This is a good read, so Durango, rvikz, queer, Matsui et al enjoy :k:
My Paki bros, you enjoy it too :jhanda:
May 25, 2003
Review: History: The Mughal Throneby Abraham Eraly
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
The lost empire
THE MUGHAL THRONE The Saga of India’s Great Emperors
by Abraham Eraly
Weidenfeld £20 pp544
At the heart of the history of northern India, a theme that runs through 1,000 years of invasions and rebirths, lies the story of the confrontation of two great religions: Hinduism and Islam. **Out of the meeting of these two very different cultures, there developed a unique fusion that reached its climax in the civilisation of the great Mughals, a period in the 16th and 17th centuries that was arguably India’s greatest golden age. **
Almost every aspect of the daily life and culture of northern India came to reflect that fusion. In music, the qawwali, the love song of the Indian Sufi holy man, mixed the indigenous musical systems of India with the new ideas brought from Persia and Central Asia; likewise, the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the classical Indian vina to form the sitar. The architecture of the Mughals — most famously in the great Taj Mahal — reconciled the styles of the Hindus with those of Islam to produce a fusion more beautiful than either of the parent traditions.
From the beginning, it was the Indian Sufi Muslim mystics who acted as a bridge be-tween the two worlds. In the peaceful and tolerant atmosphere of the Mughal empire, as Mughals and Hindus began to intermarry and the dialogue between the rival religions intensified, the two cultures fused into one and flowered into a civilisation of breathtaking beauty.
The Mughal Throne is an excellent introduction to this period and the sometimes forgotten moment of multicultural assimilation it represented. Published eight years ago in India, it is a superbly readable narrative that Weidenfeld, happily, has now made available in Britain for the first time.
As Eraly shows, it was at Fatehpur Sikri that the Mughal empire approached its zenith. The town was built by Akbar, who succeeded in extending Mughal rule over most of the subcontinent and whose whole approach to life was deeply imbued with the Sufi ideas of his time. Akbar’s reign, between 1556 and 1605, succeeded as much through tact as war, by making Mughal rule acceptable to the empire’s overwhelmingly non-Muslim population. He married a succession of Hindu wives, promoted Hindus at all levels of the administration, ended the tax levied only on non-Muslims, and ordered the translation of the Sanskrit classics into Persian. **In an age when ignorant commentators regularly talk of clashes of civilisations, and Samuel Huntington lectures us on what he believes to be the aggressive nature of Islam, it is good to be reminded that, for much of the past 500 years, Indian Muslim rulers presided over an empire whose traditions of religious tolerance and freedom had no counterpart in the West until the end of the 19th century. **
Akbar decided to build Fatehpur Sikri in honour of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti. What is so extraordinary is that the architectural style of the town was an almost perfect expression of Sufi ideals. Akbar believed that all existence is one, a manifestation of the underlying divine reality, and that love of God and one’s brethren was more important than narrow religious ritual. In Fatehpur Sikri, he translated those ideas into stone by combining Hindu and Muslim elements in a single fusion style.
Sixty years later, Prince Dara Shukoh, great-grandson of Akbar (and son of Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal), had the Gita translated into Persian, and wrote a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam that emphasised the common source of their divine revelations. His book was called The Mingling of Two Oceans. In it, he speculated that the essential nature of Islam was identical to that of Hinduism and, following the Koranic injunction that no land had been left without prophetic guidance, he became convinced that the Hindu Vedas and the Upanishads constituted the mysterious concealed scriptures mentioned in the Koran.
In the end, Dara Shukoh’s speculations proved too radical for even the Muslim élite of Mughal Delhi. The empire divided in two, with one faction supporting Dara, the other his orthodox and puritanical brother Aurangzeb. Of the two, Dara may have been cleverer and more popular, but Aurangzeb was the finer general. When the two met in battle, Dara’s huge army was crushed by Aurangzeb’s small force.
Under Aurangzeb, Hindus were persecuted and their temples destroyed, and Eraly shows how such bigotry lost the Mughals the loyalty of their Hindu subjects and brought down an empire that had been created by pluralism and diversity. Yet the orthodox reaction could only arrest, not end, the long process of Hindu-Muslim assimilation. The composite culture was far too deeply ingrained. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, presided over a small but extraordinary kingdom, where Hindus and Muslims attended the same festivals, visited the same shrines, and wore the same clothes.
Only in the mid-20th century, as pluralism was gradually replaced by savage polarisation, was that great tapestry of complexity and beauty, built up over 1,000 years, almost irretrievably pulled apart. Today, the tomb of Sheik Salim Chishti is still visited by Hindu and Muslim alike, just as it was in the days of Akbar. But just as Akbar’s religious ideas were attacked by the orthodox Muslim fundamentalists of his day, so a new generation of Hindu religious bigots is, at this moment, trying to bring to an end that extraordinary syncretism.
If, in Britain, history is sometimes perceived as the preserve of the specialist in the ivory tower, in India it is a very different story. In a region where even the most basic facts of history are disputed by rival parties, historians find themselves on the political front line. Under the current Indian nationalist government, the rewriting of school textbooks has begun in earnest, and the Mughals are now depicted as little more than a stream of violent and barbarous invaders. In an environment where every fact is malleable and every interpretation politicised, the need for clear, unbiased accounts of history is all the greater, and it is hard to imagine anyone succeeding more gracefully in producing a balanced overview than Abraham Eraly. The Mughal Throne provides an excellent introduction to the first six Mughal emperors. From Babur, born in 1483, to Aurangzeb, who died in 1707, Eraly gives a richly readable account of one of the most crucial and misrepresented periods of Indian history. He writes well — with an occasionally pompous and Indo-Dickensian style — but with a lovely eye for detail and colour.
Where Weidenfeld has badly let Eraly down is in the matter of illustrations: not a single photograph accompanies his text, a particular sadness when one thinks of the astonishing feast of Mughal miniatures, jewellery and garden tombs that could have been drawn on. Few cultures have been so richly visual as the Mughals’ and it seems astonishingly mean of Weidenfeld to publish this fabulous narrative without a single illustration.
Available at the Books Direct price of £16 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585
In loving memory
The Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan’s celebrated monument to his wife, which combines opulence and austerity, is one of the most recognisable buildings in the world — although originally, it was to have had a twin. A replica made from black marble was planned for the opposite shore of the river Yamuna, but was abandoned because of the civil war between Shah Jahan’s sons.
