The tradition of Sufi spiritual poetry was brought to North India from the first centuries of the formation of Muslim states on its territory, that is, approximately from the 13th century. Later, from the XIV century, Indian Sufi poets turned to the creation of allegorical lyrical poems in the local Awadhi language, which embodied wonderful examples of the Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis. The plots of such poems were traditionally stories about lovers with elements of a fairy tale. The poem "Padmāvat" by Malik Muhammad Jāyasī (1500‒1558) is the most significant work of this kind, combining the features of Persian masnavi and compositional elements, motifs and plots, artistic means and imagery of the classical Sanskrit tradition of lyric-epic narratives and Indian folklore. The composition of the poem is divided into two parts. The first of them is the plot of an Indian folk tale about the Sinhala princess Padmāvat and her heroic conquest by a king from a distant Rajput kingdom. A plot similar in its main outline is found in literary processing also in other significant works of Indian medieval literature. The second part of the poem is an epic narrative based on the historical event of the siege by the troops of the Delhi Sultan Allauddin Khilji (1296‒1316) of the Rajput independent fortress of Chittor in 1303. This part of the poem reproduces in many ways the canons of the Sanskrit classics (mahākāvya) and, in part, the medieval tradition of the Rajput heroic poems (vīra-rāso) in the early modern Indian languages.
However, in this poem there are descriptions that are not at all typical for the canons of the two interacting literatures, Indian and Persian. One of such places in the poem is the description of the campaign of the troops of Sultan Allauddin Khilji to besiege the fortress of Chittor, a historical episode important for the development of the plot of “Padmāvat”. In particular, the episode includes an artistic depiction of cannons, which the army carries with them, expanded into a series of stanzas: the guns are presented here in the images of seductive intoxicating beauties. Images of intoxicated beauties are found sometimes in ancient Indian literature. Modern Indian researchers even tend to compare this description with one of the episodes of the classical Sanskrit poem by Māgha (7th or 8th c.) «The Killing of Shishupala» (Śiśupālavadha). However, these episodes of the two poems have little in common: Jāyasī's poem contains a number of features that are new to the Indian tradition. Such figurativeness is also uncharacteristic of the Persian medieval literary tradition. The report discusses the possible sources of origin of the description of the campaign of the army in the poem "Padmāvat" by Malik Muhammad Jāyasī.