Gupta identifies two kinds of variant material in his critical edition—explanatory gloss, and elaborations of key descriptive passages. The most striking instance of the first kind is the stanza providing an interpretive key to the narrative and its characters. In this gloss, Chitaur stands for the body and Singhala for the heart; Padmini symbolizes wisdom and the parrot represents the guru who shows the way. Nagmati symbolizes the concerns of this world, the messenger Raghava represents the devil, and Alauddin stands for worldly illusion. This stanza occurs at key junctures, offering interpretive opportunities in different manuscripts: before Ratansen’s departure on his quest for Padmavati, or before the marriage of Ratansen and Padmavati, or as a bridge to the epilogue.27 Descriptive elaborations inserted later are much harder to detect. Since stanzas are not linked to preceding or following units, new stanzas were added within the narrative’s thematic structure, extending for instance the description of the battle between Gora and Alauddin’s warriors.28 To sum up, the manuscript tradition suggests that faithful scribal transcriptions of the text coexisted with rough copies as well as transmission through performance. These features of the manuscript material make it impossible to reconstruct an authentic original text composed entirely by a single author.
And yet, the Padmavat differs significantly from other kinds of verse traditions in the same period. In the case of the bhakti devotional traditions, the number of verses attributed to poets like Kabir or Surdas proliferated well after their deaths.29 It is therefore appropriate to consider the collections of verses attributed to these poets as authored by “diverse hands.” On the other hand, oral performance traditions from largely “folk” contexts often flourished without written texts for long periods. Such performance traditions were transmitted from one teller or generation to the next, even from one region to another, and represent a different kind of collective composition where every performance generated a fresh instance of authorship. The Padmavat manuscripts point to a different process from either of these instances: while the existence of a performance tradition introduced specific elements of interpretation and elaboration, the idea of an original narrative largely composed by a single poet has also always survived, as apparent from the numerous manuscripts that were faithful copies.
Audiences Reading Genre
The translations and adaptations of the Padmavat shed further light on how it was interpreted in the seventeenth century, in three main contexts: courtly, urban, and within Sufi networks. The language of the Padmavat was Avadhi, the dialect spoken around Allahabad, Ayodhya, and Jaunpur. From the Sultanate period, however, the terms Hindi, Hindui, and Hindavi were used to distinguish such northern dialects from Persian. Further, “when its distinction from Sanskrit was to be emphasized, the poets who composed in the language spoke of it as bhasha/bhakha (the spoken tongue).”30 The three-tier nomenclature points to the Padmavat’s location within a North Indian literary culture, as well as a differentiation from the classical languages and literary traditions of Persian and Sanskrit. Further, Hindavi was the semi-official language of the Sur sultans, since many of the Afghan chiefs could not speak Persian.31 Jayasi’s choice of language thus already suggests a particular cultural affiliation with the vernacular, as opposed to classical, idiom.
Where available, information about scribes and dates for the Padmavat manuscripts indicates that in the seventeenth century Jayasi’s narrative circulated in its region of origin in literate, lay contexts. Such manuscripts in Persian include the ones by Rahimdad Khan of Shahjahanpur (1697) and by Abdullah Ahmad Khan Muhammad of Gorakhpur for Dinanath (1695).32 The Sufi network was equally active in shaping transmission and interpretation, as is apparent from the 1675 manuscript of the Sufi Muhammad Shakir from Amroha. Shakir added a prefatory paragraph to the manuscript about an incident from the life of Nizamuddin Awliya, cited from Akhbar ul-Akhyar—the well-known sixteenth-century compendium of the lives of Sufi shaikhs (by Abdul Haqq Muhaddis Dehlavi). In such a Sufi frame of reference, for instance, the proposed impalement of the jogi Ratansen by the king Gandharvsen was one of the climactic points in the narrative, inserting the Padmavat within a hagiographic tradition going back to the martyrdom of Al-Hallaj, the famous ninth-century Sufi of Baghdad.33
The Padmavat was also translated and adapted into other languages. The first known adaptation is Hansa’s Dakkani Pema Nama, composed in 1590 at the court of Ibrahim Shah in Bijapur: this retained the perceived mystical import of Jayasi’s poem.34 Of the twelve versions in Persian and Urdu known to modern scholars, the best known are Mulla Abdul Shakur or Shaikh Shukrullah Bazmi’s Rat-Padam (1618) composed in Gujarat, and Aqil Khan Razi’s Shama-wa-parwanah (1658) composed in Delhi.35 Bazmi followed the plot of the Padmavat closely but did not ascribe any symbolism to its characters and events.36 In contrast, Razi, governor of the province of Delhi under Aurangzeb, was remembered for his erudition in Sufi doctrine and his association with the contemporary Shattari Shaikh Burhanuddin Raz-i Ilahi; in his adaptation he reinserted the Padmavat into the context of Sufi symbolism.37 Like its manuscripts, then, its translations and adaptations also interpreted the Padmavat in both mystical as well as lay perspectives. Along with the Padmavat, poets in seventeenth-century Dakkani courts also translated Shaikh Manjhan Shattari’s Madhumalati (c. 1545) from Avadhi.38 Other seventeenth-century audiences read a third Avadhi narrative, Maulana Dawud’s Chandayan (c. 1370–80), in similar terms:
Makhdum Shaikh Taqiu’d-Din Waiz Rabbani used to read some occasional poems of his [Maulana Daud] from the pulpit, and the people used to be strangely influenced by hearing them, and when certain learned men of that time asked the Shaikh saying, what is the reason for this Hindi Masnavi [the Chandayan] being selected? He answered, the whole of it is divine truth and pleasing in subject, worthy of the ecstatic contemplation of devout lovers, and conformable to the interpretation of some of the Ayats of the Qur’an, and the sweet singers of Hindustan. Moreover by its public recitation human hearts are taken captive.39
In the same period, Banarasidas, a Jain merchant in Agra,40 included Qutban’s Mirigavati (c. 1503) in the same genre as Manjhan’s Madhumalati:
Meanwhile at Agra I was trying to squeeze a living out of the little I had left . . . But I spent my evening singing and reciting poems. A small group of about ten people used to visit me regularly and to them I sang Madhumalati and Mirigavati, two books of love.41 As I would read in the evening, ten or twenty men would come and visit me. I would sing and talk, and my visitors would bless me on arising.42
While Banarasidas’s account confirms that such narratives were simultaneously read from manuscripts and recited with commentary, he does not refer to the mystical import of these poems, only calling them pothi udar, books of love. The roughly contemporary accounts of Badauni (1615) and Banarasidas (1641) again reveal dual interpretations for the Avadhi masnavi narratives in this period: as lay entertainment and for mystical instruction and appreciation. Audiences agreed, however, that these narratives were tales of love. Jayasi himself describes his subject matter thus: “Of jewels and precious stones43 I spake; sweet, with the wine of love, priceless (23).”44 He thus celebrated the love of Ratansen and Padmavati, the obstacles to it, and its triumph. Such Sufi “tales of love”45 in verse were composed between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries in northern India and the Deccan. Other works in the genre included Usman’s Chitravali (1613) and Sheikh Nabi’s Gyandeep (1619) in Avadhi; and Mulla Wajihi’s Qutb-Mushtari (1610) and Sabras (1636), Gawwasi’s Saif-ul-Mulk wa Badiuj-Jamal (1619) and Mukimi’s Chandarbadan wa Mahiyar (1627) in Dakkhini.
Such narratives circulated among courtly, urban, and Sufi audiences. Badauni refers to the patronage of Maulana Daud by Firoz Shah Tughlaq’s minister Juna Shah. The Afsana-i Shahan, a chronicle of the Afghan kings, describes the courtly patronage of poets: “Wherever he [Islam Shah] happened to be, he kept himself surrounded by accomplished scholars and poets . . . Men like Mir Saiyid Manjhan the author of Madhumalati, Shah Muhammad F
armuli and his younger brother, Moosan, Surdas and many other learned scholars and poets assembled there and poems in Arabic, Persian and Hindi were recited.”46
Adaptations also emerged in the Dakkani courts of the south. Banarasidas’s autobiography suggests equally an urban mercantile culture of patronage for music and poetry. Further, Jayasi was known in Sufi circles across the subcontinent. The seventeenth-century Maarijul-Wilayat applauding his knowledge of Hind was written at Qasur (near Lahore). The Bengali Sufi poet Alaol produced a translation in 1660 at the Arakan court (in today’s Myanmar).
Lay and Sufi contexts of circulation were not mutually exclusive, however. It is to be expected that the Sufi network invariably generated mystical interpretations and transmitted these poems for their perceived spiritual message. But such interpretations also emerged from lay contexts of patronage: Maulana Dawud and Shaikh Manjhan found courtly patronage as Sufis. And Aqil Khan Razi, who produced one of the most influential Sufi adaptations of the Padmavat, was both a practising Sufi and a courtier under Aurangzeb.47
A Tale of Love and its Antecedents
The stories of lovers mentioned in the Padmavat are conspicuous in their non-Sufi moorings, and go back to courtly narratives from at least the second century onward, including story collections such as the eleventh-century Kathasaritsagara (Ocean of Streams of Stories). The Avadhi Sufi narratives also appropriated conventions from other contiguous genres such as the Persian dastan. Such acknowledged literary precedents may have encouraged seventeenth-century readers like Banarasidas to interpret the Padmavat as a tale of love without perceived mystical content, as his comments on the Madhumalati and Mirigavati suggest.
The motif of a king from North India travelling to Sinhaladvipa (the island of Sinhala) to marry a southern princess was frequent in courtly narrative traditions, where such marriage signified the warrior/ king/hero’s regional domination and his fulfilling the ideal of the chakravartin (universal monarch).48 Other tropes from the courtly narrative reservoir remained stock motifs in medieval narratives. These included the hero and heroine first encountering each other in a dream or through hearsay; the heroine’s location on an island (Malayadvip, Sinhaladvip, Ratnadvip); the hero’s quest, involving a voyage, shipwreck, and escape; and the hero’s disguise as Brahmin or mendicant while setting out on his quest. The first meeting between the hero and heroine often occurred in a temple or a garden. While on his quest, the hero often met other beautiful princesses who were captives of a demon or tyrant; he would free such beauties and often marry them en route to the main object of his quest. Final success often came through supernatural intervention.49
Similar narratives—such as stories about Madhavanal–Kamakandala, Usha–Aniruddha, or Nala–Damayanti—continued to circulate between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Avadhi “tales of love” were being composed. In the Padmavat the pining Ratansen remembers these other suffering lovers in particular. Further, Jayasi invoked systems of classification from courtly disciplinary traditions in Sanskrit such as erotics—as when the Brahmin Raghav Chetan educates Alauddin about the four kinds of women among whom the padmini is the most exalted:
Her black brows are like a stretched bow; what man is fit enough target? . . .
The kohl lining her eyes is string stretched taught, her lashes poisonous arrows;
She aims that bow where she pleases and shoots, even mountains are reduced to dust;
The bow [of Rama] that built the bridge across the sea, even that bow accepted defeat at the hands of her brows;
Even the mighty Gandiva [of Arjuna] that pierced the eye of the fish, accepted defeat, what can I say of other bows . . . (493).
Ganpati Chandra Gupta (speaking for many scholars of Hindi literature) infers from the presence of such tropes and the abundance of such epic similes that the Avadhi “tales of love” owe very little to “foreign” forms and traditions, and are entirely Sanskritic, even “Hindu,” in their moorings; the overt Islamic content of these Avadhi narratives is thus incidental.50 While this interpretation is belied by the clear Sufi frame of the Padmavat, Jayasi’s use of a repertoire of Indic narratives and tropes suggests both his own familiarity with them as well as an attempt to address a larger audience than that available for Persian romances in Islamicate courts. Allison Busch has shown how such poetic conventions, such as the “eight-fold analysis of female characters (ashtanayikabheda),” belonged to a wider, courtly repertoire that transcended boundaries between imperial and regional, and classical and vernacular, literary cultures.51 The enjoyment of Banarasidas and his twenty friends in the seventeenth century demonstrates the success of the Avadhi “tales of love” in addressing this wider, urbane, lay audience.
Badauni’s testimony from the same period points to other generic horizons as well for the Padmavat. Shaikh Rabbani read the Chandayan as a masnavi. The Persian verse form of the masnavi invokes the genres of narrative in which it was used, the love story and the heroic dastan. Audiences familiar with Sultanate courtly culture and its Persian literary traditions would have known the masnavis of Amir Khusrau—including the Shirin-wa-Khusrau and Majnun-wa-Leyla—very well. From at least the thirteenth century onward, princes and kings in India were familiar with the Shahnameh (composed by Firdausi in Persia around 1000 CE) and the Iskandarnameh, as well as with tales of love such as Nizami’s Khamseh.52 For such readers steeped in the Persian literary tradition, the characteristic structure of the Avadhi “tales of love”—narrating the hero’s quest and his several adventures before obtaining his beloved—would thus have invoked the horizons of the dastan, typically narrating “tales of heroic romance and adventure—stories about gallant princes and their encounters with evil kings, enemy champions, demons, magicians, Jinns, divine emissaries, tricky secret agents and beautiful princesses who might be human or of the Pari (“fairy”) race.”53
Qutban’s Mirigavati deploys such tropes abundantly. While seeking Mirigavati the protagonist Rajkunwar rescues another maiden, Rupmani, from a demon’s clutches and marries her. He then escapes from the clutches of a cannibalistic goatherd by blinding him, and nearly has another adventure with a demon. The proliferating adventures here suggest the several narrative worlds that the Avadhi poets inhabited simultaneously. For instance, the Sufi exaltation of the heroine to almost transcendent status—in the Mirigavati she actually is an achari (apsara, heavenly nymph) with magical powers—overlapped with the dastan’s frequent exaltation of its beautiful women to the supernatural realm. The hero’s progress through several adventures involved tests of skill, strength, and intelligence in both Indic and Persian genres of heroic romance. Within a Sufi frame of reference in the Avadhi tales of love, this heroic quest was made symbolic for a spiritual journey that tested spiritual assets. The narrative conventions of contiguous genres like the Persian dastan and the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsa romances were thus useful in articulating a distinctively Sufi theology and practice.
A Sufi “Tale of Love”54
These Avadhi poets asserted the primacy of Sufi theology through their prefaces, interpretive glosses on the beautiful princess and the protagonist’s quest, and through distinctive appropriations of the doctrine and practice of other, heterodox sects such as the Nathpanth.55 Jayasi commences his “immeasurably deep tale” (katha avagahu) by describing the beauty of the created universe that redounds to the credit of its sole Creator (1–10). The Avadhi terms for the Creator—karataru, gusain—invoke a deity beyond form, hue or description (alakha arupa abarana), who could be the god of nirgun bhakti56 as much as Islam (7). Avadhi also provides other polyvalent terms that cross boundaries of religious affiliation, practice, and discourse. Thus the authoritative Book in which descriptions of this God are written is purana—a term that encompasses both the Quran as well as other holy books of old that praise this gusain—again, a formless god whose denomination is implied but not specified (8). From this point, however, Jayasi articulates a distinctively Sufi theology by declaring that t
he Creator created the universe for love of the illustrious Muhammad, without whom the Path would be shrouded in darkness (11).57 The invocation of Muhammad is followed by the recollection of his four illustrious friends (the first four caliphs), renowned in both worlds. The purana is now the Book written down from the remembered verses (ayata), denoted in the Arabic here; however, the ayata were transcribed at the instance of the scholarly (pandita) Usman, the Book sent by God (bidhi) to guide lost men to the right Path (pantha) (12), three terms again defying narrow denominational valences. Jayasi then identifies his pirs, his spiritual mentors: Saiyad Asraph, Saiyad Muhammad, and Sekha Barahanu, and asserts that he will endeavor to glimpse God (gusain) by following their Path (18–20). As discussed above, Jayasi identifies the Chishti silsilah (“initiatic genealogy”)58 as one of his spiritual lineages, through Saiyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani. The Chishtis were distinguished from other Sufi lineages in South Asia by their religious practice: their zealous commitment to sama, the experience of spiritual bliss through the recollection (zikr) of the Divine Names.59 The Chishtis also emphasized music and poetry as instruments for such contemplation. As Jayasi declares at the outset, the Padmavat is meant to arouse the same intense feeling in the audience that the telling generates in the poet:
The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen Page 5