The Hindus (90 page)

When we set the stories of Lavana and Gadhi side by side, each sheds light on the other, forming a double image of mutually illuminating similes. Lavana is a king who dreams that he is a Pariah and then goes back to being a king. Gadhi is a Brahmin who dreams that he is a Pariah who becomes a king, is unmasked as a Pariah, and turns back into a Brahmin. It might appear that Lavana takes up the Gadhi story at midpoint, a king who remembers that he has been a Pariah. King Lavana travels (or imagines that he travels) to another place, where he lives another life until he awakens again as a king. This also happens to Gadhi, in the middle part of his story, though in the other direction: As a Pariah, he travels to another place and becomes a king. This shared, inverted episode is, however, framed by another in Gadhi’s life, in which he dies, is reborn, and experiences an entirely new life, beginning as an embryo. And this frame casts back upon the Lavana story the implication that he too may have a frame, that a Brahmin may have dreamed that he was Lavana who dreamed that he was a Pariah. Gadhi finds out that his memories of the dream were true, but they are not his memories; they belong to someone else. What is real for Lavana becomes a simile for Gadhi, and what is real for Gadhi is merely a simile for Lavana. One man’s reality is another man’s simile.

The transformations take place differently: King Lavana is never reborn but merely travels to another place; Gadhi, by contrast, does not travel or fall into a trance but actually dies (or imagines that he dies), is reborn, and experiences an entirely new life, beginning as an embryo. On the other hand, Lavana actually succumbs to amnesia and forgets that he was a king, while Gadhi as a Pariah remembers quite well who he was and merely pretends to be a king. The fact that Gadhi is a Brahmin, with special spiritual powers, is highly significant; he remains in mental control throughout and especially at the end, in ways that the king, the victim of his passion (such as his mesmerization by the beauty of the horse), does not. But whatever the status of the protagonist, the text eventually erases the distinction between having an adventure and imagining that you have had an adventure, since in either case the events of the adventure leave physical traces that can be corroborated before witnesses.

The assumptions of Kashmiri Shaiva idealism are very different from those of the average Euro-American reader. More vividly than any argument, the text performs the proposition that our failure to remember our past lives is a more intense form of our failure to recapture our dreams. More than that, it erases the distinction between the reality status of a dreamed (or experienced) episode within a single life and a dreamed (or experienced) episode of total rebirth; the distinction between forgetting that you are a king and pretending to be a king; and, finally, the distinction between the consciousness of a king or Brahmin and a Pariah.

CHAPTER 19

Being aware of the fanatical hatred between Hindus and Muslims,
and being convinced that this arose out of mutual ignorance, the
enlightened ruler sought to dispel this ignorance by making the
books of each religion accessible to the other. He chose the
Mahabharata
to begin with, as this is the most comprehensive and enjoys the
highest authority, and arranged for it to be translated by competent
men from both religions. In this way he wished to demonstrate to the
Hindus that a few of their erroneous practices and superstitions had
no basis in their classics, and also to convince the Muslims that it was
absurd to ascribe a mere 7,000 years of existence to the world.

Abu’l Fazl (1551-1602)
¹

 

The enlightened ruler in this passage is Akbar, by far the most pluralist of the Mughal rulers (indeed of most rulers anywhere and anytime in history). His attention to the
Mahabharata
is coupled with his disdain (or that of Abu’l Fazl, his chronicler) for “erroneous” contemporary Hindu practices in contrast with the ancient classics. Other Mughals too valued some aspects of Hinduism very highly, while still others hated the Hindus and regarded their practices as not merely “erroneous” but downright blasphemous. Hinduism continued to agonize over issues of caste and gender, often newly inspired by the Mughal example or the Mughal threat, or both.

Few people have been able to resist the fascination of the Mughals, whose very name comes into English (from a Persian form of “Mongols,” sometimes spelled “Mogul”) as a word denoting someone of extravagant wealth and power. True, the Mughals had their little ways; they did tend to try to kill (or blind, or lock up) members of their nuclear family rather a lot, and many of them seem to have been drunk and/or stoned most of the time.
^jh
Punishment was severe under the Mughals (as it was under the Hindus—and, for that matter, the Europeans—of the period); people were impaled or trampled to death by elephants for a number of crimes and flayed or deprived of hands or feet for relatively minor misdemeanors.
²
But the Mughals also made spectacular contributions to the civilization of the world in general and India and Hinduism in particular. Under the Mughals, industry and trade boomed. Around the court thronged “costumiers, perfumers, gold and silversmiths, jewelers, ivory-carvers, gun-smiths, saddlers, joiners and [an] army of architects, civil engineers, stonemasons and polishers.”
³

Like the Arabs of the Delhi Sultanate, the Turks who became the Mughals were not all the same in their relationship to Hinduism. Some were religious zealots; some didn’t care much about religion; some loved Islam but didn’t believe that they should impose it on anyone else. Some (notoriously Aurangzeb) were quite (though not unambiguously) horrid; some (most notably Akbar) were quite (though not unambiguously) wonderful; and most of them were a bit of both. And there were many different sorts of Islam—Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and so forth. The Mughals as a group differed from the Delhi sultans as a group: The Mughals ruled longer as individuals and as a dynasty, were more centralized, and held a tighter rein, with more control over more of India; we also have much more available light, much more information, about the Mughals. Hinduism too had changed in many important ways since the days of the Delhi Sultanate (new sectarian movements, Tantra, philosophy), so that a different Hinduism now encountered a different Islam.

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad, otherwise known as Babur (“the Tiger”), the first great Mughal emperor, traced his descent, on his mother’s side, back to Genghis Khan and, on his father’s, to Timur the Lame (Tamerlane, in Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem) who, in 1398, led Mongol forces across the Yamuna River and defeated the reigning sultan, massacring or enslaving all the Hindus, sparing only the Muslim quarters of the city. An inauspicious beginning. A century later, in 1484, Babur was born in Ferghana, in the mountains of Central Asia (now Uzbekistan). Despite his Mongol blood, he regarded himself as a Turk, and he was educated in Turki.
⁴
A stunning mix of elegance and cruelty, Babur constructed gardens and fountains and planted melons wherever he went, a kind of Mughal Johnny Appleseed, but he also knocked down a lot of temples and killed a lot of people. He wrote an extraordinarily intimate, frank, and detailed memoir, the
Baburnama,
from which we can get a vivid sense of the man, from the early days, when he lived a nomadic life, riding his magnificent horse and carrying little with him but a book of poetry, exulting in his freedom.

As soon as he failed to conquer his first target, Timur’s old realm of Samarkhand, Babur had set his sights on India, Timur’s later conquest; he named his second son Hindal, which is Turkish for “Take India!”
⁵
But once he actually got there he formed a low opinion of India:

(He adds, a bit later, “Another nice thing is the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and practitioners of every trade.”) Seldom has the nature of a conqueror’s interest in the object of his conquest been so nakedly expressed. The lack of good horses was, as we have seen, a perennial problem.

He had relatively little to say about Hinduism: “Most of the people in Hindustan are infidels whom the people of India call Hindu. Most Hindus believe in reincarnation.” That’s just about it. His interest in rebirth and the related philosophy of karma reemerged on another occasion, when he crossed a river that now forms the border between the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and is called the Karamnasa (“Destroyer of Karma”), sometimes referred to as the Anti-Ganges. Babur remarked of it: “This river is scrupulously avoided by Hindus, and observant Hindus will not cross it. They must board boats and cross its mouth on the Ganges. They believe that the religious merit of anyone touched by its water is nullified The etymology of its name is also said to be derived from this.” He objected to both Hindu and Jaina images, especially to a group of idols, some of which were twenty yards tall, “shown stark naked with all their private parts exposed. . . . Urwahi is not a bad place. In fact, it is rather nice. Its one drawback was the idols, so I ordered them destroyed.”
⁷

His attitude to his own faith was simple and practical; on occasion he used Islamic fervor, which may or may not have been genuine in him, to rally reluctant troops against Rajputs.
⁸
His dedication to his religion was inseparable from his dedication to his military victories; after one such victory, he wrote this verse: “For the sake of Islam I became a wanderer; I battled infidels and Hindus./ I determined to become a martyr. Thank God I became a holy warrior.”
⁹
His practice of Islam was leavened by his indulgence in the pleasures of the senses: “wines, composing of some very sensual poetry, music, flowers and gardens, women, even a young boy at one time in his youth.”
¹⁰
Proselytizing and demolishing other people’s places of worship were not high on his list of priorities.

Babur is thought to have built several mosques, including the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, which an inscription attributes to him.
^ji
But the pages of the diary covering the period in which such a mosque would have been built, sometime before 1528, are missing, and it is possible that Babur merely renovated an already existing mosque, built sometime after the armies of Muhammad of Ghor reached Ayodhya in 1194.

In 1530, Babur’s eldest and favorite son, Humayun, then twenty-two, fell ill and was expected to die. Babur is said to have prayed by Humayun’s sickbed and transferred his own health to his son (transferring karma, an action more Hindu or Buddhist than Muslim), offering up his own life if Humayun recovered. Humayun recovered and Babur died. He was buried first in a garden at Agra that he himself had designed, and then, as he had wished, he was carried back to Kabul, where he was laid to rest. He had never liked India very much.

Humayun, born in 1508 in Kabul, dabbled in astrology and spiritual matters. Neither of these religious interests prevented him from blinding his brother Hindal in retaliation for killing his (Humayun’s) spiritual guide.
¹¹
In 1556, as keen on astronomy as on astrology, Humayun tripped going down the stone stairs from his makeshift observatory in Delhi and fell to his death.
¹²
A messenger hurried to inform his son Akbar, only thirteen years old, that he was now the emperor; in the meantime a man who happened to resemble Humayan (what the Hindus would have called a shadow Humayun) was displayed, on a distant platform, to the anxious crowds.
¹³

Akbar ruled for half a century. Like his grandfather Babur, Akbar was a fearless and tireless rider,
¹⁴
a man of action who killed tigers with spears and was famous for both his courage and his cruelty. When, after a long and bloody battle and siege, Akbar captured the historic fortress of Chitor in Mewar in 1568, he watched the flames consume the women as the men rode out in their own suicidal charge, and then he gratuitously massacred some twenty thousand noncombatants.
¹⁵