Introduction
Recent years have seen a number of monographs and articles that re-evaluate the nature of Mughal India by focusing on the diversity and variety of actors who were present in it. This endeavour has been especially invigorated by taking new account of the place of Jains in both the Mughal courts and in Indian society more broadly, focusing, on one hand, on the monks who contributed to what we now understand to have been a vibrant and sustained intellectual exchange between Sanskrit and Persianate intellectuals, and, on the other, on Jains’ place in the administrative, political, economic and social spheres of Mughal-era society.Footnote 1
Several other recent articles demonstrate that exchanges between Jain intellectuals and Muslim rulers precede the Mughals and that Jain authors depicted Afghan and Turkish rulers, and the actions of their armies, even prior to the advent of the Delhi Sultanate.Footnote 2 This article examines the earliest narratives of Jain interactions with their Muslim ruler, the exchanges between Jinaprabhasūri (c. 1261–1333 ce), the head monk (ācārya) of a small sub-lineage of the Śvetāmbara Kharatara Gaccha, and Sultan Muḥammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51), composed in the years 1328–33—at the height of the Sultanate's imperial reach. It also examines re-tellings of the exchanges between the monk and the sultan composed over a period of two-and-a-half centuries by monks from Jinaprabhasūri's own order as well as two re-tellings by members of the Tapā Gaccha, a rival mendicant order that grew in prominence in the fifteenth century, supplanting the Kharatara Gaccha as the dominant Śvetāmbara monastic order by the latter half of the sixteenth. These narratives of Jinaprabhasūri's relationship with the sultan established several key tropes and paradigms upon which subsequent Jain intellectuals would draw to reflect on the proper relationship between monastic leaders and Muslim kings. They created the imaginative literary space of ‘memory’ that provided the metaphors and tropes that sustained productive political exchange between these two parties until well into the reign of Akbar (r. 1556–1605). This project was a continuation of a sustained effort on the part of Jain monastic leaders to work out the proper relationship between monastic authorities and Hindu kings in works going back to the twelfth-century Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita of Hemacandra (1088–1172) and other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century narrative (prabandha) texts, which, Cort has argued, “advanced a distinct Jain theory of kingship” that delineated what subjects may expect of a king.Footnote 3 However, as the evidence discussed herein shows, this effort did not end with the advent of Islamicate rule in western India at the dawn of the fourteenth century, as Cort suggests.Footnote 4
In the process of remembering and retelling Jinaprabhasūri's story, these narratives also constituted a Jain ‘memory’ of the Tughluq sultans as the monk's interlocutors, who became paradigms for a new Jain model of interacting with, in Jinaprabhasūri's words, “Turkish rulership” (Pkt. turukkarajja) or “non-Aryan rulership” (aṇajjarajja).Footnote 5 The ascendant Tapā Gaccha finally cut off this memory and supplanted these narratives in the late sixteenth century with a new set that promotes the relationship their ācārya, Hīravijayasūri (1527–96), had with Mughal Emperor Akbar, which became the new paradigm for monastic political leadership of the Jain community that is so well known to both Jains and historians today.Footnote 6
Further, narratives about Jinaprabhasūri present a view of both Muḥammad bin Tughluq and his successor, Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 1351–88), at odds with much of the modern historiography on them, which is based mainly on Persian and Arabic sources and often suffers uncritical readings or is refracted through colonialist or Brahmanical lenses on the period. Jinaprabhasūri's narratives of his experience at court thus also grant us space to see the fault lines between these sultans and their Persian chroniclers. Juxtaposing Jain narratives with other evidence of exchanges between the Tughluq rulers and Jain intellectuals creates an epistemological space for historians to de-centre the Persian and Arabic sources and their modern readings, thereby putting the agendas of these sources (and historians’ interpretations of them) into sharper focus. The Jain sources can help us to understand, in the case of Muḥammad bin Tughluq, the frequent charge made against him in Persian and Arabic sources, by figures beginning with Ẓiyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (c.1258–1357), that he “favoured Hindūs”,Footnote 7 while helping us to see that Fīrūz Shāh's purported hostility to “Hindūs” is based mainly on the remnants of the inscription from the dome of the mosque he had built in Fīrūzābād, known as the Futūḥāt-i Fīrūz Shāhī, and may prove to be more a matter of performative iconoclasm than actual hostility toward, at least, his Jain subjects.Footnote 8
This evidence also shows that Jains remained politically engaged as a community after the advent of Islamicate empires in South Asia, contradicting a persistent view among historians that the Jain community ‘turned inward’ and disengaged from politics upon the advent of ‘Muslim rule’. However, the focus here goes beyond showing merely that the Jains were a separate religious community who had their own relations with the sultans. As a point of historiographical interest, it should demonstrate for us that the proper object of study in terms of this ‘encounter’ should not be thought of in terms of ‘Muslim’ encounters with ‘Hindus’—however broadly construed—but between particular Islamicate, Persianate state actors, including the sultans, and the various Indic communities—social and religious—operative at the time. This article concludes with some reflections on how historians may theorise these Jain narratives to read them productively as historical sources, attending to issues of memory, community, and representation.
Narrating Jinaprabhasūri in the Tughluq court
In 1328, roughly two-and-a-half centuries before Hīravijayasūri first met with Akbar, Jinaprabhasūri ventured into the Delhi court of Sultan Muḥammad bin Tughluq. Recommended by a court astrologer for being “extraordinarily learned” (Pkt. visiṭṭhayaro paṃḍio), the monk impressed the ruler, first with the poetry of his benediction, then with his skills in the debate hall (vāyagoṭṭhiṃ).Footnote 9 “Mahammada Sāhi”, as Jinaprabha calls him, celebrated the monk's victory in the debate, first by parading him around Delhi atop an elephant—to the delight of all the Jains of the city—and then by granting the entire Śvetāmbara community an edict (Pkt. phuramāṇa; Pers. farmān) that protected them from harm (Pkt. uvaddavarakkhaṇa).
As their relationship grew over a number of months, Jinaprabha requested and received another edict from the sultan that protected Śvetāmbara temples at major pilgrimage sites, such as Śatruñjaya and Girināra, located atop hills in the eastern and central parts of the Saurashtra Peninsula, respectively, and in market towns, such as the Phalavarddhi Pārśvanātha temple at Meḍatta (modern Meṛtā Road, Rajasthan). When the monk arrived at court one rainy Monday (somavāra), the sultan ordered his courtier “Malikkakāphūra” to wipe the mud from his feet.Footnote 10 Jinaprabha gave such a novel verse of benediction that the sultan “became one whose mind is exceedingly astonished” (Pkt. aīva camakkariacitto jāo). At that instant, he asked the sultan for the return of a miracle-effecting image of the Jina Mahāvīra that had been plundered from a temple in Āsīnagara (modern Hānsi, Haryana) some months prior to their first meeting. The sultan granted his request; the monk re-consecrated it in Delhi in a temple (Pkt. ceīa; Skt. caitya) located in “Malikatājadīnasarāī”. The sultan later established a section of Delhi for some 400 Jain families (sāvayakulāṇaṃ), known as the “Sultan's Sarai” (suratāṇasarāi), and had a new temple built to house the returned image along with a hall (posahasālā) for ritual fasts and lodging for mendicants.
At the sultan's request, Jinaprabha travelled to the southern ‘capital’ of Devagiri/Dawlatābād along with several prominent Jain merchants, apparently in order to establish there a community of Jains friendly to the sultan, leaving his chief disciple, Jinadevasūri, in Delhi.Footnote 11 The sultan called Jinaprabha back to Delhi after three years in order to serve as an advisor on religious and philosophical matters; the monk even briefly travelled with him on a military campaign. The expansion of the empire led to security for Śvetāmbara Jain places, as “…everywhere the Śaka (saga) army had conquered…by obtaining an edict, [Jinaprabha] ensured that holy sites (titthāiṃ) would be safe (akudobhayāiṃ)”.Footnote 12 Another farmān granted safe passage throughout the Tughluq sovereign's empire—which was at its zenith in these years, covering most of South Asia—to “Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras” alike, a rare premodern articulation of the rivals’ status as “co-religionists” (sādharmikas) equally worthy of the sovereign's protection.
Settling into a retirement of sorts, Jinaprabha spent the final years of his life in Delhi, teaching the darśanas (religion and philosophy) to people of all persuasions, while residing in a hall (posahasālā) adjoining a newly built temple to house the returned Mahāvīra in another new district reserved for Jains that was “caused to be built by the pātasāhi” right next to his palace in order to ease the old monk's journey to the court “whenever he is summoned”. The sultan himself named the quarter “Baṭṭāraka Sarai” (bhaṭṭārayasarāi), an honorific title for the head of a monastic order, otherwise known by the title ‘ācārya’.Footnote 13
We learn all of this in Jinaprabhasūri's own magnum opus, which he called the Kalpapradīpa (The Glory of the Age) but which came to be known by the Mughal period as the Vividhatīrthakalpa (Chapters on Many Sacred Places, hereafter VTK).Footnote 14 Amid this collection of some 63 Prakrit and Sanskrit chapters that discuss roughly four-dozen important pilgrimage places and market-town temples across North India, there are two narratives of the monk's experiences in the court of Muḥammad bin Tughluq and the benefits that resulted therefrom.Footnote 15 To leave us with little doubt about the importance that Jinaprabha gives to the sultan's magnanimity for the present wellbeing and future prosperity of the Jain community, in the first of three concluding verses of the first narrative he writes, “Seeing the elevation of the tradition (sāsaṇa) done by the Blessed Mahammada Sāhi, even though it is the Fifth Era, people regard (kaliṃti) it as the Fourth Era”.Footnote 16 In the monk's estimation, Muḥammad bīn Tughluq's reign had turned the clock back to the time of the Jinas themselves.
Vidyātilakasūri, a junior monk of a collateral monastic lineage whom Jinaprabha had mentored, composed the second of the two chapters.Footnote 17 He makes the case that Jinaprabhasūri should be known as the yugapradhāna (Pkt., jugapahāṇa), the ‘Leader of the Era’, a title that had recently begun to be given in lineage histories (gacchāvali, gurvāvali, paṭṭāvali) to those rare few Jain ācāryas whose leadership skills led both their monastic order (gaccha) to prominence and the wider Jain community of their time to prosperity.Footnote 18 Despite his interest being in glorifying his teacher rather than the sultan directly, Vidyātilaka concludes much the way Jinaprabhasūri himself did:
What more is there to say? It is evident that the king (nariṃda; i.e., the sultan), won over by the good qualities of the ‘emperor of heads of monastic lineages’ (sūricakkavaṭṭīṇaṃ; i.e. Jinaprabhasūri), has undertaken duties for the entire tradition (sayaladhammakajjāraṃbhā). … Just as when Hindus ruled (hiṃduarajje), as in the “More-Unhappy-than-Happy” [Era] (dūsamasūsamāe), so too in the “Unhappy” [Era] (dūsamāe), during the rule of non-Āryans (aṇajjarajje), monks go about freely spreading the teachings of the Jinas (jinasāsaṇappabhāvanāparāyaṇā).Footnote 19
This passage, perhaps ironically, seems to confirm one of Baranī's cavils about Muḥammad bin Tughluq's attitude toward his non-Muslim Indian subjects, whom he refers to as “Hindūs”:
[The Hindūs] are held in the greatest respect and esteem and are honoured highly. […] The sultan confers on them responsible offices including governorships of provinces. […] He allows them…to be furnished with the complete paraphernalia of greatness. Thus the Hindūs…enjoy all luxuries, employing Musalmāns as their servants… They also carry on unrestrained and open propaganda of their books and disseminate their teachings, preferring Hindū philosophy to Islamic literature.Footnote 20
Jain narratives and the historiography of the Sultanate
These rich narratives tell us about Jinaprabhasūri's greatness by letting audiences know the many helpful actions he was able to convince Muḥammad bin Tughluq to perform for the benefit of the Jain community and faith. Further, they depict a sultan willing to honour and celebrate the monk and to make amends for recent disturbances, which led to the recognition and integration of the Jain community of Delhi with the Sultanate. However, there is little outside of Jinaprabha's own sub-lineage of the Kharatara Gaccha, known in the lineage chronicles as the Laghu Śākhā or ‘Lesser Branch’, that a modern historian would consider corroborating evidence of the veracity of his story. Jinaprabha's presence in Delhi is mentioned briefly in a Jain narrative written by a monk of a rival order just a few years after his death.Footnote 21 There are no Persian narratives from this period that definitively mention Jains of any kind; descriptions of ‘Hindūs’ or ‘jogīs’ in Muḥammad's court, as we read in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Reḥla, do not seem to fit the description of Jain monks.Footnote 22 Few Persian sources from the entire Sultanate period even hint at the Jains. One such document is a possible draft copy of a 1325 farmān bearing Muḥammad bin Tughluq's title and seal that mentions a group of people called ‘sīvaragān’ possibly a reference to ‘śrāvakas’, a term for lay Jains. However, the authenticity of this document is unverified.Footnote 23 Thus, the recollection of encounters between the Jains and the Sultanate is almost completely one-sided. If neither Persian nor non-Kharatara Gaccha sources written close to Jinaprabhasūri's lifetime maintain much in the way of memory of his accomplishments, we seem to be justified in wondering if his story has any historical utility at all. Are we forced to take the stance of historian B. C. Law, who writes of the VTK that it “contains legends mixed up with facts”, cautioning us that we must separate fact from fiction in order to use the VTK as a source useful to the production of knowledge about the past?Footnote 24
Rather than try to decide which aspects of a narrative are ‘factual’ and which ‘fictional’, we may prefer instead to focus on strategies of representation that can answer more complex historical questions about the nature of communities and the purpose of literary production, especially of a genre as complex and unique as the Jain prabandhas of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, of which the VTK is a peculiar example. However, before we dismiss the historicity of Jinaprabha's story—and before we start to investigate the historiographical utility of literary representations of ostensibly historical events—we should wonder what value writing ‘fictitious’ narratives of engaging the court of the Sultan of Delhi would have had, especially when they claim all that is outlined above and sit among other chapters in a text claiming to describe historical events that took place at various temples and tīrthas across North India, many of which can be reasonably corroborated by material remains, inscriptions and other literature. Jain merchants were highly mobile; if a Jain quarter were established in Delhi, others would soon know about it.Footnote 25 Even if Jinaprabha were trying to take credit for the work that others had accomplished incrementally, it would still indicate that there was indeed a productive relationship between the Sultanate state apparatus and the Jains. Further, despite the lack of other narrative accounts that would confirm Jinaprabha's presence in the Tughluq court, there exists some significant evidence to show a sustained connection between Jains and the Sultanate, especially from the period of the reign of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Khaljī (r. 1296-1316) onward—enough to begin to consider how Śvetāmbara Jains established and maintained their ties to the sultans of Delhi in the period after western India was brought into the growing empire. Whether these narratives should be taken as ‘historically accurate’—that is, as a representation of an actual relationship forged between the Jain community and the Tughluq state that resulted in something like the outcomes described therein—or not, the impact and influence of Jinparabhasūri's story on the Śvetāmbara tradition lasted for over two centuries and also treats the events as simultaneously a fact and a topos for further reflection on the proper relationship between monks and Muslim kings.
Reading the Jain narratives alongside and even against the Persian narratives can expand our imaginative capacities to see the interests of both the Jain authors who narrated encounters with figures of the Sultanate state, on one hand, and those of the Persian and Arabic writers, on the other, whose own interests in depicting the Tughluq rulers in varying ways could be brought into greater relief with a contrasting set of narratives. Although we cannot definitively prove Jinaprabha's presence in the court, we can begin to assess the importance of narrative as a way for Jains to imagine what productive encounters and sustained relationships with these rulers, whom they clearly saw as foreign, could look like. Despite the uneasiness that historians justifiably have with too easily connecting textual narrative to empirical ‘facts’, material remains that help us draw these connections should not be kept too far away from the imaginative world our narratives construct. To do otherwise would foreclose our ability to understand what, in LaCapra's terms, we could say a text is ‘documenting’ and what ‘work’ it is doing on its readers.Footnote 26 In this case, reading Persian narratives for traces of possible interactions with Jains alongside the various tellings of Jinaprabha's story of meeting one sultan or another, produces a context for understanding each set of narratives, rather than merely reflecting upon a pre-established context external to the sources. This reading strategy also allows us to incorporate other evidence, material and textual, to add to our interpretive basis for understanding the impact of Jain narratives of the relations that they forged with the Sultanate state, both in the immediate aftermath of the putative meetings between Jinaprabha and Muḥammad bin Tughluq, as well as for the ‘memory’ of that period for Jains in subsequent centuries, who conceptualised this relationship as a heuristic space to reflect upon the proper relationship between monk and monarch and the qualities a monk would need to possess to succeed when entering into a courtly world.
Changing Tughluqs: Posthumous narratives of Jinaprabhasūri
With such political and literary accomplishments, the Kharatara Gaccha should have enthusiastically embraced Jinaprabhasūri. However, as mentioned above, Kharatara Gaccha histories composed by the main branch (Bṛhat Śākhā) of the lineage do not even mention his sub-lineage, the Laghu Śākhā, until a 1527 lineage chronicle, the Kharataragacchasūriparaṃparāpraśasti.Footnote 27 The main part of the order only takes note of Jinaprabhasūri in the 1618 Kharataragaccha Paṭṭāvalī, and then is given just a brief mention.Footnote 28 The long interval between Jinaprabha's death and the first mention of him in a major Kharatara lineage text calls for an explanation and leaves open the question of why anyone cared at all to include him at that late date.
It appears that to monks inclined toward intellectual pursuits, Jinaprabha's story had been well known for over two centuries, including those of their rival mendicant order, the Tapā Gaccha. Tapā power and influence began to increase under the independent Gujarat Sultanate in the fifteenth century and eclipsed their rivals for good in the Mughal court of Emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth. Their increasing political involvement required them to reassess their self-image as a purist lineage who stood in direct opposition to the Kharatara monks, whom they had seen throughout much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as too closely tied to political powers. Their success in supplanting their Kharatara rivals is also marked at a distinct moment in history, when the Tapā polemicist Dharmasāgara Upādhyāya (d. 1596) excoriated his fellow monks for speaking so highly of a monk from a heretical lineage.Footnote 29 So expelled from the Tapā Gaccha's repertoire, the Kharatara Gaccha could ‘reclaim’ him.
There is only one Kharatara lineage text that narrates Jinaprabhasūri's life in detail; unfortunately, it is undated. Although Granoff states that the text was likely produced within a generation or two of Jinaprabha's death, she gives no real basis for the claim.Footnote 30 The anonymous text, titled Vṛddhācāryaprabandhāvali (Collection of Narratives of the Great Ācāryas),Footnote 31 tells the story of Jinaprabha's selection by his guru, Jinasiṃhasūri (d. 1284), the founder of the Laghu Śākhā, and then retells the story of Jinaprabha's experiences in the Sultan's court, completely reinventing the source of Jinaprabha's influence, finding the source of his power not in his skills in poetry and debate but in his relationship with the goddess (śāsana-devatā) Padmāvatī and in his command of magical powers (vidyās). Despite its uncertain date, it was most probably composed by a monk from the Laghu Śākhā, as it traces the succession of ācāryas of the Kharatara Gaccha from its traditional founder, Vardhamānasūri (d. early eleventh century), to Jinaprabha, ignoring other contemporaneous Kharatara pontiffs from the late thirteenth century onward. It also gives a highly conciliatory explanation for how the tradition divided into the Greater (bṛhat) and Lesser (laghu) Branches under the leadership of Jineśvarasūri II (d. 1275). I begin with it here not to support an early date for it, but rather to hold its date in question. Its narrative structure and the details that it provides for how Jinaprabha was so successful at court give us a completely new orientation toward the monk that has strong resonances with two fifteenth-century Tapā Gaccha biographies. I give the basic elements of the narrative here.
Jinasiṃhasūri meditates on Padmāvatī's mantra until she appears before him. She informs him that he has just six months to live and instructs him to seek out the youngest son of a Śrīmāla merchant, who will become his successor. He trains the child, teaching him the mantra. After Jinaprabha becomes the leader of his order, he impresses the sultan, here called “Mahammadasāhi”,Footnote 32 by exorcising a demon from his wife, succeeding where all others had failed. Having thus become a courtier of the sultan, Jinaprabha fends off many attempts to outdo his magical powers or to show him up to the sultan, all because of warnings from Padmāvatī, who is always looking out for him. These include both Hindu and Muslim contenders. One is “Rāghavaceyana” (Skt., Rāghavacaitanya), who hides the sultan's ring in Jinaprabha's broom, only to have it discovered on his own disciple; another is a “magician of Khorasan”, who finds that only Jinaprabha's broom is capable of knocking down his turban, which he had magically suspended in the air in the middle of the great hall. On another occasion, Jinaprabha is the only courtier who correctly predicts how the sultan will leave the palace (by crashing through a wall!), while, on still another occasion, he makes a fig tree's shadow follow the king for some five miles, keeping him cool in the shade along the way. Finally, Jinaprabha successfully regains the image of Mahāvīra, the image discussed in the VTK's story of their initial meetings, by making the image move and speak, whence it states, “May the glorious teachings of the Jinas be victorious! May the beloved of the king prosper and be happy! May Shah Mahammad reign victorious on earth! May the monk Jinaprabhasūri be victorious!”Footnote 33 So impressed was the Sultan that he worshipped the image then and there, had a temple built for it, and offered two villages to the Jains for its maintenance.
Another undated narrative, collected in the Purātana Prabandha Saṅgraha (PPS), gives us these same basic elements, though with enough variations that it is difficult to say which comes first.Footnote 34 Interestingly, it tells the story of how Jinaprabha, accompanying the sultan—here called “Pīroja, the barbarian emperor” (mlecchādhirāja)—on a military campaign, pays a visit to the Tapā Gaccha ācārya Somaprabhasūri (d. 1316) near the former Caulukya capital of Pattana (modern Patan, Gujarat). In this scene, we have a clear declaration of the benefits to the community of Jinaprabha's interventions with the sultan and a lament about its costs to the monk:
The Blessed Somaprabhasūri began to praise him, saying that it was because of his greatness that the Jain faith was prospering. [But Jinaprabhasūri] replied, “I have failed to observe the strict life of a monk, night and day traipsing after the Sultan! I have no independence anymore. You follow the correct behaviour of a monk. The true behaviour appropriate to a monk is preserved in your monastery”.Footnote 35
Eventually, Jinaprabha goes on to lead the sultan on a pilgrimage to Śatruñjaya and Girnār; the latter site so impresses the sultan he worships the image of Neminātha there.Footnote 36
Clearly, the second narrative lauds Jinaprabha for his actions with the Sultan, which bring so much benefit to the Jain community as a whole, and stops to reflect on the Tapā Gaccha's superior conduct, upholding the correct monastic practices. Although the author of this narrative is also unnamed, this is most likely a Tapā Gaccha narrative because it spends much of its time detailing the good that can come from a close interaction with political powers, while the Tapā Gaccha monks are stuck in a “monastery” outside the regional capital of Patan. It thus makes an argument for a greater engagement with political power while cautioning monks to remain fixed on their observance of the proper Jain monastic practices. It also follows closely the changes to Jinaprabha's narrative in two fifteenth-century Tapā Gaccha re-tellings of his story, to which I now turn.
The two dated Tapā Gaccha narratives further reflect on what made Jinaprabha's relationship with the sultan successful. The first is the 1446 Upadeśasaptati (Seventy Instructive Narratives) of Somadharmagaṇi.Footnote 37 The second is the 1464 Pañcaśatī Prabodha (Prabandha) Sambandha (A Collection of 500 Edifying Narratives) by Śubhaśīlagaṇi, which contains eighteen narratives and anecdotes of Jinaprabha's deeds in the sultan's court. Many of the narratives in both texts show us Jinaprabha's cleverness as a courtier, as the unsigned text in the PPS, outlined above, does.Footnote 38 While Somadharma ignores Jinaprabha's sectarian affiliation, Śubhaśīla fully incorporates Jinaprabha into the Tapā Gaccha, making him the student of “Vijayasiṃhasūri”.Footnote 39 In one story, Jinaprabha mentions his affection for the Tapā Gaccha ācārya, here changed to Somatilakasūri (d. 1367), Somaprabha's successor as ācārya in the Tapā lineage. The story is told in the context of meeting with the layman Jagatsiṃha Shāh in the southern Sultanate ‘capital’, Devagiri/Dawlatābād. I translate “The Story of Śrī Jinaprabhasūri's Arrival in Devagiri” from Śubhaśīlagaṇi's Prabandha-Pañcaśatī here:
Once, Jinaprabhasūri walked from town to town and from village to village to praise the lords (devān). He reached Devagiri with Śrī Ahammada otherwise named Sultan Pīroja [i.e. Fīrūz]. There, the faithful expended great wealth on a festival (to celebrate) their entry into the city. Jinaprabhasūri, having praised the lords in all the temples, (and) worshipping at the house-temples (gṛhacaitya), went to the house of Jagatsiṃha Sā° (Shāh). There, the sūri worshipped images made of the finest silver, gold, quartz crystal, and cat's-eye gem; then, seeing this tīrtha that is his house, the monk started shaking his head. So Jagatsiṃha asked, “Why did your head shake?” The teacher (said), “I worshipped the lords in all the cities, towns, and other places of the world; worshipped the gurus, too. Now this one is the greatest caitya-house. Moreover, (I) worshipped the Tapā (monk) Śrī Somatilakasūri in Jaṃgharālapura; now henceforth this pair of tīrthas has become the best of all in (my) mind. Thus, I was shaking my head.”
[…] Having heard this instruction in the dharma, and having realised his righteous passion (dharmiṣṭhānurāgaṃ), the virtuous Jagasiṃha [sic] performed a special [act of] devotion to Jinaprabhasūri by giving (to him) the finest clothes, food, and drink (varyavastrānnapānadānāt).Footnote 40
Each of these three narratives—from the PPS, Upadeśasaptati, and the Prabandha-Pañcaśatī—agrees on the general trajectory of Jinaprabhasūri's life story, his success with the sultan, and his accomplishments as an intellectual. Both Śubhaśīlagaṇi's narrative and the unsigned text match with the story as it is told in the Vṛddhācāryaprabandhāvali. Śubhaśīla substitutes “Vijayasiṃhasūri” in the place of Jinasiṃhasūri but otherwise retains the story that the teacher discovers that he has just six months to live and is instructed by Padmāvatī to seek out the child who will become Jinaprabhasūri. Further, he understands that the plundered Mahāvīra image is the impetus for Jinaprabhasūri's initial encounter with the sultan, but he changes certain details, such as the original city from which the image was taken. Likewise, Somadharmagaṇi appears to have been familiar with the VTK's story, if not the text itself, as he adds details to Jinaprabha's journey to Devagiri/Dawlatābād, which Muḥammad bin Tughluq had attempted to establish as a second capital and to which he had sent the monk. However, Somadharma seems unsure of the sultan's name, claiming both “Ahammada” and “Pīroja” as names for the same person.
The confusion over the distinction between these two sultans carries through a number of Jain texts. The Nāgapurīyatapogacchapaṭṭāvalī, a late seventeenth-century lineage text of the Nāgapura branch of the Tapā Gaccha, states that its 51st and 52nd ācāryas, Hematilakasūri and Ratnaśekharasūri, respectively, both had dealings with Fīrūz Shāh. The former “was vested by Perojasāha in 1399 [vs, 1342/3 ce] in Delhi”; the latter monk was the sultan's “teacher” (pīrojasāhapātisāhapratibodhaka).Footnote 41 Much like the narratives above, the 1342/3 date would fit squarely in the reign of Muḥammad bin Tughluq, not that of Fīrūz Shāh. While it is not clear why Fīrūz would take Muḥammad's place in these narratives, there seems to be a consistent practice of doing so that may speak to a history of steadily improving relations between several Śvetāmbara Jain communities and the two sultans. The relationship between Fīrūz Shāh and Jinaprabhasūri, which will be discussed further below, is remembered in these narratives for the closeness established between the sovereign and the monk.
An overweening focus on the ‘faultiness’ of the memory that does not agree with the known dates of each figure would foreclose on a more productive reflection on what the narrative suggests for the ongoing Jain engagement with Islamicate political and cultural spaces in late medieval India. The continued production of narratives of the events of the meetings between Jinaprabha and these sultans helped Jains to make sense of the period and the changes their community and tradition underwent. As Jinaprabha's own narratives in the VTK showed to his contemporaries just how the Jain community had moved into a new period of prosperity and influence through his relationship with the sultan—a reality probably more created than merely reflected in his text—retellings of those events over a century later helped the burgeoning Tapā Gaccha to reflect on their own growing social and political leadership of the Śvetāmbara community in western and northern India. Jinaprabha's story even provided the tropes for Tapā narratives of supersession, as they gained supremacy under the Mughals in many of the same ways that Jinaprabhasūri's narratives say he had done with the Tughluq sultans.
Returning to the narratives, all three begin with Jinaprabhasūri's presence in the Tughluq court as an established fact; thus, they narrate certain experiences he had in the court that demonstrate his extraordinary powers, which served to solidify his relationship with the sultan. Rather than discuss the intellectual talents that established him at court, as the VTK narratives do, the Tapā stories follow the Vṛddhācāryaprabandhāvali in centring Jinaprabhasūri's success at court on his magical powers (vidyās), his close connection with Padmāvatī, and cleverness at courtly repartee. Most significantly, all three Tapā Gaccha narratives place Jinaprabhasūri not in the court of Muḥammad bīn Tughluq, but in that of his successor, Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq, who came to power some 18 years after Jinaprabha's death. This is especially remarkable due to the fact that two of the three narratives also push Jinaprabha's meeting with the Tapā Gaccha leader back in time to a period before the Tughluqs had even come to power, having him meet Somaprabhasūri, rather than Somatilakasūri. The significance of these narratives becomes clear when looking at the overall theme within the variations: each reflects on the ambivalence they feel toward Jinaprabhasūri, at once praising him for what he accomplished for the faith, showing him as a pious and powerful monk, and yet showing misgivings about his close relationship with the sultan in terms of his ability to conduct himself as a liberation-seeking mendicant ought.
The dates of these narratives, at least two and possibly all three of which were composed in the mid-fifteenth century, are significant. The Tapā Gaccha was slowly becoming the dominant order under a new political dispensation, the Gujarat Sultanate, based in the newly established capital of Ahmedabad. Their succession became complete with ācārya Hīravijayasūri establishing the Tapās as a mainstay in Akbar's court. This relationship is well known to most Śvetāmbara Jains today in part because of a concerted effort to narrate the Tapā presence in the Mughal court in a number of texts, including what Dundas has called the “last great mahākāvya”, Devavimala's Hīrasaubhāgya.Footnote 42 Their need for Jinaprabhasūri thus obviated, his expulsion from the ranks of the Tapā Gaccha, tenuous as it was, would come from the polemicist Dharmasāgara Upādhyāya.
Dharmasāgara would excoriate his predecessors, especially Somadharma, for speaking in laudatory terms of a Kharatara monk who not only followed that order's ‘corrupt’ practices but compromised even their debased understanding of the proper ascetic path in order to pander to the Sultan—the benefits to the community as a whole notwithstanding. As Dundas writes, “Jinaprabha's status as a moral influence upon a Muslim ruler is thus for Dharmasāgara far outweighed by his general heretical stance”.Footnote 43 Dharmasāgara saw no need to laud Jinaprabhasūri's relationship with either of the earlier sultans in light of Hīravijayasūri's relationship with Akbar, which set a new, Tapā-centric paradigm for the ideal relationship between monks who lead Jain communities and the Mughal emperors. As such, Jinaprabhasūri passed into relative obscurity after the late sixteenth century; his magnum opus remained useful only as a description of various pilgrimage places and thus the text that he called the Kalpapradīpa became known in seventeenth-century manuscripts as the Vividhatīrthakalpa.Footnote 44
Despite Jinaprabhasūri's expulsion from the Tapā Gaccha's rolls of honourable mention, his narratives continued to echo in those of the ascendant rival order. The c.1620 Bhānucandragaṇicaritra (The Deeds of Bhānucandragaṇi, BhC) by the Tapā Gaccha monk Siddhicandragaṇi, a resident in the courts of both Akbar and Jahāngir (r. 1605–27), gives us a sense of the steady waning of Kharatara political influence in the Mughal era, beginning in the latter part of Akbar's reign, while bearing numerous similarities with the VTK's narratives in its portrayal of the relationship between several leading monks and the two emperors. While the themes, tropes and narrative parallels shared between the two texts are numerous and subtle and warrant a fuller study, a few brief related examples will both illustrate their similarities and mark the Kharataras’ decline.
The first chapter (kalpa) of the VTK is a lengthy panegyric to Śatruñjaya that declares it to be the foremost pilgrimage place—a fact that was not well established in the early fourteenth century but which was obvious in the early seventeenth for image-worshipping (mūrtipūjaka) Śvetāmbara Jains.Footnote 45 The chapter briefly mentions that the site was damaged by “mlecchas” in 1313 but restored two years later through the joint efforts of a Jain layman, Samara (Shāh), and Sultan ‘Alā’ al-din Khaljī's appointed governor of Gujarat, Alp Khān (d. c.1316).Footnote 46 Jinaprabhasūri lauds the current sultan for being “kindly disposed toward the [Jain] community” (saṅghe prasannavān) and honours him with the Sanskrit title, “Overlord of Kings” (rājādhirāja); he even names the encomium “The Grace of the King” (rājaprasāda) after him.Footnote 47 In the two chapters of the VTK that discuss the monk's time in Muḥammad bin Tughluq's court, Jinaprabha details the farmāns (edicts) that he obtains from the sultan, the first of which protected Śatruñjaya and several other important pilgrimage places from harm (upadrava); this edict is specifically recalled in the later narrative composed by his acolyte, Vidyātilaka, mentioning the same sites.Footnote 48 Jinaprabha narrates how he approached the sultan, charmed him with his knowledge of poetry, and eventually obtained the sultan's trust, which led to the king granting such edicts at the monk's request.
The third chapter of the BhC narrates how Akbar granted control of Śatruñjaya to Hīravijayasūri in 1592. The edict sparked Kharatara “jealousy” (īrṣya), which led to several unsuccessful plots to discredit their Tapā rivals that instead end up backfiring, reminiscent of the attempts to discredit Jinaprabhasūri in the sultan's court in the posthumous narratives discussed above.Footnote 49 Having thus established their control over the site, in the fourth chapter, Siddhicandra narrates how he himself obtained an edict to stop Kharatara Jains from erecting a temple in one of the complexes atop the hill.Footnote 50 Later in the fourth chapter, a local authority destroyed (apātayat) a temple at the foot of Śatruñjaya and threatened to burn the main temple atop the hill. Once Siddhicandra receives word of the destruction in Lahore, he quickly approaches Akbar, who immediately grants an edict forbidding any destruction (upadravavāraṇa) of the main temple, using the same term, upadrava, used in the VTK.Footnote 51
Other traces of the extent of Jain-Sultanate relations in the textual and material record
Jinaprabhasūri's narratives give us the first elaborate description of a monk interacting with a sultan in the court; they also articulate the direct and wide-ranging outcomes of fostering a relationship between the leader of a Jain community and a sultan. They help to render sensible other traces of the presence of Jains in the Sultanate court, such as the names of Jain laymen mentioned in the paṭṭāvalis who appear to travel between Delhi and Dawlatābād, giving strong indications that Jain merchants were more than coincidental to Muḥammad bin Tughluq's ability to establish a second administrative centre there. Traces of cooperative and productive interactions between several sultans and various Jain monks and laymen, gathered from a handful of Jain sources, suggest that limited interactions between Jains and the Sultanate state, such as to obtain farmāns to conduct pilgrimages, occurred frequently throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.Footnote 52 ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Khaljī's appointment of the Jain layman Ṭhakkura Pherū (fl. 1291–1323) to an official position in the royal mint is fairly well known to historians of this period.Footnote 53 Pherū produced a number of technical works in Apabhraṃśa on topics such as coin billon assaying and gemmology that affirm his position. This section examines the traces of narrative, textual, and other material evidence that speak to a broader and sustained engagement of Jain monks and laymen with the sultans.Footnote 54
Textual references connecting Jains to the sultans of Delhi appear fairly frequently from the beginning of the fourteenth century onward. The first of these, the 1305 Prabandhacintāmaṇi of Merutuṅgasūri, places the first encounter between a Jain and a sultan way back in the reign of Shams al-Dīn Iltutmish (r. 1210–36), who thanked Vastupāla (d. 1240), the famous Jain minister to Vaghela King Vīradhavala (d. 1238), for granting the sultan's “guru” safe passage through Gujarat while on the Hajj. The 1336 Nābhinandanajinoddhāraprabandha (Narrative of the Resotration of the Jina [Ṛṣabha at Śatruñjaya]) of the Upakeśa Gaccha ācārya Kakkasūri narrates in some detail how Samara Shāh worked with Alp Khān to restore the temples atop Śatruñjaya in 1315, briefly mentioned in the VTK (see above). The text also states that Samara served as a governor of Tilaṅg (Telangana) under the first Tughluq ruler, Ghiyath al-Dīn (r. 1321–5), ironically corroborating one of Baranī's complaints about Fīrūz Shāh's Tughluq predecessors, mentioned above, that “Hindūs” occupied high offices “including governorships of provinces”.Footnote 55 Even after Jinaprabhasūri attained the rank of ācārya of his sub-lineage of the Kharatara Gaccha, other monks from his lineage obtained farmāns from the last Khaljī sultan, Quṭb al-Dīn Mubārak Shāh (r. 1316-20), and from the first Tughluq ruler, Ghiyāth al-Dīn, to lead a number of pilgrimages.Footnote 56 Yet none of these figures (or their narratives) made quite the impact on either the sultans or the Jain tradition that Jinaprabhasūri did. The first narratives describing extensive relationships between prominent Jains figures and the sultans begin with the reign of Muḥammad bin Tughluq.
The Persian portrayal of the Tughluqs in light of Jain evidence
The Persian narratives relating Muḥammad's reign focus on his bold decisions, which were poorly received by their authors. As a result, many modern historians have understood Muḥammad to have been either foolish or insane. Jhavery writes of Jinaprabhasūri's accomplishments, “We consider his achievements even higher than those of Śrī Hīravijayasūri as religious bigotry was at its zenith in his times and he had to deal with a sultan who was nicknamed ‘the mad’ owing to his senseless conduct devoid of reason”.Footnote 57 Jinaprabha's recollection, by contrast, is of a ruler possibly versed in Sanskrit poetry and appreciative of dialogue and exchange among intellectuals of all faiths. His perspective on the ruler may bring into relief the elitist agendas of the Persiphone chroniclers. One of these, Baranī, happened to write during Fīrūz Shāh's reign as an attempt to get back on the payroll of the Delhi court in the form of an in’ām, and who represents the interests of Turkish elites whom Muḥammad seems to have alienated—and with whom Fīrūz wanted to appear to have reconciled.
For his part, we would be too hasty to presume that Fīrūz Shāh really had become, in Jhavery's words, the “great fanatic [who] followed strictly verdicts of Ulemas [sic] and spared no pains to convert Hindus to Islam”.Footnote 58 The array of Persian sources evinces a sultan interested in presenting himself as an orthodox Sunni Muslim, possibly as a reconciliation with the Turkish elites so alienated by his predecessor. Jackson concurs with this opinion:
It was especially necessary for Fīrūz Shāh to promote an image that contrasted with Muḥammad's; and indeed the policies he followed tell us a good deal about those of Muḥammad which had aroused such resentment [among orthodox Muslims]… Fīrūz Shāh continued to identify himself with orthodox piety and with the interests of the religious élite throughout his reign…Footnote 59
Jain accounts help us to read the Persian sources with a more critical and less documentary eye. This evidence appears to show a more amicable relationship with non-Muslims that paints a more colourful portrait of the sultan and his administration. I turn now to the Jain portrayals of Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq in the retellings of the life of Jinaprabhasūri and other evidence of his interactions with Jains.
For all of the tone and posturing in these sources that point to Fīrūz Shāh taking a hard line with his Hindū subjects, evidence of his patronage of Jains and Sanskrit intellectual endeavours, his use of Indian objects as part of his symbolic repertoire of power, and the presence of “Brahmanas and ‘sewrās’” in his court, all militate against a portrayal of Fīrūz as a fundamentalist warrior for Islam against the infidel, and should help us to confine the representations of his reign in the Persian sources to the illocutionary purposes that each text served, chiefly, repairing relations between the ‘ulama’ (and other Sunni elites) and the new Tughluq sultan. In fact, the Jains appear to have remembered Fīrūz even more favourably than Muḥammad bīn Tughluq, as most of the fifteenth-century tellings of the life of Jinaprabhasūri anachronistically place the monk in Fīrūz's court, as we have just seen.
There are at least three specific examples of Fīrūz Shāh's patronage of Indic literature composed by Jains.Footnote 60 First, he bestowed honours on the monk Munibhadrasūri of the Bṛhad Gaccha for his 1353/4 Śāntināthacarita. The monk was a student of Guṇabhadra, who had himself been honoured by Muḥammad bin Tughluq.Footnote 61 Almost two decades later, Fīrūz honoured Ratnaśekharasūri with robes for his Prakrit Sirivālakahā (The Story of Śrīpāla), completed in 1371.Footnote 62 Third, Fīrūz Shāh sponsored the Jain monk Mahendrasūri to compose the first Sanskrit treatise on the astrolabe in 1370, the Yantrarājāgama (A Study of the King of Instruments).Footnote 63 A 1382 commentary by his student, Malayendusūri, names “śrī-pīroja-śakendrā[ḥ]” as the text's sponsor.Footnote 64 He also declares that Mahendrasūri was the foremost astronomer in Fīrūz Shāh's court. Acknowledging the extensive literature produced by Muslims on the device, Mahendrasūri himself declares that his text is a distillation of many works composed in Arabic and Persian (and possibly including al-Bīrūnī's own now-lost Sanskrit work on the astrolabe). Additionally, Fīrūz Shāh sponsored the translation of a number of Sanskrit texts on astronomy, astrology and medicine into Persian, which, as Sarma asserts, strongly suggests a highly collaborative atmosphere.Footnote 65 Unfortunately, neither Mahendrasūri's nor Malayendu's monastic affiliations are indicated in the text. They do not appear to have been Kharatara Gaccha monks, indicating that there likely was a broader engagement between the Sultanate and the Jains than even the Kharatara histories suggest.
Further evidence of Jains and Hindūs at his court emerges in ‘Afif's description of the most ambitious project that Fīrūz Shāh undertook during his reign, the construction of a new city of Delhi, eponymously called Fīrūzābād. During that time, Fīrūz moved and re-erected two Aśokan pillars, one to stand atop the three-storey palace (kotla) in Fīrūzābād itself, and the other to crest the equally sized Koshika Shikar, a ‘hunting lodge’ located in the hills then west of Delhi. As Flood argues, these were not trophies of conquest but homages to India's past rulers and an attempt to position the sultan in the same vein as the Indian kings of old.Footnote 66 The evidence for this interpretation comes in ‘Afif's report that the sultan desired to know the meaning of the Brahmi inscriptions on the pillars. He claims that Fīrūz Shāh invited “many Brahmanas and [sewrās]” to read them, though none were able. Instead, ‘Afif claims that these Hindū intellectuals reframed the inscriptions as prophecies of Fīrūz's reign: “Certain infidel Hindus interpreted them as stating that no one should be able to remove the obelisk from its place till there should arise in the latter days a Muhammadan [sic] king, named Sultán Fíroz…”Footnote 67 He further relates that the invited experts claimed that the pillars were somehow connected with the Mahābhārata, speculating that they had been Bhīma's walking sticks or used as cattle posts.Footnote 68 Finally, Rizvi notes that Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq “collected 1,300 Sanskrit manuscripts from the Jwālāmukhī and other temples” during a show of force to exact tribute from the king of Nagarkot sometime around 1365, “[s]ome of [which] were translated into Persian”.Footnote 69 This claim would seem to imply that Sanskrit and Persian intellectuals were cooperating and working closely together in his court on a broad translation project.
Elliot translates ‘Afif's “sewrās” as “Hindu devotees”; Hodivala gives us the actual term, glossing it as “‘Shrīvara’… the general designation of the ascetic order among the different gachchhas or sects of the Jainas”.Footnote 70 In Elliot's uncertainty about the identity of this group he gives the Persian in a footnote, best transliterated as “sīvaragān”.Footnote 71 Given the evidence reviewed above of the application of this term in the Mughal sources to refer to the Śvetāmbara Jains, I feel comfortable concluding that the term ‘sewrā’ (or ‘sīvara’) was also used to refer to Jains in ‘Afif's early fifteenth-century history as a translation either of “Śvetāmbaras” (Pkt., seaṃvara) or of “śrāvakas” (Pkt., sāvaga), the traditional term for Jain laymen. Regardless of the authenticity of the farmān that Husain identifies,Footnote 72 in ‘Afif we have a solid example of the use of this word in the Sultanate period to refer to a group who were intellectuals represented in Fīrūz Shāh's court and who were on par with but different from Brahmins. The combination of ‘Afif's evidence and indications of Fīrūz Shāh's patronage of Jain monks at court adds up to a picture of Jain intellectuals as regular and common participants in his court, perhaps a continuation of affairs under Muḥammad bīn Tughluq, and possibly even as far back as ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Khaljī. All of this suggests that there was a much more complex relationship between this sultan and the Jains (and likely also other Hindū groups) than the Persian sources bear out.
Resolving the strain between Muḥammad bīn Tughluq and the Persianate Sunni elites of Delhi, as M. Habib, Prasad and Husain each argue (and with whom Jackson agrees), may be the interpretive key that helps us to resolve the seeming contradiction between, on one hand, Fīrūz Shāh's strong stance against Hindūs that comes through in both Baranī's history and his own inscription, and, on the other, his patronage of Sanskrit learning and intellectuals that emerges in several pieces of Jain literature and ‘Afif's hints.Footnote 73 That is, Fīrūz's portrayal, both in his own hand as well as in the works he commissioned (and even rejected, as in the case of Baranī) in the first decade of his career were likely attempts to mend relations with this group of elites in light of what Baranī and other Persian chroniclers characterised as the disastrous effects of Muḥammad's widespread employment of foreign administrators, Hindū amīrs and others whom they considered “low born”. This attempt at image reform likely allowed Fīrūz to continue employing Jain monks (and, it seems, other Hindūs) at court as Muḥammad had apparently done.
That Fīrūz Shāh felt a pressing need to clean up the family image in order to have a successful reign seems apparent in his desire to have his own history composed within a decade of his succession. In 1360-1, he put out a general call for a historian to come to his court that went unanswered. So, the sultan set about composing his own ‘official’ history, which he had inscribed on the ceiling of the jāmi’ mosque in Fīrūzābād, the Futūḥāt-i Fīrūz Shāhī. Eventually, Fīrūz did succeed in enticing the anonymous author of the Sīraj-i Fīrūz Shāhī to write his story. The pressure to reform the Tughluqs’ image with the old elites indeed seems to have been strong; if we compare Fīrūz with Muḥammad, who had no contemporaneous history of his reign composed in his lifetime, the fact that at least three emerged within the first decade of his reign becomes rather conspicuous.Footnote 74
Taken together, Baranī and Fīrūz's accounts have led modern historians to view Fīrūz Shāh as a reactionary and hardliner who adhered to a strict orthodoxy and acted upon it to put Hindūs and other low-born folk back in their place and return dignity to the people of Baranī's social class.Footnote 75 In this sense, both texts espouse an elitist vision of proper social order that Fīrūz had come to restore. Baranī's effort to portray Fīrūz thusly is an attempt to write a history that would have been useful to the emperor, a point he found it necessary to reiterate on the ceiling of his newly built mosque. In this light, we may understand Baranī's history as teleological, leading up to a triumphant portrayal of Fīrūz Shāh. He represents the advent of the Tughluq Dynasty as a return to the proper rule of the great Sultan ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Khaljī after a period of disarray; Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq becomes a hero who saved good Muslims from the low-born converted slave and still-crypto-Hindu usurper Khusraw Khan. Muḥammad bīn Tughluq's reign threatened that legitimacy, narratively speaking, because of the strained relationship he had with Delhi's Muslim elites. Yet, Baranī never goes so far as to call him a heretic as ‘Iṣāmī does. Instead, Muḥammad's failures, which Baranī claims had caused the near collapse of the empire through the malfeasance of his low-born foreigner and Hindū cronies, would be rectified by the orthodox Fīrūz Shāh, the legitimate successor who corrected the ‘imbalanced’ relative status between Hindūs and other low-born persons, on one hand, and the Turkish, Persianate elite Muslims of the Sultanate ecumene, on the other. Baranī's Ta'rīkh is a triumphal story of reconciliation between the new king and the elites whom he needed to have back in his corner to be able to run the (now-diminished) empire he inherited.
Similarly, Fīrūz's own statements must be considered in the context in which they were originally published. As an inscription on the domed ceiling of his new jāmi’ mosque in Fīrūzābād, his new addition to Delhi, the Futūḥāt portrays him as the consummate pious sultan who used his state power to return the kingdom to an ideal Islamic state by correcting the improper actions and policies of “previous kings”—everything from excessive and illegal taxation to liberality with respect to heretics and idolaters. Given the evidence to the contrary, namely that he sponsored Sanskrit intellectual pursuits, honoured compositions in Indic languages, and apparently had Brahmins and Jains as regular members of his court, we may see these works as moments of self-representation targeted toward a specific audience, namely the Turkish, Persianate Sunni Muslim elites of Delhi who had been marginalised, if only in their own minds, by Muḥammad bīn Tughluq's policies and schemes. By shifting focus away from historians’ concerns for how ‘trustworthy’ the various Persian texts are as historical sources, and toward attending to their narrative and rhetorical strategies, we may use these texts more productively as historical representations meant for specific purposes, rather than as more-or-less reliable depictions of reality.
The Tughluq Sultans as Indo-Muslim Kings
As several scholars have recently argued, the sultans did not work exclusively within an Islamicate or Persianate model of kingship; many of their practices were also consonant with those of Indic models of kingship.Footnote 76 In the main, these arguments have rested upon reinterpreting acts that had been previously understood exclusively through an often under-theorised notion of ‘Islamic’ kingship, asserted despite the fact that, strictly speaking, no such theory exists within any formal category of Islamic thought. The desecration and destruction of Hindu and Jain temples and images wrought by the sultans and their armies has, until recently, similarly been understood to be motivated by a putative ‘Islamic iconoclasm’ and the rhetoric of the Persian historical chronicles has been accepted as the proof that ‘Islam’ was indeed the primary motivation for such acts.Footnote 77 Recent reconsiderations have attempted to view these acts within the frameworks of conquest and the desire for plunder to fund continued military operations—often away from South Asia. The human universals of the desire for power and economic gain have begun to replace religious bigotry singularly confined to a then-hegemonic Islam as the key motivations for the aggression against Hindu and Jain temples and images. In this sense, then, the actions of Muslim kings were no different from those of Hindu kings, who had plundered each other's images and destroyed each other's temples as ways of showing that the defeated king's loss of power was complete and even divinely sanctioned.Footnote 78 Further, Jackson and other more recent military historians have pointed out that religious identity was no bar to the cooperation of Hindus and Muslims on both sides of the conflicts that gave rise to, and contended with, the sultanate state.
Additionally, the notion of a uniform ‘Islamic’ mode of kingship has been challenged as other scholars have demonstrated that different kings have taken different approaches to dealing with temples and images in different situations.Footnote 79 Images have been both desecrated and treated as objects of fascination, all within an ‘Islamic’ framework.Footnote 80 In short, it should be clear that there is no uniform ‘Islamic’ theory of kingship, nor is ‘Islamic iconoclasm’ a satisfactory explanatory tool to account for all cases of how the sultans (and other kings who were Muslim) have dealt with images.Footnote 81 What appears as a uniform ‘Islamic iconoclasm’ from the temporal distance of centuries (and from the ideological stance of colonialism) should be more responsibly viewed as a series of localised, specific responses that evince a contest between local situations and ideological concerns. In short, historical particularity has now been emphasised over a causal model that asserts a slavish adherence to (an unsophisticated notion of) religious ideology.
We have now two approaches to challenging the explanatory capability of any putative ‘Islamic iconoclasm’: one is to challenge the exclusively ‘Islamic’ interpretation of acts of desecration and destruction by locating these acts as also part of Indic modes of kingship, the symbolic meanings of which the sultans well understood. Second, the very notion of a uniformly ‘Islamic’ approach to images has been undermined historically, as we see varying reactions ‘Muslim’ kings have had to Indic religious images that ranged from fascination to iconoclasm. Even when sultans have been represented as iconoclasts, such as Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq, there is enough auxiliary evidence, traces within Persian chronicles as well as external evidence—including the Jain evidence discussed here—to suggest that the actual approach was more complex than colonial and nationalist portrayals allow for, which should alert us to the need to consider all available evidence and to understand the rhetorical strategies in play in each source before drawing any conclusions.
Aside from these two approaches, we may also consider other ways that the sultans worked within an Indic framework of action for which there appears to be no Islamic precedent. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa remarks that Muḥammad bin Tughluq had huge jars of water from the Ganges River (gaṅgā-jala) carried to him while residing at Dawlatābād.Footnote 82 While it is unclear whether he ascribed any religious significance to the water, it seems that Muḥammad bought in to the prevailing Indian notion that Ganges water was the purest around and had salubrious properties.Footnote 83 As Indian kings, the sultans would have understood that patronage of Indic literature and support of all religious communities was a time-honoured practice. As dhimmīs, Hindūs appear to have been able to carry on their temple-building projects upon payment of the jizya, though in this case we have to consider the sultans’ policies individually. Certainly, Jinaprabha and Vidyātilaka saw the sultan's rule as permissive of Jains’ efforts to carry on with their religious practices as they wished. This evidence gives us an even richer picture, one in which the sultans’ symbolic acts of power coincided much more deeply with Indic notions of kingship and power.
This ‘Pax Sultanica’, for however brief a time it lasted, made possible Jinaprabhasūri's compilation of pilgrimage sites and important Jain cities in the VTK, even as the collection is marked by stories of destruction and restoration of many of the sites that it discusses. The political unification created a new imaginative space that linked these sites together—a person could know about these places in detail from local sources and could even go visit them as Jinaprabhasūri did. Far beyond the mere lists of places as we find in thirteenth-century tīrthamālā (‘garland of pilgrimage places’) hymns and caitya-paripāṭis (‘order of temples’) recited during temple rituals (caitya-vandana), the VTK blends several types of knowledge about these places: their mythic importance as articulated in the Jain purāṇas, the ‘historical facts’ about their temples and images built by great patrons, and their intrinsic properties that frequently included hidden treasure hordes and quicksilver wells so important to alchemists. As I argue elsewhere, the level of detail and the articulation of these tīrthas’ importance from multiple sources of knowledge created a network of places relevant to Śvetāmbara Jains that spanned the territory of Sultanate India at its height.
Still, even with these reconsiderations we have only the vaguest picture of the actual interactions between Muslim and Hindū intellectuals participating in courtly life at this time, and even less clear an idea about the exact roles that Indian merchants played in the Sultanate political economy, who may have found the political unification of South Asia under the Sultanate empire desirable. The Jains were key agents in both the intellectual and mercantile fields, making the traces of evidence of their presence in Sultanate affairs on these fronts all the more desirable and important to piece together. At the very least, it should indicate the importance of bringing Jain materials under more serious consideration when writing the history of Sultanate India. The evidence that Jinaprabhasūri's narratives in the VTK and subsequent sources bring to the historian's table cannot be easily integrated into this historiography as merely another set of documents contributing to an already established narrative; they must instead be carefully read and properly theorised. My approach here has been to examine Jinaprabha's work to understand how he could have communicated effectively with the Sultan on behalf of the Jain community and, in the opposite direction, composed compelling narratives of his interventions that resonated with, it appears, the entire Śvetāmbara community for centuries afterward. His narratives and the ensuing discourses that it generated within the Jain tradition have potential points of intersection with the available Persian sources that have long dominated the historiography of late medieval South Asia. These potential points of contact establish a context in which the meeting of the sultan and the sūri could have productively taken place.
To reduce the interactions between the Sultanate and the Jain community to economic interest is to overlook the actual means by which they forged their relations as recorded in the available evidence. Examining the ways that these relationships formed helps us to understand how they worked to reshape the Jain tradition, while also providing leads for investigating new modes of interaction between local Indian communities and the Muslim political powers of the Sultanate and beyond. My purpose in bringing up their mutual economic interests here is to delineate all of the parameters of their interactions, and to point out that the Jains had lost a substantial amount of the political clout that their wealth had once afforded them under the Caulukyas and Vāghelas, which they sought to reconstitute with the new ruling political power. Despite the new Persianate, Islamicate polity, religious and other differences did not prevent their communication. The narrative that the Jains ‘turned inward’ and disengaged from politics upon the advent of ‘Muslim rule’ in South Asia does not hold up; the evidence reviewed here shows plenty to suggest the contrary.
Conclusion: Historiographical Reflections on the Tellings of Jinaprabhasūri's Life
The information in these ‘biographical’ sources tells us less about the actual person of Jinaprabhasūri than about his evolving importance to the Jain tradition. In this sense, the several retellings of his story evince a life—and oeuvre—that continued to play an important role in shaping the identity of the Jain community well into the Mughal era. Jinaprabha's own narrative of his relationship with the Tughluq sultan and the stories that other Jains would tell of that relationship over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries allow us to see how monks worked out and debated ways to relate to the Sultanate rulers (and other state officials), who, while operating on models of kingship not previously seen in South Asia, endeavoured to understand their interests and needs and to work toward forging a relationship that would, with the right perspective, benefit the Jain community socially, politically, and materially. Sweeping aside the regional Hindu kingdoms and their models of kingship, the growth of the sultanate empire created a space that required the re-articulation of communitarian identities to the state; undoubtedly, this new context forged new modes of social and political connection among Jain communities and created new expressions of identity in the emergent genres of prabandha and lineage history (gacchāvali, gurvāvali, paṭṭāvali), which, we have seen here, reached beyond the confines of their monastic lineages.
These narratives also show us that Jain monks were well aware of the duality of their roles. As religious leaders, it was (and remains) their job to advise lay Jains about the latter's spiritual goals and to aid them with their more mundane struggles. This included, at a minimum, intervening with state powers when circumstances warranted it and, maximally, maintaining a permanent presence in the court as intellectuals and advisers. We see here that this relationship continued after the Hindu kingdoms of North India were swept aside and an Islamicate empire crystallised. However, it is also monks’ duty to cultivate their own detachment as they embody the path to liberation and fulfil their vows as mendicants. Their involvement with royal courts, though long accepted as part of what Jain monks do, especially the purview of leaders of the mendicant orders (ācāryas), was fraught with concerns about how they would maintain the proper ascetic practices that were not only for their own spiritual progress but also to uphold the legitimacy of their lineage by maintaining ascetic propriety. Performing this tension in literature marked their authenticity as legitimate leaders of the community, especially in light of the often-bitter disputes between rival orders (gacchas) that almost always centred on debates over the proper practices to uphold their mendicant vows.
The greater issue for the historiography of Islamicate India that these sources raise, lies in how we can carve out epistemological spaces, both to accommodate sources like those that we have examined here and to limit the influence of Persian and Arabic sources and see their own rhetorical projects more clearly. The Jain sources on both Muḥammad bin Tughluq and Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq help us to limit the degree to which violence and ‘fanaticism’ may be read from the Persian and Arabic tellings of their lives—sometimes those authored by the sultans themselves. The Jain sources do not offer a ‘purer’ or more accurate representation; they are not free from their own agendas merely for being outside the elite spheres in which these Persian and Arabic sources were composed. However, they do offer an alternative memory of these figures that help us to think more critically and with greater nuance about the representations that have emerged as the standard depictions of each sultan's zeal as a Muslim and vision as a ruler.
Finally, the posthumous narratives of Jinaprabhasūri show us how such relationships were sites for moral reflection on the acceptability of monks having relations with Muslim political authorities, and the style in which it should happen. In these narratives, the rulers’ Muslim identity is less the issue, however, than their foreignness. Their being ‘non-Āryan’ was not at issue so much in terms of their lack of caste purity, but rather for their general lack of intimate understanding of who the Jains are. This afforded Jinaprabhasūri an opportunity to establish new relationships with the sultans and, in the process, articulate anew who the Jains are to themselves as he sought to lead a broadly conceptualised community into a new era, a vision that would continue for the next two-and-a-half centuries.
