The Hindus (92 page)

Dara Shikoh (also spelled Shukoh) was Shah Jahan’s oldest and favorite son, the designated heir. But the orthodox Muslims of the
ulama
distrusted him, for he was a scholar who had argued that “the essential nature of Hinduism was identical with that of Islam,”
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a pronouncement that orthodox Muslims regarded as heresy.
^jj
He consorted with Sufis, Hindus, Christians, and Jews.
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He learned Sanskrit and translated Sanskrit philosophical texts into Persian.

In 1657, when Shah Jahan was deathly ill, his sons hovered about, as princes are wont to do. Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh were the main contenders. When Aurangzeb attacked Delhi and imprisoned Shah Jahan in the Agra fort, he killed Dara’s sons in front of him,
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paraded Dara through the streets, had him cut to pieces, and then (according to some stories) had the pieces paraded through the streets.

Aurangzeb was no more a typical Muslim than Torquemada was a typical Christian. A devout Sunni, he worked hard to repair what he regarded as the damage done by his more tolerant predecessors. In the eloquent words of Bamber Gascoigne, “Akbar [had] disrupted the Muslim community by recognizing that India was not an Islamic country: Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving as if it were.”
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When Aurangzeb sacked Hyderabad in 1687, he stabled his horses in the Shiite mosques as a deliberate insult to what he regarded as the city’s heretics.
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Thus began twenty years of discrimination against Shiites, Hindus, and Sikhs.

The Sikh support of Dara in the 1658 succession crisis angered Aurangzeb. Moreover, the ninth Sikh guru, Tegh Bahadur, drew large crowds with his preaching and proselytized among Muslims as well as Hindus. Many Muslims converted to Sikhism, so infuriating Aurangzeb that he condemned Tegh Bahadur for blasphemy and executed him. Under Guru Govind Singh, the tenth and last Sikh guru (1666-1708), who insisted that Sikhs leave their hair uncut, carry arms, and use the epithet “Singh” (lion), Sikhism became not merely a movement for religious and social reform but a political and military force to be reckoned with. In 1708, Govind Singh was assassinated while attending the emperor Aurangzeb. This spurred Sikhs, Maharashtrians, and Rajputs to outright defiance.
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The Hindus suffered most under Aurangzeb. In 1679, he reimposed the
jizya
on all castes (even the Brahmins, who were usually exempt) and the tax on Hindu pilgrims that Akbar had lifted. He rescinded endowments to temples and to Brahmins, placed heavier duties on Hindu merchants, and replaced Hindus in administration with Muslims. When a large crowd rioted in protests against the
jizya,
he sent in the troops—more precisely, the elephants—to trample them.
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He put pressure on the Hindus to convert.

Aurangzeb attacked Hyderabad, plundered and desecrated the temples, and killed the Brahmins. He destroyed all newly built or rebuilt Hindu temples and replaced them with mosques; in particular, he replaced the great Vishvanatha Temple in Varanasi and the Keshava Deo Temple at Mathura with two great Aurangzeb mosques and changed the name of Mathura to Islamabad
^jk
(as Shah Jahan had done to Anantnag). He also renamed the cave city of Ellora Aurangabad.
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In several places in Sind, and especially at Varanasi, “Brahmins attracted a large number of Muslims to their discourses. Aurangzeb, in utter disgust, ordered the governors of all these provinces ‘to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and with utmost urgency put down the teaching and the public practices of these religious misbelievers.’ ”
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(He particularly hated Varanasi because it was the center of linga worship, which he regarded as the most abominable of all abominations.
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) He sent someone to Rajasthan to demolish sixty-six temples there.
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Yet he financed the maintenance of several other Hindu temples and
matts
, and he even made land grants to some.
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He destroyed few
old
temples, generally only those that had political or ideological power. Nor, being puritanical and mean in all things and reacting against Shah Jahan’s architectural extravagances, did he allow any new mosques to be built (with the exception of the few mosques mentioned above, most of which replaced temples). This led to great hardship for the artisans.
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Other arts too suffered, as he suppressed poetry and music;
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dismissed dancers, musicians, and artists from the royal payroll; and hired jurists and theologians in their place.
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And when he went on to create the post of a
muhtasib,
a censor or guardian of public morality, whose task it was to suppress gambling, blasphemy, alcohol, and opium, the cumulative effect surely acted as a serious wet blanket on both addiction and night life.

Hindu astrologers had played an important role in the life of the Mughals until Aurangzeb replaced the Hindu astrologers with Muslim ones.
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Aurangzeb’s grandson fought against him on behalf of Hindus. Yet even Aurangzeb had Hindus in his court and ordered his officials to protect Brahmin temple priests who were being harassed, instructing them to leave the Brahmins alone so that they could “pray for the continuance of the Empire.”
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Aurangzeb lived to ninety and died in bed, alone.

When Jahandah Shah took the throne, he immediately reversed all of Aurangzeb’s policies that had curbed the pleasures of the flesh. Said to be a frivolous and drunken imbecile, Jahandah Shah surrounded himself with singers, dancers, actors, storytellers, and a notorious mistress, to whom he gave elephants and jewels. Other Mughals of that ilk followed him. Farrukhsiyar took over in 1713 and was murdered in 1719, though not before he carried out a bloody repression of the Sikhs, who continued to harass the Mughals until the British put an end to Mughal rule.
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,

Aurangzeb’s puritanical repressions were in part a response to the history of his family, several of whom suffered from addiction to alcohol and/or drugs, “the bane of the Mughals.” They started young; opium was often given to small children to keep them quiet.
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The addictions of the Mughals may well have reinforced the Hindus’ awareness of the dangers of substance abuse.

It all began with Babur, whose memoir (begun when he was barely a teenager) abounds in wine, drugs, and the Mughal equivalent of rock and roll. The drugs included cannabis exported from Kashmir, but the drug of choice was opium, made from poppies grown in Varanasi and one of India’s major export products. The opium was usually taken in the form of
ma’jun,
a drug still known today; it was made by pressing dried fruits such as plums, tamarinds, apricots, sometimes also sesame, and mixing the extract with a small amount of opium, somewhat like cognac-filled chocolates or hash brownies, truly a Turkish delight. It was carried on military campaigns and consumed in large amounts at parties, “a socially acceptable recreational drug.”
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Drugs and drink played a central role in Babur’s memoir. A typical early entry:

Babur was such a great horseman that he could even ride when he was totally stoned: “We drank on the boat until late that night, left the boat roaring drunk, and got on our horses. I took a torch in my hand and, reeling to one side and then the other, let the horse gallop free-reined along the riverbank all the way to camp. I must have been really drunk.”
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This image is also captured by a fine painting entitled
A Drunken Babur Returns to Camp at Night,
from an illustrated copy of the
Babur-nama.
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These parties were usually bachelor affairs, royal frat parties, though occasionally women were present.
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A sure clue that we are dealing here not just with people of privilege having a very good long-running party but with genuine addiction is Babur’s frequent (almost always futile) attempts to rein in his drunkenness.
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Before one great battle, he went on the wagon, and to make sure he would not backslide, he had a quantity of the latest vintage from Ghazni salted for vinegar.
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When he took the pledge not to drink wine, some of the court copied him and renounced with him, for, he noted, “People follow their kings’ religion.”
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But he hated being on the wagon and wrote a charming poem about it, which ended: “People repent, then they give up wine—I gave it up, and now I am repenting!”
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There were also excuses to get stoned other than simply wanting to get stoned, another telltale sign of substance abuse: “That night I took some opium for the pain in my ear—the moonlight also induced me to take it. The next morning I really suffered from an opium hangover and vomited a lot. Nevertheless, I went out on a tour of all Man Singh’s and Bikramajit’s buildings.” And: “The weather was so bad that some of us had
ma’jun
even though we had had some the day before.”
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E. M. Forster wrote a wicked satire on the depiction of constant drunkenness, and constant travel, in Babur’s memoir: “Was this where the man with the melon fell overboard? Or is it the raft where half of us took spirits and the rest
bhang,
^jl
and quarreled in consequence? We can’t be sure. Is that an elephant? If so, we must have left Afghanistan. No: we must be in Ferghana again; it’s a yak.”
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Here, as so often, you only know where you are by seeing what animals are with you.

None of Babur’s successors wrote nearly so vividly about their drinking problems, though as a group they did manage to run up quite a tab. Humayun was an opium addict, particularly fond of
ma’jun;
it is quite possible that his fatal fall down the stairs of his observatory may have been aided and abetted by opium. Akbar drank very rarely, but his first three sons were alcoholics. Murad (Akbar’s second son) died of alcoholism, and when Akbar forbade Danyal (his third son, aged thirty-three) to drink wine, Danyal tried to smuggle some in inside a musket; the alcohol dissolved the rust and gunpowder in the musket and killed him.
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Jahangir’s excessive use of alcohol and opium was thought to have exacerbated his cruelty and vicious temper; his Rajput wife committed suicide by overdosing on opium. He sometimes forced his son Shah Jahan to drink, against his will.
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Jahangir recorded in detail his own addiction to alcohol, and later opium, and “his apparently half-hearted battle to moderate his consumption.”
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Jahangir was also fascinated by the opium addiction of his friend Inayat Khan and had his portrait painted as he was dying. Jahangir wrote: “Since he was an opium addict and also extremely fond of drinking wine whenever he had the chance, his mind was gradually destroyed.”
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The vices of the Mughals were not limited to drugs; there was also the vice of hunting, as well as more complicated problems involving animals. There are conflicting strains in the Mughal attitude toward animals. On the one hand, they had a great fascination with and love of animals; the Sufi saints, in particular, were often depicted in the company of tame lions or bears; a tame lion accompanies Akbar’s confessor, Shaikh Salim Chishti, in one painting. On the other hand, Muslims often sacrificed animals, including cows, at the end of pilgrimages, and this was a recurrent source of conflict, for many Hindus were, by this time, deeply offended by the sacrifice of cows.
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Babur showed no compassion for dogs when he vomited and suspected that someone was trying to poison him: “I never vomited after meals, not even when drinking. A cloud of suspicion came over my mind. I ordered the cook to be held while the vomit was given to a dog that was watched.” But he also tortured the cook and had him skinned alive, ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces, and had a woman suspected of complicity thrown under an elephant’s feet.
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So at least the dog was not singled out for mistreatment (and may not even have died; indeed, compared with the cook and taster, the dog got off easy). Akbar, on the other hand, was fond of dogs. He imported them from many countries and admired their courage in attacking all sorts of animals,
^jm
even tigers. In contradiction of the teachings of Islam, he regarded neither pigs nor dogs as unclean and kept them in the harem; he also insisted that dogs had ten virtues, any one of which, in a man, would make him a saint. At Akbar’s table, some of his friends and courtiers would put dogs on the tablecloth, and some of them went so far as to let the dogs put their tongues into their (the courtiers’) mouths, to the horror of Abu’l Fazl.
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An album published during Akbar’s reign shows a Kanphata yogi (a devotee of Shiva) and his dog, with a text that says, “Your dog is better than anything in the world of fidelity.”
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One story about Akbar and dogs is also a great story about Akbar’s religious tolerance. It was told by an Englishman named Thomas Coryat, who traveled to India between 1612 and 1617: