Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India

Detailing courtly attention to beautifying the body, bearing, speech and the palace itself, Ali suggests that 'ornamentation' (ala[LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH DOT BELOW]kara), in particular, worked as a foundational 'cultural figuration' of the court: the king was 'ornamented' not only with his jewellry and crown, royal robes and perfumes, but also with his ministers, harem, offspring, intelligence, discernment, generosity, and so forth; underlords ornamented themselves with lesser versions befitting their ranks and statuses. Erotic love is the primary theme of all but one of the court dramas surviving from the early medieval period (p. 209) is analysed at length in the sastras (especially, of course, kamasastra), which provides a dominant metaphor of realpolitik in inscriptions (and it is well known that marriage alliance was a major political strategy); "sex . . . was a highly mannered and tutored experience, an 'art', which like other aspects of the courtier's life, was to be refined and perfected" (p. 213). Erotic love was "a sort of 'enactment' of the affiliative dynamics which obtained between men at court" (p. 260), complete with ambivalences (Ali stresses the considerable fluidity of favour, rank and status) and anxieties (especially surrounding attachment and separation); the sexual training of princes (like their training in all the subsidiary emotions and manners) was in fact training in statecraft; the sexual practices of sophisticates involved on-going refinement of courtly skills; "[t]he king as the most powerful man at court had to constantly represent himself as the most perfectly skilled player in the contest of love" (p. 260). [...]he teaches us to see that, and how, the rhetorical flourishes, aphoristic admonitions and elaborate metaphors abounding in these sources, which historians all too easily skim past as merely decorative displays of linguistic bravado, were instead all-important markers of and actions within a ubiquitous, trans-regional 'world' (p. 212) of shared discourses and practices based upon this courtly aesthetic, wherein the scores of actual courts that Ali mentions rose and fell, and all this literature was produced; a 'world' which in addition to spanning the whole subcontinent, and most of pre-Islamic South Asian history, also has important implications for our understanding of (its transformation within) the Delhi Sultanate, the British Empire, and ultimately Indian modernity 'a future discussion to which this is intend