The Seventeenth Century Chronicles of Mārvāṛa: A Study in the Evolution and Use of Oral Traditions in Western India

Abstract

Having won the great battle, Rāo Tīido returned to Mahevā with great wealth in train. Upon arrival, he divided up the wealth and property. To the Cāraṇas and Bhāṭas he gave many cows, many female camels and buffalo. And there were noble songs [vaḍā gîta] and exalted poems [vaḍā kavita] recited of the glorious battle and the renowned victory.The poets are the chief, though not the sole, historians of Western India;… they speak in a peculiar tongue, which requires to be translated into the sober language of probability. To compensate for their magniloquence and obscurity, their pen is free: the despotism of the Rajpoot princes does not extend to the poet's lay, which flows unconfined except by the shackles of thechhund bhojunga, or “Serpentine stanza”…. On the other hand, there is a sort of compact or understanding between the bard and the prince, a barter of “solid pudding against empty praise,” whereby the fidelity of the poetic chronicle is somewhat impaired. The sale of “fame” as the bards term it, by the court-laureates and historiographers of Rajasthan, will continue until there shall arise in the community a class sufficiently enlightened and independent to look for no other recompense for literary labor than public distinction.Stretching across North-central India from Kāthiāvaṛa to Orissa lies a great geographical and cultural shatterbelt formed by the Vindhyan mountains and their associated tracts, an area traditionally characterized by high internal subdivision and political fragmentation. The northwestern extension of this belt comprises the frontier zone today known as Rājasthān (“the land of the Princes”). Strategically situated between the rich Gangetic plains of Hindustān to the northwest and the fertile regions of Mālvā and Gujarāt to the south and southwest, it forms an area of marginal agricultural importance whose historical significance lay primarily in its position as a key transitional zone between larger cultural centers, criss-crossed and intersected at a number of points by major caraven routes.