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July 1 - August 17, 2019
just as the emperors of Vijayanagar projected themselves as Hindu sultans, the Deccani hero Shivaji was described in the Sabhasad bakhar (i.e. chronicle, derived evidently from the Persian akhbar) as a Maratha padshah.
Scribes who worked for Muslim kings and wrote their letters in Farsi were called Parsnavis, from which emerged today’s surname of Parasnis, just as the Maharashtrian name Daftardar is descended from an official bureaucratic title. Fard-Navis, or secretary/note-taker, is what birthed Fadnavis.
Shivaji’s own father and uncle, as we saw earlier, were named Shahaji and Sharifji to celebrate a Muslim pir called Shah Sharif, whom his grandparents admired.
The Marathas also, as we saw earlier, adopted Persian sartorial fashions and styles of architecture, so much so that the samadhi of Shivaji’s grandfather has been mistaken for a Muslim tomb on account of its striking resemblance to Islamic mausoleums.
certain sections of people even today a quest to find the ‘true’ essence or the purest version of the past. The irony is that such a past does not exist, and what exists is not ‘pure’ but rich and layered and marvelously complex—a past where there are Hindu sultans and Maratha padshahs, where the forebears of a Hindu king could seek the blessings of a Muslim pir.
The story of the Meenakshi temple, though, is the tale of a woman—a fearsome warrior-queen transformed into a lovable goddess; a formidable mortal tranquillised into divine immortality.
Where once the great temple in Thanjavur celebrated devadasis by the hundreds, where once they were feted for their beauty and artistic prowess, they were now savaged and violently deplored as old kings fell and foreigners emerged to rule. If Muddupalani found admirers in this new generation, they had to hide her behind a fictitious name, inventing an imaginary man.
In the course of the nineteenth century, Indian society absorbed from the British an overblown sense of Victorian piety: this much is well known.
Once, laments Radha, it was she who made love to Krishna. Now she was supplanted by another whose body was as ‘soft as bananas’.
Nice translation
‘Writing with unabashed frankness and unbridled enthusiasm, [she] feels no anxiety or remorse in so truthfully expressing her desires.’ Some believe her work is autobiographical:
With Muddupalani, however, the gaze is reversed—it is the deity who must satisfy the erotic yearnings of his female devotee. Shudder as some might at these verses, their eroticism was not what upset the elders. It was the fact that their author was a woman—one with wealth, learning, beauty and culture—that horrified her two-faced readers.
If today we are afraid of Muddupalani’s song, it is not she who is to blame. If her poem is a moral threat, it is not she who must hide in shame. Muddupalani ruled over a different age, and there she remains eternally enshrined. It is those who came after who proved themselves history’s unworthy heirs.
In 1763, at the nawab’s orders, Reinhardt presided over a massacre of dozens of Englishmen in Patna: the prisoners were invited to dinner and after ‘his guests were in full security, protected as they imagined by the laws of hospitality’, he ordered his men ‘to fall upon them and cut their throats’.
Red Wedding
As a military commander, Begum Samru showed all the qualities that marked leadership in her tumultuous age. When necessary, she could be ruthless: while she never ordered large and indiscriminate massacres, when two murderous maidservants set fire to her buildings, she had no hesitation in having them buried alive.
far from yearning to kill herself after her husband succumbed on the battlefield, Meerabai declared firmly, ‘I will not be a sati.’ She chose instead, to live for decades more, singing praises of her favourite deity, Krishna, while rejecting pressures from the muscular guardians of Rajput society.
Meerabai was cast out and became even more determined in her ways. ‘Fools sit on thrones,’ she sang, while ‘wise men beg for a little bread.’ Elsewhere she proclaims: ‘If Rana is angry, he can keep his kingdom/But if god is offended … I will wither,’ making clear where her loyalties resided.
In due course, Meerabai became a travelling saint, an outcast where she was once a princess. Her satsangs were attended by many, but the path was riddled with privations and tests—there were those within the Bhakti tradition who challenged her or sought to take advantage of this woman on her own. But she survived, dying on her own terms, in Dwarka by the middle of the century (and not in a blazing flame).
Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur was a man full of surprises, and not only because he coloured his nails red. As a boy, he once came across a party of Shaivites and was so profoundly influenced by their exchange that it ignited a lifelong fascination in him for Hindu traditions.
Adil Shah, if he was not already secretly a practising Hindu, was flirting dangerously with apostasy—at one point, he renamed Bijapur (originally Vijaypur, the City of Victory) as Vidyapur (City of Learning).
There are different languages; But there is one emotional appeal. Be he a brahmin or a Turk, He is only fortunate on whom The Goddess of Learning [Saraswati] smiles.
But unlike her familiar representations today or even in sculptures of yore, Ibrahim’s Saraswati is dressed in white robes, appearing more ‘in the form of a royal [Muslim] princess’ than in any immediately recognisable ‘Hindu’ style.
Wow. Even npw Sarawati is represented in white, Lakshmi in red and Parvati in green. Adil Shah commissioned her on white is such an irony for the Right wing folks.
Ibrahim is described as he ‘whose father is guru Ganapati, and mother the pure Saraswati’.
The Adil Shah himself, a Mughal envoy was surprised to discover, preferred speaking Marathi in court, and one of his harem favourites was a Maharashtrian dancer called Rambha. It was also well known that Ibrahim had an excellent grasp of Sanskrit, far superior than his grip over Persian, the language of his Iranian ancestors and of the emperor’s durbar in the north.
If ever there was a Mughal ruler who lived the good life, that man was Emperor Jahangir, in whose veins flowed Persian, Turkic and Rajput blood—besides double-distilled spirits and a whole lot of wine.
Arabs had mastered the seas even before the Prophet was born, and soon after its dawn, Islam was delivered to Kerala through long-standing channels of commerce. The oldest mosque in the region, for instance, is said to have been established in the lifetime of the Prophet himself,
Nangeli was a rebel, but like many rebels, in death her memory became the possession of those she opposed.
If you were a landless fisherman, you had a tax on your fishing net. If you were a man sporting a moustache, your facial hair fell within the mandate of the revenue inspector. If you owned slaves, you most certainly had to pay tax on those bleeding units of muscle.
Women of low caste, they will tell you, couldn’t cover their bodies if they didn’t pay the breast tax. They silently wept and lamented their fate, shame building upon shame under the gaze of lewd old men who decreed that the right to dignity came with a price.
It was here that a seventeenth-century Italian found himself in the court of a prince, packed with royal women covered only around the waist—two young nieces of the ruler wondered with amusement why on earth the visitor was so covered up in the tropical heat.
This was also the land where women enjoyed physical and sexual autonomy, where widowhood was no calamity and one husband could always be replaced with another.
Where elsewhere polygamy was a practice available to men, in Kerala there was polyandry on offer, because women were not unequal to their brothers (or, to be more exact, they were less unequal). They owned property and controlled resources, living fuller lives than the domesticated child-rearing destinies ordained to their sisters elsewhere.
The sexual gaze of the patriarchal Victorian was turned towards the breast in Kerala, till then not a cause of concern. When men and women entered temples, they both took off their top cloth. Today only the men are obliged to do this.
the import of Victorian patriarchy also imported shame, and women were told that a bare body was a mark of disgrace. Dignity lay in accepting male objectification; honour was located in docility.
it was British rule that allowed low-caste voices to emerge at last: it was a missionary education and access to Western texts, for instance, that galvanised Jyotiba Phule in his programme of reform.
Venereal disease notwithstanding, as the years passed, Clive achieved considerable martial distinction—battles were won in Arcot, Kaveripakkam, Arni and elsewhere that allowed the man, even in his thirties, a special kind of celebrity.
Retribution was swift—of the 1,500 Indian troops present, about 400 were killed immediately, some of them blown out of cannons, presumably to transmit the message far and wide.
The answer, the officer offered, lay in an old saying: ‘If you prick them, they will bleed; if you insult them, they will revenge.’
For all that, in the end, India came to mean more than just business to him. ‘I never was unhappy in England,’ he once wrote, ‘but I never was happy till I settled in India.’
Sir William Jones
He thought Greek poetry ‘sublime’ but when he ‘tasted Arabic and Persian poetry’, his enthusiasm for Greek ‘began to dry up’. Incidentally, one of the languages he knew ‘least perfectly’ was his native Welsh.
Writing in 1782 to Franklin, Jones noted gloomily but not less idealistically that he had ‘no wish to grow old in England; for, believe me, I would rather be a peasant with freedom than a prince in an enslaved country’.
through Jones’s obsession, as we have seen before, Europe was transfixed with Shakuntala. Translated in 1789, Jones’s Sacontalá: The Fatal Ring inspired Goethe to declare: ‘I should like to live in India myself … Sakontala, Nala, they have to be kissed.’ Friedrich Schlegel also came to consider Shakuntala the best example of Indian poetry.
