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

by Manu S. Pillai

On all sides of power, rhetoric was amplified, legends and tales competing for narrative dominance even as realpolitik was guided on the ground by battles and great armies. Both went hand in hand, adding yet another layer of detail in an already complex land.

It tells us once again that 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.

Khunza wasted away with time, written out of history, disfigured in works of art her husband had lovingly had made. Only fragments remain of her tale, and like so many women, she went to the grave uncelebrated and unmourned, as history continued to be written by unforgiving men.

Where custom demanded social invisibility of her, Meerabai chose the opposite, further enraging her family. Still, she did not care—‘I don’t like your strange world, Rana,’ she records. ‘A world where there are no holy men, and all the people are trash.’

The result was that while his name came to stand ‘high on the roll of conquerors’, it was also fit for another list—that ‘of those who have done and suffered much for the happiness of mankind.’ What the Indians thought of Macaulay’s generous estimation was, of course, irrelevant.

But even as the facade of control returned, the monsoon of 1806 in Vellore sent the first jolting intimation to the founders of the Raj that they were not, ultimately, welcome in India—and that what would become the jewel in the empire’s crown came soaked in an ocean of blood, and in ferocious anger.