Braj

In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. Using the frame of geoaesthetics, he compares early modern conceptions of the environment and current assumptions about nature and culture.
A groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of eco–art history, the book examines architecture, paintings, photography, and prints created in Braj alongside theological treatises and devotional poetry to foreground seepages between the natural ecosystem and cultural production. The paintings of deified rivers, temples that emulate fragrant groves, and talismanic bleeding rocks that Ray discusses will captivate readers interested in environmental humanities and South Asian art history.

'A wonderfully imaginative addition to the growing body of literature on the Little Ice Age. Sugata Ray traces the influence of climatic variations on South Asian art, architecture, and devotional practices with extraordinary interpretive skill.'―Amitav Ghosh, Author, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

'The rocks, rivers, forests, plants, animals, and even the skies of the Mathura-Vrindavan region in north India come alive as historical agents acting alongside humans in Ray's pioneering and imaginative attempt to develop a geoaesthetic approach to the study of Hindu religious art and architecture over a period ranging from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. His impressive ability to connect events in the realm of aesthetics and religious devotion with the climatic impact of the Little Ice Age in South Asia, is bound to influence debates in art history in South Asia and beyond. A brilliant achievement.'―Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

'Sugata Ray's Climate Change and the Art of Devotion draws an unexpected and strikingly original connection between the catastrophic consequences of the Little Ice Age (c. 1550-1850) and the rise of a site-specific theology at the pilgrim centre of Braj in India. This scholarly, elegantly written art historical monograph that skillfully combines archival scholarship with theoretical sophistication, makes a powerful contribution to recent debates on the environmental crisis in the present Anthropocene epoch.'―Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947

'Sugata Ray’s important book represents a bold attempt to frame a new ecology of art and to engage with local ways of thinking that have not been previously been incorporated into scholarship. It should gain a wide audience.'—Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Frederick Marquand Professor, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University

'A bold and ambitious project that takes on a sweeping range of issues across both the humanities and social sciences. Ray brings core Indian material into dialogue with current conversations about the relationship between the human and nonhuman, between materiality and immateriality, and climate change and visual culture. The book serves as a challenge to future scholars to expand the range of their own conversations.'―Tamara Sears, author of Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India

https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295745374/climate-change-and-the-art-of-devotion/

The article is devoted to the 17 th-century poet Bhushan, author of Śivarājabhūṣaṇa, a rītigranth most probably commissioned by the emerging Maratha ruler Shivaji Bhonsle. The existing histories of Hindi literature provide multiple accounts on the life of the poet, often calling them the hearsay tradition. Although many of them are drawn from a Maratha chronicle (bakhar), a proper study on the source of such accounts is still lacking. One more source that gives a chance to retrieve the cur-ricula of Bhushan is Śivarājabhūṣaṇa, the only homogenic text that is attributed to the poet. The manuscripts and the editions of this text, especially the stanzas referring to the poet himself, do not show significant changes or interpolations. It allows us to treat it as a relatively reliable source, and therefore the treatise can serve as a basis for the reconstruction of the poet's life and the circumstances of its composition. All portions of the text which refer to his biography are presented in order to provide complete data that can be drawn out of the internal evidence.

The study of Ā nandghan ’s transmission presents a case to examine how early modern manuscript circulation in north India was effected when a radically new idea appeared on the literary scene. The Vaishnava renunciate Ā nandghan (c. 1700–1757) in his quatrains wrote about love towards a person whom he called Sujān, a word having both Persianate and Indian undertones. By the use of this word, he emphasised continuity between mundane and divine love. Although this approach was rejected by his religious community and later even by Ā nandghan himself, his poetry became widely appreciated in north India and many of the most innovative Hindi poets in the coming centuries are indebted to him. The four extant early collections of his poetry were prepared under the influence of the Ā nandghan debate in Ā nandghan ’s lifetime or shortly after. Taking two other, now lost, anthologies into account the article examines the development of the corpus of Ā nandghan ’s quatrains into six collections...

Braj is the epicentre of the Krishna cult. The physical representation of the scriptural Braj Mandala as we see it today, however, is a medieval construct. During the 15th and 16th centuries, as a part of religious exercises or in the quest for the land of Krishna, the propagators of various sampradayas (sects) reached the region seeking spiritual solace. This process of rediscovering Braj and the settlement of the various sects was followed by a thronging of the region by merchant-followers and, subsequently, by Rajput rulers from the adjoining kingdoms of Rajasthan and Bundelkhand. The pilgrimage to Braj created an environment conducive for traders, especially from Gujarat and Punjab, to establish economic links with the region through a process of endowment and exchange. Hundis (bills of exchange) and wealth in the form of jewelry and gifts from businessmen coming to Braj on a pilgrimage significantly contributed to the development of the region. Of note, however, pilgrimage undertaken by Rajput rajas (kings) was certainly an attempt to assert their authority and raise themselves in the hierarchy vis-à-vis other rulers and nobles. As Braj came to be associated with the Mughals, this pilgrimage also meant allegiance to the courtly culture. This paper establishes that the Braj pilgrimage has served multiple purposes other than quenching one’s spiritual thirst. It served as a medium for legitimising the accumulation of wealth by merchants through their contribution to religious activities. It was also a platform for the formulation of community bonds where monetary help in adverse times could be sought, and safer business travel ensured. Unlike most medieval institutions, which have withered away with the passage of time, pilgrimage to Braj Mandala in the neighbourhood of Vrindavan and Gokul – comprising a circuit of 84 kos (around 252 kilometre) – is still a living tradition.

This paper examines the description of Mirza Raja Jai Singh, a Mughal mansabdar and a Rajput raja through the Satsai, a text written by Biharilal who was attached to the Amber court. Even though Bihari received court patronage and adhered to the literary standards and dignity of the language befitting his position as a court poet, we find that he addresses concerns far wider in range than weaving love tropes in nakh-shikh poetry. The paper hopes to use several padas to give us an insight into Bihari’s concept of power and kingship. Bihari eulogizes his patron by making several interesting comparisons between Jai Singh and divine beings like Kamadev and Krishna. Jai Singh is projected as a complete ruler who is not only skilled in the art of war but a master in the art of seduction. But it is the description of Jai Singh vis-à-vis the Mughal emperor that makes Bihari’s poetry propitious for understanding Mughal-Rajput relations in the seventeenth century.

A central figure in the rise of religious literature in the vernacular languages of north India in the early modern era was the poet-saint Sūrdās, whose poetry played a defining role in the spread of popular devotion, bhakti, to Kṛṣṇa, one of Hinduism s most well known deities. A salient feature in several of the poems ascribed to Sūrdās that depicts the iconic flute-playing Kṛṣṇa is that the flute itself appears as a female persona – Muralī. This thesis is the first study to ask why the flute appears as a woman and how the motif evolves throughout these poems. These questions are important because they engage with an understudied aspect of a central Hindu deity in of its most popular and defining representations, and because they offer a sharpened focus on the concepts of gender and devotion that deity might be perceived to embody. Utilising a theoretical outlook informed by performativity, intertextuality and gender studies, the study maps the various appearances of the female flute in both the early and late layers of the literary tradition connected with Sūrdās. It concludes that Muralī, the female flute, both functions as a religious symbol that encapsulates a general tension in the image of the flute-playing Kṛṣṇa between dichotomies such as nature and culture, gendered and ungendered, and as a rhetorical figure through which the poetry of Sūrdās can discuss competing positions on the dynamic between gender norms and religious imperatives.

This work uses the theory of Lacanian Othering on medieval Indian texts to assess the multiple layers that construct the narrative of Self and Other in texts, such as Padmavata and Prithviraja Rasau. While this method allows this work to transcend existing 'communal versus syncretic' debate in the Indian history, it also lays a ground-work to reduce appropriation of pre-modern works by modern nationalist narratives and see them as historic construction of times when they were penned. This work focuses on selected episodes of conflict between Rajput and Turko-Afghan rulers in the texts and assesses how both poems construct identities which are beyond the categories of 'communal' or 'syncretic'. The aim of this research is to take the study of pre-modern Indian literature and history in an entirely new domain where the connection between ontology, history, and conflict can be established with greater certainty and accuracy.

The aim of this paper is to present the literature of the meteorological aphorisms in some North Indian Indo-Aryan languages. Our presentation is based only upon written data, which are available in collections of proverbs and other sayings or in corpus of folk astrology.
The meteorological aphorisms, which can be considered as a class by themselves, contain two kinds of elements dealing respectively with the observation and the forecasting of weather and crops. This literature can be presented as didactic and predictive and is connected with folk astrology, especially as far as expressing date and time is concerned. Moreover, in North India, such corpus have been ascribed to legendary astrologers, whose names, as can be seen in the bhanitas, are linked with one another.
Many meteorological aphorisms can be traced as identical, with small formulary or dialectic differences, in many regions of North India. Hence we have a "continuum" of both aphorisms and formulae, the variations of which indicate their diffusion and their circulation. Thus, on the basis of this continuum, it is possible to create a thesaurus of meteorological aphorisms, which could be the beginning of a critical study.

The study of Ā n a n d g h a n's transmission presents a case to examine how early modern manuscript circulation in north India was effected when a radically new idea appeared on the literary scene. The Vaishnava renunciate Ā n a n d g h a n (c. 1700–1757) in his quatrains wrote about love towards a person whom he called Sujān, a word having both Persianate and Indian undertones. By the use of this word, he emphasised continuity between mundane and divine love. Although this approach was rejected by his religious community and later even by Ā n a n d g h a n himself, his poetry became widely appreciated in north India and many of the most innovative Hindi poets in the coming centuries are indebted to him. The four extant early collections of his poetry were prepared under the influence of the Ā n a n d g h a n debate in Ā n a n d g h a n's lifetime or shortly after. Taking two other, now lost, anthologies into account the article examines the development of the corpus of Ā n a n d g h a n's quatrains into six collections, manipulated to present either a more religious or a more secular Ā n a n d g h a n.

This article is an attempt to identify history in an early modern text belonging to Hindi literary tradition. Theoretical foundations that enable such venture are to be found in the narrativist philosophy of history, since it enabled to grant equal status to those discourses about the past which do not meet narrow criteria of world-history. V. Rao, D. Shulman and S. Subrahmanyam, working on South India, proposed that an analysis of texture allows to identify history in the compositions not belonging to the Western tradition of historiography. It is worth verifying whether their method applies to other literary traditions of India. The same researchers undermined the legitimacy of talking about prose as the only possible way of writing history – by claiming that history is written in the dominant literary genre of a particular community, space and time. Their hypotheses are hereby confronted with passages from Bhūṣan’s Śivrājbhūṣaṇ (1673).

Introduction to volume 17 of Cracow Indological Studies (2015), titled "Crossing over 'on the Birds' Wings': South Asian Literature in Local and Global Contexts".
The current volume is the result of joint efforts of an international team of 14 authors—from Poland, India, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Finland and Latvia who have contributed to the research on the multicultural nature of South Asian, in particular Indian literature. Although the papers invited for this volume followed only very general thematic suggestions from the editors, the outcome reveals notable convergence of topics and approaches in many contributions. All the participants stress the fundamental openness of Indian culture and its ability to find inspirations from most incredible sources. The articles brought together in this volume provide a detailed and deep con/textual analysis of particular cases from literary and cultural history—migration of stories, manuscripts, books, and authors, exchanges of themes and techniques, various adaptations and re-creations of both Indian and foreign texts.

The  article is focused on the notion of dāna and its use in Śivrājbhūṣaṇ, a late 17th-century rītigranth composed by Bhūṣaṇ in the court of Śivājī Bhoṃsle, shortly before the coronation. The ruler had it composed in Braj, a vernacular that had already risen to the status of a transregional language. The poem, which used to be reduced by literary historians to a simple panegyric, belongs to South Asian early modern court literature, the authors of which were explicitly manifesting their xture in Sanskrit literary tradition and simultaneously ful lled complex political agendas. The royal patronage infused the poetry with political essence, but the liter- ary conventions dictated the ways in which the political substance should be weaved into the poems. Basing on the textual analysis of Bhūṣaṇ’s work, I draw attention to the high frequency and various ways of use of the notion of dāna by the poet. This aims to prove that poetical representation of royal generosity embodied in various practices of dāna—liberally put to display—was one of the major tools of validating,vitalizing and bolstering royal authority.

Cette notre critique est consacrée aux trois ouvrages suivants : ABU’L-FAZL, The History of Akbar, vol. 1, éd. et trad. Wheeler M. Thackston, Cambridge (Ma.), Murty Classical Library of India et Harvard University Press, 2015, xxii + 614 p. (cartes, notes, glossaire, bibliographie, index) ; BULLHE SHAH, Sufi Lyrics, éd. et trad. Christopher Shackle, Cambridge (Ma.), Murty Classical Library of India et Harvard University Press, 2015, xxxvi + 443 p. (notes, glossaire, bibliographie, index) ; SURDAS, Sur’s Ocean : Poems from the Early Tradition, éd. Kenneth E. Bryant, trad. John Stratton Hawley, Cambridge (Ma.), Murty Classical Library of India et Harvard University Press, 2015, xlviii + 1010 p. (notes, glossaire, bibliographie, index). Ces trois livres appartiennent à une nouvelle « bibliothèque » indianiste lancée, sur la base d’une fondation richement dotée, par l’Université de Harvard : il s’agit d’un programme d’édition scientifique de classiques indiens du Veda à 1800, dans les différentes langues de l’Inde, avec leur traduction en anglais Celui d’Abu’l-Fazl (1651-1602), chronique en persan consacrée à l’empereur Akbar (1542-1605, r. 1556-1605), présente la vision du pouvoir politique à l’époque moghole (le persan s’était imposé depuis le sultanat de Delhi (1206-1555) comme la lingua franca et la langue du gouvernement, de l’administration et de l’islam officiel en Inde du Nord). Quant aux poèmes de dévotion à Krishna du saint poète hindou Surdas (seconde moitié du xvie siècle), composés en braj (vieux hindi littéraire occidental), et à ceux du mystique musulman Bullhe Shah (c. 1680-1750), écrits dans le panjabi dialectalement mixte typique des poètes soufis du Panjab, ils témoignent de formes de relation au divin inconnues en occident. L’article contextualise ces trois ouvrages et en présente le contenu, avant de mettre en lumière ce en quoi ces trois ensembles de textes peuvent intéresser les sciences sociales des religions. À cette fin, il revient de manière synthétique sur des questions de  statut des langues, de jeux d’échelles ainsi que de dynamiques et de pratiques des groupes religieux, en liaison avec des formes de pouvoir et d’autorité.

The text entitled Śivbhūṣan or Śivrājbhūṇaṇ (henceforth Shivrajbhushan) by Bhūṣaṇ Tripāṭhī (henceforth Bhushan) (1613-1715) which is the basis of the analysis held in the book, is a poem produced within the courtly literary culture of Braj language. The latter is part of the Hindi literary tradition. Shivrajbhushan is an example of the rītigranth (‘treatise on method’) literary genre.

Along with the attempt to define the value of the work and the pragmatic dimension of the literary expression of court literary culture of Braj language, the problem of history in the indigenous intellectual tradition of the Indian subcontinent was taken into account.
The basis for addressing this problem are multiple judgments, especially belonging to the political (19th century) and academic (19th and first half of the 20th century) discourses, on the alleged lack of history in India. As one may suppose, such judgments arise form the lack of clear (native Indian) categories that would be equivalent to the Western notion of history. The cases of acceptance of this type of judgments and changing ways of defence against them constitute in the book the main point of departure: 1) for an attempt to conceptualise the forms of recording the past which would be equivalent and equal to the traditional Western „history”; 2) a characterisation of the specific form of history of which Bhushan's poem is an example.
Bhushan's oeuvre is one of the few—known to the scholarship—examples of works of the courtly literary culture of Braj language composed in the Deccan, far from the geographical range of those languages which are classified today within the literary tradition of Hindi.

The analysis of the poem and the historical context in which it has been produced indicate that Bhushan's work forms an important element within the discourse of power of its time and place. It provides arguments that a significant part of the literary expression was an essential branch, and perhaps even a core, of the discourse of power. However, the uniqueness of this form of history lies in the fact that its medium is a poetic-rhetorical text, as multidimensional as is the whole literary culture within which it has been created. Close reading and analysis of the poem allow to assume that the specific functions of legitimisation of power and recording of the past are strengthened and emphasised with the help of the sophisticated form and the refined convention. The poetry operating on different levels of transtextual references and using multidimensional semantic or figurative messages must have been aimed at reaching various audiences—and in a variety of ways—depending on the competence, specificity of the environment or the sensitivity of the recipient.
If narrative history is a form of appropriation of the past, Bhushan's poem, although it does not reveal the narrative structures, can be perceived as a planned and institutionally sanctioned form of such appropriation. It must be borne in mind that Bhushan created above all the knowledge of history of his times, i.e. the knowledge that was still in statu nascendi. As the one who created poetic images (i.e. functional equivalents of what is narrative in traditional history of the West), he must have aimed at constructing a framework for collective, still unformed memory. What must have been crucial in the process of its shaping, was the practice of repetitive performances, during which the strength of the sound-rhythmic associations and the correspondence between the structures of the form and the convention of the genre had to manifest itself with particular intensity.
Reading the poem in the context of other traditional representations and concepts and the analysis of the significance of various elements of the imaginary world of religion and myth—exploited by the poet—disclose the presence of discourse of power in the content of the work. The poetic images of Shivaji’s fame, his strength or energy, his ability to protect the earth or the subjects, the ability to feed, his wealth, or generosity in the form of the magic potency of giving, are in fact reflections of a number of concepts grounded in various Indian literary traditions. The outline of the royal extravaganza in Bhushan's poem was an important part of the aestheticization of power. It has been used to build an image consistent with the traditional Indian concept of kingship (S. rājadharma). In the historical context of Shivaji’s political ambition, the commission of such poem on the eve of the royal consecration should be viewed as an important part of a large-scale, costly enterprise of legitimisation of his rule in accordance with the orthodox social order (S. varṇāśramadharma).
The work is dominated by the „heroic taste” (vīra rasa), it lacks clear references to the private life of the ruler, which seem to be the effect of deliberate omissions. There is no room for some of the typologies from the Sanskrit kāvya poetry often aplied by other rīti poets. All this indicates a purposeful attempt to adjust the formal aspects of the oeuvre to the circumstances and conditions in which it has been created, or finally to the functions it was supposed to fulfill. In the pre-colonial era, in a world with a well-developed manuscript culture, probably coupled with the practice of public performance, and in which print technology has not yet been widespread, poetry seems to be this form of  „writing” which is much more durable and far more communicative than e.g. prose. Under such conditions, the „historian” needed to use or adapt various existing means of literary expression to the planned or entrusted task. Bhushan successfully used—in an extremely skilful way—the available immanent poetics the application of which was probably a conditio sine qua non of gaining the necessary authority. If indeed, as postulated by V. N. Rao, D. Shulman and S. Subrahmanyam (2001), „each community writes history in the mode that is dominant in its own literary practice” the features of Bhushan's work presented in the book should be considered as an argument confirming their thesis. It turns out that not only the style, but also the rītigranth genre of poetry, seemingly rigid or—also seemingly—significantly limiting the range of content that it can transmit, in the hands or mouth of Bhushan, the poet of rīti literary stream, becomes flexible and capacious. A hyperbole, figures of „delight”, figures in which the cause is due to effect, or in which the comparans and the comparandum interchange their functions or characterise each other, or a number of other figural conventions, serve the aesthetic function of the literature. However, thanks to the skilful combination of motifs and other appropriate transtextual references, those figural conventions become means of constructing images that serve highly pragmatical purposes. The analysis of Shivrajbhushan poem, observed ways of adapting the form to non-literary functions, provide a strong argument for the pragmatic character of at least a part of the courtly literary culture of Braj language.
A literary work, particularly if it is an example of high-style poetry, is always a work of art, even if it is to be understood in terms of professional craft. Rītigranth genre served primarily the aesthetic functions. However, it has been significantly adapted to the complex discourse that clearly dominated the content of the work.
The analysis of Bhushan's allows to conclude that poetry created within the courtly literary culture of Braj language can be functional, within its cultural ecology, as both—expositio rerum gestarum and a broader reflection on the past. Not only it exposes, but also explains, directing the recipient to such an assessment of events that could serve the patron's political interests. Neither Bhushan can be called a historiographer, nor his poetic work of art can be named history-writing in the most common traditional sense that arises from Western intellectual traditions. But this literary culture did not arise out of those traditions in which both categories—historian and historiography existed. The literary culture under consideration had its own forms of recording the past. Their recognition can be regarded as an important contribution to the political, social and cultural reconstruction of the regional history of the Indian subcontinent.

Kuir Singh’s Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das is a mid-to-late eighteenth century text written in Punjabi-Braj that relates life stories of Guru Gobind Singh in the form of historical poetry. This paper will undertake a comparative reading of this text in relation to two others in the same genre--the Bachittar Nāṭak, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh and dated to the late 17th century, and Sainapati’s Gur Sobhā, completed ca. 1708--in their portrayal of an important battle widely narrated in Sikh history: the battle of Bhangani (dated to 1688). This paper will illustrate how Kuir Singh's Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das interacts both formally and thematically with other gurbilās texts and the larger genre of Hindi or Brajbhasha historical poetry. A close analysis of ways in which the vocabulary of martiality and power is articulated in these three gurbilās texts reveals how historical circumstances in the highly militarized eighteenth century shaped the modes and content of historical representation in the gurbilās at different points in time. Such inquiry also allows us to reflect on the category of historical poetry and on how to locate gurbilās literature beyond a Sikh world. Framing gurbilās literature in relation to Hindi or Brajbhasha historical literature rather than constraining it to the exclusive context of Sikh and Punjabi literature has the potential to significantly enrich our understanding of early modern North India but also to open up to a rich world of shared political and cultural imaginaries.

Short Abstract

This paper examines how the notion of court or darbar is articulated in a mid-to-late eighteenth century Braj-Punjabi text with the goal of providing a case study on how courtly life at the periphery of imperial contexts was articulated in relation to the “religious” and the “secular”.

Long Abstract

Based on recent scholarship engaging with the idea of court in late Mughal and sub-imperial contexts, this paper examines how the notion of court or darbar is articulated in the context of Kuir Singh's Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das, a mid-to-late eighteenth century text written in Braj-Punjabi that relates life stories of Guru Gobind Singh in the form of historical poetry. The implications of the concept of court — whose political function has been predominantly emphasized in scholarship about Sikh courts — can be interpreted in different ways and do not translate the more textured concept of darbar which is best rendered by notions such as "gathering" and "audience" rather than "court" alone (Murphy, 2012). The concept of darbar can imply the presence of a formal institution held in power by a sovereign figure, as is suggested by "court," or another kind of social formation, such as Fenech argues, "a group of disciples surrounding a charismatic religious figure." (Fenech, 2013). In relation to Guru Gobind Singh's court, for instance, both senses may apply. The status of the "court" in the Sikh context therefore is still open to debate. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to present a case study of how the notion of court or darbar is articulated in a regional context. On the other hand, it illustrates how the complexity of the idea of court or darbar in Sikh contexts allows us to interrogate further the relationship between the categories of secular and religious in early modern India.