Perso Indica

Tuḥfat al-hind (Gift from India), an encyclopaedic exposition of “the current Indian sciences” (‘ulūm-i mutadāwila-yi hindiya), was composed around 1085/1674-75 by Mīrzā Ḫān ibn Faḫr al-Dīn, a Mughal nobleman and litterateur in the Mughal emperor Awrangzeb’s (r. 1068/1658-1118/1707) court. It was written for one of the Emperor’s sons, the prince Muḥammad A‘ẓam (1653-1707) being the most likely addressee since the majority of the manuscripts name him as the dedicatee. The phrase “current Indian sciences” refers to the contemporaneous practices corresponding to the ensemble of linguistic, literary, musical, erotological and characterological discourses available to Mīrzā Ḫān in Braj Bhāṣā as well as through personal practice and observation. Noteworthy is the polysemy of the title that is also translatable as “gift to India”, an ambiguity that captures the two-way character of the translation. What little is known of Mīrzā Ḫān’s biography is inferable from his works. Apart from the work under consideration he composed a commentary on the panegyrics (qaṣā’id) of ‘Urfī Šīrāzī (d. 999/1591), a prominent poet of the “Speaking Anew” (tāza-gūyī) tradition of the Persian ġazal that was as popular in his courtly milieu as it was criticized. From the mid seventeenth century ‘Urfī’s panegyrics had become an object of analysis and evaluation among votaries and critics of Speaking Anew. That Mīrzā Ḫān authored a commentary on them, too, signals his implication in these debates and explains his use, as will be noted ahead, of technical Speaking Anew terminology when explaining the erotic “subtle expressions” (bing) of Braj poetics.

The Tuḥfat al-hind is divided into an introduction, on the Braj alphabet, seven chapters (bāb), and a conclusion. The seven chapters respectively address: (i) “prosody” (pingal in Braj, ‘arūż in Persian), (ii) “rhyme” (tuk in Braj, qāfiya in Persian), (iii) “tropology and metaphorics” (‘ilm-i badī‘ va bayān), (iv) “the amorous mood in literature” (singār-ras in Braj), (v) “the combined arts of music, dance and drama” (sangīt), (vi) “erotology” (‘ilm-i kok), (vii) “physiognomy” (sāmuddrik in Braj, qiyāfa in Persian). The final section is a dictionary (luġāt-i hindi) of Braj words glossed in Persian.

The introduction (muqadimma), in four sub-chapters (faṣl) and further sub-divisions, introduces the Braj alphabet and thus lays down the phonetic key to the terminology expounded in rest of the text. Rather than modifying Perso-Arabic orthography as contemporary Urdu does to indicate phonemes that do not exist in Persian-Arabic, Mīrzā Ḫān devises new names for such phonemes. For example, he names the aspirated ‘ba’ in the Braj word bhār (weight) ba-yi muwaḥḥida-yi ṯaqīla (the single-dotted heavy ‘ba’) and the retroflex ‘ṭha’ in ṭhag (thief) tā-yi fuqāni-i aṯqal (the double-dotted hyper-stressed ‘ta’). He thus denominates and specifies the pronunciation of the seventeen Braj letters that do not exist in the Perso-Arabic alphabet. His concern with the correct pronunciation of Braj serves the purpose of avoiding errors arising from Perso-Arabic prosodic habits in the scansion of Braj poetry and thus, arguably, the more general purpose of decorous courtly presentation. That this concern arose from his familiarity with Braj as it was vocalized in his milieu rather than with Sanskrit prosody is evident in how he specifies vowel points (ḥarakāt) even for letter-combinations such as ‘bṛ’ in bṛahma (the creator God) that are voweled in Braj enunciation but not in Sanskrit. He is also careful to distinguish the Indian pronunciation of words deriving from Persian-Arabic, an example being the name for the song-genre ḫayāl that the people of India, he notes, enunciate with an aspirated first consonant as khayāl (Ḫān 1354/1975, p. 353) Finally, it should be noted that his exposition of Braj orthography had its paradigmatic precedent in Abū al-Fażl’s Ā’īn-i Akbarī. In the second faṣl he relates the number and sequence of the thirty five letters of the Braj alphabet, the eighteen Perso-Arabic letters shared with Braj, the fourteen Perso-Arabic ones that do not appear in the Braj alphabet, the seventeen that are peculiar to Braj speech (muḥāwara) and that do not have equivalents in Persian-Arabic, the thirty five simple (mufrad) or freestanding letters of the Devanāgari alphabet and, finally, the rules for Devanāgari letter combinations (murakkabāt). This tabulation of orthographic asymmetries and selective use of Perso-Arabic orthographic terminology already discloses his approach through the rest of this work towards the two knowledge-systems he juxtaposes: where he finds equivalent Perso-Arabic terms he cites them, otherwise only translating the Braj term for his princely reader who, we know, was already an accomplished poet in Braj and a connoisseur of the Braj-related traditions Mīrzā Ḫān expounds. The third faṣl expounds sixteen varieties of “vowel marks” or māt in Braj (i‘rāb in Persian and Arabic) and the grammatical rules pertaining to them, justifying this taxonomy like others by citing a doctrine of “the scholars of India” (‘ulamā-yi hind), in this case to the effect that the unlisted thirty fifth letter which was also a diacritical point – namely hamza in Persian or akār in Braj – was believed by them to inhere in the nature of all the letters. Such citations of doctrine seem to serve the limited purpose of furnishing the princely reader with transmitted explanations when they are not already rationally inferable. The fourth faṣl relates in greater detail the kinds of Braj “vowel marks”, their orthography with consonants as well as expounding Braj grammar under ten sub-headings. Here, he justifies his choice of Braj from among Sanskrit, Prākrit and Braj, these being the three languages of “the people of India […] in which one can write books and dīwāns [i.e. anthologies of poetry] and are pleasing to sound natures and sharp minds” (Ḫān 1354/1975, p. 51). While Sanskrit and Prākrit are the languages of the celestial and subterranean worlds, respectively, Braj or Bhākhā “is the language of the world in which we are” (Ḫān 1354/1975, p. 52). He writes that “They compose colourful poems and descriptions of lover and beloved mostly in this language”, adding that “apart from Sanskrit and Prākrit it [i.e. the noun bhākhā] is generally applied to all the languages, especially that of the people of Braj (zabān-i ahl-i braj)” (Ḫān 1354/1975, p. 52). This account of Braj discloses the worldly or profane character of the Braj-related phenomena Mīrzā Ḫān is addressing, their association with courtly pleasure and, from an imperial perspective, the metonymic representation by the Braj language of all the languages of the Mughal empire. His exposition of Braj grammar takes the form of an elucidation of the three kinds of sabd, glossed by the Perso-Arabic kalama or “utterance”. Here, too, wherever possible, he provides equivalent terms from Arabic grammar, otherwise simply glossing the Braj in Persian with examples.

The first chapter (bāb) of the main text is an exposition, in three sub-chapters, of “the science of prosody” (‘ilm-i pingal in Braj, ‘arūż in Persian). This exposition serves the following pragmatic aims: to assist its reader in the recognition of “short” (lagh) and “long” (gur) syllables aurally and by their transcriptions in Devanāgari as well as by the Persian notations Mīrzā Ḫān stipulates for them, to let him taxonomize the meters by name and foot (mātrā) length, to recognize the auspicious meters from the inauspicious, the deities associated with each and to scan meters. Mīrzā Ḫān concludes this chapter by relating fourteen meters he has invented. He thus both displays his encyclopaedic knowledge of the science of Braj prosody by his pedagogical exposition of it while also contributing to it by extending its rules to invent his own meters. In this exposition if not in his inventions Mīrzā Ḫān draws large parts of his information from Faqīr Allāh Sayf Ḫān’s Rāg-darpan, a translation made in 1076/1666 of a Braj treatise on music, Mān-kutuhal, by Rāja Mān Singh of Gwalior (r. 1486-1516) (Faqīr Allāh 1996). This was a mode of innovation familiar in Persian literary and artistic history. In the context of Speaking Anew ġazal practice it entailed working innovations on what were considered “Pre-Eternal” (azalī) ġazal topoi (mażāmīn) while in painting it took the form of organizing relations in pictorial space according to schemas (ṭarḥ) that were inherited from prestigious older paintings and that were patterned with geometrical figures like the hexagon that bore cosmological significations (Minissale 2006, pp. 59-60). Noteworthy are Mīrzā Ḫān’s attempts in his expositions of each of the current eighty-four Braj meters to illustrate the meter with Persian verses of his own, thus mapping Perso-Arabic syllabic notations (afā‘īl) onto Braj verse. This exercise in inter-lingual prosodic mapping – at which Mīrzā Ḫān is unevenly successful on account of disparate ways of measuring syllable lengths in Braj and Perso-Arabic (Ḫān 1354/1975, p. 283) – was probably unprecedented since the scansion of the earliest Persian poetry by the rules of Arabic prosody.

The second chapter presents thirty-two syllables of rhyme (tuk in Braj, qāfiya in Persian), thirty varieties of voweled and quiescent rhymes (tuk-māt), seven technical names for kinds of rhyme (tuk-jāt), three kinds of defective rhyme and four kinds of syllables used by their location before or after the end of a hemistich or in mixed or broken forms to generate repeating lexemes glossed as equivalents of the Perso-Arabic radīf. Because long and short Braj syllables are both counted as simple (mufrad) rather than compound (murakkab) syllables, Braj has a greater variety of rhyming syllables than Persian. This places technical limits on Mīrzā Ḫān’s attempts to illustrate Braj rhyme patterns with Persian verses. When confronted with this limit he illustrates his categories with Braj lexemes and translates them.

The third chapter is an exposition of “the science of tropology and metaphorics” (alankār in Braj, badī‘ wa bayān in Persian). Mīrzā Ḫān introduces this topic as the Braj equivalent of the hold-all Persian category of “rhetoric” (faṣāḥat wa balāġat). In doing this he draws on the tradition established in Persian since the late 5th/11th century of subsuming expositions of tropes or figures of speech, metaphors and semantics without differentiation under “the science of tropology” (Rādūyanī 1368/1949). This is why he inventories the “nine moods” (nau ras) of Braj poetics under this heading. His subsequent exposition of the “subtle expressions” (bing) in Braj by which the female lover-speaker (nāyikā) makes erotic insinuations at her male lover (nāyak) is indebted to the terminology deriving from the Speaking Anew ġazal practice, popular in his milieu, of nāzuk-ḫayālī or “subtle imagination”. His exposition after this of six kinds of “comparison” (upmā in Braj, tašbīh in Persian) maps the topic (upamayī in Braj, mušabbah in Perso-Arabic) and vehicle (upmān in Braj, mušabbih bihi in Perso-Arabic) of such Braj metaphors onto the Perso-Arabic terms for them while only glossing the Braj terms for the sub-varieties of metaphor that have no Perso-Arabic equivalents. He then presents seventeen kinds of “figures of speech” (alankār in Braj, ṣan‘at-i kalām wa ši‘r in Persian) established by “the ancient masters of the people of India” (ustādān-i qadīm-i ahl-i hind), making consistent use of the Perso-Arabic terms for a comparison’s topic and vehicle and illustrating them with Persian comparisons whose images sometimes conform to Braj convention and sometimes to those of Persian. However, he illustrates the subsequent four “figures of speech” which he claims as his own inventions with Braj couplets (dohā) of his own. Since the first of these corresponds to a figure in Arabic rhetoric he cites the Arabic term for it too. He concludes this chapter with an exposition of twenty kinds of poetic “defects” (dokhan in Braj, ‘ayb in Persian) or violations of convention, partly depending for the intelligibility of such a categorization on its implicit correspondence to the Persian rhetorical category of linguistic “outlandishness” (ġarābat).

The fourth chapter, on “the science of the amorous mood in literature” (singār-ras in Braj, ‘ilm-i ‘āšiqī wa ma‘šūqī wa bayān-i aḥwāl-i ‘āšiq wa ma‘šūq in Persian), reveals, by the very length of the Persian gloss of the Braj term singār-ras, the absence of an equivalent Perso-Arabic category. This absence offers Mīrzā Ḫān an occasion to compare and contrast the relations of lover and beloved across Braj, Arabic and Persian, a comparison that, as we will note ahead, would furnish a model for later Mughal comparisons of the three literary-linguistic traditions. Whereas in Braj poetics it is the woman who expresses her desire for the man, in Arabic it is the inverse while in Persian, in contrast to Braj and Arabic, a man expresses his desire for a man. He then glosses three kinds of “lover-heroines” (nāyikās) and their sub-varieties according to the nature of their relation to their husbands or lover-heroes (nāyak) followed by three kinds of lover-heroes and their sub-varieties according to the nature of their relations to their wives or lover-heroines. These glosses, as well as those of the female “go-between” (dūtī), the three kinds of states of relation between the lovers and four kinds of encounters between them are mostly descriptive taxonomies that draw, wherever possible, on the rhetoric of conventionalized amorous descriptions in Persian and, where not possible, use Perso-Arabic terms related to adultery and fornication.

The fifth chapter, on “the science of melodic systems, metrical-rhythmic systems and dance” (sangīt in Braj, musīqī in Persian), comprises perhaps the most comprehensive exposition in Persian of contemporaneous Mughal courtly song, musical-instrumental and dance practices. It was rivalled in popularity of reception by the chapter on sangīt in Abū al-Fażl’s Ā’īn-i Akbarī, by Faqīr Allāh Sayf Ḫān’s Rāg-darpan, Mīrzā Rošan Żamīr’s Tarjuma-yi parījātak (mid 17th century) and Ras Baras’s šams al-aṣwāt, although it was, in comparison with these, the least original and most derivative of the canonical Persian-language works on North Indian art music. In his synopsis of the mythic origins of the four main musical “schools” (mat in Braj, maḏhab in Persian) in three deities and an ascetic, respectively, Mīrzā Ḫān draws on a Perso-Arabic historiographical tradition of relying on transmitted knowledge (naql) where rationally accessible knowledge (‘aql) is unavailable. However, it should be noted that in Mughal India of his period these names designated the four classical rāga-māla (“garland of rāgas”) systems (comprising 6 rāgas, imagined as male, 5 or 6 rāginīs each, imagined as their wives, and sometimes their children-rāgas too) as formulated in Sanskrit musical treatises and included no aspect of music or dance theory (Ebeling 1973). Mīrzā Ḫān depends for this information partially on Faqīr Allāh Sayf Ḫān’s Rāg-darpan and mostly on Dāmodara’s Sanskrit treatise Saṅgītadarpaṇa, composed in 1609 for the emperor Jahāngīr and translated into Braj in the mid 17th century by Harīvallabh, this translation being Mīrzā Ḫān’s probable means of access to Dāmodara’s treatise. Mīrzā Ḫān mainly presents in ten sub-chapters the song, musical-instrumental and dance related practices current in his milieu, stating that the Hanūmān-mat “is the one normal and current in this age” while the Someśwar-mat, Bharat-mat and Kallināth-mats are described only insofar as their practices diverge from those of the Hanūmān-mat. With the exception of the sub-chapter on Iranian music, discussed ahead, all these sub-chapters, too, are translations – notwithstanding a few of Mīrzā Ḫān’s‘s own observations – of Dāmodara’s expositions on the same topics. It is worth noting that Abū al-Fażl’s Ā’īn-i Akbarī cites the Someśwar-mat, not the Hanūmān-mat, as being current in its age and that the earliest known reference to the Hanūmān-mat appears in the Saṅgītadarpaṇa (Powers 1980, p. 480). Unlike in the rest of the chapters (bāb) of the Tuḥfat al-hind, the author here names the textual sources he depends on: “I have inferred and derived each of the afore-mentioned four schools from such reliable treatises (grantha) as Rāgārṇava, Saṅgīt-darpaṇ, Mān-kutūhal, Sabhā-binod and others and, in dedication to the Hanumān-mat, have expounded them in detail in this book” (Ḫān 1354/1975, p. 324). That he does not name the authors of these sources only signals their renown in his courtly milieu as well as the pragmatic, performance-oriented aims of this exposition. It is also worth noting that he depended not only on Braj treatises like Mān-kutuhal by Rāja Mān Singh of Gwalior (r. 890/1486-921/1516) but also on the afore-mentioned Faqīr Allāh Sayf Ḫān’s Persian Rāg-darpan part of whose first chapter was a translation of Mān-kutuhal (Faqīr Allāh 1996). This chapter presents the most prestigious ascription of the origins of ḫayāl, contemporary North and Central India’s dominant genre of traditional music, to sultan Ḥusayn Šāh Šarqī of Jaunpur (r. 1458-83); and of the technique of tarāna or tillāna to Amīr Ḫusraw (d. 725/1325), ascriptions that must be understood, not literally, but as the implication of the musical legacies of these figures, appropriated by Sufi shrine-based singers, in the later emergence of these and other genres (Brown 2010, p. 168). In his taxonomy of rāgas or Indian musical modes and their derivations and combinations Mīrzā Ḫān often includes iconographic specifications (ṣūrat) for 36 rāgas and rāginīs of the Hanūmān-mat, drawing these entirely from Dāmodara’s Saṅgītadarpaṇa or its Braj translation, thus transmitting and further authorizing Dāmodara and Harīvallabh’s verbal formulations, confined to the rāga-māla genre, of the rules of courtly Persian painting. A comparison of these Braj iconic prescriptions (dhyāns) with Mīrzā Ḫān’s remains a scholarly desideratum. His penultimate sub-chapter expounds the melodic modes (maqām) of the music of “the people of Iran” (ahl-i ‘ajam), stating under one sub-division which Indian note (sur in Braj, āhang in Persian) each Iranian mode corresponds to. In this brief passage, it is Persian musical categories that are translated into Indian ones rather than vice versa. Given the still-current differences between these two modal systems, this was basically a comparison of scale.

The sixth chapter (bāb), on “erotology” (‘ilm-i kok), inventories the types of female and male lovers, describes their sexual organs, five kinds of sexual intercourse, the six ages of maturity in a woman, the symptoms of sexual excitement and dissatisfaction in her, the kinds of go-betweens between lovers, scenes of love-trysts, etiquettes of intimacy, sexual positions and treatments for sexual diseases. The topic of this chapter like that of the fourth chapter on “the amorous mood” has no discrete Perso-Arabic category that might be a generic equivalent though it very likely depended for its format and terminology on earlier Persian texts on the same topic, such as the widely copied adaptation of the Kokaśāstra attributed to Żiyā’ al-Dīn Naḫšabī (d. ca. 750/1350-51) and entitled Laḏḏat al-nisā’. The absence of a discrete Perso-Arabic category accounts for why Mīrzā Ḫān retains the Sanskrit-derived Braj word kok (from the name of Pandit Kokkoka, the author of the Kokaśāstra) in this chapter title (Ms. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. 4° 214/1, ff. 242b-243a). Here, as elsewhere in the Tuḥfat al-hind, he does not omit to name and taxonomize a Braj knowledge-system when it does not correspond to equivalents in a Perso-Arabic one, instead offering literal translations or paraphrases of his sources. Where he does find such equivalences possible, as in the remaining chapters, he does not alter either Braj or Perso-Arabic terminology in his adaptation of one to the other, keeping the two discrete and naming equivalent terms only where they are available. 

The seventh chapter, on the science of “physiognomy” (sāmuddrik in Braj, qiyāfa in Persian), taxonomizes “the knowledge of lines on the hands and feet and so forth by which the signs (‘alāmat) of the virtue (ḫayr), fortune (ṣa‘ādat) and misery (šaqāwat) of men and women may be known” (Ms. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. 4° 214/1, f. 260a), making consistent use of terms he establishes at the beginning by translation. Facilitating and authorizing this terminological consistency is Mīrzā Ḫān’s implicit dependence on the already established Islamic “science of physiognomy” or ‘ilm-i firāsa, also termed qiyāfa (Speziale 2010, pp. 425-426).

The Tuḥfat al-hind concludes with a dictionary (luġat-i hindī) of some three thousand Braj words transliterated according to the rules established in the work’s introduction and glossed in Persian. This is perhaps the earliest Braj to Persian dictionary and probably set the precedent for ‘Abd al-Wāsi‘ Hānsawī’s late 11th/17th century Braj-Persian dictionary, Ġarāyib al-luḡāt, as well as Sirāj al-Dīn ‘Alī Ḫān Ārzū’s emendations of Hānsawī’s work, Nawādir al-alfāẓ completed in 1163/1750 (Ārzū 1951).

The courtly prestige of Mīrzā Ḫān’s Tuḥfat al-hind, drawing on first-hand knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Braj, set an authoritative precedent for subsequent Mughal projects in comparative poetics by leading litterateur-teachers such as Sirāj al-Dīn ‘Alī Ḫān Ārzū (d. 1168/1755) in his Muṯmir (Ārzū 1991) and Ġulām ‘Alī Āzād Bilgrāmī in his Arabic exposition of Braj nāyikā-bhed (the taxonomization of lover-heroines), Subḥat al-marjān fi āṯār al-hindustān (Āzād 1976-80) and its Persian translation, Ġizlān al-hind (Āzād 2004). It also facilitated a sharper conceptualization by such later masters of Persian literary culture of the locality of the universal categories of Perso-Arabic rhetoric, thus authorizing the regional literary practices of Urdu and Braj (Keshavmurthy 2013). Finally, it further authorized already current inter-lingual literary innovation such as Ārzū’s break in one of his ġazals with the descriptive convention of the Persian ġazal that normally describes a male beloved. Implicitly invoking the Braj nāyikā in this ġazal, Ārzū described the beloved’s breasts (Ārzū 1990, p. 234). By the late 19th century in North India the appropriation of the pre-colonial Braj heritage by the nascent Hindi and Hindu nationalism and the concomitant characterization by leading Hindu and Muslim litterateurs of Persian as a mainly Muslim language mostly obscured or distorted the literary memory of the Tuḥfat al-hind. An instance of such ideological distortion by nationalist categories of reception is the brief essay in his journal by Mawlānā Šiblī Nu‘mānī (d. 1914), one of the period’s most respected North Indian Muslim intellectuals, on the Tuḥfat al-hind. In this essay Šiblī, responding to a letter from a Hindu reader who complained that the Muslim rulers of India had not patronized Hindu arts and literatures, expounded the contents of the text as an instance of royal Muslim interest in Hindu arts, the denominations "Hindu" and "Muslim" ascribing theologico-political identities to previously profane and communally non-specific courtly practices of pleasure.