Incarnations Read online

  Krishnadevaraya claims that the god Vishnu himself commanded that he compose a poem in Telugu:

  If you ask “Why Telugu?”

  It is because this is Telugu country and I am a Telugu king.

  Telugu is one of a kind.

  After speaking with all the kings that serve you, didn’t you realize—

  Amongst all the regional languages, Telugu is the best.

  That line, “Telugu is the best,” would, some 450 years later, become a rallying cry in the demand for the creation of independent India’s first linguistic state, Andhra Pradesh.

  Krishnadevaraya molded the language into his long poem the Amuktamalyada (“The Woman Who Gives a Garland Already Worn”), about kingship and the worldly pleasures that go with it, but also about the renunciatory urges and self-doubts of its author. The Amuktamalyada is full of hard-boiled advice about how to raise money to fight wars, how to control ambitious Brahmins, and how to put down rebellious forest and hill folk.

  If a neighbouring kingdom is headed for ruin,

  help him along.

  If he manages to recover, become his friend.

  If he’s your enemy, it’s the king beyond

  who can help against him.

  When they fight, your borders are safe.

  This practical wisdom was shaped by the tradition known as niti, reflections and prescriptions on rulership and statecraft that looked back to Kautilya’s Arthashastra—a tradition Krishnadevaraya would certainly have been aware of.

  But then the Amuktamalyada starts to get much more interesting as it moves away from the usual kingly self-presentation, the customary display of wisdom, cunning, and ruthlessness. We begin to hear doubts and questionings, the stirrings of a subjective voice. Scholars of Indian history and culture have generally viewed the arrival of colonial ideas as enabling the emergence of a modern Indian sensibility. In Shulman’s provocative assessment, Krishnadevaraya might be seen as part of an “early, authentic, indigenous modernism” taking shape in India, characterized by “a sense of introspection, of an individual who has many complex voices, new images of what love is all about, different configurations of the relations between men and women, new ideas of the state,” and much more.

  In the Amuktamalyada, Krishnadevaraya dramatizes debates about the nature of kingship, about who is the best king, about whether it is better to rule or to renounce. He’s having a debate with himself. He’s turning around in his mind the contradictions and ambivalences of royal life—the inner conflict of tradition:

  The king is non-violent, though he kills.

  Chaste, though he has women.

  Truthful, though he lies.

  Ever fasting, though he eats well.

  A hero, though he uses trickery.

  Rich, though he gives away.

  Kingship is rather strange.

  15

  MIRABAI

  I Go the Other Way

  1498–1557

  Across North India, the brief season of spring weather erupts with the festival of Holi, a no-holds-barred celebration in the villages and city streets. Water sprays everywhere, children throw colored powder at one another, and soggy T-shirts and kurtas abound. It’s a holiday some girls experience as an equalizing moment, a rare chance to play freely with boys. Other girls, though, view Holi warily: as a celebration that gives cover to sexual harassers. It’s a charged moment in the gender politics of Indian life, and in many communities the soundtrack to that experience is “Rang Barse,” as performed by the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan in a film from the 1980s.

  The lines of this famous song are suggestive, as are many Bollywood lyrics: they tell of a beautiful woman, damp and color-stained from playing Holi, besotted with a man who is not her husband. Men deceived in love—it’s a familiar trope in Hindi music. The only atypical thing about this song is the strong-willed woman it celebrates: she’s over five hundred years old. The film lyricist based it on a centuries-old song about Mirabai, a mystic poet of spiritual love and longing who lived during the sixteenth century and is today one of India’s most revered female saints.

  She was born Mira, into an elite and conservative warrior caste, the Rajputs of Rajasthan (the bai, a term of respect, came later). A flouter of conventions whose family tried to suppress her ecstatic religious longings, she broke with them and their Rajput social codes and took to the road, singing and mixing freely with people of all types. She later became a heroine of the bhakti tradition (see 10, Basava, and 12, Kabir), which encouraged devotion to one’s personal god, without the intermediaries of priests, rituals, or temples. In bhakti, all you need is a simple offering of your love: a flower, a fruit, a song. In her lifetime, Mira composed perhaps a hundred songs called bhajans, which were passed down through the centuries by oral tradition, as with Khusrau (11) and Kabir—and like their bodies of work, Mira’s expanded as her legend grew.

  According to Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago, there were few important women in early Indian religious history. “Women originally were not allowed to learn Sanskrit, were not supposed to speak Sanskrit. They’re quoted a lot in religious texts written by men, but a real woman’s voice is hard to find. Not impossible—there are women from time to time. But Mirabai is the first loud and clear woman’s voice.”

  Few women since have engaged the popular Indian imagination like Mirabai. Even Mohandas Gandhi (38) was a fan: her songs filled him with “rare joy.” “Mira sang because she could not help singing. Her songs well forth straight from her heart.” He celebrated his last birthday, in October 1947, listening to one of her songs, sung to him by the South Indian Carnatic singer M. S. Subbulakshmi (45).

  Subbulakshmi helped spread Mirabai’s fame through a remarkable screen performance, in Meera, directed by an American, Ellis R. Dungan. At the November 1947 premiere of the Hindi version of the film, Nehru and the Mountbattens were in the audience. “She became Mira herself,” Dungan said of Subbulakshmi’s mesmeric incarnation of the medieval princess. The film set off a revival of the cult of Mira in the newly independent nation.

  * * *

  How will the night pass?

  How long have I been standing

  Gazing down the road?

  The pain of absence keeps me awake

  night and day.

  The one Mira is yearning for, here and in all her bhajans, is her god, Krishna. And when her songs are performed in some rural villages, Mira is a simple paragon of religious devotion. Yet her historical uses have been expansive. In her afterlives, she’s both an enemy of caste hierarchy and a rebellious feminist icon. You can understand why: the central challenge of her life—how to overcome rigid social expectations in order to pursue one’s own freely chosen values—is a struggle women all over India are engaged in today.

  Some praise me, some blame me. I go the other way.

  On the narrow path I found God’s people.

  For what should I turn back?

  As with all legends, a dense thicket of hagiography surrounds Mirabai, yet her royal Rajput ancestry is historically clear. In the Rajasthan drylands, where warring factions were ever vying for dominance, her grandfather founded a little kingdom. Mira grew up, most likely an only child, in the fief (perhaps twelve villages) controlled by her father.

  As the story goes, Mira’s religious fervor surfaced early and provided some family amusement. When she was four or five, a wandering ascetic came to the family home. Mira wheedled from him a doll-like icon of Krishna, the mischievous boy god also called Girdhar. She became so attached to the icon that her mother teased her, saying Krishna would be her bridegroom. It turned out to be a prophetic jest.

  Mira’s mother died when Mira was young, and the girl’s religious worship grew still more intense—excessive, even. Sensual and physically uninhibited in her rapture, she broke the strict purdah rules imposed on Rajput women, and proved ungovernable in her spiritual energy. As rumors of wanton and unstable behavior chased her, her family arranged h
er marriage. She was given to a rana, a Rajput prince. In the Rajput tradition—as with many other traditions across the world in medieval times—daughters were married off to seal political alliances or quell potential wars. But Mira’s marriage failed to bring about peace even in her own household.

  Soon, though, her husband was dead—perhaps poisoned—and her father died, too. Mira found herself under the thumb of her conservative in-laws—who swarmed her like bees, she sang. She had insulted them by not throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, committing sati (also known as suttee) as dictated in some Rajput traditions. They responded, according to the songs, by trying to kill her with a venomous snake. She managed to pacify it, and wore it as a necklace.

  How can anyone touch me?

  I will not descend

  From the back of an elephant

  To ride upon an ass.

  The social scientist Parita Mukta has studied the history and legacies of Mirabai, and the tradition of vair, or “vendetta,” among the Rajputs:

  I think the very fact that Mira survived says so much about her. The workings of Rajput society are based around vair and hatred, where women are exchanged as part of a process of subjugating lesser chiefs or lesser Rajput lords. And Mira stood up against it. She absolutely did not want to participate in the politics of hatred, the politics of revenge, or the politics of subjugation.

  “Your slanders are sweet to me,” Mira sang defiantly of her community’s attacks. The supposed privileges of her birthright felt to her like chains. So she broke them, seeking her freedom by mixing with very different kinds of people—with itinerant thinkers, and with people from ostracized castes, the leatherworkers and the weavers. It’s said that she took up with a teacher and poet, Ravidas or Raidas, an untouchable.

  Singing her songs of devotion to Krishna, she wandered through Rajasthan and into northern India, her hair unbraided, her eyes unrimmed with kohl. Ankle bells and karthals, or castanets, were her chosen adornments. As she moved from village to village, her following grew, and soon she was leading a popular push against social boundaries.

  The era of Muslim rule across parts of India had loosened the grip of Hindu orthodoxy, leading to the rise of movements that questioned the hierarchies of caste. The egalitarian spirit of bhakti that arose in southern India had slowly spread north, reaching Rajasthan around the fifteenth century. The paradox of bhakti traveled, too. While each individual might find her own link with God, devotion was stronger when people gathered together to sing. As Parita Mukta observes, after watching many village performances of Mira’s songs, collective singing is “a regenerative power, a power which nourishes the spirit, which nourishes one’s whole being actually, and which nourishes a community to search for a better alternative.”

  * * *

  On your lips there is a flute

  And a garland of jasmine adorns your chest.

  Mirabai says, the Lord is a giver of joy to the pious

  And the protector of the poor.

  In independent India, where protecting the poor and so-called backward classes and castes is a constitutional concern, Mira’s embrace of the lower castes has kept her memory alive in some villages and city slums, where contemporary performances of her songs are sometimes tuneful protests against the privileges of the elite. The humiliations of being at the lower end of the social order often get brought out sharply in such performances—and the religious devotion rings out, too. Yet Mira’s rejection of traditional family life and of curbs on women gets elided, even today. The need for girls and young women to subjugate their personal hopes and desires to the aspirations of their families is still seen as essential to Indian social cohesion. Postcards and comic books often show Mira singing or dancing seductively—your typical pinup girl saint. The subversive and sometimes bitter transgressor of gender conventions—the Mirabai that Indian feminists embrace—figures little in popular culture.

  Still, it would be a mistake to construe Mirabai and the bhakti tradition as nearly modern in their egalitarian impulses. Several aspects of the historical tradition were suppressed in the nationalist appropriation of bhakti, because they failed to set salutary examples for contemporary India. Allison Busch, a scholar of Hindi literature at Columbia University, notes the advice mentioned by another bhakti poet, Tulsidas: that women, like drums, are suitable for beating. In some of the older stories, Mira herself beats her low-caste servants when they try to force her to get married.

  Gender, caste, and class don’t always align as comfortably in historical works as modern sensibilities might like. Lives get sifted, and reassembled, in light of contemporary desires. As Doniger puts it, “The stories about who she was and what she did, they’re pure hagiography—and Bollywood is welcome to it as far as I see. Now, you can’t say they’re wrong. But obviously she serves different purposes for different generations.”

  It’s an observation borne out when I ask schoolchildren in Rajasthan to tell me who Mirabai was:

  “Mirabai was a freedom fighter.”

  “Er … she was Krishna’s lover?”

  “She’s written poetries and songs.”

  “Mirabai? I don’t know. I don’t study history.”

  So which Mirabai to choose? We can return to where we began, with Holi. How you experience it depends on who you are, or maybe on how much power you have. Is Mira a passionate religious inspiration? An emblem of caste blindness and intercaste friendship? A potent symbol of feminism and self-transformation, a one-woman protest movement as much as a saint? History can’t quite decide. So, perhaps fittingly, given Mira’s independent-mindedness, the choice is ultimately ours to make.

  Approve of me or disapprove of me:

  I take the path that human

  beings have taken for centuries.

  16

  AKBAR

  The World and the Bridge

  1542–1605

  Around forty kilometers west of India’s most iconic building, the Taj Mahal, stands an abandoned city, one like no other in the world. Built just over four hundred years ago out of the red sandstone of the surrounding plains, Fatehpur Sikri sprawls, severe and elegant, across the semiarid landscape. An English merchant visiting the city in 1585, at the end of its brief flourishing, described it as more crowded than his hometown, London.

  Sikri’s battlements, palaces, and shrines proclaim imperial grandeur. Yet its airy pavilions and halls have little in common with the heavy monumentalism of Versailles or the Habsburg seats of power. Parts of the city have the feeling of a tent encampment, except that animal skins and wood frames have been replaced by stone and marble, carved with great skill by local craftsmen. Walking through this now-desolate cityscape in the dry heat, you might feel, at certain turns, as if you were in one of M. C. Escher’s drawings, reworked with the stark surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico. It’s like touring the physical manifestation of a mind—the expansive, syncretic mind of its creator: Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors.

  Akbar started building at Sikri in 1571, to mark the birth of his first son, Jahangir. He originally envisioned it as a religious compound for his spiritual mentor, Sheikh Salim Chishti, who had foretold Jahangir’s arrival. Sheikh Salim was the leader of a mystical yet orthodox Sufi sect, and Akbar built him a mosque whose floor he sometimes swept himself, in a show of devotion. Soon, around the mosque, a city began to take shape. It became one in a shifting series of Akbar’s capitals, which also included Agra and Lahore.

  It was from Sikri that Akbar, a master strategist of war and religious opportunity, launched the expansion of the Mughal Empire and amassed its fabled wealth. He trebled the size of his dominion so that it covered a great stretch of the Indian subcontinent, from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea, and southward to the Deccan. Only the empire of Ashoka (5), almost two thousand years before, and the British Raj, several centuries later, surpassed it.

  Today, tour guides will confidently tell you what took place in each of Sikri’s many spaces, pointing to m
usic rooms, a treasury, a queen’s bedroom, and the like. Yet despite much academic labor, the purposes and symbolism of many of the buildings still remain obscure. We’re left with the mystery of the structures themselves: filigreed colonnades and tiered halls, waterways and parapets, studded towers and archways, and a throne room whose full significance still baffles scholars.

  One hall we do know about is the Ibadat Khana, or “House of Worship.” Akbar was certain of his right to conquer by force, and did so freely. In matters of faith, however, he was something of an experimentalist, willing to entertain challenges and argument. The Ibadat Khana was where he gathered divines and philosophers to debate the principles of belief. In the Akbarnama, or “Book of Akbar,” a magnificently illustrated contemporary chronicle of his reign, we find miniature paintings that show the emperor seated in this hall with men of different religions and sects, listening to their disputations.

  In this openness, Akbar stands out in the history of Islamic kingship. As a result, he has become an icon for modern secularists and liberals, their favorite wielder of imperious power. Along with Ashoka and poets such as Kabir (12) and Khusrau (11), Akbar is incorporated into a lineage of Indians who advocate tolerance and diversity. His reign is often used as a rebuttal to Hindu nationalist arguments that Muslim rule in India was an unremittingly dark age for Hindus, and as a reminder to conservative Muslims of Islam’s capacity for enlightened accommodation.