This article is an attempt to identify history in an early modern text belonging to the Hindi literary tradition. The theoretical foundations that enable such a venture are to be found in the narrativist philosophy of history, since it afforded equal status to those discourses about the past which do not meet the narrow criteria of world-history. V. Rao, D. Shulman and S. Subrahmanyam, in their work on South India, proposed that an analysis of texture allows history to be identified in those compositions that do not belong to the Western tradition of historiography. It is worth verifying whether their method applies to other literary traditions of India. The same researchers undermined the legitimacy of talking about prose as the only possible way of writing history – by claiming that history is written in the dominant literary genre of a particular community, space and time. Their hypotheses are hereby confronted with passages from Bhūṣan’s Śivrājbhūṣaṇ (1673).
The present article is focused on the notion of dāna and its use in Śivrājbhūṣaṇ, a late 17th-century rītigranth composed by Bhūṣaṇ in the court of Śivājī Bhoṃsle, shortly before the coronation. The ruler had it composed in Braj, a vernacular that had already risen to the status of a transregional language. The poem, which used to be reduced by literary historians to a simple panegyric, belongs to South Asian early modern court literature, the authors of which were explicitly manifesting their fixture in Sanskrit literary tradition and simultaneously fulfilled complex political agendas. The royal patronage infused the poetry with political essence, but the literary conventions dictated the ways in which the political substance should be weaved into the poems. Basing on the textual analysis of Bhūṣaṇ’s work, I draw attention to the high frequency and various ways of use of the notion of dāna by the poet. This aims to prove that poetical representation of royal generosity embodied in various practices of dāna—liberally put to display—was one of the major tools of validating, vitalizing and bolstering royal authority.
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