The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History

by Manu S. Pillai

European missionaries were dismissed as unclean parangis (a variant of the word firangi) who ate beef, kept no caste distinctions, and reaped most converts from ‘polluted’ communities.

he announced to a superior with a flourish, ‘I will become a Hindu to save the Hindus’.

In 1684, a twelve-year-old Maratha boy was installed as ruler in Tamil Thanjavur, not long after the region’s older Nayaka dynasty folded out of history. The event was emblematic of India in this bustling age, with Tamil Nadu alone attracting Afghan horsemen, Bundela Rajputs, Telugu warriors, and other varieties of adventurers.

The Sati Dana Suramu is a tremendously entertaining parody of social conventions—one that holds up a mirror to tedious notions of India’s past that cast everything as pious and monotonously proper.

‘We eat beef, we drink liquor … Don’t talk to me,’ she says. Morobhatlu does not care. ‘We drink cow’s milk,’ he replies, ‘but you eat the whole cow. You must be more pure.’

‘Haven’t you read the Sastras?’ Irony, in fact, is writ across the composition, where the low-born out-brahmin the brahmin—and so is brilliant comic effect.

Questions are raised on ethics and morality, on lust and the role of women. But the larger point Shahuji seemed to make—and make with much mirth and laughter—was that asking questions and turning some tables was not such a bad idea after all.

while there were moments of tension between India’s principal faiths, legend and myth allowed them to see eye to eye and engage on fresh ground, even while competing in the realm of ideas—a lesson we would be wise to remember in our own contentious times, when revenge is sought from people long dead and gone, and violence justified in the name of so many gods.

Goethe first encountered the legend of Shakuntala, he was moved to the extent of declaring that if heaven and earth were to combine in a name, that name would be hers.

they ought to marry right away, in the gandharva style, where passion compensates for lack of ceremony (or patience).

Tukaram was a failed shopkeeper, Namdev a god-fearing tailor. Yet, the fact that while they were low (sudra), they were not among the lowest (atisudra) meant certain liberties were permitted to them.

The Marathas, too, developed their identity in this age of Muslim power, embracing the best of Indo-Islamic tradition. Shivaji’s father and uncle—Shahaji and Sharifji—were both named after a Muslim saint called Shah Sharif.

Rajyavyavaharakosa, a dictionary he commissioned, declares, ‘overvalued Yavana [foreign] words’ were now to be replaced with ‘educated speech’. He had nothing against individual Muslims, but he jettisoned older systems built on Islamic ideals and sought one inspired by Indian high tradition.

Yavana means foreign. Not Greece as we learnt from Sandilyan's stories.

The Mughals, meanwhile, saw only themselves as legitimate Muslims; the Muslims of the Deccan were enemies of Islam as much as the Marathas were agents of evil.

Black and white were not the colours through which these voices perceived their world—there was an elite visualisation of ‘Turks’ and there was another of Hindus, but boundaries between the two were not rigid.

Shivaji proposes to conquer are not only those of ‘evil Turks’ but also those of the rulers of Madras and Kandahar; Kashmir and Kerala—and many Hindu principalities which, like Muslim states, did not meet the standards of his Hindavi vision.

The Deccan where he was born had seen Hindu princes absorb Muslim influence and Muslim kings celebrate Hindu divines; it had seen brahmins become sultans and a Muslim seek brahminhood.

‘Loaded with the burden of the Vedas,’ he pithily remarked, ‘the brahmin is a veritable donkey.’ Basava could get away with saying outrageous things because he himself was a brahmin (which was precisely the kind of privilege Chokhamela, as we saw earlier, did not possess). But he was a brahmin repulsed by brahminism, and the intellectual and material debilitations wreaked on society by caste.

‘On the same earth stands,’ one of his vachanas goes, ‘the outcaste’s hovel, and the deity’s temple. Whether for ritual or rinsing, is not the water same?’

Menstruation, for instance, ordinarily entailed ritual pollution for women, but Basava rejected this—women could continue to worship Shiva regardless of whether or not it was their time of the month.

As Basava put it sarcastically: They say: Pour, pour the milk When they see a snake image in stone. But they cry: Kill, kill! When they meet a snake for real.

Mariam uz-Zamani, though she is often erroneously called Jodhabai, the Rajput princess who was Akbar’s wife and Jahangir’s mother.

He certainly did celebrate Hindu imagery over Muslim theology, evidently also enjoying the tutelage of the guru Ramananda. But by most accounts he was definitely a Muslim, with a wife and two children, coming to mean so much to Hindus that stories about non-Muslim roots were invented to drag him, as Wendy Doniger notes, ‘over the line from Muslim to Hindu’.

While he lived, there was enough in Kabir’s message to upset Hindu and Muslim elites alike. To brahmins he asked (much like Basava some centuries before in the south) whether they were born with a caste mark on the forehead, or whether their mothers delivered them through a special canal.

it was ‘dumb’ if people sought salvation in ritual. ‘If going naked brought liberation, the deer of the forest would attain it first. If a shaven head was a sign of piety, ewes would be pious too.’

Kabir was no perfect man.

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But he too had prejudices, he too was far from ideal. ‘Woman’, he declared once, ‘is the refuse of the world’ so that ‘noble men will put her aside, only the vile will enjoy her’. Elsewhere he compared the female to a twenty-hooded serpent, and ‘if she stings one’, he warned, ‘there is no chance to survive’. But we can try and console ourselves that perhaps this streak of misogyny (offset though it was with contradictory verses where he is less suspicious of women) was a reflection of his age,

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He was merely Kabir the weaver—a product of his times, a mortal made of flesh and weakness—and he cared for Rama alone, not for the world and its numerous other quarrels.

Muhammad Quli was out riding, he encountered a woman of exceptional beauty. Her name was Bhagmati, and having married her, he decided to name his new urban project Bhagnagar. Later, when she was styled Hyder Mahal, the city became Hyderabad.

What if, instead of having his severed head impaled on a spear, Rama Raya, the de facto emperor, had triumphed at Talikota?

great empires often fell because of internal contradictions, not external enemies; due to the misguided policies of their rulers rather than the arms of any invader.

‘What are the Turks,’ it declares, ‘but drunkards and opium eaters!’ while brahmins, with ‘their diet of rice with salt and sambar’, are cast as a vastly better sort who ‘don’t suffer from pride and malice’.

Hindu agents of the Deccan’s sultans lament how ‘Our lords are drunkards who have no faith in gods and brahmins. They are,’ these characters cry, ‘barbarians and cow-killers.’

The history of the Deccan shows that in actual fact, while rivalries existed, the world was not perceived in terms of communal acrimony as we understand it today.

Mughals are painted as blessed by Hindu gods. India, in the conception of the Rayavacakamu, had three ‘Lion-Thrones’: Vijayanagar’s was blessed by Vishnu in Tirupati, Orissa had the blessings of Jagannatha in Puri, and the suzerains of Delhi shone in the glory of Visvanatha in Varanasi.

while certain Muslim kings are disparaged as barbaric, others are seen as refined; and where the Adil Shah, Qutb Shah and Nizam Shah are demons, the Mughal emperor sits confidently among the gods.

Visva Gundarasana Campu, for instance, describes Muslims (called ‘Yavanas’, a term originally applied to Greeks) as ‘terrifying’ clans that were a threat to ‘temples of Siva and of Vishnu on his serpent couch’. The same text, interestingly, also disparages other ‘evil people’ who ‘treat brahmins with contempt, as if they were no better than blades of grass’—in this case, the ‘evil people’ are Europeans settled in Madras.

Rayas of Vijayanagar was an especially revealing one: they called themselves ‘Hinduraya Suratrana’, or ‘Sultans among Hindu Kings’. The term ‘Hindu’ was one applied by the ‘Turks’ to the native peoples of India.

‘Paradise,’ he proclaimed, ‘is where no mullah exists’—naturally, even sympathetic mullahs turned away from Dara.

It is tempting, even if futile, to imagine how Mughal history might have been shaped had Dara reigned and not Aurangzeb. Would he have saved the empire by becoming the Akbar of his age, using the sword where necessary but not fearing to also offer a diplomatic embrace? Might he have won over the Marathas as Akbar succeeded with the Rajputs? Or would he have remained too long in the company of his poets and saints, allowing statecraft and power to fall by the wayside?

Dara Shukoh was perhaps destined to fail either way. He had many flaws and he had his strengths, but what really marked him out as a man of tragedy and dismay was one peculiar detail: he was far too civilised for his age.

this unusual text describes vividly Khunza’s loveliness and physical voluptuousness, comparing her breasts at one point to ripe pomegranates.

Sir Richard Francis Burton was paranoid about advertising his identity as translator on the book that went on to become a global bestseller—British laws on obscenity were so draconian that printing anything even vaguely sexual could show writers the door to prison.

In actual fact, the Kamasutra is more than a manual for lovemaking—of the seven books that constitute its body, only the second is strictly concerned with methods of human congress. Sir Richard, bent as he was on ‘the sexual liberation of Victorian society’, seems to have highlighted these while watering down the other elements.

Vatsyayana’s approach to the third gender, and to homosexuality and bisexuality, also makes for gripping reading (and interpretation), so that in the overall analysis of the work one feels partly surprised, partly amused, but always interested.

For all its sometimes outlandish views on life, marriage and intimacy, the Kamasutra remains a thoroughly fascinating work of art and cultural heritage, one we must read for more than a list of positions and bedroom acrobatics.

He assumed for himself the title of ‘Hinduraya Suratrana’, sultan among Hindu kings.

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the nomenclature of ‘Hindu’—hitherto applied by foreigners to describe Indians in general—while also transcribing into the Sanskritic vocabulary and imagination the concept of ‘sultan’, a potent new form of kingship which resounded across the land as Islamic dynasties entrenched themselves in the north, and took fire and steel into the south.

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The place of Persian as the language of diplomacy meant that as late as the 1810s, communication between a Malayali queen (whose minister was her dewan) and the English East India Company was conducted in that language.

The nineteenth-century Maharashtrian thinker Vishnushastri Chiplunkar had no qualms admitting that the ‘roots of our language’ lay as much in Persian and Arabic as in Sanskrit.