The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  Praise for Rebel Sultans

  ‘[Rebel Sultans ] is dazzling storytelling. Pillai has employed an extraordinarily powerful imagination and a prodigious talent with words to write a genuine thriller that is near impossible to shut before reaching the end.’ The Indian Express

  ‘… this rather remarkable young author is back with Rebel Sultans … a fast-paced greatest hits of the [Deccan’s] medieval roller-coaster ride…’ Scroll.in

  ‘… this fine book … (is) nuanced … convincing when assertive … (this) is scholarship.’ Business Standard

  ‘… Rebel Sultans is a remarkable, daring book.’ Hindustan Times

  ‘… a fascinating book, with delectable minutiae in practically every page…’ Outlook

  ‘Writing in an eloquent and lucid style, Pillai holds his readers spellbound…’ The Hindu

  ‘One of India’s finest young historians … Pillai unravels a forgotten chapter in our medieval past … A charming and contemporary history book …’ The Times of India

  ‘One of India’s finest young historians …’ Open

  ‘… in an elegant and lucid style … Pillai brings together a wide range of sources to weave a fascinating narrative of a historically important and understudied region and period in South Asian history … Pillai’s book is significant not only because it is the first history of the Deccani Sultanates written for a general audience, but also because of the breadth of sources it integrates … (which) gives the work a notable sophistication … Rebel Sultans is an excellent contribution … from which both scholars and the general public will benefit.’ Studies in History

  Praise for The Ivory Throne

  ‘… a gem of a book …’ The Indian Express

  ‘… the wealth of information crammed into this book is bewildering … Especially when you keep in mind that Pillai is only 25 and this is his first book, The Ivory Throne is a magnificent effort.’ Mint

  ‘This 700-page whopper of a book … swirls through Kerala’s history like a dervish possessed by the intention of telling a magnificent story, and telling it marvellously well.’ The New Indian Express

  ‘A detailed work of history … The achievement of the book matches its ambition … You will not regret the many hours you commit: It is an absolute delight.’ Business Standard

  ‘… a brilliant debut … The Ivory Throne is an exceptional work; the achievement falls into perspective when you realise that Pillai is just 25 years old.’ DNA

  ‘… a particularly fascinating account … The Ivory Throne is also a sociological study–perhaps the first of its kind …’ The Tribune

  ‘A riveting read … Even a cursory glance makes one forget that it is a debut work by a writer in his mid-twenties … an awesome achievement.’ Hindustan Times

  ‘… a gripping historical account …’ The Telegraph

  ‘A clear-headed history … Well-researched and well-written, The Ivory Throne adds a new point of view to the study of Kerala.’ Outlook

  ‘… vast and learned … Pillai has given us a wonderful book.’ Asian Review of Books

  ‘… a distinguished piece of work …’ Deccan Herald

  ‘… Pillai’s work breaks new ground …’ Fountain Ink

  ‘… a thoroughly enjoyable read …’ India Currents

  First published by Context an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited in 2019

  1st Floor, A Block, East Wing, Plot No. 40, SP Infocity, Dr MGR Salai, Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai 600096

  Westland, the Westland logo, Context and the Context logo are the trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

  Copyright © Manu S. Pillai, 2019

  Illustrations Copyright © Priya Kuriyan, 2019

  Manu S. Pillai asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN 9789388689786

  The views and opinions expressed in this work are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publisher is in no way liable for the same.

  A number of essays in this collection were published in a shorter format in the author’s column Medium Rare in Mint Lounge . Other essays were first published in The Hindu , Hindustan Times , Open , The News Minute and Mathrubhumi .

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  For Achu

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE BEFORE THE RAJ

  THE ITALIAN BRAHMIN OF MADURAI

  A MARATHA PRINCE’S MORALITY PLAY

  A MUSLIM DEITY IN A HINDU TEMPLE

  THE TALE OF TWO SHAKUNTALAS

  A DALIT AT THE TEMPLE DOOR

  THE WORLD OF SHIVAJI MAHARAJ

  BASAVA, WOMEN AND THE LINGAYAT TRADITION

  ‘JODHABAI’ MORE THAN AKBAR’S WIFE

  A WEAVER AND HIS MESSAGE

  A CITY FOR A COURTESAN?

  WHAT IF VIJAYANAGAR HAD SURVIVED?

  SULTANS AND RAJAHS TEXTS AND TRADITIONS

  DARA SHUKOH POET AMONG WARRIORS

  THE LOST BEGUM OF AHMEDNAGAR

  THE STORY OF THE KAMASUTRA

  SULTANS AND PADSHAHS FOREIGNNESS IN INDIANNESS

  MEENAKSHI FIRST A WARRIOR

  THE WOMAN WHO HAD NO REASON FOR SHAME

  ALAUDDIN KHILJI RULING BY THE SWORD

  THE COURTESAN WHO BECAME A PRINCESS

  MEERABAI A DIFFERENT KIND OF VALOUR

  THE AKBAR OF THE DECCAN

  JAHANGIR THE ENDEARING ECCENTRIC

  VARARUCHI’S CHILDREN AND THE MAPPILAS OF MALABAR

  THE WOMAN WITH NO BREASTS

  PART TWO STORIES FROM THE RAJ

  WHAT IF THERE WAS NO BRITISH RAJ?

  ROWDY BOB THE VICTOR OF PLASSEY

  THE BLOODY MONSOON OF VELLORE

  WILLIAM JONES INDIA’S BRIDGE TO THE WEST

  THE GENTLEMAN REFORMER OF BENGAL

  THE COLONIAL STATE AND INDIA’S GODS

  WHEN A TEMPLE WAS BESIEGED IN AYODHYA

  A FORGOTTEN INDIAN QUEEN IN PARIS

  THE STORY OF WAJID ALI SHAH

  VICTORIA MAHARANI AND INDIA

  THE ABSENT QUEEN OF LAKSHADWEEP

  THE ENGINEER AND HIS RICE BOWL

  THE MAN BEHIND MODERN HINDI

  THE RAILWAYS AND INDIA

  THE PHULES AND THEIR FIGHT

  THE AMMACHIES OF TRAVANCORE

  MACAULAY THE IMPERIALIST WE LOVE TO HATE

  FOOTBALL AND NATIONALISM IN INDIA

  MANUBAI THE RANI BEFORE THE BATTLE

  POWER, PREJUDICE AND CURZON

  WHEN SAVARKAR JUMPED SHIP

  SAVARKAR’S THWARTED ‘RACIAL DREAM’

  THE CHAMPION OF TUTICORIN

  THE COMPLICATED V.K. KRISHNA MENON

  THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE MATHEMATICIAN

  AN UNSENTIMENTAL MAN OF ACTION

  THE RESURRECTION OF BALAMANI

  THE GRAMOPHONE QUEEN OF INDIA

  A BRAHMIN WOMAN OF SCANDAL

  ‘I’M A NAGA FIRST, A NAGA SECOND, AND A NAGA LAST’

  THE MONK FOR EVERY INDIAN

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER–PRINCE OF JAIPUR

  PERIYAR IN THE AGE OF ‘ANTI-NATIONALS’

  ANNIE BESANT AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN

  WHAT IF THE MAHATMA HAD LIVED?

  PART THREE AFTERWORD

  AN ESSAY FOR OUR TIMES

  SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

  AUTHOR’S NOTE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION<
br />
  We live in times when history is polarising. It has become to some an instrument of vengeance, for grievances imagined or real. Others remind us to draw wisdom from the past, not fury and rage, seeing in its chronicles a mosaic of experience to nourish our minds and recall, without veneration, the confident glories of our ancestors. The collection you hold tells stories from India’s countless yesterdays and of several of its men and women. It is an offering that seeks to reflect the fascinating, layered, splendidly complex universe that is Indian history at a time when life itself is projected in tedious shades of black and white. There is much in our past to enrich us, and a great deal that can explain who we are and what choices must be made as we confront grave crossroads in our own times. But, in the end, each reader must draw her own conclusions—this book seeks only to light the way, and to reiterate the importance of that age-old principle: context.

  MANU S. PILLAI

  May 2019

  PART ONE

  BEFORE THE RAJ

  THE ITALIAN BRAHMIN OF MADURAI

  In 1623, a venerated sanyasi arrived at the court of the poligar (governor) of Sendamangalam, in Tamil Nadu. On the face of it, he was like other divines of his time: One acolyte held up a cadjan parasol, while another carried the tiger skin on which the holy man reposed. Yet another cradled his books, and a fourth a vessel with sanctified water to be sprinkled wherever the party made a halt. Ramachandra Nayaka, lord of Sendamangalam, received them warmly and washed the guru’s feet with reverence. In the conversation that followed, a grant of land and other favours were discussed so that the sanyasi might establish a branch of his mission at this important urban centre. After spending a respectable amount of time in the area, the visitors carried on with their travels, going to Salem, where too the provincial administrator received the old man with deference. He was assigned lodgings in ‘the finest quarter of the town’, and received also a promise of that coveted thing: the governor’s official friendship.

  When Roberto de Nobili was born in Montepulciano, Italy, in 1577, nobody in his family could have guessed that the boy would spend most of his life oceans away, in the dusty plains of the Indian peninsula, dressed as a sanyasi. The de Nobilis were a military set—they claimed descent from the Holy Roman emperor Otto III, and were related to cardinals, saints, and even a pope or two. As the eldest son of his house, Roberto was expected to carry on the line, but by adolescence he had already quarrelled with his parents and announced his desire to serve the Catholic church. He fled in disguise to Naples and obtained a theological education before setting sail, in 1604, for India. The journey was not smooth—the Sao Jacinto was shipwrecked and months were lost in Mozambique. But at last de Nobili arrived in Goa, and quickly thereafter moved to Cochin. And then, to put an even greater distance between himself and the furiously violent government of the Portuguese, the Italian Jesuit orchestrated a transfer to the Christian mission in Madurai—a mission that in fifteen years had made a grand total of zero conversions.

  As a missionary, de Nobili’s objectives were hardly original. ‘I long most keenly,’ he declared, ‘to travel about these vast spaces, staff in hand, and to win their innumerable peoples for Christ Our Lord.’ But what made this particular servant of god stand out was the manner in which he went about collecting his sheep. Soon after he arrived in Madurai in 1606, de Nobili grasped what his colleague, a Portuguese soldier-turned-padre, thirty-six years his senior, had failed to see. European missionaries were dismissed as unclean parangis (a variant of the word firangi) who ate beef, kept no caste distinctions, and reaped most converts from ‘polluted’ communities. Their message, then, was tainted as one for the inferior orders. The older man had no qualms about dealing with the low, given his own working-class origins; de Nobili, however, with his exalted family credentials, his sophisticated education, and a desire to make the gospel attractive to more than the peasantry, decided on a new way going forward. As he announced to a superior with a flourish, ‘I will become a Hindu to save the Hindus’.

  What followed was a fascinating social experiment. De Nobili acquired a staggering knowledge not only of Tamil, but also Telugu and Sanskrit—a brahmin convert even gave him access to the Vedas, though prejudice prevented him from seeing in them anything beyond ‘ridiculous legends and stories’. Soon, de Nobili began to live like a ‘native’: The Jesuit’s cassock was discarded for the ochre garb of a sanyasi, and only food cooked by brahmins was served on his plantain leaf. He began to keep a self-righteous distance from his colleague, establishing a veritable caste system between them—indeed, in 1619, when summoned by angry seniors to Goa to explain himself, de Nobili refused even to eat with them. A new church was constructed (a coconut ceremoniously smashed at its founding) and here, seating was on the basis of status, so that low-born converts had to wait by the threshold while the high-born sat in the front. Meanwhile, de Nobili preached the Bible to the brahmins as a kind of lost Veda, all the time also building up connections with the high and mighty of the land.

  Shrewd as this inculturative strategy was, it was also successful. Many brahmins converted, as did a brother of Ramachandra Nayaka of Sendamangalam. In 1610, the Madurai mission had sixty converts, but by the time he died, de Nobili’s flock numbered four thousand. The process was not altogether devoid of problems, though. The Italian’s high-handedness provoked complaints from his colleague, and in Goa he was firmly told to suspend his controversial methods. Not only did de Nobili cheerfully disregard such censure, he made more enemies by going behind Goa’s back, leveraging connections in Rome and getting, in 1623, Pope Gregory XV himself to declare support for the Madurai mission. In Madurai, meanwhile, brahmins were not ignorant of de Nobili’s strategy, and while he was treated well in general by local grandees, a conservative backlash meant there were also times when he had to bear the brunt of their wrath—as in 1640, when he was thrown into prison for a spell.

  De Nobili’s style provoked a debate about how Eastern peoples ought to be converted (just as his memory still provokes right-wing ire in India). He claimed that the tuft on the head (kudumi ) and the sacred thread were merely social symbols and converts could continue wearing them. His opponents, however, argued that conversion meant conversion into a European frame, in spirit as well as its outer manifestations. In the end, as it happened, they were the ones who succeeded when it came to church politics, and de Nobili’s aristocratic overconfidence led to his downfall: In 1646, he was transferred out of Madurai, and died, blind and distressed, ten years later in Mylapore. It was a lonely end for a clever man with an insatiable zeal. And though his successes lingered, some of them still visible in Tamil Catholicism (such as the car festival of Our Lady of Velankanni, replete with Hindu cultural influences), the taint he had tried so hard to expel came back soon enough to haunt the missionaries: They were parangis, defiled folk, and theirs was a faith only for the poor and weak.

  A MARATHA PRINCE’S MORALITY PLAY

  In 1684, a twelve-year-old Maratha boy was installed as ruler in Tamil Thanjavur, not long after the region’s older Nayaka dynasty folded out of history. The event was emblematic of India in this bustling age, with Tamil Nadu alone attracting Afghan horsemen, Bundela Rajputs, Telugu warriors, and other varieties of adventurers. Our adolescent prince, Shahuji Bhonsle, however, came from a family that was of especial significance for the country. Ten years earlier, his half-uncle, the celebrated Shivaji, had crowned himself king of the Marathas, and theirs was a clan that would seek power over distant reaches of the subcontinent in the years to come. Shahuji, too, was a king worthy of his elaborate titles, but even as he tackled matters of state and deployed armies in the field, he cultivated a reputation as a patron of the arts. Going out of his way to attract as many as forty-six men of letters to his court, he conferred on them an endowed agraharam (settlement), named (with typical princely modesty) after himself.

  Interestingly, Shahuji, whose reign lasted till 1712, was also a poet—his Panchabhasha Vilasa Natakam reflects the p
lurality of influences that surrounded him, featuring Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, and even Hindi verses. He was obsessed with Shiva of the Thiruvarur temple, and many were the plays and songs composed with his blessings that eulogised this deity. Some credit him as the composer of the Thyagesa Kuravanji dance drama, centred on the adoration of the lord by a woman. The theme and story are fairly conventional and fit into the larger tradition of Bhakti literature. What is perhaps remarkable—and has been described by scholars as ‘a work of extreme, deliberately outrageous provocation’—is another play from his time: the Sati Dana Suramu (Take My Wife). While some suggest it might have been composed by one of his court poets, the text itself names Shahuji as its creator, adding casually that he composed it ‘to outlast the sun, moon, and stars’.

  The Sati Dana Suramu is a tremendously entertaining parody of social conventions—one that holds up a mirror to tedious notions of India’s past that cast everything as pious and monotonously proper. The setting is the Vishnu temple in Mannargudi, where a brahmin (‘Morobhatlu the Magnificent’) arrives with his disciple for a popular festival. What upsets this pilgrimage—and, by extension, the correct order of things—is the brahmin’s infatuation with a woman he unexpectedly encounters. Not only is his pupil scandalised by this sudden outburst of lust (‘My teacher has gone crazy’), but the woman comes from the other end of society: she is an untouchable. When the student warns his guru to protect his reputation, the teacher retorts that greater men had succumbed to lust and survived. When the disciple suggests that females are demons, the older man responds: ‘She’s no demon, she’s a woman .’ When the frustrated pupil pleads that his guru focus on the ‘Vedas and Puranas and Sastras’ and their promise of eternal bliss, the brahmin distractedly sniffs that he has ‘no use for insipid, eternal bliss’.

  Soon, the brahmin approaches the woman, declaring cockily, ‘Your charm has reduced me to ashes.’ The lady, somewhat taken aback by this unsolicited declaration of love, is polite and reminds her interlocutor of the rules of caste and tradition. ‘We eat beef, we drink liquor … Don’t talk to me,’ she says. Morobhatlu does not care. ‘We drink cow’s milk,’ he replies, ‘but you eat the whole cow. You must be more pure.’ Clearly startled, the lady decides to lecture him on the impermanence of desire, the permanence of dharma, and other pious philosophical principles, hoping this will make him go away. She also reminds him that she is married, and that it would be best for everyone concerned if he stopped ‘this incoherent prattle’. But Morobhatlu is immovable. ‘We brahmins have made up all the rules, and invented religion. There is no better dharma than satisfying a brahmin’s need,’ he giggles. Perhaps, he adds, she could look upon the act as simple charity. ‘Give me your loins,’ he coyly suggests, ‘like offering [a brahmin] land.’