Introduction
When a poet is dedicated to the timeless experience of the divine, how might he go about writing about current affairs? Eighteenth-century Indian authors developed various forms of social commentary and literary responses to recent history. This entailed both innovative genres such as the Urdu shahr ashob (‘the city's misfortune’) and the nuanced reconfiguration of historical narratives in Persian, which aimed to provide relevant ‘warnings’ for contemporary readers and rulersFootnote 1 or to underline the authoritative status of the writers themselves.Footnote 2 Beyond the circles of urban poets or nawabi bureaucrats, however, we become less familiar with pre-colonial literary strategies for social critique.
This is especially true of writers from religious communities, such as the bhakti cults of Mathura and Vrindavan: it is often tacitly assumed that such intellectuals had a purely theological outlook and would not engage critically with the ephemeral world of politics and society around them, unless to eulogize their recent saints or to enter into some sectarian contest.Footnote 3 This article will indicate the inadequacies of such an assumption by examining the Harikala Beli (‘The Song of Hari's Art’), a work from 1760 written in the Braj Bhasha dialect of Old Hindi. Written in the wake of Ahmed Shah Abdali's recurring invasions of northern India, and in particular the massacre and pillage in 1757 of Vrindavan by his army, the poem describes recent atrocities in lucid detail, comments on the trials of the town's refugees, and situates these traumatic events in the wider political context of Mughal decline. The author of this extraordinary work, Caca Hit Vrindavandas (circa 1700–circa 1787), is generally remembered as a bhakti poet, and to this day members of his sect, the Radhavallabh Sampraday, use his vast output of devotional songs and poems in their ritual worship. His religiosity is not an aside to this piece, but characterizes his discussion and analysis of recent events: as well as recounting the slaughter of priests and monks, he addresses his poem directly to his god. At the centre of the disaster in Vrindavan sits Vrindavan's lord, Krishna, and the poem takes the form of a complaint to the deity. This lordship was not merely an epithet or theological formula, but was coloured by concepts drawn from Mughal political culture. As such, the complaint articulates certain expectations and obligations of the deity which draw on a contemporary social understanding of protection and the responsibility of rule. This suggests that in a period of political disruption and confusion, critical observations on the status quo could be expressed through a religious idiom, and that the god himself could be held to account.
In this article I will first discuss the literary provenance of the Harikala Beli, and argue that its defiance of typical generic conventions is suggestive of its eighteenth-century context, one which lent itself to innovation, and hybridization of forms and styles. In particular, the idiosyncrasies of this Braj Bhasha work by a sectarian Hindu poet convincingly correspond with parallels in immediately contemporary Urdu literature. As such the poem speaks to recent scholarship's advances in the expanding epistemology of vernacular sources of history and multilingual approaches to literary culture.Footnote 4 Just as the traumatic context of the writing shaped the form of its literary representation, contemporary notions of ethical government and social obligation were brought to bear on the theological formulation of the poem's argument. I will discuss how the period's disruption of these political codes influenced the poet, such that his argument with Krishna concerns trust, in a social sense, rather than faith, in a theological one. Crucially, this suggests that by the eighteenth century Hindu traditions of divine protection could be redefined through worldly, historically conditioned political expectations, such that a bhakta was a dependant in the household of his god, as much as he was a devotee.
History and poetry
By reconsidering the conventions of Indo-Persian chronicles and expanding pre-colonial historiography to include vernacular poetry, recent scholarship has developed our sense of the new forms of history-writing that rose to prominence in the ‘early modern’Footnote 5 period and has demonstrated the value of the factual kernels in such works.Footnote 6 In reference to Braj Bhasha literature, Allison Busch has argued that rather than looking for a reified aitihasik kavya genre, dependent on the assumptions of modern historiography, more can be drawn out from a greater appreciation of the various vernacular genres, such as family history (vamsavali), panegyric (prasasti), and the many forms employed in courtly poetry and treatises on statecraft.Footnote 7 Such works contain significant material for historians yet have their own rules of genre and style and do not follow the restrictions or characteristics of chronicles and other formal modes of historical narrative.
In her discussion of the Urdu shahr ashob, Carla Petievich suggests that vernacular poets were able to express themselves with greater liberty than court clerks: while Mirza Rafi ‘Sauda’ (1713–1781) and Mir Taqi ‘Mir’ (1724–1810) vented their frustration and dismay at the state of Delhi in their lifetimes, chroniclers were encumbered by a farman passed by the emperor Muhammad Shah, which censored any mention of the Persian invasion of India in official histories of his reign.Footnote 8 The encounter between poetry and historical events therefore fostered another kind of record, one that was subject to the personal experience of poets or their communities, rather than necessarily subservient to the agenda of a courtly or imperial patron.Footnote 9 In this vein Petievich argues that the shahr ashob is ‘a unique social document. It communicates to the interested reader the personal impact of the already recorded and well-known facts.’Footnote 10
Early modern historical discourse took shape in multiple, separate genres that had their own hermeneutical grammars. As this Urdu genre demonstrates, languages and styles developed to accommodate these new literary modes of discussion. Thus Muzaffar Alam's seminal treatment of Persian as the register of political culture underlines the different connotations of North Indian languages. According to the Tuhfat al-Hind (circa 1675–1700), Sanskrit, maintaining its position as the heavenly language (deva-bani or akash-bani), was deemed inappropriate for mlechha Mughal discourse, while Prakrit, as the patal-bani, or language of the subterranean realms, was too lowly for the workings of empire. In this scheme, the vernacular or Bhakha, Alam argues, was the preserve of music and love poetry, and again inappropriate for the more weighty demands of politics.Footnote 11 However, too strict a categorization would be misleading. On the one hand, Persian persisted as a literary and musical language in its own right throughout the eighteenth century. Likewise, the vernaculars developed their own trajectories in conversation with, or in parallel to, Persian,Footnote 12 and Braj Bhasha, the language of the Harikala Beli, had a significant position in the Mughal domain and provincial courts, where it was understood as an appropriate idiom for treatments of history.Footnote 13 Naturally, the choice of language determined to some extent the stylistic conventions and generic devices of the final historical work, which in turn influenced the conceptual framework of the writer's representation of past experience.Footnote 14 Therefore to make any sense of Vrindavandas, a bhakti poet writing on recent events in Braj Bhasha, it is necessary to understand how he constructed his history, how he understood his activity as a writer, and for whom he was writing. Clearly, in writing this text, Vrindavandas was aware that recent or current events were appropriate subject matter for a poetic work. However, my discussion of the text will demonstrate that he did not reconstruct the past according to the conventions of court histories, or with a patron's agenda in mind. While the Harikala Beli is unlike his other more ‘conventional’ devotional works, his social commentary and observations are framed as a complaint to a deity as much as to any human audience. Therefore we must continue to bear in mind that Vrindavandas’ repertoire defined him as a devotee whose works speak to a divine recipient. Critically, his commentary on the political sphere is embedded in a particular bhakti world view cultivated in Vrindavan.Footnote 15
To this day Caca Hit Vrindavandas is remembered and respected by the Radhavallabh Sampraday.Footnote 16 He was initiated into the sect himself in 1738 (1795VS) and lived in Vrindavan at the Radhakant temple, the house of his guru, Hit Ruplalji, for almost 20 years.Footnote 17 It seems likely that while Vrindavandas was a dedicated devotee, he did not take the vows of ultimate renunciation himself: the Radhavallabhis do not typically prioritize this over and above householder bhakti, and in the only known portrait of Vrindavandas, though he is shown with a congregation of bhaktas, he sits to the side and is distinctively represented in a layman's garb.Footnote 18 His major contribution was a substantial collection of song texts written in Braj Bhasha, dedicated to the community's worship of Radha and Krishna.Footnote 19 Almost two decades spent contemplating the Divine Couple were brought to an abrupt end when the Afghan army of Ahmad Shah Abdali entered the Jat territories, invaded Mathura and Vrindavan, and slaughtered their inhabitants. The Harikala Beli, completed in the Asarh month of the Vikrama year 1817 (June–July 1760), represents Vrindavandas’ meditation on these personally devastating events. The poet tells us how he himself witnessed the invasion, and fled initially to Farrukhabad. From there he joined the other refugees fleeing Braj, and eventually found protection with Suraj Mal, the king of Bharatpur (r.1757–63). Vrindavandas’ representation of events in this work marks a striking departure from the poet's standard bhakti repertoire, and is unique in its approach.
It is important to note that the poem does not attempt to represent a specific patron: the text's provenance is stated as Bharatpur, and the king ‘Sujan Simh’ (that is, Suraj Mal) is named. However, these references seem primarily contextual, and there is little indication that Vrindavandas was claiming Suraj Mal as his patron. The work does not relate to the king's affairs, so much as to the plight of the Radhavallabhis themselves. Indeed, the tone of the poem suggests the bewilderment and loss felt by the community, rather than any optimistic, politically charged statement, characteristic of courtly panegyric.Footnote 20 As I will discuss further, the poet's representation of Krishna, and his systematic exploitation of puranic material, which reveals the god's manipulative personality, is quite different from other inter-textual approaches, such as the political exploitation of the Ramayana across the early modern period.Footnote 21 Pollock suggests that the latter epic gestures to a grounded divine order, focused on the royal figure, and a fully developed, demonic ‘Other’.Footnote 22 By contrast the Mahabharata lends itself to political disappointment, disenchantment with the world (vairagya), and a ‘fundamental bifurcation of the (hegemonic) spiritual and the political, symbolically coded in the bifurcation of the principal characters’.Footnote 23 While it makes sense for a Krishna-bhakta to discuss this god rather than Rama, nonetheless Vrindavandas selected these specific materials from the Krishna narrative purposively, and the effect is one of discord rather than legitimization of a Hindu ruler. We might interpret this as a familiar quality of bhakti literature: outside of the courtly domain, writing could express the devotee's own demands or expositions without considerations of financial backing.Footnote 24 In this regard Vrindavandas’ conclusions do not contribute to any identifiable political agenda, but rather to the reconstitution and morale of a community in exile.
‘Kabul made its onslaught’
Vrindavandas situates the Afghan invasion of 1757, and Krishna's betrayal, in the wider context of what he perceived as the decline and decadence of the Mughals:Footnote 25
By the time of the succession of Alamgir II in 1754, the authority of the Mughal emperors had been severely undermined by other powers in northern India.Footnote 29 Perhaps it was for this reason that Vrindavandas does not refer to Alamgir, or to his predecessor Ahmad Shah (r. 1748–1754), but to Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748), who had not ruled for almost a decade. By 1757 Mughal wealth was exhausted, Maratha armies from the south were plundering Delhi, Jat authority in the east was expanding, and Rohilla Afghans had taken control of large areas to the east and north of the capital.Footnote 30 Against this background, Ahmad Shah Abdali launched a series of campaigns into northern India, and by the early 1750s held authority in Lahore, Punjab, and Multan.Footnote 31 When the vazir of Delhi, Imad-ul-Mulk, appointed Adina Beg governor of Punjab and tried to retake Lahore, Abdali crossed the Indus again in 1756. He drove out Adina Beg and proceeded to a defenceless Delhi. Alamgir II was deposed and Abdali had his own name read out in the city's prayers to declare his sovereignty over the territory. He then initiated a month-long loot of the city and slaughter of its inhabitants.Footnote 32 He ultimately granted the city back to the emperor, marrying his son to Alamgir's daughter, a match that came with a dowry of Punjab and Sind. Ahmad Shah thus established his authority in the region through symbols and strategies, such as the reading of the khutba and marriage alliances, but also with acts of terror.
On 22 February 1757 Abdali continued into the Jat territories to claim tribute from Raja Suraj Mal, then the wealthiest ruler in Hindustan. Suraj Mal was firmly resisting Abdali's intimidating presence in North India, and had previously rejected his summons. Abdali's response was twofold: first, he raided the fort of Ballabhgarh. According to a contemporary Persian text by Ghulam Hasan Samin, who accompanied Abdali's troops during the invasion, here Abdali left ‘an extraordinary display! Wherever your glance fell nothing else was to be perceived but severed heads upon lances, and the number could not be less than the stars in the heavens.’Footnote 33 From there Abdali sent two of his officers, the Rohilla chieftain, Najib-ud-Daulah, and Jahan Khan, with 20,000 men to Mathura and Vrindavan. He ordered that the entire territory be put to the sword. According to Samin's manuscript, booty was declared a free gift to the looter: this would have been especially popular after the violent plunder in Delhi, when Abdali imposed a strict demand for sole possession of the spoils and punished any self-interested soldiers.Footnote 34 The army was further instructed to bring the heads of infidels to the tent of the chief minister, who would draw up an account and reward them with five rupees for every head.
As the Afghans approached, the Marathas fled towards Agra, while the Jat, Jawahar Singh, raised an army of 5,000 to prevent their entry at Chaumuha, eight miles north of Mathura. After nine hours of fighting the Jats were defeated, with 3,000 casualties.Footnote 35 The army entered Mathura on 28 February, two days after Holi, when the town would have played host to an especially large body of pilgrims. An ‘indiscriminate massacre’Footnote 36 followed and the city was burned. On 6 March the army continued to Vrindavan. According to Ghulam Hasan Samin's account:
Wherever you gazed you beheld only heaps of the slain. You could only pick your way with difficulty, owing to the quantity of bodies lying about and the amount of blood spilt. At one place, we saw about two hundred children in a heap. Not one of the dead bodies had a head. . . The stench and fetor and effluvium in the air were such that it was painful to open your mouth or even draw a breath.Footnote 37
For a week after the massacre of Mathura, the river Yamuna flowed red; when Samin visited two weeks later it was still yellow. Visiting the huts of the bairagi and sanyasi ascetics, he found their decapitated heads tied to the severed heads of cows. Abdali himself arrived in Mathura on 15 March, and Vrindavan four days later. When he finally returned to Afghanistan it was with 28,000 animals laden with loot.Footnote 38 In his poem, Vrindavandas looks back at events in this campaign, especially the massacre of significant devotees. Having invested himself fully in the religious life of Vrindavan, he watched the total desecration of the centre of his spiritual universe.
Returning to Harikala Beli verse 117, it is apparent that Vrindavandas condemns the Mughals and their failed administration, which paved the way for ‘Kabul’. He represents the royal house of Delhi as a terrified, retreating, and impotent institution. The last line of the kabitta passes judgement: the Mughal government was responsible for the miseries borne by the people. Here the events of 1757 are shown not just as a tragedy, but as an unjust failure by those in power. However, Vrindavandas does not lay all the blame on the human actors: he reasons, ‘the intelligent do not normally assign blame in one direction, a disharmonious pair was made on both sides’. (17.3)Footnote 39 As the poem continues, the greater portion of blame is repeatedly assigned to Krishna. Here it is imperative to understand the god as a historical agent within the context of the poem and its author's world view. Krishna is placed at the centre of contemporary events:
As the divine agent, Krishna had stripped everyone of their pride and certainty: he had humiliated the Mughals, shown no protection to his devotees, and ultimately turned on the Afghan army. After the massacre in Vrindavan, Abdali's army moved towards Agra, but yielded ultimately to a cholera epidemic and was forced to retreat to Afghanistan.Footnote 43 Vrindavandas suggests that Krishna was responsible for this turn of events too:
Vrindavandas does not invoke Krishna as a medium of expression, but as a responsible party, understood according to certain historically conditioned responsibilities.Footnote 45
Literary considerations
The unique provenance of the poem may account for its unusual features and problematic style. Vrindavandas does not draw on imagery that we might usually associate with betrayal in a bhakti context: rather than channelling the voice of the spurned gopi, the poet looks instead to episodes from puranic lore familiar from the Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana.Footnote 46 This is noteworthy in itself, given that the Radhavallabhis are thought generally to direct themselves only to Krishna's relationship with Radha, viewing other portions of his narrative as irrelevant.Footnote 47 That said, while Vrindavandas incorporates accounts from the Puranas of Krishna permitting the destruction of those dearest to him, he does not follow these texts in elaborating a mythological justification, involving curses and oaths, to excuse Krishna's behaviour.Footnote 48 The effect is to underline the poet's doubt and uncertainty as he reflects on his immediate history. Rather than projecting the present into the timeless past of the Krishna narrative, this poem draws religious conceptions into contemporary reality.
Vrindavandas’ reluctance to conflate historical content with mythology extends to him challenging Krishna's conduct. He thus distanced his work from other early modern texts, including the Shrinathji ki Prakatya Varta (late seventeenth century),Footnote 49 which relates the evacuation of the Pustimarga murti to Nathdvara in the supposed course of Muslim violence.Footnote 50 The Varta ultimately conformed to puranic protocol in its accounting for traumatic events: the god chose to leave Braj because he had promised to visit a girl in Nathdvara, so he instructed a Muslim devotee to commission an army against his temple (while also banning this ‘demonic’ bhakta from entering his sanctuary again).Footnote 51 The text also celebrated the violent retribution of the devotees against Muslims. By contrast, in Vrindavandas’ text there is no elaborate apologia for Krishna's behaviour that might account for the invasion, such as a ‘higher plan’; and the devotees themselves were killed without the possibility of revenge. In terms of literary development, this reflects a further shift from the mythologization of historical content: Vrindavandas did not opt to rewrite contemporary reality. Instead, the reader (or listener) is confronted with Vrindavandas’ unmediated disappointment and anger. The bhaktas put their faith in Krishna and lived in Braj as his servants; he argues that this was a relationship of mutual understanding and expectation, by which the god was expected to protect the devotees. By failing to defend the bhaktas from the Afghans, Krishna betrayed them.
In terms of Vrindavandas’ reconstruction of recent history, his work differs significantly from the courtly Braj Bhasha works discussed by Allison Busch, particularly with respect to genre and structure.Footnote 52 In riti poetry, authorial strategies included a protagonist, the nayaka, as presented through the heroic mood (vira rasa) and virtuous traits that are readily recognizable, coloured perhaps by the praise of a patron (prasasti). So much is apparent in the sixteenth-century text, the Ratnabavani of Keshavdas: here the reification of the royal champion, the hero of Rajputana, eschews basic historical content and dramatically revises his biography. However, there is no obvious hero or single protagonist in the Harikala Beli nor, for that matter, a particular enemy (pratinayaka).Footnote 53 In their absence, the text is suffused with moral ambiguity and questioning. What is more, the reader and poet alike have to grapple with this ambiguity by themselves. In other texts moral uncertainty may provide a platform for a deity to proclaim a great truth to the bemused mortals, as when Keshavdas placed the god Rama in the narrative of the Ratnabavani to discuss the ensuing war. However, there is no such moral authority in the Harikala Beli. This is a pointed silence, emblematic of the perceived absence of the god when the Afghans entered Braj, but also of the despair of the poet as he struggles for an explanation. As such the Harikala Beli reflects a literary shift away from earlier frameworks and the development of an idiosyncratic voice.
Moreover, Vrindavandas’ imagery and stock of metaphors is extremely distinctive. At times, familiar language from the Braj canon is rendered in a disquieting form. For example, in verse 30 the poet describes the reaction of the inhabitants of Vrindavan to the arrival of Abdali's army:
The lotus buds, a staple of Braj poetry, wither in imitation of the bhaktas’ frailty in defeat and death. The image of Krishna's feminization in the following line may also be located in other works, including Caurasi Pada 47.4–5, Gitagovinda 12.10, and the Brahma Vaivarta Purana 4.15.1–181.Footnote 55 However, these references are playful, suggesting that Krishna is overwhelmed by his love for Radha, subjugated by her, and is therefore considered to be the ‘female’ in the relationship. Here Vrindavandas sharply redirects this image and uses it to charge Krishna with cowardice and unsuitable behaviour.
Elsewhere in the poem we encounter images that are less familiar. The poem opens with a visionary experience in Farrukhabad, revealing Vrindavandas troubled and distraught following the invasion and massacre of 1757.Footnote 56 As he watched a performance of the Rasalila and heard a song by the poet, Anandghan, who died in the massacre, he suddenly had a vision of a twelve-year-old boy. Distinguished by this specific age, we assume (but are not told) that the boy is Krishna himself. The boy leapt from a high building and landed on his back, but stood up again apparently unharmed. He then showed Vrindavandas that Anandghan and all the other dead bhaktas were not dead at all, but were even now sitting together and watching the performance. Then suddenly the boy leapt up and fell to the ground again. From this repetition Vrindavandas understands that the Afghans would return, and this prompts him to leave Vrindavan altogether and stay away for a further three years.
This unusual imagery is described in a straightforward account, without any stylistic elaboration. The notion of the boy plummeting to his death and surviving only to perform the same feat again is unsettling: it is a macabre illusion, and in his anxiety the poet has been emotionally manipulated. This illusory death should perhaps be understood as a metaphor for the historical tragedy in Vrindavan: the deaths of the devotees are similarly illusory within the context of the vision, as the victims are seen watching the performance. That the performance was the Rasalila is key: this dramatic reproduction of Krishna's ‘play’ is designed to intoxicate the emotions of the devotees, and draw them into participation with the divine experience. Through the Harikala Beli Vrindavandas also relates his own understanding of how this divine ‘art’ (kala) operates: Krishna plays, and draws his devotees into his sport. However, in reality this sport is disturbing, bloodthirsty, and costs its participants their lives. This novel manipulation of conventional concepts regarding the bhakta's relationship with Krishna, coupled with haunting and macabre imagery, results in a unique work that bears testimony to the traumatic circumstances of its composition.
Vrindavandas’ poem contains strong parallels to other works of the same period, also relating to Abdali's invasion, but written in Urdu by Muslim poets and collectively termed ‘shahr ashob’. Studies in this genre indicate a tradition of literary continuity, on the one hand, and radical creativity, on the other. The ‘city's misfortune’ can be traced back to bawdy and often obscene (hazaliyah) accounts of a city's residents, particularly its beautiful young men and tradesmen, in Persian and Turkish.Footnote 57 However, when the genre crystallized in Urdu in the early eighteenth century, the template for humorous praise was satirically distorted to represent a city that had become addled by the decadence and disgrace of the new power-brokers.Footnote 58 In certain cases the ruined and desolate city is understood as a reflection of the beloved's cruelty,Footnote 59 but more often these texts mediate the historical trauma of a besieged or looted Delhi, expressed with poignant realism. Like Vrindavandas, Mirza Rafi ‘Sauda’ frames the period's chaos in terms of the self-aggrandisement and disloyalty of the nobility in his long shahr ashob of 1757, the year of Abdali's invasion of Braj.Footnote 60 According to Ishrat Haque's discussion of the genre, the poets pointedly challenged the political indifference of the ruling classes to the fate of the empire's subjects, and reminded them of their duties. Similarly, Vrindavandas questions Krishna keeping his distance from Vrindavan at the time of his sanctuary's desolation, reminding the deity of his responsibilities. The ruined landscapes of Delhi and Vrindavan had much in common, and Vrindavandas and Sauda both describe the perils of the lawless roads between them:
Vrindavandas’ verse appears in the context of the bhaktas fleeing the haven of Vrindavan, and having to negotiate with the ‘lowly’ (khala, also suggesting ‘wicked’) on the roads. While the parallel in Sauda does not represent the anxiety of the refugee, both passages signify confrontations on the roads as evidence of destabilization, a precarious situation, and, most significantly, a sense of anarchy in the absence of a strong lord, be he an amir or a god.
The Urdu texts directly refer to the invasions of Nadir Shah (1739), followed by Abdali, and the accounts of Mir are especially striking when read alongside Vrindavandas. In the course of the latter incursion, Mir's patron, Raja Nagar Mal, fled to Mathura and then, like Vrindavandas himself, sought refuge in the Jat territories, where Mir remained from August 1760 to 1771.Footnote 64 Mir included the massacre of Braj in his autobiography: ‘His army stretched forth its hand of destruction, and Mathura, which was a prosperous and populous city, eighteen kurohs [36 kms] this way, was put to the sword.’Footnote 65 His account of Delhi's fate in 1760, when Abdali's army returned, is expressed in stronger terms:
The cries of the devastated people of the city reached the seventh heaven, but they went unheard by the Shah [now Shah Alam II], who remained engrossed in his own thoughts since he regarded himself as a dervish. Thousands of wretches, in the midst of that raging fire, scarred their hearts with the mark of exile and ran off into wilderness and, like lamps at dawn, died in the cold air—while the blackguards tied up innumerable defenceless people with ropes and dragged them off to their own camp. It was a reign of tyrants.Footnote 66
Thus both Mir and Vrindavandas are critical of the Mughal emperor's irresponsibility, and the propensity to lose oneself in religiosity to the extent of neglecting the disaster at hand.Footnote 67 The two authors recount the pitiless treatment of the invasion's victims and express their frustration and torment under recurring, ceaseless tribulations. Mir's apocalyptic vision of Nadir Shah from 1739 anticipated Vrindavandas’ complaint about Krishna: ‘He brings fresh calamity upon us daily, Our hearts are nothing but wounds from that heart-afflicting One.’Footnote 68 These poets wrote in response to a shared trauma, such that ‘their expression of the times took a form unprecedented’Footnote 69 in their own, distinctive schools of literature. It is possible that Vrindavandas’ writing about Muhammad Shah, a decade after the latter's reign, owed something to hearing recent works commenting on Nadir Shah's invasion; it is also plausible that the court of Suraj Mal, asylum to both Mir and Vrindavandas at the time of the Harikala Beli's completion, created a space for exchange between complaints in Urdu and Braj Bhasha.Footnote 70
In terms of longer literary traditions, the poets of shahr ashob and the bhaktas of Braj drew on correspondent but ultimately distinct canons of imagery and poetic values. While the commonalities between Vrindavandas and Mir are particularly compelling, it would be inaccurate to read the Harikala Beli as entirely consonant with the shahr ashob genre as a whole. Innovations by the Urdu poets associated with this genre may be understood as a specific set of responses to (or rejection of) aspects of Persian poetic culture, in particular, their characteristic engagement with the artisanal and working classes in their representations of the world of the bazaar.Footnote 71 Lehmann and Behl have both identified how Shaikh Muhammad Wali Nazir Akbarabadi (1735–1830) described various trades in order to present a gritty vision of urban culture, in all its emotional and sexual variety.Footnote 72 However, the emphasis on the urban in the shahr ashob is not a concern in Vrindavandas’ work, who directed his attention instead to a series of slain ascetics and priests, stitching a hagiographical thread instead. His work is similarly atmospheric, but reconstructs a very different, bhakti-oriented society. Moreover, this society is fatally wounded, the victim of unforeseen destruction and trauma. By contrast, the impoverished or anarchic world of shahr ashob tradesmen is not the primary focus in itself, but rather representative of a wider climate of confusion and decay.
Thus while Vrindavandas’ work describes a specific, intrusive event that unravels the order of Vrindavan's universe, the Urdu poets rather gesture to a larger mood of dissatisfaction and despondence, that might be read either as symptomatic of a change or rupture on a cosmic scale (inqilab), or as a more worldly discontent with the times.Footnote 73 Urdu poets such as Nazir Akbarabadi or Ghulam Husain Rasikh (circa 1749–1823) may well describe ‘the “strange” or “magical” transformations visible in the social and cultural order’,Footnote 74 but without the trauma and almost apocalyptic quality felt in Mir or Vrindavandas’ work. In the Harikala Beli no one is safe: for idle kings and pious bhaktas alike, every activity has been compromised by the times.
Framing the catastrophe in Vrindavan as a rupture on a cosmic scale and structuring his account as a confrontation with Krishna distances Vrindavandas from the Urdu poets. The commonalities between his experience and that of Mir suggest that their social and literary concerns converged in Abdali's wake. Thereafter the Urdu genre continued along its own trajectory, with the likes of Rasikh, and became increasingly distant from the Harikala Beli.
A suit against God
While the shahr ashob only denounces human actors for their negligence and callousness, Vrindavandas extends the same attack to the divine—and, as such, ultimately culpable—agent. Although his world view is evidently vaisnava, the scriptures are employed merely as evidence in the suit, rather than its basis. At times Vrindavandas seems to despair of his god: ‘Vrindavan's Beloved Beauty, I do not trust you anymore. The discerning know you to be like this.’ (13.4) It is significant that the complaint is primarily a question of ‘trust’ (bharoso). This poem and subsequent devotional works indicate that Vrindavandas did not reject belief in, or the worship of, the god that betrayed him. However, he evidently felt it was within his rights to challenge Krishna on account of his neglect. The god had a reputation as ‘tender to the bhaktas’ (bhaktabatsala), and this reputation was now tarnished. In one of the final couplets, Vrindavandas declares in no uncertain terms:
Krishna was ‘infamous’ (kuyasha) because although he was understood to be the store of compassion (kripanidhana), he had shown no mercy. Indeed, this concludes a steady attack on Krishna's reputation from the early verses of the work, where Vrindavandas outlines the god's character as a cowardly betrayer of his loved ones:
This characterization represents Krishna, in the words of Bimal Krishna Matilal, as a ‘devious manipulator’.Footnote 82 For Matilal, the Krishna of the Mahabharata cannot be subjected to a classical form of theodicy, since he does not have the prerequisite omnipotence that would hold him supremely accountable. However, ‘The concept of God . . . must include a reference to morality and justice . . . [and in] this respect, as we all know, the character of Kṛṣṇa comes under serious criticism.’Footnote 83 In this vein Vrindavandas delivers his criticism at the level of moral obligation and responsibility to the bhaktas.
This obligation is couched in terms of prevailing codes of social practice and the expectation that the lord of the land would protect his dependants: both notions were defined and refined in the context of a Mughal polity.Footnote 84 Early in the poem Vrindavandas lists Krishna's epithets, only that he might reveal them to be false claims:
Vrindavandas structures his argument such that sacred texts are brought forward as evidence (sakhi) that Krishna has promised to be the shelter for his devotees (sharanagatapala), a responsibility that was his alone.Footnote 86 This is, in effect, a methodical outline of a suit against the god.
The promise becomes a recurring theme in the text, and is especially pronounced in the concluding verses:
These lines suggest that the traditional imagery of Krishna, drawing on allusions to the narrative of his time living in Braj (‘Moon of Braj’ and so on), has now developed into a conceptually formal bond with social responsibilities. On this basis, according to Vrindavandas, the devotees entered into a relationship with Krishna that was coloured with notions of socio-political protection as much as bhakti. As a result, when the devotees were massacred, and the survivors forced to flee their homes and negotiate their way through the perils of the countryside towards an alternative refuge, this was evidence that the god was a bad landlord:
These lines gesture to early modern systems of household management, drawing on larger Mughal ideologies of reciprocal social relationships and loyalty.Footnote 90 This style of complaint, though made against a deity, was perhaps informed by the wider context of the eighteenth century: a state of ‘disrepair’ in the mechanisms basic to the Mughal administration. The poem seems to voice the anxiety felt at ground level amid the decay of the zamindari infrastructure. Alam has suggested that there would have been a general loss of faith in the systems of nobles and officials following the rapid growth of revenue-farming (ijara) in the first decades of the eighteenth century, which implied ‘men motivated by gains, without any checks and supervision to which a government official, albeit theoretically, was subjected’.Footnote 91 Generally speaking, scholarship has reconstructed political norms and the configuration of ethical government on the basis of prescriptive texts and accounts of the healthy, ideal condition of the state. As such, this poem presents an alternative dimension: the expectations of a god, lord, or ruler, in times of extreme adversity. Malik describes how the failure of authoritative bodies ‘to organize unity against anarchic diversity is the crucial fact of history of this period, and may account for the prevalent “restlessness”, that appeared everywhere in society, now separated from sovereign authority of the state’.Footnote 92 The breakdown in structures of authority and the weakness of sovereignty may have informed Vrindavandas’ frustration with Krishna's apparent neglect of his responsibilities.
Krishna's responsibilities in this work correspond to a prevailing conception of ethical government.Footnote 93 According to Vrindavandas the deity was obliged to look favourably on those under his care and provide for their welfare. Just as the slain bhaktas were his loyal devotees, so was he expected to remain loyal to their companionship, apply his strength against any threatening party, and be constant in offering them refuge. The poet represents the refugees as part of Krishna's household (ghara), and underlines the disgrace that besmirches the god's reputation, since his servants have been forced to find shelter in another's house.Footnote 94 Therefore there was an assumption that the deity was an appreciator of virtues (gunagrahi), who would acknowledge and respond to the devotion of his dependants by fighting for their cause and defending Braj.
From king to zamindar, lordship was legitimized over the course of the early modern period through codified engagements with its subjects.Footnote 95 Bayly has discussed how in the conceptual space of eighteenth-century Mughal legitimacy, ‘kingship, essential for the building of a coherent body of supporters, retained its character as redistribution, protection and incorporation in the localities’.Footnote 96 Together these three principles authorized the lord to settle conflicts and provide an essential balance to a localized corporate community: the well-being of a political system's constituent members assured the integrity of the whole.Footnote 97 Kumkum Chatterjee has further demonstrated that by the later eighteenth century, when the longevity and legitimacy of political institutions was especially volatile, the happiness and ease of the common subject was the hallmark of good government.Footnote 98 While Bayly's underlying framework largely draws on Indo-Muslim hikmat and akhlaq traditions of humoral balance between human, territorial, and natural elements, we might readily assume that by Vrindavandas’ period these had become digested within wider, non-specialist notions of government, and had become reconciled to Hindu notions of the political character of deities.Footnote 99 Furthermore, Lehmann underlines the place of consumption in Mughal notions of ‘cultural leadership’, often critiqued in later times in the Urdu poets’ portrayals of late Mughal kings, nobles, and patrons.Footnote 100 If we add consumption as a fourth category to Bayly's formula of redistribution, protection, and incorporation, then the political character of a Hindu god comes sharply into focus.
In certain political commentaries rooted in Islamic traditions, God's distance from the world is maintained. Justice (‘adalet) in the human realm may be rewarded with divine approval, but is ultimately the responsibility and dispensation of the human emperor.Footnote 101 This is a familiar theme in the shahr ashob literature, as in a mukhammas by Qa’im, which denounces Shah Alam II following the battle of Sakartal in 1772:
However, it is apparent that in a vaisnava scheme it was possible to judge divine activity by the same standards that existed in the human realm. In daily ritual practice, over the course of puja and the circulation of prasad, the temple deity is the central node in a community's economy of distribution, display, and consumption of wealth and provision.Footnote 103 In the context of pre-colonial Braj's pilgrimage economy, the scope of this integral process was enormous, on a par with the ritual and festal practices of kings. Monika Horstmann has shown extensively how both the material and symbolic aspects of this configuration surrounding the deities’ worship conferred legitimizing authority onto kings, particularly in the late Mughal period, as the landscape of Braj was drawn into the palaces of Jaipur, a ‘bower turned stone’.Footnote 104
Vrindavandas gestures to a secondary dimension that is perhaps harder to quantify: that the gods bore their own social clout, as well as conferring it on human kings. For this poet, Krishna was not operating in relation to a courtly patron, but was economically and ideologically independent and, as such, responsible for his attendant community of dependants and followers. These responsibilities entailed the same political principles of redistribution, protection, incorporation, and consumption. This argument finds a parallel in Akio Tanabe's notion of the ‘sacrificial’ community in the Khurda kingdom of Orissa (1572–1804), which draws together the tutelary goddess, king, and community: ‘Sacrifice here refers to the actions which were performed as a duty of a part dedicated for the whole. Such sacrificial activities should be thought to have included not only rituals but also politico-economic activities in the cultural paradigm.’Footnote 105 Following this reading, it is apparent that the Hindu devotee could approach his deity with social and political, as well as soteriological, aspirations. Therefore, in the context of the Harikala Beli, we can recognize Vrindavandas’ self-representation as a claimant and dependant of Krishna, as well as a bhakta.
Agency in death
The conflation of social and theological commentary and critique in the Harikala Beli approaches its conclusion through eschatological imagery and horrific accounts of the devotees’ deaths. We have already read in verse 20 (above) Vrindavandas’ striking observation that the ‘hearts of sadhus tremble’, showing how even the (theoretically) unshakeable were shaken by the Afghan presence. The final portion of the poem depicts the deaths of the renunciates in hagiographical terms, celebrating their resolution in the face of persecution. In a sense Vrindavandas finds solace in their determination before their terrible fate, and applauds their dedication to religion, despite the callousness of their deity. Indeed, despite his outrage and grief, Vrindavandas hints early in the text that he has not abandoned his religion after all, and his text is driven by the premise that there is evidence of religion's excellence within the trauma and tragedy. As such, we might view the poem as a framework for the victims, giving the murdered devotees a pious self-control and a degree of agency over their deaths, which was comforting to the survivors of Vrindavan. The victims of torture, including Krishnadas and the yogi, Yadavdas, are described as achieving their spiritual goals through their resolve in the face of torment. Rather than claiming that Krishna embraced the souls of his slain devotees, it is rather the devotees who actively acquired Krishna by their spiritual strength:
Indeed, at least two ascetics—Premdas and Bhagvandas—cut themselves into pieces in order to claim total agency over their deaths and spiritual aspirations:
Similarly, Vrindavandas commemorates a temple priest who died in the defence of his shrine, and a merchant who hurried into Vrindavan when he heard about the massacre, in order to assist the survivors. The virtuous deeds of the bhaktas are considered on their own terms, rather than in relation to Krishna: whatever he did must be borne on their heads, as his servants, but the wonderful quality of their deaths is their own. The bhaktas sanctified themselves rather than being blessed by an external, divine agent.Footnote 109 The divine agent himself is a dangerous combination: capricious, but also the orchestrator of the Dark Age. This latter dimension had an immediate bearing on how Vrindavandas understood the Afghans.
The Afghan army is at the centre of the eschatological landscape, but although it is represented as a barbaric force, it cannot be characterized in terms of Aziz Ahmad's reading of ‘counter‐epic’ literature, exemplified by the Hindi rasos.Footnote 110 Indeed, the work gestures to Sreenivasan's sense of ‘more complicated histories of accommodation between traditions that are now invariably thought of as mutually hostile’.Footnote 111 Vrindavandas refers to the Afghans as mleccha or yavans, both broadly used generic terms.Footnote 112 They are dehumanized, but the poet's condemnation is ultimately limited: they are an expression of the Dark Age, rather than villains proper. This is especially pronounced in a parallel between Samin's aforementioned Persian account and the poem. As Samin followed the Afghan army across Hindustan, he observed from a distance of eight kos Footnote 113 that the dust from the horses’ hooves rose up into a giant cloud, ‘as if it were a mountain stretching its head to heaven’.Footnote 114 In the Harikala Beli this same cloud is rendered into a symptom of the final destruction of the world:
The end of the world is ultimately a divine prerogative. By drawing contemporary experience into the Hindu imagination, Vrindavandas denies the Afghans their moral agency: the responsibility is placed with Krishna. Here then, the Muslim army is an impersonal force, the apocalyptic weapon of the true agent, the Hindu god.
The Harikala Beli therefore contributes to our understanding of Hindu-Muslim perspectives in the pre-colonial period. This nuanced text does not invoke an anti-Muslim idiom, despite Vrindavandas’ traumatic first-hand experience. Rather than defining unitary religious identity markers, the poem reflects how eighteenth-century ‘Hindu’ writers engaged subtly with a culture and economy shaped by ‘Islamicate’ influences. The victims are bhaktas caught in a localized tragedy: they are not ‘Hindus’ in any supralocal, communal sense.Footnote 116 The eulogizing of bhaktas in this poem might be understood as defining or reifying an identity for the vaisnava community, in line with Talbot's conception of ‘social history’ as constructing ‘representations of community that emphasize internal features of solidarity’.Footnote 117 However, the poet does not elaborate on this with a longer history of Vrindavan: the devotees are particularized as individuals, drawn together only in the single moment of trauma. Like Talbot's Telugu texts, the Harikala Beli is not characterized by a pejorative, anti-Muslim stance. The Mughals are weak politicians, and the Afghans, a terrifying force, but neither party is demonic. Despite their brutality, Vrindavandas does not launch an attack on the soldiers themselves.
This reading of events contrasts with twentieth-century accounts, including Natwar-Singh's representation of Abdali, which he draws in contrast to the noble figure of Suraj Mal: ‘In the calmest, most dispassionate manner he ordered the massacre of innocent people. Nothing horrified him. Cruelty came naturally to him.’Footnote 118 Ironically Vrindavandas uses similarly strong terms to describe Krishna, but not the Afghan. Indeed, there seems to be little evidence in the Harikala Beli of Natwar-Singh's assertion that ‘This was a full-bloodied religious war conducted in the sacred Braj region.’Footnote 119 This view was informed by a reading of Samin's portrait, which attempted to represent Abdali as a champion of Islam, through references to his prayers, asides to his officers explicitly stating that he is an ‘upholder of Islam’, and his instructions for a chronogram to read ‘that I have given Islām peace from the oppression of the infidel’.Footnote 120 However, these elements read as superficial glosses over the historical narrative: from his other reported words and actions, Abdali's motivation was hardly religious, while Samin's encounter with Muslim victims in Mathura suggests that the Afghan army was not in Braj to protect Islam.Footnote 121 Abdali did not have imperial aspirations, but sought to procure income and maintain his following among the military forces of Afghanistan, where he had newly consolidated power. It is apparent that the invasion of Braj was seen as an act of terror against Suraj Mal, who was withholding tribute, rather than Vaisnavism. Moreover, the Austrian missionary, Joseph Tieffenthaler, who had visited the area only a few years before the massacre, described the wealth that had poured into Mathura and Vrindavan as prosperous families built their mansions on holy soil.Footnote 122 This, as well as the exodus of the wealthier sections of Delhi society into Jat territories in 1757, increased the financial incentives for an invasion of Braj.Footnote 123 Although Vrindavandas was not immediately concerned with the causes of the invasion, he notes the decadent weakness of the Mughals and the failed systems of protection, rather than any virulent assertion of Islam, which underlines the subtlety and nuance of his account.
The continuing need for protection
After the events of 1757 Vrindavandas was compelled to move according to the demands and challenges of a turbulent political environment. From references in later compositions, Vijayendra Snatak traces Vrindavandas’ constant movement between politically safe territories: Farrukhabad, Bharatpur (circa 1757–1760, 1782), Kosi (circa 1761), Kishangarh (circa 1774–79), and Pushkar (circa 1776), as well as intermittent periods back in Vrindavan (circa 1760, 1763, 1766–73, 1780–81, 1783–7) or wandering through the Braj countryside (circa 1764–5), punctuated by recurring invasions and conflicts.Footnote 124 The Sevak Jas Viradavali and Rasik Paricayavali, both written in 1787 after some years spent exclusively in Vrindavan, are taken as his final compositions; it is therefore assumed that Vrindavandas died some time thereafter, at almost 90 years of age.Footnote 125 His works contribute to the Radhavallabh Sampraday's vani, a sung textual corpus that serves as the arena for the divine encounter in life and worship. Therefore, despite his confrontational attitude to Krishna, Vrindavandas continued to see his work as an offering and form of service to the deity. This confrontation should therefore be understood as a reminder that, like other forms of service to an overlord, Vrindavandas’ bhakti should be recognized and reciprocated with protection.
This is spelled out in the concluding verses of the Harikala Beli, where Vrindavandas summarizes his argument with an arilla verse and then a short series of soratha couplets:
Vrindavandas crafts a bold but persuasive argument. In the same breath he publicly shames (kuyasa) Krishna and asks for the god's approval of the work, in recognition of its moving, poetical potency. Thus Krishna is expected to appreciate the strength of feeling in the piece, yet also be reminded of his neglect and irresponsibility. Having outlined the remarkable achievements of the stalwart bhaktas, who took on Krishna's torments majestically, Vrindavandas is able to incorporate a sense of wonder into his account of the desolation of Vrindavan. He then humbly recognizes his insignificance before the deity, while investing his apology with the very emotion he hopes will appeal to Krishna. Having laid these foundations, Vrindavandas concludes with a plea for protection that aptly reconciles a typical bhakti prayer for theological refuge (sarana) with a very worldly need for security:
Conclusion
In the Harikala Beli Vrindavandas discusses his community's immediate and tragic past, drawing history and social commentary into conversation with a literary landscape characterized by his religious devotion. O’Hanlon and Washbrook have outlined the tension between religious texts and historiography in South Asia:
For the faithful, religion represents a transcendental system of meaning, rising above the mutable circumstances of place and time. Yet social and political relationships necessarily take place within particular contexts, to which historians necessarily give emphasis.Footnote 129
The Harikala Beli is unlike other works in Vrindavandas’ repertoire, and does not follow what might be described as a ‘conventional’ bhakti strategy. Here, expectations that developed from social and political relationships were deeply entwined with theological world views and a profound meditation on suffering. Vrindavandas grounded his discussion in recent Mughal history rather than scriptural formulations, and did not attempt to mythologize his experience by projecting Krishna into a timeless realm governed by puranic protocols. Instead, the Harikala Beli presents a case against the deity, drawing on ‘timeless’ scriptural material as a body of evidence for a contemporary plea, in view of a recent tragedy.
Thus Vrindavandas took the received tradition of Krishna as a manipulating and unfaithful personality, and redacted this understanding according to prevalent social codes regarding the expectations and obligations between an overlord and his dependants. In effect this translated the relationship between a god and his devotee into a social agreement, a mutually understood set of reciprocal expectations. This understanding was developed and coloured by the poet's historical context, particularly the perceived failure of figures in authority to protect those in their service. Here then, Krishna is the supreme authority, who has forsaken the urgent needs of Braj, a territory he had designated as his own. Vrindavandas’ dialogue with the deity was an innovative choice of form, arguably more nuanced than alternative avenues which might champion political leaders, or alienate the ‘Other’ as constructed through religious categories. That Vrindavandas did not follow these strategies—although he was in need of political protection in the fallout from 1757, and had seen his world ravaged by an alien army—raises many questions.
On the one hand, this Braj Bhasha text gestures to a more complicated and connected history of North Indian literature, especially in its similarities to the Urdu shahr ashob. Authors associated with disparate genres, languages, religions, and modes of patronage nonetheless experienced the same tribulations and as such their distinctive works were brought, directly or indirectly, into a common conversation with their environment. Read alongside Mir in particular, it is apparent that although Vrindavandas is understood as pertaining to a very different literary canon, there are considerable parallels between his reflections on society and those articulated in Urdu. That the refugees of Delhi and Braj fled the same army and found shelter in the same court at Bharatpur indicates a convergence of experience and a shared social world that informed the parallels in their works.
The example of Vrindavandas also indicates how Mughal notions of lordship and legitimacy were integrated into bhakti's emphasis on finding shelter in the deity, such that ‘refuge’ (sarana) developed into a worldly notion as well as a theological concept. This further suggests that deities need to be taken seriously as agents in South Asian historiography and as legitimate patrons and lords in a social capacity.Footnote 130 It certainly appears in this text that despite Krishna's behaviour, the dead devotees resolutely maintained their side of the understanding with the god and that Vrindavandas intended to continue with his.
