The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  Even before his reign, Jahangir was a man of curiosity. All his life, as his biographer Parvati Sharma shows, he went about measuring things—the size of a peach, the weight of a melon, the dimensions of a cave opening—just as he recorded strange and peculiar sights. So while on the one hand his generals took fire and steel into enemy lands, Jahangir took delight in watching pet cranes mate. He thundered from afar at his enemies (the Marathas he dismissed as ‘a people of unlimited stupidity’) while investing in a menagerie at home. The way to please him was to bring him animals: the English gifted him mastiffs, for whom the emperor arranged palanquins. On another occasion he was introduced to a lion that lived with a goat, while his travels threw up everything from a snake swallowing a rabbit to a spider that strangled a snake.

  Art flourished under Jahangir. Europeans were delighted with his affection for the Madonna, while Hindus noticed symbols from their own traditions. Then there were images prepared of the oddities that caught the emperor’s eye. Sharma notes the story of an emaciated courtier, thin beyond belief, who asked for leave from court. Jahangir agreed to let him depart—but only after he had his likeness made. A dervish from Sri Lanka, similarly, brought him a slender loris—‘really horrible looking’—and immediately, the emperor ordered that its likeness be painted. On yet another occasion, Jahangir was presented a zebra. A sceptic, he was suspicious at first that it was perhaps a painted horse, till much washing and cleaning refused to erase the creature’s stripes. In fact, as far as Jahangir was concerned, few living beings were left alone: but if there was one thing that revolted the sovereign of Hindustan, it was worms crawling out of the corpses of animals he’d shot.

  Jahangir’s relationship with Nur Jahan is well recorded, but he was also close to other women. There was a sister to whom he was so attached that his father made him drink her breast milk so she ‘may be like a mother to you’. When his wet nurse died, he carried on his own shoulder one end of her funeral bier. And in the Jahangirnama are multiple expressions of grief on the death of various imperial women, including, for instance, a Rajput wife, who chose suicide. There is vulnerability in this Jahangir, though another side shows also cruelty, one where interrupting a hunt could cost a servant his life, and a gardener who cut down beloved trees found himself missing a few fingers. Even the elite faced the emperor’s wrath: when a rebellious nobleman was presented, ‘Were it not for what people would think,’ Jahangir fumed, ‘I would have throttled him with my own hands.’

  Of all the Mughal emperors, Jahangir led the most comfortable life, free from many problems that afflicted those who ruled before and after him. He packed his twenty-two years on the throne with the most diverse interests, less focused than Akbar or Dara Shukoh, but rich in its sheer detail. He showed himself a remarkable man, one who could marvel at the gems sent him in tribute, just as he could stun an ambassador by gleefully driving a bullock cart. The future emperor Shahjahan’s propaganda cast Jahangir as a henpecked debauchee. But, as new insights show, and the Jahangirnama attests, the man was a little bit more: an endearing eccentric, but every inch an emperor worth remembering.

  VARARUCHI’S CHILDREN AND THE MAPPILAS OF MALABAR

  There is in Kerala a fascinating legend featuring the Hindu sage Vararuchi and a pariah girl who bore him twelve children. The story is rich in metaphor, and to this day there are families along the coast that claim descent from one or another of their fabled offspring. The eldest, for instance, was raised a brahmin, while the youngest, who oddly had no mouth, is venerated as a temple deity. One son was a celebrated master carpenter, folklore connecting him to shrines across Kerala, while another was a madman whose chief delight lay in rolling a boulder uphill, only to watch it tumble down, over and over. Yet another brought to his esteemed Brahmin brother’s feast beef to eat, while one more of Vararuchi’s tribe settled as a trader. And in a tale that weaves together brahmins and Nairs, a deity as well as a dalit, it is this sibling, Uppukoottan, who introduces a final interesting identity. For Uppukoottan, son of Vararuchi, is believed to have been raised a Mappila, adhering not so much to his father’s Hindu traditions as to the word of the Prophet Muhammad.

  While to some the presence of a Muslim in a popular Hindu legend might seem outlandish, to Malayalis the story is by no means unusual. After all, across the length and breadth of Kerala, history and legend are united in featuring Muslims (and Christians) prominently in a shared cultural universe. Arabs had mastered the seas even before the Prophet was born, and soon after its dawn, Islam was delivered to Kerala through long-standing channels of commerce. The oldest mosque in the region, for instance, is said to have been established in the lifetime of the Prophet himself, in 629 CE , though archaeologists quibble about the exact age of the structure. By 849 CE , at any rate, Muslim traders were consequential enough to witness a royal grant (made, incidentally, to Christians), their signatures inscribed in archaic Arabic. When Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan diarist, came here in the course of his travels, he saw men from Persia in settlements along the coast, and one of the most beautiful mosques in Calicut, the turquoise blue Mishkal Palli, was founded soon afterwards by a commercially prolific merchant who began his life and career in faraway Yemen.

  The influence of the Mappilas, born from the union of Arabs with local women as well as from subsequent conversions, quickly found reflection in Kerala’s already diverse culture. Some of the principal officials of the Zamorin of Calicut were Muslims, and in the great Mamankam festival at Tirunavaya—the most important religious gathering in Kerala till the eighteenth century—Muslims participated in the colourful revelries just as they did in formal royal ceremonies. At Sabarimala, where hundreds of thousands converge to worship the Hindu god Ayyappa, homage is also paid to Vavar, the deity’s Muslim friend whose name sounds (painfully to some) like Babur. The language of the Mappilas, meanwhile, developed into a unique blend of Malayalam sound and Arabic script, influenced over time by Persian as well as by Tamil and Kannada. Their architecture, too, absorbed Kerala’s indigenous style—the oldest mosques feature no domes or minarets, bearing instead the gables and tiled roof that crown temples and even Christian churches from this era. The nerchchas of the Mappila community, celebrating saints and divines, resemble Hindu festivals—the tall brass lamp, the elephants, bright parasols and fireworks, all integral to the temple pooram as much as to these Muslim commemorations. There is even, in fact, a Mappila Ramayana, featuring Ravana as a sultan; Surpanakha’s proposition to Rama in this version seeks sanction from the Sharia.

  Even prominent Hindu lineages embraced Islam. Legend has a king, Cheraman Perumal, journeying to Mecca himself, while a Nair nobleman founded the Muslim dynasty of Arakkal. His line would come to rule over the Lakshadweep Islands, forging links with Tipu as well as the Ottoman sultan, but retaining through the centuries the matrilineal system of succession that allowed women to rule, unencumbered by purdah or seclusion. Such, in fact, was the mass of seafaring Muslims in the coastal towns and ports of Kerala that Ma Huan, the Chinese traveller, was convinced in the fifteenth century that most of the region’s dwellers must be adherents of the Quran. One of the Hindu princes of Calicut certainly commanded every fisherman in his realm to bring up one son for Islam—this would enable them to sail the seas, man the royal navy and contribute to the prosperity of a land where commerce was everything.

  It was when the terms of that trade began to suddenly change that the Mappila community encountered its first chapter of decline. The Portuguese, who arrived in 1498, quickly seized control of the seas, marrying commercial rivalry with religious bigotry. Arabs who had reigned supreme for a thousand years were expelled from their pedestals of power. As one authority recorded, the Europeans, with their guns and prejudice, ‘forbade the Muslims to trade in pepper and ginger, and then later cinnamon, cloves and other commodities … They prevented Muslims from making commercial voyages to Arabia, Malacca, Achin and Damao.’ Mappila ships were set ablaze, pilgrimages obstructed, and mosques were destroye
d by white men who brought unfair dynamics into the game. At first the Zamorins, in whose dominions resided the vast majority of Mappilas, fought back. But in due course, the cold logic of economics prevailed—the sea of foreign Muslims coming to Kerala was reduced to a trickle, as Hindu rulers came to terms with the Europeans. A few Mappila heroes emerged such as the Kunjali Marakkars, naval guerrillas who gave the Portuguese a real fight. But in the end they too were destroyed, and Muslim influence, it was patent to all, was on a cascading low.

  Songs of the Mappilas to this day bear witness to this. The Mappila-pattu fall into several categories. There are festive songs, sung at weddings and ceremonies. Then there are mala or ‘garland’ songs, some praising great saints, and others celebrating warriors and heroes, including those who fell as recently as in the Mappila Rebellion of 1921. Among the oldest, however, is the Kotturpalli Mala, and in this Europeans are the villains. A brave Muslim youth, we hear, is informed of a girl being forced aboard a Portuguese ship. The courageous Mappila abandons his own wedding ceremony to rescue the abducted girl, but is killed. His body, cut into pieces, washes up on different parts of the coast, where great miracles follow—a story that bears unspoken links to the Hindu story of Sati, whose scattered limbs are worshipped in shrines across India. Either way, though the Portuguese prevailed, it was the Mappila who earned true honour, his adversaries merely agents of greed and merchants of ill repute.

  The emphasis on honour, however, barely obscures the existential crisis of the Mappilas in the colonial age. By the middle of the eighteenth century, with few exceptions, the community was poor, with many Mappilas tenants of Hindu lords. When Hyder Ali and Tipu of Mysore conquered Malabar, these Hindus fled while the Mappilas saw value in collaborating with the invaders, fortified also by their shared religion. But when defeat came to Tipu, the tables were turned: the old guard returned, and with them arrived British rule. Religious animosity swelled on both sides during the nineteenth century. In 1851, a Nair landlord was killed after he forced a Mappila to replace the call to prayer with a ‘summons to eat swine’s flesh’. Violence was also driven partly by economics—a fifth of the land revenue in northern Kerala came from eighty-six landlords, only two of whom were not Hindus. Mappila tenants could be evicted at will by superiors who, even in the best of times, charged anywhere from fifty-nine to seventy-seven per cent of the produce as rent. All legal clauses privileged the owner—even when the landlord, such as the Zamorin, wasn’t fully certain where his extensive lands began or ended. The colonial establishment, meanwhile, had no desire for reform. Even in 1917, the British were convinced that legislation to prevent arbitrary eviction would be a ‘grave political mistake’.

  It was no wonder, then, as one rebel expressed it in 1843, that ‘it is impossible for people to live quietly while the …[landlords] treat us in this way’. To such economic anxiety was also married an extremism born from a group of fanatics—in 1844, a British official noted that, encouraged by overzealous religious men, some Mappilas had started to believe that the ‘murder of a heretic is a passport to heaven’. As recently as 1896, when a Mappila was captured after a temple attack, he confirmed his suicidal convictions: ‘We came to the temple intending to fight … and die.’ And what would come after death? As testimony from an earlier survivor went, ‘I had heard that there was a reward in heaven for those who got shot.’ Indeed, in 1898, one Mappila even pointed out that his biggest fear was that he would get shot in the legs and live: only a fatal shot opened the gates of paradise.

  Without economic resources, pushed to the corners and radicalised by an extremist minority, the men who sparked the outrages exemplified a combination of factors that birthed violence. To this was added the trigger of the Khilafat Movement in 1921, with protests against the post-First World War unseating of the Ottoman Caliph being fanned, in Kerala, into outright rebellion. As a telegram received by Lord Reading, the British Viceroy, read: ‘The situation is now clearly actual war, and famine, widespread devastation and prolonged rebellion can only be avoided by prompt measures.’ Unprecedented savagery was unleashed. Hindu and Christian homes were targeted by Mappilas and, as a declaration by the Zamorin claimed, cows were slaughtered in temples, with assailants ‘putting their entrails on the holy image and hanging skulls on the walls and the roofs’. It was a horrifying display of fanaticism that came at the end of a long history of alienation: the stake Mappilas had in society had been watered down, till it was felt that the order itself must be toppled if they were to find purpose. In the end, 2,339 rebels were killed, 6,000 captured and 39,000 persuaded to surrender. Much blood flowed through northern Kerala. But from this disaster was also born introspective wisdom. For it was understood that if there was to be peace between different men, each one of them had to feel that important thing: a sense of common belonging.

  The year 1921, then, became the year of the last major communal incident in Kerala. In the decades that followed, lessons were learnt and extremism was shunned. When in 1969 a Muslim-majority district was created in Malappuram, there were temporary fears that this would be a ‘Moplastan’ within India, a local manifestation of the two-nation theory. But that was not to be, and instead the Mappilas returned to a previous history from a more confident age, where a mosque could donate land for a temple, and a temple could host an iftar for local Muslims. There are today fears of radicalism imported from abroad, but then there is also the force of heritage and the wisdom of a beautiful past. New challenges will emerge, but there still remain in Kerala those wonderful old songs: where a Mappila could join hands with his Hindu brother, and even Vararuchi the sage could have a Muslim son.

  THE WOMAN WITH NO BREASTS

  Her name was Nangeli and she lived in Cherthala, a watery alcove on the Kerala coast. We do not know when she was born or who sired her. They say she died in the early nineteenth century, her spirit cast in a hundred moulds in the two hundred summers that followed. Today, Nangeli has champions on the Internet, her story told by men and women seeking inspiration and courage on this side of time. And they too have recast her sacrifice, celebrating a tale that would have been alien to its protagonist. Nangeli has been reduced from a woman who thrust a dagger into the heart of society to one who died to preserve those artful shackles that many of us know as ‘honour’.

  The contours of the tale are well known. Nangeli and her man, Chirukandan, were Ezhavas—primarily toddy tappers—who laboured in that awkward gap that society fashions for those who are low but not the lowest. They had a little hut where they lived, and they had no children. Life for Nangeli and Chirukandan was as hard as it was for their neighbours. They survived hand to mouth, toeing lines drawn by caste and bowing before the pretensions of their superiors. Nothing about them was remarkable till Nangeli stood up. The elders proclaim that she stood up to preserve her dignity, but that is because they are afraid to admit that she stood up to them. Nangeli was a rebel, but like many rebels, in death her memory became the possession of those she opposed. She threw off one tyrant and found her legacy in the grasp of another.

  The Kerala that Nangeli and Chirukandan knew was not the Kerala celebrated today for its healthy children, emancipated grandmothers and literate masses. It was a hard, difficult landscape, and Cherthala was a speck on the map of Travancore, a state with a ruler of its own, to whom was owed allegiance—and tax money. Land tax was low, but the rajahs made up for this ancestral blunder through other levies. If you were a landless fisherman, you had a tax on your fishing net. If you were a man sporting a moustache, your facial hair fell within the mandate of the revenue inspector. If you owned slaves, you most certainly had to pay tax on those bleeding units of muscle. Nangeli and her husband acquiesced like loyal subjects, but today’s storytellers will tell you that she stood up to the one abhorrent tax that touched upon her honour; that when it came to her rights as a respectable woman, she declared: ‘No more.’

  They came one morning, the story goes, to tax her breasts, leering at their shape and dime
nsions, to calculate the figure owed. It was called mulakkaram —the breast tax—and women who were not high-born were surveyed as soon as they advanced from girlhood to adolescence. Nangeli had probably been taxed for years, but that year when the villains of the tale came to her hovel, she was prepared for the act that would cleave for her a place in history and lore. She went inside calmly while they waited by the threshold, it is said, and returned with the tax offering on a plantain leaf. Since they had come for the breast tax, that is what they got: Nangeli’s breasts, severed by her own hand and placed on the leaf in a bleeding lump. She collapsed in a heap and died in agony, her corpse cradled by Chirukandan, who returned to find his home turned into the scene of one of history’s great tragedies. Some say he jumped into the pyre as Nangeli burned and perished in flames of grief—for him, too, there was the redemption of sacrifice.

  The legend of Nangeli was birthed in blood and injustice. Women of low caste, they will tell you, couldn’t cover their bodies if they didn’t pay the breast tax. They silently wept and lamented their fate, shame building upon shame under the gaze of lewd old men who decreed that the right to dignity came with a price. But Nangeli was a woman of virtue—she would not barter money for honour. And so she chose death.

  Embarrassed and horrified by the tyranny of their own ways, the rajahs abandoned the tax on breasts. Nangeli became a heroine. Womanhood prevailed.

  This is the tale they will tell you of Nangeli. As it happens, it is all a travesty.

  For a society as open as Kerala once was, breasts came to provoke a grave panic in the Victorian age. This was the land where Portuguese merchants in the sixteenth century beheld bare-breasted princesses negotiating treaties of trade and leading bare-chested troops in battle. It was here that a seventeenth-century Italian found himself in the court of a prince, packed with royal women covered only around the waist—two young nieces of the ruler wondered with amusement why on earth the visitor was so covered up in the tropical heat. This was also the land where women enjoyed physical and sexual autonomy, where widowhood was no calamity and one husband could always be replaced with another. The coast was rich with tales of great women—from Unniarcha of the northern ballad of Malabar, an accomplished warrior from Nangeli’s caste, to Umayamma of Attingal, a princess who reigned over kings. These were brave women of towering personality. But in the nineteenth century, Kerala’s moral conscience grappled not with their achievements as much as the conundrum that their unabashed bare-breastedness presented.