This study offers a first close literary reading and contextualization of a fascinating Sanskrit epic or ‘great poem’ (mahākāvya), Hammīra-mahākāvya, “The Great Poem of Hammīra”. It deals with the famous story of king Hammīra, the last Chauhan ruler of the hillfort of Ranthambhor (r.1283-1301) who met his death at the hands of the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khalji (r. 1296–1316). The poem was composed in the early fifteenth century by the Jain poet and monk Nayacandra Sūri, who may have been the first poet – but not the last – to render the story of Hammīra into a great, epic poem.
Nayacandra’s Hammīra-mahākāvya (henceforth HMK) is a relatively well-known, much-cited but poorly understood specimen of the understudied South Asian genre of
‘historical’ poetry (kāvya). Broadly speaking, this classification is used to refer to highly ornate and complex literary works – mostly epics (mahākāvya) and plays (nāṭaka) - having historical personae and events as its subject matter. Although only a few examples survive from the first millennium CE – ‘the early days’ of Sanskrit kāvya - the composition of historical poetry became a much-preferred literary choice from the eleventh century onwards, extending well into the Mughal and colonial period.
For historians in modern times these historical poems have provided, and continue to provide, a useful counter-perspective to the Indo-Persian historiographical traditions of South Asia. Many generations of scholars understood the Persian chronicles to be more
‘historiographical’ in a Western sense, which were therefore deemed more valuable and useful for ‘doing history’ than their more poetic and less ‘serious’ counterparts in Indian languages. In recent decades more nuanced approaches to what history is, or can be, has drawn new attention to many historical poems and other genres of historical literature, composed in Sanskrit and vernacular languages. Many of these works are now read to address all sorts of historiographical and theoretical questions pertaining to changing historical sensibilities, premodern historiography itself, the representation of pre-modern ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounters, cross-cultural dialogues in the confrontation with ethnic and cultural ‘others’, shifting historical memories, historical ‘textures’ in various genres of historiographical literature, etc.2
2 For the memory approach, see the important recent work of Cynthia Talbot (2016) on Pṛthvīrāja Chauhan, and that of Ramya Sreenivasan (2007) on the story of the Rajput queen Padmāvatī. For two important books that critique earlier Orientalist claims about the absence of historical writing in Indian languages and genres, see Romila Thapar’s “The Past Before Us” (2013) on North Indian historiographical traditions and Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam’s influential “Textures of Time” (2001) on history writing in South India, and the ensuing discussion in the journal History and Theory that resulted in their “pragmatic response” (2007). See Talbot (2012), Busch (2012) and Truschke (2012) for three notable articles on historical
This historiographical and theoretical outlook also means that the many historical epics and plays have been predominantly ‘used’ to say something about historical realities external to the text, rather than valued as aesthetic practices, with important exceptions.3 Of course, this approach is not problematic in itself. Quite the contrary, I believe it is very important to ‘use’ these texts for historiographical purposes and offer fresh looks on the past, while employing new interpretative frameworks that allow us to look beyond the paradigms of ‘more serious’ Western or Indo-Persianate historiography.
The problem is that very few historical poems have actually been read as literature or poetry, worth reading from beginning to end, with attention to their distinct poetic characters, literary effects and aesthetic goals. The result is that we don’t really know what many of these remarkably complex historical poems are actually ‘about’, what they try to say or do beyond their surface meaning, or beyond the historical realties and memories they reflect (and distort). The deep literary complexities which are inherent to the genre of kāvya - also of the historical kind – are often ignored in recent historiographically oriented and socio-politically textured readings of historical poems like HMK. In short, despite the growing interest in premodern forms of historical literature, the many historical kāvyas in Sanskrit remain undervalued as literature or poetry, for reasons I will further examine below.
This study intends to show that Nayacandra’s mahākāvya or ‘great poem’ of Hammīra is truly great, not only as a remarkably innovative work of Sanskrit historical poetry, but also for its cultural-historical significance as the first - or at least earliest extant - fully-fledged epic rendering of the story of Hammīra. Like the influential literary trajectory of his (in)famous predecessor Pṛthvīrāja, the story of Hammīra’s heroic struggle had sparked the imagination of poets, bards, story-tellers and painters who turned him into one of the most famous historical heroes of North India, a tragic, admired but also profoundly ambiguous historical ‘model’.4 The story of Hammīra the ‘courageous’ (sattva)
poems in Indian languages, providing a counter-perspective to Mughal historiography and addressing the topic of cross-cultural dialogues. For a recent overview on various genres of historical writing in South Asia, and the theoretical issues surrounding it, see Daud Ali (2012).
3 A noteworthy exception is the book “Textures of Time” (2001) mentioned in the previous note, and the work of Allison Busch, put together in her book “Poetry of Kings” (2011) about vernacular courtly poetry in the early-modern period. In addition, worthy of mention is a special issue on the historical poetry of the Kashmirian poet Bilhaṇa (Bronner 2010; McCrea 2010; and Cox 2010) and the Rājataraṅginī tradition pioneered by Kalhaṇa, (Bronner 2013; McCrea 2013; Ali 2013; and Obrock 2013). For a recent reappraisal of Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅginī as a whole, see the book-length study of Shonaleeka Kaul (2018).
4 For the most complete list of fully-fledged renderings of the Hammīra tale, see Sandesara’s note (1965:362-3) on Amṛtakalaśa’s Hammīra-prabandha (1518 CE), an “unnoticed māru-gurjara poem eulogising the exploits of Hammīra”. He mentions ten works composed between the fifteenth and mid-nineteenth century, some of which also remain unnoticed and await edition.
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and later the ‘obstinate’ (haṭha) had a formative – but barely acknowledged – influence on what we now classify as ‘Rajput literature’: tragic-historical narratives from Sultanate and Mughal period India, which ostensibly glorify a warrior-ethos of heroic resistance and self-sacrifice.5 This dissertation seeks to nuance this picture by offering a novel reading of HMK, one of the earliest ‘Rajput epics’.
Broadly speaking this dissertation revolves around two major goals. First of all, I seek to demonstrate that HMK, the great poem of Hammīra, is an intriguingly complex, subversive and innovative work of Sanskrit literature. It is composed by a daringly bold author who infuses his poem with sharp critical edges, playful twists and an extraordinary intertextual depth. With important exceptions, the historical court epic continues to be predominantly read, interpreted and classified - and implicitly denounced - as ‘heroic poetry’ (vīra kāvya) and political propaganda, ‘idealizing’
literature, composed to promote and underwrite elite interests. As such, its function and raison d’être are often too easily put on pair with the genre of inscriptional praise poetry (praśasti).6 (Yet, in this genre too subversive and legitimizing functions co-exists simultaneously, as shown in a fascinating cross-cultural study and reappraisal of the genre by Rebecca Gould, who has aptly called it the “much-maligned panegyric.”)7 If we stretch this view on courtly poetry too far, or selectively focus on functionalistic or instrumentalist approaches to literature, the poet risks being reduced to a mere
5 Rajput literature’s concern with praising, promoting and idealizing a warrior-culture of heroic self-sacrifice, is central in the work of Janet Kamphorst (her PhD thesis “In Praise of Death” 2008), the work of Michael Bednar (his PhD thesis “Conquest and Resistance in context: a historiographical reading of Sanskrit and Persian Battle Narratives” (2007)), the work on Pṛthvīrāja by Cynthia Talbot (The Last Hindu Emperor (2016)), the work of Ramya Sreenivasan in a number of articles on Rajput poems, including HMK (as in
“Alauddin Khalji Remembered: Conquest, Gender and Community in Medieval Rajput Narratives” (2002)) and in a recent book by Aparna Kapadia (In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-century Gujarat (2018)).
6 As for example in Siegfried Lienhard’s evaluation of Sanskrit historical poetry in his “A History of Classical poetry” (1984). Judging this body of literature against the models of western historiography, Lienhard states that they “made no attempt to study their sources critically or to do any other historical research” (216). He denies these works the notion ‘critically’, explaining that: “As it was the poet’s intention to say nothing but good of his protector and to prophesy auspicious things for him, as in praśastis, eulogies on kings, ministers, etc., truth and fiction are mingled quite uncritically. It was not in the author’s interest to build his work on the basis of historical or geographical material; his main object was rather to compose something that was effective poetically and would earn him the approval of his master and the critics.” (p.
216)
7 Gould 2015, in an article titled “The Much-Maligned Panegyric: toward a political poetics of premodern literary form”. It compares panegyric genres in both Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic and Persian traditions, demonstrating how “the panegyric’s structure counter-intuitively subverts a patronage-based economy by glorifying poetry while ostensibly enacting the patron’s elevation, as well as by maximizing the rhetorical powers of the tropes of discursive indirection, double entendre, and self-referentiality” (p. 255).
instrument of power.8 We may overlook other important questions about what this poetry is ‘really about’, or what it is also about, and what the poet does beyond telling stories about the ‘glorious deeds’ of heroes and kings. Even though HMK can be broadly classified as ‘heroic poetry’ (vīra kāvya), the author doesn’t grant anyone fulsome praise – not the heroes, and not his patron. Put differently, it may be more prudent to read HMK as a ‘great poem’, a mahākāvya, rather than a ‘heroic poem’ (vīra kāvya). I return to this point below, drawing on methodological observations by Lawrence McCrea in an article on one of the great poems of Sanskrit literature.
Secondly, this dissertation seeks to give insight into the cultural-historical import of the Hammīra story itself, which was of great significance for the chivalric Rajput culture and literature of North India. Not only do references to “bold” (haṭha) Hammīra turn up in many narratives about Rajput kings, I would argue that his story itself provided the narrative template for many other – initially - less heroic ‘forgotten heroes’ who were also defeated by Alauddin Khalji.9 It thus seems that well-known, influential vernacular poems like Padmanābha’s Kānhaḍade-prabandha (1455), about the Chauhan ruler of Jalor, and Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmāvat, about the Guhila ruler Ratansen of Chittor, were purposefully modelled after the Hammīra legend. Even though a lengthy comparison with such poems is beyond the scope of this dissertation, I will occasionally draw attention to intriguing parallels. It is hoped that a better understanding of the Hammīra story may also elucidate what these other, later texts are about and how they took shape.
In addition, my close reading of HMK may also shed new light on the literary-historical significance and impact of earlier genres from which it emerged. For example, reading a historical poem like HMK means understanding how it both follows and plays with the conventions of the mahākāvya genre. Without a good understanding of the aesthetic goals of this genre, it becomes difficult to make sense of how the story of Hammīra is told in Nayacandra’s great poem.
Before further placing the present study in its broader research context, I want to start this introduction by briefly getting the ‘basic’ facts straight. HMK narrates the story of the last ruler of the famous Śākambharī branch of Chauhans. With its tragic plot this epic stands out from the history of Sanskrit poetry (kāvya), and thus appears to have paved the way for many later tragic-historical poems, in vernacular languages. The poem was
8 It is difficult to prove or disprove whether a particular poem or genre comes into existence (and is preserved) because of socio-political processes and needs, like the upward mobilization of rivalling warrior Rajput clans who sponsored ‘heroic poetry’. It may be more prudent to say that their courts provided the locus of poetic compositions (and competitions). A poem like HMK indeed arises in a context where patron-kings sought to legitimize claims to power, but it may be highly critical of this context itself.
9 For example, in Amrit Rai’s Mancarit (1585) who laments that “bold Hammīra” (haṭhī haṃvīra) is gone, quoted from Busch (2012: 312). Hammīra’s story is also referred to in Jayasi’s famous Padmāvat (1540) and clearly influenced its plot, as noted in Behl (2002: 206). I discuss the oft-neglected but influential literary trajectory of the Hammīra story as a running theme throughout this dissertation.
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composed more than a century after the events, by the Jain poet-monk Nayacandra Sūri.
At the end of his Hammīra poem, he ‘explains’ that his Sanskrit composition was the result of a literary contest at the (recently established) court of king Vīrama Tomar, who ruled the kingdom of Gwalior from 1402 to 1423. (I present a close reading of this often-overlooked verse in the first chapter – it is here where Nayacandra playfully states that he was ‘shaken’ into making his new poem of Hammīra). This means that HMK was composed shortly after the turbulent turn to the fifteenth century, in the wake of Timur’s (Tamerlane) sack of Delhi (1398). This landmark historical event shook the foundations of the Delhi Sultanate, creating opportunities for local chiefs – both Muslims and Hindus – like the Tomars to revolt and carve out independent kingdoms.10
Nayacandra’s great poem (mahākāvya) of Hammīra is literally great (mahā) or epic in scope in the sense that it covers, in fourteen cantos (ca. 1500 verses), the entire history of the Chauhans of Śākambharī, from its mythological founder up to the death of Hammīra, and his continued remembrance in the present. In addition to the story of Hammīra, Nayacandra’s Sanskrit epic, arguably the first fully-fledged literary reworking of his famous legend, also contains the first tragic-heroic rendering of the story of Hammīra’s (in)famous predecessor Pṛthvīrāja Chauhan (1177-1192).11 This historical king is popularly known as the last independent ‘Hindu Emperor’ of Delhi, whose various literary trajectories and various ‘remembrances’ between the year 1200 and 2000 have been recently studied by Cynthia Talbot in her book The Last Hindu Emperor (2016).12 The
10 HMK thus took shape in the context of the radically changed socio-political environment of Northern India after the (in)famous Timur left Delhi in ruins - and continued his military campaigns westwards where he would shake the political foundations of the Ottoman empire in the battle of Ankara (1402). Worthy of note is that modern historians now regard the Timurid campaigns as landmark historical events marking the transition to the ‘early-modern’ period, in which the Eurasian world was becoming increasingly connected, as discussed in Sanjay Subrahmanyam important essay “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia” (1997). See the recent edited volume After Timur left:
Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India (2014) for a number of good articles on significant changes in North Indian literary culture.
11 This point is also made in Cynthia Talbot’s work, who notes that the “idea of Prithviraj as a tragic hero” (2016: 68) appears to emerge around the fourteenth and fifteenth century, as seen in a poem like HMK.
There is of course Jayānaka’s biographical epic Pṛthvīrājavijaya “The victory of Pṛthvīrāja” (ca. 1192-3), which was composed during Pṛthvīrāja’s reign itself. But since it is composed as a patron-centred epic it doesn’t qualify as a later heroic transformation of Pṛthvīrāja’s tragic fate. The thirteenth and fourteenth century prabandha narratives clearly do not cast Pṛthvīrāja as a man worthy of the label ‘tragic hero’.
12 Her work discusses Pṛthvīrāja as a ‘site of memory’, whose story signified something different in different memory communities, changing over time. She draws attention to the fact that India’s controversial ‘heroic past’ is still very much alive, or purposefully kept alive. In recent times historical kings like Pṛthvīrāja have thus been re-modelled and appropriated as national heroes, symbolizing ‘Hindu India’s’
admirable resistance to the ‘Muslim invader’. There is an upcoming Bollywood movie Prithviraj (release date November 2020), which is likely going to reinforce this problematic rhetoric of othering.
entrance of Pṛthvīrāja as a tragic hero in Nayacandra’s epic, may support my take on the pioneering role of HMK in transforming these historical kings into full-fledged literary heroes. In this regard it is worth noting, briefly, that Nayacandra also composed a
‘historical play’ called Rambhāmañjarī, written in a mixture of Sanskrit and Prakrit (and including a panegyric in the local language), about the amorous exploits of the infamous Jayacandra of Kannauj.13 This king is also briefly (and subtly) mentioned at the end of HMK as the ‘cripple Jaitra’ (14.11), one of the many historical kings who ended up making a fool of himself – not unlike the Chauhan heroes of his Sanskrit epic.14
By paying attention to important literary issues – framing devices, ambiguous imagery, multiple layers, subversive edges, deep intertextual play, ironies, etc. – and the overall playfulness of Hammīra-mahākāvya this dissertation seeks to elucidate some of the interpretative problems encountered by historians, while also complicating some of the conclusions drawn from more superficial readings of Nayacandra’s epic as a political eulogy, as I explain later in this introduction. In fact, this study partly answers to a call made by acclaimed historians like Cynthia Talbot and Romila Thapar themselves. They have both stressed the need for a more in-depth literary and comparative study of these historical poems to understand what they actually say (or do).15 It is therefore hoped that a closer literary reading of HMK will further substantiate and possibly redirect ongoing historiographical research on what these texts reveal about socio-political realities external to the text.
13 See the PhD dissertation (in French) by Melinda Fodor (2017) for a recent discussion of Nayacandra’s Rambhāmañjarī and the rare saṭṭaka genre of which Nayacandra’s play is the first known follow-up of Rājaśekhara’s tenth century Karpūramañjarī, the model of this subgenre of erotic drama.
14 I discuss the significance of this verse as a meta-historic reflection in chapter five, in section
“Playing with memories: Hammīra ‘the good’ becomes ‘sleepy’ Pṛthvīrāja/Jayacandra”. It is worth noting here that there is not much history in this play. It is humorously framed as a reenactment of the story of Jayacandra, presented as the most powerful king of the time, with a plot revolving around his unsurpassed sex-appeal (and insatiable appetite for sexual pleasure). However, the play is infused with deep ironies, and full of oblique references to his not so ideal, tragic defeat at the hand of Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghori, which was precisely linked to his fatal infatuation with women. The play can be understood as a ‘sequel’ to his epic on Hammīra (and Pṛthvīrāja, the rival of Jayacandra).The prologue of his play even quotes how Nayacandra has described himself in his Sanskrit epic, referring to his fondness of two famous
“Playing with memories: Hammīra ‘the good’ becomes ‘sleepy’ Pṛthvīrāja/Jayacandra”. It is worth noting here that there is not much history in this play. It is humorously framed as a reenactment of the story of Jayacandra, presented as the most powerful king of the time, with a plot revolving around his unsurpassed sex-appeal (and insatiable appetite for sexual pleasure). However, the play is infused with deep ironies, and full of oblique references to his not so ideal, tragic defeat at the hand of Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghori, which was precisely linked to his fatal infatuation with women. The play can be understood as a ‘sequel’ to his epic on Hammīra (and Pṛthvīrāja, the rival of Jayacandra).The prologue of his play even quotes how Nayacandra has described himself in his Sanskrit epic, referring to his fondness of two famous