This pioneering work is a historical study of the culture of Brajbhasha poetry—a literary tradition of Hindi that flourished among court poets in early modern North India. Referred to as Riti Kal literature, this stylistically formal, neo-classical tradition acquired a trans-regional status that was recognized along with Persian as the leading literary language of early modern North India. The study proposes to redress the neglect of Riti Kal poetry as mutually constitutive with other socio-cultural practices of the time. It measures the impact of these processes on a thriving literary culture while also exploring the conditions that led to its initial emergence and growth. For anyone interested in how to understand a highly formalized literature as embedded in history in addition to the dynamics of a vernacular tradition with cosmopolitan contours, Sharma's study is invaluable.
The Riti Kal tradition produced numerous compositions, consumed not only in elite courts but also among the popular (p. 2). It is no negligible historical fact that for a period in which entrenched language ideologies remained, for both Persian and Sanskrit, a transition to a vernacular mode, that had mobility in both elite and popular cultures, occurred with such vigor. Sharma argues that this degree of influence, marking Braj as a hybrid cosmopolitan vernacular as Sheldon Pollock has suggested, was consciously aspired to. The literary register of Riti Kal poetry met the desire to both compose for courtly status and “in the language of the masses”
(p. 1). Historicizing the significance of this concern for Brajbhasha poets, who were quite capable of composing in the already established cosmopolitan literary traditions of Sanskrit and Persian, is central for Sharma's project. While some of the ambivalences and anxieties felt by poets in translating their expertise from Sanskrit and Persian to Brajbhasha are explored—paralleling recent work notably by Allison Busch—Sharma's specific focus is to assess the preoccupation of Riti Kal poets with changing socio-cultural perceptions and roles.
The first consideration is the shift in gender, kinship, and caste boundaries in socially mixed, economically dynamic situations of war and expansion. Taking note of the particular historical contexts, both topographically and temporally, Sharma's analysis suggests a new social mobility in gender and caste hierarchies (Chapter 2). These are representative repositories, in the texts, of social processes that were in flux. Sharma brings these changes in society into focus through careful attention to the construction of the hero-heroine motif so central in Riti Kal poetry, inherited from classical Sanskrit poetic sources yet significantly innovated upon.
Next, Sharma identifies the transition to a more devotional attitude orienting this traditional hero-heroine motif represented by the deities Radha and Krishna (Chapter 3). Sharma explores whether the amplified reverential stance towards the divine couple is a re-staging of popular themes in a context of newly assumed veneration. Here, Sharma suggests that these changes in anthropology, marked by an independence from Sanskrit literature, foregrounds a new devotional, perhaps bhakti-influenced, re-assessment of divine roles and their potential humanization.
Finally, Sharma helpfully shows how the preponderance of topics taken from classical Sanskrit literature displays a continued engagement with Sanskrit literary heritage and its re-working in another register (Chapter 4). Both continuities and discontinuities are noted and Sharma's analysis reveals that a critical dimension in the formation of the culture of Riti Kal poetry was the symbolic cache in re-working older lauded topics. A view of the literary past from the inside here provides the historian with a comparative angle on the historical consciousness of poets as well as patrons.
Continuing on the theme of historical consciousness, Sharma takes up, in the final section of the book, (Chapter 5), the emergence of “realistic” political narrative as poetic subject. Representing actual events, whatever the outcome, alongside the aspiration to valorise, mediate the conditions of production. Sharma shows the literary aspirations to legitimate kingly patrons is a complex affair involving not only conventional tropes carried over from older Sanskritic sources but also the presence of critique, dramatic irony and moral testaments. Via strategic deployment in literary form, Riti Kal poetry, Sharma suggests, engages with diffuse sets of regional cultural powers.
Sharma's invigorating analysis of Riti Kal literary culture and history in Mughal North India places it squarely within the burgeoning field of early modern studies of South Asia. It speaks to theoretical debates in South Asian studies on the historical consciousness of various types of texts in pre-colonial South Asia (such as recent work by Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyan, Sumit Guha and Sheldon Pollock, among others). It can also be placed alongside, and in counterpoint to, scholarship on the changing tenor of Indo-Persian aesthetic cultures in the Mughal period (as in the work of Sunil Sharma and Muzaffar Alam). Sharma's study is an indispensable contribution, pointing to new and revelatory considerations of a highly formalized literature vitally engaged in history.
