Aditya Malik - Hammīra: Chapters in Imagination, Time, History

Aditya Malik

Hammra

Religion and Society

Edited by

Gustavo Benavides

Frank J. Korom

Karen Ruffle

Kocku von Stuckrad

Luther Martin

Jacques Waardenburg

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Volume

Aditya Malik

Chapters in Imagination, Time, History

ISBN 9783110659597

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110662795

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110661637

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

As long as you think, there will be existence, person, place and thing,

but when you stop thinking there is no existence,

because there cannot be silence and existence.

Robert Adams

Everything you can imagine is real.

Pablo Picasso

This book is concerned with two broad themes that are also reflected in the structuring of the book into two roughly equal sections. One section, consisting of the Prologue and Chapters 1, 2 and 4, deals with (a) a series of related historical events that have been profusely written and commented upon through several centuries until the present time and (b) how we perceive relationships between religious communities in India in the past (and also in the present). The events described by different texts and narratives deal with the Rajput chieftain of the impenetrable fortress of Ranthambore and his enmity and ultimate defeat at the hands of the Sultan of Delhi, Al alDn Khalj. The text that receives particular focus is the Sanskrit Hammra-Mahkvya, which was composed by the Jaina scholar and poet Nayachandra Sri in 1401. The purpose of the Hammra-Mahkvya seems to be twofold: on the one hand it is about poetry about rising to the challenge of writing great Sanskrit poetry in the second millennium with all its poetical embellishments and linguistic markers. On the other hand, the poem is commemorative. It commemorates and celebrates the deeds and death of Hammra, a flawed hero, who is unbending on his word. The poem is therefore both kvya or poetry, and what we would call history, i.e. it aspires to simultaneously contain the signifiers of a literary and a historical work.

The Sanskrit poem, however, is but one of an entire continuum of oral and written Persian, Sanskrit, Rajasthani, Hindi and English works over centuries until the present day, as well as conversations held at the fortress of Ranthambore during fieldwork, that draw out the imaginative fabric of Hammras life and heroic death, so much so that this becomes part of Hindu nationalist discourse on the protection of Hindu religion or dharma in the 20th century. Thus, a singular moment the battle between Hammra and Al alDn Khalj reverberates through centuries vertically to the point of creating a temporal and cultural region, and a history through a crystallization of the event in different texts and languages: Persian chronicles, Sanskrit works, Hindi and Rajasthani poems and songs, and English translations, as well as 20th-century historiography grounded in Hindu nationalist thought.

One critical detail concerning Hammras life is that he provides sanctuary to one of Al alDn Khaljs mutineering, neo-Muslim rebel generals called Muhammed Shh (who is later called Mahim Shi) and his followers who then become more so than the formers own traitorous Rajput generals Ratipla and Ramalla his closest and most faithful allies and friends, leading, as one can imagine, to wrath of the sultan, and ultimately the tragic demise of Hammra, Muhammed Shh (aka Mahim Shi) and their families. Yet, it is intriguing that despite the singular fact of HinduMuslim friendship and loyalty lying at the core of the Hammra narrative, in the hands of contemporary, post-independence historiography this fact is glossed over while the story attains the status of a national epic (rtrya mahkvya), and Hammra the status of a national hero protecting India from Muslim imperialists.

Clearly, the text creates a narrative space that allows a series of shared religious, social and political spaces to arise. Is there a set of values that underlie the creation of this shared literary space? Why does a Jain poet write about a Hindu chieftain and his clash with a Muslim sultan, and the accompanying description of gore, treason, violence, bloodshed, weaponry, war and so on? How indeed are religious labels such as Hindu and Muslim or Jain imagined in this context? Evidently, they do not carry the same significance as they would in the contemporary discourse of essentialized, singular, bounded religious identities. Since in the original text they do not carry these meanings, how does Hammra wind up becoming central to the creation of 20th-century scholarship propelled by Hindu nationalist discourse on the protection and sustenance of Hindu