Debunking the heroic frame

From Pṛthvīrāja’s story onwards, HMK becomes more explicit in highlighting the failures and flaws of ‘sleepy’ Chauhan kings. (Or perhaps rather, several of Pṛthvīrāja’s well-known traditional flaws are being displaced to his lesser well-known descendants.) His brother Harirāja thus falls victim to an obsession with dancing girls (nārttikīs), sent to him by an anonymous but illustrious (śrī) Gurjara king to increase the Chauhan king’s satisfaction (4.2). Unfortunately, Harirāja’s eyes and mind drown in the ocean of their beauty (āsāṃ lāvaṇya-vāridhau magne dṛg-manasī, 4.11). Neglecting his duties as a king, Harirāja’s subjects “instantly turned their affection away for him, like a beautiful woman from an

37 See my discussion of this canto in chapter four.

ugly man” (virajyante sma tasmāt srāk stritamā durbhagād iva, 4.15) and abandoned his service (tasya sevām ahāsiṣuḥ, 4.24).

Kingship, indeed, is all a matter of attraction and gaining the affection of the right people – or the right woman – by cultivating the right royal qualities. The beautiful and charming Lady Fortune will turn away from a king who neglects his primary duty, that is securing the well-fare of the kingdom and its citizens. This logic will be fleshed out in detail in the speech of Hammīra’s father Jaitrasiṃha in the eighth canto. We could also quote the earlier ominous words of another sleepy Chauhan king. On his deathbed king Prahlādana explains that the ‘cause’ of Royal Fortune is a triple set: valor, wisdom and prudence (śauryaṃ buddhir aviśvāso rājyaśrī-kāraṇaṃ trayam, 4.74). It ominously foreshadows the death of his son Vīranārāyaṇa, his reckless (cāpalye, 4.75) and gullible successor, who will get tricked into defeat by Jalaluddin (- historically speaking, the first Khalji ruler and uncle of Alauddin, Hammīra’s enemy). It is for him that Prahlādana’s wisdom on Royal Fortune is meant. The verse hints rather explicitly at the recurrent problem throughout the poem. The Chauhan heroes typically lack the mindful qualities,

“wisdom” (buddhi) and “prudence” (a-viśvāsa, literally “non-trust”). Throughout HMK we are reminded of the important connection between the maintenance of Fortune and these ‘wakeful’ qualities, the kind of alertness, inner activeness and wisdom which allows one to deceive and see through deceit. Like the protagonists the reader too is put to the test of seeing through deceits, guises, ambiguities, detect suspicious silences, and appreciate the alluring effects of irony.

For example, the seemingly virtuous ruler Prahlādana falls victim due to his excessive desire to hunt, that dangerous royal activity, to which Nayacandra in one verse refers with the pejorative term pāparddhiṃ, “that which thrives on sin” (4.70). He dies, somewhat ironically, after killing a sleeping lion. This ‘achievement’ of killing a sleepy lion stirs up another lion who attacks the king from behind and fatally injures him (4.64-65). We get the impression that it is the king himself who is in a state of sleep. This is yet another variation of Pṛthvīrāja’s triumph-turned-defeat story. Like in Pṛthvīrāja’s story the whole hunting scene is described in highly ominous, ‘tremulous’ imagery. In 4.51 Prahlādana makes the earth shake (vihvalayann) with his marching soldiers, who are compared to “oceans, whirling at the end of time” (samudrair iva kalpânta-bhrāntair). He himself is described in 4.52 as “madly desirous of having fun” (nṛpo ‘bhūd rantum unmanāḥ) after seeing the forest trees, as if they were beautiful women captivating his mind (mano-harāḥ). In 4.54 Some of his soldiers are described as “addicted to the hunting ground”

(ākheṭa-lampaṭāḥ), “their feet transgressing the Bull (of virtue) like violent companions of Śiva” (chivânugā raudrā vṛṣôllaṅghana-jāṅghikāḥ). Such imagery of excess runs throughout the poem. As with the story of Pṛthvīrāja’s dancing horse or Harirāja’s dancing girls, we get the impression that Prahlādana is similarly putting all his energy into having fun (rantum) with the wrong woman.

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Importantly, something happens to the heroic frame when reading all these stories.

After Pṛthvīrāja’s story it becomes harder for the reader to ‘believe’ in the clichés from the idealistic descriptions which each time enclose the more actualized, tragic story of their kingship. The tragic story is thus sandwiched between an introduction praising the king as the most virtuous ruler and a ‘conclusion’ telling that the king reached heaven.

How to make sense of such discrepancies? It is worth comparing this with what Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have observed in their book Textures of Time (2001) about an early nineteenth-century historical kāvya narrating the tragic death of the Vijayanagaram king Vijaya Rama Raju against the British company.

They explain how the poet-historian repeatedly juxtaposes an inflated heroic rhetoric with a more realist style where a tragic mode prevails, building up to “an incongruous conflation of levels” which make it seem that “the poet himself seems not to believe in his own heroic clichés; he purposely allows them to sound hollow and surreal.”³⁸ In their analysis of this poem, the authors of Textures of Time suggest that the emptiness in content value does not mean that passages of inflated heroism and ideals do not serve a literary purpose within the dynamic flow of the narrative as a whole. They argue that they intensify the realistic narration, making it more striking or sharp: “[d]eliberate dissonance triggers a certain stark clairvoyance”.³⁹ Johan Huizinga, in his wonderful Herfstij der Middeleeuwen (“Autumn of the Middle Ages”, 1919), has observed something similar about the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French chronicles composed by poet-historians in service of the French kings and the dukes of Burgundy. He explains how the authors of these texts start by proclaiming that they are about to praise the glorious deeds, bravery and martial feats of historical heroes.⁴⁰ But no one seems to hold on to this intent. The texts tend to transform into tales of greed, cruelty and wickedness, critically exposing the human obsession with fame, glory and power. Huizinga observes how some authors as it were occasionally pick up the heroic tone of their narrative, as if they had briefly forgotten their self-proclaimed chivalric intent to praise the glorious deeds of the historical actors.⁴¹

I would argue that in HMK a similar dissonance between idealistic and ‘real’ tragic registers similarly recurs, again and again, serving a similar, contrasting effect. For example, Pṛthvīrāja’s brother Harirāja is thus first extravagantly praised in the conventional style of royal panegyric. We thus learn that in comparison to the illustrious whiteness of his fame everything else appears dark (3.78). His shining army subdues all

38 Rao et al. 2001: 91.

39 Ibid.

40 Huizinga 1975 [1919]: 60.

41 ibid.

his enemies during his conquest of the four directions (digvijaya, 3.79-82). ⁴² He is praised as a king who makes his own subjects prosper (4.1). But the subsequent tragic turn in the second verse of the fourth canto, announced by the marker “the other day” (anyedyur, 4.2), introduces the reader to the more real, less idealized, actualized story of his kingship.

The shift is almost immediate. Harirāja is portrayed as a pleasure addict who doesn’t care for his subjects. Moreover, he is cast as a fearful coward who jumps into the fire with his queens as soon as he sees Shahabuddin approaching, without putting up a fight (4.18-19) In this sense he is very much unlike Hammīra, the main protagonist of the poem, but perhaps very much like Pṛthvīrāja and Jayacandra in some accounts of the time.⁴³ Nevertheless, the overall, underlying logic and message remains the same. There is something wrong with their mind, with their way of thinking. Again, the general wisdom concluding Harirāja’s story in 4.19 proves instructive for the overall message of the poem:

Let the nature of men’s future fame be like their mind.⁴⁴

The idea is that Harirāja did not gain posthumous fame, because what he did – or what he thought - was not worthy of fame. Nayacandra seems to cast Harirāja as the scapegoat, taking over the blame of Pṛthvīrāja’s legendary failure. It is after Harirāja “filled up the heavenly world” (nākalokaṃ-pṛṇe) and his retinue withered (amlāsīt, 4.20), that the Śaka king manages to take over the abandoned city of Ajmer (4.27). But Nayacandra’s strategy to ‘save’ Pṛthvīrāja’s name is clear, and perhaps even meant to be see-through. After the death of Harirāja, we suddenly learn that ‘fortunately’ Pṛthvīrāja had a grandson named Govindarāja, who was banished (from Ajmer?) by his father (4.24) and had established a kingdom in Ranthambhor. The verse is purposefully silent about how and why he was banished, and who his father was; perhaps another strategy to save Pṛthvīrāja’s name?⁴⁵

42 It is worth noting again that in one of these verses a famous image of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa is used, when describing Harirāja’s army as a “marching torch” (saṃcāriṇī dīpikā, 3.79). The allusion is to Raghuvaṃśa 6.67 about Indumatī’s “self-choice ceremony”, where she is compared a marching torch-flame (saṃcāriṇī dīpaśikhêva). I thank Vidwan H.V. Nagaraja Rao for this reference.

43 I discuss the stories about their traditional unheroic deaths in the chapter five, section 5.7. It is possible that Nayacandra’s account of Harirāja’s unheroic death had a base in historical memory at the time.

Dasharatha Sharma (1975: 116) observes that in a contemporary Persian chronicle, the Taju-l-Ma-Asir, Harirāja’s general Jaitra and probably his king too are said to have sacrificed themselves in the flames before the fort fell. It may also suggest that Persian and Sanskrit accounts borrowed from each other. Dirk Kolff (1990: 84) makes mention of a later Rajput oral epic connected to the Chauhan Harirāja, the Bagaḍāvat Mahāgātha, where the topic of jauhar and satī is central too.

44 bhāvinī yādṛśī kīrtir matiḥ syāt tādṛśī nṛṇām

45 Most sources say that Govindarāja was in fact Pṛthvīrāja’s son, not his grandson. He is said to have been driven away from Ajmer by Harirāja, after the enemy had installed Pṛthvīrāja’s son as the tributary

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It can also be read as a comment or allusion to this tendency itself in historical poetry:

poetic strategies to put a positive – but audible -spin on not so ideal episodes in the life of kings.⁴⁶ I will elaborate on this point in the next chapter, where I focus on the eighth canto.

There HMK’s parodic relation to the genre of historical biography (carita) becomes very – and almost humorously – clear. In any case, the mention of Govindarāja signals a brief restoration of Chauhan Fortune. In line with the recurrent imagery of the kingdom as a pond, Harirāja’s former ministers portray Govindarāja as the goose (haṃsa) of the Chauhan dynasty:

Attached to that king, the goose in the pool of our lord’s dynasty, we become a vessel of fame and may remain free from fear.⁴⁷

This verse too shows that Nayacandra is not really concerned with describing or praising the rise (utpatti) and ‘purifying deeds’ of the great Chauhan kings, as he put it in the prologue (1.26). Govindarāja is just a transitional character, marking the continuation of the Chauhan line in Ranthambhor. This is only a temporary restoration of Fortune, which again signals a somewhat dark hope. The ministers may remain free from fear. But we know that they won’t.