The Other Language of the Mughal Court
This is a study of Mughal literary culture. It is not, however, about the culture of Persian literature. My focus is a more unexpected subject: a corpus of texts written in a language today known as Brajbhasha, North India's most important literary vernacular during the early modern period (1500–1800). Today the word ‘Brajbhasha’ is likely to evoke immediate associations with Krishna devotion; meaning ‘language of Braj’, the term proclaims Brajbhasha's mytho-poetic associations with Krishna lore and the Vaishnava efflorescence that took Mathura and Vrindavan by storm from the sixteenth century onwards. While Braj does indeed owe some of its popularity to its cultivation by Krishna-worshiping literati, it was also a major court language, and thus a far more versatile cultural vehicle than its present-day Vaishnava connotations suggest.Footnote 1
The first claim—and it is simple but often simply ignored—is that Brajbhasha did have a presence at the Mughal court. While this claim will come as no surprise to scholars of Hindi (though the data some adduce do not always conform to the most rigorous standards of historical verifiability), Braj literary patronage is rarely discussed in studies of Mughal India, which as a rule focus on Persian poets.Footnote 2 Persian of course had a long history in India, but from the time of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) the Mughal court became an especially attractive destination for writers who were eager to leave Safavid Iran. In a new turn towards cosmopolitanism, North India was swept up in a dramatic process of what one might think of as re-Persianization after close to two centuries of more eclectic, locally-rooted literary behaviour on the part of Indo-Muslim courtly communities. Still, even if Persian would always occupy the position of highest prestige in the hierarchy of Mughal literary forms, an impressive list of emperors as well as members of the Mughal nobility also sponsored the production of Brajbhasha texts. One of the aims of this paper is to begin the task of understanding the extent of this patronage, and to reflect on the roles played by Braj poets and the works they wrote in Mughal settings.
Nationalist Mythmaking and Some Archival Disarray
I use the modest phrase ‘begin the task’ because our present state of knowledge does not permit a more ambitious goal. Despite its evident importance, the extent of Mughal participation in Braj literary culture has never been systematically traced. There are monographs in Hindi on a few individual Braj poets who are known to have commanded Mughal patronage, but no broad, historically rigorous study of imperial court sponsorship of Braj poetry exists. To attempt even a partial reconstruction of the role of the Mughals, and Indo-Muslims more generally, in the history of Braj literary culture, is a daunting undertaking. There are enormous holes in the archive. Some texts have simply been lost; others have never been published or, if once published, have long been out of print. Brajbhasha remained the medium of a thriving poetic community into the early twentieth century, but when partisans of the new Khari Boli (Modern Standard Hindi) ousted Brajbhasha—branded as effete by colonial and nationalist discourse during a period of profound discomfort with India's courtly past—many earlier texts fell out of favour. The erosion of Persian literacy among Hindus in the modern period and the general neglect of Braj texts by Mughal scholars have prevented the Persian and Hindi domains of historical and cultural memory from being viewed in concert. Yet another impediment to reconstructing the history of Brajbhasha at the Mughal court is the familiar self-effacement of Indian authors: most poets are uncommunicative about matters beyond their immediate literary aims. Moreover, dates of texts and biographies of even major Braj authors are sometimes startlingly unknown. Record-keeping was not the Hindi literary tradition's strong suit.
In addition to these practical obstacles we are confronted with ideological difficulties. If scholars of Indo-Persian are often silent, or at best reticent, on the subject of Braj literary production at the Mughal court, we need to approach the more effusive corpus of Hindi scholarship with caution. Modern Hindi literary studies came into being during the nationalist period, and the field exhibits a complicated relationship to Mughal-period texts. Forged during a time of increasingly polarized self-definitions on the part of Hindi and Urdu users, and later exacerbated by the scars of partition-era communal conflict, Hindi literary historiography has never been able to free itself from the strictures of communalist readings of the past.Footnote 3
The narratives take different shapes, and evince at times a schizophrenic quality. Some literary historians see Brajbhasha's courtly tendencies as evidence of a wrong turn that the Hindi language took on its developmental path. Ramcandra Shukla, who wrote the first self-consciously modern history of Hindi literature in 1929, made a sharp demarcation between what he thought to be an earlier ‘bhakti’ (devotional) and later ‘rīti’ (courtly) period, helping to set the stage for a consistent denigration of courtly Brajbhasha texts as late, decadent, and suspiciously engaged with worldly matters rather than spirituality.Footnote 4 A related historiographical trope (and trap) has been the association of rīti literature with Mughal (and Muslim) decline.Footnote 5
Another breed of literary historian, while refreshingly avoiding accusations of literary waywardness, goes to the opposite extreme and seems to find a Hindi couplet flowing from every emperor's tongue.Footnote 6 The implication (gentler towards the Mughals but also at base a nationalist one) is that Muslims, like Hindus, have been passionately devoted to the cause of Hindi for centuries. In modern times, when Muslims and Hindus self-consciously eschew each others’ languages and scripts, this type of scholar seems to find solace in highlighting features of a more linguistically pluralistic past, with Hindi-using Muslim poets and patrons revered as tolerant advocates of national unity avant la lettre.
I am by no means suggesting that Hindi scholars are wilfully deceiving their readers. They are often drawing upon evidence from oral tradition as well as Hindi's copious heritage of poetry anthologies. Two influential exemplars, together totalling more than two thousand printed pages, the provenance and historicity of whose contents are not easy to verify, are the Śivsiṃhsaroj Footnote 7 (1878) and Miśrabandhuvinod (1913). In presenting a voluminous array of poems and literary biographies, the compilers seem to have adopted as their anthologizing strategy the literary-historical equivalent of the motto ‘everything but the kitchen sink.’ Over the preceding centuries, oral forms of literary culture circulated through sophisticated local mechanisms in tandem with written streams to generate a robust corpus of legends about Hindi literati, their oeuvres in some cases accruing countless phuṭkal (miscellaneous) verses that are not necessarily well attested in manuscript traditions.
Take, for example, the popular genre of stories about Braj poets’ encounters with Mughal emperors that are often reproduced in modern scholarship. One such tale celebrates the poetess Pravin Ray, courtesan of Raja Indrajit of Orchha and a student of the Braj luminary Keshavdas, for having refused Akbar's summons to court. She is reported to have sent the emperor the following couplet: ‘Pay heed, wise emperor, to what Pravin Ray has to say. Only low caste people, crows and dogs eat off the plates used by others.’Footnote 8 Dozens of tales chronicling encounters between Braj poets and Mughal emperors have come down to us. A famous example from the Caurāsī vaiṣṇavan kī vārtā relates that Surdas enchanted the emperor with his padas and then refused to perform at the Mughal court.Footnote 9 While we naturally suspect many such narratives are not true in a historically positivist sense, their sheer abundance suggests a larger composite truth about Brajbhasha poetry being a desired commodity at the Mughal court. (The fact that in the two instances cited here the poets do not go to court adds a layer of meaning about resistance to Mughal power during an age when most of North India had come under its sway.)
The problem for social and literary historians is how to get at some approximation of the truth that hovers behind various tales, undated texts, ghostly authors, and presentist fallacies that stem from wishful thinking about Hindu-Muslim unity in the premodern period. To be sure, Mughal texts are not the only domain of the Hindi corpus that poses historiographical challenges. We would have to throw out many of the greats of the Hindi canon—Sur, Kabir, and Mira Bai, for starters—if we insisted on biographical precision, or authenticating every verse attributed to them. Hindi literary study would grind to a halt. The various legends about Braj poets and the pithy, if unverifiable, verses ascribed to them form a parallel domain of cultural and historical memory that, while subject to an epistemological regime separate from the methodologies of modern scholars, cannot be entirely ignored.Footnote 10 This type of evidence is sometimes accepted readily by Indian literary scholars writing in Hindi for whom the manuscript evidence deemed critical by western scholars is less important or, perhaps, has proven inaccessible. Indeed, careful studies of manuscript traditions remain a desideratum for many Braj authors, Mughal or otherwise.
Given the limitations of the archive, then, reconstructing the story of Braj poets at the Mughal court is at the core an imperfect science, and at times requires a creative approach. I will in some cases be piecing together circumstantial evidence, or relying on informed conjecture made possible by following tracks the poets left in their texts. If too often the documentation is unsatisfactory, we also have more traceable, datable texts and individuals that can help to anchor this investigation, particularly when we put the more conventional Hindi sources in dialogue with Persian ones. Unexpected memories crop up in Persian texts, and bringing this additional archive into play adds new layers to our understanding of poets as actors in the early modern period, allowing a richer kind of social and literary history to emerge. In what follows I sift the available evidence concerning prominent Braj authors whose careers intersected with the world of the Mughal court. I reveal some hidden aspects of Mughal cultural life that are surprisingly easy to find if one actually knows where to look for them.
The Rise of Brajbhasha in the Early Mughal Period
A good starting point is to outline the literary conditions the Mughals would have encountered on the ground when they arrived in India. Whereas both Brajbhasha literary culture and the Mughals were new in sixteenth-century India, the patronage of Hindi by Indo-Muslim elites was old. In fact—though this is a fact largely unrecognized by nationalist literary historians—most important early signs of Hindi poetic creativity are traceable to Indo-Muslim performance settings and courts. Anecdotal references to vernacular verse forms and songs are found as early as the Ghaznavid period (circa 977–1186),Footnote 11 but it was more recent activity in regional Muslim courts and Sufi khānqāhs that were the impetus behind the truly major textual achievements in pre-Mughal Hindi: a series of premākhyāns (Sufi love stories) written in the Avadhi dialect from 1379–1545, which continued to be performed and enjoyed long after they were first composed. The court of Islam Shah Sur was particularly frequented by Hindi writers, notably the Avadhi poet Manjhan (author of Madhumālatī) and Shah Muhammad Farmuli, whose Hindi poems are fondly remembered by the literary biographers of early modern India.Footnote 12
During the reign of Akbar noticeable shifts occurred in North Indian language and literary preferences. The Mughal attention lavished on Persian poets is one. In vernacular literary circles, another important change should be noted: the dialect of Brajbhasha began to supersede that of Avadhi. The languages are not hugely dissimilar. They can both be classified linguistically as Hindi (which Indo-Muslims often called ‘Hindavi’), though they differ in some basic morphological features, as well as in genre preferences. Brajbhasha poets favoured short muktak (free-standing) poems, usually on devotional or royal themes, as well as treatises on classical Indian aesthetics known as rītigranth (poetry textbooks). The Braj dialect is not too distant from the Hindi spoken in Agra and it would in all likelihood have been readily comprehensible to the Mughals—especially when compared with Avadhi which, as its name indicates, originated further east.
It was precisely during Akbar's period that Hindi became a naturalized idiom for the Mughal rulers. Babur (r. 1526–1530), the founder of the empire, had been most at home in Chaghtai Turkish, the language he used to write Bāburnāmah (his memoirs). Although Humayun's lengthy exile at the Safavid court in Iran contributed to his (and his son Akbar's) Persophilia, Humayun (r. 1530–1540, 1555–1556) hosted Turkish poets at his court.Footnote 13 Akbar, however, is known to have been conversant with spoken Hindi, as was his son Jahangir and all future Mughal rulers.Footnote 14 A major political imperative in consolidating the empire was to build consensus with local Rajput kings, one expedient of which was to accept their daughters as brides. The mothers of Akbar's son Jahangir and grandson Shah Jahan were both Indian Rajputs. Thus, over the course of Akbar's reign Hindi was in some cases literally becoming the mother tongue of the Mughal princes, even if Persian remained the primary public language, and ties to Turkish were maintained.Footnote 15
Additional political factors contributed to the Mughal interest in Brajbhasha. Their early capital at Agra was situated close to the Hindu cultural centres of Vrindavan and Mathura, the locus of new Vaishnava religious communities that were gaining power with both Mughal and Rajput state support. Important members of Akbar's administration such as Todar Mal and Man Singh were patrons of Vaishnava institutions and, in 1580, Mathura became part of the ṣūbah of Agra.Footnote 16 The new types of song and poetry emerging from these same places would have been a natural subject of imperial interest. While Persian literary patronage proclaimed the Mughal rulers’ rootedness in a cosmopolitan Islamicate world, listening to Braj poetry and music was a means of engaging with the local. This would have been at once a political and a cultural choice.
The beginning of Mughal engagement with Braj literary culture is difficult to pinpoint. Most of the earliest Hindi poets associated with the Mughal court are only shadowy figures; often nothing survives but their names, and occasionally fragments of poetry. Whether or not Babur should be accorded the status of a Hindi (but not, technically, Braj) poet on the basis of a single couplet found in his Turkish dīvān,Footnote 17 he seems not to have sponsored any vernacular poets. Patronage of Brajbhasha songs, not always entirely distinguishable from poetry, has been linked to Humayun. The names of several Braj writers are also associated with his court. Better documented than others is the oeuvre of the poet Narhari, who appears also to have attracted the patronage of Islam Shah Sur and was later to become a court poet of Akbar. Another poet mentioned in early, and not entirely reliable, literary histories is Chem.Footnote 18
With the accession of Akbar, our information becomes richer, if still somewhat vague. Akbar was tremendously fond of music, especially dhrupad songs composed in Brajbhasha. His celebrated court musician, Tansen, needs no introduction here. The Ᾱ’īn-i Akbarī of Abu'l Fazl takes special note of music, and includes a section on Bishnupad (Songs to Vishnu).Footnote 19 Although Abu'l Fazl does not mention any of the numerous Hindi poets associated with Akbar's court, the names and compositions of some survive in poetry anthologies. A few, such as Karnesh and Manohar (among others), routinely make the rounds of literary histories, accompanied by sparse biographical musings. Todar Mal, Akbar's revenue administrator, is credited with writing Braj poetry, as is Faizi, Akbar's Persian-language poet laureate (and brother of Abu'l Fazl).Footnote 20 Akbar himself is also credited with a few compositions in Hindi. In the words of Abu'l Fazl, ‘The inspired nature of His Majesty is strongly drawn to composing poetry in Hindi and Persian, and he exhibits a subtle understanding of the finest points of literary conceits.’Footnote 21
Akbar's courtier Birbal is also known to have had a literary temperament. Birbal is fondly remembered as one of the navratna (nine jewels) of Akbar's court, and Indian children to this day are regaled with stories of the clever Birbal. Even if most of these are the stuff of legend, and little of his literary oeuvre survives today, that the famous Mughal courtier was also a Braj poet is beyond doubt. Although not providing any details about his poetry, both Badauni and Shah Nawaz Khan mention that Akbar awarded him the title kavirāy (king of poets). A few dozen of Birbal's Braj verses come down to us under the chāp (poetic signature) of ‘Brahma’, a name that also occurs in an authoritative list of Braj poets compiled by the eighteenth-century Braj literary critic and scholar Bhikharidas (fl. 1740).Footnote 22
Major Braj Poets Associated with Akbar and Jahangir
A major poet with clear associations to the Mughal court during Akbar's period and one widely known, if little studied by Hindi scholars, is Gang. Hundreds of poems survive with his chāp. It is indicative of the state of scholarship that even the editor of the most authoritative book on Gang is in doubt about the authenticity of some of his material.Footnote 23 Still, there is no real doubt that Gang existed, that some of the poems that survive are actually his, and—given the number of praśasti (panegyric) verses to Mughal personages—that he was associated with the court. More than 75 poems attest to the high-level company Gang kept: there are compositions in honour of Akbar, Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan, the latter's sons Iraj Khan and Darab Khan, Prince Salim (the future Jahangir), Prince Daniyal (Salim's brother), Man Singh Kachhwaha, Birbal, amongst others.Footnote 24 A century and a half later Bhikharidas considered him one of two sardār (masters) among Hindi poets, the other being Tulsidas.Footnote 25
If Gang could be mentioned in the same breath as Tulsi then we can feel quite confident of his high status in the precolonial Braj tradition. Such confidence is bolstered by the remarks made some 80 years after those of Bhikharidas by William Price who, in a grammar book written for British military recruits in 1827, noted that Gang was one of a half-dozen of the most celebrated Hindi literary figures.Footnote 26 Since then Hindi scholars seem to have suffered from an astonishing case of literary amnesia. The example of Gang dramatically illustrates how charting the early career of Brajbhasha at the Mughal court can seem a laborious exercise in weaving together tiny threads of evidence. Fortunately there are also major figures about whom we know much more. It is to these people that I now turn.
One of the founding figures of the courtly Braj literary tradition is Keshavdas Mishra (c. 1555–1617). Hailing from Orchha, a small principality in Bundelkhand, Keshavdas belonged to a family of learned Sanskrit pandits but chose—and this is just one sign of the historical rupture of the age—to take up a new type of career as a vernacular writer. Other major changes were afoot, for during the poet's youth Orchha was annexed by Akbar's armies. Although Keshavdas was a poet and not a political commentator, his awareness of the new order occasionally peeps out from his work. The full extent of the poet's personal contact with the Mughal court is not clear, but there is enough evidence to permit well-informed speculation.
Several verses from his Kavipriyā (Handbook for poets, 1601), an early exemplar of the Braj poetry textbooks that would soon become all the rage in courtly circles, mention the Mughal aristocrat Birbal. The way these are presented—in close proximity to verses about Raja Indrajit of Orchha, a known patron—suggests a similar relationship obtained in the case of Birbal.
And one day while they were in Prayag Indrajit said to make a request. The poet said, ‘Fortunate one, show your grace so that I may pass my days without worry.’
And Birbal, too, told Keshavdas to ask for his heart's desire. Keshavdas requested, ‘May nobody block me at court.’ (āmgyo taba darabāra mẽ ‘mohi na rokai koi’).
Indrajit showed him kindness, considering him his guru. He washed his feet, and bestowed upon him twenty-one villages.Footnote 27
While his request to Indrajit was apparently honoured at once, we do not know if Keshavdas ever got his wish from Birbal—but it is the nature of the wish itself that should interest us: Keshavdas’ desire to appear at court. In a cluster of verses in a later chapter, this time on the subject of dāna (the kingly virtue of generosity), he again mentions Birbal and Indrajit in tandem. The section concludes with praśasti verses to both Indrajit and Birbal, with the latter eulogized as follows:
When Birbal passed away there was great rejoicing in Poverty's court.
The pakhavaj drums of Evil began to play,
The sounds of the conch shells of Grief resounded,
The songs of Falsehood,
the tambourines of Fear—a concert of all these instruments was heard.
The house of Kaliyuga was merry with the pipes of Discord
and the streaming banners of Disgrace.Footnote 28
Although the precise details are now lost to us, Keshavdas evidently took pride in his association with Birbal, an important member of the Mughal political establishment.
Further hints about Keshavdas’ associations with Mughal elites are contained in the author's last work, the Jahāngīrjascandrikā (Moonlight of the Fame of Jahangir, 1612), which is set at Jahangir's court in Agra. The introduction contains a series of praśastis to Bairam Khan, Akbar's regent, Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan (Bairam Khan's son) and Iraj Shah Newaz Khan (Bairam Khan's grandson), the last being singled out for special attention.Footnote 29 Keshavdas depicts himself in the role of mentor to the young Amir:
It was through the merit of a former life that fate bestowed upon Keshavdas the good fortune of meeting Iraj Khan. One day Iraj said,
‘Respected Keshavray, you understand all of life's secrets: tell me, which is more important, fate [bhāgya] or human effort [uday]?Footnote 30
The work proves to have a complicated mission: to answer Iraj Khan's question with an edifying discourse on bhāgya and uday while simultaneously eulogizing the Mughal emperor—portrayed as a wise leader who can adjudicate on challenging matters.
The basic storyline of the short work is as follows: one day the personified Bhāgya and Uday are vociferously debating who is more important when suddenly an akāsbānī (voice from the heavens) instructs them to go to Mathura and seek the guidance of Lord Shiva. Shiva informs them that Emperor Jahangir can best decide and so the two set out for the royal court in Agra, which they describe in lively detail before petitioning for a verdict. After Jahangir offers his opinion (following a brief consultation with Man Singh) on the relative importance of fate and human effort (they are both equally important, says Jahangir, and they should both inhabit his kingdom), various courtiers express their appreciation for Jahangir's sagacity, bestowing myriad benedictions that take the form of Braj praśasti poems. A Qazi exhorts Jahangir to be victorious like Ram's sons Kush and Lav. A Sheikh calls on Jahangir to vanquish enemies in the manner of the fierce Hindu goddess Kali. After Bhāgya, Uday, and an assortment of ministers and poets have their say, Keshavdas inserts himself into the narrative. He expresses his desire to retire to the banks of the Ganges and pursue a life of meditation; in the final verse, Jahangir rewards him handsomely.
There is a kind of proto-magical realism in the Jahāngīrjascandrikā, and we are left to wonder whether any of the events ever really happened. Caution is certainly warranted in using an imaginative text like Jahāngīrjascandrikā to illuminate Keshavdas's lived experience or the literary practices of the Mughal court. Still, it does seem as though the poet had some personal familiarity with the environment he describes. The text includes praśasti verses to more than 20 known princes, rajas, and members of the nobility.Footnote 31 When the character Uday makes remarks such as, ‘Who is the handsome king to the left of Man Singh, talking to Parvez?’, one wonders if Keshavdas did see with his own eyes some of what he describes. Perhaps Birbal granted his wish, after all.
Did Keshavdas actually recite poems in Jahangir's court? The Jahāngīrnāmah, the emperor's memoirs, does contain quite a few references to one of Keshavdas’ Orchha patrons, Bir Singh Deo Bundela, but none to Keshavdas himself. Most of the literary activity is in Persian. Still, if we have good reason to treat with scepticism Keshavdas’ portrayal of Qazis and Sheikhs declaiming Braj poems about Hindu deities, two significant references to Hindi poets in the Jahāngīrnāmah give us pause for thought. On one occasion, Raja Suraj Singh of Marwar, uncle of Prince Khurram (the future Shah Jahan), brought a Hindi poet to court. Jahangir records the pleasure he took in the Hindi poem and the elephant he bestowed as a reward.Footnote 32 In another passage Jahangir becomes almost rhapsodic as he describes bee imagery in Hindi poetry:
The lotus flower often closes up and traps the bhaunra (bee) inside for the whole night. It also happens with the water lily. But when they open it comes out and flies away. Because the black bee is a constant visitor to these flowers, the Hindi poets consider it to be like the nightingale in love with the rose, and they produce marvellous poetic conceits based on it.
One such poet was Tan Sen Kalawant (a musician), who was in my father's service and without equal in his own time—or any other for that matter. In one of his songs he likened the face of a youth to the sun and the opening of his eye to the blossoming of the lotus and the emerging of the bhaunra. In another one he likened the beloved's wink to the motion of the lotus flower when the bhaunra alights on it.Footnote 33
In referencing not just Tansen but a larger class of ‘Hindi poets’, Jahangir signals his awareness, and by all indications sincere appreciation, of contemporary vernacular literary trends. The bhramargīt (song of the bee), deriving from the Bhāgavata Purāna tales about Krishna's messenger Uddhava and the gopis, was a common motif in Braj poetry of the period, having been popularized by Sur and Nanddas. In the light of Jahangir's remarks in his memoirs, a phrase by Keshavdas that praises the emperor's knowledge of nāyikābheda (classification of heroines), one of the most important Braj courtly genres, takes on special significance. Footnote 34 Perhaps Brajbhasha had more currency at Jahangir's court than we currently understand.
We will probably never know for certain how exactly the Jahāngīrjascandrikā, Keshavdas’ last work, came into being, or whether the poet presented it to the emperor in Agra. Keshavdas was never to be heard from again, strengthening the possibility that he did indeed receive an emolument from the emperor sufficient to support some kind of retirement.Footnote 35 If Jahangir did not commission the work himself, perhaps Bir Singh Deo Bundela, who had received many favours from Jahangir, did so as a tribute to the emperor. Bir Singh, known as a lavish builder in Bundelkhand and Mathura, also maintained a residence on the banks of the Yamuna in Agra;Footnote 36 thus, Keshavdas could easily have accompanied him on one or more sojourns to Agra. A final possibility, and the most likely one, given his prominence in the introduction, is that the true patron was Rahim's son, Iraj Khan. Jahangir awarded him the title Shah Newaz Khan in 1612, the same year that the Jahāngīrjascandrikā was composed. Footnote 37 Sponsoring a literary work in honour of the emperor may have been a way of showing his gratitude, and if so, it would be highly significant that his homage took the form of a Braj kāvya rather than a Persian qaṣīdah.Footnote 38 Iraj Khan's own father, Rahim (whom I will discuss next), is remembered as a Braj poet. Perhaps the language had a special significance in that family.
Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan (1556–1627) was a man of many talents, among which the composition of Braj poetry was just one. Raised at Akbar's court after his father Bairam Khan was assassinated in 1561, Rahim was employed in his early years as a 
ālīq (tutor) to Jahangir, and would assume various roles in the Mughal political and cultural establishment, becoming renowned for his military successes as well as for his lavish patronage of the arts. Rahim was a famously generous sponsor of Persian poets, with litterateurs from as far away as Iran sending him couplets as a means of gaining entrée at his court. He mostly hosted Persian poets at his literary gatherings, but some sources also indicate the patronage of Brajbhasha writers, including Gang, to whom a substantial number of praśasti verses in Rahim's honour are attributed.Footnote 39
Whereas Persian sources provide only scant information about Rahim's connection to vernacular literary life, the Hindi tradition fondly commemorates him as a major poet. This is a strange discrepancy, one that emerges in a recurring pattern. Several works in both Avadhi and Braj are attributed to him. Most are loosely organized rather than ordered into a coherent whole, and none is dated or contains a colophon, rendering pronouncements about his oeuvre for the time being provisional.Footnote 40 Two collections of verses in the barvai (short couplet) meter are particularly striking for their affinity with major sixteenth-century literary trends in Brajbhasha. In one collection, Krishna bhakti themes are prominent; the other draws on the genre of nāyikābheda.Footnote 41
While such catalogues of heroines have a venerable Sanskrit pedigree, abridged vernacular works on the subject became astoundingly popular in the courts of early modern India. Featuring the many different types of female character who inhabit the world of Indian poetry, these works served as guides to the budding writer and uninitiated reader, as well as showcases for poetry. Braj poets usually wrote about nāyikābheda in the rītigranth genre, providing both lakṣaṇ (definitions) and udāharaṇ (example verses) of key literary scenarios.
In Rahim's collection of nāyikābheda verses the definitions are absent, but he is completely conversant with the system. In traditional Indian literary theory the nāyikā is one of the principal underpinnings of ś 
ṅgāra rasa, considered its ālambana vibhāva (underlying cause). The question that concerned Sanskrit and, in the early modern period, Braj writers, is, what bheda (type) of woman is she, and how should she be portrayed in poetry? For instance, in the case of a svakīyā (one's own wife) the poet should focus on a woman's modesty, as Rahim does in the following couplet:
A shadow of a glance hovers at the corner of her eye.
When she moves you can't even hear her anklets.Footnote 42
A subcategory of svakīyā and a favourite of poets was the navoṛhā nāyikā (new bride). Such a woman refuses a lover's sexual advances by struggling to keep her blouse done up or locking her thighs tightly together. Some poets set their sights on even younger women, such as the mugdhā (innocent) nāyikā. Part of this series is the ajñātayauvana-nāyikā, a still unmarried girl who is so naïve that she does not even know about puberty or lovemaking yet. She typically expresses her alarm upon first noticing her budding breasts, thinking she has contracted some kind of disease until a girlfriend or nanny explains to her the ways of the world.Footnote 43 Braj poets, like their Sanskrit predecessors, were also intrigued by racier types of passion. Many a bheda was forged in describing the dynamics of a liaison with a parakīyā (the wife of another man). In some cases love is directed towards a courtesan. Have no fear, there is a name for that, too: the sāmānyā nāyikā or ‘woman available to all.’ In his nāyikābheda collection, Rahim illustrates these and many other classical types of female characters.
The literary science of nāyikābheda became available outside of Sanskrit texts only in Rahim's period. Abu'l Fazl's discussion of sāhitya (literature) in the Ᾱ’īn-i Akbarī is principally devoted to precisely this. Perhaps Rahim learned about the subject from this Persian source, or perhaps he knew the Rasamañjarī (Bouquet of Sentiment) of Nanddas (fl. 1570) or Keshavdas’ Rasikpriyā (Handbook for Poetry Connoisseurs, 1591). A comment by Abu'l Fazl in the conclusion to his discussion of nāyikābheda prompts one to wonder if these Braj works were starting to make their way into Mughal circles:
In this art the manners and bearing of the hero and the heroine are set forth with much variety of exposition, and illustrated by delightful examples. The works on this subject should be consulted by those who are interested in its study.Footnote 44
Since Abu'l Fazl was writing in Persian for an Indo-Muslim audience not conversant with Sanskrit, his suggestion that interested readers should consult ‘works on this subject’ may well have been an invitation to read an emerging class of Braj poetry textbooks. Since all of Rahim's works are undated, it is impossible to establish the historical relationship between his version and these others; all were produced within a few years of each other. Given the connection between Keshavdas and Rahim's son made explicit in the Jahāngīrjascandrikā, it is certainly not improbable that Rahim may have known Keshavdas’ work. Whether he was reading Abu'l Fazl in Persian, or a Braj author, Rahim's nāyikābheda work is an important indicator of early Mughal interest in rīti literary subjects—an interest that would only increase in the coming decades.
The Patronage of Braj Poets under Shah Jahan
The court of Shah Jahan was bustling with musicians and poets working in Brajbhasha. Like Akbar, Shah Jahan was a keen connoisseur of music. Descendants of Tansen such as Lal Khan (son-in-law of Tansen's son, Bilas) and Lal Khan's sons, Khush-hal and Vishram, maintained the tradition of dhrupad at the Mughal court.Footnote 45 Shah Jahan also commissioned Sahasras, a remarkable compilation of more than 1,000 Braj verses attributed to Nayak Bakshu, a court musician of Raja Man Singh Tomar of Gwalior (r. 1486–1516).Footnote 46 Aside from musicians, the names of many Braj poets are also mentioned in connection with Shah Jahan. Some are obscure figures, about whom little is known except for the occasional detail provided by Mughal court chroniclers. In the Pādshāhnāmah, Harinath, the son of Narhari (mentioned earlier in connection with Humayun, Islam Shah, and Akbar), is said to have enjoyed the hereditary patronage of the imperial house. Khafi Khan in the Muntakhab al-Lubāb reports that an unnamed Hindi poet was given an elephant and a 2,000 rupees cash reward.Footnote 47 Hindi literary historians mention Shah Jahan's encounters with Shiromani and the famed Braj poet Biharilal, but solid corroboration is lacking.Footnote 48
Several poets really stand out, however, both for the quality of their work and the quality of available information about them. One is the Brahman poet Sundar of Gwalior. Here we finally encounter a figure who can be securely located at the Mughal court at a precise time, and we can track him through both Hindi and Persian sources. The preface of the poet's major work, Sundarś ṅgār (Sundar's Love Poems, 1631), contains a short eulogy to the emperor, as well as personal details about the author and the favour he received at court. A sense of the preface can be gleaned from the following excerpt:
Shah Jahan assumed power, and rules from the city of Agra,
A beautiful place on the banks of the Yamuna.
The emperor is great, and the mouth of a poet small!
How can his virtues be described?
All the stars in the firmament do not fit into the palm of one's hand.
Shah Jahan gave untold wealth to talented men (gunin).
Among them he honoured the fine poet Sundar with much respect.
He gave gemstones, ornaments, rubies, horses, elephants, a gift of cloth.
First he bestowed the title kavirāy, then mahākavirāy.
Sundar Kaviray hails from the city of Gwalior,
The emperor, ever merciful to the poor (garīb-nevāj),
Showed him kindness.Footnote 49
A few points deserve particular attention. One is Sundar's use of the term ‘gunin’ (the Braj plural of gunī, talented man), which occurs often in the Braj courtly works of the seventeenth century.Footnote 50 The gunī were an emergent class of literati who sought royal patronage, bestowing the lustre of their intellectual and creative powers upon the court. They were in turn rewarded for their services with costly gifts and markers of symbolic capital, such as the two titles Sundar received from Shah Jahan: kavirāy (king of poets) and mahākavirāy (emperor of poets).
Sundarś ṅgār is an introductory work on the subject of nāyikābheda. It was no doubt of interest to somebody with Shah Jahan's musical tastes, for some of the love scenes typical of rīti poetry with its elaborate conventions (like an innocent girl's silent anklets or hypochondria, mentioned above in the discussion of Rahim's nāyikābheda poems), which had a long history in the Sanskrit courtly tradition, were part of a broader cultural repertoire available to dhrupad singers as well. Moreover, during the seventeenth century, a classification system was evolving for rāgas that was based on nāyikās, nāyakas, and sakhīs (female companions to the nāyikā).Footnote 51 Abu'l Fazl's comments in the Ᾱ’īn-i Akbarī gave us reason to speculate that Braj works on nāyikābheda were beginning to attract a Mughal readership, a point that seems to be corroborated by Keshavdas’ praising Jahangir's knowledge of the subject. The Sundarś ṅgār, written in the following generation, points conclusively to a Mughal interest in Indic literary culture that was mediated through vernacular manuals.
Although Sanskrit texts were occasionally commissioned at the Mughal court, compositions in Brajbhasha would have been far more accessible to an Indo-Muslim readership. In his colophon Sundar explicitly addresses the issue of his work's comprehensibility: ‘I carefully composed this work, Sundar's Love Poems, bringing it from the language of the gods (sura-bānī) into the language of men (nara-bānī) so that the path of rasa could be understood by everybody.’Footnote 52
Accessibility must have been an important factor behind another of Sundar's works commissioned by Shah Jahan: the Siṃhāsanbattīsī (Thirty-two Tales of the Lion-throne). Mughal interest in this work dates to Akbar's period when a translation from Sanskrit into Persian was made at the court.Footnote 53 Sundar's translation shows that by Shah Jahan's time (and in all likelihood much earlier) Braj, and not just Persian, was functioning as a target language for Mughal readers.Footnote 54 His original text is now lost, but it was known to Kazim Ali Jawan and Lallulal, two munshis who produced a Hindustani version of it at Fort William College. The frontispiece of the 1805 edition states, ‘This story of thirty-two tales from the lion throne was in Sanskrit. At the request of Emperor Shah Jahan, Sundar Kavishvar [i.e. Kaviray] told it in the dialect of Braj.’Footnote 55
Over the course of the many reprintings of the Fort William version in the nineteenth century (it was chosen as a set text for the civil service exam in 1866Footnote 56), the attribution to Sundar disappeared along with all references to its original Mughal patronage context. Even if we do not have the original Braj Siṃhāsanbattīsī today, the very fact of its existence, especially when considered in relation to evidence from the same poet's Sundarś ṅgār, suggests that Mughal patrons contributed to the vernacularizing of formal Sanskrit texts in this period.
If we turn our attention to recollections of Sundar from the Indo-Persian tradition, which prove to be surprisingly abundant, it is astonishing to discover that the Persian court historians Abdul Hamid Lahori (author of Pādshāhnāmah) and Muhammad Salih Kanbo (author of ‘Amal-i Ṣāliḥ) think of him primarily not as a Braj poet but as a diplomat. Although they call him Sundar KabFootnote 57 Ray (i.e. Kavirāy), ‘Sundar, king of poets,’ they give no inkling that they actually know anything about his poetry, recounting instead the details of the various occasions when he was dispatched by Shah Jahan for the purpose of negotiating with recalcitrant rajas. Sundar Kab Ray was an obvious choice of envoy because his relationship with his patron was a longstanding one dating from the days of Prince Khurram's successes in Mewar in 1614.Footnote 58 Language and cultural background may also have been factors. As a Hindi-speaking Hindu from nearby Gwalior, when approaching a Rajput leader Sundar presumably had a diplomatic edge over a Central Asian or Iranian Muslim member of the court.
Sundar's most important diplomatic mission was to the court of the Orchha King, Jujhar Singh Bundela (son of Keshavdas’ patron Bir Singh Deo), who rebelled twice early in Shah Jahan's reign.Footnote 59 The diplomatic missions to the Orchha court were ultimately unsuccessful, for Jujhar Singh and his son Bikramajit were executed in 1636, an incident that was grimly illustrated by Shah Jahan's court painters.Footnote 60 Regardless of the outcome, the case of Sundar ‘Kab Ray’ dramatically highlights three important points: Braj poets were present at the Mughal court; they served the court not just as literati but also in other capacities—in this case as a diplomat; perceptions of them can differ markedly in Persian and Hindi sources.
Another gunī of Shah Jahan's court—this one known mainly from Hindi and Sanskrit sources—is Kavindracarya Sarasvati, a Maharashtrian pandit whose very name (‘master of poets,’ a title probably bestowed by Shah JahanFootnote 61) signals his contribution to the literary life of his day. He is the author of several Sanskrit works, but here it is his Brajbhasha oeuvre that concerns us. His Bhasha works include Yogavāsiṣṭhasāra (also known as Jñānasāra), a rendering of the classic Sanskrit Vedanta text into Braj dohās, an unpublished Samarasāra, said to be on astrology, and Kavīndrakalpalatā (Wish-fulfilling Vine of Kavindra), a multi-tasking collection of Braj poems that includes political poetry, dhrupads, bishnupads and even some religious sermons.Footnote 62 As a Sanskrit pandit, Kavindra does not conceal his ambivalence about writing in the vernacular. In Kavīndrakalpalatā he speaks of the shame he felt, insisting that he does it ‘for the sake of others’.Footnote 63 One of those ‘others’ was the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, to whom more than half of the verses in the work are dedicated. Once again we get the distinct sense that Mughal cultural needs are a factor behind the increasing tendency of Brahman authors to write in Braj rather than in Sanskrit in this period.
Many of the praśasti verses in Kavīndrakalpalatā are standard fare, the kinds of things Sanskrit poets had been producing for centuries. However, the fact that the poet writes in Brajbhasha, and addresses the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan rather than Bhoja or some other Hindu king of old, makes these verses far from standard. One benefit of using a hybrid vernacular like Braj was that it allowed for the admixture of Perso-Arabic vocabulary in a manner forbidden to the more sanctified, and linguistically sanctimonious, realm of Sanskrit, as when Kavindra celebrates the emperor's multi-cultural competency with the following lines:
Kurāna purāna jānẽ, vedani ke bheda jāne,
etī rījha etī būjha aura kaho kāhi haĩ
Sumera ko sauno deta, dīna dunī dono deta
(He knows the Quran and the Puranas, he knows the secrets of the Vedas.
Say, where else can one find so much connoisseurship, so much understanding? He gives a Mount Sumeru worth of gold, he gives this world and the next.)Footnote 64
The pairing of kurāna, a Brajified form of ‘Qur'ān,’ with purāna deftly underscores Shah Jahan's ecumenism. The use of Braj instead of Sanskrit also allows Kavindra to tap into the Muslim thought-world by invoking the Arabic concept of dīn contrasted with dunī [i.e. duniyā] (that is, religion versus worldly life). In celebrating the emperor's military victories he is free to use the Arabic word fatuḥ rather than the more typical Sanskritic vijaya: ‘Jau laũ pāchilī Fatūha ko kavitta karẽ, tau lagi Fatūha aura aure kījiyati hai’ (No sooner have the victory poems of the last battle been composed, than more battles have already been won).Footnote 65
These sprinklings of Perso-Arabic vocabulary no doubt aided comprehension when a vernacular poet presented his work in a Persianized court, but they also allowed for playful aesthetic touches, not to mention increasing the stock of end rhymes, as when the Sanskritized words kara vara kai ([by removing] the tax bestowed a boon) are cleverly matched with the Brajified Persian phrase paravara ke (of [this] provider):
Jasa ke nidhāna bhāna pancabāna upavāna
sāhijahān sāhi hai miṭaiyā kara vara kai,
rūpa rasa jasa dāna jñāna dhyāna sanamāna
kahā laũ bakhāniye gariba paravara ke
(Repository of fame, comparable to the sun and Kamadeva,
Emperor Shah Jahan bestowed a boon by removing the tax [on Hindu
pilgrimage sites]. How can I possibly describe the beauty, feeling, fame,
generosity, wisdom, piety and prestige of this provider for the poor?Footnote 66
Quite apart from their linguistic virtuosity, these lines allude to an important political intervention that catapulted Kavindracarya to fame amongst the Hindus of his day: he successfully lobbied Shah Jahan to rescind the hated jizyah (poll tax) levied on pilgrims visiting Hindu holy centres such as Prayag and Kashi. Poets from far and wide wrote verses in his honour, which have come down to us in two separate volumes: the Kavīndracandrodaya (Moonrise of Kavindra, in Sanskrit) and Kavīndracandrikā (Moonlight of Kavindra, in Braj).Footnote 67 Kavindra, himself an author of praśasti poems, now became a recipient of them. Although the process by which the verses were solicited is obscure, they illustrate powerfully how intellectuals long before the modern age were effective at functioning collectively in the public domain.Footnote 68
Neither Kavindracarya's lobbying nor the fervent response of the Hindu literati was recorded in the Persian histories. Shah Jahan is well known to have kept tight control over his public image. Perhaps the reversal of an imperial policy, particularly as an accommodation to Hindu interest groups, was not the kind of thing one discussed in an official court history.Footnote 69 Kavindracarya does, however, show up in another context: Kanbo describes how Shah Jahan took pleasure from the dhrupad and taṣnīfāt-i hindī (Hindi compositions) of one ‘Kabindra Sannyasi’, and the emperor's gift of a robe of honour and two thousand rupees.Footnote 70 Although further details are not given, it seems virtually certain that this reward was granted specifically for Kavīndrakalpalatā, which fits Kanbo's description perfectly since it contains both dhrupad verses and ‘Hindi compositions’. That dhrupad was in this case collected in a single work alongside praśasti and other types of Braj poetry is another reminder of the importance of the language's specifically musical component in Mughal circles. It is also worth remarking that the Hindi tradition seems unaware of Kavindra's musical talents. Once again we are reminded that a richer social and intellectual history becomes possible if we do not restrict the inquiry to the archive of a single language; we also need to be more alert to the multiple spheres in which a poet-intellectual could operate.
In the case of Kavindracarya, the list of spheres could be expanded further: he also served his Mughal patrons in the capacity of mentor. Several verses from the Sanskrit Kavīndracandrodaya allude to the pandit's instructing the emperor, Prince Dara Shikoh, and the wider court, in matters of Hindu philosophy.Footnote 71 This detail from a contemporary Sanskrit text furnishes the context for a more than sixty-verse excursus into tattvajñān (metaphysics) in Kavindracarya's own Braj poetry collection. It is a bit of a whirlwind tour through Indian philosophy, briefly making stopovers in the thought-worlds of Samkhya, Yoga, Pancaratra and Jainism (to name only a few), with a decided preference for Vedanta. One wonders if in a multi-confessional environment a special resonance accrued to statements like, ‘Know there to be doctrines of many types, [but] they say that God is one.’Footnote 72 More puzzling, considering the Muslim audience for the work, is the capping of a verse with the rather pointed query, ‘Why do the Turks [bother to] pray and fast?’Footnote 73 Perhaps the point was to question all external manifestations of religiosity—Hindu or otherwise. When the Hindu pandit Kavindracarya sought to educate Shah Jahan in religious matters, did the emperor enjoy the lecture?
Another Braj writer from Shah Jahan's period with a presumed connection to the Mughal court is Cintamani Tripathi (fl. 1650), considered alongside Keshavdas to be one of the leading figures of the early rīti tradition. He is thought to have attracted the patronage of Shah Jahan early in his career with his Rasvilās (Play of Rasa), an important but still unpublished rītigranth. Any definitive assessment of the Rasvilās and Cintamani's connection to the court awaits a more detailed study of the manuscript than has been possible for scholars to date, but a few points are beyond dispute.Footnote 74 The main focus of the work is rasa theory (with a section on nāyikābheda) and, as with the Sundarś ṅgār, it is reasonable to conjecture that such a handbook had a role to play in educating the Mughal elite about Indian poetics. Unlike Sundar's handbook, this one contains an abundance of political poetry, including an elaborate virudāvalī (panegyric) to Emperor Shah Jahan. This suggests but does not guarantee that the work was commissioned by the emperor. A few praise poems address other contemporary Mughal notables including Dara Shikoh; the emperor's grandson Zainuddin Muhammad (son of Shah Shuja); Hriday Shah (r. 1634–1678), the raja of a principality in southern Bundelkhand; Jafar Khan, a Mughal manṣabdār. In theory, any of these figures could have sponsored the work.
What is beyond doubt is that Cintamani was highly regarded by the Indo-Muslim elite—both contemporaries and later redactors—for his expertise in Braj poetry. The Ma’ā 
ir-al Kirām, an eighteenth-century Persian taẕkirah compiled by Mir Ghulam Ali Azad, a leading intellectual of Bilgram, records several incidents that concern Cintamani's association with Sayyid Rahmatullah, governor of Jajmau (near Kanpur) and an admirer of the poet's now-lost work Kavitt-vicār (Reflections on Poetry). In one episode a disciple of Cintamani presents a dohā in the governor's maḥ fil with the aim of illustrating the ananvaya alaṅkāra (trope of incomparability).Footnote 75 The student makes a slight error, which Sayyid Rahmatullah, fully conversant with Cintamani's writing and thus Indic poetic theory, is not shy in pointing out. Cintamani is later asked to correct his student's verse. In another episode Cintamani stays for a period with the governor, who, we learn from Azad, has himself authored a collection of Hindi poetry called Pūran ras (Aesthetic Plenitude). In the end Sayyid Rahmatullah rewards the learned Cintamani with gold coins and a robe of honour. These incidents from the Ma’ā ir-al Kirām underscore how Indo-Muslim literati were one of the crucial audiences for both Braj poetry and literary theory, and how, on occasion, they even became Braj poets.Footnote 76
Cintamani was much in demand, and he travelled extensively. The poet himself, his poetry, and his fame circulated as far as the Deccan, where he was commissioned to translate a Sanskrit aesthetics treatise into Brajbhasha: Akbar Shah's Ś ṅgāramañjarī (Bouquet of Passion, c. 1668). The Sanskrit version of the text contains important evidence that members of the Golconda court were reading Braj authors from the North, two of whom we have already discussed: Keshavdas and Sundar.Footnote 77 The circumstances behind Cintamani's detour to the Golconda are not known, but it seems he journeyed there after he wrote his Bhāṣāpiṅgal, (Treatise on Vernacular Prosody, c. 1662) for Shahji Bhonsle, the father of Shivaji. Evidently word was spreading about Braj poets, since their services as gunī were now being sought at many courts.
Braj Poets during Aurangzeb's Reign and Beyond
Robust conditions of patronage for Braj poets remained the norm for many years. Though a thorough assessment of the patronage climate during Aurangzeb's long reign (1658–1707) cannot be attempted here, even a brisk review of the evidence suggests that it was a lively and encouraging one, in this case fostered more by the princes and nobility of the day than by the emperor himself. Observing the reception conditions of the work of Cintamani Tripathi reminds us that the purview of court culture extends far beyond just the imperial court to include the maḥ fils of governors and various ranks of nobility, who emulated (and indeed actively contributed to) Mughal style. Whereas our default position may be to think of a court as a rooted phenomenon located in a particular city and centred on the individual personality of the ruler, such a model obscures the fluidity and multi-pronged nature of the institution. Far more than just the entourage of a particular emperor, courts are constituted by an array of military, administrative, and cultural personnel that operate from diverse locales.
The extent of Aurangzeb's own patronage of Braj poets is unclear. The stereotype that he was antagonistic towards Hindus, which in the nationalist imagination means he was antagonistic towards Hindi, is a misconception. Recent work by Katherine Brown has shown how his supposed ban on music has been grossly exaggerated, which suggests the need for caution regarding the received wisdom about poetry because, as we have observed repeatedly, Braj poetry was often closely associated with musical traditions at the Mughal court. For all the tropes in Mughal historiography about Aurangzeb's tyrannical orthodoxy, his love of music, particularly in the early days of his reign, is well-attested and it was in fact only in this period that major treatises on music, such as the Tarjumah-i mānkutūhal va risālah-i rāgdarpan of Faqirullah, who served as governor of Kashmir under Aurangzeb, began to appear in Persian after a hiatus of a century and a half.Footnote 78 The emperor has also been known to cite Hindi verse, and some scholars have gone so far as to attribute Hindi compositions to Aurangzeb. At the very least we can say that several Braj poets were in his ambit, and that he probably sponsored some.Footnote 79
In an episode reminiscent of the Sundar Kab Ray mission described above, at least one poet was also employed for some non-literary activities during the war of succession between Aurangzeb and his brothers. Khafi Khan, the author of Muntakhab al-Lubāb, reports on an envoy sent to Jaswant Singh, Maharaja of Jodhpur, who was both a high-level manṣabdār and a major Braj poet of his day:
Aurangzeb sent a Brahman, named Kab, who was reputed for his Hindi poetry and eloquence, to the Maharaja, with the message:
The object of our movements is to pay our respects and offer our services to His Majesty [i.e. Shah Jahan], our patron and the master and the qibla of the two worlds. We are going to the illuminated court as an act of pure religious devotion, and have no intention of opposition or war. It would be appropriate for you to have the good fortune of accompanying us; but if this is not possible, remove yourself from our path, go back to your watn [Jodhpur] and do not become the cause of strife and bloodshed among the people of God. The Maharaja put forward the orders of His Majesty as his reason for not accepting Aurangzeb's offer and gave an impertinent reply. The next day, the two sides prepared for battle.Footnote 80
If we think of diplomats as people with not just political but also cultural skills, it made good sense to send a Hindi poet as a representative to this particular Rajput court. The episode is another telling instance of how poets served the Mughal court in multiple capacities; we are also reminded that Persian writers know things that Hindi writers don't know (and vice versa) about the history of the period.
One of the most accomplished Hindi poets who served in Aurangzeb's administration is Mirza Raushan Zamir ‘Nehi’. Like Faqirullah, he was a connoisseur of music; he also wrote Persian poetry. One of his claims to fame is that he translated an Indian music text, Saṅgīta pārijāta[ka] into Persian. While ‘Zamir’ was his Persian takhalluṣ, when he wrote Braj poetry he used the penname ‘Nehi’ (the lover). According to Khafi Khan, Zamir's ‘capacity in the composition of Persian prose and verse and of Hindi poetry was so great that he could have been called a second Amir Khusrau’.Footnote 81 Shailesh Zaidi has published 85 of Nehi's poems based on manuscripts from Aligarh, which attest to the poet's remarkable command of Braj literary style. Nehi was conversant with the Indic genre śikh-nakh (it had an analogue in the Persian sarāpā) and the sampling also includes typical topics from nāyikābheda texts like a woman's māna (jealous anger). The introduction of the work strongly suggests some kind of patronage from Aurangzeb with its praśasti poems on Śāha Ālamgīra ko dāna barnana and pratāpa barnana (Descriptions of Emperor Alamgir's generosity and valour, respectively).Footnote 82 While it is mostly in Persian sources that we find information about Raushan Zamir ‘Nehi’, Baldev Mishra in his Satkavigirāvilās (Play of the Words of True Poets, c. 1750), a Braj compilation of poems by 35 authors, included verses by Nehi alongside those of luminaries like Keshavdas, Cintamani and Sundar. Nehi was also one of the poets praised by Sudan, an approximate contemporary of Mishra's who hailed from Bharatpur showing that the work of this now forgotten Mughal poet was part of the Hindi canon in the eighteenth century.Footnote 83
Other Braj poets are known to have been patronized by Aurangzeb's family members. According to Bindraban Das, compiler of the eighteenth-century biographical dictionary Safīnah-i khūshgū, Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah ‘possessed a perfect command of many genres of Hindavi poetry, and he was above all famed for his excellent musical compositions’.Footnote 84 Azam Shah maintained what can now unhesitatingly be called a tradition of Mughal interest in Indian literary theory. Some Hindi scholars consider him to have been the first patron of Mahakavi Dev, whose poetry is among the most admired in Brajbhasha, but the evidence is uncertain.Footnote 85 We can say with more certainty that he commissioned the Tuḥ fat al-Hind (Gift from India, c. 1675) from Mirza Khan, a unique Persian treatise on Brajbhasha, which included discussions of grammar, metrics, and nāyikābheda, as well as a significant section on music.Footnote 86 Like the rītigranths by Sundar and Cintamani discussed above, the Tuḥ fat was designed to acquaint an Indo-Muslim readership with the major principles of Braj literary culture. Aurangzeb's grandsons were also enthusiasts of Braj. Rafi us-Shan (son of Azam Shah's elder brother Muazzam Shah) developed a Braj compositional habit, and some of his poetry survives under the takhalluṣ ‘Nyāyī’ (the just).Footnote 87 His brother Azim us-Shan was a patron of the poet Vrind (1643–1723). Vrind hailed from the Rajput kingdom of Kishangarh but he moved to Delhi in 1673 when he was hired, probably as a tutor, to attend Azim us-Shan.Footnote 88 When Azim us-Shan later became governor of Bengal, Vrind moved with him to Dhaka. It was here that he composed his most celebrated work, Nītisatsaī, a collection of 700 aphorisms, completed in 1704.
Vrind, like many Braj poets of the day, had multiple patrons. He mostly served royalty of the Mughal and Kishangarh courts, but one of his works, the Ś ṅgārśikṣā (Instruction in Passion, 1691), was written for a prominent Muslim family in Ajmer (near Kishangarh)—further evidence that Braj poets helped to transmit royal styles into wider social circles beyond the imperial court. The Ś ṅgārśikṣā is in the vein of a rītigranth on nāyikābheda, but it also has some unusual features. The introduction marks a subtle departure from typical Hindu practice. Most Braj works of the genre begin with a short maṅgalācaraṇ (invocation), usually to the deity Ganesh, with an additional verse or two in honour of Sarasvati or Krishna. Vrind operates within a different set of salutatory conventions seemingly tailored to an Indo-Muslim audience. The opening verse is indeed to a god, but Vrind labels his object of reverence simply ‘prabhu’, a Sanskritic but otherwise denominationally neutral word.
parama jyoti saba maĩ pragaṭa, paramānanda prakāsa,
tā prabhu kaũ bandana karaũ, mana krama bacana bilāsa.
The supreme light manifest in all, emanation of effulgent joy,
To this god I pay obeisance in thought, word and deed.
Although again expressed in a highly Sanskritic register, the emphasis on light imagery in phrases like ‘parama jyoti’ and ‘paramānanda prakāsa’ arguably nods toward the Qur'ān,Footnote 89 especially given that the second verse is dedicated to Muinuddin Chisti, the revered saint whose tomb is the major landmark in Ajmer. The text proceeds from spiritual to worldly authority with verses in honour first of the reigning Emperor Aurangzeb and then the local governor of Ajmer Muhammad Salih, the father of the principal patron of the work, Mirza Qadiri.Footnote 90
The verses dedicated to Mirza Qadiri are strikingly different in tone. While Aurangzeb is given royal traits (powerful, compassionate, praiseworthyFootnote 91) and Muhammad Salih is celebrated for his moral probity (nekī), Vrind presents Mirza Qadiri in terms that foreground his emotional qualities and connoisseurship:
His son Mirza Qadiri is in every respect clever and responsive—
He is handsome, steadfast, valiant, and skilled with a bow.
Generous, knowledgeable, an enjoyer, extremely generous in spirit,
Mirza Qadiri is the jewel of his family,
Clever with emotion, experiencing delight.
A connoisseur, he understands matters of sentiment,
And pursues love wholeheartedly.
He longs night and day for music and pleasure.Footnote 92
The Mirza is further praised because he recognizes men of talent (deta gunī-lokana kaũ māna), a self-serving argument on the part of the poet, no doubt, but one that speaks to expectations of gentlemanly behaviour amongst the nobility of the day.Footnote 93 There is much that one can find in other nāyikābheda texts, but the Ś ṅgārśikṣā contains additional lively details such as how to furnish a raṅg-maḥal (pleasure suite) and stipulates the need for being a connoisseur of refinements like pān and music.
The omissions are almost as interesting as the additions. Ś ṅgārśikṣā takes up only the category of the svakīyā nāyikā (one's own wife), leaving out the two other major categories of parakīyā and sāmānyā (other man's wife and courtesan, respectively) that are typical of the genre. It has been suggested that Mirza Qadiri commissioned the work for the education of a marriageable daughter, a proposition strengthened by the text's excursus into byāh bidhi (wedding procedures).Footnote 94 Some of the discussion of solah ś ṅgār (a woman's ornamentation) also seems framed in didactic ways:
A young woman should augment the beauty of her mouth with betel (v. 63).
Thus apply kohl to delight a lover's heart (v. 65).
Vrind says, such elegant cleverness is needed to please a clever lover (v. 73).
Keeping faithful, be a devoted wife (pativratā) to your husband (v. 78).
Regardless of who was the primary consumer of the text in Mirza Qadiri's household, the Ś ṅgārśikṣā is a bold celebration of sensual life. With its enticing descriptions of passion, ornamented bodies, the boudoir, the mouth-watering tastes of betel nut and cardamom, and its relishing of music and other pleasures, it inducts the reader into a world of highly-refined taste and sensibility. Is this what sex education looks like in an early modern context? The stress on love and connoisseurship here is not only fitting for a work that proclaims itself to be an instruction manual on ś ṅgār, it also provides yet another clue about the reception of Braj texts among the Mughal nobility. Poets like Vrind were not just teaching the dry details of Indian poetics: they were inculcating the very building blocks of emotional life and civilized comportment. It is tempting to put Vrind's text in dialogue with contemporary Persian genres on gentlemanly conduct known as mīrzānāmah to suggest that compositions in Braj with their sensory celebrations played a role in the cultural self-fashioning of Mughal elites. Also intriguing in the case of Vrind's work is the possibility of a female readership. Very little work has been done to theorize these matters for India (in contrast with early-modern Europe), but perhaps we can view Braj courtly texts as functioning within a larger repertoire deriving from both the Indian and Persian traditions that served to educate the senses.Footnote 95
Conclusion
Although my focus here has been on the long seventeenth century, it would be possible, given space enough and time, to document a pattern of virtually uninterrupted patronage for Braj poets in Mughal contexts well into the colonial period. The succession struggles that ensued after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 captured the imagination of Braj authors and engendered a historicizing impulse. Vrind, who had by this time returned home to Kishangarh, wrote his Satya Sarūp Rūpak, chronicling Maharaja Rajsingh's support for Muazzam Shah's (successful) bid for the Mughal throne. Upon the death of Muazzam Shah (Emperor Bahadur Shah I, r. 1707–1712), there were yet more struggles. And these too were recorded—this time in the Jangnāmā, which, despite its Persian-sounding name, is a Braj text by the Brahman poet Shridhar, who concludes his work with praśasti verses to the victor Farrukh Siyar (r. 1713–1719).Footnote 96 Abdur Rahman ‘Premi’, a manṣabdār of Farrukh Siyar, is the author of an extensive nakhśikh poem in Braj.Footnote 97 Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748) was a patron (and some say, writer) of Braj poetry. And so were his friends. Closely associated with Muhammad Shah was the Braj poet and king Savant Singh ‘Nagridas’ of Kishangarh (possibly a student of Vrind), who experimented with writing rekhtā poetry, which was then in vogue.Footnote 98 Emperor Shah Alam II (r. 1759–1806) wrote Braj poetry, as did Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’ (r. 1837–1857), and it may be safely presumed that this was a literary fashion among many poets connected with their courts.Footnote 99 These are all stories waiting to be told.
Why has literary history been mostly blind to the phenomenon of Braj poets at the Mughal court? Part of the blame lies with the erosion of the North Indian composite culture that gave rise to this literature in the first place. The conceptual terrain has changed utterly, and it has become nearly impossible to envision a past that looks nothing like the present: one in which Hindus and Muslims cherished a common literary language. Another handicap, to which Shantanu Phukan (one of the few scholars to think seriously about the use of Hindi among Mughal elites) has usefully drawn attention, is the ‘pervasive and largely unexamined assumption of monolingualism in the study of premodern Indian literature.’Footnote 100
It is right to associate Mughal rule with the Persian language, and it is not my intention to suggest that Braj outstripped Persian in importance for the Mughals. It did not, either in quantity of textual production or in status.Footnote 101 Nor was every Brajbhasha poet lining up outside the Mughal court, seeking imperial patronage. Many Braj poets worked in Vaishnava communities. Others served Rajput or merchant patrons. Some circulated and served diverse clientele in the course of their careers. Because the story of Brajbhasha as a language of Hindu bhakti is well known, here I have deliberately stressed the language's more courtly heritage, with a particular interest in how it was part of the cultural repertoire of Mughal elites. A largely unexamined claim about Brajbhasha (albeit one put forward by some of the tradition's own adherents), is that since it is a vernacular language it must somehow be simple, folksy, and popular in character. It can be that, but it was also a language cultivated by urbane, cosmopolitan people: it was a language of kings. It was even apparently recognized as such from within the Persian political ecumene. Tajjuddin, author of Mirat-ul-muluk, an eighteenth-century manual for princes, mentions on two occasions that knowledge of Hindi poetry is necessary for Mughal kings.Footnote 102
Why Braj texts so appealed to their Mughal audiences, and a corollary question—what kind of cultural work Braj texts may have done that Persian texts could not—are important questions prompted by this study, if not satisfactorily answered here. My primary purpose has been a more basic one: to illustrate the astonishing degree to which Brajbhasha literature was indeed part of the Mughal cultural sphere. Still, it is possible to make a few preliminary points. First of all, Indo-Muslim elites sponsored Braj poets and read their works because they found the poetry beautiful and it appealed to their literary tastes. Braj was also evidently perceived as more suitable than Persian for particular types of aesthetic experience. Phukan, working predominantly with the Mughal reception of Sufi Avadhi texts, has shown how Hindi literary culture afforded access to emotive and in some cases feminine registers of expression not as readily available in Persian.Footnote 103 Vrind's Ś ṅgārśikṣā, a lively celebration of passion, which is demonstrably linked to cultivating emotional sensibility, would be a case in point. But there are other issues to consider as well. Brajbhasha texts linked the court to local forms of culture. They served as a medium for the circulation of traditional Indic literary ideas into Indo-Muslim contexts. While some Sanskrit literature was available to the Mughals through Persian translations, Braj poetry was available in unmediated form. Braj was a branch of Hindi, a language native to North Indians, whatever their aspirations to the more refined domain of Persian letters. Its patronage and cultivation among Mughal elites also signalled their gentlemanly comportment.
We also need to think about the varying roles Braj poets played in Mughal circles, and what each party stood to gain from these cultural transactions. We expect court poets to glorify the king, and Braj poets with their numerous praśasti verses do not disappoint. The poets were rewarded with wealth, titles and prestige. One of the reasons they could be thought of as gunī was precisely that they gained the recognition of elite patrons. But this relationship cut both ways. Members of the gunī class redounded to the glory of the court. Political poetry gave rhetorical shape to imperial power and should not be glibly reduced, as it too often is, to a mere act of legitimation.Footnote 104 When Braj poets aestheticized—in a way, enacted—imperial power, they chose to do so not in Sanskrit, as their predecessors had, but in a hybrid, vernacular language, one that preserved a strong Sanskritic heritage but could now include Perso-Arabic words and meet the needs of a changing clientele in early modern North India. For all its importance to bhakti communities, Brajbhasha, in a manner that bears comparison to the literary Dakhini that evolved at the court of Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627) of Bijapur in approximately the same period,Footnote 105 was also a vehicle of composite culture: it was more suited to a Mughal politics of pluralism than either Sanskrit or Persian with their more limited constituencies.
Pluralism, in this case a multi-layered social complexity, is an attribute that applies equally to the lives of many poets, as well. Sundar was sent on diplomatic missions. Keshavdas presented himself as a learned elder to Rahim's son Iraj Shah Newaz Khan, and had some sort of personal relationship with Birbal, perhaps even with Jahangir. Rahim crossed the boundary between patron and poet by composing Hindi verses. He was a tutor to Prince Salim but also a general, a governor, and a major patron of the arts. Kavindracarya Sarasvati is arguably the most complex of all the figures considered here. He served the cause of Hindus in general as a political activist, and he was respected as a religious authority by both Shah Jahan and the Sanskrit scholars of Banaras. He was an author of books in both Braj and Sanskrit, reaching diverse audiences. The Mughals remember him especially for his musical compositions, for which (along with his Braj poetry) he was rewarded handsomely. Cintamani, for his part, is remembered as a poet, teacher, translator, and literary theorist. Vrind, like Keshavdas, seems to have been a poet with a more pedagogical mission, but he was also a historian. Clearly we miss many nuances when we think of the vocation of Brajbhasha poet as exclusively literary. These writers contributed to the knowledge economy of the court, helping to ground kings and Muslim gentry in local practices and structures of cultural and political authority.Footnote 106
Much of this social complexity emerges only if both the Hindi and the Persian archives are consulted, since each on its own paints an incomplete picture, and in some cases the roles of poets are represented in dramatically different ways. Of course, the default position has always been to see Persian chronicles as more trustworthy than the literary evidence available in Braj and Sanskrit poems, but historical chronicles too have their own biases and blind spots. These blind spots are in themselves interesting, and merit further theorization. While Sundar is called ‘Kab Ray’ in the Shah Jahani court histories, his poetic oeuvre is never referenced. Perhaps this is because of the frequently militaristic and political focus of this type of royal tārīkh. Or perhaps Abdul Hamid Lahori, Muhammad Salih Kanbo, and other Persian historians of the time were just not aware of Hindi literary trends. This would then mean that only some—not all—Mughal elites were culturally competent in Braj, and it will be important in future studies to investigate not just where literary cultures intersect, but also where they fail to do so, and the gate-keeping mechanisms that regulated these relationships. Composite culture had its limits. Indeed, one reason that Persian writers may have silenced the voices of Braj poets is sheer snobbery. In an episode from the Afsānah-i Shāhān, Mirza Kamran, the brother of Humayun, is reported to have told Muhammad Shah Farmuli, a sixteenth-century nobleman and Hindi poet associated with Islam Shah, that if only he had written in Persian his literary legacy would have been considerable.Footnote 107 Abdul Baqi Nahawandi, author of Ma’ā ir-i Raḥīmī, the major Persian biography of Rahim, pays hardly any attention to Hindi poetry but when he does so he stresses that the rewards for Hindi writers were one-tenth those accorded their Persian counterparts.Footnote 108 Whether it should be explained in terms of the expressive boundaries of particular genres, a lack of familiarity with Braj on the part of Persian writers (who were in some cases Iranian, rather than Indian), cultural snobbery, or some other reason, the Persian tradition often fails to provide any adequate representation of Braj literary life. The Ā’īn-i Akbarī is silent about Braj poetry (although it is voluble about music); yet we know that poets like Gang were notable literary figures at Akbar's court. Keshavdas portrays himself at the darbār reciting verses to Jahangir, an event that was never recorded in the Jahāngīrnāmah. Persian historiography is silent on the subject of Shah Jahan's rescinding of the jizyah at the request of Kavindracarya and yet this event is recorded in Braj and Sanskrit poetry of the period. Archival monolingualism clearly cannot capture the complexities of a multi-lingual, multi-literary realm like Mughal India. While Persian texts have always played the lead role in reconstructing Mughal history, we need to be attuned to other voices.
In paying greater attention to the Indo-Muslim contributions to Brajbhasha, both in terms of patronage and authorship, I have tried to capture instances of circulation between Hindi and Persian, as well as regional and imperial cultural realms, and to redirect the historiography of Hindi literary culture from its Hindu-centric moorings in the hope of rediscovering some of the complex dynamics of the early modern period effaced by modern nationalist history. Many gaps and questions remain, but this is a domain of research that requires attention. Honesty about the history of Hindi literature, and Mughal cultural history, depends on it.
