The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  Of course, Kabir was no perfect man. His message resonated with the masses, and with quiet confidence he stood up to the power of those who held the keys to heaven. But he too had prejudices, he too was far from ideal. ‘Woman’, he declared once, ‘is the refuse of the world’ so that ‘noble men will put her aside, only the vile will enjoy her’. Elsewhere he compared the female to a twenty-hooded serpent, and ‘if she stings one’, he warned, ‘there is no chance to survive’. But we can try and console ourselves that perhaps this streak of misogyny (offset though it was with contradictory verses where he is less suspicious of women) was a reflection of his age, and that he never himself claimed to be a perfect man, or the one true soul in whose words lay answers for all. He was merely Kabir the weaver—a product of his times, a mortal made of flesh and weakness—and he cared for Rama alone, not for the world and its numerous other quarrels.

  A CITY FOR A COURTESAN?

  In 1543, when the first Qutb Shahi ruler of Golconda was stabbed to death, one of his sons fled to neighbouring Vijayanagar to save himself from his parricide brother. For seven years, he lived in exile at this Hindu court, before coming home after the death of his murderous sibling. What followed was a phenomenal reign: the new Qutb Shah Teluguised his name from Ibrahim to Abhirama, patronised poetry on the Mahabharata, produced thirty children of his own (two of whom he put to death for plotting against him, fearing his father’s fate), and inaugurated an era of prosperity and splendour (despite, that is, the general violence of his age). Golconda’s ports attracted merchants from the world over, while its mines threw up diamonds in heaps, and by the time Ibrahim went to the grave in 1580, he was lord of one of the richest realms in India.

  But the Qutb Shah—who once, curiously, also compared the moustaches of his enemies to the pubic hair of ‘public women’—was never fully pleased with life in his old fort. He tried first to build an unwalled city towards the west. But when want of water aborted the enterprise, he constructed a bridge over the Musi river and looked instead to the east. His death meant that it was his heir, Muhammad Quli, who realised Ibrahim’s dream, founding what is today the city of Hyderabad—another place that has in our own time attracted the zeal of that special variety of politician anxious to rename great cities of the past, instead of confronting challenges in the present. Hyderabad, either way, was only one of many feathers in Muhammad Quli’s cap. As a patron of the arts, too, he was substantial, authoring a celebrated collection of works called Kulliyat that covers everything from kabaddi to the festival of Basant Panchami.

  Hyderabad, however, was an ambitious project and from early on seems to have attracted the envy of the Qutb Shah’s rivals. Fourteen thousand shops and public buildings were envisioned in the new city, with the magnificent Char Minar built over its central crossroads. The palace was a sensation, said to exceed any contemporary Mughal building—seven or eight floors high, with interiors studded with gems and gold. ‘A citie that for sweetnesse of ayre, conveniencie of water, and fertility of soyle, is accounted the best situated in India,’ is how the English merchant William Methwold described it, while the French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier thought the bridge ‘scarcely less beautiful than Pont Neuf at Paris’. Indeed, what the Qutb Shah envisioned in Hyderabad was not only a city unparalleled by rival capitals, but a ‘replica of paradise’ itself.

  The founding romance of Hyderabad is a story repeated by every self-appointed tour guide in the vicinity. One day, we are told, when Muhammad Quli was out riding, he encountered a woman of exceptional beauty. Her name was Bhagmati, and having married her, he decided to name his new urban project Bhagnagar. Later, when she was styled Hyder Mahal, the city became Hyderabad. The story is certainly old—we have the contemporary Mughal poet Faizi writing to Akbar that the place commemorates ‘a hardened whore’—but it is unlikely that it reflects fact. Hyderabad celebrates Ali (also called Hyder, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin), who was venerated by the Shia Qutb Shahs (whose Shiism was also lambasted by Faizi), and while coins record both Hyderabad and Golconda, no mention occurs of Bhagnagar. Indeed, Muhammad Quli, who catalogued the names of his seventeen beloved ladies, himself makes no mention of Bhagmati, and in the Kulliyat , the city he founded is always referred to as Hyderabad.

  What is more likely, as the historian H.K. Sherwani noted, is that Mughal antagonism towards the smaller but powerful and prosperous Deccan sultanates—which they would annex after generations of strife—meant everything impressive about them had to be disparaged. Just as the Qutb Shahs were never acknowledged as independent padshahs by the Mughal emperor, it is likely that this grand new city had to be dismissed as nothing but a vanity project that flattered ‘an old mistress’. Such a tale, in fact, may well have found an audience even in the other Deccan sultanates, which oscillated between friendship and war with the Qutb Shahs on account of their own ever-changing dynamics. So, in the end, as Sherwani concludes, a ‘sneering sentence’ from a Mughal officer grew ‘into a paragraph, the paragraph into a section, and the section into chapters’, repeated often enough to imitate the truth.

  The weight of historical evidence does seem to lie with Sherwani, but Bhagnagar continues to live in the popular imagination. European travellers in the seventeenth century used the name, for instance. Indeed, proponents of the Bhagmati story argue that if the lady does not exist in local records, it is because she was proactively wiped out—the idea that the new capital was named after a courtesan appalled enough people for it to be expunged. Such an erasure is possible—Ferishta, who wrote in the Deccan in the lifetime of Muhammad Quli, notes that Bhagnagar was named after a ‘prostitute’ called Bhagmati, but that the Qutb Shah felt ‘ashamed of his amour’ and renamed the city. But the fact that Muhammad Quli named over a dozen of his mistresses, including his five favourites, in a candid work spanning 1,800 pages, and did not mention Bhagmati at all renders the matter open to debate.

  In any case, for the garden variety bigot seeking to rename Hyderabad Bhagyanagar—a Sanskritised version of Bhagnagar—it may come as news that the last laugh will still be had by the ghost of the Qutb Shah. If he was forced to erase Bhagmati’s name, this might be justice done for a Hindu woman who loved a Muslim king; if she never existed at all, the Qutb Shah’s memory still triumphs. After all, he built a city that still endures, while the men seeking to wipe out his contributions in the service of religious bigotry have only a pretended glory—one that begins and ends with waging war on the past.

  WHAT IF VIJAYANAGAR HAD SURVIVED?

  When Vijayanagar was defeated in the Battle of Talikota in January 1565, what fell with it was the last formidable empire to tower over the Indian peninsula. To be clear, the old kingdom continued to exist for many more decades in a truncated form, but Talikota marked the end of all glories for a power that once boasted of such monarchs as Krishnadeva Raya. Weakened and emasculated, its rulers watched as their authority dissolved and regional dynasts emerged, inaugurating the so-called Nayaka period in the south. In the northern Deccan, meanwhile, Vijayanagar’s traditional enemies—the sultans who emerged victorious at Talikota—ruled for a century more till the Mughals swallowed their independence during the reigns of Shahjahan and his son. With the fall of Golconda in 1687, even their tale was concluded, and the next chapter pivoted around the feud between Shivaji the Maratha and Aurangzeb, the last Great Mughal.

  What, however, might have been the course of history had Vijayanagar survived? What if, instead of having his severed head impaled on a spear, Rama Raya, the de facto emperor, had triumphed at Talikota? He did reign, after all, over one of the wealthiest empires of his day, lacking neither in men nor money; it was better artillery and fortifications that typically helped his rivals to the north. Had he defeated them, would he have annexed their lands or merely demanded tribute? The Qutb Shah of Golconda, in fact, was an old friend, whose years of exile as a youth were spent in Rama Raya’s court. The Adil Shah of Bijapur, another of Talikota’s triumphant sultans, was Rama Raya’s a
dopted son. It is likely that Vijayanagar would have allowed these Islamic states to continue as vassals, just as the sultans did not comprehensively attach Vijayanagar’s lands after victory in 1565. But their independence would have been limited, their riches transferred from their vanquished capitals to be heaped before the Raya.

  What would this have meant for the Mughals? The picture is a fascinating one: to think of Akbar presiding over an ambitious, swelling empire from Agra, while the south remained the sphere of influence of Vijayanagar’s Rayas. The Deccan’s sultans might have formed buffer states between these two great empires—one moment seeking friendship in Vijayanagar, the next trying to persuade the Mughals to help unshackle themselves from the southern yoke. They were close, too, to the Shah in Persia: would he have played politics through his Deccani allies to balance Vijayanagar and the Mughals? Or would he have allied firmly with the Hindu dynasty that dominated the peninsula—one which was more actively part of international networks of trade—than the Mughals, who were his rivals in the wider world of Islam? And where would the Portuguese have fit into this? After all, trade in the Arabian Sea had been dragooned into their hands, and overtures had been made from Vijayanagar for special understandings and friendship. Would the Portuguese have had to choose between the Mughal and the Raya?

  To think of India divided between two dominant powers allows for a grand (even if entirely imaginary) picture: the Mughals with their influence stretched across the Gangetic belt, and from Afghanistan to Bengal, while all that lay south of the Narmada became the dominion of the heirs of Krishnadeva Raya. At some point the two would certainly have clashed—Mughal ambitions and the ballooning of their empire could only lead them towards the frontier of the southern emperor, just as the latter’s ancestral conflict with Orissa’s monarchs would have mobilised Vijayanagar’s armies towards the north. So, instead of the sensational confrontation that the seventeenth century saw between the Marathas and the Mughals, would Aurangzeb have found himself battling the might of an imperial equal? Whose arms would have triumphed? The Mughals, after all, drew talent from across the Islamic world—warriors, administrators, artillerymen, and others—while Vijayanagar, even in its rivalry with regional sultans, was often unable to source the latest technology, or even the best horses. Would, perhaps, the Portuguese have filled the gap and become Vijayanagar’s agents and arms dealers?

  Then there is the matter of culture. Persian sartorial tastes and much else from the Islamicate world touched life in Vijayanagar—its temple sculptures, its architecture, and even the famous bronze of Krishnadeva Raya and his wives in Tirupati stand testament to this. A Vijayanagar princess was once given in marriage to a sultan, while another emperor is believed to have toyed with the idea of seeking a bride from Catholic Portugal. Could an alliance with Akbar have led to a matrimonial bond between the two empires, perhaps after a military confrontation? Or would Akbar have had to concede victory to the Raya, ceding territory and becoming the lesser of India’s two great emperors? It would most likely have been difficult for either to completely overpower the other—but the constant balancing of power between north and south might have birthed interesting dynamics, even as these two major courts patronised a fascinating universe of ideas and culture, poets and scholars, artists and artisans.

  If Vijayanagar had survived, India might have entered the modern age looking a great deal different. Its experience with the European trading companies that sought to colonise this land could have taken a different shape—a powerful emperor in the peninsula might have been able to contain Portuguese, Dutch and English influence. Many later heroes—from Shivaji down to Tipu Sultan—might not have emerged at all, had Vijayanagar’s imperial order held. But fantasy is perhaps best tempered with the evidence left by reality: great empires often fell because of internal contradictions, not external enemies; due to the misguided policies of their rulers rather than the arms of any invader. So for all we know, if Vijayanagar had survived after Talikota, it may yet have collapsed a few generations later, inadequate minds and incapable men bringing about what the Deccan sultans’ armies achieved by force of arms in 1565.

  SULTANS AND RAJAHS TEXTS AND TRADITIONS

  At the dawn of the seventeenth century, decades after Vijayanagar fell before the might of the sultans of the Deccan, a fascinating new work of poetry took form in the Tamil temple-town of Madurai. The Rayavacakamu (Tidings of the King) is ostensibly about Krishnadeva Raya (r. 1509–29), but the composition stands out primarily for its polemics against Muslim kings.

  ‘What are the Turks,’ it declares, ‘but drunkards and opium eaters!’ while brahmins, with ‘their diet of rice with salt and sambar’, are cast as a vastly better sort who ‘don’t suffer from pride and malice’. Elsewhere, Hindu agents of the Deccan’s sultans lament how ‘Our lords are drunkards who have no faith in gods and brahmins. They are,’ these characters cry, ‘barbarians and cow-killers.’ When spies from Vijayanagar travel to the sultanates, they witness the most unspeakable horrors. ‘People were being sliced into two at the waist or slowly cut apart with saws,’ reports one informant, and even officials who fail to deliver gold to their greedy monarchs, are ‘tortured to death’ in ‘the middle of the street’. The lands held by these sultans—the Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar, the Adil Shah of Bijapur and the Qutb Shah of Golconda—are likened to the realms of Yama, god of death, all three rulers painted as vulgar, unrefined upstarts who know neither honour nor true kingly dignity. Dharma as construed in classical texts is elevated, while the adharma of Muslim rulers is violently castigated, boundaries drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in colours that are unprecedented.

  The Rayavacakamu is a remarkable text in retrospectively ascribing a hatred of Muslim princes to Krishnadeva’s time. The history of the Deccan shows that in actual fact, while rivalries existed, the world was not perceived in terms of communal acrimony as we understand it today. Many, for instance, popularly perceive the 1565 battle that destroyed Vijayanagar as a plot by Muslim monarchs to demolish a Hindu kingdom. The matter is complicated, however, when you recall that the (de facto) ruler of Vijayanagar at the time had spent his early career as a nobleman in the court of a Muslim sultan. In that battle was also the Qutb Shah who, in turn, as alluded to in the previous essay, had lived seven years in Vijayanagar. Similarly, further challenging this notion of a blunt Hindu–Muslim conflict is the little detail that while thousands of Marathas fought in the tragic 1565 battle, their swords were raised not in support of the Hindu rulers fated to fall, but of Muslim kings this side of the Tungabhadra. Generals and aristocrats too easily shifted between the sultanates and the Hindu empire in the south: One of them, known as Ain al-Mulk Gilani, began his career with the sultans, but by the 1550s was a prominent courtier in Vijayanagar, in which realm he made gifts of land to as many as eighty brahmins. Indeed, even a century before, there were high-born Muslims resident at court: Fath Khan, for instance, was a descendant of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who chose exile not with fellow Muslims in the Deccan but in Hindu Vijayanagar, where he did his (unsuccessful) best to persuade the Raya to march with him and seize the throne of Delhi.

  The Rayavacakamu does, however, signify a crystallisation among Hindu elites (as opposed to the masses) of a sense of common identity in competition with the ‘Turks’. While its tone has been assessed by scholars to be a result of the fall of Vijayanagar—a ‘culturally disruptive act’ which left large numbers of poets and others without patronage—this mood did not yet lead to what can be construed as a Hindu–Muslim communal divide. For instance, the very same work, while degrading the Deccan’s sultans as low-born and mean, elevates the Mughals in Delhi to levels of Sanskritic divinity. This might be partly on account of Mughal inroads into the sultans’ lands—they were enemies of an enemy and therefore friends. But what is striking is that the Mughals are painted as blessed by Hindu gods. India, in the conception of the Rayavacakamu , had three ‘Lion-Thrones’: Vijayanagar’s was blessed by Vishnu in Tirupati, Orissa had t
he blessings of Jagannatha in Puri, and the suzerains of Delhi shone in the glory of Visvanatha in Varanasi. These three rulers are likened to the devas or gods of Hindu mythology, while the sultans of the Deccan are seen as asuras, or demons, inevitably destined for defeat. In other words, while certain Muslim kings are disparaged as barbaric, others are seen as refined; and where the Adil Shah, Qutb Shah and Nizam Shah are demons, the Mughal emperor sits confidently among the gods.

  What, then, does one make of the Rayavacakamu ? There was certainly a notion in the corridors of power of ‘us’ and ‘them’, derived from diverging ideologies of power and statecraft. To repeat an important point, while one group designed court culture with Islamic ideals in mind, the other elevated Sanskritic tradition and classical Indian notions to great heights. That one was native to the land and the other of outside origins was also clear to the poets of the age—Venkatadhvarin’s contemporaneous Visva Gundarasana Campu , for instance, describes Muslims (called ‘Yavanas’, a term originally applied to Greeks) as ‘terrifying’ clans that were a threat to ‘temples of Siva and of Vishnu on his serpent couch’. The same text, interestingly, also disparages other ‘evil people’ who ‘treat brahmins with contempt, as if they were no better than blades of grass’—in this case, the ‘evil people’ are Europeans settled in Madras. As early as the mid-fourteenth century, even the founders of Vijayanagar saw the ‘Turks’ as people different from them. From the 1350s, among the titles flaunted by the Rayas of Vijayanagar was an especially revealing one: they called themselves ‘Hinduraya Suratrana’, or ‘Sultans among Hindu Kings’. The term ‘Hindu’ was one applied by the ‘Turks’ to the native peoples of India. It was internalised in Vijayanagar, where the rulers saw themselves consciously as Hindus, even as they also borrowed the new title, ‘sultan’, introduced to India by the same Turks. Calling themselves ‘Sultans among Hindu Kings’ was to equate themselves to powerful Muslims while at once establishing a cultural difference by asserting their identity as Hindus. ‘Sultan’ was an acknowledgement of a new order in India; the term ‘Hindu’ was their self-image in a time when a whole new host of identities had entered the land.