Persianate Malabar: Muhammad Shah’s Takiyya and the composition of an Arabi-Malayalam Sufi romance-mathnawī in Southern India

This study proposes a framework for understanding Sufi romance literature, the Badrulmunīr ḥusnuljamāl (The Tale of Badr ul-Munīr and Ḥusn ul-Jamāl, referred to as BMHJ) from the context of its circulation in early modern Malabar. The composition and reception of this romance marks a watershed moment in the literary history of Malabar as it holds the status of being the first Muslim romance written in the literary register of Arabi-Malayalam (we use the term Arabi-Malayalam to denote the distinct literary register that developed by the early modern literati in Tamil Nadu and Malabar. We are not using the above nomenclatures to invoke the usage of the Arabic scripts employed to write down their literary registers). There have been few scholarly attempts to locate the text in the wider context of the circulation of Persianate literature in Southern India in the last century of Persian in South Asia. The scholarly investigations to locate the ‘authentic’ Persian/Persianate original of BMHJ have often ended at Mīr Ḥasan’s Siḥr ul-bayān (The Sorcery of Expression), an Urdu mathnawī composed during the late eighteenth century. This study, for the first time, identifies BMHJ’s thematic and ideological affinity with the wider genre of Hindavi Sufi romance literature that was composed and canonized between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries in Hindustan (North India). To historicize the production of BMHJ as a Persianate Sufi romance-mathnawī garbed in Arabi-Malayalam poetics, this article reconstructs the circulatory regime of Persianate literature in Malabar at the takiyya (Sufi lodge) of Khwāja Muḥammad Shāh (d. 1767) in Koṇṭōṭṭi. We argue that the composition of BMHJ was a conscious effort from the takiyya to spread the Qādirī-Chishtī ṭarīqa (Sufi order) in Malabar through the popularization of Sufi romance literature at a particular historical moment of ṭarīqa contestation.