Culture in Circulation in 18th century North India: Urdu poetry by a Rajput Krishna devotee

FAIN: FT-54161-06

Heidi R. Pauwels
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

This project focuses on the Rajput Savant Singh of Kishangarh (1699-1764). He is famous as patron of miniatures and was also a prolific author under the alias “Nagridas.” He wrote mostly in Old Hindi, but experimented also with Urdu, a new poetic medium at the time. I will edit, translate, and analyze his Urdu works and study the manuscripts with special attention to the miniature illustrations. The project contributes to the study of circulation of ideas in 18th century North India and to the revision of the early history of Urdu-Hindi. I propose to write two papers, building up to a monograph.

Associated Products

“Romancing Radha: Nagridas’s royal appropriations of Bhakti themes.” (Article)
Title: “Romancing Radha: Nagridas’s royal appropriations of Bhakti themes.”
Author: Heidi Pauwels
Abstract: This article looks at confluence of riti and bhakti and at the interface of the personal and the religious, in particular at the influence of the Radha-Krishna mythology in construing personal identities in 18th-century North India. The article presents a case study of Savant Si?h of Kishangarh (1699–1764), who wrote under the pen name Nagaridas. He was a prolific author of devotional verse as well as a patron of miniature paintings depicting Krishna and Radha. His work shows a tendency that could be termed a ‘royalization’ of Krishna poetry, and is instructive about how religious imagery became meaningful in construing personal lives in medieval India.
Year: 2005
Primary URL: http://sar.sagepub.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/content/25/1/55.abstract
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Asia Research 15: 55-78.
Publisher: SOAS, London.

“Literary Moments of Exchange in the 18th Century: The New Urdu Vogue Meets Krishna Bhakti.” (Article)
Title: “Literary Moments of Exchange in the 18th Century: The New Urdu Vogue Meets Krishna Bhakti.”
Author: Heidi Pauwels
Abstract: This paper highlights the interface of Braj and early Urdu poetry in the 18th century. It focuses on the sponsor of the arts Savant Singh of Kishangarh alias the bhakta- poet Nagridas. He is best-known as the source of inspiration for the famous Kishangarh "sub-imperial" minature paintings, several of which were inspired by his own poetic works. He was a prolific poet in Braj, and also tried his hand at some Urdu- then under the name of Rekhta newly de vogue in Delhi in the wake of the arrival of Wali Deccani's diwan. Nagridas' Rekhta work is little-known and not appreciated by the writers of the canons of Hindi literature. Yet, it raises all kind of issues regarding circulation of ideas in 18th-century North India, fluidity of boundaries between poetic register and genre at the time, and later canon-formation and erasure or suppression of Indo-Muslim hybridity.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/arthistory/indomuslimcultures/Participants.html
Format: Other
Periodical Title: In Alka Patel and Karen Leonard, eds. Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition. Brill’s Indological Library 38. 61-86.
Publisher: Leiden: Brill.

Prizes

Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
Date: 4/1/2011
Organization: Guggenheim Foundation
Abstract: I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for support to enable me to carry out a major study of the hybrid intellectual culture of eighteenth-century India. I seek to contribute to the study of the circulation of ideas, poetic and art styles from cosmopolitan to provincial centers and the other way around. I will focus on Hindu-Muslim exchanges, and how those were regarded at the time. I seek to do so by means of a case study of Kishangarh’s famous dynamic art patron, the crown-prince Savant Singh of Kishangarh (1699-1764). He was also a prolific poet under the nom de plume Nagridas, and commissioned Kishangarhi miniature paintings to illustrate his own poetry. He mainly composed devotional poetry to Krishna, however through my research I have learned that he also tried his hand at composing in the then new style of poetry, originally known as Rekhta, but later called Urdu and associated with Islam. This shows a case of fluidity of boundaries between cultural communities in the eighteenth ce

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