Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi

Building an Ark

Prashant Keshavmurthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138185982
• eBook ISBN: 9781317287940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing in the eighteenth century, the Persian-language litterateurs of late Mughal Delhi were aware that they could no longer take for granted the relations of Persian with Islamic imperial power, relations that had enabled Persian literary life to flourish in India since the tenth century C.E.

Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi situates the diverse textual projects of 'Abd al-Q?dir "B?dil" and his students within the context of politically threatened but poetically prestigious Delhi, exploring the writers' use of the Perso-Arabic and Hindavi literary canons to fashion their authorship. Breaking with the tendency to categorize and characterize Persian literature according to the dynasty in power, this book argues for the indirectness and complexity of the relations between poetics and politics. Among its original contributions is an interpretation of B?dil's Sufi adaptation of a Braj-Avadhi tale of utopian Hindu kingship, a novel hypothesis on the historicism of Sir?j al-Din 'Al? Kh?n "?rz?"s oeuvre and a study of how Bindr?ban D?s "Khvushg?" entwined the contrasting models of authorship in B?dil and ?rz? to formulate his voice as a Sufi historian of the Persian poetic tradition.

The first book-length work in English on 'Abd al-Q?dir "B?dil" and his circle of Persian literati, this is a valuable resource for students and scholars of both South Asian and Iranian studies, as well as Persian literature and Sufism.

1 Bīdil's portrait Ekphrasis as ascetic self-transformation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315644080-1

ba andāz-i taghāful nīm rukh ham ‘ālamī dārad

chirā mustaqbal-i mardum chu taṣvīr-i farang āyī ¹

A spectacle, too, is your turning heedlessly away into a picture in profile.

Why face me like a European portrait?

The legacy of the Indo-Persian Sufi poet Mirzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Khān “Bīdil” (1644–1720) ² is conspicuous in the ongoing scholarly rehabilitation of the literatures of Mughal India, Safavid Iran and Turkic Central Asia. Once discredited for his stylistic complexities in Iran by the Neo-Classicism of the late eighteenth century, again in Soviet Central Asia by early twentieth-century “progressive” poetics, and increasingly unread in South Asia with the fading there of Persian itself, Bīdil’s prodigious oeuvre has attained a new legibility as a result of critiques of nationalist literary historiographies. However, interpretations of his prose works that engage them in their formal specificity remain a desideratum.

This chapter reads an episode of ascetic self-transformation in Bīdil’s autobiography, The Four Elements (Chahār ‘unṣur), as an account that focuses in miniature on a concern with self-fashioning that pervades all his works. Indeed, the episode, as discussed in this chapter, can serve as a possible introduction to his oeuvre. ³

An introduction to Bīdil's words and worlds: the portrait within the frame of a life

In 1116/1704, at his home Luṭf ‘Alī Havelī, located outside the Dehlī Darvāzah or Delhi Gate and at a landing by the river Jamunā called Guẕar Ghāṭ in the neighborhood of Khekaṛīyāñ on the south-east edge of Mughal Delhi or Shāhjahānābād, at the age of sixty-two, the Indo-Persian Sufi and prodigious poet Bīdil completed an autobiography which he had begun in 1094/1683, titled The Four Elements. ⁴ Into the fourth book or “Element” of this text he set an account of a portrait of himself painted around 1087/1677 by Anūp Chhatr, a painter famous for his portraits in the imperial Mughal ateliers of the time. Initially refusing this painter permission to paint him, Bīdil finally yielded and was astonished at how the resulting portrait duplicated him like a mirror. After marveling at it for a decade, he fell ill. His friends visited him in his sickbed and one of them, leafing through his anthology of texts, came upon the painting. He exclaimed at how faded it was. Bīdil himself could barely make it out on the page. When he recovered his health, he opened the anthology to examine the faded portrait and was astonished and shocked, as his friends were, to see that it had recovered its brilliant colors. He tore up the painting. This chapter studies the meanings and functions of this ekphrastic ⁵ section of Bīdil’s autobiography. In particular, this chapter offers a reading of the episode as a specific autobiographical appropriation of the semiotics he inherited from the Perso-Arabic literary tradition, an appropriation by which Bīdil fashioned his authorial authority as a Sufi in his milieu. This anecdote, however, is distinguished by its thematization of perception, the theory of which, partly adapted from the paradigmatic Andalusian Sufi thinker Muḥī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 637/1240), was central to Bīdil’s concept of the imagination. As the imagination, understood as a subjective faculty always at work in the generation of mental images, forms the implicit subjective condition for the compound metaphors Bīdil was known for in his poetry, this study also aims to prepare the reader for encounters with Bīdil’s poetry both in future chapters and independently.

But first, what does it mean to already denominate this text an “autobiography” as I have done? In what sense is it an autobiography that frames the ekphrastic representation of the author’s visual portrait? Classical Persian has no word that might be a ready equivalent of the English “autobiography.” However, the self-descriptor sometimes used by texts like Bīdil’s that we today denominate “autobiographical” – aḥvāl – does disclose a dominant, though not exclusive, conception of the form taken by a retrospective summation of all or a large portion or one’s own life. The word aḥvāl itself signifies “states of being” or “circumstances” and thus accounts for what we perceive as the anecdotal character of several biographical and autobiographical texts. This model of presenting a life entailed that an author assembled, sometimes under thematic sub-headings as in The Four Elements, more or less free-standing accounts of experiences that either he or those who participated in his conception of his own selfhood (typically ancestors, parents and teachers) had undergone. On this model, a life was thus told and read as a series of states of being rather than as a progressive accumulation. This reflected, as Dwight F. Reynolds says of medieval Arabic autobiographies: It was therefore on the discursive scale of the anecdote that prior authoritative models of a life-account were cited and poetic tropes and prose styles employed. The ordering of textual units larger than the anecdote was, in effect, a freer authorial choice and tended to be idiosyncratic. That there was a much larger corpus of biographies than autobiographies in pre-nineteenth-century Persian and Arabic meant that there were relatively fewer models for autobiographies which thus facilitated such idiosyncratic ordering of meta-anecdotal textual units in autobiographies. ⁷ This is why the larger structure of Bīdil’s autobiography conforms to no known autobiography from his lifetime or earlier. The four largest chapters corresponding to the elements of the title’s The Four Elements thus invoke, not any particular autobiographical model, but, as will be discussed, Bīdil’s simultaneous emphasis on his mortality – composed as he was, like all creatures of the four elements of fire, water, air and earth – and his power to command this mortal sphere as he ascetically commanded himself. The first chapter corresponding to the first element compiles anecdotes pertaining to his childhood and his earliest Sufi teachers; the second compiles anecdotes relating to the practice of poetry; the third presents anecdotes on ontological subjects that formed the main focus of Sufi thought and practice; and the fourth lays out anecdotes relating to personally witnessed remarkable events and mirabilia (‘ajā’ib). It is to this last chapter that the anecdote mainly under discussion in this chapter belongs.

a widespread conceptualization of life as a sequence of changing conditions or states rather than as a static, unchanging whole or a simple linear progression through time. A life consists of stages dictated not merely by one’s progression from childhood through youth to adulthood and old age but also by one’s changing fortunes, which were often contrasted to those few areas of life in which genuine accrual over time was thought possible: the acquisition of knowledge and spiritual understanding, the creation of scholarly and literary works, and the fostering of offspring and students. ⁶

However, the reader not already informed of the topics of this text by its paratexts must await Bīdil’s justification of his title for it in his preface to recognize it as an autobiography of a certain kind and form their hermeneutic expectations accordingly. There, he characterizes his text thus: Bīdil, speaking in his own name here, locates this text chronologically after a course of worldly experience (“after traversing the stations of flower and thorn”), characterizing himself as an item from the plenitude of the world’s garden – a “whiff.” He is also a “veil-adorner of the countenance of diminutions and growths.” That is, he controls the display of creation itself, captured metonymically here by its trait of diminution and growth. This aggrandizing self-characterization leads us to ask whether Bīdil thinks he is God. I will return to this possibility – the possibility of theosis – later in this chapter. Confining ourselves to this passage for now, let us note that he characterizes his text as a generous disclosure to his reader. But what is being disclosed here?

A whiff in keeping with the fragrance and color of the garden of manifestations declares after traversing the stations of flower and thorn; and the veil-adorner of the countenance of diminutions and growths casts open the unveiled levels of his generosity – so it may not remain veiled what this undrunken intoxication of the tavern of non-existence [‘adam] drank from the cup of the heedfulness [i‘tibār] of being and what this soundless melody from the party of Divine Oneness [vaḥdat] heard from the lute of the distinctions of Manyness [ka srat] [my italics]. ⁸

Bīdil invokes two senses here: taste and hearing. He does so to declare that the text to follow will disclose what he – “the undrunken intoxication from the tavern of non-existence” – “drank from the cup of the heedfulness of being.” He presents himself as caught between non-being and being. By a shift from singular to plural he maps this distinction onto the one between the One and the Many. The subsequent clause replicates this double feature by speaking of a passage from “soundless melody from the party of divine Oneness” to “the lute of the distinctions of Manyness.” This rhetorical feature corresponds to a logical feature of his self-presentation, namely his simultaneous presence before his own creation and after it. This dual self-location in time allies him to a tradition of Persian-language poets, especially prominent from the sixteenth century onward, who authorized themselves by an Islamic-Neo-Platonic conception of creativity. According to this conception, creation was an emanation from the super-sensory One into the sensory Many that yet left the One undiminished. Claiming proximity with the One allowed poets to present themselves as circling around the back, as it were, of poetic predecessors to the primordial source of poetic topoi.

But to say this and no more is to read without an ear for the Persian original where the final syllables of these clauses of identical syllabic length rhyme with each other. Almost all of the prose in The Four Elements is thus externally or internally rhymed and arranged in symmetrically measured clauses, making various uses of the Perso-Arabic tradition of such “rhymed and rhythmic prose” (saj‘ or na sr-i musajja‘). Here, the symmetry of these clauses in English, replicating the externally rhymed symmetry of Bīdil’s clauses in Persian, align his “undrunken” or undistracted focus on the nothingness from which he came into being with his preoccupation – “soundless” or undivided by representations – with the Divine Oneness that brought him into being and that is the most real. The sentence’s doubled and rhyming clauses therefore simultaneously introduce both the ontological frame of reference within which Bīdil’s text becomes meaningful and the model reader who would ideally interpret this text in terms of such ontological commitments.

These details of Bīdil’s style invite the following preliminary questions: what were the rhetorical antecedents for Bīdil’s prose? What were its social effects? Given that autobiographical discourses in pre-nineteenth-century Perso-Arabic traditions possessed no generic unity, answering these two questions lets us better answer our opening question, namely what it means here to speak of an autobiography. Answering the former question will require a brief excursus on the specific genealogy Bīdil was invoking of the uses of “rhymed and rhythmic prose.” Answering the latter will require a differentiated account of the social world such prose assumed. The following section will undertake the following tasks: trace the theological antecedents for Bīdil’s style; recount the political crisis of his milieu and thus the political effects of his style on his three overlapping circles of readers; and speak of what the mimetic origins and aims of this style imply for the sense in which we may speak of autobiography here.

Let us first turn to the question of the rhetorical antecedents of Bīdil’s style. Rhymed and rhythmic prose is as old as the Arabic language and thus older than the oldest Islamic Persian. We will not recapitulate its history here in either language but recall a scene from its earliest appearance in the Prophet Muḥammad’s own ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: political frailty and poetic power in late Mughal Delhi
• 1 Bīdil’s portrait: ekphrasis as ascetic self-transformation
• 2 Bīdil’s tarjī‘-band: the author’s kenotic chorus
• 3 A Hindu allegory of the Islamic philosopher-king: the tale of Madan and Kāmdī in Bīdil’s masnavī ‘Irfān
• 4 The local universality of poetic pleasure: Sirāj al-Dīn ‘Alī Khān “Ārzū” and the speaking subject
• 5 Khvushgū’s dream of Ḥāfiẓ: building an ark with Ārzū and Bīdil
• Index