSHADE
- –
AL-NASUT : THE HUMAN REALM
The fifth and final jauhar, on inheritance of truth (vars̱at al-Ḥaqq), begins
by citing a Qur’ānic verse on the good news of divine grace: “give the believ-
ers good tidings” (Q 10:87). Shaikh Muḥammad states that the seeker can
now affirm the truth of the statement that “these will be the heirs” (Q 23:10).50
Heirs are of two kinds: formal/external (ṣūrī) and spiritual (ma‘navī). A formal
inheritor is recognized at the death of his father. In spiritual inheritance, the
inheritor receives an internal gift that cannot be conceived except by someone
intelligent who grasps divine grace. Shaikh Muḥammad goes on to discuss
God’s grace, and then the mastery of His Names, which leads to the unveil-
ing of the invisible world of witnessing. When man looks at his own beauty
he finds himself endowed with all the Divine Names and able to have mas-
tery of them, recognizing in himself all the Names and becoming a place of
manifestation for them. There follow several practices focused on visualizing
each Name and making oneself into an image of it. In the philosophy of
vaḥdat al-vujūd or identity in difference, the seeker will find himself to be
sometimes the circle and sometimes the point, sometimes the seer and some-
times the mirror. In short, he will actualize within himself both the object
and the subject of mystical practice. This is the true inheritance of truth (irs̱
al-ḥaqq).
light brown colour; and so on in the other circles. And sometimes while
people were seated in the above-noted circles, they used to throw dice
on various sides of which figures of persons in different postures were
painted by the creative pen; and whichever figure turned up on the throw
from the hand of a person, he assumed the same position in his circle.
For instance, if the picture of a standing person turned up he stood up,
and if a seated one was presented he sat down, while if the reclining
position was cast he lay down and even went to sleep . . . [among other
uses of the carpet, a good one is that] each of the seven circles is divided
into 200 grades, so that there are 1400 seats in the 7 circles . . . thus there
can be no rivalry when people come to the carpet.51
The order of these circles stretches from the two spheres above Saturn on
the left-hand side of the second dā’irah of Maġhribī’s Jām-i Jahān Numā,
down through the planets and the four elements. As we have seen, Shaikh
Muḥammad Ġhaus elaborated on this section of Maġhribī’s text in his circle of
the nine heavens (nuh aflāk). Humāyūn uses it to order a subject population
into an ideal cosmological scheme that is then animated through court ritual.
A throw of the dice determined the position adopted by any of the players who
were on the carpet. Humāyūn himself sat in the fifth circle, the sphere of the
sun who governs the fate of rulers and kings.
What makes this remarkable reordering of a subject population more than
an elaborate and humorous board game is that the emperor divided up the
seven days of the week according to the planets and colors, and transacted all
business according to the appropriate planetary influence of each day of the
week. The people who sat in the carpet were divided into three large classes:
the ahl-i daulat (“people of power”—noblemen, state officials); the ahl-i sa‘ādat
(“pious people”—Sufis, learned judges, poets, philosophers); and the ahl-i murād
(“people of pleasure”—companions, friends, and lovers of pleasure). Thereafter,
Saturdays and Thursdays were fixed for the pious people, and on these
days audiences were granted to the literary and religious persons . . .
[A]nd the reason why these two days were allotted to this class was,
that Saturday is ascribed to Saturn, who is the patron of the respected
Shaikhs and persons of old respectable families; and Thursday is appro-
priated to Jupiter, which is the star of the Saiyids, the learned and the
strict followers of the Muhammadan Law. Sundays and Tuesdays (were
fixed) for the State officials; and all royal affairs and the duties con-
nected with the management of the government were discharged on
these days… . The advantage in appointing these two days for the holding
of the court . . . was that Sunday appertains to Sun, who in accordance
252 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
with the pleasure of the Almighty regulates the destiny of the rulers
and the Sultans; while Tuesday is the day of Mars; and Mars is the
patron of warriors. Hence it is clear and evident . . . that to adorn the
throne of sovereignty in the public court-hall by his royal sessions on
these two days . . . was more appropriate than on other days. Mondays
and Wednesdays, on the other hand, were designated the days of plea-
sure (parties), and on these two days some of the old companions and
chosen friends and parties of people of pleasure and distinction were
invited to the heavenly assemblies, and all their wishes fulfilled.52
Thus Humāyūn adapted the Shattari cosmology into the machinery of rulership,
with the planets determining the appropriate daily actions from the emperor’s
“throne of sovereignty.” The emperor also arranged all government departments
according to the four elements, earth (buildings, land grants, agriculture), water
(cellars, canals, irrigation), fire (military), and air (wardrobe, kitchen, stable), and
the officials of each department had to dress in the appropriate astrological color.
fled from Gwalior in fear of the Afghan conqueror. The Kulliyāt-i Gvāliyārī, by
his disciple Fazl ‘Alī Shat "tā" rī, recounts the shaikh’s flight from the advancing
armies of Sher Shāh into the forests of Bundelkhand:
When Humāyūn left for Iran and the rule passed into the hands of Sher
Khan, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus left for Bundelkhand before Sher Khan
could reach Gwalior. In Bundelkhand, the local landowners served him
hospitably. When Sher Shah learnt this, he sent his sister’s son Bakhtiyār
Jang to Bundelkhand with an army of 12,000 men to pursue the shaikh
and to behead him, while he himself entered Gwalior. When the army
reached the place where Muḥammad Ġhaus was staying, they attacked the
house. When they had reached the women’s quarters, the shaikh’s mother
asked him, “When is your vilāyat (spiritual authority) and ġhausiyyat (claim
to be the spiritual lode-star of an age) going to manifest itself? These peo-
ple are very ill-mannered.” Then all at once the shaikh took thought and
declared aloud, “Mars, where are you? Do your work!” And the moment
these words left his mouth a glittering sword came out of the east and
went shining into the west. Then he addressed the attacking army and
said, “Go back! Follow the Sharī‘a and leave me alone. Emperors should
only take prayers from faqīrs—do not tangle with an ascetic!” But Bakhtiyār
Jang said, “Sher Khan has ordered us to cut your head off without any
delay.” When he heard this, the shaikh became angry and said, “Mars, kill
them all!” As soon as he said this, 12,000 heads were separated from their
bodies. After this Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus went to Gujarat.55
Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus was very distressed and before the assembled
men he bowed his head down to the ground in contemplation. Then he
254 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
said, “They have martyred this faqīr’s brother at Bayana and hung his
head on the door, and now they have come for the faqīr. Whatever God
wills, will happen.” Then he went back into contemplation (murāqiba)
and bowed his head down to the ground. After a little while he raised
his head and with great anger picked up the ewer which he used for
ablutions (vuzū‘) and banged it on the ground violently, saying, “Today I
have killed that tyrant. Tomorrow, God will kill him!” Smoke began to rise
from the ewer. When those present asked, “What is happening?” he said,
“Sher Khan has been burnt up in Kalinjar from a pipe of gunpowder, and
his son Jalal Khan has become king under the name of Islām Shāh.”56
The account of Shaikh Muḥammad’s curse and its malevolent effect so fright-
ened Islām Shāh that, according to Fazl ‘Alī, he came to Muḥammad Ġhaus
and begged pardon for his (now deceased) father’s violent actions against the
shaikh’s life. Although the shaikh, his supremacy established, pardoned the
new sultan, he did not go back to Gwalior or Agra, refusing to come into
Afghan-held territory, but stayed in Gujarat, where he acquired a coterie of
followers and disciples. In his stead, his disciple Mañjhan (author of the
Madhumālatī) was among the retinue of poets and courtiers around Islām.
The emperor Humāyūn wrote to Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus from his
political exile in Iran expressing sympathy over Sher Shāh’s harsh measures
against him, and the shaikh responded by invoking the mysteries of the Divine
Names:
Thank you for your royal letter. I conveyed to your well-wishers here
the happy news of your life and safety. I came to know also about the
welfare of your servants and attendants. Everything is exactly as you
have written. There is no formality between us, for:
“Words that come from the heart, reach another’s heart direct.”
I pray to God that unfortunate circumstances may not trouble your
heart!
Whenever exalted God wishes any of his good creatures to reach the
degree of perfection, He sends down heavenly sustenance, alternatively
terrible (jalālī) and merciful ( jamālī), upon him. A merciful and gentle
age has passed. Now for a few days it is a terrible and wrathful age.
God says, “Verily there is ease with hardship.”57
(i.e., Shaikh Muḥammad) and whose authority gives the practice its political
power.58 Sufi cosmological schemes create bases for gaining power, both spiri-
tual and political.
Thus Sufis are involved in approving or denying the legitimacy of kings at
the same time as they are dependent on them for patronage. Kings seek the
shaikh’s supernatural authority to legitimate their rule and, in Humāyūn’s use
of Shattari cosmology, to articulate their political sovereignty. As Richard Eaton
has incisively remarked in the course of a similar argument about the political
claims of the Bengali Sufis:
Being in theory closer to God than warring princes could ever hope
to be, Muslim saints staked a moral claim as God’s representatives on
earth. In this view, princely rulers possessed no natural right to earthly
power, but had only been entrusted with a temporary lease on such
power through the grace of some Muslim saint. This perspective per-
haps explains why in Indo-Muslim history we so often find Sufis pre-
dicting who would attain political office, and for how long they would
hold it. For behind the explicit act of “prediction” lay the implicit act
of appointment—that is, of a Sufi’s entrusting his wilāyat, or earthly
domain, to a prince.59
The Sufis thus interpret the course of history as the arena for supernatural
intervention, and mysterious events such as the smoke rising from Shaikh
Muḥammad’s ewer can have hidden meanings, as with Sher Shāh’s death,
caused by his violence against the Shattaris. But Sufis were in practice depen-
dent on the flow of alms and patronage (futūḥāt) from political rulers, so that
their claims to superiority were tempered by the economic necessity of find-
ing a patron to establish and maintain a khānaqāh. Within this conception of
superiority-yet-dependence, the authority of kings and that of Sufis are interde-
pendent, each seeking legitimacy or patronage from the other, renouncing the
world (duniyā) and ruling it through faith (dīn).
How was this Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus Gvāliyārī related to the Sūrī court
during the period of the Afghan interregnum (1540–1556)? Since he and the
Shattari silsilah played a role in the defeat of the regional Afghan sultanates
by the Mughal state centered in Delhi and Agra, they were enemies of the
Sūr Afghan sultans. The poet’s simultaneous addresses to Shaikh Muḥammad
and Islām Shāh conceal a history of political intrigue in which Chishtis,
Naqshbandis, and Shattaris took sides with Mughals or Afghans in the strug-
gles for sovereignty over northern India in the sixteenth century.
The Shattaris’ involvement with this complicated world of competitive
religious politics began when ‘Abdullāh Shat"t"ār founded the silsilah. Not
256 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
much is known about him except that he came from Transoxiana in the
latter half of the fifteenth century. Trying to establish his authority over an
area (the Sufi idea of vilāyah) proved to be no easy task for the shaikh,
who toured Delhi, Jaunpur, Bihar, Bengal, and Malwa in search of patron-
age and disciples. He conducted his tour in a militant style, as K. A. Nizami
describes it, citing the later Shattari chronicler Muḥammad Ġhaus"ī Shat"t"ārī’s
Gulzār-i Abrār:
of work. Even the hostile Bengali Shaikh Muḥammad Qāzin ‘Alā’ became his
disciple following a miraculous dream:
The Shaikh . . . retired for a forty-day retreat (chilla). During this period
his deceased father appeared in a vision and told him that his ascetic
exercises were useless as his spiritual future was then in the hands of
a sufi whom he had called ‘the prattling fellow of Khurasan.’ So Shaikh
‘Alā’ left for Mandu and for three days stood outside the Shah’s house.
Finally, moved by Shaikh ‘Alā’s humility, Shah ‘Abdullah took him as
disciple after obtaining a pledge that he would leave his ancestral sufic
path and learn Shattariyya practices.62
Shaikh ‘Alā (d. 1495) became Shaikh ‘Abdullāh’s principal ḳhalīfah or successor,
and took the Shattari method of spiritual practice to Bengal and eastern
India. He was followed by the two able Shattaris Shaikh Z'uhūr Hājī Ḥamīd
(d. 1523) and Shaikh Abū ’l-Fatḥ Hadīyatullāh ‘Sarmast’ (d. 1539), who estab-
lished a Shattari presence in Bihar and had many links with local orders such
as the Firdausis as well as with the rulers of Bihar.63
Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus carried on the silsilah’s tradition of conquering
new territory. According to a disciple’s account, the Kulliyāt-i Gvāliyārī, he went
to his pīr to ask him to tell him where to go, and Shaikh Ḥamīd gave him
leave to go anywhere he pleased:
From this position within a fort held by the Afghan Tātār Khān Lodī, Shaikh
Muḥammad Ġhaus" was able to take sides in the growing struggle between
Afghans and Mughals for control over north India after Bābur’s victory at the
battle of Panipat in 1526.
Gwalior was a key strategic fort in this war, and Bābur, the first Mughal
emperor, mentions Shaikh Muḥammad:
After the pagan took Kandar and was close to Biana, Dharmankat,
one of the Gwalior rajas, and another pagan styled Khan-i Jahan, went
258 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
into the Gwalior neighbourhood and, coveting the fort, began to stir
up trouble and tumult. Tatar Khan (an Afghan noble, the ruler of the
fort), thus placed in difficulty, was for surrendering Gwalior to us… . We
joined to Rahim-dad Khan’s force a few Bhira men and Lahoris, [and]
Mulla Apaq and Shaikh Ghuran went also with them. By the time they
were near Gwalior, however, Tatar Khan’s views had changed and he did
not invite them into the fort. Meanwhile Shaikh Muhammad Ghaus,
a darwish-like man, not only very learned but with a large following
of students and disciples, sent from inside the fort to say to Rahim-
dad, “Get yourself into the fort somehow, for the views of Tatar Khan
have changed, and he has evil in his mind.” Rahim-dad sent to say to
Tatar Khan, “There is danger from the Pagan to those outside. Let me
bring a few men into the fort and let the rest stay outside.” Tatar Khan
agreed, and Rahim-dad posted his troop near the Hathi-Pol (Elephant
Gate). Through that gate he brought in the rest of his force at night.
Next day, Tatar Khan, reduced to helplessness, willy-nilly made over the
fort and set out to come and wait on me in Agra. A subsistence allow-
ance of 20 laks was assigned to him in Bianwan pargana.65
Such service does not go unrewarded, and Bābur gave Shaikh Muḥammad a
land grant of over a thousand bīghahs near Gwalior to set up his hospice. His
establishment was a favored site for aristocratic patronage through the reigns
of Bābur and Humāyūn, and his yogic and ascetic practices enjoyed full state
support.
This was in marked contrast to the Chishti lineages, who had long-
standing historical connections with the local Afghan sultans and nobility
and did not back the Mughals in their fight for supremacy; therefore they
were not patronized to the same extent by the Mughal rulers after the defeat
of Ibrāhīm Lodī at Panipat in 1526. For example, the Chishti Shaikh ‘Abdul
Quddūs Gangohī wrote angry letters to the Mughal emperor Bābur asking
that the lands that religious personages, Sufis, and learned men held as rent-
free tenures (madad-i ma‘āsh) from the emperor should not be subjected
to ‘ushr, a tithe of a tenth of the produce from the land.66 The shaikh also
demanded that all non-Muslims should be excluded from state service and
revenue-free grants.67 After the accession of Humāyūn, he again wrote to the
emperor restating “the need for the emperor to support the religious classes
for the good of the empire, and recommends that any revenue-producing
lands given to these groups should be in tax-free tenure.”68 The shaikh thus
linked the moral argument for the betterment of the empire to support for
the (Chishti) Sufi silsilahs, which were conceived to have an ideological claim
to the revenue of the land.
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 259
And in the year 945 h. [1538 a.d.] Mīrzā Hindāl, at the instigation of
certain turbulent innovators, put to death Shaikh Buhlūl, brother of
Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus of Gwāliār, who was one of the chief expo-
nents of the art of invocation and incantation, and who enjoyed the full
confidence of Humāyūn.69
What the mystical practices that the brothers taught Humāyūn might have
been, and how the emperor used them, has not hitherto been very clear.
Many mystical practitioners and Sufis in north India after the thirteenth
century adapted Nāth yogic practices.71 The reference here to their techniques
employs the vernacular terminology for asceticism that the Hindavī romances
adapted into an equivalent for Sufi practice in the fantasy world.
The Shattaris took Nāth yogic practices and translated them into their own
ascetic regimen. In addition to being the author of the Kalīd-i Makhāzin and
the Javāhir-i Khamsah, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus also translated into Persian
the Ḥauz al-Ḥayāt, the Arabic version of the Sanskrit text on yoga known as
the Amṛtakuṇḍa (“The Pool of Nectar”).72 Yusuf Husain has proposed that the
Persian text is “syncretic,” combining “Islamic and Hindu systems of prac-
tice.”73 Richard Eaton has disputed this, suggesting that “the work consists of
two independent and self-contained worldviews placed alongside one another—
a technical manual of yoga preceded by a Sufi allegory—with later editors
or translators going to some lengths to stress their points of coincidence . . .
[H]ere, at least, yoga and Sufi ideas resisted true fusion.”74
I would like to propose an alternative solution to this crux: that the Persian
“Pool of Nectar” appropriated yogic practices and adapted them into a larger
Shattari system of practice, explained and legitimized with the help of Qur’ānic
verses and traditions of the Prophet Muḥammad. Rather than undergoing sys-
temic articulation within the Nāth yogic texts on practice, yogic practices now
work within the Shattari pīrs’ system of invoking the Names of Allah (da‘vat
al-asmā’), which is in turn based on the cosmology outlined above. This text, in
conjunction with practical manuals left by the order, prescribes a complex set
of doctrines, yogic asceticism, and letter mysticism for the Shattari acolyte.
Within the competitive religious scene of northern India, it was not unex-
pected for the shaikh and his silsilah to assert their separate and superior
status while using practices that were comprehensible within Indian ascetic
systems. As Carl Ernst has pointed out, the Gulzār-i Abrār describes Shaikh
Muḥammad Ġhaus’s translation of yogic practice as a militant assertion of
dominance:
The Baḥr al-Ḥayāt is the translation of the ascetical work and manual
of the society of Jogis and Sannyāsis, in which occur interior practices,
visualization exercises, description of holding the breath, and other
types of meditation… . These two groups are the chief ascetics, recluses,
and guides of the people of idolatry and infidelity. By the blessings
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 261
Far from being populist syncretizers, the Shattaris cite the Qur’ānic passages
likening infidels to erring “cattle” who need to be driven into the fold of the
“true Islam.” The single casket of “truth” that the shaikh forged may have
had elements in it from many different esoteric systems, but it was controlled
by the authority of the shaikh. Thus, in the Persian translation of the Ḥauz -
al-Ḥayāt, Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus begins his treatment of the body, its
seven cakras (nerve centers) and their planetary correlates, by declaring that
his yogic interlocutor said, “Know that the microcosm contains that which
is in the macrocosm.”76 This microcosmic body contains seven ganglia or
cakras that constitute the nerve centers of the spinal column. Each of these is
coordinated with a different planet in the Shattari cosmological system, and
endowed with a Name of Allah that is to be recited inwardly by the novice.
The planets are part of the larger cosmological system of concentric circles
or spheres called dā’irahs. The planets and their invocations are arranged as
shown in Table 7.2.
Each station is associated with a tutelary deity, as well as a Name of Allah,
repetition of which unlocks the powers and mysteries of that station.77 The
order of these planets is the same as it is in a section of the second dā’irah in
Maġhribī’s Jām-i Jahān Numā, with the exception of the interchanged positions
of Jupiter and Mars. The Shattari planetary scheme of the seven heavens is
here used to give new meanings to the Nāth yogic cakras, which are six (not
seven) in number and are matched with mantras and deities different from
the ones in this text.78 Although the Shattaris took from the Nāths general
concepts and forms of yogic practice such as the cakras, inverted meditation
(ulṭī sādhanā, taken over by the Sufis as namāz-i ma‘kūs), and the cleansing of
the body through prāṇāyāma or breath control (Persian, ḥabs-i dam), they often
emptied out the specific instructions within these frameworks and replaced
262 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Note: This table has been simplified slightly in order to give only the elements essen-
tial to my argument here.
Source: Carl Ernst, The Arabic Version of “The Pool of the Water of Life” (Amṛtakuṇḍa)
(forthcoming).
them with Sufi concepts and terminology. The larger Shattari cosmology of
planetary circles helps to place this competitive appropriation and reworking
(rather than direct translation) of yogic practice within a Shattari worldview.
Further, it is clear from Maġhribī’s second dā’irah that the realms of the
seven planets occupy a set of spheres in the middle of the cosmology, not
the highest reaches of the manifestation of divine Being. This is consistent
with Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus’s views of bringing infidel practices from false
spirituality (istidrāj) to the true faith. The distinctive Shattari invocation of the
Names of Allah (da‘vat al-asmā’), their letter codes, their astrological manipula-
tions, and their modes of divination provide a larger context for the yogic pos-
tures and exercises that the Shattaris used. The Shattari materials also allow
us a rare glimpse into the exact historical referents of the ascetic quest of the
hero in the Hindavī Sufi romances, who has to disguise himself as a yogi in
order to attain the divine heroine.
The Shattaris formulated elaborate methods for superimposing cosmolog-
ical diagrams on their bodies, and the practical manuals of the order con-
tain directions for their use. Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱’s followers developed
the Shattari system of divination and invocation with great elaboration, and
many manuscripts, such as Ismā’īl Farḥī’s Makhzan-i Da‘vat (“The Treasury
of Invocation”) or Shaikh ‘Īsá Jundullāh’s ‘Ain al-Ma‘ānī (“The Essence of
Meaning”), apply these principles and methods in differing contexts of visu-
alization and prediction.79 These applications of Shattari cosmology—yogic,
Bodies That Signify: The Madhumālatī, Part 1 263
magical, and visionary – thus show a common system that runs through all
these cultural domains, encoded in the letters of the Divine Names, which are
the loci for visualization and interior discipline. These practices, which were
carried out in Shattari khānaqāhs, were the esoteric side of the silsilah’s social
positioning of itself vis-à-vis kings and political leaders. The next chapter exam-
ines the face-to-face erotic encounters between Manohar and Madhumālatī in
Mañjhan’s Sufi romance, within the context of the theology and cosmology of
the Shattaris.
8
She is astonished when she looks about her, for there is another bed spread
out beside her, with a mighty prince lying upon it. She gathers up her courage
and asks him how he has come to her inaccessible heavenly realm:
The prince’s self dissolves (fanā) like sugar in water; he is transformed by the
moment of vision. He introduces himself to Madhumālatī as a royal prince
who is dazzled by her transcendent beauty, and explains his plight:
Rasa is the juice in her words that enables Shattari absorption as well as plea-
sure in hearing stories. The impact of her words on the prince is profound:
Here the rasa in her words is the agent that causes the mystical dissolution
of self, captured in the figure of salt (or, as above, sugar) dissolving in water.
The Seasons of Madhumālatī’s Separation 267
It is thus the bond between lovers as they come together, but the word also
links the text with its audience, forming a bond of literary pleasure between
the poem and its readers.
Since the prince has fainted, the princess has first to revive him. She
fans him and sprinkles ambrosial water on his face. Wiping the prince’s face
with the border of her sari, she raises his head from the ground. When he
recovers, she asks him to tell her the truth (ḥaqīqat/sat) about his condition.
Manohar invokes a spiritualized primal love between them; he proclaims to
Madhumālatī that they are the same matter, and that they have been together
since the beginning of creation:
The poetic image of water mingling in clay refers to the Qur’ānic narrative
of God’s creation of Adam out of clay. If the dust from which God created
humans is the stuff of creation, Manohar suggests, the water that leavens it
into clay is love. In Manohar’s speech to Madhumālatī, separation is what
brings the soul into existence, since the universe emerges only by leaving
God.
In the Shattari scheme of emergence and return, the pain of separation
is a constant reminder of the demand of love, of the world’s separation
from God.
Because the pain of separation prompts the human return to God, it is the
source of happiness; sorrow is the precondition for joy. Manohar welcomes it
into his heart:
The imagery makes embodiment the common experience between them. Here
the body is the niche in which the flame of divine light burns, refracted through the
glass and shining out from the niche throughout the world (as in Qur’ān 24:35).1
Madhumālatī’s beauty is God’s beauty, yet in seeing her Manohar recog-
nizes his own identity with divinity:
The word used here for beauty is rūpa, which also means form. All concrete
forms in the Shattari cosmos share in God’s beauty and can be read for signs
of God’s presence. The Shattari formulation of the moment of recognition
makes contemplation of this rūpa true spiritual meditation.
Madhumālatī recognizes the prince as her lover and falls in love with him.
She loses her heart to the tale he tells:
Though Manohar and Madhumālatī are tied together in this mirrored longing,
they cannot consummate their desire immediately.
Mañjhan introduces the social implications of the spiritual or ḥaqīqī love
that Manohar has defined so well for the princess. Before pledging herself
to Manohar, the princess is worried about a second possible consequence of
love: public disgrace for her for taking a lover before marriage. But as the
prince sees Madhumālatī before him, his desire gets the better of him and he
stretches out his hands toward her in lust:
To keep the prince at bay, the princess invokes a misogynistic gender hierar-
chy. Woman, she says, is a house to sin itself, and needs to be contained by
the family in order to prevent her from disgracing herself and her clan:
The lovers must not consummate their desire, nor reveal their love to the
world. The seeker must not disclose the secret identity of lover and beloved.
Madhumālatī is only willing to go as far as good girls go. She proposes
a consummation of desire only within the framework of righteous conduct,
which could mean both marriage and Islamic sharī‘ah law:
Correct action lies in promising to be true to one another while not overstep-
ping the bounds of the mystic path. Public disgrace is the consequence of
not following the strictures of righteous conduct. The path of truth (ḥaqīqat)
referred to here is Shattari self-purification, polishing the mirror of the heart
until one is fit to receive the divine revelation, or in this situation not giving
way to lust when temptation beckons. Once the oath is taken, Manohar has
promised to be true to her eternally, and to be silent about the details of their
lovemaking for fear of public disgrace.
Therefore, they cannot make love fully, but only engage in lovers’ play. The
poet draws a curtain over the scene by referring only obliquely to what tran-
spires, again suggesting jalālī and jamālī aspects of Madhumālatī’s love play:
They exchange their jeweled signet rings as tokens of their undying love, and
then fall asleep on one another’s beds. The promise of truth (sati bacana), the lov-
ers’ pledge, which the rings signify, is brought up every time the couple meet.
Avoiding direct physical description, the poet moves directly to the point
where the apsarases return to find the beds all creased, the flowers withered,
and the signs of lovemaking on both bodies:
The nymphs are shocked, and consider what to do next. They pick up the
sleeping prince and take him back from heaven to earth, from Mahāras to
his own kingdom of Kanaigiri. The first major turning point of the narrative,
the meeting between the lovers, is concluded. Manohar and Madhumālatī are
separated again. The rest of the plot revolves around their efforts to consum-
mate their love, to change separation into union.
While the main heroine of the Sūfī mathnavīs symbolises divine Beauty
for which the hero is pining in the torments of viraha, it is a second-
ary heroine, usually the hero’s first wife, who appears as the traditional
virahiṇī and sings the viraha-bārahmāsā; thus the Muslim authors of
274 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
The bārah-māsā is a message to the seeker entreating him not to forget his
responsibility to the world and to take into account her agony. The seeker
comes back, bringing his divine beloved with him, and the two wives fight.
Only after the hero persuades the two women to make peace can he consum-
mate his love with both of them, reconciling the claims of the world and of
spirituality.
In the Madhumālatī, however, Mañjhan uses this Hindavī literary conven-
tion in a new way, to deliver a generic set piece without explicit allegorical cod-
ing. There is no second wife, as there is in the Cāndāyan; in her place, Pemā
is Manohar’s spiritual guide to his beloved Madhumālatī. After Manohar and
Madhumālatī are separated, she roams the forests for twelve months, seeking
her lost love, as God comes into the world in search of man. The premākhyān
poets generally used this set piece to turn human desire artfully toward the
divine, but the bārah-māsā of Madhumālatī represents a movement in the other
direction, expressing the longing of the celestial Madhumālatī for her human
lover, drawing the divine into a situation of reciprocal longing (ḥubb-i ilāhī).
In the letter, Madhumālatī recounts all the past sufferings she has endured,
parted from the prince and still enchanted in the form of a bird. The imagery
employed interlaces Madhumālatī’s incarnation as a bird with the cycle of
nature, using the description of the passing of the seasons to connect her
body with nature.
She begins her letter to Pemā with the month of the rains, Sāvan, when
the dark masses of clouds thundered and her eyes rained tears and the scarlet
ladybirds came out:
The rainy season continued in the month of Bhādon,̱ with its dark cloudy nights:
During the rains, the season in which lovers are united in poetry, she sought
desperately for her lover, but found him nowhere:
She continued to wander without hope. The season changed with the month
̱
of Kunvār or Aśvin, but Madhumālatī’s agony did not abate:
In her bitter exile, she saw all the signs of nature returning to normalcy after
the torrential rains:
Despite the festivities around her, she could not find her Manohar anywhere.
She assures Pemā that she can barely speak, let alone write, of the agonies
she went through in early autumn. In Kārtik, the cool month when the moon
shines forth in silvery radiance, she was tortured by the moonlight:
Madhumālatī could not enjoy those autumn nights of moonlit radiance because
no sweet-talking lover (ravanh miṭhbolā) shared her bed. She watched everyone
celebrate Dīpāvalī while she wandered alone in the forest.
Winter came with the month of Aghan, and it was bitterly cold.
Madhumālatī’s body wasted away in the winter months, but she could not die
because she was searching for her lover in the phenomenal, embodied world.
Time itself became implicated in Madhumālatī’s sorrow; the poet links the
shortening of the days in the dark and cold winter to the forcible shortening
of Madhumālatī’s joys:
Each winter night passed like an age, and the following month of Pūs was
even more difficult because of the coincidence of this time with the time of
Madhumālatī’s coming of age:
Even though her love was far away, she was constantly reminded of him. Her
soul could not leave her body, and her body had no peace. Here the poet
invokes her form as a bewitched bird:
The next three verses describe the seasons turning into spring. First, the
month of Phāgun comes with the festival of Holī and its riotous colors. The
pyre that burns the effigy of Holikā, the evil stepmother of Viṣṇu’s devotee
Prahlād, is lit, and Madhumālatī feels herself burnt on it in her agony. The
image is conventional to the imagery of the bārah-māsās in the premākhyāns,
but the poet links it with the red flowers of the flame-of-the-forest, the ḍhāk
tree, spreading through the woods like a forest fire. Madhumālatī alone of all
the birds remains, and the dry thorn bushes convey the desolation that spring
has wrought upon her:
With the month of Caita, nature decked itself out like a young woman blossoming
with fresh new life, greenery, and color; but Madhumālatī just longed for Manohar,
calling him sāīṉ or lord, which could mean either her husband or God:
Soon, continues Madhumālatī, in the hot summer month of Jeṭh, the sun
ignited a fire in the world:
Scorched between these two blazing fires, she could barely survive. She sums
up her separation in a dohā that explains the reasons for her anguish. The
last reason invokes the term rūpa, “form” or “beauty,” implying Madhumālatī’s
original divine form, which she has had to leave behind because of her moth-
er’s enchantments. She has now lost her beauty, jamāl, so important in the
initial encounter at midnight:
The last verse in the bārah-māsā brings the progress of the seasons full cir-
cle, as after the summer the rains come again with the month of Asāḍh. For
Madhumālatī, the tumult in the skies signaled regeneration of all nature:
The rains came again, but Madhumālatī was not reborn. She ends the letter
by begging Pemā to help her be united with Manohar. The entire bārah-māsā
thematizes the longing for passionate fulfillment that, in Shattari terms, is the
existential condition of both humans and the divine.
sing songs of celebration in the streets. Manohar is still in yogic guise, as befits
an ascetic, but once the wedding night comes he throws off his yogic clothes and
becomes a prince again, reunited with his beloved. Madhurā, Pemā’s mother, has
the women’s quarters (ranīvāsā) prepared, and the wedding ritual takes place.
The prince and princess exchange garlands in the rite of the jaimālā, and finally
the fire of separation that has raged in both their hearts is satisfied.
After they celebrate the ritual of tying the knot and circling the sacred fire,
the lovers retire to a private bedchamber. The night of love (suhāga rāta) that
follows is described with brio and panache:
Narrative and erotic consummation coincide as Mañjhan works the arts of love
into the scene of the wedding night. The prince, appropriately aroused, presses
forward to gain the object of his desire.
The Seasons of Madhumālatī’s Separation 283
She replies by invoking the necessity of secrecy and silence, the pledge to
which the lovers are bound:
Here the reference is to Manṣūr al-Hallāj, who lost his life by declaring the
greatest secret of Sufi thought, that of the human soul’s identity with God.
This great secret is also indicated by the reversal of the bārah-māsā in this
text, which goes further than any of the other premākhyāns in declaring God’s
need for man. Though her handmaidens continue to press Madhumālatī,
she will not reveal her secret. In a reference to the opening of Rūmī’s great
Mas̱navī, Mañjhan says:
reference that informs the logic of the narrative transformation of desire into
love. The Madhumālatī has a circular plot within which doubles and the inter-
sections between characters form the turning points of the narrative. The plain
text, ‘ibārah, conceals and reveals a play of referentiality, ishārah, as well as
allegory and exemplification, tams̱īl. The sanction for this poetics of sugges-
tion may perhaps be found in Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus’s ̱ statement in his
cosmological treatise about the kind of crooked vision that is needed to see an
object, for as he puts it, “Humans are the origin of a true reality that cannot
be found, for an object cannot see itself by itself.”6 In Mañjhan’s contribution
to the genre of the Hindavī Sufi romance there is no annihilation, no folding
back of the world into a mysterious Godhead. The only annihilation is of the
seeker’s own carnal nature, which gives him the concrete power simultane-
ously to stay in the world and to transcend it, echoing the Shattari silsilah’s
own cosmology and the practices that turned the novice into a shadowy mirror
for God.
9
Hierarchies of Response
the Sufi shaikhs and their disciples who composed the Hindavī romances also
constructed a hierarchy of response in which the Sufi novice was the most
ideal reader for their sensuous poems. The courtly and Sufi accounts of audi-
ence response show how these poems were performed and received within the
aristocratic and mystical cultures of the day. Moreover, the Chishti composers
of the genre recognized that the suggestive character of Hindavī verse and its
explicit imagery had a powerful effect on the listener by arousing his desire.
Careful control had to be exercised over the experience of listening to poetry,
so that the desire could be directed toward Allah. Sufi recognition of the power
of poetry was accompanied by elaborate glosses for correct interpretation and
procedures for training the self of the listener toward Allah. Descriptions of
the performance of Hindavī poetry in the courts of Afghan and Turkish nobles
and sultans, supplemented by evidence for the Chishti Sufi practice of samā‘
(musical audition), indicate how these romances were understood during the
period in which they were composed and allow us to sketch out the theory of
reading that ideal readers or listeners were expected to bring to bear on the
poems.
Not all readers are created equal. In fact, not all readers are readers;
some are listeners. In Indian theories of response, the ideal receiver was the
sahṛdaya, the “person with heart” who could open himself up to the meanings
and nuances of poetry, music, and dance. Aesthetic experience was seen as a
transsubjective communication of the rasa or juice of a performed or recited
piece. Evening gatherings (majlis, pl. majālis) for Persian and Hindavī poetry,
music, and dance were a common entertainment in the cultivated life of the
Delhi sultanate. Poetry was performed at such gatherings at aristocratic courts,
as well as in the context of the Sufi ritual audition of music (samā‘).
In both these contexts of reception, words had power. For instance, when
the prince in Qut"ban’s Mirigāvatī sets out as a yogi, he comes to a coun-
try whose king questions him about his ailment. He responds by feigning to
refuse, then launching into this description:
The yogi’s song makes the king and his populace faint and weep. Theories of
response from the period emphasize this affective power of poetry, whether
couched in terms of theories of audition or courtly protocols of presentation.
They also recognized the links between reading or listening to poetry and the
ascetic regimen.
These nightly musical parties were also part of official state celebrations and
public holidays, produced for the people who flocked to the court at Delhi and
its festive occasions.
The historian Baranī speaks, with nostalgia and regret, of the vanished par-
ties of his youth. The setting for his evocative picture of a courtly culture of
poetry, song, and dance is the reign of ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī’s uncle Jalāl al-dīn
Khaljī (d. 1296):
The ġhazal singers of the Sultan’s majlis (evening gathering) were the
noble Amīr and Ḥamīd Rājah. Every day Amīr Khusrau would bring
a new ġhazal to the gathering. The Sultan was in love (sheftah) with
the ġhazals of Amīr Khusrau and gave him much largesse. And the
cupbearers (sāqīs) of the Sultan’s majlis were the boys Haibat Khān
and Niz̤ām Kharīt"ah-dār. Yildiz was the head sāqī. They had beauty,
and loveliness, and miraculous grace (karishma), such that every ascetic
and devout worshipper who even glanced at them put his sacred thread
down in the middle of the town (bastī) and made his prayer-rug the
reed mat of the wine-shop! In the grip of obsessive love for those
matchless ones, destroyers of the repentance of the devout (taubah),
they became disgraced and notorious (rusvā). Of the musicians of the
Sultan, Muḥammad the Harpist played the harp (cang), Futūḥā . . . and
Nuṣrat Khātūn recited poetry (surūd) and from the beauty of just their
plain voices the birds came down from the air. The listeners would be
left without consciousness, their hearts would be aflame, and their lives
in tumults . . . wherever these [singers] looked, and every grace that they
displayed, and every flirtatious glance that they let loose, they spilled
open a mine of salt! And there were dancers in the majlis of the Sultan,
and everyone who saw the dancing, its marvellous grace and proud
airs, wanted to take his life and offer it up . . . [in short], the majlis of the
Sultan was one that cannot be seen outside of dreams.2
This is a vivid description of the aristocratic way to have fun in the Delhi
sultanate: good company, wine, beautiful people, poetry, song, and dance.
Saltiness, in the above passage, signifies sexiness, and the passage goes on
to describe the flirtations and amusements that surrounded the performance
of poetry. It is not unreasonable to assume that this was a model for aristo-
crats and others to emulate in their own evening gatherings for entertainment
(majālis).
Ḥusain Shāh Sharqī of Jaunpur, at whose court-in-exile Qut"ban composed
and recited the Mirigāvatī, was a poet and a noted patron of the distinctive
Sharqī style of architecture. He was also an accomplished musician.3 This is
290 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
the context for the end of prologue to the Mirigāvatī, in which Qut"ban describes
with immediacy the performance of his romance in front of Ḥusain Shāh:
he had received, and the royal camp proceeded without any merrymaking or
revelry.
On his way home through Avadh, however, he met an artful and beauti-
ful courtesan. She was “a piece of the moon, coquettish and wily, devastat-
ingly lovely, clad in a gold-embroidered robe, a gold-worked quiver of arrows at
her waist, . . . [and] a royal cap covering half her ears across her head.”6 Baranī
describes the meeting:
She laid herself on the ground in front of the sultan and recited
this verse in a dainty voice and with a heart-ravishing melody:
“If on my eye you’d place your foot,
I’d spread my eyes out on your path, that you may advance!”7
And then she said to the sultan: “King of the world, the opening
couplet of this ġhazal is more appropriate in your service, but
I am afraid and I cannot recite it!”
The sultan was amazed at this vision, and intoxicated by her words.
He brought his horse to a halt and said, “Recite it, and don’t
be afraid!” And that breaker of the resolve of many abstinent
ones said,
“O silver cypress! You are going into the countryside—
A virtuous promise-breaker you are, that you’re leaving without me!”8
The sultan immediately halted his advance and responded by exchanging some
aptly flirtatious verses with her. As he was drawn into her seductive converse,
he called for wine and companions and held a party of music and poetry right
there. When he returned to Delhi, the populace rejoiced because the sultan
had returned to his old ways. Vats of wine were broken open and the contents
distributed publicly; Delhi celebrated Kaiqubād’s return as the return of the
good times.
A later historian, ‘Abd al-Qādir Badāyūnī, also mentions the royal patron-
age of Hindavī and Persian verse in Delhi and its musical and recitative per-
formance in his account of the reign of Fīrūz Shāh Tuġhlaq (r. 1351–1388). He
notes that Fīrūz Shāh was interested in astrology and books of omens, some of
which he had translated from Sanskrit into Persian with the help of Brahmins.
Moreover, says Badāyunī, “I saw a few other books that had been translated
in the name of Sultan Fīrūz. Some of them were about the science of piṅgala,
that is, the art of music, and about the types of assemblies (akhāra) called
pātur-bāzī, and some were on other subjects.”9 Pātur-bāzī signifies frequent-
ing courtesans and their music and dance parties, while piṅgala is the art of
prosody. There are also some scattered verses and a ġhazal by Amīr Khusrau
about the cruelty of separation, spoken, in macaronic Persian and Hindavī
292 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
lines, from the perspective of an Indian woman who knows both languages.10
I reproduce a quatrain by him that mixes Persian and Hindavī in a way that
could have been appreciated only by a bilingual audience:
The verse, with its cleverly mixed lines, even reproduces the rustically charm-
ing Gujarati accent in the boy’s pronunciation, demanded for reasons of
scansion, of Turk as “Turuk.” In its lines one can read both an erotic and
a linguistic encounter, the mutual desire and fascination that is part of any
contact zone between people. Taken together, the ġhazal and the other maca-
ronic verses by Khusrau are the work of someone with a mixed background,
equally at home in the conjoint and interactive linguistic worlds of Persian
and Hindavī. Although he wrote panegyric after inflated panegyric about the
Islamic conquest of Hindustan in his professional career as court poet to sev-
eral successive sultans of Delhi, he was a half-breed who represented himself
both as an aristocratic Muslim poet with a Turkish father and as an Indian
with an Indian mother and proud of India’s unique beauty.
He had been connected with the imperial court for years, and he based his
administration on the traditions of the Sharī’ah, on statesmanship, and on
the law of equity and justice; his rule was said to have brought prosperity
and happiness to the common people.12 As the Ġhunyat al-Munyah notes, in a
musical verse, “No one sighed except over the melody of the cang (harp) / and
no one cried except over the singing of the tambour.”13 The verse suggests the
activities that filled the leisure hours of the utopia ensured by the rule of this
member of the Tuġhlaq provincial ruling élite.
When he was feeling the strain of hard work, this noble and discriminat-
ing patron refreshed his temperament (t"abī‘at) by finding “a refined or civi-
lized hour” (sā‘at-i lat"īf) to listen to the Persian samā‘ and the Hindavī sarūd,
which the text defines as a compound of voice, words, and melody.14 The func-
tion of music and poetry was to allure, to give pleasure to a temperament
sensitive to nuances of meaning and expression in voice and melody. Musical
evening gatherings for Persian and Hindavī poetry and dance were a common
practice in the cultivated life of the Delhi sultanate. Given this cultivation of
the pleasures of poetry, dance, and song, it is not surprising that the Ġhunyat
al-Munyah should have been written as a guide for provincial nobles at the
court of the official appointed to Gujarat from Delhi. The author goes on to
state the reasons for the composition of his work:
The companions of his assembly stated that the difficulties of the poetry
had defeated them, and from the surging up of the waves of that encir-
cling ocean of eloquence some pearls of meaning came to the surface
of the water. Sometimes they asked about the difficulties of the sound,
and from the quivering of the temperament of that emperor on the
throne of rhetoric the veil of the bride of music was separated thread
by thread. But due to the excessive fineness of each thread it could not
be separated from the weave.15
Therefore, the patron assigned the author the task of lifting “the veil from the
face of the heart-enchanting bride” and showing off her revelatory splendor
(jalvah). And so he translated into Persian, to instruct the companions of the
assembly, the relevant sections of Sanskrit works on poetics, music, and dance,
including Bharata’s Nāṭya-Śāstra, Mataṅga’s Bṛhaddeśī, Śārṅgadeva’s Saṅgīta-
Ratnākara, and Somabhūpāla’s Saṅgīta-Ratnāvalī. The Sanskrit sources listed
by the author include several works now lost to us in Sanskrit and known only
through their Persian summaries in the Ġhunyat al-Munyat.
Rasa theory, which we considered in detail in Chapter 2, was received into
Persian as part of an Indian aesthetic culture, a weave or pūd, in the terms of
the author of the Ġhunyat al-Munyah, of performed poetry, music, and dance.
294 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Thus the subtle poetic feelings evoked by each rasa and their appeal to the
temperament (t"ab) were carefully brought over into Persian, and the lyr-
ics that accompanied the music were understood in terms of rasa theory.
Similarly, in the section on dance, the instructions for understanding the
motions of the dancer’s eyes and her gestures translate entirely the system
of the rasas, the bhāvas or permanent emotions, and the transitory emo-
tions.17 The dancer becomes an aesthetic vehicle for the rasa of the piece she
is performing.
Moreover, aesthetic appreciation entailed a proper setting for a perfor-
mance, which is described as a large and open-roofed space with trees all
around it, perfumed with musk, ambergris, camphor, and rose. The audi-
ence should all sit facing the head of the assembly according to their social
rank (martabah). The connoisseurs who understand and appreciate music and
dance should sit on the left, and the performers must all be in front of them.
The sponsor and head for such an assembly (ṣāḥib-i majlis) should be gen-
erous, noble, and knowledgeable, and he should dress better than everyone
else. The companions who accompany him should be without excessive anger
and wrath, and be prepared to listen and judge each piece justly and calmly.
They should defer to the head of the assembly, as well as to better-informed
connoisseurs.18 The musicians, singing girls, and dancers who were the per-
formers in these assemblies often had special neighborhoods in large cities
like Delhi.
Hierarchies of Response 295
The Arab traveler Ibn Bat"t"ūta, who visited Delhi in the early fourteenth
century, describes the area around the Ḥauz-i Khāṣ in Delhi as follows:
Along its sides there are forty pavilions, and round about it live the
musicians. Their place is called Tarab Ābād (“City of Music”) and they
have there a most extensive bazaar, a Jāmi‘ mosque, and many other
mosques besides. I was told that the singing girls living there, of whom
there are a great many, take part in a body in the tarāwiḥ prayers in
these mosques during the month of Ramaḍān… . The male musicians
do the same.19
The performance of Persian and Hindavī poetry was thus part of the grand
occasions of courtly life, and public recitation part of the cultivated lifestyle
sponsored by the aristocracy. The patronage for these performers and their
assemblies frequently came from the court of the sultan and set the style for
cultivating poetry and music among lesser aristocrats and people of taste.
Persian literary critics have been suspicious of such a view of poetry and its
aura as “licit magic,” with the power to transform people, to make the poet a
rival to God, the Creator, and they have distinguished it carefully from the black
magic (siḥr al-ḥarām) that can be used to control jinns, influence events, and so
on. Much of al-Jurjānī’s analysis of literature was focused on figures of speech
and their precise workings, but “he also looked at them in terms of literary his-
tory and with a view to their ethical implications, i. e., he raised the question
of their veracity.” If poetry was based on lies, exaggeration, and word play, what
accounted for its power? The suspicion lingered, in Arabic and Persian literary
criticism, that the effectiveness of poetry was linked to its degree of departure
from the truth (“The best poetry is the most untruthful”).22
Bürgel points out that what was at stake in this question was the very sta-
tus of fiction, which the later Arabic scholar of poetics, the thirteenth-century
Hāzim al-Qartājanni, called ikhtilāq or creation:
Creative poetry, he said, may . . . remain within the limits of the possi-
ble, in which case it is hardly different from poetry based on experi-
ence. Transgression of these limits is, according to Qartajanni, achieved
mainly in two ways: one is exaggeration, i. e., by means of hyperbole;
the other is by talking of things that do not exist except in fantasy, such
as a man with a lion’s claw, etc.23
Bürgel goes on to demonstrate how Persian poets made the long narrative
poem, the mas̱navī, the stage on which to represent neo-Platonic Sufi ideas
about the perfect man (insān al-kāmil) and to transmute ordinary reality into
a poetic medium with multiple planes of meaning. Both theoretically and in
terms of literary history, this perspective is important because of the prestige
of Persian in India and the frequent citation of Persian poets such as ‘At"t"ār,
Sanā’ī, Niz"āmī, and Rūmī in the discourses of Indian Sufi Shaikhs.24 These
were the models for the Indian Islamic traditions that émigré and newly
converted Muslims forged in the sultanate courts and provincial centers of
Hindustan.
Bürgel uses Niz"āmī, the most famous poet of Persian romance, to provide
persuasive examples of these points. His discussion of the poetic manipulation
of words and elaborate rhetorical plays is particularly subtle when he shows
how a master poet such as Niz" āmī can create a suggestive poetic texture:
The passage is taken from the early part of the story of Khusrau va Shīrīn,
where the sultan and his ravishing bride are enjoying a spring frolic in a
green flowering meadow. As Bürgel notes, “Features of fancy and of reality
are intertwined here almost imperceptibly. Nevertheless, the imagery is not
random: images of love, marriage, pregnancy and child rearing, reaching from
metaphor to reality, have been chosen quite deliberately for the loving couple
going to enjoy the scenery.”26 The suggestiveness of the images, their textured
presentation, and Niz" āmī’s ability to imply psychological and aesthetic realities
beyond the literal level of expressed meaning have made the Khamsah one of
the most widely imitated and read oeuvres in the Persian-speaking world.
The magical power of poetry and mystical symbolism to reach people and
the suggestiveness of Niz" āmī’s romantic imagery are not far removed from
the Sanskrit critics’ painstaking analysis of literary and generic appropriateness
(aucitya), the power of rasa and suggestion (dhvani), and the infinite possible
variety of poetic universes. In the Indian formulation of “how newness enters
the world,” freshness of poetic invention is never a problem. New poetic
universes, in the words of Abhinavagupta’s Locana (L), can be produced and
extended infinitely because of the power of poetic imagination:
versification and celebrating the poet’s capacity to create surprising and new
fictional universes, literary artifacts constructed for aesthetic pleasure. Although
the deliberations of Arab and Persian literary critics, the romances of Niz"āmī,
and the theoretical treatises and poetic manuals of critics provide important
models for understanding the sources and allure of the Hindavī poems, they
cannot be applied directly to Hindavī poetry. We must therefore turn again to
the prologues of the genre to understand how the Hindavī poets defined poet-
ics with these earlier models in view, as well as how they placed their literary
efforts socially and ideologically. In their addresses to courtly patrons and to
readers of their poems, the poets of these romances created a theory of read-
ing, that is, a theory about what made the Hindavī poems both intelligible and
a source of pleasure to audiences.
The prologue of the Cāndāyan describes the patrons of the Hindavī poets
as ideal reading subjects, whose capacity to read the texts properly is fun-
damentally tied to their ability to perceive multiple meanings in poetry. The
Khān-i Jahān Jūnā Shāh, Dā’ūd’s ideal reader and patron, used this talent to
confound pandits, scholars of Sanskrit:
The fourteen sciences are a reference to the caturdaśa vidyā, the traditional
branches of Sanskrit learning that include the Vedas, Purāṇas, and Upapurāṇas.
Whatever the state of Jūnā Shāh’s knowledge of the Sanskrit classics, what is
important here is the ideal reader’s ability to find multiple meanings in poetry,
an attribute also important to connoisseurs of Arabic and Persian poetry.
Similarly, Qutban" in his Mirigāvatī addresses his patron Ḥusain Shāh
Sharqī as the ideal reader, who shared the poet’s understanding of language.
The move is clear in the following verse from the prologue, which the manu-
scripts entitle “ṣifat paḍhne kī” (“description of reading”):
"
The “scripture” or purāṇa that Qutban refers to, in the Hindavī reinscription
of Islamic religious terms, is the Qur’ān. Why was it necessary for the ideal
300 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
He has chosen the sweet and pleasurable desī or local language, thus distanc-
ing himself from Sanskrit (ārajā < āryā) and Apabhraṃśa, even while drawing
on older literary and metrical conventions.
Qut"ban’s stance toward Persian and Sanskritic models of poetic under-
standing is also distinctive, as is evident from his envoi to the love story:
The poet assumes a readership that understands the various rasas that consti-
tute the soul of poetry. He also assumes a knowledge of six languages, whose
identity is not certain but must surely include Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Turkish,
and some regional languages. With respect to Sanskrit, Qutban " has taken some
liberties with the classical model of the nine rasas. He uses the emotions of
singār (< śṛṅgāra, love) and bīr (< vīra, valor) in conformity with Sanskrit aes-
thetics, but in his desī articulation he adds a new rasa, the mood of asceticism
"
(joga < yoga). Qutban’s story, indeed the entire genre, explores the connection
between Sufi asceticism and eroticism. His use of joga here reimagines Sufi
ideology within an Indian landscape and reshapes rasa poetics in Sufi terms.
Here the distinctive double distancing that is characteristic of the genre
comes into play. In framing his aesthetics of asceticism and eroticism, Qutban "
is not limited to adapting and rejecting classical Indian models. His story is
different also from the versions that he may have drawn on in Persian or
Turkish. His reference to the circulation of ideas and stories between Hindavī
and Persian draws attention to the existence of a separate Hindavī literary and
linguistic identity, which a multilingual reader can understand and put in its
302 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
proper place. Such a reader would not only be familiar with Persian theories
of ma‘ānī and the Indian poetics of rasa, but would appreciate Qut"ban’s fash-
ionably ethnic desī poetics and colorful local imagery.
The later poets of the genre develop this classicizing Hindavī literary tra-
dition, and the many implications of the term rasa, into a genre of great
sophistication. In his prologue to the Padmāvat, Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī uses
graphic imagery in speaking of the centrality of the hidden meanings of his
poem and the rasa of love:
Afsānah-i Shāhān (“Tale of the Kings”), a chronicle of life in the Afghan inter-
regnum that has come to us in the form of the recollections of a retired Afghan
soldier:
Within this mixed and multilingual courtly milieu, which included Vaiṣṇava
poets such as Sūrdās, poetic performance was seen as a cultivated pleasure
to be savored with betel (pān) and enjoyed in opulent assemblies. Mañjhan
recited his poem in front of his noble patron and his courtiers against the tap-
estried and khus-scented walls of the Sūrī court. And Mañjhan’s prologue con-
tains the most developed set of frameworks for understanding his poem. He
sketches out three key elements of his aesthetic: the ideology of love (prema),
the importance of ascetic practice, and the privileged status of language in dis-
seminating the truth embodied in poetry.
Mañjhan’s view of love can be traced back to Persian mas̱navī prologues,
which frequently include short philosophical reflections on love or poetry. For
instance, Amīr Khusrau’s Shīrīn va Khusrau contains the following lines in
praise of love or ‘ishq:
These sentiments are echoed in several verses about love in Mañjhan’s prologue.
He asserts its importance in the creation of the world in Sufi cosmology:
The verse refers to the line popular among Sufis: “I was a hidden treasure,
and longed to be known.” From Allah’s love for seeing His own beauty, the
universe came into being as a mirror for Allah’s face. Love and beauty (rūpa)
are central to the aesthetics of the Madhumālatī.
Mañjhan’s prologue explicitly links this aesthetic of the rasa of love with
the path of asceticism. Among his group of Shattari Sufis, initiates practiced
an intensive regimen of fasting and vegetarianism, supererogatory prayers,
and a program of yogic exercises and letter mysticism. Mañjhan describes the
method and goal of their spiritual practice:
The terms nirguṇa (the attributeless Absolute), nirañjana (the Pure or Untainted
One), and sūnā (the Void) describe the place where the seeker can remain
absorbed in Allah. The deep cave, or fathomless void, is the ground for reveal-
ing the mystery of the self to itself. The allusion is to Ibn ‘Arabī’s theory of the
unity of all existence (vaḥdat al-vujūd), in which created forms are refractions
of divine essence but need spiritual practice in order to realize their identity-
in-difference with divinity.
Hierarchies of Response 305
In the verse cited above, the poet also uses the terms sahaja bheda, the
“simple or spontaneous mystery,” and sahaja-samādhi, the “mystic union of
Sahaja.” In Kabīr and the other devotional poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the term sahaja refers to the soul’s “self-born” unity with the attrib-
uteless or nirguṇa Rāma, the transcendence in immanence to which the seeker
has to awaken.37 Among the Sufi poets, sahaja represents the internalization of
the Sufi paradox of the identity, yet radical difference, of the being of divin-
ity and human beings. This carries through into Mañjhan’s view of language,
which encapsulates the paradox:
Language becomes the currency of immortality for the poet, since it encom-
passes the divine and the human. Words last, though humans are perishable;
the word, like divinity, is perpetually alive because it is refracted in every
heart.
This topos is directly traceable to Persian prologues, as for instance the
address to discourse (sukhan) in Niz"āmī’s Haft Paikar. Here Niz"āmī focuses
on the creative power of the word “Kun” or “Be,” with which Allah created the
heavens and the earth:
Mañjhan takes these sentiments a step further in his Hindavī prologue. In the
very next verse, he makes the word the foundation of all poetic discourse, but
then he continues:
Rasa is the pleasure that listeners or readers take in stories as well as the
lovers’ consummation of desire in love (prema). The Sufi cosmology within
which this aesthetic of prema-rasa is set allows the Hindavī Sufi poets to refer
suggestively to the relation of mirrored desire between God and creatures. It
is in this sense that the Hindavī romances are susceptible to interpretation in
multiple ways. The next section of this chapter explores their performance and
reception within the context of Sufi shrines.
The promise and pledge that I made to God (on the Day of Creation)
was in Purbi rhyme.
"
—Nizām al-dīn Auliyā’39
legal scholars, and the Chishtis had often to defend their practice in court.
Yet the practice of samā‘ maintained the Hindavī romances within a context
of reception with its own complex and logocentric theory of reading, as well
as within an ascetic regimen based on fasting, prayer, and rigorous spiritual
exercises.
The conventions of address to the Sufi masters in the poems reflect the
basic principles of the mystical agenda within which they were articulated.
Each of the four Hindavī Sufi romances is dedicated to a Sufi pīr or spiritual
guide, and sometimes to one or more spiritual lineages that were especially
important to the poet. This was a Persian convention reimagined in Hindavī
verse.
The shaikh holds the spiritual jurisdiction (vilāyah) and mastery over both
this world and the invisible world of the hereafter. It is through him that
devotees have access to God, since it is his closeness to Allah in the divine
court that allows him to be a conduit for grace or barakah. Khusrau similarly
extols these qualities in his Shīrīn va Khusrau, where the grace of the shaikh’s
court (taufīq-i dargāh) is the source of all territorial authority (vilāyah-dārī; SK
250). The poet uses the terms of political authority, but supersedes them by
Hierarchies of Response 309
showing that the shaikh is a pure human mirror for the perfection embodied
in the Prophet. The shaikh’s piety, beauty, and attributes make him superior
to any worldly ruler.
Maulānā Dā’ūd adapts this convention of the praise of the spiritual pre-
ceptor to express his own devotion to his guide in Hindavī. His teacher was
Shaikh Zain al-dīn Chishti, the nephew of Shaikh Nasīr al-dīn Maḥmūd
‘Chirāġh-i Dihlī,’ the successor to Shaikh Niz" ām al-dīn Auliyā’. Dā’ūd praises
him in the following terms:
Shaikḥ Zain al-dīn, who enabled Dā’ūd to climb into “the boat of faith,” was
Shaikḥ Naṣīr al-dīn’s sister’s son, and he is mentioned in a number of epi-
sodes in the Khair al-Majālis of Ḥamīd Qalandar and other Chishti works.40
He was the caretaker of the shrine in Delhi, but his competition with Sayyid
Muḥammad Gesūdarāz, his uncle’s prize pupil, led to a dispute that ended
when the spiritually charged material relics (tabarrukāt) that indicated succession
and authority were interred with the body of the great shaikh. The conflict was
part of the frequent pattern of rivalry in which the lineal descendants of Sufi
shaikhs argued with their spiritual disciples over succession. The possession of
the tabarrukāt was often the key to making any claims to authority.41 Although
Shaikh Zain al-dīn took care of the shrine in Delhi after the death of Shaikh
Naṣīr al-dīn Maḥmūd, the interment of his uncle’s relics effectively ended the
chain of succession.
Qut"ban’s terms of praise express the idea of the pīr or spiritual guide as the
pure teacher for both the worlds, purifier of all the devotee’s sins. The true
path that he teaches is the way to enlightenment, if one’s intentions are pure.
The identity of this Shaikh Buḍḍhan, whose name means simply “the
eldest one,” is a matter of some controversy. S. A. A. Rizvi notes that Shaikh
Buḍḍhan was “the disciple of Shaikh Muhammad Isa Taj of Jaunpur. Although
Shaikh Isa Taj was a distinguished Chishti, Shaikh Buḍḍhan seems to have
been initiated into both the Chishtiyya and Suhrawardiyya orders.”42 S. M.
Pandey has suggested that Qutban " was affiliated to a Chishti Shaikh Buḍḍhan,
a “great musician, [who] lived during the time of Husain Shāh Sharqī in
Barnawa in Meerut district near Delhi.”43 Barnawa’s proximity to Delhi puts the
town quite far from Ḥusain Shāh’s court in exile in Bihar after the Lodis took
Jaunpur in 1483, and directly in the path of the invading armies of the Lodis
and the Sharqis. Moreover, Shaikh Buḍḍhan’s solely Chishti affiliation makes
"
Qutban’s discipleship with him an unlikely possibility.44 In any case, Qut"ban
drew on mystical ideas common to both the Chishtis and the Suhrawardis in
his romance, as well as on the model of the Cāndāyan of Maulānā Dā’ūd.
Both Dā’ūd and Qutban" compress their panegyrics to their spiritual guides
into a single verse unit of a caupāī-dohā, five short rhymed pairs of lines with a
longer couplet at the end. The next two poets of the genre, Malik Muḥammad
Jāyasī and Mīr Sayyid Mañjhan Rajgīrī, use the model to express their admira-
tion in much more elaborate terms. Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī addresses his
Padmāvat to two separate spiritual lineages from which the poet derived instruc-
tion, the Mahdavis and the Chishtis. He begins with the great fifteenth-century
Chishti Shaikh Ashraf Jahāngīr Simnānī (d. 1436/1437),45 a famous peripatetic
Sufi who traveled throughout Bengal and Jaunpur in search of a vilāyah:
Since the lifespan of this Chishti shaikh is separated from his own by sev-
eral decades, a heated controversy rages about Jāyasī’s precise link with Ashraf
Jahāngīr.46 The latter’s guide was Shaikh Alā’ al-Ḥaqq, among whose disciples
was Shaikh Nūr Qutb-i " ‘Ālam of Pandua.47 The prologue to the Padmāvat men-
tions three disciples of Ashraf Jahāngīr, a certain Ḥājī Shaikh, called a “flaw-
less jewel,” and Shaikh Mubārak and Shaikh Kamāl, referred to as “shining
lamps” (P 19). Shaikh Kamāl had been converted to Islam by Ashraf Jahāngīr
but formerly wandered the world as Kamāl Jogī. This points to the constant
interaction of Sufis and yogis on the cultural landscape of northern India, on
the territories of the doab and central and eastern India, the land of Hindustan.
These two sets of complex spiritual lineages were constantly responding to
each other and competing for devoted followers and ascetically minded disci-
ples. In addition to the spiritual descendants of Shaikh Ashraf Jahāngīr, going
all the way to Kamāl Jogī or Shaikh Kamāl, the prologue gives a second Sufi
genealogy in the person of a Mahdavi Shaikh named Burhān, mentioned as
the actual pīr of Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī.48
The last poet under consideration, Mīr Sayyid Mañjhan Rājgīrī, addresses
his praises to Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ Gvāliyārī (d. 1562), the poet’s teacher
and the fourth in a line of Shattari Sufi masters.49 Shaikh Muḥammad was
intimately involved in politics at the Mughal courts of Gwalior and Agra. The
verses addressed to him emphasize his years of long asceticism and his impor-
tance in defining Sufi practice for seekers at his hospice:
The disciple whom the guru nurtures is the king of all four aeons.
[MM 14.1–6].
The poet notes two crucial aspects of the shaikh’s power: the transformative
power of his gaze (disṭi) and the figurative kingship of even a disciple of his.
The first of these refers to the power of the gaze of the spiritual guide, which
can reach within a disciple’s being and change his way of being in the world.
The disciple can then triumph over “death,” a reference to the Sufi experience
of fanā, self-annihilation on the path, and the stage of subsistence after anni-
hilation, baqā’. Here the poet uses the Hindavī disṭi to approximate the Persian
tavajjuh, the absorbed attention of the shaikh that transforms the conscious-
ness of the disciple. Such a disciple becomes not merely an earthly king like
the one the poet has been praising, but king over all the ages of the world.
Losing oneself, however, involves giving oneself up to the authority of the
shaikh. Among the Shattaris, as among other orders of Sufis, annihilating
one’s being in the teacher (fanā fi’l-shaikh) was an important step along the
Sufi path:
Here, as elsewhere, the Sufi distinction between the interior (bāt"in) meaning
and exterior (z"āhir) form is invoked to comment on the double reality of the
spiritual guide. The shaikh has a visible worldly form and an invisible signifi-
cance in the spiritual cosmos of the Shattaris. From this station he transcends
the attainments and powers of both kings and saints, and is thus the focal
point of Shattari asceticism. As spiritual guides and teachers for the Hindavī
poets, these shaikhs from the Chishti, Suhrawardi, and Shattari silsilahs for-
mulated different ascetic regimens for their disciples and interacted in com-
plex ways with political rulers and each other, asserting their superior claims
to spiritual authority in their own spheres of influence.
What did Hindavī poetry mean to them, and how did they interpret it?
One of the earliest descriptions comes from the fourteenth-century discourses
of Sharf al-dīn Manerī, the Firdausī Shaikh of Maner Sharif in Bihar.50 The
Firdausīs were a local branch of the Suhravardis who had also adopted the
practice of samā‘ formulated by the Chishtis, despite the wider rivalry between
the two silsilahs. The shaikh emphasizes the ability to listen receptively and to
Hierarchies of Response 313
respond to poetry as part of the Sufi training of the self. After the noonday
prayers, the assembly in the shrine listened to the singing of first Persian
verses, then Hindavī ones. The shaikh commented on the quality of response
the Hindavī verses elicited:
This recognition of the power of Hindavī verse to stir the passions because of
its graphic and lush descriptions is coupled with anxiety over its uncontrolled
use, which would lead to unbridled sensuality.
Although the practice of samā‘ was common to many Sufi silsilahs, the
Chishtis in the thirteenth and fourteenth century were the distinctive formula-
tors of the practice and the first Hindavī Sufi poets. The controversial prac-
tice of samā’ allowed the Chishti Sufis to link sympathetic response to poetry
to the taste (ẕauq) for things spiritual. The Chishtis of the Delhi sultanate
were the inheritors of a system of musical theory in which music and ecstasy
(vajd/ḥāl) were means to spiritual advancement. As Bruce Lawrence has put it
in a pioneering article,
[I]n the Indian environment from the period of the Delhi Sultanate
through the Mughal era samā’ assumed a unique significance as the
integrating modus operandi of the Chishtī silsilah. Chishtī apologists
adopted a distinctive attitude to samā’: far from being an embarrass-
ment to them, as the literature sometimes suggests, samā’ was aggres-
sively defended as an essential component of the spiritual discipline
or ascesis incumbent on all Sufis. The Chishtī espousal of samā’ also
served a valuable practical function: it separated the Chishtī saints from
the Suhrawardīya, their major mystical rivals in the pre-Mughal era of
Indian Islam, and also opposed them to the ‘ulamā, those too comfort-
able spokesmen for official, i. e., government sanctioned, Islam. Samā’
became, if not the monopoly of the Chishtīya, the preeminent sym-
bol crystallizing their position vis-à-vis other Indo-Muslim leadership
groups.52
Though the Chishtis were not free from their own dependence on court
patronage, their enthusiastic and longstanding espousal of Hindavī and Persian
314 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
samā‘ against all rivals and opponents allowed them to make major advances
in terms of musical and poetic theory.
In the year 772 h. (1370 a.d.), Khān-i-jahān the Vazīr, died, and his
son Jūnā Shāh obtained that title; and the book Chandāyan which is a
Masnavī in the Hindī language relating the loves of Lūrak and Chāndā,
a lover and his mistress, a very graphic work, was put into verse in
his honour by Maulānā Dā’ūd. There is no need for me to praise it
because of its great fame in that country, and Maḳhdūm Shaiḳh Taqīu-
d-Dīn Wāiz" Rabbānī used to read some occasional poems of his from
the pulpit, and the people used to be strangely influenced by hearing
them, and when certain learned men of that time asked the Shaiḳh
saying, what is the reason for this Hindī Masnavī being selected? he
answered, the whole of it is divine truth and pleasing in subject, wor-
thy of the ecstatic contemplation of devout lovers, and conformable to
the interpretation of some of the Āyats of the Qur’ān, and the sweet
singers of Hindūstān. Moreover by its public recitation human hearts
are taken captive.53
In explaining the appeal of Hindavī poetry, the phrase used in the Persian
to describe the Cāndāyan is ḥālat-bakhsh (“worthy of ecstatic contemplation,”
or more literally, “ecstasy-inducing”). The shaikh’s words explaining his selec-
tion of this text are crucial: all of it is divine truth (ḥaqā’iq), worthy of ecstatic
contemplation by devout lovers (muvāfiq-i vajdān-i ahl-i shauq-va ‘ishq) despite
its graphic nature. Unlike the Persian mas̱navīs, Hindavī is seen as a sensu-
ous, erotically charged language with a powerful poetic tradition that the Sufis
Hierarchies of Response 315
have discovered and adapted. Further, it is recognized that the Hindavī verses
describing feminine beauty excite desire in the listeners, and can be justified
only by adducing Qur’ānic referents. Thus the shaikh explains the Sufistic
interpretation of the text in terms of tafsīr (Qur’ānic interpretation): devout
lovers, or more accurately, the people of desire (shauq) and love (‘ishq), can
appreciate the poem because it is conformable (mut"ābiq) to certain Qur’ānic
verses.
This passage implies a theory of reading in which erotic attributes and pas-
sages were transferred to the divine beloved, the distant Allah whose nearness
the Chishtis sought so assiduously to cultivate. Audition attracted, because of
its controversial nature, many theoretical statements in defense of a practice
that the orthodox jurists condemned as forbidden to true believers. Already
in classic manuals of Sufi practice such as Suhravardī’s ‘Avārif al-Ma‘ārif and
‘Alī ‘Usmān al-Hujvīrī’s Kashf al-Mahjūb (“The Unveiling of the Hidden”), the
controversial practice of listening to music and poetry had been defended as
a means to a spiritual state of ecstasy.54 As Shihāb al-dīn Abū Ḥafs ‘Umar
Suhravardī (d. 1234) put it in his textbook of practice, listening to music entails
a physical and emotional response:
Samā‘ is audition, about which believers are not divided. It has been
decided about the (ideal) listener that he is a man of intellect and rightly
guided. Samā‘ is that which, influencing his heat with the coolness of
faith, becomes the cause of a rain of tears from his eyes. Sometimes
these are tears of sorrow and regret, because there is heat in sorrow
and regret. Sometimes these are tears of enjoyment (ẕauq) and passion
(shauq), and passion is also hot by nature. When samā‘ endowed with
these qualities affects a man of heart who is full of the coolness of
faith, the opposition (of heat and cold) makes tears flow.55
This bodily theory of heat and cold and the condensation that results from
their commingling indicates the physicality of the response to poetry and
music. It is part of a set of attitudes toward hearing that place listening to
the Qur’ān at the top, and then extend the praiseworthiness of this practice
to the permissibility of listening to poetry and music. Thus, ‘Alī bin ‘Us̱mān
al-Hujvīrī (d. ca. 1071) begins his chapter on audition with these words: “The
most beneficial audition to the mind and the most delightful to the ear is that
of the Word of God, which all believers and unbelievers, human beings and
peris alike, are commanded to hear. It is a miraculous quality of the Koran
that one never grows weary of reading and hearing it.”56
From the miraculous quality of listening to the Qur’ān, the Sufi commen-
tators extended the powers of hearing to many sorts of objects. They drew
316 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
on a body of musical theory that acknowledged the power of song and music
to move human beings and made distinctions that were based on listeners’
responses to music.
There were independent treatises about the practice of samā‘, and the anec-
dotal compendia and discourses of Sufi shaikhs mentioned it. As Lawrence
points out, assessing the available literature,
The subtle or delicate things (lat"ā’if) hidden in poetry, and the spiritual myster-
ies attached to them, are brought up in the heart as part of the training of a
novice. The power of the voice is such that it attracts the heart toward what
is sung, and it is this power that the Sufis sought to use in their spiritual
practice.
In his discussion of the two Chishti treatises, Lawrence emphasizes this
link of music with emotion. The Uṣūl al-Samā‘ (“Principles of Samā‘”) of
Faḳhr al-dīn Zarrādī is a detailed consideration of aspects of samā‘, and its
argument proceeds along well-defined lines:
Hierarchies of Response 317
Other Chishti sources define music and its effect on its audience in ways
that echo this idea of the ecstatic movement of the listener overcome by the
music. Muḥammad bin Mubārak ‘Alavī Kirmānī begins a detailed chapter
on audition in his Siyar al-Auliyā’, a compendium of anecdotes and maxims
relating to practice, by citing the great Chishti Shaikh Farīd al-dīn Ganj-i
Shakar (d. 1265) on the subject: “Samā‘ is a pleasant voice that makes the
hearts of the listeners tremble and ignites the fire of passion in their chests.
If it is out of control it is seen as right, and if within limits, it is diseased
(ma‘lūl) samā‘.”60 The power of music to cross bounds and the potential it has
for exciting passions that can then be trained toward God is underscored by
the other major work on samā‘, Ḥamīd al-dīn’s Risālah-i Samā‘ (“Treatise on
Samā‘”), a brief meditation on the benefits of audition. As Lawrence points
out, Ḥamīd al-dīn links samā‘ with vajd or ecstasy; they are both “wings
of the spirit by which it takes flight till it reaches the Divine Presence.”61
There are numerous instances of Sufis expiring in an ecstasy of samā‘, the
most famous of these being Qut"b al-dīn Baḳhtiyār Kākī, who died in a samā‘
assembly in Delhi in 1232.
The perceived capacity of samā‘ to break all limits, its potential for spiritual
advancement, and the dangers posed by the sensual effects of poetry occa-
sioned fierce controversy and a focus on the variety of audience response.
Chishti theorists answered the legal opposition to samā‘ by formulating a clas-
sificatory scheme distinguishing lawful from unlawful effects of music. Thus
al-Hujvīrī resolved the controversial question by appealing to the effect of audi-
tion on the mind: “Its lawfulness depends on circumstances and cannot be
asserted absolutely: if audition produces a lawful effect on the mind, then it is
318 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
(1) he should listen to sama‘ with a conscious ear (gosh-i hosh) and he
should pay little attention to and restrain his eyes from looking at the
other listeners, he should not yawn and stretch and throw his head up
in thought, and he should restrain his heart from clapping and danc-
ing and movement and other inclinations; (2) he should not snap his
fingers or cry, but instead restrain his spirit and not cry for sorrow or
dance just for the sake of movement; (3) he should aim for a sameness
Hierarchies of Response 319
Although audition is meant to make the seeker mindful of the distant but
all-powerful Allah, it is in a communal setting that his ecstasy becomes true
ecstasy (vajd-i sādiq). The seeker’s quest for nearness to God was thus tied
to a social setting where his affective responses were on display and could
be channeled through prayer and ascesis into what his Sufi teacher thought
appropriate for him. Moreover, the affective response, by being socially visible,
was implicitly tied to a whole set of Chishti attitudes to the interpretation of
performed poetry and music.
The goal of poetry that was sung in a beautiful voice was to open the
seeker’s subjectivity to a succession of spiritual states and stations. As Niz" ām
al-dīn Auliyā’ put it in a famous passage in the Favā’id al-Fu’ād, these are the
benefits of listening to recitation of the Qur’ān and to music:
Each part of the body is here matched to an appropriate state in the invis-
ible world. The scheme of the spiritual effects of audition is part of a Chishti
cosmology in which God is of a different essence from the world and hence
inaccessible, yet part of a cosmic unity of being (vaḥdat al-vujūd). However,
the successive states of reflection or refraction of this essence (ẕāt) in increas-
ingly concrete realms are available to the seeker as part of his mystical journey
through the stages of love and asceticism.
320 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
One day Haz" rat Niz" ām al-dīn Auliyā’, the sultan of shaikhs, was sitting
on the threshold of his house and Sāmit the singer sang in front of
him. It had an effect on the sultan of shaikhs, and tears and ecstasy
overcame him. None of his friends was there, and therefore when he
began dancing those present were worried. Meanwhile a man came in
from outside, put his head on the ground, then began to dance. The
sultan of shaikhs did the same thing in conformity, and for a while
they enjoyed the taste of samā‘. When the gathering was over the man
went outside again. The shaikh said, “Look for that man from the invis-
ible world.” Men went out all together in search of that dear one left
and right, but they could not find him.67
Music thus reveals the truths of hidden meanings (ma‘ānī) to each bodily
sense. Whether they are the subtleties of the realities (ḥaqā’iq) of Allah, or
their physical analogues in the sensible world, the response to music unites
all the levels of reality known to Sufi theory. The theory of reading implied
by this spiritual principle unites for Sufi readers all the disparate images and
details of sung poetry, eliciting a deep response within the listening self.
Hierarchies of Response 321
The transfer of the words expressing the qualities of God is such that
it always happens from the apparent words towards something that is
appropriate (munāsib) to the words. From the command of God the
Majestic and Supreme then the words of the couplets are as if alle-
gorical (ims̱ālī); the aim of the allegory is the thing which is thought
appropriate and the place of use of that allegory is not the place of the
external meaning—this is the meaning.71
Thus the true meaning of poetry is precisely its ability to present to listeners
and readers the likeness (mis̱l) of Allah. This mis̱l (or tams̱īl), an allegory or
exemplum of invisible spiritual meanings, was more important than the literal
or “external” meaning. To understand poetry, on the Chishti path, was to open
oneself up to the hidden spiritual processes of the cosmos and witness within
oneself the unfolding of divine essence into the world. Signs of the invisible
divine presence, according to the Chishtis, were sent to seekers in the revealed
books as well as in the words of the Prophet, and finally in the actions and
words of their Sufi shaikhs, their own preceptors.
322 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
Such a strong principle of reading poetry, directed only toward the single
goal, Allah, requires that the creation of endless meanings by poets and read-
ers be severely curtailed and subject to a single interpretive rule. This applies
to poetry in all the languages used by the Chishtis: poetry’s power is here
redefined as its ability to represent the theoretically unrepresentable absolute
through language. The power of samā‘ is due to its overwhelming capacity to
remind men of their link with Allah:
Then Badr al-dīn Ġhaznavī asked Shaikh Niz" ām al-dīn, “Where does
the unconsciousness (bīhūshī) of the people who listen to samā‘ come
from?” He answered, “They heard the sound of ‘Am I not your Lord?’
and become unconscious. From that day forward a certain unconscious-
ness is centered in them, and whenever they hear samā‘, that uncon-
sciousness that is within them has an effect and produces amazement
and movement.”72
Certain people are overcome by ḥāl (ecstasy) in samā‘ such that they
have no decorum (tamīz), and some, while they feel a mystical state,
are not overcome and their perfection is precisely in this that they are
not overcome. Some people become so heedless in samā‘ that even if
an iron nail were to go into their foot they would not know it, while
others are so present to Allah in samā‘ that even if a flower-petal were
underfoot they would know it. This is the perfected stage they are in.73
Hierarchies of Response 323
The Chishti notion of the perfected listener, who would feel even a flower petal
underfoot, shifted the taste for poetry from a relation between text and audi-
ence to a relation between the seeker and Allah. Thus the Chishti commenta-
tors exploited to the full the inherent capacity of rasa to excite a response in
the sensitive listener.
This responsiveness entailed a recognition of the power of Hindavī verse in
its own right, yet yoked its effects to an ascetic regimen based on the Qur’ān
and Islamic traditions and teachings. The following passage from the Favā’id
al-Fu’ād about the spiritual discipleship of Shaikh Aḥmad Nahrvānī attests to
the Chishti move to turn Hindavī to the service of mystic practice and belief:
This episode of conversion proves the ideological superiority of Islam, but also
the enduring appeal of the Hindavī verses and melodies that in other contexts
of performance were even equated with Qur’ānic verses. Hindavī poetry and
music (sarūd-i Hindavī), therefore, was a distinctive part of Chishti Sufi prac-
tice. The ascetic imagery and erotic allure of Hindavī were used to express
the Sufi ideology of fasting, prayer, and ascesis, all aimed at gaining access
to the invisible spiritual cosmos (‘ālam-i ġhaib). An invisible divinity hedged
ordinary physical events and shaped causes and effects in mysterious ways.
The aesthetic goal of the Sufi poets and their audiences was to catch the scent
of this invisible world, undergirded by adepts and the mysterious divine will.
In performances in shrines, the Sufis sought to contain the proliferation of
multiple meanings implicit in poetry by interpreting the erotic resonances of
Hindavī poetry as referring to Allah.
But the authority of interpretive communities is not absolute, and the
Chishti projections of the ideal reader as receptive Sufi novice should be sup-
plemented by recalling the celebration of polysemy that is part of the genre.
Hindavī poetry circulated beyond the court and khānaqāh, to be read with-
out courtly ceremonial or Sufi glosses. One later account of readership comes
from a very unusual document, the autobiography of a Srimal Jain merchant,
Banārsīdās. Writing in 1641 at the age of forty-five, Banārsīdās describes his
life’s vicissitudes in a book that he called Ardhakathānaka (“Half a Tale”), since
he believed at this point that he had spent half his allotted lifespan. Banārsīdās
324 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
periodically lost all his money in risky ventures and spent parts of his life in
destitute poverty. At one such juncture, he entertained a number of persons
in his house by reciting and singing large portions of the eastern Hindavī or
Avadhi love stories:
I had only a few coins left. I would remain sitting at home, and stopped
visiting the market-place. But I spent my evenings singing and reciting
poems. A small group of about ten or twenty people used to visit me
regularly and to them I sang Madhumalati and Mirgavati, two grand
books. My visitors continually praised my singing and conversation. My
evenings were thus spent pleasantly, though I was so miserably poor
that I had nothing to eat the next morning. One of my regular lis-
teners was a halwai who sold kachauris—a kind of stuffed, deep-fried
pancake. I bought large quantities of kachauris from this man’s shop
on credit. . . . I ate kachauris for all my meals, breakfast, lunch or dinner;
often eating them cold or even stale. My halwai friend was unaware of
my true circumstances. But one day, when I was alone with him, I told
him all, confessing that I had no money left with me and that I even
owed a lot. I warned him not to give me any more kachauris for he
might never get his money back. The halwai was a kindly soul. He gave
me leave to eat kachauris worth twenty rupees from his shop, assuring
me that he would not bother me for money . . . my evening sessions of
story-telling continued in this manner for six months.75
Therefore dissemination and reception of the Hindavī Sufi romances was not
limited to the institutional contexts of court and shrine. Nor were the proto-
cols of interpretation laid out for these contexts the sole determinants of the
meanings of these poems. Often a group of cultivated men, rasikas or connois-
seurs, gathered to listen to love poetry privately. Familiar with the language and
the generic features of these poems, they came together for the pleasure of a
good story told in elegant verse. The notion of rasa as a relationship between
text and reader, a relationship of mutual understanding and aesthetic pleasure,
enabled the circulation of these texts among different social groups. Through
the manuals of performance and anecdotes of audience response, it has been
possible to delineate a theory of reading which allowed the Sufi romances to
circulate and to be understood differently in different contexts. The courts of
nobles and rulers, Sufi shrines, bazaars and mosques, and the houses of the
affluent were the contexts of reception for enjoying the pleasure of the text.
Epilogue: The Story of Stories
ca. 750 a.d., as the tales of the wise sage Bidpai or, in Sanskrit, Vidyāpati, the
fables were disseminated as the narrative exchanges of Kalīlah and Dimnah, a
pair of jackals who told these easy to-understand-stories illustrating just about
every trick in the book to young princes in training for rulership.7 Kalīlah and
Dimnah are modeled on the Sanskrit Karaṭaka and Damanaka, two Indian
jackals who similarly instruct princes on statecraft and strategy.
These beast fables traveled as folklore, courtly literature, song, fable, and
wonder tale through the courts and languages of the Middle East and Europe.8
They circulated with the merchandise and money whose routes Janet Abu-
Lughod has delineated so deftly in her account of the premodern global sys-
tem of the Islamicate world:
Ships sailing to China from Mesopotamia exited the Persian Gulf and
then skirted the western coast of Sind (today’s Pakistan) and Hind
(today’s India), making frequent port calls and seldom out of sight of
land. The monsoon winds allowed them to cross the open sea from
Muscat-Oman to India, but boats were small and navigational meth-
ods were still primitive. In the tenth century, the Arabs had only the
sidereal rose, a method of plotting locations via the polar star that
the Persians had used before them. By the thirteenth century if not
before, however, Arab navigators were supplementing star navigation
with the floating compass the Chinese had employed a century or so
earlier.9
In this milieu, it is no surprise that there are many extant examples, full of
linguistic manipulations of various sorts, of later retranslations of Arabic tales
back into Indian Persian or other regional languages, as well as folkloric ver-
sions and fresh translations from the Sanskrit. In 1919, in an exhaustive trac-
ing out of Pañcatantra story motifs in later folkloric renditions, W. Norman
Brown stressed the continuous back-and-forth borrowing of motifs and frames
by the tellers of oral tales and the composers of literary fictions, and the
high degree of coincidence between oral and written tales.10 There are also
continuous instances of interlinguistic transfers back and forth. The Mughal
emperor Akbar, apparently dissatisfied at the degree to which the Anvār-i
Suhailī (“Lights of Canopus”) and Abū ’l-Fazl’s ‘Iyār-i Dānish (“Touchstone of
Wisdom”) departed from the Sanskrit original of the Pañcatantra, sponsored
a fresh Persian translation of a Jain Sanskrit version of the tales called the
" Khāliqdād ‘Abbāsī, who apparently used
Pañcākhyāna. The translator, Muṣtafá
a copy of the Jain recension in the imperial library, was also responsible for
a complete Persian translation of the famous Sanskrit collection of tales enti-
tled the Kathā-sarit-sāgara (“The Ocean of the Streams of Story,” commonly
328 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
called “The Ocean of Story”).11 We have the itinerary of another such travel-
ing literary phenomenon, the Sanskrit Śuka-saptati, the “Seventy Tales of a
Parrot.”12 Translated into Persian as the Tūt ī-Nāmah by the fourteenth-century
north Indian Chishti disciple Ziyā’ al-dīn Nakhshabī, these tales illustrate a
misogynistic stereotype of the age, the cupidity and lustful nature of women.13
They were translated back into Deccani Urdu, a local or regional language, by
Ġhavvāsī, the celebrated poet laureate (malik al-shu‘rā’) at the Golkonda court
of Sultan ‘Abdullāh Qutb " Shāh in the seventeenth century.14
These examples demonstrate the polyglot worlds in which tales traveled,
both in the cosmopolitan Persian-speaking Islamicate world and in the multi-
lingual local worlds of Hindustan and the Deccan. Moreover, as Richard Eaton
notes about the rise of tales about the phenomenon of travel itself,
are modeled in part on Persian allegorical poems such as ‘At"t"ār’s Mant"iq al-
Ta" ir or The Conference of the Birds, along with richly symbolic and suggestive
poems such as the Khamsah of Niz" āmī, they fully reimagine these Persian
concepts and models through local aesthetics and narrative conventions.
This realm of crisscrossing polities, erotologies, ascetic lineages, lit-
eratures, and languages was also part of the larger Islamicate world and
pre-Islamic world of the Indian Ocean. Parallel to the process of consoli-
dating and expanding Turkish and Afghan rule over Hindustan, there was
an expansion of trade and travel networks16 through the extensive Indian
Ocean trade that was revitalized by the Arabs after the eighth century.17 The
Arab traders took over the classical Greek and Roman trade with India and
worked alongside the existing trading systems of the Indians, Indonesians,
and Chinese.
Following the pioneering work of K. N. Chaudhuri, scholars have treated
the littorals of the Indian Ocean as a group of societies linked by trade,
the annual compulsion of the monsoon winds, commonalities of culture
and social practice, and networks of circulation and exchange.18 In tandem
with this process of cultural and mercantile exchange based on transoce-
anic trade, there were significant overland developments. The pax Mongolica
enabled overland trade between Europe and China and linked Asia, the
Middle East, and Europe in what Abu-Lughod has termed a premodern
world system.19 This world system was “Islamicate” in the sense that it was
not always linked “directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and
cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both
among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.”20
As Phillip Wagoner indicates in his study of the court dress code of the
south Indian kingdom of Vijayanagara, this systemic shift also entailed a
civilizational change. In the world of the Indian Ocean, people adopted cul-
tural and discursive practices from the Turkish sultanate of Delhi and the
regional Afghan kingdoms while maintaining indigenous forms as part of
their useful symbolic repertoire.21
from the bounds of ordinary experience and allowed them to travel to faraway
lands and unlikely places populated by marvelous beasts and beings. Yet this
invitation away from the brute realities of history into a world of exotic won-
ders and romantic quests had its own historical status within the struggles of
the age that produced it.
In another context of cultural encounter, the European apprehension of
the “new” world of the Americas, Stephen Greenblatt has spoken of wonder
as “the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radi-
cal difference.”22 In the Islamicate world of the sultanate period, accounts of
marvels or wonders (‘ajā’ib) that travelers saw were marked by a similar sense
of astonishment (‘ajab or ta‘ajjub). Their astonishment had a double referent,
as it was provoked by the extraordinary monuments of classical antiquity as
well as by the marvels encountered in distant lands. Early accounts, such as
the tenth-century Captain Buzurg bin Shahryār’s Kitāb ‘Ajā’ib al-Hind (“The
Book of Wonders of India”), were, as C. E. Dubler insists, “no wanton inven-
tions of fancy, but [were] often based on a minute and exact observation of
nature.”23 However, as the geographical accounts and cosmographies of Arab
writers grew more elaborate, they ventured more into the realms of fantasy
and imaginative literature:
The taste for the fantastic was so pronounced in the medieval Arab
world that it spawned a distinctive genre of literature, that of aja’ib
(marvels), and books were written on the marvels of Egypt, of India
and of the cosmos as a whole. Such books were hugger mugger com-
pilations of improbable information about the stupendous monuments
of antiquity, strange coincidences, the miraculous powers of certain
plants, stones, and animals, and feats of magic. Many of the marvels
first found in “non-fiction” works on cosmography eventually made
their way into the Nights. The Sinbad cycle, which is a fictional rework-
ing of mariners’ yarns about the wonders to be found in the Indian
and China seas (among them the wak-wak tree with its human-headed
fruit, the Old Man of the Sea and the fish as large as an island), is the
most obvious example of this process.24
The sense of astonishment over the radically different, as well as over the
stupendous and magical, comes to a person “at the time of that person’s igno-
rance of the sabab (cause) of something.”25 Amazement is frequently accompa-
nied by a formulaic affirmation of Allah as the supreme creator of all things
found in the universe. Marvels are thus fitted into the totalizing frame of
the divine will that is expressed through creation, signs of wonder that make
humans aware of Allah’s omnipotence.
Epilogue: The Story of Stories 331
The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see . . . is the
fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liber-
ated, so to speak: experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered,
exempt from the conditions that we normally know to attach to it
and . . . drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a
particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state,
a state subject to all our vulgar communities.26
In one sense, these fantasies liberated readers and listeners from the bounds
of ordinary experience and allowed them to travel to faraway lands and unlikely
places populated by wondrous beasts and beings. Although such audiences
were bounded by an overarching sense of a cosmic and natural order over-
shadowed by God, the marvels and wonders of creation stretched the limits of
the imagination and of what James calls “all our vulgar communities.”
In another sense, as Tzvetan Todorov notes in his study of the fantastic,
fantasy is dependent on notions of the real because they provide a basis for
comparing the imaginary world with the ordinary one:
The reader and the hero . . . must decide if a certain event or phenomenon
belongs to reality or to imagination, that is, must determine whether or
not it is real. It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished
a basis for our definition of the fantastic. No sooner have we become
aware of this fact, than we must come to a halt—amazed.27
Todorov’s well-staged amazement or hesitation between the real and the imagi-
nary is the focus for a thoroughgoing analysis of a variety of fantastic texts and
discourses. As Graham Seymour indicates, “The real constitutes a linchpin for
the analysis of the reading of literary fantasy in so far as it indicates the point
from which the subject is suspended in the hesitation of his/her desire—a hesi-
tation and a division which . . . is both aimed at and provoked by the fantastic.”28
Todorov himself comments on the origins of this “linchpin” as follows: “The
nineteenth century transpired, it is true, in a metaphysics of the real and the
imaginary, and the literature of the fantastic is nothing but the bad conscience
of this positivist era. But today, we can no longer believe in an immutable,
external reality, nor in a literature which is merely the transcription of such a
reality. Words have gained an autonomy which things have lost.”29
The universe of words of the Avadhi or eastern Hindavī premākhyāns is
a fantasy world of marvels and exotic locales, of supernatural helpers and
332 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
agencies who aid the hero along his way. The linchpin of the genre, how-
ever, is not some positivist notion of the real, but an aesthetic of rasa that
is adapted from Sanskrit poetics to suggest new and varied Sufi and secular
meanings. The literary mechanism by which the poetry could be interpreted in
multiple ways was the Sanskrit theory of dhvani or suggestion, which allowed
poets and readers to go beyond the literal and figurative levels of meaning in
poetic texts.30
This theoretical move holds a mimetic form of literary and artistic repre-
sentation to be secondary to the enterprise of writing literature. In reading any
genre that follows this poetic system, one cannot assume a straightforward
link between a particular time and space and its representation in poetry. As
Abhinavagupta puts it, in his Locana, “A poet has no need to carry out a mere
chronicle of events. That is a task accomplished by the historian” (L 3.10–14e).
Instead, the poet invents a new universe through the innumerable varieties of
suggestion that can be created from the old subjects of poetry. In this deter-
minedly anti-mimetic universe, experience is liberated and disembroiled from
the travails of everyday life. This constitutes the appeal of the poetic effort. As
Todorov notes, “The fantastic requires . . . a reaction to events as they occur in
the world evoked. . . . In short, the fantastic implies fiction.”31
Todorov construed the fantastic as the staging of amazement over marvel-
ous events and phenomena, as a hesitation over whether they are real or imag-
inary. The authors of romances may construct fantasy worlds to liberate the
imagination, but we must delineate their generic and narrative outlines against
the shadowy background of the material fragments and literary remains of the
sultanate period. As Stephen Greenblatt put it, “It is . . . a theoretical mistake
and a practical blunder to collapse the distinction between representation and
reality, but at the same time we cannot keep them isolated from one another.
They are locked together in an uneasy marriage in a world without ecstatic
union or divorce.”32
When the fictions we examine are about the victors and vanquished in a
particular historical situation, how can we separate our readings from these
political and theological resonances? How can we sidestep the theoretical dual-
ism of real and imaginary, of having to decide between truth and falsity in
some perpetually unsatisfactory positivist operation? Rosemary Jackson, writ-
ing about fantasy, indicates the beginnings of a productive line of inquiry by
urging an emphasis on ideology, which she characterizes as “roughly speaking,
the imaginary ways in which men experience the real world, those ways in
which men’s relation to the world is lived through various systems of meaning
such as religion, family, law, moral codes, education, etc.”33 Understanding the
many meanings of fantastic literature lies precisely in unpacking the ideologi-
cal frames and uses of narrative.
Epilogue: The Story of Stories 333
Formulaic Structures
In formulaic literature, “Originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that
it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it.”34 As
John G. Cawelti notes, “Since the pleasure and effectiveness of an individual
formulaic work depends on its intensification of a familiar experience, the for-
mula creates its own world with which we become familiar by repetition. We
learn in this way how to experience this imaginary world without continually
comparing it with our own experience.”35 The pleasure of entering this fan-
tastic world can be maximized by the author’s use of the most widespread
and conventional social and narrative forms. This factor allows many different
audiences to enjoy the formulaic plots of the Hindavī romances, much as they
enjoy the Indian cinematic extravaganzas of the present day.
Like these films, the generic formula of the Hindavī Sufi romances con-
tains a set of easily predictable conventions and motifs. Originality consists of
using the formula in new ways, but the basics remain the same: the hero’s
quest for self-transformation impelled by an initial dream, vision, or encoun-
ter; the use of abstract characters or narrative options in the progress of true
love; the entwined articulation of erotics and asceticism in the service of an
ideal of mystical love; and the use of an aesthetics of rasa that is reworked
from its classical sources to express a distinctive Hindavī agenda of Sufi love.
As Cawelti noted:
of the great sultanate Hindavī love stories did not create such elaborate narra-
tives as the Padmāvat and the Madhumālatī.49 But in the seventeenth century,
‘Usmān of Ghazipur (ca. 1613) composed his Citrāvalī,50 which represents the
Creator as a painter (citerā) who looks at the world and paints it full of imagi-
nal forms as a kind of picture pavilion or citra-sārī. A prince, Sujāna, magically
transported to the picture pavilion of Princess Citrāvalī of Rūpa-nagara, sees a
ravishing picture of the princess, is transfixed, and draws a picture of himself
next to it. When the princess sees his picture, she falls in love, and the rest
of the plot covers the adventures of the prince and princess as they try to
consummate their mutual desire. These adventures include being blinded and
eaten by a python, finding a magic ointment for regaining sight, and surviving
a subplot involving a second heroine, Kaulāvatī. Nūr Muḥammad of Azamgarh,
a prominent eighteenth-century premākhyān poet, wrote works including the
Indrāvat (1744)51 and the Anurāg-Bānsurī or “Flute of Love,” completed in
1764.52 Romances such as these continued to be composed till the beginning
of the twentieth century, though under the Mughals the genre became a local
literary tradition without significant imperial political sponsorship.
It is natural to wonder about the “impact” of a genre of literature, if that
can ever be measured. Subsequent to the era of the great sultanate romances,
narrative genres such as qiṣṣah and dāstān in the new literary languages of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hindi and Urdu, were recreated out of
earlier genres.53 Still later, the makers of Bombay films drew upon performance
traditions such as nauṭankī and Parsi theater. In short, even after the sultan-
ate had been obliterated, both individual motifs, such as becoming a yogi in
love, and the larger cultural space of storytelling and formulaic fantasy that the
Hindavī Sufi romance poets carved out continued to be reconstituted. Just as
Qut"ban used the voyages of Sindbād and the marvels of India as motifs in the
Mirigāvatī, his text and the other Sufi romances were a source for later qiṣṣah
and dāstan writers, as well as novelists, filmmakers, and opera composers. The
literary, artistic, and musical echoes continue to resonate.
Shantanu Phukan has unearthed rare and interesting accounts of the later
reception of the Hindavī Sufi romances. Of these, perhaps one can be sin-
gled out as exemplary of the process by which the genre became a “classical”
received tradition for later listeners and readers. In 1739, a nobleman by the
name of Anand Rām, with the Persian pen name of Mukhliṣ (“Sincere”), went
to the death-anniversary celebrations at a Sufi shrine. On his first night there
he could not sleep, so he requested his servant to tell him a tale to while away
the night:
[M]y servant told the colorful tale that Jāyasī, author of the Hindi
Padmāvat, had written entirely in the Eastern dialect (pūrabī)—as
Epilogue: The Story of Stories 337
though it were an Eastern melody brimming over with pain. Jāyasī had
based its wording on uncommon ideas and rare metaphors; however,
since the work contains the bewitchments and marvels of love, it com-
pels the heart to feel pain.54
In his analysis of this quote, Phukan demonstrates that Mukhliṣ felt the
“unmistakable pull of its language upon his sensibility—it moved him, as does
a soulful melody ‘brimming over with pain’ (sar tā sar chūn pardah-yi pūrabī
labrīz-i dard). The Eastern dialect of Hindi evidently evoked associations of
musicality, rhythm, and cadence.”55 This was precisely the reason the Hindavī
Sufi romances were prized and enthusiastically translated and retold numer-
ous times.
Moreover, as Phukan shows, Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ went on to use a sarto-
rial metaphor to explain the intention behind his translation of the tale into
Persian. As he puts it:
And I said to myself, “If this Hindi Beloved were to be displayed in the
robes of a Persian writer (qalamkār-e Fārsī) then it is possible that this
work of art might appear elegant and permissible in the estimation of
the people of taste (dar nazar-e ahl-e z" auq īn fan mustaḥsan numāyad).
Therefore, my pen laid the foundations of this literary project and, hav-
ing completed it within the span of a week, called it Haṅgāma-e ‘Ishq
(the clamor of love).”56
Here qalamkār-i Fārsī refers not to a “Persian writer” but more properly to the
“work of the pen,” or writing. A charming ambiguity is conveyed by the fact
that the word qalamkār also refers to a certain type of patterned cloth pro-
duced to this day in Iran, especially around Isfahan. The phrase should read
“in Persian robes patterned by the pen.”
Phukan overstates the case when he claims that this passage has to be
understood in an oppositional way: “Here Hindi is defined by opposition: if
Persian robes refine the Hindi-beloved, making her fit for the eyes of the lite-
rati, then Hindi by implication lacked polish, elegance, and taste.”57 Hindavī
was hardly the poor provincial cousin that Phukan makes her, but rather a
sophisticated regional literary tradition that had its own polished sweetness and
charm, which is why appealing examples from it were rendered into Persian
so many times. The Hindavī romances were fully part of the mental furniture
of the sultanate male aristocrats, just as much part of their cultural and liter-
ary canon as were the older works of Sa‘dī or Firdausī. The patrons and audi-
ences of these texts were Indian Muslims, frequently intermarried, sometimes
converted, tracing their genealogy back to Arabia or Persia or Central Asia but
338 l ov e’s su b t l e m agic
very much part of the desī landscape and celebrating their love of their native
land in Hindavī poetry. The metaphor of dress is interesting, too, when one
considers how the Hindavī romances constitute a Persian genre that is com-
pletely reinvented in Indian form. The characters of the Hindavī romances are
Muslims in local dress, questing princes in the garb of yogis, as much a part
of a cross-dressing colonial élite as a Simla fancy-dress party during the sum-
mer seasons of the Raj or a Richard Burton in the robes of a Persian doctor
on the hajj.
Amīr Khusrau once described himself as a parrot using his beak to break
Indian sugar rather than refined Persian sugar candy. Echoing this choice, the
Hindavī poets celebrated the desī mixture of ghee and jaggery, the raw golden
guṛ made from sugarcane juice. It is not hard to imagine a cosmopolitan desī
literary and devotional culture newly created in the provinces of the Delhi sul-
tanate and the Afghan kingdoms, centered around evening gatherings at court
or private musical sessions at Sufi shrines. These contexts of reception shaped
a range of responses to these beautiful and conventionally patterned narratives
in the spoken language of Hindustan. The pleasure of a long formulaic genre,
such as the Persian dāstān, the Hindavī Sufi mas̱navī, or the modern Indian
film, consists of abandoning oneself to the events and descriptions in the story,
the set pieces that every instance of the genre must include, and tasting the
juice of love that is the express aesthetic agenda of the poets and storytellers
of these media. Along with the poem, courtly audiences would have enjoyed
the usual intoxicants—the pleasurably narcotic red juice of pān, wine, and
other stimulants—as well as the luxurious atmosphere of khus-scented kiosks
hung with tapestries and perfumed with incense. If the stories resolved the
perceived cultural tension between eroticism and asceticism, so much the bet-
ter. They fit perfectly into a cultural scene that knows gods such as the erotic
ascetic Śiva,58 in which there were and are many competing ascetic lineages
with distinct poetic and devotional practices, and in which kings as famous as
Raja Bhartṛhari renounced their kingdoms and went wandering as yogis on a
quest for the divine beloved and the savor of prema-rasa.
Notes
c h a p t er 1
7. See Irfan Habib, “Formation of the Sultanate Ruling Class of the Thirteenth
Century,” in idem, ed., Medieval India. 1: Researches in the History of India
1200–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1–21.
8. On the perceived opposition between asceticism and sensual pleasure dur-
ing the period, see Simon Digby, “The Tuḥfa i naṣā’iḥ of Yūsuf Gadā: An
Ethical Treatise in Verse from the Late-Fourteenth-Century Dehlī Sultanate,”
in Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab
in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 105.
On the coincidence between asceticism and eroticism, see Wendy Doniger
(O’Flaherty), Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (Oxford
University Press, 1973; retitled Siva: The Erotic Ascetic, 1981).
9. K. A. Nizami, “Early Indo-Muslim Mystics and Their Attitude Towards the
State,” Islamic Culture, vol. 22, 1948, p. 397. See also his Some Aspects of
Religion and Politics in India During the Thirteenth Century (Delhi: Idarah-i
Adabiyat-i Delli, 1974).
10. I. A. Zilli, “Successors of Shaikh Nasiruddin Mahmud and the Disintegration
of the Chishti Central Organization,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress,
vol. 44, 1984, p. 324.
11. Iqtidar Alam Khan, “Shaikh ‘Abdul Quddūs Gangohī’s Relations with Political
Authorities: A Reappraisal,” Medieval India: A Miscellany, vol. 4, 1977, p. 80ff.
12. Simon Digby, “The Sufi Shaikh as Source of Authority in Mediaeval India,”
in Islam et Société en Asie du Sud: Collection Puruṣārtha 9, ed. Marc Gaborieau
(Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1986), pp. 57–77.
13. Aziz Ahmad, “The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal Muslim India,” Der
Islam, vol. 38, 1963, pp. 142–53.
14. See Digby, “The Sufi Shaikh,” pp. 57–77.
15. Idem, p. 63.
16. Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī, Favā’id al-Fu’ād, ed. with an Urdu translation by Khwaja
Hasan Sani Nizami (Delhi: Urdu Academy, 1990), p. 320. See also the notable
English translation by Bruce B. Lawrence, Morals for the Heart: Conversations
of Shaykh Nizam ad-din Awliya recorded by Amir Hasan Sijzi, p. 294. I have
cited the English translation, with occasional emendations.
17. Sijzī, Favā’id al-Fu’ād, 232–34, and Lawrence, Morals for the Heart, p. 97.
18. See Farīd al-dīn ‘At̤t ̤ār, The Conference of the Birds, tr. D. Davis and A.
Darbandi (London: Penguin Classics, 1984). For a concise treatment of
Islamic allegory, see Peter Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Ibn
Sīnā), with a Translation of the Book of the Prophet Muḥammad’s Ascent to
Heaven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 4–10.
19. Sijzī, Favā’id al-Fu’ād, 498, and Lawrence, Morals for the Heart, p. 186.
20. See K. A. Nizami, Some Aspects of Religion in India During the Thirteenth
Century (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1974), pp. 231–35, for a description
of some of the formalizations of the mystical path drawn on by the Chishti
Notes to pp. 10–14 341
35. See also Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990);
and Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj.
36. I. H. Qureshi, The Struggle for Pakistan (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1987),
p. 13.
37. Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (Allahabad: Indian Press,
1946), p. 137.
38. Aziz Ahmad, “Epic and Counter-Epic in Medieval India,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society, vol. 83, no. 4, 1963, p. 470.
39. Annemarie Schimmel, Classical Urdu Literature from the Beginning to Iqbāl,
Series: A History of Indian Literature, vol. 8, part 1, fasc. 3 (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1975), p. 128.
40. Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), p. 58.
41. On this point, see Muzaffar Alam, “Competition and Co-existence: Indo-
Islamic Interaction in Medieval North India,” Itinerario, vol. 13, no. 1, 1989,
pp. 37–59.
42. Shantanu Phukan, “The Lady of the Lotus of Gnosis: Muhammad Jayasi’s
Padmavati,” unpublished paper, pp. 2–3. I am grateful to Shantanu Phukan
for sharing his unpublished work with me.
43. Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval
India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); and The Rise of Islam on
the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (University of California Press, 1996).
44. Ernst, Eternal Garden.
45. P. M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Mu’īn al-Dīn Chishtī of Ajmer (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1989); and Paul Jackson, S. J., The Way of a Sufi:
Sharfuddin Maneri (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1987).
46. Mohammad Habib, “Chishti Mystics [sic] Records of the Sultanate Period,”
in his Politics and Society During the Early Medieval Period: Collected Works of
Professor Mohammad Habib, ed. K. A. Nizami (New Delhi: People’s, 1974),
vol. I, pp. 385–433; and Bruce B. Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute: The
Extant Literature of pre-Mughal Sufism (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of
Philosophy, 1978).
47. See Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute, pp. 27–59, for a review of the mea-
ger literary output of the early Chishtis and the “voluminous corpus” of later
Chishti authors.
48. See Abdul Haqq, Urdū kī ibtidā’ī nashv va numā meṉ Sūfiyī-i kirām kā kām
(Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqī-e Urdū Hind, 1939). See also S. H. Askari, “Avvalīn
musalmān aur desī bhāshā’eṉ,” Patna University Journal, 1954, pp. 59–80.
49. Ernst, Eternal Garden, p. 168.
50. Cynthia Talbot, “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim
Identities in Pre-Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History,
vol. 37, no. 4, 1995, p. 694.
Notes to pp. 17–21 343
c h a p t er 2
Adabiyat-i Delli, 1988), p. 1. Further quotations from this text will be indi-
cated by page number after the cited portion; the title is henceforward abbre-
viated as DRKK.
13. Maulānā Dā’ūd, Cāndāyan, ed. M. P. Gupta (Varanasi: Vishvavidyālaya
Prakāśan, 1967), p. 1. Future quotations will be incorporated into the text by
verse number following the abbreviation C.
14. For a detailed treatment, see G. H. Schokker, “The Language of Bhakti,” in
Studies in Mysticism in honor of the 1150th anniversary of Kobo-daishi’s nirvāṇam,
Acta Indologica, VI, 1984.
15. Qut̤ban, Mirigāvatī, verse 1. Further citations will be indicated by verse num-
ber in the body of the text following the abbreviation M.
16. The literature on Ibn ‘Arabī (1165–1240) is voluminous. For a summary
account, see Henri Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, tr. L. and P. Sherrard
(London and New York: Kegan Paul International and Islamic Publications
for the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 1993), pp. 291–96. For a brief treatment
of the philosophy, see William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany:
State University of New York Press). For an excellent intellectual biography,
see Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arabi (Cambridge,
UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1993). After the fourteenth century, Ibn ‘Arabī’s the-
ory had become the accepted version of creation for most Indian Sufi orders,
and therefore it is not surprising to see the poets after Dā’ūd using different
aspects of his ideas.
17. Jāyasī, Padmāvat, verse 1. I have used the editions of M. P. Gupta (Allahabad:
Bharati Bhandar, 1973) and Vasudev Sharan Agraval (Cirganv, Jhansi: Sahitya
Sadan, 1956). Further citations will be indicated by verse number in the
body of the text following the abbreviation P. All translations are my own.
18. A. Yusuf Ali, tr., The Holy Qur’ān (1934; reprint, Beirut: Dār al-Qur’ān
al-Karīm, 1982), pp. 907–8.
19. Mañjhan, Madhumālatī, ed. M. P. Gupta (Allahabad: Mitra Prakashan,
1968), verse 1. Aditya Behl, Simon Weightman, and S. M. Pandey,
trs., Madhumālatī: An Indian Sufi Romance (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, Series: Oxford World’s Classics, 2001). All future references are
indicated by verse number in the body of the text following the
abbreviation MM.
20. On the role of such orthodox voices in shaping public opinion, see Kanwar
Muhammad Ashraf, Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 1969 [1928]), pp. 20–21, and Simon Digby, “The
Tuḥfa i naṣā’iḥ of Yūsuf Gadā: An Ethical Treatise in Verse from the Late-
Fourteenth-Century Dehlī Sultanate,” p. 105.
21. Ashraf, Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan, p. 47.
22. A. K. S. Lambton, “Islamic Mirrors for Princes,” Quaderno dell’Accademia
Nazionale dei Lincei, no. 160, 1971, pp. 419–42.
Notes to pp. 47–53 347
23. Keykāvūs ebn Eskandar, Qābūs Nāmeh, ed. G. H. Yusofi (Tehran: Bazmgāh-i
Tarjumah va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1967). Translated by Reuben Levy as A Mirror for
Princes: “The Qābūs Nāma” by Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar, Prince of Gurgān (New
York: Dutton, 1951).
24. Nizām' al-Mulk Tūsī, Siyāsat-Nāmah, translated by Hubert Darke as The Book
of Government, or Rules for Kings: The Siyar al-Muluk or Siyasat-nama of Nizam
al-Mulk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
25. Julie Scott Meisami, tr. and ed., The Sea of Precious Virtues (Baḥr al-Favā’id): A
Medieval Islamic Mirror for Princes (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991).
26. Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987), p. 180.
27. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–2.
28. Ibid., p. 2.
29. Fakhr al-dīn Rāzī, Jāmi‘ al-‘Ulūm, ed. M. K. Malik al Kuttab, cited by Richard
Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), pp. 29–30.
30. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, p. 30. See Eaton,
pp. 23–32, for a concise summary of the use of Persianate ideas of kingship
in the sultanates formed in the Indian subcontinent.
31. For detailed dynastic lists, see C. E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A
Chronological and Genealogical Manual (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), pp. 185–89, 199–200.
32. Niz̤āmī Ganjavī, Khusrau va Shīrīn, ed. B. Sarvatiyān (Teheran: Maktaba Tus,
1988), pp. 88–89. Future quotations will be integrated in the text by verse
number following the abbreviation KS.
33. Niz̤āmī, Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance, tr. Julie Scott Meisami
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 15.
34. See Simon Digby, “The Tuḥfa i naṣā’iḥ of Yūsuf Gadā: An Ethical Treatise in
Verse from the Late-Fourteenth-Century Dehlī Sultanate,” pp. 105, 121.
35. On this figure, see Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, p. 185.
36. See Z̲ iā al-dīn Baranī, Tārīḳh-i Fīrūzshāhī, pp. 531–38 (translated in Elliot
Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, III, Delhi:
Low Price, 1990 [1867–1877]); Yaḥya bin Aḥmad bin Sirhindi, Tārīḳh-i
Mubārakshāhī, ed. Maulvi Hidayat Hosain (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal,
1931), pp. 120–23; and M. Habib and K. A. Nizami, A Comprehensive History of
India, Vol. V: The Delhi Sultanat (A. D. 1206–1526) (Delhi: People’s Publishing
House, 1970), pp. 570–73.
37. For further details concerning Jūnā Shāh’s succession to the political office of
vazīr under Fīrūz Shāh Tuġhlaq, see Shams-i Sirāj ‘Afīf, Tārīḳh-i Fīrūz Shāhī,
pp. 426–27.
348 Notes to pp. 54–60
38. For a more detailed history of the period, see Habib and Nizami, A
Comprehensive History of India, pp. 630–732. For a detailed history of the
Sharqī kingdom, see M. M. Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur: A Political
and Cultural History (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1972).
39. Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur, p. 111. See also S. H. Askari, “Qutban’s
Mrigavat: A Unique Ms. in Persian Script,” Journal of the Bihar Research
Society, vol. 41, no. 4, December 1955, pp. 457–58; idem, “Bihar Under Later
Tughlaqs and Sharqis,” in his Medieval Bihar: Sultanate and Mughal Period
(Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1990), pp. 22–31; and D. F.
Plukker, The Miragāvatī of Kutubana, p. xviii, n. 4.
40. For details see Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur, pp. 111–12 and pp.
206–7, and A. Halim, “History of the Growth and Development of North-
Indian Music During Sayyid-Lodi Period,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of
Pakistan, vol. 1, no. 1, 1956, pp. 46–64.
41. See Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The ethnohistory of the mili-
tary labour market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), for an excellent account of Sher Shāh’s rise to power as an
Afghan warlord.
c h a p t er 3
17. Lee Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as
Exemplified in the Gītagovinda of Jayadeva (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1978), p. 21.
18. Līlāśuka, Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta, I. 4, in Wilson, The Love of Krishna, p. 96.
19. For an account of the sources and composition of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, see
Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-bhakti: The early history of Kṛṣṇa devotion in South
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 483–552. For good general
accounts of adaptation of South Indian bhakti ideology into the formation of
north Indian devotional sects, themselves composed out of numerous regional
traditions, see inter alia Hardy, Viraha-bhakti; and Vasudha Narayanan, The
Way and the Goal: Expressions of Devotion in the Early Śrī Vaiṣṇava Tradition
(Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA: Institute for Vaishnava Studies and
Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, 1987). See
also Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism
in the Vaiṣṇava-sahajiyā Cult of Bengal; Sudhindra Chandra Chakravarti,
Philosophical Foundation of Bengal Vaiṣṇavism; Richard Barz, The Bhakti Sect
of Vallabhācārya; Krishna Sharma, Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A Study
in the History of Ideas; and David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation:
A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana.
20. Jayadeva, Gītagovinda, I. 46, in Miller, Love Song of the Dark Lord, p. 77.
21. Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love, p. 69.
22. See, for instance, Edward C. Dimock, Jr., and Denise Levertov, tr., In Praise of
Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (New York: Anchor Books, 1967).
23. Subhadra Jha, ed. and tr., Vidyāpati-gīta-saṃgraha or The Songs of Vidyāpati
(Benares: Motilal Banarsidass, 1954), p. 14 (translation emended considerably).
24. Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love, p. 45.
25. Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in
the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā Cult of Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), p. 177.
26. Richard Barz, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhācārya (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
1976), pp. 83–84.
27. See James D. Redington, Vallabhācārya on the Love Games of Kṛṣṇa (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1983).
28. See Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabīr (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1993), pp. 109–30. I have drawn extensively on Vaudeville in the sum-
mary account of Kabīr that follows.
29. Kabīr, Sākhī 10, tr. Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabīr, pp. 179–80.
30. Kabīr, Ślok 2, tr. Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabīr, p. 297.
31. See S. W. Fallon, A New Hindustani-English Dictionary, with Illustrations from
Hindustani Literature and Folklore (Banāras: Medical Hall Press, 1879), pp.
1015–16; and William Crooke, A Rural and Agricultural Glossary for the North
West Provinces and Oudh (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1888), pp. 104–5.
Notes to pp. 70–77 351
32. Kabīr, Pad 8, tr. Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabīr, pp. 274–75.
33. Cited in Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs: The
Development of the Genre (New York: New York University Press, 1971),
p. 85.
34. Ibid., p. 64.
35. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
36. For a more extensive list of topoi, as well as complete references to the
Platonic and Aristotelian sources of these ideas, see Joseph Norment Bell,
Love Theory in Later Ḥanbalite Islam (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1979), pp. 4–5.
37. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, pp. 137–38.
38. Bell, Love Theory, p. 9.
39. See, for instance, Ibn Hazm, The Ring of the Dove, tr. A. Arberry (London:
Luzac, 1953).
40. See P. K. Agravala, The Unknown Kamasutras (Varanasi: Books Asia, 1983).
41. Vātsyāyana, Kāma-Sutra, 1.2. 11. The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana. A new transla-
tion, introduction, and commentary. By Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar.
London and New York: Oxford World Classics, 2002.
42. D. H. H. Ingalls, tr., ““Love in Enjoyment,” An Anthology of Sanskrit Court
Poetry: Vidyākara’s “Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1965), p. 198.
43. D. H. H. Ingalls, “Love in Enjoyment,” p. 199.
44. Bruce B. Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute, p. 42. On Naḳhshabī’s transla-
tion of the Sanskrit Śūka-saptati, the “Seventy Tales of a Parrot.”
45. Al-Hujvīrī, Kashf al-Maḥjūb, p. 306.
46. See ibid., p. 310.
47. Muḥammad Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’ (Delhi: Mat̤ba’ Muḥibb al-Hind, 1885),
p. 476.
48. Ibid., p. 463.
49. See Al-Hujvīrī, Kashf al-Maḥjūb, pp. 210–11.
50. See Bruce B. Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute: Sufi Literature in Pre-
Mughal India (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1978), p. 31.
51. For a full discussion of samā,’ audition, see Chapter 9.
52. Ḥamīd Qalandar, Khair al-Majālis, ed. K. A. Nizami (Aligarh: Department of
History, Aligarh Muslim University, 1959), pp. 42–43.
53. Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, p. 108.
54. Stansley Insler, “Les dix étapes de l’amour (daśa kāmāvasthāh) dans la lit-
térature indienne,” Bulletin d’Études Indiennes, vol. 6, 1988, p. 311. See also
Nāṭya-Śāstra, ed. Manmohan Ghosh (Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1967),
XXIV.169–91, and Kāma-sūtra, 5.1.4–5.
55. I am indebted to Mujeeb Rizvi for the idea of the fluctuation of the heroine’s
attributes as mirroring the gentle and terrible divine attributes and Names.
352 Notes to pp. 78–85
56. Bilgrāmī, Abdul Vāḥid, Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī, Aligarh: Maulana Azad Library;
trans. into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi (Varanasi: Nagaripracarini Sabha, 1957), p.
39. See also Aligarh ms., Ahsanullah Collection 297.7/11, f. 192. For a detailed
account of the transcendent references of the sarāpā in the Cāndāyan, see
especially S. M. Pandey, “Candāyan meṉ nakhśikh aur uskā ādhyātmik
svarūp,” in his Sūfī Kāvya Vimarśa, pp. 1–26. In another essay on the sarāpā,
Pandey convincingly compares Niz̤āmī’s sarāpās to Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī’s,
to conclude that Jāyasī’s text represents an Indianization of the form with
much greater emphasis on the transcendent or supernatural referentiality of
the heroine’s body. See, in the same volume, “Jāyasī aur fārsī kavi Nizāmī kā
nakhśikh: ek tulnātmak adhyayan,” pp. 88–96, esp. pp. 95–96.
57. More detailed consideration of the sarāpā is the focus of Chapter 7 (on the
Madhumālatī of Mañjhan Shat t' 'ari), in which I contrast the poetic description
of the female body with the male ascetic body and place it within the context
of Sufi cosmology and practices.
58. Bruce B. Lawrence, “The Lawa’ih of Qazi Hamid ud-din Nagauri,” Indo-
Iranica, vol. 20, 1975, p. 38. In view of the reluctance of the early Chishti
shaikhs to write books, the survival of this fragment assumes great impor-
tance as evidence of the mystical ideology of the silsilah.
59. Bī-‘āshiq va ‘ishq kār-i ma‘shūq habā ast,
Tā ‘āshiq nīst nāz-i ma‘shūq kujā ast?
60. Lawrence, “The Lawa’ih of Qazi Hamid ud-din Nagauri,” p. 39.
61. Ibid., p. 41.
62. S. M. Pandey, “Love Symbolism in Candāyan,” in Monika Thiel-Horstmann,
ed., Bhakti in Current Research, 1979–82 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1983), p. 281.
63. For the Nāth-yogic symbolism of the raising of the sun, see R. S. McGregor,
Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1984), p. 28, and Chapter 5.
64. Bilgrāmī, Ḥaqā’iq-i Hindī, p. 60. See also Aligarh Ms., Ahsanullah Collection
297.7/11, f. 197.
65. See Premchandra Jain, Apabhraṃśa Kathākāvya evaṃ Hindī Premākhyānak
(Amritsar: Sohanlal Jaindharm Pracharak Samiti, 1973), pp. 267–343, for an
exhaustive list of descriptive topoi and motifs.
66. Premchandra Jain, Apabhraṃśa Kathākāvya evaṃ Hindī Premākhyānak, pp. 333ff.
67. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, ed., Varṇa-Ratnâkara of Jyotirīśvara-Kaviśekharâcārya
(Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1940). See also S. M. Pandey, Hindi
aur Fārsī Sufī Kāvya, pp. 39–40.
68. Jyotirīśvara-Kaviśekharācārya, Varṇa-Ratnākara, p. 2.
69. Verrier Elwin, Folk-Songs of Chhattisgarh (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1946), pp. 338–70.
70. Satyendranath Ghoshal, “Sati Mainā aur Lor-Candrālī,” Vishva Bharati, 1956,
cited in Vishvanath Prasad, “Prastāvanā,” Candāyan (Agra: Agra University,
1962), p. 23.
Notes to pp. 85–98 353
71. S. M. Pandey, The Hindi Oral Epic Loriki: The Tale of Lorik and Canda
(Allahabad: Sahitya Bhawan, 1979), pp. 9–10.
72. S. M. Pandey, “Cāndāyan aur Lorikāyan,” in his Hindī aur Fārsī Sūfī Kāvya,
pp. 31–45.
73. McGregor, Hindi Literature, pp. 14–15.
74. Joyce B. Flueckiger, “Caste and Regional Variants in an Oral Epic Tradition,”
in Stuart H. Blackburn, Peter J. Claus, Joyce B. Flueckiger, and Susan S.
Wadley, eds., Oral Epics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), p. 35.
75. The following brief synopsis is based on S. M. Pandey, The Hindi Oral Epic
Loriki, pp. 11–15. For other versions of the story, see idem, The Hindi Oral Epic
Tradition: Bhojpurī Lorikī (Allahabad: Sāhitya Bhavan, 1995) and The Hindi
Oral Epic Canaini (Allahabad: Sāhitya Bhavan, 1982).
76. Flueckiger, “Caste and Regional Variants in an Oral Epic Tradition,” p. 42.
77. Ibid., pp. 47–52.
78. Joyce B. Flueckiger, Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 134.
79. S. A. H. Abidi, ed., ‘Ismat Nāmah yā Dāstān-i Lorik va Mainā (New Delhi:
Markaz-i Taḥqīqāt-i Zabān-o Adabiyāt-i Fārsī dar Hind, 1985).
80. Ibn Hazm, The Ring of the Dove, tr. A. Arberry, p. 197.
81. Bharata, Nāṭya-Śāstra, XXIV.169–171. Of course later authors freely adapt these
lists to different narrative and poetic purposes; a varied set of representative
lists is given in Insler, “Les dix étapes de l’amour,” p. 311.
82. For representative lists, see Bell, Love Theory, pp. 157–59; and also Mir
Valiuddin, Love in Its Essence: The Sūfi Approach (Delhi: Indian Institute of
Islamic Studies, 1967).
83. For the yogic practice of the Gorakhnathis, see inter alia Agehananda
Bharati, The Tantric Tradition; Hazariprasad Dwivedi, Nāth Sampradāya
(Allahabad: Lokbhāratī Prakāśan, 1981); George Weston Briggs,
Gorakhnāth and the Kānphaṭa Yogīs (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989);
Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality, and Freedom, tr. W. R. Trask (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969); and David G. White, The Alchemical
Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
84. For further details about the competitive interaction between Sufis and yogis,
the specific imagery of the Gorakhnāth panth, and its adaptation by the
Hindavī Sufi poets, see Chapter 5.
85. Peter Gaeffke, “Alexander in Avadhī and Dakkinī Mathnawīs,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society, vol. 109, 1989, p. 529.
86. Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, pp. 102–3.
87. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Raleigh: University of
North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 143.
88. Muḥammad Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’, p. 463.
354 Notes to pp. 98–110
c h a p t er 4
14. Husain Haddawy, tr., The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Stories
(New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 18–19.
15. Mia I. Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and
One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1963), pp. 236–63.
16. Ferial J. Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context
(Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996), pp. 68–81, esp. pp. 77ff.
17. Peter D. Molan, “Sinbad the Sailor: A Commentary on the Ethics of Violence,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 98, no. 3, pp. 237–47.
18. Haddawy, tr., The Arabian Nights II, p. 19.
19. Elliot Colla, “The Popular Imagination of Sindbad: Towards a Historical
Understanding of the Variant Texts of Alf Laylah wa Laylah,” unpublished
ms., pp. 20–21. Colla notes that the words ta‘ajjub and tavakkul recur fre-
quently in the text and perceptively contextualizes his analysis of the variant
endings of the Sindbād cycle within Abbasid and Mamluk mercantile cul-
tures. I am grateful to him for sharing his unpublished work with me.
20. Haddawy, tr., The Arabian Nights II, pp. 19–20.
21. Muhsin Mahdi, “Exemplary Tales in the 1001 Nights,” in The 1001 Nights:
Critical Essays and Annotated Bibliography, Mundus Arabicus, vol. 3, 1983,
pp. 1–24. Mahdi is a little too severe in his judgment that “most of the
secondary literature makes use of one unknown source to prove the exis-
tence of another unknown source; speaks of Indian sources and proto-
types of which we find only meager and scattered fragments today, and
suggests that they were transmitted through many centuries and coun-
tries . . . all this belongs to the history of mythology and is itself quasi-
mythological in character” (p. 4). As I hope to show through the rest of
this chapter, the sources are not necessarily fragmentary or meager, and
each context of narration encodes within it significant historical and ideo-
logical processes.
22. Husain Haddawy, “Introduction,” The Arabian Nights (New York: Norton,
1990), pp. xii–xiii.
23. Buzurg bin Shahryar, The Book of the Wonders of India: Mainland, Sea and
Islands, ed. and trans. G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville (London and the Hague:
East-West, 1981), pp. 106–7. A ratl is approximately equal to half a pound.
24. Ibid., p. 108.
25. Ibid., pp. 109–10.
26. Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century
English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, DC: Three Continents
Press, 1981), pp. 19–20.
27. G. E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 298.
28. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Penguin Books,
1994), p. 71.
Notes to pp. 129–132 357
29. For the enormously complicated history of the manuscripts, editions, and
translations of the Arabian Nights, see Duncan Black Macdonald, “The Earlier
History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1924,
pp. 353–97; E. Littman, “Alf Layla wa-Layla,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (New
Edition), vol. I, pp. 358–64; as well as Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A
Companion, pp. 14–62. The following account is mostly drawn from these
works, to which the reader may refer for more detailed coverage, and my
differences from them are noted in the text.
30. Al-Mas‘ūdī, Les Prairies d’or, ed. and trans. C. Barbier de Meynard (Paris,
1861–1877), vol. IV, pp. 89–90, cited and translated in Robert Irwin, The
Arabian Nights: A Companion, p. 49.
31. Bayard Dodge, ed. and tr., The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-century Survey of
Muslim Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), vol. II, pp. 713–14.
32. W. A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1887), vol. I, p. 9, n. 1.
33. See B. E. Perry, “The Origin of the Book of Sindbad,” Fabula, Band 3, Heft
1/2, 1959, pp. 1–94; and Stephen Belcher, “The Diffusion of the Book of
Sindbād,” Fabula, Band 28, Heft 1/2, 1987, pp. 34–58.
34. See Josef Horovitz, “The Origins of ‘The Arabian Nights,’” Islamic Culture,
vol. 1, 1927, pp. 36–57.
35. See B. E. Perry, “The Origin of the Book of Sindbad,” p. 5, n. 7. For a treatment
of translation into Arabic, see Ulrich Marzolph, Arabia Ridens: Die humoris-
tische Kurzprosa der frühen adab-Literatur im internationalen Traditionsgeflecht
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), 3 vols.
36. Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm, vol. II, p. 715. For the Arabic passage, see
Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq al-Nadīm, Fihrist, ed. Yusuf Ali Tawil (Beirut: Dār al-
Kutb al-‘Ilmiya, 1996), p. 476.
37. On the textual history of the Bṛhat-kathā and its transmission, see M.
Winternitz, History of Indian Literature, tr. with additions by Subhadra Jha
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1963), vol. III, part 1, pp. 346–70.
38. The discoverer and first critical editor of the Nepali manuscript, Félix Lacote,
places the date of composition sometime between the eighth and ninth
centuries, while later commentators have placed it variously in the “fifth or
sixth century A. D.” (Moti Chandra) and “the Gupta age” (U. N. Roy). See F.
Lacote, Essai sur Guṇāḍhya et la Bṛhatkathā (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), pp.
146–49; Moti Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India (New Delhi:
Abhinav, 1977), p. 129; and U. N. Roy, “The Bṛhatkathā-Śloka-Samgraha on
Maritime activities in the Gupta Age,” in M. Rao, S. Pande, and B. N. Misra,
India’s Cultural Relations with South-East Asia (Delhi: Sharada Publishing
House, 1996), p. 59.
39. See Moti Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India; E. H. Warmington,
The Commerce Between the Roman Empire and India (Cambridge: Cambridge
358 Notes to pp. 132–137
University Press, 1928); J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays
in Asian Social and Economic History, tr. J. S. Holme and A. van Marle (The
Hague and Bandung: W. van Hoeve Ltd., 1955); and Janet Abu-Lughod, Before
European Hegemony, pp. 261–90. For materials and modes of travel and trans-
port, see Radha Kumud Mookerji, A History of Indian Shipping (Allahabad:
Kitab Mahal, 1962); and now Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications in
India Prior to Steam Locomotion, tr. James Walker (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1994), particularly vol. II, “Water Transport.”
40. The classic study of this phenomenon is G. Coedes, The Indianized States
of Southeast Asia, ed. W. F. Vella and tr. S. B. Cowing (Honolulu: East-West
Center Press, 1968). For bibliographic references as well as a somewhat
skeptical review of the extensive literature on the Indianization of Southeast
Asia, see Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, pp. 299–302. For a
narrative account, see D. G. E. Hall, A History of South-east Asia (London:
Macmillan, 1968), pp. 3–227.
41. Pāṇini, Gaṇapāṭha V.3.100, cited in Moti Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes in
Ancient India, p. 53.
42. Budhasvāmin, Bṛhat-kathā Çlokasamgraha, ed. F. Lacote (Paris: Ernest Leroux,
1908), book 18, verses 486–95, trans. J. A. B. van Buitenen, Tales of Ancient
India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 246.
43. Budhasvāmin, Bṛhat-kathā Çlokasamgraha, book 18, verses 499–510, trans. J.
A. B. van Buitenen, Tales of Ancient India, p. 247.
44. For the voyages of Cārudatta, see Moti Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes in
Ancient India, pp. 130–31. For a discussion of the ideological significance of
the Vāsudeva-hiṇḍī, see Jagdish Chandra Jain, Prākrit Sāhitya kā Itihāsa, pp.
381–93.
45. Sylvain Lévi, “Maṇimekhalā, a Divinity of the Sea,” Indian Historical Quarterly,
vol. 6, no. 4, 1930, p. 608.
46. See Paula Richman, Women, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil
Buddhist Text (Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs,
Syracuse University, 1988), for a careful and critical study of the text.
47. Shattan, Manimekhala (The Dancer with the Magic Bowl), tr. Alain Daniélou
with T. V. Gopala Iyer (New York: New Directions Books, 1989), pp. 64–65.
See also the more restrained and literal translation in Paula Richman, Women,
Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist Text, pp. 39–42.
48. Shattan, Manimekhala, p. 65.
49. I have preferred to cite Paula Richman’s translation of the final speech of the
chief, since it brings out more clearly his recognition of the appropriateness
of the goods he offers to Sāduvan’s world of trade and exchange. See her
Women, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist Text, p. 42.
50. For a more detailed commentary on the story of Sāduvan, see Richman,
Women, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist Text,
Notes to 138–147 359
pp. 42–52. Richman’s work also remains the most detailed and insightful con-
sideration of the rhetorical pattern and message of the entire Maṇimekhalai.
51. E. B. Cowell, ed., The Jātaka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, tr. W.
H. D. Rouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), vol. 2, p. 90.
For the Pali text, see V. Fausboll, ed., The Jātaka Together with Its Commentary
Being Tales of the Anterior Births of Gotama Buddha, vol. 2 (London: Trubner,
1879), pp. 127–30. I have amended the translation only to change the rendi-
tion of yakkhinī from “goblin” into “she-devil.”
52. See R. H. Major, “Introduction,” India in the Fifteenth Century. Being a
Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India, in the Century Preceding the
Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope; from Latin, Persian, Russian,
and Italian Sources, Now First Translated into English (London: Hakluyt Society,
1857), pp. xxxi–xlv.
c h a p t er 5
26. ṡūfī nihād dām va sar-i ḥuqqah bāz kard/ buniyād-i makr bā falak-i ḥuqqah-bāz
kard// ai kabk-i khush-khirām kih khush mīravī ba-nāz/ ghurrah mashau kih
gurbah-yi zāhid namāz kard. See Ḥāfiz,' Dīvān, ed. Qazvini Ghani.
27. Digby, “Sufis and Jogis,” pp. 94–95.
28. See Richard M. Eaton, “Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in
India,” in Richard C. Martin, Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 106–23.
29. Digby, “Sufis and Jogis,” p. 95.
30. On the Islamic notion of paradise as a garden, see the essays in Richard
Ettinghausen, ed., The Islamic Garden (Washington, DC: Trustees for Harvard
University, Dumbarton Oaks, 1976); as well as Elizabeth B. Moynihan,
Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughal India (New York: George Braziller,
1979). On artistic and architectural representations of the celestial garden, see
Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, eds., Images of Paradise in Islamic Art
(Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991). On allegori-
cal gardens in Persian poetry, see Julie Scott Meisami, “Allegorical Gardens
in the Persian Poetic Tradition: Nezami, Rumi, Hafez,” International Journal
of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 17, 1985, 229–60.
31. jabahi dīpa niyarāvā jāī/ janu kabilāsa niyara bhā āī.
32. Abū ’l-Majd ajdūd Sanā’ī, Dīvān, ed. M. Razavi (Teheran, 1962), pp. 30–35. On
Sanā’ī in general, see J. T. P. de Bruijn, Of Poetry and Piety: The Interaction of
Religion and Literature in the Works of Ḥakīm Sanā’ī of Ghazna (Leiden: Brill,
1983).
33. Annemarie Schimmel, “The Celestial Garden,” in The Islamic Garden, ed.
Richard Ettinghausen (Washington, DC: Trustees for Harvard University,
Dumbarton Oaks, 1976), p. 23.
34. This refers to the māsa-vāsīs, ascetics who wander everywhere and stop for
just a month in each place. For further details on the various sects of ascet-
ics, see Shirreff’s footnote to this verse, Padmavati, p. 25, note 33.
35. See M. Shahidullah, Les Chants Mystiques de Kānhipā; and Nilratan Sen,
Cāryagītīkośa (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1977).
36. David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 57.
37. Sen, ed., Cāryagītikośa, p. 132, translation slightly emended.
38. P. D. Barthwal, ed., Gorakhbānī (Prayāg: Hindī Sāhitya Sammelan, 1979),
pp. 120–21, translation mine.
39. A kāpālī ascetic is one who carries a human skull. For more detailed read-
ings of yogic symbolism in the Padmāvat, see Millis, Malik Muhammad
Jāyasī, pp. 168–82. Millis takes the view that this yogic symbolism shows
the “influence” of the Nāth panth on Jāyasī; rather, I argue that Jāyasī takes
certain elements from the Nāth panth, as well as from other sources, and
362 Notes to pp. 162–169
55. David Cashin, The Ocean of Love: Middle Bengali Sufi Literature and the Fakirs
of Bengal (Stockholm: Association of Oriental Studies, 1995), p. 194.
56. Ibid., p. 195.
57. Ibid., p. 195.
58. See White, The Alchemical Body, p. 486, n. 200, for references to the “curved
duct” in yogic texts. White notes that the term also has an alchemical appli-
cation: it is “a curved tube which, tapered at one end, is used as a blowpipe
for ventilating a flame.”
59. See Chapters 3 and 8.
60. This verse is omitted in the editions of Mataprasad Gupta and V. S. Agraval,
but it does appear in the 1675 Rampur manuscript (f. 107) as well as in
Ramchandra Shukla, ed., Jāyasī Granthāvalī, p. 167. I include it against the
judgment of the two later editors because it indicates how a Sufi reading
community would have interpreted the events of the narrative.
c h a p t er 6
c h a p t er 7
63. For details of the spread of the silsilah in Bihar, see the writings of S. H.
Askari, especially his “Gleanings from the Malfuz of the 17th Century Shuttari
Saint of Jandaha,” Current Studies, 1963, pp. 1–26, and his “A Fifteenth
Century Shuttari Sufi Saint in North Bihar,” Journal of the Bihar Research
Society, vol. 37, 1951, pp. 66–82.
64. Ġhorī, Gvāliyar kā Rājnaitik aur Sāṉskritik Itihas, p. 229. The manuscript of
the Kulliyāt-i Gvāliyārī, which is held in private hands in Gwalior, has been
unavailable to me, necessitating dependence on secondary sources for an
account of the Shaikh’s stay in Gwalior.
65. Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Bābur Padshah Ghazi, Bābur-Nama, tr. Annette
S. Beveridge (1921; reprint, Delhi: Low Price, 1989), pp. 539–40. See also
Al-Badāyūnī, Muntakhabu-t-Tawārīkh, vol. 1, ed. Maulavi Ahmad Ali (Calcutta:
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868); and tr. George S. Ranking (1898; reprint,
Delhi: Atlantic, 1990), vol. 1, p. 445.
66. Iqtidar Alam Khan, “Shaikh Abdul Quddus Gangohi’s Relations with Political
Authorities: A Reappraisal,” in Medieval India: A Miscellany, vol. IV, p. 83.
67. Simon Digby, “‘Abdul Quddūs Gangohī (1456–1537 A. D.): The Personality
and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian Sufi,” Medieval India: A Miscellany, vol. 3,
1975, pp. 33–34.
68. David Damrel, “The ‘Naqshbandî Reaction’ Reconsidered” (paper presented
at the Shaping of Indo-Muslim Identity Workshop, Duke University, April
1995), p. 13.
69. al-Badāyūnī, Muntakhabu-t-Tawārīkh, vol. 1, tr. Ranking, p. 459.
70. I use “letter mysticism” rather than cabbalism to characterize Shattari practices
of invocation because of the specifically Judaic associations of the Kabbalah.
The classic study of technical language in Sufi practice remains Massignon,
Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism.
71. See S. A. A. Rizvi, “Sufis and Nâtha Yogis in Mediaeval Northern India (XII
to XVI Centuries),” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, vol. 7, nos. 1–2,
1970, pp. 119–33.
72. For a detailed study of this text, see Carl Ernst’s translation and introduction
to the text, in The Pool of Nectar: Muslim Interpreters of Yoga (forthcoming);
as well as Yusuf Husain, “Haud al-Hayat: La Version arabe de l’Amratkund,”
Journal Asiatique, vol. 113, 1928, pp. 291–344. For a listing of the numerous
manuscript versions of the Persian and Arabic versions of the text, see Eaton,
The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, p. 78, n. 23.
73. Yusuf Husain, “Haud al-Hayat: La Version arabe de l’Amratkund,” p. 292.
74. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, p. 81.
75. Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ī Shat ̤t ārī,̤ Gulzār-i Abrār (Asiatic Society of Bengal Persian
ms. 259), ff. 327b–328a, cited and translated in Carl W. Ernst, “Sufism and
Yoga According to Muḥammad Ghawth” (paper presented at the American
Academy of Religion Conference, Anaheim, CA, 1989), p. 6. As Ernst notes,
372 Notes to pp. 261–288
the modern Urdu translation by Fazl Ahmad Jivari, Aẕkār-i Abrār: Urdū
Tarjumah-i Gulzār-i Abrār, mutes the disparaging language of this passage
and replaces “idolators” and “infidels” simply with Hindus.
76. Carl Ernst, The Pool of Nectar: Muslim Interpreters of Yoga, p. 33. I am indebted
to Ernst for sharing his unpublished translation with me.
77. The tutelary deities are not the standard Nāth figures, and seem to be taken
from a wide range of sources. Here they are being used to approximate the
spiritual agents (muvakkil-i rūḥānī) that are the guardians of each letter in
Shattari cosmology.
78. See George W. Briggs, Gorakhnāth and the Kānphaṭā Yogis (1938; reprint,
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), p. 310, for a list of the six Nāth cakras and
their positions in the body; and David White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha
Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), for
detailed accounts of the various physiological concepts employed among the
Tantric practitioners. For a reading of these notions as they are deployed in
Hindavī Sufi romances, see Chapter 5.
79. See, for instance, Shaikh Ibrahim Shāt t' 'arī, Ā’īnah-i Ḥaqā’iq Numā (Rampur Raza
Library Persian ms. 873), and Ismā‘īl Farḥī, Makhzan-i Da‘vat (Asiatic Society of
Bengal Curzon ms. 437). On Shaikh ‘Īsā Jundullah, a Shattari Sufi who lived
in Burhanpur in the Deccan, see the Urdu monograph by Shaikh Farīd, Ḥazrat ̤
Shāh ‘Isā Jundullāh (Hyderabad: National Fine Printing Press, 1975), which con-
tains an account of Shaikh ‘Īsā’s system for invoking all the ninety-nine Names
of Allah. For a good account of visualization in other Sufi orders, notably the
Chishtis and the Naqshbandis, see Mir Valiuddin, Contemplative Disciplines in
Sufism, ed. Gulshan Khakee (London and the Hague: East-West, 1980).
c h a p t er 8
1. See Chapter 2.
2. See Chapter 3.
3. Charlotte Vaudeville, “Preface,” in Bārahmāsā in Indian Literatures (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), p. x.
4. Idem, “Bārahmāsā Literature in Indo-Aryan Vernaculars,” in Bārahmāsā in
Indian Literatures, pp. 38–39.
5. For more details on the imagery of the gavana, see the discussion of Kabīr in
Chapter 3.
6. Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱, Kalīd-i Makhāzin (Rampur Raza Library Persian ms.
912), f. 80.
c h a p t er 9
2. Ẕiā al-dīn Baranī, Tārīḳh-i Fīrūzshāhī, pp. 531–38, (translated in Elliot Dowson,
The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, III (Delhi: Low Price, 1990
[1867–77]), p. 199.
3. For details see M. M. Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur: A Political and
Cultural History (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1972, pp. 111–12, 206–7); and
A. Halim, “History of the Growth and Development of North-Indian Music
During Sayyid-Lodi Period,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan, vol. 1,
no. 1, 1956, pp. 46–64.
4. See A. Halim, “Music and Musicians of the Court of Shāh Jahān,” Islamic
Culture, vol. 18, no. 4, 1944, pp. 354–60, esp. 355–56.
5. M. Habib and K. A. Nizami, A Comprehensive History of India, Vol. V: The
Delhi Sultanat (a.d. 1206–1526) (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970), p.
304.
6. Baranī, Tārīḳh-i Fīrūz-shāhī, p. 158.
7. gar qadam bar chashm-i mā ḳhvāhī nihād/dīdah bar rāh mī-naham tā mīravī.
8. sarv-i sīmīnā ba-saḥrā mīravī / nīk bad-‘ahdī kih bī-mā mīravī. Baranī, Tārīḳh-i
Fīrūz-shāhī, pp. 158–59. The ġhazal recited by the courtesan is by Sa‘dī Shīrāzī.
The closing couplet is also on the theme of the departing beloved: dīdah-i
Sa‘dī va dil hamrāh-i tū’st/tā na pindārī kih tanhā mīravī (“The eyes and the
heart of Sa‘dī go with you / So you will not feel that you go alone”). For the
text, see Sa’dī, Kulliyāt-i Sa’dī, ed. M. A. Furoghi, p. 691. For a commentary
on the opening verse, as well as responses to the theme in the works of
later Persian and Urdu poets, see Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness:
Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.
96–103.
9. ‘Abd al-Qādir Badāyūnī, Muntaḳhab ut-Tawārīḳh, ed. Maulavi Ahmad Ali
(Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868), vol. I, p. 249, and tr. George S.
Ranking (1898; reprint, Delhi: Atlantic, 1990), vol. I, p. 332. With his char-
acteristic disdain for popular practices, Badāyūnī judges the worth of these
works: “I found most of them to be profitless, and their paucity of interest
is for the most part due to the triviality of their subject matter, and the diffi-
culty of explaining it, as is evident.”
10. The opening couplet of this ġhazal, often sung still by qawwals, is:
These verses and the preceding couplet, cited in note 10, are cited in A.
Halim, “Growth of Urdu Language and Literature During Sayyid-Lodi Period,”
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan, vol. III, 1958, p. 53. The translation is
my own.
12. Shahab Sarmadee, ed., “Introduction,” in Ġhunyat-ul-Munya: The Earliest
known Persian Work on Indian Music (Bombay: Asia, 1978), p. 6.
13. Ibid., p. 3.
14. Ibid., p. 33.
15. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
16. Ibid., p. 32.
17. Ibid., pp. 72–4.
18. Ibid., pp. 108–9.
19. Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa a.d. 1325–1354, tr. H. A. R. Gibb
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for the Hakluyt Society, 1971), vol.
III, p. 625.
20. On al-Jurjānī, see Margaret Larkin, The Theology of Meaning: ‘Abd al-Qāhir
Jurjānī’s Theory of Discourse (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society,
1995); and K. Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjānī’s Theory of Poetic Imagery (Warminster:
Aris and Phillips, 1979).
21. J. C. Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh: The “Licit Magic” of the Arts in Medieval
Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 57.
22. Ibid., p. 67.
23. Ibid., p. 68.
24. See K. A. Nizami, State and Culture in Medieval India (Columbia, MO: South
Asia Books, 1985), pp. 209–38.
25. Cited in Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh, pp. 73–74. I have modified the trans-
lation somewhat, using the Persian text in Nizāmī " Ganjavī, Khusrau va Shīrīn,
ed. Behruz Sarvatiyan (Teheran: Maktaba Tus, 1987), pp. 253–54.
26. Bürgel, The Feather of Simurgh, p. 74.
27. Pandita Damodara, Ukti Vyakti Prakaraṇa, ed. Acharya Jina Vijaya Muni
(Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1953).
28. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, “Introduction,” Varṇa-Ratnâkara of Jyotirīśvara-
Kaviśekharâcārya (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1940), p. xxi.
29. Margaret Larkin, The Theology of Meaning: ‘Abd al-Qāhir Jurjānī’s Theory of
Discourse, p. 9.
30. K. Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjānī’s Theory of Poetic Imagery, pp. 24–25.
31. Ibid., p. 25.
32. A. Yusuf Ali, tr., The Holy Qur’ān (1934; reprint, Beirut: Dār al-Qur’ān
al-Karīm, 1982), pp. 49, 1302. On application of this Qur’ānic verse even to
the physical sciences, see S. H. Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological
Doctrines (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 6, 10 et
passim.
Notes to pp. 300–310 375
33. Julie Scott Meisami, “Allegorical Gardens in the Persian Poetic Tradition:
Nezami, Rumi, Hafez,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol.
17, no. 2, May 1985, pp. 229–30. On the exegesis of the Qur’ān see also Paul
Nwyia, Exégese Coranique et langue mystique: nouvel essai sur le lexique tech-
nique des mystiques musulmans (Beirut: Dar al-Machreq, 1970), pp. 314–16.
34. Thomas de Bruijn, The Ruby Hidden in the Dust: A Study of the Poetics of
Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (Leiden: Rijksuniversitaet Proefschrift,
1996, p. 157.
35. On the inseparability of viraha and prema in Jāyasī’s text, see Charlotte
Vaudeville, “La Conception de l’Amour Divin chez Muhammad Jāyasī: virah
et ‘ishq,” Journal Asiatique, 1962 (250:4), esp. pp. 356–57.
36. Muḥammad Kabīr, Afsānah-i Shāhān (British Library Ms. Add. 24409), f.
105b. The Persian text and Hindi translation are also given in P. L. Gupta,
ed., introduction to Miragāvatī (Varanasi: Viśvavidyālaya Prakāśan, 1967), p.
39; and cited in S. C. R. Weightman, “Symmetry and Symbolism in Shaikh
Manjhan’s Madhumālatī,” in The Indian Narrative: Perspectives and Patterns,
eds. Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,
1992), pp. 195–96. I have slightly amended the translation to follow the man-
uscript more closely.
37. See Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 115.
38. Niz"āmī, Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance, tr. Julie Scott Meisami
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 22–23.
39. Dārā Shikūh, Ḥasanat al-‘Ārifīn, Nadwat-ul-Ulama Ms., Lucknow No. 202, p.
21, cited in K. A. Nizami, “Introduction,” in Bruce B. Lawrence, Morals for the
Heart: Conversations of Shaykh Nizam ad-din Awliya Recorded by Amir Hasan
Sijzi (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 17.
40. For a compilation of sources on Shaikh Zain al-dīn, see S. M. Pandey, “Maulānā
Dāūd’s Teacher Shaikh ̣ Zainuddīn,” in A. W. Entwhistle and Françoise
Mallison, eds., Studies in South Asian Devotional Literature: Research Papers,
1988–1991 (Paris: École Française d’Extrême Orient, 1994), pp. 285–97.
41. For an analysis and detailed account of the rivalry, see Simon Digby,
“Tabarrukāt and Succession Among the Great Chishti Shaikhs,” in R. E.
Frykenberg, ed., Delhi Through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture and
Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 77–89.
42. S. A. A. Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
1978), vol. I, p. 367.
43. S. M. Pandey, “Kutuban’s Miragāvatī: Its Content and Interpretation,” in R.
S. McGregor, ed., Devotional Literature in South Asia: Current Research, 1985–
1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180.
44. M. M. Saeed has suggested another possibility for Qutban’s " teacher: the
Mahdavi Shaikh Burhān al-dīn Ansārī of Kalpi (d. 1562–63). Shaikh Burhān
376 Notes to 310–315
al-dīn was also a Hindavī poet and instructed Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī, the
author of the Padmāvat. However, in view of Qut"ban’s reference to Shaikh
Buḍḍhan Suhravardī in the text, the ascription cannot stand. See Saeed, The
Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur, p. 200, and below for Shaikh Burhān as Jāyasī’s
teacher.
45. On Shaikh Ashraf Jahāngīr Simnānī, see M. M. Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate
of Jaunpur: A Political and Cultural History (Karachi: University of Karachi,
1972), pp. 241–45.
46. See John Millis, Malik Muhammad Jāyasī: Allegory and Religious Symbolism in
his Padmāvat (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1984),
pp. 32–39, for a review of the controversy.
47. For the full Chishti genealogy, see sources listed in note 14 on p. 360,
above.
48. For a detailed discussion, see Chapter 5.
49. For detailed information about the shaikh and his silsilah, see in particular
the excellent Urdu biography by Mas‘ūd Aḥmad, Shāh Muḥammad Ġhaus̱
Gvāliyārī (Mirpur Khas: Aftab Press, 1964), and Chapter 7.
50. For a discussion of the shaikh’s life and work in Bihar, see Fr. Paul Jackson,
S.J., The Way of a Sufi: Sharf al-dīn Maner (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli,
1987).
51. Muḳh al-Ma‘ānī, Majlis 35, cited in Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil:
Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 135.
On the audiences for Sufi literature at khānaqāhs, see also Richard M. Eaton,
Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 142ff.
52. Bruce B. Lawrence, “The Early Chishtī Approach to Samā’,” in Milton K.
Wagle, ed., Islamic Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Aziz Ahmad (New
Delhi: Manohar Books, 1984), pp. 73–74.
53. ‘Abd al-Qādir Badāyūnī, Muntaḳhab ut-Tawārīḳh, ed. Maulavi Ahmad Ali
(Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868), vol. I, p. 250, and tr. George S.
Ranking (1898; reprint, Delhi: Atlantic, 1990), vol. I, p. 333.
54. For a history of the controversies surrounding samā’, see inter alia Annemarie
Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 178–86; Lawrence, “The Early Chishtī Approach to
Samā‘”; Sirajul Haq, “Samā‘ and Raqṣ of the Darwishes,” Islamic Culture, vol.
18, no. 2, pp. 111–30; and Jean During, Musique et Extase: L’audition mystique dans
la tradition soufie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988). For an account of the opposition
to samā’ in fourteenth-century Delhi and Nizām " al-dīn’s successful defense of
samā‘ at the court of Ġhiyās̱ al-dīn Tuġhlaq, with references to the controversy
in Baghdad and other Islamic centers, see Muḥammad bin Mubārak ‘Alavī
" Muḥibb al-Hind, 1885), pp. 535–42.
Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’ (Delhi: Matba’
Notes to pp. 315–326 377
55. Shihāb al-dīn Abū Ḥafs ‘Umar Suhravardī, ‘Avārif al-Ma‘ārif, translated into
Urdu by Shams Barelvī (Delhi: Arshad Brothers, 1986), p. 320.
56. Alī bin Uthmān al-Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-Mahjub: The Oldest Persian Treatise
on Sufiism, tr. Reynold A. Nicholson (Lahore: Islamic Book Foundation, 1976),
p. 394.
57. Lawrence, “The Early Chishtī Approach to Samā’,” pp. 74–75.
58. James Robson, ed. and tr., Tracts on Listening to Music (London: Royal Asiatic
Society, 1938), p. 71.
59. Lawrence, “The Early Chishtī Approach to Samā’,” pp. 75–76.
60. Muḥammad Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’ (Delhi: Mat"ba’ Muḥibb al-Hind, 1885),
p. 502.
61. Lawrence, “The Early Chishtī Attitude to Samā’,” p. 77.
62. Al-Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjūb, p. 402.
63. Muḥammad Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’, pp. 501–2. See also Favā’id al-Fu’ād, pp.
1020–23; and Lawrence, Morals for the Heart, pp. 355–56.
64. Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’, p. 503.
65. Ibid., pp. 503–4.
66. Sijzī, Favā’id al-Fu’ād, p. 304; and Lawrence, Morals for the Heart, p. 121.
67. Muḥammad Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’, p. 520.
68. James Robson, ed. and tr., Tracts on Listening to Music, p. 71.
69. Muḥammad Kirmānī, Siyar al-Auliyā’, p. 505.
70. Ibid., p. 504.
71. Cited in Kirmānī, op. cit., p. 505.
72. Ibid., pp. 509–10.
73. Ibid., p. 509.
74. Sijzī, Favā’id al-Fu’ād, p. 764; and Lawrence, Morals for the Heart, p. 276.
75. Banārsīdās, Ardhakathānaka, ed. and tr. Mukund Lath (Jaipur: Rajasthan
Prakrit Bharati Sansthan, 1981), pp. 49–50 (translation slightly emended).
epil o gu e
1. Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
2. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic
History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), p. 34.
3. See Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century
English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, DC: Three Continents
Press, 1981).
4. See Chapter 2 for early Persian versions of the “mirror for princes.”
378 Notes to pp. 326–329
5. For the Pañcatantra, see Patrick Olivelle, The Pañcatantra: The Book of India’s
Folk Wisdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Series: Oxford World’s Classics,
1997).
6. See Alexander Mackie Honeyman, The Mission of Burzoe in the Arabic Kalilah
and Dimnah (privately printed Ph. D. dissertation, distributed from Chicago:
University of Chicago Libraries, 1936).
7. Thomas Ballantine Irving, “Introduction,” Kalilah and Dimnah: An
English Version of Bidpai’s Fables Based upon Ancient Arabic and Spanish
Manuscripts (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1980), p. x. See also I. G.
N. Keith-Falconer, Kalīlah and Dimnah, or, The Fables of Bidpai, Being an
Account of Their Literary History, With an English Translation of the Later
Syriac Version of the Same, and Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1885).
8. See the excellent essays collected in Ernst J. Grube, A Mirror for Princes
from India: Illustrated Versions of the Kalilah wa Dimnah, Anvar-i Suhayli,
Iyar-i Danish, and Humayun-Nameh (Bombay: Marg, 1991); as well as Esin
Atil, Kalilah wa Dimnah: Fables from a Fourteenth-Century Arabic Manuscript
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).
9. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System a.d. 1250–1350
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 200.
10. See W. Norman Brown, “The Pañcatantra in Modern Indian Folklore,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society, vol. 39, 1919, pp. 1–54.
11. See Must"afá Khāliqdād ‘Abbāsī, Panjākyānah, ed. Tara Chand and Sayyid
Amir Hasan Abidi (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1973).
12. See Richard Schmidt, Die Çukasaptati: Textus Simplicior (Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 1893).
13. See Ziya’u’d-din Nakhshabi, Tales of a Parrot, tr. and ed. Muhammed A.
Simsar (Cleveland, OH and Graz, Austria: Cleveland Museum of Art and
Akademische Druck u. Verlagsanstalt, 1978).
14. Ġhavvāsī, T'ūt"ī-Nāmah, ed. Mīr Sa’dat ‘Alī Rizvī (Hyderabad: Silsilah-yi
Yūsufiyya, 1357 a.h.).
15. Richard M. Eaton, “Introduction,” in Hans J. Kissling et al., The Last Great
Muslim Empires: History of the Muslim World, tr. F. R. C. Bagley (Princeton:
Markus Wiener, 1996), pp. xiii–xiv.
16. Genevieve Bouchon and Denys Lombard, “The Indian Ocean in the Fifteenth
Century,” in Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Person, eds., India and the Indian
Ocean, 1500–1800 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 46–70. For
a survey of seagoing trade in the period, see Simon Digby, “The Maritime
Trade of India,” in Tapan Raychoudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds., The Cambridge
Economic History of India, vol. I: c. 1200–c. 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 125–159.
Notes to pp. 329–333 379
17. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, p. 44. See also George
F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval
Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 51–84.
18. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, pp. 34–36.
19. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, pp. 153–84.
20. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in
a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. I,
p. 59.
21. Phillip B. Wagoner, “‘Sultan Among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles, and the
Islamicization of Hindu culture at Vijayanagara,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol.
55, no. 4, November 1996, pp. 851–80.
22. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 14. On that encounter see
also Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, tr.
Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
23. C. E. Dubler, ‘Adjā’ib, Encyclopaedia of Islam (New Edition), vol. I, p. 203.
24. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Penguin Books,
1994), p. 182.
25. Rāġhib al-Iṣfahānī, al-Mufradāt fī Ġharīb al-Qur’ān, ed. M. Kailani, p. 322,
cited in Roy P. Mottahedeh, “‘Ajā’ib in The Thousand and One Nights,” in
Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, eds., The Thousand and One
Nights in Arabic Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), p. 30.
26. Henry James, The American (New York: Scribner, 1907), p. xvii.
27. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. R.
Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 167.
28. Graham Seymour, “On Reading Literary Fantasy: Towards an Aesthetics of
the Fantastic,” Paragraph: The Journal of the Modern Critical Theory Group, vol.
5, no. 4, March 1985, p. 65.
29. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 168.
30. For more about dhvani, see Chapter 9.
31. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 60.
32. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 7.
33. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen,
1981), p. 61.
34. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1964), p. 85, cited in John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and
Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), p. 9.
35. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, p. 10.
36. Ibid., p. 30.
380 Notes to pp. 333–336
37. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, tr. Laurence Scott et al. (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 114–15. See the discussion in Chapter 4.
38. Vladimir Propp, “Transformations of the Wondertale,” in his Theory and
History of Folklore, tr. A. Y. Martin and R. P. Martin (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 82.
39. See, for instance, Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire de Décameron (Hague: Mouton,
1969), and also Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives,” in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (London: Jonathan Cape,
1982), pp. 251–95.
40. Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” p. 295.
41. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 37.
42. See Chapter 3.
43. Published in Linda Y. Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the
Chester Beatty Library (London: Scorpion Cavendish, World of Islam Festival
Trust, 1995), pp. 189–232.
44. For a complete listing of later versions of the Padmāvat, see now Thomas de
Bruijn, The Ruby Hidden in the Dust: A Study of the Poetics of Malik Muḥammad
Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (Leiden: Rijksuniversitaet Proefschrift, 1996), pp. 24–34.
45. For a discussion of interlinguistic resonances in this version, see Shantanu
Phukan, “‘None Mad as a Hindu Woman’: Contesting Communal Readings
of Padmavat,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,
vol. 16, no. 1, 1996, esp. pp. 47–53.
46. For a brief account of Persian versions of the Padmāvat, see S. A. H. Abidi,
“The Story of Padmavat in Indo-Persian Literature,” Indo-Iranica, vol. 15, no.
2, pp. 1–11.
47. An illustrated manuscript copy of the translation exists in the private collec-
tion of Simon Digby, to whom I am indebted for showing it to me.
48. For an introduction, see Rupert Snell, The Hindi Classical Tradition: A Braj
Bhāṣā Reader (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, 1991).
49. For details, see R. S. McGregor, Hindi Literature from Its Beginnings to the
Nineteenth Century (Series: A History of Indian Literature, vol. 8, Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 150–54.
50. ‘Usmān, Citrāvalī, ed. Jaganmohan Varmā (Benares: Nagaripracharini Sabha,
1912–13).
51. Excerpt published in G. P. Dwivedi, Hindī Premgāthā-kāvya (Allahabad:
Hindustani Academy, 1953), pp. 239–309.
52. Nūr Muḥammad, Anurāg-Bānsurī, eds. R. C. Shukla and Chandrabali Pande
(Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1997).
53. See Frances W. Pritchett, Marvelous Encounters: Folk Romance in Urdu and
Hindi (Delhi: Manohar Books, 1985) for an excellent account of the genre.
Notes to pp. 337–338 381
54. Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ, Hangāmah-yi ‘Ishq (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Library,
Persian ms. 8918), f. 5, cited in Phukan, “The Rustic Beloved: Ecology of
Hindi in a Persianate World,” Annual of Urdu Studies, no. 15, 2000, p. 4.
55. Phukan, “The Rustic Beloved,” p. 5.
56. Mukhliṣ, Hangāmah-yi ‘Ishq, f. 5, cited in Phukan, “The Rustic Beloved,” p. 4.
57. Phukan, “The Rustic Beloved,” p. 5.
58. Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty), Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva
(Oxford University Press, 1973; retitled Siva: The Erotic Ascetic, 1981).
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Index
Citrarekhā of Jāyasī, 23 Delhi, 1, 47, 52, 56, 144, 152, 154, 179,
Citrāvalī of ‘Usmān of Ghazipur, 336 184, 191, 197, 201–2, 204, 256,
cloister, Sufi. See Khānaqāh 293–95, 309
Clouston, W. A., 130 Delhi sultanate
colonialism, 13–14, 178, 223 cultural and literary milieu or patron-
communalism, 14, 17, 19, 178, 199 age, 5, 16, 20, 22, 24–25, 47–48,
community. See ummah 59–61, 180, 198, 216, 286, 288, 293,
connoisseurs (rasikas), 31, 100, 294, 295, 326, 332, 338
306–7, 324 history or historiography of, 5, 19, 24,
conquest(s) 47, 49, 54, 217
epics or poetry of, 14, 19, 24, 27, 52, religious milieu, 25, 313, 322
108, 141, 179–81, 197, 200 demons, 21–22, 28, 110, 117–18, 120,
eroticism and, 184–85, 205, 217, 223 146, 175, 191, 194, 222, 246–50,
Islamic, 15, 143–45, 176, 184, 216, 292 265, 272
Turkish, 4, 14, 27–29, 47, 49–50, 102, descriptions
178, 181, 185, 198, 216–17, 329 of cities or landscapes
continents, 37, 42, 56, 155, 167–68, 202. (nagara-varṇana), 84, 88, 111, 190,
See also Jambudvīpa 195
cosmology, 16, 24, 28, 37, 45, 142, 155, foot to head (nakha-śikha varṇana),
221, 223, 243, 255, 261, 263, 264, 23, 226
330 head to foot (sarāpā; śikha-nakha
courtesans, 135, 290–91 varṇana), 23, 28, 63, 76–79, 91,
courts, aristocratic or royal, 1–2, 46, 48, 93–94, 115, 167, 202–3, 221, 223,
57, 59–61, 289–90, 303 226–32, 284
poetry and, 84, 156, 297
Dalmau (court of), 23, 34, 53 desire (kāma; shauq)
dance or dancing girls, 135, 206–8, 280, erotic, 2, 22, 67, 73, 111, 266
289, 290, 292–94, 320 for or of God, 41, 65, 78, 80–82, 238,
dār al-Islām (land of Islam), 52, 197 274, 283
dār-al ḥarb (territory of war), 53 for hero, 118, 165, 172
Dā’ūd, Maulānā, vii, 21, 23, 26–27, for heroine, 22, 71, 76–78, 90–91,
32, 34, 36–41, 46–47, 59–108. 166, 203, 232
See also Cāndāyan illicit, 92, 100, 102, 104
as courtier, 47, 53–54, 60, 108, narrative, 334
290. See also Junā Shāh, Khān-i physical signs of. See under love
Jahān transformed into love, 80,
on love, rasa, or erotics, 63–65, 73–74, 88, 91, 104, 107, 111, 116, 119,
92–93, 107, 290 285, 307
other authors or texts and, 41–42, 44, unfulfilled. See love: unrequited
59, 118, 216, 227, 274, 298 Deval Rānī Khizr Khān, 36, 38, 52, 181,
as Sufi, 47, 62–63, 65, 75–76, 101, 185–89
108, 308–9, 314 dharma, 44, 55, 137, 190, 192, 196,
Davā’ir-i Rashīdī (“The Circles of 309
Rashīd”) of Shaikh Rashīd, 236 dhvani (poetic suggestion), 32, 57, 62,
de Bruijn, Thomas, 146, 166, 302 147, 155, 297–98, 323
388 Index
uniqueness or popularity of, 30–31, 57, women as vehicles for, 102, 182
223, 286 Iltutmish, Sultan Shams al-dīn, 101
Hindi, 10–11, 14, 20, 25, 336–37. imagination, poetic (pratibhāna), 297–98
See also Hindavī immersion in Allah (mashġhūlī-yi
Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās, 11 ḥaqq), 8
Hindu-Muslim relations, 19, 178. immolation (satī; jauhar), 23–24, 27, 70,
See also communalism 104, 107, 119, 170, 172, 177, 180, 182,
Hindustani. See Hindi; Hindavī; Urdu. 185, 193, 196–200, 207, 214, 216
Hīrāman. See parrots incarnation. See manifestation, divine
historians, 14, 17, 178, 200, 212, 250, Indian Ocean, 27, 29, 119–20, 125, 128,
289, 291, 332 131–32, 134–35, 139–41, 325, 328–29,
Holi. See festivals 331
Homer, 121–22, 128–29, 140 Indo-Aryan, 3–4, 15–17, 19, 89, 160, 179,
honor (‘izzat; māna), 19, 24, 27, 83, 198, 298
86–87, 145, 180–81, 184–85, 190, 217 Indra, 41, 290
horses (real or metaphorical), 90, 111–12, iqt"ā‘-dār (general or provincial governor),
121, 139, 147, 162–63, 175, 179, 202, 47, 53–54, 290
204, 291, 362n46 Irwin, Robert, 129
hospice, Sufi. See khānaqāh ‘Īsá Jundullāh, Shaikh, 262
Humāyūn, Emperor, 55, 233, 250–55, ‘ishq. See under love
258–59, 265 islām (submission), 5
Ḥusain Shāh Sharqī, Sultan, 23, 27, Islam. See also Muslims; Sufis; world:
54–55, 62, 290, 299–300, 310 Islamicate
Ḥusain Shāh, Sultan ‘Alāuddīn of Bengali, 15, 150, 168, 255–57
Bengal, 55 conversion to (Islām qubūl kardan),
Husain, Yusuf, 260 27, 50, 143, 151, 154, 200, 296, 323
Ḥusām al-Dīn, Shaikh, 256 Indian, 17, 219, 284, 313, 338
Sunni, 49
Ibn ‘Arabī, 41, 45–46, 234, 236–37, Islām Shāh Sūrī, 23, 56–57, 220,
304 254–55, 303
Bat"t"ūt"ah, Ibn, 295 ‘Iṣmat Nāmah (“Account of Chastity”),
Ibrāhīm Lodī, 258 62, 88, 129
Ibrāhīm Shāh Sharqī, Sultan, 256
Ibrāhīm Shat"t"ārī, Shaikh, 236 Ja‘far al-Sādiq, 242
idealization Jackson, Peter, 48
of kings. See under kings or kingship Jackson, Rosemary, 332
of women. See under women Jāḥiz", al-, 71
identities, 17, 19, 24, 176, 179 Jains, 27, 61, 158, 180–83, 197, 323, 327
ideology, 4, 13, 20, 24, 28, 122, 127, 139, Jalāl al-dīn Khaljī, Sultan, 289
142, 176, 178, 191, 197, 200, 299, Jalor, 181, 185, 189–96
326, 332–33 Jambudvīpa, 156, 167–68, 173, 362n54
of love, 80, 95, 303, 307 James, Henry, 331
royal or of rulership, 35, 47, 49, 190 Jām-i Jahān Numā (“The World-showing
Sufi, 24–25, 27, 31, 35, 62–63, 80, Cup”) of Muḥammad Shīrīn
95–96, 102, 143, 150–51, 173, 223, Maġhribī, 236–38, 244, 251, 261
230, 258, 301, 303, 307, 322–23 Jāmi‘ al-‘Ulūm of Fakhr al-dīn Rāzī, 49
392 Index
Kitāb Alf Lailah va Lailah (“The Book of Lat"ā’if-i Ġhaibīyyah (“Subtleties of the
the Thousand Nights and a Night”). Invisible World”), 256
See Arabian Nights Lat"ā’if-i Quddūsī (“Quddūsī’s Graces/
Kitāb al-Zahra, 72 Subtleties”), 62
Koka-śāstra, 73–74, 224 Lavā’ iḥ (“The Lights”) of Qāzī Ḥamīd
Kolff, Dirk, 200 al-dīn Nāgaurī, 80–81
Kṛṣṇa, 23, 63–64, 66–68, 82, 115, 133, Lawrence, Bruce, 80, 198, 218–19, 313
335 Laylī va Majnūn of Niz'āmī, 34–35, 37
Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta, 66 Laẕẕāt al-Nisā’ (“The Delights of
Kṣemendra, 131 Women”), 74
Kubrawi order, 242 Lefebvre, Henri, 141
Kulliyāt-i Gvāliyārī of Fazl ‘Alī Shat"t"ārī, legitimacy, 48–49
253–54, 257 letter mysticism. See alphabet
Lévi, Sylvain, 135
lakṣaṇā (secondary or figurative mean- light (nūr), 13, 29, 38–46, 83, 89, 97,
ings of a word), 31 103, 105, 115, 148, 161, 173, 195, 201,
land grants, tax-free (madad-i ma‘āsh), 225, 228, 250, 252, 268, 270, 276,
6–7, 101, 252, 258 278, 281, 305, 309, 311, 319
landscapes divine (nūr-i avval ), 38, 40, 46, 65,
cultural, 1, 27, 155, 176 78, 163–64, 228, 234, 236, 238,
geographic or physical, 27, 143, 242, 244, 269
147–48, 151–52, 176, 198, 216 of Muḥammad (nūr-i Muḥammadī;
imaginary or fantasy, 23, 27, 128, 141, puruṣa nirmarā), 38–39, 41, 43
145, 156, 158, 170, 176, 218, 326 Līlāśuka Bilvamaṅgala, 66–67
interior, 27, 142, 145, 159–60, 164, 198, lions (real or metaphorical), 39, 42, 44,
215, 225 54, 56–57, 69, 93
South Asian, 142, 152, 198, 223 literary criticism
spiritual or sanctified, 27, 47, 143, Arabic or Persian, 296, 298, 300
151–55, 158, 180, 198 nationalist, 10–11
languages Sanskrit, 30–32
dialects and, 3, 20 literature
interactions of multiple, 3 Indian Islamic, 19, 57, 62
Islamic theories of, 299–306. self-conscious, 10, 20, 31, 33–34
See also alphabet lodge, Sufi. See Khānaqāh
limitations of, 69, 322 Lodī sultanate. See under sultanates
literary, classical, or cosmopolitan, Lorik of Gaura (Cāndāyan hero), 34, 64,
2, 4, 18–19, 30, 32, 288, 300. 82–88, 92–108, 129, 226, 314
See also Arabic; Persian; Sanskrit love
national, 10–11 abstract quality of, 22, 28
native (mother tongues), 18 Arabic, Islamic, or Persian views of,
race and, 19 71–76, 93, 108, 303
regional or desī, 3, 15, 19, 61, 300–2 awakening or arising of, 23, 81
space or landscape and, 141–42 Chishti view of, 26, 64–65, 74–75,
Latā’
" if-i Ashrafī (“Subtleties of Ashraf”), 80–82, 307
149, 152 divine, 36
394 Index
Mughals, 19, 178, 233–34, 238, 252, 255, nafs. See under soul
257–59, 313, 327, 335 Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 10
Muḥammad bin Mubārak ‘Alavī Nāgmatī (Padmāvat character), 166,
Kirmānī, 5, 74–75, 317–18 174–75, 180, 210, 214–15
Muḥammad Gesūdarāz, Sayyid, 309 nakha-śikha varṇana (foot-to-head descrip-
Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ Gvāliyārī, tion). See under descriptions
Shaikh, 221, 232–35, 237–42, Nala and Damayantī, 12
244, 251–55, 257–62, 285, Name(s), divine, 35–36, 41, 43, 45, 70,
311–12, 335 76, 82, 120, 155, 227, 231, 234,
Muḥammad Ġhaus̱ī Shat"t"ārī, 256 236–41, 243–44, 246, 259–61, 263,
Muḥammad ibn Dā’ūd, 72 351n55
Muḥammad Jaunpurī, Sayyid, 150 Naqshbandis, 5, 152, 242, 255
Muḥammad Shīrīn Maġhribī, 236–38, Naṣīr al-dīn Maḥmūd “Chirāgh -i Dihlī,”
251, 261 Shaikh, 75, 101, 152, 309
Muḥammad Tuġhlaq, Sultan, 53 Nāth yogis, 97, 158, 160, 162–63,
Muḥammad, Prophet, 34, 37–41, 43–44, 171, 176, 259–61, 361n39.
72, 81, 144, 225, 233, 236, 240–44, See also Gorakhnāthī yogis; yogis
260, 302, 309, 317, 321 nationalism, 13, 18, 177–78, 180, 217
Muḥammad Qāzin ‘Alā’, Shaikh, 220, nature, 21, 105, 155, 273
256–7 Nāṭya-Śāstra of Bharata, 31, 76
Muhta Naiṇsī rī Khyāt, 180 neo-Platonism, 223, 234, 296
“Mukhliṣ” (“Sincere”) [Anand Rām], Nepali, 131
336–37 nirguṇa. See attributeless God
multilingualism, 2, 16, 55, 292, 301, 328, niyābat (governor). See governors
334–35 Niz"ām al-dīn Auliyā’, Shaikh, 6–7, 35,
Murūj al-Ẕahab (“Meadows of Gold”), 74, 218–19, 307–9, 316–22
129 Niz"ām al-Mulk Tūsī, 48
Mushtāqī, Shaikh Rizqullāh, 219 Niz"āmī Ganjavī, 34–35, 37–38, 46,
music, 5, 292–94, 335 50–52, 63, 252, 296–97, 299, 305,
courts and, 55, 57, 59–61, 287–91 308, 328, 335
Hindavī, 32, 323 Nizami, K. A., 5, 8, 256
Hindustani classical, 3, 55 nonviolence, 137, 183–84
Sufis and, 5–6, 22, 33, 75–76, 96, nūr. See light
307, 313–20. See also samā‘ nūr-i Muḥammadī (light of
Muslim-Hindu relations, 19, 178. Muḥammad). See under light
See also communalism Nūr Muḥammad of Azamgarh, 336
Muslims. See also Islam; Sufis Nūr Qutb " -i ‘Ālam of Pandua, Shaikh, 148
Bengali, 15, 168, 180 nurses (dhāī), 64–65, 92–95, 97–98, 114,
desī, 2, 20–22, 25 116–17, 172, 196, 220–21
Muṣt"afá, Kalb-i, 199 nymphs (apsaras), 29, 80, 94, 97, 110–11,
Muṣt"afá Khāliqdād ‘Abbāsī, 327 114, 132, 208, 221, 224, 265, 272
Padmanābha, 181, 185, 189, 197, 201, 208 shadow of on earth (janu kabilāsa
Padmāvat of Jāyasī, vii, 16–17, 23, utari bhui chāva), 29, 246
42, 55, 88, 145–48, 151, 155–67, parrots, 165–67, 169, 172, 179, 203, 338
169–77, 180–81, 199–202, 205, patronage. See also under Hindavī Sufi
216 romances
Arabic or Persian influences on or literary, 2, 47–48, 50, 61
translations of, 147, 163, 335, 337 of Sufism, 5–7, 15, 216, 255
ending of, 176, 181, 198–216 Pemā (“Love”; Madhumālatī character),
fantasy in, 27, 145, 147, 156, 158, 170, 246–48, 272–76, 280–81, 284
174 performance
folk or oral sources or versions, of Hindavī romances. See under
179–80, 198–200, 217 Hindavī Sufi romances
importance or uniqueness of, 217, prescriptive rules for (ādāb-i samā‘),
335–37 318–19
Indic influences on, 145–47, 155–58, Perry, B. E., 131
160–63, 169, 172, 176, 216, 302, Persia, 2, 51, 141, 337
352n56, 361n39 Persian, 2–3, 8–9, 18, 20–21, 50, 130, 157,
Islamic or Sufi influences on, 145, 181, 236, 260, 286, 288, 291, 295,
155–58, 161, 163, 176, 310 298, 301, 328
landscape in, 27, 145, 147, 155–56, as Muslim language, 14–16, 178
158, 160, 164–65, 167, 170, 176, Hindu or Indian use of, 13, 296
217 Phukan, Shantanu, 16–17, 215, 336–37
manuscripts, history, and texts of, Phūl, Shaikh, 252, 259
10–11, 163, 179–80, 335, 344n81, pīrs. See shaikhs, Sufi
346n17 planets, 38, 52, 64, 88, 103, 106,
plot or narrative motifs of, 164–67, 237–41, 250–53, 261–62, 265,
169–74, 200–16 354nn101–2
prologue of, 30, 42, 145, 150 pleasure
Padmāvatī (Padmāvat heroine), 27, 155, aesthetic, 3, 5, 18, 29, 32, 47–48, 63,
164, 169–70, 172–75, 177, 179, 181, 65, 82, 147, 266–67, 293, 299,
196, 201–2, 208–16, 302 303, 306–7, 324, 328, 333, 338.
̄
Padmāvatī of Alāol, 180 See also rasika; rasa
Padminī (“Lotus Woman”), 202. carpet of (bisāt"-i nishāt), 250–52
See also Padmāvatī reprehensible (duniyā -i murdār), 100,
Paimān, 23 270–71
Pañcatantra, 326–27 sensual (bhoga), 116–19, 126, 136, 140,
Pandey, Gyanendra, 14 190, 218. See also sex
Pandey, S. M., 82, 85, 310 Plukker, D. F., 40
panegyrics, 30, 34, 47–56, 177, 186, 292, poetic tropes
308–10 bees, 79, 113, 118, 146, 169, 172, 210,
paradise (jannah; kabilāsa; Mathura), 213
28–29, 67, 79–80, 84, 91, 134, birds, 88, 98, 106, 120, 126–27,
137, 145, 155–57, 159, 162–64, 166, 132–34, 139–40, 157–59, 173, 175,
169–70, 227, 241, 284 213, 268, 276, 282. See also
narrow bridge to, 169, 227 parrots
398 Index
as courtier, 55, 109, 111, 290, 300. readers, ideal or cultivated (sahṛdaya), 31,
See also Ḥusain Shāh Sharqī, 34, 287, 299–300, 322–23
Sultan reading
other authors or texts and, 41–44, 55, desire and, 334
109, 118, 200, 216, 310, 336 Sufi theories of, 287, 299, 308, 313–15,
on rasa, poetry, or language, 115–16, 321–22
287, 300–2 revelation, divine. See manifestation,
as Sufi, 309–10 divine
revivalism, Hindu, 11
race, 13, 19 rhetoric
Rādhā, 68 dualistic. See dualisms,
Rāghav Chetan (Padmāvat character), rhetorical
201–3, 208–9 of warriors, warfare, or conquest, 2,
Raisen, 200 22, 24–25, 54, 143, 184, 198, 200
Rāj Kuṉvar (Indo-Persian text), 335 Risālah fī’l-‘Ishq va ’ln-Nisā’ (“Essay on
Rāj Kuṉvar, Prince (Mirigāvatī hero), Love and Women”), 71
109, 111–22, 125, 139–40 Risālah-i Samā‘ (“Treatise on Samā‘ ”) of
Rajasthan, 178 Ḥamīd al-dīn, 316–17
Rajputs, 17, 24, 27–28, 61, 88, 173, 176, Rizvi, S. A. A., 221, 310
178–81, 185, 189–95, 197–200, 204, romances, 24, 218, 331, 336
207, 215–17, 364n9 conquest and, 27, 185, 189.
Rāma (or Rām), 11, 63, 69–70, 82, 158, See also under Hindavī Sufi
203, 305 romances (premākhyāns)
Rāmāyaṇa, 111 European chivalric, 134
Ranthambhor, 185–86, 203–4, 206–7 Hindavī Sufi. See Hindavī Sufi
rasa (essence; poetic sentiment), 16, 26, romances (premākhyāns)
30–32, 34, 53, 57, 63–68, 78–79, Persian, 27, 31, 34, 46, 48–49, 59,
99, 114, 147, 166, 170, 266–67, 296, 335. See also Niz"āmī Ganjavī
287, 293, 295, 298, 306–7, 321–23, Roy, Asim, 15
332–33, 338 Rukn al-dīn Quddūsī, 62
definition or types of, 31, 64, 294, 301 Rūmī, Jalāl al-dīn, 8, 283, 296
elements of, 31–33, 294 rūpa (form; beauty), 32, 46, 89, 112, 155,
physical, 31, 68, 169 165, 264, 269–70, 279
prema- (pure love), 63, 65, 67, 81–82, Rūpcand, King (Cāndāyan character),
88, 91, 104, 107, 168–69, 203, 205, 64, 76–77, 80, 83, 91–92
215, 217, 220, 303, 307, 338 Rūpminī (Mirigāvatī character), 117–20
śṛṅgāra (erotic), 67, 73–74, 116, 159,
205, 294, 301 Sāduvan (Maṇimekhalai character),
rasāyaṇa. See alchemy 135–36
Rashīd, Shaikh, 236 sahaja (mystical absorption), 22, 304
rasika (connoisseur of rasa), 31, 100, 324 sahaja bheda (simple mystery), 1, 305
Ratansen (Padmāvat hero), 23, 27, 147, sahṛdaya (“person with heart”; culti-
166–67, 169–70, 172–77, 179–80, vated reader). See readers, ideal or
198, 201–4, 206–8, 210–13, 215–16, cultivated
302 Śaivas, 41, 158
400 Index