White Mughals Page 21
Moreover Mughal princesses tended to be richer, and to possess far greater powers of patronage, than the secluded Iranian noblewomen Shushtari would have been familiar with in Iran: half the most important monuments in Shah Jehan’s Mughal Delhi were built by women, especially Shah Jehan’s favourite daughter Jahanara, who independently constructed several mansions (including one in the Red Fort which alone cost 700,000 rupees,cf a garden, a bath-house and a palatial caravanserai; she also laid out the whole of the principal avenue of the city, Chandni Chowk.20
Aristocratic Mughal women also tended to be much better educated than their Iranian cousins: almost all of them were literate, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or ‘learned matrons’; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry and astronomy.21 As a result there were many cases of highly educated Indian Muslim princesses who became famous writers or poetesses: Gulbadan, the sister of the second Mughal Emperor Humayun, wrote her brother’s biography, the Humayun Nama, while her great-great-great-niece Jahanara wrote a biography of the celebrated Indian Sufi, Mu’in ud-Din Chisti, as well as several volumes of poetry and her own epitaph.22 More scholarly still was Aurangzeb’s daughter, Zeb un-Nissa. According to the Maasir i-Alamgiri, the history of Aurangzeb’s reign, Zeb un-Nissa had learned the Koran by heart and ‘completely mastered the Arabic and Persian languages, as well as the art of writing all the various styles of calligraphy. Indeed her heart was set on the collection, copying and reading of books. The result was that she collected a library the likes of which no man has seen; and a large number of theologians, scholars, pious men, poets, scribes and calligraphists by this means came to enjoy the bounty of this scholarly lady.’23
This sort of thing was dangerous enough, thought Shushtari; but more shocking still was the way these over-educated and independent-minded Indian women behaved. He was particularly horrified at the number he came into contact with on his travels who had had affairs—or even intermarried—with the English:The women of the immoral Hindus and the Muslims they have corrupted, of their own accord and desire enter into the bonds of wedlock with the English. These English do not interfere with their religion nor compel them to leave purda veiling; when any son born of the union reaches the age of four, he is taken from his mother and sent to England to be educated. Some daughters are left with their mothers to be trained by them in their own way before being married off to a Muslim who is then given some appointment; the fathers also leave the girls something of their inheritance. When children reach the age of discretion, they are free to choose their religion themselves.24
This approach was not in fact some radical colonial departure, but was part of an old Indian tradition: providing wives or concubines for rulers had long been a means of preferment in courtly India. As the British rose to power across the subcontinent it became increasingly politically opportune to marry princely Indian women to them, so binding the British, and especially the British Residents, into the Indian political system and gaining a degree of access and leverage over them: William Linnaeus Gardner for example is quite open about the fact that his application to marry his Begum was ultimately agreed to by her family as ‘on mature deliberation, the ambassador [i.e. Gardner] was considered too influential a person to have a request denied, and the hand of the young princess was promised’.25
Behind these frequent liaisons between British men and Indian women—and Shushtari’s horrified attitude to such connections—lay not just different approaches to gender, but radically differing approaches to both romantic love and sexuality between India and Iran. Sexuality in India was always regarded as a subject of legitimate and fascinated enquiry, and looked upon as an essential part of the study of aesthetics: srngararasa—the erotic rasa or flavour—being one of the nine rasas comprising the Hindu aesthetic system. Such was the lack of embarrassment in both Hindu and Muslim courts that numerous miniatures were commissioned and painted showing exactly how the fullest possible pleasures of this rasa might be attained. It was a world away from the rigid ban on the depiction of images of any sort that defined the strictest interpretations of Middle Eastern Islam.
Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries many of the classics of Hindu writing on love and eroticism were translated into Persian for the use of the princes and princesses of Indian Muslim courts. Significantly, it was in the more cosmopolitan and less comprehensively Islamicised courts of the Deccan such as Bidar, Bijapur and Golconda that much of this work of translation and dissemination took place: erotic treatises such as the famous Kama Sutra and the Srngaramanjari (literally ‘The Bouquets of Sexual Pleasure’) were translated into Persian or Deccani Urdu, while Indian Muslim authors added new studies to the erotic shelves of the palace libraries such as the Lazat al-Nissa (or ‘Delights of Women’) and the Tadhkirat al-Shahawat (‘Book of Aphrodisiacs’), both of which were much read and copied throughout the eighteenth-century Deccan.
Other texts advised on how to plant a pleasure garden with sensually stimulating plants as an aid to seduction, or even, in the case of the ‘Itr-i Nawras Shahi, how to ‘charge’ a palace bedroom with scents appropriate to prolonging and heightening sexual pleasure: as well as placing bouquets of tuberoses and other strongly scented flowers at varying heights in the room, the writer suggests burning varieties of citron- and jasmine-derived incense, and lifting the bedspread so that the sheets can absorb the fragrance, which will be ‘enticing, invigorating, and pleasure giving’.26
Nor was it just a matter of erotic theory: judging by the evidence of travel accounts, sexuality played a significantly more open role in daily life and gossip in India than it did in Iran. Travellers to the subcontinent regularly brought back tales of romantic liaisons in the palaces of the Mughals, especially with the khanazads or salatin, the palace-born princes who moved freely about the harem as children and whose entry as adults was restricted but not entirely forbidden. The salatin, who tended to marry into the royal household and lived in the precincts of the Mahal, were said to have taken full advantage of their status: certainly, according to the seventeenth-century Venetian quack Niccolao Manucci, ‘under cover of this title, these princesses and many great ladies gratify their desires’.27
If this is true of Mughal India in general, it is especially true of late Mughal India between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. After the end of the enforced puritanism of Aurangzeb and Nizam ul-Mulk’s period, attitudes changed completely: Nizam Ali Khan even founded a department of his civil service to oversee and promote the business of dancing, music and sensuality, the Daftar Arbab-i-Nishaat (the Office of the Lords of Pleasure).28 At the same time there was an explosion of unrestrainedly sensual art and literary experimentation: in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, poets at this time wrote some of the most unblushingly amorous Indian poetry to be composed since the end of the classical period seventeen hundred years earlier.
This was the age of the great courtesans:cg in Delhi, Ad Begum would turn up stark naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one would notice: ‘she decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in place of the cuffs she draws flowers and petals in ink exactly as is found in the finest cloth of Rum’. Her rival, Nur Bai, was so popular that every night the elephants of the great Mughal omrahs completely blocked the narrow lanes outside her house; yet even the most senior nobles had to ‘send a large sum of money to have her admit them … whoever gets enamoured of her gets sucked into the whirlpool of her demands and brings ruin in on his house … but the pleasure of her company can only be had as long as one is in possession of riches to bestow on her’.29
Nur Bai’s counterpart in Hyderabad was Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the mistress of Mir Alam, and the most celebrated beauty of the age.30 She was as renowned for her intelligence as her matchless dancing; and on meeting her, according to Shushtari, the young Mir Alam immediately ‘fell in love with this moon-
faced beautych and threw off the gravitas of the scholar. In the days of the full springtime flush of his youth, his mind was unsettled by her seductive beauty and ravishing charm, so that he could only think of love and poetry, and soon fell ill. It took him more than three months to recover and get back to studying and teaching the Islamic curriculum.’31
Mah Laqa Bai was not just glamorous and seductive: she was widely regarded as Hyderabad’s greatest contemporary poet, whose works were collected as far away as Delhi and Lucknow. She built a famous library filled with books on the arts and sciences, and commissioned the Mahanama, a major new history of the Deccan; later she became an important patron of poets in her own right.32 Such was the Nizam’s reliance on her wisdom that alone of the women of Hyderabad she was given in her own right the rank of a senior omrah, so that she could attend the durbar and advise the Nizam on state policy.33 She also accompanied him to war, dressed in male clothing, and gained a reputation for her riding skills, her accomplishments with the bow, and even with the javelin. No wonder Kirkpatrick’s Assistant John Malcolm called her ‘an extraordinary woman’, or the Hyderabadi sage Qadrat Ullah Qasim wrote that she was ‘a unique combination of body and soul’.34
The poetry of Mah Laqa was typical of much of the verse of the period in being concerned largely with the joys of love. At this time a whole new specialist vocabulary of Urdu and Deccani words and metaphors developed to express the poet’s desires: the beloved’s arms were likened to lotus stalks, her nose to a champa bud, her thighs to banana stems, her plaited hair to the Ganges, and her rumauli—a word that was coined to describe the faint line of down which ran from below a woman’s navel—to the River Godavari. In this spirit, the Avadhi poet Shauq (1783-1871) wrote a whole series of masnavis on amorous subjects entitled Fareb-i-Ishq (‘The Wiles of Love’) and the Bahar-i-Ishq (‘The Spring of Love’), while his contemporary Nasik summed up his life’s work with the epitaph:I am a lover of breasts
Like pomegranates;
Plant then no other trees
On my grave but these.
This sort of thing was not to everyone’s taste: the great Delhi poet Mir expressed his view that most Lucknavi poets could not write verse, and would be better-advised to ‘stick to kissing and slavering’. But this mood of fleshy decadence crossed from the mushairas (poetic symposia) of the poets to the workshops of other artists: to the tailors, for example, where derzis laboured to produce ever more transparent and revealing cholis with weaves of wondrous lightness named baft hawa (‘woven wind’), abe-rawan (‘running water’) and shabnam (‘evening dew’).
Similar concerns inspired the scriptoria of the miniaturists. In Hyderabad, the artists of Nizam Ali Khan’s period were producing miniatures that tapped into the old erotic pulse of so much pre-Islamic Indian art and which were concerned above all with the depiction of aesthetic bliss in the Arcadia of the scented Deccani pleasure garden. Here courtesans as voluptuous as the nude yakshisci and apsarascj of south Indian stone sculpture attend bejewelled princes who seem to have walked off the walls of the ancient Hindu cave sculptures of nearby Badami. These women smoke hookahs and swim in long garden pools, they drink wine and play with pigeons or while away the moonlit monsoon nights on swings, listening to music and carousing in marble pavilions. The hunting and battle scenes of high Mughal art have disappeared. As one rather surprised Indian art historian has commented, ‘it is difficult to account for their sudden absence from the painters’ list of themes, but it shows that women and not hunting or war were important for their patrons’.35
There was nothing to compare with this pleasure-loving spirit in Shushtari’s Persia. For in strong contrast to the sensual decadence of late Mughal India, the Iranian and Middle Eastern attitude to romantic love lay much closer to Eastern Christian notions (the environment in which so many early Islamic attitudes developed), which emphasised the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and even, in extreme cases, the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity. In Iranian literature love is usually portrayed as a hazardous, painful and dangerous condition: typically, in the great Persian epic Layla and Majnun, Majnun is driven mad by his love for Layla, and ends up dying wasted, starving and insane.ck
This is the attitude to romantic love that Abdul Lateef Shushtari subscribes to, and the Tuhfat contains a discussion of the subject in which he emphasises the derivation of the Persian word for romantic love—’Ishq—as coming from ‘the bindweed that strangles … doctors call it a melancholy distemper of black bile, curable only by sexual union with the desired object’.cl
As Shushtari wrote on this subject, the notorious affair between his cousin’s granddaughter Khair un-Nissa and James Kirkpatrick must have been at the back of his mind. At the time he was writing the affair had led to the destruction of all his hopes—and those of much of his family—of wealth, success and power in India: romantic love and sexual fulfilment had indeed turned into a kind of poisonous bindweed dragging down all who had become entangled in it.
The liaison was thus a most sensitive and scandalous subject, and Shushtari refuses to discuss it directly, remarking only that ‘a detailed account of this notorious affair is not appropriate to these pages, indeed even a summary mention of it would provoke horror and disgust in the reader’; but what is intriguing about his account is the fact that he clearly does not in any way blame Kirkpatrick for what happened. Instead he describes him in the warmest terms: ‘The Company representative, Major James Kirkpatrick, is a man of good character and firm friend of mine. He has made a garden on the outskirts of Hyderabad where he lives: it is a beautiful garden and I occasionally went there in his company and found him a man of great intuition and understanding, second only to my older brother.’ As far as Shushtari is concerned, James did not initiate the affair, and so was not responsible for what happened.
Over and over again in his book, Shushtari emphasises the uniqueness of his clan of Sayyeds, the importance to them of endogamy, and the central duty of Sayyed men to look after their women and to guard their virtue. Yet here was a case of a good Shushtari Sayyed—his own first cousin, Bâqar Ali Khan—coming to India, intermarrying with an Indian Muslim family, and so in Shushtari’s eyes picking up immoral Indian ways. The result: Bâqar’s granddaughter throwing herself not just at a non-Sayyed, but at a non-Muslim, a firangi.
The initiative, he implies, came from Khair un-Nissa’s side, and it was there that lay the shame.
In January 1799, about a month after the wedding of Nazir un-Nissa, serious disagreement broke out in the household of Bâqar Ali Khan about the match intended for the younger of his two granddaughters, Khair un-Nissa.
An engagement had been arranged by Bâqar Ali for the girl, who was then probably not much older than fourteen. The man in question is never named, but he was from the clan of one of the most powerful Hyderabadi nobles, Bahram ul-Mulk, and the son of a close friend and ally of Mir Alam, a prominent nobleman named Ahmed Ali Khan.36
It is not clear what the women of the family objected to in the match: maybe Ahmed Ali Khan’s son was violent, drunken or untrustworthy; maybe they just disliked him or thought him insufficiently grand for the girl; maybe it was simply that Bâqar Ali Khan had arranged the marriage without consulting the women when, as maternal grandfather, his legal right to matchmake was open to question: after the death of Khair un-Nissa’s father, Mehdi Yar Khan, legal responsibility for the girl’s marriage would normally have fallen first to Sharaf un-Nissa, her mother, then to Mehdi Yar Khan’s surviving brother, Mir Asadullah Khan and his close male relations.cm Bâqar Ali Khan would not normally have been expected to involve himself in such matters.
Possibly the disaffection of the women of the household was due to a mixture of all these reasons. But whatever the cause, it is quite clear that they strongly disagreed with the match; and it is also clear that in eighteenth-century Hyderabad there was an understanding that the women of an aristocratic family—and especially the bride herself—did have a r
eal right to veto any marriage arranged for them: a decade earlier, for example, the women of Nizam Ali Khan’s zenana had joined together to reject a proposal from Tipu Sultan that his brother-in-law might marry one of the Nizam’s daughters. The women argued that Tipu and his clan were parvenu Indian-born commoners with no noble blood in their veins, that even Tipu himself was the son of an illiterate soldier of fortune, and that it would dishonour the blood of the Asafiya dynasty to mix it with such peasant Indian stock—after all, Tipu’s father had been a humble soldier in the Nizam’s army. Despite the political benefits that an alliance with Mysore might bring to Hyderabad, Nizam Ali Khan eventually agreed to the women’s demands, and Tipu’s ambassador was sent back to Seringapatam empty-handed.37
By the end of January 1799, the women of Bâqar Ali Khan’s household appear to have despaired of persuading the old man to cancel the engagement of his own volition. Some sort of public engagement ceremonycn had been performed ‘which rendered it impossible to break off the match without disgrace to the parties’, and Bâqar dug his heels in, saying that he refused to shame the family by withdrawing from the contract.38 But the women did not admit defeat, and in mid-February they seized an opportunityto take matters into their own hands when Bâqar and Mir Alam had to leave Hyderabad for several months to go off on campaign.
The cause of their departure was the Nizam’s decision to join the British in their new war against Tipu Sultan. This was the next stage in Lord Wellesley’s aggressive campaign to extinguish the last remnants of French influence in India and to establish the British not only in their place, but as the undisputed pre-eminent power in the subcontinent. From captured correspondence, Wellesley now had solid proof of what he had always suspected: that Tipu was seeking French troops and supplies from the Governor of Mauritius, and was actively plotting with Bonaparte to bring down British rule in India. Wellesley was determined he would never allow either Bonaparte or Tipu a second chance. The captured letters were the excuse he needed to open hostilities and to play the checkmate in the forty-year-long struggle between the sultans of Mysore and the East India Company.