Let me repeat that HMK offers us the earliest extant epic rendering of the heroic deeds of the famous Rajput king Hammīra Chauhan of Ranthambhor and his tragic struggle against the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khalji, who defeated the Chauhan king in 1301. The cultural significance of this event, or at least of the stories and historical memories arising from it, can hardly be underestimated. I will propose that Hammīra is the first historical ruler to embody the ideal of Rajput warrior-hood and resistance, as opposed to the more pragmatic concern of making alliances with a cultural and ethnic other. Hammīra became a profoundly ambiguous hero, a tragic-historical ‘model’, whose story offered a literary template to explore multiple perspectives and tensions revolving a core socio-political and cultural problem: alliance-making with an ethnic, cultural and more powerful ‘other’.
Despite the great literary and historical relevance of the Hammīra tradition, its key texts, and the story itself, remains understudied and poorly understood.
Instead of paraphrasing the story of Hammīra as it is told in HMK, I want to make some more general observations about the significance of his famous legend. The reason for this is because Nayacandra appears to play an intriguing game with what we could call the ‘traditional story line’, infusing most – if not all – the key elements with inversive twists, as I try to demonstrate in chapter five. Moreover, it takes eleven cantos (out of fourteen) before we reach the ‘core’ of the Hammīra legend. Before saying more about how these earlier cantos connect to Nayacandra’s version of the Hammīra story, it is useful to further explain what the story of Hammīra signified.
Among many other things, Hammīra came to embody the (ambiguous) ideal of heroic, but unsuccessful resistance to Sultanate rule, or to a superior might in general. However,
51 As for example discussed in McCrea 2010: 507, and 2013: 185-9, and Pollock 2001: 217-19.
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as always with great stories that take on epic proportions, there are many sides to the story, generating many conflicting versions, all of which may claim to tell the ‘true’ story.
Of crucial importance for the birth of the Hammīra legend, I believe, is that the fall of Ranthambhor is connected to the first recorded instance of jauhar, the ‘heroic’ practice where the women and children collectively immolate themselves before the warriors rush into battle to face certain defeat. Hammīra was believed to have faced his fate with an extraordinary courageousness, unlike other rulers at the time who surrendered to the superior might of Alauddin or fled the battlefield.52 Hammīra, the last ruler of the famous Śākambharī branch of Chauhans, like no historical king before him, came to embody the ideal of the selfless warrior-king, always true to his word, unafraid to sacrifice everything – his kingdom and his life – for the sake of the true hero’s vow (vīra-vrata). Moreover, so the legend goes, he did all this for the sake of protecting another, not just another, but literally an ‘other’, a ‘foreigner’, a Mongol and Muslim warrior who had fled from the service of Alauddin and was given shelter at the Chauhan kingdom of Hammīra. Tradition links Hammīra’s defeat – and thus the jauhar in the fort - to his unwavering adherence to his vow to protect several Mongol refugees. The result was that Hammīra became one of the most famous and legendary historical heroes of the time. His story was told and sung at many courts across Northern and Western India.
In the fifth (and last) chapter I will draw attention to a striking difference regarding the significance of the Hammīra story, and that of his predecessor Pṛthvīrāja. Unlike the early literary trajectory of ‘sleepy’ Pṛthvīrāja – discussed in Cynthia Talbot’s recent study on the Pṛthvīrāja tradition (2016)53 - the Chauhan king Hammīra initially enjoyed a much more positive status. Soon after his death he was awarded – at least initially – with the celebratory status of being Hammīra the ‘good’ or courageous (sattva). In one fifteenth-century tale, by the famous author of Maithilī (in Northern Bihar) Vidyāpati, he even emerges as the epitome of compassion (dayā, karuṇā). In the preface of the famous mid-fourteenth century anthology of Sanskrit poetry, the Śārṅgadhara-paddhati “The anthology (compiled by the poet) Śārṅgadhara” the compiler proudly links his ancestry to the Chauhan court of the brave Hammīra. Later, however, Hammīra would acquire the more ambiguous heroic status of being Hammīra the ‘bold’ or ‘obstinate’ (haṭha), as in the title given to an early nineteenth century classical Hindi epic and a beautiful series of paintings illustrating his story made at the court of Mandi in the far north of the Punjab hills. Regardless of the ambiguity surrounding Hammīra’s tragic heroism, for many centuries this Chauhan king was remembered across North India as one of the most famous historical heroes of the present age.
52 I will support this point by referring to several early sources, discussed at length in chapter five in section 5.3 “Hammīra the good (sattva) becomes Hammīra ‘the bold’ (haṭha)”).
53 Talbot 2016: 29-68.
The prevalent misunderstanding of HMK as a straightforward eulogy may come from the way Nayacandra somewhat deceitfully introduces his poem as a praise poem (stavanaṃ, 1.12), deliberately imitating the style and tone of the genre of eulogistic biography (carita, 1.10). He thus introduces the subject of his poem, Hammīra Chauhan, as the one and only praiseworthy king of the present age, the kali-yuga (“the age of conflict”), because he excelled in the quality of selfless goodness or courage (sattva-guṇena, 1.8). But there is something unsettling about this framing. The expectations are not met. When reading the actualized narrative, the main protagonist often appears far from being a luminous example of goodness, a model of kingship or altruistic warrior-hood supposed to inspire admiration, emulation and a ‘purification’ (1.10), at least not in the expected sense. I will show how Nayacandra presents Hammīra as the last ‘sleepy’ ruler, whose story is modelled as a somewhat tragi-comic reenactment of the story of his infamous predecessor Pṛthvīrāja, the epitome of sleepy kingship at Nayacandra’s time.
Nayacandra’s self-styled heroic biography (caritaṃ, 1.10) and praise poem (stavanaṃ, 1.12) is clearly not just about Hammīra’s legendary story alone. Quite curiously indeed, it is only after eight (out of fourteen) cantos that the story of his kingship takes off. In fact, even though his auspicious birth is announced at the end of the fourth canto, we have to wait until the eleventh canto before we encounter the traditional core element of Hammīra’s tragic story: his heroic promise or vow to protect the Mongol Mahimāsāhi, and his unwavering adherence to it– the typical casus belli and start of other Hammīra poems at Nayacandra’s time – but not in HMK.54 Why is the largest part of Nayacandra’s epic of Hammīra seemingly not concerned with Hammīra’s traditional story and the heroic quality that made him famous or infamous, his sattva, deriving from his legendary unwillingness to give up his vows and bend his head before the enemy?
This study not only emphasizes the importance of looking beyond the surface framing and intent of HMK and ‘read ironically’, but also to take seriously the poem’s large, zoomed-out scope. It is important to not only focus on the story of Hammīra itself, in our evaluation of what the poem is about, or what it does.
It is instructive, in this regard, to briefly mention the most basic structure of the poem (which tells us almost nothing about what actually happens in these cantos). The first two cantos describe Hammīra’s predecessors from the illustrious Chauhan dynasty, from its mythological origins up to the kingship of Pṛthvīrāja. The third canto describes the downfall of Pṛthvīrāja. The fourth canto describes the tragic kingship of his descendants, up to the birth of Hammīra at the end of this canto. The fifth canto describes the change to the spring season, and the concomitant erotic mood. The sixth canto describes erotic
54 I elaborate on the ‘core elements’ of the Hammīra legend in chapter three where I discuss Nayacandra’s epic as a playful engagement with more overtly heroic accounts of the ‘traditional ‘Hammīra legend.
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water games (jala-krīḍā) in the lake, the seventh canto describes the fore play and love making in the fort’s inner chambers. The eighth canto describes how Hammīra receives Royal Fortune from his father. The ninth canto describes Hammīra’s ‘world conquest’
(digvijaya) and the ensuing court intrigues involving Hammīra’s fatal decisions to blind and castrate his minister Dharmasiṃha “Lion Dharma”, and replace his wise ‘half-brother’ Bhojadeva by a ‘hero’ called Ratipāla “Protector of Sexual Pleasure”. The tenth canto describes how Bhojadeva goes over to the side of Alauddin, who vows to completely destroy the Chauhan dynasty. The eleventh canto describes how Hammīra rejects an offer for truce, leading to a battle in which Nusrat Khan, an important Sultanate general, is killed. The twelfth canto describes two days of fighting, something the valiant Hammīra requested. In the thirteenth canto all sorts of court intrigues unfold, culminating in Hammīra’s decision to order his queens and daughter to enter the flames, before rushing himself into the battlefield to die at the side of his most loyal warriors, including the Mongols who had taken shelter with him. The last canto offers a reflection on what happened after Hammīra’s death, in the form of a series of lamentations about the death of the Chauhan king, who is hyperbolically presented as the only praiseworthy hero of the present age.
Very often ‘the surface story’ in each canto is radically undermined by all sorts of subversive poetic strategies: the lamentations are put in the mouth of ‘others’, heroic utterings are framed as delusional statements, deafening silences, symbolic names and imagery, inversions of traditional story lines, etc. More generally, I will suggest that Nayacandra purposefully subsumes Hammīra’s personal history into a much grander, tragic narrative about the complete destruction of the Chauhan dynasty, in which Hammīra emerges as the new epitome of ‘sleepy kingship’. Through a contextualization of the Hammīra story itself, I seek to demonstrate that Nayacandra’s great Sanskrit poem almost literally intends to ‘shake’ the heroic foundations of the Hammīra legend.
Finally, regarding the topic of the ‘other’, it is worth making two notes. The name Hammīra is the Sanskritization of the Perso-Arabic Amir, a word that came to denote a strong, worthy commander – often the Turkish enemy other (para) in inscriptions and literary works before the fourteenth century. I will highlight that Nayacandra was aware of the ‘irony of history’ that the last Chauhan king, a famous Rajput king, died because he refused to make an alliance with the enemy ‘other’.55
55 See the section called ‘The fate of Hammīra’ in Finbarr Flood (2009: 255-259, a) for an elaborate discussion of the use of the title “Hammīra”, pointing out this irony of history from the perspective of the present.
Secondly, the Sultanate enemy in Nayacandra’s poem is mostly referred to as śaka, a king of a non-indigenous clan, and curiously, never by his dynastic name, Khalji.56 Originally it is the Sanskrit for ‘Scythian’, someone from Central Asia, and it is used interchangeably with yavana, “Ionian/Greek”, and mleccha, “barbarian” and turuṣka or
“Turk”, used less frequently in HMK. Romila Thapar has made the important observation that pre-modern texts, when for example referring to Turks of Afghans as śaka or yavana, reveal “an attempt to associate new entrants with existing categories which are therefore expressive of more subtle relationships than we have assumed”.57 She notes how especially the term śaka might have a “complimentary” association, given their connection to the śaka rulers of the beginning of the common era who founded the important śaka calendar of 78 CE which is still in use today.58 This connotation might be present in HMK too, partly explaining why the Khalji dynastic name is never mentioned.
I have therefore chosen to not translate the original words, like śaka, yavana or mleccha, which in much early studies have been translated as Muslims or Muhammadans, even in the relatively recent work of scholars like Phyllis Granoff. For example, she included a brief discussion of HMK in an article on the colossal images of Jinas adorning the hill-fort rocks of the Gwalior fort, and states that:
Extant literature of the period indicates that the Jains regarded the Muslim victories as a tragic moment in history. (…) This is a poem, then, that describes in poignant terms the death of a Hindu king at the hands of invading Muslims and was written by a Jain monk who was present in the Gwalior court close to the time of the large sculptural project there. Nayacandrasūri also tells us that hearing about the death of the heroic Hammīra, there were many poets who composed poems to sing his glory (14.1). It seems reasonable to conclude that such poems about the invasions of the Muslims and the death of Hammīra formed a part of the literary and probably political culture of Gwalior at the time we are investigating. In addition, Nayacandrasūri makes frequent reference to the Kali yuga in his poem. His saga of the death of Hammīra seems inseparable from his firm conviction that both poet and king lived in a terrible time.59
Much of Granoff’s work on Jain narrative literature and poetry is inspiring, and I often draw on her close readings in this dissertation. In the same article she also makes perceptive notes about how Nayacandra’s with a “wry sense of irony” writes about his extraordinary skill in writing erotic poetry, a task that is far better suited to monks who
56 See Thapar “The Tyranny of Labels” (1996) for further discussions of these terms, critiquing the way these have often been translated as “Muslims”, noting that the religious connotation is mostly absent in the texts.
57 Thapar 1995: 9.
58 ibid. p. 12.
59 Granoff 2006: 41.
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have never made love.60 But such conclusions as the one above, need nuancing. I will stress that in HMK we are dealing mostly with a conflict between the Chauhans and the Śakas (and not the Muslims or Khaljis), or between hammīras and śakas. Those on Hammīra’s side are typically presented as thriving on ‘heroism’ (vīra) and valor (vikrama), whereas the Śakas thrive on ‘playful deceit’ (lasat-chalena).61 We will see that this distinction has very little to do with a struggle of good vs. bad (or Hindu vs. Muslim). The Śakas are presented as almost divine tricksters (māyāvin), incarnations of Viṣṇu or Śiva, who manage to control their fates (and time), whereas many Chauhan kings are presented as ‘unstable’
(capala, tarala) warriors, who get deluded (moha) and therefore get tricked into defeat.