Courtly Encounters

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674071681
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Cross-cultural encounters in Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the potential for bafflement, hostility, and admiration. The court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and were forced to make sense of one another. By looking at these interactions, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere.Both individual agents and objects such as texts and paintings helped mediate encounters between courts, which possessed rules and conventions that required decipherment and translation, whether in words or in pictures. Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives special attention to the depiction of South Asian empires in European visual representations, finding a complex history of cultural exchange: the Mughal paintings that influenced Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch painters had themselves been earlier influenced by Dutch naturalism. Courtly Encounters provides a rich array of images from Europe, the Islamic world, India, and Southeast Asia as aids for understanding the reciprocal nature of cross-cultural exchanges. It also looks closely at how insults and strategic use of martyrdom figured in courtly encounters.As he sifts through the historical record, Subrahmanyam finds little evidence for the cultural incommensurability many ethnohistorians have insisted on. Most often, he discovers negotiated ways of understanding one another that led to mutual improvisation, borrowing, and eventually change.

1

Courtly Insults

Why have Brahmins to worship you,

when Sayyids can do it better?

Why have śāstra-learned Brahmins to praise you,

when Maulavis can do that better?

Why have bhaktas sing for you,

when there are fakīrs who shout louder?

Why have pure and principled Brahmins,

when you’re surrounded by pīrzādas?

We are being thrown out, but cling on to the eaves,

while you’ve already started looking west.

Quick to kill your enemies,

Man-Lion of the Lion-Hill.

—Gogulapati Kurmanatha Kavi, Simhādri-Narasimha-śatakamu (ca. 1755)

Kurmanatha Kavi, a Niyogi Brahmin and poet from the temple town of Simhachalam, was clearly annoyed at his god, the man-lion form of Vishnu, Narasimha. He had sensed that, unlike in the good old days when Brahmins enjoyed the favor of both kings and gods, now it was the Muslim “from the west” (pāschātyulu) who had the upper hand. The proximate provocation for this taunting verse—insulting the god while simultaneously praising him as Vairi-hara-ramha simhādri Narasimha, “Quick to kill your enemies, Man-Lion of the Lion-Hill”—appears to have been as follows. In 1753, the Hyderabad ruler or Nizam, Asaf-ud-Daula Salabat Jang, had been obliged in straitened circumstances to hand over the Simhachalam region to French revenue farmers. However, their entry into the area was resisted by Jaʿfar ʿAli Khan, the entrenched faujdār at Srikakulam, who in turn brought in Raghoji Bhonsle and other Maratha warlords to aid him. A set of skirmishes thus opposed the French and their ally, Raja Vijayarama Gajapati, against this mixed force, which also attacked and plundered the Simhachalam temple and its surrounding villages. Kurmanatha Kavi was later to claim that matters might have been worse still if he had not managed to summon up a miracle: the god eventually sent a swarm of bronze bees, which began stinging the invaders viciously and drove them all the way to the coast.1

Familiarity breeds contempt, so runs the somewhat cynical proverb. Moreover, a certain degree of familiarity is the precondition of the deliberate and well-placed insult (as distinct from an inadvertent one) that unerringly attains its target—whether leveled at a man or a god. Once largely the domain of the anthropologist and linguist, the history of insults has possibly fared better in past decades than the history of battles,2 yet battles and insults are often more closely related than one would suspect. It is widely agreed that a great and deeply significant battle took place in south-central India, or the Deccan, in the latter half of January 1565 C.E., late in the lunar Hijri month of Jumada II 972. But no one seems able to agree on much more than that. Where this battle took place and what its exact date or dates were continue to exercise historians. We can more or less concur on the principal protagonists, but not on their motivations. The battle set the forces of the Vijayanagara (or Karnataka) Empire, which was ruled over officially by its third (or Tuluva) dynasty but controlled in reality by a clan of Telugu warriors—the Aravidu or Araviti clan originally from Palnad—against the forces of four sultanates of varying dimensions: Ahmadnagar and Bijapur to the west, tiny Bidar in the center, and Golkonda to the east.3 Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, the forces of a fifth sultanate, that of Berar farther north, did not actually take part in the engagement. The action proper possibly did not last more than a few hours. At its end, the chief Aravidu warlord Aliya Rama Raya had been killed, as had at least one of his younger brothers. In its aftermath, the armies of the sultanates marched south to the great city of Vijayanagara and occupied it for a time. However, they eventually withdrew, and for a time the territorial losses of Vijayanagara remained limited. Between 1570 and the 1630s, the rulers of the polity—now officially in the hands of members of the Aravidu clan such as Venkatapatideva Raya (r. 1586–1614)—continued to manage a reduced enterprise, first from a center in the hilltop fort of Penukonda, then in Chandragiri and Velur even farther to the southeast. Eventually, in the later 1630s and 1640s, further campaigns mounted by the sultanates of Bijapur and Golkonda swept away most of the remnants of this kingdom, leaving only a titular monarch of the Aravidu family. In turn, these sultanates were themselves conquered a mere half-century later.

Still, the battle of 1565—like its predecessor some four decades earlier at Panipat—occupies a place of importance in popular histories, school texts in India, serialized television productions on Indian history, and even the works of visiting travel writers.4 It could quite plausibly be included in any list of subcontinental lieux de mémoire, but at a conceptual rather than literal level, as there are at least three rivals for its location: Talikota (the best known but least plausible), Rakshasa-Tagdi (in fact, Rakkasgi-Tangadgi), and Bannihatti. Two of these lie north of the Krishna River: Talikota is located farthest north, on the banks of the tributary Don River, and Rakkasgi and Tangadgi are two distinctly separated villages on the north bank of the Krishna. Bannihatti lies farthest south, at the confluence of the small Maski River and the even smaller Hukeri rivulet (just northwest of Mudenur).

From this viewpoint, it is tempting to compare the battle of 1565 with another legendary battle that took place a mere thirteen years later, on August 4, 1578 (30 Jumada I, A.H. 986), in the Larache region of Morocco.5 In this instance, the date is clear, as are the protagonists, but much else remains shrouded in mystery. The proximate circumstances involved two rival claimants for power in the region: Sultan ʿAbd al-Malik al-Saʿdi and his nephew, the former sultan Abu ʿAbdullah al-Saʿdi. The latter, after having been expelled by his uncle (who had Ottoman aid), appealed directly for help to the Portuguese court, which had had interests and ambitions in the region since the fifteenth century. The young king Dom Sebastião decided on an unusual step, namely, to personally lead an expeditionary force involving a large number of Portuguese noblemen. For several generations, none of his ancestors had entered the field of battle, and many advised him strongly against it. In the battle and its immediate aftermath, all three royal protagonists perished, but Dom Sebastião’s death was not an agreed-upon fact: his body never was found, and this became the source of the various “Sebastianist” movements that would follow.

So the “Battle of the Three Kings,” as it is sometimes known, has remained deeply contested territory in its own fashion.6 Termed the battle of Wadi al-Makhazin (Oued el-Makhazen) in the Maghreb, it is known as Alcácer-Quibir (from al-Qasr al-Kabir) to the Portuguese. It is seen as a triumph against European ambitions by a part of Moroccan historiography, but as a national tragedy in conservative Portuguese historiography, since it eventually led in 1580–81 to the incorporation of Portugal into the Habsburg monarchy for six decades. In a classic manner then, rival nationalisms have produced not merely competing memories but competing historical interpretations. One man’s national triumph is inevitably another’s historical tragedy.

Similarly, melodramatic emplotments of and exegeses on our Deccan battle of 1565 have not been lacking. We may take a relatively recent instance, written in the 1970s, by the best-known historian of the Golkonda Sultanate:

The year 972/1564–65 may be regarded as one of the most important in the history of South India, if not in the history of the whole country. It was the first time after the downfall of the Bahmanī kingdom that its successor states sheathed their swords which they had been continuously sharpening against one another, and not merely entered into treaties but actually sealed them by matrimonial alliances between their ruling families.7

We may distinguish here between the notion of rival understandings of the causes and consequences of the battle, and the concept of radically distinct readings of even its significance. When and why did this battle emerge into such significance, so much so that the history of South India is often simply divided into two phases, before and after “the fall of Vijayanagara (1565)”? There is a natural tendency to lay the blame at the door of the English civil servant and amateur historian Robert Sewell, because he is the author of perhaps the most influential work on Vijayanagara, entitled A Forgotten Empire.8 First published in 1900, this work has remained in print ever since and still lies at the center of standard narratives regarding Vijayanagara—despite several generations of other works with epigraphy and narrative texts since its publication.9 Sewell was certainly well acquainted with the South Indian epigraphy of his day, but the novelty of his work lay in his use of two sets of contemporary Portuguese materials: the writings of Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes from the early 1520s and early 1530s, and an early seventeenth narrative by Jesuit Manuel Barradas.10 The first two narratives (which had been accidentally discovered and published in 1897 by David Lopes) allowed Sewell to construct a vision of a “golden age” for both the royal capital and its larger military-political system; the latter account (already better known, and mostly concerned with succession struggles in the 1610s) he used to set out a picture of the Vijayanagara polity in an enfeebled state.

Sewell’s view of the historical role of Vijayanagara is unambiguous enough. He thus commenced his work with the following words, before developing his thesis of Vijayanagara as “a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquest”:

In the year 1336 A.D., during the reign of Edward III of England, there occurred in India an event which almost instantaneously changed the political condition of the entire south. With that d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Courtly Insults
• 2. Courtly Martyrdom
• 3. Courtly Representations
• Conclusion: Difficult Junctions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index