The Last Cakravartin? The Gujarat Sultan as ‘Universal King’ in Fifteenth Century Sanskrit Poetry

Abstract

The fifteenth century was a period of significant transitions in South Asian history. This was a period when Delhi ceased to be at the centre of political action as newer regional kingdoms emerged all over the subcontinent. Their courts also became important sites of patronage from where a variety of regional traditions flourished and continued into the following early modern era. This article explores one such transitional process, the gradual shift in the expression of political power through courtly literature in a Sanskrit text about the Muslim sultan of Gujarat entitledRājavinodamahākāvyam. It is argued that this was one of the last remaining examples of Sanskrit production in which an Islamicate king could be represented as an Indic cakravartin or ‘universal king’. As the regional vernaculars developed and Brajbhasha emerged as the new cosmopolitan courtly language from the sixteenth century under the Mughals, new ideologies of kingship and corresponding literary idioms were introduced all over the subcontinent. This article suggests that the Rājavinodamahākāvyamcan be located at the intersection of two important literary traditions—the older Sanskrit tradition of aestheticised poetry that was established during the early medieval era and that of Brajbhasha, heralding the early modern.