The Mubarak Manzil in Agra, a historic monument of the Mughal-era, has been largely destroyed even after directions by the State Archaeological Department for its protection. Built during the reign of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mubarak Manzil held a significant historical value. Important Mughal figures such as Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb and Shuja resided in the structure, as per an article by The Observer Post. The original structure was later transformed into a customs house and salt office under British rule and was known as Tara Niwas by the year 1902. Aurangzeb commissioned the construction of Mubarak Manzil post his victory at the battle of Samugarh.

A builder allegedly in collusion with the local authorities carried out the demolition recently. There was no action taken by the authorities even after several complaints had been filed by the locals of the area. More than 70% of the structure has been demolished.

Through a tweet, on X, the Scottish Historian William Dalrymple has heavily criticised the demolition of Mubarak Manzil in Agra. He expressed how India, a culturally rich and vast country is destroying its own appeal as a tourist destination as per reports by Deccan Herald and Times of India.

This recent demolition of the Mubarak Manzil points to a much larger issue, the desperate attempts of charged religious-nationalist politics to disconnect Indian Muslims from India’s past, and thereby denying them a legitimate place in India’s future. In order to have a “Hindu Rashtra (nation), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his supporters whose ideological parent is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), are not only attempting to establish Hindu dominance in the present, but also systematically rewriting the history of India. As per an interview by The Guardian Professor Imtiaz Ahmed, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University said “By destroying the symbols of a community you destroy the community itself.” 

By labelling Muslims as foreign invaders who destroyed a thriving Hindu civilization, all Mughal-era constructions have been designated as sites of desecration and have attracted unwarranted conflicts due to extremist Hindu Propaganda. History and archaeology have become the battlegrounds of the RSS to form and shape a nation of a monolithic Hindu identity.

It is imperative to understand here that the architecture that has been built by Muslim monarchs in India, is our collective South-Asian heritage. The Sultanate or Mughal architecture is not found anywhere in the world but on the Indian subcontinent as per Hindustan Times. However, this rich cultural heritage has been caught in the middle of a conflict where a political party is seeking the supremacy of one identity by systematic erasure of the other by display of violence and destruction.

The deliberate destruction of Muslim past is not limited merely to cultural heritage sites. In 2023, more than 300 Muslim homes were destroyed in the city of Nuh, Haryana. The century-old Azizia Madrasa in Bihar was burned down along with 4500 rare books in its library, by an angry mob chanting “Jai Shree Ram” in the year 2023. As per a report published by The Guardian, more than 230 unique Islamic sites were destroyed in Gujarat alone during the 2002 riots, which is similar to destruction of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas and the destruction of Tibetan Monasteries by the Red Guard. Further, the names of places connected to Islamic past are being changed. For instance, Allahabad was renamed as Prayagraj in the year 2018 as an attempt to detach it from its Muslim origins. The railway station Deen Dayal Upadhyay junction was previously known as Mughal Sarai. Feroz Shah Kotla stadium in Delhi was renamed as Arun Jaitley Stadium in the year 2019. In an article by Maktoobmedia, it has been mentioned that certain Hindu nationalists have claimed that Qutub Minar was previously a “Vishnu Pillar”. Even the Taj Mahal has not been spared and there have been demands to rename it as “Tejo Mahalaya” and it be declared as a Shiva Temple.

Another point at issue is how Aurangzeb Alamgir, India’s most targeted and controversial Muslim ruler has been brought back to life by the country’s far right regime and organisations associated with the same majoritarian ideology, as a “savage oppressor”, from whose taint, India needs to be purified. Aurangzeb is central to the quest of rectifying the past of Hindus in India and to right the perceived wrongs. It has been claimed by Richard Eaton, professor at the University of Arizona, who is also known for being an authority on pre-modern India, that the temples destroyed by Aurangzeb were slightly more than a dozen as opposed to the claim that thousands of temples were destroyed by him, and the same was done for political reasons and not entirely religious as per an article of AP News. (Also refer to the original work, Temple Destruction and Muslim States in Medieval India. However, Aurangzeb has been weaponized to promote extremist right wing cultural propaganda.

Hindu nationalists have attempted to erase Aurangzeb’s presence from the public sphere. After protests from BJP leaders, New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road was renamed in the year 2015. Following that, school textbooks in certain state governments were rewritten to deemphasize Aurangzeb. In May, 2022, the mayor of Northern Agra city went on to describe Aurangzeb as a “terrorist” and said that his traces should be erased from all public places as per AP News. The Mubarak Manzil, which was constructed by Aurangzeb, can be said to have been destroyed as a result of this historical revisionism and active efforts to erase all traces of Aurangzeb from Indian history.

A parallel can be drawn between India and Israel here. India is very closely following the steps taken by Israel to systematically erase the Palestinian culture, legacy and history from the landscape. India seems to be taking inspiration by how more than 530 Palestinian villages have been destroyed in Israel after the Nakba of 1948 as per an article by Aljazeera. The Ben Gurion Airport in Israel has been built on the remains of the ground from where Palestinian communities were forced out of their homes, just as on the debris of the historic Babri Masjid mosque, a new temple of Hindu god Ram has been raised.

India takes more inspiration from Israel by removing chapters of Islamic history from school textbooks much like the way there is no mention of Palestinian or even acknowledgment of their existence as a separate community in Israeli museums.

Gregory Stanton, the President of the Genocide Watch, who had predicted the Rawandan Genocide in 1989, has warned that India is following a similar path as per Aljazeera.

Taking into perspective the current state of communal disparity in India, a question is raised, that by these violent acts of destroying and burning libraries, demolishing mosques and cultural heritage sites, forgetting old city names, what part of our identity as India are we losing and what monolithic nation are we building?

Related:

How India’s Hindu Nationalists Are Weaponizing History Against Muslims

How India’s demolition drive is alienating its Muslim population

Politics of ruin: Why Modi wants to demolish India’s mosques

India’s Mosques Are Under Siege. The Destruction of the Babri Masjid Explains Why

The post The targeted vandalisation caused by revisionist history: Agra’s Mubarak Manzil appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Commenting on the changes in the history books of NCERT, noted historian Irfan Habib said that the BJP government is trying unsuccessfully to communalise education. In a special conversation with NewsClick, Habib said that after the changes, the image of India will be tarnished in front of the world.

Courtesy: Newsclick

The post Mughals Won’t Disappear From History Just Because Sangh Wishes so: Irfan Habib appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Mughal court became a site of cultural production in the early modern world. It was a curious confluence of “Islamicate” and “Indic” cultures. Like any other dynasty with the desire to rule, the Mughals, contrary to the present state-sponsored communal (mis)understanding, did not rupture the existing socio-cultural fabric of the land. Besides introducing Timurid and Mongoloid traditions, they appropriated existing courtly norms and iconographies to legitimise their reign. Take, for instance, the ritual of Jharokha-darshan introduced by Akbar, which stems from the Hindu practice of beholding the deity in the sanctum sanctorum. Another instance of Mughal multiculturalism would be the presence of Jain and Brahmin intellectuals and the production of Sanskrit texts in the court. According to the historian Audrey Truschke, Sanskrit offered the Mughals “a particularly potent way to imagine power and conceptualise themselves as righteous rulers”. The illustrations in a Persian translation of the Ramayana, commissioned by Abdul Rahim Khan-i Khana (completed in 1598 C.E.), now called the Freer Ramayana, depicts the characters of the great epic in settings akin to Fatehpur Sikri. In the same spirit, the Mughals celebrated festivals like Holi and Diwali with pomp and splendour, besides Naurouz and Eid. In fact, Naurouz too is a pre-Islamic festival of Persia, which was retained by the new Islamic rulers after the decline of the Sasanian Empire, with the Arab conquest in 651C.E.

Sparklers in Words: Diwali in Literary Texts

…during the Dewali… the ignorant ones amongst Muslims, particularly the women, perform the ceremonies. They celebrate it like their own Id and send presents to their daughters and sisters…. They colour their pots… fill them with red rice and send them as presents. They attach much important and weight to this season…

These are the words of Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi (1564-1624C.E.), a Hanafi jurist of the 16th century. This particular tract shows that Diwali was also celebrated by the common Muslim, outside the court. Jean de Thévenot, the French polyglot and traveller who visited India in the 17th century, chronicled the aristocratic celebration of Diwali. “The Gentiles being great lovers at Play of Dice, there is much Gaming, during the five Festival days… a vast deal of Money lost… and many People ruined.” According to historian R. Nath, Abu’l Fazl recorded the unique practice of lighting the aakaash diya, or the lamp of the sky using the Surajkrant, in Ain-e-Akbari:

At noon of the day when the sun entered the 19th degree of Aries, and the heat was the maximum, the (royal) servants exposed a round piece of shining stone (Surajkrant) to the sun’s rays. A piece of cotton was then held near it, which caught fire from the heat. This celestial fire was preserved in a vessel called Agingir (fire-pot) and committed to the care of an officer.

Besides the regular camphor candles (kufuri-shama) on candlesticks of gold and silver to illuminate the palace, the aakaash diya was lit atop a 40 yards high pole, fuelled by maunds of binaula, or cotton-seed oil.

The Divine Light

mage courtesy The Chester Beatty Library

The divine light is an integral part of the Mughal imperial ideology. In paintings depicting the emperor, the halo, borrowed from Christian iconography, surrounded the face of the sovereign from Jahangir’s time. Catherine Asher highlights the importance of the light imagery in Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama, in which Akbar is described as an emanation of God’s light. The canopy was believed to set apart the radiance of the legitimate, divinely-guided sovereign from that of the sun. In comparison to erstwhile Islamic rulers, who were called zill-e-ilahi, or the shadow of God on earth, Akbar was loftier — he was also the farr-i-izadi, or the light of God, and thus the perfect man, insaan-i kamil. In paintings, the sovereign’s divine effulgence is shown in contrast to the nefarious darkness of the masses. As John F. Richards points out, the light imagery is traced back to the Timurid-Mongol notions of kingship, in particular, to the myth of Aalnquwa, a Mughal (Mongol) princess “from whose forehead shone the lights of theosophy” (anwar khuda shinasi) and the “divine secrets” (asrar’ ilahi).” Legend has it that she got impregnated by a ray of light while sleeping in her tent, and the triplet born from this divine fertilisation was called nairun, or light-produced. According to Abu’l Fazl, this divine light travelled down from one generation to the next, and was manifested in the persona of Akbar. Though the divine light was not related to Diwali, it shows the imperium’s obsession with the light imagery, as a sacred source of legitimation.

Ignitions in the Gunpowder Empire
Although the Mughal state is no longer seen as a “military patronage state”, gunpowder and the artillery played a significant role in the making of the empire, which has been described as a “patchwork quilt”. Stephen P. Blake writes that Dussehra and Diwali marked the beginning of the campaigning season, and a review of the horses and elephants of the imperial and noble households commenced the celebrations under Akbar and Jahangir. A similar military ritual, symbolic of the ruler’s power, was seen in the Mahanavami celebrations in the Vijayanagara Empire. Perhaps somewhere, there’s a connect between Mughal militarism and the celebration of Diwali. The gunpowder technology was invented in China, and the Mongols used it in warfare. Although Kaushik Roy opines that the Arthashastra bears reference to saltpetre, or agnichurna as the powder that creates fire, the technology got diffused to different parts of Eurasia with Mongol invasions, and the Chagatai Turks brought firearms to India. Tarikh-e-Ferishta, written in between 1606-07 C.E, mentions that the envoy of Hulegu Khan was welcomed with a pyrotechnics display on his arrival in Delhi in 1258 C.E. A blinding display of pyrotechnics or aatish bazi marked the Shab-i Barat and Diwali celebrations in Mughal India. In Calcutta, people still refer to firecrackers as “aatosh-baaji”, a Bengalised version of the original Persian term.

In paintings like The Marriage Procession of Dara Shikoh (circa 1750 C.E.), currently in the National Museum, we see a series of firecrackers dazzling the dark sky. In another painting from the late 18th century by Hashim II, we see court ladies dressed in brocaded fineries, burning sparklers and watching fireworks from a riverside terrace-pavilion, with two gilded candelabra adding to the brightness of the celebration. The celebrations in Shahjahanabad escalated with the coming of Muhammad Shah ‘Rangile’. The gilded Rang-Mahal, with its enamelled and pietra dura artistry, became the venue for Diwali celebrations. His predecessors performed rituals borrowed from the Indic repertoire, like tula-daan or jashn-e-wazan, in which the king was weighed against materials and these materials were distributed amongst the poor. The tradition of chappan thal, which perhaps has its roots in the contemporaneous Krishna Bhakti practices of Braj, became a part of the Mughal cuisine. Sweets like ghevar, peda, jalebi, phirni, kheel and falooda were characteristic of the Diwali air. The Mughal dastarkhwan was laden with the choicest of dishes, just like in Naurouz. The Mughal Diwali or Jashn-e-Charaghan was extensively recorded in court muraqqas under the rule of Rangile. Fanoos or lanterns were released, and chiraghs or lamps illuminated the urban core of Shahjahanabad.

Diwali would begin with a ritual royal bath for which water was brought from seven holy wells, and the emperor was given an aromatic bath while pundits and maulanas chanted sacred hymns. Then the emperor, dressed in soft muslin, would visit the harem to meet his wives and concubines. In the court, his courtiers, according to their status in the administrative hierarchy, were supposed to present a symbolic tribute to the emperor, called nazrana. Though the celebrations suffered a setback during Nadir Shah’s invasion in 1739 C.E., the celebrations continued till the reign of Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’, notwithstanding the acute financial constraint and the shrinking resources of the empire. With the emergence of the regional or provincial Mughal courts, such as those in Awadh and Murshidabad,  in the 18th century, Jashn-e Charaghan became an integral part of these courts as well, in the wee days of colonialism. With the aroma of honey and almond wafting through the heavy air of decadence, the kufuri-shama casting silhouettes of a glorious past, and Nazeer Akbarabadi’s nazms resonating with a sense of coexistence, the last Mughal Diwalis were a curious confluence of tears and laughter.

Somok Roy studies history at Ramjas College, University of Delhi.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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Unceasingly playing a prominent role in the history of the Indian subcontinent for the past 800 years, arguably there is no city on earth with more historic mosques than Delhi. Even before the Mughals, many rulers built their capitals here and beautified them with architectural masterpieces. The remains of which lie scattered about the city… at times barely.

Like the other structures, the mosques of the pre-Mughal era lie forlorn and in benign neglect with little to no upkeep. Here are some of the most prominent examples of desolate pre-Mughal mosques.

Kalu Sarai Mosque

This structure is over 600-years-old and was built by Juna Shah Maqbool Telangani, Wazir of Feroz Shah Tughlaq. It has allegedly been illegally occupied by squatters for years now. Some of its domes have collapsed, and the family residing in it, is making modifications and accretions to the heritage structure as it pleases. They may just even pull down the whole structure to build a purpose-built home in its place. Visibly, no one is stopping them from doing so.

Coordinates: 28.54206618021871, 77.20296988312094

Photo Credit: Varun Shiv Kapur/Wikimedia Commons

Khirki Mosque

The grandest of all seven mosques built by Maqbool Telangani is the Khirki Masjid. It is said to be the largest roofed mosque in the world when it was built in the 14^th century. It’s such a prominent monument in the locality that the area adjoining the mosque is named after it – Khirki Village. Those living nearby have continued to expand their dwellings at the expense of the mosque’s land, and the authorities merely watch in despair. As opposed to the main function that Telangani built it for, the Khirki Mosque now serves as a home for anti-socials and young couples away from the prying eyes of their respective families. Outside the mosque, the signboard has been vandalised and every mention of “mosque” on it has been haphazardly whitened out.

Coordinates: 28.531473013355, 77.21959412585349

Photo Credit: Das/Wikimedia Commons

Tughlaqabad Fort Mosque

Within the ruined fort of Tughlaqabad, built in 1321-23 AD by the founder of the Tughlaq Dynasty, Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, lies this unique mosque that has no parallel in the country. The mosque has no domes; it has a sloping roof instead. Surprisingly, it still survives despite many of the original structures of the fort lost in the mists of time.  

Coordinates: 28.511897475476182, 77.26318898959298

Photo Credit: Harpal Singh/Google Maps

Chauburji mosque

Most of Delhi’s pre-Mughal mosques like the Chauburji Mosque date back to the era of the Feroz Shah Tughlaq who was a prolific builder. Chauburji literally means four towers; it could be a reference to the mosque’s original four domes. During the Partition, the mosque was vandalised and illegally occupied. The encroachers have long gone yet the mosque remains deserted.

Coordinates: 28.681534332426722, 77.21524666513318

Photo Credit: Das/Wikimedia Commons

Darwesh Shah Mosque

Located within the confines of the Gulmohar Park, this Lodhi era mosque has been left to the vagaries of nature that threaten to erode its physical fabric.  

Coordinates: 28.554755240067838, 77.21141685798423

Photo Credit: Bhagwat Singh Bisht/Google Maps

Begumpur Mosque

Surrounded by arched cloisters, this sprawling mosque is believed to be the main congregation mosque of the city of Jahanpanah, which was founded by Muhammad bin Tughlaq. It is said that the architecture of the Begumpur mosque impressed Tamerlane (Taimur) so much, that he had a mosque similar to it called the Bibi-Khanym Mosque built in his capital, Samarkand. He is even believed to have taken masons from the city to build it.

Unlike Samarkand’s Bibi-Khanym Mosque that has been craftily restored, the Begumpur Mosque has been left in neglect and apathy, with many of its domes having collapsed and a sizeable portion of its land encroached. It finds itself in a horrid state despite the fact that it has been under the purview of the Archeological Society of India (ASI) since 1928.

Coordinates: 28.539183657172043, 77.20603881183953

Photo Credit: Varun Shiv Kapur/Wikimedia Commons

Madhi Masjid

Rarely visited, save for the odd history aficionado, the Lodhi era mosque sees plasters that cover its sturdy stone walls fall with each passing day. Though abandoned, the place is a photographer’s delight owing to its breathtakingly beautiful qibla wall that is punctuated with alcoves.

Coordinates: 28.514843672265442, 77.18460464040885

Photo Credit: Pranav/Wikimedia Commons

Mubarak Shah Mosque

Located a stone’s throw away from the tomb of Mubarak Shah, the mosque stands wedged between residential buildings and shops. It is one of the rare mosques built by the elusive Sayyids that still survives. On a visit to it, expect to see buffalos roaming in its courtyard and empty beer bottles strewn about its prayer chamber. The loss of its physical fabric is so great that it may soon become unsalvageable.

Coordinates: 28.57242762610085, 77.22222691140468

Photo Credit: Eric V/Google Maps

*Mohammed Ahmed is an independent journalist and avid history aficionado.

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Shah Jahan’s reign saw the Mughal Empire at its zenith. He was a great builder who built the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid of Delhi. To this day, these iconic buildings represent the soul of India. The Independence Day is celebrated at the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal symbolizes India in the same way as pyramids symbolize Egypt. Shah Jahan also laid the foundation of Shahjahanabad, one of seven Delhis. Ibne Insha, the Urdu humourist, once jokingly remarked that if Shah Jahan had not been an Emperor, he would have been a “raj mistri” (a mason)! Such was Shah Jahan’s zeal for buildings. His favorite daughter Jahanara founded the Chandani Chowk in the heart of Delhi. Shah Jahan was also a foodie. He relished exotic meals. Recently, I came across a cook book Nuskha-e-Shah Jahani (Recipes of the Shah Jahan age), penned by the food historian Salma Hussain. It tells us that Shah Jahan had mutton gulab jamuns at his dastarkhwan (dining table). Mutton gulab jamuns? I’ll try some day.

And Shah Jahan, like Dasrath, had four sons. Dasrath had Ram, Lakshman, Bharat and Shatrughan. Shah Jahan had Dara, Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad. The eldest son Ram was Dasrath’s favorite. And the eldest son Dara Shikoh was Shah Jahan’s favorite. Dara Shikoh was a man of letters. A great philosopher well ahead of his times. Very similar in temperament to his great grandfather Akbar. He was a Sufi at heart who believed in Sarv Dharm Sambhaav (equality of all religions). A brand ambassador of Hindustan’s Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb, the Gandhi of the Mughal Era!

When Shah Jahan fell ill, swords were unsheathed to capture the Peacock Throne. The coveted Takht-e-Taus of Hindustan. As the eldest son, Dara Shikoh was the obvious successor to Shah Jahan. The crown prince (yuvraj, as they say in Hindi). But Aurangzeb was a cunning guy. A “chatur lomdi” of Panchtantra stories. When the succession battles ensued, Dara Shikoh had an upper hand. But the Battle of Samugarh changed it all.

A small mistake made by Dara at the battle cost him the throne of Hindustan and his life. Dara Shikoh rode an elephant as the Indian kings often did. Aurangzeb’s army stood no chance. But then Dara Shikoh dismounted the royal elephant for no specific reason. And his soldiers got confused. Seeing an empty “howdah” (the seat on elephant back), they panicked. Thinking that Dara Shikoh  was killed, his soldiers ran helter skelter. A delighted Aurangzeb seized the moment and turned the tables. Dara was captured. Like a wild animal, the Mughal  shahzada was caged. He was tortured and then beheaded at Aurangzeb’s orders. (Before Hindu fanatics jump on this incident as an example of Muslims’ cruelty, let me remind the Ram Bhakts that Pramod Mahajan was murdered by his younger brother Praveen Mahajan!). Thus, Dara Shikoh’s momentary lapse changed the course of history. “Lamhon  ne  khata ki, sadiyon ne  saza  paayi” (moments made errors and centuries suffered.)

Aurangzeb ascended the Mughal throne and predictably proved to be an unmitigated disaster. To rule a big country, the ruler needs a big heart. Aurangzeb was a Sunni bigot full of hatred towards Hindus, Sikhs and Shias. Rebellions against his rule became the order of the day. He put the Sikh Guru Tegh  Bahadur to death but couldn’t crush the Sikh resistance. Marathas rebelled under Shivaji, called Mountain Rat by Aurangzeb. Jats revolted near Agra and Mathura. And then Aurangzeb shifted to Deccan to bring Shia kingdoms to knees. But Golconda and Bijapur proved hard nuts to crack. It is said that Spanish ulcer destroyed Napoleon. The Deccan ulcer caused Aurangzeb’s doom. The old Emperor, exhausted by ceaseless battles, breathed his last in Deccan and the fall of Mughals began.

In 1739, Nadir Shah raided Delhi and took with him the Peacock Throne to Persia. The Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah Rangeela hid the priceless Kohinoor diamond inside his turban. When Nadir Shah came to know about it, he exchanged his turban with the Mughal Emperor as a token of friendship!

Curtains finally came down on the Mughal Empire after the 1857 Mutiny. The last Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was arrested at Humayun’s Tomb. The Emperor was exiled to Rangoon, Burma where he died in prison. A heart broken man who couldn’t get “do gaz zameen” in his motherland for burial.

The New India has almost forgotten Dara Shikoh. The only Dara, Indians remember is Dara Singh, the wrestler. But Dara Shikoh was a tragic hero. A scholar-warrior who fought for truth, justice and communal harmony. The Aligarh Muslim University has done well to include his biography in the syllabus. Aligarh is known for “tala ” and “taaleem” (locks and education). I hope that Dara Shikoh’s glorious life will open some locks in the closed minds of communal Hindustanis!

(Mr. Amitabh Kumar Das is a 1994 batch IPS Officer. His views are personal.)

First published on http://www.themorningchronicle.in/

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It’s a breezy, spring morning in Delhi, the sparkling sunlight streaming through a speckless, blue sky is rather Pahari. Professor Ebba Koch, sitting across the table, under a bougainvillaea blossom, wraps her head to keep the sun at bay- “never thought I would be in purdah”, she laughs. The Mughals, her dramatis personae, did construct tents to provide shade from the scorching tropical sun. This, too, was expressed as a political metaphor- the tent separated the light of the sun from the radiance of the emperor, the carrier of divine light, or Farr-i izadi, invoking notions of illumined kingship from early Indic, Persian and Timurid traditions. Notwithstanding the sun, what followed was a conversation on the political iconography of the Mughals, the nature of early modernity, and Professor Koch’s work in South Asia and Europe, spanning over four decades. A fascination for fluid histories took over a previously structured framework for an interview, and what we have is a stream-of-consciousness conversation, held together by the very nature of early modernity, a connectedness that defies delimiting frames. We parted while discussing Professor Koch’s photographic archive, painstakingly put together over the years, her harvest from the field. I wonder what personal memories and histories each photograph, each negative might whisper if heard attentively, transgressing temporal and geographical boundaries, as in her work, reading the contemporary in the early modern, making the imperial intimate. As Professor Koch asked reflectively, in her essay, “The Mughal emperor as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a Think Tank for Allegory”(2010), I ask with wonder- “how much more multilayered could an image be?”

Somok Roy: Professor Koch, let’s begin with a discussion on early modernity. With the recent shifts in historiography, early modernity has received scholarly attention. As an art historian working with visual sources, how do you reconstruct the early modern, in terms of the methods that you use?

Ebba Koch: Firstly, in India, the Mughals are not put under the category of early modern, they are thought to be medieval, and I have a problem with that. But we could talk about my methodology, to begin with. I studied European art history in Vienna. The Viennese school of art history and architecture focuses on the analysis of forms, identification of the style of a particular artist, and they question where a particular form comes from. The major thrust is on formal and stylistic issues. I was asked to do a paper on equestrian monuments in the Austrian Baroque and thought the formal analysis was somewhat limited. I turned to Germany, where in the 60s and 70s, Critical Theory and Habermas’s work had introduced a different approach to art, and the economic conditions in which art was produced, and its political context were being studied. I found this very appropriate, and these are the two methodologies that I have been working with when I came to India. However, I was asking myself whether it was justified or legitimate to approach Indian art with methods that have developed in the European context. Eventually, I used a syncretistic approach, on one hand, the analysis of style, on the other, to look at the context and ask about the meaning- why was a particular work of art created, what was it meant to express, and here I was particularly interested in the political context because the ‘use’ of art was a major concern of the patrons. I read Mughal sources, with the help of Dr Yunus Jaffery of Zakir Hussain College. Not much was coming from Mughal sources in terms of theorising art, compared to the literary genre of theories on art and architecture that were produced in early India¹, hence I had to go forward with my own method.

SR: Your magnum opus, Shah Jahan and Orpheus: The Pietre Dure Decoration and the Programme of the Throne in the Hall of Public Audiences at the Red Fort of Delhi was published in 1988, much before “connected histories” became a fashionable thing to do. Sanjay Subrahmanyam begins his explorations in connected history in the 1990s.

EK: Yes, but this has to do with the fact that I came as a European art historian to study the Mughals. My formal training in Vienna had nothing to do with Islam or the cultures of the Ottomans and Safavids. Both Islam and India were new for me, which I really had to work on. Initially, I was interested in and fascinated by the European elements in Mughal art, and tried to answer the question of why would the Mughals use European forms. This is how I came to connected histories. At that time I used the word “influences”, which in today’s time is wrong. So my first paper has its origin in my friendship with a Jesuit scholar who invited me to read a paper on the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first Jesuit Mission to the court of Akbar- “The Influence of the Jesuit Missions on Symbolic Representations of the Mughal Emperors”, which was the first in a series. As a European art historian, I first saw the European quotations and motifs in Mughal art, in a similar way, the Mughals looked at the cultures and traditions of the European courts for newfound expressions for things that were already familiar to them. This again relates to the question of micro and macro history, but I would like to describe myself as a micro-historian. I’m interested in a detailed study, but I also like to look at linkages, I like comparisons of two factors which one knows reasonably well. Often macro or global historians end up talking about things superficially, perhaps because one relies a lot on secondary literature. For instance, millenarianism has become a catchword. I don’t think the Mughals were so impacted by thinking about the end of time.

SR: This brings us to Azfar Moin’s The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (2012) on millenarian sovereignty, in which he vividly draws upon art historical materials, especially in The Painted Miracles of the Saint Emperor (2014).

EK: He engages with the German scholar Kantorowicz’s work on the king’s two bodies. Moin operates with the notion of sacred kingship. The way the Mughals described it was perhaps a kingship sanctioned by God, as it was represented in different media. What I find really valuable in Azfar Moin’s work is his engagement with the irrational side of the Mughals. He looks at magic and other such practices, which too was part of early modernity, and gives a complex picture.

SR: Going back to micro-history, I’m reminded of Carlo Ginzburg, who was in Delhi a couple of weeks before. In a conversation, he said that he tries to write about the methodology so that the reading public has a sense of the inferences, of the practice of “doing” history. In your recent essay, “Palaces, Gardens and Property Rights under Shah Jahan: Architecture as a Window into Mughal Legal Custom and Practice” (2019) which employs architecture as a source to study the history of legality and inheritance, you begin on an anecdotal note, discussing your survey, documentation and analysis of Shah Jahan’s palaces and formal gardens. It perhaps helps the reader to contextualise the work of the historian.

EK: What I try to do is to make the reader trace my process of recognition, to take them along in this journey. Talking about methodology, like what I did with my paper on equestrian monuments, I structure my approach based on the material I’m investigating. You cannot come with a preconceived set of ideas. Methodology evolves from the material in the archives. For instance, we don’t have texts that directly tell us about ownership rights in Mughal India. A picture began to form in my mind when I was reading the histories of Shah Jahan with Dr Jaffrey, who was a big help, and I would make a note when a palace of a mansabdar was mentioned. When I put this material together, I realised that the palaces, havelis and gardens would not remain with the mansabdar on an inheritable basis. Constantly things were changing in terms of land ownership, and this comes out when you put isolated material together, in a context. Again, I have restricted myself to a specific social category, that of the highest ranking officers or the Khassan. I think the historical material should be the basis of method, to avoid stereotypical thinking and generalisations. In the 1990s, at a conference of the College Art Association, in the United States of America, I remember almost every panel was trying to fit into the frame of either postcolonialism or deconstruction. I, however, did stylistic analysis put into the specific context of the artwork.

You were asking about visual material as a source of early modern history. The Mughals expressed certain things only in art, and visual sources make a different statement, as I have shown for the Padshahnama. The empire’s whole relation to Europe was expressed visually. Thomas Roe spent more than two years in the court of Jahangir, and not for once does Jahangir mention him in his memoirs. But the interest in European art is expressed in other media- painting, architecture, applied arts, and obviously now in India, it’s not politically correct to follow Mughal interests! Interactions with other cultures in the Roman Empire have led to famous discussions amongst scholars, for instance, the French anthropologist Paul Veyne’s work on Palmyra, which was a Greco-Roman province in Syria. He says that the people in Palmyra adopted certain foreign practices and usages, in order to update themselves, but not to lose sight of their historical identity. Similarly, the Mughals looked for newer forms of expression. Their interest in naturalism drew from the arts of the European courts. Abu’l Fazl writes that art was also used to express abstract ideas and in this case the idea of rulership.

SR: We could think of visual expressions of the divine light in the form of a halo or nimbus in the works produced in Jahangir’s atelier.

EK: Yes, the halo was used in Buddhist art, from ancient times, but the Mughal depiction was different. The Mughals looked at the materials that the Jesuits brought with great interest but did not convert to Christianity, but used it for their own representation as sacred kings, as rulers sanctioned by the divine. Another thing that we might reflect upon is that after the construction of a self-image, how far does a ruler believe in it, in terms of practice. Take, for instance, Jahangir’s chain of justice. It is a royal gesture going back to the Achaemenid times. It could have been a public performance, a spectacle, a mere allegory!

That Jahangir was using Achaemenid symbols in the seventeenth century, reminds me of the French scholar Bruno Latour, who said that we have never been modern². This could also answer your question on early modernity! Something that Azfar Moin also points out, the other side of the Mughals, as we have discussed before. Again, in the early modern, allegory is constructed with reference to science, for instance, Jahangir’s globes. Scientific instruments, globes and cartographies are depicted in paintings of the emperor. This could seem like a contradiction, given we have magic practices on the other hand, but that was the complex nature of early modernity.

I was also thinking of Jahangir’s image as an Indian king. Akbar had undoubtedly started this, but it was Jahangir who expressed many of his ideas in the visual arts. It is remarkable to think of how he expressed through allegories the idea of justice, carved out elephants in keeping with the notions of Indian kingship, and to depict himself clad in a yellow dhoti like a Rajput ruler. The Mughals would take from any source that served their purpose, that was their form of universalism.

SR: So we could call it transcultural.

EK: Yes, very much so. In his letter to Shah Abbas, Akbar wrote that he accepts all religions and cultures that give him the right to rule above all. Tolerance was also seen as an instrument to rule.

SR: Coming to your extensive work in the field, how did it all begin?

EK: When I came to India and looked for plans of Mughal buildings, it was very hard to find them. The British had done surveys and the Archaeological survey of India continued to map sites and monuments after Independence, but hardly a few on Mughal monuments were published. I started going around with a measuring tape, with the architect Richard A. Barraud, much like a nineteenth-century colonial surveyor! We would measure buildings, prepare ground plans, make drawings, and at that time there was no internet. The architect would make blueprints and send them to me, which I would correct and send him back. It was a very challenging task. Many of the palaces of Shah Jahan were being looked at for the first time. We also did a survey of the Agra Fort. The survey and documentation material of Shah Jahan’s palaces and gardens is weighing heavily on my shoulders.

SR: Can we expect Shah Jahan’s palaces and gardens as the next publication then?

EK: Inshallah! One had to cross over a hundred years of art history for this. On one hand to do the basic documentation in the field, and then to ask the finer questions that the discipline has developed.

SR: There has been a concerted attempt on part of the current ruling party in India and its allies to vilify the Mughals, and very viciously and simplistically equate the Mughals with Muslims at large and tell them that this is not their homeland. The question of the homeland, however, was important in a fluid early modern world characterised by frontiers and contact zones. What is often invoked for wrong purposes, based on intentional misreadings is Babur’s distaste for things Indian as recorded in the Baburnama. How would you look at the question of the homeland as it appeared in the Mughal imagination, and the recurring references to Timur as a source of legitimacy in the Mughal world?

EK: One thing that Babur complaints about is the Hindustan of the Lodhis, and not of earlier Hindu rulers, something that is often made out of his writings. Obviously for Babur India wasn’t a place of preference. He wanted to build an empire in the footsteps of his ancestral provinces in Central Asia. The situation was fraught with the contesting claims of the Uzbeks. But he came to Kabul and then India, quite literally in the footsteps of Timur, carrying the Zafarnamah of Sharaf ad-Din Yazdi. Akbar focused less on Timur as a source of legitimacy, but later it was Shah Jahan who commissioned a genealogical dynastic portrait to document his lineage from Timur and undertook the Balkh and Badakhshan campaigns, to come as close as possible to him. References were also being made to Timur’s legacy in Samarkand, particularly in architecture, by adopting elements like the use of minarets in the Taj Mahal and other Shah Jahani structures. The Ottomans also did it, but there was a renewed interest in the Mughal world. Jahangir too sent finances for the upkeep of Timur’s tomb, Gur-i Amir, in Samarkand.

SR: Shah Jahan even goes on to use the Timurid epithet Sahib Qiran³

EK: Yes, but even the Safavids and Ottomans used it. But Shah Jahan used it in a very ostentatious way. His usage was very formalised, structured, and demonstrative.

SR: Thinking of formalism and demonstration, I’m reminded of your work on Mughal gardens, and especially the integration and use of natural formations like grottoes and terraces to further political ideas. Could you talk about such parallels of political landscaping in other cultures?

EK: In China, scholars left inscriptions in interesting natural settings, but it was not so much of an imperial practice. In early India, Ashoka, of course, commissioned inscriptions on rock faces. The Achaemenids and Sassanians also used rocks and other natural formations to inscribe kingship allegories. In early modern Europe, gardening was prevalent, not just out of love for nature but to demonstrate both economic status and rulership, for instance, the gardens of the Medicis of Florence. The idea was to leave an imprint in the natural world. The inscriptions that the Mughals commissioned were often genealogical in nature.

SR: Another interesting theme that you have written about is the erotic in imperial art. I’m reminded of your reading of the Mughal hunt as a romantic dialogue between the predatory and the prey, who behold each other. Could you touch upon the writing of the history of emotions with reference to this image?

EK: Let’s look at the image of Shah Jahan as portrayed in contemporary sources. The European travellers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century read love into the story of Taj Mahal, influenced by the idea of romantic love in eighteenth-century Europe. Qazvini too wrote about Shah Jahan’s grief on Mumtaz’s death, and tells us that the court was clad in white, the colour of mourning, and that there could be no public celebrations on Wednesdays, the day of her death. Grief, and indeed emotions, become the subjects of history. There’s a shift in the writing of Shah Jahan’s history- suddenly tarikh stops and masnawi begins, and once the story of Mumtaz’s death is narrated, it goes back to the genre of tarikh. It is through a reading of these accounts that one feels that Shah Jahan could also be described in the light of the story of Layla and Majnun.

SR: In that sense, the style of writing official histories was being experimented with.

EK: Yes, but also the content- what constituted history. Architecture too becomes a subject of history. What Jahangir does for natural history, in terms of minutiae observations, for instance, his description of the breeding habits of the saras cranes, Shah Jahan does for his architecture. Scientific descriptions of architecture and consistent usage of terms is a remarkable feature of Shah Jahan’s chronicles. On consistent use of terms, Stephan Popp’s recent work on the practices of gift-giving shows how pishkash, pay-andaz, etc. were used in a more formalised manner in Shah Jahan’s histories.

SR: Coming back to the Mughal hunt, how did it occur to you that the Persianate allegory of the moth being attracted to the flame could be read in the relationship between the prey and the predator?

EK: I studied the hunting palaces of the Mughals, of which Shah Jahan built some. I read Persian poetry with Dr Yunus Jafferey during this time. The Mughals, as hunters, were aware that in India hunting was slightly problematic because it went against the principle of ahimsa. The Rajputs did hunt, but the Mughal hunt was quite different. In “primitive societies” hunting rituals were performed in which the relationship between the hunter and the hunted was expressed. The Mughals chose to depict the prey as the one craving to be hunted, and since this was expressed in poetic terms in which the predator became the lover and prey the beloved, the moth and the candle imagery was used.

SR: Do we have records that tell us about the traditions of apprenticeship in the imperial atelier?

EK: There were family lineages, for example, Abu’l Hasan was the son of Aqa Riza, and Manohar the son of Basawan. Painters did learn from their fathers and elder brothers. Manuscripts were produced and illustrated in the ateliers. Akbar looked into the work of his painters, so did Jahangir in an even more engaged manner, and Shah Jahan. Qazvini writes about it, but Shah Jahan’s official historian Lahori doesn’t. There’s a history of close interactions between the ruler and his painters. Jahangir claimed to recognise the work of each painter in his memoirs and prided himself as a connoisseur. Coming to the institution of the kitabkhaneh, it was run by a closely-knit group of people involved in the art of the book.

SR: In terms of Shah Jahan’s architectural projects, can we think of the histories of labour and work?

EK: I would believe that there’s been some work on this in Aligarh. But nobody really thought of the people who were involved in making the buildings, they were always associated with the patron. Shah Jahan wasn’t very keen on recording the names of his architects. Calligraphers, however, were allowed to sign their creations, for instance, the calligrapher of Taj Mahal, Amanat Khan. Calligraphy has a very high status in the arts of the Islamic world. Interestingly, the labourers were allowed to put mason marks on buildings.

SR: What are mason marks?

EK: Mason marks are figures, symbols and inscriptions on buildings, that were probably done for collecting payments. Similar marks at different places perhaps indicate the work of the same person.

SR: In the introduction to your new book, The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan (2019) you mention that the work hopes to engage students with the nature of early modernity. That makes me think of you as a teacher, and what teaching means to you.

EK: I mean students in the widest way, and we are all students. I really enjoy teaching, but at Vienna, people like to know about the Mughals, but very few work on them. But I have been engaging with students outside Vienna, like Yuthika Sharma, Chanchal Dadlani, Mehreen Chida-Razvi, and Afshan Bokhari. Afshan Bokhari’s research question looked at Jahanara’s self-representation as an imperial patron and her engagement with the sufis.

SR: In your recent essay, “Palaces, Gardens and Property Rights under Shah Jahan: Architecture as a Window into Mughal Legal Custom and Practice” you begin with a discussion of the existing literature on legal rights of inheritance in early modern South Asia which reviews the work of historians who function within methodological-scholastic frames, like Irfan Habib, Athar Ali, Ranajit Guha and John F. Richards, all stalwarts of their respective schools (here, “Aligarh”, Subaltern and “Cambridge”). You, on the other hand, don’t belong to any such school of history writing. How do you think of your methodology?

EK: I still see myself as an art historian trained in formal analysis, which works fairly well for the Padshahnama paintings and the audience halls of Shah Jahan. But I’m an art historian with a strong historical bent. I try to look at the historical context and its details, and perhaps bridge the gap between history and art history. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Azfar Moin did engage with art historical writings in their scholarship. Sunil Kumar and I engage with each other’s work, and perhaps the next generation of historians would look more closely at visual material.

SR: With the populism of the global right, Islamophobia is on the rise…

EK: All images of the Islamic world that the media circulates are extremely aggressive. A couple of years ago when I was attending a literary festival in Lahore, the motto was ‘books not bombs’, but no media house reported it globally. You are absolutely right, the Muslims are under siege, one could say.

SR: So at this juncture, doing the history of Islamicate cultures could imply a political intervention, much needed to bust the myths propagated by the media. What does “doing” Mughal history feel like?

EK: Doing Mughal history is a tight-rope walk. Neither the Islamist orthodoxy in Pakistan nor the saffron in India back the Mughals. On the contrary, Ottoman history in Turkey receives considerable institutional support. But for me, it’s an extremely rewarding exercise, and I wish to impart this to my students. I see the Mughals as models of political acceptance. Rajeev Kinra, in his work, “Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i Kull”(2013) points out that in 1641, Thomas Roe, in his speech to the English Parliament, held up the Mughal example of rulership that could improve the economic conditions of the realm, which is quite contrary to the idea of oriental despotism. His was a different voice on the Mughals, a different opinion altogether. 

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

The post Beyond Modernist Frames: Ebba Koch on the Mughal World appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Holi was celebrated as Id-e-Gulabi during the reign of Mughal emperors like Shahjahan and Akbar. In Mughal India, it was also called “Aab-e-Pashi” (shower of colourful flowers). It is mentioned in Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, the autobiography of Mughal Emperor Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir, that Jahangir used to hold Mehfil-e-Holi.

Even though literature, art and music around Holi is mainly relegated to the Radha and Krishna lore, Holi and Islam have had a historic relationship in India which set the foundation of the Indian composite culture. Holi has been an integral part of Islam for centuries.

Holi was celebrated as Id-e-Gulabi during the reign of Mughal emperors like Shahjahan and Akbar. In Mughal India, it was also called “Aab-e-Pashi” (shower of colourful flowers). It is mentioned in Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, the autobiography of Mughal Emperor Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir, that Jahangir used to hold Mehfil-e-Holi.

This syncretic culture in India was actually inspired by the holiest Sufi saint of Delhi, Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia and his disciple, Amir Khusrow. They revered colours, especially “pink” and “yellow”, as divine expressions in their beautiful Persian and Hindavi poetry. Therefore, Holi and Basant became an integral part of the Dargah celebrations. Hazrat Amir Khusrow wrote beautiful poems on the divine connotations of colours in his Hindavi poetry:

Kheluungii Holi, Khaaja ghar aaye,
Dhan dhan bhaag hamare sajni,
Khaaja aaye aangan mere

(I shall play Holi as Khaaja has come home, blessed is my fortune, o friend, as Khaaja has come to my courtyard).

The famous Punjabi Sufi mystic — Bulleh Shah — rendered beautiful poetic exhortations of divine love and union in the celebration of Holi. His words are more relevant today in the conflict-ridden and communally-vitiated atmosphere:

Hori Khelungi, Keh Bismillah.
Nam Nabi ki ratn chadi, boond padi Allah Allah.
Rang rangeeli ohi khilave, Jis seekhi ho Fanaa fi Allah.
“Alastu bi rabbikum” Pritam bole, Sab sakhiyan ne ghunghat khole.
Qaloo Bala,yun hi kar bole, “la ilaha illallah”

(I will play Holi beginning in the name of the Lord, saying Bismillah.
Cast like a gem in the name of the Prophet,
Each drop falls with the beat of Allah, Allah,
Only He may play with these colourful dyes,
Who has learnt to lose himself in Allah.
“Am I not your lord?” asked the lover,
And all maids lifted their veils,
Everyone said, “Yes!” and repeated)

Jahangir used to hold Mehfil-e-Holi in `Tuzk-e-Jahangiri’.  Many artists, specially Govardhan and Rasik, have shown Jahangir playing Holi with Noorjahan, his wife. Mohammed Shah Rangila would run around the palace, his wife chasing him with a ‘pichkari’.

The last Moghul Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, allowed his Hindu ministers to smear his forehead with gulal on Holi. He believed that his religion would not be affected by this social ritual. “Jam-e-Jahanuma”, an Urdu daily, said in 1844 that during the days of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, special arrangements were made for Holi festivities.

Here’s what he wrote about the festival:

Kyun mope maari rang ki pichkaari
dekh kunwarji du’ngi gaari

(Why have you drench me with colour?
O Kunwarji I will swear at you)

bhaaj saku’n main kaise moso bhaajo nahin jaat
thaa’ndi ab dekhu’n main baako kaun jo sun mukh aat

(I can’t run, I am unable to run
I am now standing here and want to see who can dare to colour me)

Bahut dinan mein haath lage ho kaise jaane deoon
Aaj mainphagwa ta sau Kanha faita pakad kar leoon.

(After many days have I caught you, how can I let you go
I will catch you by your cummerbund and play Holi with you)

At Dewa Sharif, the Dargah of Haji Waris Ali Shah in Uttar Pradesh, Holi is celebrated with as much enthusiasm as Id. Munshi Zakaullah in his book “Tarikh-e-Hindustani” rightly asked: “Who says Holi is a Hindu festival?”

“Mir Taqi Mir, who was in the court of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah wrote in praise of Jashne-e-Holi. Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, who considered himself to be the embodiment of Krishna, is known to have celebrated the festival with much fervour. One time when Holi and Muharram fell on the same day, he made sure both festivals found attention at different times of the day. While the morning in Lucknow was marked by colours of Holi, the evening was sombre with mourning in place. Shah wrote, More kanha jo aaye palat ke, ab ke hori main khelungi dat ke. This thumri not only found a place in Vrindavan and Varanasi in the centuries that followed but found much resonance after thumri exponent Shobha Gurtu recorded it. Bollywood also immortalised it in Sardari Begum,” The Indian Express reported.

With Mughal art, music and literature celebrating the many colours of Holi, it seems reductive for any religion to stake a claim on any festival of joy. As many artists point out, the colours are smeared to remove any trace of identity and erase all differences, so that all of us can be one.

The post The colourful history of Holi and Islam appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The historian in conversation with Somok Roy
 

Catherine B Asher | Image courtesy The Bodhi Tree and the Orchid

Catherine B. Asher is a stalwart in the field of South Asian art history. Her forte is  art, architecture and courtly cultures of early modern India, more specifically, of the Mughal period. Her seminal book Architecture of Mughal India, published as part of the “The New Cambridge History of India” series, is a rich, textured work.
 

Professor Asher’s study marks an important departure because she shifts the gaze from the imperial capital cities to the provinces. The realm of ‘sub-imperial’ patronage and court cultures open up a world of ideological programmes, political practices, and aesthetics, hitherto overshadowed by the domineering literature on the imperium at the centre. Her essay “Sub-Imperial Palaces: Power and Authority in Mughal India”,  focuses on Mun’im Khan Khan-i-Khanan’s architectural patronage in Jaunpur and Chunar, and Raja Man Singh’s fort of Rohtasgarh. She shows the “rapid spread of technology and imperial taste” in the easternmost hinterlands, early in Akbar’s reign — a provincial articulation of Mughal rule. Asher’s reading of structures devoid of the conventional iconography of power (which are, quite often, manifestations of “technology as the voice of authority”) is particularly interesting. Her “mapping of Hindu-Muslim identities” in pre-modern cities like Amber, Shahjahanabad, and Jaipur alludes to a complex pattern of architectural landscaping in terms of religious identities. These are determined not merely by the patronage of the ruler and the economic status of the believer community, but also by the recalibration of religious values and ritual practices to suit new urban contexts.

Asher’s new book, Delhi’s Qutb Complex: The Minar, Mosque and Mehrauli, traces the cultural history of Mehrauli over time, using a variety of sources. Here, she chronicles the after-life of monuments. Interestingly, she has also written on what could be called ‘cultures of seeing’. Her work on popular representations of the Taj Mahal as a metaphor for romantic love is fascinating, and becomes particularly relevant in these times of manufactured hate and state-sponsored communalism . In the following conversation with Professor Asher, we discuss her new book and the life of monuments in the age of right-wing totalitarianism, amongst other themes. What remains untranscribed, however, is Professor Asher’s passion for her work.

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Somok Roy (SR): Professor Asher, let’s begin with what has been happening in India in the last few years. You know about the rise of the Hindu Right, and its use of monuments to polarise identities. In one of your essays, you write about the Taj Mahal as a site drawing from the religious imagery of Jannat or the paradise in Islamic thought. It is markedly different from what is being projected by the communal forces in India. How do you see the changing interpretation of the Taj in independent India?
Catherine Asher (CA): I’ll start earlier. I think even in the seventeenth century it was clear to westerners that the Taj was an object of beauty. We have a Frenchman, Francois Bernier, who was embarrassed to say how beautiful Taj was and was hugely relieved when his colleague agreed with him that there was nothing as fine in Europe. So, I think from that moment on, you get this sort of tension between its extraordinary beauty and this notion that it is superior to many buildings in the West. I might add that in the seventeenth century the Taj was not a very important structure. It was important to the Mughals as a dynastic site. It’s the end of a tradition and not the beginning of one, and it wasn’t super accessible to the people because they could see it, but going into it wasn’t allowed for most. But by the late nineteenth century, Fergusson, who, as you know, was the first person to write the history of Indo-Islamic architecture, spent a lot of time quibbling over whether the Parthenon is a better building than the Taj. Well, once again, we see the East-West obsession. He argued that the Taj has more to do with design, ornamentation, and the Parthenon of course is a great intellectual thing. But I think that it sets the stage for people like E.B. Havell, who seem on surface like fairly open minded people. But if you start reading his writings you suddenly realize that he thinks that the only true India is ancient India. And therefore, because the Taj is so beautiful it has to be a part of that ancient Indian tradition. So he starts ignoring anything like the Humayun’s tomb, which could have been an influence, and argues that stupas like Borobudur, which the Mughals have not seen, are the basis of the Taj. This sounds very intellectual, but these ideas filter down in a broad way to finally reach people like P.N. Oak. It is at this point that the whole idea that the Taj has to be a Hindu temple, which is based on a misreading of the Mughal documents, comes up. You have to be very knowledgeable to really understand how flawed the arguments of Oak, and his American followers like Stephen Knapp, are. Right now, things have gone to the extreme, and the idea is to see Taj as foreign, and not Indian. The Hindu Right cannot ignore it; it’s like an elephant in the room.

SR: Interestingly, in your essay on the Taj, you talk about the complex as a social space, and how it was an attack on the people of Agra who were debarred from using it for leisure. How people, who would play cards in the garden after the Friday players, could no longer access the place once the new regulations were imposed…
 

 
CA: Yes, it was a social space. I remember people used to picnic there — you are too young to remember though — and play cards, and this shouldn’t be seen as a corruption of a sacred Islamic space. Dargah Quli Khan’s writing describes the Thursdays in Dargahs and the kinds of entertainment that people looked forward to in these places. A visit to Kotla Firuz Shah on a Thursday reminded me of Dargah Quli Khan. After offering rose petals and agarbattis to the Jinns, people lunch together, play cards and buy ice creams. Now because the Taj is so popular, rules have been imposed. Tim Edensor, an anthropologist, wrote a well known book called Tourists at the Taj, based on interviews conducted with both tourists and local Muslims. The residents reminisced that it used to be a lot of fun earlier, and now they can just sit and look. The locals wanted to use the mosque in the complex for namaz and the ASI was dead against it. Now they can use it for the Friday prayer, but not access the gardens to socialise. Probably without realising, the ASI is breaking cultural traditions.

SR: Something that I have been confused about is the implication of a living mosque or a living temple on the historical structure. As you said, the continuity of traditions is part of the site’s intangible cultural heritage. But, at the same time, the structures become vulnerable to human action. For instance, places of worship in Mehrauli, which date back to the early modern period, are still in use by the locals. How do historians and archaeologists see this problem?

CA: Well, I think Mehrauli is more complex than the way you put it. Mehrauli became a site for refugees after the Partition of 1947, so a lot of the former mosques are houses now, and families have been living there for a long time. Some of the monuments are theoretically under the protection of ASI. Those ones, by and large, are not large mosques. People might offer a prayer in them but I don’t think they have Friday congregations. I don’t think the ASI is very keen on making people move at this point, after 70 years. The Dargah of Bakhtiyar Kaki is a living shrine and integral to the social life of the local community. One of the problems of course is nature on monuments. Because of heavy monsoons in India, if you get something like a seed of a tree inside the crack of a building, it makes the entire building vulnerable. Many a times you come across a heap of bricks and realise that it was a mosque — not because anyone destroyed it willfully, but because nature took its course. So whether it is use or neglect, the scenario is layered.

SR: Again, this is something related to people and historic precincts, and is perhaps subjective. But I wonder how people in a post-colonial context, engage with pre-modern monuments in the city, which are dislocated in historical time. For instance, if you go to the Agrasen ki Baoli, all you see around are high rises that decontextualise, and perhaps recontextualise, the pre-Sultanate step-well.

Agrasen ki Bāoli, Delhi | Photograph by Somok Roy

The boards installed by the ASI provide scanty and inaccurate information. How do people relate to historical structures in such contexts?

CA: So, in the last two months that I was here, I have given a couple of lectures in Delhi and Aligarh, and one of the things that I realised after the lectures is that it is very difficult to get students to think about the impact of a structure in the early modern world, which didn’t have a vast number of permanently constructed structures. One needs to think about the larger landscape of which the structure was a part of, and its purpose. For instance, a baoli, as a water reservoir, was a public work. One needs to think where a public work would be located. So it’s an exercise in asking logical questions. As far as I can remember, the Agrasen ki baoli doesn’t have an inscription, so we don’t know if it was built by a temple. But its size and extent allude to its importance for public use. It’s a manner of being trained to think about visual cultures. It’s sad that not many universities in India have departments of visual cultures.

When I came here in the late 60s and lived here in the 80s, we could see the Qutb Minar from real distance. One needs to think what the presence of such a structure meant in the pre-modern landscape.

An image of Qutb Minar from 1870 | Image courtesy My thical India

SR: So that is possible by a stretch of the imagination…
CA: Well, more than imagination, as Irfan Habib would say, by thinking “scientifically”, or maybe systematically.

SR: Moving on to a contentious topic, I would like to think about temple desecrations in the early modern period, and their contemporary narratives. The Hindu Right invokes this past every other day to fume communal hatred. In university departments, you can discuss the politics behind the act of desecration, how the destruction of a site of political legitimacy facilitated conquest and the subsequent establishment of a new order in the pre-modern world, or how the use of spolia was motivated by material needs. Such discussions tend to use a vocabulary known to the social sciences and liberal arts academia. But how do we disseminate the history of temple desecration, or let’s say strike a historically informed conversation in the public domain?
CA: That is a great question, to which I wish I had an answer! I think the public has made up its mind, and it’s very difficult to get through people. One thing that I try to point out when I’m talking to an audience unfamiliar to historical ways of looking at things is that Hindu kings desecrated the temples built by their Hindu rivals, so this is not unique to Islam — not a new game in town! Try to get across that not every temple was desecrated, and I’m actually working on this now. I don’t know how to counter people who read (Sita Ram) Goel’s books. I was in Goa with my family, and my daughter somehow told the local family that I was a historian, so this gentleman came over, and he asked me if I knew that there was a story going around that the Taj was really a Hindu temple. I talked to him very calmly, without getting agitated, and he really listened. He didn’t scream or yell! Even though I’m not an Indian, it’s difficult for me to keep calm when such ahistorical claims are made. But I try to keep myself calm and collected, because you cannot be logical once you lose your temper. I’m not saying that this is the best way to counter what is being spread in the name of history, but I don’t know of better ways. There will come a time when people will get so sick of the communal tensions that they will look for something new. It’s pretty exhausting.

SR: Let’s hope for that! Recent scholarship has produced some fascinating research on the history of emotions. Could architecture be a source for the history of emotions, and if yes, how does one ‘read’ architecture in terms of human experiences?
CA: Oh yes. I got caught up as a part of a conference held in Germany, and it was a conference on the emotions in the monsoons. I took Babur’s and Jahangir’s writings on the seasons from various sources, and Jahangir’s pavilion in Agra, possibly originally established by Babur and later rebuilt by Jahangir. I looked at things he wrote in general, but occasionally on the garden pavilion during the monsoons, and looked at some paintings of the pavilion, and carefully figured out plants that would have flourished during the rains in seventeenth century India, what kind of smells they had, so on and so forth. The idea is to not restrict one’s self to a particular kind of source. In the second part of the project, I travelled to Deeg [a water palace near Bharatpur], to study the pavilion which was supposed to emulate the monsoons. There’s less literature, and you have to increasingly look for a variety of sources. For example, I refuse to teach courses just on architecture, and solely on Mughal architecture. You have to put things together. One needs to study Rajput material to understand Mughal culture, and also take into account the material culture of the Safavids and the Ottomans. Focusing on one medium is limiting, for instance the baoli surrounded by twentieth century buildings that we were talking about needs to be seen in its larger milieu to understand its significance. Coming back to your question, I knew in Germany, there was a lot of obsession with emotions and smells, but I didn’t know that similar work was going on in India — a very interesting publication on Akbar by Cynthia Talbot, for example, focuses on the conquest of Bundi and the experience of anger.

SR: The very idea of reconstructing the intangible through tangible sources is very intriguing…
CA: A former student of mine has worked on smells and sounds in Ottoman mosques, and I think she could probably do it because the Ottomans have so many records and chronicles. She could find out how many types of incense they were burning and how much money they spent for it because there’s detailed documentation of such practices in the form of manuscripts and other material.

SR: We started the conversation with a discussion on the changing interpretation of the Taj. I was wondering how did the Mughals see the Sultanate monuments, and what did their presence in the vicinity of the capital cities mean to them.
CA: We know that Babur entered Delhi and did a legitimising tour of the important monuments. As Ebba Koch pointed out, he visited the places that his ancestor Timur had visited, but he also visited the Sufi shrines of the Chishtiya silsila which Timur had not done. So, clearly he was aware of the role played by Sufis in the politics of Delhi. He paid homage at the tomb of Bahlul Lodhi, which is the Sheesh gumbad in the Lodhi gardens. Shahjahan goes on to build a hunting tower and pavilion that looks like the Qutb Minar. There are many flanges on Mughal buildings which sort of emulate the flanges of Qutb. Ebba Koch in her article called “Copies of the Qutb Minar” has given a list of examples. We know, for example, Aurangzeb repaired old mosques. Now if this includes the old Mughal ones, or even the ones predating the Mughal state, has to be seen. Since he was in the Deccan, it’s most likely that he repaired the Bijapur mosques built prior to the Mughal conquest. Jahangir added to the existing architecture of Mandu, which was the capital of the Malwa sultanate.

SR: Your new book, Delhi’s Qutb Complex: The Minar, Mosque and Mehrauli, evidently has an elaborate title, focusing on two structures and a locality. Why did you choose to focus on these three in the title?

CA: Well, I wanted to write something about an area that didn’t end with the early fourteenth century. I wanted to show that Mehrauli continued to be a very important place even when it changed, up to the present. It’s an interesting way to think about the multiple layers of history. There are a couple of things that I found interesting. For example, I had initially assumed that all sufis in Mehrauli belong to the Chishtiya order, but that is not true, there are other sects also.

Mehrauli became a major Afghan area starting in the early sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. There may be more surviving buildings scattered down there, than we know now. Bakhtiyar Kaki’s Dargah, as you know, became an important site for seeking legitimacy and asking for spiritual favours. Sikandar Lodhi, while repairing the Qutb, I’m very sure, put the topmost layer. Gandhi’s visit to the Dargah of Bakhtiyar Kaki in 1948, to put a halt to the communal violence in the aftermath of the Partition was historic. Mehrauli is a living settlement, and the people living in the vicinity of the historic structures are part of the history and memory of the area. I like to look at things over a period of time, taking broad chronological spans.

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Somok Roy studies history at Ramjas College, University of Delhi.

This article was first published on Indian Cultural Forum

The post Remembering the Mughals with Catherine B Asher appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image courtesy Tehelka
 
After the Maharashtra State Education Board excluded chapters about Muslim rulers in India and Mughals from its history textbooks for classes VII and IX last month, the Uttar Pradesh State Education Board has decided to follow suit by launching a special panel of historians who will “rewrite” history for the students of the state. Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma, who is also the Minister of Secondary and Higher Education in the BJP-led government of UP, recently claimed that Mughal leaders such as Babur and Aurungzeb “plundered” the nation, harassed people and lacked “Indian values”. Muslim rulers, such as Bahadur Shah Zafar, who served the interest of the nation and started the fight for Independence will, however, be honoured. He further claimed that, unlike these Muslim “invaders”, Indian icons such as Guru Teg Bahadur, Maharana Pratap, and Shivaji continue to remain under-represented in Indian history. Quite unsurprisingly, in one breath he says that we must learn to respect the legacy of “Lord Rama, Krishna, Guru Nanak… Shivaji.” We must study about them and not “invaders”, he advised the audience at the Safaigiri awards of a Delhi-based media house in Lucknow. Sharma’s words are strikingly reminiscent of former education minister of Rajasthan, Kalicharan Saraf’s claim that Akbar was an “outsider”, and it was Maharana Pratap, not Akbar, who won the Battle of Haldighati. Following on the heels of Saraf’s claim, the Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government in Rajasthan had proposed to “rewrite” university history textbooks and hail Maharana Pratap as the winner of the battle.

The Indian Cultural Forum spoke to Professor Irfan Habib regarding the BJP-led state government’s decision to rewrite history, and Professor Habib was categorical that it is not the business of a syllabus to demonstrate either “the glory” or the drawbacks of any historical period. A syllabus cannot be “revised to prove something. It should indicate the results of serious historical research.” Already in Haryana, he added, the setting of the syllabus reflects “the objective of communalising history”. In Maharashtra, history has been reduced to Maratha history, as if the history of Maharashtra can be understood without studying the history of India. Professor Habib also said that it is not just medieval history which is in danger of crude and ahistorical interpretation in the course of setting up a syllabus. When it comes to modern times, the BJP and its allies want to “supplant the figures of the national movement with their non-entities.”

The BJP-led state governments’ proposal to “rewrite” history in this manner is characteristic of historical negationism or denialism. Historian James M. McPherson defines historical negationism as “a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present.” As a collective, social resource, history plays a major role in shaping a nation and more importantly, a national identity. What the BJP government aims to do is consolidate a singular Hindu identity. In a bid to consolidate a singular Hindu identity, the BJP government demonises an enemy – India’s Muslim rulers and the Mughals – and aims to provide an illusion of victory where there is none. Disturbed by this recent trend of rewriting history, eminent historian Harbans Mukhia says that these claims are not related to history at all. In fact, they are related to the consolidation of a Hindu identity and a Hindu vote bank. This consolidation of a singular identity is what Hitler did, and what white supremacists continue to do even today. If Babur and Aurungzeb “plundered” the country, where did they carry all the loot to, he wonders. “Nadir Shah plundered India, the British plundered India, when did the Mughals plunder India?” he asks.

What overrides this is the transfer of guilt to the Muslims currently living in India. This may be seen as the “payback” logic – the descendants of a particular community have to pay for the deeds of their ancestors.

Notice how Dinesh Sharma inadvertently mythologises history by saying that ours is a legacy of Lord Rama, Krishna and Shivaji. This seamless merging of mythology and history is an old right wing ploy. The same logic was deployed to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in the year 1992. Writer and activist S P Udayakumar writes, “Having invoked a communal understanding of “national history,” established its validity by back-projecting it onto a popular story, and mobilised their adherents through insidious political manoeuvres, the Hindu communalists have set the stage for the actual enactment of their drama… The name of the drama is Ram Temple.” By invoking the myth of the Ram Temple, the right wing ideologues try to violently replace “national history” with an inviolable popular and public “memory” of the past.

Tired of BJP’s relentless negationism, historian Sunil Kumar says, “I think serious thinkers should not respond to asinine remarks by uneducated people like Sharma. He does not deserve any response.”
 

The writer is a member of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

The post After Maharashtra, UP Government Proposes to Remove the Mughals from History Textbooks appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
If we choose to forget Akbar, we also forget these paintings which accompanied translations of Valmiki’s Sankrit Ramayana into Persian:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

The post A Life Without Biryani, History Texts Without Mughuls : India 2017 appeared first on SabrangIndia.