Troubled histories

SUPRIYA GANDHI

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IN a nation which has witnessed communal violence from its inception, conversations about Islam have frequently turned towards history. It is often through appeals to history that we articulate, and seek to address, our present day conflicts between religious communities. Paradoxically, religions continue to be commonly discussed in the public sphere as fixed and reified systems, rather than viewed as continually remade in the contexts of histories that are not necessarily smooth and continuous. This tension between examining our histories through the lens of religion while denying religions their histories has served to define and limit the boundaries of our knowledge about Islam.

A recent example can be found in Ashutosh Gowarikar’s epic film Jodha-Akbar (2008). This commercially successful film also met with a largely sympathetic reception in the liberal media, praised in a leading national magazine as a ‘noble-hearted call for unity of religions and cultures.’1 In portraying the relationship between the Mughal emperor Akbar and his Rajput wife, it takes the bold step of reversing the established pairing in Bollywood of a Muslim woman with a Hindu man.2 That the film raised the ire of certain Rajput and Hindutva activists who resented the suggestion that one of ‘their’ women could have married, and subsequently fallen in love with a Muslim emperor, does not, however, imply that it presents a particularly fresh or nuanced portrayal of Hindu-Muslim relations. As is often the case with historical films, Jodha-Akbar is more a reflection of present narratives about religions in India than those of the past. Well-intentioned though the film’s director may have been, Jodha-Akbar reveals an underlying discomfort surrounding the idea of Islam in India, even among those who do not consciously subscribe to Hindu nationalist ideologies.

 

It takes a Rajput princess, who affirms her Hindu identity with a very modern clarity and determination, to transform Gowarikar’s Akbar into the icon of tolerance so feted in the history books of independent India. He is nonetheless still despised by certain Hindutva ideologues, who view him as yet another link in the chain of rapacious Muslim invaders.3 In the imaginary Hindustan of Jodha-Akbar, there is nothing intrinsic to Islamic religious traditions, or the evolving Timurid-Mughal notions of kingship, or Persianate political ethics, that could have possibly propelled the emperor’s inclusivist policies. Akbar is the exceptional Muslim who owes his ‘enlightenment’ to the persistent efforts of his Hindu queen, his tolerance measured by the length to which he can go in order to ease the lives of his Hindu subjects.

Is it merely Jodha’s enduring love for the emperor, articulated in the sacrificing devotion of a familiarly modern Hindu ideal of womanhood, that brings about his transformation? While the director avows that Jodha-Akbar should be seen primarily as a love story, rather than a reconstruction of historical facts, the film contains an unsettling subtext: that her religion is better than his – a point underscored through an episode where a severely wounded Akbar hovers between life and death, as both Jodha, and Akbar’s mother, Hamida Banu, offer fervent prayers for his recovery. Although Hamida Banu’s namaz produces no effect, Jodha’s tearful entreaty to the image of Krishna, which she had earlier fought to have in her living quarters, is followed by a burst of sunlight, and an immediate improvement in Akbar’s condition.

Similarly, it is due to Jodha’s influence that Akbar is moved to waive the pilgrimage tax for Hindus, who then laud him as the greatest emperor. In these ways the film references the widely held position arising from the colonial era, that there is something intrinsically tolerant about Hinduism. The multiplicity of Hindu deities and the diversity of sectarian traditions are often cited in order to demonstrate Hindu inclusiveness. According to this view, Hindus accepted a host of foreign invaders, including Muslims, in the process tempering the bigotry that is tacitly understood to be associated with Islam.

 

The film’s suggestion that Akbar’s open-mindedness finds its ultimate origin in his encounters with Hindus, and as such is foreign to Muslims, is only tempered by the depiction of the emperor’s proclivities for Sufism. Here the film pits Akbar’s affinity with Sufi religious practice, understood as the ‘liberal’, ‘pluralistic’ aspect of Islam, against what is seen to be the less attractive face of Islamic ‘orthodoxy’. Thus Akbar is given to worship at the Ajmer shrines and, in a bizarre dance sequence accompanying the qawwali Khwaja Mere Khwaja, is even depicted performing the whirling dances unique to the Mevlevi Sufi order of Anatolia. It would be pedantic to observe that the Mevleviye were not in the orbit of the sixteenth century Mughal court, as their appearance in the film is meant to evoke a kind of transcendental spirituality rather than any specific historical moment.

Such an anachronism conjures up the performances for tourists staged regularly under the auspices of the Turkish Ministry of Culture, referencing a current, global construction of ‘acceptable’ forms of Islamic piety. These free-wheeling dancers, surrounding the young, lithe, bejewelled Akbar, contrast sharply with the shrill, bearded ulama whose attire and appearance, a cross between that of Iranian akhunds and Deobandi maulvis, serve as visual cues to conjure up the images of ‘fanatical’ Muslims, so often encountered in today’s print and electronic media.

 

Akbar’s devotion to the Chishti Sufi order during the early years of his reign and his attempts to wrest religious authority from the ulama, are indeed well documented. However, the emperor was not unique in patronizing Sufis, as the intersection between Muslim rulers and Sufi saints can be seen not only in the affiliation of Timur, the progenitor of the Mughal dynasty with Khwaja Ahrar of Samarqand, but also with the ‘temple-razing’ Aurangzeb’s affiliation with a host of mystics. Akbar’s connection with the Chishti order, and his differences with the ulama derive their meaning not from a nascent form of religious tolerance, but through a construction of Mughal kingship which made the emperor a locus of spiritual authority. In Jodha-Akbar, however, the portrayal of these themes rests on a reductive dichotomy between the legalistic defenders of orthodoxy and the Sufi-leaning Akbar.

These stereotypes, which suggest a strict, authoritarian and ultimately truly authentic Islam, put Jodha-Akbar in dialogue with a host of similar cultural productions which evoke the notion that though Sufism may be open to peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims, ‘real’ Islam is ultimately something to hold in suspicion. This assumption builds on the positions of British Orientalists in India who deployed the category ‘Sufism’ to describe certain phenomena which they thought to be an aberration from normative Islam.4 These days it has become common to contrast Sufi practices, viewed as peaceful, inclusive, and independent of state power, with modern interpretations of Islam as a political ideology. Indeed some Muslims are turning to Sufi traditions to consciously reclaim Islam from ‘fundamentalists’.

 

Recent years in India have also seen a growing interest in Sufism among the upper classes in the urban metropoles, with festivals of Sufi music and related cultural events enjoying great popularity. The rich intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic traditions of Islamic mysticism, and the inclusive religious atmosphere of several Sufi shrines have a great deal to offer. However, to de-link Sufism from ‘orthodox Islam’ and privilege the former, only flattens the complexities of Muslim histories in the subcontinent, where Sufis and ulama were often not mutually exclusive categories and where Sufism for centuries provided the main institutional framework for Islam in India. Moreover, it shuts the door to a serious engagement with other forms of Muslim piety. While qawwali, or modern redactions of Sufi poetry are legitimised through their circulation among the intelligentsia, symbols of Muslim piety and identity such as the Quran and the mosque remain unexamined areas of suspicion in the public imagination.

 

To return to Jodha-Akbar, in portraying the dichotomy between the heavily Sanskritised Hindi of the Rajputs and the Urdu idiom of the Mughals, the film speaks to the deep connections of modern language politics with religious identities in present day South Asia, with the ‘official’ Doordarshan Hindi and PTV Urdu symbolically framing the two opposing sides of the spectrum, while the registers of everyday speech lie at shifting stages in between.5 The multilingual competencies shared by many inhabitants of the subcontinent during the Mughal era would be difficult to render on screen.

The sheer range of languages entering the sphere of Akbar’s court and its patronage – including Arabic, Persian, Chaghatay Turkish, Sanskrit, and various forms of Hindavi – was unconstrained by the religious boundaries of the present day. For instance, the prominent nobleman, Abd al-Rahim ‘Khan-i Khanan’, patronised literary works in both Persian and Sanskrit, and himself composed poetry in Braj Bhasha. While Persian already had a presence in India, Akbar’s pragmatic establishment of Persian as the official language of the administration laid the foundation for its growing status as a cosmopolitan medium, used by both Muslim and Hindus, having somewhat the role of the English language today.

 

Akbar himself supervised a vast translation project of rendering Indic works, such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, into Persian. These translations were produced during dialogues between scholars of Persian and the pandits who assisted them. Akbar’s move to translate Indic literary works addressed various facets of his imperial project: his policy to have Persian as the official language, his aim of reducing sectarian divisiveness, and the cult of personality which he constructed around himself. The Ramayana translation served the latter aim well, for it incorporated a play on the identification of Rama, the ideal king for all times, with Akbar. This Mughal appropriation of the Rama story served as a counterweight to the numerous regional versions of the epic produced after the advent of Muslim rule in India, which identified Rama’s rakshasa adversaries with Muslims.6

For liberal, secular Indians, there is a great temptation to nostalgically seek out in such instances of cross-fertilisation and linguistic diversity, a utopian pre-colonial harmony between Muslims and Hindus. When faced with the claims of Hindutva historiography, this is hardly a surprising move. Thus, for instance, a Persian rendition of the Ramayana becomes a newsworthy, commemorative symbol to be memorialised in an activist pamphlet, the website of a manuscript library, or a news article as a reminder of the inter-religious cooperation that we could strive to recover. On the one hand, it is imperative to bring to attention these often ignored instances of cultural engagement and more fluid religious identities. On the other, we run the risk of subsuming them into a sort of rosy nationalism projected onto the past, without developing strategies to confront the phenomena of religious conflict as well.

 

Our current educational infrastructure is not adequately equipped to explore such thorny issues. In the absence of departments in ‘History of Religions’ or ‘Religious Studies’,7 a field which facilitates the interdisciplinary, critical investigation of religious traditions from a non-sectarian perspective, discussions pertaining to Islam tend to take place within the rubric of history. One problematic area in this regard is the conceptual framework of history pedagogy itself, which classifies the chronological scope of ‘medieval’ Indian history as primarily (though not exclusively) synonymous with what colonial historians classified as the ‘Mahometan’ period.8

‘Medieval’ is itself a category drawn from a European teleology leading from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and culminating in the progress of Modernity, according to which colonized peoples could only enjoy such progress through the civilizing mission of European colonialism. Such a classification and all of its assumptions of the medieval as violent and primitive still couches the way in which Islam is configured within the public realm today.9 As such, Muslims in India are ‘othered’ through this pairing with the term ‘medieval’, a category which increasingly has come to be associated as the essential domain of Islam itself. This is evident in the pejorative applications of the term ‘medieval’ to current Muslim practices, and modern Muslim political movements.

 

While access to these histories of our shared pasts is mediated through the texts and material objects which have survived from earlier periods, our entry into these sources is frequently negotiated through the choices made by colonial Orientalists, albeit sometimes in tandem with the Indian scholars who collaborated with them in interpreting and translating texts. A well-known example is the History of India As Told by Its Own Historians, a collection of translated extracts from an array of Indo-Persian chronicles, compiled after the 1857 mutiny by Henry Miers Eliot and John Dowson, and arranged around their argument that the Muslim rulers of India were despotic, and unfit to govern. A century and a half later, this is still a much-cited source on pre-colonial India for those who do not read Persian.

Several other legacies of the colonial encounter frequently reappear today. The common perception that Islamic law, for instance, is an immutable set of precepts, rather than a dynamic and evolving tradition informed by local contexts, is reflected through the media as an unquestioned truism, and is further reinforced in the Muslim Personal Law, which originated as part of the colonial enterprise.

While the materials with which to rethink such claims abound there are many impediments to accessing them.10 Take for instance, the approximately one hundred thousand manuscripts in the Perso-Arabic script housed in Indian libraries, not counting those in private collections.11 These include manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, Avadhi, Braj Bhasa, and other forms of Hindavi, Urdu and Punjabi. This script and these languages alone do not cover the full range of written expression pertinent to the lives of Muslims in the subcontinent through the ages. Countless numbers of these texts escaped the attention of Orientalists or previous generations of scholars, and thus languish today as manuscripts hidden away in repositories across the country. It is from studying manuscript cultures that we discover, for instance, that contrary to the popular stereotype, Aurangzeb’s reign witnessed a flourishing of Persian writing among Hindus living on the peripheries of the circles of power and patronage, many of whom composed texts on religious topics which they dedicated to him.

 

To read and analyse such works, however, requires skills which are not commonly cultivated in the curricula of most Indian universities. While the humanities in general are marginalised within our educational system, in terms of prestige the study of languages such as Persian and Arabic ranks near the bottom. As it stands, the current curriculum forces students into narrow fields, without allowing, say, a student of history to also learn Arabic, or one who majors in mathematics to have a subfield in Persian literature.

When such linguistic competencies do exist, for the most part they tend to fall among religious lines. Few Hindu students study Urdu or Persian today in contrast to the not so distant past. Even rarer than proficiency in Persian and Arabic are the multilingual skills of many of our forebears, combinations of say Braj Bhasa and Persian, or Arabic and Sanskrit, which are crucial to understanding the complex religious fabric of our pasts and present. Until the humanities are imbued with greater value, such competencies will necessarily remain the specialised domain of a tiny few.

 

These challenges prevailing in our educational and cultural institutions aside, the tricky problem of free speech in India imposes limits on the liberty of expression needed to expand the epistemic boundaries of our discourse about Islam. Free speech is limited by the Constitution as well as violently threatened from time to time by government and non-governmental actors, the latter often composed of (but not confined to) Hindutva activists. While Article 19 of the Constitution, section 1(a), guarantees all citizens the right to freedom of speech and expression, section 2 imposes several restrictions on this liberty, all of which can be loosely interpreted.

These limits include ‘the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.’ Moreover, Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises offences against religion undertaken with ‘deliberate and malicious intention’, assigns to religion and religious sentiments a special space over and above other identities, values and moral positions.

While on the one hand these restrictions might provide a sort of symbolic protection for minorities, they have also served as a form of censorship imposed on the discussion of important and controversial topics. Attacks in recent years on academics, artists and writers, and the institutions with which some of them have been associated, have become a commonplace. These are often motivated by manufactured outrage over books which are not even read by those who cite them as cause for their violent acts, or who call for them to be banned. The furore in Maharashtra in 2004 over James Laine’s book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, and its subsequent banning, abetted by a Congress government and timed to coincide with the general elections, is just one example. Political complicity in cultural censorship extends as well to control over school curricula, the recent rewriting of NCERT history textbooks by the BJP government being a case in point.

 

If we are to develop fresh vocabularies to talk about Islam in India, we need spaces for critical discussion which are independent of political interference and control. This would involve rethinking pedagogy and curricula to allow for student questioning and exploration, safeguarding academic autonomy and free expression. Intersecting with the issue of liberty of expression is the problem of who speaks for the Muslims of India. A commitment to free speech, while politically risky, would ultimately grant a platform to a more diverse spectrum of Muslim voices. It would also aid the creation of spaces in our educational institutions for inquiring into religious traditions and contextualizing the reified constructions of religious identities which are in currency today.

 

Footnotes:

1. Namrata Joshi, review of Jodha Akbar in Outlook India, 10 March 2008.

2. Contemporary Mughal chronicles do not refer to Akbar’s Rajput wife by her name, however, but use rather her title Maryam-i Zamani (literally the ‘Mary of the Age’).

3. See for instance Purushottam Nagesh Oak’s book, Who Says Akbar Was Great? Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2000.

4. While Muslims all over the world have long engaged in interior spiritual practices in affiliation with lineages of religious authorities, the category ‘Sufi’ was deployed more as an ethical label dependent on the context of the people using it. See Carl Ernst, ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Problematizing the Teaching of Sufism’, in Brannon Wheeler (ed.), Teaching Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.

5. Bollywood has of course remained the main public arena for the preservation of Urdu, post Partition.

6. Sheldon Pollock, ‘Ramayana and Political Imagination in India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 52, 1993, pp. 261-293, p. 287.

7. Exceptions include Punjabi University in Patiala, which has a Department of Religious Studies, and Jamia Millia University, which has recently started offering an MA in Comparative Religion.

8. See for instance, Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India: Hindu and Mahometan Periods, John Murray, London, 1866.

9. For an analysis of the negative connotations of the term ‘medieval’, see Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘Getting Medieval: History and the Torture Memos’, Perspectives on History (September 2008) online edition.

10. By focusing on texts here I do not mean to discount the manifold lived and oral traditions of Muslims today.

11. Omar Khalidi, A Guide to Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu Manuscript Libraries in India, http://www.lib.umich.edu/area/MELA Notes/MELANotes7576/KhalidiGuide. pdf, p. 1.

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