The Hindus (79 page)

In the culture at large, Hindus adopted a number of Muslim social customs. When the royal women of the Turks and the Rajputs first met, the Muslim women did not keep particularly rigidly to purdah; they joined in the drinking parties and literary salons (as we know, for instance, from Babur’s memoirs). It was after they had lived in India for a while and encountered the Rajput codes of modesty and honor that the women were more strictly concealed by the curtain of purdah and the zenana (harem) and at the same time also adopted some aspects of the Hindu caste system. Hindu women, in turn, adopted a modified version of the Muslim purdah. What a pity that each side took the worst of both worlds; why not ditch both purdah and caste? How very different world history would have been if they had. Even within these restrictions, however, some women asserted themselves; the ten thousand women allegedly sequestered in the harem of one sultan set up what has been called a feminist republic, with their own administration, militia, manufacturing system, and market.
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This was a time when agricultural frontiers expanded, extensive commercial networks developed, gradual technological change took place, and new political and religious institutions (including Hindu ones) developed.
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Even under Muhammad bin Tughluq, most trade, industry, and financial services remained in Hindu hands, and some Hindu converts to Islam achieved particularly high office. Throughout the Delhi Sultanate, Hindus controlled the royal mints and generally ran the economy. Hindu bankers got rich by helping Muslims, newly arrived from Central Asia, to buy slaves, brocades, jewels, and even horses (previously imported from Central Asia) that they would then present to the sultan. Particularly among working people, among artisans, cultivators, and the commercial and secretarial classes, Indian Muslims and lower-caste Hindus lived and worked together and changed each other.
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Women circulated like money (as is generally the case); many Muslims took Hindu wives. And when you add in the gardens and melons and fountains that the Mughals gave to India, not to mention the art and architecture, the picture of cultural exchange brightens considerably.

In dramatic contrast with Buddhism, which was driven out of India by a combination of lack of support, persecution, and the destruction of religious monuments and monasteries (by Hindus as well as Muslims), Hinduism rallied and came back stronger than ever. Though most sultanate rulers condemned idolatry, they did not prevent Hindus from practicing Hinduism. A Hindu inscription of c. 1280 praises the security and bounty enjoyed under the rule of Sultan Balban.
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In 1326 Muhammad bin Tughluq appointed Muslim officials to repair a Shiva temple so that normal worship could resume, and he stated that anyone who paid the
jizya
could build temples in Muslim territories. Another Delhi sultan, ruling in Kashmir from 1355 to 1373, rebuked his
Brahmin
minister for having suggested that they melt down Hindu and Buddhist images in his kingdom to get the cash.
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Indeed, in general, despite the evidence of persecution of varying degrees in different times and places, Hinduism under Islam was alive and well and living in India. The same sultans who, with what Hindus would regard as the left hand, collected the
jizya
and destroyed Hindu temples also, with the right hand, often married Rajput princesses, patronized Hindu artists and Sanskrit scholars, and employed Hindus in the highest offices of state. In Bengal in 1418 a Hindu actually became sultan, Raja Ganesh. His son, converting to Islam, ruled under his father’s direction until 1431. He was succeeded by an Arab Muslim, Ala-ud-din Husain (r. 1493-1519), who revered the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya, in return for which the Hindus regarded the sultan as an incarnation of Lord Krishna. On the other hand, during a war, the same Ala-ud-din Husain destroyed a number of temples, particularly in Orissa.
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Yogis and other ascetics on the fringes of society appear to have been open to friendly exchanges with Muslims from an early date. The Persian merchant and traveler Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, writing around 953, commented that the Skull Bearer (Kapalika) ascetics of Ceylon “take kindly to Musulmans and show them much sympathy.”
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The Tibetan Buddhist historian Taranath, writing in the thirteenth century, was critical of the Nath yogis for following Shiva rather than the Buddha and for saying “They were not even opposed to the Turuskas [Turks].”
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A new generation of Indo-Aryan languages, the linguistic and literary ancestors of all the modern North Indian languages, was evolving. The new languages drew their genres, conventions, and themes from both Muslim literary languages (Persian, Arabic) and Hindu languages—classical (Sanskrit) and vernacular (dialects and Prakrits). Persian and Arabic words and concepts entered the vocabularies of Indian languages at all levels.

Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, heavily influenced and was influenced by Hinduism. By the middle of the eleventh century Sufis had reached the part of Northwest India that was under Ghaznavid control.
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Khwaja Muin-ud-din (or Moin-al-din) Chishti is said to have brought to India the Chishti Sufi order; he came to Delhi late in the twelfth century and settled in Pushkar in Ajmer, a place of Hindu pilgrimage.
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He had many disciples, both Muslim and Hindu. The Chishti Sufi masters were powerful figures in the cultural and devotional life of the Delhi Sultanate (where their followers were often influential members of the court), despite the fact that they regarded “going to the sultan” as the equivalent of “going to the devil.”
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For many Hindus (though, of course, not for the Sufis themselves), Sufism was Islam lite, or a walking incarnation of interreligious dialogue. Early Indian Sufism proclaimed that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Hindus all were striving toward the same goal and that the outward observances that kept them apart were false. This idea was then incorporated into Hinduism as a major strand of the bhakti movement, which was growing in both power and complexity in this period. In court literature, the Sanskrit theory of the aesthetic emotions (
rasa
), particularly the erotic emotion, fused with the Islamic metaphysics of the love of God to produce a Sufi narrative simultaneously religious and erotic; the Sufi romances made their hero a yogi and their heroine a beautiful Indian woman.
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Our main subject here is the Muslim contribution to Hinduism, but we must at least acknowledge, in passing, the flow in the other direction during this period, Hindu influence on Muslim culture. Azad Bilgrami (d. 1785) attempted to prove that India was the true homeland of the Prophet,
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which is perhaps going too far, but India was indeed the homeland of many important Muslim cultural traditions. One text,
The Pool of Nectar
, which circulated in multiple versions and translations, made available to Muslim readers certain practices associated with the Nath yogis and the teachings known as Hatha Y oga.
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A school of Kashmiri Sufis, whose members call themselves
rishis
(the name that Hindus use for their pious sages), are strict vegetarians and recite the verses of Lal Ded, a fourteenth-century poet and Hindu holy woman from Kashmir. Sufis appropriated the Sanskritic poetic language of emotion and devotion from the sects devoted to the worship of Krishna and incorporated much of the philosophy of yoga.

Arabs and Iranians learned much about storytelling in India, and passed on this knowledge to Europeans; many of the same stories are told both in the Hindu
Ocean of the Rivers of Story,
in which the gods are Shiva and Vishnu, and in
The Arabian Nights
, in which there is no god but Allah; some of the stories that these two texts share (such as the plot of Shakespeare’s
All’s Well That Ends Well
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) got to England long before the English got to India. Al-biruni made excellent use of Sanskrit and Indian scholarship
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and produced a fine study of Hindu culture.
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The Delhi sultans employed Hindu temple building techniques and Hindu artisans to build their mosques,
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which was less expensive than outsourcing to Afghanistan. As a result, some mosques are decorated with carved Hindu temple moldings that reveal, in subtle ways, “the unmistakable hand” of Indian artisans.
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This use of Hindu temple techniques not only gave employment to Hindu artisans but was also much easier on Hindus than the use of the actual stones from Hindu temples to build the mosques.

Sufi mysticism heavily influenced the North Indian tradition of bhakti Sants (“saints”), who emphasized the abstract aspect of god “without qualities” (
nir-guna
).
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Many of the Sants who straddled Hinduism and Islam were both low caste and rural, such as Ravidas, who was a Pariah leatherworker (Chamar); Dadu, a cotton carder; Sena, a barber.
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But not all bhaktas were of low caste; Guru Nanak (who founded Sikhism) was a Kshatriya, and Mirabai a Kshatriya princess. Sants from the thirteenth to seventeenth century in Maharashtra were drawn from all castes.
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The most famous of the Sants was Kabir, who was born in Varanasi around the beginning of the fifteenth century into a class of low-caste weavers who had recently converted from Hinduism to Islam.
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One early hagiography mentions that Kabir had previously worshiped the Shakta goddess, suggesting that Kabir’s Muslim family may have converted to Islam from a yogic sect related to the Shaktas, such as the Naths. His mixed birth gave rise to many different stories, some of which attempt to show that Kabir was not really a low-caste Muslim by birth but was adopted by Muslims. Sometimes it is said that Kabir was a Brahmin in a former life or that he was of divine origin but adopted by Muslim weavers of the Julaha caste, who had been Brahmins but had fallen from dharma and become Muslims. Or that he was adopted by Brahmins, worshipers of Shiva, whom some foreigners (perhaps Muslims) forced to drink water from their hands, making them lose caste and become weavers.
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One version says that a Brahmin widow conceived him immaculately, gave birth to him through the palm of her hand, and set him afloat in a basket on a pond, where a Muslim couple found him and adopted him
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(an episode that follows the Family Romance pattern of the birth of Karna in the
Mahabharata
), or it is said that the Brahmin widow became pregnant when a famous ascetic blessed her, but she exposed the baby in order to escape dishonor.
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All these stories attempt to drag Kabir back over the line from Muslim to Hindu.

Kabir is widely believed (on scant evidence) to have become one of the disciples of the Hindu saint Ramananda (c. 1370-1440), who was said to have been a disciple of the philosopher Ramanuja and who preached in Hindustani and had many low-caste disciples. There’s a story about Kabir’s tricking Ramananda into accepting a Muslim disciple: Kabir lay down across the stairs where Ramananda bathed every morning before dawn; Ramananda tripped over him and cried out, “Ram! Ram!” thus (Kabir argued) transmitting to him Ramananda’s own mantra, in effect taking him on as a pupil.
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This Ram is not Sita’s Ram, however, but a god “without qualities” (
nir-guna
), whose name, evoking no story, is complete in itself, a mantra.

Scholars believe that Kabir probably married, and indeed had a son named Kamal, but the Sadhus of the Kabir Panth insist that Kabir was celibate, just as they are.
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There are, in any case, stories about Kabir and his wife, such as this one.

This is also a story about the exploitation of women and the lower castes by men of the higher castes. Despite his casual attitude to his wife’s fidelity in this story, Kabir often used a wife’s impulse to commit suttee, in order to stay with her husband forever, as a positive metaphor for the worshiper who surrenders his ego to god.
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And he described Illusion (
maya
) as a seductive woman to whom one becomes addicted and from whom one must break away.
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Women evidently meant several different things to him.

Kabir preached in the vernacular, insisting, “Sanskrit is like water in a well; the language of the people is a flowing stream.” With the social identity of a Muslim and both the earlier family background and the belief system of a Hindu,
¹²⁷
being a weaver, he wove the woof of Islam onto the warp of Hinduism (or, if you prefer, the reverse) to produce a religion of his own that emphatically distanced itself from both. He once described the two religions, disparagingly, in terms of the animals that Hindus offered to the goddess Kali and that Muslims killed at the end of a pilgrimage: “One slaughters goats, one slaughters cows; they squander their birth in isms.”
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Not surprisingly, both groups attacked him during his life; more surprisingly, both claimed him after his death. For this is the sort of thing that he said: