The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Drugs and drink played a central role in Babur’s memoir. A typical early entry:

  We drank until sunset, then got on our horses. The members of the party had gotten pretty drunk. . . . Dost-Muhammad Baqir was so drunk that no matter how Amin-Muhammad Tarkhan and Masti Chuhra’s people tried they could not get him on his horse. They splashed water on his head, but that didn’t do any good either. Just then a band of Afghans appeared. Amin-Muhammad Tarkhan was so drunk he thought that rather than leaving Dost-Muhammad to be taken by the Afghans we should cut off his head and take it with us. With great difficulty they threw him on his horse and took off. We got back to Kabul at midnight.65

  Babur was such a great horseman that he could even ride when he was totally stoned: “We drank on the boat until late that night, left the boat roaring drunk, and got on our horses. I took a torch in my hand and, reeling to one side and then the other, let the horse gallop free-reined along the riverbank all the way to camp. I must have been really drunk.”66 This image is also captured by a fine painting entitled A Drunken Babur Returns to Camp at Night, from an illustrated copy of the Babur-nama.67 These parties were usually bachelor affairs, royal frat parties, though occasionally women were present.68 A sure clue that we are dealing here not just with people of privilege having a very good long-running party but with genuine addiction is Babur’s frequent (almost always futile) attempts to rein in his drunkenness.69 Before one great battle, he went on the wagon, and to make sure he would not backslide, he had a quantity of the latest vintage from Ghazni salted for vinegar.70 When he took the pledge not to drink wine, some of the court copied him and renounced with him, for, he noted, “People follow their kings’ religion.”71 But he hated being on the wagon and wrote a charming poem about it, which ended: “People repent, then they give up wine—I gave it up, and now I am repenting!”72

  There were also excuses to get stoned other than simply wanting to get stoned, another telltale sign of substance abuse: “That night I took some opium for the pain in my ear—the moonlight also induced me to take it. The next morning I really suffered from an opium hangover and vomited a lot. Nevertheless, I went out on a tour of all Man Singh’s and Bikramajit’s buildings.” And: “The weather was so bad that some of us had ma’jun even though we had had some the day before.”73 E. M. Forster wrote a wicked satire on the depiction of constant drunkenness, and constant travel, in Babur’s memoir: “Was this where the man with the melon fell overboard? Or is it the raft where half of us took spirits and the rest bhang,jl and quarreled in consequence? We can’t be sure. Is that an elephant? If so, we must have left Afghanistan. No: we must be in Ferghana again; it’s a yak.”74 Here, as so often, you only know where you are by seeing what animals are with you.

  None of Babur’s successors wrote nearly so vividly about their drinking problems, though as a group they did manage to run up quite a tab. Humayun was an opium addict, particularly fond of ma’jun; it is quite possible that his fatal fall down the stairs of his observatory may have been aided and abetted by opium. Akbar drank very rarely, but his first three sons were alcoholics. Murad (Akbar’s second son) died of alcoholism, and when Akbar forbade Danyal (his third son, aged thirty-three) to drink wine, Danyal tried to smuggle some in inside a musket; the alcohol dissolved the rust and gunpowder in the musket and killed him.75

  Jahangir’s excessive use of alcohol and opium was thought to have exacerbated his cruelty and vicious temper; his Rajput wife committed suicide by overdosing on opium. He sometimes forced his son Shah Jahan to drink, against his will.76 Jahangir recorded in detail his own addiction to alcohol, and later opium, and “his apparently half-hearted battle to moderate his consumption.”77 Jahangir was also fascinated by the opium addiction of his friend Inayat Khan and had his portrait painted as he was dying. Jahangir wrote: “Since he was an opium addict and also extremely fond of drinking wine whenever he had the chance, his mind was gradually destroyed.”78

  NONVIOLENCE MUGHAL STYLE, ESPECIALLY TOWARD DOGS

  The vices of the Mughals were not limited to drugs; there was also the vice of hunting, as well as more complicated problems involving animals. There are conflicting strains in the Mughal attitude toward animals. On the one hand, they had a great fascination with and love of animals; the Sufi saints, in particular, were often depicted in the company of tame lions or bears; a tame lion accompanies Akbar’s confessor, Shaikh Salim Chishti, in one painting. On the other hand, Muslims often sacrificed animals, including cows, at the end of pilgrimages, and this was a recurrent source of conflict, for many Hindus were, by this time, deeply offended by the sacrifice of cows.79

  Babur showed no compassion for dogs when he vomited and suspected that someone was trying to poison him: “I never vomited after meals, not even when drinking. A cloud of suspicion came over my mind. I ordered the cook to be held while the vomit was given to a dog that was watched.” But he also tortured the cook and had him skinned alive, ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces, and had a woman suspected of complicity thrown under an elephant’s feet.80 So at least the dog was not singled out for mistreatment (and may not even have died; indeed, compared with the cook and taster, the dog got off easy). Akbar, on the other hand, was fond of dogs. He imported them from many countries and admired their courage in attacking all sorts of animals,jm even tigers. In contradiction of the teachings of Islam, he regarded neither pigs nor dogs as unclean and kept them in the harem; he also insisted that dogs had ten virtues, any one of which, in a man, would make him a saint. At Akbar’s table, some of his friends and courtiers would put dogs on the tablecloth, and some of them went so far as to let the dogs put their tongues into their (the courtiers’) mouths, to the horror of Abu’l Fazl.81 An album published during Akbar’s reign shows a Kanphata yogi (a devotee of Shiva) and his dog, with a text that says, “Your dog is better than anything in the world of fidelity.”82

  One story about Akbar and dogs is also a great story about Akbar’s religious tolerance. It was told by an Englishman named Thomas Coryat, who traveled to India between 1612 and 1617:

  Ecbar Shaugh [Akbar the Shah] . . . never denyed [his mother] any thing but this, that shee demanded of him, that our Bible might be hanged about an asses necke and beaten about the town of Agra, for that the Portugals [Portuguese] tyed [the Qu’ran] about the necke of a dogge and beat the same dogge about the towne of Ormuz. But hee denyed her request, saying that, if it were ill in the Portugals to doe so to the Alcoran, being it became not a King to requite ill with ill, for that the contempt of any religion was the contempt of God.83

  Akbar grants, implicitly, that the dogs insulted the Qu’ran, but he differs from his mother (as he rarely did) in refusing to take revenge, thus short-circuiting the karmic chain of religious intolerance.

  NONVIOLENT VOWS OF AKBAR AND JAHANGIR

  Dogs’ talent for hunting was important to Akbar, who was famous for his own skill, courage, and enthusiasm for the sport. Many pages of the Ain-i-Akbari are devoted to hunting tigers and leopards and catching elephants. Yet even there Abu’l Fazl feels it necessary to justify hunting by an argument that it is not merely, as it might appear, a source of pleasurejn but a way of finding out, while traveling incognito, about the condition of the people and the army, taxation, the running of households, and so forth.84 Moreover, on two separate occasions Akbar himself made vows to limit, if not to give up, hunting, the repeated attempts to give it up being a telltale sign that he, at least, regarded it as an addiction. He made the first vow when his wife was pregnant with his first son, Jahangir, and the embryo seemed to be dying; it happened on a Friday, and Akbar vowed never to hunt with cheetahs on Friday, a vow that he (and Jahangir, in response) kept all his life. This closed off one loophole that he had left in an earlier, limited move toward noninjury, in advising any adherent to his “Divine Faith” (Din-i-ilahi) “not to kill any living creature with his own hand” and not to flay anything: “The only exceptions are in battle and the chase.”85

  On the secon
d occasion, Akbar apparently underwent a conversion experience not unlike that of Ashoka (whom Akbar resembles in other ways too, as we have seen): When Akbar was hunting on April 22, 1578, he looked at the great pile of all the animals that had been killed and suddenly decided to put a stop to it.86 After that he became a halfhearted vegetarian (also like Ashoka), as we learn from the section of the Ain-i-Akbari that records the sayings of Akbar: “Were it not for the thought of the difficulty of sustenance, I would prohibit men from eating meat. The reason why I do not altogether abandon it myself is, that many others might willingly forgo it likewise and be thus cast into despondency.” Abu’l Fazl attributes to Akbar a connection between vegetarianism and what a Hindu would have called noncruelty, a connection that Hindus also made: “The compassionate heart of His Majesty finds no pleasure in cruelties. . . . He is ever sparing of the lives of his subjects. . . . His Majesty abstains much from flesh, so that whole months pass away without his touching any animal food.”87

  Abu’l Fazl explicitly attributes much of Akbar’s qualified vegetarianism to his affinity with Hinduism, rather disapprovingly (which is a good indication that it is probably true):

  Beef was interdicted, and to touch beef was considered defiling. The reason of this was that, from his youth, His Majesty had been in company with Hindu libertines, and had thus learned to look upon a cow . . . as something holy. Besides, the emperor was subject to the influence of the numerous Hindu princesses of the harem, who had gained so great an ascendancy over him as to make him forswear beef, garlic, onions, and the wearing of a beard.88

  But since Jainism was also powerful in India at this time, and the Jainas were always more vigorous in their vegetarianism than the Hindus, and since Akbar had been favorably impressed by the Jaina monks in his court and had issued land grants to them as well as to the Hindus, Akbar’s change of heart may owe as much to Jainism as to Hinduism.

  Jahangir too underwent two conversion experiences about hunting. He had been, if anything, even more obsessed by hunting than Babur and Akbar were, as addicted to hunting as he was to alcohol and opium, and allergic to moderation of any kind. Then, when he took the throne in 1605, he issued a proclamation that no animals should be slaughtered for food, nor any meat eaten, on Thursday (the day of his accession) or Sunday (Akbar’s birthday). But he broke this vow by shooting tigers, first in 1610, because (he said) he could not resist his overpowering “liking for tiger-hunting,” and again on several other occasions, as late as 1616.89

  Then, in 1618, when he was fifty, Jahangir made a second vow, to give up shooting “with gun and bullet” and not to injure any living thing with his own hand. His memoir suggests that Jahangir was displacing long-festering feelings of remorse for the murder of Abu’l Fazl, his father’s right-hand man. Yet Jahangir rescinded this vow too in 1622, when his own son (the future Shah Jahan) openly turned on him in rebellion, as he himself had turned against Akbar. Instead of taking measures to kill his son, Jahangir started once again to kill animals, another displacement. Since Jahangir did not share his father’s great enthusiasm for the Hindus (though he generally continued his father’s policies toward them), it is, again, likely that Jainism, which Jahangir had earlier treated with intolerance but later had encouraged with a number of land grants, rather than Hinduism influenced him positively in this instance.90

  HINDU RESISTANCE: SHIVAJI AND THE MAHARASHTRIANS

  Inevitably, there was resistance. The Hindus demolished some mosques and converted them into temples, in the early thirteenth century, after 1540, and again during the reigns of Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.91

  The Mughals did not have control of all India; there were major pockets of resistance, including the Punjab under the Sikh gurus, Vijayanagar, the kingdoms in the far south, and, most famously, the Maharashtrians under the command of Shivaji. Even before Shivaji, the Maharashtrians had been a thorn in the Mughal side. In Ahmednagar (the center of power in Maharashtra), the leader of the opposition to the Mughals after 1600 was Malik Ambar, an Abyssinian who had been sold in Baghdad as a slave but became a brilliant military commander and administrator in the Ahmednagar sultanate, dealing equitably with both Hindus and Muslims. He trained mobile Maharashtrian cavalry units and won many victories against Jahangir, until his death in 1626. The most effective cavalry in India belonged to Maharashtra and Mysore, both of which had ready access to the west coast ports and to trade, primarily in horses, from the gulf states.92

  In 1647, when he was just seventeen years old, Shivaji founded the Maharashtrian kingdom, an unexpected revival of Hindu kingship in the teeth of a powerful Muslim supremacy. When Shivaji captured Bijapur, his men took the treasure, horses, and elephants and enlisted to their side most of the Bijapuri troops, some of whom were Maharashtrians, while some of Shivaji’s men were Muslims. In this, as in so much of medieval Indian history, allies and enemies were formed on political and military grounds more often than on religious ones, even for Shivaji, who in later centuries became the hero of Hindu militantism against Muslims. The scourge of Aurangzeb, Shivaji made lavish donations to Brahmins but (according to the Muslim chronicler Khafi Khan) made a point of not desecrating mosques or seizing women. A Maharashtrian Brahmin constructed a Kshatriya genealogy for him that linked him with earlier Rajputs. There are also many legends connecting Shivaji with the Maharashtrian saints Tukaram (1568-1650) and Ramdas (1608-1681). Shivaji died of dysentery in 1680.93

  In 1688, Aurangzeb captured Shivaji’s successor, Shambhaji, and had him tortured and dismembered limb by limb. Shambhaji’s brother Rajaram took over until his death, when his senior widow, Tarabai, assumed control in the name of her son, Shambhaji II. In 1714, Shivaji’s grandson Shahu appointed as his chief minister a Brahmin who was such a poor horseman that he required a man on each side to hold him in the saddle.94 The Maharashtrian resistance did not last long after that.

  INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE UNDER THE MUGHALS

  It is hard to generalize about interreligious relations under all the Mughals; they were so different, Akbar the best (and Dara, though he never got to rule), Aurangzeb the worst, Shah Jahan a mixed bag (he destroyed many Hindu temples, but Mughal officials during his reign participated in Jagannath festivals). 95 But if we do try to generalize, we can say that throughout the Mughal period, official conversions of Hindus to Islam were rare;96 non-Muslims were not obliged to convert to Islam on entering the Mughal ruling class, and the Mughals generally regarded Islam as their own cultural heritage and did not encourage conversion to Islam among the general population.97 There is no evidence of massive coercive conversion. Surprisingly little was written about conversion in contemporary sources on either side, suggesting that few regarded it as a major issue. Jahangir did not approve of mass conversions; he punished one Mughal official for converting the son of a defeated Hindu raja.98 There is evidence of fewer than two hundred conversions under Aurangzeb.

  Yet evidently many Hindus did convert, or the Muslim population of India would not have grown as it did. Some Hindus converted for money, some as punishment, some for marriage, some because they believed in it. The sons of a rebellious Rajput were spared on condition of accepting Islam; some refused and chose death instead. One prince converted because he got a tremendous raise in pay by doing so.99 The Hindu wives of Muslim rulers sometimes converted and even built mosques.100 A Brahmin who had been appointed to help a theologian of Akbar’s court translate the Atharva Veda from Sanskrit into Persian ended up converting to Islam. A ruler of Kashmir converted through association with his Muslim minister.101

  On the other hand, so many Muslims converted to Hinduism that Shah Jahan established a department to deal with it and forbade any proselytizingjo by Hindus,102 and so many conversions took place as the result of intermarriage that Akbar (Akbar!) forbade Hindu women to marry their Muslim lovers; he had the women forcibly removed from their husbands and returned to their birth families. Under Jahangir, twenty-three Muslims in Varanasi fell in love with Hindu women and converted
to Hinduism. Under Shah Jahan, Muslim girls in Kashmir married Hindu boys and became Hindu. Muslim women married to Hindu men, and Muslim husbands of Hindu women, sometimes reconverted to Islam. In the fifteenth century the Brahmins thought that there was already a need for conversions back to Hinduism;103 they overhauled ancient ceremonies designed to reinstate Hindus who had fallen from caste (usually as a result of some ritual impurity) and evolved ceremonies for reconversion, called purification (shuddhi), usually involving both the payment of money and a ritual.

  One Portuguese Augustinian friar, Sebastião Manrique, noted the Mughal policy of honoring Hindu law in Bengal between 1629 and 1640, during the reign of Shah Jahan:jp

  THE CASE OF THE POACHED PEACOCKS

  Disguising himself as a Muslim merchant, apparently in order to avoid the hostility that a Christian missionary might expect, Manrique rode on horseback through the monsoon rains and took shelter in the cowshed of a Hindu village. One of his Bengali Muslim attendants caught, killed, and cooked a pair of peacocks; when Manrique learned of this, he feared the wrath of the Hindu villagers and buried the bones and feathers. But the villagers found a few feathers and, armed with bows and arrows, pursued Manrique’s company (and their Hindu guide) to the nearby town, where the villagers filed a formal complaint with the Muslim administrator [shiqdar] whom the Mughals had put in charge of law and order there. “Evidently aware that to Hindus the peacock was a sacred bird,” the administrator threw Manrique et cie in jail and, after twenty-four miserable hours, brought them to trial.