The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  To the brahmin on the street, however, the ‘Turk’ was not more alien than the untouchable. Identities on the ground were diverse and fragmented, and indeed, cultural exchanges were exceedingly syncretic. Muslims adopted Hindu habits, and Hindus became disciples of Sufi masters. The annual urs of one particularly famous sultan was presided over by Shiva-worshipping Lingayats, while among the Bhakti saints in the time of Tukaram and Ramdas was a Muslim student of Advaita philosophy. Against a background of cultural exchange, texts like the Rayavacakamu were not so much a reflection of reality as an articulation of elite political preoccupations, with one or two other agendas. Soon after Vijayanagar was founded, for example, it ejected Muslim rulers from Madurai. The epic Madhuravijayam , on the face of it, is full of laments about the destruction of the dharmic balance by foreigners, with a prince of Vijayanagar restoring order. What is often forgotten is that before Madurai, the Vijayanagar forces destroyed another enemy—the Sambuvarayas, who were Hindus. Besides, in painting themselves as restorers of classical high tradition, the Telugu–Kannada rulers of a new empire were also legitimising themselves in the eyes of their Tamil subjects around Madurai. In showing the Turks as foreign barbarians, they were making their own relative newness to the scene seem less foreign. Rhetoric was a space in which all kinds of grand designs could be articulated—reality was generally a more practical negotiation.

  Muslims, in other words, once they established themselves, were given a place in the conception of Indian rulers. It was not a flattering place, but it was an acceptance of their claim to rule in the subcontinent. That is why literary sources incorporated sultans into age-old Sanskrit metaphors. The king of Orissa was the Gajapati (Lord of Elephants); the Raya of Vijayanagar was the Narapati (Lord of Men); and the sultans of the Deccan (or, alternatively, the Mughals) were Ashvapatis (Lords of Horses), linking them to their military expertise in cavalry warfare. Bukka, one of the founders of Vijayanagar, was celebrated in overblown verse as Krishna reincarnated ‘to deliver the world when it was overpowered by Mlechchas’ (Muslims). A simple reading of this would suggest that the king saw Muslims as enemies. In reality, while he certainly had political ambitions in the Deccan, from which he wished to oust local sultans, to do so he sought the aid of another ‘mlechcha’, the sultan of Delhi. Turks, furthermore, were to Bukka just one of many enemy clans to be destroyed. So in one instance, we have him eulogised as follows: ‘When his sword began to dance on the battle-field, the faces of the [Muslim] Turushkas shrivelled up … the Andhras ran into caves, the Gurjaras lost the use of their limbs … the Kambojas’ courage was broken, the Kalingas suffered defeat.’ Muslims are listed along with other Hindu dynasties and not marked out for any pronounced hostility here. At certain moments, then, literary and political texts incorporated them as legitimate members of society, while at other times they challenged the legitimacy of ‘Turks’ in the Sanskritic order of things. But the presence of the Turks in and by itself was not unusual.

  This perhaps explains an action of Krishnadeva Raya in the sixteenth century which is somewhat at odds with the claims and ambitions of the Rayavacakamu a hundred years later. In 1523, the Raya marched into the Deccan, defeated the Muslim powers that existed there, and put their armies to flight. Did he, thereafter, take over their lands or seek to swallow their realms whole? He did not. Instead, he resurrected an older Muslim dynasty, the house of the Bahmani sultans, and by his own royal command had them crowned monarchs of the northern half of the plateau. He did not replace Muslim power in the Deccan with Hindu might in the name of a grand dharmic cause—instead, he restored the legitimacy of a much older Muslim line and placed them in a position of official authority. Then, to commemorate this action, Krishnadeva added to his list of styles and titles a fascinating new one in 1523, one that encapsulates the world of the early modern Deccan: the Raya of Vijayanagar, it was announced to all, was now the ‘Yavana Rajya Sthapana Acharya’—the Hindu king who re-established the kingdom of Turks.

  DARA SHUKOH POET AMONG WARRIORS

  By the end of August 1659, everyone in the imperial court in Agra knew that Dara Shukoh would soon find himself minus his head. Emperor Shahjahan’s eldest and favourite son, beloved of mystics and poets, had lost the war of succession, outsmarted by the shrewder Aurangzeb. Plundered by his own soldiers, abandoned by old retainers, his wife dead (possibly by suicide), and betrayed by a man he thought loyal, Dara seemed conscious of his impending doom. He wrote to his royal captor from his place of confinement, promising to spend the rest of his days praying for the new emperor’s welfare. But his pleas were rejected—the victorious Aurangzeb’s hatred for Dara had accumulated over decades, and in the sham trial that followed, the elder brother was accused of every kind of crime, from perverting imperial judgement to scandalous heresy, till the younger confirmed, self-righteously, the sentence of death.

  The life Dara had led before was full of splendour and privilege. He sat on a golden chair in his father’s court, and was styled, in happier days, Prince of Lofty Fortune. Before both chair and fortune were abruptly toppled, he had enjoyed two crore silver rupees a year in income. He was his father’s closest adviser, provoking envy from more than one of his several siblings. Dara’s personality was fascinating, and while he wrote sentimental verses on renunciation, he was no stranger to the notion of self-interest. When Aurangzeb cornered the Shia sultanates of the Deccan, it was to Dara that their rulers sent their appeals. The senior prince, the sultans knew, had the ear of the emperor—and since Dara had no desire to see ambitious Aurangzeb swell in power, he prevailed on their father and had his brother’s designs thwarted. Indeed, if Dara had won the war of succession, there is no reason to expect that he would have been kinder than Aurangzeb in dispatching his rivals.

  He did have natural defects of character. ‘He entertained,’ wrote François Bernier, who was Dara’s personal physician for a brief period, ‘too exalted an opinion of himself [and] believed he could accomplish everything by the powers of his own mind … He spoke disdainfully of those who ventured to advise him, and thus deterred his sincerest friends from disclosing the secret machinations of his brothers.’ Added to this fatal overconfidence, born of soaring intellectual talents, was disdain for proud men with narrow minds. ‘Paradise,’ he proclaimed, ‘is where no mullah exists’—naturally, even sympathetic mullahs turned away from Dara. And so, for all the love and regard his father fed him, the man assembled enemies with resentments as sharp as Aurangzeb’s. His chief military campaign, moreover, was a flop, and he lacked with ordinary troops that bond which brought success to his brothers—while they picked the sword, Dara collected Sufi saints.

  But the Mughal prince’s weaknesses were only of the kind that one might find in any human being. His mind far surpassed that of his contemporaries. At twenty-five he authored his first book, and two years before his execution, he was still composing lines of pure delight. ‘He was constantly in the society of brahmins, yogis and sanyasis,’ complained a poet employed by Aurangzeb, till he regarded ‘these worthless teachers of delusions as learned and true masters of wisdom’. He composed the Majma-al-Bahrain (The Mingling of Two Oceans), seeking, like his ancestor Akbar, to unite faiths to fashion a new vision for society. It was Dara who translated the Upanishads from Sanskrit to Persian, which a century later allowed Voltaire in France to immerse himself in Indian wisdom. These were, Shahjahan’s ill-destined son wrote, ‘without doubt of suspicion, the first of all heavenly books’—a line that would one day be used against him as representing a direct challenge to the Quran to which he was pledged.

  But the times were violent and while Dara scaled the heights of intellectual attainment, he failed to claim the power of arms that sustained kingship in that complex age. When Shahjahan fell ill, his son made tactical mistakes. He yet had chances of success, with the royal forces and treasure vaults at his disposal, but on the battlefield Aurangzeb was the real warrior, Dara a poet in armour. He was defeated and fled Agra, wandering from pr
ovince to province, while his father wept, till Aurangzeb’s men defeated him once again. He should have fled to Persia when he had a chance—perhaps he might have returned like Akbar’s father to fight another day. But bad judgement and betrayal by someone he had once helped delivered Dara his warrant of death. His wife, for instance, urged him to carry on but the man thought too soon that they were out of danger; his helpers were suspicious of a regional grandee whose hospitality Dara accepted, and he was proved wrong and these sceptics correct.

  When Dara came shackled to Delhi, the people shed tears of sincere regret. ‘From every quarter,’ noted Bernier, ‘I have heard piercing and distressing shrieks … men, women, and children wailing as if some mighty calamity had happened to themselves.’ Aurangzeb had, then, to eliminate this popular rival, and men were sent to do the deed on the last day of August. His younger son died with him, while the older was captured and slowly poisoned to death. For these brutal political events, of course, a religious vindication was expertly prepared. As Aurangzeb’s chronicler wrote, with his obsession with the Vedas and his attention devoted to ‘the contents of these wretched books’, Dara was an apostate. ‘It became manifest that if Dara Shukoh obtained the throne … the foundations of faith would be in danger and the precepts of Islam would be changed for the rant of infidelity and Judaism.’ The murder of brother by brother, then, was both imperial justice and god’s fury in direct play.

  It is tempting, even if futile, to imagine how Mughal history might have been shaped had Dara reigned and not Aurangzeb. Would he have saved the empire by becoming the Akbar of his age, using the sword where necessary but not fearing to also offer a diplomatic embrace? Might he have won over the Marathas as Akbar succeeded with the Rajputs? Or would he have remained too long in the company of his poets and saints, allowing statecraft and power to fall by the wayside? It is impossible to say, though as a historian once wrote, Dara Shukoh was perhaps destined to fail either way. He had many flaws and he had his strengths, but what really marked him out as a man of tragedy and dismay was one peculiar detail: he was far too civilised for his age.

  THE LOST BEGUM OF AHMEDNAGAR

  In 1565, after what is popularly called the Battle of Talikota, Husain Nizam Shah returned victorious from Vijayanagar to his court in Ahmednagar. There had been horrific bloodshed—ending with the enemy’s head on a spear—and much gold and silver had been gained. But Husain seemed not destined to savour his victory: That very year, he would die, and while some held alcoholic excess to be the cause of his end, at least one Portuguese chronicler decided it was poison, not drink, that took the Nizam Shah to his grave. Deccan politics was dangerous to begin with, and in this instance, it was the ruler’s own wife who was blamed for his death. She was a devadasi-turned-begum, wrote the European historian, and to plant her own son on the throne, instead of a rival’s, she decided to take the life of the man who made her his queen.

  Khunza Humayun was a remarkable woman, and while she was never a devadasi, she was in every sense extraordinary. Aftabi’s Tarif-i Husain Shah Padshah-i Dakan , a eulogy commissioned around the time of the king’s death, is full of praise for his queen. Indeed, alongside beautiful paintings (including one where she appears in her husband’s lap), this unusual text describes vividly Khunza’s loveliness and physical voluptuousness, comparing her breasts at one point to ripe pomegranates. Other sources present her ancestry—she was descended from a ruler of Baghdad, though a fall from power meant scions like her father joined hordes of other Persians seeking employment and a future in India. Here he joined the court of the Nizam Shah—the Muslim dynast with brahmin forebears—and before long, Khunza was married to Husain.

  Few women appear in retellings of the history of the Deccan, and if there is a queen who shines, it is usually Khunza’s daughter, Chand Bibi. At the end of the sixteenth century, she bravely resisted the Mughals, and her tragic assassination enshrined her as a romantic heroine. Khunza, however, did not die at the end of a sword: her power was thwarted and restrained, and death in prison years later did not quite attract glamorous poems. And so she was forgotten, even her form and face crudely painted over in many of the miniature paintings. If Chand Bibi was celebrated even by the Mughals for her valour, Khunza came to be resented by her own son. There was no place for an inconvenient woman like her, and what survives is in bits and pieces, her fall from influence obscuring her fame forever.

  Even in her husband’s day, Khunza appears to have had some say in politics. One poem, in fact, ascribes an insult to her as the provocation for Husain’s war against Vijayanagar. Of course, the battle in 1565 followed generations of tension and rivalry and had various causes, but it is telling that the Fath Nama-i Nizam Shah cites, in the words of scholar Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘a potentially sexually loaded’ reference to the queen as rousing the fury of her husband. The sultans of the Deccan often traded insults with Vijayanagar, but in this instance a line was crossed: in an inflammatory letter demanding tribute from Husain, the ruler of Vijayanagar listed, besides diamonds and rubies, the anklets of the begum. Disgusted and furious, Husain the ‘lion’ was roused against the ‘pig’ to whom he delivered death.

  Leaving literary bombast aside, the death of Husain in 1565 enthroned Khunza’s son in Ahmednagar. The boy was fated for instability and eventual murder, but for the next six years power was in the hands of his mother. She governed with the aid of trusted men—there was a eunuch and there were her brothers. She sat in court and gave orders, proving strong enough to ensure her commands were obeyed. She even went into battle—including against Chand Bibi’s husband, who ruled a principality next door—and showed herself unafraid. It wasn’t like the men around her saw this as admirable: a coup was thwarted in 1567. Her own son was involved, but chickening out in the last minute, he told his mother about the plot. For the time being, Khunza prevailed.

  Powerful women like her, however, always had to tread with care. In the thirteenth century, the empress of Delhi, Razia Sultan, was murdered by men of her own court, and Khunza’s daughter too was betrayed by those she thought she could trust—though war with the Mughals raged, Chand Bibi’s assassin was not an invader but an insider. Khunza was always on her guard, but after half a decade at the helm, when the nobility decided to terminate her ‘petticoat government’, her downfall was confirmed. Khunza’s foreign policy had proved a disaster—alliances were destabilised by impetuous demands, and those inclined to support her left her side in disapproval. Then there was the internal politics of the realm: there was an African faction, a Persian faction and a local faction, all of them perpetually at loggerheads.

  By 1571, the Nizam Shah was ostensibly liberated from the hold of his mother so that he could start making mistakes of his own (which included trying to kill his son in due course) and earn the epithet deewana , or madman. Khunza, abandoned by the men she had raised to power and wealth, was imprisoned and spent the rest of her days in oblivion. A similar unhappy fate her relations elsewhere too endured—the Mughal emperor Akbar’s regent, Bairam Khan, was an extended family member, though assassination meant that he too was remembered with some poetic regret. Khunza wasted away with time, written out of history, disfigured in works of art her husband had lovingly had made. Only fragments remain of her tale, and like so many women, she went to the grave uncelebrated and unmourned, as history continued to be written by unforgiving men.

  THE STORY OF THE KAMASUTRA

  In 1883, when the Kamasutra first made its appearance in English, European readers of Vatsyayana’s treatise hadn’t the faintest idea that its publisher—the wordily nomenclatured Hindoo Kama Shastra Society—was, in fact, an entirely non-existent body. Ostensibly headquartered in Varanasi, with links to London and New York, the ‘Society’ was actually a work of fiction, born from the imagination of a couple of British officials and their associates in faraway India. That the translation, despite its numerous infirmities, was indeed of Vatsyayana’s 1,600-year-old disquisition was not doubted. But even as t
he Kamasutra made its way into the great libraries of the West, the true identity of its translator remained shrouded for years behind this fictitious organisation.

  There were several reasons why Sir Richard Francis Burton was paranoid about advertising his identity as translator on the book that went on to become a global bestseller—British laws on obscenity were so draconian that printing anything even vaguely sexual could show writers the door to prison. For the Kamasutra to be published then, it took some creative thinking to evade Victorian prudery. The Sanskrit word yoni , for instance, was used in the English text for the vagina, even when Vatsyayana himself never used that word in the Sanskrit original. But the gamble paid off—in time, the bogus Kama Shastra Society’s translation would become, as one scholar notes, ‘one of the most pirated books in the English language’, registered across the world as the oldest and foremost classical text on all matters pertaining to love and human sexuality. This, even when it wasn’t exactly sincere to Vatsyayana’s moral outlook from centuries before.