The Language Of History by Audrey Truschke

Author:Audrey Truschke [Truschke, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2021-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Maratha-sponsored Sanskrit histories largely concentrate on true events, with a strong political focus. For instance, in his five-chapter Parn̄laparvatagrahan̄khȳna, Jayarama narrates numerous military actions undertaken by Shivaji’s forces against Bijapur and the Mughals, chief among them the seizure of Panhal Fort, a Bijapuri stronghold, in March 1673.89 Keshava’s Rājārāmacarita focuses on Rajaram’s 1689 flight to Jinji Fort as he was pursued by Mughal troops, with a positive spin on how Rajaram ‘warded off the Lord of Delhi’s pride’ (I guess by various skirmishes en route).90 Keshava wrote within a few months of these events, in January of 1690, and hypes his work, also five chapters, as a ‘prabandha of fame’ (yaśaḥprabandhaṃ).91 Even in the expansive Sūryavaṃśa, a work of thousands of verses that remains unfinished at thirty-two chapters (the final one incomplete), Paramananda maintains a relentless emphasis on political moments. In the text, the poet narrates the exploits of Shahji and Shivaji to a group of Benares Brahmins, a community who had come to wield intellectual and political influence across much of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.92 In the Sūryavaṃśa, the Benares Brahmins serve, among other functions, to keep Paramananda’s attention on political developments. For instance, Paramananda segues into speaking of Shivaji’s childhood play (bālalīlā) at the end of Chapter 7, and then Chapter 8 opens with the pandits asking how Shahji captured Shivneri Fort.93 Chapter 9 concludes with some nice verses on Shivaji learning his first letters, and Chapter 10 begins with the pandits requesting more information on how twelve-year-old Shivaji reached Pune on Shahji’s orders.94 By my count, the Benares pandits speak around two dozen times in the Sūryavaṃśa, and they invariably ask about politics, sometimes snapping the poet out of digressions on other subjects.

Like earlier Sanskrit historians, the Maratha-sponsored historians also wrote their histories through and as poetry, drawing liberally on Sanskrit literary conventions and echoing early works. For instance, the Rājārāmacarita opens with a conversation between Shiva and Narada.95 The Paramānandakāvya contains a fairly elaborate story about Kali, the current age, taking birth as Shivaji’s wife, Soyarabai, to lead the king astray.96 The Śambhurājacarita, which survives in fragments, has been described as notably heavy on poetry.97 The Sūryavaṃśa imitates Kalidasa’s Raghuvaṃśa, in both its title and in specific verses.98 The Sūryavaṃśa also bills itself in colophons to each chapter as an anupurāṇa, a ‘new purana’.99 ‘Anupurana’ is an anomalous genre in the collection of texts I discuss in this book, and it likely was meant to highlight Shivaji’s claim to be part of the solar lineage, one of the five appropriate topics (pañcalakṣaṇa) of a purana.100 Additionally, the Sūryavaṃśa cites verses from the Mahabharata and adopts the epic’s meta-framework of a story being told to Brahmins.101 Notably, as described above, Paramananda deployed even the trope of a Brahmin audience in pursuit of, not in spite of, Maratha political history.

Bhonsle Definitions of the Other

The Maratha-sponsored Sanskrit histories often invoke a framework of opposition, Us versus Them, with the identities of both sides defined in military and political terms.

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