![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article offers a reappraisal of Nayacandra Sūri’s Sanskrit epic, Hammīra-mahākāvya, narrating the heroic but unsuccessful struggle of the warrior-king Hammīra Chauhan of Ranthambhor (r.1283–1301) against the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khalji (r. 1296–1316). Created at the Gwalior court of Vīrama Tomar (r.1401–1423), this historical court epic stands out in the history of Sanskrit poetry for its tragic ending. Challenging conventional socio-political readings of the epic as a eulogy of an admirable Hindu/Rajput/kṣatriya hero, this article foregrounds the poem’s playful and tragic literary logic, arguing that it can be read as a subversive response to more overtly heroic presentations of Hammīra elsewhere. As such, it reveals the poet’s underlying concern to provoke an estrangement from the ideals of ‘Rajputizing’ elites and their obsession with heroic pride and fame. I show this to be the case through a literary analysis of Nayacandra’s poem against its specific historical background, namely the emergence of an independent Tomar kingdom in Gwalior.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Heidi Pauwels for her comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, for an important recent book on Pṛthvīrāja Chauhan. For the most complete list of fully-fledged renderings of the Hammīra tale, see Sandesara’s note on Amṛtakalāśa’s Hammīraprabandha (1518 CE), an ‘unnoticed māru-gurjara poem eulogising the exploits of Hammīra’, in Sandesara, “The Hammīraprabandha,” 362–363. He mentions ten works composed between the fifteenth and mid-nineteenth century, some of which also remain unnoticed and await edition. Despite the great literary and historical relevance of the Hammīra tradition, its key texts are understudied and poorly understood. Arguably, the Hammīra narrative shaped the epic renderings of many other historical heroes. References to ‘bold’ (haṭha) Hammīra thus turn up in many narratives about Rajput heroes. For example, in Amrit Rai’s Mancarit (1585) who laments that ‘bold Hammīra’ (haṭhī haṃvīra) is gone, quoted from Busch, ‘Portrait of a Raja’, 312. Hammīra’s story is also referred to in Jayasi’s famous Padmāvat (1540) and clearly influenced its plot, as noted in Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic, 206. I discuss the oft-neglected but influential literary trajectory of the Hammīra story in my PhD dissertation, which is in progress.
2. As in Bednar, “Conquest and Resistance in Context,” and “Mongol, Muslim, Rajput,” Sreenivasan “Alauddin Khalji Remembered,” Thapar, Somanatha, 116–131; in book-projects in progress by Audrey Truschke and Aditya Malik, and in a forthcoming article by Cynthia Talbot, titled “Turks, warriors, and conquerors.” I thank these scholars for sharing their projects with me.
3. Ahmad, “Epic and counter-Epic.”
4. See, for example, the studies in Richard Eaton’s edited volume India’s Islamic traditions where Ahmad’s article is reprinted as the first essay of the book. Similarly, Michael Bednar’s doctoral dissertation called “Conquest and Resistance in Context” is explicitly framed as a reaction against Ahmad’s article. It also forms an important point of contrast in the discussion of HMK and other Sultanate period epics in Thapar, Somanatha, 116–131 and Sreenivasan, “Alauddin Khalji Remembered”.
5. As in Bednar, “Conquest and Resistance in Context”, Bednar, “Mongol, Muslim, Rajput,” Sreenivasan, “Alauddin Khalji Remembered,”; and Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, 65–66.
6. For example, as Romila Thapar, Somanatha, 119 remarks about the negative portrayal of Pṛthvīrāja in Pṛthvīrājarāso, this cycle of poems reads more like ‘an explanation of defeat in the guise of a eulogy and often expressed with sensitivity’. She makes the important distinction (p.133) that poems can be ‘forms of legitimizing power and status or attempts at explaining why these were lost.’ See Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, for a book length study on the Pṛthvīrājarāso tradition and Pritchett, “Prthviraj Raso” for an analysis of its core narrative elements.
7. As in Sreenivasan, “Alauddin Khalji Remembered,” Bednar, “Conquest and Resistance in Context”; and Bednar, “Mongol, Muslim, Rajput,” the former overlooking the Gwalior context.
8. Bednar, “Mongol, Muslim, Rajput,” 604.
9. Bednar, “Conquest and Resistance in Context,” 254–255.
10. For example, Padmanābha’s Kānhaḍade prabandha (1455, transl. by Bhatnagar) which recounts the defeat of Kānhaḍade – the Chauhan ruler of Jalor at the hands of Alauddin – is explicit in his concern to praise the dynastic lineage of his patron, a descendent of the Chauhan hero of the poem. The context of composition is therefore significantly different from HMK where we see no explicit concern to link the Chauhan hero to the Tomar patron, as I show in the second section.
11. See Bednar, “Mongol, Muslim, Rajput” for a discussion of this character.
12. Such a critique seems also implicit in Nayandra’s Rambhāmañjarī, a play in the rare saṭṭaka genre about king Jayacandra of Kannauj, the famous rival of Pṛthvīrāja who was also defeated by Shahabudin Muhammad Ghori. It is edited with an English introduction and translation by Poddar, Nayacandrasūri’s Rambhāmañjarī. Like his rival Pṛthvīrāja in the rāso tradition, Jayacandra’s defeat is typically linked to his addiction to sensual pleasure – which is precisely the topic of Nayacandra’s play. A recent study of the play is included in Melinda Fodor’s PhD dissertation, “Contribution à l’étude du genre,” on the saṭṭaka genre. I have briefly discussed the ironic treatment of his story by Nayacandra in my Master’s thesis on HMK, “Nayacandra Sūri’s Hammīramahākāvya,” 56–57.
13. HMK 14.43, translated and discussed in the second section of this paper. I use the edition by Jinavijaya Muni, which is based on the same manuscript from the first edition by Nilakanth Kirtane, carrying the date 1485 CE (1542 VS). Jinavijaya’s edition lists variants from an older manuscript preserved in Kota from 1429 CE, and includes an anonymous, undated and incomplete Sanskrit commentary on HMK, titled Hammīra-mahākāvya-dīpikā, which unfortunately breaks off in the middle of the fifth canto. The modern scholarly understanding of HMK has been much informed by the useful but highly problematic English preface and detailed paraphrase of HMK from the first edition by Kirtane. It has been reprinted in Jinavijaya’s later edition and in a Hindi translation of HMK by Nathulal Trivedi. Kirtane’s paraphrase has cast a long shadow over the interpretation of Nayacandra’s epic. He takes a Hindu nationalistic stance, casting Hammīra as the heroic Hindu hero of India who ‘deserves our sympathy’ in fighting the ‘Muhammadan conquerors’ (Kirtane, The Hammīra Mahākāvya, iv). Moreover, Kirtane’s paraphrase is highly selective, maintaining that whole cantos ‘as not possessing any historical value, may be ignored in this precis of the poem’ (Ibid.).
14. Pauwels links this to the central role played by the rash and virile Pāṇḍava brother Bhīma in this vernacular Mahābhārata, see her discussion of Viṣṇudās’ work in this special volume. The character of Bhīma also forms an important point of comparison in Nayacandra’s HMK, see my brief discussion of the symbolic significance of Hammīra’s general ‘Bhīmasiṃha’ in the third section of this paper.
15. Some scholars might want to criticize my use of the notion ‘tragic’. I will thus occasionally refer to the motif of tragic blindness (or sleepiness) as one of HMK’s most defining and structuring themes. It is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper to engage with debates surrounding Indian and Western notions of ‘tragedy’ or ‘tragic’. I nevertheless foreground the fact that the overall story in the HMK develops along a plotline that we can call tragic, in a broad sense, as a narrative about the shift from fortune to misfortune. Such a plot comes along with a set of themes, poetic strategies, effects, emotional responses and tensions that are different from or at least less pronounced in stories with an overtly triumphant plotline.
16. Hammīra’s heroic resistance appears to have been more ‘memorable’ than the struggles of other kings who were defeated by Alauddin. For example, in the Nābhinandana-jinoddhāra-prabandha (1333) of the Jain writer Kakka Sūri the defeated Hammīra of Ranthambhor emerges as the only ‘proud and brave’ ruler in a series of verses enumerating Alauddin’s successful military campaigns (1297–1313), see Sharma, “New Light on Alauddin Khalji’s,” 96. Amir Khusrau, Alauddin’s court poet, who wrote about his conquests in his Khazā’in al-Futūḥ (c. 1311–1312), also treats the war with Hammīra as a long and difficult siege against a brave warrior-king, see the discussion by Bednar, “Conquest and Resistance in Context,” 56–9. This might explain why in later Persian histories too like Yahya’s Tarikh-I-Mubarak Shahi Hammīra’s heroic resistance is treated in much more length than the stories of the defeated rulers of Deogiri, Chittor, Malwa, Jalor, and the Telangana kingdom in the South. See (Basu, “Yahya Bin Ahmad Abdullah Sirhindi’s,” 75–76.
17. I thank Christopher Diamond for sharing his unpublished paper ‘Pragmatics and Ideals: Masculine-Warrior Ethics & Memory in three tales of the Hammīra narrative’, based on two conference talks on Hammīra (one at UW, Seattle, 14–15 September 2017, and the next year at the 25th European Conference on South Asian studies (ECSAS), Paris, 24–27 July). It includes a more detailed comparison and contextualization of the narratives of Isami, Vidyāpati and Bhāṇḍau Vyāsa. His work stimulated me in thinking through the significance of many important differences and overlaps between these texts.
18. More specifically, they revolted against Alauddin’s brother and general Ulugh Khan. The reason for this revolt is often linked to the Mongols’ unwillingness to hand over the looted booty, as in HMK (10.21) and Yahya’s Tarikh-I-Mubarak Shahi (Basu, “Yahya Bin Ahmad Abdullah Sirhindi’s,” 75).
19. Including HMK and all the later vernacular epics. The fact that it occurs in Isami’s text which predates HMK more than half a century, shows that already from early on Hammīra’s story centred on his heroic vow to protect the Mongol refugees/traitors.
20. Although Amir Khusrau’s Khazā’in al-Futūḥ (c.1311–1312) contains probably the earliest written account of Hammīra’s story, it doesn’t dramatize the events in the way later narratives do, avoiding, for example, the use of real dialogues as in Isami’s text. It (therefore?) also lacks the episode of Hammīra’s heroic vow. But the basic narrative elements are present: the treacherous Mongols taking shelter in Ranthambhor, Alauddin’s encircling of the fort leading to a famine, and the jauhar in the fort preceding the final battle, perhaps the first recorded in history, becoming a trope in later Rajput literature, as explained in Bednar, “Conquest and Resistance in Context,” 58.
21. Quoted from translation by Husain, Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn, 446.
22. See note 1. It is also, for example, the title given to two late vernacular Hammīra epics – a Hammīra-haṭha by Candraśekhara (1846) and by Gvāla (1827) – and a beautiful series of miniature paintings of the Kangra school, which are said to form the inspiration of these poems, see the discussion of these paintings and the story of ‘Hammira’s obstinacy’ in Shastri, ‘The Hamir Hath’, which includes a comparison with Nayacandra’s HMK.
23. This problem is also raised in Diamond’s discussion of Isami’s text in his unpublished ‘Pragmatics and Ideals’.
24. In Bednar, Conquest and Resistance in Context, this practice is discussed as an inversion of act of satī, the self-immolation of women on the funeral pyre after the death of their husbands. Bednar discusses jauhar as an act of heroic self-sacrifice, mirroring the feats of their husbands, and integral to the emerging warrior-ethos of Rajputs.
25. Moreover, he explicitly says how ‘the brave Hindu Rai Hammir [] by his wisdom [] frustrated all the plans devised by the Turks.’(translation quoted from Husain, Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn, 449). This point is also made in Diamond’s unpublished ‘Pragmatics and Ideals’.
26. Thus, in Puruṣaparīkṣā Hammīra’s courtiers remind him that ‘this (conflict) has indeed started because you gave him protection’ (tad-rakṣā-nimittaka evāyam ārabdho, ed. by Jha, Vidyāpatikṛta Puruṣaparīkṣā, 18).
27. The existence of this work is a debatable point. It is usually ascribed to Hammīra’s supposed bard Śārṅgadhara, who is in fact only known as the compiler of a Sanskrit anthology called Śārṅgadhara-paddhati (c.1363), about which more in the next section. The identification of Śārṅgadhara as Hammīra’s bard is probably first made by Colonel James Tod in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (Vol. II, 452), where he says that he has translated two works of Śārṅgadhara with the help of his Jain guru, a ‘Hamir Rásá’ and a ‘Hamir Cavyá’, and also briefly discussed in the preface to HMK’s first edition (Kirtane, The Hammīra Mahākāvya, i). Scholars might have taken over Tod’s idea of Śārṅgadhara as Hammīra’s bard and ascribed the Apabhraṃśa verses of Hammīra in Prākṛtapaiṅgalam to his hand. I leave it in the middle whether they are just stray verses or from a now lost Hamir-rāsā, the latter option being suggested in the preface to the edition of the Prākṛtapaiṅgalam (Vyas, Prākṛtapaiṅgalam, iv). I do contend that it’s very likely that there must have existed fully-fledged oral or written epics prior to HMK. The verses on Hammīra from Prākṛtapaiṅgalam are added as appendix (1) to the edition of Hammīrāyaṇa (Nahata, Bhāṇḍau Vyās’ Hammīrāyaṇa, 38–43), accompanied with Hindi translation. See Ollett, Language of the Snakes, 186–187, for a discussion of Prākṛtapaiṅgalam’s language as Avahaṭṭha, also noting the verses about Hammīra, and pointing to the significance of this work for our understanding of the emergence of vernacular literature.
28. I elaborate on this point in the next section.
29. The ambivalence surrounding Hammīra’s character is also noted in Talbot’s discussion of Sūrjana-carita (c. 1590) where, conspicuously, in opposition to an earlier praiseworthy description of the Chauhan king, ‘Hammira’s fate is cited as an example of one to avoid’ (Talbot, “Justifying defeat,” 347). In the case of Puruṣaparīkṣā, its author Vidyāpati tries so hard to create an ideal image of Hammīra and silence the topic of blame that one cannot but see through his strategies – perhaps intentionally. For example (Sanskrit quotations are from Jha’s edition), he is conspicuously silent about the Mongols’ treason, a problem that is raised two times, but never made explicit. We know that there is ‘some reason’ (kenāpi nimittena) for Alauddin’s anger and that Mahimasahi has been an offender (āpathya-kāriṇam), but Mahimasahi himself purposefully silences the fact that he betrayed his former lord when he tells (or lies to) Hammīra that there was no offence (vināparādham). In the same vain, his courtiers have to explicitly tell Hammīra that their lord is without offence (niraparādho) for having caused the conflict by his heroic vow of protection. Interestingly, Vidyāpati also emphasizes that the women themselves chose to immolate themselves, unlike the narratives of Isami, Nayacandra, and Bhāṇḍau Vyāsa, which make rather explicit that the women are given no choice. Diamond also draws attention to this important difference in his unpublished paper ‘Pragmatics and Ideals’. It shows that there might have been different opinions surrounding the heroic value of jauhar.
30. ‘I prefer Fame, Molhā (name of the envoy), you take Fortune’ (kīrati molhā! variji maiṃ, lāchī tuṃ le jāha, Hammīrāyaṇa v.153, briefly discussed by Sharma (in Nahata, Bhāṇḍau Vyās’ Hammīrāyaṇa, 55 and 60).
31. See Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, 50–68 for a discussion of the negative remembrance of ‘sleepy’ Pṛthvīrāja in pre-fifteenth century sources. Nayacandra thus deliberately drops the word ‘sleepy’ (śayālum, HMK 3.1) in the opening verse of the third canto about Pṛthvīrāja.
32. This concern is repeatedly made explicit in verses referring to the ‘cause of destruction’ of the clan or kingdom, as, for example, in in 8.74 (kulasya sarvasya vināśa-hetuḥ), 8.94 (rājya-saudhasya vināśa-hetuḥ) and 10.28 (tadrājyasya vināśa-hetur).
33. Sheldon Pollock’s groundbreaking study, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, on the strong connection between the production of courtly literature (kāvya) and power (rājya) has been very influential in shaping socio-political readings of these works. See, for example, Kapadia, ‘Universal Poet, Local kings’, on the legitimizing function of two fifteenth-century regional Sanskrit works; and Sreenivasan, ‘Warrior-Tales at Hinterland Courts’, for the political significance of vernacular warrior tales at hinterland courts (14th-16th c.). I have adopted the term ‘patron-centred epic’ from McCrea’s discussion of the seminal role of Bilhaṇa’s Vikramāṅkadevacarita (c.1085–1089) in this new genre (McCrea, “Poetry beyond good and evil”).
34. See, for example, the close readings of Sanskrit historical kāvya by Bronner, “The poetics of ambivalence,” McCrea, “Poetry beyond good and evil,” Sarkar, “What makes a good poet,”; and Talbot, “Justifying defeat,” and the close readings of vernacular historical poetry by Busch, “Literary responses to the Mughal,” 41; “Portrait of a Raja,” 311–315. The prevalence of this poetic attitude of cynicism and ambivalence in historical narratives is intriguing and requires more scholarly attention. It is, for example, also a salient feature in the thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Sanskrit historical prose narratives (prabandha) of the Jains, see Granoff, “Sarasvatī’s sons,”; and Arai, “Jaina Kingship as viewed.”
35. See the discussion of verse 1.27 in Bilhaṇa’s VDC by Bronner, “The poetics of ambivalence,” 464; and McCrea, “Poetry beyond good and evil,” 506–507.
36. See Pauwels in this volume.
37. As done in Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, 56 and Sreenivasan, “Alauddin Khalji Remembered,” 287–288.
38. The mid-fifteenth-century vernacular Kānhaḍade-prabandha (on the Chauhans of Jalor) and the Sanskrit play Gaṅgadāsa-pratāpa-vilāsa-nāṭakam (on the Chauhan king of Champaner, discussed in Kapadia, ‘Universal Poet, Local kings’) are thus clearly composed to praise a Chauhan patron, both linking the heroes of their poem to the Śākhambhari Chauhans Hammīra and Pṛthvīrāja. By contrast, the popular old-Rajasthani Vīsaladevarāsa (c. 1450, edition and translation by Smith), on the Chauhan ruler Vighraharāja (Vīsala), clearly pokes fun at this Chauhan king who is repeatedly accused of being foolish (mūḍha), similar to the portrayal of Chauhans in HMK. Both texts don’t really fit into the tradition of patron-centred eulogies.
39. Even such careful historians as Michael Bednar, Conquest and Resistance in Context, and Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, who writes: ‘Although no patron is named in Hammīra Mahākāvya, typically the patron of this type of dynastic history belonged to the same lineage as the text’s protagonist’ (p.56).
40. Sreenivasan, “Alauddin Khalji Remembered,” 287–8.
41. kāvyaṃ pūrva-kaver na kāvya-sadṛśaṃ kaścid vidhātā ‘dhune- ty ukte tomara-vīrama-kṣitipateḥ sāmājikaiḥ saṃsadi/ tad-bhū-cāpala-keli-dolita-manāḥ śṛṅgāra-vīrādbhutaṃ cakre kāvyam idaṃ hamīra-nṛpater navyaṃ nayenduḥ kaviḥ//14. 43//
42. Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa thus ends with the death of king Agnivarṇa, who wasted away because of his addiction to sensual pleasure (kāma). Nayacandra’s statement of being moved by ‘rashness’ (cāpala) alludes to a famous introductory verse from this text (1.9), also alluded to in HMK's own introduction (1.10), and discussed later in this section. Nayacandra seems to remind his audience of one of the hallmarks of his poetry, namely the constant intertextual play with earlier masters of the Sanskrit literary tradition. I am mostly indebted to vidvan H.V. Nagaraja Rao for pointing these out to me during my reading sessions with him (December-February, 2017–2018) at his home in Mysore. See Dezso, ‘‘We do not fully understand’, for a discussion of Raghuvaṃśa’s problematic ‘tragic ending’, which also troubled later commentators. See also Shulman’s article ‘Waking Aja’ which presents a brilliant literary analysis of Raghuvaṃśa as a whole. The less ideal tragic ending of Raghuvaṃśa seems not to be taken up in later kāvya literature. An exception might be Kalhaṇa’s mid-twelfth-century Rājataraṅginī, whose tragic poetics of decay and despair McCrea links to the text’s emulation of the Mahābhārata as a literary model (McCrea, “Śānta rasa in the Rājataraṅginī”). Arguably, like the Rājataraṅginī, Nayacandra’s poem did something rather new and challenging by defying the long-established aesthetic ideal of happy endings in Sanskrit kāvya.
43. As also briefly mentioned by Sreenivasan, “Alauddin Khalji Remembered,” 287–8. See also Pollock’s (The Languages of the Gods, 394–5) discussion of the emergence of the vernacular in Gwalior. He discusses a vernacular inscription of Vīrama Tomar (Bīraṃmadeva) from 1405 as symptomatic of the vernacular transformation in Gwalior (292) as evidenced by the ‘vernacularization’ of the two Sanskrit epics by Viṣṇudās.
44. The roughly contemporaneous author Padmanābha Kāyastha in his Sanskrit kāvya Yaśodhara-carita (1420), patronized by Vīrama Tomar’s minister Kuśarāja, explicitly praises the Tomar dynasty of Gwalior and its founder Vīrasiṃha (Dvivedi, Tomaroṃ kā itihāsa, Vol. 1, 37). Likewise; a generation later, the poet Viṣṇudās, who composed a Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata in the local language of Gwalior, explicitly praises the Tomar king Dūṅgarendra Siṃha as his patron, and compares him to the heroic subject of his poem, see discussion by Heidi Pauwels in this issue. And similarly, the Apabhraṃśa compositions of the Jain poet Raïdhū contain eulogistic colophons (praśasti), praising the Tomar patrons, see De Clercq, ‘Apabhramsha as a literary medium’, 353–361.
45. See Vyas, “Raṇamalla Chanda’ of Śrīdhara Vyāsa,” 151.
46. We indeed see that there was some anxiety among poets to be accused of hypocrisy in their panegyric writing, see for example Shulman, ‘Poets and Patrons in Tamil Literature’, on the mutually interdependent, but often asymmetrical relationship between poet and patron, noting the typical critique of royal flattery in poetry about patronage (p. 92). Cf. also similar observations in Granoff’s article on biographical narratives of poets in the Jain prabandha literature (Granoff, ‘Sarasvatī’s sons’). Worthy of note is that HMK’s author was well familiar with this literature.
47. Yahya’s Tarikh-I-Mubarak Shahi (Basu, Yahya Bin Ahmad Abdullah Sirhindi’s, 191). This rhetoric is very similar to the description of the events in Bihamad Khani’s Tarikh-i-Muhammadi, 1438).
48. Yahya’s Tarikh-I-Mubarak Shahi (Basu, Yahya Bin Ahmad Abdullah Sirhindi’s, 192 & 198).
49. Both Yahya’s Tarikh-I-Mubarak Shahi and Bihamad Khani’s Tarikh-i-Muhammadi show that there must have been a strong alliance between the Tomars and two Chauhan branches: the Chauhans of Etawa, north east of Gwalior, and the Chauhans of Chandawar, east from Agra, and adjacent to Etawa; both lying north of the Chambal river. Some of the rebellious chiefs got killed during this struggle for independence. For example, the Chauhan chief Abhayacandra of Chandawar, who also took part in the rebellions in the last decade of the fourteenth century, is said to be killed during a treacherous scheme, from which only Sumer Chauhan of Etawa managed to escape according to Yahya’s Tarikh-I-Mubarak Shahi (Basu, Yahya Bin Ahmad Abdullah Sirhindi’s, 153–4). Nevertheless, like the Tomars and Etawa Chauhans, the Chauhans of Chandawar seem to have remained in power during the fifteenth century (Sharma, Early Chauhān Dynasties, 24–26).
50. The region surrounding the Gwalior fort had been part of the Chauhan dominion in preceding centuries, as evidenced by inscriptions about the Chauhans, including Hammīra, that are found in territories adjacent to inscriptions of the Tomars, see the numerous Chauhan inscription in Willis, Inscriptions of Gopakṣetra.
51. Apart from a brief discussion by the historian Dvivedi, Tomaroṃ kā itihāsa, 275–276 the significance of this character has been overlooked in previous studies about the HMK. Dvivedi identifies this Candrarāja with the last Tomar king of Delhi named Cāhaḍapāla (- although the names don’t match), who is presented in both Persian and Indic sources as a devoted ally of Pṛthvīrāja. He seems to have helped Pṛthvīrāja Chauhan during his campaigns more than once and ultimately died fighting for him at the battle of Tarain against Muhammad Ghori. However, Dvivedi doesn’t explain why the Tomar name is not mentioned in HMK, or why his role in this text doesn’t really correspond to the ‘historical role’ described by him. Moreover, the Gwalior Tomars don’t seem to link themselves to the Delhi Tomars, at least not in Nayacandra’s time. Nevertheless, the deliberate silence about the clan name of this character is suspicious. A connection with a Tomar king might be implied, but explicit identification seems deliberately avoided. I would therefore suggest, with some caution, that the character of Candrarāja of Gwalior forms part of Nayacandra’s recurrent concern to imbue the traditional Hammīra legend with new, fictive characters, which allow him, in this case, to evoke a parallel with the troubled political situation of Gwalior.
52. There are nevertheless important historical connections between the Chauhans and Tomars of Delhi, who appear to have ruled the Delhi region as subordinates of the Chauhans, see for example the discussion ‘From Tomar to Chauhan rule in Delhi inscriptions’ in Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor, 90–93.
53. Understanding HMK in terms of a playful engagement with other Hammīra narratives doesn’t deny the possibility that Nayacandra’s re-evaluation of the Chauhan past was motived by what Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam in their study of historical literature in South India, Textures of Time, repeatedly refer to as an historiographical impulse to present a linear, analytical narrative, driven by concerns of factuality and causality (as on p. 61, 76, 99).
54. Emeneau, “Sanskrit syntactic particles,” 248, discussing the different use of the syntactic particles kila, khalu and nūnam. If Nayacandra intended to express certainty or avoid ambiguity, he would have used another particle.
55. …tadīya-tat-tad-guṇa-gauraveṇa vigāhya nunnaḥ kila karṇa-jāham, HMK 1.10. This verse echoes and intensifies the imagery from a famous verse in the prologue of the Raghuvaṃśa: tad-guṇaiḥ karṇam āgatya cāpalāya pracoditaḥ (1.9, in Kale’s edition) (‘I was impelled to the rashness [of composing a poem on the Raghu lineage] because his qualities had reached my ears’.) Verse 1.11 similarly alludes to and intensifies the imagery of Raghuvaṃśa 1.2.
56. The verses I identified in Peterson’s edition are 1254 on Pṛthvīrāja (by Vināyakapaṇḍita), 1255–6 on Vighraharāja (from a praśasti; referred to as Vīsaladeva in 1255), 1257 on Hammīra’s horses in battle (anonymous), 4004 laments Hammīra’s death, by the poet Deveśvara, listed in the ‘tragic mood’ (karuṇa rasa) section. Interestingly, there’s also a verse listed as from the hand of king Hammīra himself (3974) (a heroic utterance he supposedly proclaimed before rushing into his death). The fact that the paddhati includes such a verse reinforces Śārṅgadhara introductory claim about the strong affinity between his ancestors and Hammīra.
57. See the previous note.
58. He thus starts his prologue by lauding king Hammīra of the Chauhan lineage (cāhuvāṇānvaye), ‘whose valour was like Arjuna’ (śaurya ivārjunaḥ) (v.1.2, in edition by Peterson, The Paddhati of Sarngadhara, 1). He continues by saying that in Hammīra’s assembly his grandfather Rāghavadeva served as the most respected guru (v.1.3). Dvivedi (Tomaroṃ kā itihāsa, Vol. 1, 34) states that these verses are in deśya-bhāṣā, vernacular speech, probably uncritically adopting the view that Śārṅgadhara was the author of the vernacular verses in Prākṛtapaiṅgalam, as noted earlier. Nevertheless, worthy of attention is the use of the more vernacular cāhuvāṇā for the clan name instead of the Sanskrit cāhamāna, used throughout HMK and earlier Sanskrit kāvyas on the Chauhans like Pṛthvīrāja-vijaya (c. 1192–3).
59. Dvivedi, Tomaroṃ kā itihāsa, 32–3.
60. Ibid.
61. HMK 9.153
62. …lobha-drṣṭim nṛpaṃ kṛtvā, HMK 9.167.
63. HMK 9.163–5.
64. HMK 9.188
65. HMK 13.81
66. For example, Rāyapāla in Hammīrāyaṇa, and Rāmapāla in Puruṣaparīkṣā. Although these narratives post-date HMK, it is safe to assume that in earlier versions – now unfortunately lost to us - one of these traitors was also called Rāyapāla or a name resembling it. The more ominous name ‘Ratipāla’ only makes sense as a playful variation of a well-known character. It is indeed unlikely that Nayacandra invented the theme of the two traitors, which would imply that all later Hammīra narratives borrowed from HMK.
67. Although in the penultimate canto (HMK, 13.164-68) Hamm īra eventually reaches a brief moment of tragic hindsight (like an Aristotelian anagnorisis) his blind folly – illustrated through the story of cutting out Dharmasiṃha’s eyes – remains an integral part of his tragic kingship. As a point of comparison, see Shulman’s insightful study on the comic and tragic transformations of kingship in South Indian literature, and their conflation, making similar insightful comparative remarks with Western tragic literature (Shulman, The King and the Clown, 214–218).
68. Nayacandra consciously mirrors their stories, for example by having both Pṛthvīrāja and Hammīra decide not to kill their enemy when given the opportunity, voicing the same argument that they want to keep their enemy alive to have fun with in battle (in 3.45 and 13.36).
69. …sphuṭa-subhaṭatayā, HMK 10.21.
70. …bhojadevaḥ kṛtaghno, HMK 10.65.
71. HMK 10.65.
72. …jaya-śrīyo mohana-mantravat, HMK 10.68.
73. …nikhile śrīcāhamāne kule, HMK 10.87.
74. In verse 10.81 from Alauddin’s heroic speech Nayacandra thus creates an ominous flashback to the ironic death of Hammīra’s ‘sleepy’ predecessor Prahlādaṇa, who died after killing a sleeping lion and stirring up another, who attacks him from behind. Echoing this episode, Alauddin proclaims that Hammīra has awakened a lion from his sleep. Here, as in many other places, Nayacandra implicitly contrasts the Chauhan king’s sleepiness with the wakefulness of the antagonist.
75. …krīḍīkṛtāṃ krīḍaya rājya-lakṣmīm, HMK 11.61.
76. … na vikramaṃ nītividaḥ stuvanti, HMK 11.21.
77. …tad mudgalān no nanu yācamānau na kiṃ tvadīśau jaḍa-dhi–vataṃsau, HMK 11.67.
78. Including Mahimāsāhi’s ‘heroic act’ of slaying his wives and children to prove his loyalty, which is linked to a state of angry stupor (mūrcchayā…krudhā, 3.152), caused by Hammīra’s refusal to let him take part in the final battle. Hammīra’s subsequent praise of Mahimāsāhi’s rather cruel act is similarly uttered after he had fainted (mūrcchālaḥ, 13.161).
79. This is made very explicit in canto three through the words of Udayarāja, an ally of Pṛthvīrāja, who reflects ‘If I go away, Shame will joyfully play in my gauḍa-clan’ (…ced vrajāmi krīḍāṃ vrīḍā kalayati tadā gauḍa-gotre sukhaṃ me, 3.68). The obsession with future fame becomes very explicit in Hammīra’s speech to his daughter, where he rebukes her arguments about the importance of protecting the kingdom, saying that a man should only acquire ‘fame and dharma’ (kīrtiṃ dharmaṃ ca, 13.125).
80. In verse 3.53 we learn that the experience of fear resulting from his former defeat makes Shahabuddin resort to deceitful stratagem, just like Ulugh Khan’ deceitful plan results from ‘remembering the fear experienced earlier’ (pūrvānubhūta-bhī-saṃsmaraṇād, 11.19).
81. This is also repeatedly emphasized in Jaitrasiṃha’s lecture on kingship in the eighth canto (especially in v.8.80–85).
82. Verses 8.74–75, for example, part of the ominous speech of Hammīra’s father, make clear that Lakṣmī will abandon a king who lacks right discernment (viveka) and mistreats their subjects.
83. Unlike what Sreenivasan, ‘Alauddin Khalji Remembered’, 288 and Bednar, Conquest and Resistance in Context, 207 and ‘Mongol, Muslim, Rajput’, 604 seem to assert.
84. It was unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper to argue at length how in this grander historical vision Nayacandra deliberately links Hammīra’s rather positive remembrance to the more negative remembrance of his infamous ‘sleepy’ predecessor Pṛthvīrāja, as noted several times in this paper.
85. As argued in Bednar, Conquest and Resistance in Context, and “Mongol, Muslim, Rajput.”
86. Registers of praise and critique can of course co-exist, as in the many patron-centred epics, and the many Rajput stories of tragic defeat. But it’s important to be attentive to its interplay: the critical layer might undermine the eulogistic narrative mode or format, which, I argue, is the case in HMK. Such interplay might be reflective, not only of the poet’s own ambivalent attitude towards the heroic subject, but of potentially diverging and conflicting perspectives between patrons and poets regarding political and heroic ideals. By contrast, in socio-political readings of Rajput poems the poet’s voice typically conflates with that of the patron. For example, Ramya Sreenivasan emphasizes that ‘primary issue for the poets and patrons of the Hammiramahakavyam and the Kanhadade Prabandh was the honour of the patron’s lineage’ (p. 296). I want to stress the importance of not confounding the hero’s perspective (or the patron’s vision) with the poet’s vision, and be attentive to the constant interplay between perspectives within the poem, which is clearly the case in HMK, but probably too in other texts.
87. This is in fact already foreshadowed by Hammīra himself in the eighth canto in an episode where he initially refuses to take over the throne, indicating that kingship will bring clear stains (suvyakta-kalaṅka) and never lead to happiness (8.52).
88. There is thus a clear intertextual conversation going on in historical poems about the Chauhans. The author (Narapati) Nālha of the Vīsaladevarāsa (c.1450) is mentioned as the bard in Hammīrāyaṇa, overseeing the tragic events (v. 301, p. 34 in Nahata, Bhāṇḍau Vyās’ Hammīrāyaṇa). There are also clear intertextual links between Kānhaḍade prabandha and Hammīrāyaṇa, discussed by Sharma (in Nahata, Bhāṇḍau Vyās’ Hammīrāyaṇa, 50–52), and a later Hammīra-prabandha (c.1518) by the Jain poet Amṛtakalāśa, discussed by Sandesara, ‘The Hammīraprabandha’, 363–364. Identifying the nature of these intertextual dialogues seems crucial to understand the many ambivalences and ironies surrounding the characterization of the Chauhans in these poems. Noteworthy is that the later vernacular Hamīrhaṭha or ‘Bold Hammīra’ epics also clearly emphasize the negative nature of his stubbornness. In his discussion of Hammīra’s story as depicted in a series of miniature paintings, titled ‘Hamir-hath-saka’, Shastri chooses to translate it as ‘The suicide caused by the obstinacy of Hamir’ (Shastri, ‘The Hamir Hath’, 25), where saka (suicide) refers to both the practice of collective immolation of the woman (jauhar) and the male warrior’s rushing into battle in the face of certain defeat.
89. The wide-ranging scope and depth of this intertextual play not only constitutes a dialogue with other Hammīra stories, but with an enormous body of literature, especially the Sanskrit court epics (mahākāvyas) of old, the sub-genre of patron-centred biography (carita), collections of stories -fictional (kathā) and historical (prabandhā), the emerging tradition of Rajput ballads (rāso), and of course the Sanskrit epics Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, which provide a constant point of comparison and contrast.