I asked: What is the faqir’s repast in hunger?
He replied: His own flesh.
I asked: What is a morsel in the throat?
He replied: The food of patience.
I asked: What is the faqir’s existence?
He replied: Always in prostration.83
Though this excerpt lyrically renders one conception of a faqir’s ideal qualities, there is little here that might resemble an actual encounter between Dara Shukoh and Baba Lal. In contrast to this absence of specificity, though, this particular text details seven precise locations in which the two met in Lahore.84 This serves as a way to carve the cultural memory of the prince deep into Lahore’s geography and architecture, whether or not he actually met Baba Lal at these different settings.
Some manuscripts present longer, more involved dialogues, though even these do not all seem to belong to one identifiable family of manuscripts. Further, these longer versions of the dialogues are not quite transcripts of actual conversations, rather, they have undergone clear literary reshaping. Yet some of the manuscripts offer information about the mechanics of the encounters. A certain Rao Jadav Das is said to have acted as a secretary during the meetings. He recorded their dialogues in the Hindi that the prince and the ascetic must have used as a spoken medium.85 This raw material was then distilled into Persian prose, sprinkled with a few verses for embellishment. Some manuscripts attribute this transformation to Chandarbhan Brahman, the imperial scribe and litterateur, whose hometown was Lahore.86 This is by no means impossible. Rashid Khan, author of the Lataif-ul-akhbar, notably mentions that Chandarbhan accompanied Dara Shukoh to Qandahar as his manager of household supplies (diwan-i buyutat).87
The longer versions of the dialogues refer to Dara as Aziz, which means both “illustrious” and “beloved”. They call the ascetic Kamil, the “perfected one.” This honorific evokes the ideal in Islamic mysticism of the perfect human (insan-i kamil), who has obtained the heights of divine knowledge. The prince comes across as an earnest seeker, and Baba Lal as a patient teacher. According to the memory of these encounters endorsed at the Dhyanpur shrine today, Baba Lal dazzled Dara Shukoh, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb alike, and they all became his followers. But in these Persian dialogues, there is no attempt to establish the superiority of either Baba Lal or Dara Shukoh, though their relationship is one of master and disciple. The prince asks thoughtful questions that reveal a serious interest in Indic religious thought and texts: What is the difference between the nad (creative utterance) and the Vedas? What do dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (complete absorption) really mean? Why did Sita remain untouched even after being held in the demon Ravana’s house? Why wouldn’t a demon magically assume Rama’s form?
Dara Shukoh grapples with some concepts and practices that, to him, would have seemed incompatible with monotheism and Islamic views on representing the divine: “What exactly is idol worship in the land of India, and who enjoined it?”
“This was instituted to strengthen the heart,” replied Baba Lal. “Just like unmarried girls who play with dolls and then stop doing this when they run a household … those who are unaware of the interior, [engage with] exterior forms, and when they become aware of the interior, [they] abandon the exterior.”88
The dialogues also reflect the prince’s emerging interest in Advaita, or nondualist Vedantic philosophy, an inclination that Baba Lal appears to have also shared. Dara Shukoh enquired about the distinction between atma (individual self) and paramatma (supreme self). “There is no difference,” Baba Lal answered. The prince also asked several questions about the stages of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, with which Advaitic philosophical traditions are deeply preoccupied. These states serve to explain the different levels of reality and illusion.89
An important problem for the prince is how to negotiate liberation while remaining wedded to the material world: “When it is clear that [a ruler] is a yogi, how can it be established that his rule isn’t free from the business of external ornamentation?” Baba Lal’s reply suggests that the ruler can accommodate both roles: “The yogi exists in the ruler, for this reason … whenever he seeks the company of God’s people, at that time the world does not interfere.”90
For a few days, Baba Lal responded to the prince’s shower of queries. Then he suddenly fell silent. The prince was ready with fresh questions. Baba Lal explained that the prince’s constant referral to books was getting tiresome. If they could pause a moment, then perhaps they could derive some repose, and also pleasure, from their discussion. Recall Dara Shukoh’s undermining of book knowledge in his letters to Muhibbullah and the Haqqnuma. When it came to books on Indic religions, he apparently had a different attitude.
At another point in their conversation, Dara asked, “What ought a faqir do altogether?” Baba Lal remained quiet. The prince tried again. The ascetic still would not speak. Did this silence mean that “the seeker was an initiate of the glance’s states?,” asked Dara. Baba Lal replied that he had answered. When asked what his response was, he replied, “Silent.”91 The dialogue resumes again after this exchange.
It would take a while for Dara Shukoh to fully absorb and build on his lessons with Baba Lal. His immediate task was to complete the Hasanat-ul-arifin. Dara Shukoh begins this collection of ecstatic utterances with a divinely revealed shath from the Quran: “He is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward.”92 This means, the prince explains, that God says, “existence is contained in me, and all is I.” He also quotes a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “I am Ahmad, without the letter m.” Ahmad, like Muhammad, is related to the Arabic word hamd, or “praise,” and is another name for the Prophet. Removing the “m” in Ahmad makes it Ahad, which means “the One.” These examples set the tone for the Hasanat. This work is inflected with themes that Ibn Arabi and his followers developed on the nature of existence (wujud) and the ultimate unity of creation and the divine. The collection includes aphorisms from the Prophet’s companions, early Sufis from Baghdad, later mystics from the Persian-speaking world, and Dara’s own contemporaries.93
Though Mulla Shah and Miyan Mir merit their own entries, Dara devotes by far the longest section to another teacher of his, Shaikh Bari, who had died a short while earlier in 1651/2. He was a solitary mystic, Dara says, using the term mufrad, which connotes a Sufi who did not need supervision from the qutb, the guiding spiritual authority of the age. The prince relates some of his numerous memorable encounters with Shaikh Bari.94
Dara also commemorated Muhammad Sharif, “one of the profligates and free spirits of our times” who proclaimed that the Muhammadan ultimate truth or reality (haqiqat-i muhammadiya) had now manifested in him: “A thousand years ago there was the Prophet Muhammad / A thousand years later there is Muhammad Sharif.”95
The entries in the Hasanat focus both on the saints of past generations as well as on Dara’s contemporaries and stories from his own teachers. Take, for instance, Sandal, a mystic about whom the late Miyan Mir had spoken admiringly and who, according to Miyan Mir, had danced among the catamites of Lahore for forty years. Once, Miyan Mir recounted, a group of ulama were asked to petition the divine for rain. Their efforts went unanswered. Eventually Sandal was brought in and his exhortations resulted in rain. The lesson of this story is, for Dara Shukoh, “that in every community and in every garb, there are visible and hidden friends of the Divine Truth. On account of their blessings the heavens and earth stand, and emperors rule. On account of their blessings, the ulama prevail over the heretics.”96 Note that in this context, Dara uses the term “ulama” approvingly but subordinates them to God’s friends, the Sufis, without whom they cannot perform their role.
The idea that God’s favored friends exist in every community opens the door not only for social rebels and eccentrics but also for non-Muslims, two of whom make their way into the Hasanat-ul-arifin. One of them is, of course, Baba Lal, described here as the “shaven-headed.” Baba Lal was “one of the most perfect gnostics,” says the p
rince, “his knowledge of spiritual mysteries and constancy” unrivaled among the Hindus (hunud). It was Baba Lal who told Dara that every religious community had a gnostic, spiritually perfected person, through whose blessings God saved that community.97
The other is Kabir, the fifteenth-century poet-saint, whose hard-hitting Hindavi verses traveled the subcontinent. Like Dara’s verses chastising literal-minded religious authorities, Kabir’s poetry frequently inveighs against both mullas and pandits who fail to grasp the true nature of spiritual devotion and gnosis. Dara Shukoh would have heard more about the saint from Baba Lal, who counted Kabir as one of his own spiritual teachers. The prince narrates various anecdotes about Kabir, including the famous story regarding Kabir’s imminent death and the ensuing struggle between Hindus and Muslims who each vied to perform his last rites. The Hindus wished to cremate him; the Muslims wished to bury him. In the end, Kabir, still powerful even in death, shut himself in his cell; when the door was opened his body had vanished and flowers were found in its stead. In this account, Dara could have used the term hunud (the Arabic plural of hindi) for Hindus here. Instead he casually refers to them as kafirs.98 Dara does not use this term in an entirely pejorative sense; it had become a normalized way of designating a social category. But kafir does imply that these Hindus were not true followers of Kabir’s monotheism. So while the term could hold a positive meaning in the inverted vocabulary of “mystical infidelity,” here it serves the more prosaic purpose of rejecting Indian polytheists as infidels. Indeed, the prince would not dream of calling Kabir or Baba Lal kafirs, for he regarded them not as infidels but as genuine monotheists.
Kabir died roughly a century and a half earlier. Yet Baba Lal disclosed to Dara some of what he claimed to have learned directly from Kabir himself concerning the role of the spiritual guide (murshid):
There are four kinds of murshid: the first [are] like gold, which cannot create another like itself. Second, like an elixir that turns into gold whatever comes in contact with it … Third, like a sandalwood tree, which turns a favorable host tree into sandalwood, yet holds no sway over [a tree] that is not a favorable host. The fourth murshid is like a lamp, for he is known as a perfect murshid, for, from one lamp, a hundred thousand lamps are illuminated. With regard to this I [Dara] have said:
The gnostic bejewels your heart and soul,
He plucks out a thorn and puts a rose in its place.
The perfect one draws out all from the form,
One candle illuminates a thousand candles.99
Dara fuses a quatrain of his own composition with his report of Kabir’s words.100 These Persian lines of verse in no way resemble the Hindavi poetry commonly associated with Kabir. The Persianizing of Baba Lal and Kabir in the Hasanat-ul-arifin allows them and their sayings to seamlessly integrate into the company of the Sufi luminaries whom Dara Shukoh held in high esteem.
Other Muslim authorities in Dara’s age also regarded Kabir as a monotheist. In the Akhbar-ul-akhyar, the renowned Abd-ul-Haqq of Delhi relates an anecdote involving Kabir that he heard from his uncle. Apparently, when Abd-ul-Haqq’s father was a young child, he asked his own father, “Was this famous Kabir, whose utterances people recite, a Muslim or a kafir?” Abd-ul-Haqq’s grandfather replied that Kabir was a monotheist (muwahhid). The child then asked, “Does this mean that a muwahhid is neither a kafir nor a Muslim?” to which the old man retorted, “To understand this matter is difficult. [Later] you will understand.”101
* * *
WHILE DARA SHUKOH WAS STILL caught up in the exhilaration of war preparations, Aurangzeb trudged toward his punishment post in the Deccan. His wife, Dilras Bano, mother of three girls, was expecting a fourth child. On January 2, 1653, he met his brother Murad Bakhsh at the village of Doraha.102 The emperor wanted Aurangzeb to proceed to Daulatabad, the Mughal capital of the Deccan, as swiftly as possible, though he recognized that there was administrative work to be handled in Burhanpur first. Shah Jahan also reminded Aurangzeb to supply him with mangoes and grapes when the season started—this being one of the prince’s responsibilities, as we know from Aurangzeb’s Qandahar campaign.103 The Burhanpur palace had fallen into disrepair, so Aurangzeb lingered outside the city while it was renovated before entering on February 9.104
There, later writers say, the thirty-five-year-old prince fell passionately in love with a woman named Hira Bai, though the details of their accounts vary. The often-salacious collection of stories entitled Ahkam-i Aurangzeb (Aurangzeb’s Edicts) attributed to one of Aurangzeb’s servants, Hamid-ud-Din (fl. 1660), relates that Aurangzeb met her while visiting his maternal aunt, Saliha Bano, who was married to Burhanpur’s governor, Saif Khan. But the author of the Ahkam-i Aurangzeb appears to have the facts wrong: Saif Khan had long been removed from his governorship; moreover, his wife was Malika, not Saliha, and she had died over a decade earlier.105 The author of the later biographical collection Maasir-ul-umara (Memorials of the Nobles), Nawab Shahnawaz Khan (d. 1758), relates that Aurangzeb took the ladies of his household for a stroll in the garden complex across the Tapti River from the Burhanpur citadel, where his mother had been once briefly interred. Female members of the Burhanpur harem also accompanied them. One of them, Hira Bai, who had earlier been in Aurangzeb’s aunt’s retinue, cheekily leapt up to pluck a mango from a tree, records Shahnawaz, though if this took place in February, the mangoes would have been terribly unripe. In Ahkam’s version, she merely held a branch and sang melodiously.
Whatever the case, the story goes that the prince immediately lost his heart, and along with it his senses. The Ahkam has it that he collapsed to the ground. His anxious aunt tended to him, but he could be assuaged only once he managed to acquire Hira Bai by giving his uncle two of his own concubines in exchange. According to the Maasir, for the next few months, Aurangzeb’s besottedness for Hira Bai, a talented singer, took over his life. She once put a goblet of wine in his hand and mercilessly pressed him to drink it. The prince reluctantly brought the cup to his lips. Then she grabbed it and scoffed it down herself, saying, “My intention was only to test your love.”106
There is something very formulaic about the anecdote—the sudden onset of Aurangzeb’s passionate love and his desire taking the form of a malady borrow from the motifs of Persian narrative poetry. And the inconsistencies in the stories necessitate that these accounts be treated carefully. But the prince’s correspondence with his father does hint that something inappropriate had taken place. On the fourteenth of May, Aurangzeb received a letter of reprimand from Shah Jahan. He hastily penned a reply, assuring his father that he was “guilty of no act which might be contrary to the will of God or of God’s shadow on earth.” Aware of the rumors circulating about him, Aurangzeb explains, he had preemptively sent a clarificatory letter to his agent at court. “I recognize that conduct of this kind is despised by all men; how could I sink to such a depth?”107
Aurangzeb’s crime was not that he had an affair outside of his marriages; imperial and noble men would unquestioningly assume rights over the bodies of their wives and concubines. It was rather that he had lost control of himself. As Akbar’s poet Faizi warned, in his poem on the Indian lovers Nal and Daman, a king could love, but his love must be tempered by sobriety.108 The wine in the anecdote here not only reflects a real or imagined incident but serves as a metaphor for the prince’s unquenchable emotions—in Persian poetry, wine and lovers are inseparably associated.
Aurangzeb’s romance with Hira Bai ended as suddenly as it began, with her untimely death. If the Maasir is to be believed, she was buried in the city of Aurangabad, close to Daulatabad. Formerly known as Fatehnagar, Aurangzeb named this city after himself during his governorship of the Deccan and made it into his capital. Hira Bai must have accompanied Aurangzeb to Daulatabad when he made the monthlong journey there during November 1653.
The Venetian adventurer Niccolo Manucci (d. circa 1720), who traveled through India during the period, reports that after Hira Bai died, Aurangzeb “vowed never
to take up wine or to listen to music,” and would later claim that God had been very gracious to him by putting an end to that dancing girl’s life, for through her the prince had “committed so many sins that he ran the risk of never reigning by being occupied in such vices.”109 Always one for a salacious story, Manucci exaggerates, though Aurangzeb later did, somewhat like his father, cultivate an austere persona, and it is possible that this incident influenced him to do so.110
There was no letup in Shah Jahan’s admonitions. That summer, the ruler awaited a consignment of Deccani mangoes from a choice tree, the padshah pasand (Emperor’s Favorite), and even commanded that Aurangzeb send men to stand watch over the tree after it flowered, waiting for it to bear fruit.111 Aurangzeb replied to his father’s command with the news that the crop that year had been bad. When fewer and poorer-quality mangoes arrived than Shah Jahan had desired, he railed, insinuating that Aurangzeb must have consumed them. Did Aurangzeb’s childhood theft of bananas still linger at the back of his mind? The prince defended himself politely, “How could I permit mangoes, fit for Your Majesty’s table, to be eaten here?”112 Shah Jahan also complained to Jahanara, who wrote her brother. Perhaps, Aurangzeb explained, the mangoes were picked too soon, or the dak chauki (courier service) was running late, or the fruit fell out of the basket on the way. He then laid out in detail how he was going to ensure that the next shipment was better.113
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