Hindavi vernacular poetry

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A prince hears a heroine described and is undone. He has not seen her; the report alone has opened a wound that nothing in the visible world will close, and so he leaves his kingdom and rides into forests and across oceans toward a face he knows only by rumor, losing everything he had in order to reach the one thing he never possessed. Read as a story, this is the oldest shape in Indian narrative: the quest-romance, with its ogres and talking parrots, its kingdoms won and burned. Read as the poets who wrote it intended — and as their prologues openly instruct the reader to read — it is something else entirely. The prince is the soul, the unseen beloved is God, and the impossible journey is the discipline of the path. Hindavi vernacular poetry is the body of romance in which those two readings were held to be true at once, neither dissolving into the other: a courtly adventure that is also, surface for surface, a map of the soul’s ascent.

Laurak and Chanda rest on their journey to a trysting place, a leaf from an early sixteenth-century manuscript of the Chandayana, the earliest of the Hindavi Sufi romances — Brooklyn Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The name marks a language and a moment. Hindavi — the speech of Hind — is the early literary register of the North Indian vernacular that would later branch into Hindi and Urdu, written in this corpus in its eastern, Awadhi form. Between roughly the close of the fourteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth, Indian Sufis composed in that register a sequence of long love-stories in rhymed verse whose signature is so distinct that scholarship has given it a name of its own: the premākhyān, the love-narrative. Each follows one architecture. A hero is seized by longing for a heroine he has never met; he renounces his settled life and undertakes a journey of separation, ordeal, and eventual union; and every stage of that journey answers to a stage of the seeker’s progress toward the divine. The conventions are those of the Indian folk tale and the Persian narrative poem married together, but the burden they carry is the Sufi doctrine of ishq — that passionate love, even love kindled by a mortal face, can be schooled until it becomes love of God.

The double surface

What sets the premākhyān apart from both the folk romance it borrows and the mystical treatise it serves is its refusal to choose between them. The poems do not encode a secret meaning beneath a disposable cover; they assert that the cover is true and the meaning is true and that the one is the vehicle of the other. The love story is meant to be loved as a love story — its grief is real grief, its reunion real joy — precisely so that the soul, moved by it, can be carried into the second reading without ever being lectured. This is the genre’s central wager, and the poets stated it plainly in their own prologues rather than leaving it to later commentators. The most explicit key belongs to the Padmāvat. There the poet sets out, in his own voice, the correspondence the reader is to keep in mind: the hero Ratan Sen is the human soul; the heroine, the Sinhala princess Padmāvatī, is wisdom, the discerning intelligence; the fortress-city of Chittor is the human body; and the besieging sultan, the historical Alauddin Khalji, is māyā, the illusion that storms the body to seize what it cannot understand. A rival queen, Nāgmatī, stands for the world and its entanglements, the one to whom the soul that binds itself cannot be saved. The romance does not need this gloss to be read as romance. With it, the siege of a Rajput citadel becomes the soul’s defense of itself against unknowing.

This is the discipline of double reading that the wider tradition calls allegorical exegesis, turned from a method of interpreting received scripture into a method of composing new fiction. The premākhyān is allegory built forward rather than read backward: the symbolic scheme is laid into the poem at the moment of writing, declared at the threshold, and then allowed to disappear into a story good enough to be enjoyed for itself. The poets’ confidence that an audience would follow them through both registers rested on the existing habits of their listeners, for whom the parrot who carries a message between lovers and the soul that carries a longing toward God were not distant metaphors but neighboring idioms in a single devotional culture.

Queen Nāgmatī questions her parrot, a folio from an illustrated manuscript of Jayasi’s Padmāvat, c. 1750; the talking parrot who carries word of the unseen beloved is a recurring figure of the genre — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The corpus, in order

The tradition can be read as a single conversation conducted across a century and a half, each poet writing with the others in view. Its earliest survivor is the Candāyan of Maulana Daud, composed in Awadhi in 1379, late in the fourteenth century — a work that many historians of Hindi literature treat as the threshold of written literature in the language itself, the point at which the vernacular first carries a sustained literary romance. Daud took his plot not from a book but from the air around him: the Candāyan versifies the oral epic of Prince Lorik and the heroine Candā (the Laur-Chandā cycle), a folk romance sung across Awadh, Bundelkhand, and the western Gangetic plain. He was a Sufi of the Chishti order, a disciple in the line of Shaikh Zainuddin, who himself followed Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Delhi, the last of the great early Chishti masters of the capital — so that the genre is born inside the order that, of all the Sufi paths in India, was most at home in Indian song and most willing to let the vernacular carry the weight of the path.

A page from an illustrated Laur-Chanda (Chandayana) manuscript, c. 1450–75, in pre-Mughal style — Bharat Kala Bhavan, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A second generation widened the form. Shaikh Qutban Suhrawardi, attached to the brilliant court-in-exile of Husain Shah Sharqi at Jaunpur, composed the Mirigāvatī — the tale of the magic doe — in 1503, framing it openly as an initiation into mystical practice for his disciples; a prince pursues a doe who is a woman who is the divine, through a landscape of transformations that double as trials of the soul. The genre’s most famous work followed a generation later. The Padmāvat of Malik Muhammad Jayasi, completed around 1540, sets its allegory upon the legendary siege of Chittor — the assault of Alauddin Khalji on the Rajput fortress and its queen Padmini — and ends in jauhar, the self-immolation of the women of the citadel, which the poem reads as fanā, the annihilation of the self in the fire of love by which it becomes one with the Beloved. Five years after Jayasi, in 1545, Mir Sayyid Manjhan Shattari Rajgiri — a Sufi of the Shattari order rather than the Chishti — composed the Madhumālatī, the tale of Prince Manohar and the princess whose name means night-flowering jasmine, the most architecturally controlled of the romances, its every episode keyed to a station on the way. That the line ran through more than one Sufi order, and across the courts of Delhi, Jaunpur, and the provincial sultanates, is itself part of the point: the premākhyān was not the property of a single lineage but a shared literary instrument that Indian Sufism as a whole had learned to play.

Persian inheritance, Indian body

The premākhyān is the offspring of two literatures that met in the poets who wrote it. Its outer frame and its prosodic ambition descend from the Persian masnavi, the long narrative poem in rhyming couplets that Sufi poets of the Iranian world had already made the great vehicle of mystical storytelling — the form in which Nizami of Ganja (1141–1209) gave the love of Layla and Majnun its enduring shape, and in which Attar of Nishapur sent his birds across seven valleys toward a king who turns out to be their own reflection. The Hindavi poets knew this inheritance and claimed it; the convention of love-in-separation as the engine of the soul, the beloved as the unattainable divine, the journey as discipline — all of it came down through the Persian poetic mysticism that fed the assemblies of their own order.

But they did not write in Persian, and they did not write Persian poems. The premākhyān adopts Indian meters — the dohā and the caupāī, the couplet and the quatrain of vernacular verse — and pours into them the furniture of Indian storytelling: the seasons of separation sung in the bārahmāsā, the woman’s twelve-month lament; the gardens and monsoons and demon-guarded cities of the Sanskrit and folk romance; the catalog of the heroine’s beauty drawn limb by limb in the manner of the classical mahākāvya. The result is neither a translated Persian poem nor a Sufi treatise in disguise but a genuinely new thing: an Islamic mystical vision composed in the body of Indian narrative, speaking to listeners in the language and images of their own country. This indigenization is the heart of what the genre accomplished — the demonstration that the inward dimension of Islam, the discipline the Arabic tradition calls tasawwuf, could be carried whole inside a Hindavi love-song without ceasing to be itself.

What the romances revised

For most of the twentieth century the Hindavi premākhyāns sat at the margins of literary history, read where they were read at all as charming curiosities or as evidence for the diction of early Hindi. The recovery of the genre as a major witness to the religious history of South Asia belongs largely to two bodies of scholarship. Aditya Behl, who spent some twenty years on the corpus before his death in 2009, argued in Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545 — completed and published posthumously in 2012 — that these romances constitute the earliest sustained attempt to render an Islamic vision in an Indian idiom, an indigenization of Islamic literature accomplished not by argument or conquest but by storytelling. Ramya Sreenivasan, tracing the long afterlife of the Padmini legend in The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen (2007), showed how Jayasi’s Sufi romance was the first telling of a story that Rajput bards, colonial administrators, and nationalist historians would each refashion in turn, every age finding in the queen of Chittor the past it required.

What this scholarship has used the romances to revise is the older picture of how Islam settled into the subcontinent — the picture of two sealed systems, Hindu and Muslim, meeting at a hard edge. The premākhyāns show instead a long negotiation conducted inside a shared poetic language: the same vernacular, the same meters, many of the same images as the Hindu devotional poets of the bhakti movement who were composing in the same decades and the same country. The Chishti teaching that human love can be trained toward God ran parallel, across a confessional border, to the bhakti conviction that the soul reaches the divine through love rather than ritual; and the two devotional cultures drew freely on one another’s stock of images even where their theologies did not touch. The poet Jayasi could open an Islamic allegory with an invocation that any Hindu listener would recognize, and mean both at once.

The kinship is closest, and the distinction most instructive, with the Sant poetry of the formless God and with Kabir above all, whose verses move in the same linguistic world and whose followers kept his songs alive across the same plain. The kinship is unmistakable and has drawn much scholarly attention. But it is resemblance across a frontier, not identity. The structural substrate of Sant poetry is, on the dominant scholarly reading, Nāth-yogic — the inner channels and the unstruck sound, the inverted discipline of withdrawal from all outward form — with Sufi influence visible chiefly in the insistence on a single God. The premākhyān, by contrast, is Sufi to its foundation, an exercise in the Chishti training of ishq, even as it speaks in Indian images. The two currents borrowed without merging; the question of where genuine borrowing ends and mere shared idiom begins is one that careful study keeps open rather than collapsing, and the romances are among its best evidence. The student of comparative mysticism finds here a caution as much as an invitation: a common vocabulary of love and longing running through traditions that decline to become one.

The poem and its readings

The premākhyān has proved unusually resistant to being read in only one key, and the most searching recent scholarship has made that resistance its subject. Thomas de Bruijn’s study of the Padmāvat, Ruby in the Dust (2012), reads Jayasi’s poem not as a cipher with a single solution but as a work of deliberate semantic polyphony, addressed at once to the poet’s spiritual brethren and to his worldly patrons, carrying its mystical, courtly, and political meanings together without ranking them. To force the poem into the modern grid of Hindu versus Muslim identity, on this reading, is to lose precisely the doubleness the poet built. The allegorical key Jayasi himself supplied is not a lock that closes the poem but one of several true readings the surface was designed to bear — which is why the Padmāvat could become, in the centuries after him, both a Sufi scripture of the soul and a Rajput epic of honor, the same poem read in two directions by two communities who each found themselves in it.

The pavilion known as Padmini’s Palace within the fort of Chittor in Rajasthan, the citadel whose legendary siege the Padmāvat reads at once as a historical event and as the soul’s defense of the body — photograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The afterlife of the genre runs along the same grain. The romances were copied, illustrated in the painting ateliers of the sultanates and the Mughal court, and sung; the Candāyan survives in luxurious illuminated manuscripts, and the Padmāvat generated translations and adaptations into Persian and Urdu across four centuries. The verse of these poems also fed the devotional music of the order that bred them, the qawwali repertoire of Persian, Hindavi, and Punjabi song through which the Chishti assemblies kindled the heart; and the metaphysics of the unity of being that Ibn Arabi bequeathed to later Sufism gave the later poets a vocabulary for the union toward which their lovers strove. The textual record itself is uneven — several of the romances survive in few manuscripts, their datings argued over, their authors known mostly from what they say of themselves in their own prologues — so that the genre is reconstructed as much from the poems’ internal testimony as from any external archive.

To read these works as their poets asked is to watch a doctrine and a love-story occupy the same words without strain. The hero who renounces his throne for a face he has only heard described is a prince and is the soul; the fortress that falls is a fortress and is the body; the fire that takes the heroine is a queen’s death and is the self’s annihilation in love. The poets of the premākhyān grasped, and proved across a century and a half of practice, that the deepest claims of a mystical path could be made to travel inside an ordinary tale of longing, in the language people actually spoke.

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