Cosmopolitan Soirées in Eighteenth-Century North India: Reception of early Urdu poetry in Kishangarh

This paper looks at poetic dialogues and exchange of ideas in eighteenth-century North India. The focus is on the reception of the new Urdu poetry (then called Rekhtā) in the lesser-known Rajasthani principality, Kishangarh. This small kingdom near Jaipur is known in the art world for its gorgeous paintings, especially the delicate depictions of the love of Rādhā and Krishna that have made the Kishangarhi school famous and give it an air of timelessness. Sometimes the school is also considered ‘provincial’. Yet, there is more to this small principality than is commonly known. This paper shows how it was in fact quite cosmopolitan, very much in the midst of new intellectual and artistic developments at the Mughal court in the first half of the eighteenth century under Mahārājā Rāj Singh (r. 1706-1748). The paper’s point of departure consists of two Kishangarhi paintings that were produced during Rāj Singh’s reign. Both pictures portray mixed Hindu-Muslim gatherings. They show how there was more to the culture of Kishangarh than the world of Braj Bhāṣā poetry about Rādhā and Krishna. I read these paintings in conjunction with literary material that illustrates that in Kishangarh there were also experiments with the then-new style of poetry, later called Urdu. I present evidence of poetic dialogues between what are now regarded as separate poetic traditions, Urdu and Braj. The paper is based on recent manuscript research in India of Kishangarhi poems and collections. Methodologically it seeks to establish what can be gained in understanding by reading paintings together with contemporary literary sources

A Sufi listening to Hindi religious poetry: Mir Abdul Wahid Bilgrami's Haqayaq-i Hindi.

First written in 1992, slightly rewritten but not updated 2006 and 2011.The Haqayaq-i Hindi is a 16th Century polemical work that defends the use of Hindu (in fact Krishna bhakti) poetry in sama' sessions of Sufis. It does so by explaining the meaning of fragments of this poetry against an Islamic mystic background. It is thus very interesting to study Hindu-Muslim interaction in the sixteenth century. The work is often seen as an example of ‘syncretism’, but a closer study reveals that such is not unproblematically the case

Aurangzeb as Iconoclast? Vaishnava Accounts of the Krishna images\u27 Exodus from Braj

This paper studies how Brajbhs Vaishnava narratives describe the role the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb played in the displacement of Krishna images from the Braj heartland in the 1660s and 1670s. While contemporary discourse frequently suggests that the emperor was a villain persecuting beloved Hindu deities, who in turn are victims forcibly moved from their original homeland, the early-modern vernacular narratives we consider here perceive these peregrinations in rather more complex ways. This article foregrounds the case of the best-known dispersed Krishna image: r Nthaj, a deity of the Vallabha-Sampradya, now residing in the Mewar area of Rajasthan. It analyses mostly the discourse of the r Nthaj k Prkatya-Vrt, or The story of the Appearance of r Nthaj\u27, attributed to Vallabha\u27s descendant, Hariry. The sectarian logic presents Aurangzeb as an ardent, if uncouth, devotee and r Nthaj as an autonomous agent, not a victim, but rather a victor

Histoire et philologie de l'Inde médiévale et Moghole (XIIIe-XVIIIe siècles)

Delvoye Françoise, Pauwels Heidi. Histoire et philologie de l'Inde médiévale et Moghole (XIIIe-XVIIIe siècles). In: École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences historiques et philologiques. Livret-Annuaire 20. 2004-2005. 2006. pp. 444-453

Epic and vernacular production in Tomar Gwalior in the fifteenth century

The development of literature in the vernacular in fifteenth-century Gwalior has been attributed to its local rulers' intentionality at that time. The patronage of the Tomars, a Rajput dynasty, for retellings of the epics in Classical Hindi has been ascribed to a reaction to 'Muslim' sovereignty and to a desire to ascertain their 'son of the soil' credentials. This paper complicates this commonplace reduction of the motives of patronage, and opens up the study of the complex contemporaneous environment, where other forms of literature were being produced as well. To better situate the emergence of Classical Hindi, this paper presents a contextualized overview of the literary production of two other prominent communities, besides the Hindu Tomar court, namely that of the Jain merchants, and of the Sufis catering to the military garrison. The study of these multiple patrons and audiences suggests that the impetus of vernacularization is not to be reduced to a single court, but emerged from complex interactions between different milieus and extended networks of circulation