For too long, the fifteenth century in South Asian history lay neglected, with historians seeing it as an interregnum between the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. Fortunately, this is beginning to change, particularly for Gujarat.Footnote 1 Aparna Kapadia's In Praise of Kings is a welcome addition to this new direction in premodern South Asian history. What makes the book unique is its focus upon proto-Rajput chieftains (garasiyas) in remote parts of Gujarat. This is a different perspective in comparison with other recent studies of fifteenth-century Gujarat, which have either examined the region as a whole or focused on the emergence of a Muslim community there.Footnote 2 For the larger scholarship on premodern Rajputs, Kapadia's Gujarat-centered perspective is new in a literature dominated by a focus on Rajasthan and the Gangetic Plains.
The book's first chapter lays out the medieval history of Gujarat. It highlights the emergence there of local chieftains of unknown origin who, from the sixteenth century, claimed the hereditary and exalted warrior status of “Rajput” (p. 40). In chapters 2 and 3, Kapadia studies a few texts that these chiefs commissioned in a context that saw the consolidation of regional kingdom of the Muzaffarid sultans. The ambitions of the garasiya chiefs came up against the sultanate, resulting in military confrontations, submissions, and rebellions.
Chapter 2 is a study of the Raṇmallachanda, a poem in praise of the chief of the hill fort of Idar. This poem's Sanskrit preface presented its subject, Ranmal, in the stock tropes of a great Indic king. Its Old Gujarati section in Dingal style drew upon idioms that also circulated in neighboring Rajasthan to communicate the king's heroism. In the third chapter, Kapadia examines two Sanskrit works celebrating Gujarati chieftains: the Gaṅgādāsapratāpavilāsanāṭaka, a play in praise of Gangadas Chauhan of Champaner, and the Māṇḍalīkanṛpacarita, a biography celebrating Mandalika Chudasama of Junagadh. Both were composed by a Brahmin émigré from Vijayanagara, Gangadhara.
What is common to Kapadia's findings about the different texts composed for these chiefly patrons is that, despite their use of either a cosmopolitan language (Sanskrit) or a transregional style (Dingal), they remained firmly rooted in the local. Instead of seeking to portray world conquerors, the territorial horizons of these texts remained limited to their immediate vicinity (pp. 65, 68, 93–94, 100). For Sanskrit kāvya, this introduced a regional flavor that departed from the placelessness that, according to Sheldon Pollock, characterized its cosmopolitanism. Put another way, Kapadia argues that a turn to the vernacular was not essential for communicating regionally grounded ambitions and a sense of place (pp. 100–101).
Chapter 4 is a study of another Sanskrit text, the Rājavinoda, composed for the most successful of the Gujarat sultans, Mahmud Begada (r. 1459–1511). Kapadia shows that the sultans continued the practices of earlier Indic kings in their choice of Sanskrit for articulating their power. They also built upon an epigraphic tradition that for a century or so prior had eulogized Muslim kings in Sanskrit. In the Rājavinoda, unlike the texts commissioned by smaller chieftains that are the subjects of chapters 2 and 3, the sultan as Indic king claimed universal dominion, even as the land of Gujarat became the center of this imagined world. Kapadia asserts that Sanskrit literature thrived in fifteenth-century Gujarat, seeking to complicate Pollock's narrative of the fate of Sanskrit literature in the second millennium CE (pp. 74, 159).
Chapter 5 leaps into the colonial period, studying a history of Gujarat, the Ras Mala, that an East India Company officer, Alexander Forbes, published in 1856. Forbes elevated to preeminence the Rajputs as guardians of Gujarat's authentic past. In writing this history, Forbes saw tremendous value in Charan and Bhat oral traditions and leaned on a Brahmin poet named Dalpatram for linguistic and cultural access. Here, a reflection upon the colonial romanticization of the Rajputs, inaugurated by Company officer James Tod a few decades before Forbes, would have been apropos. Kapadia reads precolonial traces—fluidity in the narrative structure and in the social order (pp. 147–49)—persisting in Forbes's history. She also notes the still open-ended nature of “Rajput” status in comparison with its more exclusive definition in contemporary Rajasthan.
Kapadia handles the question of Hindu-Muslim relations as reflected in her fifteenth-century sources with nuance. She notes Indic chieftains’ representation of Muslims as different and often “evil” (p. 51) not only because of their ethnicity but also because of their faith (pp. 69–72). At the same time, she highlights a shared culture and the many ways in which these boundaries collapsed, whether through political alliance, military service, or literary representations that cast Muslim sultans as kshatriya kings blessed by Puranic deities (pp. 116, 120). The book makes the important suggestion that Sultanate Gujarat set a precedent for Mughal Emperor Akbar's patronage of Sanskrit works at his court. It succeeds in bringing alive the fifteenth century from the perspective of its “little” kings. The book is also valuable for the sources on which it is based. At least two of the texts that Kapadia studies exist only as single manuscripts (pp. 47, 83), even if these have been edited and published. A critical discussion and dating of all of the manuscripts used would have been helpful.
All in all, in excavating an emergent Rajput worldview in Sultanate Gujarat, In Praise of Kings opens up a new area for exploration. Historians of medieval and early modern South Asian literature, particularly Old Gujarati/Marwari and Sanskrit works, of Rajput pasts, and of Hindu-Muslim relations will find this book helpful. It will also be of interest to historians of warrior ethics and kingly identity in other parts of the medieval world.
