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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  MĪR SAYYID MANJHAN SHAĀRĪ RĀJGĪRĪ

  Madhumālatī

  An Indian Sufi Romance

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  ADITYA BEHL and SIMON WEIGHTMAN

  With SHYAM MANOHAR PANDEY

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  MADHUMĀLATĪ

  MĪR SAYYID MANJHAN RĀJGIRĪ’S father was Sayyid Muḥammad ‘Alī Manjhan, who was in turn the son of Sayyid Muḥammad Chakkan of Jaunpur. His mother was Bībī Khunja Daulat, the daughter of the renowned Shaikh Muḥammad Qāzin ‘Alā, who, although reared in both the Mādarī and Chishtī Sufi traditions, later proved to be one of the principal exponents of the way in Bihar. He was therefore born and brought up in the very centre of Sufism in Bihar at what was probably its most active and influential period. His own Shaikh was no less than Shaikh Muḥammad Ġhau Gvāliyārī (d. 1563), one of the major spiritual figures of his age, and Manjhan himself was an authorized teaching shaikh at some point in his life. We know that he was a courtier at the court of Islām Shāh Sūr where he was already a well-established poet. He says in his poem he began to write Madhumālatī in 1545. Apart from these few slender details nothing else is known of Manjhan other than his poetry, of which only Madhumālatī is extant.

  ADITYA BEHL teaches in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He translates fiction and poetry from Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi into English and is the author of a book on Sufi poetry entitled Shadows of Paradise on Earth: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379-1545, and the editor of The Penguin New Writing in India (1994).

  SIMON WEIGHTMAN is the former Head of the Department of the Study of Religions at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Working mainly in Persian, Hindi, and Sanskrit, he is the author of Hinduism in the Village Setting (1976); Teach Yourself Hindi (1989)—with R. Snell; Mysticism and the Metaphor of Energies (2000); and numerous research papers. He edited The Traveller’s Literary Companion to the Indian Subcontinent (1992).

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology

  MADHUMĀLATĪ

  Appendix: The Symmetry of Madhumālatī by Simon Weightman

  Explanatory Notes

  For Mujeeb Husain Rizvi

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE process of collaborative translation, and of bringing to completion a long project, has necessarily involved many people since its inception. Since we think of academia as a community of friends, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the generosity of the friends and scholars who have encouraged and helped us along the way. Our first expressions of gratitude must go to two senior scholars who kindly assisted us at early stages of this project: Dr Shyam Manohar Pandey of the University of Naples, and Dr Mujeeb Husain Rizvi of Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. Dr Pandey, the doyen of Hindi scholars of the Sufi romances, generously collaborated with Simon Weightman to produce the first rough prose translation of the Madhumālatī; his contributions as co-author are recognized on the title-page of this volume. Dr Rizvi enthusiastically shared his knowledge of the Hindavī Sufi romances with us, helping Aditya Behl to check the printed edition of the text line by line against a manuscript held in the Rampur Raza Library. We dedicate this book to him as a mark of our affection and respect.

  A word about the division of intellectual labour is also in order here. The current blank verse translation was composed by Aditya Behl from his own initial verse translation, Simon Weightman’s prose translation, and the manuscript and printed editions of the text. This was subsequently checked line by line against Manjhan’s Hindavī verses by Simon Weightman. In addition, Aditya Behl’s assistants Sean Pue, Saba Waheed, and Shabana Khan helped with the research for the Introduction, both in Berkeley and in London, and commented on early drafts of the verse translation. In her capacity as graduate research assistant, Adrienne Copithorne painstakingly did the research for some of the factual notes to the text and composed clear and elegant explanations for the unfamiliar customs and terms that occur in Manjhan’s poem. Our gratitude to all these assistants is heartfelt; without their help, the Madhumālatī would have been a much poorer work in its English incarnation. The financial provision for these invaluable aides came from the University of California at Berkeley; we are obliged to the University for supporting our work materially. Aditya Behl’s class on Indian Romances at Berkeley read a penultimate version of the draft translation and were the proverbial intelligent general readers who prompted explanations
of the aesthetic resonances and cultural meanings of the poem.

  In addition, a number of friends, colleagues, and students generously took time from their busy lives to read drafts of the introduction, notes, and translation. We are much indebted to Lawrence Cohen, Wendy Doniger, Maya Fisher, Robert Goldman, Linda Hess, Padmanabh Jaini, Vijay Pinch, and Frances Pritchett for responding to all or part of the volume. A special debt of gratitude is owed to the late A. K. Ramanujan, who encouraged us to produce a verse translation that recreated the poetic form of the original text. We are also grateful to Simon Digby for his support and knowledgeable guidance at crucial moments. The sympathetic and generous response to our text from friends and scholars has revivified in our minds the Sanskrit notion of the sahdaya or sensitive reader. We are beholden to the late Akbar Ali Khan Arshizada of the Rampur Raza Library for allowing us to have access to the Rampur manuscript of the Madhumālatī, and to the staff of the Bharat Kala Bhavan for allowing Aditya Behl to consult the Benares manuscripts of the text. The Philadelphia Museum of Art graciously allowed us to use a leaf from their Gulshan-i‘Ishq manuscript for the cover. Judith Luna of Oxford University Press has been an enthusiastic and skilled editor; she has enriched this volume through her interest and efforts. Finally, our sincere thanks to all those who provided warm and considerate hospitality, moral support, and insightful direction at important junctures: Naureen Butt, A. W. Azhar Dehlavi, Yasmin, Shahid, and Mehreen Hosain, the Countess Catherine Raczynska, Jameela Siddiqi, Micaela Soar, Veena Taneja, and the late Begum Sakina of Rampur. Our families have loyally and lovingly stood by us throughout the long period it took us to complete this work; without them, none of this would have been possible.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE Madhumālatī (Jasminum grandiflorum, ‘Night-flowering Jasmine’) is a mystical Indian romance composed in AD 1545, here translated for the first time into a western language. Shaikh Mīr Sayyid Manjhan Rājgīrī, the author, was a Sufi of the order. The Sufis have been termed the ‘mystics’ of Islam, and Sufism its ‘mystical dimension’.1 A Sufi, a mystic or spiritual seeker, would, through his initiation to a particular Shaikh, a spiritual master and teacher, become affiliated to a particular spiritual lineage or chain (silsilah). The lineages, organized around links between Sufi masters and their disciples, focused on prayer, fasting, asceticism, and cultivating the self through music and poetry to attain nearness to Allah. The Shaārīs were an order founded in India in the fifteenth century by Shaikh ‘Abdullāh Shaār. Manjhan was the disciple of a major Shaikh, Muḥammad Ġhau Gvāliyārī (d. 1563), and the silsilah was powerful and popular at the time Manjhan wrote his romance.2 Manjhan’s name means simply ‘the middle brother’, the midpoint in a series in Hindavaī between Chuan (the little one) and Buhan (the eldest one). Manjhan’s birthplace Rajgir is in the present-day State of Bihar, not far from Patna in northern India, and the poem itself is written in Awadhi or eastern Hindavaī. Along with Maithili, Awadhi has remained a major literary dialect of the spoken language of northern and eastern India (‘Bhākhā’) since the days of the Delhi sultanate.

  Manjhan’s poem belongs to that moment in Indian history when the success of the empire established by the early Mughal rulers Bābur and Humāyūn was not yet a historical certainty. Northern and eastern India, the territory of Hindustan, was occupied by a number of Afghan warlords and Rajput lineages newly demonstrating their martial prowess and attempting to carve out territories for themselves after the demise of the regional sultanates of Delhi and Jaunpur. The Sūr Afghāns from Bihar seized power after their military leader, the warlord Sher Shāh, had defeated the Mughal emperor Humāyūn and forced him to flee to Iran in 1540.3 During the short Afghan interregnum, Sher Shāh Sūr set up an administrative and military structure that was later to prove useful to the Mughal emperors. He was killed in 1545, on the battlements of the massive fort at Kalinjar, when the base of a cannon exploded towards Sher Shāh rather than away from him. The date is given by a chronogram in Persian, z’ātish murd (‘he died by fire’), an event to which Manjhan alludes when giving the date at which he began his poem.

  Sher Shāh was succeeded by his son Islām Shāh—also called Salīm Shāh—whom Manjhan praises in his prologue as the king of the time. It is as a poet in residence at Islām Shāh’s cultured and multilingual court that we have the only historical description of our author Manjhan. He is mentioned in the Afsānah-i Shāhān (‘Tale of the Kings’), a chronicle of life in Afghan times that has come to us in the form of the family lore of a Bihari Afghan Shaikh of the early seventeenth century:

  Wherever he [Islām Shāh] happened to be, he kept himself surrounded by accomplished scholars and poets. Kiosks [khūshak] were set up, scented with ghālliā [a compound of musk, ambergris, camphor, and oil of ben-nuts*], and provided with betel leaves. Men like Mīr Sayyid Manjhan, the author of Madhumālatī, Shāh Muḥammad Farmūlī and his younger brother, Mūsan, Sūrdās and many other learned scholars and poets assembled there and poems in Arabic, Persian and Hindavī were recited.4

  This rich and interactive mixture of vernacular and classical or, in Sheldon Pollock’s phrase, ‘cosmopolitan’5 languages was part of a court-sponsored aesthetic culture. The Turkish and Afghan courts of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries fostered the growth of regional literary, musical, and artistic identities. Poets at these courts forged a distinctively Indian Islamic aesthetic culture using models and elements from Persian and Arabic literary and religious traditions as well as from Sanskrit and Indian regional languages.

  The historical agents who were part of this Indian Islamic literary culture were, however, not just the courtiers and kings of the Delhi sultanate and the Afghan kingdoms that followed in its wake. They were also disciples in Sufi orders, guided by shaikhs who set themselves up as commanding spiritual jurisdiction (vilāyat) over different parts of the territory of Hindustan. The army of prayer (lashkar-i du‘ā), as it is sometimes called, led by these shaikhs formed one dominant cultural force during the period. Sufi shaikhs played at being kingmakers, and established themselves at a calculated distance from royal courts in hospices (khānaqāhs). Here they trained disciples to attain nearness to Allah by teaching them spiritual exercises and cultivating their taste for things spiritual (zauq) through a ritually controlled exposure to music and poetry. They also wrote romances in Hindavī that describe the ascetic quest of the hero towards the revelatory beauty of a heroine (or God) by linking mortification, fasting, and prayer with a female object of desire. Drawing on the local language of ascetic practice, they made their hero into a yogi, while the heroine is a beautiful Indian woman. Their sensuous romances were recited in different contexts, including royal courts and Sufi hospices, and these diverse contexts for reception each provide us with protocols of interpretation for the poetry. Kings were celebrated in the prologues of the genre as ideal readers sensitive to the multiple resonances of poetry. In the Sufi hospice, the erotic attributes of the heroine and the seductive descriptions of love-play found in the genre were understood logocentrically as referring ultimately to God rather than to a worldly beloved.

  I. The Formation of a Literary Genre

  Amīr Khusrau, the celebrated poet who died in Delhi in 1325, famed both for his contributions to Indian music and to Hindavī and Persian poetry, was a disciple and close friend of the great Chishti Shaikh Niām al-dīn Auliyā’.6 Although it is certain that he composed poetry in Hindavī to Maḥbūb-i Ilāhī (‘The Beloved of Allah’), as the Chishtī Shaikh was affectionately known, no early written manuscripts survive that testify to Khusrau’s literary creativity in the spoken language of Hindustan. The only verses that are available to us come through the oral transmission of generations of singers at Sufi shrines (qawwāls), as well as through one eighteenth-century manuscript containing Khusrau’s Hindavī riddles and punning verses.7 The first surviving longer composition in Hindavī is the Cāndayān, the romance of Lorik and Cāndā penned by Maulānā Dā’ūd in 1379. Maulānā
Dā’ūd was a highly placed courtier in the retinue of Sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tuġhlaq, and wrote the poem in attendance at the provincial court of Dalmau in Awadh. His immediate patron was Malik Mubārak, the nobleman assigned to Awadh as the muq or governor of the province (iq).

  Maulānā Dā’ūd was also a disciple of Shaikh Zain al-dīn Chishtī, the nephew of Shaikh Naīr al-dīn Maḥmūd ‘Chirāġh-i Dihlī’ (‘The Lamp of Delhi’), the successor to Shaikh Niām al-dān Auliyā”. Shaikh Zain al-dīn was the caretaker of the shrine in Delhi, but his competition with Sayyid Muhammad ‘Gesūdarāz’ (‘Long Locks’), his uncle’s prize pupil, led to a dispute that ended in the interment of his uncle’s spiritually charged material relics (tabarrukāt) with the body of the great Shaikh. The rivalry was part of a frequent pattern of competition in which the lineal descendants of Sufi shaikhs disagreed with their spiritual disciples over the succession. Possession of the tabar-rukāt was often the key to making any claims to authority.8 Shaikh Zain al-dīn took care of the shrine in Delhi after the death of Shaikh Nasīr al-dīn Maḥmūd and the departure of Sayyid Muḥammad Gesūdarāz on his spiritual conquest of the Deccan. He also instructed disciples, amongst whom was the Hindavī poet Maulānā Dā’ūd.

  The generic model that Maulānā Dā’ūd created in the Cāndāyan is a composite one, and one which can best be seen as the textual record of the historical interaction of the Chishtī Sufis with Sanskritic, Persian, and regional religious and literary traditions. In his creative engagement with Indian and Persian literary models and conventions, Dā’ūd takes topoi and narrative motifs from diverse sources and refits them into a framework adapted from the Persian masnavī.9 Chief among the conventions taken from Persian are the elaborate theoretical prologues that frame these romances within the metaphysics of an Islamic godhead reinscribed in a local language as well as within courtly and Sufi institutional settings with their distinct yet interlinked protocols of reception. The central aesthetic value or linchpin of Dā’ūd’s literary creation, however, is a uniquely Indian poetics of rasa, the ‘juice’ or ‘flavour’ of a literary text, poem, or play. Along with the Hindavī words kāma, ‘desire’, and prema, ‘love’, Dā’ūd uses the aesthetics of rasa to link the narrative pleasure of listening to love-stories with the erotics of union with an impossibly distant transcendent God. His distinctive literary formula also contains elements taken from Indian regional traditions such as the bārahmāsā, the rural songs describing the twelve months of separation from one’s beloved.10