Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India

by Daud Ali

Overview

Representing the first full-length study of courtly culture in classical India, this book explores the growth of royal households and the development of a courtly worldview in the Gupta period (c. 350-750) and its aftermath. Using both literary sources and inscriptions up to 1200, the book establishes the organization, personnel and protocol of the royal household as the background for a sustained examination of courtly ethics, notions of beauty, and theories of erotic love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521816274
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/24/2004
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society , #10
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Daud Ali is a Lecturer in the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

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Cambridge University Press
0521816270 - Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India - by Daud Ali
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Introduction

In 1888, R. H. Farmer, the Government of India's political agent to the princely state of Pudukkottai in south India, declared that the palace of the newly installed king Martanda Tondaiman was to be extensively reformed. This task was assigned to the British-appointed diwān to the Pudukkotai court, A. Seshaia Sastri.¹ The diwān's most important task was to monitor palace expenditures and guard against the misappropriation of 'public funds' for domestic use by the young prince. Interestingly, Tondaiman's body, deemed obese, was a point of special concern and in 1890 he was removed from the palace to receive 'physical education' near the British military cantonment outside Trichinopoly. Along with this reform of the king's body and sumptuary, various members of the palace retinue, mostly brahmins but also a number of dancing girls who contributed to palace 'vice', were summarily dismissed for fiscal considerations. In the Inam Settlement of 1888 the remaining palace attendants' rights to enjoy the revenue of lands given by the king was substituted by a system of fixed wages, with the old iṉām holdings apportioned and deeded to the palace staff as private property subject to taxation.

Some twenty-three years later, Ganganatha Jha of Muir Central College in Allahabad edited an abridged version of the fifteenth-century manual for princes, the Puruṣaparīkṣā, for use in schools to replace the 'animal fables' (of the Hitopadeṣa and Pañcatantra) which were currently in use.² The Puruṣaparīkṣā, like the texts before it, was to provide young boys at school with an introduction to morals, but without the air of 'unreality' that pervaded the fables. According to one of the several study guides to the text published in subsequent years, the stories of the Puruṣaparīkṣā, or 'The Test of Man', were to 'serve as a good social and moral guide for the training of the young and go a great way in forming their moral character and making them live a life worth living'.³

These two events, I would like to suggest, represent the contradictory relationship that modernity in India, as elsewhere, has shared with some of its own political antecedents - a relationship which has acted as a perennial irritant in the understanding of pre-colonial India. On the one hand, there has been widespread condemnation. Accounts of the corpulent and decadent bodies of the ancien régime characterise the European critique of dynastic absolutism and feudalism as much as the British, and later nationalist, diatribe against the oriental prince. Liberal writers and statesmen of the nineteenth century looked forward to the transformation of the aggressive 'passions' of human life - lust, avarice and the desire for domination - into enlightened 'self-interest' to be pursued through the rational accumulation of wealth. Men would peacefully accrue wealth rather than appropriate war-trophies and women. In Europe, this vision entailed a systematic attack and destruction of the old order, the ideology and practices of the feudal and absolutist classes. In India, it entailed the subjugation of the social order in the name of liberating it from itself. The British political agent's concern over the king's 'home life' in Pudukkottai - his body and manners - was a concern over what might be termed 'the habits of despotism'. The king's body, corrupted by the old order, was to be reshaped to reflect new-found principles of government based on fiscal thrift and public welfare. He was to lose the excess of the past and discipline his appetites. In India, such transformations, part of what one scholar has aptly called the 'colonisation of the political order',⁴ relied heavily on particular representations of past Hindu and Muslim kingdoms. Indeed, the various theories of traditional Indian government served the ends of the emerging colonial state in its dismantlement and reconstitution of the political.⁵ Throughout the nineteenth century, the bourgeois concepts of 'state' and 'civil society' were repeatedly counterposed to the pomp and despotism of Indian potentates and the choking hold of the caste system. The 'state' in ancient India was a particularly debased form of monarchy, one steeped in sensuality and imagination. But because of its isolation from 'society', rigidly enthralled by the religious sanction of caste, it was at the same time powerless and irrelevant.

Yet the fate of the practices which sustained the ancien régimes of late pre-colonial India, both provincial and imperial, were hardly sealed, for they were subject to both wide scale relocation and ideological recuperation. Even as the colonial state sought to reform and re-educate India's 'princes', it also integrated them into its own imperial durbars and splendorous pageantry. These incorporations continued with the rise of nationalism (though India's loyalist princes were consigned to all that was corrupt in the past!). History once again played an important role in ideological transformation, with nationalists defending the critique of Indian despotism and attempting to find the lineages of their own modernity in ancient village republics, benign welfare states and glorious Hindu kingdoms. These visions are perhaps best captured in the Indian state's later adoption of the Aśokan lion-capital as its national emblem, a 'symbol' that was properly ideological, having no organic relationship with the practices of governance and language of state which it so nicely crowned, as symbol of secular unity. At one level, India is hardly unique in this matter, for most modern states have deployed symbols of the past in similarly anachronistic ways.

Yet there is a vast, complex and problematic history here which remains largely unwritten. For perhaps more important than these ideological postures was the gradual 'relocation' of numerous forms (manners, modes of dress, literary cultures, etc.) grounded in practices of polity, both imperial and provincial (and only partly embodied in the princely states the British chose to patronise), to the newly emerging realm of 'civil society' - that is, beyond the borders of the newly christened colonial and post-colonial state apparatus. This process entailed not so much a wholesale movement of practices as their increasing recontextualisation in a world where the political was ostensibly located elsewhere - within the Indo-Saracenic sandstone of the Indian parliament.

This is in fact the process of modernity everywhere, where elements of pre-modern political life survive as apparently depoliticised aspects of 'civil society' and 'national culture', where manuals for princes like the Puruṣaparīkṣā become character-building exercises for the nation's youth. Yet what of everyday forms of life beyond the designs of the state's civil authority, forms of practice whose political connotations were now silent? If in some cases these constituted 'social problems' in need of eradication, in others they have formed the ostensible basis of 'social ethics' among various classes and communities in everyday life. The recent and rather misplaced claims for an indigenous Indian 'modernity' notwithstanding, the problem which faces historians in charting the history and evolution of these practices is complex, for while it may be argued that in Europe the evolution of the bourgeois world occurred in open (often antagonistic) dialogue (i.e. dialogic process) with the aristocratic cultures it displaced, and thus were in some sense 'organic', the colonial context prevents any simple application of such a model to India. To put it crudely, while it may be argued that in Europe 'civil society' and 'public life' were complex (and often antagonistic) reworkings of the practices and concepts of civilité, courtoise and le monde, in India, political modernity everywhere has had a more fitful and divided existence. It is an implicit presumption of this book that in order to comprehend this history in more complex and convincing paradigms than either the 'imposition' of Western modernity onto India or the rediscovery of an 'indigenous modernity', it is first necessary to explore critically the evolution of these practices outside the paradigms which have been made for them by those who seek to escape or return to some putative past. This work hopes to make a modest contribution to such a larger project.

The court in early India: approaches

This book is about early Indian courts and the activities that transpired at them. It approaches the court from a broadly conceived 'social history' perspective. That is, it seeks to understand early Indian courts first and foremost as societies, coherent social formations composed of individuals whose relationships were governed by particular codes of behaviour and modes of thought. Its primary concern will be with courtly culture - and in particular the emphasis in courtly sources on beauty, refinement and love. It will place these themes, however, within the context of the court as a social institution, focusing on its organisation and structure, protocol and the relational dynamics of its members. Ultimately, this approach hopes to add something to our knowledge of both the sociology of early Indian courts as well as their impressive cultural achievements.

The dynamics of courtly life in India have held remarkably little interest for scholars of Indian history and literature and, barring a handful of important articles on early medieval and Mughal courts, there is very little secondary literature on the subject.⁶ This is not, however, because of any dearth of source materials. In fact, the source materials on which this book will be based is for the most part well known, having been the ballast of historical, literary and religious scholarship on early India for the last one hundred years. The contribution this study hopes to make, then, is at some level perspectival. In traversing familiar territory through new paths of analysis, this book will parse the evidentiary terrain in different ways and, hopefully, reveal new vistas. It will juxtapose materials which have often been read disparately in order to present a courtly 'world' which is coherent in its own terms.

One region of the current landscape which must be remapped is what we know as 'kingship'. Ancient Indian kingship has been a perennial topic in Indological study. The dominant approaches in recent times have seen the Indian king as a problematically sacred or 'dharmic' figure, locked in eternal struggle with and ideological dependence on, his priestly companion, the brahmin. Such theories of ritual or religious kingship have no doubt advanced our knowledge, particularly with regard to the cosmological and religious dimensions of royal ideology. Yet they have, even from these perspectives, rarely if ever treated the immediate world of either the king or those around him (other than priests) as a topic worthy of study, despite the fact that these are precisely the concerns of the manuals on polity which formed the most important knowledge the king was to acquire.

This book will to a large extent, then, de-emphasise the figure of the king as an embodiment of 'kingship'. It will suggest that greater attention to the court itself as an arena of activity and knowledge will shed fresh light on the ruling classes as a whole in early India. In a sense, such a turn should be obvious, as kings in early India were manifestly complex agents; their coronations, routines, edicts, counsel and pleasures being regularly attended by large numbers of ministrants and companions, whose own agendas and commitments were only partly lived through those of the king. Of course it is not possible to ignore the king altogether, for as the central 'organ' of the kingdom, he remains an unavoidable figure in the study of monarchical political forms in early India. The focus in this book, however, will mainly be on the royal household, the culture and dynamics of which were relevant not only to the king, but to a whole class of élites of which the king was only a part, and from whose ranks he often rose.

A more formidable realm of scholarship which will remain largely unaddressed in this study is the historiography of 'state formation' in early India. This may seem peculiar to those who would assume that a book about early Indian courts should be concerned first and foremost with the procedures and functions of the state. To some extent such a sentiment is justified, but the existing historiography of state formation in early India, as elsewhere, has tended to approach the evidence with an overly substantialist notion of the state as an abstract thing. These models generally view the state as a sort of administrative or bureaucratic polity suspended above a 'society' composed of castes. The major debates in this historiography until very recently have revolved around the relative centralisation or decentralisation and administrative structure of the state. These debates have been useful and important. But they often presume a sort of almost self-evident bureaucratic rationality as the framework of the medieval state. The actual 'activities' of the court, beyond revenue collection and warfare, have, when treated at all, been comfortably glossed, using theories of dharmic kingship, as the 'legitimation' of authority. While this approach has some merits, for the sort of study undertaken here, its overweening faith in a putative bureaucratic or administrative rationality as the 'glue' holding together the organisation of the state itself has been, to my mind, detrimental to coming to terms with the sources themselves. To use the words of Pierre Bourdieu, in trying to 'think the state' this historiography has been 'taken over by the thought of the state'.⁷ Since the administrative apparatus of states have a sort of self-evident logic which holds them together, the preoccupations of the court can do little more than sprinkle coloured powder on otherwise 'functional' furniture.

The approach here, drawing on the work of Ronald Inden and others, will conceive of the 'state' as existing more relevantly in the specific activities and ideas of the individual men who composed it rather than any self-evident functional structure. It was the activities of the king's court, composed of dependents and retainers, and attended by underlords and vassals, which constituted 'government' rather than a putative 'administration'.⁸ This means relinquishing the idea of the king's court as a sort of 'symbol of authority' representing the actuality of the 'state'. The activities of the court in an important sense were the activities of the state. The men and the activities which constituted the state, to be sure, extended far beyond the royal household to the revenue collectors and local lords who may have rarely appeared at the king's assembly. The relevant point, however, is that the royal court stood at the apex of this circle not as a symbol but a superordinate set of human relationships. The approach here thus views the court as a complex agency of rule which continually re-articulated itself in response to diverse relations both within and beyond it. Its focus will be on mental and practical concerns of people of the court within the dynamics of the imperial household as a set of relationships.

Judging from the sources, these concerns were strikingly procedural, aesthetic and even ethical in nature. The people of the court were preoccupied with questions of style and protocol. The largely indifferent attitude toward such concerns in the historiography of early India is at variance with other historiographical traditions (on Europe and elsewhere), which have produced rich and diverse interpretations of courtly societies and cultures.⁹ While important evidentiary differences preclude any wholesale application to Indian materials, such scholarship on the whole suggests two broad points relevant to this study.¹⁰ First, and perhaps most obviously, the cultural achievements of courtly societies may be most effectively understood with specific reference to the functioning and dynamics of these societies themselves. As we shall see, barring a few recent studies, the overwhelming approach to courtly culture in India has been rampantly formalist or blandly reductive in approach, so much so that the courtly basis of much of the literature that has come down to us from early India is almost entirely obfuscated by the secondary scholarship. Second, courtly societies developed peculiar and pronounced, yet coherent, forms of 'sociability' which, as much as they attracted comment and even censure from both contemporary critics and later reformers, are worthy of study for social historians. These norms of behaviour formed important 'socialising' or 'integrating' mechanisms for the ruling classes of medieval society. They also, viewed from a macro-historical perspective, were key and indeed formative 'moments' in the evolution of wider conceptions of individual and social being. In Europe, later notions of civility and morality often grew up in explicit dialogue with courtly precedents.

Concerns around courtly sociability have recently been raised by historians writing on the 'history of manners', inspired at least in part by the eminent scholars Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault.¹¹ Elias emphasised that the behaviours of men and women at court had to be understood with reference to the specific conditions of life there - chiefly, the fact that the court was nothing other than the extended household of the king. Here the courtier's most intimate life and his 'career' were confined to a single field of operation. Appearance, outward bearing and manners, considered mere 'externals' in bourgeois society, were the means through which the people of the court secured their livelihoods. From this perspective, the courtier's preoccupation with appearance and good form was not an intrinsic superficiality, as its bourgeois critics assumed it to be, but was rational behaviour suited to a particular social environment.¹² It is only when these practices were delinked from their social moorings, when professional opportunities were freed from the yoke of feudal and courtly hierarchies, that such social accoutrements took on a potentially 'superficial', or 'hollow', aspect.¹³

Elias connected the behaviours of the courtly elite to wider processes of social transformation. He placed the habits of feudal, absolutist and bourgeois societies in Europe on a continuum which saw an increasingly internalised restraint of human drives, social detachment and individuation - key elements of what the West had defined as 'civilisation'.¹⁴ Methodologically, Elias' key formulation was that each type of society, or 'social figuration' as a network of interdependent individuals, generated a particular set of manners, psychic structures and intersubjective relations which were appropriate to it. This approach allowed historians to see many aspects of courtly life (and other societies), from attitudes to bodily functions to the nature of intersubjective relations, within an historical frame - rather than through vague and psychologising explanations which treated such features as consubstantial with human nature itself.¹⁵ Whatever disagreements scholars have had with Elias' method, this contribution alone, as simple as it sounds, has made his work a landmark in the study of courtly life and manners.

Michel Foucault's contribution to the study of manners has been less direct, partly because he never took up the topic directly, and partly because his approach is less assimilable to normative historical and sociological inquiry.¹⁶ In his uncompleted History of Sexuality, Foucault began to develop his ideas about pre-bourgeois forms of discipline in the West.¹⁷ In the first volume of this history Foucault posed the question of how modern individuals came to recognise themselves as the possessors of 'sexuality'. His answer, now famous, was that medical, legal and juridical institutions and knowledges did not so much 'discover' or 'bear down' upon human sexuality, but instead 'implanted' it as a natural and legitimate domain of being human. In retracing the antecedents of this dispensation, Foucault concluded that it would not suffice to follow the threads of pre-bourgeois notions of 'flesh' and 'desire' which sexuality itself had tried to lay claim to. Instead, it was necessary to begin with the larger ethical frameworks in which sex had always been placed - not merely around interdictions regarding sex itself, but its place in a larger sense of how individuals should constitute relations with themselves and others. Foucault argued that the male citizen in antiquity considered his ability to subject himself to techniques of self-discipline (not only with regard to sex but a host of other aspects of his life) as a mark of personal beauty and freedom which set him above his social inferiors. Courtly manners in this sense would probably have gained their significance as specific forms of ethical practice - and their capacity to produce a certain type of ethical 'subject'.¹⁸

Whatever their differences (and they are considerable), both Elias and Foucault have played influential roles in resisting the common liberal and humanist trivialisations of pre-bourgeois manners in the name of producing a rational 'enlightened' ethics.¹⁹ According to perhaps the chief spokesman of this ethics, Immanuel Kant, the superficiality of manners hinged on their lack of inward self-determination and control: 'affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy and ingratiating and captivating behaviour . . . call of no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues'.²⁰ Kant's outline of a rationally determined and universal moral imperative was a defining moment in a general trend which has viewed ethical activity as an essentially 'inner mental' and almost monologic form of ratiocination. This relocation of 'authentic' ethics from the more 'public' and socially mediated contexts it had occupied in pre-Enlightenment society to the 'inner world' of modern man, occurred at the same time as the rise of the new ideas of the public good based on the wholly different principles of utilitarianism. The interiorisation of ethics, in other words, was complemented by the rise of the modern notion of society where men would rationally pursue their enlightened 'self interest'.²¹ And it is this dual movement which has made it so difficult to sensitively reconstruct practices like courtly manners in both India and Europe. In India, the reform of the oriental despot entailed the re-education of the prince in the new values of modern society, in ideas of 'public good' and fiscal thrift. It also entailed the trivialisation (through the discourse on oriental pomp and decadence) and partial relocation and diminishment of a wide variety of socially mediated ethical practices.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. The Rise and Structure of Courtly Life in Early Medieval India: 1. The people of the court; 2. The culture of the court; 3. The protocol of the court; Part II. Aesthetics and the Courtly Sensibility: 4. Beauty and refinement; 5. The education of disposition; Part III. Anxiety and Romance: 6. Courtship and the royal household; 7. The battle of love; Postscript.

Editorial Reviews

"...this book is necessary reading for cultural historians and graduate students of South Asia." - Michael Linderman, University of Pennsylvania

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