The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Fatehpur Sikri was the result of Akbar’s particular devotion to Sufism; ignoring the Shattaris, who were an important Sufi sect at that time and had influenced earlier Mughals, he had become attached to the Chishtis.20 In 1569, Akbar visited the Sufi saint Shaikh Salim Chishti, who lived in the village of Sikri. Salim predicted that Akbar would have the son and heir he longed for, and indeed a son (Salim, named after the saint, later to become Jahangir) was born in Sikri that very year. The grateful Akbar immediately made Sikri his capital (renaming it Fatehpur Sikri) and personally directed the building of the Jami Masji (the Friday Mosque) in 1571, as well as other structures that reflect both Hindu aand Muslim architectural influences. But he moved the Mughal capital back to Delhi in 1586, in part because of Fatehpur Sikri’s inadequate water supply but also because he was no longer so devoted to the Chishti saint for whom he had chosen the site.

  Akbar proclaimed that “the wisdom of Vedanta is the wisdom of Sufism,”21 and that “all religions are either equally true or equally illusionary.”22 His eclecticism also extended to Christianity, with which he flirted to such a degree that the Portuguese missionaries congratulated themselves that he was on the brink of converting—until they realized that he continued to worship at mosques (and, on occasion, at Hindu temples, as well as participate in Parsi fire rituals23). Here, not for the first or last time, Muslim and Hindu pluralism ran up against Christian intolerance. (Indeed, at the very time when Akbar was pursuing these enlightened conversations, the Inquisitions were going on in Europe; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, “just as Akbar was preaching tolerance of all religions in Agra.”24) In 1603, Akbar granted the Christians the right to preach, make converts, and build churches. Three sons of Akbar’s youngest son, Danyal, were actually christened, although this had been a political ruse, to disqualify the boys from contending for the (Muslim) throne, and they soon reverted to Islam. On one occasion, Akbar proposed to a group of Jesuits and Muslim theologians the test of walking through fire (somewhat like the test that a South Indian Shaiva had proposed to the Jainas) in order to determine which was the true religion. But unlike the Jainas, the Jesuits (in the person of Father Aquaviva) refused. Sometime later Hindus seeking revenge for the destruction of some of their temples by Christian missionaries murdered Aquaviva.

  Akbar had a number of wives (usually political rather than romantic alliances), but unlike Henry VIII in a similar pickle, he got his priests to stretch the rules about polygamy.25 He was less successful in establishing his new religion, his “Divine Faith” (Din-i-Ilahi) with himself at its center—as God or his humble servant? No one has ever been quite sure.26 Like Ashoka, Akbar carved out his own religion, his own dharma, but with a difference: The rallying call of the new faith—“Allahu Akbar”—was a very serious pun, which could simply be the usual pious invocation affirming that God (Allah) is great (akbar) but in this context suddenly revealed another possible meaning, that Akbar (Akbar) is God (Allah).

  In keeping with his pluralism, Akbar’s new faith was designed to transcend all sectarian differences and unite his disparate subjects.27 But it did not have even the limited success that Ashoka’s dhamma had had. Not surprisingly, some people regarded it as a hodgepodge,28 but it did not merely peter out with a whimper. “Bang!” went the old elite, the orthodox ulama, in revolt against Akbar as a heretic.29 They issued a fatwa urging all Muslims to rebel, but Akbar rode it out, for the Hindus stood behind him against the Muslim old guard.

  HINDUS UNDER AKBAR

  The first of the great Mughals to be born in India, Akbar regarded Hindus not as infidels but as subjects. And since some Muslims were his enemies, some Hindus (the enemies of his enemies) were his friends; he was sheltered by a Hindu king when he had to flee from a powerful Muslim enemy. He married the daughter of the raja of Amber (near Jaipur) and brought the raja, his son, and his grandson (Man Singh) into the Mughal hierarchy as amirs (nobles), his most trusted lieutenants, allowing them to retain their land, their Hinduism, and their caste status. In return, they (and other Rajput princes) provided him with cavalry (a reverse of the usual process whereby Muslims sold horses to Hindus).30

  Two Hindus, both of whom simultaneously played Brahmin and Kshatriya roles and bridged the social worlds of Hindus and Muslims, were prominent among the inner court circle known as Akbar’s nine jewels. One was a Brahmin named Birbal (1528-1583), who was Akbar’s minister and a kind of unofficial court jester, inspiring many folktales about his humor and his wit. But he was also an important military leader, and Akbar called him Raja Birbal. The only Hindu to join in Akbar’s “Divine Faith,”31 he died (perhaps as the result of treachery) while he was fighting the Afghans. The other Hindu “jewel” was Todar Mall (also spelled Todar Mal and Todaramalla), a Kshatriya born in Oudh (north of Lucknow), who became Akbar’s leading general, finance officer, and then prime minister. Yet he was a pious devotee of Krishna, famous for setting up images of Krishna, and in 1572 he gathered together a group of Varanasi scholars to compose a giant Sanskrit compendium of Hindu culture and learning, the Todar-ananda (“Todar’s Bliss”). In it he criticized in general the “aliens” (mlecchas, surely meaning the Muslims) and in particular the rulers of darkness (tamas) (possibly meaning his patron, Akbar). He said that the rising tide of alien culture had inspired him to write the book in order to rescue the Veda when it had been sunk in the ocean of aliens (the old myth of the flooded earth) and to restore the light of empire that had been shut out by the darkness of the rulers in the cruel Kali Age.32

  Akbar was not always good to Hindus, but he almost always apologized after he had done them harm. He approved the conversion of a temple into a mosque and a Muslim theological school (madrassa). In Nagarkot, near Kangra, during Akbar’s reign, Muslim soldiers under Birbal slaughtered two hundred cows and many Hindus and demolished a temple. Local tradition adds that later Akbar made amends and sent a golden umbrella to cover the idol. Akbar also allowed the reconstruction of a Hindu temple built at Kurukshetra, cite of the Mahabharata battle, when it had been demolished and a mosque built on its debris.33 He admitted that in his youth he had forced many Hindus to convert to Islam (he offered life to his first adversaries, after the battle of Panipat in 1556, only if they would convert to Islam34), but he later regretted it35 and went to great lengths to see that Hindus were treated with respect.

  He did many good things for Hindus. He abolished the jizya, the tax on pilgrims, and other discriminatory measures against Hindus. He ensured that Hindus would have their own laws and their own courts. He celebrated the Hindu festivals of Divali and Dussehra. He put Hindus in charge of almost the entire moneylending system, acknowledging their competence in matters mathematical and financial.36 The lasting impression that this pro-Hindu policy made on Akbar’s Hindu subjects is suggested by the fact that in some of the bardic traditions of Rajasthan, Akbar came to be equated with Rama.37

  In 1605, a few weeks before Akbar’s death, Prince Salim (who was to become Jahangir) inscribed his own genealogy on the Ashokan pillar that Samudra Gupta had already used as a palimpsest; Akbar sent Abu’l Fazl to deal with Jahangir, who had Abu’l Fazl murdered38 and had the head sent back to him (Salim) in Allahabad.39 Akbar was understandably infuriated and saddened; a few weeks later he died in Agra.

  JAHANGIR THE ALCOHOLIC

  Akbar’s Rajput bride had given birth to Jahangir (Salim) in 1569. When he grew up, Jahangir murdered, in addition to Abu’l Fazl, several religious leaders, including both the Sikh guru Arjan and the Shi’i Qadi Nurullah Shushtari. He punished an insurgent by serving him the head of his only son, like a melon. Closer to home, when his own son Khusrau waged battle against him, Jahangir had him blinded, remarking that the relationship between father and son was irrelevant to a sovereign. Khusrau’s Rajput mother committed suicide.40

  Jahangir’s attitude to Hinduism was disdainfully noninvasive. He talked with Hindu pandits and visited yogis in Peshawar, though he said they “lacked all religious knowledge
” and he perceived in their ideas “only darkness of spirit.” At Kangra, in the Himalayas, Jahangir demolished a Durga temple, built a mosque at the site, and had a bull slaughtered in the fort, but he didn’t demolish the Hindu temple to the goddess Bhawani below the walls of the fort, at the bottom of the hill, which he spoke of in terms of admiration and even affection. Jahangir also left untouched—indeed, had both repaired and extended—the Jwalamukhi (“Mare with Flame in Her Mouth”) Temple, “after testing the priests’ claim that the fire there was divine and eternal and could not be extinguished by water”—at least, I would add, not until doomsday, when the ocean would extinguish it. Jahangir also allowed a temple to Vishnu’s boar avatar to be constructed at Ajmer; he objected not to the temple but to the boar (which was, after all, just a big pig, anathema to Muslims); he spared the temple but destroyed the boar image and threw it into a tank,41 declaring that it was an example of the “worthless Hindu religion.” Still he ordered that no temples be destroyed (though also that no new ones were to be built).42 Like Babur, he wrote an extensive memoir, but unlike Babur, he took no pleasure in horses. He died in 1627 while traveling from Kashmir to Lahore.

  SHAH JAHAN THE BUILDER

  Shah Jahan was the third son of Jahangir and the Rajput princess Manmati. He discriminated against non-Muslims and destroyed many Hindu temples, seventy in Varanasi alone. In Kashmir, he demolished an ancient temple at Anantnag (“The Serpent of Infinity,” a name of the cosmic cobra that Vishnu rests upon) and renamed the town Islamabad. At Orchha, in Madhya Pradesh, he demolished a temple because it had been built by the grandfather of a Rajput raja who had rebelled against the Mughals.43 But Shah Jahan was still open to the culture of Hinduism—including Sanskrit poetry—and to some of its people, particularly the rajas. He took a verse that the Sufi poet Amir Khusra (1253- 1325), son of a Rajput mother and a Turkic father, had originally composed in praise of India (Khusra’s motherland) and had the words inscribed around the roof of the Audience Hall in his Delhi palace: “If there is a heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.” When he built the great Jami Masjid, the Friday Mosque, in Delhi, he included a rather miscellaneous arcade made of disparate columns from twenty-seven demolished Hindu temples.44 Despite the alleged aniconic nature of Islam, the pillars are still graced with figures, some of Hindu gods, a few of them still with their heads on.

  Shah Jahan also built the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir, the white marble palace in Ajmer, and the high-carat golden, jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne. And when his beloved wife, Mumtaz, died in bearing him their thirteenth child, he built the Taj Mahal in her memory, on the banks of the Yamuna (Jumna) River, on a site bought from a Rajput and made of marble from Rajasthan. His son Aurangzeb imprisoned him across the river, where he could gaze at the Taj Mahal until his death eight years later.

  DARA SHIKOH THE MYSTIC SANSKRITIST

  Dara Shikoh (also spelled Shukoh) was Shah Jahan’s oldest and favorite son, the designated heir. But the orthodox Muslims of the ulama distrusted him, for he was a scholar who had argued that “the essential nature of Hinduism was identical with that of Islam,”45 a pronouncement that orthodox Muslims regarded as heresy.jj He consorted with Sufis, Hindus, Christians, and Jews.46 He learned Sanskrit and translated Sanskrit philosophical texts into Persian.

  In 1657, when Shah Jahan was deathly ill, his sons hovered about, as princes are wont to do. Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh were the main contenders. When Aurangzeb attacked Delhi and imprisoned Shah Jahan in the Agra fort, he killed Dara’s sons in front of him,47paraded Dara through the streets, had him cut to pieces, and then (according to some stories) had the pieces paraded through the streets.

  AURANGZEB THE ZEALOT

  Aurangzeb was no more a typical Muslim than Torquemada was a typical Christian. A devout Sunni, he worked hard to repair what he regarded as the damage done by his more tolerant predecessors. In the eloquent words of Bamber Gascoigne, “Akbar [had] disrupted the Muslim community by recognizing that India was not an Islamic country: Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving as if it were.”48 When Aurangzeb sacked Hyderabad in 1687, he stabled his horses in the Shiite mosques as a deliberate insult to what he regarded as the city’s heretics.49 Thus began twenty years of discrimination against Shiites, Hindus, and Sikhs.

  The Sikh support of Dara in the 1658 succession crisis angered Aurangzeb. Moreover, the ninth Sikh guru, Tegh Bahadur, drew large crowds with his preaching and proselytized among Muslims as well as Hindus. Many Muslims converted to Sikhism, so infuriating Aurangzeb that he condemned Tegh Bahadur for blasphemy and executed him. Under Guru Govind Singh, the tenth and last Sikh guru (1666-1708), who insisted that Sikhs leave their hair uncut, carry arms, and use the epithet “Singh” (lion), Sikhism became not merely a movement for religious and social reform but a political and military force to be reckoned with. In 1708, Govind Singh was assassinated while attending the emperor Aurangzeb. This spurred Sikhs, Maharashtrians, and Rajputs to outright defiance.50

  The Hindus suffered most under Aurangzeb. In 1679, he reimposed the jizya on all castes (even the Brahmins, who were usually exempt) and the tax on Hindu pilgrims that Akbar had lifted. He rescinded endowments to temples and to Brahmins, placed heavier duties on Hindu merchants, and replaced Hindus in administration with Muslims. When a large crowd rioted in protests against the jizya, he sent in the troops—more precisely, the elephants—to trample them.51 He put pressure on the Hindus to convert.

  Aurangzeb attacked Hyderabad, plundered and desecrated the temples, and killed the Brahmins. He destroyed all newly built or rebuilt Hindu temples and replaced them with mosques; in particular, he replaced the great Vishvanatha Temple in Varanasi and the Keshava Deo Temple at Mathura with two great Aurangzeb mosques and changed the name of Mathura to Islamabadjk (as Shah Jahan had done to Anantnag). He also renamed the cave city of Ellora Aurangabad.52 In several places in Sind, and especially at Varanasi, “Brahmins attracted a large number of Muslims to their discourses. Aurangzeb, in utter disgust, ordered the governors of all these provinces ‘to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and with utmost urgency put down the teaching and the public practices of these religious misbelievers.’ ”53 (He particularly hated Varanasi because it was the center of linga worship, which he regarded as the most abominable of all abominations.54) He sent someone to Rajasthan to demolish sixty-six temples there.55

  Yet he financed the maintenance of several other Hindu temples and matts, and he even made land grants to some.56 He destroyed few old temples, generally only those that had political or ideological power. Nor, being puritanical and mean in all things and reacting against Shah Jahan’s architectural extravagances, did he allow any new mosques to be built (with the exception of the few mosques mentioned above, most of which replaced temples). This led to great hardship for the artisans.57 Other arts too suffered, as he suppressed poetry and music;58 dismissed dancers, musicians, and artists from the royal payroll; and hired jurists and theologians in their place.59 And when he went on to create the post of a muhtasib, a censor or guardian of public morality, whose task it was to suppress gambling, blasphemy, alcohol, and opium, the cumulative effect surely acted as a serious wet blanket on both addiction and night life.

  Hindu astrologers had played an important role in the life of the Mughals until Aurangzeb replaced the Hindu astrologers with Muslim ones.60 Aurangzeb’s grandson fought against him on behalf of Hindus. Yet even Aurangzeb had Hindus in his court and ordered his officials to protect Brahmin temple priests who were being harassed, instructing them to leave the Brahmins alone so that they could “pray for the continuance of the Empire.”61 Aurangzeb lived to ninety and died in bed, alone.

  When Jahandah Shah took the throne, he immediately reversed all of Aurangzeb’s policies that had curbed the pleasures of the flesh. Said to be a frivolous and drunken imbecile, Jahandah Shah surrounded himself with singers, dancers, actors, storytellers, and a notorious mistress, to whom he gave elephants and jewels. Other Mugh
als of that ilk followed him. Farrukhsiyar took over in 1713 and was murdered in 1719, though not before he carried out a bloody repression of the Sikhs, who continued to harass the Mughals until the British put an end to Mughal rule.62,

  THE OPIATES OF THE RULERS: ADDICTION TO OPIUM (AND WINE)

  Aurangzeb’s puritanical repressions were in part a response to the history of his family, several of whom suffered from addiction to alcohol and/or drugs, “the bane of the Mughals.” They started young; opium was often given to small children to keep them quiet.63 The addictions of the Mughals may well have reinforced the Hindus’ awareness of the dangers of substance abuse.

  It all began with Babur, whose memoir (begun when he was barely a teenager) abounds in wine, drugs, and the Mughal equivalent of rock and roll. The drugs included cannabis exported from Kashmir, but the drug of choice was opium, made from poppies grown in Varanasi and one of India’s major export products. The opium was usually taken in the form of ma’jun, a drug still known today; it was made by pressing dried fruits such as plums, tamarinds, apricots, sometimes also sesame, and mixing the extract with a small amount of opium, somewhat like cognac-filled chocolates or hash brownies, truly a Turkish delight. It was carried on military campaigns and consumed in large amounts at parties, “a socially acceptable recreational drug.”64