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February 17 - April 24, 2020
de Nobili, however, with his exalted family credentials, his sophisticated education, and a desire to make the gospel attractive to more than the peasantry, decided on a new way going forward. As he announced to a superior with a flourish, ‘I will become a Hindu to save the Hindus’.
here, seating was on the basis of status, so that low-born converts had to wait by the threshold while the high-born sat in the front. Meanwhile, de Nobili preached the Bible to the brahmins as a kind of lost Veda,
Shrewd as this inculturative strategy was, it was also successful. Many brahmins converted, as did a brother of Ramachandra Nayaka of Sendamangalam. In 1610, the Madurai mission had sixty converts, but by the time he died, de Nobili’s flock numbered four thousand.
He claimed that the tuft on the head (kudumi) and the sacred thread were merely social symbols and converts could continue wearing them.
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.’
‘We brahmins have made up all the rules, and invented religion. There is no better dharma than satisfying a brahmin’s need,’ he giggles.
‘Final freedom is that state of no pain, no pleasure, no qualities, nothing—or so some idiot said. But when a ravishing young woman … is free from her clothes—that’s freedom for me.’ At long last, then, the husband agrees
to present his wife to the brahmin, only for the latter to belatedly heed his pupil’s voice
It so happens that the sultan’s daughter had long before gone into the storeroom and collected the idol, taking it to her apartments and there playing with it as if it were a doll. The implication, however, is that by dressing him, feeding him and garlanding him, as is done to deities in Hindu temple rituals, the princess was essentially worshipping the image, winning divine affection—while during the day he kept her company in the form of an idol, at night, the Koil Ozhugu mischievously suggests, he played with the princess in a completely human avatar.
when revenge is sought from people long dead and gone, and violence justified in the name of so many gods.
Shakuntala was swiftly enthroned as the ideal of Indian womanhood, her integrity and blamelessness going down as virtues to be emulated by every good daughter and every self-sacrificing wife.
Unlike in the Mahabharata, she barely even talks to Dushyanta directly—she is too innocent and sweet to do anything of the sort. In fact, as a companion explains, she is ‘as delicate as a jasmine’, which also means she knows nothing of the ways of the world. She falls in love with the king, in any case, and he is tempted by this ‘flower that no one has smelled’. Their mutual attraction results soon enough in a consummation, and in a twist that might have been inspired by a Buddhist tale, the king departs after handing over to Shakuntala his ring. While she is lost in romantic dreams and
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Eventually, after the ring reaches the king through the means of a dead fish, he remembers everything and sets out to reunite with his wife and child. Nobody is to blame here—Shakuntala is pure, the king’s crudeness was the result of a curse, and what really determined matters was a tragic twist of fate, not human choice and action.
This Shakuntala, who travelled seamlessly from Kalidas’s Sanskrit verses to the Victorian imagination, still eclipses the more remarkable woman who first appears in the great Indian epic: one who does not conform to notions of patriarchal correctness and stands proud, instead, as a challenge to the world of men.
that Chokhamela had ever wanted was a chance to glimpse the deity within. But in the end, he had to settle forever by the door—precisely where they said he belonged even when he lived.
When a Maratha grandee declined Shivaji’s invitation to join forces, emphasising his loyalty to a Muslim superior, Shivaji reminded him that his own course was not one of disloyalty—instead, it was of a higher loyalty to their local deity, in whose name they ought to create a ‘Hindavi’ kingdom. No longer was he interested in accepting the supremacy of Persianised padshahs—not when he could become a Maratha padshah and establish a kingdom of his own.
Shivaji actively pursued a new form of political expression rooted in Sanskritic tradition. Genealogical claims linked him with the Rajputs in the north, and by the end of his life, he was writing letters not in Persian—the language of diplomacy at the time—but in Sanskrit. As the 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.
Are they who celebrate Basava’s heterodox teachings, who uphold the vachanas of many remarkable women, who bury their dead and go to no temples, really Hindus? Those on the extreme right insist they are—where majoritarianism is the goal, one can hardly allow the dilution of the majority. And so, as many Lingayats contemplate a second divorce from the Hindu fold, it is the Hindus who seek to retain Basava’s children within their order—not so much due to a similarity of vision as to the naked expediencies of cultural politics.
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.
But the times were violent and while Dara scaled the heights of intellectual attainment, he failed to claim the power of arms that sustained kingship in that complex age. When Shahjahan fell ill, his son made tactical mistakes. He yet had chances of success, with the royal forces and treasure vaults at his disposal, but on the battlefield Aurangzeb was the real warrior, Dara a poet in armour. He was defeated and fled Agra, wandering from province to province, while his father wept, till Aurangzeb’s men defeated him once again.
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.
Even in her husband’s day, Khunza appears to have had some say in politics. One poem, in fact, ascribes an insult to her as the provocation for Husain’s war against Vijayanagar. Of course, the battle in 1565 followed generations of tension and rivalry and had various causes, but it is telling that the Fath Nama-i Nizam Shah cites, in the words of scholar Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘a potentially sexually loaded’ reference to the queen as rousing the fury of her husband. The sultans of the Deccan often traded insults with Vijayanagar, but in this instance a line was crossed: in an inflammatory letter
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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. That, in the end, is the secret of its enduring appeal, and in that also lies Vatsyayana’s genius.
The dominance Muslim rulers enjoyed for centuries saw the import of Persian culture into the subcontinent, and much from Farsi and Arabic blended with Indian tongues. 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.
as the power of the Marathas spread across large swathes of the country, the status of Persian as a link language made its resurrection inevitable.
So it was that Meenakshi—she with fish eyes, a political superlative since the fish was the totem of the Pandyas—made her appearance on earth. Her father worried that her three nipples ‘will make even enemies laugh’, and languished in ‘depression and unhappiness’. He had sought a child—a son, valiant and unparalleled in might—but what he got was a freak. A voice from the heavens, however, reassured him and the three-nippled girl was raised a boy, dissolving boundaries of gender and sex. When (s)he came of age, her parents said it was time to marry. (S)he, however, decided it was time to
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the Mappilas returned to a previous history from a more confident age, where a mosque could donate land for a temple, and a temple could host an iftar for local Muslims.
it was a missionary education and access to Western texts, for instance, that galvanised Jyotiba Phule in his programme of reform.
As one 1858 report noted, Persian was ‘for 600 years the language of justice … the language of the Court … [and indeed] it was much better known even than the English language is at present’.
attendants in service with the princes had goaded already upset sepoys by calling them unmanly ‘topiwallas’ who had sacrificed their honour for firangi coins. The result was a combination of caste and religious pride, political vendetta and accumulated resentment against British haughtiness culminating in spectacular slaughter.
The Shah had once been heir to a kingdom and to a large fortune—a decade after Awadh’s annexation, it was found that the British still owed the ex-king £2 million.
The British, Sir Arthur thought, brought ‘disgrace to [their own] civilised country’ by their ‘grievous neglect’ of India. He decided to make amends.
it was through these publications that Harishchandra, as the scholar Vasudha Dalmia notes, ‘veritably created literary Hindi’ even as he gently voiced his support for Hindu consolidation. He became a catalyst for a vernacular nationalism that would achieve full force in the following century, simultaneously rising as the ‘Father of Modern Hindi Literature and Hindi Theatre’.
‘The progress of one’s own language is the root of all progress,’ Harishchandra argued, and page after page in his magazine was devoted to plays, poetry, satire and essays, all of which combined to create a new corpus for speakers of an increasingly standardised Hindi.
In 1853, for example, he lambasted the brahmin orthodoxy for its stand against female education, stating that, ‘In their opinion, women should forever be kept in obedience, should not be given any knowledge, should not be well-educated, should not know about religion, should not mix with men,
it was Savitribai who often faced physical retaliation for their work. This came in the form of being pelted with dung and stones while she walked to their schools, for example. She remained undaunted, inspiring her husband and countless others.
In the royal family too, much to the disbelief of outsiders, the wife of the maharajah was not his queen—she could only be addressed as ‘the consort’ and had no claims to being a ‘Highness’. There was, however, a maharani, the difference being that she was either the sister or niece of the ruler, and it was she who produced heirs to the throne through a male ‘consort’ of her own. Power always descended from uncle to nephew and not father to son, and no maharajah had ever inherited the throne from his father, and no son of his could ever claim anything more than a glamorous bloodline.
the partners of the princesses of Travancore were not permitted to sit in their presence, and had always to address their wives as ‘Highnesses’, never by name. When the aforementioned maharani had earlier decided to ‘modernise’ things and permit her husband to take a seat and to drive with her, her uncle, the maharajah, ‘much disapproved’ of such radical innovations.
It was also he who declared that, ‘If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.’
The Indian Penal Code was the result of his labours and remains the backbone of India’s legal system, despite its many un-Indian provisions. The Indian Civil Service too, from which are descended today’s bureaucrats, was designed by Macaulay.
Macaulay decided, Indians must learn mathematics, geography, science—and they would learn it in English. Far from singing praises of Indian culture, he saw it as British destiny to bring modernity to India—where a few decades earlier William Jones had immersed himself in Indian literature, Macaulay spent his time in Calcutta reading classics from Greece and Rome. ‘It may be,’ he hoped with patronising transparency, ‘that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better
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He famously wanted to create a class ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.
In the end, history didn’t quite play out in the way Savarkar and his confederates theorised. Nehru proved perfectly stable, the Hindutva cause was damaged after Gandhi’s murder, while Sardar Patel integrated most principalities with the carrot of money and status and the stick of armed intervention. Despite obituaries and shrill prophecies of danger, India became a secular democracy, and not a Hindu rashtra. And, in perhaps what might have caused the father of Hindutva to recoil in horror, it was not the Nepali dynasty of Savarkar’s ‘academical’ premise that soared to power in New Delhi.
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‘The failure of India’s shipping,’ we are informed, ‘was not caused by the non-existence of her marine engineering industry … Nor did shipowners demonstrate a lack of managerial skills or experience specific difficulties in manning and running their fleets … The basic cause of the lamentable position of Indian shipping … was the formidable opposition they encountered from the major British companies operating in Indian waters’—companies that enjoyed a practical monopoly, to which they would brook no challenge or competition.
In Reconstructing India are ideas that even today resonate with Indian thinkers. ‘If bureaucracy prevails,’ he warned, for instance, ‘industries will not prosper.’ Without modern industry—which meant progressive education, social reform, and, crucially, women’s empowerment—the nation itself would not prosper. The state had to guide the process but also recognise its limits: the ‘people require help and backing,’ he argued, ‘not control and direction.’ Page after page presented Visvesvaraya’s vision for India, one in which caste retreated before ‘a saner social system’ and nationalism meant a
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what distinguished Balamani was her preference for destitute women who were disenfranchised by anti-devadasi legislation. Her company, it has been noted, was in fact ‘almost an asylum for women who needed shelter and security’. Of course, none of this alleviated the stigma that came with being ‘the dancing girl’ of Kumbakonam, but Balamani flourished as a businesswoman and a patron of the arts, as much as an individual of singular personality.
There were in Vivekananda’s message contradictions, and indeed he may have had more than one message. In his own time, however, these did not seem like contradictions at all. He spoke to different people in different ways. When addressing Indians struggling against caste, speaking multiple languages, and with regional identities, his purpose was to engender national unity through a common, reinvented Hinduism.
Her strongest message, however, was that while ‘the jewels of Western learning’ must come to India, ‘the diamonds of the Eastern faith’ must also be given their due. In other words, Besant decided that her quest in life was to champion India and Hinduism, more important than all of the missions that had animated her journey thus far. Besant was also, incidentally, one of the founders of the famous Banaras Hindu University (B.H.U.),
Gandhism, to Ambedkar, ‘with its call back to nature, means back to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people’. He disagreed with Nehru too, but as a constitutionalist and a builder of institutions himself, Ambedkar could meet halfway with the Pandit while parleying bitterly with his guru.
