It was also in the long fifteenth century that across much of South Asia vernacular, spoken languages appeared in written form, for both documentary and expressive purposes. This ‘vernacular revolution’, however, did not displace India’s older, transregional literary traditions, Sanskrit and Persian, but occurred alongside and in dialogue with them.
Like the emergence of regional and Rajput identities, the appearance of vernacular literatures was associated with the Delhi sultanate’s diminished status following Timur’s invasion. As Delhi’s authority receded, former imperial governors, lesser regional chiefs and local warlords all asserted themselves politically. Larger players such as the sultans of Bengal, Jaunpur, Gujarat or Malwa could do this by patronizing imposing works of architecture or by maintaining substantial numbers of armed retainers. But smaller chiefs or warlords, possessing fewer resources, had fewer options. Just to survive amidst a patchwork of mutually hostile states meant spending much of their limited resources on recruiting mercenaries from India’s military labour market. On the other hand, what small but ambitious warlords could feasibly manage was to build up large households and attain local renown by patronizing the best and the brightest literati they could find. These would be poets, singers or bards who composed and propagated literary works intended for as wide a circulation as possible within their patron’s realm. But because such states might be of modest size, the literature was likely to be composed in the spoken language and dialect specific to a state’s sovereign domain. These could be songs extolling their patron’s generosity or power, genealogies, biographies, hagiographies, popular narratives dedicated to a political patron or, most commonly, vernacular adaptations either of Persian classical genres such as romance literature, or of Sanskrit classical genres such as courtly epics. In creative ways, then, India’s two transregional literary traditions were effectively reinvented in ways that could be intelligible in the more fragmented political and social world that had emerged in the wake of Timur’s invasion.66
As an illustration of this process, ever since 1394 north India’s Tomar lineage had controlled the fort of Gwalior, 320 kilometres south of Delhi. But by the fifteenth century that fort’s ruler, Dungar Singh Tomar (r. 1427–59), had to face pressure from two Tughluq successor states that coveted this strategically located fort – the Saiyid sultans of Delhi to the north, and the Khalaji sultans of Malwa to the south. The beleaguered Dungar Singh managed to keep the two powers at bay by paying tribute to them both. He also patronized abridged and modified vernacular versions of India’s great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana – the former in 1435 and the latter in 1443. These were the first extant versions of the great epics to appear in the dialect of Hindavi later known as Brajbhasha, referring to the dialect of Braj, that is, the region of the upper Ganges in western Uttar Pradesh associated with the hero and Hindu god Krishna.67 Composed by the poet Vishnudas, the epics appear to have been originally sung at Dungar Singh’s court, where they were written down and, like other vernacular works of the period, tailored to suit the values and ambitions of their patron. Thus, the hero of Vishnudas’s Mahabharata is not Arjuna or Yudhishthira as in the Sanskrit epic, but the muscular Bhima – an appropriate model for an aspiring but hard-pressed king. Similarly, in his version of the Ramayana, abridged to only a sixth of the Sanskrit original, Vishnudas narrates episodes that stress royal splendour, courageous combat, and one of the most common themes of fifteenth century north India: renewing or breaking former alliances and forging new ones.68
Another illustration of India’s literary vitality in the long fifteenth century is seen in the Hindavi Sufi romance, or premakhyan (love story).69 Composed in eastern India between the late fourteenth and mid sixteenth centuries, these stories narrate a princely hero’s quest for romantic love, a metaphor for the quest for union with God.70 Although the poets of this genre were thoroughly familiar with classic Persian romance literature by poets such as Nizami Ganjavi (d. 1209), they were also immersed in local Hindavi culture and its own traditions of storytelling. For a poet such as Muhammad Jayasi (d. 1542), India was home, and his references to stepwells, temples, yogis, Jains, white-clad sadhus, Śiva-worshippers and so on all served to valorize that home.71 The patrons of this literature, moreover, were Turkish or Afghan local rulers or regional warlords who had become transformed by the Indian culture that surrounded them.72 Herein lies the contrast between a premakhyan like Jayasi’s Padmavat (1540) and courtly narratives of the early Delhi sultanate era. Whereas poets of that time had represented north India as a stage for enacting triumphal narratives of conquest, and indigenous warrior clans as infidels to be conquered and subdued, Jayasi reverses this opposition. In narrating ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji’s conquest of the fort of Chittor (1303), the poet identifies himself not with the victorious sultan but with the doomed Indians who resisted the invading Turks. For him, the Indians’ annihilation at Chittor becomes a metaphor for the Sufis’ ultimate mystical quest, namely annihilation of the self (fana’) by way of achieving an abiding presence of God.73
Owing to their need for official records, regional courts also stimulated the use of written vernacular languages. In 1513 the sultan of Malwa was issuing public decrees in Hindavi. In some states, local administration was conducted on a bilingual basis, with records kept in both Persian and the local vernacular, which in north India might be Hindavi, written in nagari, the script of Sanskrit. By the early 1500s, the Lodi Afghans of Delhi were issuing bilingual documents in Persian and Hindavi.74 In the Deccan (see Chapter Four), ruling authorities of the sultanates of Golconda (1497–1687) and Bijapur (1490–1686) realized that the most efficient way of managing their judicial and revenue bureaucracies was to employ the same class of skilled, literate administrators that had been serving the Deccan’s ruling authorities for centuries. In Golconda these were mostly Brahmins. Whereas that state’s royal edicts of the sixteenth century had been issued in Persian only, by the early seventeenth century such documents were typically issued in both Persian and Telugu. By the end of the seventeenth century, they were issued entirely in Telugu, with brief Persian summaries appearing only on their reverse sides.75 Moreover, because the state’s sovereign territory roughly coincided with Telugu-speaking Telangana and the Andhra coast, the kingdom’s ruling classes tended to imagine their sovereign realm as a Telugu one, and the rulers themselves as Telugu sultans.76 Consequently, they vigorously patronized the production of Telugu literature, just as the sultans of Bengal, whose sovereign territory likewise coincided roughly with a Bengali-speaking region, did the production of Bengali literature. Sultan Ibrahim Qutb Shah (r. 1550–80) was known in Telugu sources as Ibharama cakravarti (‘emperor Ibrahim’), a ruler so thoroughly steeped in Telugu aesthetics that he would sit, as one court poet put it, ‘floating on waves of bliss’ listening to the Mahabharata recited to him in its classical Telugu version.77
The same was true in the western Deccan. Early in their history, the sultans of Bijapur began collecting revenue and administering justice in written Marathi, not Persian. The change came abruptly in 1535, when Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah I (r. 1534–58) ordered that all public revenue and judicial records, formerly recorded in Persian, be kept in Marathi and placed under Brahmin management.78 Royal decrees (farmans) were still written in Persian, but vernacular Marathi was used for orders (khurdkhats) issued by crown bureaucrats or landholders, letters (misalis) issued by mid-level bureaucrats or police chiefs, letters of assurance (qaul-namas) issued by higher authorities to lower ones, and judgments (mahzars) issued by judicial assemblies.79 In particular, courts administered or acknowledged by the state became arenas for repeated face-to-face disputations. A single case might be taken from court to court, from locale to locale and from level to level along the socio-political spectrum, in each case involving diverse peoples of various castes, classes and religions. Since the language in which local cases were litigated was vernacular Marathi, the very act of engaging in public disputation had the deeper effect of forging a larger, discursive community around that language, both as spoken in the courts and as recorded by them.80 Regional states such as the sultanate of Bijapur thus created a political and judicial framework that in turn allowed for the emergence of a public, vernacular space.
Further contributing to the creation of such a space was the spread of paper-making technology, which Persianized Turks had introduced to north India from Central Asia in the thirteenth century; with the growth of the Delhi sultanate in the fourteenth century it diffused across South Asia. By the time that Timur sacked Delhi in 1398–9, it had already reached that sultanate’s provinces, so that in the fifteenth century, when they had become regional states, this revolutionary technology was already available for use. Around 1590 the Bengali poet Mukundaram noted the presence of whole communities of Muslim paper-makers (kagaji) in Bengali cities.81 The link between paper production and Indo-Persianate governance is suggested by the name of an ancient town called Kaghdhipura (‘paper town’), located very near Daulatabad, the oldest centre of Persianate government in the Deccan.82 Almost everywhere it went, paper-making technology gradually displaced other media such as copperplate, palm leaf or stone. It is true that earlier courts such as the Chalukyas (974–1190) and the Yadavas (1175–1318) had patronized the writing of vernacular Marathi and Kannada inscriptions and expository treatises, and that as early as the tenth century both languages were used for documentary purposes.83 But given the cumbersome and expensive technology of communication in those earlier, pre-paper centuries, such texts – even when committed to memory and transmitted orally – did not circulate far beyond elite groups.84 Paper, by contrast, being cheaper to produce and easier to handle, enjoyed a much greater velocity of movement and a far wider circulation than any other media then in use. This allowed it to penetrate deeper in the social order and bring greater numbers of people belonging to different social classes into closer communication both with each other and with the state. It is revealing that the ordinary words for ‘paper’ and ‘pen’ in many South Asian vernacular tongues are derived from two Perso-Arabic words, kaghaz and qalam respectively, suggesting not only the new technology’s path of transmission from Central Asia to South Asia, but also the deep impact that it had made on the peoples of India.
If the emergence of a public, vernacular space was stimulated by the diffusion of paper-technology and the use of local languages in regional administration, both revenue and judicial, that space also expanded as a result of forces coming ‘from below’, in the form of popular devotional movements. Although powerful waves of popular religiosity, or bhakti, can be traced as far back as sixth-century south India, in the long fifteenth century they swept across the whole of India. Because it entailed a direct encounter with the divine – unmediated by ritual, learning or priests – bhakti presented a formidable challenge to the more ritually oriented Vedic traditions preserved by Brahmin elites. Privileging personal experience over ritual, bhakti celebrated mutual companionship among fellow devotees, including both sexes and all social strata. Moved by a direct engagement with divine reality, people turned to both poetry and song, the natural vehicles of bhakti, which invariably appeared in the spoken tongues of India’s various subregions, composed by poets popularly venerated as saints.85 Writing in Hindavi, these included such powerful voices as Kabir (d. c.1518), Raidas (d. c.1520), Mirabai (d. 1557) and Surdas (d. 1573); in Bengali, Chaitanya (d. 1533); in Punjabi, Nanak (d. 1539); in Gujarati, Narsinh Mehta (d. 1488); and in Marathi, Namdev (d. 1350) and Eknath (d. 1599).86
In different ways, then, regional courts, the advent of paper-technology and the ‘bhakti public sphere’ all served to stimulate the spate of vernacular works that appeared in India’s long fifteenth century. This momentous outcome compares with a nearly simultaneous development in Europe, where vernacular literatures were beginning to displace the hegemony of Latin for both documentary and discursive purposes.