Plus while Hindu
Nationalists see it as a Hindu rebellion, Pakistan furthermore traces its
Nationalist history back to the (by Pakistan’s historiography considered a
Muslim) 1857 Sepoy Mutiny.
This said, Muslim
rule had been first introduced to S.Asia, when Arab
forces seized control of the Sind region of the southern Indus plain (now in
Pakistan) in 711. Around the same time, the greatest empires of ancient India
were based in the Gangetic plain which, along with the Indus plain, boasted the
earliest urban centers of the subcontinent.
In south India, in
contrast, settled agriculture was confined to relatively small pockets,
although it had a longer history there than in western or eastern India.
Because of its more difficult terrain, dispersed agrarian zones, and localized
social circles, the peninsula's kingdoms were typically smaller than those of
the Gangetic north prior to 1000 CE. The only states that had ever extended
their power across the Vindhyas were those based in
the north. Eastern and western Indian states were even later to develop than
those in the south and were similarly restricted in size, for the most part.
Just as in Europe,
regionalization occurred at the expense of a cosmopolitan language and culture,
in South Asia's case, Sanskrit, and was a sign of the growing relevance of more
localized concerns and identities among the elite populations. These regional
cultures also interacted with or were affected by aspects of the cosmopolitan
culture of Persia and the Middle East in differing ways in the centuries after
1200.
For much of India's
ancient history, the earlier development, greater wealth -- and larger
population of the Gangetic north gave it political and cultural dominance. This
explains why it was the Sanskrit language once spoken in the north that
eventually developed into the pan-Indic literary medium. For a period of
approximately a thousand years beginning in 300 CE, the prestige of classical
Sanskrit was so great that it eclipsed all other languages and
literatures in the area.
And although the
religious beliefs and practices of India were never systematized by a central
institution or spiritual authority, the circulation of Sanskrit and Brahmins
throughout the subcontinent thus, did produce some semblance of a unified
religious culture at the elite level by 1000 CE.
The largest temple in
eleventh-century India was located in Tanjavur, the
capital of the mighty Chola dynasty of the far south. Consecrated in 1010, the
temple housed a form of Shiva named Rajarajeshvara
after the Chola ruler Rajaraja, who was its main
patron. While the far south of India was thriving under the Chola dynasty,
political power in the northern half of the subcontinent continued to devolve
to an increasing number of small states.
At the same time that
King Rajaraja I of the Chola dynasty was making plans
to build his enormous temple at Tanjavur,
another king had emerged in far-off Afghanistan. Known to posterity
simply as Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998-1030) after the
Afghan city that was his capital, he is usually regarded as the first Muslim
king to have a major impact of what under British rule was called the Indian
subcontinent.
Even Indo-Muslim chronicles
of a later time ignore the Arabs of Sind and begin their narrative of Muslim
rule in India with Mahmud of Ghazni. Mahmud lived
about 350 years after the inception of Islam, at a time when many in the
Islamic world feared that their centuries of political supremacy might be at an
end. In the years immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632),
Muslims had given their allegiance to a single caliph or head of state. Under
the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs (661-750) based in Damascus and then the
Abbasids of Baghdad, much of the Islamic world had been politically unified, at
least in theory. This unity had fragmented by the tenth century, with three
different rulers one in Umayyad Spain, another in Abbasid Baghdad, and yet
another in Fatimid Cairo - each claiming to be the sole caliph. While all
Muslims would never again be brought together in one state, the tenth-century
fear that Muslim dominance was on an irreversible decline proved to be wrong.
Instead, the influx of a new group of people, the Turks, would politically
reinvigorate much territory ruled under the banner of Islam. From the ninth
century onward, Muslim rulers had increasingly relied on personal troops
composed of enslaved Turks from the Central Asian steppes. These military slaves
or mamluks were considered more loyal than other soldiers because they were
taken captive at a young age and owed loyalty only to their master. Many
mamluks went on to become prominent generals and leaders in the Islamic world
in this era; at the same time, various tribes of Turks were gradually migrating
into Muslim lands and becoming Islamicized. Due to
their nomadic background, the Turkic peoples were skilled at cavalry warfare.
Mahmud of Ghazni's ascendance occurred in this context of rising
Turkic military and political power. His grandfather, Alptigin,
was a Turk who began as a military slave and ended his career as governor of Ghazni, a city in the center of what is now Afghanistan. Sebuktigin, Mahmud's father, was also a slave at one time,
before he married Alptigin's daughter and succeeded
to Alptigin's position as governor. He eventually
declared his independence and annexed much of modern Afghanistan, becoming the
first in the Ghaznavid line of Turkic rulers. After Mahmud, the Ghaznavids lost
their base in Afghanistan to the Seljuq Turks, a group of nomadic tribes who
went on to conquer a huge swath of territory encompassing modern Turkey, Iraq,
Iran, and much of Central Asia. The Ghaznavids and Seljuqs were conscious of
their status as newcomers to Islam and so never sought symbolic leadership over
the entire Islamic world. Instead of claiming the ultimate authority as
caliphs, Mahmud and other Turkic rulers were called sultans, a title for Muslim
kings that spread widely in later centuries. After several centuries during
which the Islamic frontiers had hardly advanced, the Turkic sultans of the
eleventh century initiated major expansions of the Islamic realm, the
Ghaznavids toward the east and the Seljuqs toward the west.
Mahmud of Ghazni started making frequent campaigns into the Indian
subcontinent in 1001. Keen on building up his prestige within the international
Muslim community, Mahmud portrayed his entry into the subcontinent as an
instance of jihad, in this case a war against infidels. Making this claim also
allowed him to legitimately take booty, which Mahmud did in great quantities.
Mahmud commenced by taking territory around the Indus river in what is today
Pakistan and eventually made his way large majority of Muslims are Sunni, the sense
of an ummah was almost readymade. Also significant in creating unity among
Muslims was the existence of a common language, Arabic, for religious purposes,
as well as common cultural practices and constructs.
Very little intact
architecture from the Ghaznavid period survives, but we do have existing
examples from their Seljuq successors that are quite similar to the Ghaznavid
style. The most notable example of a Seljuq monument is the Great Mosque of
Isfahan in Iran.
Although Mahmud could
claim to belong to a worldwide Muslim community, the Ghaznavid Turks had
adopted an ideology and style of kingship that originated in just one part of
the Islamic world, its eastern segment. This mode of kingship drew heavily on
the pre-Islamic traditions of Persia and cast the king as an all powerful autocrat deemed superior to other mortals. The
elevated position of a ruler in later PersoIslamic
society was a far cry from the egalitarian ethos of the early days of Islam,
when the ruler was simply an esteemed man who was elected from a body of equals
just as an Arab chief had been chosen from the elders of the tribe. Rulers such
as Mahmud of Ghazni were considered shadows of god on
earth and, as such, merited great respect and awe.
The fact that Mahmud
of Ghazni used Persian as a court language also
differentiated him and other contemporary rulers in Iran and Central Asia from
their counterparts in Spain, Egypt, and Baghdad who spoke Arabic.
These intertwined
traditions of Turkic military prowess, Islamic religion, and Persian culture
were introduced into the Indian subcontinent by Mahmud of Ghazni
and his successors. Mahmud's son had to yield most of the Ghaznavid realm to
the much larger and more powerful Se1juq Turks, but the dynasty managed to
retain a small stronghold around Lahore, today in Pakistan. There the
Ghaznavids survived for almost two hundred years, until they were dislodged by
another upstart dynasty from Afghanistan, the Ghurids,
who further spread Perso-Islamic culture in South Asia. Although Arab sailors
and merchants, as well as the early Muslim Arabs who conquered Sind, were no
strangers to South Asia, the Muslims who became politically dominant in the
subcontinent would typically be Turco-Mongol in ethnic background, horse-riding
warriors in occupation, and Persian in cultural heritage.
In the year 1000 thus, two kings at the extremities of the greater South Asian
world region had been poised for expansion. There was Rajaraja
Chola of Tanjavur, on the one hand, who envisioned an
extension of power into Southeast Asia that would be realized by his son
Rajendra. And at the same time, Mahmud of Ghazni,
situated in the borderland between the Middle East, Central Asia, and South
Asia, was setting his sights on the area of northwestern India.
By 1200, however, the
Chola dynasty had withered away along with Indian influence in Southeast Asia,
whereas a second wave of Turkic warriors following in Mahmud of Ghazni's footsteps was overrunning much of north India. The
Cholas flourished toward the end of one long phase, a period of roughly a
thousand years when Indian culture had spread far beyond the confines of the
modern region not only into Southeast Asia but also into central and eastern
Asia. Mahmud of Ghazni, on the other hand, stood at
the inception of a second phase, during which Islamic religion and culture were
transmitted as far east as the southern Philippine islands. What happened
subsequently in India was not so much a clash of civilizations as a
revitalization of its politics and an enrichment of its already diverse
culture. That is the story to which we now turn our attention.
The origins of the
Delhi Sultanate can be traced to the career of the, Muhammad Ghuri, so-called after the mountainous region in
Afghanistan where his family was based. His full name was Shihab al-Din
Muhammad bin Sam, but he is also known in the historical sources as Muizz alDin. Muhammad Ghuri was based in Ghazni, the
former capital of the renowned Mahmud, and from there he turned his attention
eastward toward India beginning in 1175. Like Mahmud, Muhammad Ghuri spent years campaigning in the Indian subcontinent
and won victory after victory. Unlike Mahmud, however, Muhammad's goal was to
annex territory and not merely to carry out profitable raids. Muhammad's first
conquest in South Asia was the region of Punjab, held by the Muslim descendants
of Mahmud of Ghazni. For two decades from 1186, the
main city in the Punjab, Lahore (now Pakistan), served as the primary Ghurid base in South Asia for a series of successful
attacks on north India proper.
The sophisticated
military system of their native Afghanistan was the principal reason for the
success of the Ghurid armies in India. The ease of
the Ghurid conquest has puzzled historians in the
past, given the far greater agrarian wealth and population of the conquered
Indian kingdoms that should have provided them with ample resources for
military defense. Hence, early twentieth-century scholars often pointed to the
lack of unity among Indians as the chief explanation for their defeat. Since
the concept of India as a nation was still centuries away, Prithviraj
Chauhan and Jayachandra Gahadavala
- Muhammad Ghuri's opponents - had no incentive to
forge a united front and indeed are depicted as mortal enemies in a later
ballad that champions Prithviraj. Similarly, there
was no sense of a common religious identity among Indian warriors at the time,
for the notion of a unified Hinduism is a modern one.
Muhammad Ghuri's sudden death in 1206 precipitated an intense
contest for power among the leading Turkic military slaves upon whom Muhammad
had so heavily relied. In that year Qutb al-Din Aibak, a slave of Turkic origin, seized control of the
armies from Afghanistan that were occupying numerous forts in the heartland of
north India. Qutb al-Din Aibak's
act was but the first in a series of struggles for dominance among the leading
members of the Turkic forces in India. This event easily could have been
relegated to the status of a footnote in history had the occupying Turkic
armies eventually retreated back to their area of origin, as had Mahmud of Ghazni two hundred years earlier, or had the fledgling
Islamic state torn itself apart in internal conflict. Instead, Qutb al-Din's political successors were able to entrench
themselves in India for centuries thereafter and, in doing so, ushered in
momentous changes not only in the political makeup of the subcontinent but also
in its culture. The importance of the date 1206, when the first of a series of
dynasties collectively known as the Delhi Sultanate was founded, is thus clear.
A New Delhi Sultanate
Enter a few hundred
years later, Zahiruddin Muhammad also known as Babur,
who was twelve years old when he ascended the throne of the tiny Mughal
principality of Fergana in faraway Central Asia. And although soon he soon lost
Fergana and had to wonder about in the mountains of Central Asia, a king
without a kingdom, with the blood of Timur (on the paternal side) and Chingiz Khan (on the maternal side) apparently he had great
dreams. When fortune favored him eventually with the throne of Kabul, his eyes
turned eastwards, where, beyond the mountains, lay the vast, fertile
Indo-Gangetic Plain, renowned for its wealth, which was then ruled by the
Afghan dynasty of Lodis.
In November 1525, Zahiruddin Muhammad descended from the snow-capped
mountains, crossed the Indus, and swept into Hindustan. This was a perilous
enterprise, for he had only a small army of just twelve thousand men, while
opposing him was the mammoth Lodi army of some hundred thousand with a
formidable contingent of a thousand elephants. But in a five-hour battle fought
at Panipat, about eighty kilometres north of Delhi,
he entirely routed the enemy. Babur, aged forty-three, was at last an emperor.
Four years
later Babur died and was succeed by his son Humayun. An easy-going bon vivant,
Humayun was devoted more to the pleasures of life than to the pursuit of power
and did not have the grit and ruthlessness needed to prevail in the turbulent
political environment of India. The Mughal's adversaries, though routed in
several battles by Babur, were not destroyed and they hovered on the periphery
of the empire, regrouping, watching, waiting. In 1540 the resurgent Afghans
struck, seized the imperial throne, and drove Humayun out of India.
For three years
Humayun wandered about in the western borderland of India with a small band of
followers, hoping for a turn of fortune. That did not happen. So he finally
crossed the Indus and, scurrying through the domains of his hostile brothers in
Afghanistan, took refuge with the shah of Persia. The shah welcomed Humayun as
an honoured royal guest and Humayun basked in the
opulent Persian hospitality for a year, 'feasting and carousing', as his
personal attendant Jauhar described it. But he had to vindicate his honour, win back his empire. So he set out again, though
rather reluctantly. Humayun was now accompanied by a contingent of troops
provided by the shah, with whose help he seized Afghanistan from his brothers
and, after consolidating his power there over several years, finally headed for
India to recover his lost empire.
Humayun had with him
at this time only a tiny army of around five thousand. That was enough, though.
Sher Shah, Humayun's great Afghan adversary, had died a few years earlier and
North India was in political disarray. In July 1555, Humayun stormed back into
Delhi, fifteen years after he had been driven out of it by Sher Shah. But he
died soon afterwards in a tragic accident, tumbling down the stairs of his
astronomical observatory where, obsessed with astrology, he had gone to study
what the stars boded.
AT MIDDAY ON Friday,
14 February 1556, a time and date that was considered astrologically
auspicious, in the obscure little town of Kalanaur on
the Ravi river in Punjab, an illiterate and umuly
youth of fourteen, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, was
enthroned as Mughal emperor on a hastily built, rough masomy
platform. Thus began, in a lowly and bleak setting, the reign of the greatest
ruler of India after Asoka, the celebrated Buddhist emperor of the third
century BCE.
The grand destiny of
Akbar was not evident at the time of his accession. Quite the contrary: the
future looked very grim for the nascent empire and its boy-king, for the
Mughals had as yet only a tenuous toehold in India, and in Akbar there was no
sign at all of any greatness. But the scene changed entirely over the next
couple of decades. Not only did Akbar build an extensive and powerful empire,
but he also, more importantly, inaugurated the second golden age of India after
the decline of its classical civilization a thousand years earlier. He and his
immediate successors so decisively stamped their personalities on India that
the Mughal Empire became, in the public perception, synonymous with India. And
it remained so for quite a long time, even after the empire had entirely
disappeared and the emperor had become a humble pensioner of the British.
Akbar, however innitially, was not yet ready to assume
responsibility, and for the time being he left governance entirely to his guardian,
Biram Khan, a suave Persian noble of exceptional
ability. For four years Biram Khan ruled as de facto
emperor while Akbar remained 'behind the veil'. But despite his seeming
disinterest in government, Akbar was all the while observing, learning, quietly
preparing himself for the role that destiny had assigned to him.
By 1560 he was ready.
That year Akbar dismissed Biram Khan from his service
and shortly thereafter, in what seemed like a ravenous earth-hunger, launched a
rapid series of conquests which enlarged the Mughal kingdom in India into a
vast sub continental empire. Entirely fearless and blessed with phenomenal
physical prowess and stamina, he invariably led his army from the front,
impetuously plunging in where the fight was fiercest.
Exuberant physicality
characterized Akbar in his youth. As he grew older, however, his life became
more and more austere and he revealed himself to be a man of wide cultural interests
and insatiable intellectual curiosity. Though as a child he had stubbornly
refused to learn to read and write, despite the persistent efforts of his
erudite father, and would remain formally illiterate all his life, he now had
his officers read regularly to him from the books in the vast royal library,
and in time he became quite a savant.
Akbar was eclectic in
his tastes, liberal in his outlook and entirely open minded, without any
prejudice as to race, religion or culture. In 1564, when he was twenty-two, he
took the bold step of abolishing jizya, the poll tax that Muslim states
mandatorily imposed on non-Muslims, thus ending a major discrimination against
Hindus in his empire. Later, he invited to his court leaders of diverse
religions - Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains and Parsees - and often held
night-long discussions with them. There was also a small group of Jesuit
missionaries at his court and he paid careful attention to their expositions as
well, once even attending service in their chapel.
But what Akbar sought
was knowledge, not faith. 'He is a man who makes justice the guide of the path
of inquiry, and takes from every sect what is consonant with reason,' he held.
And it was the practical aspect of knowledge that interested Akbar. 'Although
knowledge in itself is regarded as the summit of perfection, yet unless
displayed in action, it bears not the impress of worth,' he contended.
In 1582, when he was
forty, Akbar took the revolutionary step, most unusual for a monarch, of
founding a syncretic religious fraternity of his own, called Din Hahi (Divine Faith). 'For an empire ruled by one head, it
is a bad thing to have its people divided among themselves and at variance with
one another,' Akbar said, explaining his reason for founding the fraternity.
'We ought, therefore, to bring them all into one, but in such fashion that they
should be both one and all; with the great advantage of not losing what is good
in anyone religion while gaining whatever is better in another. In this way,
honor would be rendered to God, peace would be given to the people, and
security to the empire.'
Din Hahi was more an elite socio-political brotherhood than a
religious sect in the conventional sense. Its orientation was towards
rationalism rather than faith. It had no pantheon, no theology, no
transcendental concerns. Its sole objective was to guide its followers to lead
sensible, responsible lives as human beings and citizens. Religious tolerance
was its bedrock. 'No one,' Akbar declared, 'should be interfered with on
account of his religion. Anyone should be allowed to go over to any religion he
pleased.'
Din Hahi did not survive Akbar. It could not: like its creator,
it was way ahead of its time. When Akbar died, the medieval culture of the age
entombed Din Hahi as well. But on the whole Akbar had
had a singularly fortunate career, and nearly everything in his life worked out
perfectly for him - everything, except for his own sons. Growing up in the
awesome shadow of the great emperor, the personalities of the princes became
stunted and warped. Two of them drank themselves to death in their youth, and
his only surviving son, Jahangir, also became an alcoholic and an opium addict.
Akbar in his last
years was hardly the emperor, or the man, that the world had known. Fortune no
longer waited on his pleasure. Aggravations and misfortunes broke his once
indomitable spirit. His health collapsed and in October 1605, at the age of
sixty-three, he died after a reign of forty-nine years.
Apparently Akbar's
last act on his deathbed was to invest Jahangir, aged thirty-two, with the
regalia. Jahangir had broken out in rebellion towards the close of Akbar's
reign, but no one held that against him. The fight of son against father, and
of brother against brother, for the throne was the norm among the Mughals:
Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb all fought fratricidal wars,
and most of the emperors had to face rebellions by their sons as well. Such
clashes were a rite of passage for Mughal princes, which enabled the fittest of
them to survive and rule.
In character and
temperament Jahangir was like his grandfather Humayun, a debonair, gregarious,
fun-loving epicure. And just as Humayun had had a serious interest in astronomy
and astrology, Jahangir took a serious interest in nature studies and was a
connoisseur of art. He also prided himself on being a poet and he wrote his own
candid memoirs. He was very much his father's son, too, being open-minded and
liberal in his cultural and religious attitudes. Unlike Akbar, however, he had
no deep interest in religion and was generally scornful of all faiths. 'Jhe-hangier- Shah ... is an atheist,' stated Sir Thomas
Roe, the first British royal ambassador to India.
According to Sir
Thomas Roe, Jahangir once told the Jesuits in his court: 'If yee cast the Crucifix and Picture of Christ into fire
before me, if it burne not, I will become a
Christian.' In comparison with Akbar, Jahangir pales to insignificance - though
only in comparison with Akbar. He was a man of diverse talents and, despite a
certain playfulness, quite conscientious in the discharge of his royal duties.
But he was a physical wreck during most of his reign due to his long addiction
to wine and opium, and his life would have probably ended in disgrace but for
his good fortune in having by his side the imperiously beautiful and enormously
talented Nur Jahan, his chief queen. As the reins of power began to slip from
his enfeebled hands, she stood beside him and gave him strength. She, noted the
Mughal courtier Inayat Khan, 'gradually acquired such unbounded influence on
His Majesty's mind that she seized the reins of government and took on herself
the supreme civil and financial administration of the realm, ruling with
absolute authority till the conclusion of the reign'.
There were two major
rebellions towards the close of Jahangir's reign, by the prince Shah Jahan and
by the royal commander Mahabat Khan, but both were
effectively and decisively suppressed under the leadership of Nur Jahan. And
when Jahangir died after a reign of twenty-two years, the great empress had the
grace and wisdom to retire quietly from public life and spend the last eighteen
years of her life in contented obscurity in the provincial town of Lahore.
Jahangir was
succeeded by Shah Jahan, aged thirty-five, and with him the Mughal golden age
reached its culmination. Shah Jahan was the quintessential Great Mughal, who by
the splendour of his dress and ornaments, and his
lordly bearing and conduct, personified the opulence and grandeur of the empire.
In him the Mughal rumbustiousness was at last tamed under the influence of
Persian courtly formalism. Though courteous and soft-spoken, his bearing in
public was always stiffly dignified. 'I never saw so settled a countenance, nor
any man keepe so constant a gravity, never smiling,
or in face showing any respect or difference of men, but mingled with extreme
pride and contempt of all,' observed Roe.
Shah Jahan, unlike
his ancestors - particularly unlike his father and grandfather - was a rigidly
orthodox Muslim, and with him began the attempt to convert the Mughal Empire
into a theocratic Muslim state, in a deliberate reversal of the established
Mughal policy. Though all his predecessors, except Akbar, had occasionally
persecuted Hindus and demolished temples, they had done so in random and
impulsive acts. Now it was state policy. Furthermore, while Akbar and Jahangir
had allowed anyone to adopt any religion, Shah Jahan prohibited Muslims from
changing their religion. He also directed that Hindus should dress differently
from Muslims: while Muslims tied the tunic on the right-hand side, Hindus were
required to tie it on the left.
A major influence on
the formulation of Shah Jahan's policies was his queen, Mumtaz Mahal. She was a
niece of Nur Jahan and, like her aunt, she played a crucial role in government,
but discreetly, from behind the throne. Mumtaz, wrote the Mughal chronicler Aminai Qazvini, was the emperor's
'intimate companion, colleague, close confidante in distress and comfort, joy
and grief'. Shah Jahan was totally devoted and faithful to her, and though he
had other wives he begot children only by her. And she was marvelously fecund:
she bore him fourteen children in the nineteen years they lived together, but
died at the age of thirty-four while delivering her last child. Shah Jahan was
devastated by the tragedy and it was to commemorate his love for her that he
built the Taj Mahal, often considered to be the most beautiful building in the
world.
Shah Jahan had a keen
interest in music and dance - he used to sing at the private gatherings of his
intimate nobles - but his main artistic interest was in architecture, which
found expression in a number of magnificent buildings he erected. He took
enormous pride in them, as reflected in the couplet he had inscribed on the
hall of public audience in his Delhi palace: If there be a paradise on earth,
It's this, it's this, it's this!
That, indeed, was how
the contemporary world saw the Mughal court. Shah Jahan was the richest and
most exalted monarch in the world in his time and he lived in the greatest
possible magnificence. But his last years were pathetic. Trouble erupted in the
summer of 1657 when Shah Jahan fell seriously ill. This sent shivers of anxiety
through his four sons, stationed in the different provinces of the empire, for
each knew that if the emperor died his own life would be in peril as the
successor would liquidate him as a potential contender for the throne. The only
way a prince could save his life was by securing the throne for himself. It was
the throne or death for each of them.
Soon the princes were
on the march with their armies, headed for the imperial capital. Once these
moves had been initiated there was no turning back for them, even though Shah
Jahan recovered and the immediate threat to their lives and fortunes passed. A
prolonged and traumatic war of succession ensued, out of which the emperor's
third son, Aurangzeb, emerged victorious, eliminating all his brothers and
usurping the throne. And he, saturnine and remorseless, kept Shah Jahan confined
in the Agra fort for eight years, till the end of his life.
Aurangzeb was
an unlikely Mughal ruler. He did not have the dynamism, charisma and
verve that characterized his ancestors, but was a dour, joyless drudge. This,
however, was a persona that he deliberately cultivated. He had in his early
youth loved music, enjoyed hunting, and was susceptible to feminine charms, but
he burnt out all those vulnerabilities with his searing, inexorable will SQ as
to focus his whole being on the business of winning the throne and ruling.
Utterly implacable and cold-blooded in his pursuit of power, his life was a
triumph of mind over body and of will over nature.
Aurangzeb believed
that he had a divine dispensation to rule, not for his own enjoyment of power but
for the restoration of the true kingdom of Islam in India. Characteristically,
when his sister Jahanara pleaded with him to spare
the life of his brother Dara, he said: 'Dara is an infidel and a friend of
Hindus. He must be extirpated for the sake of the true faith and the peace of
the realm.' He had no feeling for his father either; in all the years he kept
him confined in the Agra fort he never once visited him, not even during his
final illness, and did not attend his funeral. He had no weakness of sentiment
or love.
Yet he was a man of
great humility, soft-spoken, mild-mannered and of equable temper. He was
particularly kindly in his treatment of the lowly. Once, when a eunuch stumbled
against him and knocked him down, and himself collapsed in fright, Aurangzeb
spoke to him kindly: 'Wherefore fearest thou a
created being, one like thyself ... Rise and be not afraid.' He led an ascetic
life, was very simple in dress, wore hardly any jewels, and met his personal
expenses by making caps. Contemporary Muslims regarded him as a saint.
Under Aurangzeb the
very nature of the Mughal Empire changed. Shah Jahan had tentatively begun the
conversion of the secular empire into a theocratic Muslim state; this process
was now completed by Aurangzeb. He reimposed jizya, 115 years after Akbar had
abolished it, and imposed various disabilities on non-Muslims as required by
orthodox Islamic tradition. However, in all this he acted strictly within the
law, doing what was permitted and obligatory for a Muslim ruler but nothing
beyond that, and he did on occasion pull up his officers who in their
theocratic fervour unlawfully persecuted Hindus.
One phase of
Aurangzeb's life ended in 1681 when, after reigning
from north India for twenty-three years, at the age of sixty-three he crossed
into the peninsula to begin the final ascent to the summit of the Mughal
Empire. He would spend the next twenty-six years there in ceaseless wars,
conquering new territories, subduing rebels, capturing forts. At the end of
this titanic effort a vast sweep of land from Kabul across virtually the entire
Indian subcontinent lay under his sway. There were no more lands to conquer, no
more
Efforts to take or
armies to defeat. Aurangzeb had become master of the largest empire that India
has ever known. Mughal imperial destiny had been fulfilled, it seemed. Yet,
just when Aurangzeb appeared absolutely triumphant, everything was in fact
utterly lost. At the moment of his supreme triumph, Aurangzeb found to his
horror that the very ground on which he stood was crumbling.
The Marathas were his
nemesis. Aurangzeb thought that he had pounded them into the earth; and indeed
he had, but they rose again out of the soil everywhere to confound him. When
the weary old emperor began his slow trek northwards to Delhi, his mission'
accomplished', the Marathas hounded him, incessantly snapping at his feet.
Meanwhile, seeing the emperor's helplessness, panic began to spread through the
empire and the immense, multitiered Mughal administrative edifice began to
crack and crumble. Rebels and bandits roamed the land freely and, as
Aurangzeb's end neared, his sons, even his grandsons, squared off to fight for
the succession.
Aurangzeb trudged on.
But on the way, while camping at Ahmadnagar in
central Maharashtra, he fell ill with a high fever. And on 3 March 1707, a
Friday, in the early morning while he was saying his prayers, Aurangzeb,
eighty-nine years old and emperor for forty-nine years, slid into death. This
second, Muslim (in this case Mughal alias Mongol) conquest of India
apparently did not involve any major changes in the racial, linguistic or
religious make-up of the subcontinent. There were in fact very few Mughals in
Mughal India. Babur had brought with him into India about 10,000 of his own
people, but a number of them had returned to Kabul after the battle of Khanua, and even those who remained were later driven out
by Sher Shah. The reconquest of India by Humayun involved even fewer Mughals, a
mere 5000 cavalrymen. However, under Akbar and his immediate successors, when
the Mughal empire became renowned as the largest, richest and most dynamic
Muslim kingdom in the world-the land of opportunity for Muslims
everywhere-there was a steady migration of Muslims from Central Asia and Persia
into India. These migrants occupied the top echelons in the Mughal government,
but their total number was at no time large, a drop in the vast ocean of Indian
population. Even this dribble of migration virtually stopped during the reign
of Aurangzeb, as the Mughal empire lost its vitality, and Muslim culture
everywhere went into decline.
There was some
population movement within India in Mughal times, as groups migrated to avoid
famine or oppression or war, but these were insignificant compared to the
previous, great shufflings of people that had taken
place in early medieval India. By and large, the racial, religious and
linguistic mix of India, and the geographical rooting of its peoples and their
socio-cultural contours, had firmed up by the time the Mughals arrived.
What the people had
congealed into, however, was not a nation, or even a family of nations. Though
the Mughals had imposed on the subcontinent such political unity as had never
before existed, and had given it a uniformity of administrative system, court culture,
coinage and official language, there was no sense that the subjects of the
empire were one people. Nor was there any concept of citizenship, either in the
Mughal empire or in any other Indian state-it was land, not people, that made
up the state, and frontiers, indefinite and ever shifting, were always porous.
There was a Indian empire; there was no Indian nation.
The people of one
part of the subcontinent hardly knew those of the other parts, and had little
in common with them. They spoke different languages, worshipped different gods,
had different social systems. Only in the thin top crust of society, among
brahmins and the Persianized Muslim aristocracy, were there pan-Indian
linkages. Even among them there was no real sense of belonging together.
Paradoxically, there
was no regional cohesiveness either, not even among the Rajputs
and the Marathas. Tribally fragmented, or divided into castes and sects, even
the people who spoke the same language, lived in the same area and belonged to
the same broad religious group, developed no sense of shared history or common
identity. The only sharp distinctions were those of caste and tribe. All other
identities were amorphous, all other barriers permeable. This absence of sharp
we/ they distinctions between the regional peoples of India, or between Indians
and foreigners, in part accounts for the docile acceptance of conquerors by
Indians. Foreign rule was seldom perceived as foreign rule.
Even the name India
is not Indian. The word is derived from the Persian mispronunciation of Sindhu
(Indus River) as Hindu, which the Greeks turned into Indus, and used the term
India to refer to the region around and beyond the Indus. It was only in the
sixteenth century, at the beginning of the Mughal rule, that the term India was
for the first time used in the sub continental sense, initially by the
Spaniards or the Portuguese. Its usage was confined to Europeans. Indians
themselves never used the term India in pre-modern times to describe their
country, nor did the Mughals. The alternate term, found in Mughal chronicles,
was Hindustan, but this meant only the Indo-Gangetic plain; the Deccan was not
part of it, nor the north-west or the north-east, nor Kashmir. The term Bharat
is not mentioned in any Mughal work.
Babur recognized
India as a distinct geological and bio-cultural entity-"It is quite a
different world" he writes. "Its hills and
rivers, its forests and plains, its animals and plants, its inhabitants and
their languages, its winds and rains, are all of a different nature. You have
no sooner passed the river Sind (Indus) than the country, the trees, the
stones, the wandering tribes, the manners and customs of the people, are all
entirely of Hindustan." But the distinctiveness of India that Babur saw
existed only in the eyes of the outsider, and was no more meaningful than the
designation of all Europeans as Feringhees by
Indians, or of all fair-complexioned Muslims as Mughals by Europeans.
"They were
called Moguls, that is, white of complexion . . . the natives being all brown
or olive colour," says Tavernier. According to
Bernier, "to be considered a Mogol, it is enough
if a foreigner have white face and profess Mahometanism."
Some Europeans even thought that the term Mughal meant simply a circumcised
man; Terry thus believed that the Great Mughal meant "the Chiefe of the Circumcision". Bernier also wrote:
Indians are 'tenderhearted towards animals of every description, man only
excepted.' Indians, says Ovington, are 'profligate of their own lives', though
caring towards animals.
In fact in the deep
south, except in Kerala, there were very few Muslims in Mughal times. Mughal
chronicler Muhammad Sharif Hanafi, a contemporary of Shah Jahan, writes about
Madura: 'There is not a single Musulman there.
Occasionally a Musulman may visit the country,
deputed by Nizam Shah, Adil Shah or Qutb Shah, but
the natives are all infidels.'
Furthermore, the term
Mughal is an Arabic and Persian corruption of Mongol. The Mughals were Mongols.
But they generally preferred to call themselves Chaghatai
Tufks-Chaghatai, because their ancestral homeland was
north of the river Amu Darya (Oxus), which was the domain of Chaghatai Khan, the second son of Chingiz
Khan; Turks, because they had become Turks in language and culture due to their
long residence in Turkish countries. In Indian history the term Mughal is
specific to the dynasty founded by Babur, but is also applied loosely to their
immigrant officers and men.
The Mughal cosmos
revolved around the emperor. Everyone else was either his servant or his
subject. Broadly speaking, his servants made up the leisure class, and his
subjects the productive class. The leisure class was the ruling class, and had
its own work (administrative, military or religious) but not many members of
the class were economically productive, or even supportive of production-by and
large they merely appropriated what others produced. This polarization was
further accentuated by the fact that the productive class was overwhelmingly
Hindu, while the leisure class was predominantly Muslim. Muslims as a community
belonged to the ruling class, by community right; others, such as the Rajputs and other local chieftains, were merely admitted to
the class as a matter of administrative, political or military expediency.
The ruling class was
not a homogeneous class. Apart from racial, religious and social differences,
there were great economic disparities among the members of the class, and the
majority of them lived a life not very different from that of the common
productive class. Within Muslim society there were, in addition to class
divisions based on wealth and position, divisions based on race and profession,
although Muslims did not have the social and ritual taboos that vacuum-sealed
the Hindu castes. Different Muslim classes and occupational groups even had
different graveyards in cemeteries. And Persians formed a very superior class
by themselves.
If Mughal India, or
indeed the whole eastern Muslim world, had a natural aristocracy, they were
Persians. Everyone looked up to Persians, and Persians looked down on everyone.
Their language was the Mughal court language, their culture the Mughal court
culture, and it was from the Shah of Persia that the Mughal emperor sought peer
recognition.
Apart from their
assumed superior culture, the fair skin of Persians also helped to establish
their superior status-a bias for fair complexion was part of the Indian psyche,
and in Mughal India, in popular perception, all fair-skinned Muslim immigrants
were viewed as Mughals, and therefore as masters. "The children of the
third and fourth generation," writes Bernier, "who l:!.ave the brown
complexion, and the languid manner of this country of their nativity, are held
in much less respect than new comers."
Persians often
sneered at Mughals and Indians as semi-barbarians; they snickered at the Indian
efforts to speak and write Persian, and ridiculed the Indian imitations of
Persian courtly manners as vulgar, very much in the same way in which the
British would later privately mock Anglicized Indians. Persians, says Bernier,
often indulged in much "satirical merriment" about Indians; Manucci says that Persians often called Indians 'slaves' or
'blacks'.
The topmost positions
in the Mughal empire were invariably held by Persians. It was not, however,
merely their racial origin or superior culture that won Persians their
privileged place, but rather their high talent, hard work, and devotion.
"No other nation is better than the Persians for acting as clerks,"
Aurangzeb maintained. "In war, too ... none of this nation has turned his
face away from the field, and their firm feet have never been shaken. Moreover,
they have not once been guilty of disobedience or treachery to their master.
But, as they insist on being treated with great honor, it is very difficult to
get on together with them. You have anyhow to conciliate them and should employ
subterfuges." The traits of Persians, Aurangzeb believed, were derived
from their astrological status. "As the Sun is the guardian planet of the
Persians, the intellectual keenness of those men in quickness of perception and
foresight is four times as great as that of the Indians, whose tutelary planet
is Saturn," he stated. "Their only defect is that by reason of its
conjunction with Venus, they have grown ease-loving, whereas men governed by
Saturn are accustomed to toil."
In contrast to
Persians, Afghans, whom the Mughals overthrew from power in Hindustan, were
generally seen, in the jaundiced eyes of the victor, as a crude and vulgar
people, without manners, gluttons and drunkards. "These Afghans remain
very rustic and tactless!" says Babur. Afghans were a tough, unruly
people, "an intractable race," as Bernier puts it. "Even the
menials and carriers of water belonging to that nation are high-spirited and warlike."
The sharpest division
among Muslims in India at this time was the north-south division. The northern
Muslims were predominantly Sunnis, while in the south they were mainly Shiahs. In the north, India-born Muslims and Hindu converts
were held in low esteem, and were denied any major role in government. In
contrast, in the south, native Muslims held high positions, along with Afghans,
Ethiopians and a few Persians. The preferred language of Muslims in the north
was Persian; in the south, it was Dakhini (Deccani Urdu). Further, as Muslims constituted only a small
percentage of the population in the south, a far greater number of Hindus were
employed in high positions in the southern Muslim kingdoms than in the Mughal
empire.
However whether in
the south or the north, a Muslim, whatever be his race and sect, automatically
belonged to the ruling class in Mughal times. It was a matter of wonder to
contemporary as well as later European writers that a small number of Muslims
should have been able so effortlessly to dispossess Hindus of power and rule
over them for so many centuries, treating them as second-class citizens, and
subjecting them to severe political, social and economic disabilities. "It
seems a wonderful thing, that such a prodigious multitude of men should be
cowed by a handful, and bow so easily under the yoke of the Mahometan
princes," says Jean Baptiste Tavernier.
Hindus and Muslims
were in every respect antipodal communities. Yet by and large they coexisted in
peace. Though there were innumerable revolts against Muslim rulers in India,
nearly all of them were by Muslim nobles, hardly any by Hindu chieftains. There
were occasional communal flare-ups over such issues as cow slaughter, Holi
revelry and Diwali fireworks, and sometimes Hindus retaliated against temple
demolitions-remarks Sher Shah: "[Hindus] have thrown down masjids and
buildings of believers and placed idol shrines in them"-but there were no
major communal conflicts in Mughal India. Foreign travelers, who would normally
have reported such matters, are entirely silent on them.
How do we account for
this strange amicability? One reason could be that Muslim rulers were not as
harsh to Hindus as is commonly assumed. Contemporary Muslim writers of course
exultingly tell gory tales of the oppression of Hindus by Muslim rulers, but
there is little doubt that they were panegyrically exaggerating the religious
fervor of their patrons in the conventional hyperbolic style of the times.
Infidel-bashing was
more a matter of literary overkill than of physical excess. Typical was the
comment of Badauni on the death of a Hindu officer:
"He went to his natural abode-Hell, where he got into hot water." And
on the death of Todar Mal and Bhagwan
Das, he wrote that they "hastened to the abode of hell and torment, and in
the lowest pit became the food of serpents and scorpions-may God scorch them
both!" Such affectations had become so common a routine that even the
Hindu chroniclers of the age writing in Persian, like Ishwardas
Nagar, adopted it, invoking damnation on Hindus in the manner of the Muslim
chroniclers-they, as H. M. Elliot points out in his classic mid-nineteenth
century compilation of the chronicles of Muslim rule, routinely referred to
fellow Hindus as infidels, and stated that when Hindus were 'killed "their
souls were dispatched to hell", and that when Muslims were killed they
drank "the cup of martyrdom".
It was not that there
was no discrimination. Though the actual conditions of life for Hindus under
Muslim rule was not as rough as the chronicles of the age would have us
believe, there is no doubt that they lived under severe restrictions. For a
short while, under Akbar, their inferior status virtually disappeared, but even
then not entirely, and at no time would a Muslim of even the lowest status have
considered giving a daughter in marriage to a Hindu of even the highest status.
It was a major crime for a Hindu to keep a Muslim woman as wife or concubine.
Even the easygoing Jahangir was incensed when he learned that a Muslim community
in the Bhimbhar district of Kashmir was giving
daughters to Hindus, and he forbade the practice on penalty of death. In the
same spirit, Jahangir cut off the tongue of a son of Raja Bikramjit,
imprisoned him and ordered that he should eat only with dog-keepers and
outcasts-for the crime of keeping a Muslim concubine, and for killing her
mother and father to keep it a secret.
The degree of
discrimination that Hindus had to suffer varied from ruler to ruler and from
province to province, depending on the ethos of the region and the temper of
its governor. A ludicrous case was that of the Mughal governor of Lahore,
Husain Khan, who once committed what he considered to be a most awful faux pas,
in greeting a Hindu with civility, mistaking him to be a Muslim, because he was
dressed in the Muslim style. On realizing his mistake, the Khan was so
thoroughly ashamed of himself that, to avoid similar blunders in future, he
ordered that Hindus thereafter "should sew a patch of stuff of a different
color on their garments near the bottom of the sleeve," says Badauni. He further ordered that Hindus, "in
accordance with the requirements of the Holy Law, should not ride on saddles,
but should sit on a packsaddle."
Such fiats were as
much the expressions of ruling class arrogance as of religious prejudice. In
fact, the Hindu-Muslim relationship was primarily a relationship between
masters and subjects, not just between two competing communities. This largely
accounts for Muslim haughtiness and Hindu subservience. Hindus suffered
disabilities not merely because of their religion, but also because they were a
subject people, and they deferred to Muslims because they (Muslims) were the
masters. The 300-odd years of Muslim rule that preceded the Mughal regime had
ingrained in Hindus a subject mentality.
Hindus were moreover
long habituated to discriminations within Hindu society itself, because, of
caste and sectarian divisions, and the taboos and tyrannies associated with
them. To most Hindus, ill-treatment by Muslims would have seemed like any other
caste or sectarian outrage, maybe more virulent than anything within Hindu
society, but not fundamentally different. Besides, for the common people, who
were brutally exploited by their own rulers, the establishment of Muslim rule
meant merely the substitution of one predator by another, which did not
significantly alter the quality of their lives.
Passivity was in any
case a Hindu cultural trait. Their lot was their karma, Hindus believed, and by
and large they fatalistically accepted their subject status, as if it were
their natural, immutable condition of life, and they tried to make do within
that environment, taking all excesses and humiliations in their sluggish
stride. Through all the political and social upheavals in medieval India, and
some radical movements within Hinduism itself, the Hindu social order endured
its structure and indwelling spirit the same. It accommodated all things new or
deviant in its capacious fold by applying the principle of tolerance by
exclusion. Hindu society yielded to change like a plant bending to the wind,
but did not itself change. This was its means of survival. The "peaceable
and submissive Deportment [of Hindus] wins mightily upon the Moors and takes
off much of that scornful Antipathy which they harbor against them," says J.Ovington.
There was in any case
little chance of a Hindu/Muslim divide in Mughal India, because Hinduism,
unlike Islam, was not a monolithic religion, but a conglomeration of divergent
sects and castes. "The idolaters," says Tavernier, "have no
union among themselves, and ... superstitions have introduced so strange a
diversity of opinions and customs that they never agree with one another."
Writes Manucci: "The inhabitants of these places
differ in their customs, as well as in their mode of life, the ceremonial at
their temples, and the doctrines of their religion." Despite the
traditional brahminical endeavor to incorporate local
and tribal deities into the Hindu pantheon, and the devotional bhakti movement
tending to efface regional differences, Hindu gods in Mughal India remained
mostly localized. The gods worshipped by one Hindu community were not
worshipped by other Hindu communities.
Divergence in the
occupations of Muslims and Hindus also helped to deflect communal tensions.
Muslims were mostly in government service or in some sinecure or other; a small
number of them were traders and craftsmen, but they generally avoided
agriculture, which they considered a demeaning occupation, while trade and
agriculture, especially agriculture, were the primary occupations of Hindus.
"First, they are the leading merchants and jewelers, and they are most
able and expert in their Qusiness," says Pelsaert about the occupations of urban Hindus. "Next,
they are workmen, for practically all work is done by Hindus, the Moslems
practicing scarcely any crafts but dyeing and weaving ... Thirdly, they are
clerks and brokers: all the business of the lords' palaces and of the Moslem
merchants is done by Hindus-book-keeping, buying, and selling. They are
particularly clever brokers, and are consequently generally employed as such
throughout all these countries, except for the sale of horses, oxen, camels,
elephants, or any living creatures, which they will not handle as the Moslems
do."
Communal peace was
also facilitated by the fact that Hindus in general did not come into everyday
contact with Muslims, for Muslims in India were largely an urban people, while
most Hindus lived in villages. In the urban centres
where the two communities mingled, peace generally prevailed because the Hindu
urban elite belonged either to the political or the trading class, and both
these classes had a vested interest in avoiding strife, though for different
reasons-the political class, especially the Rajputs,
had made a cosy career for themselves by serving the
Mughals; as for the trading class, they kept as low a profile as possible, to
make themselves and their wealth invisible to the rapacious rulers. The urban
Hindu adroitly adopted Mughal culture to blend with the new rulers, dressing
like them, living in homes like theirs, and speaking their language.
It was all politics (or
business) as usual. On the few occasions when the Hindu political elite clashed
with Muslim rulers, the primary issue involved was power, not religion. The
Maratha, Rajput and Sikh rebellions, though they had some communal aspects to
them, were essentially political conflicts. Thus we see Maratha captains, on
occasion Shivaji himself, serving in Muslim armies, and we see Muslim captains
in the Maratha army; there were Muslim chiefs in the army of Rana Pratap Singh
opposing Akbar, and there were Rajput chiefs, including the Rana's brother, in
Akbar's army menacing the Rana; Vijayanagar had Muslim divisions in its army
fighting against the Deccan Sultanates, who in turn had Hindu divisions in
their armies; the Sultans sometimes sought the help of Vijayanagar against each
other, while Vijayanagar factions often invited Bijapur
to intervene in their internal squabbles; Ranga Rayal,
the last of the Vijayanagar rulers, once even offered to become a Muslim along
with his family in return for Mughal help against his enemies; the list could
go on.
Only very rarely do
we hear of Hindu chieftains seeking to protect Hindus. Akbar's general Man
Singh is said to have once forbidden the Mughal army under his command from
plundering in Rajasthan, but normally Rajput chieftains offered no opposition
even to temple demolitions by the Mughals. As for Muslim rulers, temple
demolitions were a part of their victory rite rather than a specifically
religious act. Though Muslim rulers often termed their wars against Hindu kings
as jihad, this was done more as a matter of convention than as a deliberate
policy: their objective was political rather than religious.
Muslim rulers, even
the Turko-Afghans,· were on the whole careful not to
push Hindus beyond endurance. By the time the Turks invaded India, the
religious fervor of Islam had largely dissipated the motive of their conquest
was essentially political, not religious and this had a moderating influence on
Muslim theocracy in India. As for the Mughals, except in Aurangzeb and to some
extent in Shah Jahan, the religious impulse was virtually non-existent in them,
and they sought to conciliate Hindus to their rule through such measures as the
abolition of jizya and the prohibition of cow slaughter. "Oxen and cows
are not slaughtered, as they have to work while they are young, doing
everything that is done by horses in Holland; and besides, their slaughter is
strictly forbidden by the King on pain of death, though buffaloes may be freely
killed," says Pelsaert of what he observed in Jahangjr's India. "The King maintains this rule to
please the Hindu rajas and banias, who regard the cow
as one of the most veritable gods or sacred things."
The Mughals also took
care to give the Hindu political elite an important role in the governance of
the empire. The number of Hindus in Mughal service was however small relative
to their population, and only a handful of them occupied top government
positions even in the best of times, and no Hindu was ever elevated to the post
of the Vizier, the highest office in the Mughal empire. Hindus were mostly in
subordinate positions.
Hindus generally had
a greater political role in small Muslim kingdoms than in the Mughal empire-the
Vizier of Sultan Abdul Muzaffar Shah of Malwa early
in the sixteenth century, for instance, was a Rajput, Basant Rai; later,
another Rajput, Medini Rai, became the de facto ruler
of the kingdom under Sultan Mahmud, and Rajputs
occupied all the important positions in government. In Bijapur
during the reign of Muhammad Adil Shah, the government was "delivered ...
over to a mischievous, turbulent Brahmin, named Murari
Pundit," says Lahori; and in Golconda, Madanna,
another Brahmin, ruled supreme for several years in the name of the sultan. A
few Hindus of the lower castes also rose to high positions in Muslim
states-they in fact had far greater career opportunities in Muslim states than
in caste-bound Hindu kingdoms, as the dramatic rise of Hemu
under Adil Shah of Bihar demonstrated. The Hindu-Muslim barrier was a soft
barrier, which could be easily pierced by men of ability.
Surprisingly there
were hardly any Brahmins, the traditional Hindu ministerial class, among the
top officers of the Mughal empire, Raja Birbal, Akbar's companion, and
Raghunath, Aurangzeb's revenue minister, being the only distinguished
exceptions. Though the Mughals preferred Hindus as revenue administrators-at
one time Hindus headed the revenue departments in eight of the twelve Mughal
provinces-the top positions were held by Khattris and
Kayasthas and an occasional Rajput, not by Brahmins.
The most prominent
Hindu community in the Mughal service were the Rajputs,
and they were held in high esteem by the emperors. "Rajas," writes
Bernier, "bear an equal rank with the foreign and Mahometan Omrahs."
Still, the Rajputs could not aspire to the high
administrative positions held by Persians, and were mostly in military service.
Says Pelsaert, "In wartime the race is much
esteemed, and is feared by other classes of soldiers, but during peace they get
the cold shoulder, because in palaces or camps they make less show or display
than the Moguls or Hindustanis." Even under Akbar, Rajput soldiers were
paid less than Muslim soldiers.
The Rajputs were a heterogeneous people. Though some of them in
bold flights of fancy traced their origin to Vedic Aryans or epic heroes, most
of them were descendants of early medieval immigrants, while some were of the
Dravidian and aboriginal stock. What distinguished them was not race but
martial culture. "They are a bold and courageous people, determined and
loyal," lauds Pelsaert. "Rasbooches ... knowe as well howe
to dye as anye men in the world, in regard to theire desperatenesse," says
Withington. "Those (Rajputs)
excepted," remarks Terry, "all the rest in the countrey
are in generall pusilanimous,
and had rather quarrell than fight." Rajput
chiefs, says Manucci, "carry on such a
disastrous. warfare against each other that it is rare to see one of them die
of disease."
Like many other
medieval people, the Rajputs were given to banditry,
and, though they had a certain reputation for chivalry, they were by no means
the white knights that British romantics like James Tod imagined them to be.
"Rashbootes, a number of which live by spoyle; who in troopes surprize poore passengers,
cruelly butchering those they get under their power," says Terry. Confirms
Careri: "The Rashootis
are very great Thieves." The odium of this charge is somewhat mitigated by
the fact that the term Rajput was at one time a synonym for brigand, and the Rajputs, line the Marathas in later times, often had
unfairly to bear the blame for the crimes of others.
Whatever their
faults, the Rajputs had a relatively high sense of
personal honour, and they were usually steadfast in
loyalty and relentless in battle. These were not, however, absolute virtues,
but relative to the political and military culture of the age. The Rajputs were not a people apart. Even the best of them
sometimes opportunistically switched loyalties-as Jai Singh did when he
abandoned Dara for Aurangzeband many valued life and
career over honor. Jaswant Singh, for instance, often changed sides and
betrayed trust. His valour too was suspect. According
to Khafi Khan, after the battle of Dharmat "Raja Jaswant's chief wife ... strongly
condemned her husband's conduct, and refused to sleep with him." The raja,
in her view, should have died in the battlefield, rather than return home
defeated.
Honor was everything
to the Rajput. It was his strength. And also his weakness. "One of the
fundamental rules of their caste is never to give way, but either to die or
conquer," says Manucci. Unfortunately, most of
the time the Rajputs died rather than conquered.
Their fierce obstinacy, though awesome, was not always an advantage, for to
retreat tactically was as important in battle as to fight heroically. They were
so fearless in battle as to seem almost senseless. Aurangzeb had therefore only
disdain for what he termed "the crass stupidity of the Hindustanis, who
would part with their heads but not leave their positions [in battle]".
The Rajputs were voluptuaries of death. Cultural habituation
was a major factor in theft daredevilry, but so was poppy chemistry. Living in
a state of perpetual war, the Rajput had become a familiar of carnage. Death
meant little to him, his own or that of others. And this trait was augmented,
perhaps crucially, by the Rajput practice of going into the battlefield heavily
drugged with opium. "They are slow to retreat in a fight, and are
obstinate in attack, because the quantity of opium they eat excites them, and
causes them to care little for their lives," says Pelsaert.
The most awesome
Rajput rite of honor was jauhar, in which, when faced
with certain defeat, a fate worse than death for them, they sacrificed their
women and children-normally in fire, but if time was short, by sword and
dagger-and then, frenzied with opium, shed all
their clothes, and offered themselves to be ritually slaughtered by their own
captains, or charged naked on the enemy, to kill and be killed, in a carnal
embrace of death beyond defeat and victory.
The fearsome rite was
probably a primitive tribal custom brought into India by migrants, but the term
jauhar seems to have been derived from jauhara, the Prakrit version of the Sanskrit term jatu-griha, meaning a lac-house, like the inflammable house
in which the Kauravas tried to burn the Panda vas
alive in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. The Mughals beheld jauhar
for the first time at Chanderi. Records Babur:
"In a short time the Pagan, in a state of complete nudity, rushed out to
attack us, put numbers of my people to flight ... Two or three hundred of them
slew each other in the following manner: One person took his stand with a sword
in his hand, while the others, one by one, crowded in and stretched out their
necks eager to die."
Jauhar was not an
individual decision, but a community choice. Women and children had to be
killed to save them from dishonor at the hands of the enemy, and perhaps also
for the warriors thus to sever all earthly attachments, so they could face
death without anxiety. "It is the custom of Indian rajas under such
circumstances to collect wood, cotton, grass, ghee, and such like into one
place, and to bring the women and burn them, willing or unwilling," notes
Abul Faz!. "This they call jauhar
. . . Whoever out of feebleness of soul was backward [to sacrifice herself]
was, in accordance with their custom, put to death." In most cases Rajput
women needed no inducement to perform jauhar.
"Women, especially Rajput women, have often a higher sense of honor than
men," says Khafi Khan; "and for this reason
will rather bear the torture of fire than suffer disgrace."
The Rajputs, for all their valor and romantic history, had no
political future in India. Their time in the sun had in fact been over long
before the Mughal conquest of India. The Mughal connection potentiated them
temporarily by opening up for them a theatre of operation far wider than they
could have otherwise had, but they became too enmeshed with the Mughals to
survive the fall of the empire.
The Rajputs were eager collaborators of the Mughals, and not
even the theocratic rigor of Aurangzeb turned them away. It was only when
Aurangzeb began to abrogate their political privileges that they turned
hostile. This willing subservience of the rajas was a major reason for the
remarkable dynastic stability of the Mughals. Says Francois Bernier:
"Fifteen or sixteen of these Rajas are rich and formidable . . . [and if
some of them] chose to enter into an offensive league, they would prove
dangerous opponents to the Mogol." Manucci believed that "if they (the Rajputs) were only of one mind they would be able to thrust
out every other tribe and race."
Internecine squabbles
among the Rajputs precluded any possibility of a
Rajput league against the Mughals. Even if the Rajput clans had united, it is
doubtful whether they could have fought off the Mughalsa
desert people, they were poor in resources, and their mode of warfare, which
relied on individual valour rather than on discipline
and training, was archaic and ineffective. The Rajput domains were tiny in
comparison to the Mughal empire-all their kingdoms together made up only a
small portion of the vast land mass of the Mughal empire; the great Rajput
states of Chitor, Jodhpur and Bikaner were just
districts in the Mughal province of Ajmer, and Jaipur a taluq
subdivision of a district.
As the political role
of the Rajputs atrophied, that of the Marathas
swelled, and they would emerge from the shambles of Shivaji's little kingdom to
sweep across the subcontinent. In another respect, the future also belonged to
Brahmins, who, despite their numerous sectarian and lineage divisions, were the
only distinctive all-India community. They were a baffling people to Europeans,
an embodiment of the mystery of the mysterious East. Terry, reflecting the
common prejudice of the Christian clergy, says that Brahmins were "so
sottish and inconstant in their grounds that they scarce know what they
hold."
Manuccisarcastically notes that Brahmins, "according to their view,
are the noblest family of all mankind, and the one most venerated, not merely
as superiors, but as gods." Their ingenuity, however, could not be denied.
Writes Pelsaert, "Some of the brahmans are very
ingenious, good astronomers, familiar with the course of stars."
With the near total
eclipse of Hindu kingdoms in medieval India, Brahmins had lost their secure
traditional role as royal advisors, and though here and there they did rise
above the tide-there was even a dreaded Brahmin bandit by the name of Chintu Chimma in Bijapurthe community was in general on the decline in
Mughal India. It was only with the establishment of the Maratha kingdom that
Brahmins finally began to rehabilitate themselves, achieving a position of
political prominence, which they would further expand and consolidate under the
British, by both serving and battling the new empire.
In trade; the
dominant community in Mughal times were Baniyas. They concentrated almost
exclusively on making money, and were viewed with resentful respect by Europeans
who also had their eyes glued to money. Rivalling Baniyas in commercial acumen
were Parsees, a tiny community with a great future. They were ancient
Zoroastrian fire worshippers who had fled from religious persecution in Iran,
to settle in Gujarat in the tenth century. From Gujarat they gradually spread
southward towards Bombay, living quietly and obscurely as farmers and weavers.
"Their profession is, for the generality, all kinds of husbandry,"
says Terry. Peter Mundy found them cultivating palm-trees. "Their
habitations are for the most part along the Sea-Coast," writes Mandelslo, "and they live very peaceably, sustaining
themselves by the advantage they make out of the Tobacco they plant, and the
Terry (toddy) they get out of the Palms of these parts, and whereof they make
Arak, in regard they are permitted to drink Wine. They intermeddle also with
Merchandise, and the exchange of Money and keep Shops, and are of all Trades,
except those of Farriers, Blacksmiths and Locksmiths; in regard it is an unpardonable
sin among them to put out the fire." "In their Callings they are very
Industrious and diligent, and careful to train up their Children to Arts and Labour," says J.Ovington.
In 1578 the community
suddenly and dramatically emerged into Mughal history, when Akbar invited their
leader, Dastur Mahyarji Rana, to explain
Zoroastrianism to him. In the seventeenth century, Parsees established an
energizing and immensely profitable association with European traders,
especially the English. The chief broker of the English factory at Surat in
1660, for instance, was a Parsee, Rustom Manek, and
it was to a Parsee, Kharshedji Pochaji,
that the English entrusted, in 1664, the construction of their fort in Bombay.
Thus began the community's ascent to prosperity and national prominence.
There are in Mughal
accounts a few other sketches, brief and random, of several other Indian
communities. Kashmiris, especially Kashmiri women, fascinated Bernier; he
considered them as beautiful as the women of Europe and spent a good amount of
his time (and money) in the engaging hobby of girl-watching in Kashmir. As for
the men of Kashmir, they were, says Bernier, "celebrated for wit, and
considered much more intelligent and ingenious than the Indians."
At the other end of
the subcontinent from Kashmir were the 'Malabaris',
the people of Kerala, whom Linschoten at the close of
the sixteenth century considered as "verie
arrogant and proud, of colour altogether blacke, yet verie smooth both of haire and skinne, which commonly
they anoynt with Oyle, to
make it shine ... Of Face, Bodie and Limbes, they are
altogether like men of Europe, without any difference, but onley
in colour. The men are commonly verie
hairie, and rough upon the brest,
and on their bodies." Ralph Fitch found them bizarre, with "horrible
great eares, with many rings set with pearles and stones in them."
Beyond the pale of
medieval Indian society were the untouchables. "To give some conception of
the infamy attached by the Hindus to these blacks, I will say that there are no
words to express the vileness of the esteem in which they are held," says Manucci. The outcastes passively accepted their lot,
observes Ovington, and to go thro' with their
Drudgery without noise aad concern." In Kerala,
outcastes were not allowed to get closer than about twenty metres
to a high caste Hindu, says Thevenot in “On India and
it’s People”; a Nair could kill an untouchable if his breath fell on him. As
for the forest tribes, they were regarded as no different from wild beasts.
During the royal hunt, says William Finch, "the beasts taken, if mans meat, are sold and the money given to the poore; if men, they remain the Kings slaves, which he yearely sends to Cabull to barter
for horses and dogs; these beeing poore,
miserable, theevish people that live in woods and desarts, little differing from beasts." The Marathas,
it is said, "trapped and slew them Gungle
tribes) in numbers as pests and outcasts."
Slavery was also
common in Mughal India, as in other parts of the medieval world. Enslaving the
conquered people had the sanction of tradition among both Hindus and Muslims,
and slaves were as numerous in the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar as in any
Muslim state. Slaves abounded in Goa too, where, according to Linschoten, they "were sold daily in the market like
beasts." During times of famine, children were often sold into slavery or
hawked in the streets. A Persian envoy once bought a large number of slaves in
India, for they were, says Bernier, "extremely cheap" on account of
the famine. The normal price of a slave in India was fifteen or twenty rupees,
though at times it rose to as much as fifty rupees; a slave girl in Goa cost
forty to sixty rupees. Insolvent debtors and tax defaulters were also enslaved;
sometimes their wives and children were taken in payment of debts. Agricultural
bondage was also common.
To be a slave was
not, however, odious in the Muslim world. Many slaves rose to high positions in
government, and some even rose to be sultans in Delhi before the Mughals. In
the Deccan they-like Malik Amber, the de facto ruler of Ahmadnagar,
who was Originally a slave-continued to playa major
role in politics in Mughal times. Slaves from Ethiopia (Habshis)
were especially valued in the Deccan as eunuchs and bodyguards, and it was they
who manned the local navies.
Akbar disfavored
slavery and "forbid the restriction of personal liberty and the selling of
slaves", says Abul Faz!. Elsewhere he amplifies:
"It had been the
custom of the royal troops, in their victorious campaigns in India, to sell
forcibly and keep in slavery the wives, children, and dependents of the
natives. But His Majesty, actuated by his religious, prudent, and kindly
feelings, now issued an order that no soldier of the Royal Army should act in
this manner."
Still, slavery
persisted in India. In the mid-nineteenth century, the British, who had by then
become the dominant power in India, formally abolished slavery, and the
practice then gradually died out. There was no agitation against its abolition.
Slavery has always been mild in India.
By the close of the
seventeenth century there were a fair number of Europeans all over India, in
trading and political centers. The Portuguese were the first to arrive, in
1498, when Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut on the Kerala coast, seeking, as he
put it, "Christians and spices", and went on to rule the Indian seas
in the name of Mammon and Christ. A century later, the Dutch arrived on the
scene, and then came the English, the French and the Danes, while Portuguese
power declined. As traders, Europeans were generally welcomed by Indian rulers,
for the curiosities they brought from Europe-ranging from works of art to wine
and pet dogs-as well as for the profit from their trade, and occasionally for
military supplies like cannons and horses. Indian Muslim rulers also looked to
them for protection of the overseas pilgrim traffic to Mecca.
Akbar was the first
emperor to admit Europeans to the Mughal court, Jesuit priests whom he summoned
from Goa to instruct him in Christianity and European culture. By the
mid-seventeenth century, European professionals in various fields, especially
artillerymen, were employed in growing numbers by Indian rulers. European gunners
were a pampered class, who, says Manucci, "only
took aim; as for all the rest-the fatigue of raising, lowering, loading, and
firing-this was the business of ... labourers kept
for the purpose." Some of them were paid as much as 200 rupees a month, about
fifteen times more than what was paid to Indian artillerymen. When Aurangzeb
cut the European artillerymen to size by reducing their pay, and in addition
required them to load the guns, several of them, including Manucci,
left the imperial service.
Europeans in India
were a motley lot-traders, professionals like physicians and jewellers, royal ambassadors, missionaries, adventurers,
romantics, as well as cheats, vagabonds and desperadoes. The first English
settler in India was probably Fr. T. Stevens, an Oxford educated Jesuit
missionary who landed in Goa in 1579, lived there for forty years, mastered the
Marathi language, compiled its grammar and wrote in it an epic poem of 11,000
strophes titled Krishta Purana on the life and
teachings of Christ. The letters of Stevens to his father in England, which
were later published, are believed to have contributed to the growing British
interest in India, roused already by legends of Portuguese adventures.
European physicians
were favored by the Mughal aristocracy, for most of them, like Bernier, were
highly qualified, though some, like Manucci, the
gunner-turned-physician, were shameless quacks. Such was the faith of Indians
in the healing powers of Europeans that even quacks thrived sensationally. Once
a surgeon accompanying Norris was called to attend to a man dead for several
hours, which drew from the acerbic ambassador the comment that Indians were so
ignorant that they believed the English could "almost raise ye deade".
A number of wild
European adventurers, the dregs of European society, also began to descend on
India around this time. "They are of many nations, mostly thieves and
criminals," says Manucci. "The Christians
who served in the artillery of the Moguls retained of Christianity nothing but
the mere name ... were devoid of the fear of God, had ten or twelve wives, were
constantly drunk, had no occupation but gambling and were eager to cheat
whomsoever they could." European pirates roamed the Indian seas, infamous
desperadoes like William Kidd and Henry Bridgman (alias Evory),
who terrorized the Indian seas at the turn of the seventeenth century. The most
villainous of the lot were the Portuguese and half-caste pirates operating in
the Bay of Bengal-"They were unworthy not merely of the names of Christians,
but of men," says Manucci.
Many Europeans in
India adopted the Indian lifestyle, but many others, especially those from the
upper classes, did not; they had no empathy for Mughal culture, and looked down
on India with the pride of a resurgent Europe. But then, Indians had no great
regard for Europeans either. While Europeans saw themselves as major players in
India, the Mughals regarded them as minor curiosities. Thus while Sir Thomas
Roe, the British ambassador, and Captain Hawkins, the presumed ambassador,
claimed intimacy with Jahangir, and their journals are full of lore about their
relationships with the emperor, there is not even a passing word about either
of them in the 745-page long (in English translation) memoirs of Jahangir,
though the visits of Persian ambassadors are described in detail, and even the
missions from petty Central Asian potentates are noted. European powers did not
amount to much in Mughal estimation.
The sources of quotations are given in the text.
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