From the Interstices of History: Rethinking Regional Polity in North India and the Deccan, 14th–16th Centuries

The idea of “regions,” and the categories and denominations derived from them – whether regional states and polities, regional literatures and languages, or regional idioms and styles – would seem to be among the most natural and commonsensical heuristic devices available for those seeking to understand the past. This is so much so, in fact, that any scrutiny of the concept might, from the outset, be deemed an act of interpretive bad faith – pedantic at best or wantonly deconstructive at worst. Yet, for all their utility and familiarity, historians might also agree that the use of regional perspectives may, from different standpoints, also be seen as arbitrary, retrospective or even anachronistic. This set of essays will test the utility of the concept in relation to a time period that has been particularly singled out as one dominated by “regionalism”, where the political map of the subcontinent was seen to go through a “regional” phase and its literature and arts defined by the growth of “vernacular” idioms. What then, are the uses and limits of the concept of region in historical interpretation? The essays herein seek to shed some preliminary light on this question (and others that perhaps follow from it) from the vantage point of a sub-period in medieval history understood as being distinctively characterized by “regional developments” and/or the growth of regionalism – that is, the temporal interstice between Timur’s invasion of north India in 1398 and the founding of the Mughal polity in Delhi in 1526 – what has been called the “long fifteenth century”.¹ Northern and central India during this period were littered with small independent kingdoms that sometimes aligned with earlier geographical regions and, in other cases, were relatively new in their provenance. Because many elements of this geopolitical mosaic endured well into the early colonial period and beyond, its traces are still visible and “felt” in demographic, monumental and the rural-urban patterns across much of northern and central India, even though, as we shall see, the polities themselves have often been relegated to insignifcance and neglect.

Regions and localities are essential components to the formation of polities in all periods of Indian history. However, we may broadly distinguish between the discourses and practices that generated spatial understanding of regions by agents in diverse places (both within and beyond what is known as “South Asia” today) in pre-colonial times down to the nineteenth century on the one hand, and, on the other, in discourses and practices that constitute modern geo-political space, once again both within and beyond “South Asia”, from the period of colonialism and nationalism onwards. This chronological divide remains important because the logic and framework of modern geopolitical assumptions have, like spatial notions before them, attempted to overtake those of the past. This would seem to pose the problem of disjunctures and continuities across this temporal boundary, but the key point is that the subsumption of earlier geopolitical regions to those based on modern geopolitical space has been more complete and determinative than ever before. In earlier historical scenarios, heterogeneous notions of regional, local and universal space often co-existed, but from the nineteenth century, just as property relations and revenue space became increasingly fixed, so too did apparently universalist assumptions about political geography – first under empire and then under decolonization. Indeed, the emergence of the modern national state and the “international system”, emerging first during the powerful colonial empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then remade through decolonization in the twentieth, has been hegemonic and totalizing. There of course remain problems – disputed territories, space illegible to the modern international system, and social, spatial and geographical currents which may in the future render the common-sense world of nation-states obsolete – but the current international framework remains in every sense dominant and determinative. The modern state and the international system have cast a long shadow into the past and the conceptualization of medieval and early-modern geopolitical systems has, from its outset, been to a large extent determined by its ontology. Since the rise of Indian nationalist politics, this ontology has been deeply inscribed into re-articulated “regional” landscapes in modern India in selective ways, largely erasing or limiting pre-existing and localized conceptions of region and locality. The period under question, partly by virtue of its enduring presence through built environments and local identities across much of north and central India, has arguably seen the most erasure – understood as an “interstitial” period between moments of imperial “stability”, where “regional” polities were deemed unworthy of recuperation, and cast into the rubbish bin of history.²

The Historiography of Regional Polity

In thinking about regions, the predominant conceptualization of states in Indian historiography has been organized around the dyadic antipodes of centralizing and dispersive political tendencies. Vincent Smith, writing at the height of British imperial vision at the beginning of the twentieth century, envisioned India as a land of autochthonous centrifugal political energies that were, at different moments, more or less controlled by a putative political center. In introducing the history of India from the seventh century, Smith argued that,

Harsha’s death loosened the bonds which restrained the disruptive forces always ready to operate in India, and allowed them to produce their natural result, a medley of petty states, with ever varying boundaries, and engaged in unceasing internecine war. Such was India when first disclosed to European observation in the fourth century B.C., and such it always has been, except during the comparatively brief periods in which a vigorous central government has compelled the mutually repellent molecules of the body politic to check their gyrations and submit to the grasp of a superior controlling force. The three following chapters, which attempt to give an outline of the salient features in the bewildering annals of Indian petty states when left to their own devices for several centuries, may perhaps serve to give the reader a notion of what India always has been when released from the control of a supreme authority, and what she would be again, if the hand of the benevolent despotism which now holds her in its iron grasp should be withdrawn.³

Putting aside its imperialist rhetoric, the depiction here of subcontinental history, oscillating between periods of powerful controlling and centralizing tendencies under the aegis of local or foreign “empires” and periods of entropy or fragmentation characterized by the free reign of local or regional “petty states,” is one that historians of many different persuasions, from nationalist to Marxist, would readily accept as one of the chief dynamics of precolonial South Asian history. Medieval history was itself understood, largely adapting models from Europe, as the outcome of the collapse of the centralizing structures of earlier empires. According to early nationalist historians, the political mosaic that emerged from the seventh century set the stage for political collapse in the face of the “foreign” invasions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The nationalist scholar of this period, C. V. Vaidya, described his history of the period after Harsha’s death as a history of the “decline and downfall of the Aryan empire in India, like the immortal work of Gibbon on the decline and fall of the Roman empire.”⁴ Regional states in such modern statist narratives were either failed political experiments, or problematic local assertions. They formed the structural counterparts, either in their subordination or assertion, to the great empires which formed the real focus and fascination of colonial and nationalist historiography.

Such tendencies began to change in the 1960s and 70s when new approaches questioned various elements of earlier historiography, including its assumptions about the nature and structure of precolonial and medieval “states”, and the openly state-national or “civilizational” geographical spatial assumptions they relied upon. Anthropologists and historians began to ask a number of more pertinent questions about the long-term spatial, social and political history of the subcontinent.⁵ Integral to these studies were new theories of circulation and historical geography that moved far beyond modern geopolitical boundaries. Bernard Cohn, writing the key essay in a groundbreaking volume on the subject published in 1967, suggested that “for most of us, the conceptualization of regions contains mostly non-physical phenomena, which I might term historical, linguistic, cultural and social structural, and/or the inter-relations between these kinds of variables”.⁶ Key to Cohn’s idea here was that such regional entities were diverse, non-comparable, overlapping, and, most importantly, mutable through time. Even within a single prism, of say linguistic regional formation, substantial change was possible at both the level of practice and conceptualization. Cohn points out, for example, that the modern map of “linguistic regions” based on literary standards (rather than geographically defined dialectal contours) was a relatively recent one, reinforced by print and reform over the course of the nineteenth century, and that the linguistic map of the subcontinent in the eighteenth century, notwithstanding population movement, would have looked very different than that conceived by the States Re-organization Commission of 1955. From the vantage point of history, Cohn once again noted different types of regional formations, including nuclear, perennial, shatter zone, route area and isolate.⁷

The analytical potential of this intervention, nearly fifty years on, has still not been fully realized in medieval historiography. There has been sustained analysis of local and regional social change that has formed the basis of theories of polity. Both segmentary and processural theories of state formation, widely influential in the 1980s and 90s, began with regional historical foci.⁸ Physical geography formed the starting point for both, and accounts of the development of regional social formations were tied to questions of resource production and distribution in riparian, coastal, wet and dry land and other environmental contexts. Each also eschewed the notion of regions and regionalism as the disarticulation or fragmentation of earlier political unities, but instead saw them as historically formative – where localized developments gave rise to state systems whose fundamental logics were not determined by the spectrum of centralized/decentralized. For their part, historians of early India at the same time largely abandoned the notion of centralized administered states that once dominated Mauryan and Gupta historiography as the prehistory of fragmented and feudal polity. Romila Thapar, in her groundbreaking work on the Mauryan empire, suggested instead a nodal structure linking centers and peripheries. Its break up was thus conceived not as a “fragmentation” into smaller “successor states” but as the rise of peripheral zones whose development, while partly caused by the Mauryan presence, was predominantly local in its structure and focus – what has sometimes been called “secondary” state formation.⁹

Essential to these historiographical developments was the premise that the political and social developments in key areas of the subcontinent, from the seventh to twelfth centuries, could be seen as developments of autochthonous “regional” societies and polities. These local formations arose through interaction with pan-regional and subcontinental religious and political currents, and historians of literary and political culture have stressed a common pattern across the subcontinent which was the result of the contact between “great” and “little” traditions, between “Brahmanical” and indigenous belief systems, and between Sanskritic and local/vernacular notions of kingship.¹⁰ The results of such historical processes were nevertheless deemed regionally distinctive and seen to be determinative of later social formations and even, in some cases, later regional identities.¹¹ The idea of regional polity has remained dominant among historians despite the admission of pan-regional patterns. More recently, there have been theorizations of structural courtly and literary continuities across the subcontinent and beyond, from the early Gupta period down to the Sultanate.¹² Such interventions have not altered the historical commitment to regional perspectives, and may perhaps have deepened them. A recent survey of the period has recognized these countervailing tendencies very productively, and celebrated the “early medieval origins” of modern India.¹³

While much of this literature is an important corrective to earlier nationalist geopolitical frameworks and has made indisputable contributions to our understanding of medieval history and the legacies of the early medieval period, on the latter point it remains incomplete without parallel analysis of the substantial historical changes that took place in the second millennium. There have been a few longue durée regional histories that attempt to integrate all periods, but they remain sparse and uneven, not to mention their heavy reliance on the linguistic states of modern India.¹⁴ This deficiency in part derives from an attenuated historiography of the so-called “Sultanate period” of medieval history (1200–1500) which has received far less attention than both the “early medieval” and “Mughal” periods since the 1970s. The traditional narrative inherited from colonial and nationalist historiography set out an initial period of despotic conquest and centralized authority in northern and central India under the early Sultanate Slave, Khalji and Tughluq lineages with “Hindu opposition” in southern India taking the form of the Vijayanagara empire. The fourteenth century saw a weakening of central power from Delhi and the rise of independent “regional sultanates” – in Madurai (1335), the Deccan (1347), Bengal (1359), Malwa (1392), Jaunpur (1394), and Gujarat (1394), culminating with Timur’s sack of Delhi in 1398. The contraction of the Delhi sultanate in the fifteenth century and the rise of regional powers set the stage for the conquest of Delhi by Babur in the sixteenth, inaugurating the subcontinent’s final great pan-regional empire. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in this narrative were once again understood as an era of balkanization, and the sultanates and political formations that flourished in the period deemed fissiparous and even inconsequential in their scope and vision.

Only comparatively recently has the first half of the second millennium gained any serious reinterpretation. Sunil Kumar’s revisionist history of Ghurid polity and Barry Flood’s study of material culture and circulation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have questioned both the statist assumptions and geopolitical logic of traditional historiography of the early Sultanate, instead portraying the Ghurid polity as a politically complex and contingent formation of elites (rather than a presumed state “structure” as such) and as a polity that linked northern India in circulatory flows of goods and people with much of western Asia.¹⁵ The full implications of these groundbreaking works have not yet been realized in subsequent scholarship. An important essay by Simon Digby set the scene for rethinking developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, arguing that the provincialization of the Sultanate through the course of the century was not simply the result of a weakened center but also the outcome of settler groups, often led by Sufis, who moved into smaller towns south and east of Delhi under the aegis of the Sultanate.¹⁶ These towns eventually became seats of localized power. This model of dispersal and localization provides a new perspective on the emergence of “regional” centers. As far as the “regions” themselves are concerned, the works of Richard Eaton on Bengal, Samira Sheikh, Aparna Kapadia and Jyoti Gulati Balachandran on Gujarat, and Philip Wagoner, Richard Eaton, Emma Flatt and Pushkar Sohoni on the Deccan have done much to open up areas away from the political center of Delhi to the scrutiny of thick social history.¹⁷

Literature, Arts, Courtly Cultures

The question of language and literature has been an important element in theories of the “regional” in South Asia from the outset. The more traditional understanding had been that Sanskrit, representing the high points of Brahmanical culture in early India, became ossified by the end of the first millennium, and was gradually displaced by “vernacular” languages. The latter were seen to represent an upsurge of regional popular movements, often coupled with devotional religions, that posed themselves against the elitism of Sanskritic culture. Sheldon Pollock’s notion of a “vernacular millennium,” which he theorized following the disappearance of his “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” fundamentally challenged this model. He argued that Sanskrit was partially displaced by Persian as a new cosmopolitan language of power, but more importantly was joined by vernacular, regional languages which made themselves over on the model of Sanskrit to develop new local and regional imaginaires for literature and polity.¹⁸ This theory has had mixed reception with the most compelling critique coming, unsurprisingly, from scholars and historians of early modern India who have sought a more historically compelling genealogy for the complex linguistic/literary formations of the second millennium. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, in their landmark volume, note that the evidence seems to fit Pollock’s theory in only a single case – Kannada – while all other regions provide more variegated and complex pictures of “vernacularization” than Pollock’s theory would allow.¹⁹ To this may be added, from the vantage point of the contributors to this issue, the fact that Pollock’s theory does little to challenge, and in fact partly reinscribes, long held narratives of “regional polity” under his cryptic and unelaborated notion of “vernacular polity”. Inattention to other forms of courtly practice and discourse (literary, hagiographical, and prescriptive) beyond self-avowed literature and its theorization in Sanskrit (kāvya, sāhitya, and alaṃkāraśāstra) is partly responsible for the aporia of Pollock’s theory of the “vernacular millennium”. Orsini and Sheikh instead propose a “multilingual and multi-locational” approach to the problem of language and power, “mirroring the social forces that were active and vocal in the polities of the regional sultans and Rajput kingdoms and the religious marketplace of the time.”²⁰ This wider ambit provides a far more salubrious point of departure for the contributors to this volume than Pollock’s model.

Also important has been the recent landmark study of Pankaj Jha which has extended the approach of Orisini and Sheikh even further, through sustained textual readings of a single author and region, and been inspirational for many contributors to this volume.²¹ Focusing on three works from the oeuvre of the prolific fifteenth-century author from Mithila, Vidyapati, Jha argues that despite being situated at the geographical periphery of the political and economic worlds of northern and eastern India at the time, Mithila was nevertheless part of a geopolitically polycentric and linguistically polymorphous multilingual universe in which the “influence” between “high” literary registers, in languages like Sanskrit and Persian, and established and emergent literary traditions in “vernacular” languages was open and bi-directional. This multilingual world of the fifteenth century, according to Jha, had been long in the making, being the outcome of a longue durée tendency towards closer interactions among individuals and communities from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, starkly visible by the thirteenth century and all the more so during Vidyapati’s career. This gradual shift toward entanglement, imbrication and multilinguality was connected to the political world but was in no sense the agency of any particular state or ruler. Indeed, Jha’s focus on Mithila also questions the implicit assumption among some historians that cultural production and imperial political power were isomorphic. The impending Mughal world, often seen to be marked by a distinctive kind of cultural interaction and often attributed to the vision and genius of particular rulers, was actually just the extension of deeper cultural processes very much evident, even in peripheral and “regional” domains like Mithila, a century before Mughal rule. Jha’s work makes clear that there is no single template for understanding the relations between high and vernacular, and between localizing and centralizing tendencies of courts in the world of the fifteenth century.

The papers in this volume seek to give pause to the assumption that political developments and courtly cultures in the fifteenth century were “leading” somewhere – either to the longue durée birth of linguistic regions or to the expression of regional identities that would be subsumed within an impending Mughal imperium. They are, nevertheless, keenly interested in the “regional”, but seek instead, at different levels, to assess the diverse geo-spatial dynamics of these “regional” polities and their courts within their own terms, instead of as moments on a more or less predetermined oscillation between entropy and centralization, between part and whole, between petty state and empire. They seek to problematize geopolitical ideas and practices rather than presuppose them, in the words of Singh, to “rethink the regional not merely as a cartographic segment, but as a discursive idea staged through human thought and action.” They also maintain that the practices and voices creating regions were multivocal and contingent, obliging the historian to assess the ways in which regions became salient and visible in any particular set of historical circumstances

The methods used by the contributors to tease out these contingent meanings include what Balachandran calls circulatory “convergences,” of sufic and political discourses in the case of Gujarat or Gupta’s “connected book history” that reveals material and intellectual networks for particular authors and texts to be a milieu both local yet far reaching in its scope, as in the case of Malwa. Singh, through a close reading of a bilingual inscription by a female performer in fifteenth-century Chanderi, shows how even diverse social agents experienced and deployed spatial categories. The inscription, inscribed within a stepwell, underscores at the same time local rootedness as well as a heightened kind of cosmopolitan orientation that worked not through the erasure of the regional, but rather through a heightened consciousness of the connectivity of regions in a world of seemingly increased mobility. Sheth focuses on the royal geopolitical strategies of the Baghel kings who deployed at once an older discourse of territorially “expansive” titulature along with a realpolitik of geopolitical consolidation tending towards stability, constituted by alliances based on friendship and brotherhood that allowed them to maintain their position among the mosaic of polities across north India in their time. Finally, Sohoni argues that the polities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Deccan created a geopolitical ecumene that stretched beyond the sea, even as it was understood to be rooted in distinctive regional practices of architecture, coinage, and marital alliances, and that was in no way bound or driven by particular political entities, either “regional” or “imperial”. Each of these scholars, through their engagement with literary, political, and religious sources, with texts, manuscripts, coins, inscriptions, and buildings, show in different ways how inadequate the older framework of “regional polity” is for rethinking the long fifteenth century. They show how the region and the regional was neither a “given”, nor an anticipation of an impending imperium, but was constituted in complex and contingent ways by a variety of historical actors. These regions were deeply entangled in wider geo-political notions of connectivity and ecumene in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ayesha Sheth, who helped conceptualize and realize the conference leading to this publication, and who was instrumental at every stage in moving our collective labours to press. Thanks also go to the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for generous support necessary for our meeting in 2022.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, ‘Introduction’, in Orsini and Sheikh, eds. After Timur Left; Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 1.

2. This is manifestly clear in the almost total neglect of these regional polities, despite their persistence everywhere across the landscape and culture, in the public and officially sponsored ‘memory’ and heritage practices of the modern linguistic states in north and central India as embodied in hero statuary, road and airport naming, etc.

3. Vincent Smith, The Early History of India from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest Including the Invasion of Alexander the Great (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914) pp. 356-57.

4. C. V. Vaidya, History of Mediaeval Hindu India (Being a History of India from 600 to 1200 A.D.) 3 vols. (Poona: Oriental Book Agency, 1921), vol. 1, p. iii.

5. Key here is the volume edited by Robert Crane, Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study, Duke Southern Asian Studies Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, no. 5 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967), see esp. Introduction.

6. Bernard Cohn, ‘Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and Society,’ in Regions and Regionalism, p. 6 et passim.

7. Cohn, ‘Regions Subjective and Objective’, p. 12.

8. For the role of ‘regional’ change in the formation of segmentary states, see Burton Stein, ‘Circulation and the Historical Geography of South India,’ Journal of Asian Studies 37,1 (1977): 7-26; idem. Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (London: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Richard Fox, ed., Realm and Region in Traditional India, Duke Southern Asian Studies Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, no. 14 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977). For theories of processural polity, see Herman Kulke, ‘Royal Temple Policy and the Structure of Medieval Hindu Kingdoms’ in A. Eschemann, H. Kulke and G. C. Tripathi, eds. The Cult of Jagannatha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (Delhi, Manohar, 1978), pp.; idem. ‘The Early and Imperial Kingdom: A Processural Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India,’ in Kulke, ed., The State in India, 1000-1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 233-252; B. D. Chattopadhyaya, Political Processes and the Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India’ in B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 190-232.

9. See Romila Thapar, The Mauryas Revisited (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1987), pp. 1-31.

10. Two exemplary works treating religion are A. Eschemann, H. Kulke and G. C. Tripathi, eds. The Cult of Jagannatha and the Regional Tradition of Orissa (Delhi, Manohar, 1978) and Kunal Chakrabarti, Religious Process: The Purāṇas and the Making of a Regional Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

11. See Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press).

12. On pan-regional political institutions and practices, see Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) and on literary culture, see Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

13. See Manu Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

14. See Karine Schomer, Joan Erdman, Deryck Lordrick and Lloyd Rudolph, eds., The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity, 2 vols. (Delhi: Manohar and American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994) and Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia, eds., The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2010). For an important yet neglected monograph on a region that crosses the boundary of the thirteenth century, see Nandini Sinha Kapur, State Formation in Rajasthan: Mewar during the Seventh-Fifteenth Centuries (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002).

15. See Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate 1192-1286 (Delhi: Permanent Black 2007), and Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval Hindu-Muslim Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

16. Simon Digby, ‘Before Timur Came: Provincialization of the Delhi Sultanate through the Fourteenth Century,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, 3 (2004): 298-356.

17. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993); Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat 1200-1500 (Delhi: Oxford University Press 2010); Aparna Kapadia, In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-century Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Narrative Pasts: the Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020); Philip Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,’ Journal of Asian Studies 55, 4 (1996): 851-880; Philip Wagoner and Richard Eaton, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites in India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014); Emma Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Pushkar Sohoni, The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate: Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018).

18. See Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,’ Daedalus 127.3 (1998): 41–74; Pollock, Language of the Gods, pp. 283-436.

19. Seen Orisini and Sheikh, After Timur Left, pp. 12-15.

20. Orsini and Sheikh, After Timur Left, p. 15ff.

21. Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).