Region, Politics and Literary Culture: Reflections from Mithila in the Long 15th Century

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of region as they figure in certain literary texts of the medieval and early modern north India across diverse linguistic archives. The idea is to look at and beyond how these compositions understood and represented the region. What were the constituent factors of the region, and how do they manifest themselves? As an imagined, lived, constituted and contested idea, what are the varying set of traits associated with regions? Is it possible to make a repertoire of such traits outside of contemporary and temporally-spatially specific discourses available within particular literary cultures? No less important is the question of how modern historians might fruitfully relate to, and deploy, the fraught category while researching any aspect of pre-modern past, and not just while dealing with local/regional/vernacular. The paper argues that the question of what constitutes region and what constitutes a grander totality, of which a region is but a part, is a matter of contesting claims to power that are settled as much in the domain of cultural representations and resources as in actual political might.

Keywords:

• Region
• vernacular
• imperium
• Jaunpur
• Mithila

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. One of the more eloquent and early expositions to this effect was formulated by B.D.Chattopadhyaya in his presidential address to Indian History Congress in 1983. See Chattopadhyaya, ‘Political Processes and the Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India: Problems of Perspective’, Presidential Address, Ancient India Section, Indian History Congress, 44th Session. (Reproduced in The State in India, 1000-1700, ed., H.Kulke, 195-232.)’.

2. For the geographers’ common sense, see Ashok Dutt & Allen G. Noble, ‘The Culture of India in Spatial Perspective’, in idem, eds, India: Cultural Patterns and Processes, New York: Routledge, 2018 (First published, Westview Press: 1982), p. 3. Dutt and Noble were responding here to Schwartzberg’s famous classification of regions as instituted, denoted, generic, etc. See Joseph Schwartzberg, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of South Asian Regions and Regionalism’, in Regions and Regionalism in South Asian Studies: An Exploratory Study, edited by Robert I. Crane, Durham, Duke University Press, 1973, p. 90.

3. Doreen Massey, For Space, London: Sage, 2005, p. 76.

4. Interesting and rich historiography has emerged in the last one and a half decades that seek to chronicle the forging of regions or the complex character of specific politico-cultural units of space. See for example, Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat 1200-1500, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010; Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia, eds, The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010; Jyoti G. Balachandran, Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, 1400-1650, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020; Roy S. Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World: Identity, Society and Politics in the Early Modern World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

5. See Mahābhārata, 2: 23-29, cited in Sheldon Pollock, Language of the Gods in the World of the Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, p. 226.

6. See Pollock, Language of the Gods, p. 246.

7. Dineshchandra Sircar, ‘Copper-Plate Grants from Bihar’, Epigraphia Indica, vol. XXXV, pt. II, 1963, pp. 134-35.

8. Ibid, p. 137.

9. See, for example, Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Death of Sanskrit’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 43, no. 2 (2001), pp. 392-426; for further details see Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 20-24.

10. Gayatoṇḍe, Gajananashastri, ed. Śrī Skandapurāṇa, Sahyādrikhaṇḍa. For an interesting discussion of the specific context in which the reference to Maithila community occurs, see Anshuman Pandey, ‘Recasting the Brahmin in Medieval Mithila’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 2014.

11. For a very brief discussion on this issue, see Jha, ‘Vidyapati: itihaskaron ki pratiksha mein’, pp. 228-29. Also see, Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, p. 114-15.

12. This was the broad pattern followed in standard ‘Histories of India’ published between the 1940s and 1960s. See for example, Majumdar, The History and Culture of the Indian People, vol. 6, Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1960.

13. For an interesting discussion of the problems and instabilities inherent in such relativistic imagining of the region, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Afterword. On Region and Nation’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), vol. 10, 2014, pp. 1-10.

14. Hermann Kulke, ‘The Early and the Imperial Kingdom: A Processural Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India’, in The State in India, 1000-1700, edited by, Kulke. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Paperback edition, 1997, pp. 233-62. For the essay that seems to have ‘inspired’ the idea of the ‘integrative state model’, see Chattopadhyaya, ‘Political Processes and the Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India’.

15. S. Nagaraju, ‘Emergence of Regional Identity and Beginnings of Vernacular Literature: A Case Study of Telugu’, Social Scientist, (special issue on Literary History, Region and Nation in South Asia), vol. 23, nos. 10-12, pp. 8-23.

16. Pollock’s works are easily accessible and too well known to bear repetition or even detailed referencing. For the latter, and for a critical review of his ideas on the issue at hand, see Jha, A Political History of Literature, pp. 50-57.

17. Thus, Maithils (literally, the inhabitants of Mithila) are counted among the most learned today in popular imagination. This is an astounding identification mark for a region that has consistently been among those with lowest levels of literacy rate in India. The image persists primarily because the word ‘Maithila’ often is used to refer to those expatriate Brahmins of the region who for historical reasons have done relatively well in careers (bureaucracy, engineering, medical sciences, academics, etc.) that are the most common conduits for upward mobility among the middle classes.

18. The Sharqi domain was one of the several sovereign states that fragmented out of the Delhi Sultanate in the second half of the fourteenth century.

19. He seems to have received patronage, at different points of time, from various chiefs including a queen, Viśvāsa Devi. However, it is unclear if these chieftains had, in the physical sense of the word, a proper court.

20. Vidyapati, Kīrttilatā, edited by V. Shrivastav, Patna: Bihar Rashtra Bhasha Parishad, 1983, pp. 54-56.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 61.

23. The metre shifts from chapada to gītikā chanda, the latter being very useful for vigorous and celebratory renditions in heroic mode. See, Jha, A Political History of Literature, pp. 209, 213.

24. There should be no doubt that Vidyapati was fully sensitive to the different registers of the ‘other worldly time’ and ‘this worldly time’. In his Sanskrit treatise on nīti (a code of political ethics) and manliness Puruṣaparīkṣā, the seed story itself flags the issue: a minister tries to instruct his king in appreciating various categories of desirable qualities in a man, and offers examples of characters like Hariścandra, Partha, and Yuddhisṭhira. The king points out that these heroes are from a different era, and hence their times and truths were different. The minister goes on to give examples from this era [kaliyuga], thus telling stories about historical characters like Vikramāditya, Chandragupta, Bhoja, and Alauddin Khilji. See Vidyapati, Puruṣaparīkṣā, edited by S. Jha ‘Suman’, Patna: Maithili Akademi, 1988, pp. 2-6.

25. Though the author himself does not mention it anywhere, it is widely believed that Vidyapati also accompanied the sons of his erstwhile patron to Jaunpur. The source of this belief is probably the quality of his account of the city and court of Jaunpur, which creates the impression of an eyewitness testimony.

26. For a detailed discussion of this aspect of Kīrttilatā, see Jha, A Political History of Literature, pp. 213-20.

27. Vidyapati, Kīrttilatā, p. 70.

28. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

29. Ibid., pp. 74-75.

30. Ibid., pp. 82-83.

31. Ibid., p. 75.

32. Ibid., p. 89.

33. Ibid., p. 73.

34. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

35. The clever play of what appears to be a willful juxtaposition of Persian and Sanskrit words is lost in translation. This is how it reads in original: ajja ucchava ajja kallāna/ ajja sudina sumuhutta/ ajj mā-e majhu putta jā-ia/ ajja punna purisattha/ pātisāha pāposa pā-ia. Ibid., p. 98.

36. Ibid., p. 106.

37. For the idea of region as part of a totality, see Romila Thapar, ‘Regional History with Reference to the Konkan’, in idem, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 109-122.

38. See Caṇḍeśvara, Rājanītiratnākara, edited by V. Gairola and T. Jha, Varanasi: Chowkhamba Vidyabhavan, 1970, p. 5.

39. See Udayarāja, Rājavinodamahākāvyam, edited by G.N. Bahura. Jaipur: Rajasthan Purātan Granthmālā, 1956. For an interesting discussion of the Sanskrit text as a panegyric to the ‘Muslim’ sultan, see Aparna Kapadia, ‘The Last Cakravartin? The Gujarat Sultan as “Universal King” in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry’. The Medieval History Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (2013), pp. 63-88.

40. I.H. Siddiqui, ‘Introduction’, in Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui, Waqi‘at-e Mushtaqui, translated by I.H. Siddiqui, New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research and Northern Book Centre, 1993, p. xvi.

41. Khwaja Nizamuddin Ahmad, The Tabaqāt-i Akbarī, (A History of India from the early Musalmān Invasions to the Thirty-sixth Year of the Reign of Akbar), vol. 1, translated by B.De, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927, p. iv.

42. Ibid., pp. vi-vii.

43. Abul Fazl, Akbarnamah, [The History of Akbar], edited and translated by Wheeler M. Thackston, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006, part II, p. 479.

44. For an interesting discussion of Akbar’s trusted chronicler Abul Fazl’s conceptualization of the country of Hind, see Athar Ali, ‘The Evolution of the Perception of India: Akbar and Abu’l Fazl’, Social Scientist, vol. 24, No. 1/3 (1996), pp. 80-88.

45. Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020, p. 59.

46. Ibid., p. 136.

47. Ibid, p. 130. Asif insists, however, that ‘Babur uses badshah to mean Muslim rulers’. See footnote no. 90 in ibid., p. 252. Yet, the context of the cited passage suggests that he was deploying the term badshah to emphasize the sovereign and superior character of the position of badshah as against only the rajas and rauts. This is the sense in which, for example, the Vijayanagar ruler Kṛṣṇadevarāi also used the term ‘Sultan’ [among Hindu kings]’ in his inscriptions. See Philip Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4 (1996), pp. 851-80.

48. Linguist Tsuyoshi Nara in his meticulous analysis of the various historical aspects of Avahaṭṭha argued that ‘Avahaṭṭa is the developed literary form which was used by and for the mass of the people roughly from the 5^th-6^th century A.D. to early 15^th century in the Indo-Āryan speaking area. It was nearest to the deśī bhāṣā (‘the country speech’) termed by the earlier grammarians such as Purushottam and Hemacandra.’ See Tsuyoshi Nara, Avahaṭṭha and Comparative Vocabulary of New Indo-Aryan Languages, Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1979, p. 7.

49. Vidyapati, Kīrttilatā, p. 47.

50. See Abdul Rahman, Sandeśarāsaka, edited by C.M. Mayrhofer. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1998, p. 2.

51. Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 57, no. 1 (1998), pp. 6-37.

52. In a comparable though very different context today: social and political formations so objectively apart from each other (in scale and character) as Bhutan and Luxembourg on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other rightfully claim their place within the precincts of the United Nations – primarily as nation-states. At least notionally, their claims stand on identical grounds. The stability of each nation state, big and small, derives from an equilibrium of power obtaining in a particular place at a given moment. Historically, the contingent and transient character of these ‘equilibriums of power’ are perpetually adjusting themselves in tune with changing circumstances. The older nation-states are breaking up, or (less frequently) coming together to give birth to new ones, practically all the time. Is there a cue here for historians trying to figure out how exactly to understand and define the ‘region’ or its other, whatever that might be?.