Incarnations Read online

  Shivaji’s meticulously choreographed ceremony gives us an insight into how he wished to be seen by the world. A Maratha Kunbi such as Shivaji, though he may have amassed considerable power, was not entitled to rule, according to the Hindu caste order. So preceding the ceremony were religious wheelings and dealings. Shivaji brought in around one thousand Brahmins, including the renowned scholar and pandit Gaga Bhatt from the holy city of Benares. A fortnight before the coronation, in a sacred thread ceremony, Shivaji was initiated into the Kshatriya caste and raised to the Rajput warrior clan of Sisodias. Such genealogical sleights were not uncommon, and many Maratha tillers turned fighters, drawn from the Kunbi and other lower castes, would later claim descent from the higher-caste Rajput warriors of Rajasthan.

  The price Shivaji had to pay for acquiring this caste legitimacy (a bit like a papal indulgence) had been vigorously negotiated by the presiding Brahmins: he was required to gift them a fifteen-kilogram gold idol of Vishnu, and to distribute other expensive commodities (measured out in his body weight) and “many elephants, horses and money.”

  The coronation, or abhisheka, finally took place under the Chhatra-dharan, the “royal umbrella.” The origins of the abhisheka lay in Vedic ritual; it was an intricate procedure involving several baths and changes of vestments. No ruler had performed the abhisheka ceremony for at least two centuries. Even Hindu rulers and courts drew on Persian styles and symbols associated with the Mughals. Shivaji dressed in the Persian style, and his coronation ceremonies included some Mughal emblems, but he was now announcing himself as a Hindu kingly power who would rule over Hindu society from within.

  The coronation rituals were designed to mirror the orthodox Hindu social order that Shivaji claimed to defend. Here, for instance, is what happened during one of the several purification rituals: Brahmins poured ghee from a golden pot on his east side; Kshatriyas poured milk from a silver pot on his south side; Vaishyas poured curds from a copper pot at the west; and Shudras poured water from an earthen pot to his north.

  Despite its clear Brahminic symbolism, Shivaji’s spectacular coronation has become controversial among some Marathas. For many from the lower castes, to accept that Brahmins led the ceremonies is to cede control over Shivaji’s memory to the upper castes. Yet Shivaji’s deal with the Brahmins can also be read another way. He was declaring that, even though a Maratha Kunbi—a “peasant boy” was how his enemy Afzal Khan taunted him—might rank below a Brahmin, he could still pay for them to anoint him as ruler and buy their acquiescence. In that light, he wasn’t so much affirming the power of the Brahmins as tainting and weakening their supposedly inviolable authority—even as he was acquiring some of it for himself.

  * * *

  By the time of his death in 1680, Shivaji commanded a realm of some 130,000 square kilometers (around 4 percent of the subcontinent), collecting revenues equal to more than a fifth of what Aurangzeb drew. He had graduated from adolescent rebel to commander of the most important rival to the Mughal Empire until the expansion of British rule a century later.

  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some Indians likened Shivaji to the Italian Garibaldi, a fighter for national independence. Others saw him as a saintly figure in the bhakti tradition, fighting for the downtrodden and a more egalitarian order. For Hindus well beyond Maharashtra, he remains an important champion; and in Maharashtra, there’s still no figure from history more beloved.

  Shivaji the Hindu avenger, though, might in coming decades seem less appealing than Shivaji the maker of his own career. Today, senior managers bring their employees to his forts and battlegrounds on corporate bonding excursions, hoping that his ambition and spirit might lift individual performances—and company profits. “Shivaji Maharaj is our idol,” a company CEO leading his employees around Raigad Fort tells me. “He’s our god. He’s a right networker, to select the right people, to fight, to develop the right people. So we bring people here to understand how he created history in the world. So we bring people here to create history in their lives.”

  20

  NAINSUKH

  Owner Transfixed by Goose

  1710–1784

  There’s a game you start to play after looking at hundreds of Indian miniature paintings—call it Mughal miniature bingo. Is there an imperious prince with a very straight back? Check. Pavilions? Check. Musicians? Gathered courtiers? Glorious gardens? Check, check, check. Most of these paintings, exquisite as they are technically, were controlled, even calculated, images. You start to feel this is rote work, and to sense the subservience of the artist to those who commissioned it.

  In the Mughal era, many paintings were essentially press releases for royalty. So it’s bracing to turn to portraits of Balwant Singh, a minor royal—pretty much a nobody in eighteenth-century India’s princely hierarchy—who has become one of the more intriguing subjects in Indian art. We know about him today only because of his intimate, profoundly creative relationship with a painter from Guler named Nainsukh.

  Guler, a small kingdom in the Himalayan foothills, was one of the homes of the well-established Pahari School of miniature painting. Nainsukh, though, was different from his predecessors—in the extraordinary precision of his lines, the bold use of blank space in his compositions, the emotional poise of his portraits. But what I love about Nainsukh’s work is that everyday concerns of his time aren’t banished from the frame.

  In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds around a dozen of Nainsukh’s works, there’s a striking painting of Balwant Singh being entertained by a group of musicians and players. As the prince smokes a hookah, one performer mimics him, pretending to drag from a long paper scroll. Come closer, though, and look at the lead singer with a magnifying glass. This thin man in a neat white-and-orange turban has tiny scars on his face: marks from smallpox, one of the leading causes of death in the eighteenth century.

  It’s often said that life in India is so chaotic, so overloaded with sensory stimuli, that Indians stop seeing what’s all around them. Nainsukh, however, saw plenty: the domestic, the natural, the found comedy of courtly life. In Balwant Singh, he had a patron confident enough in his own self-image to allow Nainsukh to escape the stiff formalities often found in the miniature genre and express a more original vision. His technical skill, his clarity of sight, is focused on the quirks, and thus the humanity, of the individual—whether king, lowly musician, or himself.

  * * *

  The painter Howard Hodgkin is a connoisseur of Indian art and a collector of Nainsukh’s work. “He’s a truly great artist,” Hodgkin says. “He’s not the first, of course, because many of the Mughal painters had an identity and were written about, but I would have said, even so, he was probably the first great modern artist of India.”

  Nainsukh was born in 1710 into a family of highly skilled painters. His father and brother schooled him in the Pahari tradition of the hill areas of northern India, a school characterized by simplified landscapes or interiors, flat monochromatic backgrounds, and, in the foreground, stylized, often static, portraiture. Yet Nainsukh learned his art in a period of stylistic transition, as elements of Mughal painting began to percolate through the Pahari artistic world. A greater interest in naturalistic details developed, alongside subtler color palettes and a growing refinement of line. This gave Nainsukh scope to stretch the inherited boundaries of his art.

  A self-portrait by Nainsukh at around twenty years old shows a lean face with a faint mustache, a shaven head adorned by a single tuft of hair under a sharply angled turban, and prominent front teeth. Truth was clearly more important than vanity. His left hand supports a takhti, or wooden drawing board. In his right hand, a brush is poised above blank paper. He is just at the moment of beginning to draw, and his expression is intent, as if he’s fixing an image in his mind.

  Around the time he created this portrait, Nainsukh met Balwant Singh at Jasrota, the citadel of a minor hill kingdom in today’s Himachal Pradesh. Nainsukh had left his home in Guler in searc
h of a patron, and had initially worked for Balwant’s father, who was a princely relative of the Jasrota maharaja.

  Nainsukh’s first portraits of his new patron date from the early 1740s, when Balwant Singh was around seventeen. One of the earliest of these paintings was rediscovered a little over a decade ago, in a private collection in Lahore. It shows Balwant as a beardless adolescent, in an elegant embroidered Mughal-style jama, or gown, sitting on a terrace furnished with bolsters. He has a hookah in hand and a sword beside him. It’s one of the most formal and conventional portraits Nainsukh ever painted. Yet he manages to break the stiffness by giving us what he saw rather than what was expected. Even as Singh is shown in a classical pose, his left hand—quite poorly drawn—is, unconventionally, turned backward at the wrist.

  Soon, Nainsukh was starting to experiment more boldly. He played with scale, giving depth to the background with a single horizontal line. Restraining his use of color, he celebrated white, and blank expanses of paper. Many of his paintings display a great compositional confidence, and equally striking is the sense of ease, even equality, in his portrayals of his patron. Nainsukh shows Singh obediently having his beard trimmed by a barber; huddled, ill and depressed, under a bulky quilt; and writing a letter bare-chested in his tent, while his attendant, fly whisk in hand, has dozed off in the hot afternoon.

  Portraits such as these were rare for the times, given the hierarchical relations between patron and court painter. There’s an almost Instagram-like familiarity. B. N. Goswamy is one of India’s leading art historians, and an authority on Nainsukh. “He attached himself to this prince, who was not even a member of the main ruling family—probably was a pretender to the throne,” Goswamy says. “But Nainsukh stayed with him. Twenty years or more he stayed with him. I mean, he was like a shadow—or maybe Balwant Singh was a shadow of Nainsukh.”

  * * *

  In one of Hodgkin’s favorite paintings, Balwant Singh, wearing pink slippers and holding a sword, stares transfixed at his pet goose. It’s a humorous and moving play on convention. “Of course in the center of it, it’s all highly formalized,” Hodgkin says. The goose, too, is “completely transfixed by the look he gets from his owner,” he says, laughing. “As far as I can tell, this is almost unique in the history of Indian painting. Balwant Singh was clearly a man of real sensitivity. Well, they both were.”

  Goswamy thinks that the two men must have had a regular dialogue about Nainsukh’s work, but that Singh did not command him to paint this or that scene. As a result, Goswamy says, Nainsukh recorded things few court painters in Indian history could. “No other patron that I know of in the Indian context would have allowed it.”

  Both Nainsukh and Balwant Singh shared a deep interest in music and dance, and some of Nainsukh’s most vivid paintings are of court performances. In one of his greatest works, to my eye, music, patron, and artist all come together. It’s a painting of Singh sitting on his takht, or throne. In one hand, as was his custom, is a hookah. In the other is a painting. It’s been handed to him by Nainsukh, who stands behind his patron, leaning forward, hands folded, all buckteeth. He seems to be waiting on the prince’s verdict.

  On the other side of the painting, looking on at artist and patron, is a group of musicians and retainers. Each face is distinct; their expressions, features, and skin colors hint at a range of histories, untold stories. These were people Nainsukh would quite probably have hung out with. “Watch the fingers of the man who’s playing on the drum and the one who’s playing on the Jew’s harp—it’s astonishing,” Goswamy says. “My guess is that after some time, Nainsukh’s attention started shifting to the minor characters—the musicians, the dancers, the retainers. Very penetrating and sympathetic studies—it is the humanity in Nainsukh’s work which is so extraordinarily engaging.”

  * * *

  It’s habitual to speak of Indian painting in terms of traditions, not individual talent or personality (in a way that T. S. Eliot, who wrote that art was an escape from personality, might have appreciated). Yet with Nainsukh, we encounter work that seems not just “of his time,” but also simply his own. Instead of the static brightness of the earlier Pahari style, we find intimacy and warmth, mystery and sly humor—individuality. What we don’t find is sentimentality. Emotion is understated in Nainsukh. Only a flash of vulnerability or mockery ever gets shown. In his hands, that flash is enough. As Goswamy puts it, “There’s a kind of trilling quality about Nainsukh’s work—a lightness of touch, wit, and the ability to keep on paying homage to tradition, the classical, and then break free.”

  In the last two decades of his life, Nainsukh returned to more conventional subjects: Ragamala paintings depicting musical moods, and scenes from the religious stories and epics—Krishna and the gopis, his cowherd girl devotees, all in the brighter colors of the more traditional Pahari style. For once in Indian history, the explanation is simple: Balwant Singh died in 1763, and Nainsukh had to find a new patron. At Basholi, another hill kingdom, he found a prince with a more conventional sensibility.

  If these late paintings are staid compared with what came before, Nainsukh’s brilliance still surfaces occasionally. In one of his final masterpieces, it’s nighttime. Villagers gather around a fire, smoking hookahs and chillums, some seen in silhouette and others illuminated by flame. A child, up past bedtime, nestles in the arms of one of the elders. A woman looks on from a doorway. Bright sparks fly up from the fire to the branches of a tree and mingle with the stars beyond. “The way Nainsukh studies the reflections, shadows—it’s not a night scene,” Goswamy says. “It’s his way of telling you: this is how night falls. Subtlety—subtlety is the essence.”

  21

  WILLIAM JONES

  Enlightenment Mughal

  1746–1794

  On September 25, 1783, a frigate named the Crocodile sailed up the Hooghly River in Bengal and docked at Calcutta’s Chandpal Ghat. On board was a thirty-six-year-old Welsh scholar and barrister bearing essentials for what he expected to be a six-year stint in India. These included two large sheep and an intrepid young wife whom he had married just four days before embarking from England. Awaiting him in Calcutta was an East India Company judgeship with a salary far greater than he had ever known. His hope was to incorporate Hindu and Muslim laws into his own rulings, so that the British could govern Indians according to Indians’ own “manners and sentiments.” During the leisurely journey from England, he put to paper an exhaustive list of topics he needed to study:

  The Laws of the Hindus and Mohammedans; The History of the Ancient World;… Modern Politics and Geography of Hindustan; Best Mode of Governing Bengal; Arithmetic and Geometry and the mixed Sciences of the Asiatics; Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy of the Indians;… The Poetry, Rhetoric, and the Morality of Asia; Music of the Eastern Nations …

  The list went on. Ambitious as it was, this plan would eventually be dwarfed by what he achieved in his eleven years in India. Sir William Jones was to become the greatest Orientalist of his time. Two hundred years later, Edward Said and his epigones would turn that word, Orientalist, into a slur, but Jones produced a revolution in knowledge about language and history. “A far-seeing man,” the German Romanticist Goethe would say of Jones, “he seeks to connect the unknown to the known.”

  Jones brought to Calcutta something more useful than sheep: an uncanny mastery of languages. Eventually, he would learn twenty-eight languages—or, as friends ribbed him, every language but his native Welsh. When he turned this prodigious skill to ancient Sanskrit texts, the effects were profound. He would go on to change not just the way the world sees India, but how Indians see their own history and culture.

  * * *

  In his lifetime, Jones garnered almost as many nicknames as he gleaned languages: Harmonious Jones, Persian Jones, Asiatic Jones, Oriental Jones. The son of an accomplished Anglesey mathematician, his genius was recognized early. A star at Harrow, he learned Greek and Latin as you might expect, but also French, Italian, and Hebre
w. A love of the Arabian Nights and Persian poetry in translation inspired him to cajole a native speaker at Oxford to teach him the language. Jones later remarked, “From my earliest years, I was charmed with the poetry of the Greeks; nothing, I then thought, could be more sublime…; but when I had tasted the poetry of the Arabs and Persians—”

  After Oxford, Jones wrote A Grammar of the Persian Language, and translated Confucius and Mandarin poetry to great acclaim. But these were not the sort of works to earn him much, so in 1774 he turned to legal practice. Nine years later, his ability to understand the languages, laws, and customs of other cultures brought him an offer to become one of four judges on the Bengal Presidency’s newly established Supreme Court in Calcutta—the first Supreme Court in the world.

  Politically, Jones wasn’t the safest choice for the job. He had ardently supported the American independence movement, wrote political tracts of a republican stripe, and was radical in many of his leanings. He was also that shifty, unpredictable animal, a poet. Yet he reassured his patrons that his interests in India wouldn’t extend to political rights, and that he would “certainly not preach” democracy to the Indians, “who must and will be governed by absolute power.”

  Jones believed that the authority of that absolute power must nevertheless be established on the basis of India’s ancient laws—not London’s diktats. But presiding in the new court, he grew impatient, and not a little suspicious, at having to depend on Brahmin pandits for translations of Sanskrit ethics and legal codes, and of oaths in particular. (This topic greatly exercised the British: because Indians would not swear on the Bible, but instead offered a variety of other oaths, the veracity of their legal testimony was always suspect in British eyes.) Better, Jones thought, to learn the infernal language himself.