Rethinking the Regional in Rājamatī’s World: Placemaking, Patronage and the Performance of Polity in Chanderi, c. 1479

Abstract

A bilingual inscription on a stepwell built in 1479 on the suburbs of Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh presents a rare biography of its patron Rājamatī, a female entertainer (bhāṭiṇi), who is said to have received extraordinary largesse from the Sultans of the seven regions of her time. In this gift economy, Rājamatī is not only the beneficiary of generous rewards but herself the benefactor of eminent men arriving from different regions. The rhetoric turns on her patronage of a water facility for travellers, portrayed as an honourable act of public piety (dānadharma) but also as an act of political performance (rājadharma), thus inscribing the influence of a provincial woman in the Persianate world of Hindustan. While such inscriptions constitute valuable documents of social history, they tend to be viewed as philological texts filtered for “credible facts” and “fantastic claims”. Instead, by reading the epigraph in its architectural landscape, I show how this discursive text shaped, and was shaped by, everyday places of interaction, a perspective that affords new insights into the practices of placemaking, patronage and performance through which a female entertainer acquired prestige and visibility in the broader cultural landscape of fifteenth-century North India.

Keywords:

• regionalism
• performance
• placemaking
• courtesans
• stepwell
• Chanderi

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Muzaffar Ansari who first guided me to Rajmati Baoli in August 2016 and 2022, to Daud Ali and Ayesha Sheth for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper in a workshop organised at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2022, to Michael Willis for his insights and encouragement, and to Dominic Goodall for improving my reading of the inscription.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Key proponents of such continuity include B.D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Manu V. Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

2. As noted by Vishwa Mohan Jha, “Settlement, Society and Polity in Early Medieval Rural India”, Indian Historical Review, 20, 1-2 (1994), 64-65. The discontinuities have been explored by Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010).

3. The scholarship is vast, but see Karine Schomer, Joan L. Erdman, Deryck O. Lodrick, and Lloyd I. Rudolph, eds., The Idea of Rajasthan, Explorations in Regional Identity (Delhi: Manohar & American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994); Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Anne Feldhaus, Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir (London: Hurst & Co, 2004); Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); Aparna Kapadia, In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020).

4. The toponym Chanderīdeśa appears in inscriptions on numerous memorial pillars, for which see Michael Willis, Inscriptions of Gopakṣetra: Materials for the History of Central India (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 18, 29, 34, 40.

5. Pushpa Prasad, “A Curious Step-well Stone Inscription of V.S. 1535,” U.P. Historical Review: Journal of History, 4 (1987), 72–81, 74.

6. The inscription was first noticed by M.B. Garde, Annual Report of the Archaeological Department, Gwalior State, for the year Samvat 1980, Year 1924-25 (Gwalior: Alijah Darbar Press, 1925), 12, 34, listed with a summary in the Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy for the Year 1966-67, 34, and for the Year 1993-94, 42 and published with an edition and translation by Prasad, “A Curious Step-well Stone Inscription”, whose transcript I was able to improve by reading the inscription in situ.

7. Samira Sheikh, “Languages of Public Piety: Bilingual Inscriptions from Gujarat, C. 1390–1538,” in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 198-206; and Luther Obrock, “Uddhara’s World: Geographies of Piety and Trade in Sultanate South Asia”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, (2020), 1-23.

8. This village is known as Singhpur Chālda to distinguish it from another village of the same name north of Chanderi, for which see M.B. Garde, Annual Report of the Archaeological Department, Gwalior State, 1924-25 (Gwalior: Alijah Darbar Press, 1925), 34.

9. The geomorphology is discussed in more detail by Gérard Fussman, et al, Naissance et déclin d’une qasba: Chanderi, du xe au xviiie siècle (Paris: De Boccard, 2003), 37-40.

10. Reginald Craufuird Sterndale, “Campaigning in Central India in 1859, with a Description of the Fort and Town of Chanderi,” in Naissance et déclin d’une qasba: Chanderi, du xe au xviiie siècle, ed. Gérard Fussman, Denis Matringe, Éric Ollivier, Françoise Pirot (Paris: De Boccard, 2003), 224-231.

11. David Leatherbarrow, “Is Landscape Architecture?,” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 15.3 (2011), 208-215.

12. Jutta Jain-Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat in Art-Historical Perspective (1981); Kirit Mankodi, The Queen’s Stepwell at Patan (Bombay: Franco-Indian Research, 1991); and Julia Hegewald, Water Architecture in South Asia (2002), 155-167.

13. Both inscriptions are listed in the Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy for the Year 1993-94, ed. M.N Katti and M.D. Sampath (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1999), p. 32, appendix B, nos. 158-159.

14. Monks named Guṇasundara are attested in several Jain sources, for which, see the Jaina Prosopography Database « https://jaina-prosopography.org/ »

15. See Appendix, line 29. Prasad, “A Curious Step-well Stone Inscription,” 79 translated rājamaṃdir as “royal temple”, but here it is better understood as “royal palace” because the main object being qualified is ghar “house”. The Hindavi usage is comparable to the Persian aivān “lofty palace” and khāna “house” in the ʿĀliya Bāolī inscription of 1499.

16. S.A. Rahim and Z.A. Desai, “Inscriptions of the Sultans of Malwa,” Epigraphia Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement, 1964 (1966), 74-75. For the mahal and bāolī, see Fussman, et al, Chanderi, 111; pl. 94, fig. 186, 188.

17. These building materials were said to have been reused for dwellings in the village, according to an old family residing in Singhpur.

18. “Three miles to the north-east of Chanderi stands one of the Mahals built by Bundela Rajas of Chanderi. It is picturesquely situated in the midst of charming mountain scenery overlooking a lake. But for its pleasant site it is in no way remarkable. It has been repaired and converted into a shooting box or rest-house by the order of the late Maharaja Scindia.” Garde, Annual Report of the Archaeological Department, Gwalior State, 1924-25, 12.

19. Yves Porter, “Jardins Pré-Moghols,” in Jardins d‘Orient, Res Orientales, III, ed. R. Gyselen (Paris: Groupe pour l’Étude de la Civilisation du Moyen-Orient, 1991), 37–43.

20. On the Jahāz Maḥal, see G. Yazdani, Mandū: The City of Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), 63–67, and Yves Porter and Gérard Degeorge, The Glory of the Sultans: Islamic Architecture in India (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 190–191.

21. Fussman, et al., Chanderi, 141-178.

22. Fussman, et al., Chanderi, 310.

23. Sheikh, “Languages of Public Piety,” 187-210.

24. Rahim and Desai, “Inscriptions of the Sultans of Malwa,” 63-71.

25. Kirit Mankodi, “The Stepwell as Gift of Water: Danadharma,” in The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples: Materiality, Social History and Practice, eds. Himanshu Prabha Ray, Salila Kulshreshtha, Uthara Suvrathan (Delhi: Routledge, 2022), 111-125.

26. Fussman, et al., Chanderi, 310.

27. Rahim and Desai, “Inscriptions of the Sultans of Malwa,” 64, v. 5.

28. The relationship between climatic variation and social change in South Asia is explored by Sugata Ray, “Hydroaesthetics in the Little Ice Age: Theology, Artistic Cultures and Environmental Transformation in Early Modern Braj, c. 1560–70,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40, 1 (2016), 1-23, and Anne Casile, “Climatic Variation and Society in Medieval South Asia: Unexplored Threads of History and Archaeology of Mandu,” The Medieval History Journal, 24, 1–2 (2021): 56–91.

29. Paleoclimatic data from the medieval city of Chandravati, Rajasthan, provides some support for a period of weak monsoon precipitation corresponding to the Little Ice Age (c. 1350–1850); see Pokharia, et al., “Variable Monsoons.”

30. This is reflected in the patronage of stepwells in neighbouring villages, as at Naderi and Ranod where stepwells were built in 1469 and 1470 by local Hindu men during the rule of Sher Khān at Chanderi; Willis, Inscriptions, 36.

31. Fussman, Chanderi, 313.

32. Mankodi, “The Stepwell as Gift of Water,” 111-25.

33. On a memorial pillar in the village of Pachrai, dated 1282 (vikrama saṃvat 1339) in the reign of Gopāladeva; see A.K. Singh & N.K. Jain, Inscriptions of Shivpuri: Material for the History of Gopādri Region, 1 (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2018), 123-24, line 5: caṃderīdesyātya.

34. On a memorial pillar from the village of Terahi, dated 1378 (vikrama saṃvat 1435): suritana Gayasadīna te gaḍhayo Caṃderidese; see Singh & Jain, Inscriptions of Shivpuri, 166, no. 147.

35. Sunil Kumar, Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate: AD 1192-1286 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 99-100: shahr wa qaṣaba wa atrāf/ muẓāfāt.

36. See Ziauddin Desai, “The Chanderi Inscription of ‘Alau’d-Din Khalji,” Epigraphia Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement 1968 (1969), 7-8; and S.A. Rahim, “A Unique Inscription of Malwa Prince Qadr Khan from Chanderi,” Epigraphia Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement 1972 (1980), 50.

37. Pushpa Prasad, Sanskrit Inscriptions of the Delhi Sultanate (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 204.

38. Annette Schmiedchen, “The Ceremony of Tulāpuruṣa: The Purāṇic Concept and the Epigraphic Evidence,” in Script and Image: Papers on Art and Epigraphy, Papers of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, eds. Adalbert J. Gail, Gerd J. R. Mevissen, and Richard Salomon (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006), 145-184.

39. Ronald Inden, “The Ceremony of the Great Gift (Mahādāna): Structure and Historical Context in Indian Ritual and Society”, in Asie du Sud: Traditions et changements, eds. M. Gaborieau & A. Thorner (Paris: CNRS, 1979), 131-136.

40. Upendra Nath Day, Medieval Malwa: A Political and Cultural History, 1401–1562 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1965), 367-392.

41. Mian Muhammad Saeed, The Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur: A Political and Cultural History (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1972), 111112.

42. Ziauddin Desai, Malfuz Literature as a Source of Political, Social & Cultural History of Gujarat & Rajasthan (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1991), 45.

43. See Sikandar b. Muḥamad ʿurf Manjhū b. Akbar, The Mirat-i-Sikandari: A History of Gujarat from the Inception of the Dynasty of the Sultans of Gujarat to the Conquest of Gujarat by Akbar, ed. S.C. Misra and M.L. Rahman (Baroda: The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1961), 86, 89. For the mosque and mausoleum of Makhdūmā-ye Jahān “Bībī Mughalī” in Ahmadabad, see M.A. Chaghatai, Muslim Monuments of Ahmedabad through their Inscriptions (Pune: Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, 1942), 53-54. I thank Dr. Fatima Quraishi for these references.

44. Khwājah Niẓāmuddīn Aḥmad, Ṭabaqāt-i-Akbarī, trans. Brajendranath De and Baini Prashad (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1939), vol. III, 249.

45. ʿAlī b. Maḥmūd al-Kirmānī “Shihāb Ḥakīm”, Maʾāthir-i Maḥmūdshāhī, ed. Nūr al-Ḥasan Anṣārī (Delhi: Delhi University, 1968), 34.

46. See the map of “South Asia in the Time of the Lodis, 14511526” in Joseph E. Schwartzberg, A Historical Atlas of South Asia, 2nd impression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), plate V.4, 40.

47. See Blain Auer, “Finding the Local in Islamicate History Writing in India (1200–1400 CE),” Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, vol. 74, no. 1 (2020), 117-135.

48. James Heitzman, The City in South Asia (Oxon: Routledge, 2008), 63.

49. Babur, Baburnama, ed., trans., Wheeler Thackston (London: The Folio Society, 2013), 330-331.

50. Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan – The Invention of India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 105.

51. See Ramya Srinivasan, “Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts in North India, c. 1370-1550,” in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 242–272.

52. Aparna Kapadia, “The Last Chakravartin: The Gujarati Sultan as ‘Universal King’ in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry,” The Medieval History Journal, vol. 6, no. 1 (2013), 63-88.,” and Luther Obrock, “Muslim Mahākāvyas: Sanskrit and Translation in the Sultanates,” in Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India, ed. Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, John Stratton Hawley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 58-76.

53. Mir’āt-i Sikandarī, ed. S.C. Misra and M.L. Rahman (Baroda: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1961), 222-223.

54. R.S. McGregor, Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 757 gives bhaṭinī as the “wife of a bard” (bhāṭ) and bāī as a “lady,” a respectful form of address used in Rajasthan, Gujarat and the Deccan.

55. Day, Medieval Malwa, 367-370, 391-92, 422-428.

56. Orsini and Sheikh, After Timur, 33.

57. Sreenivasan, “Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts,” 247-248.

58. Day, Medieval Malwa, 244-246; and Mir’āt-i-Sikandarī, 247.

59. Ā’in-i Akbarī, ed. H. Blochmann, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1869), 144; trans. H.S. Jarrett, vol. 3 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1894), 258; discussed in Saarthak Singh, “The Place of Performance in a Landscape of Conquest: Raja Mansingh’s akhārā in Gwalior,” South Asian History and Culture, 11:1 (2020), 92-93.

60. Mirigāvatī, trans., Aditya Behl, The Magic Doe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 131133; discussed in Singh, “Raja Mansingh’s akhārā,” 93-94.

61. Singh, “Raja Mansingh’s akhārā in Gwalior.”

62. Abd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, trans. G.S.A. Ranking, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1884), 496.

63. Āʾin-i Akbarī, ed. Blochmann, vol. 2 (1869): 138, trans., Jarrett, vol. 3 (1894): 251; Mir’āt-i Sikandarī, trans., Fazlullah Lutfullah Faridi (Dharampur: Education Society Press, 1889), 170.

64. Mirigāvatī, trans., Behl, The Magic Doe, 131–33.

65. Abu’l Fazl names 36 male musicians, but there is no mention of a single female performer among the ahl-i tarāb; see Shadab Bano, “Women Performers and Prostitutes in Medieval India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 70 (2009-2010), 256.

66. Rev. J.E. Abbott, “Bai Harir’s Inscription at Ahmadabad, A.D. 1499,” in Epigraphia Indica, vol. 4 (1896-97), 299-300.

67. A mosque standing beside the mausoleum of Bāī Ḥarīr to the west of the well is commemorated by an Arabic inscription dated 906/ 1500, now preserved at CSMVS, Mumbai. See C.R. Singhal, “An Arabic Inscription of Bā’ī Ḥarīr from Ahmadabad,” Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica (1925-26), 9-10.

68. Shadab Bano, “Women Performers and Prostitutes in Medieval India,” 255, citing Niccolao Manucci’s Storia do Mogol, trans., W. Irvine, vol. I, 189 and Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire (A.D. 1656-68), trans., V.A. Smith, 273.

69. Daud Ali, “Connected Histories? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact between Early South and Southeast Asia,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, ed. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Seva (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 5.

70. Read .

71. Read .

72. This verse is from the Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta of Bilvamangala (c.1220-1300), 2.103, ed. trans. Frances Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), 178-179. It is cited with slight variations in the Subhāṣitāvalī of Vallabhadeva (1417-67), v. 46, ed. Peter Peterson and Durgaprasad Pandit (Bombay: Education Society Press, Byculla, 1886), 7.

73. This is a reference to the early association of Gaṇeśa with a class of possessing demons called vināyaka, before his standard identification as the remover of obstacles; see Judith Törzsök, “Three Chapters of Śaiva Material Added to the Earliest Known Recension of the Skandapurāṇa,” in Origin and Growth of the Purāṇic Text Corpus, With Special Reference to the Skandapurāṇa, ed. Hans T. Bakker (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004), 17-39, 21.

74. The image of moon faces and starry eyes draws on Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa, 6.34; see The Raghupañcikā of Vallabhadeva: Being the Earliest Commentary on the Raghuvaṃśa of Kālidāsa, ed. Dominic Goodall and Harunaga Isaacson, vol. 1 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2003).

75. Read .

76. Read .

77. The moon is the masculine friend of white-water lilies.

78. Read .

79. Read .

80. Read .

81. Read .

82. The wording is perhaps intended to call to the reader’s mind the figure of Cārudatta, by whom things are given freely, in the Mṛcchakaṭikā.

83. Read for , “generally” or “rather”.

84. Read , shadow.

85. (P. arẓa-dāsht) is a petition, request, entreaty; Śyāmasundar Dās, revised edition (Varanasi: Nāgarī Pracāriṇī Sabhā, 1965–1975), 308; McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, 54.

86. The letters are damaged but my reading suggests a reference to a terrible conflict in relation to the padishah of some province (), implying that Sher Khān maintains his ground as the lord of Chanderi.

87. (P. , damāmah) is a large drum, and by extension, noise or pomp; McGregor, Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, 479.

88. The title of high dignitaries under the Bahmani Sultans was held by a number of individuals, notably Khwāja-i Jahān “Turk” (Malik Shāh, d. 1465–66) who was in the service of Humāyūn Shāh (r.1458–61) and Ahmad Shah III (1461–63). See H.K. Sherwani and P.M. Joshi (eds.), History of Medieval Deccan (1295–1724), vol. 1, Mainly Political and Military Aspects (Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1973), 177–183.

89. There is some ambiguity here in the use of the pronoun which may refer to the Garden Palace as belonging to Rājamatī, or to her son Rāmacandra, or even to his brother Veṇīdās mentioned just before.

90. McGregor, 173 gives (H. karānā) as “the marriage of a widow (esp. with the former husband’s younger brother).” Does this imply that this Bībūḍoḍu is the younger brother of Rājamatī’s former husband?

91. Read .

92. Read The following letters at the end of this line are lost.

93. The last five lines of the inscription (32–36) display pronounced irregularities in script that remain to be deciphered and interpreted in their entirety.