Beyond the Sultan's Court: How Regional Languages Told Their Own History

India's medieval past wasn't written in just one language — or from just one point of view

Painting depicting the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad

The "Official" Story — and Why It's Not the Whole Story

When we study the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) in textbooks, most of what we read comes from Persian court chronicles — histories written by scholars like Minhaj-i-Siraj and Ziauddin Barani. These were the "insiders": court-employed writers who recorded wars, conquests, and royal decisions from the sultan's point of view.

Alongside Persian, Sanskrit was still used by Hindu royal courts for genealogies, land grants, temple records,  literature and the mainstay in Brahmanical rituals  — a tradition of "high" courtly writing stretching hundreds of years back. 

But here's the question; what if we only ever heard history from the top? What about the farmer, women, the soldier, the weaver, the devotee singing at a temple, and ordinary people in general? For that, we need a different set of sources — ones written not in the language of the court, but in the languages people actually spoke at home.

The term Vernacular refers to the everyday, regional language of a place (like Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, or Telugu), as opposed to a "prestige" language used mainly by elites like Persian or Sanskrit).

An Explosion of Local Writing

Between roughly 1200 and 1600 CE, regional languages across the subcontinent — Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Kannada, and Dakhani — produced a huge and varied body of literature. Historians value these sources because they capture things court chronicles usually ignore: local memory and experience, regional landscapes, and popular religious and cultural traditions.

This wasn't one uniform genre — it took many forms. Across the subcontinent, diverse literary forms preserved local memories, histories, heroic traditions, devotional ideas, Sufi teachings, and everyday experiences, giving regional communities their own voices and perspectives.

Remembering Conquest: Heroic Epics and Regional Chronicles

Painting of Prithviraj Chauhan hunting a tiger, with Chand Bardai beside him

When regional medieval kingdoms faced defeat or political upheaval, communities often processed the shock through heroic epic poetry.

• In North India, the Prithviraj Raso (in Braj Bhasha) retells the defeat of King Prithviraj Chauhan by Muhammad Ghuri in 1192 CE — turning a military loss into a story of heroic honour.

• In the Telugu and Kannada regions of the Deccan, similar heroic memory-narratives developed that turned the fall of local kingdoms into founding legends. Ekamranatha's 16th-century Telugu text, the Prataparudra Charitramu, dramatized the fall of Warangal to Malik Kafur and Ulugh Khan (Muhammad bin Tughlaq) as a tragic rupture in local order. In Kannada, the Kumara-Ramana-charita recorded the 1327–28 CE fall of the Kampili kingdom, linking its resistance to figures Harihara and Bukka, thereby preserving the founding memory of the Vijayanagara Empire as a polity born out of regional defense.

In Maharashtra, much later, between the 17th and 19th centuries, the Bakhars—more than two hundred prose historical narratives—offered a retrospective regional perspective on earlier events, including northern Sultanate interventions in the Deccan such as those of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. Larger Bakhars were composed to recount the history of the Maratha state and its rulers, including the Maratha Empire’s relations with the Mughals, particularly during the reign of Aurangzeb. These narratives also reflect the longstanding involvement of Maratha families in the political and administrative structures of the Muslim-ruled Deccan Sultanates, particularly Ahmadnagar and Bijapur. For generations, members of these families served as military commanders, revenue officials, and high-ranking nobles, and the Bakhars frequently acknowledge these courtly relationships, diplomatic interactions, and administrative alliances.

The Marathi Bakhars were primarily produced by Maratha state officials, royal scribes (chitnis or chitnavis), accountants (deshkulkarni), and senior bureaucrats, often at the behest of Maratha rulers. They were written to record royal biographies (charitras), preserve accounts of political events, and establish or reinforce the legitimacy of ruling houses. Their narratives cover rulers, wars, political developments, administrative affairs, and the histories of prominent families. Although composed retrospectively and shaped by the political contexts in which they were produced, the Bakhars provide valuable regional perspectives for understanding the later Sultanate period and the political and social networks that connected the Deccan Sultanates with the emerging Maratha state.

Chronicles from the Frontier: Tripura and Assam

Far from Delhi, in the easternmost frontiers regional kingdoms kept their own detailed written histories:

• Tripura's Rajamala (compiled ~1407 CE) traces 185 rulers of the Tripura dynasty, recording everything from ancient religious rites to diplomacy and conflict with the Bengal Sultanate. Originally preserved orally by the Chantai (royal priests) in the Tripuri language and recorded in Sanskrit as the Rajratnakaram, it was compiled into Bengali verse under King Dharma Manikya by court scholars Banneswar and Sukreswar. It's one of the oldest works of Bengali verse literature.

• Assam's Buranjis were secular administrative chronicles kept by the Ahom kingdom (founded 1228 CE). Originally written in the Tai-Ahom language, they later shifted to Assamese — recording revenues, borders, and diplomacy for centuries. The Ahom kingdom was never directly ruled by Delhi. However, the Buranjis reflect Delhi’s changing political power from a distance. As Bengal broke away from Delhi and emerged as an independent power, the Buranjis recorded the Ahoms’ early conflicts and negotiations with Bengal, followed later by their encounters with the Mughals.

These show that "Indian history" wasn't only unfolding around Delhi — powerful, literate kingdoms on the eastern frontier were writing their own histories 

Not Everything Was a Reaction to Conquest

It is tempting to view all vernacular literature as a response or reaction to Muslim rule during the pre-Mughal Sultanate period. Yet much of this literature had little to do with conquest or political change. It reflected the myriad artistic, literary, and spiritual traditions, giving voice to the concerns, predicaments, and preferences that captured people's imagination across different regions of the period.

Krishnadevaraya, the Vijayanagara emperor, wrote the Amuktamalyada in Telugu — a masterpiece about a Tamil saint named Andal's divine marriage with Lord Ranganatha (Ranganayaka), a form of Lord Vishnu, not about war. He chose Telugu not out of defiance, but because he wanted a grand, "imperial" language to match Sanskrit.

In Assam, the poet Madhava Kandali translated the Ramayana into Assamese in the 14th century under the patronage of the Kachari king Mahamanikya. His work formed part of a broader vernacular literary tradition across India in which Sanskrit religious epics were translated, adapted, and reimagined in regional languages. Similar examples include Krittibas Ojha’s Bengali Ramayana, Tulsidas’s Awadhi Ramcharitmanas, and Kamban’s Tamil Ramavataram among others.

Local languages were not merely a shield against outsiders; they were vibrant and creative artistic traditions in their own right. They freely adapted the great Hindu epics composed in Sanskrit, translating and reimagining them in regional languages, infusing them with distinctive regional forms and cultural sensibilities, and making them accessible to audiences beyond the literary elite.

When Medieval Saints Spoke the People's Language

An illustrated manuscript page of the Bhagavata Purana from Dakhinpat Sattra, written in Early Assamese

Perhaps the most powerful examples of vernacularization can be found in the religious traditions of the period, particularly in the teachings and practices of the Sufi saints and Bhakti saints across India.

The Bhakti movement expanded religious expression through regional languages, making devotional ideas accessible beyond Sanskrit-literate groups. 

• Tamil Alvars: Between the 6th and 10th centuries, the Alvars—Tamil poet-saints deeply devoted to Lord Vishnu, including Andal—composed devotional hymns in Tamil. These hymns were later compiled into the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, known as the “Tamil Veda,” which became an important Tamil counterpart to the Sanskrit Vaishnava scriptures.

• Sankaradeva and Chaitanya: Srimanta Sankaradeva promoted Ekasarana Vaishnavism in Assam through Assamese and Brajavali, using naam ghars, satras, and naam kirtan for collective devotion. In Bengal, Chaitanya popularized Krishna devotion through public kirtan, with Bengali used for popular expression and Brajabuli for Radha-Krishna lyrics.

• Kabir, Mirabai, and Surdas: Kabir used Sant Bhasha, a mixture of North Indian vernaculars, to express mystical ideas through everyday metaphors and paradoxes. His verses were later preserved in the Bijak, Kabir Granthavali, and Guru Granth Sahib. Mirabai composed Krishna-devotional bhajans in Rajasthani and Braj, while Surdas contributed to the literary prominence of Braj Bhasha through the Sursagar.

Princess Padmavati, ca. 1765, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Sufi traditions similarly used regional languages, music, folk genres, and local narratives alongside Persian and Arabic to communicate mystical ideas

• Chishti Sufis and Hindavi: Chishti khanqahs (hospices) became centres of interaction with local communities. Figures such as Moinuddin Chishti, Baba Farid, and Nizamuddin Auliya are associated with vernacular communication, particularly Hindavi. Baba Farid’s Punjabi verses were later included in the Guru Granth Sahib- the holy book of the Sikhs. 

• Amir Khusrau: A disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, Amir Khusrau was a prolific writer in Persian and Hindavi. His Persian works, including Khaza’in-ul-Futuh and Tughlaq Nama, provide accounts of the political history of the Delhi Sultanate, particularly the reigns of Alauddin Khalji and Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq. He also composed the multilingual Khalik Bari, associated with Persian and Hindavi vocabulary. He referred to himself as a “Hindustani Turk” and was famously known as “Tuti-e-Hind” (Parrot of India). He also contributed to Indo-Persian musical traditions and is traditionally associated with the development of qawwali, combining Persian and Indian linguistic and musical elements.

• Awadhi Sufi Premakhyans: Sufi poets adapted local romances to express spiritual themes. Maulana Daud’s Chandayan (1379) used the Lorik-Chanda story to convey spiritual longing, while Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat (1540) employed the story of Padmavati and her husband Ratansen as a Sufi allegory of the spiritual quest.

• Dakhani Sufi Songs: In the Deccan, Sufi poets used Dakhani a variety of Hindustani in songs connected with everyday activities, including Charkhanama (spinning), Chakki-nama (grinding grain), Lurinama (lullabies), and Shadinama (wedding songs). These compositions connected Sufi devotion with local household practices and regional traditions such as Kannada vachanas and Marathi abhangs.

Both Bhakti and Sufi traditions used vernacular languages, music, oral performance, folk narratives, and community spaces to circulate devotional ideas. Regional languages such as Tamil, Assamese, Bengali, Awadhi, Braj, Punjabi, Hindavi, and Dakhani developed alongside Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic as important mediums of this religious expression.

What Ties These Traditions Together

Mu'in al-din Chisti and other Sufi saints in gathering. (Murshidabad, West Bengal, North-Eastern India, ca. 1780 - 1800). Chiswick Auctions: Lot 305

Across all this variety — heroic epics, frontier chronicles, devotional retellings, Sufi romance — a few shared traits keep resurfacing, and they tell us something about how vernacular literature actually worked.

First, creative retelling over literal translation: when vernacular writers drew on Sanskrit sources, they rarely translated verbatim. The Assamese Saptakanda Ramayana, attributed to the court poet Kandali, freely reorganizes, abridges, and reimagines the Ramayana narrative tradition of Valmiki rather than rendering it line by line — the source is a starting point, not a script to be followed. As A.K. Ramanujan and scholars such as Paula Richman have argued, the hundreds of Rama narratives found across India, Southeast Asia, and beyond are not "divergences" or imperfect copies of one authoritative original; each telling is complete and meaningful in its own right, true to the concerns of the tradition that produced it.

Second, collaborative, multi-generational authorship: unlike the fixed Sanskrit canon, many vernacular texts were left unfinished and completed by later hands — Kandali's missing cantos were supplied a century later by Madhavdev and Sankaradeva. Authorship here is often a relay, not a single voice, but multi-author textual traditions assembled across generations. The Bhakti tradition shows an even more radical version of this pattern, since many of its central figures never wrote at all. Kabir is said to have touched neither paper nor pen; his verses survived as spoken and sung compositions, gathered into manuscript form only fifty to a hundred years after his death by different religious communities. Generations of anonymous poet-singers composed new verses under a saint's name such as Kabir or Surdas as a shared devotional signature rather than a claim of individual authorship.

Third, chronological displacement: many of these sources were composed long after the events they describe — the Bakhars, written in the 17th–19th centuries, look back on 13th–14th-century events. What we're reading, in cases like this, is later memory rather than eyewitness record — which doesn't make these sources less valuable, just differently valuable.

Comparing the Two Kinds of History

	Persian Court Chronicles	Vernacular Sources
Viewpoint	Imperial centres, court cities	Regional landscapes, local communities
Focus	Kings, wars, administration	Ordinary life, memory, devotion
Purpose	Legitimize the ruler's authority	Often question or reframe that authority
Form	Prose annals, official histories	Epics, chronicles, songs, poetry, folk verse

A Word of Caution

When using vernacular histories to understand the Delhi Sultanate period, several methodological issues must be kept in mind. These sources carried their own cultural and ideological biases — often idealizing certain groups or figures to serve contemporary state-building goals. Many texts were composed long after the events they describe. Maratha bakhars written in the 18th century about 14th-century events reflect later political ideologies rather than contemporary 14th-century experiences. Works like the Prithviraj Raso or early sections of the Rajamala blend documentable history with myths and legends- though this legendary quality is itself historically significant, since it reveals how communities in the medieval period  processed and remembered traumatic political change.

Why Vernacular Voices Matter in History

Guru Nanak seated with Sant Kabir and Bhai Mardana playing the rabab, from the Janamsakhi, painted by Alam Chand Raj, 1733

Vernacular histories and literatures do not replace written sources such as Persian court chronicles; rather, they complement and sometimes complicate them, offering a fuller understanding of medieval South Asia. While Persian and Sanskrit records illuminate aspects of imperial administration, court politics, and land grants, vernacular sources reveal how political transformations were experienced, interpreted, and remembered beyond the imperial centre. They bring the perspectives of non-elite groups into view, offering insights into regional experiences of political change, the persistence of cultural identities, and the ways communities responded to and negotiated periods of transformation.

Vernacular production during the Sultanate period was therefore far more than a series of reactions to conquest. It encompassed Rajput epics, Maratha and Deccan memory-chronicles that preserved memories of both conflict and alliance, Vijayanagara statecraft poetry, frontier dynastic annals from Tripura and Assam, Vaishnava epic retellings, Bhakti devotional poetry, Chishti Hindavi writings, and Sufi romances in Awadhi. Taken together, these sources challenge a simple binary of foreign conquest and indigenous resistance. Instead, they reveal a dynamic landscape of cultural negotiation, linguistic innovation, and shared spiritual expression. They also show that the Delhi Sultanate period was not a monolithic political entity defined solely by the onset of Islamic rule, but a complex social formation shaped by continual negotiation, adaptation, and cultural exchange.

The sources discussed here are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Many other vernacular chronicles, epics, and devotional works from across the subcontinent remain beyond the scope of this essay. This discussion should therefore be seen as an entry point into a much larger and still-expanding body of vernacular historical writing.