Days of yore

A prayer for my grandchildren has climbed quickly up the list of the most-read posts. Very gratifying. So also the fact that two old posts have made their way back into that list after a long time: What sort of person am I? and 3 Idiots. The first one pleases me because it was very hard to write – just try it yourself to find out how hard – and writing it down gave me a profound satisfaction; the second one because a) it was written a whole decade ago and is still finding readers, perhaps even among those who were far too young to read and understand it then, b) so many things I said then are still so starkly relevant now. The one thing that I deeply regret is that though at that time my readers were so much fewer, the comments were so much greater in number! Are today’s readers far lazier, or clueless, or simply couldn’t be bothered, because Pubg entertains them better?

My daughter has made it possible for me to read several recent and very well written history books in succession – Dara Shukoh, the emperor that never was, by Supriya Gandhi, The First Firangis by Jonathan Gil Harris, one of Urbi’s professors at Ashoka University, and a new biography of Akbar the Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty.  This comes hard on the heels of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy that brilliantly recreates Henry VIII’s England. How pathetic are people who don’t enjoy and profit from reading history indeed (if only to learn how humankind has fought, conquered and survived epidemics with great elan so many times before!). How sad that at least two generations have grown up in this country not knowing this, believing that reading stuff like history is ‘useless’, in the sense that it doesn’t lead to ‘paying’ careers (meaning, typically, becoming cybercoolies, or at best government doctors at vast expense through the private college route), and may even be a serious ‘obstacle’ on that road! I cannot deal in detail with all those books here, but just a few words, in the hope that I can get a few of my readers interested…

The First Firangis should ideally be read as a companion volume to William Dalrymple’s White Mughals. While the latter book is about Englishmen who started living like Indian grandees (focusing on the career of one particular man, James Kirkpatrick), the former is about foreigners – not even necessarily white skinned – who arrived in India when the Mughal empire was at the zenith of wealth, power and glory, meaning the times of Akbar to Shah Jahan (and even the Bahmani kingdoms and Vijaynagar in the south were thriving) and spent extraordinarily colourful lives here, all sorts of people from just travellers to beggars and sadhus, medicine men and courtiers, artists to military commanders, who often even intermarried with the natives and left behind hordes of multi-lingual progeny, vastly increasing the rich complexity of the cultural maelstrom that is India. It not only gives the lie to any claim about the importance of preserving some sort of ethnic purity but makes the very idea of ‘purity’ in this country laughable and dangerous: the ‘purer’ a population is, the poorer it is, culturally speaking: that is a historical truism for all time, added to recent discoveries in genetics. But of course, it makes India uniquely difficult to govern. Which is why a ruler like Akbar will remain a guide and beacon light for would-be rulers forever.

I take pride in saying I knew a lot about the first and greatest Great Mughal already, yet Mukhoty’s book kept me absorbed from the first page to the last. I found out so many things about the man still, such as how maniacally he cultivated the strong man image (riding and taming bull elephants in musth, for God’s sake), how great a patron of art he was, how, despite his lifelong and very violent military campaigns, compassion remained a very strong inner driving force with him, how hard he tried to ameliorate women’s condition and raise their social status against tremendous resistance, how deeply he loved his friends, what a prodigious memory he had as a student of so many different subjects despite remaining functionally illiterate all his life (I wish I had found one such ‘illiterate’ pupil in all my life as a teacher), how deeply he had absorbed what he considered the best tenets from so many religions in the light of his own reason and conscience, how deeply he wished to be the paternal ruler of all Hindustan… the writer manages to paint a glorious picture of the man despite quoting at great length from harsh contemporary critics like the scholar Badauni (it is a measure of Akbar’s greatness that even such men enjoyed not only his tolerance but his munificent patronage!) I can pay no greater tribute to Mukhoty’s writing than to say that I mourned over the chapter that describes the great badshah’s death as though I had suffered a tremendous personal loss. ‘Here was a Caesar. When comes such another?’

There could have just perhaps been another, or at least a pale shadow. That is what Dara Shukoh confirms. He was unusually gentle for a Mughal prince, a truly learned and eclectic scholar of many languages, histories and cultures, he strove lifelong to create, through his own efforts, a genuine Indo-Islamic culture (getting the Upanishads translated into Persian, as Akbar had done with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata), and continued the large-hearted, welcoming tolerance of men of all faiths and racial backgrounds into his court. But he did not have his great grandfather’s boundless energy, steely resolve, ability to judge men and earth-girdling vision nor foresight, he was arraigned against Aurangzeb, for whom he was no match as a strategist or a warrior, and, above all, he was unlucky, so he was put to the sword, and, though the writer asserts that he was ‘neither secular nor liberal’ in the current sense, India’s history, and maybe the whole world’s history (if the Mughal empire had not crumbled so early, and the British did not take over so completely so soon) would have been very different if he had managed to become emperor and carried on the inclusive legacy of the greatest of the Mughals: this biography definitely confirms that long-held and very popular belief among scholars and laymen alike.

What a magnificent epoch the late 16th-17th century was in India, and what horrors followed in the next! We are still to recover from the latter economically and politically, but the even sadder fact is that culturally, we don’t even seem to realize the need to restore the best, most invigorating, most creative features of that glorious age so that bharat abaar jogot shobhay sreshtho ashon lobey. How far can mere blind and parochial chauvinism take us?