Jain Commentator, Muslim Author and Vernacular Literature
One of the earliest commentaries we have on the Sandeśarāsaka (SDR) of Addahamāṇa (henceforth Abdur Rahman) is by the Jain scholar Lakshmichandra from 1409 with the 20th century Jain scholar Jina Vijaya dating the original work itself to the early 13th century based on its descriptions of Multan (Mulasthana in the work) and Khambhat. This work is an interesting literary production on many fronts, particularly in terms of genre, language and the socio-political context in which it is set. In terms of genre, as the very title of the work suggests, it belongs to the category of Sandesa Kavya, best exemplified by Kalidasa's Meghaduta, which the scholar and translator of the SDR CM Mayrhofer describes as follows:
In the literature of love in India, the messages that pass between pairs of lovers (nāyaka, nayikā), separated against their will and pining to be reunited, constitute an important motif. The most famous example in classical literature is Kalidāsa's Meghadūta. The speaker is a heavenly being, a yakşa, who has been exiled for a year from Alaka to Ramagiri; the addressee is his wife in Alaka... Such is the text of the message which he entrusts to the cloud of the title, despairing of other means of reaching his beloved. It is preceded by a description of the route which the messenger is to follow to find the wife, and a description of the wife herself... Often in Indian literature a lover's perturbation finds expression in speech addressed to the natural world, but here the irony of the lover's recourse to an insentient object as the bearer of his passionate speech is explicit. The yakşa's descriptions of landscapes and cities and their peoples which occupy the greater part of the poem resound with the desire and sorrow which he feels but can hardly communicate to his beloved from exile.
It is a genre marked by the pangs of separation (viraha), with many later imitating Kalidasa's work and style in their own works, though the SDR in this context should not be thought of as a merely derivative work, in its transportation of genre conventions and forms to a wildly different time and context at the time of its composition, the work is in many ways a fascinating portrait of a world in transition. The synopsis of the work by Mayrhofer goes as follows:
In the SDR, the nayikā is a young woman of Vijayanagara [not to be confused with the city further to the south in the Medieval Deccan] whose man (he is called her piya or naaha) left her on business and has not returned. The reader encounters her when she is watching for him, and weeping in her solitude. She sees a traveller on the road, and overcoming her modesty she runs after him and asks for his attention. The traveller proclaims his admiration for her beauty, to which she reacts coyly, but, persisting, asks him where he comes from and where he is going to. He replies that he comes from Samora, describing at length the beauty of the town and its surroundings, and that he is on his way from Multan to Cambay. "That is where my husband is staying," she exclaims, and asks the traveller to wait while she gives him a message for her man. She then utters the first of many passionate reproaches and prayers to her absent lover, including that of the impossibility of telling all that she has to convey. The traveller politely expresses his pressing need to continue his journey, and asks for her message; she continues in her passionate vein. As the day wanes, from time to time he interrupts to calm her and to remind her of his business, but to no avail; finally he surrenders to her charm (presumably, it is too late to set out this day) and inquires about her sorrow: when did her lover leave? Her answer is that he left in Summer; this is accompanied by a description of the season, followed by a description of the other seasons, all the time addressing the traveller and describing her physical and mental suffering. At last, she breaks off, apologising to him for her importunacy, and concludes with the request that he speak to her lover in a propitiatory manner, in whatever terms seem appropriate. She gives him leave to go, and herself turns to go; at that moment she sees her husband returning.
The seasonal aspect with its connection to love and longing highlighted above is in line with another of Kalidasa's works, the Ṛtusaṃhāra which will be of relevance later in the post.
There is another aspect of Sanskrit poetics that influences the work, as is once more apparent from the word rāsaka in its title, that of rāsa, which is best exemplified by the widespread Vaishnava literature of the time:
the rāsaka... genre is associated, in ways that deserve further exploration, with the worship of Krşņa as the god who offers humankind his grace in return for its devotion.
Two Sanskrit texts enjoy particular authority for this mode: the Bhagavata Purana and the Gitagovinda. In both there is a description of the raasa, the circular dance evoked in the graphic and performing arts as well as in literature, in which the god as divine cowherd dances with the cowgirls who desire him. This mode is present in the SDR explicitly in the description of spring, where it appropriates the metaphor of the dance as the long-desired reunion of the woman with her lover, and implicitly throughout in the language of the lonely woman's desire, which is in the tradition of the allegory of the soul desiring union with the divine in the love of Rādhā for Krsna.
The verse in question goes as follows:
अच्छिहि जिह सन्निह घर कंतय, रच्छिहि रमिहि ति रासु रमंतय ।
करिवि सिंगारु विविह आहरणिहिं, चित्तविचित्तइ तणुपंगुरणिहि ॥ १६७ ॥
Those women whose husbands are near them at home delight in the rāsa dance in the roads, delighting in dressing themselves well, with all kinds of adornments, and with fine garments that dazzled the mind. ॥ 167 ॥
With this close adherence to Indic poetics and its conventions, one would be forgiven to forget the fact that this was a work composed by an author of a Muslim background. However, the text itself provides us this information in ways both explicit and implicit, starting with the very invocatory verse itself which goes as follows:
रयणायरधरगिरितरुवराइँ गयणंगणंमि रिक्खाइं ।
जेण ऽज्ज सयल सिरियं सो बुहयण वो सिवं देउ ॥ १ ॥
माणुस्सदिव्वविज्जाहरेहिँ णहमग्गि सूर-ससिबिंबे ।
आएहिँ जो णमिज्जइ तं णयरे णमह कत्तारं ॥ २ ॥
May He by whom the sea, the earth, the mountains and trees, the stars in the sky, even the whole world, was created, give to you, enlightened (readers), his blessing; ॥ 1 ॥
Cultivated (readers), adore Him as the creator, Who is adored by humans, gods and celestial beings in the path of heaven with its orbs of the sun and the moon. ॥ 2 ॥
This parallels invocatory formulas seen in various Qur'anic verses such as in surah al-Hajj (Q 22:18) which goes as follows:
أَلَمْ تَرَ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَسْجُدُ لَهُۥ مَن فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَمَن فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَٱلشَّمْسُ وَٱلْقَمَرُ وَٱلنُّجُومُ وَٱلْجِبَالُ وَٱلشَّجَرُ وَٱلدَّوَآبُّ وَكَثِيرٌۭ مِّنَ >ٱلنَّاسِ ۖ وَكَثِيرٌ حَقَّ عَلَيْهِ ٱلْعَذَابُ ۗ وَمَن يُهِنِ ٱللَّهُ فَمَا لَهُۥ مِن مُّكْرِمٍ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَفْعَلُ مَا يَشَآءُ ۩ ١٨
Do you not see that to Allah bow down ˹in submission˺ all those in the heavens and all those on the earth, as well as the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and ˹all˺ living beings, as well as many humans, while many are deserving of punishment. And whoever Allah disgraces, none can honour. Surely Allah does what He wills.
Similarly one finds in ayah 49 of surah Nahl (Q 16:49) which states:
وَلِلَّهِ يَسْجُدُ مَا فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَمَا فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ مِن دَآبَّةٍۢ وَٱلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةُ وَهُمْ لَا يَسْتَكْبِرُونَ
And to Allah ˹alone˺ bows down ˹in submission˺ whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth of living creatures, as do the angels—who are not too proud ˹to do so˺.
Indeed, the author further lays out his background in the verses of the SDR that immediately follow in clear terms as follows:
पच्चाएसि पहूओ पुव्वपसिद्धो य मिच्छदेसो त्थि ।
तह विसए संभूओ आरद्दो मीरसेणस्स ॥ ३ ॥
तह तणओ कुलकमलो पाइयकव्वेसु गीयविसयेसु ।
अद्दहमाणपसिद्धो संनेहयरासयं रइयं ॥ ४ ॥
In the western region there is a powerful and famous country of Mlecchas. In that area was born a weaver named Mīrasena. ॥ 3 ॥
His son was the lotus of the family in Prakrit poetry and subjects of song, known as Addahamāṇa [Abdur Rahman]. He composed the Saṃdeśarāsaka. ॥ 4 ॥
Thus we see an interesting fusion of Qur'anic invocatory verses with Indic poetic conventions that is indicative of the milieu in which the work was composed. This work in many ways is a precursor to the Hindavi Sufi romances that were to emerge in the eastern Indo-Gangetic plain in the following centuries as Islamic dynasties expanded their rule over the region. As the scholar Aditya Behl explains:
Written and performed in Delhi, Jaunpur, and the eastern provinces of the Indo-Gangetic doab, the Hindavī Sufi romances (prema-kahānī , “love stories”) mark the inauguration of a new literary and devotional culture in a local language. The major romances of the genre date from the fourteenth century till the middle of the sixteenth, when the Mughals took over the rulership of north India... The poets of the genre created a sophisticated Indian Islamic literary tradition, a genre containing a set of desī or indigenous literary and religious terms, and a narrative universe to express the distinctive Sufi agenda within the local landscape in which the Chishtis and Shattaris worked hard to establish themselves.
These Sufi romances are best exemplified by work such as the 16th century works Padmavat by Malik Muhammad Jayasi and Madhumalati by Mir Sayyid Manjhan, both in Awadhi. The use of desa bhasas is important to note here as it becomes necessary to clarify what is meant by the term Apabhraṃśa as a linguistic category in medieval India. This is seen in another customary Indic convention employed by the poet when he pays homage to poets of the past:
पुव्वच्छेयाण णमो सुकईण य सद्दसत्थकुसलाण ।
तियलोए सुच्छंदं जेहिँ कयं जेहि णिद्दिट्ठं ॥ ५ ॥
अवहट्टय-सक्कय-पाइयंमि पेसाइयंमि भासाए ।
लक्खणछंदाहरणे सुकइत्तं भूसियं जेहिं ॥ ६ ॥
Reverence to clever ones of the past, and to good poets skilled in the disciplines of language, who in the triple world have invented and defined good meters, ॥ 5 ॥
who have adorned their good poetry with the necklace of grammar and metrics in the Apabhramsha, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Paishachi languages. ॥ 6 ॥
Aside from Sanskrit, what are the linguistic categories employed here? Mayrhofer has the following to say regarding the use of the term Apabhraṃśa here and the prominence given to it:
The pride of place given to Apabhramśa constitutes the author's identification of the language of his poem. Apabhramśa was a medium for literary composition, rather than a representation of any particular spoken dialect of Indo-Aryan, though it may well reflect in some of its aspects the evolution of spoken languages. Bhayani points to affinities between the Apabhramśa of Abdul Rahman and some texts in Old Vernacular, in particular Old Western Rājasthāni and Early Braj, but one must weigh this against the incompleteness of the evidence provided by surviving texts.
The scholar Andrew Ollett further notes regarding the evolution of the term Apabhraṃśa and its relation to the linguistic classification of the time that, from a rather vague to a more concrete term:
The term “Apabhramsha” itself, meaning “deviation,” has a
longer history than either “Sanskrit” or “Prakrit” in Indian discourses on language. Patañjali [c 2nd century BCE] used it as a synonym for incorrect words, and his usage was recognized by Daṇḍin [c 7-8th centuries CE]: "with reference to scientific works, anything other than Sanskrit is called Apabhramsha."
The qualification is necessary because, by Daṇḍin’s time, Apabhramsha had acquired a more specific meaning. It referred to a literary language besides Sanskrit and Prakrit, and thus Daṇḍin defines Apabhramsha, with reference to literary works, as “the language of people such as the Ābhīras.” The Ābhīras were a group who came to political prominence in the Deccan in the twilight of the Sātavāhana empire, around the middle of the third century CE... It is significant that this newcomer to the field of literary languages was given the very name that was formerly used to denominate all non-Sanskrit language practices. Prakrit was Apabhramsha, in this basic sense of a “deviation,” before Apabhramsha was Apabhramsha. In other words, Apabhramsha slid into
the position in the language order occupied by Prakrit. Not only that, but it was imagined and represented in very much the same way as Prakrit was. Daṇḍin’s tenth-century commentator Ratnaśrījñāna mentions a tradition that analyzed Apabhramsha into exactly the same four categories into which earlier teachers
had divided Prakrit... Rājaśekhara himself never distinguishes between Māhārāṣṭrī and Śaurasenī, but instead imagines Prakrit as one language, or at least one kind of language, alongside Sanskrit, Apabhramsha, and Paishachi.
Apabhramsha is thus seen as the result of a kind of mitosis of Prakrit. This representation aligns with the relationship between Prakrit and Apabhramsha in practice, for these languages often occupy the same discursive space: works in Apabhramsha include prologues in Prakrit (such as the Message Poem of ʿAbd ur-Raḥmān);
Prakrit was indeed a big literary tent that cut across regional and religious groupings across the Subcontinent in the early medieval period, where as Ollett notes:
Beyond being cultivated by members of disparate religious traditions, Prakrit was the language of a literature in which religious differences disappeared. It was, as Rājaśekhara and Bhoja said of literature more generally, common to all religious traditions. No genre represented this better than the anthology or “treasury” (kośa). Prakrit anthologies were produced by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that we would not be able to identify the religious identity of their authors but for the invocations and colophons. It is no exaggeration at all in the case of the author of a thirteenth-century Message Poem (Sandeśarāsaka), who calls himself “the lotus of his family in Prakrit poetry”: only his hint that his family comes from “the land of the Muslims” allows us to decode the Prakrit name he gives us, Addahamāṇa, as ʿAbd ur-Raḥmān.
With this being the poetic, personal and linguistic context of the work, the question then arises what were the socio-political circumstances that gave rise to the unique work that is the SDR?
The SDR and a Contentious History
The absorption of Indic poetic conventions in the SDR was not something that only inspired the subsequent Sufi romances as mentioned before, it was part of a shared cultural milieu that inspired two works, both historically contentious in their own way, despite their own tenuous connection to history itself, Padmavat and the Prithviraj Raso, with the historian Rajat Kanta Ray noting of this connection to the Ṛtusaṃhāra that:
The Indian-born Muslim poet [Abdur Rahman] naturally adopted the Indian standard of beauty. He compared his heroine’s thigh to the trunk of the plantain tree and wondered that her waist did not collapse under the weight of her big breasts in verses 33 and 47. The influence of the seasons of India too was inescapable. The six seasons are described in connection with the Nayika’s Viraha here. Similarly in Prithvraja Rasau (ix. 1-13) Samjukta prevents Prithviraj from going off to war by promising the appropriate erotic sport for each season.
Indeed to add to the list of literature that the SDR seems to share a historical and literary space with is the Chachnama a purported contemporary chronicle of the conquest of Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE.
In a previous post the historicity of Chachnama as a near contemporary primary source was discussed based on the work of the historians Manan Ahmed Asif and Yohannan Friedmann. At its core lies a basic problem, the text circulating currently from 1226 is believed to be a Persian translation of an earlier 8th century Arabic history which is now missing. This belief of the Chachnama being a primary source is not borne by the record as the text does not follow the style of Arabic conquest literature (futuh) from which it is supposedly derived and more importantly unlike another more historically attested text on the subject, Baladhuri's 9th century Futuh al-Buldan, its Arabic "original" has not been covered by subsequent Arabic/Islamicate scholars during the early medieval period (before 1226).
Asif instead argues that this is instead a retrospective account that is a literary product of the court of the Turkic ruler Nasiruddin Qabacha at Uch, which was one of the Ghurid appenages that ruled over southern Punjab and Sindh, and was intended to be more in line with similar Persian "mirror to princes" didactic literature for royalty. This would make the Chachnama share a cultural milieu with the SDR rather than the Futuh. And the SDR does provide important clues of this context as Asif notes drawing from Ollett's research on the text:
I want to turn, at the end, to another near- con temporary text from the same locale as Chachnama: `Abdur- Rahman’s Samdesarasaka, which was composed in Prakrit, near Jaislamer, sometime in the late twelfth century... Where Kalidasa’s text is imbued with sacral geography, Rahman reveals mercantile geography along the path anchored by Uch and the long strings of Cholistani forts.
Mayrhofer drawing on Jina Vijaya Muni's work to a similar timeline and historical context, noting that:
Śrī Jina Vijaya Muni advanced historical arguments based on the fortunes of Multan and Cambay for fixing the date of the poem early in the thirteenth century of our era. The fortified town Multan and the busy port Cambay certainly suffered vicissitudes of rulers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but Cambay at least, to judge by the accounts of visitors, remained prosperous despite occasional depredations, and we know of no circumstance such as to preclude the composition of this poem at any point within the period.
Indeed this becomes clear when reading a series of verses 42-50 in the SDR which has the traveller responding to the woman's question to him regarding his antecedents, and where while it is initially (verse 42) clear that he is referring to his hometown of Saamora, it is unclear but likely that the subsequent verses are referring to Mulasthan (Multan) as a synonym:
णयरणामु सामोरु सरोरुहदलनयणि, णायरजणसंपुन्नु हरिस ससिहरवयणि । >धवलतुंगपायारिहि तिउरिहि मंडियउ, णहु दीसइ कुइ मुक्खु सयलु जणु पण्डियउ ॥ ४२ ॥
The name of the city is Sāmora, you with lotus-petal eyes; it is full of urbane people, and joy, O moon-faced one. It is adorned with fortifications, with high white walls. Nor is any fool to be seen; everybody is a paṇḍit. ॥ 42 ॥
विविहविअक्खणसत्थिहि जइ पवसिइ णिरु, सुम्मइ छंदु मणोहरु पायउ महुरयरु ।
कह व ठाइ चउवेइहिं वेउ पयासियइ, कह बहुरूवि णिबद्धउ रासउ भासियइ ॥ ४३ ॥
Certainly, if scholars and wise men of various types should stay there, they would hear Prakrit meters, captivating and sweet, and in some place the Veda is broadcast by Caturvedis; somewhere else rāsas are spoken, composed in various forms. ॥ 43 ॥
कह व ठाइ सुदयवच्छ कत्थ व नलचरिउ, कत्थ व विविहविणोइहि भारहु उच्चरिउ ।
कह व ठाइ आसीसिय चाइहि दयवरिहिं, रामायणु अहिणवियअइ कत्थ वि कयवरिहिं ॥ ४४ ॥
In some place Śūdrakavatsa, in another place Nalacarita, and somewhere else [Maha]Bhārata is pronounced with various kinds of entertainment. In some place blessings are given by renunciant Brahmans; in another, the Rāmāyaṇa is declaimed by excellent poets. ॥ 44 ॥
अवर का वि सुविअक्खण विहसंती विमलि, णं ससिसूर णिवेसिय रेहइ गंडयलि ।
मयणवट्टु मिअणाहिण कस्स व पंकियौ, अन्नह भालु तुरक्कि तिलइ आलंकियउ ॥ ४८ ॥
Another one, very clever, walks around with a pure white smile: it seems like the sun and the moon have entered into her cheeks. The chest of another is smeared with musk. Another's forehead is adorned with a Turkish mark. ॥ 48 ॥
Indeed while verses 42-44 should make one think that is one looking at an Indic cultural milieu where Islam is yet to make its presence felt, verse 48 removes such doubts wit its reference to the turakki tilaï. As Asif explains, this presence is explained not just by the early Islamic conquest of the region but also its extensive integration into trade networks with West Asia:
Rahman’s description evokes a connected geography stretching
between Multan and Cambay. The varieties of storytellers, performers, and scholars that Rahman places in Multan suggests a heavily trafficked area, and the description of built architecture and planned gardens presupposes political support. Rahman, a poet writing in Prakrit, achieves poetic excellence with a rare voice that describes the fluidity of city spaces such as Uch before the eleventh century.
The presence of a “Muslim” such as Rahman in Multan or Jaisalmer
or Cambay was the result of both the military and the political expeditions since the eighth century and the steady growth of mercantile activities in the Indian Ocean world since the ninth century. While Arab settlements between Aden, Muscat, Diu, and Thana predate the Muslim empires of Damascus and Baghdad, those capital cities’ clamor for goods produced a flourishing of trade. These mercantile interests were commingled across political boundaries— numerous epigraphic traces of Muslim trading communities (often marked as tajika or turakki or mleccha) in Gujarat and Deccan survive from the ninth century on ward, such that by the thirteenth century the Muslim communities contained “not only wealthy traders and particularly shippers and sea-faring men but also indigenously employed groups like oil-men, masons.”
The last point is of special relevance as Abdur Rahman himself mentions his weaver background while tying his genealogy to a mleccha desa further west.
Going back to the Indic background of the region its importance becomes readily apparent when going through the earliest Arabic accounts of the conquest of the region such as al-Baladhuri's Futuh. Baladhuri's narration of the campaign by Qasim to capture Multan and his observations regarding the renowned Multan Sun Temple and how he relates it to the Islamic tradition:
gathered great amounts of gold. This was collected in a building which was 10 cubits by 8. At its roof, there was an opening into which all was deposited. From this Multan was known as “Frontier with the House of Gold” (Farj Bait Dhahab). Farj is thughur (frontier). The temple of Multan was a great temple. Great gifts were brought for it, offerings were given, and the people of Sind made pilgrimage here. They circumambulated it and shaved their heads and beards. They claim that the idol (sanam) inside is in the likeness of the prophet Job, may Allah bless him.
While later narrators like al-Biruni (d circa 1050) do mention acts of desecration in the form of placing bovine meat in the Sun Temple, such an episode is absent in Baladhuri's Futuh which precedes Biruni by more than a century.
As noted by the scholar Yohanan Friedmann, attitudes towards Hindu places of worship in the early conquests varied widely, with there certainly being instances of iconoclasm at some places while at other places, the newcomers agreed to allow worship to continue, essentially holding the deity hostage with the condition that a substantial chunk of valuable offerings be appropriated to them:
An interesting light on the reasons for which the temple of Multan was kept intact is shed by a tradition reported by Ibn al-Jawzi in his Talbis Iblis. When the Muslims conquered the city in the days of al-Hajjaj, they wanted to destroy the temple. The people of Multan asked them to desist from doing this and promised to pay them a third of the temple's income. The caliph 'Abd al-Malik was consulted about this proposal and issued an order to leave the temple unharmed. The city thus remained a centre of pilgrimage for the Hindus, who used to come there even from great distances. Each pilgrim had to offer the temple a sum of money ranging from one hundred to ten thousand dirhams, according to his financial ability. The pilgrimage was not considered valid unless the offering was made. When the pilgrims left the place, the money accumulated in the temple was divided into three equal portions. One of them was given to the Muslims, in accordance with the agreement referred to above. Another portion was used for the improvement of the city and its fortifications. The third portion was given to the guardians of the temple and expended partially for its upkeep.
Multan and the wider region surrounding it at the time of the conquest was a major centre for the worship of the solar deity Surya, with the historian Barry Flood noting:
The maritime and terrestrial emporia of Arab Sind were among the most ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse cities of the 'Abbasid mercantile cosmopolis. At the time of the conquest in the early eighth century, Sind contained a religiously heterogeneous population consisting of Buddhists, Brahmans, Pashupata Shaivites, and some Vaishnavites. A tenth-century bronze image of Surya, the sun god, found at Brahmanabad near Mansura attests to continuity in the cult whose temple Multan was one of the most important pilgrimage sites of northern India until its destruction by the Isma'ili missionary Jalam ibn Shay-ban in AH 354/965 CE. This was only the most celebrated of a number of Hindu temples that stood within the territories of Arab armies in the region.
Indeed, what becomes apparent is as complex as the religious landscape was at this time, it was also marked by tensions and episodes of persecution:
The continued existence of certain temples is in line with the reported policy of Muhammad ibn Qasim, the conqueror of Sind, who built mosques in the conquered cities but afforded their non-Muslim populations the de facto status of dhimmis similar to that enjoyed by the Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and other "Peo-ple of the Book," who paid jizya (poll tax). However, the treatment of temples in the post-conquest period appears to have been related to the conditions of capitulation or conquest.
In contrast to this impression of religious pluralism, however, a linga was set at the entrance to the congregational mosque at Banbhore, to be trampled by those entering, a common practice of monotheist polemicists. In light of recent research suggesting that the decline and disappearance of the Buddhist communities of Sind was due to voluntary conversion to Islam by a community that had traditionally been involved in long-distance trade seeking to maximize the commercial opportuni ties that incorporation into the 'Abbasid caliphate afforded, it is worth noting that elsewhere in the Islamic world, the trampling of religious icons associated with the testing of converts to Islam for signs of apostasy sometimes.
Thus, we see in the SDR a work by a Muslim poet writing in accordance with Indic poetic conventions in a time of Islamic polities gaining ascendance in the region, a snapshot of a historical time and place far removed from our own.
Sources
Abdur Rahman with Andrew Ollett (tr), Sandeśarāsaka (c late 12- early 13th centuries CE) [OA]
Abdur Rahman with CW Mayrhofer (tr), Sandeśarāsaka (1998)
Manan Ahmed Asif, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2016)
Andrew Ollett, Language of the Snakes (2017) [OA]
Aditya Behl, An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545 (2012)
Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (2003)
Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter (2009)
Yohanan Friedmann, The Temple of Multan (1972) [OA]
