Taking Delhi
On October 15 1990 a DCM-Toyota van, gaudily transformed into the television-style replica of an ancient Indian chariot, advanced through the streets of an upper middle class suburb in Delhi. Through loudspeakers affixed to its cab, a slight and bespectacled Sindhi gentleman berated the local residents about their inattention to their ancient Hindu heritage, while behind him processed an exotic line of travellers, their skin painted blue and orange, their compact wrestlers’ bodies costumed with metal crowns and flowing robes. They carried with them swords, bows and tridents.
For the most part, the suburban Delhi-ites proffered the strangers a polite, if bemused, welcome, some even applauded; when the van passed through South Delhi, onlookers would throw flowers in its path, others would come forward to the Toyota cab and hand offerings to its occupants. It was only when it crossed into the walled former Mughal city of Shahjahanabad and reached its oldest thoroughfare that the riots began.
The bespectacled tourist was L.K. Advani , the ideological leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Hindu Nationalist movement. He had been on his travels through western, central and now northern India for over a month. Advani styled his progress a ‘Rath Yatra’ , an ancient pilgrimage, travelling ultimately to the contested ‘birthplace’ of Rama in the city of Ayodhya , where he would instigate a televised, global movement to tear down a local mosque and build in its place a Hindu temple. 1 A recent popular television series based on the myth of the Ramayana had suggested the idea of marking out a political constituency by procession. Delhi was the only city in which Advani ’s tour lingered for several days, and the only one on his itinerary not generally associated with Hindu pilgrimage. Alongside New Delhi’s importance as the remote modern centre of Indian national politics, Old Delhi represented the other aspect of the discursive dyad that Advani had foregrounded in his visual and pamphleteering narrative of Rama’s homecoming. If the aim of the tour was the reconstruction of ‘Hindutva’ , a term enjoined by V.D. Savarkar in 1923 and centred on the notion of territoriality, its route to that ethnonationalist homecoming lay precisely through the medieval Mughal empire .
When Advani first set out in his pasteboard-clad Toyota van, Hindu Nationalists were considered by the mainstream Indian press as a thuggish political absurdity. Today, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP are enjoying their second stint as the national government of India. If Delhi was the moment of political departure for the movement, then the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya marked its full arrival in the national imagination. Now swollen to thousands, Advani’s pantomime army razed to the ground—brick by brick and filmed in real time by the world’s television cameras—the sixteenth-century mosque supposedly erected there by the first Mughal emperor (Babur). Historians of the event have taken for granted the communalist significance of its Mughal dimension; since the late nineteenth century, Mughals and Muslims in India have been easily conflated. 2 Few have noticed that although enacted as a televisual spectacle—through the new global media of what one historian calls ‘electronic capitalism ’ 3 —the taking of Delhi and the demolition of the Babri Masjid originate, at least in part, from a surprisingly literary narrative, one centred as much on reinventions of the political-theological roots of colonial sovereignty in India, as on the vicious pleasures of sectarianism.
Advani would have absorbed this more literary heritage, if not from his own colonial education in Karachi and Hyderabad, then from the canonical texts of ‘Hindutva’ : propagandist histories that since the late nineteenth century had imaginatively invested and reduced the architecture of Mughal India over and over again. 4 Perhaps too, as Indian boys still did in the 1930s and 1940s, he had also read the many regional translations of the popular late nineteenth-century Bengali historical novels of Romesh Chunder Dutt and Bankimchandra Chatterji , in which brave young patriots left their provincial homes to fight for national self-determination against the distant forces of the Mughal empire. 5 Stop off in any bookshop in a major Indian city today and you will find a surprising selection of racy contemporary interpretations of this genre of fiction, more often than not written in English. It is quite possible that, like those early Indian novelists, Hindutva propagandists and anti-colonial nationalists, Advani had also grown up reading the Mughal histories and historical novels written by the British colonisers, orientalist 6 and romantic narratives of Indian feudal despotism, aristocratic chivalry and fanatical local resistance that in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 leant weight and shape and an enlarged colonial and metropolitan audience to the Anglo-Indian literary industry. 7 What is certain is that the plot the BJP ideologue had chosen for his reinvigoration of late twentieth-century neo-Hindu sovereignty was not only romantically bookish, but also decidedly colonial in its political iconography. It is this overlooked, collaborative and highly politicised literary Mughal imaginary that I want to explore in this monograph, through the historical fiction—British and Indian—of late colonial India.
‘White Mughals’ and the Ghosts of Empire
While the BJP enjoyed their first year of coalition government at the centre, a young British journalist was conjuring up a resonant title for his own more scholarly raid on Indian history, settling on a catchphrase that would indirectly respond to the ‘clash of civilizations ’ narrative being peddled in London, New York and New Delhi. In 2002, William Dalrymple published to critical acclaim and astonishing sales, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India , a richly researched and yet highly imaginative account of the colonial career of James Kirkpatrick and his marriage in Hyderabad, in 1800, to Khair un-Nissa, the daughter of a local Deccan Mughal aristocrat. 8 Kirkpatrick was a distant ancestor of the author. Despite the gentle irony of its title, Dalrymple’s narrative embraces and arguably reinvigorates the romanticised self-presentation of late eighteenth-century British cosmopolitans. 9 His intention was to reclaim a slice of early colonial history from discourses governed, he wrote, by ‘the normal steely dualism of Empire—between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and colonised’. For what he had found in the archives, distinct from the later cultural, racial and political apartheid of Victorian colonial ideology, was a British life in India that ‘seemed instead to be about intermixing and impurity, a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas’ (p. xlvi). This was a history, he argued, that had been eclipsed not just by later colonial writers, but by post-Independence nationalist historians, and perhaps more surprisingly by recent postcolonial scholarship operating with what he considered to be the blunt binary tools of Said’s theory of Orientalism (p. xlvii). Through its speculative narrative style as much as its historical content, White Mughals claimed to reach back to a world in which a clear line between a Mughal and British socius had not yet been drawn. 10 Here waiting to be found in the London archives of the British Library, was a sound riposte to the malign fantasy of clashing cultures that late empire had fostered.
Dalrymple rightly identifies a major socio-cultural shift in colonial attitudes to India at the turn of the nineteenth century. 11 Aamir Mufti (2016) is only the most recent of historians to describe the far-reaching consequences of the pivot away from a close British interest in and (beyond Cal...