The Hindus (94 page)

In the realm of religious texts, both bhakti and Sufism transfused popular literature so thoroughly that it is often hard to tell which tradition is the source of a particular mystical folk song.
¹⁰⁵
Much of the poetry written by Muslims, with Muslim names, in Hindi, Bengali (Bangla), Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi begins with the Islamic invocation of Allah but goes on to express Hindu content or makes use of Hindu forms, Hindu imagery, Hindu terminology. In return, the sixteenth-century Bangla text entitled
The Ocean of the Nectar of Bhakti,
by the theologian Rupagoswamin, tells the life of Krishna in a form modeled on a Sufi romance.
¹⁰⁶
The heroes of the Persian epic the
Shah Nama
and the Sanskrit
Mahabharata
interact in the
Tarikh-i-Farishta,
composed under the Mughals. Hindu-Muslim sects flourished, especially in Bengal, and new Hindu sects emerged, headed by charismatic leaders. Muslims allowed Hindus to perform sacrifices in the ruins of old temples, and many Muslim pilgrims attended the Hindu shrines in Kangra and Mathura.
¹⁰⁷

Syncretism
^jq
remained at the heart of Sufism, which in the course of time produced Muslim disciples who had Hindu disciples who had Muslim disciples, and so on, some of whom called God Allah, some Rama or Hari (Vishnu).
¹⁰⁸
In Sufi centers, low-caste Hindus, including Pariahs, shared meals with other Hindus as well as with Muslims.
¹⁰⁹
A similar synthesis took place in the seventeenth century in “Dakani” poetry composed in Urdu, which blended Islamic and Hindu genres as well as male and female voices, introducing, from the Hindu lyric tradition and the Arabic storytelling tradition, a female narrator.
¹¹⁰
Popular religion often mixed Hindu and Sufi practices together inextricably, to the annoyance of reformers.
¹¹¹
Many people were Hindu by culture, Muslim by religion, or the reverse. Mughal emperors patronized yoga establishments. Hindus worshiped Sufi Pirs.
¹¹²

The enrichment of Hinduism by Islam, and Islam by Hinduism, was greatly facilitated by the production of translations, which inspired new, original genres in both cultures. By the time of the Mughals, Indian literature was flourishing in North India in a number of languages: Sanskrit, Persian (the official court language), Arabic, the Turkic languages, and many regional languages, including Sindi, Punjabi, Pashto, and Hindi.
¹¹³
In public spheres in South India too, particularly but not only in the Telugu-speaking world, language boundaries were porous both geographically and linguistically, and multiple literary cultures were loosely connected.
¹¹⁴
Urdu (“camp”), a hybrid dialect that Akbar developed in the military encampments, was widely used; it was written in Perso-Arabic script, with much Sanskrit-Hindi syntax and vocabulary.
¹¹⁵
Developed further under Shah Jahan, Urdu became the primary fusion language.

The Mughals extended their patronage to many Hindu scholars and commissioned the translation of many Hindu works from Sanskrit into Arabic and Persian. Already by the eighth century, the collection of animal fables called the
Panchatantra
had been translated into Arabic (known as
The Mirror for Princes
[
Kalila wa Dimna
]), and another version into Persian (entitled
The Lights of Canopus
[
Anvari Suhaili
]). Akbar had Abu’l Fazl translate it into Persian again and also had both the
Mahabharata
and the
Ramayana
translated into Persian.
¹¹⁶
There were Persian translations of the
Harivamsha,
gorgeously illustrated.
¹¹⁷
Jahangir had an abridged translation made of the
Yoga-vasishtha,
and Dara Shikoh himself later translated it again, more fully. Dara also provided the first Persian translation of the Upanishads, which became known in Europe (through a French translation of Dara’s Persian) and introduced the British Orientalist William Jones to Indian literature. Thanks to Akbar and Dara, Sanskrit became an important literary language in the Muslim world.
¹¹⁸
The Turkish and Afghan courts of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries sponsored a rich and interactive mixture of vernacular and classical or cosmopolitan languages and fostered the growth of regional literature, music, and art.
¹¹⁹
The erotic literature of the Turks and Persians easily assimilated translations of the
Kama-sutra
into Persian, often with wonderful illustrations; the Persian was then translated into European languages.

As the Mughals were superb plunderers, so were they superb builders. Their architecture was strongly influenced by Hindu architecture,
¹²⁰
and in return, Mughal architecture had a vivid impact on many Hindu monuments,
¹²¹
inspiring, as in literature, unprecedented Hindu forms.

Babur, who scorned most things Indian, disdained the Indian builders: “A stone mosque was built, but it was not well made. They built it in the Indian fashion.”
¹²²
But Akbar, who admired most things Indian, admired its architecture, too; the eclectic architecture of Fatehpur Sikri combined Persian with Hindu and Jaina forms. Akbar employed nearly fifteen hundred stonecutters at Agra.
¹²³
He gave Man Singh permission to erect a number of temples in Vrindaban, built of red sandstone, the material usually reserved for Mughal official architecture; these Hindu temples also had many Mughal architectural features.
¹²⁴
Since there were no Rama temples in Ayodhya until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, there is some irony in the strong possibility that Babur, whose mosque was to become such a cause célèbre, may have sponsored the first Rama temples in Ayodhya, built when he built the ill-fated Babri Mosque.
¹²⁵

In painting too a fusion of Hindu and Muslim forms led to innovations in both cultures. Many paintings on Hindu themes are signed with the names of Muslim artists, and many Hindu miniature paintings were modeled on Persian originals
¹²⁶
or incorporated composite figures and other fantastic themes from Persian miniatures.
¹²⁷
Though Indian painters already knew how to illuminate manuscripts with miniatures, the Persians made it a court practice and introduced new techniques and refinements.

As always, the common people of India picked up the tab.
¹²⁸
The great Mughal monuments were also monuments to Mughal “extravagance and oppression.” Though there were no more crop seizures, there was still crippling taxation on peasants and artisans, and the plight of the cultivator was worse than ever, with increased exploitation from above.
¹²⁹
As there was no free temple, there was certainly no free mosque.

CHAPTER 20

It is a simple fact that contemporary Hinduism as a living practice would not be what it is if it were not for the devotional practices initiated under Mughal rule.

Amitav Ghosh (1956- )
¹

 

Hinduisms of various kinds flourished under the Mughals. The production and preservation of a large number of digests, as well as literary and religious texts, during this period suggest that this was another of those periods—we have encountered several—when the presence of foreign cultures in India led many Hindu intellectuals to take pains to preserve their cultural heritage.
²
This was not an unalloyed Good Thing. Some Hindus retreated into more conservative practices lest someone mistake them for Muslims in the dark of cultural fusion. As K. M. Pannikar, prime minister of Bikaner in the 1940s, put it, with benefit of hindsight, “The reaction of Hindu lawgivers to [the Mughal] challenge was in general to make Hinduism more rigid and to re-interpret the rules in such a way as to resist the encroachments of Islam. It is perhaps this defensive attitude toward society that is responsible for the orthodoxy of views which is characteristic of the Dharma Sastra literature of this period.”
³

But in a more positive vein, Hindu kings in medieval India arranged large-scale public debates.
⁴
Fear of Muslims and a desire to circle the wagons were among the inspirations for this burst of literary and religious activity. Mughal policies that encouraged trade and pilgrimage
⁵
(in part because several of the Mughals collected taxes on pilgrims) benefited the sacred Vaishnava sites of Ayodhya and Vrindavan. Devotional Vaishnavism flourished under the Mughals in the sixteenth century in ways that are foundational for subsequent Hinduism. The establishment of Muslim rule and the subsequent loss of a political center for Hinduism triggered a shift of focus in Vaishnavism away from the more warriorlike and kingly aspects of Vishnu to those of the passionate god of the forest, the playful, amorous god, Krishna the cowherd.
⁶
Though the Mughals picked up some aspects of caste, by and large they ignored it, and some Hindus followed their lead and loosened up. Outside the nervous world of the Brahmin imaginary, many good things were happening.

Tulsidas (c. 1532/1543-1623), one of the main architects of North Indian Vaishnavism, was close to several movers and shakers at the Mughal court, including Man Singh.
⁷
His retelling of the
Ramayana
in Hindi, titled “The Holy Lake of the Acts of Rama” (
Ramcaritmanas
), is still read and enacted each year at the “Rama Play” (Ramlila) throughout North India, particularly at Ramnagar near Varanasi. Tulsidas, who composed his poem at a pilgrimage center that had been attacked by Muslims, said that even the Muslims would be saved by Rama’s name
⁸
(rather reminiscent of earlier claims that this or that pilgrimage spot would save even Pariahs). The Brahmins of Varanasi, where the text was composed, are said to have been shocked by the composition of such a text in a vernacular language. They tested it by placing it in the Shiva temple for one night, with the Vedas and Puranas placed on top of it. In the morning Tulsidas’s’s text was on top of them all, legitimizing its authority,
⁹
like that of the scriptures in the South Indian myth (which texts will float upstream?), buoyancy being, apparently, a sign of sanctity.

Some Brahmins also objected to Tulsidas’s challenges to caste. Although by and large Tulsidas toes the Brahmin party line and upholds caste, there are also moments of compassion for Pariahs and tribals, such as this story about a Pariah, told, significantly, through the masking device of an animal:

The manifestation of god’s universal form within an anthropomorphic body, a manifestation that we have seen experienced by Brahma and Vishnu, by Arjuna (in the
Gita
), and by Krishna’s mother, is here given to a crow, an unclean scavenger. The caste issue is explicit here: The crow was an uppity Pariah in a former life, until Shiva cursed him to be reborn as a crow. This story stands in marked contrast with Rama’s treatment of a crow in Valmiki’s
Ramayana,
in which he regards the crow as an enemy and blinds him.

Tulsidas also tackled in his own way the problem of Rama’s treatment of Sita. In the centuries that had intervened since Valmiki’s
Ramayana,
as Rama had become one of the two great gods of Vaishnavism (Krishna being the other), Sita’s fate had become more vexing than ever. Tulsidas dealt with this problem by incorporating into his poem the tradition of the illusory or shadow Sita from earlier Sanskrit texts. Sita enters the fire at the ordeal and “both the shadow form and the stigma of public shame” are consumed in the blazing fire.
¹¹
Thus the Vedantic concept of illusion allows Tulsidas to argue that Rama never intended or needed to test Sita (since he knew she wasn’t in Ravana’s house at all) but goaded the shadow Sita into undertaking the fire ordeal merely in order to get her into the fire so that he could bring the real Sita back from the fire.
¹²
And the real Sita then stays with him; Tulsidas omits entirely the episodes in which Sita bears twin sons and enters the earth; the story ends with Rama and Sita together, happily ever after.

Like Sita, Radha suffered in separation from her beloved (Krishna), but the spirit of Radha’s longing in separation was different from Sita’s and was interpreted still differently by each of two great medieval Bengali poets, Chandidas and Chaitanya.

In the fourteenth century Bangla poetry of Chandidas, Radha is already married when she goes off with Krishna. (In the sixteenth-century Sanskrit plays of Rupagoswamin, Chaitanya’s most famous disciple, Radha is married to Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna.
¹³
) Chandidas writes: