Taking Laila’s Name: Reimagining the Laila-Majnun Story in Brajbhasha

The story of Laila and Majnun served numerous poets in the Persian cosmopolis with an occasion to comment on love, both earthly and divine, and its transformative power. This essay examines an early modern Brajbhasha version of this famous love story and the ways in which a seventeenth-century Rajput-Muslim poet navigated register, idiom, plot, and literary devices so as to create a tale that addressed as wide an audience as possible, comprised of different religious sects, without losing sight of the Sufi message of the work. This, in turn, points to the need to study religious communities in early modern South Asia not as isolated islands but as part of a loosely connected network in which interaction, shared motifs, stories, and concepts were commonplace.