Literary Responses to the Mughal Imperium: The Historical Poems of Keśavdās

The penetration of Mughal power into previously autonomous regional kingdoms produced significant political, but also literary effects. In this article, I trace the advent of the Mughal political order to the princely state of Orcha (located in what is now north-western Madhya Pradesh) through the eyes of Keśavdās (fl. 1600), the leading poet from that court. Keśavdās is famous in Hindi literary circles as one of the progenitors of the Brajbhasha rīti tradition, a constellation of courtly poetic and intellectual practices that flourished in a climate of mixed Mughal and sub-imperial patronage. There is a pronounced tendency to think of Keśavdās’s work (and that of most rīti poets) as a corpus of baroque, purely decorative poems largely comprising time-worn erotic and devotional themes. This preliminary study of Keśavdās’s three historical poems will help to complicate such an understanding by bringing into our conceptual purview a fuller range of rīti textual expression. These lesser known works by one of the foremost rīti poets are certainly striking for their literary accomplishments, but they also serve as an invaluable window onto a critical moment in Orcha history. They constitute the perfect testing ground for the enterprise of retrieving historical meaning from the literary sources that were the dominant form of pre-modern Indian courtly self-expression, and the methodology employed here is to critically engage both aesthetic and historical perspectives simultaneously.