The Pursuit of Pilgrimage, Pleasure, and Military Alliances

Abstract

Nagaridas’s Tīrthānand (1753) is the memoir of a two-year pilgrimage to Braj composed by Nagaridas, also known as Savant Singh, the deposed king of Kishangarh in Rajasthan. Pauwels delineates how the ‘culturally mediated category’ of pilgrimage structures Nagaridas’s experience and its narratological reconstruction in the versified memoir. Just as pilgrimage itself is a polysemous experience that satisfies multiple goals and needs, so the Tīrthānand too works at multiple levels. As Nagaridas narrates events in the mundane world—visits to temples, devotional singing, religious plays, and the like—he frequently elevates these happenings onto the mythological plane of Radha and Krishna’s eternal Braj. Yet contemporary political circumstances and errands of royal necessity intrude at critical junctures of the narrative. The Tīrthānand is thus a tribute to mythical Braj, a travelogue, and a chronicle of contemporary political and social developments.