Contested History: Brahmanical Memories ofRelations with the Mughals

 By: Audrey Truschke 

Stanford University and Rutgers University-Newarkaudrey

truschke@gmail.com

Abstract

Brahman Sanskrit intellectuals enjoyed a century of relations with the Mughal elite.  Nonetheless, such cross-cultural connections feature only sporadically in Persian  chronicles, and Brahmans rarely elaborated on their imperial links in Sanskrit texts. In  this essay I analyze a major exception to the Brahmanical silence on their Mughal con

nections, the Kavīndracandrodaya (“Moonrise of Kavīndra”). More than seventy  Brahmans penned the poetry and prose of this Sanskrit work that celebrates  Kavīndrācārya’s successful attempt to persuade Emperor Shah Jahan to rescind taxes on  Hindu pilgrims to Benares and Prayag (Allahabad). I argue that the Kavīndracandrodaya constituted an act of selective remembrance in the Sanskrit tradition of cross-cultural  encounters in Mughal India. This enshrined memory was, however, hardly a uniform  vision. The work’s many authors demonstrate the limits and points of contestation  among early moderns regarding how to formulate social and historical commentaries in  Sanskrit on imperial relations.

Keywords

Brahmans – Mughals – Sanskrit – Persian – history – memory

 Introduction

By the mid-seventeenth century, Brahman Sanskrit intellectuals had enjoyed  nearly a century of support from members of the Mughal elite. The Mughals  were a Persian-speaking Islamicate dynasty with a sustained interest in tra ditional Indian knowledge systems and their intelligentsia. Brahman schol ars first entered the central imperial court in the 1560s, following the Mughal  expansion into eastern India under Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605).1 Within  twenty years, many Brahmans had become integrated into the fabric of  courtly life and operated in a variety of often overlapping capacities. They  served as astrologers for the Mughal emperors, resident scholars, informants  on learned Indian traditions, translators, and political negotiators. Sanskrit knowing Brahmans actively engaged with the Mughals throughout Jahangir’s  rule (1605-1627) and continued to populate the court well into Shah Jahan’s  reign (1628-1658).2 Despite their enthusiastic participation in Mughal impe rial life, however, Brahmans rarely elaborated in Sanskrit texts on their cross cultural activities. Brief mentions of receiving Mughal patronage abound, but  Brahman-authored Sanskrit narratives of events at the Mughal court are non existent, and few texts offer even a glimpse into what imperial relations meant  for Brahmanical communities culturally, socially, and religiously.3 Brahmans  were reluctant to reflect in Sanskrit literary texts upon their experiences  regarding the Mughal imperial world.

Some scholars have tried to bypass this profound Brahmanical silence by  pointing to unacknowledged Persianate influences in the literary production  of certain Sanskrit writers. For example, Christopher Minkowski has argued  that the sixteenth-century polymath Sūryadāsa modeled bidirectional poetry  (vilomakāvya) on the Persian script, which reads right-to-left.4 Sheldon Pollock  has proposed that the personal tone of some of Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja’s  poetry is indebted to Perso-Arabic literary practices.5 Yigal Bronner and Gary  Tubb have suggested a parallel influence on Jagannātha’s poetic analysis.6  While such instances of undisclosed crossovers remain important to identify,  they show, among other things, how Brahmans typically omitted any overt  recognition of cross-cultural connections. Even in cases in which Persianate  influences can be detected centuries later, contemporary writers consistently  declined to note (or perhaps failed to realize) their sources of inspiration.  Can we find instances, however, of a more forthcoming approach whereby  Brahmans tried to formulate a vision of what links with the Mughals meant for  their social and intellectual communities? Such attempts would have impor tant consequences for how we conceptualize Brahmanical Sanskrit culture in  the early modern period and the importance of memory and forgetting in the  Sanskrit tradition. To date, the Sanskrit text I have found that tries most overtly  to define a Brahmanical memory of connections with the Mughal court is the  Kavīndracandrodaya, composed to honor Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī.

Kavīndrācārya was a Maharashtrian Brahman who was based in Benares.  At some point he traveled to the court of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and  engaged in various aspects of Mughal cultural life.7 Among other activities,  Kavīndra taught Sanskrit texts to members of the royal family and sang vernac ular songs for the imperial assembly, as I discuss below. He was well paid for his  efforts, and Shah Jahan’s largesse helped Kavīndra build an impressive library  of more than two thousand Sanskrit manuscripts.8 Kavīndra’s greatest imperial achievement, in the eyes of his fellow Brahmans, was that he convinced  Shah Jahan to cease levying an onerous tax on Hindu pilgrims to Benaras and  Prayag (Allahabad).9 Kavīndra maintained his connection with the imperial  court until the end of Shah Jahan’s rule. When Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir rose to  power in 1658, he cut off Kavīndra’s imperial stipend in a political move cal culated to distinguish himself from his elder brother, Dara Shikuh, previously  the likely successor to the throne.10 Kavīndra was subsequently sponsored by  Danishmand Khan, a Mughal notable, and later served for three years as a cul tural intermediary for the European traveler Francois Bernier.11 The Kavīndracandrodaya was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century,  during the height of Kavīndra’s favor with Shah Jahan and after many decades  of Brahman-Mughal relations. Neither Persian nor Sanskrit sources offer any  linear narrative of precisely what it was that passed between Kavīndra and Shah  Jahan that resulted in the cancellation of Hindu pilgrimage fees. However, doz ens of Brahmans composed celebratory verses and prose extolling Kavīndra that  were collected into two texts: the Sanskrit Kavīndracandrodaya (“Moonrise of  Kavīndra”) and the significantly shorter Hindi Kavīndracandrikā (“Moonlight  of Kavīndra”). These praise poems appropriately parallel Kavīndra’s own bifur cated production of Sanskrit and vernacular texts and his engagement with  both traditions at the Mughal court.12 Scholars have occasionally tried to pluck historical information from these parallel praise poems, but they have rarely  considered either work as a literary whole.

In this essay I examine the Sanskrit panegyric Moonrise of Kavīndra as a  mode of historical memory for the early modern Brahman community. Praise  poetry for kings and gods has a long history in India, especially in Sanskrit,  but compiling a text honoring a community leader’s political achievement has  far fewer precedents.13 One modern scholar has even dubbed the Moonrise of  Kavīndra “the first festschrift in Sanskrit.”14 I am interested in this work because  of its emphasis on a cross-cultural event and its corresponding implications  for history and memory in early modern India. The Kavīndracandrodaya constituted an act of selective remembrance of cross-cultural encounters in  Mughal India. Moreover, this enshrined memory was hardly a uniform vision.  Nearly seventy named writers and many anonymous authors contributed to  the Sanskrit praise poem,15 which allows us to see the general contours of the  project, as well as its limits and points of contestation.

Recovering the valence of the Kavīndracandrodaya is beset by a major  methodological challenge that is helpful to address at the outset. Early  modern Sanskrit authors inherited a strong penchant for conventions. This  banal observation is true for many genres of Sanskrit works, but it is perhaps  nowhere more evident than in praise poetry. Authors frequently recycled  verses and even entire poems for different subjects. Original contributions  often followed predictable patterns and set formulas. These conventions did  not render Sanskrit praises devoid of meaning or prohibit specificity, but they  made novelty a subtle art. Additionally, modern sensibilities are hardly cali brated to detect the nuances of seventeenth-century Sanskrit panegyrists. As a  result, Sanskrit encomiums, when read today, often seem vague and divorced  from their social contexts. The Kavīndracandrodaya is no different, and many  contributions probably strike most modern readers as applicable to any laud able individual rather than as tailored to Kavīndra and Mughal tax relief. I take  a two-pronged approach to these challenges by reading both with the grain of  the text and against it. On one hand, I recover the contextual meanings often  embedded in conventions by reading sensitively with an eye to how seven teenth-century readers would have understood seemingly generic formula tions in rather specific ways. On the other hand, I highlight instances in which  individual writers bent the rules, even slightly, or elaborated beyond a stan dard script and commented on contemporary affairs.

I analyze the Moonrise of Kavīndra in three major sections. I first explore  the pertinent social and literary contexts for understanding the work and its  framing. I then examine the poem’s depiction of Kavīndra and the Mughals. In  discussing the text’s treatment of Kavīndra, I both provide a literary analysis of  the work and bring out the cultural implications of the various ways of prais ing Kavīndra. Regarding the authors’ handling of the Mughals, I engage with  the overarching reluctance to discuss distinctive markers of new religious and  social groups in Sanskrit and suggest some ways to tease out the contemporary  import of lines mired in tradition. Having explored the Kavīndracandrodaya,  I turn, at the end of the essay, to the question of historical memory and offer  a few thoughts about what this peculiar work can tell us about historical  sensibilities and modes of remembering the past in early modern India. The  Moonrise of Kavīndra demonstrates the variety of approaches adopted by early  moderns for formulating social and historical commentaries in Sanskrit on  real-world events.

1 The Social Context and Historical Project of the  Kavīndracandrodaya

There are a few pertinent contexts for understanding the Kavīndracandrodaya,  beginning with the social history of Brahman-Mughal ties. By the time Kavīndra  approached Shah Jahan, Brahman intellectuals had profited from nearly a cen tury of ongoing associations with the central Mughal court. Beginning early  in Akbar’s reign, Brahmans entered the Mughal courts from across northern  and central India, both through Rajput networks and also of their own accord,  in search of the Mughals’ well-known liberal patronage. Some Brahmans,  like a variety of other Indians, learned Persian and entered imperial service.  In contrast, Kavīndra and his ilk generally acted outside of the formal struc tures of imperial service—they did not receive imperial ranks (manṣabs),  for example—and remained grounded in traditional Indian knowledge systems.16 Nonetheless, Sanskrit-knowing Brahmans participated in many  aspects of the Mughal polity. For instance, Kavīndra sang vernacular praises  for Shah Jahan and other members of the royal family and instructed them  in Sanskrit texts.17 Scholars have proposed, based on compelling circumstan tial evidence, that the Yogavāsiṣṭha was among the works that Kavīndra intro duced to the royal family.18

Brahmans had also long solicited the Mughals for favors, and, in Kavīndra’s  case, the goal was rescinding a tax levied on Hindu pilgrims to Benares and  Prayag. Neither the Sanskrit nor Persian traditions offers details about this tax,  its origins, or how long it had been in effect.19 We are also unclear about how  Kavīndra came to negotiate this policy. Based on attestations that Kavīndra  served the Mughals as a scholar and singer, it seems most likely that he was first  admitted to the Mughal court for these other reasons and then took the oppor tunity to solicit the emperor.20 Several of Kavīndra’s admirers in the Moonrise  of Kavīndra allude to his other imperial activities (see below), but none elabo rates on the precise circumstances that led him to request tax relief. We can  nevertheless safely say that nobody was surprised by Kavīndra’s mere presence  at the Mughal court or his decision to participate in imperial life. Brahmans  had been pursuing similar engagements for several generations. What appears  to have been new in Kavīndra’s case was the magnitude of the imperial conces sion he earned, which, in turn, prompted an unprecedented textual response  on the part of his Brahmanical community.

Brahmans generally avoided extended reflections in Sanskrit on their  activities at the Mughal court. In contrast, Jains produced at least half a dozen  detailed Sanskrit narratives that chronicle their interactions with the Mughals.  The Jain works fall within a variety of genres, including poetry, narrative writ ing, and chronicles (kāvya, carita, and prabandha, respectively). They also  emerged from two different Jain sects, the Tapā and the Kharatara Gacchas. I  have written about these Jain works elsewhere.21 I bring them up here to high light a basic but often overlooked point: the Brahmanical textual muteness  about the Mughals was not predetermined but a meaningful choice. Sanskrit  writers were generally slow to respond to social changes and hesitant to intro duce new groups into their social imagination, as many scholars have noted.22  But we have been far too hasty in declaring a total absence of Sanskrit texts  that respond to the advent of Indo-Islamic rule.23 By the mid-seventeenth  century, there were many Jain works in Sanskrit that displayed a broad spec trum of options regarding whether to write about such topics and how to do  so. In the face of such evidence, the Brahmanical reluctance to write about the  Mughals requires serious analysis and explanation, rather than blasé accep tance. I leave for another day consideration of the overarching Brahmanical  decision not to discuss their imperial links in Sanskrit literature. Here I investigate the Kavīndracandrodaya, the text that partially broke the Brahmanical  prohibition against incorporating Mughal events into Sanskrit. Sixty-nine named authors contributed to the Kavīndracandrodaya, and  there are several anonymous passages. Altogether, the work contains more  than three hundred Sanskrit verses, numerous lengthy prose passages, and a  few Prakrit and Marathi lines.24 A writer named Kṛṣṇa25 assembled the verses  and prose into a single work, grouping the praises of each author together.  Kṛṣṇa also penned a series of introductory verses that describe Kavīndra and  the reasons behind the work. Kṛṣṇa, in one of the earliest verses in the text,  characterizes the encomium as a cooperative effort:

Composed by the glorious luminaries of Kashi that are good poets, the  similar inhabitants of Prayag, and residents of all lands who delight in  great learning, this collection of verses was written down by glorious  Kṛṣṇa and is dedicated to glorious, venerable Kavīndra, the lord of good  poets, who is a treasure house of knowledge, known by the name teacher  (ācārya), and yoked with the title sarasvatī.26

Roughly one-third of the encomium’s authors can be identified with known  figures of the period, and a few additional writers state their relationship to  Kavīndra (e.g., his students) or their geographical location (e.g., the learned of  Varanasi).27 So far as we know, however, the overwhelming majority of contrib utors to this encomium had no personal connection with the Mughal court.  Rather, Brahman literati across the board judged that Kavīndra had engaged  with the Mughals in a manner that was proper to commemorate, in particular  ways, in Sanskrit praise poetry.

The intended audience for the Moonrise of Kavīndra was at least twofold.  The direct addressee of the text is Kavīndra himself, whom the work exalts. But  Kṛṣṇa, its compiler, also outlines a second broader reception at the beginning  of the text:

Warding off the mass of utter darkness, removing the anguish of all wise  men, let this composition called the Moonrise of Kavīndra traverse the  world.28

Here Kṛṣṇa projects an audience far beyond a single individual. This envisioned  wide readership is confirmed by the first eight verses of the work, authored by  Kṛṣṇa, which briefly review Kavīndra’s biography, including his scholarly train ing and receipt of titles.29 Other contributors offer little indication about who,  beyond Kavīndra, they hoped would read their praises. A few ask Kavīndra  for specific concessions, including financial assistance and his help liberating another city “from the siege of oppressors.”30 Several take the opportunity  to show off their poetic skills or display mastery of various meters.31 But it is  unclear whether such efforts were meant for Kavīndra’s appreciation, intended  to please learned readers more generally, or simply appropriately typified the  tribute to Kavīndra.

We know little about the actual reception of the Kavīndracandrodaya.  Kavīndra himself certainly appreciated the text and reproduced seven  verses that address his learning and high esteem among the Benaras-based 

Brahmanical community in his vernacular version of the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha.32  Others copied the work at least a few times, and manuscripts reside today in  Bombay, Calcutta, and Bikaner.33 One of Kavīndra’s protégés, Janārdana Vyāsa,  borrows verses from the first two contributors to the panegyric in his commen tary on Mammaṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa.34 Notwithstanding its seemingly limited  reception, the imagined large audience of the Kavīndracandrodaya stands in  stark contrast to the Brahmanical reticence to write anything in Sanskrit about  most of their imperial activities. Dozens of Brahmans agreed that Kavīndra’s  actions merited a Sanskrit praise poem devoted entirely to commemorating his  encounter with the Mughals. The content of their eulogies offers a wealth of  insights concerning how Brahmans, as individuals and a community, decided  to memorialize Kavīndra’s political achievement.

2 Commemorating Kavīndra through Sanskrit Conventions

The majority of contributors to the Kavīndracandrodaya offer standard trib utes that invoke Kavīndra’s name but no other historical details. Nonetheless,  we should not hastily brand all such praises bland and generic, lacking any  contemporary context. Early modern Sanskrit intellectuals developed sophis ticated methods of commenting on specific circumstances by working through  the conventions of their tradition. Take for example Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja,  who penned a Sanskrit encomium directed to Asaf Khan, Shah Jahan’s vizier.35 

In the work Jagannātha avoids any overt contemporary references, aside from  a few names. Nonetheless, he draws upon aspects of the Sanskrit tradition that  would have resonated with a Mughal audience, such as admiring Kashmir’s  gardens, a classic Sanskrit theme and a particular interest of Asaf Khan.36 The  authors of the Kavīndracandrodaya adopted similar convergent approaches  that enabled them to speak about their contemporary situation without step ping outside of their inherited tradition.

Many Brahmans frame Kavīndra as a savior, often comparing him to Hindu  gods and their incarnations, typically without specifying what he did to jus tify such lofty comparisons. Popular references include Vishnu’s various ava tars that are known for rescuing the world. For example Vrajabhūṣaṇa, a man  who pursued his own interactions with the Persianate world,37 marvels that,  “Having taken on mendicant clothing, Kavīndra lifted up Prayag that was  drowning in an ocean of taxes, just as Vishnu [in his boar incarnation] rescued  the earth that was drowning in the grip [of the demon Hiraṇyakṣa].”38 Many  authors laud Kavīndra’s generosity, and specifically eulogize his compassion  (kṛpā, dayā) and empathy (kāruṇya/karuṇa) with the hardships faced in the  world.39 The figures of Dadhīci, Bali, and Karṇa arise in a few verses and are  celebrated for their selfless munificence.40 Without specifically mentioning  tax relief for religious pilgrims, such homages encapsulated Kavīndra’s suc cessful negotiations with Shah Jahan.

Many authors hail Kavīndra’s legendary learning, including his knowl edge of the śāstras and poetics. Several admire Kavīndra’s mastery of a range  of philosophical traditions. One panegyrist proclaims Kavīndra the equal of  the founders of the six schools of Indian philosophy.41 An anonymous writer  from Mithila positions Kavīndra among such great poets as Vālmīki, Vyāsa, and  Kālidāsa.42 A contributor known as Kūrmācala Vīreśvara Paṇḍita covers philo sophical, liturgical, and poetic expertise in a verse that imagines Kavīndra’s  speech as a beautiful woman who embodies traditional Indian learning:

Your speech—whose body is the Vedic canon, whose auspicious fore head mark is Yoga, whose lovely earrings are Vedānta, whose bracelet is  Mīmāṃsā, whose belt is the Āgama, the splendor of whose necklace is  Vaiśeṣika, whose tinkling anklets are Sāṃkhya, whose brilliant clothes  are sophisticated literature, whose diadem is Nyāya—O Kavīndra, your  dancing speech is victorious.43

As Kūrmācala Vīreśvara Paṇḍita says in his closing line, Kavīndra’s oratorical  skills helped him triumph. He leaves implied, however, that Kavīndra’s role as  an instructor of the Mughals left him well positioned him to gain “victorious”  tax relief.

Other contributors also indicate obliquely the relationship between  Kavīndra’s erudition and his successful encounter with Shah Jahan. For  instance, a prose section by “the renouncers and pandits who live in Kashi”  (kāśīsthasannyāsipaṇḍitānām) esteems Kavīndra “as skilled in initiating  decrees, just as he is skilled in [giving] good advice” (hitopadeśakuśalānapi  vihitopadeśakuśalān).44 The line leaves it unclear to whom Kavīndra is impart ing guidance, but the Mughals are the likely recipients. In addition to linking  his tutoring of the Mughals with eliciting a royal order, this praise cleverly  works in the phrase hitopadeśa “[giving] good advice,” which is also the title  of a popular Sanskrit book of instructive fables. As everyone of that time  would have known, the Hitopadeśa and other Pañcatantra works were popular  among Mughal intellectuals and repeatedly translated into and reworked in  Persian.45 We do not know for certain that Kavīndra’s instruction to Shah Jahan  and other members of the royal court included the Hitopadeśa, but even the  veiled suggestion of this work in the Kavīndracandrodaya reminds readers of  the multifaceted relations between Sanskrit intellectuals and Mughal elites.

Some Brahmans chose to address more specifically Kavīndra’s high esteem  at the Mughal court. Several poets celebrate that he received the Sanskrit  title of vidyānidhāna (“treasure house of knowledge”), also sometimes given  as sarvavidyānidhāna (“treasure house of all knowledge”), from Shah Jahan.46  One writer, Pūrṇānanda Brahmacārin, presents a series of verses that cite this  designation, which he directly connects with Kavīndra’s feat of introducing  Sanskrit learning to Shah Jahan. For instance:

Kavīndra, lord of the three worlds, teaches the Lord of Delhi everyday  according to knowledge of the Vedas, sacred texts, and śāstras. Even  though famous for releasing major pilgrimage sites from royal tax and  honored with [the title] vidyānidhāna, [Kavīndra] does not fall prey to  pride.47

Two verses by separate authors attribute Kavīndra’s receipt of the title  vidyānidhāna to compassion (kṛpā). But one author speaks of Shah Jahan’s  benevolence, while the other extols Kavīndra’s empathy.48 Kavīndra’s title car ried significant cultural cachet in Brahman literary circles. Kavīndra himself  claimed it in both his Sanskrit and Hindi writings, and it is also written on  manuscripts held in his library.49

Some authors indicate how Kavīndra may have achieved a place of pride in  imperial circles. Several mention Kavīndra’s debating prowess, and a few even  call attention to his renowned argumentative skills in the context of the royal  court.50 While we know of no specific instances involving Kavīndra orating  before Shah Jahan, Brahmans and Jains both regularly participated in Mughal led debates. These exchanges often involved religious questions. Sometimes  Jains and Brahmans argued with each other about long-standing points of  dispute.51 In other cases, the Mughals pressed members of one tradition on a  specific contention. For example, a Brahman who visited Jahangir in the com pany of Ramdas Kachhwaha was asked to explain why Hindus considered the  mouths of cows polluted, given that they revere the animal.52 Probably playing  on similar themes, Kṣmānanda Vājapeyin lauds Kavīndra as “one whose logic  dances in the court.”53

Despite portraying Kavīndra as learned and wise, the contributors seem  to evade describing explicitly how he used such faculties to gain tax relief.  Nīlakaṇṭha Ācārya 54 comes closest in his only verse in the work:

OKavīndra! Freed by you from the grasp of imperial taxes through [teach ing the king] commentaries (bhāṣya), poetry (subhāṣita), etc., Glorious  Kashi is glorified by the feet of sages and enlightens people in good and  bad speech, just as the Kāśikā commentary, freed by your own hand, O  World-ruler, with [your] writing about the [Mahā]bhāṣya, illuminates  correct usage and provides wisdom concerning speech and mis-speech.55 It is difficult to imagine Kavīndra working through a Sanskrit commentary  (bhāṣya) with the Mughal emperor. Although more plausible is the notion that  Shah Jahan admired Kavīndra’s eloquence and grasp of philosophy. Another  admirer, Raghunātha Bhaṭṭa Gurjara, likewise emphasizes Kavīndra’s poetic  dexterity in an imperial context, admiring him as “lord of poets in the sul tan’s court” (suratrāṇasaṃsatkavīndra).56 In the same verse, this poet lauds  Kavīndra as suratrāṇakārī, a phrase that has the double meaning of “rescuer of  the gods” and “king-maker.” An anonymous author simply salutes Kavīndra as  “conqueror of the king” (kṣitipativijayī).57

While most authors eschew detailed descriptions of Kavīndra’s interac tions with the Mughals, they regularly imagine Kavīndra as a king complete  with the trappings of royal authority. Many writers marvel at Kavīndra’s fame,  an attribute frequently associated with royalty in Sanskrit. Few contributors  state directly that Kavīndra’s fame is the result of his encounter with Shah  Jahan, although the poets occasionally note the Mughal emperor’s crucial  role in making Kavīndra a celebrity. For instance, Mādhavabhaṭṭa celebrates  that “the rise of your esteem was enacted by the king.”58 Kavīndra is also occa sionally compared to a ruler in the work. For example, after borrowing openly  from Bāṇa’s Kādambarī, Mauni Viśveśvara Bhaṭṭa adds the acclamation that  Kavīndra ought to “live long like a king.”59 In one of his six verses, Pūrṇānanda  Brahmacārin fancies Kavīndra a king (nṛpati) and imagines his home in Kashi  as a royal court.60 Others play upon imagery typically associated with victo rious monarchs in Sanskrit. For instance, Mauni Raṅganāthabhaṭṭa describes  the weeping wives of Kavīndra’s slaughtered enemies, a common image in  royal praises that underscores a king’s success in battle.61

Rather than liken Kavīndra to a monarch, some Brahmans elected to com mend the virtues that set Kavīndra apart from the worldly Mughal court,  even when the details they provide are not historically accurate. For example,  Kṣmānanda Vājapeyin celebrates that Kavīndra rejected Shah Jahan’s offer of  wealth and instead demanded relief for religious pilgrims: For the hordes of elephants and horses, gold, and lines of jewels that were  being offered, Kavīndra had no thirst. He was committed to the deliver ance of all pilgrimage places. Surely a mass of rainclouds takes no plea sure in rain?62

As a point of comparison, Jain sources likewise praise their leaders for refusing  Mughal financial compensation. For instance, the late-sixteenth-century Jain  writer Padmasāgara describes how Akbar offered a Jain monk heaps of wealth  on platters, from which the mendicant turned away in disgust.63 One verse in  the Kavīndracandrodaya even tenders similar imagery.64 The difference is that,  so far as we know, Jain claims about rejecting Mughal wealth are accurate, but,  in the case of Kavīndra, the boast is false.

Persian and European sources both attest that Kavīndra accepted cash pay ments from the Mughals. According to Shah Jahan’s historians, Kavīndra was  rewarded for his skills as a vernacular singer and writer. Two Persian-language  chroniclers, Muḥammad Sāliḥ Kambūh and Muḥammad Vāris̱, record that  “Kabīndar Sanyāsī,” who was skilled in dhrupads and Hindi compositions  (taṣnīfāt­i hindī), entered Shah Jahan’s court and received two thousand rupees  and a robe of honor—and a horse, Vāris̱ adds—in exchange for pleasing the  emperor.65 Vāris̱ also mentions at least one other occasion on which Kavīndra  met Shah Jahan at Lahore and received 1500 rupees.66 Francois Bernier, a French  visitor to Mughal India, confirms this financial arrangement, although he per ceived the stipend as rewarding Kavīndra’s erudition. He writes: “[Kavīndra] is  a Fakire or Devotee so eminent for knowledge that Chah­Jehan, partly for that  consideration, and partly to gratify the Rajas, granted him a pension of two  thousand roupies, which is about one thousand crowns.”67

While Sanskrit literati generally gloss over or even flatly deny these aspects  of Kavīndra’s links with the court, they were aware of both his singing and his  receipt of cash. One Sanskrit writer, Muralīdhara, grandson of Kālidāsamiśra,  explicitly notes Kavīndra’s dual roles of singer and scholar for the Mughals,  writing in the Kavīndracandrodaya: “The illustrious Svāmi Kavīndra learned  knowledge and studied songs for everybody’s sake, in order to protect cows and  Brahmans from fear.”68 Some of Kavīndra’s disciples also refer to their teach er’s musical talents (“singer of the legions of virtues of Shiva and Vishnu”).69  Another contributor to the Kavīndracandrodaya calls Kavīndra a kalāvant,  which was probably meant to have the dual meaning of somebody skilled in  the arts (kalā) and a specific type of Indian singer popular among Mughal con noisseurs.70 In terms of money, Kavīndra was widely famed for his financial  generosity, and several poets discuss his liberality in the Kavīndracandrodaya.  They acclaim him as “a destroyer of poverty” and somebody who “vanquishes  lines of wishing trees in generosity.”71 His disciples note that he was “a great  giver of dinars to the poor.”72 Pūrṇānanda Brahmacārin offers the most explicit  verse, celebrating Kavīndra for giving away gold (suvarṇa) at the Viśveśvara  temple in Kashi.73

One author, Mahādeva Paṭṭavardhana, asks Kavīndra overtly to lend him  two hundred rupees, presumably out of his more lucrative Mughal stipend.74  Significantly, while Mahādeva Paṭṭavardhana offers numerous Sanskrit verses  lauding Kavīndra’s generosity, he switches to Marathi to make his explicit plea  for financial assistance. Even the literary dialect of Braj Bhasha, the language  of the Kavīndracandrikā, was not appropriate for such a topic. Mahādeva  Paṭṭavardhana turned instead to Marathi, a vernacular understood widely in  the North Indian Brahmanical community, including by Kavīndra, who was  himself from Maharashtra.75 Here we glimpse some of the limits of what  Brahmans thought it appropriate to discuss in the transregional, cosmopolitan  idiom of Sanskrit. Exalting Kavīndra’s generosity was acceptable, but specific  solicitations ought not to be enshrined in a high literary tongue.

3 Characterizing Mughal Imperial Culture in Sanskrit

Despite writing to commend successful negotiations with Shah Jahan, many  contributors to Kavīndra’s Sanskrit encomium do not mention the Mughals  or explicitly discuss the imperial court. Sanskrit authors had long elided their  social and political contexts. Given this literary inheritance, avoiding overt ref erence to the Mughals was probably the most time-honored option, especially  for those seeking to fit an already innovative idea—writing an entire Sanskrit  work to honor the cross-cultural activities of one Brahman—within a tradition  that favored continuity. But sidestepping the Mughals was not the only option  available to Brahman authors of the day. Several contributors openly invoke  the Mughal imperial context in their encomia to Kavīndra. Such mentions  tend to be brief but nonetheless demonstrate a notable range of approaches to  incorporating the Mughals into Sanskrit literature.

Some of Kavīndra’s admirers present the Mughals in a negative light, if  mildly. Predictably, given Kavīndra’s feat, the oppressive taxes of the Mughals  are cited frequently, often along with the fear triggered by such hardship.  Most writers simply speak about royal taxes, however; only a handful note  that these taxes were imposed by the Lord of Delhi (dillīpati) or yavana (for eign or Muslim) kings.76 Dillīpati (and synonyms, such as dillīśa) was widely  used in Sanskrit as a neutral or positive epithet for the Mughal emperor. The  word yavana likewise did not have a particularly negative connotation and is  invoked elsewhere in the Kavīndracandrodaya as a positive descriptor of Shah  Jahan.77 One writer, Jagadīśa Jānīka, refers to Kavīndra “raising up the Hindu  bulls who were drowning in a sea of barbarians (mlecchas).”78 However, even  this division of barbarians from “Hindus” (whether that means Brahmans,  non-Muslim Indians, or all Indians here)79 seems more of a rhetorical device  to honor Kavīndra than a strong condemnation of the Mughals. Nobody men tions Shah Jahan’s destruction of a temple (or possibly multiple temples) in  Benares in 1632.80 Several writers refer to the darkness of the current age, typi cally to laud Kavīndra’s victory over such depravity, although none connects  this degradation directly with Mughal rule.81

Numerous writers in the Kavīndracandrodaya portray the Mughals in a pos itive light. A few mention Shah Jahan by name and appropriate honorifics.82  More commonly, the writers simply refer to the king as a powerful and victo rious monarch and even a universal emperor (sārvabhauma).83 A few extol  the Mughals as compassionate in certain acts, such as honoring Kavīndra with  the title “treasure house of knowledge” (vidyānidhāna).84 While such mentions  may seem the opposite of those who condemn Mughal tax policies, the two  approaches actually have much in common. Neither group of authors offers  many details about the Mughals, preferring instead to use well-worn Sanskrit  ways of describing and accommodating an “Other.”85

One poet, Hīrārāma Kavi, goes much further than his contempo raries in openly discussing the Mughals. He penned three verses for the  Kavīndracandrodaya. In the first, he mentions that Kavīndra had relations  with both Shah Jahan and his son Dara Shikuh, at the time the heir apparent:

[Kavīndra] brought Glorious Shah Jahan, the best of kings, under his own  control. Shah Dara Shikuh certainly also approached [Kavīndra] and was  instructed. The sole cause of releasing the grasp of taxes reinstated on  Prayag and Kashi is that glorious Kavīndra, the teacher of poets, king of  Benares. May he be victorious!86

In praising Kavīndra for controlling Shah Jahan, Hīrārāma probably intended  to insinuate the tax relief. Kavīndra surely encountered Dara Shikuh at Shah  Jahan’s court, and, given the prince’s interest in the Upaniṣads and other Sanskrit texts,87 the two men probably had some relationship. Kavīndra’s own  Kavīndrakalpalatā contains verses that laud Dara Shikuh, as well as philosoph ical verses that were perhaps intended for Dara’s edification.88 In mentioning  Dara here, Hīrārāma alludes to Dara Shikuh’s status as the favored son of Shah  Jahan and as heir apparent. Hīrārāma’s third verse acknowledges Kavīndra’s  prowess in debate, perhaps alluding to the religious debates at the Mughal  court that I discuss above.89

Hīrārāma’s second verse deserves particular attention as arguably the most  unique and the most compelling verse in the entire Kavīndracandrodaya. Here  Hīrārāma lists various social and ethnic groups present at Shah Jahan’s court,  drawing upon both old and new categories in order to express the heteroge neous composition of the Mughal elite:

In the assembly of Glorious King Shah Jahan, those born in Kashmir, Iraq,  Karaskara,90 Darada,91 Khurasan, and Habshan (Abyssinia), Bengalis,  Arabs, Firangis (Westerners), Turks, Shakas (Scythians), Badakhshanis,  Multanis, those from Balkh, Qandaharis, even the lords of Kabul who  rule the earth, Magas (Iranians), and Ottomans, O Kavīndra, they all  praise you.92

This list contains a variety of traditional Sanskrit classifications alongside  more contemporary and definitively Perso-Islamic additions. The Karaskaras,  Daradas, and Shakas appear in classical Indian texts, and the latter two are  even said to have fought in the Mahābhārata war.93 Many other groups were  more recently introduced into the Sanskrit imaginaire, including the imported  Persian term firangī (phiraṅga in Sanskrit), meaning Europeans.94 Hīrārāma  also displays a nuanced appreciation of various places in Central Asia that  were politically salient identity markers in Mughal culture.

Hīrārāma Kavi was one of the few Kavīndracandrodaya poets also to  contribute verses to the Kavīndracandrikā, the parallel collection of Hindi  praises. In the Kavīndracandrikā, Hīrārāma offers a Hindi verse that lists an  assortment of place names similar to his Sanskrit verse. In the Hindi verse,  members of these groups are not at Shah Jahan’s court. Hīrārāma instead enu merates the places to which Kavīndra’s fame has traveled. He includes “Anga,  Bengal, Kalinga, and Darada, Firanga (the West), Kabul, Badakhshan, Multan,  Tibet, Balkh, Habshan, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Iraq.”95 A few contrasts  between Hīrārāma’s Sanskrit and Hindi verses are noteworthy. Slightly fewer  places are mentioned in Hindi, although this could be the result of metrical  constraints. Most significantly, when writing in Sanskrit, a notably inward looking tradition, Hīrārāma imagines representatives of various places at a  definitively Indian location, namely the Mughal court. In contrast, in Hindi he  writes about Kavīndra’s fame traveling outward to the rest of the world. The  cosmopolitan and the vernacular offered different resources for representing a  changing world, within India and beyond.

Even in Sanskrit, Hīrārāma is an outlier. Nobody else in the Kavīndra candrodaya seemed to follow his lead in introducing Mughal ethnic and  social groups into Sanskrit. One writer whom we have encountered already,  Raghunātha Bhaṭṭa Gurjara, describes Shah Jahan’s court as “luminescent  with many kings” but does not elaborate further.96 In contrast to Hīrārāma,  one writer openly invokes a pilgrimage-based geography of India, mentioning  places such as Pushkar and Naimisha.97 Mughal place names appear elsewhere  in Sanskrit, although rarely as densely as Hīrārāma gives them. For example,  Harideva Miśra, author of a praise poem for Jahangir, offers an alphabetical  list of about seventy-five places in or near the Subcontinent, including Khash  and Khurasan.98 Persian writers in Shah Jahan’s court, such as Chandar Bhān  Brahman, enumerated the diverse groups at the imperial court, although they  typically omitted traditional Sanskrit classifications and listed Indian and  non-Indians separately.99 Open, detailed recognition of the Mughal imperial  reality was a limit of what it was possible to include within Sanskrit historical  memory.

4 History and Memory in Early Modern Sanskrit

Having explored the Kavīndracandrodaya at some length, I now want to step  back and offer a few thoughts on what this text can tell us about historical  practices in early modern India. This work was envisioned for an audience far  beyond Kavīndra and constitutes one of the few Sanskrit works that Brahmans  authored specifically on their relations with the Mughals. It occupies an impor tant place in the early modern Sanskrit tradition as a self-conscious attempt to  write about cross-cultural events for the benefit of current and future generations. In short, it is a historical work. The Moonrise of Kavīndra is many other  things also—an exuberant encomium, an anthology of poetry, and an oppor tunity to display literary skills. But we lack, in particular, an understanding of  historical writing in early modern India, including useful methods with which  to approach such works. Here I highlight a few key aspects of writing about  real-world events in early modern Sanskrit and draw out their implications for  contemporary scholarship.

First, writing about cross-cultural relations was a contested practice in the  Sanskrit tradition. What could be said—and, perhaps more crucially, what  should be left out—were controversial issues. The Kavīndracandrodaya, with  its more than seventy authors, offers acute insight into some of the perceived 

limits of Sanskrit literature for the Brahmanical community, especially when  we have only a single author exploring ideas that are absent from other con tributions, such as the mention of Kavīndra’s financial compensation from  Shah Jahan or the enumeration of the ethnic and regional groups present at  the royal court. Such dissenting voices can be few and far between, but we  often make the mistake of characterizing Sanskrit as a cohesive tradition with  agreed-upon rules. On the contrary, people frequently held different visions  of what was appropriate, and some pushed back against received practices.  Crucially, these disagreements did not happen in a vacuum. Rather, there were  important cultural stakes in terms of community identity, the constitution of  the Sanskrit literary tradition, and the impacts of cross-cultural encounters  tied to the creation of quasi-historical Sanskrit records.

The disputed nature of historical memory concerning the Indo-Persian  world in early modern Sanskrit culture becomes even clearer in light of  other collections of verses from the same period. Most Sanskrit anthologies  are not devoted to a specific individual or event, but many mention Perso Islamic figures. For instance, the Rasikajīvana includes a verse in praise of  Akbar by an author known as Akbarīya Kālidāsa (Akbar’s Kālidāsa). Other  mid-seventeenth-century anthologies, including the Padyaveṇī and Harikavi’s  Subhāṣitaratnāvalī, contain several additional verses by this curiously titled  individual.100 The Padyaveṇī also records praises of the martial prowess of  Jahangir and Parvez, a son of Jahangir who was a serious contender for the  Mughal throne before drinking himself to death in 1626.101 Some compilations  of Sanskrit verses were created under cross-cultural patronage. For exam ple, Caturbhuja compiled the Rasakalpadruma (“Wishing-Tree of Aesthetic  Emotion”) in the late seventeenth century, on the orders of Shaysta Khan,  Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s maternal uncle.102 The Rasakalpadruma includes verses  devoted to many Mughal figures and even earlier Islamicate kings, such as the  fourteenth-century Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq.103 This Sanskrit collection also  features several verses attributed directly to Shaysta Khan, which introduces  the possibility of Persianate figures participating in the Sanskrit tradition as  authors, in addition to being patrons, benefactors, and interlocutors.104 These  works, along with the Kavīndracandrodaya, negotiated a rarely agreed-upon  issue: how should the reality of Brahman-Mughal relations be reflected in the  Sanskrit literary tradition? Overwhelmingly, the answer involved integrating  imperial figures and cross-cultural ties into accepted literary frameworks. The  challenge today is to recover the meanings of those conventions, including the  possibilities for contestation and novelty.

In continuing to think through the disputed nature of historical memory in  Sanskrit, there are significant overlaps, differences, and connections with ver nacular traditions that deserve further investigation. The Sanskrit praises for  Kavīndra have a compelling counterpart in Hindi, and the two have yet to be  compared in detail. Further research will need to take into account Kavīndra’s  own mixed feelings on vernacular composition. On the one hand, he was  unique among Sanskrit literati of the time in writing in Hindi, but, on the  other, he disavowed the activity as merely “for the sake of others.”105 Kavīndra’s  discomfort notwithstanding, historical writing in various linguistic traditions  was on the rise in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India. This trend was  not confined to the Mughal Empire; in many ways, the most compelling schol arship to date concerns South Indian sources and their dynamic approaches  to representing reality in literature.106 While it poses practical challenges for  modern scholars, we may be served best by considering emerging literary prac tices and genres as cutting across linguistic lines.

Nonetheless, there were often important differences between the contents  of vernacular and Sanskrit sources. Kavīndrācārya served the Mughals as a ver nacular singer in addition to being a representative of a Sanskrit-using commu nity, and his singing is known primarily from Persian sources. We have a similar  situation for one of Kavīndra’s contemporaries, Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja, who is  perhaps the best-known Sanskrit poet and literary theoretician of the seven teenth century. Yet he is remembered in the Persian tradition as a vernacular  singer. His name appears in two Persian-language court histories from Shah  Jahan’s reign, where he is known as Jagannāth Kalāvant or Jagannāth Kabrāy, a  singer of vernacular dhrupads. There are even fourteen dhrupads in a collectionfrom the late seventeenth century attributed to Jagannāth Kabrāy, and a col lection of his bhajan songs is extant in a single manuscript in Baroda.107 A Braj  Bhasha work dated to 1673 details Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja’s life and confirms  that the singer and poet were indeed the same person.108 R.B. Athavale reports  on this work that is now inaccessible to scholars, a biography of Vallabhācārya  titled Sampradāyakalpadruma. The metered text reviews Jagannātha’s ancestry, his early education in poetry and philosophy (nyāya), and his famed musi cal skills. The Braj Bhasha work also corroborates a long-standing rumor in  the Sanskrit tradition, that Jagannātha enraged many of his contemporaries by  marrying a Muslim woman.109

In light of the selective nature of many sources, we need to draw on numer ous archives to reconstruct the lives of people, such as Jagannātha and Kavīndra,  who operated in multiple cultural contexts. Only multilingual research can  help us generate a more accurate picture of the past. Moreover, working in  multiple languages and archives promises to reveal the sorts of things that were  typically deemed appropriate to be mentioned in specific linguistic traditions  and how historical memories were formed through both inclusion and omis

sion. For instance, the Kavīndracandrodaya contains enough scattered infor mation to reconstruct the basic contours of Kavīndra’s courtly activities, but  most of the authors omit key details, especially Kavīndra’s vernacular singing,  his financial arrangement with Shah Jahan, and descriptions of the Mughal  imperial milieu. In contrast, Persian chronicles comfortably incorporated such  topics but omitted altogether Kavīndra’s Sanskrit abilities, the tax relief for  Hindu pilgrims, and Kavīndra’s status among learned Brahmans of the period.

More profoundly, the Kavīndracandrodaya offers no larger context for  Kavīndra’s cross-cultural links. Of the work’s dozens of authors, none gives any  indication of the nearly century-long history of Mughal-Brahmanical relations.  There is no mention of the long-standing Mughal interest in Sanskrit intellec tuals and knowledge systems, nor is there any recognition that all of Kavīndra’s  activities at court—soliciting royal orders, singing, and teaching Sanskrit  texts—had substantial precedents among Mughal-affiliated Sanskrit literati.  Instead, the panegyrists provide a context dominated by Sanskrit literary con ventions, references to well-known myths, and other self-referential cultural  and literary features. A few explicit historical details slip through, but they  stand out against a largely traditional backdrop. Kavīndra gaining tax breaks  from Shah Jahan was an event special enough to be remembered in Sanskrit  but primarily through a host of time-honored approaches and self-consciously  timeless tropes.

Modern scholars often invoke the strength of tradition and conventions  when analyzing premodern and early modern Indian texts, as I have here, but  our ideas of how novelty worked within specific genres, languages, and com munities remain surprisingly fuzzy. My analysis of the Kavīndracandrodaya demonstrates the need to read conventions for both their long literary history  and their more pointed political resonances. For example, Mauni Viśveśvara  Bhaṭṭa borrowed his contribution from Bāṇa’s Kādambarī and expected edu cated readers, above all Kavīndra, to recognize and appreciate this literary  reference. But he also punctuated his borrowing with a call for Kavīndra to  “live long like a king,” an appeal that invoked the specific imperial context of  Kavīndra’s negotiations with Shah Jahan.110 Others spoke of Kavīndra’s great  learning, a classic way of praising a pandit but also of particular relevance in  this case, given that it was partly erudition that enabled Kavīndra to gain the  ear of Shah Jahan. In such references, tradition and novelty coexisted fruitfully as authors carefully deployed stock tropes to speak to specific historical  circumstances.

The Kavīndracandrodaya also compels us to recognize diversity within tra ditions. Anthologies, with their multiple authors, are particularly useful in this  regard. The Kavīndracandrodaya shows that, while many mid-seventeenth century Brahmans who knew Sanskrit were conservative in their literary pro duction, some were bolder. In the authors who chose to describe those present at Shah Jahan’s court or note that Kavīndra instructed the Mughals in Sanskrit  texts, we can see at work the uneven process of making history. Given our  limited information about the reception of the Kavīndracandrodaya, we have  little sense of how this bold work was received, but it seems reasonable to sup pose that early modern readers would have noticed the same variety of views  that I have highlighted here. Above all, the message was that certain aspects  of the Indo-Persian realm were now a subject of debate in the Sanskrit literary  universe.

While the Kavīndracandrodaya honors a real-world event, it is self consciously a literary creation. Many Sanskrit writers viewed representation  and aesthetics as key concerns in writing about the world, sometimes irrespec tive of empirical truth and other times as the best way of expressing historical  truth. We ought not to miss the more basic point embedded in this encomi um’s existence, which is that, contrary to many modern assumptions, Sanskrit  writers were highly engaged with on-the-ground reality and responded in a  variety of ways to Indo-Islamic rule. The Kavīndracandrodaya showcases more  than seventy intellectuals of its day commemorating in Sanskrit literature  Kavīndra’s cross-cultural, political feat at the Mughal court. But the form of  these responses is more interesting than the mere fact of their existence. In  order to analyze this work properly, we must overcome our modern obsession  with historical accuracy. This preoccupation has even led some scholars to try  to locate a form of code-switching in premodern Indian texts, whereby authors  neatly transitioned from a literary to a historical mode.111 Such approaches  miss altogether how many precolonial authors went about producing history,  not in spite of their literary inheritances but rather through these rich tradi tions complete with tropes, repetition, and aesthetic expectations.

Privileging—and even trying to distinguish—a straight account of the  facts fails to capture the early modern Brahmanical emphasis on the power  of texts to shape both memory and future realities. I intend no condemna tion here of Sanskrit historical methods as imprecise. Rather, texts such as  the Kavīndracandrodaya push us to recognize that history in early modern  India was a more fluid, dynamic, and creative category than we typically allow  today.112 The contributors to the Moonrise of Kavīndra largely agreed on the  need to recast Kavīndra’s relations with Shah Jahan and other imperial figures  in a Sanskrit literary framework, although, in the end, they hardly present  a uniform picture. For some, such as Hīrārāma, accuracy and its associated  innovation may have been a significant goal. But, for many early moderns,  brute reality was too limiting. Brahmanical writers turned to the malleability  of Sanskrit literature and the balance afforded by standard tropes and tradi tional formulations in order to reimagine an increasingly Indo-Persian world  in culturally intelligible terms. Significant novelty arose out of these efforts,  but the central project was not conceived as adapting Sanskrit modes of writ ing and expression to accommodate the Mughal world. Rather, the authors of  the Kavīndracandrodaya strove to incorporate the Mughals and cross-cultural  imperial engagements into Sanskrit literature, a project that brought to the sur face contested ideas about constructing history in an Indian classical tongue.

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———. 2011. Speaking from Siva’s Temple: Banaras Scholar Households and the  Brahman ‘ecumene’ of Mughal India. South Asian History and Culture 2/2:  264-67.

Paradkar, M.D. 1969. Kavīndrācārya Saraswatī, a Native of Mahārāṣṭra. Journal of the  Ganganatha Jha Research Institute 25: 377-80.

Patkar, M.M. 1939. Padacandrikā: A Commentary on the Daśakumāracarita by  Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī. The Poona Orientalist 4/3: 134-35.

Pollock, Sheldon. 1993. Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India. Journal of Asian  Studies 52/2: 261-97.

———. 2001. The Death of Sanskrit. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43/2:  392-426.

———. 2003. Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out. In Literary Cultures in  History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock. Berkeley: University  of California Press: 39-130.

———. 2011. The Languages of Science in Early Modern India. In Forms of Knowledge  in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500­ 1800, ed. Sheldon Pollock. Durham: Duke University Press: 19-48.

Qanungo, K.R. 1929. Some Side-Lights on the Character and Court-Life of Shah Jahan.  Journal of Indian History 8/9: 45-52.

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———. 1947. A Note on Janārdana Vyāsa and Kavīndrācārya. The Journal of Oriental  Research Madras 16/4: 182.

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Riedel, Dagmar. 2010. Kalila wa Demna I. Redactions and Circulation. In Encyclopaedia  Iranica. http://www.iranica.com/.

Sarma, K. Madhava Krishna. 1943. Kavīndrācārya as a Hindi Scholar. Adyar Library  Bulletin 7/1: 33-36.

———. 1947. Janārdana Vyāsa: A Protege of Kavīndrācārya. The Journal of Oriental  Research Madras 16/4: 178-81.

Sarma, Sreeramula Rajeswara. 2009. Persian-Sanskrit Lexica and the Dissemination of  Islamic Astronomy and Astrology in India. In Kayd: Studies in History of Mathematics,  Astronomy and Astrology in Memory of David Pingree, ed. Gherardo Gnoli and  Antonio Panaino. Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente: 129-50.

Sastry, Ananta Krishna. 1921. Kavindracharya List. Baroda: Central Library. Schofield, Katherine Butler. 2013. Chief Musicians to the Mughal Emperors: The  Delhi Kalāwant Birāderī, 17th to 19th Centuries. Journal of the Indian Musicolo gical  Society.

Sharma, Dasharatha. 1945. Kavīndrakalpalatā, a Hindī Work by Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī.  Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 26: 153-54.

Sharma, Har Dutt. 1936. Forgotten Event of Shah Jehan’s Reign. In Mahamahopadhyaya  Kuppuswami Sastri Commemoration Volume. Madras: G.S. Press: 53-60. Shastri, Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad. 2005. A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit  Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care of the Asiatic Society, 2d ed.  Vol. 4. Kolkata: Asiatic Society.

Truschke, Audrey. 2015. “Regional Perceptions: Writing to the Mughal Courts in  Sanskrit.” In Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud. Sources, itinéraires, langues (XVIe XVIIIe siècle), ed. Corrine Lefèvre, Ines Županov, and Jorge Flores. Paris: Editions de  l’EHESS.

———. Forthcoming. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York:  Columbia University Press.

———. 2012. Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and  Grammars of Persian. Journal of Indian Philosophy 40/6: 635-68.

———. 2012. Setting the Record Wrong: A Sanskrit Vision of Mughal Conquests. South  Asian History and Culture 3/3: 373-96.

 

Notes

 

* I thank Anand Venkatkrishnan for his comments on an earlier draft of this article. I also  thank the participants of the 2013 Oxford Early Modern South Asia Workshop: Discipline,  Sect, Lineage and Community: Scholar-Intellectuals in India, c. 1500-1800 for their feedback.  I retain diacritics for the names of authors, intellectuals, and texts but forgo them for kings,  princes, and places.

1  Mahāpātra Kṛṣṇadāsa, of Orissa, and Narasiṃha, first associated with the court of Gajapati  Mukundadeva, are among the earliest datable Mughal-sponsored Sanskrit intellectuals.  See A. Truschke Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia  University Press, forthcoming): chap 1.

2  I outline this social history in ibid.: chap. 1.

3  In a few types of Sanskrit works, authors confronted the expanding Indo-Persian sphere,  including its imperial facets, in limited ways, such as Sanskrit grammars of Persian. A. Truschke.  “Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian.”  Journal of Indian Philosophy 40/6 (2012): 635-68.

4  C. Minkowski, “On Sūryadāsa and the Invention of Bidirectional Poetry (vilomakāvya).”  Journal of the American Oriental Society 121/1 (2001):

5  S. Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43/2 (2001):  408-12.

6  Y. Bronner and G.A. Tubb, “Blaming the Messenger: A Controversy in Late Sanskrit Poetics  and Its Implications.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 71/1 (2008): 87. 7  We do not know when Kavīndra first entered Shah Jahan’s court, but he was known in impe rial circles by at least 1652. K.R. Qanungo, “Some Side-Lights on the Character and Court-Life  of Shah Jahan.” Journal of Indian History 8/9 (1929): 51.

8  A.K. Sastry, Kavindracharya List (Baroda: Central Library, 1921). As Gode reminds us, how ever, this document is not to be taken as a fully accurate picture of Kavīndra’s library.  P.K. Gode, “The Kavīndracārya-Sūcī: Is It a Dependable Means for the Reconstruction of  Literary Chronology?” New Indian Antiquary 6/2 (1943): 41-42. Today, many of Kavīndra’s  manuscripts are housed in the Anup Sanskrit Library, the Sarasvati Bhavan in Varanasi, and  the Library of the Maharaja of Jammu.

9  The basic outline of Kavīndra’s gaining tax relief is clear enough from the Kavīndra candrodaya, ed. H.D. Sharma and M.M. Patkar (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research  Institute, 1939). Several contributors specifically mention Varanasi and Prayag (e.g.,  Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 15, 24, 169, 180, and 284). Kavīndra also names Kashi and  Prayag in his Kavīndrakalpadruma (kāśīprayāgau, verse 4) and in his Kavīndrakalpalatā (p. 2, verse 14, kāsīkī aru prāgakī). Kavīndrakalpadruma, ed. R.B. Athavale (Bombay:  Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1981); Kavīndrakalpalatā, ed. L. Cundavat (Jaipur: Rajasthan  Oriental Research Institute, 1958).

10  Truschke, Culture of Encounters: chap. 1 and conclusion.

11  P.K. Gode, “Some Evidence About the Location of the Manuscript Library of  Kavindracharya Sarasvati at Benares in A.D. 1665.” In Jagadvijayacchandas, ed. C.K. Raja  (Bikaner: Anup Sanskrit Library, 1945): 47-57. More recently, see Pollock, “Death of  Sanskrit”: 407.

12  Kavīndra’s known Sanskrit oeuvre includes the anthology Kavīndrakalpadruma, a com mentary on Daṇḍin’s Daśakumāracarita titled Padacandrikā, the Jagadvijayacchandas,  the Yogabhāskara, a commentary on the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, the Mīmāṃsāsarvasva,  and a (now fragmentary) commentary on the Ṛgveda. Kavīndra’s Hindi works include  the Bhāṣāyogavāsiṣṭhasār, also known as Jñānsār (a version of the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha),  the Samarasār (on astrology, unpublished), and the Kavīndrakalpalatā (a collec

tion of poetry, songs, and various other materials). Most of these works are listed in  New Catalogus Catalogorum: An Alphabetical Register of Sanskrit and Allied Works and  Authors, ed. V. Raghavan, K.K. Raja, and T. Aufrecht (Madras: University of Madras, 1949–):  3: 289-91. Kavīndra’s authorship of several of these works remains to be confirmed. For  example, Patkar notes the thin evidence for Kavīndra’s authorship of the Padacandrikā.  M.M. Patkar, “Padacandrikā: A Commentary on the Daśakumāracarita by Kavīndrācārya  Sarasvatī.” The Poona Orientalist 4/3 (1939): 134-35.

13  One noteworthy precedent for the Kavīndracandrodaya is the Nṛsiṃhasarvasvakāvya,  a collection of Sanskrit poetry and prose by more than seventy authors compiled by  Saccidānandāśrama for Nṛsiṃhāśrama, a contemporary of Akbar. M.H. Shastri. A  Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care  of the Asiatic Society, 2d ed. (Kolkata: Asiatic Society, 2005): 4: 81-85.

14  Pollock, “Death of Sanskrit”: 407.

15  Sharma and Patkar list the sixty-nine named contributors (introd. to Kavīndracandrodaya:  v-ix), and there are several anonymous contributions. The count of sixty-nine named  authors is revised from Sharma’s prior estimate of sixty-one named contributors based  on one manuscript of the Kavīndracandrodaya. H.D. Sharma, “Forgotten Event of Shah  Jehan’s Reign.” In Mahamahopadhyaya Kuppuswami Sastri Commemoration Volume (Madras: G.S. Press, 1936): 56-60.

16  For more information on Sanskrit-knowing Brahmans (and Jains) at the Mughal court,  see Truschke, Culture of Encounters: chap. 1.

17  The Kavīndracandrodaya specifically mentions that Kavīndra’s subhāṣita helped con vince Shah Jahan to rescind the pilgrimage tax (verse 92). I translate this verse below. 18  Dara Shikuh commissioned a Persian translation of the Yogavāsiṣṭha. At the very least,  this shows his interest in the text. Kavīndra was known to be learned in this work  (Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 12) and even produced a Hindi summary of the work titled  Bhāṣāyogavāsiṣṭhasār. Additionally, like all Mughal-sponsored translations of Sanskrit  texts, Dara Shikuh’s pandits probably produced their Persian version of the Yogavāsiṣṭha by first having the Sanskrit text translated into Hindi. In many cases, such Hindi transla tions probably remained oral, but it is possible that Kavīndra’s Bhāṣāyogavāsiṣṭhasār con stitutes a written intermediary Hindi translation for Dara’s Persian Yogavāsiṣṭha. For this  suggestion, see V.G. Rahurkar, “The Bhāṣā­yogavāsiṣṭhasāra of Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī.”  The Poona Orientalist 21 (1956): 97-98. On Dara Shikuh’s Yogavāsiṣṭha, see C.W. Ernst,  “Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of Arabic and Persian Translations  from Indian Languages.” Iranian Studies 36/2 (2003): 184.

19  To complicate matters further, modern scholars have often referred to this tax as a jizya (poll tax). Akbar had rescinded the jizya, and it was not reinstated fully until 1679, under  Emperor Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir.

20  V. Raghavan came to the same conclusion, based on his reading of the Kavīndracandrodaya.  “Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī.” In D.R. Bhandarkar Volume, ed. B.C. Law (Calcutta: Indian  Research Institute, 1940): 161. I discuss Kavīndra’s singing below.

21  Truschke, Culture of Encounters: chap. 5, and A. Truschke, “Setting the Record Wrong: A  Sanskrit Vision of Mughal Conquests.” South Asian History and Culture 3/3 (2012): 373-96. 22  Regarding Muslims in particular, e.g., B. Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other? Sanskrit  Sources and the Muslims (Eighth to Fourteenth Century) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998);  B. Leclère, “Ambivalent Representations of Muslims in Medieval Indian Theatre.” Studies  in History 27/2 (2011): 155-95.

23  Some scholars have fruitfully suggested that we read certain references to demons, infi dels, and the like as stand-ins for Islamic figures. See A. Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism:  Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University  Press, 2010): 190-196; S. Pollock, “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India.” Journal of  Asian Studies 52/2 (1993): 261-97. Such covert approaches are separate from what I seek to  discuss here.

24  The text has been edited by Sharma and Patkar, based on three manuscripts (Sharma and  Patkar, introd. to Kavīndracandrodaya: iii). Several additional manuscript copies in north ern and central India are listed (some twice) in New Catalogus Catalogorum: 3: 288-89.

25  For ease of reference, I give the names of all contributors as they appear in the introduc tion to Kavīndracandrodaya: v-ix.

26  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 9.

27  In the introduction to the Kavīndracandrodaya, Sharma and Patkar identify twenty-four  of the sixty-nine named contributors (v-ix). In addition, others have proposed the fol lowing identifications. Brahmendra Sarasvatī is probably identical with Nṛsiṃhāśrama,  known from a Sanskrit letter and a nirṇayapatra (letter of judgment), dated 1657, regard ing a caste dispute. See P.K. Gode, “The Identification of Gosvāmi Nṛsiṃhāśrama of Dara  Shukoh’s Sanskrit Letter with Brahmendra Sarasvatī of the Kavīndra-Candrodaya— Between A.D. 1628 and 1658.” In Studies in Indian Literary History (Bombay: Singhi Jain  Sastra Sikshapith, 1954): 2: 447-51. A few additional contributors, such as Pūrṇendra  Sarasvatī, also signed the 1657 nirṇayapatra. See R. O’Hanlon, “Letters Home: Banaras  Pandits and the Maratha Regions in Early Modern India.” Modern Asian Studies 44/2  (2010): 229-33. Chaudhuri notes that Gurjara Kavi and Nageśa Paṇḍita, son of Somarāja  Paṇḍita, are also cited in the Subhāṣitasārasamuccaya. J.B. Chaudhuri, “Some Unknown  or Less Known Sanskrit Poets Discovered from the Subhāṣita­sāra­samuccaya.” In B.C. Law  Volume, ed. D.R. Bhandarkar et al. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1946):  2: 145-58. In addition, Vrajabhūṣaṇa (Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 102) is probably the same  Vrajabhūṣaṇa who wrote the Pārasīprakāśavinoda (“Play of the Light on Persian,” 1659).

28  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 2. In another verse (32), Kṛṣṇa similarly proclaims that the  encomium ought to be taught.

29  Kavīndra was trained in the Āśvalāyana śākhā (a Vedic school of thought), renounced  the world in his youth, and received the titles kavīndra (lord of poets), vidyānidhāna (treasure house of knowledge), and ācārya (teacher) (Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 3-8).  Several secondary sources have summarized Kavīndra’s life (e.g., Athavale, introduction  to Kavīndrakalpadruma and Raghavan, “Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī”).

30  I discuss below the plea for money. Līlādhara, a southerner, solicits Kavīndra’s help in  liberating the town of Prakasha (prakāśā) in verse 159 (on this, also see Raghavan,  “Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī”: 162).

31  Many verses use alliteration and other tropes. The display of metric versatility is in verses  231-46, where Mahādeva Paṭṭavardhana offers variants on the same verse in several  meters (including some unfamiliar to me). Between verses, he notes the changes that will  transform one meter into the next. The same author offers prose praises that put Kavīndra  in a succession of Sanskrit grammatical cases (pp. 41-48).

32  Kavīndra wrote his Braj Bhasha (literary Hindi) version of the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha,  titled Bhāṣāyogavāsiṣṭhasār (also known as Jñānsār), in 1656-1657. S. Pollock, “The  Languages of Science in Early Modern India.” In Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia:  Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500­1800, ed. S. Pollock (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2011): 28. Compare Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 174-80, and the  Bhāṣāyogavāsiṣṭhasār’s introductory verses printed in K.M.K. Sarma, “Kavīndrācārya as  a Hindi Scholar.” Adyar Library Bulletin 7/1 (1943): 35. The Hindi text was translated into  Persian in the mid-eighteenth century. T. Chand, “Rāfiʾ-ul-Khilāf of Sita Ram Kayastha  Saksena, of Lucknow (Kavīndrācārya’s Jñānasāra and Its Persian Translation).” Journal of  the Ganganatha Jha Research Institute 2/1 (1944): 712.

33  See manuscripts listed in New Catalogus Catalogorum: 3: 288-89.

34  K.M.K. Sarma prints the verses in his “Janārdana Vyāsa: A Protege of Kavīndrācārya.”  The Journal of Oriental Research Madras, 16/4 (1947): 178-81. V. Raghavan discusses the  overlap with verses from the Kavīndracandrodaya in “A Note on Janārdana Vyāsa and  Kavīndrācārya.” The Journal of Oriental Research Madras 16/4 (1947): 182.

35  Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja, Āsaphavilāsa. In Pandita Raja Kavya Samgraha: Complete Poetical  Works of Panditaraja Jagannatha, ed. K. Kamala (Hyderabad: Sanskrit Academy, Osmania  University, 2002).

36  Truschke, Culture of Encounters: chap. 2, and A. Truschke, “Regional Perceptions: Writing  to the Mughal Courts in Sanskrit.” In Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud. Sources, itinéraires,  langues (XVIe­XVIIIe siècle), ed. C. Lefèvre, I. Županov, and J. Flores (Paris: Editions de  l’EHESS, 2015).

37  Vrajabhūṣaṇa composed the Pārasīprakāśavinoda (“Play of the Light on Persian,” 1659), an  abridgment of Vedāṅgarāya’s Sanskrit-Persian astronomical lexicon, titled Pārasīprakāśa (“Light on Persian”), written for Shah Jahan. S.R. Sarma, “Persian-Sanskrit Lexica and the  Dissemination of Islamic Astronomy and Astrology in India.” In Kayd: Studies in History  of Mathematics, Astronomy and Astrology in Memory of David Pingree, ed. G. Gnoli and  A. Panaino (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2009): 144-46.

38  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 102.

39  For example, Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 39 and verses 52 and 310, respectively. 40  For example, Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 96 and 136. Note also similar comparisons to  Karṇa (among other figures) in verses 275 and 172.

41  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 309. The six schools are Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Yoga,  Vaiśeṣika, and Nyāya.

42  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 269. Several other verses also compare Kavīndra favorably to  Kālidāsa or other poets (e.g., Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 183, 304, 305, and 306). 43  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 50.

44  Kavīndracandrodaya: p. 31.

45  The Pañcatantra had been known in the Persianate world since the sixth century CE,  when it was translated into Middle Persian. D. Riedel reviews the later Persian redactions  in “Kalila wa Demna I. Redactions and Circulation.” In Encyclopaedia Iranica (http://www .iranica.com/, 2010). Akbar sponsored two Persian versions of the Pañcatantra: ʿIyār­i Dānish (“Touchstone of the Intellect”), which reworked an earlier Persian rendition, and  another, Panchākhyāna, which was based on a Jain recension of the Sanskrit work. 46  For example, Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 39, 115, 116, and 118. The title is also mentioned  in the majority of prose contributions in the Kavīndracandrodaya. The Mughal emperors  Akbar and Jahangir bestowed Sanskrit, Hindi, and Persian titles on Brahman intellectuals,  so Shah Jahan was acting within an established tradition in this regard (Truschke, Culture  of Encounters: chap. 1).

47  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 115.

48  Respectively, śrīmatsāhijahāṃdilīpakṛpayā (Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 116) and  bhavatkṛpātaḥ (Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 39).

49  Colophon to the Daśakumāracarita as quoted in M. Krishnamachariar, History of Classical  Sanskrit Literature, 3d ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004): 373-B. See also the colophon  to sections of his Laghuyogavāsiṣṭhasār (Sarma, “Kavīndrācārya as a Hindi Scholar”: 36).  Sastry mentions the title being used on Kavīndra’s manuscripts (Kavindracharya’s List: v).

50  Specific mentions of Kavīndra’s debating skills in the royal assembly are found in  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 28 and prose on p. 35.

51  See, e.g., S. Jain, “Piety, Laity and Royalty: Jains Under the Mughals in the First Half of the  Seventeenth Century.” Indian Historical Review 40/1 (2013): 74, and Truschke, Culture of  Encounters: chap. 5.

52  ʿAbd al-Sattār ibn Qāsim Lāhaurī, Majālis­i Jahāngīrī, ed. A. Nawshahi and M. Nizami  (Tehran: Markaz-i Pizhuhishi Miras-i Maktub, 2006): 95-98. C. Lefèvre discusses this epi sode in “Splendours and Miseries of Scholar-Intellectuals at the Mughal Court: A View  from the Majālis­i Jahāngīrī (1608-1611)” (paper presented at Paris, 2012).

53  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 56.

54  Sharma and Patkar suggest that this may be Bhaṭṭa Nīlakaṇṭha but do not appear very  confident in this identification (introd. to Kavīndracandrodaya: vii).

55  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 92. The verse depends upon a śleṣa (double entendre), which  I have translated both ways by introducing a simile (“just as”) for clarity. V. Raghavan read  this verse as referring to Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya (“Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī”: 161). Based on the  strong play on grammatical terms in the verse, however, I find it more likely to refer to  Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya in the second reading. I am grateful to Victor D’Avella and an  anonymous reviewer for their assistance interpreting this verse.

56  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 324.

57  Ibid.: verse 307.

58  Ibid.: verse 45 (mānonnatiṃ tava narendrakṛtām).

59  mahendra iva ciraṃ jīvatu (Kavīndracandrodaya: p. 25). The corresponding section of the  Kādambarī is praising the sage Jabali, not a sovereign. Bāṇa, Kādambarī, ed. by Kashinath  Pandurang Parab (Bombay: Nirnaya Sagara Press, 1890): 1: 89. This change suggests a con scious attempt to treat Kavīndra as a royal figure, going beyond the parallel section of  Bāṇa’s Kādambarī.

60  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 113.

61  Ibid.: verse 226.

62  Ibid.: verse 58. Similar imagery of a wise man refusing financial compensation for greater  gain appears elsewhere in the Sanskrit tradition. For example, in the Kaṭhopaniṣad,  Naciketas refuses Yama’s offer of horses, gold, elephants, and other things in exchange  for learning about death and immortality. Kaṭhopaniṣadbhāṣya of Śrīraṅgarāmānuja, ed.  K.C. Varadachari and D.T. Tatacharya (Tirupati: Sri Venkatesvara Oriental Institute, 1949):  1: 1: 24. I thank Anand Venkatkrishnan for the reference.

63  Padmasāgara “Jagadgurukāvya.” In Vijayapraśastimahākāvya, ed. Hargovinddas and  Becardas (Benares: Harakhchand Bhurabhai, 1911): verses 175-76.

64  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 163.

65  Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Kambūh, ʿAmal­i Ṣāliḥ or Shah Jahan Namah (a Complete History of  the Emperor Shah Jahan), ed. G. Yazdani, 3 vols. (Bibliotheca Indica. Calcutta: Asiatic  Society of Bengal, 1923): 3: 122, and the Pādshāhnāmah of Vāris̱ as cited in Chand, “Rāfiʾ ul-Khilāf”: 8-9. The wording of these two works is similar. Using Kambūh’s version, Allison  Busch has suggested that this episode records Shah Jahan rewarding Kavīndra for the  Kavīndrakalpalatā. A. Busch, “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal  Court.” Modern Asian Studies 44/2 (2010): 291-92.

66  Cited in Qanungo, “Character and Court-Life of Shah Jahan”: 51.

67  F. Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656­1668, ed. V.A. Smith, trans. A. Constable  (London: Oxford University Press, 1914): 341-42. Bernier does not give Kavīndra’s name  but offers a detailed description of a pandit who assisted him in Benares. P.K. Gode first  identified Bernier’s pandit as Kavīndrācārya in “Bernier and Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī  at the Mughal Court.” In Studies in Indian Literary History (Bombay: Singhi Jain Sastra  Sikshapith, 1954): 2: 364-79. Gode later provided additional evidence for this identifica tion from the Persian tradition (“Location of the Manuscript Library of Kavindracharya”).  Pollock has accepted that the two men are one (“Languages of Science”: 27 and “Death of  Sanskrit”: 407-08).

68  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 126.

69  girīśagovindaguṇagaṇagāyakeṣu, ibid.: 28.

70  On Mughal kalāvants, see K.B. Schofield, “Chief Musicians to the Mughal Emperors:  The Delhi Kalāwant Birāderī, 17th to 19th Centuries.” Journal of the Indian Musicological  Society (2013) Kalāvant can also mean moon, which may well have been another intended  meaning here; I thank Robert Goldman for the suggestion.

71  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 146.

72  dīnāvalidīnāravṛndadāyakeṣu, ibid.: 28.

73  Ibid.: verse 116 (śrīviśveśvarakāśikāsuranadītīre suvarṇaṃ dadau). For this reading, also  see Rahurkar, “Bhāṣā­yogavāsiṣṭhasāra of Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī”: 101. On the impor tance of the Viśveśvara temple during this period, see R. O’Hanlon, “Speaking from Siva’s Temple: Banaras Scholar Households and the Brahman ‘ecumene’ of Mughal India.” South  Asian History and Culture 2/2 (2011): 264-67.

74  Sharma and Patkar, introduction to Kavīndracandrodaya: v. Mahādeva Paṭṭavardhana  contributed several verses (138-155 and 227-268) and prose passages to the  Kavīndracandrodaya.

75  R. O’Hanlon has noted the prevalence of Marathi among Deccani Brahman migrants  to North India during the seventeenth century (“Letters Home”: 114). Kavīndra’s  Maharashtrian origins are indicated by these verses, several of Kavīndra’s Hindi works,  the Kavīndracandrikā, and also by Marathi words in Kavīndra’s Padacandrikā, a commen tary on Daṇḍin’s Daśakumāracarita. M.D. Paradkar, “Kavīndrācārya Saraswatī, a Native of  Mahārāṣṭra.” Journal of the Ganganatha Jha Research Institute 25 (1969): 377-80.

76  For mentions of yavanas in relation to Mughal taxes, see Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 7, 21,  85, and 210.

77  Verse 59 of the Kavīndracandrodaya refers to Shah Jahan as “lord of the yavanas”  (yavanādhipa), “lord of Delhi” (dillīśa), and “best of men” (naravara).

78  Ibid.: verse 83 (mlecchāmbhonidhimagnahaindavavṛṣoddhārāya).

79  The word hindū was originally a Perso-Arabic term that entered Sanskrit in the mid fourteenth century. It was used widely in Sanskrit by the mid-seventeenth century,  although its exact valence depended on the context. Writing in the early seventeenth cen tury, Kavi Karṇapūra defined the Persian term hindū as “theistic Indians” (hindū viprādir  āstiko lokaḥ) in his Saṃskṛtapārasīkapadaprakāśa, ed. H. Yogi (Kashi: Goraksatilla  Yogapracarini, 1952): verse 222.

80  Several earlier scholars cited Shah Jahan’s tax on Hindu pilgrims to Benares and Prayag  as part of the supposed wider Mughal persecution of Hindus, which also included tem ple destruction (Sharma, “Forgotten Event of Shah Jahan’s Reign”: 54, and Raghavan,  “Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī”: 159). More recently, scholars have effectively disposed of the  idea that the Mughals led any systematic, religion-based attack on Hindus. In contrast,  as Richard Eaton has shown, Mughal temple destructions were primarily political rather  than religious acts. R. Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States.” In Beyond  Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, ed. D. Gilmartin  and B.B. Lawrence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000): 246-81.

81  See mentions of the Kali Yuga (e.g., Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 82, 96, 192, 193, 283,  291, 292, 294, 319, and prose p. 25). Other scholars have pointed to instances in which  actions by Islamicate figures that harmed Brahmanical or Jain communities were subsumed under the explanation of the degradation of the Kali Yuga; e.g., P. Granoff,  “Tales of Broken Limbs and Bleeding Wounds: Responses to Muslim Iconoclasm in  Medieval India.” East and West 41 (1991): 189-203.

82  For example, śrīmatsāhijahāṃdilīpa, śrīnṛpasāhajāha (Kavīndracandrodaya: verses 116  and 156, respectively).

83  By the Mughal period, sārvabhauma had arguably become synonymous with the  Mughals. Writing in the seventeenth century, Veṇīdatta equates sārvabhauma and  dillīpati. Pañcatattvaprakāśa, Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS Orientali 172, fol. 1b, verse  18, printed in The Sanskrit Grammar and Manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth S.J. (1620­ 1668): Facsimile Edition of Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome, Mss. Or. 171 and 172, ed. A. Camps and  J.-C. Muller (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

84  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 116.

85  The standard account of Sanskrit ways of describing Muslims is Chattopadhyaya,  Representing the Other?

86  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 169.

87  S. D’Onofrio, “A Persian Commentary to the Upaniṣads: Dārā Šikōh’s Sirr­i Akbar.” In  Muslim Cultures in the Indo­Iranian World During the Early­Modern and Modern Periods,  ed. F. Speziale, and D. Hermann (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2010): 533-63.

88  D. Sharma, “Kavīndrakalpalatā, a Hindī Work by Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī.” Annals of the  Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 26 (1945): 153-54. Kavīndra also has verses in his  Kavīndrakalpalatā that mention other Mughal figures, including Murad, possibly Jahanara,  and even one “Sayyad Hayat Khān” (mentioned by Sharma in “Kavīndrakalpalatā”: 154).

89  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 171.

90  The Karaskaras served in Yudhiṣṭhira’s household. The Mahābhārata for the First Time  Critically Edited [Mahābhārata], ed. V.S. Sukthankar et al. 19 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar  Oriental Research Institute, 1933-): 2.46.21. Later literature identifies their origins as  near the Narmada river valley, in central India, see The Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of  Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha, ed. P. Olivelle (Oxford and New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999): app. II, p. 343. However, the listing of Karaskara here, sur rounded by areas outside of the Subcontinent or on its northern fringes, suggests that  Hīrārāma may have had another location in mind.

91  Darada is near Kashmir, and the Darada people appear in many Sanskrit texts, including  Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī: A Chronicle of the Kings of Kaśmīr, ed. A. Stein (Mirpur, Azad  Kashmir: Verinag, 1991): 1.312 and 7.911.

92  Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 170. I translate rūṃmaśāmāḥ, literally the “Empire of Rome,”  as “Ottomans.” Cf. a similar use of the term in Marathi a few decades later, quoted by  S. Guha in “Conviviality and Cosmopolitanism: Recognition and Representation of ‘East’  and ‘West’ in Peninsular India C.1600-1800.” In Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud. Sources,

itinéraires, langues (XVIe­XVIIIe siècle), ed. C. Lefèvre, I. Županov, and J. Flores (Paris:  Editions de l’EHESS, 2015).

93  The Daradas and Shakas are listed among the warriors in many places (e.g., Mahābhārata:  7.19.7-8). Also note 1.165.35-36, where the Shakas and Daradas are said to have been born  from the wishing-cow through Vasiṣṭha’s power.

94  Raghavan takes phiraṅga here as meaning the Portuguese in particular (“Kavīndrācārya  Sarasvatī”: 161), but, given the range of Westerners who visited Shah Jahan’s court, I think  it more likely that Hīrārāma meant Europeans generally.

95  Kavīndracandrikā, ed. K. Divakar (Pune: Maharashtra Rashtrabhasha Sabha, 1966):  verse 24.

96  bhūribhūbhṛcchubhāyāṃ, Kavīndracandrodaya: verse 318.

97  Ibid.: verse 223.

98  Harideva Miśra, Jahāṅgīravirudāvalī, ed. J. Pathak (Allahabad: Ganganatha Jha Kendriya  Sanskrit Vidyapithan, 1978): 2-3.

99  See, e.g., Chandar Bhān’s Chahār chaman (“Four Gardens”), quoted and translated in  R. Kinra, “Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of  Mughal Ṣulḥ­i Kull.” The Medieval History Journal 16/2 (2013): 253-54.

100  Athavale notes the inclusion of lines by Akbarīya Kālidāsa in Harikavi’s Subhāṣitaratnāvalī (introd. to Kavīndrakalpadruma: v). On Akbarīya Kālidāsa, see also J.B. Chaudhuri, Muslim  Patronage to Sanskritic Learning (Calcutta: Pracyavani, 1954): 33-45.

101  Veṇīdatta, The Padyaveṇī: Critically Edited for the First Time, ed. J.B. Chaudhuri (Calcutta:  Pracyavani, 1944): verses 153 (on Jahangir) and 159 (on Parvez).

102  Caturbhujamiśra writes about wanting to please Shaysta Khan in Rasakalpadruma, ed.  B. Mishra (New Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1991): p. 4, verse 10.

103  For the verse on Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq, see Rasakalpadruma: p. 205, verse 14.

104  Rasakalpadruma: pp. 294 (śāntarasa), 311 (saṃkīrṇa), and the rest anyokti: pp. 330, 332,  343 (two verses), and 345.

105  Kavīndrakalpalatā quoted in Busch, “Hidden in Plain View”: 289. Pollock makes the point  that Kavīndra stood out for his bilingual writing (“Languages of Science”: 28). 106  Most notably, V.N. Rao, D.D. Shulman, and S. Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing  History in South India (New York: Other Press, 2003). While this book’s thesis is seldom  fully accepted by scholars, it has provoked much productive scholarship.

107  F.N. Delvoye mentions Jagannātha’s dhrupads collected in the Anūpasaṅgītaratnākara in  “Les chants dhrupad en langue Braj des poètes-musiciens de l’Inde moghole.” In Littératures  médiévales de l’Inde du nord, ed. F. Mallison (Paris: Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient,  1991): 169. Pollock mentions the bhajan collection, titled Kīrtanapraṇālīpadasaṃgraha (“Languages of Science”: 42 n. 31).

108  On this Braj Bhasha work, see R.B. Athavale, “New Light on the Life of Paṇḍitarāja  Jagannātha.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 48-49 (1968): 418. 109  Sheldon Pollock discusses Jagannātha’s mentions of this woman in his poetry in “Sanskrit 

Literary Culture from the Inside Out.” In Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from  South Asia, ed. S. Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 97-98.

111  Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time.

112  Many Indologists (e.g., Allison Busch, Prachi Deshpande, Sumit Guha, Christian Novetzke,  and Ramya Sreenivasan) have underscored the importance of memory and the fuzzy  boundary between history and fiction in precolonial India.