Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  The Sikh langar, a communal kitchen and collective meal, blows apart these rules. Food cooked in a Sikh temple, or gurudwara, is served by volunteers to anyone who comes. Everyone eats together, seated on the floor. It’s an equalizing act, an effacing of caste and other boundaries. While many hungry people go to the langars in Delhi’s gurudwaras, or in Birmingham, or the two in Queens, New York, because the food is good and free, there’s a decidedly political dimension: a small protest against old ways of thinking that are diminishing but by no means dead.

  This everyday act of radicalism was introduced by Nanak. In his fifties, when he had finished wandering, he established a village at Kartarpur, in the Punjab, on the banks of the Ravi River, and lived there for the last two decades of his life with his wife and two sons. The members of this community, or panth, became his first followers, or “learners”—the original meaning of Sikh. The guru taught his disciples to practice an intense personal devotion to the formless, ever-present God, as well as to pursue an active life in the world. And he cemented the bonds of the community by having everyone, regardless of caste or gender or status, eat together on the floor.

  Navtej Sarna explains the significance of the langar:

  If one God created this whole creation, then how could he have created men differently—men and women for that matter? And if you’re sitting on the floor and eating off leaves, it brings this message through even more clearly. When you take it back five hundred-odd years, you can see what a major achievement this must have been. Society was not only marked by the rich and the poor, but it was also very straightlaced between the castes and subcastes.

  Nanak also knew how to use food in an incendiary way. It’s said in the Janam Sakhis that he challenged the vegetarianism of certain Hindus by deliberately cooking the meat of a deer on an auspicious day. “Those who abjure meat,” he wrote in one of his verses,

  and sit holding their noses,

  Eat men at night;

  They make a show of hypocrisy for others

  But have no true knowledge of God.

  The inclusion from the very beginning of women within the panth created a significant legacy. It is said that Nanak’s first follower was his elder sister, Nanaki, with whom he was close. Sikh families were encouraged to educate their girls, and in later centuries, women were allowed to read from the scriptures during public worship. It is no surprise that today many Sikh women are confident professionals with distinguished careers in public service. They’ve perhaps benefited from the relative equality that their religion encouraged for centuries.

  If the real and metaphorical dimensions of agrarian society and manual labor, and the cycle of the seasons, remained a hallmark of Nanak’s verse, they also shaped his religious vision. “Liberation in Sikhism is to be obtained by living the life of a householder—through marriage, through work,” the writer and journalist Hartosh Singh Bal says. In one story from the hagiographic tradition that captures this ethos, Nanak goes to a rich merchant’s house to dine, but when he looks at the man’s hands, he notices they don’t have calluses. “So he says, ‘This is not a house where I can eat.’”

  Kirat karni, or “working with your hands,” remains one of the three basic tenets of Sikhism. The others are naam japna, or “meditation on the names of the Supreme Being,” as embodied by the verses of Nanak and his successors, which were collected in a holy book called the Adi Granth; and wand chhakna, or “sharing some of your earnings through charitable giving.” Bal says, “If anybody is to distill the message of Sikhism as it is known to most people in ordinary belief, these are its three senses.”

  * * *

  Sikh identity did not emerge fully formed from Nanak’s mind, however. Like most religions, the Sikhism we know today evolved by a long and gradual process. But because Sikhism is one of the newest of the major world religions, with a rich trail of documentation, we can gain a relatively clear view of its evolution.

  Nanak was succeeded by nine other gurus who, over two hundred years, helped build and consolidate the Sikh faith. Over that time, the religion’s differences from Islam and various strains of Hinduism sharpened, and confrontations with Muslim rulers and then Hindus grew more frequent.

  The last of the gurus in the line Nanak founded was Gobind Singh, who, shortly before his death in 1708, abolished the role of guru. After his sons were killed in the fight against the Mughals and their ruling agents, Gobind Singh wished to foreclose later struggles for succession within his own religion. In the place of a human hierarchy, he set a book, the Guru Granth Sahib, a remarkable work assembled by an earlier guru, which, in addition to the words of the gurus compiled in the Adi Granth, contains verses by Kabir and other sants, as well as Sufi texts. From then on, this has been the religion’s supreme guide.

  Yet Gobind Singh’s more radical innovation was to create the Khalsa, a brotherhood of initiates. His father had been executed at Delhi’s Chandni Chowk by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for his refusal to give up his faith. Embattled against the Mughals and their regional military chiefs (many of them Hindu rajas), Gobind Singh saw a need for Sikhs to organize better to defend themselves, and henceforth, the traditions of martial action and martyrdom became important within Sikhism. In 1705, Gobind Singh composed a letter to Aurangzeb, the Zafarnama, which contains these lines, resonant across the history of the Sikhs:

  When all has been tried, yet

  Justice is not in sight,

  It is then right to pick up the sword,

  It is then right to fight.

  The Khalsa would be that band of men dedicated to defending the religion. Membership was marked by five outward symbols, called “the five Ks,” which are still embraced, and worn, by many Sikhs today: the kesh, or long hair; the kangha, a small wooden comb; the kirpan, a curved dagger; the kara, a metal bracelet; and the kacchaa, a pair of loose breeches. According to Hartosh Singh Bal, these five, along with an unspoken sixth, form three pairs symbolizing power and restraint. “Guru Gobind Singh says you have to think of these in terms of polar opposites,” Bal says.

  Hair in the Indian tradition (unshorn hair, loose hair) is a sign of spiritual power. The comb is a polar opposite—that is, spiritual power must be under a certain discipline. The kirpan is a sign of physical power, and the kara is a symbol of restraint on this. And the fifth symbol obviously goes with the unsaid idea of sexual power, tantric power, with the kacchaa as a symbol of restraint. So these three great forces of power in the Indian tradition must be harnessed in Sikhism, but they must be harnessed with a sense of restraint and control.

  To other Indians, perhaps the most problematic dimension of Sikh identity has been the claim that Sikhs constitute their own quam, a term broadly meaning “nation,” which is often translated as “people who stand together.” The urge among some Sikhs to establish the panth as a nation conceived in more modern terms goes back to the 1940s; it was, in part, a reaction to the demand for the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims. The Partition of the subcontinent was in many ways most brutally felt in the Punjab, a region slit and torn by end-of-empire mapmaking. It created a large Sikh refugee population—many of whom fled for safety to Delhi—and the bright embers of a demand for a separate Sikh homeland, Khalistan.

  In the 1980s those embers were stoked into ferocious violence by radical young Sikh preachers, a supportive diaspora, and the subversion of democratic politics in the Punjab by India’s leadership in New Delhi. In 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (46) ordered an assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the site of the most important Sikh symbols of spiritual and temporal authority, which had become a fortified redoubt of Sikh militancy. Five months later, she was gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards. Days of anti-Sikh massacres in the capital followed, in which more than three thousand Sikhs are estimated to have been killed. The perpetrators of these massacres were never tried under the Indian justice system, and it took several years more of military repression before the Sikh secessionis
ts were defeated. So deep was Sikh disaffection that it seemed hard to imagine their reintegration. Yet, barely twenty years later, India had a Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh. This isn’t to suggest an easy story of acceptance and reconciliation. Martyrdom is a current that runs deep in the Sikh tradition, as does a powerful sense of justice. But there’s also that recognition of needing to return from the mountain realm of sages and purist visions: to live down here, in the world.

  14

  KRISHNADEVARAYA

  “Kingship Is Strange”

  Reigned 1509–1529

  Imagine an imperial court in South India at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The king sits at the center, flanked by women “with eyes like blue sapphires,” who are cooling the air with yak-tail fans. Seated in front of him, scholars discuss the fine points of Paninian grammar, atomistic philosophy, and metaphysics. Warriors hold swords darkly glowing in the afternoon light that filters across the hall, refracting through the jeweled crowns of defeated rivals as it comes to rest on the king himself.

  This king ruled over the largest empire ever in South India, and the description of his court comes from his favorite poet, the great Telugu writer Allasani Peddana. The king’s capital, built at Hampi in the central Deccan, was called Vijayanagara, the “City of Victory.”

  His name was Krishnadevaraya, and he had a talent for turning conflict into order. Like quite a few triumphant Hindu kings of the precolonial era, he often gets recruited into Indian history’s platoon of resisters to Muslim domination—in his case, against the sultanates of the Deccan whose borders edged the Vijayanagara empire. But Krishnadevaraya was a successful warrior ruling in a brutal age—a fact that lent itself to an unsentimental, tactical, and highly flexible approach to politics, reminiscent of Kautilya’s (4).

  Krishnadevaraya was also living at a moment when the literary imagination of South India was being revolutionized. “The whole system underwent a kind of civilizational shift,” says David Shulman, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a scholar of South Indian literature. “And one of the elements of that shift was the emergence of a new notion of the individual.” For Krishnadevaraya, this meant that, in addition to conquering and ruling, he embraced poetry, a form in which he could consider himself not just as a monarch, but as a human being, too.

  In his verse, he at times expressed disinterest in (even disdain for) the power that enabled him to rule. His attitude was a way to address the perennial conundrum of Hindu kingship: how to convert power into authority. The Hindu map of society drew boundaries between different social orders: power, wealth, and status could never be consolidated in one group or person. Kings and warriors might have power. Wealth belonged to merchants and traders. Brahmins, of course, had status. A king might try to acquire authority by associating himself with those who had status—he could seek out Brahmins to support him—but neither king nor Brahmin could get too close to one another, for fear of blurring the distinct character of each. Another way, perhaps more risky for an ambitious king, was to appear not to be that interested in power at all—to renounce it, or at least to seem to.

  Oh! What is this glorious empire?

  What are these pleasures?

  Why these emotions?

  I’ve enjoyed this life without ever considering the path to freedom,

  but have I really lived?

  Those are Krishnadevaraya’s words, the words of an epicurean intellectual as well as a self-doubting king. “One hears in the poetry of Krishnadevaraya skeptical tones, earthy, romantic, passionate tones,” Shulman says. “When you read his work you have the sense that you are listening to an authentic, very subjective, unusual, creative and original voice.”

  * * *

  Krishnadevaraya was in his early twenties when he gained the Vijayanagara throne, in 1509. At the time, the empire was in the doldrums, weakened by famine and riven by internal family jealousies. He quickly turned around its fortunes, winning new lands and, as was the custom, endowing temples to thank the gods for his acquisitions. He expanded his capital, set in the rocky outcrops of Hampi, into a prospering city. When the writer V. S. Naipaul visited its ruins in the 1970s, his pulse quickened at what he saw as evidence of a purely Hindu bastion resisting the Muslim tide engulfing India. In fact, Vijayanagara was a heterogeneous place, absorbing a variety of religions. “In this city,” said a Portuguese visitor who thought it grander than Rome, “you will find men belonging to every nation and people.”

  That diversity was reflected in the city’s mix of cultural and architectural styles. The architectural historian George Michell, who has studied and worked at Vijayanagara for four decades, was startled when he first saw some of the buildings Krishnadevaraya had put up in his capital. “The whole thing is built in what we call a sultanate style,” Michell says about the imposing row of stables where the king’s elephants were kept. The architects and builders seemed to have had knowledge, and perhaps experience, of the styles of rival sultan kings of the Deccan. “So the question to ask,” says Michel, “is what the hell is this sultanate-type architecture of the so-called enemy doing in the middle of a royal center of a Hindu imperial city?”

  The answer, contends Michell, is that Krishnadevaraya’s was “a city and culture set up to be, in a way, what we would call cosmopolitan—that is, embracing all the known cultures and architectural techniques and styles of the period. That’s what imperial culture is. It embraces everything.” The Vijayanagara kings were Hindu in their religious worship, and Krishnadevaraya was himself a devout worshipper of Vishnu. Yet, in their secular activities—in fighting wars and administering their empire, in their courtly manners and even in their dress styles—they were influenced by the Islamic culture and standards of taste they encountered in neighboring and sometimes rival Muslim-ruled kingdoms and also through their trading links with the Arab and central Asian world.

  Krishnadevaraya, too, was shaped by these elements, but his driving concern was how to extend his sway. He broke with the older Vijayanagara ruling style, which was based on sharing spoils with, and delegating regional authority to, kinsmen. Instead, he recruited warriors and administrators who didn’t share clan or caste identities with the kingdom’s hereditary elite. Some of these men were self-made and maverick, but he also brought in Brahmins. Krishnadevaraya promoted them all to rule over his imperial conquests, and so secured their loyalty—a strategy that allowed him to mobilize large armies and to enjoy the prestige that came of having the support of the priestly caste. By the middle of his reign, he had expanded his territory roughly one thousand kilometers northeast, into today’s Orissa.

  Krishnadevaraya projected himself as the unifying center of this spreading realm. His subjects spoke all the languages of South India. They worshipped Shiva and Vishnu. Many were Muslims. And some of those subjects were themselves kings. So among the titles used to describe Krishnadevaraya was Hinduraya-suratrana, the “Sultan over Hindu Kings.” In temple inscriptions we also find him described as Yavanarajya-sthapanacharya, “The lord who established the kingdom of the Muslims.” By coining such curious, hybrid titles, he was proclaiming himself a ruler who protected and advanced the interests of all under his command, whatever their religion or language; he was transforming himself from a king into an emperor. As Shulman puts it, “He embodies this sort of integrative moment where a single major player, the Vijayanagaram king, could control nearly all of India’s southern peninsula … I think that’s why he’s remembered today as the last of the great universal South Indian kings.”

  * * *

  Emperors must command armies, but after conquest comes rule. To keep the throne, they must win allegiance and belief. Ashoka (5) had his dhamma and his Rock Edicts. Rajaraja Chola (9) had his sky-scraping temple and his personality cult. Krishnadevaraya went for poetry.

  Poems were regularly read in the great hall he had built, called “Conquest of the World,” which looks out on the boulder piles and rice paddies of Hampi. It was later
said that Krishnadevaraya gathered around him in the hall eight great poets of the South Indian languages, including the greatest of them all, Allasani Peddana. Peddana, who described the scene with its philosophers, warriors, and blue-eyed women, tells us of his king’s true passion:

  Seated enthroned in the hall known as “Conquest of the World,”

  in the company of learned people,

  he was struck by the joy of poetry, so he turned to me

  and gently said:

  “They say that out of the seven kinds of children a person may have,

  the only one that lasts is a poem.

  Make a poem for me, Peddanaraya…”

  The work Peddana wrote for his king, the Manucaritramu, was perhaps the finest to come out of the Vijayanagara court. It tells the story of the birth of Manu (the mysterious progeny of a divine courtesan’s unrequited passion for a Brahmin) and his development into a human personality. According to Shulman, it’s a narrative poem about “what it means to be a human being and how you can produce a human being—what happens in terms of the inner workings of the mind and the mind-body complex in order to make a real human being come alive.”

  When you read Peddana, and even Krishnadevaraya, you sense that there’s something explosive about Telugu literature of the sixteenth century. It mixes roguishness and decorum, divinity and eroticism, a will to power and vertiginous self-doubt. Most strikingly, though, there’s the upsurge of an interior voice, the creation of a new, psychologically real sensibility. “Books like you had never seen before in India” began appearing in the language, Shulman says. “The great breakthrough to a new kind of textual world happened in Telugu.”

  Telugu was not Krishnadevaraya’s mother tongue, but as he reached for a medium through which he could command the belief of his manifold subjects, the language presented itself as a divinely inspired choice. Like the architecture of his city, Krishnadevaraya’s poetry had to reflect his complex ruling ideology—to show the king as a universal imperial monarch, and at the same time worthy of ruling as a Hindu over a caste-based society that believed that status, power, and wealth ought to be separated between the social orders. Telugu was spoken by a large number of his subjects, including many of his warrior chiefs, and its literary flowering was investing it with a new status. To write in Telugu was to write in a language regarded with immense respect and pleasure among elites, but also the wider populace, and knowing Telugu poetry was recognized as a sign of cultivation. Perhaps Krishnadevaraya was also attracted by the possibilities for inward reflection opened up by Telugu narrative poetry such as Peddana’s. With this language and its literary forms, he could step back a little from the vainglory that went with being kingly. He could present himself as a spiritually aware individual bent not on usurping status and wealth from the other orders, but serving them.