A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  Thus the liberality of Gujarat’s greatest king. He endowed temples and reservoirs throughout his kingdom, and against his enemies fought like a lion. “O sea, make a swastika of pearls! O moon, shine in full splendour,” wrote Hemachandra in praise once, “conquering the earth, Siddhraj arrives.” He was slight in stature and fair, and enjoyed going about incognito in the night to mingle with his subjects (and no doubt hear good things about himself) and visit popular entertainments. He was indifferent to religion. Legend reprimands his lustiness and intrigues with Brahmin women. And due to a curse from a low-caste woman called Jasma, he could not have a son to succeed him.

  A curious story was told to Forbes about Kumara Pala, who succeeded Jaisingh, and Hemachandra. According to this legend, the king and his priest-scholar both became Muslims, through the wiles of a Muslim magician. A more mainstream tradition says that the monk Hemachandra and the monarch Kumara Pala once visited together the great temple of Somnath by the Arabian sea. While the two sat in the inner sanctum of the temple, through the power of the monk’s meditation Shiva himself appeared and instructed the prostrate king to learn the true path from the monk. Thus Kumara Pala was converted to Jainism and forbade the slaughter of animals in his kingdom.

  Hemachandra is an attractive, enigmatic character: a scholar, a poet, and an ascetic, as well as a trickster, and surely political? Having held influence in the courts of Gujarat’s two great kings, at eighty-four years of age he prepared himself to die, and abstaining from food gave up his last breath.

  But legend presents two quite delicious alternatives regarding his end.

  The Jains had gained ascendancy in the kingdom, and there were already a hundred thousand of their monks in Anhilvada. There was much hatred between them and the Brahmins, who, having lost an argument (due to an illusion produced by Hemachandra), were preparing to leave the capital. However, just at this time the great Brahmin and pan-Indian ascetic Shankaracharya happened to be in the area and was asked to assist his coreligionists. In the morning, when Kumara Pala called the Brahmins and ordered them to leave the kingdom, Shankaracharya stepped forward. What’s the need to expel anyone from the kingdom? he asked. At nine o’clock the ocean will rise from the west and swallow up the entire country. Hemachandra denied this could happen, for according to Jain doctrine the world had no beginning or end. When nine o’clock arrived, Kumara Pala, Hemachandra, and Shankaracharya climbed to an upper storey of the palace and looked out the western window and beheld the sea approaching in waves. On and on the waves came, until Anhilvada began to drown. The three climbed still higher, until they reached the seventh floor. Water had submerged everything in the capital, even its tallest spires and trees. Kumara Pala turned in terror to Shankaracharya and asked, Is there no escape? Is this the end? Shankaracharya told him, A boat will come this way from the west, whoever jumps into it will survive. Soon enough, a boat appeared, and came closer, and the three prepared to jump. But just when the time was right to leap, the wily Shankaracharya stayed the king with his hand and let Hemachandra go first. The ocean and the boat turned out to be illusions, and Hemachandra fell to his death on the pavement below.

  Another story describes how Shankaracharya stirred with his little finger a glass of milk destined for the old Hemachandra. The Brahmin’s fingernail, however, contained a poison. The monk died.

  All communities have such folk histories. Delightful stories, they are also propaganda, repeated generation to generation, with variations. But as soon as you remove them from the realm of the imaginary, they become dangerous messengers of communal divisiveness.

  The Solankis were followed by the Vaghela dynasty, whose rule came to an end in 1298, when the armies of Alauddin Khilji of Delhi conquered Anhilvada. The last of the Rajput kings of Anhilvada was Karan, known to posterity by the unfortunate title of Karan Ghelo, or Crazy Karan, who is said to have wrought his own tragedy.

  The bards tell of how Karan had stolen the wife of one of his ministers, Madhav, and killed Madhav’s brother, Keshav. Madhav, whose wife happened to be a Padmini Brahmin—that is, of the highest order—vowed that he would not touch food in Gujarat until he had avenged himself and brought back the “Turks” to destroy Karan’s kingdom. Therefore he went to Alauddin in Delhi and enticed him with the prospect of Gujarat’s conquest. There is no doubt, according to the historian S. C. Misra, disputing the counterclaims of modern revisionist historians who see in this bardic tale an aspersion on the Hindu character, that Madhav did collaborate with Alauddin. Madhav had been a powerful minister, second only to the king. Evidently, he must have been provoked. Karan abandoned his capital to the enemy, offering no resistance.

  When Alauddin’s generals Nusrat Khan and Ulugh Khan took Anhilvada, “the treasures, elephants, and women-folk of Raja Karna [Karan] fell into the hands of the army of Islam,” according to the contemporary Delhi historian Zia Barni. Karan’s queen, Kanvala Devi, was taken to Delhi and joined Alauddin’s harem. She became his favourite queen. A few years later, instigated by Kanvala Devi, the sultan asked Karan, who was back in Anhilvada, to send Kanvala’s daughter Deval Devi to be a wife of the heir apparent, Khizr Khan. Karan seems to have agreed joyfully but perhaps had treachery in mind, for when Alauddin sent his army under the former slave “thousand-dinar” Malik Kafur (later to earn infamy for his dark treachery at the Delhi court) to Gujarat, Karan had fled. The Delhi army found the young Deval Devi on the road among a party fleeing Anhilvada. Disguised as a young man, she was almost killed by the soldiers before her identity was discovered. She was taken to Delhi posthaste and married to Khizr Khan.

  The passion of Khizr Khan for Deval Devi moved Amir Khusrau of Delhi, a friend of Khizr, to depict it in an epic poem written in 1316 in Persian, which he called Ashiqa, “The Lovers.”

  The story is controversial.

  For many, even to this day, the thirteenth-century story of Rajput defeat and humiliation festers in the mind, writ large as a chapter in the continuing saga of Hindu-Muslim enmity, and as one more invasion that Mother India had to endure in the travail that has been her history. A Rajput-Turk war becomes one pitting Hinduism against Islam. In this tragic nationalist scenario, the Gujarati kingdom at Anhilvada becomes a Camelot where wise kings ruled harmoniously over their people, and culture and learning prevailed. There was no crime to speak of: the lower castes lived as good neighbours next to the upper castes and not out of sight, and presumably the rajas fought each other in the best traditions of chivalry. A historian writes, “Amir Khusrau seems to have been suffering from a delusion that the Hindus had no sense of honour and their women no sense of chastity.” By such history is extreme nationalism backed. Even the existence of Kanvala Devi and Deval Devi has been doubted. S. C. Misra, on the other hand, after considering claims and counterclaims, has little doubt about the basic authenticity of the story of Deval Devi and Khizr Khan. Khusrau was not only a poet but also an able historian.

  Getting on with the story, the young Gujarati princess’s ultimate fate in Delhi, in a court teeming with ugly intrigues, was a tragic one.

  Having had Alauddin’s queen put in prison, Malik Kafur, the evil schemer of the palace, had Khizr Khan imprisoned and blinded, his only solace his beloved Deval. The ailing Alauddin himself was possibly poisoned by Malik. He was succeeded by Qutbudin Mubarak, another of his sons, who had Khizr Khan executed. In this bloody dungeon scene the devoted Deval, clinging to her husband, had both her hands cut off by the murderers and was wounded in the face. An alternative ending has Deval Devi ending up in the harem of Qutbudin, who was subsequently murdered by his favourite companion, a Hindu convert, who for a short time ruled as Nasirudin and took Deval Devi into his harem.

  One shudders.

  Amir Khusrau claims to have been told the story by his friend Prince Khizr Khan: “My head was exalted by the honour of my selection, and I retired with the narrative in my hand.” He was not beyond embroidery, of course.

  Timur’s (Tamerlane’s) sacking of Delhi at the en
d of the fourteenth century considerably weakened the Delhi sultanate, whereupon in 1407 Gujarat’s governor, Zafar Khan Muzaffar, asserted his independence and began a local dynasty of Muslim kings. Zafar Khan was himself a Hindu of the Tank caste who had converted to Islam—such are the wonderful ironies that India throws up. The portion of Gujarat actually ruled from Delhi and later independently from Anhilvada, increasingly called Patan in the accounts, was a strip stretching from Patan south via Baroda, including the wealthy ancient ports of Cambay and Broach. To the east, west, and the north lay independent or semi-independent Rajput kingdoms and military garrisons of the sultanate. There were frequent rebellions and acts of defiance, the Rajputs and the Muslim generals often at war against each other, or in alliance with each other against the king in Patan. Also to the east was Malwa, another province of Delhi, whose governor often became involved in plotting against his rival in Patan. Much of the sultan’s energy was therefore taken up marching across the land subduing rebellions or extending his conquest. Understandably, some of the dispossessed Rajputs had taken to banditry or guerilla warfare. Palace intrigues continued, here as in Delhi. It would appear from the histories that more rulers died by poison than any other means. Zafar Khan received his cup of poison from his grandson Ahmed Shah, for allegedly having put to death (by poison) Ahmed’s father, Tatar Khan. Ahmed Shah (1411–1442), on his way back from campaigns to the south, established Ahmedabad as the new capital. Anhilvada receded into insignificance and is now no more than the small regional town of Patan, known more for the exclusive weave of cloth made there than for its early history.

  The Mughals had arrived in India with Babur and were extending their reach south from Delhi. In 1573, Akbar, the third Mughal, wrested Gujarat from its sultan and annexed it to the Mughal empire, of which it remained a province for two hundred years. It was during this period of Mughal ascendancy that the future masters of India took their first steps on the subcontinent, in 1608, when an English ship arrived at the wealthy Gujarati port of Surat under Captain Hawkins, envoy of King James I. Jehangir was the emperor. Shortly thereafter, by a treaty of 1613, signed in Agra, the English were given permission to trade and open factories in Surat, Gogha, Cambay, and Ahmedabad. Surat became the most important port of Gujarat.

  Akbar, whose memory is beloved to Indians of all backgrounds, began a period of Mughal rule that was tolerant, and in his own time indeed benevolent, towards religious differences. He was a great conqueror, a stern and just ruler, and a pious worshipper of the Sufis, whose wives were from the Christian, Muslim, and Hindu faiths. He attempted to found a universal Indian religion, and in his new capital of Fatehpur Sikri, outside Agra, he had three prayer rooms for his wives of three faiths. His great-grandson, the stern, bigoted Aurangzeb, however, repressed both Hindus and nonorthodox Muslims. Aurangzeb ruled for almost fifty years, during which time he carried out lengthy campaigns across India. After his death in 1707, the Mughal empire lay exhausted and in a state of centrifugal decline. The Marathas, a group of Marathi-speaking warrior clans from Maharashtra, after a few decades of battling against and sharing power and alliances with Mughal remnants, finally, by about 1760, established themselves in parts of eastern and central Gujarat, including Ahmedabad. The rest of what we know as Gujarat broke up into local kingdoms.

  With Mughal decline and Maratha ascendancy, the British began to exert a greater influence and gradually took control, first of Surat, and later, defeating the Marathas, of most of Gujarat. Five districts were ruled directly by the British, the remaining areas made up of princely states ruled under supervision of British Residents. This was the political situation that prevailed at Independence in 1947.

  In the City of Sandalwood

  [Its air] is healthy, and the earth picturesque; the vineyards bring forth blue grapes twice a year, and the strength of the soil is such that the cotton plants spread their branches like willows and plane trees…and besides Cambay, the most celebrated of the cities of Hind in population and wealth, there are 70,000 towns and villages, all populous, and the people abounding in wealth and luxuries.

  (A 1300 AD description of Gujarat)

  BARODA, OR VADODARA, is the first city in Gujarat that I visited. It is not my ancestral place, but I had made friends here, Raj Kumar and Mohamed and others, on my first visit and was invited back, and therefore it became the base from which I could explore other parts of the state. Baroda is a small city in central Gujarat; its ancient name was Chandanavati, “city of sandalwood,” and it formed one of the districts of Delhi’s medieval Gujarat province, mentioned in the histories as a junction on the way from Patan to go down south to the port of Broach, or to get to Champaner in the east. In 1590, a writer described the highway from Patan to Baroda, one hundred and fifty miles, as lined on both sides with mango trees, the fields bound by hedges, and the countryside so abundant in fruit trees as to look like a garden. That road is now paved, of course, with toll booths along the way and lined with factories and dhabas, trucks and buses trundling along its route. In itself it could not have been very important, and even today it can claim not much more than a modest status. While parts of the modern city bear the clamour of any urban centre in India, here one can still find green spaces and drive through quiet avenues, and no place is really too far.

  Baroda was captured from the remaining vestiges of the Mughal empire by the Marathas in 1734 and ruled thenceforth by the Maratha Gaekwad dynasty, directly at first, then later under British protection as the capital of the princely state of the same name, until Indian Independence in 1947. In modern times it long held a reputation for its high culture, an aura of which it still carries to some degree, especially due to the presence of its major English-language university, but its greater importance currently lies in its industrial sector.

  Baroda’s prestige can be traced to a single name, that of its remarkable prince Maharaja Sayajirao III (1863–1939). His predecessor Khande Rao had left no male issue and was succeeded by his younger brother Malhar Rao, who was quickly declared unsuitable and deposed. Malhar Rao’s sins were many. For one thing he had been accused of instigating an uprising against the British during the 1857 Mutiny; he had also been accused of trying to murder his elder brother by sorcery or poison. And later, after his succession, he tried to poison the British Resident. There was more. He was exiled to Madras, and Khande Rao’s widow was asked by the British Government to adopt a son. A poor thirteen-year-old relation was found in a village in Maharashtra, duly adopted, and given the name Sayajirao. His education was entrusted to an English administrator, Mr. F. A. H. Elliot.

  Perhaps due to this background, Sayajirao had a passion for reform that makes him look modern even today. Among his innovations was the endowment of public libraries and a major college (Baroda College, later upgraded to a university), and making primary education compulsory in his domain, even for girls and those of the lower castes. He passed legislation to allow Hindu widows to remarry and to prevent infant marriages. He provided scholarships for the “Untouchables” to study in India and abroad. One such beneficiary was B. R. Ambedkar, who went on to attend Columbia University in New York, and upon his return as a scholar and reformer he fought for the human rights of low-caste Indians, becoming finally one of the architects of the Indian constitution. Sayajirao was also an art collector and brought great painters and musicians to his court. The singer Fayaz Khan, it is said, would sit atop one of the gates of the old city early in the morning to perform. The great south Indian painter Ravi Varma spent many years at the court. His magnificent portraits of the royal family are collected in the small but charming Fateh Singh Museum, founded by the family, along with paintings inspired by classical Indian mythology. Since some of them inevitably remind one of Western paintings of classical motifs, his reputation waned somewhat before reviving. Sayajirao’s second wife was given the name Chimnabai II (1871–1958). Educated after her marriage, she “imbibed from the Maharaja a passion for reform,” according to the description bes
ide her Varma portrait. She renounced purdah (not coming out in public, as befitted a noblewoman by tradition) by one day sitting beside the maharaja during a prize-giving ceremony at the Nyaya Mandir, the Palace of Justice. And she co-authored a book, The Position of Women in Indian Life, in 1911.

  Surely there must be more to explain this remarkable prince than his humble background. One imagines long informal chats with his teacher that served as avenues to discovery; there were the travels abroad to open his eyes to the backwardness of Indian society. And there were of course other modern Indians of the time, inspired by their travels abroad and imbued with the spirit of liberalism and change: Gandhi, Tagore, the Nehrus, Sarojini Naidu, Muhammad Iqbal, and many others.

  The maharaja’s university, called the Maharaja Sayajirao (or MS) University, boasts some elegant early-twentieth-century buildings of red brick, set off with domes, medallions, decorative arches, and verandahs in an example of what is known as Indo-Saracenic architecture. Alongside these are the more recent blank-faced box extensions, their occupants the unfortunate humanities departments, connected by unpaved paths, next to an area that appears blotted by the clustered mass of hundreds of students’ parked motorbikes, which are the most convenient form of commuting in Baroda, used by both men and women. A ninja-like figure speeding along the road would be a girl in shalwar-kameez with a scarf covering all of her face except the eyes: as protection against dust and smoke, she would say; to keep her skin pretty and fair, say the cynics among the men.