A Mahabharata, the Mughals, and Manuscripts: Patronage and Sabal Singh Chauhan’s Mahabharata

In India today, the sixth Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) is frequently remembered as a devout but fanatical Muslim ruler who persecuted non-Muslims. Recently, however, several scholars of South Asian history have begun to seriously challenge this monolithic and inflexible representation of Aurangzeb. This paper builds on these recent studies by carefully analyzing a seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) retelling of the Mahabharata epic that repeatedly praises this Mughal emperor. Sabalsingh Chauhan’s Bhasha Mahabharat is an overtly Hindu bhakti or “devotional” poem that reframes the Mahabharata as the deeds of the popular Hindu deity Krishna. In the prologue of the sixteenth book of his Mahabharat, Chauhan describes himself performing his poem before a king named Mitrasen and Aurangzeb, in Delhi. He also praises Mitrasen in the prologue of the seventh book and Aurangzeb in the prologues of the sixth, eighth, ninth, and seventeenth books of the Bhasha Mahabharat. Through close readings of these different prologues, I will reveal how religious concerns and political concerns are deeply intertwined in this poem. This paper will also examine different manuscripts of Chauhan’s Mahabharat. The five separate references to Aurangzeb are found in all modern printed editions of the Bhasha Mahabharat as well as the majority of the manuscripts. In three manuscripts from 1758, 1836, and 1845, however, every single line with Aurangzeb’s name is missing. Yet the lines praising Mitrasen (a presumably Hindu king) are still found in these manuscripts. Taking into account other Bhasha accounts of Aurangzeb and the distinctly devotional content of the poem itself, I will demonstrate how the manuscripts of Chauhan’s Mahabharat create a mini-reception history of Aurangzeb in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North India.