Scorpion in the Hand : Brajbhasha Court Poetry from Central India 1800

The Bundelkhandi poet Thakur was one of the most celebrated Hindi poets of his times.

His poetry was part of the lively and innovative Brajbhasha literary scene during the last phase of indigenous Hindi literature unaffected by Western ideas.

Brajbhasha court literature at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was flourishing in smaller and bigger centres and with the mediation of oral transmission and manuscript culture thriving as never before transcended the limits of court patronage and reached down to the wide masses of learned people in the villages.

Thakur was among the favourites of nineteenth-century anthologists and in the twentieth century he was known as one of the few representatives of a personal voice in the highly stylised Riti-poetry.

He can today be considered as one of the most powerful protagonists of early modern sensitivity in Brajbhasha literature through his expression of individual sentiments or his search for a simple, more realistic style.

His poetry also demonstrates that innovations associated with modern poets had already been a defining feature of poetry before the advent of colonial modernity. This critical edition of more than three hundred quatrains is based on readings from almost a hundred handwritten, lithographed and printed anthologies.

The poems are annotated and can be read both by students or scholars of Brajbhasha.

However, readers unfamiliar with this poetic idiom can also use the book since for the first time Thakur is presented to an English readership through a detailed introduction and the translation of a large body of selected poems.