Madhumalati Read online

  Rasa itself was defined famously in Bharata’s eighth-century Sanskrit aesthetic treatise, the Nāya-Śāstra, as the juice or flavour of a poem arising from ‘the combination of the vibhāvas (sources of rasa), the anubhāvas (actions, experiential signs of rasa), and the transitory emotions (vyabhicāribhāvas)’.11 The aim of reading is to have an experience of the dominant rasa that animates the poem, and the sahdaya, or cultivated reader, feels the emotions of the parted lovers in the poem. The sahrdaya’s response is shaped by the sources of rasa depicted by the poet. These include monsoon clouds indicating the season of love, the experiential signs of love such as bodies trembling and perspiring from desire, and the transitory emotions that attend the progress of the main emotional mood of a poem: apprehension, envy, contentment, shame, joy, and so on. A reader can approach the poet’s vision and the feelings of the characters only because he is a rasika or connoisseur.

  Dā’ūd approaches these classical conventions and ideas creatively, using them to compose a text that served as a model or formula for an entire regional tradition of Indian Sufi poetry. After the Cāndyān of Maulānā Dā’ūd stands Quban’s Mirigāvatī (1503), composed at the court of Sultan usain Shāh Sharqī of Jaunpur. Although there are scattered references to two romances entitled the Paiman and the Jot Nirañjan from the early sixteenth century, these have not survived.12 The model of the Cāndāyan and the Mirigāvatī is emulated most powerfully by Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī, several poems by whom are still extant. Pre-eminent among these is the Padmāvat (1540), which tells the story of King Ratansen of Chittaur and his quest for the Princess Padmāvatī. In addition, he composed a version of the life of Krishna called the Kanhāivat, as well as a number of shorter poems. These include the Akhrāivat (‘Alphabet Poem’), an acrostic composed out of the beliefs of a millenarian group of Sufis (the Mahdavīs of Jaunpur), and the Ākhirī Kalām (‘Discourse on the Last Day’) a foreshadowing of the events of doomsday. Finally, there is the Madhumālatī (1545) of Mīr Sayyid Manjhan Rājgīrī, the Sufi attached to the court of Islām Shāh Sūrī.13 Although poets continued to compose romances on this model until the early twentieth century, they did not reproduce the formula of the two heroines or the elaborate Sufi ideology of the earlier works.14

  What is an ideal romance for the authors and audiences of the Hindavī narratives? All four poets use the same metre and form and all draw on the conventions of the Persian masnavī to frame their romances with introductory prologues. In these prologues there is first praise of God, then of Muḥammad and the first four ‘righteous’ Caliphs, then praise for the king of the time and the author’s immediate patron, then praise and thanks to the author’s spiritual guide followed by a disclaimer of the poet’s own poetic skills. The stories are set in the ambience of the court, with kings and queens, princes and princesses, handmaidens, friends and companions. There are marvellous palaces and lush gardens containing mango orchards, canals of cool running water, and picture-pavilions. Demons, heavenly nymphs, wonderful beings, and magical events all add to the imaginative allure of these works. Early in each poem an image of divine beauty is introduced: the heroine’s body is described in a formal literary set-piece called a nakh-śikh-varana (‘toe-to-head description’) in Sanskrit which parallels the sarāpā (‘head-to-foot description’) in Persian and uses the same symbolism and imagery. In the twenty verses of these set-pieces, the beloved is described from the top of her head to her legs, usually with verses alternating between emphasizing divine grace and beauty (jamāl) and divine might and majesty (jalāl). This first encounter of the lover and the beloved is treated as a way of conveying the Sufi concept of the first meeting of the soul with divinity in the phenomenal world.15 After this initial contact with the image of divine beauty, which is then taken away, the hero begins to suffer from viraha, the pain of love in separation. The stories of the romances are driven by the urge to transform this desire into a mutually fulfilling love, called prema-rasa by the poets.

  All the plots have certain formulaic elements that are drawn from earlier canons or common cultural stereotypes about gender and culture and reshaped into a distinctive formula by the Hindavī poets. These include the moment of the awakening of love through a vision, a dream, or a description of the heroine’s beauty as a divine manifestation, a convention common to both Persian and Indian romances. The hero and heroine have helpers who commonly exemplify spiritual values such as mystical absorption (sahaja) or the abstract quality of love (pemalprema). Alternatively, there are demons to fight and trials of strength, which the lovers have to pass through in order to attain each other. The necessary transformation of the hero into a yogi and his ascetic quest draws on the poetry of the Gorakhnāith panth. The ordeals on the quest for the beautiful princess and the passage to a heavenly realm are modelled on Persian spiritual quests like ‘Aār’s Conference of the Birds.16 The hero’s abandonment of a first wife in order to consummate his love with the divine heroine is a distinctive motif, and ultimately draws on the common cultural stereotype of the jealousy between co-wives (sautan) in a harem. This deserted wife then sings a bārahmāsā, a description of her suffering from the pain of love in separation in each of the twelve months of the year, which is conveyed to the hero. On hearing it, the hero takes his divine beloved and returns home with her, whereupon the two co-wives quarrel and have to be reconciled. The hero’s resolution of the strife between the co-wives, his death and the burning of both his wives on his funeral pyre uses the misogynistic stereotype of the Indian woman’s satī to signify a mystical annihilation (fanā).

  II. The Shaārī Sufi Silsilah

  The involvement of the Shaārīs in this richly creative religious and literary world began with the founder of the spiritual lineage, Shaikh ‘Abdullāh Shaār (d. 1485), who came to India from central Asia in the second half of the fifteenth century. In the competitive cultural landscape of northern India, it might have been expected that a newcomer would settle in a single place and slowly build up his following and area of spiritual influence, his vilāyat. However, ‘Abdullāh Shaār preferred a rather more martial style of public presentation. He travelled widely with a large retinue of disciples dressed in military uniforms, and, to the beat of drums, in every town or village, he demanded to know if there was anyone who wished to be shown the way to God. Inevitably the Shaikh’s claims to spiritual superiority brought him into competition with the Sufis who were prominent in the regional sultanates. Eventually, he settled down in Mandu under the patronage of Sultan hiyās al-dīn Tuhlaq and was buried there after his death.

  One of the prominent Sufis who both ignored his challenge and made disparaging remarks about the outlandish claims of newly arrived Sufis from Khurasan and Fars, was the Bengali Shaikh Muḥammad Qāin Alā, who was the maternal grandfather of our author, Manjhan. His initial hostility was overturned by a miraculous dream in which his deceased father told him his spiritual future was in the hands of Shaikh Abdullāh. He left for Mandu and waited three days outside the Shaikh’s house until, moved by his humility, the Shaikh took him on as a disciple, but only after he had promised to give up his previous methods and learn practices. Shaikh Qāin Alā (d. 1495) became Shaikh ‘Abdullāh’s principal khalīfa or successor, and took the method of spiritual practice to Bengal and eastern India. Shaikh Abdullāih Shaār forged a distinctive spiritual regimen based on fasting, asceticexercises, practices of visualization, and the Arabic letters that made up the names of Allah.

  These practices were passed down in his lineage through the successors of Shaikh Qāin ‘Alā, Shaikh uhūr ājī amīd (d. 1523) and Shaikh Abul Fah Hadīyatullāh Sarmast (d. 1539). These Shaikhs established a Shaārī presence in Bihar and had many links with local lineages such as the Firdausiīs, as well as with the rulers of Bihar. Shaikh amīd had as disciples the remarkable brothers Shaikh Muḥammad hau and Shaikh Phūl. Under him they learned the method of ikr, the esoteric science of the invocation of the names of Allah encrypted in the letters of the Arabic alphabet. T
hey also performed forty-day fasts and meditated in the caves and jungles around the town of Chunar. During this period Muḥammad hau composed the most famous work of asceticism, the Jawāhir-i Khamsah (‘Five Jewels’).17 Arranged in ‘five jewels’ that ascend from ordinary prayers to the inheritance and realization of divine truth, the work was seen as a summa of esoteric Indian Sufi practice and is commonly found in manuscript form in shrine libraries to this day.

  The third jauhar or jewel, the central part of the book, is focused on the invocation of the divine names. This mode of practice, with elaborate prescriptions for purity and directions for gaining different sorts of powers, implies a Sufi notion of the human body as the site for a divine manifestation in microcosm. Shaikh Muḥammad haūs’s account of the coming into being of all created things is encoded in the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet. In letter-mysticism, combinations of letters signified selected names of Allah in sequence as well as places in the cosmology, and each was the abbreviated code for a different practice. Apart from interior visualization, the cosmology had another application: to predict or to influence the future by calling up the angels or spiritual agents of each station in order to make them perform whatever task was desired, or to make an efficacious talisman or amulet.18 Each of the twenty-eight letters was matched with a numerical value, a name of Allah, a quality, either terrible or benevolent, a perfume or incense, an element, a zodiacal sign, a planet, a jinn, and a guardian angel. These were called up in rituals of invocation that varied with the particular goals of the seeker.

  In accordance with the order’s tradition of conquering new territory, Shaikh Muḥammad haus went to Gwalior in 1523. After three years, he had acquired a considerable following and was an acknowledged influence on the local population. This enabled him to intervene in the political and military struggle over Hindustan between the Afghan rulers and the Mughals in the 1520s. Although the received Sufi wisdom was to avoid having anything to do with kings, in sixteenth-century India Sufi lineages like the Chishtīs, the Naqshbandīs, and the Shaārīs took sides with Mughals or Afghans in their struggles for sovereignty over northern India. The Chishtīs, for example, had longstanding historical connections with local Afghan sultans and nobility and did not back the Mughals in their fight for supremacy. On the other hand, Shaikh Muḥammad hau, the poet Manjhan’s spiritual guide, was instrumental in the Mughal emperor Bābur’s capture of the fort of Gwalior from the Afghans. By passing privileged information to the leader of the Mughal forces and exhorting him to establish a token presence in the city, the Shaikh enabled Bābur’s army to seize this key strategic fortress through a covert night attack. He was rewarded with a considerable land-grant on which he built his hospice in Gwalior. His establishment became a favoured site for aristocratic patronage during the reigns of Bābur and Humāyūn. Shaikh Muḥammad hau and his brother Shaikh Phūl were so highly influential in the Mughal court that many Sufis of other lineages took affiliation in addition to their own existing connections, simply in order to acquire patronage and position.

  The emperor Humāyūn in particular was extremely interested in occult and mystical matters and was especially favourably disposed to the Shaārīs. One imperial chronicle relates that Shaikh Muḥammad hau and his brother Shaikh Phūl taught the emperor occult sciences and were very much in favour at court. Humāyūn’s younger brother Mirzā Hindāl eventually had Shaikh Phūl murdered in 1539 when the Shaikh attempted to dissuade him from making his own bid for power. fortunes suffered a further reversal when Sher Shāh Sūrī defeated Humāyūn in 1540. When Humāyūn went into exile in Iran, Manjhan cultivated the Afghan court, almost certainly with the encouragement of his spiritual guide Shaikh Muḥammad hau. The Shaikh himself, on the other hand, fled from Afghan reach to the sultanate of Gujarat, whence he conducted a secret correspondence with Humāyūn. In this way, the s had both possible outcomes covered. The author of the Madhumālatī, Shaikh Manjhan, with impressive pedigrees as the grandson of Shaikh Qāin ‘Alā and as the spiritual disciple of Shaikh Muḥammad hau, was at the very centre of the Sufi order when it was at its most vigorous and influential. When his presence was noted as a courtier at the court of Islām Shāh, it would have been both as a poet and as a Sufi Shaikh, almost certainly by then authorized to give spiritual instruction to others.

  A person wishing to set out on the spiritual path would first find a Shaikh, either one personally impressive or one belonging to the chosen Sufi lineage, who was willing and authorized to accept him or her as a pupil. Along with the authorization, ijizat, went the barakat, the grace, blessing, spiritual power which derived from the spiritual founder of the lineage and was passed from one Shaikh to another down the chain, the silsilah. Thus a lineage was a chain of blessings and authority, and the different orders were distinguished one from another by the pedigree of the Shaikhs who were members. A spiritual lineage was also known as a arīqah, a path or way, and a disciple on the path was known as a sālik, a traveller. Each lineage had its own path of spiritual training and development, although all included such spiritual practices as prayer, fasting and other privations, periods of seclusion, attendance at the Shaikh’s talks, collective and private formulaic repetitions, self-observation and self-awareness exercises. What is important for the understanding of Shaikh Manjhan’s poem is how the Shaārī arīqah differed from those of other orders.

  The Shaārīs, probably more than any other spiritual lineage, appropriated Indian yogic practices into their regimen. Among Shaikh Muḥammad hau’s many compositions is the Persian Bar al-ayāt (‘The Water of Life’), a translation of the Aakua (‘The Pool of Nectar’), a now-lost Sanskrit text on yoga.19 In accordance with the order’s competitive stance, it should come as no surprise that the Shaikh represented his efforts as liberating useful practices for cultivating spiritual awareness from the shackles of false belief. These practices included: using exercises for breath control, using yogic postures for sitting, maintaining ritual purity of place and person, assimilating the Indian yogic chakras and their tutelary deities into the Shaārī cosmology, controlling diet strictly to exclude flesh and liquor, and using certain Hindavī words in the ikr (repetition of names and attributes of Allah, often done in conjunction with physical exercises to accomplish spiritual transformation). In addition, the Shaārīs claimed their method of spiritual development to be swifter than the methods of other lineages in effecting the spiritual transformation of its disciples. ‘According to the Shaāriyya technique, the neophyte at the very beginning of his training is required to consider himself in the presence of Being and then descend step by step from the realm of Self-manifestation of the Absolute to the phenomenal world. Then step by step he re-ascends and reaches the Divine sphere, effacing all traces of the stages of ascent. In contrast to this method, the other Sufis direct their disciples to ascend step by step from the realm of humanity to Wadat al-Wujūd [the unity of all existence].’20

  Shaārī self-transformation was thus focused on realizing the human being’s link with Allah and seeing oneself as part of a larger universe that has its source in Allah and refracts the divine essence through the many veils of existence. The circular structure implied by the initial taste of jabah or mystical absorption and the eventual return to Being can be seen to have its impact on the plot-structure of the Madhumālatī. Thus, the hero Manohar (‘Heart-enchanting’) meets his divine beloved Madhumāilatī through supernatural agency, falls in love with her, is separated, and then has to climb back step by step to the joys that he first tasted in a midnight encounter. In addition, as one scholar has pointed out, ‘The Shattārs did not have to pass through the stage of fanā [evanescence] or the final stage of fanā al-fanā [extinction in evanescence]. Their intuitive perception of Allah in their own beings was permanent. This state was described as baqā al-baqā, the everlasting reintegration of the spirit with Allah. Mystics of other silsilahs were either conscious of their love for God or experienced ecstasy while the Shattars transcended these two st
ates as separate conditions producing a new combination of their own.’21 The poet Manjhan eschews the generic pattern of the two co-wives of the hero and their final annihilation on a funeral pyre. As we shall see, his romance ends with the everlasting and blissful union of the two pairs of happy lovers.

  III. The Prologue to the Story

  Despite these broad correspondences between Shaārii cosmology and poetic meaning, we should emphasize that there is no single or flat allegorical scheme to be found in the events and imagery of the story. Rather, when these works were performed in Sufi hospices and royal courts, different protocols of interpretation were used to explain the poem’s mystical or erotic meanings and allegorical moments. In the elaborate prologue to the romance, the poet establishes a set of historical and theoretical frameworks that enable us to delineate these different understandings of his poem. These are modelled on the panegyrical conventions of the Persian manavī or verse romance, which begin with the praise of God (amd), the Prophet Muḥammad (nat), the ruling king, and the author’s commissioning patron, frequently a highly placed nobleman or courtier.22 In common with the other poets of the genre, Manjhan extends these conventions to create a set of distinctive Hindavīi metaphysical and aesthetic terms. He begins his prologue with six verses in praise of Allah. Manjhan links the Creator first with ‘love, the treasure-house of joy’ (prema prītī sukhanidhi), the central value of the love-story. Then he sketches out the attributes of the ruler of the universe: the Creator (vidhātā), Lord (gosā’īn), King (rājā) of the three worlds (heaven, earth, and the netherworld, the tribhuvana) and the four ages (juga). In constrast to all of these stands the poet, whose tongue is not equal to the praise of the glorious Creator. When all those who came before him have failed in the task, how can the poor poet Manjhan succeed in conveying Allah’s true stature?