1
Introduction
Sufi and the Ghazi
The politics of the imagination of a âHindu Indiaâ has depended crucially on a particular reading of the oppression of the disunited denizens of the subcontinent by Muslim conquerors and rulers from the eleventh century till the establishment of British rule in the mid-eighteenth century.
Believing in four Vedas, six Shastras, eighteen Purans and 33 crore devtas Hindus, to begin with, were differentiated according to language, beliefs and customs, and then the [war of the] Mahabharata caused further havoc. The one or two germs of valour that remained were finished off by the Ahimsa of Lord Buddha . . . Our ferociousness simply disappeared; our sense of pride deserted us, and as for anger, all sorts of sins were laid at its door. The result: we became devtas, mahatmas, or for that matter nice fellows [bhalmanus], but our spunk, we lost that. No fire, no spark, simply cold ash, thatâs what we became . . .
And on the other side in the desert of Arabia a soul appeared who was brave as his word, and in whose religion killing, slaughtering, fighting and marauding were the principal elements . . .1
Thus wrote Manan Dwivedi, Bhojpuri poet, Hindi novelist and writer of nationalist prose in the prologue to an impressive two-part âHistory of Muslim Rule in Indiaâ, commissioned by the Hindi-nationalist Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha in the year 1920.2
There are obvious continuities here with what Partha Chatterjee has called the ânew nationalist history of Indiaâ written in Bengali some fifty years earlier in the late nineteenth century.3 These vernacular histories transmitted the âstereotypical figure of âthe Muslimâ, endowed with a ânational characterâ, fanatical, bigoted, warlike, dissolute, cruel.â This distinct history, says Chatterjee,
[o]riginates in, and acquires its identity from the life of Muhammad. In other words, the dynasty that will be founded in Delhi at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the many changes that will take place in the subsequent five centuries are not to be described merely as the period of Turko-Afghan or Mughal India: they are integral parts of the political history of Islam.
The actors in this history are also given certain behavioural characteristics. They are warlike and believe it is their religious duty to kill infidels. Driven by the lust for plunder and the visions of cohabiting with the nymphs of paradise, they are even prepared to die in battle. They are not merely conquerors but âdelirious at the prospect of conquestâ (digvijayonmatta), and consequently are by their very nature covetous of the riches of India.4
Jin jÄvanÄn tuv dharam nari dhan tinhon lÄ«nhon: âYou Muslim foreigners! You have robbed us [Hindus] of [our] dharma, women and wealthâall threeâ, wrote the Hindi poet Bharatendu Harishchandra in 1888, echoing pithily the stereotypical recollection of Muslim conquest and its effects on a Hindu India.5
Ruled by Muslim kings of different dynasties, the Sultanate of Delhi, c. 1200 ce, expanded over the next three centuries to encompass large portions of northern and peninsular India. And when it was snuffed out in the 1520s by Zahir-ud-din Babur, an adventurer from the petty principality of Farghana in present-day Uzbekistan, the Delhi Kingdom was replaced by the more glamorous Mughal Empire, which lasted as an expanding imperial venture till the early eighteenth century, and nominally till the suppression of the Rebellion of 1857. It was then that the last of the Mughals was exiled by the triumphant British to oblivion in distant Rangoon. In their exercise of imperial hegemony and subcontinental power, the Mughals totally transformed the predatory meaning of the term âMongol/Mughalâ, reconfiguring in the process (in active interaction with the indigenous/local/âHinduâ) a wide swath of the social, cultural and intellectual world of India.
Medieval âMuslimâ warfare and rule, c. 1000 onwards, has understandably been the object of considerable narrative anxiety from the nineteenth century to the present. And for good reason, for at its heart is the issue of the pre-colonial conquest of the subcontinentâand of its consequences. How different was this medieval âMuslimâ India of Turkish sultans and Mughal padshahs from the conquest and colonisation of India by industrial Britain? Here most accounts have been unable to extricate themselves from the blame/praise formatâand a good deal of this has to do with the tie-up between history-writing and nation-formation. For a large part, mainstream history-writing usually relates to one form of communityâthe national community. Modern history invokes the idea of a people as sovereign and historically constituted, and this has been productive of most national histories. The triumph of the idea of self-determination has meant that all conquest has come to be regarded as unjust. It is in this context, writes Camal Kafadar in his study of the formation of the Ottoman state, âthat the meaning of medieval Muslim invasions has been particularly problematic one to deal with among many Eurasian nationsâ, for to take âoneâs comingling with the âotherâ seriously in the historical reconstruction of heritages . . . seems to demand too much of national historiographiesâ.6 How can the historianâs history then reengage in newer ways the issue of conquestâin this case, the Turkish conquest of north India, c. 1000â1200?
What was the nature of iconoclasm and pillage, especially of the notorious Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, whose repeated raids into northern and western India, 1000â1026 ce, resulted in widespread despoliation and destruction? Writing in his wake, the eleventh-century savant Al Beruni seems to have predicted uncannily the path of the memories of Mahmudâs invasions:
Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims.7
Its metaphoric charge notwithstanding, this sentiment has been echoed in every textbook of Indian history, beginning with a Bengali tract written in 1858: âOf all the Muslims it was [Mahmudâs] aggression which first brought devastation and disarray to India, and from that time the freedom of the Hindus has diminished and faded like the phases of the moonâ.8 Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni is then the familiar conqueror-marauder of history textbooks, as he is the idealised iconoclast of Indo-Persian chronicles, panegyrics and medieval treatises on governance.9
There have been a series of retorts to this âcommunalisation of historyâ, as it is called in South Asia, the term âcommunalâ implying an adherence to narrow religio-sectarian loyalties that colour and impede the development of a properly contextualised history and a composite cultural past and present, not exclusively Hindu or Muslim. The most powerful (and very nearly the first) such critique came from Professor Mohammad Habib, who in a series of essays, c. 1920â1950, sought to counter the communalisation of Indiaâs medieval history from a broadly Marxist perspective.10 His ire was directed particularly against the partisan scholarship of British administrator-orientalists who had consistently projected the âMuslim Indiaâ of c. 1000â1700 as a period of oppression and fanaticism from which colonial rule had finally liberated the grateful Hindus.
Habib countered by arguing that the âreal motives of the plundering expeditionsâ of the beginning of the eleventh century, associated with the name of Mahmud of Ghazni, were âgreed for treasure and gold. The iconoclastic pretensions were meant only for the applause of the galleryâ.11 The Muslims of India were not so much the progeny of Turkish conquerors, he wrote, as local converts from the artisanal classes, socially and spatially at the margins of both Hindu society and early medieval towns: âan Indian Muslim had as little chance of becoming a warlord of the empire of Delhi as a [low caste] Hindu Sudra of ascending a Rajasthan throneâ occupied by Hindu rajas and maharajas. For Habib, âsuch limited success as Islam achieved in Indiaâ as a proselytising force âwas not due to its kings and politicians but to its saintsâ.12
In this view, âthe Indo-Muslim mystics, without perhaps consciously knowing it, followed the footsteps of their great Hindu predecessors . . . And Hinduism in its cosmopolitan outlook enrolled the Muslim mystics among its rishis, and neighbourly feelings soon developed a common calendar of saints. So it was in the thirteenth century and so it remains todayâ.13 A part of the âage-old moral and spiritual traditions of our peopleâ, syncretism for Habib and several others delineates an essential Indian characteristic, one marked by emotive floral, faunal and cultural signifiers. In such an understanding, syncretism is not a historical process, a product of coming to terms with events like political conquest and the otherworldly challenge posed to the indigenous jogis (yogis) by what must have seemed like arriviste Sufis. It springs, fully formed, so to speak, from the same âsacred land where the black gazelles graze, the munja grass grows and the pÄn [betel] leaf is eaten, and where the material and the spiritual are organically intermixedâ. I take these evocative markers of Indiaâs sacred topology from Habibâs powerful address to the Indian History Congress in the immediate aftermath of Independence and Partition in December 1947.14
But we know that the medieval Sufis, though gentle in their persona, especially in archetypal opposition to the âholy warriorâ, had to forcefully carve out their spiritual domain against the locally ensconced authority of jogis. Hagiographies constantly harp on contests between the Sufi and the jogi for spiritual supremacy, contests in which the jogi is invariably bested: he either converts along with his disciples, or retires, leaving the Sufi in triumphant possession of a prior holy and tranquil spot (often by a lake). One of Indiaâs most venerable Sufis, Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, is said to have established his hospice only after successfully overcoming ogres and warriors attached to a pre-existing site commanded by a jogi and his entourage.15 Sometimes, all that remains of the preceding jogi is a wisp of a name, carrying the toponymic stigmata of a âhistoricâ defeat for all to utter. Many place names in the Gangetic heartland enshrine the memory of such holy victories and defeats (though I am far from arguing that every time a local mentions, say, the name Mau-nÄth-bhanjan, she necessarily recollects the destruction [bhanjan] of the lord and master [nÄth] of Mau, a thriving manufacturing town near Banaras since the seventeenth century). In other cases, the defeated spiritual master is transformed into an ogre by the sheer act of transcription from one language to another. While the Sanskrit dev stands for a god, or the title of a revered person, when written in Persian without this gloss the word deo stands for a ghost, demon or monster. Spiritually and linguistically mastered, the holy-harmful figure often submits before the majestic Sufi, who grants the vanquished and now subservient deo his last wish that his memory be recorded for posterity in terms of some trace. This frequently gets enshrined in the nomenclature of a placeâfor example, Maunath Bhanjan, or Deoband, the place of the incarcerated deo-demon, incidentally the locale of an Islamic seminary since the 1860s. The trace could be retained as a visible sign of an equally monstrous sort. At the Bahraich shrine of Salar Masud Ghazi in northeastern Uttar Pradesh (UP), for example the earrings of the subdued deo Nirmal are the size of grindstones.
These are some of the ways in which eventful encounters between the holy men of Islam and of the Hindus get enshrined in the life histories of popular Sufi sites. And of course these shrines attract both Hindus and Muslims as devotees. Muzaffar Alam has shown with great acuity how many descriptions of such Sufi saints are subsequent representations, probably guided by the political necessity, either to overcompensate for a founding headâs politically incorrect dealings with an earlier Sultan, or to elevate him (as with Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer) into a full-fledged Indian prophet (Nabi-yi-Hind). As the dominant Chishtiya silsilah faced threats in the seventeenth century from ânew Central Asian sheikhsâ from the erstwhile homelands of the Mughals and their Indian disciples, such efforts to save the phenomena of dominance and fame of the Chishti Sufis became more pronounced.16
Let me clarify. My point is not to deny the composite following of Indiaâs justly famous Sufi saints. All I wish to do is to create a space for encounter, clash and conquest as necessary elements of the conflictual prehistory of such cultic sites as that of Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, and Nizamuddin Auliya, medieval and modern Delhiâs greatest Sufi saint. Wrathful, hypostatical, miraculous events and encounters, I am suggesting, not a simple, longstanding Indian spirit of accommodation, go into the making of Indiaâs vaunted syncretism. Or, to put it sharply: accommodation is predicated, necessarily in such stories, on a prior clash of two opposing wills. The hermetically cloistered figures of rosary-fondling Sufis (saints) and saber-rattling ghazis (warriors), even when yoked to the cause of good pluralistic politics, produce bad history. Not History with a capital âHâ, but the representation and recollection of their exploits outside proper, verifiable, contemporary medieval archives are some of the elements of a new history that we should strive towards. I say this for two reasons: one, because irrespective of their specificities of time and place, such accounts feed into the life stories of prominent Sufis, forming the template for recollecting the ex...