And if he did not get the message then, he certainly got it in May 2009 when Indian national elections gave the Congress-led coalition a decisive victory over Modi’s BJP. Indeed, the decline of Modi, which those elections might suggest, is as sure a sign as any of India’s triumphal entry into the twenty-first century. At the end of the day, despite all of the trends I have noted, I believe that enough Hindus will not ultimately give in to hate, regardless of the Muslim threat. We can thank India’s democratic spirit for that, a spirit that is truly breathtaking in terms of what it can overcome. That is India’s ultimate strength.
But in Gujarat, at least, peace will not come easily. From Diu I hired a car and drove two hours westward along the coast to Somnath, site of the Hindu temple destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazna, as well as by other invaders, and rebuilt for the seventh time starting in 1947.
Adorned with a massive pale ocher shikhara (tower) and assemblage of domes, this temple is located at the edge of a vast seascape glazed over with heat. Its coiled and writhing cosmic scenes on the facade are so complex they create the sculptural equivalent of infinity. Prayer blasted from loudspeakers. It was a madhouse on account of the full moon. Hundreds of worshippers checked their bags at a ratty cloak stand and left their shoes in scattered piles. Beggars attached themselves to me; hawkers were everywhere, as at many pilgrimage sites. Signs proclaimed that no mobile phones or other electronic devices would be permitted inside. I knew better, I told myself. I put my BlackBerry in my cargo pocket, not trusting it to the mild chaos of the cloak stand, and expecting the usual, lackadaisical third world frisk. I then joined the long, single file line to enter the temple. At the entrance, I was savagely searched and my Black-Berry discovered. I was rightly yelled at, and beckoned back to the cloak stand. “Muslim terrorism,” one worshipper alerted me. From the cloakroom I got back in line and entered the temple.
Semi-darkness enveloped me as worshippers kissed the flower-bedecked idol of a cow. The air was suffocating with packed-together bodies approaching the womb-chamber. I felt as if I were trespassing on a mystery. Though nonbelievers were officially welcomed, I knew that I was outside the boundaries of the single organism of the crowd—philosopher Elias Canetti’s word for a large group of people who abandoned their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol.18 This sanctum was a pulsating vortex of faith. Some dropped to their hands and knees, and prayed on the stone floor. There was no seduction of outsiders as at the Vatican, a place diluted by global tourism; nor was this the Kali temple in Kolkata, where foreigners are regularly welcomed and accosted by “guides” demanding their money. The universalism of the kind I had experienced at the Sultan Qabus Grand Mosque in Oman, which celebrated material civilization throughout the Indian Ocean, was not missing here, it was simply irrelevant. I had had the same extreme and cloistered sensation inside the shrine of the Black Madonna at Czstochowa in Poland, and in the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf in Iraq, two of the holiest sites of Catholicism and Shiism, respectively; at the latter unbelievers are expressly forbidden and I had to sneak in with a busload of visiting Turkish businessmen.
Being here you could not help understanding Hindu feelings about Muslim depredations of this temple, one of India’s twelve Jyotirlingas (places with signs of light that symbolize the God Shiva). Emotions crackled like electricity, yet I thought of what human rights official Hanif Lakdawala had asked me in a pleading tone: “What can we poor Muslims of today do about Mahmud of Ghazna?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE VIEW FROM DELHI
Of all the periods of Indian Ocean history with which Gujarat is associated, and which are pertinent to our larger strategic discussion, among the most important is that of the Mughal Empire. Mughal emperor Akbar the Great marched into Ahmedabad in 1572 and completed the conquest of the province two years later. For the first time, the Mughals were rulers of a full-fledged coastal state with a substantial foothold on the Arabian Sea. Gujarat offered the Mughals not only possession of the busiest seaports of the Subcontinent at the time, but also a maritime kingdom that included vast and rich agricultural lands, and was in addition a powerhouse of textile production. By linking Gujarat with the Indo-Gangetic plain, and with soon-to-be-conquered Bengal, Akbar secured a subcontinental empire that spanned the two great bays of the Indian Ocean: the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. It was by conquering Gujarat that Akbar saved India from disintegration, and from falling further into the hands of the Portuguese, whose hold on Goa threatened the other Arabian Sea ports.
Few empires have boasted the artistic, religious, and cultural eclecticism of the Mughals. They ruled India and parts of Central Asia from the early 1500s to 1720 (after which the empire declined rapidly). Like the Indian Ocean world of which it was a part, the Mughal Empire was a stunning case in point of early globalization. Take the Taj Mahal, the white marble mausoleum built on the bank of the Yamuna River in Agra by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to honor his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth (her fourteenth) on June 17, 1631. The tomb fuses all the liberating grace and symmetry of the best of Persian and Turkic-Mongol architecture, with an added Indian lightness and flair. It is as though, with its globular dome and four slender minarets, it is able to defy gravity and float off the ground itself. There is a romance to the tomb and the story surrounding it that makes one forget that Shah Jahan was an extremely orthodox Muslim whose rule, according to Duke University history professor John F. Richards, represented a “hardening” of relations between the dominant Muslims and those of other faiths in the Subcontinent.1
Mughal is the Arabic and Persian form of Mongol, which was applied to all foreign Muslims from the north and northwest of India. The Mughal Empire was founded by Zahir-ud-din-Muhammad Babur, a Chaghatai Turk born in 1483 in the Fergana valley in today’s Uzbekistan, who spent his early adulthood trying to capture Tamerlane’s (Timur’s) old capital of Samarkand. After being defeated decisively by Muhammad Shaybani Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan, Babur and his followers headed south and captured Kabul. From there Babur swept down with his army from the high plateau of Afghanistan into the Punjab. Thus, he was able to begin his conquest of the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal, or Timurid, Empire that took form under Akbar the Great, Babur’s grandson, had a nobility composed of Rajputs, Afghans, Arabs, Persians, Uzbeks, and Chaghatai Turks, as well as of Indian Sunnis, Shias, and Hindus, not to mention other groups. In religion, too, Akbar’s reign of forty-nine years (1556–1605) demonstrated a similar universalism. Akbar, who was illiterate, possibly the result of dyslexia, spent his adult life in the study of comparative religious thought. And as his respect grew for Hinduism and Christianity, he became less enamored with his own, orthodox Sunni Islam. In his later years, writes Richards in his rich yet economical history of the Mughal Empire, Akbar gravitated toward a “self-conceived eclectic form of worship focused on light and the sun.”2 Moreover, he championed an “extraordinarily accommodative, even syncretic style of politics,” even as he governed in the courtly style of a traditional Indian maharaja, as demonstrated in the miniature paintings.3
All that changed under his successors Jehangir, Shah Jahan, and especially Aurangzeb, who returned the empire to a fierce Sunni theocracy that, nevertheless, tolerated other sects and religions. This very religious dynamic was a factor in the tense relations between Mughal India and Safavid Persia. Although Persian administrators were among the largest ethnic groups in the Mughal nobility, the Safavi Persians, who were fervent Shias, showed contempt for the Sunni Timurids governing India. This extreme dislike was intensified by the uncomfortable cultural similarity between the two empires that shared a common frontier through what is today western Afghanistan, for the Mughal imperium truly conjoined India and the Near East.
This is what makes the Mughal Empire so crucially relevant to an understanding of the destinies of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the twenty-first century. The very term “Indian Subcontinent” instills in us the geographical logic and inevitability o
f the Indian state as a separate, inviolate unit framed by nature itself, hemmed in as it is by the Indian Ocean on three sides and by the Himalayas in the north. Meanwhile, we also tend to think of Pakistan and Afghanistan as more or less separate units, with their own historical and natural legitimacy, if less so than India. But the Mughals governed what is today Pakistan and much of Afghanistan from their northern Indian heartland, even as they had trouble subduing the Maratha tribes of the Deccan plateau in India’s own south.
The Mughals were everywhere, it seems. They fought the Uzbeks in the extreme north of Afghanistan. They had strong bases in Baluchistan, Sindh, and Gujarat on the Arabian Sea, in the two eastern Indian provinces of Orissa and Bengal, and in a sliver of Arakan in western Burma.* In other words, the Mughals united Central Asia with the Indian Ocean, in both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, reaching all the way to Southeast Asia. Islam was the adhesive that held this sprawling state together.
Kabul and Kandahar were a natural extension of this venerable Delhi-based dynasty, yet the strongly Hindu area in southern India around present-day Bangalore—India’s high-technology capital—was much less so. Aurangzeb, the “world-seizer,” under whose rule in the late seventeenth century the Mughal Empire reached the zenith of its expansion, was an old man in his eighties still fighting Maratha insurgents in India’s south. He died in 1707 in his camp in the Deccan plateau, unable to subdue them. In fact, it was this long-running and intractable insurgency in southern India that sapped the cohesion and morale of the Mughal elite. Aurangzeb’s preoccupation with the Maratha warriors—to the exclusion of imperial problems elsewhere—made it easier for the Dutch, French, and British East India companies to gain footholds on the coast, which led eventually to British rule in India.4
The British would unite the Subcontinent through a railway system and other tools of modernity, making a stable and united India appear inevitable, even if, for a host of historical and cultural reasons—as Aurangzeb’s experience showed—it was not necessarily. Neither, for that matter, is it inevitable that the borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and between Pakistan and India, will continue to have the same meaning they have today. Harvard historian Sugata Bose notes that what both the British and ourselves have referred to as the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan—the current haven of al-Qaeda and the Taliban—is “no frontier at all,” but the “heart” of an Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic continuum that straddled the high plateau of Central Asia and the steamy lowlands of the Subcontinent for millennia.5 Thus, our struggle to separate Afghanistan from Pakistan may be in vain if geography, history, and culture are any guide. To succeed in Afghanistan means stabilizing both countries, not one. In fact, for negative reasons like cross-border terrorist attacks or for positive ones like the construction of roads and pipelines, this vast region of the Mughal Empire may achieve a new kind of unity, ultimately bringing Sindh and Gujarat, as well as Central Asia and the Subcontinent, together once again, anchoring, that is, South Asia to a Greater Middle East.
The memory of the Mughal Empire suggests a new and borderless world in the process of emergence, in which the old divisions of Cold War area studies are dissolving across Asia. Nowhere in India did I feel the tensions of what this implied as in the capital of New Delhi. Under the Mughal emperors Shah Jahan and his son Aurangzeb, Delhi was the richest and most populous city between Istanbul and Tokyo, and its existing British-built structures re-create that dominating mood. Walking can be difficult in the administrative heart of New Delhi, parts of which are built on too grand a scale, with much open space and often not enough shade, despite the abundance of trees. Erected in the 1920s, after the capital had been moved from Calcutta, the visual effect of its core government buildings, so graceful and yet so overwhelming, is reminiscent of the fortress architecture of the Mughal Empire itself. Each structure demonstrates the same monumental calm and sweeping proportions of Shah Jahan’s one-and-a-half-mile-long Red Fort, constructed in the mid-seventeenth century in the old part of the city. New Delhi’s sandstone government edifices, with their various earthen shades of red and ocher, their long walls, lonely pigeon-inhabited porticoes, and distant oriental domes of varying widths and depths—like planets arrayed in the heavens—convey a political power so certain and self-confident that it rises above mere ambition.
The scholar and India expert William Dalrymple sees in New Delhi’s architectural panorama vague evocations of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, both of which were contemporaneous with Britain’s own brand of authoritarianism in India, and both of which shared with the British Empire the illusion of permanence.6 It is said that British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens had bells carved into the columns of the Viceregal Lodge, now the official residence of the President of India, because as they would be silent, British rule would never come to an end. Indeed, some years earlier, Lord Curzon had proclaimed: “The Empire calls, as loudly as it ever did.… The Frontiers of Empire continue to beckon.”7 Yet a mere two decades after this building spree the British deserted India, and these gargantuan structures—and all the power and presumption they express—are now the offices of the Indian armed services and government ministries.
The lesson of the fragility of central authority appears to have been internalized by the current occupants. In several days of meetings with top Indian military and civilian officials in New Delhi on separate visits, it became clear to me that although they have plans for India’s projection of power throughout the Indian Ocean world, they are also deeply worried about the feebleness of India’s own borders, to say nothing of India’s internal strife. The voices I heard mixed a determined ambition with a prudent sense of tragedy. Whereas the British had assumed a lot, the current occupants assume less.
It is important to situate these buildings geographically. In terms of architecture, culture, and history, Delhi is where Turko-Persian Central Asia meets the Hindu Gangetic plain, where inner Asia meets the periphery of the Indian Ocean world. As such, it has been the seat of great Asian power since the Middle Ages. In the twenty-first century, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, India will emerge as the key “swing” state in international politics. As Lord Curzon wrote a century ago:
The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbours, its reserve of military strength … all these are assets of precious value. On the West, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on the north-east … it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam [Thailand].8
The British and the Mughal emperors who followed Babur might have been there no longer, but India’s current rulers occupied the same geographical position as they did, and in our conversations, therefore, I noted that they looked out at the world similarly.
The Mughals were a land-based empire of Central Asian origin, and the British a sea-based empire. For the moment, India was rising more in the way of the British. Just as the British Royal Navy ruled the seas, allowing for the protection of its crown colonies, notably India, the story of a rising India is, at least in military terms, the story of its navy. Hemmed in on land by a combination of the Himalayan Mountains and failing states from Pakistan and Nepal to Bangladesh and Burma, India can best project power at sea. India stands sentinel astride the major sea-lanes from the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of Malacca, where the threat of naval or containerized terrorism is very real. And although countries such as Malaysia and China “have reservations about the U.S. pushing its geostrategic objectives in the name of maritime security,” in effect, without ever declaring it, India can play the role of the chief balancer vis-à-vis China.9 The renowned policy analyst of India Stephen P. Cohen argues that New Delhi officials since the time of the Cold War have inculcated the precepts of George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796: that India, like the United States, inhabits its own geogr
aphical sphere, in India’s case between the Himalayas and the wide Indian Ocean, and thus is in a position of both dominance and detachment.10 During the Cold War this meant nonengagement; now it means that Indians see themselves with their own separate status as a rising power.
Chinese policy intellectuals are becoming deeply concerned with the emergence of a capable Indian navy.11 One Chinese analyst even worries that the 244 islands that constitute India’s Andaman-Nicobar archipelago can be used as a “metal chain” to lock shut the western entrance of the Strait of Malacca on which China so desperately depends for its oil deliveries. This analyst, Zhang Ming, reasons further that “once India commands the Indian Ocean, it will not be satisfied with its position and will continuously seek to extend its influence, and its eastward strategy will have a particular impact on China.” Ming sums up by saying that “India is perhaps China’s most realistic strategic adversary.”12 Of course, this may bear the sound of a professional worrier from the Chinese equivalent of Washington’s own theory class. But policy elites worry to a serious purpose, and even if Ming is somewhat exaggerating the extent of the Indian menace, his concerns demonstrate just how seriously Beijing takes New Delhi as a major sea power in its own right.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 15
