Aavarana- The Veil

by S L Bhyrappa

  My dearest bibi,

  I would be lying if I told you I’m not upset with you. But I’ve been so busy that I don’t have the time to be upset. The government has given me a new project! Well actually, two new projects, and we must begin work immediately. This time, it’s historical plays. The titles are already final—Akbar the Great and Tipu Sultan: A National Hero.

  The scope is ambitious. Apart from writing and directing, we need to train professors and teachers in all major colleges and universities in Karnataka on how to enact this play in their own institutions. But it doesn’t stop at this! After we finish Hampi, we need to work on documentaries showcasing Gol Gumbaz, Saranath, Nalanda and Taj Mahal. But bibi, with so many projects already, I just can’t take on these plays. You will do them, right?

  Do you remember the years when we used to perform on stage? Wish we could go back to those days. I still meet theatre lovers who ask me when we’ll perform together on stage again. Like I said, I’m terribly busy and I really can’t spare time for these two plays much as I want to. It’s a one-time thing—write the scripts, direct them, stage them in schools and colleges, then train other directors. Please? And don’t worry about money. The government has a personal stake in this. But now, come to Bangalore as soon as you can and meet Professor Sastri. He’ll tell you how to go about this.

  Lovingly yours,

  Amir

  She was thrilled. It had been so long since she had all but left theatre. Film-making had sapped her, cut her almost completely away from theatre. She wondered if she actually had the discipline now to sit down and write those plays. Then she reminded herself that it was her domain—like swimming, you could learn and never forget. How long would it take to write the scripts? And they are historicals, so that means I don’t need to temporarily stop my history studies. I can do both simultaneously. I’ll discover some method as I go along. Let me see what the professor says. I’ll be able to spend sometime with Amir that way.

  Professor Sastri was delighted when she met him after she returned to Bangalore. ‘I’m so happy that you agreed to do this. Actually, this is my brainchild, which the government willingly accepted because it is urgent to check the communal cancer that’s spreading like wildfire. Only artists and writers have the necessary skills to cure this. An entire body of ministers including the chief minister saw the wisdom in my words. Plus, lots of money will come your way. Devote yourself to the service of history.’ He gently patted her back.

  Amir, on the other hand, was seething. He told Razia that there was an all-night shooting schedule and he had to leave.

  ‘You’re a horrible liar, Amir…you know that no studio in Bangalore allows shooting documentaries. Or is this an ego thing? It’s bad manners to play with a woman’s feelings like this, especially after she’s come just for you after two months of separation. Or is this the Muslim husband in you speaking to his wife?’ she teased and then threw the gauntlet, which she knew he would pick up, ‘Or is anger your excuse to conceal your age?’ she said softly and stepped closer to him.

  She returned to Narasapura the next day and rummaged through her father’s pile of books, looking for material on Tipu Sultan. Fortunately, she found a bunch of handwritten papers stapled together. Her father’s notes on Tipu, in his own handwriting. She read through them quickly and began to look up other reference books on Tipu. When that was done, she went to Bangalore and spent a day in the library reading up additional material and making notes. Amir was not in town and Amina Banu had gone to Ramanagaram to visit her daughter. She returned to Narasapura and reflected on the notes she had made about Tipu Sultan. Every work she had read about Tipu, indeed her entire research on him, showed him in exactly the opposite colours of what the secularists in the old Mysore region and the Indian Muslims painted him in. Professor Sastri won’t let me stage the play if I write the script based on the history I’ve read. And he has already decided the title—Tipu Sultan: A National Hero. My script needs to show Tipu as a spotless ruler, tolerant of diverse faiths. Just a hint of the truth about Tipu and the government will choke the funding. This won’t be easy. It’s impossible to ignore the sordid record of his incredible cruelty and religious fanaticism. It’s technically easy to write a play. You have a plot. Create characters. Have them mouth whatever dialogue that suits your propaganda. But Tipu is different. You need a special technique to give a shape and form to the complexity of his character, complete with his cruelty, his fanaticism and his hatred of other religions. I need to talk to Amir.

  So she wrote to Amir.

  Dearest Amir,

  Trust you’re fine. Tell me you miss me. I do. Everyday I hope that your love for your bibi will drag you here. You’ve never come here to see me even once. People here are very sweet; they’ve accepted me like I’m their own daughter. You need to come here often. They’ll forget everything and treat you like you’re their son-in-law. I’m saying this from experience—whatever their caste and community divisions, Hindus have retained their age-old attitude of transcending these differences. Come here and experience it first-hand. You’ll understand what I mean.

  But now there’s an urgent reason I’m writing to you. I need your input, your guidance as a creative artist. You know I’ve been researching over the past two months on Tipu for the play Professor Sastri wants me to write. Every new material I come across alerts me as to how tough it is to stage that play. I wanted to come to Bangalore to discuss this with you, but writing helps me express my thoughts much more clearly.

  Amir, some writers, especially a huge chunk of Kannada writers in the old Mysore region, have glorified Tipu Sultan to sickening degrees. Is there no end to their slaughter of truth done under the mask of exercising creative freedom? I’ve always believed that there should be no restriction of any kind on writers. I must now admit with some shame that while at one time, I was part of this same group that loudly howled about unconditional, unlimited artistic freedom, I now realize what they were—me included—doing all along. We hollered about our right to artistic freedom, but denied the same freedom to our critics. What we did was gangsterism—we defined everything. Our idea of progress was Progress, our classification of dialectics became Logical Reasoning, our definition of economics was Economics and we had the Final Word on history because, well, because we were doing all of this in the service of history. Spreading the distorted version of Tipu Sultan’s story is just another page in their grand project of projecting falsehood as truth because it helps the march of Progressiveness. And I’ve happily played my part in this, leading from the front on several occasions.

  The legend of Tipu as a hero started during the period of our freedom struggle as songs sung by wandering minstrels. These rustic, uneducated, illiterate singers sang his praises at street corners, before shopkeepers, at village fairs and in marketplaces to earn their livelihood. It’s incredible to seriously believe that these folks had any accurate idea of the historical Tipu. Rich Muslim shopkeepers paid them quite handsomely to listen to the praises of the long-deceased sultan. But because it was the time of our struggle for independence, anybody who had fought in the past against the British for whatever reasons was automatically considered a freedom fighter. Thus, plays were written at that time glorifying Tipu as a patriot and audiences believed these plays. And this was really how Tipu became a legendary freedom fighter in the popular imagination. This trend continued post-Independence. Myths are hard to create but far harder to destroy. Our Marxists, vote-bank politicians, artists, film-makers…everybody wanted a piece of this heroic Tipu. And so, true history was buried. Nobody bothered to verify the basis of the legend of Tipu Sultan the Great.

  Look how insidiously an idea is buttressed with careful deletion of facts. As an example of British hard-heartedness, our eminences harped on the British taking Tipu’s two sons as hostages. However, they concealed the fact that taking war hostages was originally an accepted practice among Muslim kings. Mir Jumla, a general under Aurangzeb, defeated and looted the e
ntire treasury of the king of Assam. And he didn’t stop there. He demanded more money and took the king’s sons and a daughter as ransom till the king brought him the sum. Mir Jumla also took the sons of the king’s feudatories—Burhagohain, Borgohain, Gad Gonia Phukan and Bad Patra Phukan—as prisoners of war. Saqi Mustad Khan records this event in Masir-i-Alamgiri, Aurangzeb’s authorized history, written in 5th Al Hijra 1072.5, which corresponds to January 1603. I looked this up in Jadunath Sarkar’s A Short History of Aurangzib (Orient Longman, 1979, p. 108). When Khurram’s rebellion against his own father failed, Jahangir took his son’s sons—his own grandsons, Dara and Aurangzeb—as captives.

  Not just that: during the Mughal rule, every Rajput king had to station at least one son in the badshah’s court as a sign of respect. The undertone of this arrangement was clear to both parties—the son was a glorified hostage, ensuring obedience from the Rajput kings. It might surprise you but this custom was inaugurated by Akbar. This took on other forms—a Rajput ruler defeated in war had to marry his daughter off to the Mughal king—a wife, but nevertheless a permanent hostage, really. Most Rajput kings agreed to this, given their vanquished status. Maharana Pratap was the exception. He refused to send his son to Akbar’s court. It is also a fact that every such prisoner was compulsorily converted. But Cornwallis, who took Tipu’s sons as hostages, treated the boys with the care and propriety that befitted royal heirs, something that none of the Muslim rulers did in similar circumstances. If our progressive historians and writers paint Tipu Sultan in heroic hues for the sole reason that he fought the British, why do they remain mute about the Marathas, who fought the same British? The British by their own admission had identified the Marathas as a bigger threat to their imperial ambitions. And then there’s this other mass of very vocal Kannada-language champions who hail Tipu as the ‘son of Karnataka’ and the ‘true son of Kannada’. Kannada was the official language of the state when the Wodeyar dynasty ruled over the Mysore kingdom. I’m talking about the time before Tipu’s father, Hyder Ali, a trusted general of the Wodeyars, usurped the throne of Mysore. But when Tipu took over, he changed the administrative language from Kannada to Farsi. You can see this even today. Land and revenue records in Karnataka use Farsi terminology till date —‘Venkata Gowda’s son Narasimhe Gowda’ is written as ‘Narasimhe Gowda bin Venkata Gowda’. Similarly, we’ve still retained ‘Khata’, ‘Khirdi’, ‘Pahani’, ‘Khanesuvari’, ‘Gudasta’ and ‘Baranamoona’, a direct handover from Tipu’s times. Not just that—Tipu changed the names of entire cities and towns: Brahmapuri became Sultanpet, Kallikote became Farookabad, Chitradurga became Farook yab Hissar, Coorg became Zafarabad, Devanahalli became Yusufabad, Dinigul became Khaleelabad, Gutti became Faiz Hissar, Krishnagiri became Phalk-il-azam, Mysore became Nazarabad, Penukonda became Fakrabad, Sankridurga became Muzaffarabad, Sira became Rustumabad, and Sakleshpur became Manjarabad—are these samples of Tipu’s nationalism and religious tolerance?

  But Tipu merely followed a time-honoured precedent set by most Muslim rulers: renaming cities from their original Hindu names to Islamic ones. Aurangzeb renamed Chatagaon to Islamabad. After demolishing the Keshava temple in Mathura, he renamed it Islamabad as well. In his time, Varanasi or Kashi became Mohammadabad. Other Muslim rulers also did their bit: Delhi became Shahjahanabad, Agra became Akbarabad, Golconda became Hyderabad, Bidar became Zafarabad, Kadapa became Neknamabad, Kalpi became Mohammadabad, Khandauth also became Mohammadabad, Prayag became Allahabad and today’s Aligarh was called Kol.

  This list is just a fraction—my father’s research yielded eight pages, complete with the names of cities, towns and villages that were renamed. I’m reproducing his note on the subject: ‘This list is incomplete. The ideal method is to tour every corner of India and talk to scholars and local people and then compile a comprehensive volume of the list of places that have been renamed during Muslim rule. I wouldn’t really care if they built a town from scratch and gave it an Islamic name. But renaming existing cities is as heinous as forcibly converting a living, breathing person to another religion.’

  Amir, my father’s notes open a whole new world. I’m still unable to imagine how he managed to accomplish so much.

  But back to Tipu. My father’s copy reads, ‘Tipu Sultan’s dreams’. It’s a bunch of papers, all typewritten. The original was written by Tipu himself in Farsi. It was a highly secret document, which he wrote, and he read what he had written only when he had absolute privacy. Colonel William Kirkpatrick, the British army officer who participated in the Fourth Mysore War in which Tipu was killed, found these papers in Tipu’s toilet in the Srirangapatanam palace. Tipu’s trusted servant Habibullah recognized Tipu’s handwriting. Kirkpatrick himself translated several of these from Farsi to English. The India Office in London still retains the original and some translations.

  Tipu himself speaks in these papers, which are effectively the strongest and first-hand evidence of his fanaticism. He always refers to Hindus as kafirs and the British as Christians. You must read Tipu’s dreams, Amir: a long-bearded maulvi frequently appears in his dreams; Tipu goes to Mecca on a pilgrimage; Prophet Mohammad tells a long-bearded Arab, ‘Tell Tipu that I shall not enter Heaven without him’; Tipu is then on a mission to convert all non-Muslims to Islam and Islamize all non-Islamic nations.

  I’ve read the whole thing. Tipu never talks about modernizing India and fumes that the Christians (British) are his biggest obstacle that he must urgently remove. What’s funny is that based on these very papers, our Progressives call him the forefather of Indian technology, a role model of secularism and the progenitor of Progressiveness! How they can claim the exact opposite using the same papers is a question these intellectuals need to answer.

  Tipu, who embarked on a long campaign to Malabar and Coorg and left a brutal trail of forcible conversion in its wake, refrained from trying a similar stunt in the Mysore region because he was shrewd enough to realize that it wouldn’t work here—the odds were just too enormous. In a move to placate the Hindus here—actually, he needed their support after his financial humiliation in the Third Mysore War of 1791, which was when he had to submit his two sons to the British—he gave a large donation to the Sringeri Shankaracharya Mutt. Our secular-progressives uphold this as an instance of Tipu’s non-sectarian noble quality. But there’s tons of evidence on the other side: Tipu actually wrote to the Afghan king Zaman Shah and the caliph of Turkey to invade India and establish the rule of Islam. In his infamous sack of the Mysore palace in 1796, he rounded up the entire library containing invaluable ancient Hindu palm-leaf manuscripts, inscriptions, papers and books and had them all burnt as fuel.

  His ‘reform’ in education is another mark of his supposed progressiveness. The Muslims in Malabar speak, read and write Malayalam even today like the Tamil Muslims in Tamil Nadu do in Tamil. Thanks to Tipu, Muslims in Karnataka speak only Urdu. This is the direct result of Tipu’s insistence that Farsi and Urdu remain the only permitted mediums of instruction.

  This letter is already far too lengthy, I know, but the point is, I can’t write the script showing Tipu for what he was not. Several letters that he had written to his military officers ordering the capture and conversion of Hindus in his kingdom are still available. All of these show enough and more evidence of Tipu’s cruelty, bigotry and a savage disregard for the original rulers of Mysore. It is simply impossible to ignore this kind of proof and the more I research, the more I discover newer evidence of his brutal side. I don’t want to list them all here but I trust you understand my difficulty. If I write this play showing Tipu as a national hero, I’ll be lying to the whole world and to myself.

  I need your help, Amir.

  Lots of love,

  Bibi

  She waited for more than a month. He didn’t reply. She knew when she wrote the letter that it would displease him. But for her, it was a question of being truthful to her art. And she had married him because he was equally passionate about art, forsaking her religion and her
father. Now after twenty-eight years of living together, she had no one to turn to, to share her crisis, to tell all, to hide nothing…and suddenly, for no reason, she remembered her father, who had been both a mother and a father to her. What was Amir thinking? He could have scribbled a line asking me to come to Bangalore to discuss my letter if he felt awkward to come here. But nothing. Not even a ‘received your letter’ response. Silent snub. He’s showing his contempt. Neglect.

  She was furious. Two days letter, she decided to go to Bangalore.

  He was home. He opened the door and let her in. She broke the silence by joking about his weight gain, and then embraced him warmly from behind the chair he was sitting on. He grunted his response. Her patience wore off. She pulled up a chair opposite him, looked him directly in the eyes and retold all that she had written.

  ‘We aren’t debating history. We’re doing a play,’ he said curtly.

  ‘But this play involves historical characters,’ she almost shouted without realizing it.

  ‘That’s an artist’s freedom!’ he matched her pitch.

  ‘Oh, I’m all for artistic freedom but that freedom is only meaningful if the work is the artist’s original creation. The moment you use it to propagate your ideology, you stop being an artist.’

  ‘And your hatred for Islam has increased lately!’

  ‘How irrational can you get? Why can’t you recall how many times we’ve spoken about how artists are beyond religion? I think truth is greater than art, and an artist’s creation must be an expression of truth. I think—I’m convinced that using art for any other purpose is backstabbing art.’