Panel No. 5

Panel Title: Before the Divide: 'Intermediary' Genres in North Indian Literary Culture

Convenor: Dr Francesca Orsini, Cambridge University, UK
Co-convenor: Dr. Vasudha Dalmia, Berkeley University, USA

    Thursday 8 July, 9–12:40 & 14–16:50
Note that the panel does NOT start at 8 AM, but at 9 AM

Panel Abstract: The myth-making and exclusions that were involved in the construction of a pure 'Hindu-Hindi' and 'Muslim -Urdu' literary and cultural tradition have been discussed at length in recent scholarship (Faruqi, King, Dalmia). The question to be asked now is: How can we envisage the literary landscape of north India before the divide? What does that literary landscape suggest in terms of cultural and group identities? A new body of evidence and new categories may be needed to handle this task. To simply postulate a harmonious 'composite culture' before the divide on the basis of select evidence is no longer acceptable.
The panel seeks to bring together scholars working on ”high” and ”popular” literature, music and intellectual traditions in north India, especially of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Contributions are invited either documenting a single genre or body of material or drawing comparisons and correlations across the field. Each contribution will also place the material within the wider north Indian literary system and will address the questions this material raises about the context of its production and transmission, its patronage (if any) and audience, and its relation to contiguous literary styles. Contributions on neglected genres, musical styles and oral genres are particularly invited.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel

Paper Giver 1: Francesca Orsini, University of Cambridge, UK

Paper 1 Title: Qutub Shatak, Delhi and early Hindavi

Paper Abstract: The "lateness" in the beginning of literary production in Hindavi has been remarked upon in recent revisionist studies (Faruqi and McGregor in Pollock): while Sufis started writing in Avadhi in the 13c., nothing seems to be found in the languages of north-Western India after Khusrau's putative beginnings until the Sants and the early flowering of Braj Bhasa in 15c. Gwalior and Braj. How can we "reconstruct" the landscape of literary production in the years before the flowering of Dakkhini, Gujri and Braj Bhasa (roughly contemporary, in the 15c)?
In this paper I would like to briefly raise the issue of the persistence of Apabhramsa literature in this period (some "cariu" were composed in Delhi in 14c. for Agarwal merchants), including the Sandesarasaka. These texts are mainly vartas about love with great internal metrical variety. The anonymous Qutub Shatak, whose earliest manuscript - in Devanagari - date from the late sixteenth century but which, on account of its language, is considered by Mataprasad Gupta to possibly date back to the late 15c., seems to be a continuation of such texts in a new language. In this paper I will analyse the linguistic and narrative features of this text and ask how it can help us to think through issues of “vernacularisation” in north India.

Paper Giver 2: Thomas de Bruijn, Senior Policy Officer, Leiden University, Netherlands

Paper 3 Title: Dialogism in a medieval genre: the case of the Avadhi epics

Paper Abstract: In search of intermediary genres in North Indian literature that is not ?divided? up between monolithic and fixed cultural and political identities, the medieval genre of the Avadhi epic provides interesting material. The composite semantics and textual material of texts like Padmavat and Madhumalati has been researched quite thoroughly in the last years. These works developed in a particular cultural environment, but certainly not in isolation. The fact that a prominent text such as Tulsidas?s Ramacaritamanas also used parts of the aesthetical model of the Avadhi epics raises the question whether it is possible to define the intertextual relations between the various texts as characteristics of an intermediary genre that responds to changes in the position of literature in medieval Indian society.
The genre of the Avadhi epics may constitute a dialogic platform but it yielded texts that ended up in totally different positions. This raises interesting questions, such as: how did the various connected milieus communicate, is there any link in the transmission of the texts, what is the semantic program of the various texts in the genre and to what extent this is shared by the recipients, what is the role of patronage in the genre, who is mediating for whom? The paper will explore these and other questions as they emanate from a reading that focuses on the dialogic qualities of the texts involved and their location in their cultural submilieus.
It is very well possible to see Padmavat and Ramacaritamanasa as two manifestations of the same model that was engrained in the genre. Both used the caupai-doha format to include a running comment on the main story, thus creating a dialogic literary stage for the multiple transformations of the discourses they referred to. The somewhat abstract notion of the literary genre with a specific place and function but with a wide variety of manifestations may present an useful framework for a comparative study of Jayasi and Tulsidas and other major poets of this genre.
The main benefit of this structural approach might be to distinguish a pattern behind the many details and peculiarities demonstrating the rise of religious poetry in the local vernaculars of Northern India really was a new instance and that it did not just continue lines from the past in another language, but transformed these into fundamentally new creations in a dialogue of localised vertical and horizontal influences.

Paper Giver 3: Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Paper 3 Title: The links between ‘Bhasha’ and ‘Braj’

Paper Abstract: From at least the fourteenth century onwards, ‘bhasha’ or ‘bhaka’ seems to have been an umbrella term designating many literary dialects and registers current in Madhya Desh. Shiva Prasad Singh in his Surpurva Brahbhasha aur uska sahitya (1958) has shown convincingly that ‘bhasha’ consisted of at least two broad linguistic streams, which could be present in the literary corpus of one and the same poet, even that of so clearly a nirguni sant-poet as Kabir. These two streams were: 1) an earlier stage of Khariboli, represented by Sant Bani, (Ramchandra Shukla was to call it Saddhukari; it was to become the direct ancestor of modern-day Hindi) used in verse radically questioning and subverting traditional religious authority and 2) a more easterly literary dialect, which was used for more affective devotional verse, later associated exclusively with Vaishnava saguna bhakti poets emanating from the Braj area.
The Krishna bhakti verse in this latter mode had thus a long and prestigious tradition which preceded Surdas. The stature and mellow power of Surdas’ verse was to lead to his being placed at the head of the group of the eight ‘ashta chap’ poets, who would come to occupy pride of place in the canon of the Vallabha sampradaya. My paper will explore the placement of the life histories of these eight poets, as also the strategic insertion of their verse in these histories, in the two hagiographical compendia of the sampradaya, compiled early in the eighteenth century, the very period in which the term ‘Braj bhasha’ was to acquire wide currency. The lives of four of the eight poets were located at the tail end of the first hagiographical compendium, the Chaurasi vaishanavan ki varta, the other four lives continuing seamlessly as it were into the beginning of the second compendium, the Do sau bavan vaishnavan ki varta. The eight poets thus connected the life histories not only of the followers of Vallabha, the first and founding preceptor of the sampradaya, with the followers of the second preceptor, Vitthala, Vallabha’s second son, they also legitimated the lineage which was thus established. My focus will be on the use of ‘Braj’ bhasha poetry in this legitimating process, which would finally link and seal the connection of ‘bhasha’ with the ‘Braj’ area, particularly in its spread into the west of the subcontinent.

Paper Giver 4: Allison Busch, University of North Carolina, USA

Paper 4 Title: ‘Language register in the riti tradition’

Paper Abstract: This paper probes the dynamics of language register in early-modern north India through the lens of seventeenth-century poetry and scholarly writings (shastra and commentarial works) from the “riti” or courtly tradition. It is clear that, not unlike modern Hindi, Brajbhasha could tap into different vocabulary streams, and was thus susceptible to use in multiple registers. But what is not so clear is what meanings we are to assign to this phenomenon. Are there patterns of usage that can be detected and theorized within specific genres, or among different social groups of writers? For instance, in riti-period scholarly writings on literary science (alankarashastra), frequently but not exclusively written by Brahmins, we observe a predilection for Sanskrit-based lexemes; however, riti poetry itself exhibits a wide range of lexical styles, including the Persianized. Are categories such as region or religion or patronage context pertinent in theorizing the shifting registers of Brajbhasha? Or might there be other kinds of logic in operation, perhaps intellectual or aesthetic choices? What kinds of guidance do riti writers themselves provide for helping us to conceptualize the terrain of pre-colonial language use outside modernist teleologies such as bounded linguistic and religious communities?

Paper Giver 5: Lalita Du Perron, School of Orienrtal and African Studies, University of London, UK

Paper 5 Title: ‘The language of Khyal’

Paper Abstract: Khyal is the main genre of Hindustani music today. Its origins are currently the subject of new research but are likely to be located somewhere in the early 18th century, a result of the confluence of dhrupad and qawwali. Popular opinion ascribes the “invention” of the genre to Niyamat Khan “Sadarang”, a court composer at the darbar of Mohammad Shah “Rangile” who reigned from 1719 to 1748.
Texts in an oral tradition are famously difficult to locate in a historical or geographical context. As the earliest recorded evidence of khyal only goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century when recording began in India, making any pronouncement on the linguistic development of khyall lyrics is problematic. Although there is manuscript evidence of earlier khyal texts, it is difficult to say whether these written compositions were ever the subject of performance. What is clear from the manuscripts, however, is that the idiom of khyal adhered to in the early nineteenth century is largely in harmony with the texts as we hear them performed today. Khyal texts therefore appear to have managed to escape the effects of the linguistic upheaval that has taken place in North India in the past century.
In Khyal we may note the continuity in language use and subject matter between lyrics that are likely to have been composed at different times in different places. Compositions ascribed to composers who lived hundreds of years and hundreds of miles apart adhere to a certain idiom, indicating that the poet-musicians were, and continue to be, self-consciously locating themselves within the boundaries of the Hindi lyrical tradition. My paper aims to illustrate this continuity of idiom with the help of compositions ascribed to the “inventors of khyal” as well as texts composed by some of the great exponents of the genre in the twentieth century. Although there are variations between texts in terms of language and subject matter, the majority of compositions clearly belong to one particular tradition, and are distinguishable from closely-related genres such as qawwali and ghazal.

Paper Giver 6: Christina Oesterheld, Südasien Institut, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Paper 6 Title: ‘Language of women/language for women? Observations on marsiyas by Sauda and other Urdu poets’

Paper Abstract: Mirza Muhammad Rafi’ ‘Sauda’ (1713-1780) is regarded to be the second outstanding classical Urdu poet along with Mir Taqi Mir. Known today particularly for his satires, qasidas and ghazals, he is famous for his eloquence and especially for his command over the highly ornate register of Urdu which draws heavily on Persian and Arabic. Less attention has been rewarded to his marsiyas which constitute the smaller part of his works but even then quite considerable part of his works. The focus of this paper will be on women’s speech in the marsiyas, based on the analysis of selected verses. These examples will show how the poet selected a different register to represent women’s speech which is much closer to the Indic poetic tradition and to colloquial language than his usual style. It can be argued that within Urdu poetry a special variety of poetic language was designed for utterances of women which employed numerous images and words of Indic origin but adapted them to the Urdu environment of the text. We encounter this feature in marsiya texts from the ‘Karbal katha’ onward. However, not incidentally early marsiyas remained outside the orbit of the literary canon as it was developed in the late 19th century. It seems that this was done not so much to exclude the Indic tradition but to set poetry as an art form in its own right apart both from colloquial language as well as from its use for extra-literary purposes.

Paper Giver 7: David Lelyveld, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Paper 7 Title: ‘Traces and Mixtures: Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Account of the History of Urdu’

Paper Abstract: After a lengthy descriptive catalogue of the buildings of Delhi in the second edition of Asrar us-sanadid (Vestiges of Kings) (1853), Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98) includes as an appendix an account of the Urdu language. This is then followed by a reproduction in various languages and scripts of inscriptions that he found in his exploration of the city’s past. The present paper will examine Sayyid Ahmad’s attitude to language and history during this early period of his career before the 1857 rebellion and the rise in the 1860's of the Hindi-Urdu controversy. Drawing on Sunil Kumar’s recent critique of Sayyid Ahmad’s account of the Qutb Minar in the same work, I will consider how Sayyid Ahmad’s treatment of the history of buildings, religion and political regimes might relate to his ideas about language. For one thing, Sayyid Ahmad treats language as an object of historical study to be understood in relationship to conquests, rulers, and migrations. But beyond that, he accounts for linguistic change as the achievement of exemplary literary figures, such as the 18th century poets Mir and Sauda, but also the Fort William College munshi Mir Amman, whose own account of the history of Urdu, written a half century earlier, was probably an important source for Sayyid Ahmad’s own ideas. Sayyid Ahmad’s concept of Urdu arises out of a linear concept of history and ideological assumptions rooted in Mughal culture and Persian literature. The paper will also consider Sayyid Ahmad’s account in the light of Amrit Rai and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s conflicting notions of the role of the late Mughal elite and the early British colonial authorities in advancing a concept of Urdu as built on past claims of Muslim hegemony. To what extent were Sayyid Ahmad's ideas of history and linguistic ideology in the early 1850s a staging ground for the subsequent "divide" or are they perhaps expressions of a more pluralist and cosmopolitan concept of language and literature?

Paper Giver 8: Valerie Ritter, University of Chicago, USA

Paper 8 Title: Networks, patrons, and genres for late Braj poets

Paper Abstract:This paper’s subject matter constitutes a coda to the panel’s examination of literature ‘Before the divide’: Braj Bhasha poetry in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, centering on ‘Ratnakar’ (1866-1932), known as the ‘last great
Braj Bhasha poet’, and ‘Hariaudh’ (1865-1947), a poet in Braj and Khari Boli.
These authors experienced a unique set of circumstances in regard to their
literary development and sources of patronage, and they grappled with a variety
of genres and registers in the face of changing literary values and politics.
This paper will approach several questions: How did these authors conceive of
themselves and their literary projects in light of their engagement with Urdu
genres, their Sikh literary mentor, and pan-regional literary circuits? How did
shifting structures for poetic production/consumption impinge upon their
condition of writing *within* evolving cultural divides? Lastly, how did the
linguistic register and content of their poetry mediate the disjunctures between
conventional Braj poetry and burgeoning ideologies of modern Hindi poetry?