Literary Responses to the Mughal Imperium: The Historical Poems
of Kesavdas
South Asia Research, 25 (1):
31--54 (2005)Abstract
The penetration of Mughal power into previously autonomous regional
kingdoms produced significant political, but also literary effects.
In this article, I trace the advent of the Mughal political order
to the princely state of Orcha (located in what is now north-western
Madhya Pradesh) through the eyes of Kesavdas (fl. 1600), the leading
poet from that court. Kesavdas is famous in Hindi literary circles
as one of the progenitors of the Brajbhasha riti tradition, a constellation
of courtly poetic and intellectual practices that flourished in a
climate of mixed Mughal and sub-imperial patronage. There is a pronounced
tendency to think of KesavdasṂ�''s work (and that of most riti
poets) as a corpus of baroque, purely decorative poems largely comprising
time-worn erotic and devotional themes. This preliminary study of
KesavdasṂ�''s three historical poems will help to complicate such
an understanding by bringing into our conceptual purview a fuller
range of riti textual expression. These lesser known works by one
of the foremost riti poets are certainly striking for their literary
accomplishments, but they also serve as an invaluable window onto
a critical moment in Orcha history. They constitute the perfect testing
ground for the enterprise of retrieving historical meaning from the
literary sources that were the dominant form of pre-modern Indian
courtly self-expression, and the methodology employed here is to
critically engage both aesthetic and historical perspectives simultaneously.
Description
Wujastyk's main bibtex file, April 30, 2010