Beyond the Sultan's Court in Delhi: How Vernacular Sources Tell Their Own Accounts of the Past
India's medieval past wasn't written in just one language or from just one point of view
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| Painting depicting the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad |
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). Between roughly 1200 and 1600 CE, vernacular languages across the subcontinent such as Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Kannada, and Dakhani produced a huge and varied body of literature. Historians value these sources transmitted in the vernacular 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.
The Memory of Conquests: Heroic Epics and Regional Chronicles
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| Painting of Prithviraj Chauhan hunting a tiger, with Chand Bardai beside him |
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, containing 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 Eastern Frontier: Tripura and Assam
Far from Delhi, the easternmost frontiers of the subcontinent developed their own powerful kingdoms and traditions of historical writing. These regions maintained detailed records of their rulers, political affairs, religious traditions, diplomacy, and conflicts, showing that historical memory was not shaped solely by events at the imperial centre.
In Tripura, this tradition is represented by the Rajamala. Compiled around 1407 CE and expanded over subsequent generations, the Rajamala traces the lineage of Tripura’s rulers, recording traditions ranging from ancient religious rites to diplomacy and conflicts with the Bengal Sultanate. The tradition was originally preserved orally by the Chantai, the royal priests, in the Tripuri language, and was associated with Sanskrit genealogical records such as the Rajratnakaram. Under King Dharma Manikya, court scholars Banneswar and Sukreswar compiled the royal traditions into Bengali verse, making the Rajamala an important early work of Bengali historical and literary tradition.
Further east, the Ahom kingdom developed an even more systematic tradition of historical record-keeping. Founded in 1228 CE, the Ahom kingdom maintained secular administrative chronicles called the Buranjis that were initially written in the Tai-Ahom language and later increasingly in Assamese. These records documented matters such as revenues, borders, administration, diplomacy, and military campaigns over several centuries. Although the Ahom kingdom was never directly ruled by Delhi, its chronicles still reveal how changes in northern and eastern Indian politics affected the region. 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 expanding Mughal Empire.
Together, the Rajamala and the Buranjis reveal a broader picture of medieval Indian history. Political and literary traditions were not confined to Delhi or the major imperial centres; powerful kingdoms on the eastern frontier maintained their own records, remembered their own rulers, and documented their interactions with neighbouring powers. In this sense, “Indian history” was not a single story unfolding around Delhi, but a collection of interconnected regional histories shaped by kingdoms across the subcontinent.
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 (Saptakanda 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
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| An illustrated manuscript page of the Bhagavata Purana from Dakhinpat Sattra, written in Early Assamese |
The Bhakti movement expanded religious expression through regional languages, making devotional ideas accessible beyond Sanskrit-literate groups. Between the 6th and 10th centuries, the Tamil poet-saints deeply devoted to Lord Vishnu known as the Alvars 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.
The tradition of expressing devotion in the language of the people subsequently spread to other regions of India. In Assam, Srimanta Sankaradeva promoted Ekasarana Vaishnavism through Assamese and Brajavali, using institutions such as naam ghars and satras, along with naam kirtan, to encourage collective devotion. Similarly, in Bengal, devotional expression took a vibrant public form under Chaitanya, who popularized Krishna devotion through public kirtan, with Bengali used for popular expression and Brajabuli for Radha-Krishna lyrics.
Alongside these Vaishnava traditions, the Bhakti movement also fostered devotional and mystical expression in North India. 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. This vernacular devotional tradition was further enriched by poets such as Mirabai and Surdas: Mirabai composed Krishna-devotional bhajans in Rajasthani and Braj, while Surdas contributed significantly to the literary prominence of Braj Bhasha through the Sursagar.
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| 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 Sufi khanqahs (hospices) became important centres of interaction between Sufi saints and local communities, encouraging communication in languages accessible to ordinary people. Figures such as Moinuddin Chishti, Baba Farid, and Nizamuddin Auliya are associated with vernacular communication, particularly Hindavi. This interaction between Sufi spirituality and regional languages also found expression in poetry: Baba Farid’s Punjabi verses were later included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy scripture of the Sikhs.
The use of vernacular languages alongside Persian reached a particularly influential literary form in the work of Amir Khusrau. A disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, Khusrau was a prolific writer in both Persian and Hindavi. His Persian works, including the Khaza’in-ul-Futuh and Tughlaq Nama, provide important literary 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, traditionally associated with Persian and Hindavi vocabulary. Describing himself as a “Hindustani Turk,” he became celebrated as Tuti-e-Hind (“Parrot of India”), reflecting his association with the linguistic and cultural world of India. His contribution extended beyond literature into the realm of music as well: he played an important role in Indo-Persian musical traditions and is traditionally associated with the development of qawwali, which brought together Persian and Indian linguistic and musical elements.
This blending of Sufi ideas with local cultural forms became even more pronounced in vernacular Sufi literature. In North India, Awadhi Sufi poets adapted popular romances to convey spiritual themes and the longing of the soul for the divine. Maulana Daud’s Chandayan (1379) drew upon the popular Lorik-Chanda romance to express spiritual longing, while Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat (1540) used the story of Padmavati and her husband Ratansen as a Sufi allegory of the spiritual quest.
The same process of connecting Sufi devotion with everyday life can be seen in the Deccan. Sufi poets composed songs in Dakhani, a variety of Hindustani, drawing on familiar household activities and regional customs. Works such as the Charkhanama (spinning songs), Chakki-nama (songs associated with grinding grain), Lurinama (lullabies), and Shadinama (wedding songs) brought devotional ideas into the rhythms of ordinary domestic life. In doing so, Dakhani Sufi poetry became part of a wider regional culture of vernacular devotion, existing alongside 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.
Listening Across Vernacular Voices
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| Mu'in al-din Chisti and other Sufi saints in gathering. (Murshidabad, West Bengal, North-Eastern India, ca. 1780 - 1800). Chiswick Auctions: Lot 305 |
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 superimposed on earlier period rather than eyewitness record. This, however, doesn't make these sources less valuable. Rather we see how later communities and groups interpreted, remembered and reconstructed the earlier period while negotiating various socio-political conditions of their own times.
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
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| Guru Nanak seated with Sant Kabir and Bhai Mardana playing the rabab, from the Janamsakhi, painted by Alam Chand Raj, 1733 |
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.
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