The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  In the course of the nineteenth century, Indian society absorbed from the British an overblown sense of Victorian piety: this much is well known. And in this age of duplicity, Muddupalani—that woman with a singular voice—was cast as the author of raging vulgarity. Krishna came to her in a dream, she said, inspiring her poem of love. But now her words were used against her, as the confabulations of a ‘shameless prostitute’. There was, the critic Kandukuri Veeresalingam grudgingly admitted, charm and scholarship in her writing; ‘this woman’s poetry’ was both ‘soft and melodious’. But she was too obsessed with ecstasies of the flesh for her palm-leaf verses to be elevated to the dignity of modern print and paper. What appeared in an 1887 translation of Muddupalani’s composition was vandalism, her soul excised and discarded. But with the woman made invisible, the elders could remain unthreatened and sanctimonious.

  Every line in the epic’s 584 poems threatened disorder, but some passages were especially calamitous. Not only did Muddupalani show Radha grooming Krishna’s bride, Ila, for their wedding night, she also highlighted Radha’s furious envy thereafter. At first it is concern for Ila that Radha expresses, like a ‘good’ older woman (‘How will the lips of this young girl suffer his bites … How will her breasts bear his clawing?’). Then it is advice for the girl (‘He is the best lover, a real connoisseur, extremely delicate. Love him skilfully and make him love you’). But after she has delivered his bride to Krishna’s chamber—and given him counsel on how to make love to this young thing ‘new to the art’—Radha collapses into an ocean of jealousies, ‘her mind a jumble of misery and joy’.

  Once, laments Radha, it was she who made love to Krishna. Now she was supplanted by another whose body was as ‘soft as bananas’. Lying restless in bed, she pictures them together, tortured by the images arrayed in her cruel mind. ‘Inside her,’ tells Muddupalani, ‘she was burning. As for Krishna, he was busy with the [other] girl.’ But the story does not end in torment or tragedy: Krishna returns to Radha and appeases his first love. She is comforted, and soon it is the hero who expresses exhausted discomfort. ‘If I ask her not to get too close,’ protests Krishna, ‘she swears at me loudly. If I tell her of my vow not to have a woman in my bed,’ he complains, ‘she hops on and begins the game of love.’

  In other words, when Radha had Krishna in her embrace again, she commanded unforgiving allegiance. Muddupalani’s Radha was not timid like the newly-wed Ila. Indeed, she was not like any other Radha. She turned convention on its head and claimed her right to bodily pleasure. For the first time in compositions of its type appeared a woman determined to quench her desire. She yearns for her lord, not coyly but insisting on physical affection. At first, she fears betrayal, but when her lover returns, she collects her dues and demands physical satisfaction.

  Muddupalani—named after the deity in Palani—was a woman who composed a whole epic bursting with eroticism. As her biographer Sandhya Mulchandani records, ‘Writing with unabashed frankness and unbridled enthusiasm, [she] feels no anxiety or remorse in so truthfully expressing her desires.’ Some believe her work is autobiographical: Pratapasimha was initially patron to Muddupalani’s grandmother, herself an acclaimed courtesan called Tanjanayaki. Was Radha’s envy a reflection of what the poet’s own forebear felt when her partner transferred his affections to one so much younger? Was the appeasement of Radha at its core the tale of a Maratha prince who returned, at last, to placate a neglected Telugu lover?

  Devotional poetry by women in language charged with erotic feeling was not Muddupalani’s innovation. She was, in fact, heir to a tradition as long as it was illustrious. Raghunatha Nayaka, lord of Thanjavur in a previous age, had a wife, Ramabhadramba. In streams of Sanskrit verse, she paints him as the embodiment of kingly ideals, bursting with masculine strength and physical vigour. When Raghunatha seeks women’s embraces, his consort ‘compares him admiringly’, writes Vasudha Narayanan, ‘to Lord Krishna’. She ‘extols his sexual prowess as he goes through a typical night’ making love to ‘an astounding series of women’. There is heroism and there is ardour. But here, as in works before, it is the man who commands love and attention—it is his pleasure that is central.

  With Muddupalani, however, the gaze is reversed—it is the deity who must satisfy the erotic yearnings of his female devotee. Shudder as some might at these verses, their eroticism was not what upset the elders. It was the fact that their author was a woman—one with wealth, learning, beauty and culture—that horrified her two-faced readers. From men, they lauded padams full of sringara . Ksētrayya, in the voice of a lovelorn woman, sings to his beloved god in lines that are famous:

  I can see all the signs

  Of what you’ve been doing

  Till midnight, you playboy.

  Still you come rushing through the streets

  Sly as a thief to untie my blouse.

  Elsewhere, he is still more playful:

  When we are on the bed of gold

  Playing at love talk

  He calls me Kamalakshi

  The other woman’s name.

  I am so mad

  I hit him as hard as I can

  With my braid.

  But Ksētrayya was a man, his verses, therefore, naturally sublime. Muddupalani was female: ‘an adulteress’ who had not the ‘modesty natural to women’. Where was virtue, demanded her critics. Where was shame? ‘Several references in the book are disgraceful and inappropriate for women to hear, let alone be uttered from a woman’s mouth,’ they screamed.

  Then, in the early twentieth century, Nagaratnamma, a devadasi from Bangalore, resurrected Muddupalani from darkness. She turned to these men and asked sharply in turn: ‘Does the question of propriety and embarrassment apply only in the case of women, not men?’ Was desire only a feeling permitted to men and forbidden forever for women? But the world was not ready; the elders still reigned. And Muddupalani went underground again, far from the self-righteous eyes.

  As for Nagaratnamma, the self-righteous sneered at her. A ‘prostitute had composed the book,’ announced a magazine, ‘and another prostitute has edited it.’ Surely no ‘literate gentleman can realise god by reading that he enjoyed sex in forty different ways’. But Nagaratnamma remained devoted. ‘However often I read this book … I feel like reading it all over again … this poem, brimming with rasa … written by a woman.’ While her contemporary Ancukam, a devadasi in Colombo, invited her ‘kind’ to follow the path of virtue, wearing not jewels but rudraksha, not make-up but sacred ash, Nagaratnamma hungered for Muddupalani, who had no reason for shame, no desire for ‘reform’.

  Then, at long last, after many decades had passed and India became free, the ban was withdrawn and justice done. Scholars like Susie Tharu and K. Lalita set out to retrieve Muddupalani, encountering on the way men yet opposed to such unholy plans. One alone offered words of wisdom ringing with an inconvenient truth. Said Yandamuri Satyanarayanarao: ‘These epic poems are well-formed works, complete with all the nine rasas . If we look at them with our present view of women, they might appear low and unrefined.’ But that is ‘the inadequacy of our culture, and not that of the epic or the poet’ herself.

  It’s a simple point, but it needed to be reiterated. If today we are afraid of Muddupalani’s song, it is not she who is to blame. If her poem is a moral threat, it is not she who must hide in shame. Muddupalani ruled over a different age, and there she remains eternally enshrined. It is those who came after who proved themselves history’s unworthy heirs.

  ALAUDDIN KHILJI RULING BY THE SWORD

  Alauddin Khilji, the fourteenth-century Muslim king of Delhi, had a fearsome mother-in-law. The conqueror—captured in a 2018 film as the very picture of unwashed ferocity, complete with sinister, surma-lined eyes, an insatiable appetite for gore and gold, and much lust for virtuous Hindu princesses—does not seem to have enjoyed any domestic tranquillity during his very eventful life. His first wife and her mother, described variously as ‘fool of fools’ and ‘silliest of the silly’,
were supremely dominating, so much so that some of his early campaigns were also partly an excuse to place as much distance as possible between himself and them. Things got a little more complicated after he seized the wife of a Gujarati king—the lady missed her young daughter, so another round of battles had to be fought to seize the object of her motherly affections. Then he had in his harem a slave girl who was sent out to do battle and died in the process. Finally, he also fell in love with Malik Kafur, the eunuch general, who cheerfully exploited this sentiment till he found his way abruptly to a forgotten grave.

  Alauddin was nephew and son-in-law to the first of the Khilji sultans, a man who killed his predecessor and then belatedly found himself consumed by guilt. This uncle wouldn’t sit on the throne, for instance, because he was convinced he was unworthy. While older nobles at court were sufficiently moved, those of a more aggressive temperament thought this sentimental nonsense. They began to plot to replace the mild-mannered monarch with a more manly substitute. When news of one of these intrigues reached the ruler, he summoned its participants to his august presence. And there, instead of relieving them of their seditious heads, he proceeded to lecture them on alcohol and the importance of not getting carried away into making murderous plans while under its influence. The young men nodded, wept and begged forgiveness, but among those who realised that the sultan was more heart than head and ambition was Alauddin. In 1296, after he raided Devagiri without imperial permission and returned with phenomenal quantities of plunder, he sought his royal uncle’s pardon and invited him to come in person to collect the treasure. Trusting and naïve, the old sultan went where he was told—and very quickly found himself in more than one piece.

  ‘While the head of the murdered sovereign was yet dripping with blood,’ writes the chronicler Ziauddin Barani, ‘the ferocious conspirators brought the royal canopy and elevated it over the head of Alauddin. Casting aside all shame, the perfidious and graceless wretches caused him to be proclaimed king by men who rode about on elephants.’ The new king was touched. After he put his uncle’s sons to flight and eventually imprisoned his infuriating mother-in-law, the men who helped raise him to the throne were also rewarded with death—that is, leaving aside two who had been already destroyed by leprosy or madness. The loot from Devagiri (later called Daulatabad) was put to good use. After all, gold could erase all traces of a less-than-conventional succession to the throne, purchasing loyalties that could not be immediately inspired. In subsequent policy, Alauddin was firm. ‘I issue such orders as I conceive to be for the good of the State, and the benefit of the people,’ he declared. ‘Men are heedless, disrespectful, and disobey my commands: I am then compelled to be severe to bring them into obedience.’ An elaborate network of spies was formed, so that if anything unwise was said against the sultan, His Majesty was perhaps also among the first to hear it.

  Alauddin’s career was not easy, though, despite all its violence and fury. Having murdered his uncle, he could hardly point fingers at his own nephews for seeking to follow in his august, blood stained footsteps. One tried to shower him with arrows, and for this his head appeared on a spear. Two sons of a sister decided the time was right for rebellion, so they were both blinded. In due course, however, it was clear that the sultan meant business, and the court fell in line. The times were such that to claim and retain power, one also needed to indulge in periodic violent demonstrations of its use. Alauddin became an empire builder. Kingdom after kingdom in northern India fell to him, while his trusted commander Malik Kafur acquired mountains of gold in the south. When hordes of Mongols invaded India soon after the sultan’s ascent to power, they were defeated. In 1303, however, when Alauddin was away, the Mongols destroyed Delhi. The king returned and locked himself up in a fort, unable to do much on this occasion, though he put to good use the lessons he learnt from the experience. For the rest of his reign, he never once allowed the Mongols a victory.

  Interestingly, the sacking of Delhi in 1303 occurred because Alauddin was at the time in Chittor, doing battle. Padmavat , an Awadhi poem that has since been embraced as historical fact, offers a most imaginative motive for the sultan’s presence there. A parrot had told the already married ruler of Chittor about a dark-skinned Ceylonese beauty. After many adventures, this beauty became queen in the desert, from where a wicked sorcerer was expelled by her Rajput husband. This character told Alauddin all about her, and so it was that the Muslim king marched his men and demanded the princess’s enlistment in his harem. To cut a long story short, battles were fought, masses of people died, and the lady jumped into a fire. Alauddin himself never knew this story, for it first appeared two centuries after his death. It would hardly have mattered though, for his end was not very happy. Illness depleted him, and he spent his time fearing his own sons, lapsing more and more into the hands of Malik Kafur, who may even have had something to do with his death. Either way, Alauddin died in 1316, and a fresh cycle of intrigues and violence began, ending with the fall of his dynasty and the inevitable advent of a new one.

  THE COURTESAN WHO BECAME A PRINCESS

  In the summer of 1795, soldiers attached to a Mughal jagir in present-day Uttar Pradesh rose up in mutiny and chained their commander-in-chief to a gun carriage. It was the nadir of their ultimately foiled enterprise, but the whole episode was packed with extraordinary drama. To begin with, the commander-in-chief—who languished for a whole week in excruciating heat—was a woman. She had launched her career as a dancing girl, not only rising to become the begum of Sardhana, but also to win the affection of the Mughal emperor, who styled her Zeb-un-Nissa (Jewel among Women), Farzand-i-Azizi (Beloved Daughter), and even Umdat-al-Arakin (Pillar of the State). She had spent her youth by the side of a much older German lover, inheriting his fortune and lands, and later joined a Frenchman in a doomed marriage. Now, as she lay shackled and humiliated in public, riding heroically to her rescue was a former Irish paramour, one who would title himself the ‘Raja from Tipperary’, becoming famous in due course for his own colourful military exploits.

  Begum Samru, as our protagonist is best known, was born in the 1750s to the junior wife (or mistress) of a petty Mughal nobleman. The early death of her father saw both mother and child turned out on to the streets, and by her teens the part-Kashmiri girl, who would one day take the name Joanna Nobilis, was a courtesan in Delhi. It was at this time that she encountered Walter Reinhardt. A serial deserter turned mercenary, this man of obscure origins had upset practically all of his employers, including the French and the British. He had originally served the French, assuming the name Somers when he transferred his loyalties to the English—this was later amended to ‘Sombre’ when he flipped again to the French side, which identity was finally Indianised into the ‘Samru’ of legend after he abandoned both European companies and took service with the Nawab of Bengal. In 1763, at the nawab’s orders, Reinhardt presided over a massacre of dozens of Englishmen in Patna: the prisoners were invited to dinner and after ‘his guests were in full security, protected as they imagined by the laws of hospitality’, he ordered his men ‘to fall upon them and cut their throats’. Only a doctor was spared, and the horror of the atrocity clouded Reinhardt’s reputation for the rest of his life.

  Even as the furious English authorities placed a bounty on his head, our German mercenary with many identities now entered the service of the Nawab of Awadh, essentially putting as much of a physical gap as he could between himself and East India Company justice. It was no wonder, then, that when even his latest master lost to the English, Reinhardt moved on yet again, travelling with much treasure and a large body of men to the court of the Jat ruler of Bharatpur. Here, in his newest capacity, he joined the 1765 Jat attack on Delhi. And now, at last, he encountered the courtesan who would take his name and bring to it a sheen of unusual glamour and magnetism. At the time, incidentally, Reinhardt already had an Indian wife and a son, but very quickly his romantic associate from Delhi became his principal partner. Indeed, Begum Samru would live with
him for over a decade, sharing in his numerous adventures. At first, this unlikely couple—the ‘butcher of Patna’ and the dancing girl from Delhi—stayed in Bharatpur. But in 1773, when the Jats were defeated by troops fighting for Emperor Shah Alam, Reinhardt switched sides again. It was the final gamble of his life, but a remunerative one. He received from the Mughals the jagir of Sardhana, which at last lent him a semblance of prestige, becoming also the stage where his begum would leave her own indelible mark.

  The years she spent with Reinhardt transformed Begum Samru. Accompanying her ‘husband’ on his numerous military campaigns, she became his right hand in managing Sardhana, investing in its growth and watching its revenues multiply. After Reinhardt’s death in 1778—something that infuriated the English, since it denied them the chance of ever avenging his barbarity—she played her cards with uncommon shrewdness, having the emperor recognise her, and not her husband’s hopeless son, as heir to his estate and all its appurtenances. Even while her dead spouse’s reputation continued to plague her, Begum Samru won admirers across the board, all of whom noted her determination, charm and store of wisdom—after all, she had come begrimed from crisis and want, and here she was now, wealthy, strong, and a force in her own right. Indeed, successive commentators recorded her ‘masculine’ gifts, which, in this patriarchal age, as Julia Keay wrote, was their highest compliment. The begum, too, encouraged such an image: she sported a turban and appeared unveiled in paintings, with a hookah pipe in her hand. She was essentially making, as art historian Alka Hingorani argues, ‘subtle alterations of traditionally masculine prerogatives’, carving out a space for herself in contemporary India. And that made her, at the time, completely extraordinary.