The Hindavi Sufi Romance

The cultural history of sultanate India is, in part, the history of the enthusiastic participation of Sufis and other Muslims in the formation of the canons of Indian poetry, art, and music. The genre of the Hindavi Sufi romance should be read against this larger background of cultural appropriations, co-minglings, and creative formulations. The Hindavi Sufi poets used Sanskrit rasa theory and the conventions of Persian poetry to create a mystical romantic genre centred around the various meanings of prema rasa, the juice or essence of love. While it is important to understand their poems as aesthetic and mystical creations, this genre can nevertheless be read for marks of historical process and seen as embodying a history of narrative motifs.
The Hindavi romantic ideal of desire and its transformation into Sufi love is set in a fantasy world of marvels and exotic locales, of supernatural helpers and agencies who aid the hero along his way. The poets of the Hindavi Sufi romances articulate their distinctive aesthetics of self transformation through the narrative, the unfolding of a story in a fantastic fictional universe. These narrative universes have four characteristic features. First, inspired by Persian verse narratives (mathnawis), they relate the story of a spiritual quest that proceeds through the deferment of desire and the enticement of the hero/reader further and further on the journey of self transformation. Second, the fictional universe is formulic and episodic, but the poet structures these formulic motifs using abstract characters or narrative options like the different kinds of love,or .. the relative values of asceticism and sensual pleasure. Third, they are not directly allegorical but suggestive of general Sufi values through the ordeals and experiences of the hero. Finally the narrative motifs that the poets use reveal a history of complex interactions between, on the one hand, Persian and Arabic storytelling, and on the other, Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other narrative traditions in the Islamic and pre-Islamic world of the Indian Ocean. - Aditya Behl in the Cultural History of Medieval India edited by Meenaskhi Khanna