Premākhyans

The genre of the Hindavi Sufi romance embodies an Indian Islamic literary tradition, the acculturation
of a monotheistic faith and a literary model into a local landscape. Poets during the period drew on
the three classical (or, in Sheldon Pollock’s term, “cosmopolitan”) languages of law, religion, and
literature: Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. There were in addition the particular regional literatures in
Apabhraṃśa and the various Prakrits, elements from which were adapted by various poets in the new
Indo-Aryan languages.

Through their use of generic conventions, the Hindavi Sufi poets linked the genre to the Persian
prototype of the masnavi, the long romantic, martial, or didactic poem in rhyming couplets. However,
they also felt free to take concepts, models, generic conventions, imagery, poetic techniques, and
themes from local universes of discourse to create their desi Muslim literary tradition. The Hindavi
poets themselves belonged to different silsilahs who were in competition with each other and sought
out areas and populations to which they could minister. The poets of the genre created a sophisticated
Indian Islamic literary tradition, a genre containing indigenous literary and religious terms, and a
narrative universe to express the distinctive Sufi agenda within the local landscape in which the
Chishtis and Shattaris worked hard to establish themselves. Although the authors of the Sufi romances
used the inflated rhetoric of the conquest narratives of Hindustan, they reimagined themselves as the
“natives,” the Rajputs who defended their forts to the last and created narratives such as the fictive
sacrifice of Padmini at Chittaur.

The Hindavi Sufi romances were sung most ideally in private sessions in Sufi shrines. Here, the novice
was exposed to poetry and music in order to direct him towards realising divinity through his own
inner journey. The romances were enmeshed in complex protocols of reading aloud, singing and
recitation in different contexts outside the Sufi shrines as well, in aristocratic courts and story-telling
sessions conducted by connoisseurs. The notion of flexibility of meaning deployed by the Sufi poets
allowed these works to circulate widely and contemporary and later commentators often note the
power and lush appeal of the poetry.

In the generic formula, the first encounter of the hero and the heroine is treated as a way of conveying
allegorically the Sufi concept of the first meeting of the immortal spirit with divinity in the phenomenal
world. Erotic desire is aroused between the hero and the heroine in this initial encounter, but in order
to transform it into love, the hero and the heroine have to pass through several trials or ordeals which
signify the trials and tribulations of the soul on the path of its union with reality. They have helpers,
who commonly exemplify spiritual values such as mystical absorption (sahaja) or the abstract quality
of love (prema). And there are demons to fight and trials of strength that the lovers must pass through
in order to attain each other.

All the plots have certain formulaic elements that allude to earlier canons or to common stereotypes
about gender and culture that the Hindavi poets reshaped into a distinctive formula.

 The Cāndāyan and Padmavat deploy many of the characteristic topoi of the masnavi as a
prologue (praising God the Creator, his Prophet Muhammad and the first four Caliphs).
 They also include the aesthetics of rasa (‘flavour’, also dominant ‘flavour’ or emotion
conveyed or intended to be conveyed in it narrative) as well as conventions derived ultimately
from the Sanskrit Mahakavya (courtly epic).
 These include the moment of the awakening of love through a vision, a dream, or a
description of the heroine’s beauty as a divine manifestation, a convention common to both
Persian and Indian romances.
  Description of the heroine’s body follows the order of the sarāpā, the head-to-foot
description of the heroine in Persian poetry, but uses much of the imagery of the nakha- ś
ikha varṇana, the toe-to-head description of human heroines in Sanskrit Mahakavyas.
 The necessary transformation of the hero into a yogi on an ascetic quest draws on the poetry
of the Gorakhnāth panth.
 The hero’s abandonment of a first wife in order to consummate his love with the divine
heroine is a motif that draws on the common sultanate cultural stereotype of the jealousy
between co-wives (sautana ) in a harem.
 The message that the deserted wife sends, describing her agony through the twelve months
of the year, uses the convention of the bārahmāsā, taken from oral songs in the various
regional languages.
 The hero’s resolution of the strife between the co-wives, his death, and the burning of both
his wives on his funeral pyre uses the stereotype of the self-immolation of the Indian satī to
signify mystical annihilation.

The inauguration of the genre may be seen in the Cāndāyan of Maulana Daud, composed in 1379 at
the provincial court of Dalmau in Avadh. It is followed by Qutban’s Mirigāvatī (1503), composed under
the patronage of Sultan Ḥusain Shāh Sharqī of Jaunpur. Malik Muhammad Jāyasī emulated the model
of the Cāndāyan and the Mirigāvatī in several poems that are still extant, pre-eminently the Padmāvat
(1540), which tells the story of King Ratansen of Chittaur and his quest for the princess Padmāvatī.

Reflection of Patron’s Interest

 The historical agents who formed this Indian Islamic literary culture were not just courtiers
and kings of the Delhi sultanate. Northern India experienced significant imperial expansion
in the early decades of the fourteenth century under Alauddin Khalji and Bin Tughluq and then
in the late sixteenth century under Akbar. In the intervening periods provincial governors and
chiefs asserted themselves against the emperors. Such chiefs drew resources from the local
warlords who controlled strategically important towns and tried to assert their position in a
broader North Indian political elite. In the absence of adequate resources to assert their claims
to kingship in the conventionally accepted idiom of their time, one of the strategies used by
such rural gentry adopted was the patronage of poets and performers. It was to such aspiring
chiefs that several vernacular country narratives were addressed.
 By adopting the received canonical classical literature of the Sanskrit Mahakavya and the
Persian Masnavi, poets like them were essentially addressing the concerns and constraints of
their patrons. Although the authors of the Sufi romances used the classical literary tradition,
they reimagined themselves as the “natives,” the Rajputs who defended their forts to the
last and created narratives such as the fictive sacrifice of Padminī at Chittaur. The
representation of warriors in narratives composed at marginal courts in this period was
shaped by by the political horizons of the patrons for such narratives. Daud, Narayandas, and
Jayasi modify the plots of their narratives and the trajectories of their p reflect the political
constraints and opportunities faced by such warriors in this period.

 The classical models for the typically dealt not with ambitious warriors but with great kings
from illustrious lineages. Between the late fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, however,
in the absence of successful imperial authority, regional state—building proliferated. That is
to say, the absence of a successful and durable centralizing regime in this period encouraged
 the emergence of the local warlords. Poets seeking patronage from such local patrons
articulated the latter’s distinctive concerns in novel adaptations of received classical genres.
Thus, the new, vernacular masnavi or kavya of this period celebrated the great warrior rather
than the distinguished king from ancient and exalted lineage. The warriors in such narratives
also aspired to negotiate successful: relationships with the political overlord of the day,
through i which they could retain control over the women in their households and also win
suitable rank at the overlord’s court.
 In the hinterlands beyond emergent regional capitals between the ' fourteenth and sixteenth
centuries, by contrast, vernacular narratives from marginal courts all focus on a valiant
warrior afflicted by desire who embarks on a quest to win (or regain) his beloved. The quest
typically involves some austerities and renunciation, and/or initiation into ascetic discipline
by a prominent master belonging to the Shaiva ascetic order of the Naths. Nath yogic powers
then enable the warrior to obtain (or regain) his beloved. In parallel, these warrior—
protagonists have to negotiate the thorny question of a mutually beneficial relationship with
an ever—looming overlord. The sticking point in such negotiations is typically the status of
the warrior’s beloved, desired equally by the overlord for her reputed beauty. The resulting
conflict has a different outcome in each of these narratives. In these stories of the sacrifice of
Rajput women, the ultimate preservation of their women from the enemy functions as a
palliative for their loss of symbolic honour after they were forced to admit the suzerainty of
the Delhi sultans.
 All these narratives carry detailed and conventionalized descriptions of the 'splendours of
the capital city. What is worth remarking being that all three narratives were composed
and/or recited for patrons in fortress and market towns in the hinterland; neither such patrons
nor the towns they controlled were likely to have had the resources necessary ' for such lavish
urban architecture as the narratives describe. In other words, there is a conspicuous gap
between the idealized royal city that the narratives describe, and the more modest
habitations of their patrons between the fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries.

The text, Mirigāvatī or the Magic Doe is the work of Shaikh Qutban Suhrawardi the Indian Sufi
Master attached to the glittering court in exile of Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur.
Composed in 1503 as an introduction to mystical practice for disciples, this powerful Hindavi or
Early Hindi Sufi romance is a richly layered and sophisticated text, simultaneously a spiritual
enigma and an exciting love story full of adventures. Mirigāvatī presents the local world which
was dominated by the political and military struggle between Ḥusain Shāh Sharqī and the Lodi
sultans of Delhi for control over Avadh and Jaunpur. At the beginning of the romance, the Prince
(Rajkumar) is out hunting in a forest with a company of nobles. He sees in the distance a
glimmering seven-coloured doe, and follows her. When he follows her, he sees her sink deep
into a lake and disappear. Episode after episode describes the near-death experiences of the
prince in his effort to convert into love the desire (kāma/ shauq) that has been aroused in him
by his vision of Mirigāvatī. His nurse (dhāī), performing the function of a Sufi pīr or guide as
usual in these narratives, comes to him to ask what is wrong. He describes his sorrow through
the seasons of the year in a form of the bārahmāsā. The prince uses the generic set piece of the
sarāpā or head-to-foot description and the language of analogy to describe, through poetic
imagery, the unpresentable divine essence in bodily form. By examining particular forms and
landscapes and then embedding them within the poets’ articulations of aesthetics and theology,
we can understand how these romances might have worked as blue-prints for a spiritual
education in the north Indian provincial sultanates. A careful reading of the text of the
Mirigdvati demonstrates how built forms and landscape descriptions were used to denote the
 process of interior voyaging. After the doe has lured the Prince to a magic lake deep in the forest,
it vanishes in its waters. Although the Prince jumps in, she is gone and he is left lamenting. When
his companions return to court and inform the Prince’s father, the entire town comes out to the
forest to reason with the Prince, but he will not return. He asks the King to build him a seven-
levelled red-and-gold palace around the shining lake. The seven-levelled palace by the lake finds
an echo in the seven ordeals that the Prince now turned into a yogi, has to overcome in his quest
for Mirigavati after they are separated later in the tale. Finally, the Prince reaches and enters
Kanchanpur, the City of Gold, singing of his pain in separation, viraha, and accompanying
himself on his stringed kingari instrument. The Queen (Mirigavati’s mother) hears of this
mysterious yogi, and summons him to her palace. Here, the poet tells, ‘He leapt across the seven
steps/All Seven had separate meanings. Thus, the seven steps of the palace gate echo the seven
ordeals. After climbing the seven steps of the palace in Kanchanpur, the Prince answered the
question posed by Mirigāvatī and her friends, discards the yogic disease, and is joined in mystical
union with her.

The Padmavat offers us a grand mystical progress through a fantasy landscape and an interior
landscape of the self. The story is set in a local, Hindustani landscape, and its use of words in dialect
reproduces the view from a small provincial centre in Avadh or Bihar, in this case the town of Jais.
The story is set in a local, Hindustani landscape, and its use of words in dialect reproduces the view
from a small provincial centre in Avadh or Bihar, in this case the town of Jais. . Jāyasī goes on to
place his imaginary Sufi landscape within a full range of Indian religious renunciants, the
competitors of the Chishti Sufi s. The variety and all-inclusiveness of Jāyasī’s list spans the religious
spectrum from naked Jains to devotees of the god Rāma, Nāth panthī yogis, wandering mendicants,
tantric worshippers of the goddess Śakti, and all manner of holy men. Within this imaginary
landscape of paradise, Jāyasī invokes another symbolic plane: the interior landscape of the ascetic’s
body. The seeker has to cross many shifting stages within this symbolic geography. The imaginary
landscape on which Ratansen advances to attain Padmāvatī is also an interior landscape, within
which Ratansen crosses stages in the symbolic geography of the body to reach the Sufi goal. Jāyasī
takes up all the classic tropes and motifs of Rajput martial literature but reads them within the
Chishti arrogation of the physical landscape of Avadh. His poem can therefore also be read as a
critique of political power: although political élites proclaimed their dominance through the
sponsorship of art and literature, the Hindavī Sufi romances concealed within them a covert Sufi
claim to spiritual superiority over the kings who supported them. The contest between love
rightfully gained and love wrested through violence sends a clear message to political élites about
the symbolic independence of Sufi silsilah s despite their reliance on those same élites for
patronage. Jāyasī used all the tropes and figures native to India to create a “false” or seemingly native
image of an Indian romance, which is only a front for the “true” Sufi message of the poem. And
although the historical Padmāvatī did not ascend the flaming pyre, and her jauhar is a historical fi
ction, and the fi nal martyrdom uses the theme of Rajput resistance to Turkish invaders to convey the
message of the spiritual struggle to taste prema-rasa , the larger conflation of erotic fetishization and
military subjugation makes the text a powerful statement of the actual cultural logic of its period.