A Place Within Page 9

  When Nizamuddin died, his disciple Khusrau wrote, in the Sufi vein, “Gori soyi sej par, mukh par daale kes / Chal Khusro ghar aapne, raen bhai chanhu des,” singing which lines at a restaurant table, my friend Mahesh wipes his eyes with emotion. The bride lies in the bed, Mahesh translates, her face covered by her (black) hair / Come away Khusrau to your home, night falls in the four directions. Simple lines depicting the death of a beloved, and of a spiritual master, when his light forsakes the world. The Sufi, or any mystic, of course, is a bride of God.

  Such poetry, such yearning, lives on in the romantic heart of the nation, even as the airwaves and newsprint dazzle and bewitch with the transitory magic of the material. But the poetry thrills the heart, it is one’s link to here; surely, you think, India cannot let it all go in its frantic race to superpowerdom?

  They Walked with Loud Lamentations

  Delhi…[is] the metropolis of India, a vast and magnificent city, uniting beauty with strength. It is surrounded by a wall that has no equal in the world, and is the largest city in India, nay rather the largest city in the entire Muslim world.

  IBN BATTUTA (1304–1368)

  AMIR KHUSRAU’S LIFE PRESENTS a familiar conundrum. His greatness as a poet was unquestioned in his own time. Seven hundred years later, his compositions continue to thrill audiences, which in our electronic age have become worldwide. Not many who listen to his verses must be aware that Khusrau was also Alauddin’s historian, describing his achievements in glowing terms. And this is where our problem emerges. As the modern historian M. Habib wrote, “The statesmen of the middle ages patronised poets as their modern successors patronise the printing press”—and, one might add, more recently television and the Internet. Khusrau could not but help write propaganda when required. He may have licked the spit of his spiritual master, and sung Ali! Ali! in ecstasy at the Sufi gatherings at Nizamuddin’s centre, but he was also a courtier who dined with sultans, ate their salt, as we say. He was the poet who survived when his sultans—first Jalaluddin, then Alauddin—were betrayed. The dreadful Malik Kafur did not touch him, though Khusrau was around the court at the time of Alauddin’s death and as his friend Khizr Khan languished in the dungeons, soon to be blinded and murdered. What do we make of his silences, and of his jingoistic pronouncements? Was the Sufi in him only playing games? The one who knows doesn’t tell, he says in one of his songs, and the teller doesn’t know.

  When he writes with such relish about the destruction of an important temple by Alauddin’s forces, what does he not tell? Thus—

  The foundations of this golden temple, which was the holy temple of the Hindus, were dug up with the greatest care. The glorifiers of God broke the infidel building, so that spiritual birds descended on it like pigeons from the air. The ears of the wall opened at the sound of the spade. At its call the sword also raised its head from the scabbard; and the heads of Brahmans and idol worshippers came dancing from their trunks at the flashes of the sword…the stench of blood was emitted by ground once fragrant with musk. And at this smell the men of Faith were intoxicated and the men of infidelity ruined.

  Amir Khusrau presents a poem to Sultan Alauddin.

  Is there a trace of irony in these words? asks Habib. “[Was] this the trumpet of a bloated fanaticism or the excruciating melody of the tragic muse? Was Amir Khusrau praising the idol-breakers or bewailing their lack of true faith?” Such questions are not academic, they test our own attitudes, our biases.

  No one who reads accounts of the early Muslim historians of India would fail to feel uneasy at the bigotry and the arrogance they reveal among the ruling classes and in the behaviour of the sultans. Accounts of temple destructions so casually fill the histories they become embarrassing to read. They remind us, let’s be honest, of Muslim fanatics of today. Says Alauddin to his qadi (judge), according to Barni, “Now you tell me that it is all in accordance with law that the Hindus should be reduced to the most abject obedience.” Says the much nicer Firoz Shah in his memoir, “I forbade the infliction of any severe punishment on the Hindus in general, but I destroyed their idol temples, and instead thereof raised mosques.” Surely we must acknowledge this past, which casts a shadow upon our lives even today, when a politician can invoke it to create discord and mayhem in the nation. Surely we must ask if we can turn away from those aspects of it that disturb us while allowing others to move us. We must come to terms with it.

  Lest we judge the past too harshly and easily, several mitigating factors have been pointed out by modern scholars regarding such historical accounts. First, the historians of the time often were at the mercy of their sultans in whose employ they were, and none was more so than Amir Khusrau, receiving his thousand-tanka stipend from Alauddin (thirty could fetch a concubine or a handsome lad) to produce flattery and bombast upon demand. Furthermore, descriptions of temple destructions were often merely a formula used to extol a ruler as a pious Muslim (even when he was far from it) and therefore prone to exaggeration if not outright manufacture. The sultans also often helped to build temples. They were practical men who administered a vast, diverse territory and population, and well knew that stability within their kingdoms depended on the wealth and cooperation of that population, the great majority of which were Hindus, happy or unhappy with the rule of the day, as people are everywhere with their governments. When the sultans were infected by excessive zeal or bigotry, their victims often included nonorthodox Muslims. And finally, what seems obvious but is often overlooked in the translations is that the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” should be understood in historical context and always be qualified. After all, who was a “Hindu”? The term itself is modern. What must have been meant in the original Persian accounts, especially in the earlier periods, is a person of Hindustan who was not an immigrant. Though, of course, a temple was a temple.

  Nevertheless, even with these cautions against oversimplification, the arrogance and bigotry, the discrimination against Hindus and the destruction of their temples, cannot be wished away from our historical consciousness. They were the reality of the day, and we must acknowledge them, albeit as reflecting the values of the Muslim elites of a long-gone past—a time in which, to take one example, the punishment for selling goods that were underweight was to have the difference in weight cut from the haunches of the culprit. As for Khusrau, even great artists bear the prejudices of their age. We do not have to look hard in our own times to find them. And it must not be forgotten that fanatical intolerance has existed everywhere, India’s caste system being but one example that still persists, sometimes in grotesque forms.

  I always cringe at the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” they are so final, so unequivocal. So exclusive. For “Hindu”—itself derived not from the name of a founder, as “Christian” is, or a philosophy or attitude (of submission), as “Muslim” is, but from a geographical marker, the river Indus—I often substitute “Indian,” for India’s primary identity is rooted in its ancient history and culture, which preceded these religious divisions. I imagined India as my ancestral homeland; to witness, upon my arrival, its divisions running so deep was profoundly unsettling. It was to be asked to carry an open wound where perhaps only an itch had existed; to accept difference at the profoundest level.

  There was a prevalent tendency, I found, to essentialize—and therefore, in a certain way, to exclude. If you were a Muslim you ate meat, could not possibly be vegetarian; you spoke Urdu (the cultured language of poetry that evolved from old Hindi under the influence of Persian), which would be wonderful were it true, but it is not my language. As a Muslim, the understanding was, you naturally felt closer to a Muslim from another corner of the country, and even from a foreign country, despite the very obvious differences, in cultures, languages, and foods, than to a neighbour from your own region. During my early visits, my hosts, out of misplaced consideration for me, would take pains to point out the nonvegetarian sections of the menu at a restaurant; a dear friend regretted she could not introduce me to some Muslim frien
ds who happened to have left town; another friend, as dear, pointed out a Muslim club I could join. A Gujarati woman asked me how I learned my Gujarati. At my mother’s breast, I replied impatiently.

  Partition had sharpened the separation; and Muslims, it seemed to me, instead of asserting their essential and primary Indian-ness, shouting it from the rooftops and from their guts, had fallen into the trap of allowing themselves to be seen as a minority and as outsiders, accepting a primary identity defined by faith, in a unity (called the “umma”) that crosses political, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. But such an identity is often abstract and culturally rootless. How dangerous such a self-affirmation can become for young people we have witnessed in our own times—for example in the July 7, 2005, bombings in London—when in their frustrations about the plight of their “brothers” across the world, they run amok attempting to destroy the very societies that have nurtured them.

  On the other hand, I come across Muslim sympathizers—in India as well as Toronto—who need their Muslims as the distinct Other, the antagonist to pit against the “majority” society they consider unjust, to which of course they implicitly and comfortably belong. To tell people that politically and culturally you don’t subscribe to this gulf among the same people, and that in matters of faith you were brought up in a very local Indian tradition that was a blend of the two faiths, is to appear naive or quixotic. It is to meet a blank stare, it is to end a conversation.

  I come from simple Indian village and town folk who happened to follow a line of Muslim mystical singer-preachers, the first of whom, per legend, arrived from the Near East nine hundred years ago and was welcomed in the capital, Patan, of the Gujarat kingdom. He was, to mainstream Islam, a heretic. How could we possibly identify with the conquering Afghan and Turkish hosts, who professed to be Muslim in a very traditional, orthodox sense? For me the Afghan-Turkish, and later Mughal, dynasties and their cast of characters are fascinating because of their sheer alienness and their distance in time, and because of the manner in which they influenced the history and culture of the subcontinent. Their achievements have been remarkable, and they present us with the paradox that while producing works of sublime beauty they were capable of the utmost physical cruelty. History brings them down to us as real and intriguing personalities that make us ponder about our own humanity and times.

  There was an African who came to Delhi seven centuries ago; even before I read of his journey to India, the retroflex music of his name, Battuta, had thrilled me as a child, for he had also visited my part of Africa and written about it. He did not use his observations to flaunt his literary skill, as Khusrau did; nor was he sanctimonious, like Barni. He simply travelled and travelled, and at the end he wrote what he recalled, when no sultan could look over his shoulder.

  In 1334, from a crossing at the banks of the river Indus in the northwest, the intelligence service sent a report to Delhi’s sultan, who ruled almost the whole of the territory of India, that a North African traveller had arrived by way of Kabul, on his way to the capital. He was a respectable man, accompanied by an entourage of forty; he was well travelled and had visited the holy cities and performed the hajj, and he appeared well versed in Islamic jurisprudence. This intelligence would have taken about five days, by relayed courier, to reach the sultan. The traveller waited two months in Multan before the reply came, bidding him and the other visitors waiting with him to come to Delhi. But he had to sign a statement that he had come with the intention of settling permanently in India, otherwise he would have been turned back. Delhi needed qualified Muslim immigrants.

  The visitor was Ibn Battuta (1304–1368), perhaps the greatest traveller of the medieval world. In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, saying goodbye to his sorrowful mother and father, he had set off east from his native Tangier with the aim of visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; but the urge to travel proved insatiable, and by the time he returned home to settle, he had spent twenty-nine years on the road, his journeys having taken him across varied lands and seas all the way to China. In the interim he had time to make a sea voyage down the Indian Ocean to the coast of East Africa, up to Mombasa and Kilwa. His last voyage, when he was well on in years, was across the Sahara to the Mali kingdom of West Africa. Back finally in Morocco, in Fez, he prepared a memoir of his travels with the aid of a young secretary. He was not a man of letters, and this was his only book. Its great appeal today is precisely that it is a memoir: intimate, expansive, unpretentious. Ibn Battuta had to be a survivor, too; his journeys were often hazardous, and he came across rulers who rewarded him and gave him positions in their lands, but who also made him tremble and could have had his head cut off and stuck on a rampart for all to see. Alberuni, the great eleventh-century Persian scholar-traveller, after spending ten years in India learning all he could, produced an invaluable record, but he does not reveal himself so openly. Ibn Battuta gives us the man on the road.

  On the way down to Delhi from Multan, Ibn Battuta describes seeing sati processions in which “richly dressed” widows were carried to the cremation site to be immolated with their dead husbands. The Muslim sultans tolerated this practice, which was alien to them, and the traveller’s reaction to the spectacle is only to tell us how happily the women embraced their dead husbands and burnt with them.

  It had been eighteen years since Alauddin Khilji had died, and the Tughlaq dynasty was now in place. The sultan was Muhammad Tughlaq, son of Ghiyasuddin, the builder of Tughlaqabad, the third city. Muhammad, credited with arranging the death of his father (who died when a wooden shelter fell on him), had raised a fourth city, essentially comprising the two older Delhis, Alauddin’s Siri and the older Qutb area, which together were enclosed within a protecting wall and given the grand name of Jahanpanah, “Asylum of the World.” This was the city to which Ibn Battuta arrived.

  Muhammad Tughlaq was one of the most enigmatic and controversial of India’s rulers, brilliant, idealistic, pious on one hand, and extremely cruel and arbitrary on the other. He learned Arabic so he could read the religious literature first-hand, became adept at the art of calligraphy, and wrote Persian verse. He held learned discussions with Hindu ascetics and Jain scholars, not to mention those of his own faith, and has even been called a nonbeliever and a rationalist. At the same time his administrative and military achievements were significant and astute; he ruled over a vast empire and defended its borders. Yet to be close to him was to live on the edge. Some historians have called him mad. Ibn Battuta, who wrote in the comfort of his home in Morocco, describes him fearlessly.

  This king is of all men the fondest of making gifts and shedding blood. His gate is never without some poor man enriched or some living man executed, and stories are current amongst the people of his generosity and courage and of his cruelty and violence towards criminals.

  Soon after his arrival, Ibn Battuta obtained an audience with the sultan. In the magnificent Hall of a Thousand Pillars, he came before the “Master of the World, a tall, robust, white-skinned man seated, his legs tucked beneath him, on a gold-plated throne.” One imagines, standing among the courtiers beside the sultan, the historian Barni (who would also write about this sultan) watching the nervous Moroccan’s performance as he paid his respects. Writes Ibn Battuta,

  I approached the sultan, who took my hand and shook it, and continuing to hold it addressed me most affably, saying in Persian, “This is a blessing; your arrival is blessed; be at ease, I shall be compassionate to you and give you such favours that your fellow-countrymen will hear of it and come to join you.”…Every time he said any encouraging word to me I kissed his hand, until I had kissed it seven times, and after he had given me a robe of honour I withdrew.

  Craven, but otherwise he might not have lived to tell the tale. There is a charming transparency about him. The sultan appointed him a qadi, a judge, of Delhi on a lavish stipend. No wonder that he extols the sultan’s “dominant quality” of generosity, even as he talks about his bloodiness.

  Although
Ibn Battuta describes Delhi as a magnificent city, he also says that it was empty and unpopulated when he arrived. It could not have been quite so, but the statement reflects the fact that this “second Baghdad,” which had trembled under the siege of the Mongols yet staved them off successfully, had recently experienced a terrible upheaval at the hands of its own sultan.

  As long as Delhiites did not run afoul of the sultan they could live their lives in peace; what blood was spilt was among the ruling elite. But around 1327 events took place in Delhi that completely shattered this peace. Muhammad Tughlaq decided to move his capital four hundred miles south to Daulatabad, in the Deccan, so it could be at the centre of his vast empire. But he did not merely move his government, he forced the entire upper class to pick up and go along as well, lock, stock, and barrel. These cosmopolitan elites were naturally reluctant to leave the splendour of their great capital—“Hazrat-i-Delhi,” Khusrau had called it—to set up anew in a provincial town in a distant, alien region of the country. Anonymous and abusive letters were thrown into the sultan’s audience hall in protest. The sultan responded with measures appropriate to his nature. Among those who resisted the move were the Sufis, for Delhi had become an important centre for them. Nizamuddin was dead, so a major battle of wills was averted. With the lesser of these men of God, the ruler had his brutal way. They were dragged out of their houses, pulled by their beards, tortured. The khanqahs, the Sufi centres, were emptied. “They walked with loud lamentations, like persons who are going to be buried alive,” says Barni. There were women, children, and the elderly among the migrants, it was summer, and the ground was burning hot.