Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

Al-Biruni does not seem to have had a family of his own — he probably never married — and his single-minded devotion to scholarship, and indifference to wealth, were probably in part because he did not have to provide for a family. The absence of family also enabled him to travel freely, wherever the pursuit of his studies took him. He spent several years in India, in Punjab, interacting with Brahmin pundits there and translating into Persian or Arabic some Indian books, such as on Samkhya and Yoga, the principal Indian philosophical schools of the age. A facile linguist, he knew several languages, including Sanskrit and Greek, but wrote mostly in Arabic.

One of the most brilliant polymaths of the medieval world, al-Biruni is said to have written over a hundred books — a camel load of books, it is said. Of them only twenty-two books are extant now, but even these cover a wide range of subjects, including various sciences, as well astrology, history, sociology, geography, philosophy and theology. There was hardly any field of contemporary knowledge that al-Biruni did not deal with. He was the first scholar anywhere in the world to study Indian culture methodically, and he may be rightly considered the patriarch of Indology. His treatment of Indian culture was fair and objective, almost entirely without racial or religious prejudice.

ANOTHER VERSATILE GENIUS of early medieval India was Amir Khusrav. He, like al-Biruni, was a prolific writer, and is credited with writing a large number of books — there is tradition that he wrote 99 books, on different subjects and in a variety of literary modes — and also some 400,000 verses. He is also said to have introduced several innovations in music. We do not know whether all the achievements attributed to him are true — it is not impossible that he did all that, but we have to also bear in mind that there was a tendency in India at this time to attribute innovative works to some renowned person, in order to gain general acceptability for the innovations.

Khusrav was born in 1253 in Patiali, a small town near Delhi, and he died in 1325, aged seventy-two. His father was a migrant Turk, but his mother, according to some accounts, was a Hindu convert to Islam, and it is probable that it was this genetic and cultural hybridity that enabled him to smoothly blend Hindu and Muslim cultural traditions in his works.

Khusrav was a child prodigy, and wrote his first collection of poems in his teens. He then went on to serve eight successive Delhi sultans, from Balban to Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq, as their court poet, and he kept himself in royal favour by writing panegyrics on all those sultans. He was particularly favoured by Jalal-ud-din Khalji, who, according to Barani, a fourteenth century Delhi chronicler, ‘was a great appreciator and patron of talent … [The sultan appointed Khusrav as] one of his chosen attendants … [and] invested him with such robes as are given to great nobles, and girded him with a white sash.’ He was also given generous cash awards. Ala-ud-din Khalji also favoured Khusrav, and appointed him as his court poet. On the whole Khusrav had a remarkably smooth and successful career in those turbulent times. But in his old age he abandoned all temporal pursuits, became a follower of the Sufi saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya, and lived a cloistered life, though he still wrote poetry.

Khusrav wrote mainly in Persian, but he freely used Hindi words in his compositions, as in the mixed Hindi-Arabic-Persian-Turki language called Hindawi, the precursor of Urdu, that was taking form in the region around Delhi in his time. He often set his poems to music, and is thought to be the father of Qawwali, the Sufi devotional music.

Khusrav’s works are characterised by luxuriant literary flourishes, and are marvellously mellifluous, qualities which were greatly admired in medieval times, but are mostly lost in English translation, as of these verses:

AN IMPORTANT CULTURAL development of the early medieval period was the translation of several Sanskrit works into Arabic and Persian. The first book thus translated was Suka-saptati (Parrot’s Seventy), a circa twelfth century compilation of amusing ancient Indian tales, told by a clever parrot to a forlorn woman (whose husband was away), to distract her from straying. This was translated into Persian by Zia Nakhshabi in the early fourteenth century. The Persian book, titled Tuti-nama (Book of the Parrot), gained wide popularity in India and the Middle East, and was in time translated from Persian into Turkish and several European languages. Zia Nakhshabi also translated Koka-shastra (also known as Rati-rahasyam : Secrets of Love), a popular early medieval Sanskrit work on erotica written by Kukkoka. During the reign of Firuz Tughluq, a number of other Sanskrit works on a variety of subjects were translated from Sanskrit into Persian under royal patronage. Similarly Mahabharata and Kalhana’s Rajatarangini were translated into Persian under the patronage of Zain-ul-Abidin, a mid-fifteenth century sultan of Kashmir. Such liberal royal patronage of the ancient Indian cultural heritage would continue till almost the very end of the Delhi Sultanate, with Sikandar Lodi commissioning the translation of several Sanskrit works into Persian.

In contrast to this vigorous Sanskrit-to-Persian translation activity, there was hardly any attempt at this time to translate Persian literature into Sanskrit or any other Indian language. The Indian intelligentsia, in their characteristic cultural insularity, almost totally ignored the dominant Muslim cultural presence in India. The Turkish invasion of India, as Kosambi comments, did not make ‘the slightest impression upon the mannerisms or complacency of the local intelligentsia. The last great Sanskrit literature, written about this time … contains not the slightest mention of contemporary events.’ Thus even when the Turkish advance was threatening to overwhelm Jayachandra Gahadavala, king of Kanauj, the last great Hindu ruler of North India, his court poet Sriharsha was turning out self-indulgent romances and lyrics in Sanskrit.

The cultural scene was not much different elsewhere in India either, with the court poets of the rajas continuing to indulge in their ‘mannered stupidities,’ as Kosambi describes it. Typical of this was ‘the Rama-charita of Sandhyakara-nandin, [which] reduced Sanskrit poetry to the level of an acrostic … In effect, it cannot be understood at all,’ comments Kosambi. Hardly any of the Sanskrit works of the medieval period had any merit, they being mostly mediocre reworkings of old classics. The preoccupation of the Sanskrit writers of medieval India was with form, not substance.

The dreary state of Sanskrit literature at this time was not surprising, for it was then the dead language of a comatose civilisation. What mainly sustained literary activity in it in medieval times was the pretentious patronage of Sanskrit writers by the rajas, for whom it was prestigious to patronise literature in India’s classical language. But as most rajas lost their power consequent to the Turkish invasion of India, Sanskrit scholars and writers lost their main source of patronage, and that led to a sharp decline in the quality and quantity of Sanskrit literary output in medieval India.