by M G Vassanji
It is always instructive to remind oneself of this obvious fact: The boundaries and names of many places are only recent in origin and often hide richer, more complex truths than one might imagine; the past then becomes inconvenient and slippery, far less easy to generalize.
In this respect it is useful to know that southeastern Afghanistan was culturally and politically closer to South Asia than to the Near East, a fact evident to this day in its chaotic porous mountain border with Pakistan; Kabul is less than a hundred miles from Peshawar. Before the partition of India it was not unusual to see Afghans plying their trades in northern India. Kipling’s famous spy on the road, Mahbub Ali, was an Afghan horse trader. At the same time, many of India’s peoples have originated in the north. And in ancient times, the Maurya empire, based in present-day north India, had embraced parts of Afghanistan, where it brought Buddhism, which survived many centuries. The great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as un-Islamic, were from the fifth century AD.
Islam arrived in the region of Afghanistan in the seventh century, but it took a slow hold on the land, as people still clung to their pre-Islamic traditions. Politically the region consisted of changing frontiers and fortunes under rival Turkish dynasties often at war. Descended from the nomadic tribes of the lands north of the Oxus river, the Turks had been brought into the Islamic domains as slaves and converted, and rose among the ranks in the armies. From Baghdad in the west to Bukhara (in central Asia) in the east, they were the warrior class of the Islamic world, just as the Kshatriyas were the warrior caste among the Indians. From the tenth century onwards, most of the ruling dynasties of the Muslim world were Turkish in origin, just as the ruling dynasties of northern India were Rajput Kshatriya. The battles for Delhi (1191–92) were therefore fought by these two warrior peoples, the Turks and the Rajputs.
The story of the “Muslim conquest” of India must begin, however, with a larger-than-life character called Mahmud of Ghazna (a city on the Kabul–Kandahar road). In a chaotic, fragmented Afghanistan, in 998 AD, Mahmud came to power and began a series of conquests to build up a large empire stretching from Persia to present-day Pakistan. In his homeland he is celebrated as a great conqueror—he never lost a battle in forty years of ceaseless warfare—and as a pious and cultured ruler, who brought the best poets, artists, and scholars to his court. (One of his acquisitions was Alberuni, a Persian scientist and scholar, who spent ten years in India, learned Sanskrit, and wrote one of the most important and comprehensive accounts ever attempted of life in India.) In India, however, Mahmud of Ghazna’s reputation derives largely from his conquests. In 999, Mahmud was designated a sultan by the Caliph of Islam, considered the representative of the Prophet, whose seat was in Baghdad. Upon this prestigious endorsement the Turk took a vow to wage holy war against the Hindus every year. Starting in the year 1000, up to 1030, when he died, Mahmud made at least seventeen incursions into India; his most infamous act was the destruction and plunder of the wealthy temple of Somnath by the Arabian Sea. The name of Mahmud of Ghazna, therefore, is emblematic of the destructiveness of temple-razing Muslim sultans and tops the historical hate list of present-day Hindu nationalists. Only after him on that list comes Muhammad of Ghur.
Mahmud never stayed in India; his base remained at Ghazna, capital of his empire and (now known as Ghazni) still important today. His empire was finally overrun in 1150 by the sultans of Ghur.
The background of Ghur, too, defies easy generalization. Lying in the central west of the region amidst high mountain ranges, Ghur was a land not easily accessible to conquest. The intrepid Mahmud subdued it only by feigning a retreat. Orthodox Islam also faced hard going against a residual Buddhism, and Mahmud had to appoint teachers to bring an acceptable Islam to the people of Ghur. A sect called Karami, with beliefs and practices strongly influenced by centuries of Buddhism, was prevalent in the region. In their newly Islamic beliefs, the Karamis substituted the idea of Buddha on his lotus throne with a similar, corporeal Allah. Even the notoriously unorthodox Ismailis tried to gain a foothold here. It might be argued that their idea of a godlike Imam bore resemblance to the Karamis’ God. Muhammad of Ghur, the eventual conqueror of northern India, was possibly a Karami before converting to the Hanafi Sunni school.
In 1191, after a series of military campaigns in the north, Muhammad of Ghur arrived on the plains of Tarain, some ninety miles from Delhi, where he faced a confederacy of Rajput Indian forces which had gathered to check his advance.
The Rajputs had dominated northern India through a number of independent, competing kingdoms. At the time of Muhammad’s invasion, Delhi was a city in an important Rajput kingdom based at Ajmer and ruled by Prithviraj III, also called Rai Pithora. In the First Battle of Tarain, Muhammad of Ghur was roundly defeated, and suffered a severe wound as well. A graphic description of a key confrontation in the battle seems almost to leap out of a miniature painting of the period. Imagine the dust of the north Indian plains, the blinding, deafening clash of steel, the cries of soldiers, the Turks on their steeds, the Rajputs relying on elephants. And then,
the Sultan attacked the elephant on which the ruler of Delhi, Govind Rai, was riding…. He struck his lance at the face of the Rai with such force that two of his teeth fell into his mouth. The Rai threw a javelin at him and severely wounded his arm. The Sultan turned round his charger’s head and retreated. Due to the agony of the wound, he was unable to remain seated on horseback and was about to fall on the ground when a lion-hearted warrior, a Khalji stripling, recognized him, sprang up (on the horse) behind the Sultan and, supporting him in his arms, urged the horse with his voice and brought him out of the field of battle.
Back in the mountains of Ghur, Muhammad began preparations to avenge his defeat, not without punishing first the amirs who had somewhat ignominiously fled the battlefield of Tarain. So great was his grief at his humiliation, it is said, that he would refuse to eat or drink.
At about the time when Muhammad was licking his wounds in Ghur and preparing his comeback, a young mystic called Muinuddin, of a Sufi order founded in the nearby town of Chisht saw the Prophet of Islam in a dream and left for Ajmer in the kingdom of Rai Pithora, where he founded what would become the greatest Sufi movement in India. That Muinuddin Chishti, as the young shaikh was called, could carry out his activities in a kingdom that was at war with his compatriots and coreligionists is something to ponder over. To this day, long after the Turkish dynasties have passed into oblivion, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims of all faiths visit Ajmer on the anniversary of Muinuddin of Chisht’s death.
In 1192, at the Second Battle of Tarain, Rai Pithora was defeated by Muhammad. According to some sources the Rajput king was executed; according to others he was allowed to function at Ajmer as a vassal and later put to death for treason. Rai Pithora’s son was allowed to rule in Ajmer for a while. Govind Rai, the ruler of Delhi and hero of the first battle, was killed in the second one, but his successor ruled for some time, acknowledging the authority of Muhammad.
From here on, the fate of India took a sharp turn. A new culture, based on a new faith, grew, receiving royal patronage and sometimes guiding the rulers using precepts that were foreign to this already highly cultured land. Architecture, music, language, law, and politics were all affected. Mosque minarets and domes, the muezzin’s prayer call five times a day, the Arabic script, and the Persian language symbolized this new order. The Turks had distinctly Oriental features, with fair skin, dark hair, and high cheekbones. They brought with them different court and civil rituals, alien personal manners and prejudices. Their racist epithet for the dark Indian was “crow.” They imported army mercenaries and civilian immigrants. And the seed of resentment and division was sown on the subcontinent to last to the present day. The Partition of 1947 was not a resolution; it simply amplified the resentments. Its violence and ravages were in effect another war. Since then, three conventional wars have already been fought by India and Pakistan.
The R
ajput king Prithviraj—Rai Pithora—is a figure of a romantic and ultimately tragic legend, a gallant and noble king, whose story has come down to us in an epic poem titled Prithvirajaraso, composed by his court poet and friend Chand Bardai but thoroughly embellished over the generations. His dashing courage is illustrated by a bravura public act: at a ceremony held in a neighbouring and rival Rajput kingdom, in which its princess, Sanyogita, would select her groom from a number of suitors, Prithviraj had suddenly emerged from behind a statue and rode away with the princess, who all the time had been his secret lover. Prithviraj had purposely not been invited to the ceremony. His defiance proved the downfall of the Rajputs, for whereas they had united in the First Battle of Tarain, in the second confrontation Prithviraj went without the previous level of support and was crushed.
According to a Rajput legend, Prithviraj was taken in chains by his conqueror all the way to Ghur. There, having dared to look Muhammad in the eye, he was blinded. But he had his beloved Chand Bardai at hand. Chand contrived a ruse to avenge Rajput humiliation. Presented before the sultan, he boasted that his lord, though blinded, was so skilled an archer that he could take aim and shoot his target merely from hearing a sound. An archery competition was called to test this claim, at which Chand caused the foolish, arrogant sultan to utter an inopportune word. Prithviraj turned, at once took aim, and slew the conqueror of Delhi.
In contrast, the Turkish Afghan sultans hardly cut romantic figures. They seem hard, hungry, and restless. According to some accounts, their horses were swifter and their fighting tactics faster against the cumbersome but lavishly decorated elephants of the Rajputs. They were on the offence, and on the chessboard that was the battlefield the knight had outdone the rook.
Not surprisingly, Chand Bardai, and those who interpolated the text of his tragic romance afterwards, portray Muhammad as a treacherous thug and torturer. The Muslim chroniclers, who wrote in Persian, were not writing nostalgic heroic paeans but historical narrative, but they, too, naturally had their biases, arising from the arrogance of the conqueror and the necessity to demonstrate Islamic piety and superiority, as well as abject loyalty to their benefactors the sultans. According to them, Muhammad of Ghur was assassinated on the evening of March 15, 1206, in his tent on the bank of the Indus river while returning from a military campaign. The identity of the assassins is a matter of debate. Among the suspects are the Ismailis, of Assassin notoriety, and Rajput loyalists. Within fourteen years of his death, his birthplace, Ghur, had been razed by the Mongols, its inhabitants massacred. The independent sultanates of Central Asia disappeared. Only Delhi remained to resist the Mongol onslaught, and it did so valiantly.
Muhammad of Ghur had left behind in Delhi his viceroy Qutbuddin Aibak, who in 1206 declared himself the independent sultan of Delhi. His capital was at the site of the old Rajput city, called Qila Rai Pithora, in the present-day suburb of South Delhi. The thick rubble-built walls of this old city are still visible in some places. In the new city, Aibak built the magnificent Quwwatul Islam mosque and began construction of the tower called Qutb Minar, both of which stand today at the Qutb complex among a dazzling array of red sandstone structures in various stages of ruin. The Qutb Minar was completed by later sultans and stands at 238 feet, with five storeys. The tower and the mosque symbolize the triumph of the new order and, more relevant for modern times, the beginning of a clash of cultures. An inscription on the mosque tells us it was built out of materials taken from twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, the evidence of which is still visible in the rows of pillars in the mosque decorated with typically Indian floral motifs and animal and human figures, some of which have been disfigured so as not to offend the piety of the Muslim prayer house. A great screen wall with arched openings stands in front of the mosque. The arches of this early mosque are of the indigenous style (succeeding layers of brick projecting a distance outwards from the one below, to form an arched opening), found in many ancient cultures. The “true arch” of the Roman and Islamic world would come to predominate later. Each of the storeys of the Qutb Minar had a balcony, the balustrades of which are now missing. It was perhaps a tower of victory; its sides are embellished by Quranic texts, and it has been claimed that it might also have been used by the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer.
Not surprisingly, taking into account the bitter humiliation, not to say hatred, that some still draw from the result of the eight-hundred-year-old Second Battle of Tarain, the Qutb Minar has been the subject of some controversy. A tradition claims that the tower was originally built by Prithviraj for his beloved wife Sanyogita to catch a glimpse of the Jumna river every morning, but this has been dismissed by archaeologists. In 1957, a 213-foot brick tower, the Minare Jam was discovered in the Ghur region in Afghanistan and is believed to be a direct inspiration for the Qutb Minar. Recently and more significantly, Hindu militants have claimed the site as Hindu, on the basis that temple materials were used there; an attempted worship was aborted by authorities. The tower has also been struck by lightning and been restored and repaired over the centuries.
A certain Major Smith has earned a reputation for his indiscriminate interference with the Indian monuments. Among his dubious achievements is the removal of the balustrades from the Qutb and building a superstructure upon it in 1803 that was so hideous that in 1848 the governor general, Lord Hardinge, had it removed.
Eight centuries later, oblivious to all this history and controversy, visitors come in great numbers to stroll inside the grounds that house the pink and white structures, for this is a popular site, spacious, beautiful, and mysterious, away from the buzz of the main city. Vendors ply limp postcards and packaged snacks, a snake charmer plays to a lethargic snake.
The Sultan and the Sufi
There is joy today
I have found my pir
Nizamuddin Auliya, Nizamuddin Auliya!
AMIR KHUSRAU
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON one time in Delhi, a few of us decide to go visit the ancient tank, a water reservoir, called Hauz Khas in suburban South Delhi. It is my last day in the city, until the next time, so there is a sense of farewell in our outing and conversations. By now I have made close friends in Delhi, and we will have our final lunch together. For me the day will be painfully long, for planes heading west to Europe and North America leave awfully late, and Delhi airport is a nightmare not worth contemplating.
We park at the shopping centre of Hauz Khas Village, visit the bookstore first. Mahesh, my host during my more recent few visits, introduces me to the owner. He ran a newspaper stand when I was still in college, says my boisterous friend. Now he owns a chain of bookstores! The man, in his early sixties perhaps, is on his way out and feels embarrassed, as do I. But his is another of Delhi’s rags-to-riches stories, post-Independence.
A quiet street leads from the shopping centre towards the Hauz Khas. First comes a rustic-looking restaurant partly hidden by the woods, exclusive merely by its location. After a Punjabi lunch we walk into the park and come upon a small lake, at the sight of which my friend goes ballistic. Not long ago this was still a conventional though defunct water tank, a rectangular reservoir with steps leading down for Delhi’s inhabitants of olden times to fetch water. A historical site. Now it is a suburban lake in a park. When he was young, Mahesh says, he could walk straight across from here to the Qutb; now a grid of busy roads girdles the area in between. To our right, a posh apartment complex abutting an ancient wall looks down upon the lake. The wall is part of an imposing structure. We stroll towards it, find ourselves at the bottom of an archaeological site. The climb up is unorthodox and a little risky, accomplished partly on all fours, with assistance from an attendant at the top. To our amazement he assumes the two middle-aged greybeards and two ladies to be out for hanky-panky, like teenagers, among the ruins and expects a large tip. He is disappointed. But there are teenagers out from school locked together intimately on the wide windowsills, exhibiting the arrogance of the young, rich, and Westernized.
Thus the ghosts haunting Delhi’s ruins, a cast of characters seen as through a mist, mystifying, awe-inspiring, ultimately too alien. A Shakespeare might have infused life into these shades, made them speak and feel. But no such creative genius sprang up here sufficiently detached from his narrative to render it timeless, less alien. Did they feel like us, these sultans who lived here, paraded their victories, built towers of enemy skulls? Their customary treachery and cruelty make the blood curdle; and yet they administered and defended a vast empire; and they professed profound piety, patronized scholars and scientists, and favoured poets who produced beauty we still marvel at, composed songs that move us to tears. Consider Alauddin.
About a century after the conquest of Delhi and the inauguration of the Turkish dynasty by Qutbuddin Aibak, a new dynasty began in 1290 in Delhi, with Jalaluddin Firuz Khilji. Himself an Afghan, Jalaluddin ended Turkish chauvinism in the ruling and administration of the state. Well on in his years when he ascended the throne, he came to be admired—and repudiated—as a good man, almost to the point of idiocy. Rarely has a ruler of those times been described, and criticized, for his goodness. Jalaluddin simply did not fit the mould of the ruler, and the noblemen were intensely frustrated with him. When some of these nobles broke out into an insurgency, the sultan, instead of punishing them brutally in exemplary fashion, had them clothed, wined, and dined. When thieves were caught in Delhi, he extracted promises of good behaviour from them and freed them. When Thugs (the notorious robbers of the night who strangled their victims with knotted kerchiefs) were captured in Delhi, he had them exiled. He tolerated the Hindus in their un-Islamic beliefs. He was therefore considered weak and an idiot. Says Ziauddin Barni, “Men complained of the clemency and humanity of the sultan.”