Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the Chatraprakāś of Lal Kavi, a Braj text written shortly after Aurangzeb’s death. While centrally concerned with an insurgent Bundela king, a parsing of its layers of panegyric and political critique contributes new perspectives to the historiography of Aurangzeb’s reign.

Paper long abstract:

Our understanding of Mughal-period India derives overwhelmingly from the chronicles produced at the imperial center and accounts by Europeans. My paper contributes to the collective effort of bringing attention to new types of sources. In this paper I analyze the vignettes of Aurangzeb and his officials that are available in Lal Kavi's Chatraprakāś (Light on Chatrasal, c. 1710), a Brajbhasha historical poem commissioned by the insurgent Bundela ruler Chatrasal (1649-1731). Written shortly after Aurangzeb's death, the Chatraprakāś is in part a retrospective on Aurangzeb's reign and the poet finds much to take issue with. The work is a valuable source of regional history that gives voice to how the Mughal Empire was perceived from the periphery. In places, Lal Kavi engages in trenchant political critique, expressing the court's strong disillusionment with the Mughal manṣabdārī system as well as more local grievances. While by no means the dominant tone of the work, there are occasional hints of the court's outrage at Mughal offenses against what Lal Kavi explicitly terms "Hindu dharma." Certainly the work must also be approached as an example of Indic praśasti (literary panegyric). Parsing the Chatraprakāś as both poetry and history, I try to follow in Lal Kavi's footsteps by providing a regional perspective on late seventeenth-century Mughal politics.