The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Page 3

  About four hundred years before the Peshwa’s orders arrived from Pune, Pandharpur was home to a man called Chokhamela—the very Bhakti saint whose image is referred to in the 1784 order. From early in his life, Chokhamela was devoted to the deity, and it was only his untouchable Mahar caste status that kept him from beholding Vithoba within the temple premises. He was resigned to his fate for the most part, though now and then his frustration took the form of appeals to the brahmin gatekeepers of the temple. ‘The cane is crooked, but its juice isn’t crooked,’ he cried. ‘Chokha is ugly, but his feelings aren’t ugly. Why be fooled by outward appearance?’ It was a question he asked in the fourteenth century, but even towards the dawn of the nineteenth century, those of his kind received in response only continued rejection, and no real answer.

  Among Maharashtra’s (male) Bhakti thinkers, Chokhamela is the first untouchable to appear, though he spent most of his life doing the peculiarly menial work that was the mandate of the Mahars. His fellow saints in the Bhakti pantheon, in comparison, came from relative privilege, though few could be reckoned as part of the elite—Tukaram was a failed shopkeeper, Namdev a god-fearing tailor. Yet, the fact that while they were low (sudra), they were not among the lowest (atisudra) meant certain liberties were permitted to them. Their verses, therefore, often took the risk of packing a punch. Jnandev, son of an ostracised brahmin, is said to have mocked the old guard by causing a random buffalo to produce sounds that resembled Vedic verses, while Tukaram was relieved that he was ‘no wretched pandit splitting Vedantic hairs’. They could all, to some degree, get away with a certain radicalism even within a deeply hierarchical social order, while for Chokhamela the untouchable, this was never a feasible option.

  Instead, he couched his devotion in terms of his social conditioning as a Mahar. Addressing the deity as he might an upper-caste superior, he sang: ‘I am the Mahar of your Mahars, I am so hungry; I have come for your leavings, I am full of hope.’ In another verse, he brings a ‘bowl for your leftover food’—with no access to the shrine and its blessed occupant, perhaps he could satisfy his devotion by serving the deity as a low-born serves his overlord, eating his scraps and offering complete submission? ‘O god, my caste is low; how can I serve you? Everyone tells me to go away; how can I see you? When I touch anyone, they take offense … Chokha wants your mercy.’

  Interestingly, though there is anguish, the Mahar poet rarely points a finger at those who designed his shackles and branded him at birth as undeserving. Indeed, he goes as far as to flagellate himself, blaming karma for his terrible plight. In a previous birth, he explains in an example of the fatalism caste engenders, he must have disrespected god; ‘this [present] impurity is the fruit of our past’.

  While there were moments when Chokhamela seemed on the verge of standing up to those in power (‘The earth and the Ganga are common to all, irrespective of caste and religion’), it was his son who was more blunt in his criticism of the way things were. Karmamela, as the boy came to be known, spoke thus to the deity: ‘Are we happy when we’re with you? … The low place is our lot; the low place is our lot; the low place is our lot, King of gods! … It’s a shameful life here for us. It’s a festival of bliss for you and misery written on our faces.’ It isn’t surprising, as the historian Eleanor Zelliot found, that Karmamela, with his sharper critique, finds fewer devotees singing his verses during the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur today. In contrast, Chokhamela has been elevated as the product of a divine birth: God met his mother once and bit into a mango she offered him. When he left and she looked at the half-eaten fruit, there lay in its place the baby Chokhamela.

  Part of this posthumous promotion may have been due to his own efforts—borrowing the later sociological expression—to Sanskritise. He spoke out against animal sacrifice not only because ‘you will be inflicting cruelty on another life and destroying it’, but also because, one suspects, this was more in consonance with ritual ‘purity’. He railed against alcohol, which in many parts of India was associated with certain ‘low’ forms of worship; this too seems to have helped his subsequent upgrade in the high-caste imagination. God, it is said, appeared to him in several forms: One version has Chokhamela struggling to drag away a dead cow, another duty that fell upon the Mahar, and the deity, manifesting as a young man, lends him a hand. But most memorably, after he is rejected at the temple’s gates on yet another occasion, the lord comes to him instead, offering him commiseration as much as he does company, the two of them sitting quietly by the riverside like old friends.

  At the end of the day, Chokhamela was devoted to Vithoba but did not transgress any concrete lines drawn by society and its privileged elders—nor did Vithoba, in any of his manifestations, insist that Chokhamela breach custom and step in through the temple gates.

  Chokhamela died in an accident when labouring on a construction site, and legend has it that even his bones were chanting the name of god. These bones were carried to the temple and buried at a spot that still receives visitors. Such remains, however, are deemed impure, and so his memorial stands at the foot of the temple’s steps—that very spot where, four hundred years later, the Peshwa’s officers did not want untouchables to gather and cast their shadows and sweat on anybody else. All that Chokhamela had ever wanted was a chance to glimpse the deity within. But in the end, he had to settle forever by the door—precisely where they said he belonged even when he lived.

  THE WORLD OF SHIVAJI MAHARAJ

  In 1630, when the Maratha noblewoman Jijabai brought forth the second of her two sons, little did she imagine that the boy would grow up to shatter forever the might of the Mughal empire.

  The Deccan into which Shivaji arrived, though, was already a fascinating place. Until four years before his birth, the hero of the plateau was a Muslim warrior called Malik Ambar, whose career began in slavery in Africa and culminated at the height of power and glory in India. The local sultan was the Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar, whose ancestors were brahmins but whose line welcomed brides of both African and Persian extraction. Shivaji’s grandfather, Maloji, was closely affiliated with both Malik Ambar and the Nizam Shahi dynasty, while his maternal family lent its men and resources to the imperial Mughals of Agra. The horizon was one of unending military drama, and when Shivaji was still a child, the last of the Nizam Shahs was incarcerated in a Mughal fortress, his ancestral dominions swallowed in bits and pieces by Emperor Shahjahan and his forces.

  The Deccan was once home to celebrated Hindu dynasties which fell before Alauddin Khilji in the fourteenth century, making way for what became the Bahmani sultanate. These early military encounters provoked massive cultural disruptions, though soon enough, the new kings settled down and reached an accommodation with subjects of the old. The Bahmanis and their heirs in Maharashtra, the Nizam Shahs included, connected the Deccan to Islamic networks of international commerce, establishing also in the region a Persianised court culture. All the same, the newcomers married Maratha women, patronised the Marathi language, and were nourished by local traditions—there could be no other way, for the urban Muslim aristocracy was handicapped without the cooperation of those who dominated the vast and impenetrable countryside. And so, wisely, they joined hands with older leaders of the land, and together birthed something new, enduring for centuries in splendour till the ambitions of a new northern emperor called Aurangzeb reduced them to another tragic chapter.

  The Marathas, too, developed their identity in this age of Muslim power, embracing the best of Indo-Islamic tradition. Shivaji’s father and uncle—Shahaji and Sharifji—were both named after a Muslim saint called Shah Sharif. If one travels to Ellora, the ancestral seat of the Bhonsle clan, the samadhis of Shivaji’s grandfather and other relations so closely resemble Islamic mausoleums that they have been mistaken for ‘tombs’ like those of the Nizam Shahs and the legendary Malik Ambar. The African general, in fact, when he established the city that became Aurangabad, named its various quarters after Maratha commanders, paying homage to their loy
alty. In costume, cuisine and vocabulary too, the sultans left their imprint, and many are the Maratha families that trace their glory to the service of these Muslim lords. Together they made history—when at the famous Battle of Talikota in 1565 the Deccan’s sultans defeated Vijayanagar, fighting for the Muslim princes were Maratha warriors in the thousands. In matters of faith also, there was debate and discussion. Contemporaneous with the Bhakti saint Tukaram was Muntoji, a scion of the Bahmani dynasty who equated the bismillah with the invocation of Rama, while Eknath featured in his bharuds not only brahmins and Mahars, but also Muslims and Africans.

  Shivaji, however, was a man who envisioned power and its projection differently. Where his father was happy to be acclaimed by a sultan as ‘the abode of intrepidity and grandeur’, ‘the pillar of the mighty state’, and even ‘my son’, Shivaji saw in the decline of regional Muslim power an opportunity to consecrate a whole new order. Many were the Marathas who saw the choice as one between preserving regional Muslim potentates and accepting the Mughal embrace. Shivaji desired something different, a new order in which Persian and Islamicate influences were consciously discarded to celebrate a ‘Maharashtra dharma’. When a Maratha grandee declined Shivaji’s invitation to join forces, emphasising his loyalty to a Muslim superior, Shivaji reminded him that his own course was not one of disloyalty—instead, it was of a higher loyalty to their local deity, in whose name they ought to create a ‘Hindavi’ kingdom. No longer was he interested in accepting the supremacy of Persianised padshahs—not when he could become a Maratha padshah and establish a kingdom of his own. Of course, there were many who chose not to invest their energy and support in his project—he saw them as ‘misguided’, or at worst, ‘snakes’ who would eventually be persuaded by his charm (or might).

  To be clear, no part of what Shivaji proposed could be described as communalism with large numbers of people waking up overnight to the realisation that they constituted ‘the Hindus’ and seizing arms to destroy a blanket category called ‘the Muslims’. What Shivaji represented, however, was a crystallisation of a new ideology among the political elite of the land. Even as he employed Muslims and empowered qazis to dispense justice, Shivaji actively pursued a new form of political expression rooted in Sanskritic tradition. Genealogical claims linked him with the Rajputs in the north, and by the end of his life, he was writing letters not in Persian—the language of diplomacy at the time—but in Sanskrit. As the Rajyavyavaharakosa , a dictionary he commissioned, declares, ‘overvalued Yavana [foreign] words’ were now to be replaced with ‘educated speech’. He had nothing against individual Muslims, but he jettisoned older systems built on Islamic ideals and sought one inspired by Indian high tradition. While he allied with sultans like the Qutb Shah of Golconda (whose ministers were brahmins), when he challenged fellow Hindu Marathas (whose loyalties lay with assorted sultans), and even as he himself came close, on one occasion, to being absorbed into the Mughal court, Shivaji was creating a fresh self-image which the Sabhasad bakhar describes as ‘navi paddhati ’ or the new course. It was by no stretch nationalism defined in communal terms—it was very much a feudal order, derived, however, from Hindu roots.

  Of course, the project was fraught with contradictions only natural in this age of diverse identities and fragmented political authority—self-image did not always reflect lived reality on the ground, and even the Mughals often spoke in a religiously charged idiom that concealed cooperation when it came to actual business. For instance, the man they sent to reduce the ‘infidel’ Shivaji was himself an infidel called Jai Singh, the famous Rajput.

  The Sivabharata , a grand epic eulogising the deeds of Shivaji, was composed in the Maratha king’s own lifetime, giving on the one hand a vision of his political philosophy, while also acknowledging long-standing links between Islamic and Hindu interests in actual transactions. Shivaji was, according to his court poet, an incarnation of Vishnu, who ‘crushes unruly Muslims’. He protected brahmins and cows, and ‘descended the earth to strike’ enemy sultans. Islamic rule was a wicked force, manifest on earth ‘disguised as barbarians’ to conquer and command (though not as evil a force as the Europeans on the coast, who were even lower in divine estimation). ‘Foreign religions (mlechcha dharma)’ were growing, complained the Sivabharata , and there was ‘great fear’ among the righteous and the just. ‘All these clans of Muslims are incarnations of demons,’ we read at one point, ‘risen up to flood the earth with their own religion.’ Shivaji, then, is presented as the restorer of a classical idea of balance, the deliverer of a Sanskritic notion of justice.

  But the heady picture here is a formal aspiration. In reality, even the Sivabharata recognises a more complex cultural universe. Like the Hindu god Kartikeya, who was protected by the gods as he battled an asura , the poem presents Malik Ambar, shielded by Shivaji’s father and other lords in his war against the Mughals—Ambar, an African Muslim ‘as brave as the sun’, is likened to a Hindu god, while the mighty enemy to the north is cast as a demon. When Shahaji leaves the Nizam Shah’s ranks, he is ‘nostalgic’ about their shared, intertwined past; as he accepts service with the Adil Shah of Bijapur, another of the Deccan’s sultans, that kingdom is likened to the land of ‘Lord Rama himself’. The Nizam Shah, whose associate Shivaji’s grandfather was, is described as a dharmatma , to whom barbs against ‘Turks’ do not apply. And when Afzal Khan is famously dispatched to smash Shivaji, with him march Marathas—Jadhav, Bhonsle, Naik, Ghorpade and more—while Shivaji, we know, held the loyalty of men like Siddi Ibrahim. The Muslim side could be divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, never painted with the brush of presumed uniformity—Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, a Sunni who venerated Hindu gods, was ‘dignified’, while a successor was seen as wicked. The Mughals, meanwhile, saw only themselves as legitimate Muslims; the Muslims of the Deccan were enemies of Islam as much as the Marathas were agents of evil.

  In theory, then, the Sivabharata visualised a ‘Hindavi’ kingdom built on a rejection of Islamic kingship, but even Shivaji’s poet could not ignore the reality of Muslim–Maratha entwinement in this turbulent period. There was ideology that was different from the court culture of Shivaji’s political predecessors, and then there was a mixed reality—each fed off the other, and neither was absolute in its influence. The Sivabharata also had another significant role to play, one in which an emphasis on Sanskritic tradition was integral. Completed in time for the coronation ceremony that saw Shivaji transformed from warlord to consecrated king, a poem like this was essential for cementing his legitimacy as a sovereign. It was not, in itself, original— the emperors of Vijayanagar had applied the word ‘Hindu’ to define their self-image, even as, without irony, they battled other Hindu kings and employed Muslims by the thousands. A Telugu text, which we shall encounter later in this book, similarly, articulated even before Shivaji was born a ‘Hindu’ ideology of statehood, comparing some Muslim kings with the devil while speaking of the Mughals as blessed by the gods. Islamic texts too exaggerated themes such as ‘the destruction of infidels’, as noted in a previous essay, when the reality was often somewhat different.

  Black and white were not the colours through which these voices perceived their world— there was an elite visualisation of ‘Turks’ and there was another of Hindus, but boundaries between the two were not rigid. Indeed, in one canto in the Sivabharata , among the lands Shivaji proposes to conquer are not only those of ‘evil Turks’ but also those of the rulers of Madras and Kandahar; Kashmir and Kerala— and many Hindu principalities which, like Muslim states, did not meet the standards of his Hindavi vision. Shivaji, then, was a challenge to the establishment of his day, an establishment defined in terms that were Persianised and Islamic, but he was the ‘lion’ that challenged Hindu as well as Muslim ‘elephants’ that stood against him. His was certainly a challenge asserted in a consciously Sanskritic fashion. But was he launching a nationalist ‘Hindu state’ as his Hindavi kingdom is today sometimes defined, or was his world far more syncretic
, a melting pot of cultural influences? The answer lies somewhere in the middle— where culture and the lives of the people were an ocean of shared experience, the politics of the elite sought to define itself in language that sought to establish competing narratives. Energised by both, the eclectic traditions of his land and the righteous force of ideology, Shivaji established his Maratha swaraj.

  The Deccan where he was born had seen Hindu princes absorb Muslim influence and Muslim kings celebrate Hindu divines; it had seen brahmins become sultans and a Muslim seek brahminhood. Now, however, it opened a new chapter in the history of India, one in which this land was destined to go down also as the graveyard of the Mughals and their formidable empire. And the man who stood at the cusp of this great transformation was Shivaji the Maratha, Vishnu-reborn in Sanskrit poetry, pragmatic warrior-king in reality.

  BASAVA, WOMEN AND THE LINGAYAT TRADITION

  India has a long tradition of bright minds poking holes in some distinctly un-bright ideas. And one such mind lived over eight centuries ago in the south, tearing a hole so large through that disastrous institution called caste that a flood of people—about 6.5 million today—escaped the old order, arriving at an identity of their own. Of course, this identity, when formalised, invited its own peculiarities and contradictions, but over the years, as a section of the Lingayat community sought recognition outside all-subsuming Hinduism, custodians of the majoritarian cause were gripped by understandable anxiety. And this despite the feelings that Basava, the twelfth-century intellectual preceptor of the Lingayats, himself expressed about such self-appointed custodians in his own day. ‘Loaded with the burden of the Vedas,’ he pithily remarked, ‘the brahmin is a veritable donkey.’

  Basava could get away with saying outrageous things because he himself was a brahmin (which was precisely the kind of privilege Chokhamela, as we saw earlier, did not possess). But he was a brahmin repulsed by brahminism, and the intellectual and material debilitations wreaked on society by caste. ‘False, utterly false,’ he declared, ‘are the stories of divine birth. The higher type of man is the man who knows himself.’ His was a kind of humanism that rejected man-made inequalities justified in the name of the divine, wedded though it was to the worship of Shiva. ‘On the same earth stands,’ one of his vachanas goes, ‘the outcaste’s hovel, and the deity’s temple. Whether for ritual or rinsing, is not the water same?’ Just like the outcaste chandala, the brahmin, too, was born from a human womb. Or ‘is there anybody in the world,’ scoffed Basava, ‘delivered through the ear?’ If he expected anybody to answer, they stewed instead, in anger.