The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  Basava, son of Madiraja and Madalambike, was born in 1105 in Bagewadi. Poets subsequently embellished the tale with typical apocryphal excess—that his arrival was a boon from Shiva, or that the baby only opened his eyes when an image of the deity was dangled before him. But myth-making aside, the boy was sharp—at sixteen, he is said to have discarded the brahminical thread, and by twenty-eight he was clear in his vision of a society without caste. In the fashion of his day, the vocabulary of his reform was also religious. And so Basava sought to break the monopoly temples and priests enjoyed over god by popularising the portable Ishtalinga, a symbol of Shiva worn around the neck. From his centre in Kudalasangama, the idea of the temple was diluted, as was the popularity of polytheism. ‘Gods here, gods there, with no space for our feet!’ Basava exclaimed. Shiva alone was, he argued, a truly divine force in an ocean of pointless divinities, and Shiva came to mean for Basava what Krishna would to Meera.

  Many were those of dazzling intellect who joined him. Tired of social shackles and determined to chart an alternative course, they found in Basava’s anti-caste, egalitarian crusade a resonance that has survived the ages. Perhaps the most revealing test of the sincerity of any drive for reform lies in how welcoming it is of the voices of women—and here Basava proved himself sincere. Of the 210 saints associated with him, as many as thirty-five were female, fourteen of them unmarried. These were women of uncommon brilliance who, in addition to their battles against caste and inequality, also challenged patriarchy’s grip over their bodies and thought. As with most in the Bhakti tradition, their ideas were expressed in the language of devotion, evoking, as the scholar Vijaya Ramaswamy says, ‘very strong sexual imagery’ that was ‘erotic in style and metaphor’. Thus, for instance, we have the saint Remmavve of the weaver caste, who sang ecstatically of her union with the patron deity of the Lingayats, Shiva himself:

  All husbands have seeds

  My husband has no seeds

  All husbands are above

  My husband below, I am above him!

  Like elsewhere, women in medieval Karnataka found their lives cemented in patriarchal norms: father, husband, son and family were the frontiers of their universe. Those seeking freedom from this prescribed existence received sanctuary in Basava’s movement, also insulating themselves from social opprobrium through a pronounced commitment to god. The celebrated Akka Mahadevi left her royal husband’s palace behind, wandering naked and singing praises of Shiva. ‘You shall be doomed if you touch the woman married to [the lord],’ she warned, but even then the road was not safe. In a version of the Shunyasampadane that holds the Lingayat vachanas, there is a figure who attempts to violate Mahadevi. ‘She is not,’ we are informed, ‘desecrated.’ But the fact was that even with their voices couched in spirituality, women thinkers were not always safe and had more battles to fight than their male counterparts could truly know or imagine.

  Basava, cognisant of this, went out of his way to promote equality between the sexes as much as he fought for equality among the castes. Menstruation, for instance, ordinarily entailed ritual pollution for women, but Basava rejected this—women could continue to worship Shiva regardless of whether or not it was their time of the month. When Mahadevi’s nudity became a source of controversy within his circle, he came to her defence and asked: ‘Does the one who has loved the sky-clad one have need of a girdle cloth?’ He also raised questions of institutions built around gender. ‘Look here, dear fellow,’ goes one of his vachanas. ‘I wear these men’s clothes only for you. Sometimes I am man, sometimes I am woman.’ The singular Mahadevi, meanwhile, argued the opposite. ‘A woman though in name, I am, if you consider well, the male principle.’ Clothed in Shiva’s ‘light’, she was not bound by shame. ‘Where is the need for cover and jewel’ when she was under the gaze of the divine? It was all about devotion—but within it lay also an assertion of who Mahadevi was.

  If these were more personal expressions of individuality in a time when community reigned supreme, Basava and the Lingayats had questions for society too. Their age was one of brahmin supremacy, and the orthodox did not welcome Basava’s call for a society unrestricted by caste, open to introspection and embracing of women who seemed, to them, unpredictable freaks. The Lingayats were dismissed as contrarian for the sake of it, their female saints simply branded strange. Strange, in fact, even the men must have appeared in any case—a fellowship of rebels from the most unaristocratic backgrounds. Basava was certainly a brahmin, but Allama Prabhu was a drummer; Siddharama a cowherd; Maccayya a washerman; and Kakkaya a skinner of dead cows. What was positively infuriating, however, was their pointed criticism of conservative brahminical hypocrisy. As Basava put it sarcastically:

  They say: Pour, pour the milk

  When they see a snake image in stone.

  But they cry: Kill, kill!

  When they meet a snake for real.

  But then Basava, who was simultaneously a bureaucrat since 1132, having advanced from royal accountant to chief minister at the tumultuous, fractious court of the local ruler in Kalyan, went one step too far. Already his Hall of Experience (Anubhava Mantapa) was attracting men and women from all castes to gather freely and express radical new thought with ever growing liberty. He proceeded to eat meals with untouchables, flouting age-old law. What could have been written off as a new, somewhat eccentric Shiva cult now began to shake the very pillars on which powerful social hierarchies were perched. ‘Today he dines with [the low-born]. Tomorrow he will encourage mixed marriages,’ cried the orthodox, fearing ‘caste mix-up’ and the ‘utter ruination’ of the status quo. Their alarm was, as it happens, valid, for Basava did proceed to intermarriage. The king was prevailed upon to warn his minister to behave—and the king was politely disobeyed.

  The event was cataclysmic—and not merely because it was happening in 1167 in a country where inter-caste unions still provoke violence and murder. The daughter of a brahmin, Madhuvarasa, was wedded to the untouchable son of Haralayya in the full gaze of the public. The monarch and the establishment were apoplectic—the respective fathers, it is said, had their eyes gouged out, after which they were thrown under elephants to painfully meet their maker, casteless in death. Basava himself survived the calamity, but the kingdom descended into political chaos (chaos which was simmering also on account of other factors—after all, Basava was a political figure too, and politically motivated charges of corruption had been used to topple his reform movement earlier). The last thing the king wanted on his hands at a time of turmoil was social disorder. Basava’s career ended, and he left for Kudalasangama, for the riverside where he had first declared his love for Shiva.

  He did not live for long afterwards, however, and for over two centuries after his death in 1168, his sharanas (followers) kept the movement alive but unprovocative. It was only in the fifteenth century that Lingayat identity evidently reasserted itself after one of their own became minister to the emperor of Vijayanagar. By now Basava’s vachanas had been compiled, and the movement invested with a structure of its own. In order to survive, a certain accommodation with the brahminical order was arrived at, essentially turning the Lingayats into one of the very many other castes that exist in Indian society. To Basava himself, such a compromise might have seemed unfortunate, but he had long departed and those left behind had to be pragmatic in the face of hostility. Today, however, Lingayats question this classification. Are they who celebrate Basava’s heterodox teachings, who uphold the vachanas of many remarkable women, who bury their dead and go to no temples, really Hindus? Those on the extreme right insist they are—where majoritarianism is the goal, one can hardly allow the dilution of the majority. And so, as many Lingayats contemplate a second divorce from the Hindu fold, it is the Hindus who seek to retain Basava’s children within their order—not so much due to a similarity of vision as to the naked expediencies of cultural politics.

  ‘JODHABAI’ MORE THAN AKBAR’S WIFE

  In 1575, authorities in the port of Surat prevente
d a woman called Gulbadan Begum from embarking on her pilgrimage to Mecca for an entire year. Negotiations dragged on, and eventually, she had to bribe them with the entire city of Valsad in order to board the boat. It was no surprise that the begum paid in town, not coin—Gulbadan was the daughter of Emperor Babur and aunt to the mighty Akbar, then sovereign of all of upper India. It was, however, revealing that even a senior representative of the imperial harem found herself applying for leave to sail: The truth was that the Mughal emperor’s power met its limit at the beach. It was the writ of the king of Portugal that prevailed in the Arabian Sea, and without Portuguese consent, no princess, of whatever consequence, could depart India’s shores. Even as Akbar dismissed the Portuguese as ‘chickens’, Mughal ships quietly paid to carry on their business—the Europeans might have been overpowered on land, but on international waters their mastery of navigation ensured that even the imperial family gnashed its teeth but, ultimately, fell in line.

  In 1613, during Jahangir’s reign, however, the Portuguese, already imperilled by the arrival of the Dutch and the English, went a step too far, hastening their decline in India. The emperor, to be sure, was a friendly, curious man—as we shall see in a subsequent essay—and may have allowed things to carry on as before given his lack of personal interest in matters such as warfare. But in September of that year, Portuguese provocation was so brazen that only firm action could restore Mughal prestige. The underlying issues were many. Politically, the ignominy of seeking licences was a demonstration of the limits of Mughal power, always somewhat embarrassing when the emperor was officially ‘Conqueror of the World’. Then there were religious concerns: The Portuguese were such fervent Christians that each cartaz (licence) carried images of Jesus and Mary—a troubling detail for orthodox Muslims compelled to buy these documents in order to do the haj. Also in 1613, a Hindu lady got embroiled in these Mughal–Portuguese dynamics, her wrath bringing down the full force of the empire, ringing the death knell of the latter’s long-standing power at sea.

  The lady in question was Mariam uz-Zamani, though she is often erroneously called Jodhabai, the Rajput princess who was Akbar’s wife and Jahangir’s mother. While conventional depictions are fairly predictable—she was beautiful and regal in a predictable, overblown sense, as seen in a 2008 Bollywood portrayal—in actual fact, the dowager was a formidable woman. Described by a contemporary as ‘a great adventurer’, she headed phenomenal business enterprises even while sequestered in the Mughal harem. At court, as scholar Ellison B. Findly notes, she was one of the four seniormost figures and the only woman to hold a military rank of 12,000 cavalry, entitling her to the right to issue firmans of her own. She was also the proprietor of the Rahimi , believed to be the largest Indian vessel trading in the Red Sea, displacing 1,500 tonnes, its mast some forty-four yards high—it was, one account tells us, ‘verye richlye laden, beeinge worth a hundred thowsande pounde’. In addition to such goods worth millions of rupees, the dowager empress regularly conveyed Muslim pilgrims to Mecca on her ship. Add to this the fact that she funded the construction of numerous mosques, even while she remained a devout Hindu, and her prestige is patent.

  In 1613, the Portuguese decided it was a clever idea to seize and subsequently burn the Rahimi . The action was unprecedented, and, given who the owner of the vessel was, the insult landed straight on the otherwise cheerful, opium-loving Jahangir. The whole affair was meant to gain leverage at a time when the Portuguese were threatened by competition from other European companies. But the move backfired. As one observer noted, Jahangir immediately had Daman besieged, blocked all Portuguese trade in Surat, and ‘hath likewise taken order for the seizing of all Portingals [sic] and their goods within his kingdoms’. Furthermore, the emperor ‘sealed up their church doors and hath given order that they shall no more use the exercise of their religion in these parts’. Rattled, the Portuguese made amends by offering three lakh rupees as compensation, but on the condition that the Mughals expel the English from Agra. Jahangir refused to blink and welcomed soon afterwards, in 1615, Sir Thomas Roe, the famous English ambassador. ‘The Portuguese folly in the capture of the Rahimi , then,’ writes Findly, ‘tipped the scales in favour of the English.’

  But it was not as if the newcomers were granted a red-carpet reception; on the contrary, the playing field was merely levelled somewhat. Mariam uz-Zamani herself wasn’t sympathetic to the English: In 1611, after an Englishman outbid her representative at the indigo market in Bayana, she exerted enough pressure on her son to ensure that Roe’s unofficial predecessor, William Hawkins—the ‘English Khan’ who till then was friendly with Jahangir—had to pack his bags and leave the empire for good. It was clear enough that the emperor’s mother was a force to reckon with, the affair around the Rahimi merely cementing such thinking. And in 1623, when Mariam uz-Zamani died—still immensely rich and powerful—due honour was given her by burying her in a mausoleum close to that equally redoubtable man to whom she was once married: Emperor Akbar.

  A WEAVER AND HIS MESSAGE

  When Kabir, the poet-saint, died five centuries ago, he could not have predicted that he would be reimagined over and over again, to allay the anxieties of every succeeding generation. To most, of course, this icon of Bhakti is a champion of Hindu–Muslim unity, his Arabic name sitting cheerfully alongside the chant of Rama, which he repeated so often in his quest to realise god. Indeed, only a few years after his death, Abul Fazl, Emperor Akbar’s chronicler, described him as ‘the asserter of the unity of god’, one who ‘discarded the effete doctrines’ of his time and came to be ‘revered by both Hindu and Muhammadan for his catholicity of doctrine and the illumination of his mind’. Sikhs too looked upon him with admiration, dedicating to his work whole passages in their Adi Granth. And in the nineteenth century, European missionaries laid claim to the weaver-saint of Benares, delighting in his barbs against caste, finding in his sayings a reflection of such thought as could only, they were convinced, be Christian in origin.

  ‘Kabir appears to modern India,’ Charlotte Vaudeville pointed out, ‘to be the true symbol of nonconformity.’ And yet, everything about him is immersed in myth and awe. He was the poor son of Muslim weavers, though the lexicon of his devotion led early on to Hindu claims upon his memory. Some invented for him a miraculous birth—he was the conception of a brahmin widow, delivered through her palm. Abandoned, he was raised by Muslims. Others said he descended enveloped in lotus leaves and light from the heavens, floating upon a lake where he was discovered by his julaha father. He certainly did celebrate Hindu imagery over Muslim theology, evidently also enjoying the tutelage of the guru Ramananda. But by most accounts he was definitely a Muslim, with a wife and two children, coming to mean so much to Hindus that stories about non-Muslim roots were invented to drag him, as Wendy Doniger notes, ‘over the line from Muslim to Hindu’.

  While he lived, there was enough in Kabir’s message to upset Hindu and Muslim elites alike. To brahmins he asked (much like Basava some centuries before in the south) whether they were born with a caste mark on the forehead, or whether their mothers delivered them through a special canal. ‘And if you say you’re Turk,’ added Kabir, ‘why weren’t you circumcised before birth?’ So too, he sneered, it was ‘dumb’ if people sought salvation in ritual. ‘If going naked brought liberation, the deer of the forest would attain it first. If a shaven head was a sign of piety, ewes would be pious too.’ That low castes and kafirs were doomed to their fate by the accident of birth was nonsense, he declared. Only those ‘who don’t have Rama on their lips’ were ignorant; they alone were the low-born of the earth. ‘Those who read the Vedas call themselves Pandits, those who read the Koran call themselves Maulana; they give themselves different names, these pots made of the same clay. They are all,’ announced Kabir, ‘in their own delusions, not one of them knows the Lord.’

  Like those before and after him in the Bhakti tradition, Kabir too knew persecution. Many are the tales that place him at the receiving end of the ire
of Sikander Lodi, Sultan of Delhi. Punishment was ordered, and suffering was inflicted, but here again Kabir laughed at the irony. Giggling, it is said, in the presence of the emperor himself, the palm-born weaver declared, ‘All my life I have tried to impress upon the Hindus and Muslims that god is one.’ He had tried to build a bridge between different paths, only to be ridiculed: ‘How could a brahmin demean himself by joining hands with a low-caste weaver? How could a maulvi degrade himself by allying with a kafir?’ They did not listen to words of wisdom, but hate achieved what Kabir himself had failed to bring about: ‘They could never bear to stand together in the court of [god] the King of Kings, but today it amuses me to see them standing united in the court of a [mortal] king.’ And this because custodians of the faiths universally disliked Kabir and his dissident message.

  It was his large following—those like him, illiterate, weak, and devoid of books—that made him an asset to wardens of the great traditions after he went to the grave. Indeed, they fought over his remains when he died, till, legend claims, only flowers remained under the funeral sheet: some were buried, the rest cremated, and both sides got to claim a share of Kabir’s great legacy. He would have chuckled at the feud over rites and ownership had he witnessed what transpired. ‘His death in Benares’, he once declared, ‘won’t save the assassin from certain hell’, just as ‘a dip in the Ganges won’t send frogs—or you—to paradise’. Matters of ritual were all futile: mere instruments to enthrall the susceptible, shrouding true wisdom from the masses. But no sooner had he died than Kabir, too, became an instrument. ‘I say the world is mad,’ he had laughed earlier. ‘If I tell the truth they rush to beat me; if I lie they trust me.’ Now that he was in the grave, the need to own him trounced the upholding of his message—and for this, the very ideas, practices and institutional norms he eschewed became suddenly imperative.