A Muslim king sat down to write a book of songs, and the first names he set on the page were a Hindu goddess and a Hindu god. The king was Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, and the book was the Kitab-i-Nauras — the "Book of Nine Rasas," nine essences, the nine emotional flavours that Indian aesthetics says a work of art can carry.1 It opens by invoking Saraswati, goddess of learning, and Ganapati, the elephant-headed god, set down beside the Islamic divines a sultan was expected to praise.2 Inside are fifty-nine devotional songs and seventeen couplets, and they were not meant to be read in silence on a shelf. They were meant to be sung — set to ragas, the melodic frameworks of Indian music, performed aloud in a court.3
This is the king who called the world to one thing: "There are different languages," he wrote, "but there is one emotional appeal. Be he a Brahmin or a Turk, he is only fortunate on whom the Goddess of Learning smiles."4 A sultan, in his own hand, telling Brahmin and Turk that they share one feeling and one goddess. No wonder, Pillai notes, that a section of his own court was apoplectic.5
The Kitab-i-Nauras is a songbook composed by Ibrahim Adil Shah II (reigned c. 1580–1627), ruler of the Deccan sultanate of Bijapur. Its title fuses Persian (kitab, book) with the Sanskrit-derived aesthetic vocabulary of navarasa — the nine rasas or emotional essences of classical Indian art.6 The collection runs to fifty-nine devotional songs and seventeen couplets, written in Dakhni, the Deccan's own vernacular, and set to be performed musically rather than recited as scripture.7
Its content is what makes it extraordinary. The opening dedication brings Islamic and Hindu divines together in the same breath. Inside, Ibrahim praises Shiva and Parvati and draws on the great Hindu epics; he names the people and creatures of his own world, including his beloved Chand Bibi and his pet elephant, Atash Khan.8 One painting he commissioned shows him with a father named as "guru Ganapati" and a mother named as "the pure Saraswati."9 The text, in a scholar's phrase Pillai quotes, offers "the rich syncreticism of the period" inside "an engaging text that is, in parts, highly visual in its imagery and metaphor."10 It is a king's personal aesthetic and devotional manifesto, and it does not fit any tidy story of a "Muslim sultanate."
The engine of the book is a single claim, and it is an aesthetic one before it is a religious one: feeling runs underneath language. "There are different languages; but there is one emotional appeal."11 Brahmin and Turk speak differently, worship differently, eat differently — but the rasa, the essence the heart tastes, is the same. That is why the framing device is navarasa, the nine emotional flavours: Ibrahim builds his bridge not on doctrine, where the two traditions cannot meet, but on emotion, where they can.
Music is the mechanism that makes the claim real. A theological treatise asking a Brahmin and a Turk to agree would fail on the first page. A song, set to a raga, addressed to Saraswati, sung in Dakhni that both could follow, does an end-run around the argument entirely — it produces the shared feeling instead of arguing for it. The book does not say you are the same; it makes a Brahmin and a Turk feel the same thing at the same time. Ibrahim, who called himself Abla Baba, "Friend of the Weak," on his copper coins and Adil Shah Sufi in his farmans, was practising on the page a politics he practised on the throne: a cosmopolitan kingship that found its glue in shared aesthetic experience rather than in shared creed.12
This page hands the vault a hard, single object — one book, one author, one set of contents — against which the larger claims about Deccan cosmopolitanism can be tested. When the four-kingdom narrative says the Deccan sultanates were syncretic, the Kitab-i-Nauras is the artefact that proves the claim is not a modern romance: here is a Muslim sovereign invoking Saraswati in his own composition, in writing, set to music.13 It supplies the devotional-aesthetic counterpart to the political story of Ibrahim Adil Shah II and the visual counterpart to The Saraswati Portrait — the same devotion expressed in song that the painting expressed in pigment. It also gives the bhakti pages a Muslim borrower: a king reaching for the rasa vocabulary that Hindu devotional theory had spent centuries refining.
Begin with the opening lines, because Pillai's sources single them out: "Ibrahim's somewhat eclectic religiosity is expressed from the opening dedication, which brings together references to Islamic and Hindu divines."14 A dedication is where a writer declares his allegiances, and Ibrahim declared a double one on the first page. To a Sunni court already nervous about a sultan who endowed Hindu temples and protected pilgrims, the dedication was not poetry — it was provocation.15
Now read the device. The book is the "Book of Nine Rasas," and rasa is borrowed equipment. The doctrine of nine emotional essences is the spine of classical Hindu aesthetics, the framework Sanskrit and later vernacular theorists used to analyse drama, poetry, and devotion. Ibrahim, a Muslim king, takes that Hindu critical apparatus and builds his own devotional songbook on it. The borrowing is the argument: emotion is the common ground, and the Hindu theory of emotion is good enough for a sultan to organise his soul by.
Then the cast list. The songs do not float in abstraction. They name Chand Bibi — the celebrated woman of the Deccan's politics — and they name Atash Khan, the king's pet elephant.16 A devotional book that finds room for the household and the menagerie tells you what kind of devotion this is: not a renunciate's flight from the world but a sovereign's embrace of it, with the family, the politics, and the elephant all swept into the same nine essences.
Finally the gods themselves. Shiva and Parvati appear; the Hindu epics flow in.17 In a connected painting Ibrahim is captioned as the son of Ganapati and Saraswati — a Muslim monarch giving himself Hindu divine parents.18 Pillai's point lands here: this is not a ruler tolerating Hinduism from a polite distance. This is a ruler writing himself, in his own celebrated book, into the Hindu sacred imagination — and doing it as a musician, so the heresy would be sung.
The lamps are lit and the courtiers are seated on the carpets, and the musicians are tuning to a raga the sultan himself chose. Ibrahim Adil Shah II sits among them, his fingernails coloured red, rudraksha beads — the seed-beads of Hindu ascetics — resting at his throat.19 He is not a spectator. The songs about to be performed are his, from the Kitab-i-Nauras, and the first invocation rises to Saraswati and Ganapati before it reaches any name a Sunni courtier would expect.
Listen to what happens in the room. The Dakhni words are intelligible to almost everyone present — the Brahmin scribe who runs the royal library on a thousand-hon salary, the Turkish noble, the Persian-reading clerk.20 The raga carries the feeling under the words. For the length of the song there is, quite literally, "one emotional appeal," and Brahmin and Turk are inside it together. The king who minted coins calling himself Friend of the Weak is, in this hour, demonstrating the policy as art.
And along the wall stand the men Pillai calls apoplectic. They hear Shiva praised, they hear the goddess invoked, they remember that the sultan renamed his own capital Vidyapur — City of Learning — and they suspect their king has crossed a line.21 The same room holds the music and the scandal at once. That is the Kitab-i-Nauras in performance: a court hearing its sovereign sing his heart to a Hindu goddess, half of it transported, half of it terrified.
The way this book gets misremembered is the failure to watch for. The first misreading flattens it into a heartwarming tolerance story — a nice king who liked everyone. That loses the edge. Ibrahim was the same ruler who could have brothers killed and overbearing regents blinded; the songbook is not proof of a gentle soul but of a deliberate cultural politics, chosen and worked at.22 Treating the Nauras as sentiment rather than statecraft empties it.
The second misreading runs the other way and reads it as crypto-conversion — the sultan was "secretly a practising Hindu."23 That was his own court's suspicion, and it is just as flat. Ibrahim, raised Sunni, pointedly stayed Sunni, mocking the noblemen who scrambled to convert as "political Sheeas."24 He invoked Saraswati and remained a Muslim king; the whole interest of the book is that it refuses the either/or the suspicious court demanded.
The diagnostic sign of both failures is the same: someone needs the Kitab-i-Nauras to settle which side Ibrahim was "really" on. The book was built precisely to not settle it — to live in the one-emotion-many-tongues space where the question does not apply. When a reading forces the book onto one side of the religious line, the reading has lost the book.
Pillai's account leans on the survival of the text itself and on the paintings and farmans around it — the dedication that "brings together references to Islamic and Hindu divines," the Saraswati portrait, the coins.25 The figures are firm: fifty-nine devotional songs and seventeen couplets, quoted as such from his sources.26 The hard interpretive question is the one his own court raised and never resolved: did this devotion to Saraswati mean Ibrahim was "flirting dangerously with apostasy," or was it a sovereign's cosmopolitan aesthetic that never touched his Islam?27 Pillai preserves the contradiction rather than resolving it — and the Kitab-i-Nauras is the document at the centre of the unresolved argument, which is exactly why it matters. A live question: how much of the syncretism is Ibrahim's own conviction, and how much is the genre — a court songbook in a shared Deccan vernacular almost required a shared emotional vocabulary to work at all.
Pillai is arguing against a communal narrative that wants the Deccan sultanates to be straightforwardly "Muslim states," and the Kitab-i-Nauras is one of his best exhibits, so it is worth watching where his framing pulls. His cosmopolitan thesis needs Ibrahim's songbook to mean something large — evidence that Indo-Islamic kingship could absorb Hindu devotion without strain. The conservative narrative he opposes needs the same object to mean a sultan losing his religion. The book sits in the gap. Pillai's honesty is that he reports the court's apoplexy and the apostasy charge in full rather than waving them away; he lets the tension between the cosmopolitan reading and the communal one stand on the page. Where a reader should stay alert is the quiet weighting: by foregrounding the syncretic dedication and the Saraswati devotion, Pillai makes the cosmopolitan reading feel like the obvious one, when the genre-constraint question — was Ibrahim free, or was a Dakhni court songbook always going to look like this? — is left underexplored. The convergence with his Saraswati-portrait material is total: song and painting say the same thing, and Pillai uses them to reinforce each other into a single, hard-to-dismiss claim about who this king let himself be.
Here is the plain version: a Muslim king borrowed the Hindu theory of devotional feeling to write songs to a Hindu goddess, and that borrowing connects to how bhakti works and to how rulers turn art into power.
First, Bhakti as Path. Bhakti is the Hindu devotional current that made emotional relationship to the divine — love, longing, surrender — the whole of the path, and it developed the rasa vocabulary Ibrahim borrows for his "Book of Nine Rasas." The structural parallel is exact and surprising: bhakti's core move is that feeling, not ritual correctness or caste standing, is what reaches the divine. Ibrahim's songbook makes the same move across a religious boundary that bhakti made across a caste one — "be he a Brahmin or a Turk, he is only fortunate on whom the Goddess of Learning smiles." The insight you get only by putting them together: bhakti's levelling of caste through shared emotion gave a Muslim sultan a ready-made grammar for levelling creed through shared emotion. The devotional theory the bhakti saints built to get past the Brahmin's wall was structurally portable enough that a king could use it to get past the Sunni's. Neither the bhakti page nor the political history of Bijapur alone shows you that the technology of devotion travelled — that a Hindu solution to caste exclusion became a Muslim solution to religious exclusion. The tension is real too: bhakti's emotional path was often a renunciate's or a poor devotee's, and here it is wielded by a sovereign with an elephant and a thousand-hon librarian, which raises the question of whether a king singing bhakti's tune is doing devotion or doing statecraft dressed as devotion.
Second, The Four-Kingdom Deccan and the Rise of the Marathas. That page frames the Deccan as a contested, plural political space out of which the Maratha state would rise. The Kitab-i-Nauras is the aesthetic proof-of-concept for the plural part: before Shivaji built a Hindu kingship inside this world, a Muslim sultan built a Hindu-Muslim aesthetic at its court. Set the two against each other and a sharper point appears — the Deccan was a place where the religion of the throne and the religious imagery of the art could come apart, where a Sunni king sang to Saraswati. The insight neither produces alone: the cultural fluidity the songbook documents is the substrate the later, harder communal lines were drawn across; the Maratha story reads differently when you know the Deccan court it grew up beside was capable of a king writing himself as the son of Ganapati and Saraswati. The same ground that produced cosmopolitan Bijapur produced Maratha self-assertion — the Deccan held both, and the songbook is the upper bound on how plural the place could be.
Sharpest implication: the Kitab-i-Nauras shows that the deepest cultural fusion in the Deccan happened not in treaties or theology but in art — specifically in music, where shared feeling could be manufactured rather than negotiated. A king who could not have argued a Brahmin and a Turk into agreement could sing them into a shared emotion for the length of a raga. That relocates where Indo-Islamic synthesis actually lived: in the performance, not the doctrine.
Generative questions: