Bhojadeva’s lament: blaming Hammīra, waking Alauddin

Let me repeat that HMK is deeply concerned with the topic of fame and blame, and their potentially blurred distinction. What is really at stake throughout HMK, at least for the Chauhan king himself, is the prevention of posthumous blame. I have highlighted how his story doesn’t take a splendid start. Hammīra, introduced in verse 1.8 as the one and only (eka) king worthy of praise in this age, doesn’t escape the typical criticism of kings found throughout Sanskrit literature. In the ninth canto Nayacandra thus uses a stock imagery of royal critique when comparing Hammīra’s behavior to that of a courtesan (veśya, 9.169). In Shulman’s book The King and the Clown, which discusses the various comic and tragic transformations of kingship in South Asian literature, he notes how kings and courtesans are believed to “indulge in “sin,” are indifferent to others’ sufferings, blend truth and falsehood, cruelty and mercy; both, moreover, seek their own advantage before all else.”⁴⁹ Nayacandra of course never gets that explicit. He never directly speaks of Hammīra as a cruel, selfish king. He uses other characters to voice subversive visions on Hammīra’s kingship. Hammīra will even get the chance to defend himself. And this is what makes the poem so fascinating. Nayacandra seems to be playing a game of balance, in which not only opposing narrative modes clash, but also a range of perspectives.

In this section I will further explore the perspective of Bhojadeva, who can be said to assume the role of the unjustly treated Dharmasiṃha. I do this through a close reading of the tenth canto. After the turbulent ninth canto, the criticism of Hammīra becomes less explicit. It is as if the poem seeks to gradually rebuild the heroic stature of the main protagonist, or restore the balance between the eulogistic format and the deeply tragic content. But the damage done to Hammīra’s heroic image does continue to make itself audible in the rest of the narrative. As always, we are invited to read or listen carefully.

The tenth canto further reflects on Hammīra’s not so ideal kingship from the perspective of the unfortunate Bhojadeva, who decides to betray the king. Bhoja’s betrayal will eventually drive him further into misery. But it also brings about the fruition of what he wants: revenge, the retaliation (prati-kriyā, “counter-action”, 10.2) of what he perceives as causeless injustice. And interestingly, all this leads to the awakening of the

‘lion’ Alauddin from his sleep, as I will demonstrate in this section. We learn in the first verse of the tenth canto that Bhoja, while leaving the kingdom, starts contemplating his misfortune (sva-durdaśām), caused by the king’s crime (apamānād). Worthy of note is that Bhoja’s subsequent betrayal is thus again motivated by thoughtful reflection, and not by

49 Shulman 1985: 308, n18, paraphrasing Sternbach (1953: 143) about this popular comparison in gnomic literature.

the recklessness that characterizes the Chauhan king. The second verse explains the reason behind his betrayal:

Without any reason even, the king – protector of man - has displayed such contempt for me.

If I don’t retaliate this then of what use is the destiny of the wise?⁵⁰

This and several of the subsequent verses make explicit that for less virile men like the wise Dharmasiṃha and Bhoja too, there’s something like a sense of pride (abhi-māna, 10.1, 10.5), here most likely in the sense of self-respect. As is often the case in epic and tragic literature, as well as in real life, conflict typically revolves around the problem of pride.

There’s an ambivalence toward this notion. It can assume many forms, with both positive and pejorative connotations, ranging from a sense of self-respect to a blinding, selfish arrogance, obstinacy and self-conceit, often indicated by the more pejorative ahaṅ-kāra,

‘the I-maker’, egoism. In Rajput literature it is typically used in the sense of one’s wounded sense of honor (māna) which aligns with the hero’s (somewhat delusional) desire to prevent future shame and blame, a major topic in the penultimate canto (discussed in the next sections).

The general idea here is that Bhoja’s sense of pride or self-respect dictates him to do something, and not just let the injustice go unpunished (like Dharmasiṃha did). One verse (10.7) says that people who tolerate (sahate) the humiliation inflicted by the enemy have an impotent mind (klība-manā, 10.7): let there be no birth to him, for he steals away the pride of his mother’s youth (jananī-yauvana-garva-garhiṇī). The verse clearly voices the point implicit in the previous canto where the castrated Dharmasiṃha’s preserved his mental potency, in contrast to the de facto impotence of extreme virility (puṃstvam,

“manliness”), embodied by Bhīmasiṃha (and warrior-kings like Hammīra). In other words, Bhoja seems to resume the role of the unjustly humiliated Dharmasiṃha.

Another important point is that through Bhoja’s stream of thoughts, we learn that friendship and enmity is a matter of how one acts alone (kriyayâiva, 10.6): friends/family can therefore turn into enemies, and vice versa (10.6), again reinforcing the message from the previous canto (as made explicit in 9.156). It is not a crime (pātakam) when one would kill someone who commits great crimes, even when he is a kinsman (10.5). These points – Bhoja’s perspective – anticipate Hammīra’s later fatal delusion. He will refuse to kill his beloved new general ‘Ratipāla’, accused of treason, because of his noble descent (kulīna).

By contrast, he will reason that the Mongol refugees will betray him because of their

50 vitatāna vinā ‘pi kāraṇaṃ nara-nātho mama yāṃ tiraskriyām | vidadhe yadi tat-pratikriyāṃ na tadā kêva manasvināṃ gatiḥ ||10.2||

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natural otherness (paratvam). I discuss these episodes in the next sections. For now, I want to emphasize how Bhoja’s thoughts make us understand – and indeed sympathize with - the perspective of those who set out to shift loyalties. It may only be natural that those who are humiliated without any reason (vinā’pi kāraṇam, 10.2), like Dharmasiṃha and Bhoja, will want to retaliate the injustice inflicted upon them.

Bhoja himself is perhaps not entirely excused for what he does next, when he decides to go to Yoginīpuram (Delhi), and serve the king of the mlecchas ‘the barbarians’. We learn how every day the king nourished (apuṣat) his ‘mature’ pride (prauḍha-mānam) – here perhaps in the sense of Bhoja’s wounded sense of honor – with many gifts of gold, horses, etc. The result is that Bhoja became his own (nija, 10.21) - or one of his own people. (In the slightly later Kānhaḍade-prabandha (1455), this Bhoja is presented as one of Alauddin’s most loyal warriors.)⁵¹ The episode presents this winning over of Bhoja as the result of Alauddin’s infallible political skills (10.13). But we might also get the sense that Bhoja gets back what the blind Hammīra/Dharmasiṃha unjustly extracted from him. Indeed, what Bhoja ultimately wants, is retaliation, justice.

Bhoja’s arrival in Alauddin’s court serves as the prelude to a fascinating episode, in which the reader, together with Alauddin, is invited to see through the illusory nature of the panegyric mode. Having won Bhoja over to his side, Alauddin, on some occasion (anyadā), asks Bhoja if it is possible to defeat Hammīra quickly in the war (katham eṣa hammīro jīyate yudhi mayā drutam eva, 10.14). What follows is a set of verses in which the fearless (gata-bhīr, 10.15) Bhoja lavishly praises Hammīra’s qualities as a warrior and ruler, each time ending by throwing back the question Alauddin asked him: “how is it then possible to conquer the illustrious hero Hammīra on the battlefield in mere play” (sa śrīhammīravīraḥ samara-bhuvi kathaṃ jīyate līlayâiva, 10.16-10.24)?

The illustrious image of Hammīra in these verses creates a stark dissonance with the actualized portrayal of Hammīra’s kingship from the previous canto. But like in the previous cantos, right after the body of praise thickens to an extreme, our poet breaks this illusory image, and unveils the mask of the panegyric mode. Again, the imagery of waking and blindness becomes central in making this playful move. And the movement itself, the transition to the ‘truth’, appears to become audible through a meaningful change in meter and tone.

Let me show how this shift happens. Important to note is that Bhoja in fact introduces his long speech by saying that if Alauddin asks the truth (satyam), he shouldn’t get angry at him. The meter then purposefully changes to the long sragdharā meter (4x21 syllables) where Hammīra is lavishly praised as the most ideal ruler, conjuring up an image of the Chauhan king that would indeed potentially anger his new lord Alauddin. The first verse (finally) re-introduces Lakṣmī, the goddess of Royal Fortune who was left out from the

51See p. 35 in translation by Bhatnagar 1991.

not so ideal ninth canto. It thus ends by saying that Hammīra is like Viṣṇu who “displays the Fortune of prosperity and happiness” (tanute bhāgya-saubhāgya-lakṣmīṃ, 10.16). This idealistic tone continues for another eleven verses. But in the two last verses the concluding refrain - ‘how is it then possible to defeat him’ - drops out. And the meter meaningfully changes to that of the “tiger’s play”, śārdūlavikrīḍita, as if to anticipate the slow (and dangerous?) approach of the truth (satyam), which Bhoja said he would tell.

Let’s first consider how the imagery of ‘waking’ recurs in one of these final verses of praise:

Some are brave, others intelligent, and some are benevolent.

Some are wise, others good, and yet others are generous.

That superior man who is endowed with the greatness of cultivating only one of these qualities, he is awake.

But someone whose body contains all these excellent qualities, that is the hero Hammīra.⁵²

Bhoja’s verse – clearly mimicking the tone of the royal panegyric (praśasti) - suggests that Hammīra must be the most wakeful hero on the earth. After all, he is someone who is endowed with all the virtuous qualities (needed to attract Royal Fortune). This verse thus continues the tone of the previous verses, all of which ended with the rhetorical question

‘how then can Hammīra be defeated in battle, in mere play?’ But the exclusion of this refrain, together with the switch to the ‘tiger’s play’ meter creates the expectation that we are about to hear something different, the truth (satyam) about how and why Hammīra can be defeated. It is indeed only two verses later that we hear another “but” (param).⁵³ It throws us back to Hammīra’s not so ideal actualized kingship, reminding us that now the kingdom is under the sway of a “blind man”:

But now -

just like what the wind is to a flame what a cloud is to a bunch of lotuses what the passing of day is to the sun

what sex with a beautiful woman is to the best ascetic what the swelling of a disease is to the body

what clinging to extreme greed is for a group of good virtues -

52 śūraḥ kaścana kaścanâpi matimān dākṣiṇyavān kaścana prājñaḥ kaścana kaścanâpi sukṛti dātā punaḥ kaścana | ity ekâika-guṇa-prarūḍha-mahimā jāgarti bhūyān janaḥ

sarvaiḥ śreṣṭha-guṇair adhiṣṭhita-tanur hammīra-vīraḥ param ||10.25||

53 Like in the other verse, the ‘but’ comes at the very end of the verse. In English we would place it at the very beginning to create the contrastive effect.

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there is a cause of the destruction of his kingdom:

one blind man is gambling.⁵⁴

It seems that Hammīra as an embodiment of the wakeful ideal king (and good husband to Royal Fortune) only exists in some unreal, idealized space outside time, in the panegyric mode. The verse slowly approaches the tragic truth, perhaps not unlike the tiger’s slow but deadly pace which gives its name to the meter of these final verses.⁵⁵ The verse thus starts with a more general imagery about a process of fading or decay in natural phenomena. When reaching the last example we are clearly reminded of Hammīra’s blinding greed from the previous canto. The last line then finally announces ‘the truth’, or really responds to Alauddin’s question. The supposedly invincible Hammīra can actually be defeated. This is because now, in the present time (adhunā), there’s one blind man, who “shines” or rather “gambles” (dīvyati).⁵⁶ This blind man is or will be the cause of the destruction of his kingdom (tad-rājyasya-vināśa-hetur). On the surface, the verse is meant to point to the blinded Dharmasiṃha who is pulling the strings in Hammīra’s kingdom. However, the verse purposefully speaks in unspecific terms about “one blind man” (eko ‘ndho). The assimilation between Dharmasiṃha and Hammīra in the previous canto, as argued above, is therefore preserved. There too Bhoja only speaks about the

‘blind one’, never about Dharmasiṃha.

More can be said about Bhoja’s concluding verse. We could say that in this verse the parallel with the destructive dice game of the Mahābhārata becomes apparent. In the Chauhan kingdom there’s a “blind man playing the dice”. Similar to the start of the Mahābhārata war, the events leading to the complete destruction of the Chauhan dynasty, take off with the public humiliation of Dharmasiṃha, Hammīra’s foremost minister. The scene might be meant to be reminiscent of the assault on Draupadī – who symbolizes the goddess of Fortune - after Yudhiṣṭhira staked her in a dice game and lost her, leading to her public humiliation in the assembly hall. Both the humiliation of Dharmasiṃha and Draupadī function as the major drive for the ensuing conflict, ultimately culminating in a destructive massacre on both sides.

54 dīpyasyêva samīraṇaḥ sarasija-śreṇer ivâmbhodharaḥ sūryasyêva dinâtyayo yativarasyêvaîṇadṛk-ṣaṅgamaḥ | dehasyêva gadôdayo guṇa-gaṇasyêvâtilobhâśrayas

tadrājyasya vināśa-hetur adhunâiko ‘ndhaḥ paraṃ dīvyati ||10.28||

55 Cf. Yigal Bronner’s observation about this meter in a different context, noting how “to the ear of the trained kāvya reader, even the pattern of long and short syllables resembles the trot of a large cat”

(2010:32).

56 This verbal root also signifies “to shine, be bright”, but the connection with the cause of defeat clearly suggests its meaning as gambling, playing the dice game. In Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata this dīvyati “he gambles, plays or stakes” recurs again and again when Yudhiṣṭhira stakes his kingdom.

I suggest that Nayacandra purposefully evokes this parallel, making the analogy rather explicit through the dice-imagery chosen by Bhoja. He explains how a blind man who gambles (dīvyati) is the “cause of his kingdom’s destruction” (tadrājasya vināśa-hetuḥ).

The repeated evocation of Mahābhārata imagery may lend support to this reading. Bhoja was thus compared to Vidura (9.154), the wise and respected advisor to the Pāṇḍava side.

Moreover, Bhoja’s replacer, the would-be-traitor Ratipāla, will be compared to Śakuni (13.80), the cunning advisor of the Kaurava side who indeed wins the dice game for Duryodhana against Yudhiṣṭhira. Furthermore, in the eighth canto Jaitrasiṃha had reminded Hammīra - in the penultimate verse of his ominous talk on political wisdom that - one should stay away from the game of dice (durodaram 8.104): because of a dice game, which awakens great misfortune (jāgrad-udagra-kaṣṭaṃ), the Pāṇḍavas became an object of mockery (viḍambanām). And this is what will happen to Hammīra too. I will explain in the next sections that he repeatedly expresses his fear to become ridiculed (viḍambanam, as in 13.142).

Bhoja subtly and ambiguously reveals to Alauddin what the reader figured out before, the truth about Hammīra’s fatal condition of blindness. The deliberate ambiguity about the ‘gambling blind man’ thus continues ingeniously in the next verse, preventing the heroic frame from collapsing. Bhoja explains that if Alauddin attacks the Chauhan kingdom now, Hammīra’s subjects will leave him. This is because “already earlier they had reached a state of despair, due to the very violent punishment inflicted by someone who lost his eyes (itā nirāśatāṃ gata-netra-caṇḍa-tara-daṇḍanāt purā, 10.30). Again, the assimilation is skillfully preserved.⁵⁷

It’s important to be attentive to the charm of this silence about Dharmasiṃha’s name.

For example, the ambiguity gets lost in Kirtane’s paraphrase which irons out the ambivalences and tensions, or in the Hindi translation of the text, which chooses to translate the unspecified “blind man” and “the one who lost his eyes” with the name Dharmasiṃha.⁵⁸ But his name, as mentioned before, never shows up after ‘the blind man’

assimilated into Hammīra himself as his most devoted minister. The general idea emerging from Bhoja’s perspective is that the Chauhan kingdom is under the sway of a blind man. Bhoja explicitly blamed Hammīra for insulting him without any reason. Now he implicitly blames him for blindly staking the Fortune (Śrī/Lakṣmī) of the kingdom,

57 The severe punishment or daṇḍa, literally the staff or rod as the symbol of power, inflicted by

“someone without eyes” (gata-netra), can both refer to Hammīra, who ‘blindly’ punished Dharmasiṃha, or to the blinded Dharmasiṃha who in revenge punishes Hammīra by tormenting his subjects. In the previous canto the powerful post of daṇḍa-nāyaka, “the one who wields the staff” (9.188) seems to pass on from Dharmasiṃha to Bhoja, then back to the revengeful blind Dharmasiṃha, then to the hero Ratipāla,

“Protector of Pleasure”, who will continue to symbolize the unstable nature of Hammīra’s power.

58 Trivedi 1997: 117.

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putting at risk the welfare of his subjects, who like Bhoja himself have reached a state of despair (nirāśatāṃ, 10.30).

Apart from blaming Hammīra, Bhoja has another important role to play in the tenth canto. The story of Bhoja’s misfortune and flight to Alauddin’s court has the effect of inverting the traditional heroic core of the Hammīra legend. I explain in more detail in the next chapter how the refugee Bhoja clearly takes the place of the refugee Mahimāsāhi in the traditional story. Here I want to emphasize how Bhoja’s inversive role aligns with another purpose laid out for him, namely to awaken Alauddin by instigating his anger (allāvadīnâmarṣaṇo, which is the title of the tenth canto.) Like the ‘fictional’ Dharmasiṃha, Bhoja fades out from the poem as soon as this role is completed. Interestingly, as noted earlier, HMK’s Bhoja seems to have a short afterlife as Alauddin’s loyal general in the vernacular epic Kānhaḍade-prabandha.

After Bhoja points out the weakness of the Chauhan kingdom – Hammīra himself -, Alauddin sends forth his army to the ‘Hinduvāṭa’ pass in the Chauhan kingdom. This happens, again, with Ulugh Khan as the celebrated commander “who considers worthless the best among the kṣatriya warriors” (kṣatrôttaṃsān manyamānas tṛṇâṃśān, 10.32). We get a new variation of the triumph-turned-defeat logic, which will extend itself over the rest of the cantos. The Chauhan camp wins this first military encounter, leading to the obtainment of Lady Victory (jaya-lakṣmir, 10.62). The Chauhan victory is celebrated in utmost joy, with an ominous emphasis on Hammīra’s admiration and celebration of his new general Ratipāla – the future traitor. It is Ratipāla “Protector of Pleasure” who gladdens Hammīra by spreading forth the king’s renown (khyāti-kṛte, 10.61). This is how Hammīra praises his beloved general Ratipāla, a clear echo of the deeply ironic

After Bhoja points out the weakness of the Chauhan kingdom – Hammīra himself -, Alauddin sends forth his army to the ‘Hinduvāṭa’ pass in the Chauhan kingdom. This happens, again, with Ulugh Khan as the celebrated commander “who considers worthless the best among the kṣatriya warriors” (kṣatrôttaṃsān manyamānas tṛṇâṃśān, 10.32). We get a new variation of the triumph-turned-defeat logic, which will extend itself over the rest of the cantos. The Chauhan camp wins this first military encounter, leading to the obtainment of Lady Victory (jaya-lakṣmir, 10.62). The Chauhan victory is celebrated in utmost joy, with an ominous emphasis on Hammīra’s admiration and celebration of his new general Ratipāla – the future traitor. It is Ratipāla “Protector of Pleasure” who gladdens Hammīra by spreading forth the king’s renown (khyāti-kṛte, 10.61). This is how Hammīra praises his beloved general Ratipāla, a clear echo of the deeply ironic