The current scholarly and popular understanding of HMK has been much informed by the useful but highly outdated English preface and detailed paraphrase of HMK from the first edition by Nilkanth Kirtane (1879). Although written more than a century ago, it remains the starting point to get acquainted with the poem’s content. It has been reprinted in Jinavijaya Muni’s later edition (1968; reprint 1993) and in a Hindi translation of HMK by Nathulal Trivedi (1997). It is worth highlighting how the paraphrase from Kirtane’s edition has cast a long shadow over the interpretation of Nayacandra’s great poem. This is mostly because this 39-page long paraphrase is highly selective, filtered through a historiographical outlook on the text. “The present attempt to place the English reader in possession of the historical information contained in the Hammīra Kāvya”, Kirtane writes in 1879, “will, I presume, be acceptable to those who are interested in the
60 ibid. 37. Her translation of verse 14.33 grasps this irony well:
Those who speak eloquently of sexual passion, in phrases deeply moving, have never made love. And those who have made love, know not how to describe it. The elephant tusks that poets glorify, white as jasmine, are not what the elephant uses for chewing. No one can even see the teeth that the elephant uses to chew.
61 It is possible that battle between the Chauhans and Śakas is meant to resonate with the influential cycle of stories surrounding the war between the legendary king Vikrama and the Śaka king Śālivāhana, who gave their names to the ‘rivaling’ calendars, respectively the Vikrama era (starting in 57 CE) and Śaka era (starting in 78 BC.)
advancement of our knowledge of Indian history”.62 In addition, his historiographical paraphrase is highly coloured through his heartfelt admiration for Hammīra. This is how Kirtane introduces the subject of Nayacandra’s epic:
The hero of the poem is Hammīra Chohān of Raṇasthaṃbhapura (Raṇathaṃbhor), a name celebrated in Hindi song. Hammīra is one of those later heroes of India who measured their swords with the Muhammadan conquerors and fell in the defence of their independence. Even the history of the conquered is not without interest. The man who fights against hope, - fights because he thinks it [is] his duty to do so, - who scorns to bow his neck before the oppressor, because he thinks such a course opposed to the ways of his ancient house, deserves our sympathy and our admiration.
Hammīra is such a character.63
For Kirtane, Hammīra signifies a hero from the Hindu religion, whose story is of national significance. He deserves to be admired because of his extraordinary resistance against a loathsome ‘oppressor’ from the Muslim or Muhammadan faith.64 Kirtane’s view of Rajasthan’s heroic past is partly indebted to the orientalist, romanticist and colonial vision of the British administrator ‘colonel’ James Tod. Kirtane cites him sympathetically as the “sentimental and enthusiastic annalist of Rājasthan” in whose work the Chauhans are called the noblest of Rajputs. Kirtane explicitly states that he wants to carry Tod’s research further, by supplying new “historical information”, from a text he believes was not available to Tod. He does this, as he explains himself, by sifting this valuable historical information from the tedious ahistorical “bushels of poetical chaff”, “poetical nonsense”
and “fanciful conceptions.”65 As noted above, this sort of evaluation or devaluation would become a cliché in the evaluations of historical poetry in later histories of Sanskrit literature.66
Kirtane’s historiographical outlook on the text is one of the reasons why he characterizes the main narrative as “all through, very uneven”67 and why he left out five cantos from his paraphrase of the text, maintaining that these “as not possessing any
62 Kirtane 1879: ii. Emphasis added.
63 ibid. iv.
64 Kirtane does also write sympathetically about Nayacandra’s work, which as poetry, “has considerable merits” (ii). But he also uses this point to reinforce his religious standpoint. Thus, while mentioning the way Nayacandra opens his poem by simultaneously addressing the Hindu gods and the Jain
‘ford-makers’ (tīrthaṅkaras) we learn that this possibly reflects “the freedom of thought so characteristic of the age in which the author lived, when the narrow and bigoted intolerance even of the Muslīm had begun to appreciate the beauties of the allegorical language of the Hindu popular religion”(v).
65Kirtane 1879: v and xi.
66 Kirtane 1879: iv.
67 Kirtane 1879: v.
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historical value, may be ignored in this precis of the poem.”68 Kirtane also stresses that even in the more historic chapters Nayacandra “relapses into rhapsody which amounts to a confession of his ignorance of the historical facts.”69
Let me make clear that I do not mean to criticize Kirtane himself and blame him for his time-bound vision and approach to the text. The reason why I am unsympathetically quoting Kirtane’s words, is to explain how his criteria for paraphrasing HMK continue to influence our understanding of this poem, and of the significance of the Hammīra’s story more generally. The point is that his 39-page long paraphrase of HMK constitutes a somewhat deceptive, unreliable guide for historians to make sense of what ‘really’
happens in the poem. By leaving out crucial poetic aspects – complex imagery, silences, ambiguous passages, play on names, recurring motifs etc. – Kirtane’s paraphrase falls short, like any paraphrase of course, to explain how Nayacandra tells or poetically models the history of the Chauhans.
Later studies and the new Hindi prefaces in the edition of the HMK by Muni Jinavijaya in 1968 have not only continued the modern historiographical practice of sifting the important historical matter from the non-historical chaff, but have also reinforced the idea of Hammīra as a national hero of the Hindu religion, whom HMK is said to celebrate, despite the many unheroic episodes.70
In the past three decades scholars have been responding to such earlier scholarly tendencies to evaluate such poems in religious or nationalistic terms, which cast heroes like Hammīra and Pṛthvīrāja as Hindu heroes fighting for independence from loathsome Muslim oppressors. It is worth mentioning in this regard that Nayacandra’s Sanskrit epic and several other Sultanate-period works, including the cycle of poems about Pṛthvīrāja, have thus earlier been classified as “Hindu epics of resistance” as opposed to “Muslim
68 Kirtane 1879: vi.
69 Kirtane: vi; It is worth noting how Satya Vrat, a scholar of Jain historical kāvya, seems to have disagreed with Kirtane, and calls him “the only poet who may be called the nearest approach to a modern historian” (Vrat 2003: 163). Even though Vrat’s vision fits in the trend to judge Indian historical poetry against the model of the “trustworthy” modern historian, he does have a point that HMK is probably more driven by ‘historiographical concerns’ than the tradition of patron-centered historical poetry.
70 The HMK is thus accredited the status of a “national poem” (rāṣṭriya mahākāvya) about one of the nation’s most famous historical heroes Singh (1968: 28) “Hammīr Mahākāvya – ek paryālocan”, in Jinavijaya 1993 (1968). Both introductions are also reproduced in the Hindi translation of the HM by Nathulal Trivedi (1997). Candra Prabha’s discussion of HMK in his Historical Mahākāvyas in Sanskrit, Eleventh to Fifteenth Century A.D (1976: 291-319) is largely based on Kirtane’s paraphrase. Dasharatha Sharma, the historian of the Chauhans, also expresses his sympathy for Hammīra’s admirable efforts to fight the Muslim conqueror. He explicitly states that Hammīra should be forgiven for his faults – described in the HMK -, unlike his notorious predecessor Pṛthvīrāja whose flawed, indolent character he holds responsible for the advent of Muslim rule, see Sharma 1975: 132-3. Similar evaluations of Nayacandra’s work are found in Satya Vrat’s chapters on HMK in his work on Jain Sanskrit mahākāvyas (Vrat 1994: 136-152 and 2003: 163-180).
epics of conquest” following an influential article by Aziz Ahmad (1963). This problematic communal reading, imposing modern religious dichotomies on a pre-modern past, has led scholars to put effort into re-interpreting many of these texts. Much of the recent discussions of the HMK and other thematically related texts are explicitly framed as a response to this article. 71In nuancing the idea of HMK as a “Hindu epics” these studies tend to supplant earlier ‘religious readings’ by a socio-political mode of analysis.
Typically, these new readings interpret HMK as a political eulogy about a Rajput or kṣatriya warrior-king, composed to glorify the ideals of an emerging warrior elite, reinforcing its claims to power and social status.72
Accordingly, current scholarly historical analysis of HMK hinges on the assumption that the composition of HMK is linked to and shaped by the political agenda of its patron.
The early Tomar kings were probably in need of a legitimizing narrative after they had – according to contemporary Persian chronicles and the later Mughal-period classical Hindi Gopācālākhyāna “Chronicle of Gwalior” - treacherously captured the Gwalior fort.73 In societies where claims to power were closely linked with social status and lineal descent, those who aspire to rule need stories that establish their status as legitimate rulers. This function is of course prominent in the tradition of patron-centered historical literature – in both Sanskrit and vernacular languages - commissioned by royal patrons from rivaling dynastic clans who wanted to see their life story and/or that of their predecessors glorified and refashioned into epic poetry.
It is tempting to fit HMK in this tradition of patron-centered court epic, especially since it is clearly modelled on this genre and to a great extent adopts its formal, stylistic and thematic characteristics.74 Moreover, it seems not to have been uncommon at the time for Chauhan poems to be commissioned by Chauhan elites for purposes of legitimation (with important exceptions).75 However, it has often been overlooked that Nayacandra Sūri’s
71 See, for example, the studies in Richard Eaton’s edited volume India’s Islamic traditions (2003) where Ahmad’s article is reprinted as the first essay of the book. Similarly, Michael Bednar’s doctoral dissertation (2007) is explicitly framed as a reaction against Ahmad’s article. It also forms an important point of contrast in the discussion of HMK and other Sultanate period epics in Thapar (2005: 116-131) and Sreenivasan (2002).
72 As in Bednar (2007 and 2017), Sreenivasan (2002) and Talbot (2016: 65-66).
73 See Pauwels 2020 for a discussion of these texts.
74 As done in Talbot (2016: 56) and Sreenivasan (2002: 287-8.)
75 The mid-fifteenth-century vernacular Kānhaḍade-prabandha (on the Chauhans of Jalor) and the Sanskrit play Gaṅgadāsa-pratāpa-vilāsa-nāṭakam (on the Chauhan king of Champaner, discussed in Kapadia (2014)) are thus clearly composed to praise a Chauhan patron, both linking the heroes of their poem to the Śākambhari Chauhans Hammīra and Pṛthvīrāja. By contrast, the popular old-RajasthaniVīsaladevarāsa (c.
1450, edition and translation by Smith 1976), on the Chauhan ruler Vighraharāja (Vīsala), clearly pokes fun at this Chauhan king who is repeatedly accused of being foolish (mūḍha), similar to the portrayal of Chauhans in HMK. Both texts don’t really fit into the tradition of patron-centered eulogies.
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poem on the Chauhans may not have been commissioned by a Chauhan patron.76 It doesn’t contain the typical, and perhaps expected, praise of a patron. All we learn is that it was composed within the context of a literary challenge held at the court of the Tomar king Vīrama. How to explain this somewhat atypical context – a Chauhan poem in a Tomar court? Ramya Sreenivasan, even though aware of this context, doesn’t really address the problem. Adopting the framework in which the sponsorship of Sanskrit poetry serves a political goal, she writes how
Nayacandra legitimizes his king’s authority to rule by his very choice of language and genre. In a period when local narratives, both courtly and popular, were gradually emerging in a regional linguistic and literary tradition, Nayacandra chose to compose in a classical language and canonical genre. Through such choices, the poet tacitly exalts his patron by locating him on the same plane as the great kings of the past, in whose courts such poems were composed. It is this concern with legitimizing his patron (the present king) that shapes Nayacandra’s treatment of his protagonist. It is Hammīra’s kingship that is celebrated, as he launches a series of expeditions to conquer Sarasapura, Dhara, Ujjaina, Citrakuta (Chitor), Abu, Varddhanapura, and several other kingdoms and towns. 77
But how does Nayacandra’s poem about the kingship of the Chauhan Hammīra work as a legitimizing story for his patron ‘the present king’, who is a Tomar ruler? Curiously, the Tomars are strikingly absent from Nayacandra’s version of Chauhan history.
Sreenivasan’s emphasis on the legitimizing function of courtly poetry is more or less representative of historical analysis of ‘Rajput epics’, as in the work of Cynthia Talbot, Michael Bednar, and Aparna Kapadia’s recent book In Praise of Kings.78 One major problem with foregrounding the poet’s concern to ‘idealize’ kingship - in case of HMK (and probably related Rajput poems) - is that idealizing episodes are typically followed or preceded by episodes that undermine the ideal. Thus, the episode used by Sreenivasan to illustrate her point, namely about Hammīra’s successful “world-conquest” digvijaya in the beginning of the ninth canto, only forms the idealistic prelude to a story line in the very same canto, that radically inverts Hammīra’s celebratory status as an exemplar of kingship. I will show that such discrepancies between idealizing and criticizing registers may betray much more than just the poet’s ambivalence to his heroic subject.
76 Even such careful historians as Michael Bednar (2007) and Cynthia Talbot (2016), who writes:
“Although no patron is named in Hammīra Mahākāvya, typically the patron of this type of dynastic history belonged to the same lineage as the text’s protagonist” (p.56).
77 Sreenivasan (2002: 287-8). Emphasis added.
78 Sheldon Pollock’s book (2006) on the strong connection between the production of courtly literature (kāvya) and power (rājya) has been very influential in shaping socio-political readings of these works. See, for example, Kapadia (2014) on the legitimizing function of two fifteenth-century regional Sanskrit works; and Sreenivasan (2014) for the political significance of vernacular warrior tales at hinterland courts (14th-16th c.).
As with Kirtane’s selective historiographical lens, recent readings of HMK thus remain oriented towards historiography. Particular episodes, which are of interest to our historiographical questions, are selected from the text to make claims about socio-political realities external to the text. My main contention is that a good understanding of how a complex historical poem like HMK works as literature – how it is framed, structured; how it plays with opposing narrative modes and perspectives, ambiguous imagery, etc. – should not just complement historiographical analysis, but form its basis.
In the absence of fine-grained literary analysis and complete translations, one should be extra careful in picking out and analyzing the ‘meaning’ of specific episodes. Without understanding their poetic logic or significance in the literary structure as a whole, historical analysis of such episodes might occasionally distort what the poem is actually trying to say or do in the selected fragment. Put differently, we may implicitly reinforce the Orientalist practice of sifting the valuable ‘historical information’, from the less valuable poetical fancies. The ‘poetical chaff’ is of course essential to understand how the poet treats the ‘information’. Without careful literary analysis of complex literary works, we risk implementing pre-conceived theoretical frameworks on texts that might actually not fit the theory.
Apart from flattening HMK’s literary complexity and downplaying the poet’s personal voice, recent studies do not adequately address some of the questions that arise from the applied socio-political mode of analysis. What is a poem about the Chauhan dynasty
‘doing’ in the court of the Tomars? Why would a Tomar king - ruling over the newly established kingdom of Gwalior - sponsor or invite a court poet to present a poem about the heroes from another dynasty? How does the negative portrayal of the heroes’
kingship in tragic-historical epics like HMK and many other poems fit in interpretations of such works as legitimizing narratives? These questions prompt my critique of the currently prevalent socio-political interpretations of HMK.
Moreover, recent attempts to connect the poem’s content and literariness to its socio-political context tend to be unprecise and over-generalizing.79 For example, placing Nayacandra’s epic against the background of the Tomar’s conflict with neighboring kingdoms and sultanates, Michael Bednar argues that in a period where a “fort fell by subterfuge more often than by siege texts such as the Hammīra-Mahākāvya and the Legend of Kānhaḍa De instruct people on the value of loyalty and the danger of betrayal.”80
I maintain that these are over-generalizations downplaying the specificity of individual works. It disregards how thematically similar texts, like HMK and
79 As in Sreenivasan (2002) and Bednar (2007 and 2017, the former overlooking the Gwalior context).
80 Bednar 2017: 604.
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prabandha, or other Hammīra narratives for that matter, are framed differently, and might be treating the same themes or story lines from different, opposing perspectives.81 I will, for example, demonstrate that Nayacandra’s poem clearly questions the value of staying loyal to ‘wicked’ kings like Hammīra. We will see that the poem doesn’t always invite us to side with the perspective held by the heroes themselves. A poem like HMK doesn’t really promote or praise the perspective of the tragic heroes, who are typically blind to other perspectives (and the consequences of their foolish actions). Moreover, I will demonstrate in chapter five that it is possible to actually see or hear traces of the Tomar context (and Gwalior) in the poem. It is not unlikely that Nayacandra is deliberately playing an intriguing mirror-game with the present.
In my analysis of the tragic plot, in chapter four, I will stress that HMK alienates the reader from the heroic ideals held by the protagonist. By contrast, Michael Bednar states that the poets of ‘battle-narratives’ like HMK and Kānhaḍade-prabandha invite the reader to act like the protagonists.82 He explains that the reader
would have identified with the nāyaka [protagonist], hoping for his victory while subconsciously realizing that it could only end in defeat. The poets transformed this defeat into a heroic success by glorifying the nāyaka’s death and his prowess on the battlefield, by lauding the means of his death as the epitome of human action, and by highlighting his attainment of liberation and happiness in heaven with wives and apsaras (nymphs). The tragic–heroic emplotment retained the tragic expectation while transforming the tragic demise of the protagonist into the triumphalistic and heroic ending.83
The kind of heroic transformation described by Bednar, in which tragic defeat is presented as some sort of heroic success, is clearly at the heart of the Hammīra story, and many later Rajput tales. But it is not what Nayacandra’s version highlights. HMK, rather, seems to expose this transformation as what other people made of Hammīra’s story, or as the Chauhan dynasty’s own version of the story of their last great ruler. The poem is infused with meta-poetic and meta-historic concerns which have been ignored in historiographical analyses of the poem. I will therefore suggest we can see the eulogistic
The kind of heroic transformation described by Bednar, in which tragic defeat is presented as some sort of heroic success, is clearly at the heart of the Hammīra story, and many later Rajput tales. But it is not what Nayacandra’s version highlights. HMK, rather, seems to expose this transformation as what other people made of Hammīra’s story, or as the Chauhan dynasty’s own version of the story of their last great ruler. The poem is infused with meta-poetic and meta-historic concerns which have been ignored in historiographical analyses of the poem. I will therefore suggest we can see the eulogistic