The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (55 page)

One of the most brilliant polymaths of the medieval world, al-Biruni is said to have written over a hundred books—a camel load of books, it is said. Of them only twenty-two books are extant now, but even these cover a wide range of subjects, including various sciences, as well astrology, history, sociology, geography, philosophy and theology. There was hardly any field of contemporary knowledge that al-Biruni did not deal with. He was the first scholar anywhere in the world to study Indian culture methodically, and he may be rightly considered the patriarch of Indology. His treatment of Indian culture was fair and objective, almost entirely without racial or religious prejudice.

ANOTHER VERSATILE GENIUS of early medieval India was Amir Khusrav. He, like al-Biruni, was a prolific writer, and is credited with writing a large number of books—there is tradition that he wrote 99 books, on different subjects and in a variety of literary modes—and also some 400,000 verses. He is also said to have introduced several innovations in music. We do not know whether all the achievements attributed to him are true—it is not impossible
that he did all that, but we have to also bear in mind that there was a tendency in India at this time to attribute innovative works to some renowned person, in order to gain general acceptability for the innovations.

Khusrav was born in 1253 in Patiali, a small town near Delhi, and he died in 1325, aged seventy-two. His father was a migrant Turk, but his mother, according to some accounts, was a Hindu convert to Islam, and it is probable that it was this genetic and cultural hybridity that enabled him to smoothly blend Hindu and Muslim cultural traditions in his works.

Khusrav was a child prodigy, and wrote his first collection of poems in his teens. He then went on to serve eight successive Delhi sultans, from Balban to Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq, as their court poet, and he kept himself in royal favour by writing panegyrics on all those sultans. He was particularly favoured by Jalal-ud-din Khalji, who, according to Barani, a fourteenth century Delhi chronicler, ‘was a great appreciator and patron of talent … [The sultan appointed Khusrav as] one of his chosen attendants … [and] invested him with such robes as are given to great nobles, and girded him with a white sash.’ He was also given generous cash awards. Ala-ud-din Khalji also favoured Khusrav, and appointed him as his court poet. On the whole Khusrav had a remarkably smooth and successful career in those turbulent times. But in his old age he abandoned all temporal pursuits, became a follower of the Sufi saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya, and lived a cloistered life, though he still wrote poetry.

Khusrav wrote mainly in Persian, but he freely used Hindi words in his compositions, as in the mixed Hindi-Arabic-Persian-Turki language called Hindawi, the precursor of Urdu, that was taking form in the region around Delhi in his time. He often set his poems to music, and is thought to be the father of Qawwali, the Sufi devotional music.

Khusrav’s works are characterised by luxuriant literary flourishes, and are marvellously mellifluous, qualities which were greatly admired in medieval times, but are mostly lost in English translation, as of these verses:

Bakhubi hamcho mah tabindah baashi;

Bamulk-e dilbari paayindah baashi.

Man-e darvish ra kushti baghamzah;

Karam kardi Ilahi zindah baashi.

Jafaa kam kun ki farda roz-e mehshar;

Baru-e aashiqan sharmindah baashi.

Ze qaid-e dojahan azad baasham;

Agar tu hum-nashin-e bandah baashi.

Barindi-o bashokhi hamcho Khusrau;

Hazaran khanuman barkandah baashi.

May your charming face ever shine like the full moon;

May you hold eternal sway over the realms of beauty.

By your amorous glance you have killed me, a vagrant;

How generous of you? May god give you a long life.

Pray do not be cruel lest you feel ashamed of yourself

Before your lovers on the day of judgment.

I shall be set free from the bonds of the two worlds

If you become my companion for a while.

By your wanton playfulness you must have destroyed

Thousands of hearts of lovers like that of Khusrav.

AN IMPORTANT CULTURAL development of the early medieval period was the translation of several Sanskrit works into Arabic and Persian. The first book thus translated was
Suka-saptati
(Parrot’s Seventy), a circa twelfth century compilation of amusing ancient Indian tales, told by a clever parrot to a forlorn woman (whose husband was away), to distract her from straying. This was translated into Persian by Zia Nakhshabi in the early fourteenth century. The Persian book, titled
Tuti-nama
(Book of the Parrot), gained wide popularity in India and the Middle East, and was in time translated from Persian into Turkish and several European languages. Zia Nakhshabi also translated
Koka-shastra
(also known as
Rati-rahasyam
: Secrets of Love), a popular early medieval Sanskrit work on erotica written by Kukkoka. During the reign of Firuz Tughluq, a number of other Sanskrit works on a variety of subjects were translated from Sanskrit into Persian under royal patronage. Similarly
Mahabharata
and Kalhana’s
Rajatarangini
were translated into Persian under the patronage of Zain-ul-Abidin, a mid-fifteenth century sultan of Kashmir. Such liberal royal patronage of the ancient Indian cultural heritage would continue till almost the very end of the Delhi Sultanate, with Sikandar Lodi commissioning the translation of several Sanskrit works into Persian.

In contrast to this vigorous Sanskrit-to-Persian translation activity, there was hardly any attempt at this time to translate Persian literature into Sanskrit or any other Indian language. The Indian intelligentsia, in their characteristic cultural insularity, almost totally ignored the dominant Muslim cultural presence in India. The Turkish invasion of India, as Kosambi comments, did not make ‘the slightest impression upon the mannerisms or complacency of the local intelligentsia. The last great Sanskrit literature, written about this time … contains not the slightest mention of contemporary events.’ Thus even when the Turkish advance was threatening to overwhelm Jayachandra Gahadavala, king of Kanauj, the last great Hindu ruler of North India, his court poet Sriharsha was turning out self-indulgent romances and lyrics in Sanskrit.

The cultural scene was not much different elsewhere in India either, with the court poets of the rajas continuing to indulge in their ‘mannered stupidities,’ as Kosambi describes it. Typical of this was ‘the
Rama-charita
of Sandhyakara-nandin, [which] reduced Sanskrit poetry to the level of an acrostic … In effect, it cannot be understood at all,’ comments Kosambi. Hardly any of the Sanskrit works of the medieval period had any merit, they being mostly mediocre reworkings of old classics. The preoccupation of the Sanskrit writers of medieval India was with form, not substance.

The dreary state of Sanskrit literature at this time was not surprising, for it was then the dead language of a comatose civilisation. What mainly sustained literary activity in it in medieval times was the pretentious patronage of Sanskrit writers by the rajas, for whom it was prestigious to patronise literature in India’s classical language. But as most rajas lost their power consequent to the Turkish invasion of India, Sanskrit scholars and writers lost their main source of patronage, and that led to a sharp decline in the quality and quantity of Sanskrit literary output in medieval India.

Still, some amount of Sanskrit literary activity continued at this time, mainly in regions outside the Muslim rule, particularly in Vijayanagar, under the vigorous patronage of its rajas, some of whom, like Krishnadeva, were themselves literary figures of merit. The old Indian tradition of poets writing panegyrics in Sanskrit on kings also continued during this period, and such poems were written even on sultans, like the one on Mahmud Begarha of Gujarat. In fact, similar eulogies continued to be written in modern times too, such as
Victoria-charita
—on Victoria, queen of England and empress of India—published in Dacca in the late nineteenth century. But none of these works had any literary merit compared to the Sanskrit classics of the ancient period.

A positive consequence of the decline of Sanskrit in medieval times was that it opened up literary space for regional Indian languages to grow and flourish. Sanskrit, or rather Prakrit, had spawned a number of regional offshoots in North India in the late classical times, and from around the eighth century on some of these regional languages began to produce their own literatures, and this gathered considerable momentum over the years. Many of the early writers in these languages were Buddhists and Jains, as they sought to reach out to the common people by writing in their languages, rather than in Sanskrit, which was understood only by the erudite. Buddhists in particular made major contributions in promoting regional languages—the earliest writers in Bengali, for instance, were Buddhists.

The spread of the Bhakti movement in Hinduism at this time was another factor that stimulated literary activity in regional languages—as Bhakti was a movement of the common people, it used the language of the common people
for its devotional literature. At this time there were also several translations of popular Sanskrit works, like the
Puranas
and the epics, into regional languages, and that greatly enriched the literature in these languages.

IN CONTRAST TO the moribund state of Sanskrit literature in medieval times, Tamil, the only other ancient Indian language which had a literature of its own, remained vibrantly alive during this period. But the ethos of Tamil literature in the medieval times had changed altogether from what it had been in the classical period. While Tamil in the classical period produced sensitive secular literature, depicting the chiaroscuro of everyday life, its miseries and pleasures, mainly under Buddhist and Jain influence, its emphasis now shifted to religious literature, both devotional and expository, under the influence of resurgent Hinduism and its devotional cults. Religious fervour now replaced the calm reflectiveness that had earlier characterised Tamil literature.

The golden age of this new Tamil literature was the imperial Chola period, from the mid-ninth to the late twelfth century, when a great amount of Shaiva and Vaishnava texts, and even a few Buddhist and Jain texts, were written. The age also produced a few quasi-historical works in the style of the Puranas, mainly describing the legends about prominent South Indian temples. A few secular works on the exploits of local heroes, and some anthologies of old Tamil works, with commentaries appended to them, were also compiled at this time. A major lexicographic work on Tamil,
Nigandu-cudamani
by Mandalapurusha, a Jain scholar, also belongs to this period. But the best known Tamil literary work of the age is the
Ramavatharam
, popularly known as
Kambaramayanam
, a retelling of the story of the
Ramayana
by Kamban in the twelfth century. Its story is drawn from the Sanskrit epic, but Kamban enriches it by introducing a good amount of local flavour into it.

This emphasis on local flavour is particularly evident in the literature of the regional offshoots of Tamil that appeared in the late classical period, around the same time when literature in the regional offshoots of Sanskrit appeared. Tamil spawned three offshoots—Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam—and these in time produced impressive literatures of their own in the medieval period, each distinguished by the distinctive flavour of its region. As these offshoots of Tamil evolved, their literature came to be heavily influenced by Sanskrit, while Tamil literature itself remained relatively unaffected by it. In fact, a major part of the early literature in these regional languages consisted of reworked old Sanskrit texts. But in time these languages developed distinctive literatures of their own. The individuation of these languages, and the growth of literature in them, were facilitated by the use of these languages by Bhakti sages, and by the patronage of the literature in them by local rulers.

The earliest of the offshoots of Tamil to develop a literature of its own was Kannada, in which literary works began to appear around the middle of the first millennium, and by around the tenth century it produced some major works. The oldest extant literary work in Kannada is considered to be
Kavirajamarga
(Royal Path of Poets) of around the ninth century, its very title indicating the existence of older literature in the language. Most of the early works in Kannada were by Jains, and this was followed by the contributions of Vira-Shaivas, a sect of Shiva devotees.

A fascinating development in Kannada literature at this time was the introduction in it of a folksy style known as
vacana
, using simple, clear prose without any literary flourishes. The pioneer of this style is thought to be Madara Chennaiah, an eleventh century cobbler-sage. In the following century, this form of literature flourished under the patronage of Basava, the chief minister of the local kingdom, and himself a distinguished poet.

Early Telugu had a very close affinity with Kannada, and the two shared virtually the same script. But by around the fifth or sixth century, Telugu acquired many distinctive characteristics of its own, and it gradually grew into a separate language. The first major literary work in Telugu is
Mahabharatam
, written by Nannaya in the early eleventh century. But Nannaya died before he could finish the work. Two centuries would pass before the gargantuan task of completing the work was taken up by another poet, Tikkana, the greatest Telugu poet of all time, who, because of his brilliant literary skills, came to be known as Kavi Brahma. But even he left out a portion of the epic, and it was Yerrapragada (Errana) of the fourteenth century who finally completed the translation.

Around this time Telugu developed its own distinctive script, in the place of the Kannada script it had been using all along. Further, literary Telugu then began to diverge from the language of the common people, because of its heavy Sanskritisation. The high period of Telugu literature was the early sixteenth century, during the reign of Krishnadeva of Vijayanagar, who was himself a noted writer.