With humyaun’s death, thirteen-year-old Akbar became the new ruler. He is usually called the third Mughal Emperor but it was actually he who created the foundations of a stable empire. Apart from continuing with the changes introduced by Sher Shah Suri, he attempted to improve relationships with the Hindus living in his empire in the second half of his reign. This was a huge step forward.
From the writings of Muslim writers of that time as well as from the ways in which the Hindus responded to the Turkish invaders, it is clear that Delhi’s rulers before Akbar regarded themselves as foreign occupiers. Thus, Hindu rulers, especially the Rajputs, saw themselves in perpetual conflict with the Delhi sultans. For example, the rajput rulers of Mewar did not just see themselves just as kings but as the custodians or guardians of the Hindu civilization embodied in the temple of Eklingji. The deity Shiva was considered to be the real king of Mewar, which is why the rulers did not call themselves ‘Maharaja’ or Great King. They called themselves Rana which means ‘Custodian’ or ‘Prime Minister’. Mewar suffered huge losses and faced extreme hardship but its rulers still did not give up their fight against the sultans. On three different occasions, its capital Chittaur was defended to the last man and even after the capital fell, the fight continued in the hills.
The shrine of Eklingji is less than an hour’s drive from Udaipur. It is a thousand-year-old temple complex wedged into a hillside. The complex is heavily fortified. The fortifications of Chittaur, Kumbhagarh and even Udaipur are within a few hours’ drive. Mewar must have been the most militarized place in the medieval world. This was a population that was willing to fight to the death.
By Akbar’s time, However, everyone was tired of the fighting that had been going on for centuries. Thinkers like Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, had already argued that both civilizations must learn to accommodate their differences. Emperor Akbar was probably liberal by nature but his thoughts also evolved with time. The change may have happened with the siege of Chittaur, the capital of Mewar in 1568. The fort fell after many months. Almost every soldier was killed. The women killed themselves in a ritual suicide. Akbar further killed 20,000 people—unarmed civilians. Like Ashoka, eighteen centuries earlier, he may have been shocked by the bloodshed he had created.
After this, Akbar began to think about reconciling the two cultures. In 1555, the Mughal nobility or Omrah consisted of fifty-one foreign-born Muslims (Uzbeks, Persians, Turks, Afghans). By 1580, there were 222 in this group but it included forty-three Rajputs and a similar number of Muslims. Not everyone was happy about this. On the one hand, the orthodox Muslims thought Akbar was being too liberal. The rulers of Mewar were still suspicious of his motives and kept up their resistance. The ballads of how Rana Pratap and his army of Bhil tribesmen fought the Mughals can still be heard in the Aravallis of Mewar. His coat of armour and that of his horse Chetak are prominently displayed in the Udaipur City Palace Museum. It took more than a generation before Mewar accepted a more friendly relationship with the Mughals.
Akbar shifted the capital south from Delhi to Agra and then to a newly built city called Fatehpur Sikri. This city took fifteen years to build but was abandoned after only fourteen years because of water scarcity—just like Tughlaqabad. The capital was moved back to Agra. Meanwhile, Delhi remained an important city but it was only a century later, after Akbar’s grandson built Shahjehanabad (Old Delhi), that it would regain its full glory.
Akbar did build something grand in Delhi—his father’s tomb. The architecture of Humayun’s Tomb is not as well-known as that of the Taj Mahal but it is an impressive building by any standard.
It’s not that medieval India was only about the building, abandoning, destruction and rebuilding of cities. Most of the population lived in rural areas. Babur tells us that Indian villagers rarely spent any effort in either irrigation or in building permanent homes. Instead, they were always prepared to abandon their villages and take refuge in the forests. This is how common people coped with repeated invasions and war. Much of the country was covered with forests and may have even turned to jungle again after people fled their settlements. There were forests just outside Delhi where the rulers hunted within a few hours’ ride from the city walls. Feroze Shah even built a number of hunting lodges along the Aravalli ridges, including one in what is now the urban village of Mahipalpur, very close to the international airport. Deer, leopards and possibly lions were found where bright neon lights now announce budget hotels. British records say that the ‘Hurriana lion’ was seen here as late as the 1820s.
A LION IN THE BUSH
Babur’s diary tells us that he didn’t think much of the people of India but he was very impressed by the flora and fauna of the country. He spent many pages describing the peacocks, elephants and river dolphins. He was particularly interested in the rhinoceros that he came across in the forests near Peshawar. It’s interesting that rhinos were found so far to the west in the sixteenth century. They are now found only in the swampy grasslands of Assam, North Bengal and Nepal’s Terai regions. Oddly, Babur does not talk about the big cats. He probably had seen lions and cheetahs in Afghanistan and north-Eastern Iran and did not think they were uniquely Indian.
The Mughals were big hunters and their adventures are recorded in several writings and paintings. They hunted a wide range of animals like nilgai, blackbuck, birds and, of course, lions. There are relatively fewer accounts and paintings related to hunting tigers. This may be because the Mughals mostly did their hunting in the north-west of the country which had lions and not tigers. We know that there were important hunting grounds near Agra, Delhi, and Bhatinda in Punjab. Most of these places are now thickly populated and farmed but in those times, there were large expanses of uncultivated Land near Delhi and Agra as well as on the road to Lahore. These large areas were available to wildlife and several tracts were meant only for the royal hunt. The lion continued to symbolize the power of the State. Only the king and members of the royal family could hunt the animal. Others had to take special permission.
There are many stories about Akbar’s lion hunts. Once, in 1568, Akbar went hunting in the Mewat region near Alwar, south of Gurgaon. A lion was spotted and was quickly killed by a hail of arrows shot by his companions. Akbar was annoyed. He issued an order that if another lion were to show up, he would shoot it himself. Another one did come by and Akbar shot it in the eye with an arrow. The wounded animal charged but Akbar could not get a good shot at it though he’d dismounted from his horse. In his excitement, one of the courtiers shot an arrow which further angered the animal and it mauled the man! In the end, the lion had to be finished off by other courtiers.
Akbar was very fond of hunting and was willing to take personal risks, too. In his younger days, he would hunt on horseback or even on foot. He used a large number of trained cheetahs to keep him in the chase. Later in life, he kept a stable of a thousand cheetahs! Over time, However, the emperors got used to hunting from sitting on an elephant’s back and hunting with guns—far safer and more accurate. In a single hunting expedition to rupbas near Agra in February–March 1610, Jehangir, who succeeded Akbar, and his companions killed seven lions, seventy nilgai, fifty-one blackbucks, eighty-two other animals, 129 birds and 1023 fish—all within fifty-six days!
On a hunt in 1610 in Bari near Agra, one of emperor Jehangir’s courtiers, Anup Rai, came across a half-eaten cow and traced a lion to a thicket. The animal was surrounded and Jehangir was informed. He rushed to the spot and tried to shoot the animal—and missed! The lion charged and the emperor’s followers panicked. They ran helter-skelter, even trampling the emperor in their hurry. Anup Rai saved Jehangir’s life by battling the lion to the ground with his bare hands till Prince Khurram killed it with a sword. A Hindu Rajput was not just allowed to accompany the royal family on a hunt but was willing to risk his life for a Muslim king—Taimur’s descendant, no less. This shows how much the relations between Hindus and Muslims had improved after Akbar. Jehangir gave Anup Rai the title A
ni Rai Singhdalan—commander of Troops and Lion Crusher.
A few years after this, the first English ambassador arrived at the Mughal court. Sir Thomas Roe was a distinguished diplomat and was in India from 1615 to 1619. He became a close friend of Jehangir’s. However, this did not mean that he could kill lions freely. In 1617, a lion and a wolf made nightly raids on Roe’s camp near Mandu and killed a number of his sheep and goats. He was not allowed to hurt the animals and he had to ask Jehangir for special permission. The permission was eventually given but the lion escaped. The wolf was not as lucky.
Roe says that the symbol of the lion was very important to the royals. One of the royal standards had a lion and the rising sun. The Shahs of Iran as well as the Hindu tradition in the subcontinent shared this love for the lion symbol. The Mughals knew that they were inheriting an ancient imperial dream—Emperor Jehangir inserted his own inscription in Persian on the Mauryan pillar in Allahabad. Thus, the column has inscriptions by three of India’s most powerful emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jehangir—a continuity across eighteen centuries! Why? Whether you take Jehangir’s inscription to the Mauryan pillar or the effort to link Akbar to Kalhana’s history of Kashmir, the Mughals were trying to build the foundations of their empire in India—as part of the Indian Civilization, not an intrusion of it. This was a big shift from how earlier Delhi sultans saw themselves.
THE ARABS RULE THE SEAS
While all these invasions were going on, trade in the Indian Ocean continued to flourish. Marco Polo as well as Ibn Batuta had talked about this. However, the role of the Indians in the trade began to change from the end of the twelfth century. Indian merchants had once been explorers and risk-takers who criss-crossed the oceans in their stitched ships. They could be found in large numbers in ports from the Persian Gulf to China. Buddhist and Brahmin scholars sailed in large numbers to South East Asia where people welcomed them eagerly. But suddenly, a little over a century after the Chola naval raids on Srivijaya, they almost disappeared. What happened?
Around this time, the caste system in India became more rigid and there was a rule that prohibited people from crossing the seas. But this was only a reflection of something larger. There seems to have been a shift in India’s attitude towards risk-taking and innovation—a closing of the mind. There are many signs of this that we can see in the culture and civilization of that time. Sanskrit, which used to be a language that changed and grew with the times, stopped taking in new words and usages. Sanskrit literature became obsessed with ‘purity’. Scientific progress came to a halt as people began focusing more on learned knowledge rather than experimentation.
Al-Biruni, who visited India around the same time that Mahmud Ghazni was making his infamous raids, commented that Indian scholars were so full of themselves that they were unwilling to learn anything from the rest of the world. He also contrasted this attitude with that of the earlier generation of Indians.
Given these changes, Indian merchants chose to remain on the shores while shipping was taken over by the arabs. There were also Jews, Persians and Chinese traders. Ibn Batuta noticed a number of Chinese ships in calicut (Kozhikode) and he describes a military junk that must have been accompanied by a merchant fleet. It was large enough to accommodate a thousand men, six hundred sailors and four hundred men-at-arms. It’s clear that Ibn Batuta was looking at a very active trading network on his journeys. There was so much going and coming in this network that he once met a man from ceuta, a city very close to his hometown of Tangier, first in Delhi and then again in China. He may have been the one to write about his travels but the routes he took were well known to Arab merchants.
The spirit of ancient India was kept alive for several more centuries by the kingdoms of South East Asia. Angkor remained the capital of the Khmer Empire till it was sacked by the Thais in 1431. Its ruins must be seen to be believed—especially angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world. The remains of the kingdom of Champa in Vietnam are equally interesting. The kingdom flourished till its capital Vijaya was sacked by Viet troops in 1471. A smaller Cham kingdom limped along till it, too, was overrun in the late seventeenth century. Hindu temples built by the Chams are still scattered across Vietnam—a few are used by the tiny Balamon Cham community that continues to practise Hinduism (they number around 30,000). Sadly, the most important cluster of cham temples in My Son was heavily bombed by the americans during the Vietnam War. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site but there is very little to see. The small museum at the entrance has some pre-war photographs that provide an idea about how glorious it used to be once.
Java was another important hub of Indian culture. In the fourteenth century, the Majapahits of Java had established direct or indirect control over much of what is now Indonesia. As they expanded, they pushed out the ancient Srivijaya kingdom based in Sumatra. A naval raid on the Srivijaya capital of Palembang in 1377 finally got rid of their main rival in the region.
One of the Srivijaya princes, Sang Nila Utama, is said to have escaped to the riau cluster of islands, just south of the Malay peninsula to escape from the Majapahits. One day, so the story goes, he had gone hunting on the island of Temasek where he is said to have seen a lion. So, when he built a settlement here, he named is Singapura or Lion city. And that’s how Singapore got its name! However, the animal the prince had seen must have been a Malayan tiger and not a lion. The last wild tiger of Singapore was killed in the 1930s in the neighbourhood of Choa Chu Kang.
One of Sang Nila Utama’s successors, Parmeswara, seems to have found it difficult to stay in Singapore because of local rivalries and the continued threat from the Javans. He moved farther north and established his headquarters at Melaka (or Malacca). This is what South East Asia looked like when Admiral Zheng he arrived with the Chinese ‘treasure fleet’.
Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch from Yunan. He had been brought as a boy prisoner to the Ming court and castrated. He went on to lead seven major naval expeditions between 1405 and 1433 that visited South East Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Arabia and East Africa. The ‘treasure-fleets’ were quite remarkable. There were over a hundred ships and tens of thousands of men. Chinese naval technology at this stage was centuries ahead of the rest of the world. In recent years, some authors have argued that Zheng he may have even visited the americas. He had the technology to undertake such a voyage but it’s unlikely that he actually made the journey across the Pacific.
These naval expeditions were taken for many reasons, including trade and exploration. However, the main goal was to show how powerful China was. The Chinese had defeated the Mongols just a few decades earlier and they were keen to flaunt their importance to the rest of the world. If the sheer size of the fleet did not impress the locals, Zheng He was willing to take military action as he did in a civil war in Sri Lanka.
Around this time, there were already a number of chinese settlements in South East Asia but the Majapahit Empire of Java was the most powerful. A century earlier, they had defeated the Chinese and the Mongols who tried to control the region. In 1378, the Ming emperor tried to install his candidate on the Srivijaya throne. The Majapahit, annoyed by this interference, simply killed the envoys sent by the emperor.
Zheng He would have been aware of this history. He had a plan to neutralize the Majapahit—supporting Parameswara’s new kingdom in Melaka. A large Chinese settlement was created in Melaka and Parameswara personally visited the Ming court. The Chinese encouraged the Melakkans to convert to Islam. Zheng he and many of his commanders were Muslims but he probably did this for political reasons too—the Javans he was trying to defeat were Hindus and it is even possible that the Chinese wanted to reduce the risk of Indians once again influencing this region. The Chinese of this period were very conscious of themselves as a nation and wanted to impress everyone with their power. The Chinese strategy led to the steady Islamization of South East Asia. Melaka boomed while Majapahit slowly lost its powers and the last of the Majapahit princes escaped to the small island o
f Bali where their descendants continue to live and practise Hinduism. The network of Chinese merchants survived European colonization and they are still an important part of business in the region.
The Chinese domination of the seas, However, came to a sudden end. The mandarin officials in Beijing decided that the voyages were too expensive and not worth it. The treasure fleets rotted and their records were suppressed. Like India, China also closed its mind. Technological superiority could not save them from the change in attitude. For a while, it seemed as if the Indian Ocean would be under the control of the Arabs once again but this was not to be. In december 1497, a small Portuguese fleet rounded the Cape of Good hope and sailed boldly into the Indian Ocean.
6
Where One-eyed Giants Roam
As we saw in Chapter 3, the people of the Iron Age knew a lot more about geography than the people of the Vedic Bronze Age. The epics clearly show that people knew about the far corners of the subcontinent. They had a fairly detailed knowledge of the terrain by the time of the Mauryan Empire. But, did ancient Indians try to create a map of the country? Over centuries of maritime trade, they would have come to know quite a lot about the geography of the Indian Ocean rim, even as far as the Chinese coast in the west and of the Red Sea in the east. At the same time, they were also quite used to expressing ideas in the form of diagrams, including architectural plans. Because of Aryabhatta, by the time of the Guptas, Indians knew that the world was spherical and even had a fairly accurate estimate of its circumference.
Everything required for map-making or cartography was right there. We would expect that the Indians would have put together all this knowledge and mapped their country and the surrounding oceans. We would also think that they would have created maritime manuals just as the Greeks did (remember Periplus?) to help merchants and seamen.
The Incredible History of India's Geography Page 12
