Royal Rage in Rajputana: The Politics of Anger in Mughal India

This paper explores the issue of anger and kingship in precolonial India, drawing primarily on Dalpat Vilas, a warrior chronicle composed ca. 1600 in a regional language of western India.  In seeming contradiction to the many religious and medical texts in the cosmopolitan languages of Sanskrit and Persian which deplore the emotion of anger, Dalpat Vilas relates several incidents of rage leading to physical violence without overt disapproval.  Indeed, since the episodes of rage are restricted to the only royal figures in the chronicle, the implication is that public manifestations of anger are a prerogative of kings.  If so, we can point to a commonality between the emotional norms of the Hindu warrior clan who commissioned the text, the Rathors of Bikaner, and certain late medieval European dynasties who similarly deployed anger for political purposes. 

Although anger has been little studied in South Asian settings, Barbara Rosenwein's notion of emotional communities, also first developed in relation to late medieval Europe, may prove useful.  This is suggested by Dalpat Vilas's unusual interpretation of a famous incident involving the Mughal emperor Akbar in 1578.  In contrast to the Persian histories produced in the imperial context, which describe Akbar as having a mystical experience on this occasion, Dalpat Vilas casts it as an episode of rage.   Other instances of royal anger involve the king of the Bikaner Rathors and are directed at his recalcitrant kinsmen.  An analysis of anger in this vernacular chronicle thus highlights the dynamics of power relations among the important Hindu Rajput subordinates of the Mughal empire.