Politics, Patronage and Polyvalence : Mirza Raja Jai Singh in Biharilal’s Satsai

The Satsai written by Biharilal is a compilation of ‘seven hundred’ verses of independent but mutually complementary couplets that were collated in AD 1662. It groups short pithy verses to evoke mood, describe a hero or heroine, or exemplify a literary category. His work has generally been categorized as riti kal poetry, which is usually associated with erotica, and later by colonial and nationalist writers as morally degenerate poetry. By and large, riti poets favoured a combination in which aesthetic, rhetorical and semantic categories intertwined with love or devotional situations and sentiments. While Bihari is a past master in the art of alankarashastra and kavya, this paper concentrates on politico-military connotations in his work.