Manjhan answers his rhetorical question by asserting that his poem can only go ‘as far as the bird of knowledge can fly, as deep as the mind can fathom … beyond that point, where are the means?’ Despite this metaphysical and poetic assumption of Allah’s ineffable nature, the poet goes on to find Hindavī approximations for the widespread Sufi theory of wadat al-wujūd or the unity of all existence, playing on the Lord’s unity (waḥdat) and his multiplicity (karat). Manjhan expresses his amazement at the contrast between the oneness of the Creator and the multiplicity of created forms behind which God is hidden. Manjhan represents the Lord as unqualified, yet singular, hidden, yet manifest, formless, yet many-formed. Manjhan refers to the Names of Allah, which are so important as prototypes of all things in existence. In the Sufi cosmogony, these form the patterns or models through which divine light is refracted into the veils of existence. Manjhan’s use has a special referent, though, because the Shaārīs formulated an elaborate system of letter mysticism and cosmology based on the Names of Allah. The divine Names were used extensively by the Shaārīs to inculcate God’s qualities or attributes in the practitioner.
Next, he uses the convention of the nat (praise of the Prophet) and the praise of the ‘companions’ of the Prophet elegantly to suggest Muḥammad’s true nature. Muḥammad is not simply the Prophet but rather the cosmic principle of the Creator within creation, the reason for creation and the light within it. Manjhan uses the paradoxical logic of the Sufi theory of the refraction of divine light into the forms of this world to declare the sole substantial reality of Muḥammad’s body (sarīra) and the shadowiness of the concrete, sensible world: ‘He is the substance, and the world his shadow.’ Further, he uses the Hindavīi word rūpa (‘form, beauty’) to skirt the language of incarnation dangerously. Allah is alakh, the invisible one, but the form that can be seen is that of Muḥammad. The true meaning of this beautiful form is God; significantly, rūpa is also used extensively in the erotic encounter in the romance to refer to the divine and human aspects of the love that blossoms between the hero and heroine. He ends his nàat with the standard words of praise for the first four ‘righteous’ Caliphs, expressed simply and beautifully.
There follows the traditional address of obeisance (khitāb-i zamīnbūs) to the ruling sultan, Salīm Shāh, which is couched in terms of conventional extravagance. Modelled on Persian prologues that themselves draw on the inflated claims and rhetoric of Islamic texts on polity and statecraft (‘mirrors for princes’), the address to Salīm Shāh waxes eloquent in praise of the king’s generosity, bravery, and justice. Manjhan uses the standard tropes of the lion and cow playing happily together, of lamb and wolf grazing together in peace, to describe Salīm Shāh as an ideally just king and his state as a ‘garden come to flower without any thorns’. He also refers to kings famed for their greatness and nobility in Indian mythology and history: the eldest of the Pāavas from the Mahābhārata, Yudhihira, the generous Kara, and the cultivated patron of poetry and the arts, King Bhoja of Ujjain. Manjhan also praises the Afghan nobleman and military commander Khizr Khān Turk,23 a regional governor of Bengal who may have patronized the poet and supported him in his entourage.
The balance of spiritual over temporal is then redressed by no fewer than eight verses in praise of Manjhan’s spiritual guide, Shaikh Muḥammad hau Gvāliyārī. As we have seen, Shaikh Muḥammad was intimately involved in politics at the Mughal courts of Gwalior and Agra. The verses addressed to him emphasize his long years of asceticism and his importance in defining Sufi practice for seekers at his hospice. He is described as a great Shaikh, ‘profound in knowledge, matchless in beauty’. The poet focuses on two crucial aspects of the Shaikh’s power: the transformative power of his gaze (disi), and the figurative kingship of even a disciple of his. The first of these refers to the power of the gaze of the spiritual guide, which can reach within a disciple’s being and change his way of being in the world. The disciple can then triumph over ‘death’, a reference to the Sufi experience of fanā, self-annihilation on the path. The triumph over death refers to the stage of subsistence after annihilation, baqā. Here the poet uses the Hindavī disi to approximate the Persian tavajjuh, the absorbed attention of the Shaikh which transforms the consciousness of the disciple, awakening him to the unseen mysteries of the spiritual cosmos. Such a disciple becomes not merely an earthly king like the one the poet has been praising, but king over all the ages of the world.
Having completed the conventional and historical proprieties, Manjhan now comes to defining some theoretical terms that are important for a fuller understanding of his poem. He elevates prema-rasa to the rāja-rasa, the royal rasa, and sketches out three key elements of his aesthetic: the ideology of love (prema), the importance of ascetic practice, and the privileged status of language in disseminating the truth embodied in poetry. To begin with Manjhan’s view of love, the topos can be traced back to Persian manavī prologues, which frequently include short philosophical reflections on love or poetry. These ordinarily emphasize that the world has its foundation in love, without which the human being is just an aggregate of clay and water. Similarly, in Manjhan’s Madhumālatī, the very first word is love, and the final couplet is again devoted to love. Love is thus both the beginning and the consummation of his work. For Manjhan, love is much more than the feeling human beings sometimes have for one another; it is a cosmic force which pre-exists creation, which drives creation and which permeates creation. Particularly beloved by Sufis with regard to the causes of creation is the tradition attributed to God: ‘I was a hidden treasure and longed that I should be known’. While one understanding of this tradition is that God created the universe because he wished to be known, another understanding emphasizes that it is only through love that God can be known. For Manjhan, then, love is the most precious property in the universe. Along with love goes suffering, particularly the pain felt of being separate from one’s beloved, whether human or divine. This pain of love in separation, viraha, is both an intense sorrow and a great blessing because it is the very means by which the human soul becomes self-conscious.
Love and beauty are central to the aesthetics of the Madhumālatī, in which the heroine becomes an exemplification of the process of the self-disclosure of the divine. Her beauty arouses love within the seeker, while viraha, the condition of being separated from his beloved, drives him onwards along the Sufi path. The path of asceticism involved, among the Sufis, an intensive regimen of fasting and vegetarianism, supererogatory prayers, and a programme of yogic exercises and letter-mysticism. As we have seen, the Arabic letters of the Names of Allah encoded a system of visualization and interior discipline. Manjhan also refers to the unique engagement with the Indian practices of yoga, exhorting the seeker to ‘abandon consciousness, wisdom, and knowledge’ in order to focus on meditative practice. He describes as a void (sūnā) the place where the seeker can remain absorbed in the attributeless Allah. Allah is the Absolute, the ground for revealing the self to itself. In this ascetic regimen, all created forms are refractions of divine essence but need spiritual practice in order to realize their identity-in-difference with divinity.
In addition, the poet uses the term sahaja-samāudhi, the ‘mystic union of Sahaja’. In Kabir and the other north Indian devotional poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sahaja refers to the soul’s ‘spontaneous or self-born’ unity with the attribute-less or nirgua Rāma, the transcendence in immanence to which the seeker has to awaken.24 Among the Sufi poets the term represents the internalization of the Sufi paradox of the identity, yet radical difference, of the being of divinity and human beings. This carries through into Manjhan’s view of language, which encapsulates the paradox. As he points out, ‘if words arise from mortal mouths, then how can the word be imperishable?’ Further, ‘if man, the master of words, can die, then how does the word remain immortal?’ Language becomes the currency of immortality for the poet, since it encompasses the divine and the human. Words endure, although humans p
ass away. The answer to this paradox, of course, is that the word, like divinity, is perpetually alive because it is refracted in every heart.
In itself this topos is directly traceable to Persian prologues, which contain frequent reflections on poetry or verbal discourse (sukhan).25 These focus on the creative power of the word Kun or ‘Be’, with which Allah created the heavens and the earth. This is approximated in the Hindavī text to the mystic word O, which Manjhan borrows from Indian religious systems to express the might and majesty of Allah in the Qur’ānic cosmogony. Manjhan makes the word the foundation of creation, as well as of all poetic discourse. As he puts it, ‘If the Maker had not made the word, how could anyone hear stories of pleasure?’ The poet resolves the paradox of identity-indifference through his claim that divinity is manifest (pargata) in the word, an incarnationist view that would be heretical to express in Persian. Language, in Hindavī poetics, becomes the ground for understanding and representing the revelation of divinity to humans.
Language thus embodies poetic pleasure, but it also becomes the medium for another sort of embodiment: the refraction of the divine essence in visible form. For the Hindavī Sufi poets, the body of the heroine provokes a blinding flash of revelation in the eyes of the seeker. The revelatory flash pushes the seeker on to his quest for love, to realize the union that he has only glimpsed in his vision. To savour prema-rasa is to understand the secret of the shared identity-in-difference between the seeker and the sought, the subject and object of mysticism. Manjhan asks his audience to cultivate the taste for this royal rasa at the end of his prologue:
A story sweet as nectar I will sing to you:
O experts in love, pay attention and listen!
Such juicy matters only connoisseurs know,
tasteless stuff is tossed out by them.
Termites run away from wood without juice;
will camels eat cane without any sugar?
Whatever has rasa, is enjoyed as such,
and the man who does not have the taste
will find even the tasteful tasteless.
Many tastes are found in the world, O connoisseurs!
But listen: I shall describe love, the royal savour of savours. [43.1–6]
Rasa is the pleasure which listeners or readers take in stories as well as the lovers’ consummation of desire in the savour or juice of love (prema). The Sufi cosmology within which this aesthetic of prema-rasa is set allows the Hindavī Sufi poets to refer suggestively to the relation of mirrored desire between God and creatures. It is in this sense that the Hindavī romances are susceptible to interpretation in multiple ways, whether as sensuous ornate poetry in courtly performance, or as mystical verses referring ultimately to God within the context of Sufi shrines.
IV. Manohar and Madhumālatī
After this elaborate prologue, the poet begins the story of Manohar and Madhumālatī in earnest. Many of the narrative motifs that he uses will be instantly recognizable to readers of Indian and Islamic story literatures. For instance, the story opens with King Sūrajbhānu (Light of the Sun) who has everything conceivable except a son, for whom he longs and hopes. For twelve years he serves an ascetic, who finally gives his Queen a small morsel of magical food which results in her giving birth to a son, a motif common to many Indian epic, literary, and folk traditions. The major device used to order the plot is the initial night meeting between the lovers orchestrated by flying nymphs, after which the lovers must wander in pain until they are able to regain that first flush of felicity. This motif occurs also elsewhere, most famously in the Arabian Nights, in the tale of the Prince Qamar al-Zamān.26 In that story, the lovely Princess Budur is carried to the bedroom of Qamar al-Zamān by flying jinns, who cannot decide which of the two is more beautiful. They leave them there overnight while they go to play. The Prince and Princess awaken, look at each other and fall in love. When they go to sleep again, the jinns carry the Princess back to her father’s palace, and the Prince spends the rest of the story on a quest for the beautiful maiden who captured his heart in a midnight encounter. In the same way, the plot of the Madhumālatī, in common with those of the other Hindavī Sufi romances, draws the reader into the story by arousing his or her desire and constantly deferring that desire till the lovers attain erotic, narrative, and spiritual consummation.
Once the hero is born, astrologers are summoned who name the child Manohar. Foreshadowing the central narrative themes of desire (kāma), separation (viraha), and love (prema), they also predict that in his fourteenth year he will meet his beloved and fall in love. The two will then be separated and he will wander as a yogi for a year suffering the pain of love in separation. After that he will be King in all his births. The Prince is brought up and properly educated so that at the age of 12 he is crowned King. When he reaches the age of 14 some passing nymphs, attracted by his good looks, resolve to find a Princess for him of matching beauty. They debate the matter and decide on Madhumālatī, the daughter of King Vikram Raī. The King rules the city of Mahāras, the great rasa, suggesting the ultimate aesthetic and spiritual value of prema-rasa. To compare the lovers, the nymphs transport Manohar to Madhumālatī’s bedroom and put his bed next to hers. Astonished at the resulting loveliness they pronounce them a perfect match and go off to play. Manohar wakes up and is amazed by Madhumālatī’s beauty, which the poet describes in the twenty verses of a head-to-foot description of the heroine’s body.
When Madhumālatī wakes up she becomes extremely alarmed, but as they talk, love, coming from a former birth, is born between them. They pledge themselves to eternal fidelity and make love—though not fully—and then fall asleep. The nymphs return and are horrified at their dishevelled state and quickly carry back Manohar to his palace. When he awakes, the pain of separation overwhelms the Prince and he tells his nurse Sahajā (the simple or spontaneous mystery or mystical state) what has happened. Various kinds of doctors are called but they fail to cure him because they do not know love. Eventually Manohar resolves to set out against his parents’ wishes to find Madhumālatī in Mahāras. He disguises himself as a saffron-clad yogi and sets out with a large retinue, but as they cross an ocean a storm sinks the ship. All are destroyed except Manohar who is washed up on a foreign shore, ‘alone save for the name of Madhumālatī and the mercy of God’.
Manohar sets off inland and reaches a plantain forest, the kadalī vana that signifies the place of self-mortification and spiritual attainment in Tantric practice and devotional poetry in the north Indian languages.27 As he is wandering through this dark wood, he finds a pavilion in which a young and innocent Princess, Pemā (Love), is imprisoned. She is the beloved daughter of King Citraseun of Citbisarāiu (Forgetfulness or Ease-of-Mind). She was out playing with her girlfriends when they had to take shelter in a gallery or pavilion painted with pictures (citrasārī) to escape a swarm of bees. The pictures painted on the walls of the pavilion suggest the realm of images (ālam-i imal) in Sufi cosmology, one step closer to the world of concrete phenomena than the place of the divine Names. As they came out of the picture-pavilion a demon seized her and brought her to the dark forest where she is an unhappy prisoner. Manohar introduces himself and tells her about Madhumālatī. Pemā, in reply, says she is a childhood friend of Madhumālatī’s and that Madhumālatī visited her parents’ home with her mother every month. When he hears this, Manohar resolves to save Pemā by confronting the demon. When the demon returns, Manohar wounds it, but the demon miraculously recovers.
Pemā explains that there is a tree whose ambrosial fruit grants immortality, and that in it resides the demon’s life. Hearing this, Manohar knows that Allah would give him victory if he could but destroy the tree. He is hesitant to commit the sin of killing a living tree, but is persuaded by Pemā’s unfortunate plight. By cutting down the tree and uprooting the trunk, he leaves the demon no source from which to renew his life. Once the demon is dead, Manohar takes Pemā back to her parents, who are so grateful they offer him their kingdom and Pemā’s hand in ma
rriage. He declines, since his heart is pledged to Madhumālatī. He becomes increasingly impatient to set off on his quest again, when Pemā informs him that Madhumālatī and her mother are coming the next day. He waits in the picture-pavilion, restless with the pain of separation. Pemā brings Madhumālatī there, leaving them together as she guards the door. Manohar moves in and out of consciousness in her presence. She is initially angry at his cruelty in deserting her, until their former love reawakens. They renew their vow not to make love fully until they are married and fall asleep together. Madhumālatī’s mother, meanwhile, worrying about her daughter, descends on the pavilion and finds them there together. Overcome with shame and rage, she has Madhumālatī taken back to Mahāras, where she utters a spell and turns Madhumālatī into a bird. When Manohar wakes up he finds Madhumālatī gone; he is cast down once more in his own bedroom at Kanagiri. He resumes his yogic disguise and sets off again on the quest for his beloved.
Madhumālatī, transformed into a bird, flies all round the world in search of Manohar. This motif is found commonly in Islamic mystical literature, in which the divine in the form of the Universal Spirit moves through the world in the form of a dove after creation.28 She suffers horribly from viraha, the pain of love in separation. Despairing, she sees a Prince who looks like Manohar and allows herself to be caught. He is Prince Tārācand of Pavanerī (Wind City, a reference to the airs or winds of the subtle yogic body) who, hearing her story, leaves his kingdom to serve her and bring her back to her family and native land. Madhumālatī’s mother is full of remorse and quickly restores her to her former self. She offers Tārācand Madhumālatī in marriage but he refuses, knowing she could only be happy with Manohar. Madhumālatī’s parents meanwhile write to Pemā telling her what has happened. Madhumālatī encloses a bārahmāsā, a song describing her suffering through the twelve months using exquisite natural and seasonal imagery. The letters reach Pemā just as Manohar reappears still disguised as a yogi. Further letters are exchanged and a marriage is arranged between Manohar and Madhumālatī. After the wedding ceremony, they consummate their long love-affair in full, much to the amusement of Madhumālatī’s girlfriends. Tārācand stays with them both and one day he sees Pemā swinging in the picture-pavilion and falls in love with her although he does not know who she is. Madhumālatī realizes it must be Pemā he has fallen for and tells Manohar. Manohar says that since Pemā had been offered in marriage to him there was no difficulty in her being married to Tārācand. The marriage of Pemā and Tārācand takes place and after a while they all decide that they must return to their respective kingdoms. After an elaborate leave-taking, Manohar and Madhumālatī finally reach his kingdom where, amid great rejoicing, he is reunited with his happy parents.
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