Inflected Kathas Sufis and Krishna Bhakt

II
Of Proximity and Distance
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7 Inflected Kathas
Sufis and Krishna Bhaktas in Awadh
Francesca Orsini
Once [Hazrat Shah Abdur Razzaq] Bansawi arrived at the home of Chait
Ram and Paras Ram in Rampur village, 10 kilometers from Bansa. He
found the bhagatiyas dancing; one of them played the role of Krishna and
the other was dressed as a gopi. They sang Sant Kabir’s dohas. Moved by
their songs, the Hazrat fell into a trance. Meanwhile the singing reached
a high-pitch note. That is when the Hazrat, now under the spell of the
divine, opened his eyes. The audience—Hindu and Muslim zamindars,
bairagis and faqirs—were moved to tears. All those present, rich and
poor, were spellbound.1
Other essays in this volume lead us to imagine religious interchange

as a face-to-face exchange between religious experts—Akbar’s famous
‘ibadat-khana or the pandits’ shastrarthas—or as the philosophical cogi-
tation of keen individuals. The Harikatha or tale of Krishna’s life that is at
the center of this essay leads us instead to imagine oral and performative
settings in towns, villages, and homes, courtyards, chaupals, or ahatas
1 Quoted in Muzaffar Alam, “Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation

and Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society,” in Tradition, Dissent and
Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar, ed. R. Champakalakshmi and
S. Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 174. In order not to burden
this essay with diacritics, I will limit them to titles and direct quotations. All
translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.
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196 Religious Interactions in Mughal India
(covered assembly spaces and courtyards in the villages) where singers

performed and storytellers (kathavachaks) recited and expounded in
front of mixed audiences like the one described above. While the type of
performance will have varied—with or without a book as a substantive
source or as a symbolic token, in the language of gods or that of men,
as part of a ritual offering or as a free-standing performance—the fact
that we find the same stories, stock characters, episodes, and religious
vocabulary occurring in performative texts that for us belong to differ-
ent religious traditions suggests that kathas (stories) were in fact part
of a kind of public sphere (Samira Sheikh has used the suggestive term
“religious marketplace”).2 In other words, whether katha texts choose to
clearly place a particular theological stamp on a story or to work through
double channels of exoteric/esoteric signification, and whether they
explicitly acknowledge other participants and possible opponents or
not, we can see them as reflections of debates that encompassed a whole
range of actors and audiences.3 So, for example, whereas we tend to
see the Harikatha as “belonging” to Krishna bhakti groups and to be atten-
tive only to debates and variations among these groups, in actual terms
the range of Harikathas in early modern India, the treatment and
inflections of the characters and the story, and audience reactions like
that of Shah Abdur Razzaq show that the chaupal (here used as a short-
hand for open performative spaces) was one site where stories and faith
were pooled together. Not in some harmonious fashion, with no distinc-
tions made, but with a partly common idiom and vocabulary allowing
poets, performers, and audiences to establish equivalences, not (neces-
sarily) equations or mergings, as Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Harikatha
will make amply clear.4 While it would be foolish to generalize, it is
2 Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat,

1200–1500 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chapter 4,
“Religion, Politics, and Patronage in a Settling Society.”
3 Someone who clearly acknowledged rival participants in this debate was
Tulsidas, who famously accused sants of wishing to “create discourses with sakhi,
sabadi and dohra; the Bhagats of the Kali age explain Bhagati and pillow the
Vedas and Puranas.” Tulsidas, Tulasī Granthāvalī, Dohāvalī, ed. Ram Chandra
Shukla (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1973–1977), II, 554.
4 I would like to thank Vasudha Dalmia for help with this formulation, as
well as her and Munis Faruqui for their more general comments on this essay.
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Inflected Kathas 197
nonetheless striking that observers at different points in time have noted

how the tales represented a palimpsest that was continuously rewritten
and reworked across the board.5
krishna bhakti in awadh: a comparative

perspective
The first thing to say about Krishna bhakti in Awadh is that sectarian
and scholarly accounts—skewed not only toward Braj and Puri but also
Bengal, Gujarat, and Rajasthan—have hardly anything to say about it.
Tradition claims that Vallabha studied and was married in Banaras and
occasionally stopped there, but that is about it.6 So it is actually Sufi
sources that alert us to the important circulation and appeal of Krishna
bhakti in this area, and it is only within a comparative perspective that
we can begin to piece together the context of a Harikatha like Malik
Muhammad Jayasi’s Kanhāvat (1540).7
5 See, for example, Father della Tomba’s remark in the late eighteenth century
that Kabir panthis studied Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. Quoted in Purushottam
Agrawal, Akath Kahānī Prem kī: Kabīr kī Kavitā aur unkā Samay (New Delhi:
Rajkamal Prakashan, 2009), 143. Also the north Indian Muslim qasbati children
in Intizar Hussain’s narratives who are exposed to different creation stories from
their grandparents and from itinerant storytellers; for example, Intizar Husain,
Basti, trans. Frances W. Pritchett (New Delhi: Indus, 1995).
6 According to the Nijvārtā-gharuvārtā, Vallabha and Vitthalnath traveled
all over north India during their various tours. Quoted in Hariharnath Tandon,
Vārtā-sāhitya: Ek B�hat Adhyayan (Aligarh: Bharat Prakashan Mandir, n.d.), 603.
In drawing an extensive pilgrimage map, hagiographical texts like the Caurāsī
Bai�hak extend the Vallabhan geography of influence over religious sites con-
nected to Ram in this area (e.g., Chitrakut, Ayodhya, Naimisharanya, Hanuman
Ghat, Janakpur, etc.). Gokulnatha, Chaurasi Baithak: Eighty-four Seats of Shri
Vallabhacharya, ed. Vrajesh Kumar, trans. Shyam Das, vol. 10 of Śrī Vallabha
Studies Series (Delhi: Butala Publications, 1985), 39–45.
7 Malik Muhammad Jayasi, whose pem katha (Awadhi Sufi romance)
Padmāvatī has long been recognized as a masterpiece of Hindi literature, was a

Sufi poet who seems to have lived all his life in Jais (now Rae Bareilly district);
for a review of the information we have on him, his milieu, and his Sufi pir,
see Thomas de Bruijn, The Ruby in the Dust: Poetry and History of the Indian
Padmavat by the Sufi Poet Muhammad Jayasi (Leiden: Leiden University Press,
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Consider these dates and locations. After the “discovery” of Shrinathji

in 1492 Vallabhacharya undertook several tours of India. According
to the Śrī Vallabhadigvijaya he came to Arail, across the river from
Prayag/Allahabad, after his son’s Vitthalnath’s birth in 1515 (VS1572),
and returned there again in 1519.8 It is here, according to the Caurāsī
Vai��avan kī Vārtā, that he met Parmananddas (who would become one
of the Ashta Chap poets whose songs are part of temple worship). The
latter was a Kanaujiya Brahmin who had come and settled in Prayag and
made his living as a famous poet-singer of kirtans. Known as Parmanand
Svami, he attracted a regular audience and disciples: “a group of listeners
always gathered around Paramānanda Svāmī at about eight o’clock at
night,” and on special occasions he would sing all night long.9 The sec-
tarian hagiography sets the encounter in the familiar trope of the poet-
singer who “did not know how to sing the lila of union and sang only of
viraha” until his meeting with the acharya and his sectarian initiation,
and then spent the rest of his life singing for the seva at one of the sect’s
Krishna temples in Braj. But we can read this account against the grain
and imagine Parmananddas—much like Surdas—as a flourishing and
independent singer of Krishna bhakti, already active in one of the urban
hearts of Awadh in the first decades of the sixteenth century, before a sect
like Vallabha’s took root.
It was also in Kannauj that the Sufi shaikh ‘Abdul Wahid Bilgrami
(1510–1608), from the nearby qasba of Bilgram, spent part of his life
later in the century. He must have heard numerous Krishna songs (bish-
nupad ), for he suggested a Sufi mystical interpretation of the terms found
in dhrupad and bishnupad songs in a Persian text he called Haqā’iq-i
2012), and Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts
in India c. 1500–1900 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); for the subsequent
fortune of his Padmāvat, see Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen,
and Shantanu Phukan, “Through a Persian Prism: Hindi and Padmāvat in the
Mughal Imagination” (University of Chicago PhD thesis, 2000), 158, 160, who
suggests that he interacted with the neighboring Raja of Amethi.
8 After his trip from Jagadishvara; this is when the svarupa of Sri Dwarkanath
also came to Arail and stayed with Damodardas Sambhalvale. Dindayalu Gupta,
A��achāp aur Vallabh-sampradāy (Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1970), I,
222n.
9 Richard Barz, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhacharya (Faridabad: Thomson
Press, 1976), 144.
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Hindī (“The Truths of India,” 1566). This included a systematic treat-

ment of terms related to the story of Krishna, and from the tenor of
his explanation it is clear that while the songs greatly appealed to him
aesthetically (and emotionally), the theology of Krishna bhakti did not
interest him at all. 10
In the case of Krishna songs, bishnupad and kirtan, we can imagine
them circulating in Awadh through groups of singers, sometimes taught
and managed by wandering bairagis, resident svamis, and even Sufi shai-
khs, and performed in urban centers, at fairs, at Sufi sama‘ gatherings, as
well as for private seva and worship. In the case of the tale of Krishna’s
life, commonly known as Harikatha and based on the tenth book (Dasam
Skandha) of the Bhāgavata Purā�a, even the relatively abundant textual
sources and references for this period probably obscure a much wider
and more varied range of performance practices, this time at the bor-
derline between Sanskrit and bhasha (lit., “language”), the general term
used in Hindi for the vernacular. Sectarian traditions themselves point
toward a wider circulation. Thus the Caurāsī Vai��avan kī Vārtā tells the
story of another Brahmin of Kannauj, Padmanabhadas, who used to
support his family by discoursing on the Bhāgavata Purā�a and other
texts. After he heard Shri Mahaprabhu (that is, Vallabha) “recite some
lines from his treatise, the Nibandha, in which he explained that the
Bhāgavata Purā�a should not be used for one’s income,” he temporar-
ily gave up his profession and later turned to reciting the Mahābhārata
to a “local king.”11 We see here the sect trying to place its theological
stamp on the story (several vartas feature disciples of other svamis being
10 See my “‘Krishna is the Truth of Man’: Mir ‘Abdul Wahid Bilgrami’s
Haqā’iq-i Hindī (Indian Truths) and the Circulation of Dhrupad and Bishnupad,”
in Culture and Circulation, ed. Allison Busch and Thomas de Bruijn (Leiden:
Brill, forthcoming). Muzaffar Alam has already considered the text within a
paradigm of “assimilation from a distance” in which the Sufis of Awadh worked,
out of their belief in the (inclusive) doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, but also out of
political necessity in the face of continued threats and attacks from local Rajput
zamindars. In Haqā’iq-i Hindī, according to Alam, Bilgrami “sought to recon-
cile Vaisnav symbols as well as the terms and ideas used in Hindu devotional
songs with orthodox Muslim beliefs” within the “syncretistic religious milieu”
of Awadh qasbas. Alam, “Assimilation from a Distance,” 174, emphasis added.
11 Gokulnatha, Eighty-four Vaishnavas, trans. Shyam Das (Delhi: Butala
Publications, 1985), 31–37.
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won over by Vallabha’s commentary or oral discourse on it), but also

on the practice itself by placing it outside the economics of religious
performance. That Brahmin kathavachaks were not the only tellers of
the story is proved by the first Hindi vernacular adaptation of the Dasam
Skandha, the Haricharit in chaupai doha by Lalach Kavi, a Kayastha
from “Hastigram” (present-day Hathgaon) near Rae Bareilly, concluded
in 1530 (VS1587).12 This is only ten years and forty miles away from
where Jayasi saw it performed in Jais in 1540 and decided to retell the
story “to all.”13 Lalach’s Harikatha does not invoke any specific sectarian
affiliation but generally praises bhakti, sants, and satsang, the gathering
and singing of devotional songs, as we shall see. It circulated widely and
for a long time; the text was completed by another poet a hundred years
later and scores of manuscript copies of this text have been found as
far afield as eastern UP and Bihar, Malwa and Gujarat, all in the kaithi
script.14
Of course, we should also remember that Krishna tales and poems had
circulated long before bhakti and Sufi poets took them up and molded
12 For the date, see Theodore Pavie, Krichna et sa doctrine (Paris: B. Duprat,
1852), 3; Lalachdas, Haricarit (Lālacdās k�t Avadhī-kāvya), ed. Nalinimohan
Sharma (Patna: Bihar Rashtrabhasha Parishad, 1963) (only the first twenty-
three chapters, on the basis of five mss). It was partly translated into French by
Pavie (Krichna et sa doctrine). According to R.S. McGregor, it was well known
in the eighteenth century. Hindi Literature from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century, vol. 8, fasc. 6 of History of Indian Literature, ed. Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1984), 96n. Lalach is also credited with a Vi��upurā�a (Vi. 1585);
see “Avadhī mẽ K��akāvya ke Pra�etā: Kavi Lālacdās,” Hindī Anuśīlan 14, no.
3: 18, quoted in Murari Lal Sharma “Suras,” Avadhī K��a Kāvya aur unke Kavi
(Agra: Ranjan Prakashan, 1967), 40n.
13 Elsewhere, as we shall see, he mentions the fact that he “read and heard”
the story (pa�heū̃ suneū̃) the story. This might well be an interpolation, since it is
not present in the Berlin manuscript and is a very common devotional locution,
as Imre Bangha has suggested. Personal communication, June 2009.
14 A later adaptation, Ramdas Nema’s Haricharitra (from Malwa, dated
1644 (VS1701)), acknowledges Lalach directly; Lalach’s Haricharit was com-

pleted in 1614 (VS1671) by one Asanand, from a village near Rae Barelli; see
Uday Shankar Dube, “Lālacdās k�t Haricarit Grantha kī ek Prācīn Prati,” private
copy, Maru-Bhāratī, 1967?, 15; also, oral communication, August 2008. Almost
all the manuscript copies date from the nineteenth century.
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them to their own purposes, both in courtly and non-courtly milieus.15

And the same is true of the Rama story as well, as has been so well docu-
mented. What a comparative and geographically sensitive perspective can
offer is a more vivid sense of the various forms that existed and circulated
at a particular time in a particular place. Within that particular field of
possibilities, how did authors inflect their versions of that familiar tale?
What did they hold up as important before their audiences? The written
texts we have at our disposal clearly do not exhaust all available strands
since they occasionally refer to oral performances of which we have no
other trace—for example, Jayasi mentions, at the beginning of his work,
the Ahirs singing the Harikatha at Divali, a festival we nowadays associate
with Ram:
It is nine hundred and forty-seven. At this time the poet speaks with
words full of rasa [sarasa bacana];
At Divali, which falls in the month of Karttik, the Ahirs sang clapping
to the beat.
So I said, I will sing this kha��, I will tell Kanha’s story to all.16
What was the performance like? How much of Jayasi’s version echoes
theirs? Impossible to know.
kathas as meritorious pastime

Harikathas were part of a much larger body of stories, which at this time
were generally touted as a ritual that could substitute for other, more
expensive and cumbersome duties, and was just as good as listening to
15 Notably with Jayadeva in Orissa and Vidyapati in Mithila. For Krishna
bhakti in Gujarat from the twelfth century onward, see Françoise Mallison,
“Development of Early Krishnaism in Gujarāt: Vi��u, Ra�cho�, K��a,” in
Bhakti in Current Research, 1979–1982, ed. Monika Thiel-Horstmann (Berlin:
Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1983) and Françoise Mallison, “Early K��a Bhakti in
Gujarat: The Evidence of Old Gujarati Texts Recently Brought to Light,” in
Studies in South Asian Devotional Literature, ed. Alan W. Entwistle and Françoise
Mallison (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994); also Sheikh, Forging a Region,132ff.
16 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (14.1–3), 140; Heidi Pauwels has noted that the word
is spelt āhira/āhara, i.e. “day” (and not ahīra), but given the “Ahir touch,” see
below, and the need for a subject in the sentence, I would still go for Ahirs.
Pauwels, “When a Sufi tells about Krishna’s Doom: The Case of Kanhāvat
Chapter_07.indd 201 6/3/2014 4:02:22 PM

the “Vedas and Puranas.” As this fifteenth-century story of a virtuous

wife put it in its final stanza:
Whoever listens intently (mana lāī) to the tale of Satyavati loses his great
sins (mahāpāpa)
Knowledge springs in the mind of the listener, as if he’d heard the Vedas
and Puranas,
As if he’d given gifts and money (dravya dāna) to the Brahmins, and dis-
patched them honorably;
As if he’d performed ritual obligations (nema, dharma, acārā), and gained
darśan of Deva Gopala;
As if he’d bathed in all the tīrthas, been there and given gifts.
Doha: The fruit of telling the story equals that of listening to the thou-
sand names of God;
Isar kabi sang and it was as if he’d traveled to scores of tīrthas.17
Phala shruti, the merit (punya) accrued by listening to a story, was

tagged onto all kinds of tales, not only ones we would now recognize
as “religious.”18 It could also of course be inserted by the storyteller in
a performance context, as in the following stanza which is not found in
(1540?),” The Journal of Hindu Studies 6 (2013): 35; Gupta, A��achāp aur
Vallabh-sampradāy, I, 140. References from the Kanhāvat in brackets, here and
below, are to the stanza and verse numbers in Parameshvari Lal Gupta’s printed
edition (Varanasi: Annapurna Prakashan, 1981); occasional reference is made
to Shiv Sahay Pathak’s edition (Allahabad: Sahitya Bhavan, 1981). The only
available manuscript at present, the MS OR 29 of Sprenger’s collection held at
the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, is incomplete in the beginning and its folios have
clearly been mixed up after stanza 96. I have followed Gupta’s reconstruction
since it seems to correspond more to the order of the story, unless otherwise
specified.
17 Ishvardas, Īśvardās k�t Satyāvatī Kathā tathā anya K�itiyā̃, ed. Shivgopal
Mishra (Gwalior: Vidyamandir Prakashan, 1958), 94.

18 See, e.g., a martial tale from a Baghela milieu, Bhima Kavi’s 1493 Da�gvai
Kathā; see Bhīma Kavi k�t Da�gvai Kathā, ed. Shivgopal Misra (Allahabad:
Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1966), which has the line “by reading and listening
to it your sins will be removed” (pa�he gune te pātakhu jāī (2.4)). Although
fitting a broad epic-Puranic genre and featuring Krishna as a “ba�a sultana,” it
nonetheless calls itself a K��a caritra. Bhima Kavi, Da�gvai Kathā, 82, 2 doha.
Chapter_07.indd 202 6/3/2014 4:02:22 PM

the oldest manuscript of the Kanhāvat and glosses the text as a devo-
tional katha:
Eternal is Hari and eternal Hari’s story!
The Vedas, Bhāgavata, and the sants all sing it.
The Vi��u, Padma, Śiva, and Agni Purā�as,
The [Mahā]bhārata and the Hariva�śa all tell his tale.
I heard and read the Bhāgavata Purā�a,
I acquired the sandhāna of the path of love [pem pantha].
Yoga, bhoga, tapa, and ś��gāra,
dharma, karma, sata—all combined.
…
I remember the feet of Ved Vyasa,
Who told the story of Hari a thousand times.
Kanha’s katha is as numerous
As the stars and asterisms in the sky.
There is no other love story like it in the whole world,
I have seen and checked in Turki, Arabic, and Farsi.19
Equivalence with the “Vedas and Puranas” is a familiar self-legitimizing

strategy for religious texts that set themselves up as alternatives to the
smarta religiosity for which the Vedas and Puranas were a shorthand. But
here we can think of it also as a strategy to legitimize the katha as a genre
which could and did actualize a religious/spiritual experience.20 Jayasi’s
move in Kanhāvat, as we shall see, is a complex one: he never denies that
19 Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak (14.1–4, 6–8 and doha),12.

20 Ken Bryant brilliantly showed how Surdas’s padas in performance actual-
ize the spiritual experience of longing, absence, and presence central to Krishna
bhakti. Bryant, Poems to the Child-God: Structures and Strategies in the Poetry of
Sūrdās (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Aditya Behl showed that
pem kathas, of which Jayasi’s Kanhāvat can be rightfully considered an example,
signaled and actualized the spiritual experience to the initiated seeker—but we
could also say to the careful listener—through the careful repetition of code
words and a denser texture of coded vocabulary and references (of flowers, gems,
fruit, trees, as we shall see) at key moments of the story. Aditya Behl, “Love’s
Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition” (Series of four lectures
delivered at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, November 14,
20, 21, and 28, 2008). Behl’s life work has now been published as Aditya Behl,
Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545, ed. Wendy
Doniger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Chapter_07.indd 203 6/3/2014 4:02:22 PM

Krishna is an avatara of Vishnu, that he can show his cosmic form to the
gopis, etc. In other words, Jayasi does not disturb the overt theology of
Krishna or the basic elements of his story. Yet, in his precise choice and
use of terms, in the arrangement and coding of the story, and in skillfully
directing the listener to what are for him the key moments, Jayasi also
conveys a particular reading of the Krishna story as a Sufi tale, a kind of
hidden, or batin, counterpart to the visible, or zahir, well-known story
of Krishna. In making both readings and identifications possible at the
same time, isn’t Jayasi in effect offering the katha as a spiritual experi-
ence “for all”—not by transcending religion as Kabir did, but in a way
that worked for several religious strands at the same time?21 While we
must posit the possibility that members of the audience responded and
were moved and transported into a spiritual experience by listening to a
discourse, a song, a poem, or a tale, and construed its religious message
in tune with their own sensibility and beliefs—as in Bansawi’s example
quoted at the beginning—with Jayasi’s Kanhāvat we have an author
consciously mobilizing multiple religious audiences.
Finally, it is useful to think of kathas as a religious pastime because
of the obvious “entertainment value” of certain scenes, like the fights
between wrestlers, the colorful language Radha and Chandravali
exchange during their quarrel, and the playful banter between Krishna
and the gopis. To this must be added the pleasure of intertextuality, with
especially Sufi romance authors keen to evoke other heroes and other
stories.22 In the Kanhāvat Krishna and Radha quote Rama and Sita at
various stages with an eye to a good laugh. When the “supreme God”
(paramesura), angered at Kamsa’s pride, decides to “create” Vishnu in
order to punish him, Vishnu initially pleads not to be sent back into
the world:
21 As Aditya Behl put it in his last public lecture at the School of Oriental
and African Studies in November 2008, “I would like to propose that, in larger
cultural historical terms, we adopt what it seems to me obvious that the cultural
forms of the period indicate: that the historical agents who put these forms
together thought in at least a ‘both and’ way. That is to say, they produced forms
that signified in various ways, both Indic and Islamic and much more besides.”
Aditya Behl, “Love’s Subtle Magic.”
22 See, e.g., Thomas de Bruijn, “Dialogism in a Medieval Genre: The Case
of the Avadhi Epics,” in Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture, ed.
Francesca Orsini (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2010).
Chapter_07.indd 204 6/3/2014 4:02:22 PM

I suffered a lot as Rama’s avatara, now I won’t descend into the world.
I spent that life in austerities, I knew but one wife, Sita,
And Ravana kidnapped her—never did the earth know such pain.23
But the supreme God reassures him that this time he will have a life
of enjoyment (rasa bhoga), with 16,000 gopitas created expressly for that
purpose, and all enemies will be disposed of speedily.24 While rasa bhoga
is the central concept of the poem, in this circumstance its humorous
effect is undeniable.25
In the rest of the essay I will first compare our three available Harikathas
from this period—Nanddas’s incomplete translation of the Dasam
Skandha, Haricarit’s also incomplete version, and Jayasi’s version—in terms
of religious inflection. I will then concentrate on Jayasi’s Kanhāvat and its
reworking of the Krishna story and use of coded religious vocabulary in a
way that resonates for both Krishna devotees and Sufi practitioners.
openings
In her work on the printing of Punjabi qissas, which also circulated
in a mixed religious milieu, Farina Mir has noted how often it is the
opening section, with its invocations, that reveals the religious inflec-
tion of a particular version of the story. This is a useful insight to bring
to our Harikathas.26 We may start by comparing the opening of Lalach’s
Haricharit with the Dasam Skandha (ca. 1570) by the Vallabhan poet
Nanddas. Nanddas has a “friend” ask him to explain the Bhāgavata
23 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (42.5–7),156.

24 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (43),157.
25 Heidi Pauwels has dedicated two essays to this text: “Whose Satire?
Gorakhnāth confronts Krishna in Kanhāvat,” in Indian Satire in the Period

of First Modernity, ed. M. Horstmann and Heidi Pauwels, Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2012, 35–64, and the aforementioned “When a Sufi tells about
Krishna’s Doom.” Her argument is that the Kanhāvat is really a satire of Krishna
by the Sufi poet Jayasi; while recognizing the undeniable humor—rather than
satire—in parts of the narrative (a feature of many episodes of Krishna’s life and
indeed part of his personality), I would argue that Jayasi’s project is rather one of
reworking and speaking at multiple levels, see below.
26 Farina Mir, “Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives:
Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism,” Comparative Studies in Society

and History 48 (2006): 727–58.
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Purā�a in “easy language” (sarala bhā�ā) because “I cannot understand

Sanskrit words.” Nanddas at first recuses (Aho mitra, etī mati kahā̃)27—
how can he succeed where “great poets have got stuck,” and after the first
commentator on the Bhāgavata Purā�a, the great Shridhar Svami? But
with the grace of one’s guru “a dumb man can read the whole pi�gal and
a lame man can climb mountains.”28 Nanddas then begins by explaining
in great detail the exact meaning of the nine lak�as and tenth lak�a�a. In
other words, Nanddas is keenly aware of the existing textual (granthana)
and commentarial tradition, and also of the need to produce a doctrinal
text, and his tone is at once more didactic and sectarian.29 By contrast,
Lalach’s opening is more broadly devotional. Between the usual invoca-
tion to Ganesha and Sarasvati,30 in the first stanza he turns to Gopala,
whose praise he will sing in a katha full of rasa: it was thanks to Gopala
that Brahma (pitāmaha) undertook creation, that Shiva became an
ascetic and destroyed the world in the pralaya. “You are immanent in
all beings” (saraba bhūta ke antarjāmī, saba maha vyāpa rahe tuh sāmī),31
he says, and “remove the obstacles from the path of the sants” (bighina
harana santanha sukhadāī).32 It is for the sake of bhaktas (bhagata hetu)
that Lalach invokes Sarasvati; he also asks for Murari’s grace and that of
“all the sants.” No patron is mentioned, only the place of composition
and date (Rae Barelli, 1587Vi, although the editor reads it as 1527)—
this therefore seems to be an independent composition: it is for the
sake of all the sants (sakala santa) here that he is attempting to sing this
katha bisala in bhasha.33 Lalach’s theological introduction is limited to
27 Nanddas, Daśam Skandha, in Nanddās Granthāvalī, ed. Brajratnadas

(Varanasi: Nagari Pracharini Sabha 1949), ch. 1, I.3.
28 Nanddas, Daśam Skandha, 1 doha.
29 There is no invocation to other gods, and Shuka and Parikshit do not
need to become bhaktas, they are already ones: “Parikshit is counted among the
excellent listeners [uttama śrotā], drenched through with rasa. He forgets food
and shelter, his only support is listening to the praises of Hari. In the same way,
Shuka became an excellent expounder [baktā], drenched in the highest rasa of
love.” Nanddas, Daśam Skandha, 218.
30 Lalachdas, Haricharit (Invocation, stanzas I–II), 13–14.
31 Lalachdas, Haricharit (Invocation, I.7),12.
32 Lalachdas, Haricharit (Invocation, I.8),12.
33 Lalachdas, Haricharit (Invocation, III), 14–15. He also asks Sarasvati’s
grace to “ākhara pāvo” in order to sing Hari’s praises, although he lacks intel-
ligence. Lalachdas, Haricharit (ch. 1, II.6), 13.
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describing Hari as the Highest Being (paramaha�sa) who has no home,

son, mother, or father, no shape, body, birth, or karma, no ears, mouth,
or hands—he is the parama purusha.34 Then Lalach brings us straight
into the Puranic frame of the Bhāgavata Purā�a—Narada obtained this
Harikatha and retold it to Vyasa, Shukadeva overheard it …
Karahu kripā saba Hari guna gāvo, Paramaha�sa kaha bheda sunāvo.
G�ha, suta, mātu, pitā nahῖ jāke, rekha rūpa nahῖ kachu tāke.
Sīsa na ākhi, badana nahi rasanā, janama, karama kachu āhi na racanā.
Sravana, bacana, kara-pallava nāhī̃, parama purāna purukha niju āhi.
Nābhi kavala te Brahmā upāne, niraguna ke prabhu ihai na jāne.
Divya purukha eka khojata āe, paramaha�sa ko anta na pāe.
Ha�sa rūpa Hari āe dekhāvahi, caturabeda Brahmā samujhāvahi.
Uhe kathā Hari Nārada pāī, Vyāsadeva kaha āni sunāī.
Suni Sukhadeva sravana sukha lāgī, upajī bhagati, bhae anurāgī.
Uha to haripada sadā viyogī, sabha taji bhae biha�gama jogī.
Doha: Amrita kathā bhāgavanta, praga�ita ehi sa�sāra.
Carana sarana Jana Lalac, gāvahi guna bistāra.
Please sing all the qualities of Hari, tell us the secret of the Highest Being.
He has no home, son, mother, or father, nor any form or shape.
No head or eyes, no face or tongue, no birth or karma to leave behind.
No hearing, speech, or hands/touch, he is himself the most ancient puru�a.
He created Brahma from his lotus navel, he [Brahma?] does not know
the nirgu�a lord.
[If a divine puru�a came to look for the [beginning or] end of the Highest
Being, he would not find it.]
Hari came and showed his ha�sa form and taught the four Vedas to Brahma.
It was that Harikathā that Narada received, and went and told to Vyasadeva.
Sukhdeva heard it, and his ears were glad, bhakti arose in him and he
became a passionate devotee.
He is always lost in the feet of Hari, and has left everything to become a
wandering yogi.
Doha: The immortal tale of the lord was revealed to the world.
Jan Lalach, taking refuge in Hari’s feet, sing the vastness of his
qualities.35
34 Brahma was born from his navel. Hari showed himself in the form of a
ha�sa (goose) and explained the four Vedas to Brahma. Lalachdas, Haricharit
(Invocation, IV) 15–16.
35 Lalachdas, Haricharit (Invocation, IV), 15–16.
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As for the rest of the story, Lalach’s Haricharit follows quite closely the
Bhāgavata Purā�a, and the narrative moves swiftly, as in other kathas
from this period. Only, instead of theological asides, Lalach inserts more
direct intimations to pursue bhakti: those who forget the Lord have
squandered their human birth like dogs36 and there is a whole stanza
inveighing against pakha��a dharma (“hypocritical dharma”).37 Lalach
often uses dohas as refrain, where he uses stock expressions of thanks and
invocations and praises for his Lord—in other words general expressions
that are not specific to any tradition:
Doha: Alakha, agocara t�ākura, so bica Gokula āva
Braja kula santa sa�ga raha, Jana Lālac guna gāva.
The invisible and imperceptible Lord came into Gokula,
With the people of Braja and the sants Lalach the servant sang his praises.
Variant second line:
Nagara loga saba harakhīta…
With all the townspeople happily…38
The terms in the first line—alakha and agocara—are terms used by

Naths and sants like Kabir to refer to the invisible Higher Being, but
here they seem to be employed without a specific theological under-
pinning but rather to underscore Hari’s movement from invisibility to
manifestation in Gokul.
In line with other Awadhi Sufi romances, the opening of Jayasi’s
Kanhāvat consists of several elements, as follows. It begins with a state-
ment on the impermanence of the world and of false pride, a coded refer-
ence to the core idea of the poem—Kamsa, and even Krishna, all die at
the end, just as the world is created and will disappear. There follows a
short hamd, an Islamic introduction in praise of God, the Prophet, his
companions, the ruler of the time (Humayun badshah), and Jayasi’s own
spiritual masters (Sayyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani and Shaikh Burhan).39
God the Creator is beyond praise, and even though Sheshnag—whose
two tongues in his thousand hoods are often used in images of praise and
36 Lalachdas, Haricharit (ch. 1, III.7), 25.

37 Lalachdas, Haricharit (ch. 1, IV), 26–27.
38 Lalachdas, Haricharit (Invocation, III doha), 15.
39 For an extensive discussion of Jayasi’s pirs, see Jayasi, Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak;
de Bruijn, The Ruby in the Dust; and de Bruijn, “Dialogism in a Medieval Genre.”
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who features also in the story—praises him with all his tongues, this is
still not praise enough. Thus, even in the hamd Jayasi introduces figures
familiar from Puranic lore.
Next, Jayasi introduces a reference to what will become a recurrent fea-
ture of Indo-Persian historical writing (from Firishta onward)—that is, the
history of India of pre-Islamic times; in this case Jais, “a dharma asthānu
since the time of the Satya Yuga,” an abode of rishis during the Treta, who
abandoned it in the Kaliyuga, when it was resettled by “Turkan.”40 We
may notice how Jayasi does not mention conquest but resettlement. He
also directly affiliates his town with Puranic history and geography, using
an idiom that everyone around him would have understood:
Kahaũ nagara bara āpuna �hāū,̃ sadā sohāvā Jāyasa nāū.̃
Satajuga hutau dharama asthānū,̃ tahiyā kahata nagara udiyānū.̃
Puni tretā gaeu, dvāpara [mukhī], Bhū̃jā rāja mahā rikhi rikhī̃.
Rahata rikhīsura sahasa a�hāsī, ghanai [ghan�a?] pokhara caurāsī.
Bā̃dhā ghā�a ī̃�a ga�hi lāe, au caurāsī kuvā̃ banāe.
Bica-bica bā̃dhe bhī̃�a sohāī̃, nisi bhae gãgana janahu tarāī̃.
Ṭhāū-̃ �hāū̃ para bana bahu bārī, tehi ūpara saba marhī sãvārī.
Doha: Bait�i tapā tapa sādhe, sabai purukha autāra,
Homa jāpa japa nisi-dina, karahī jagata asa pāra.
I’ll tell you about my great town, the ever-beautiful Jais.
In the satyayuga it was a holy place, then it was called the “Town of
Gardens.”
Then the treta went, and when the dvapara came, there was a great rishi
called Bhunjaraja.
88,000 rishis lived here then, and dense … and eighty-four ponds.
They baked bricks to make solid ghats, and dug eight-four wells.
Here and there they built handsome forts, at night they looked like stars
in the sky.
They also put up several orchards,41 with temples on top.
Doha: They sat there doing tapas, all those human avataras.
They crossed this world doing homa and japa day and night.42
40 I prefer Pathak’s reading here (Gupta reads ba�a āpuna as Bid[rā] ban �hāū)̃
since this is clearly about Jais; Jayasi, Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak (stanzas 7–8), 6–7.
41 The meaning of bārī is unclear here.
42 Jayasi, Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak (8), 7–8.
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Puni kayajuga kīnhaũ paisāru, gae jo rikhīsura taji sa�sārū.

[jiha �hāī̃] puni basagata rahā, bhā aravana Jaikarana kahā.
[āi] ca�hi tiha tatakhana dasā, bhā Turakāna puri bhari basā.
[saba] bhagavanta sarāhai jogū, pāna-phūla nau nidhi rasa bhogū.
[rāu] ra�ka ghara ū̃ca avāsā, agara candana ghana āvai bāsā.
Meru sugandha rahā bhari pūri, kumkuma parimala au kastūrī.
Doha: Dekhaῖ nagara sohāvana, d�alai puhupa jasa bāsa.
Jasa jasa niyare jāī, jānaũ car�ai Kailāsa.
Then kaliyuga came, and the rishis left this world and disappeared.
This place became a bamboo thicket again, a forest called Jaykarana.
When it was in such condition, it was settled again by Turks.
Its lord is worthy of praise [?], and there is enjoyment of delicate things
and nine kinds of rasas.
Rich men and poor men live in high houses, and a rich scent of incense
and sandalwood wafts through.
It is full of the scent of meru, kumkum, and kasturi.
Doha: When you see this beautiful town, with the scent of flowers,
And the closer you get, you feel you are climbing the Kailasa.43
The failure to mention a specific patron is not unusual in Jayasi and

some of the other Awadhi Sufi poets. What is striking in this case, how-
ever, is the insistence on the town as an “open” setting for performance.
I am not suggesting that we take this as a realistic description, only that
by going into such detail concerning the economy of service, trade, and
entertainment in a town Jayasi is perhaps signaling the way in which he
would like us to frame the story. Thus both in his brief historical account
of the town of Jais and in the more elaborate description of Kamsa’s town
of Mathura—which geographically reflects the site of Jais, with its fort and
city on top of a hill and ponds lying all around—kathas feature promi-
nently in the public life of the town.44 In Jais, the local sultan has built a
fort with twelve doors, but also markets with thriving trade. A minister and
a pandit sit there with him, as well as horsemen.45 Others sit reading the
43 Jayasi, Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak (9), 8.

44 “Dancing, prancing, and many tales are happening all around.” Jayasi,
Kanhāvat (10 doha), 138.
45 “One minister and learned pandit(s), and armed men riding on their
horses.” Jayasi, Kanhāvat (12.4), 139.
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Puranas, or read out and explain from a book (kitab, possibly the Quran).
Attendants sing songs and play music full of rasa. There is a sense that the
full talent of Malik Muhammad is not appreciated here, although it could
refer to the spiritual knowledge (marama) he can infuse in his poetry:
Tahā̃ kabi Malik Muhammad, marama na janai koi,
Lahai so lākh karoran, jo koi gāhak hoi.
There the poet Malik Muhammad, no one knows his secret,
If someone becomes a customer, he will earn hundreds of thousands.46
The description of Mathura is not only longer, but also seems to sug-
gest the pattern by which towns were settled. First the fort is built47 and
then a moat, after which the town is given a name. Then the king builds
his palace, with a harem of ranis from other regions (the “seven climes”),
and several courtyards (akharas) containing houses.48 Then a city grows
around the fort, with walled gardens and pavilions and tall dwellings for
the rich and the poor. This is when the populace begins to grow. Public
seating is arranged for people to sit and play games. Kings and chiefs
from neighboring areas also come to the rajasabha. Good roads and water
supply encourage traders to settle—possibly attracted by the wealth of
these chiefs/soldiers or their ability to trade over long distances.49 Once
this healthy trade is established, sadhus and wrestlers wander into the
city. Various kinds of actors and mime artistes also perform while pandits
sit and expound the shastras (bhā��, na�, na�inī nācahῖ, pa��it bai�hi
sāstar bācahῖ).50 People sing, tell stories, it is a good way to pass the time.
People from the fort relax and are happy to give a handsome reward:
Gīta nāda rasa kathā, bhala hoi bisarām,
Ga�ha kai log bhaeu sukhī, dān dehῖ bhala dām.51
46 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (12 doha),139.

47 With seven doors made of seven different precious metals, which Krishna
will cross and defeat one by one; Kamsa’s fort is clearly an extension of his false
pride and his desire to conquer not just the whole world but also death; hence
the precious metals of each door must resonate with esoteric meanings. Jayasi,
Kanhāvat (19), 143.
48 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (21), 144–45.
49 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (24), 146
50 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (24.7), 146.
51 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (24 doha), 146.
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Once again, I am not suggesting that we read this as a realistic

description, since wealth and elegant buildings and a profusion of music
and poetry are standard elements in the “description of cities” (nagara
var�ana), but that it is striking that the setting for entertainment in the
town is neither court nor Sufi khanqah—are these open spaces where he
suggests we should frame his story?
the ahir touch

Perhaps in the version of Krishna’s story that Jayasi saw performed by the
Ahirs in Jais certain traits were already emphasized in the representation of
Nanda as the semi-independent chief of the cow herders of Braj. But what
in the Bhāgavata Purā�a is a passing mention of customary tribute to the
king52 acquires a thicker social and political inflection in the Kanhāvat:
Nanda and the cow herders go merrily into town for Karttik puja and
Divali in order to offer obeisance (johar). They call out to be allowed to
perform their dances and songs in order to receive a reward (prasada) from
the king, who is also called gosain:
We look forward to your cheerful offering (dāna), o king!
We will all come again after twelve months.53
The king offers Nanda some betel nuts and makes him “sit before
him” (āgẽ baisāvā) in a ritualized mutual recognition of loyalty. But isn’t
the performance also an occasion to recruit military manpower from
among the Ahirs? This is suggested by Kamsa’s words as he lures Nanda
into bringing young Krishna to show off his fighting prowess against the
court wrestlers (malla):
I also want to see how he fights, and I will send him a robe of honor
(pahirāī pa�hāvõ)
To all the cow herders (govār) who come, I will give twice as much (bisāī
bisāha)54
To you I will give a Tukhara horse and will make you a cavalryman (kar-
ihõ asavāra)55
52 Bhāgavata Purā�a,XXXIX.11–12.
54 This line is unclear: bisār is grain given on credit, for which 1/4 more is
taken back.
55 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (165.5–7), 225.
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In the event, it is the Ahirs who easily overpower the royal wrestlers in
a lively “action scene,” and King Kamsa has to take refuge inside his fort.
The point of marking out this inflection is to suggest an Ahir/“Bundela”
martial tinge to Krishna bhakti in Awadh and Bundelkhand, and pos-
sibly an audience for Jayasi’s story. (Among Bundelas, the rajas were
usually Krishna devotees, while the ranis were devoted to Rama.)
the kanhāvat analyzed

In the same year that he composed the Kanhāvat, during the para-
mountcy of Sher Shah Suri, Jayasi began to compose his most celebrated
work, the Padmāvat, which we know traveled far and wide, from Arakan
to the Deccan, and was eagerly copied and retold in Persian and other
languages.56 We can safely say that Jayasi’s version of the Krishna story
enjoyed less fame. Only three manuscript copies have been found so
far, and the only one dated (1067H/1657) tells us that it was copied
by a certain Sayyid Abdulrahim Husain, the son of a drug seller and
resident of Masauli near Kannauj, for a local Kayastha, Rajaram Saksena
of Qasimpur, also in Kannauj district. This is meager evidence but it
does suggest that this Awadhi version of the Krishna story written by a
Sufi poet did have some circulation.
The story of Krishna in the Kanhāvat largely follows the blueprint of
the Bhāgavata Purā�a (and Lalach’s Haricharit), although with less of a
Puranic taste for the slaying of demons and less attention to Brahminical
rituals.57 Jayasi also draws upon some of the popular lilas, like the phul-
vari lila and the dana lila, when Krishna poses as a tax collector demand-
ing a tax in kind from the gopis who are going into town to sell their
milk and curds, which were not part of the Bhāgavata Purā�a but came
to form a popular stock of situations for Braj poets. At the same time,
56 For a list of translations and retellings of the Padmāvat, see de Bruijn, The
Ruby in the Dust.
57 Similar features include: Krishna’s birth and the swapping with Yashoda’s
baby girl, an incarnation of Bhavani; Akrura sent by Kamsa to summon Krishna,

although less fulsome in his stuti here than in the Bhāgavata Purā�a; Krishna
lifting Mount Govardhan on his left hand (rather than little finger), although
not to protect the inhabitants of Gokul from Indra’s wrath but his cows from the
stones thrown by Kamsa’s army; also Krishna’s death and end of the Yadu clan
are the same as in the Bhāgavata Purā�a.
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Jayasi rearranged the sequence of episodes and the cast of characters so as

to make Krishna’s story also work as an allegory for the Sufi Chishti path
of love. Heeding Aditya Behl’s warning, we should not try to find a one-
to-one match between characters and episodes and mystical concepts
and stages, but rather listen carefully to the text and what the episodes,
situations, and code words suggest each time.58 The rearrangement of
episodes and cast of characters, the narrative “thickening” at important
moments, and the profusion and repetition of code words can guide us
in this pursuit.
To begin with the rearrangement of episodes and characters, we may
note that the episode in which the child Krishna dives into the river to
fetch the ball he has lost and defeats the snake Kaliya is transformed into
a descent to the nether world to fetch the thousand-petaled lotus from
Shiva’s garden, which is guarded by the snake Sheshnaga. Kamsa had
asked Nanda to get the lotus, sure that Krishna would offer to undertake
the task in his place and would be killed in the attempt. As Krishna
descends the ladder that takes him to the “unpassable path, the tirtha of
the Tirbeni (Triveni),” this is marked as the beginning of Krishna’s jour-
ney (73.1). But lo and behold, all the rivers—Sona, Sharda, Gandaki,
Narmada, Kalindi/Yamuna, Ganges, Gomti, and so on—come and pay
their respects, and so does the sea (samudra).59 Krishna stands unafraid
in front of sleeping Sheshnaga, paying no heed to the warnings of the
Naga’s wife, Basuki, and reveals to the angry Sheshnaga who he really is
(see below). While the terms belong to a familiar religious langue, they
are rearranged to convey a specific parole; the idiom is a common one
but the message is enigmatic.
Another major rearrangement concerns Krishna’s love-making, here
divided into three phases: the first involves the gopis and Radha (also
called Rukmini Devi after their wedding, coalescing the two distinct fig-
ures) and culminates in his forest wedding night and simultaneous dalli-
ance with all the gopis in a kind of round dance. Thereafter Krishna goes
58 Aditya Behl, “Love’s Subtle Magic.”

59 As usual, numbers suggest an esoteric meaning (here “18 X 4”);
the key locus of love, the garden (phulvari), appears here for the first time. The
water and agama pantha reappear at the moment of Kamsa’s death, when he
receives “seven mortal wounds” and is thrown into the Yamuna by Krishna.
Jayasi, Kanhāvat (297), 289.
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to fight Kamsa’s wrestler Chanvara/Chanura (an episode that occurs later

in the Bhāgavata Purā�a) and returns to Gokul. Now a second extended
love episode takes place with Chandravali, who becomes the second
heroine; the usual fight between the two heroines ensues. The episode
in which Kamsa sends Krishna’s uncle Akrura to Gokul, where he is
welcomed courteously, follows the Bhāgavata Purā�a, as does Krishna’s
meeting with his old friend Sudama and curing of Kubja the hunchback,
although in the Kanhāvat she becomes his third love interest. Krishna
easily overcomes the seven gates of Kamsa’s castle and defeats him, but
here the story diverges again. After defeating Kamsa, Krishna spends his
time in Mathura in pleasure with Kubja, while Radha, Chandravali, and
the other gopis pine away in Gokul, and the wind they ask to deliver a
message to Krishna scorches everything on the way.60 Krishna now takes
pity on the gopis and sends boats to fetch them: only some gopis manage
to climb onto the boats, others fall into the river. Krishna helps them.
They travel by boat and spend their time in pleasure with Krishna.61
In the Kanhāvat, then, Krishna does not rule or move to Dwarka.
Rather he establishes a dharamshala in Mathura offering food and
shelter to all itinerant ascetics (an oblique reference to Sufi khanqahs?).
When he hears that the sage Durvasa lives on the other side of the
Yamuna he asks the gopis to take food to him; Krishna, however, orders
the gopis to tell the river that they have never been with Krishna. The
gopis do so, although they wonder why they are supposed to lie, and
sure enough the river lets them pass. The sage eats their food, blesses
them, and tells them to cross the river in a similar manner (that is,
by telling a lie, that he did not eat anything).62 The gopis sulk until
Krishna tells them what the mystery behind it is, and he once again opens
his mouth to reveal to them his cosmic form and his secret (bheda).63
One more episode is inserted before the curse that leads to Krishna’s
death and the end of the Yadus—a long dialogue with Gorakhnath on
the respective merits of bhoga and yoga, on which more below.
60 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (300–24), 290–304.

61 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (324–28), 304–06.
62 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (329–35), 307–10.
63 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (336–41), 310–13. The episode reworks a famous story
about a saint, his wife, and a derwish across the river told by the Sufi master
Nizam al-Din Awliya; cited in Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic, 9.
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creation, descent, and revelation

Krishna in the Kanhāvat retains the character of both avatara and
supreme God. As he tells Basuki at the beginning of the poem:
The creator who created the world has taken a human avatara.
Neither was he ever born, nor did anyone beget him.
Nobody has such a light-form (joti sarūpā), no one is of such lineage.
He stands unblemished and untarred (nihakala�ka niramala) amidst ev-
erything, you can glimpse him like light and shade,
Life and death appear to all [or, he shows], yet he is without shape or
form.64
Such a Lord (gosāī), a king of kings, the world and men are his creation.
Doha: Just like the drop and the sea, I am its/his particle (a�sa);
I descended as Kanha, I have come to kill Kamsa.65
Unlike the heroes of the other Sufi romances, Krishna needs to

undergo no transformation in order to enter the spiritual path. Rather
he is God who wants to make himself known and to love and be loved
by his creatures. This is one way we can read all the various instances
in the romance when Krishna reminds his interlocutor of his divine
nature and the ten avataras, as well as the various instances in which
he appears before Radha, Chandravali, and the gopis in disguise—first
as a tax collector (dani),66 then as a bairagi accusing them of stealing
the forest flowers,67 and a third time again as a bairagi in Chandravali’s
garden.68 Each disguise, or doubt expressed by the gopis, is followed by
a revelation.
64 The text reads bihāī, which could be taken as a “renunciant”, since

bihānā means “to renounce.” Kalika Prasad, Rajvallabha Sahay, and Mukundilal
Srivastava, eds., B�had Hindī Kośa (Varanasi: Prakashak Jnanmandal, 1989),
815.
65 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (80), 176. And yet to his brother Balabhadra who asks
him how he got so dirty, he replies enigmatically: “The one who is unblemished
and untarred, who created the world and played all the games (khela saba khelā),
and who descended without blemish, acquired a blemish and his light dimmed”
by descending into the nether world. Jayasi, Kanhāvat (86.2), 179.
66 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (97), 185.
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Jayasi skillfully uses Vaishnava metaphysics in order to formulate the

Sufi metaphysics of God’s essence and manifestation and what Aditya
Behl called the “circulation of desire:”69 thus the world is manifested
for the sake of God’s play (khela = lila), the avataras are “created” by
the “supreme God” (paramesura), and there is a secret identity between
God and his creatures—as Krishna tells both Radha and Chandravali: I
am you and you are me, a message that listeners of Surdas’s padas would
also have related to very well.70 As Krishna himself puts it, “I don’t know
who is the bee and who the flower.”71 And again he tells Radha: “There
is no difference between you and me, like a shadow inside a pi��a.”72
When Radha hesitates to follow him to his abode of love (Kabilasu =
Kailasha) because she does not want a “bee husband” who will spend a
moment with her and then flit away to some other flower, he replies that
he is actually with all the gopis at the same time:
You Radha, who are so smart, why do you pretend to be so unknowing/
innocent?
Like the sun in the sky is the ādi sarūpa, whose light shines forth over the
whole world;
And it pervades/lives in the whole world and its light shines over
everything;
In the same way I am tapa (?) with all the gopis, [kāhu hutaῖ] I am not
hidden.
…
I make love with them all the time, none of their beds ever remains empty.
In a manner appropriate to each of them, I enjoy bhogu with all, night
and day.73
Krishna is often described in his beautiful form (rupa anupa), and yet
he is also a bahurupiya who can take on many forms. When he enters
Mathura to challenge Kamsa, everyone sees him in his own image:
69 Aditya Behl, “Love’s SubtleMagic.”

70 I am grateful to Vasudha Dalmia for making this point to me.
72 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (140.1), 211; a pi��a is a round clod (or cake made as
offering to the ancestors); here it could mean the shadow inside a solid round
object.
73 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (142.1–4, 6–7), 212.
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Krishna disguised himself (bhesa apuna kīnhā) so that each saw him ac-
cording to his own hue (barana).
A king saw him as a king, a young man as a marvelous young man,
Daityas saw him as a daitya, and Kamsa saw in him his death.
Khatri (Kshatriya) heroes said: “He’s a hero,” Ahirs said: “He’s an Ahir,”
Yogis said: “He’s is a yogi,” and Brahmins said: “He is a jyotikhi.”
Doha: He appeared so clearly (darasana nirmala) as if in a special mirror;
Each saw his own face, Kanha [agara nirekha?]74
This is God who wants to make himself visible as if through an

unblemished mirror, a typical image of Sufi poetry. In the Kanhāvat,
then, Jayasi sets side by side the typical Krishnaite metaphor for revela-
tion—Krishna opening his mouth to reveal the whole cosmos within
it—with a whole range of other metaphors, some more everyday (e.g.,
like ghee in the milk, like scent in the flower), and others more par-
ticularly of Sufi origin, like that of the mirror. Another metaphor for
revelation is that of the opening of the antarpata, the inner door to the
guputa jagata, the secret world. As he tells the gopis one final time:
Krishna said, “Now look young women,” and opened the inner door of
his body;
“I am/There is difference only for deceit, it is gosāīn who takes leasure
[with] himself,
And like Durvasa said, this happens in every body (gha�a-gha�a mãha).
He75 himself takes pleasure, and the blame falls on someone else.
He is the flower (jagata phūla) that blossoms, and he is the bee who loses
itself in the rasa of its scent;
He is the fruit and the gardener, and he is the one who tastes all rasas.76
And again:
There is no one apart from the one, and the whole world is its shadow.
Wherever you look, it is all the artwork of gosāīn.77
He created the game as he wanted, and filled fourteen worlds.
74 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (287.2–7, doha), 284.

75 Lit., “apu,” which could stand for the indefinite pronoun as well as for
“oneself ” or the“self.”
76 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (339.1–3, 5–7),312.
77 This is almost a literal translation of the Persian verse, for which ‘Abdul
Quddus Gangohi had already found a Hindavi equivalent.
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There is colour, light and form in all of them, like the sun that shines
over/pervades everything.
See the art of parga�a guputa, visible and hidden: he is in everything,
everything is within him.
He dictates where every eye turns, no mouth can speak without him;
Just like life is inside the body, so he pervades the whole world.78
Durvasa, who here seems to stand for the enlightened seeker, has
understood this secret, which is why he sees through and accepts
Krishna’s “lie” and replies with a similar statement: he has eaten the food
that was brought to him, but since there is no duality, who has eaten
what?79 Thus, not only immanence but even the doctrine of avatara
can be made to carry a Sufi connotation as God’s creation of the vis-
ible world. The Vaishnava doctrine according to which Krishna is the
only man and everyone else is a woman can similarly be reformulated
in terms of God inhabiting all his creatures (“Sixteen thousand women,
and one man in all of them”).80
Rasa Bhoga, Kapata Gyan

Rasa bhoga, “the enjoyment of rasa,” is the term with which Jayasi
seeks to present the story of Krishna as equivalent to the mutual
desire, longing, and union between God and man. This is the key
for interpreting bhoga as a spiritual path—bhoga bhagati as it is
called in the poem. We are used by now to the transformation of the
hero into a yogi in Sufi romances and qissas,81 but what is the relationship
between yoga and bhoga in this poem (also rhyming, and to be con-
trasted, with Kamsa’s pride-sickness, garaba roga)?
78 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (340.1–7), 312.

79 See footnote 63.
81 See Christopher S. Shackle, “Transition and Transformation in Varis
Shah’s Hir,” in The Indian Narrative, ed. Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992); Jeevan S. Deol, “Love and Mysticism in
the Punjabi Qissas of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (MPhil diss.,
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996) for Sufi
qissas in Punjabi; and of course Aditya Behl’s work on Awadhi romances.
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Twice, we have seen, Krishna appears to the gopis and to Chandravali

as a yogi, significantly both times in a garden or garden-like forest, a
spiritually charged place, for the many trees, flowers, fruit, and scents
listed are all code words for the awakening and circulation of desire,
as Aditya Behl would put it. The second time the gopis wonder, “How
come he, a bairagi and a yogi, is staring at Chandravali, with bhoga in
his heart?!”82 This is the time when Krishna himself has fallen sick with
love and has become despondent (audāsī, nirāsī), hidden love raging
within him like a sickness.83 Any medicine only increases the “pain of
biraha,” so much so that the people of Braj think he may have caught
the evil eye.84 Chandravali’s nurse Agasta—not a character I have found
in other tellings of the story—has come to visit him, and he begs her
to be his guru and lead him to Chandravali.85 Agasta reminds him of
who he really is, and that his tapa will bring him the bhoga he desires;
she advises him to go and hide in Chandravali’s garden in the guise of
a yogi. This seems at first sight only a disguise but it is also a prepara-
tion in order to attain Chandravali.86 Krishna sits for fourteen nights in
her garden, repeating (japa) her name—“the bairagi does bhagati,” the
text says87—and only then does Chandravali come. To her he appears a

83 This is when the phrase “The path of love is thin and harsh/hard, one
crosses, the other is killed” is uttered a second time. Jayasi, Kanhāvat (196.7),
240.
85 “You can do whatever you wish, and get me wherever you want … Now
you are my guru and I am your chela, if you say so I will get the game (khela)
I have played. I will follow any path you set me, which will get me the happy
darasana I ask for.” Jayasi, Kanhāvat (203.4, 6–7),244.
86 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (196.3–7, doha), 240:
Nothing pleased him, everything saddened him: how can hope rise in a
desperate man?
His body seethed, his heart scorched, nobody can spell out such pain.
Love cannot be revealed [not sure]; once it’s revealed, it kills you.
Love revealed is a risky business: it’s a player playing with his head.
Love’s path is narrow and hard, one may be spared, the other is struck.
Its branding mark is hidden, not even the smoke shows.
The heart/mind (man) suffers and refines itself, nobody knows its secret.
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strange creature, a mixture of Vaishnava god and Shaiva yogi, a beautiful

man with a gada, a chakra, and a conch shell, who counts the rudraksha
beads and plays the flute—the sight of him is bhagati that makes her
forget the world.88 When she asks him why he is dressed like a beggar if
he is the king that he says he is, he first reveals that he is actually not a yogi
but Gopala, the rasa bhogi and avatara of Vishnu, and when questioned
further he reveals his secret knowledge:
Listen Gaura this is my knowledge, I am untouched by pleasure or pain.
Nothing comes, nothing goes, I [one] sit quietly throughout.
This is what you call a basic knower (mūla gyānī), one who does not smile
at pleasure or weep in pain.
This is the game of the creator, and I am it, like the shadow inside a pi��a.
Outwardly I look (praga� rūpa) like Gopala Gobinda, but the hidden
knowledge (kapaha gyāna) is: neither Turk nor Hindu.
Murari’s rūpa comes in different shades: sometimes a king, sometimes a
beggar.
Sometimes a pandit, sometimes a fool, sometimes a woman, sometimes
a man.
Doha: So, for the sake of my rasa, it’s all a game, after all.
Many different shades/guises, the only one (akela) takes pleasure in
all.89
As we have seen already, at one level this declaration is perfectly

in tune with the theology of Krishna bhakti: Krishna has created his
beautiful form, in fact any form, for the sake of his lila, and he is at one
time the ineffable Being and the saguna God. At another level, according
to the Sufi theology of wahdat al-wujud, this is Allah, the only God,
revealing that he is immanent in all people and that there is a hidden
realm in which no outward difference matters; the enlightened seeker
knows this and remains unmoved by appearances and events because
he can see through them. A third possible way of looking at it is that
Jayasi has used language, concepts, and metaphors in such a way that
he has been able to speak to all and to suggest a kind of equivalence
between different religious ideas. “Neither Turk nor Hindu” is, I suspect,
not to be read in Kabir’s terms—as a rejection of both institutionalized

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religions—but as the existence of a hidden realm of truth behind the

world of appearances, although of course no one would have stopped
the audience from giving it a different meaning.
That the yogi in this romance is not really a yogi, and that the path of
rasa bhoga is different from, and superior to, the path of yoga is finally
spelt out in the debate between Krishna and Gorakhnath at the end, a
significant innovation by Jayasi to which I shall return shortly.90
In other Sufi premakhyans the married hero leaves his wife—to go on
a quest for the heroine, or he first meets the heroine, but then, in the
course of his quest for her, acquires another wife on the way. Within this
scheme, the hero is the novice whose first experience of worldly love pre-
pares him but also needs to be left behind, because he must undergo vari-
ous trials before he can attain the divine essence (and light) represented
by the second heroine.91 Heroines, embodiments of divine essence, are
also actively loving, just as God actively loves created beings.92 Krishna’s
love exploits (rati keli) with Radha, Chandravali, the other gopis, and
Kubja fit well within the theology of rasa as shauq (passion, desire) and
of the mutual, active love between God and created beings, and Krishna
plays with all of them the role of teacher as well as lover, as we have seen.
Once again Jayasi takes up characters with a well-established personality
and theology, and fits them within his scheme.
Radha (also called Rahi or Radhika, and Rukmini later) is a strong
presence in the poem, with a well-defined character and identity, the
daughter of Devchand Mahar. She is the first to meet Krishna in disguise
in the dana lila episode and to tell him that she will not give in to his
request for bhoga bhagati because she is a tapasvini sati and astrologers
have told them she will marry the one all gods bow to, to which Krishna
laughingly replies that he indeed is the one. Radha then asks him to
show his real face and “tie the knot” (echoing God’s covenant with his
90 See also Pauwels, “Whose Satire?”

91 Ramya Sreenivasan has argued that the presence of the two wives and the
tension between them can be traced back to the dual context of these narratives,
that is, Sufi circles and elite lay courts, each with their own ethic: “The inexo-
rable fact of elite polygyny seems to coexist uneasily with a Sufi monogamous
ethic here.” Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen,55.
92 Aditya Behl, “Rasa and Romance: The Madhumālatī of Shaikh Mañjhan
Shattari” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1995).
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people in the Quran?): “You who are called a bahurupai, like sun and
shade. Show yourself to me quickly in many new forms.”93 Krishna
immediately shows his child and cosmic forms.94 Radha then goes
home pledging to return; her slow self-adorning in a long nakha shikha
marks the awakening of desire and of the “game of love,” with flowers,
fruit, scents, and colors acting as code words for the forthcoming love
union and arousing the senses of the listeners. As Aditya Behl put it,
“The sarapa captures the moment of the arousal of desire (shauq) …
and introduces the multiple resonances of longing and love: the rela-
tion between God and created beings, lover and beloved, and reader
and text.”95 Music here acts as that which bewitches and makes one
forget the world: whether it is the musical instruments that accompany
Radha’s shringara and that make the whole world and the earth forget
themselves,96 or the “ragas of bairaga” that Krishna plays on his flute
while waiting for Chandravali, himself lost to the world97 and of course
bewitching everyone who hears him.
The love union with Radha is presented as a wedding, albeit a forest
wedding, with all the gods, rishis, and the sun and the moon rejoicing.
Brahma recites the Vedas, Shiva spreads the mandapa, and Parvati sings
the wedding songs98—a scene found in other kathas of the time.99 Their
union is like the long-awaited meeting of the chataka bird at the svati
asterism familiar from the poetic tradition, and the emphasis is on “new
love, new wife, new husband.”100 We noted above the hidden meaning
of this union as of the other erotic moments with the other heroines.
That Radha and Chandravali and even Kubja are equivalent with
respect to Krishna is hinted at through repeated references to Krishna
as the sun and the heroines as the moon: Radha is the moon and the
gopis are the stars; Chandravali of course is the moon and her beauty
93
Jayasi, Kanhāvat (103 doha), 188.
94
Jayasi, Kanhāvat (104), 189.
95 Behl, “On Reintegration,” the fourth lecture of Behl, “Love’s Subtle
Magic.”
99 E.g., Isvardas’s 1501 Satyāvatī kathā.
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“shines by night and hides during the day,”101 and after her transforma-
tion even Kubja is “four times more beautiful and unblemished than
the moon.”102 However, metaphors of light abound more explicitly
in the Chandravali episode, making her a more overt representative of
the divine light that the seeker must turn to after being awakened to
human love. It is perhaps for this reason that Krishna seeks Chandravali
and is trapped by her in a way that he was not by Radha.103 Krishna’s
union with Chandravali is like the conjunction of the sun with the
moon (although Krishna playfully replies to a jealous Radha that this
is indeed not possible: how can he and Chandravali dally when the sun
and the moon can never be together?). Their erotic union is described
once again as “bhoga bhagati,” but Chandravali, who has learnt from the
“pandits reading the Vedas and what is written in Puranas,”104 reminds
Krishna to go and fight Kamsa and asks him to show his royal form to
her. The character of Chandravali is more developed in Gaudiya
Krishna bhakti, where she is not just one of the sakhis but Radha’s
chief rival.105 This rivalry is replayed here as the rivalry between the
two wives, or rather the wife and the lover (although Radha addresses
Chandravali derogatorily as savati, her co-wife,106 while Chandravali
scoffs haughtily at her for her rusticity). When both women and their
16,000 companions are on their way to offer puja to Mahendra and
they start exchanging insults, Chandravali, resplendent in her beauti-
ful shringara, asks Mahendra to have Krishna all for herself,107 while
Radha appears with wasted body and unkempt hair, like a virahini, and
pleads with Mahendra to free her from the co-wife; she briefly speaks in
Sita’s voice, underscoring her virtue as a sati.108 After their verbal and

103 The poet dwells here on the metaphor of the heroine’s eyebrows as a
wounding bow, and the heroine as a hunter, well familiar in Persian (and later
Urdu) love poetry. Jayasi, Kanhāvat (213–35), 248–59.
105 See, for example, Rupa Gosvami’s Sanskrit play Vidagdhamādhava.
Donna M. Wulff, Drama as a Mode of Religious Realization: The Vidagdhamādhava

of Rūpa Gosvāmi (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984).
107 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (238–43), 260–63.
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hysical fight, Krishna not only separates the women but also teaches
p
both that he is with each at the same time.
As for the episode with Kubja, its place within the overall structure
of the poem is to provide a counterpart of bhoga (in Madhubana) to the
gopis’ biyoga in Gokul.109 The bhoga with her, encapsulated in a “six-
season” set piece, contains all the accompanying elements that we have
found before—flowers, scents, fruit, and colorful clothes; if anything
now they are all concentrated in the same person, and the final season
leads to the communal enjoyment (bhoga vilasa) of dance and color
at Holi, when “the heart’s desire was fulfilled for all six seasons and
twelve months.”110 Earlier Krishna had told Chandravali that he was a
bhogi of “all the six rasas,” and the “six seasons” seem to correspond to
that fullness. And while in the other Sufi romances the juxtaposition
between bhoga and viyoga/viraha is represented by the contrast between
the second heroine’s “six seasons” and the plaintive “twelve months” of
the first wife, here both Radha and Chandravali pine together with the
other gopis in the barahmasa that follows upon Krishna’s love play with
Kubja.111 With another interesting twist, the gopis are not left behind
in Mathura to fulfill their bhakti of biraha but are brought along to
enjoy rasa bhoga with Krishna, when they are further enlightened in the
Durvasa episode mentioned above.
The meaning of bhoga is thus explained several times in the course
of the story through Krishna’s various encounters and exchanges with
Radha, Chandravali, and the other gopis. What the path of bhoga
means in relation to other paths is explained at the end, through the
encounter between Krishna and Gorakhnath. Gorakhnath (also called
Matsyendranath in the text) appears in Mathura with an impressive
retinue (ka�aka) of yogis because the fame of Krishna bhakti has spread
through the whole world and he has heard of Krishna as a famous and

111 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (300–19), 290–301. For a comprehensive analysis of
the “six seasons” and “twelve months” in Sufi romances, see chapter 8 of Aditya
Behl’s Love Subtle Magic (“The Seasons of Madhumālatī’s Separation,” 264–85),
where he points out that the first wife’s call for the hero to return is a signal to
the Sufi seeker that the inner spiritual quest is necessary, but also a reintegration
with the material world.
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talented gyani. Now, however, he is disappointed to see him enveloped

(lipa�āna) in bhoga: he should take advantage of the time he has left
to become a yogi, so as to acquire an immortal body and the powers
that come with it. Krishna goes to meet Gorakh at the camp, partly
in humble courtesy and partly holding his ground, and claims to be
overjoyed by this darasana, but he goes with 20,000 bhaktas all shout-
ing “Bhakti”!112 Krishna rejects Gorakhnath’s offer on various grounds:
(a) yoga is “outward knowledge and outward form” that is no good to
him. (b) Beside, what do yogis know of bhoga? (c) “He is a true ascetic
who remains detached at home (or in the body).” “Outwardly I live
where everyone else lives, in secret I repeat113 the name of paramesur.”114
(d ) He is in a position to teach the 16,000 gopis who serve him with
folded hands: as long as he is there, they will not sin. (e) And what is
the point of taking human birth if one does not experience bhoga? This
is why avatara took place, and why the jiva takes on a body and experi-
ences emotions (kāma krodha tiśanā mana māyā). Death will come for
all, whether bhogi or yogi.115 After this debate, they decide to fight, but
it is a brief and inconclusive fight with an accommodating ending: “Yoga
is best for the yogi, and bhoga best for the bhogi.”116 Gorakh and his
Naths return to Mount Sumeru, while Krishna’s abode is a Kailasha-like
Madhubana.
We are familiar with the Krishna bhakti juxtaposition between the
“simple devotion” of the gopis vs formless knowledge as exemplified
in the popular repartee between Uddhav and the gopis of the bhramar
git,117 but what should we make of this juxtaposition between Krishna
and Gorakhnath, especially since Gorakhpanthi verses and techniques
were familiar and popular among Awadh Sufis, and the prince-as-yogi in
112 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (344),315.

113 Japaũ an alternative reading is jīvaũ, “I live by God’sname.”
114 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (346.6–7), 316.
117 In the Kanhāvat, Krishna is himself called Uddhav a couple of times
briefly (e.g., Jayasi, Kanhāvat, (133, 300), 208, 290), possibly because he is
the gopis’ teacher, as well as Arjuna—and his brother Balarama is called
Balabhadra—during the final fight with Kamsa (for example, Jayasi, Kanhāvat
(291), 286).
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Jayasi’s other romance, the Padmāvat, is clearly modeled on a Nath Yogi?

We have seen that code words are not fixed and have multiple mean-
ings. Bhoga, which in most of the poem stands for the erotic-theological
union between God and his creatures, may also stand for appropri-
ate enjoyment of a kingdom, as Krishna says in his short sermon to
Kamsa’s son when enthroning him.118 While in the rest of the poem
yoga stands for the intermediate stage when the lover has left the world
and is preparing himself for bhoga, in the debate between Krishna and
Gorakh yoga seems to stand for an outward form of religion (praga�a
bidyā, praga�a bhesū, as Krishna calls it119) that is blind to the true, secret
essence of things and an attitude that values spiritual exercises for the
sake of personal benefits, in other words, for shari‘a Islam. Once again,
Jayasi brilliantly makes two religious statements at the same time—one
about the superiority of Krishna bhakti over Nath Yoga, and the other
about the superiority of the Sufi path to the shari‘a.
***
There are several reasons why a comparative approach to Harikatha texts

and performances, and the Kanhāvat in particular, is significant for a
project that seeks to rethink religious interchange. Textual traditions
from early modern India often speak in exclusive or else assimilative
terms—by and large Sufi texts speak of Sufis, their faithful and Muslim
rulers and officials; Persian courtly texts speak of rulers and courtiers;
sant texts speak of sants, scheming Brahmins, and the occasional
royal patron; Vaishnava texts speak of Vaishnava religious leaders and
devotees, with non-Hindus making rare and formulaic appearances.
The same is true of literary scholarship and its categories: thus we have
Sufi literature, bhakti literature (divided according to religious and
sectarian affiliation: Krishna bhakti, and Vallabhan poets, Haridasis,
Radhavallabhas, etc.), courtly literature in Brajbhasha and in Persian.
Once these categories occupy the theoretical centre stage, they engender
a whole vocabulary for describing literary activities: Hindus “contribute”
to Persian and Muslims “contribute” to Hindi as if they were outsiders
118 “Today I am giving you the kingdom, do not be proud when enjoying

the kingdom.” Jayasi, Kanhāvat (299.3), 290.
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having to negotiate entry, and not part of a comprehensive/shared social

world. Histories old and new (tazkiras, vartas, as well as the more recent
scholarship since the nineteenth century) evolve intriguing stories ques-
tioning how a Hindu could write Persian verse or a Muslim write about
Krishna.
By contrast, the proliferation and circulation of Harikatha texts and
performances (as Lalach’s Haricharit and Jayasi’s Kanhāvat), exhibiting
a striking range of inflections and a high degree of inter-textuality, give
us a very different picture of that world. Kathas, and the Harikatha in
particular, offered a wide, non-sectarian pool of stories, characters, and
performative and generic forms from which both the bhakti poets and
Sufi poets like Jayasi drew. Both Lalach and Jayasi explicitly evoke perfor-
mances and refer to other textual and performative sources in their texts.
A comparative approach is both necessary and fruitful in this regard,
for it highlights how each text was the outcome of precise choices and
strategies within a wide range of possibilities. Unlike other texts, where
language and genre suggest which audience is being addressed (clearly a
sectarian work addresses an internal audience, but it may also be a dig
at philosophical opponents), kathas were by nature open and circulated
easily, and that made them particularly liable to becoming narrative sites
of interchange and inflection.
Together with Samira Sheikh’s idea of a “religious marketplace,” the
metaphor of the bisat may be useful for imagining the religious (and
literary) world of this period—a kind of a chessboard on which play-
ers knew they were surrounded by other players and could be closer
to or further from centers of power (of which there were many: local,
imperial, religious, moneyed, landed). While religious history tends to
be written from the perspective of the authorities and institutions that
produced archives, hagiographies, and lineages, Lalach’s Harikatha, with
its clear devotional slant yet lack of sectarian drive (unlike Nandadas’s),
is significant because its centuries-long spread testifies to the popularity
of this kind of non-sectarian Krishna devotion in central north India.
One consequence of this crowded bisat was that players often found
themselves addressing multiple audiences (insiders and outsiders) and
playing multiple games, as the Kanhāvat shows. In fact, Jayasi’s Kanhāvat
forces us to reflect on the reason why this provincial Sufi poet writing in
the local language took on the Krishna story. Is it evidence of symbolic
appropriation? In his analysis of another, almost contemporary, Awadhi
Chapter_07.indd 228 6/3/2014 4:02:24 PM

Sufi tale, Manjhan’s Madhumālatī (ca. 1545), Aditya Behl argued that
we should read the Sufi poets’ choice of idealized Indian locales and the
romantic quest of Indian heroines in terms of “appropriation” within the
context of the now “dominant” Islamic polities.120 More recently, Ramya
Sreenivasan has suggested that: “While the ethos of many regional courts
in North India during the Sultanate and Mughal periods may have been
broadly Islamicate, local networks for the circulation of such narratives were
by no means exclusively Muslim. In fact, such taxonomies of religious affili-
ation may not even be useful in considering the lay patrons and audiences
of such narratives.”121 This is true even of an explicitly religious story such
as Krishna’s.
First, as I have tried to show, if we take the local geography and
local networks seriously, we are minded to understand power less in
terms of sovereignty or domination (whether worldly or spiritual, the
sultan’s or the shaikh’s) and more, as Muzaffar Alam has suggested, in
terms of accommodation between local groups. In order to understand
the Kanhāvat we need first of all to place it within the local geography
of Krishna bhakti, in which it is one of many different actors—Kayastha
and Brahmin storytellers and poets, Ahir performers, sampradayas, and
Sufis.
Second, Sreenivasan highlights circulation as a stage in the literary
cycle that goes beyond the putative origin of a text as its locus of identity.
And while it is true that circulation always potentially exceeds the frame-
work and intentions of the producer, this is all the more true within a
multilingual and layered world like that of north India, whose exemplary
figure is that of the palimpsest. So while Aditya Behl was unsurpassed in
providing a Sufi reading of the Awadhi premakhyans, we remain aware
that this would have been only one reading because—and the Kanhāvat
itself is an example of this—circulation to a different audience meant
a new “interpretive community.” Neither only “Sufi” or “Krishnaite,”
the Kanhāvat plays multiple registers at the same time, and creates
something new in the process. Here attention to genre, audience, and
setting is crucial: for if both the Kahnāvat and ‘Abdul Wahid Bilgrami’s
Haqā’iq-i Hindī are Sufi takes on Krishna motifs, whereas the Haqā’iq-i
120 Aditya Behl, “Rasa and Romance.”

121 Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, 45, emphasis added.
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Hindī addresses an audience of Sufi disciples, the Kanhāvat, I have sug-

gested, locates itself as a katha in the open arena of entertainment and
exchange. Although it is clear that neither complete equivalence nor
“syncretism” was Jayasi’s aim, the cultural multilingualism of authors
and audiences, and the presence of multiple aesthetics, pressed among
some the desire to bring those aesthetic worlds together, and led others
to realize that some religious ideas could be considered at least formally
equivalent.
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II

Of Proximity and Distance

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Other essays in this volume lead us to imagine religious interchange

1 Quoted in Muzaffar Alam, “Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation

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(covered assembly spaces and courtyards in the villages) where singers

2 Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat,

Chapter_07.indd 196 6/3/2014 4:02:21 PM

nonetheless striking that observers at different points in time have noted

krishna bhakti in awadh: a comparative

Padmāvatī has long been recognized as a masterpiece of Hindi literature, was a

Chapter_07.indd 197 6/3/2014 4:02:21 PM

Consider these dates and locations. After the “discovery” of Shrinathji

Press, 1976), 144.

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Hindī (“The Truths of India,” 1566). This included a systematic treat-

Publications, 1985), 31–37.

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won over by Vallabha’s commentary or oral discourse on it), but also

1644 (VS1701)), acknowledges Lalach directly; Lalach’s Haricharit was com-

Chapter_07.indd 200 6/3/2014 4:02:21 PM

them to their own purposes, both in courtly and non-courtly milieus.15

kathas as meritorious pastime

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the “Vedas and Puranas.” As this fifteenth-century story of a virtuous

Phala shruti, the merit (punya) accrued by listening to a story, was

Mishra (Gwalior: Vidyamandir Prakashan, 1958), 94.

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Equivalence with the “Vedas and Puranas” is a familiar self-­legitimizing

19 Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak (14.1–4, 6–8 and doha),12.

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Chapter_07.indd 204 6/3/2014 4:02:22 PM

23 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (42.5–7),156.

Gorakhnāth confronts Krishna in Kanhāvat,” in Indian Satire in the Period

Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism,” Comparative Studies in Society

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Purā�a in “easy language” (sarala bhā�ā) because “I cannot understand

27 Nanddas, Daśam Skandha, in Nanddās Granthāvalī, ed. Brajratnadas

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describing Hari as the Highest Being (paramaha�sa) who has no home,

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The terms in the first line—alakha and agocara—are terms used by

36 Lalachdas, Haricharit (ch. 1, III.7), 25.

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Puni kayajuga kīnhaũ paisāru, gae jo rikhīsura taji sa�sārū.

The failure to mention a specific patron is not unusual in Jayasi and

43 Jayasi, Kanhāvat, ed. Pathak (9), 8.

horses.” Jayasi, Kanhāvat (12.4), 139.

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46 Jayasi, Kanhāvat (12 doha),139.

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Once again, I am not suggesting that we read this as a realistic

the ahir touch

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the kanhāvat analyzed

baby girl, an incarnation of Bhavani; Akrura sent by Kamsa to summon Krishna,

Chapter_07.indd 213 6/3/2014 4:02:23 PM

Equivalence with the “Vedas and Puranas” is a familiar self-legitimizing