By: Tahmidal Zami
In
1892, the British Parliament passed the Indian Council’s Act. While the Indian
politicians wanted election of members
to the Legislative Council, the new act provided for nomination of members by existing socio-political
institutions rather than voters. Rabindranath Tagore organized a protest meeting in the General
Assembly Hall, Kolkata. He invited Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the grand old man of modern
Bengali literature, to preside over the meeting.
In
the packed meeting, the young nationalist Tagore read an article called “The
Englishmen and the People of India”
(“Ingraj o Bharatbashi”). He observed that the Englishmen lacked mental affinity with the Indians. Comparing English
rule with erstwhile Muslim rule, he noted that the “Muslim kings were also oppressive, but we shared
equal ranks with them in a good many
respects”. He invoked Akbar with special reverence and referred to
“Akbar’s Dream” (1890–91), a poem
written by Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), who had lately passed away.
In
the poem, Tennyson, the poet laureate of United Kingdom, not only furnished a
raison d’être for British imperialism,
he enlisted Indian history at the latter’s service. The poem is in the
main a monologue by the Mughal emperor
Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–1605) to the great intellectual Abul Fazl (1551–1602), who was
the emperor’s friend and counsellor. The poem
begins with a quotation of a poem by Abul Fazl that was allegedly
composed for a temple in Kashmir:
Elahi, bar khane ke mi negaram, juyayi tu’and wa be-har zaban ke mi shenwam guiayi tu, Kufr wa eslam dar rahat puian, wahde la sharika lah guian
O God! in every temple I see people that seek thee,
and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee.
Polytheism and Islam feel after thee.
Each religion says, 'Thou art one, without equal.' (Abul Fazl, tr. Blochman, 1873)
Abul
Fazl goes on to state that in every religion’s place of worship he finds the
same pursuit of God. There is no
essential difference between orthodoxy and heresy as long as the goal is
finding God. Following the quotation,
Tennyson begins his poem proper, which opens with the brooding Akbar telling Abul Fazl how his policy of
toleration to people of all faiths could be reversed when his son Jahangir takes over the reins.
After expatiating at length about the importance of religious ecumenism and the folly of
fanatical claim by the doctors of different faiths of having a monopoly of truth and righteousness, Akbar
presages that a new race of rulers will succeed who would uphold his ideal even more
faithfully:
… [W]hile I groan'd,
From out the sunset pour'd an alien race,
Who fitted stone to stone again, and Truth,
Peace, Love and Justice came and dwelt therein,
Nor in the field without were seen or heard
Fires of Suttee, nor wail of baby-wife,
Or Indian widow; and in sleep I said
"All praise to Alla by whatever hands
My mission be accomplish'd!" (Tennyson, 1882)
Tennyson’s
poem reflects a pattern of British appropriation of history to repurpose
Mughal imperial ideology so that the
latter is morphed into “a creed whose primary imperative is not individual salvation in the next world but
multiethnic religious toleration in this one.” (Sapra & Stevens, 2008) When Queen Victoria was
proclaimed the Empress of India, she was projected as inheriting the throne of the ancient
Mughals[i]. This was a relatively benign conceptualization arising from imperial historicism where the
oriental is appropriated for appreciative inclusion, whatever the motives might be.
Tagore
however was critical of Tennyson’s perceived continuity between the Mughal and
British ideologies and drew a clear line
of distinction between the two. According to Tagore, it was love which separated the Mughal approach from the
British:
“Love is positive rather than negative. The unity of love that Akbar sought to establish through resolving all religious disputes was a positive program. He found an ideal of unity in his own heart and penetrated the heart of every religion with a broad and respectful mind… He wanted to unify the king and the people not only by means of politics but also with the tie of love. The foreigners coming from the land of sunset do not interfere with our religion, but does this aloofness bespeak love or politics? The difference is fundamental”. (Tagore, 1893)
Tagore
imputed the aggravation of Hindu-Muslim contentions to the aloofness of the
British. Lacking the principle of love,
they cultivated jealousy more than love between the two principal faiths of India. In Tagore’s view, instead of
keeping a non-committal equidistance from all
faiths, the ruler should assume a positive role of joining hands of
contending communities through an act of
love. This was a reprimand against a longstanding policy approach of the British Empire.
Rising
to speak after the keynote by Tagore, the elderly Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
sounded a shrill note of
dissonance:
“Why
do people of this country dance at the name of Akbar? He caused more harm than
good when it comes to protecting and
preserving the Hindu race. Even if we leave that aside, his noble, sublime
policy hides an alien self-serving
agenda. He picked and chose the Kshatriya princesses for his harem, which reveals only a self-serving agenda with not a
shred of generosity. Had we seen that he arranged for marrying Mughal princesses to Hindu Kshatriya
princes, we could reckon for once that he was evenhanded. In society and administration, Akbar was
merely a successful ruler who managed to implement his self serving agenda with
mighty force and ability”. (Quoted by Gopalchandra Ray, 1960, p. 38)
Bankim
was always a rather awkward speaker, not much given to lecturing in the public.
The point he drove home in this speech
was carefully thought out. His opposition to Mughal Empire was many-sided. As strands of Indian
historiography in our times have readily absorbed received conclusions of 19th century historiography,
the Mughal era is usually painted as the more
enlightened era – offering non-Muslim subjects greater liberty and
protection – compared to the preceding
Sultanate era. Tagore himself in more than one instances voiced his clear
preferences for the Mughal rule over
that of the Delhi Sultans. For Tagore, the Sultanic era was an
unmitigated
‘blood-red meteor storm’ that does not inspire the historical imagination of
the Indians, lacks rasa, and hence falls
short of belonging to the national history proper, while Mughal era at least from Akbar to Aurangzeb
was the balmier one which laid down the
conditions of intercommunal coexistence. Why would Bankim think
otherwise about the Mughals?
To
a certain extent it was a matter of Bankim’s preference for self-rule in
Bengal. He sang the paeans of the
Sultanate era as opposed to the Mughal era since Bengal was virtually
independent during the Sultanate era.
Certain commentators have traced the lineaments of a linguistic-ethnic conception of nationalism in Bankim based on
stray assertions taken in isolation from the
context, including the line in the Vande Mataram anthem where the sons
of the mother-goddess are counted 70
million. In fact, Bankim viewed the linguistic nations that emerged in India
as fragmented communities. “Bengal is
merely a fragment of India”. He waxes lyrical on what a wonder it would be if all these fragments
were joined into a whole, tied together by the common knot of English language. We may remind
ourselves that the great critic of the Mughals would be honored as Companion of the Indian Empire
(C.I.E.) in 1894.
Bankim’s
preference for the Sultanate era was not for the status of Bengal as an
autonomous Sultanate. The Sultans were
alien rulers in his eyes, and the period was better only because it was the native Hindu landlords who exercised
authority under the nominal sovereignty of the Sultan. A subnational nativist foundation of politics
rather than the political regime at the center
constituted the legitimacy of Sultanic rule in Bengal.
Bankim’s
rhetoric on Akbar was a problematization of gender politics: he was vexed at
the one way transfer of women from Hindu to Muslim community. He avenged this
historical inequity in his novel
Durgeshnandini, where a Muslim princess falls in love with a Hindu man.[ii]
Exogamy was legitimate when balanced, or
tilted in favor of his own. For Bankim, Akbar would have to prove his fairness by giving Mughal
princesses in marriage as a sort of quid pro quo. Akbar nestled closer to Hindus by his apparently
liberal policy, but it was a discomforting closeness invading the proper boundaries of community
and threatening the integrity or autonomy of the Hindu self. As opposed to Tagore’s
celebration of the bond of love between the Mughal ruler and the native subjects, Bankim cast the
relationship of love in terms of unequal power and gender asymmetry. In Anandamatha or Shitaram,
Bankim redraws the red lines in which the
virtuous and necessarily endogamic men and women collectively secede
from the established Muslim authority.
Secession was necessary for preserving endogamic purity and politico spiritual
autonomy.
In
an 1878 poem called “Akbar Badsha-r Khosh Roj”, Bankim depicts a Rajput
princess visiting a carnival held in
Akbar’s capital. When she loses her way in the venue’s labyrinthine exit
route, she chances upon the Badshah
himself. Akbar is enamored by her looks and solicits her to go home with him. The helpless princess invokes
goddess Durga – the central figure in Bankim’s
nationalism with a very specific gender-power configuration – to her
rescue. Bolstered by divine blessing,
she snatches the Emperor’s scimitar and threatens to kill him. Akbar is
pleasantly startled at her bravery and
accedes defeat. The princess then administers an oath to the Emperor to the effect that he would never brook any
humiliation of Hindu women, and he would see her, and potentially other Hindu women, as his
sister. Bankim’s heroines always have a benign,
weightless
spectrality about them. Interestingly, in an 1875 poem, a precocious Tagore
sang the glory of self-immolation of
Rajput women threatened with the prospect of rape and bondage under the invading Yavana army. As a matter
of fact, Tagore had a longstanding view that both Christianity and Islam (a fine balance of a
‘tu quoque’ couple indeed, where evoking one
justifies evoking the other) are aggressive proselytizing religions that
wreaked much havoc on the more
inward-looking societies. A proselytist ideology at its best includes the
other, but only at the cost of
assimilation. The non-proselytist ideology is in a way non-invasive, but it
also keeps the other out of its fold
(Tagore, 1329 BE).
Bankim
Chandra must be given his due: He also favored love between the two main communities of Bharatbarsha. Such love
however would have to be negotiated under the terms of Hindu superiority. Bankim explains his
principles of love thus:
“He [the ultimate reality] cannot be loved without loving all human beings… As long as we do not understand that the whole world is the same as I, that I and the universe are identical, we do not have knowledge, religion, devotion, and affection. Thus, universal love is at the very root of Hinduism: there is no Hindutva without inalienable, indiscriminate universal love.”
Further,
“Hindus and Muslims are but the same to a Hindu”. For Bankim, Hindu agency is
a prerequisite for love and amity, even
as the latter is integral to the former. The Bengali Hindu was in his consideration a lineal descendant
of the Aryan and is thus a legatee of all the glories of an Aryan civilization. The Bengali society
had the Aryans in its upper reaches and both non Aryans and Bengali Muslims in
the lower ranks. Even the Bengali Muslims – low as they were – were “Hindu in
practice”, as “they don’t eat the flesh of cows” (Bankim, 1875).
Bankim’s
reversal of the terms in the gendered politics of love is an echo of the
premodern Muslim conceptions of
sovereignty. The Sultans of Bengal would project themselves as practitioners of Adal or justice and balance.
A wide range of groups professing various faiths and practices would enjoy liberty and security.
Non-Muslims would occupy key positions of the
administration and military. As Mughal rule was established, its formal
concept of sovereignty was patrimonial,
tracing the legitimacy of the Gorkan line in Timur’s legacy. Ecumenism was
a part of Mughal policy in the times of
Akbar onwards. The Akbarian dialogy of faiths partly trickled down to local Mughal officers, as in
the case of Ismail Quli Khan, brother of Mughal
Governor of Bengal in late 16th century. When Quli met a Portuguese
Christian father, he enthusiastically
engaged in questions of theology and family law. Similar tolerance to
multiple faiths can be observed in
extra-Mughal or sub-Mughal domains, as in the small polities in Bengal during the 12 chiefs’ period. Local chiefs
like Isa Khan, Pratapaditya, or Kedar Rai granted rights of religious debate, proselytism, and
of course rights of property and residency (Zami & Lorea, 2016). No wonder that for European contemporaries
the oriental kingdoms represented an
aspirational example as late as 18th century, when Voltaire effusively
praised the various empires in the
east:
“The
Great Lord [the Ottoman emperor] governs in peace 20 nations of diverse
religions. Two hundred thousand Greeks
live in safety in Constantinople… [The Empire] is full of Jacobites,
Nestorians, Monotelites, Cophtes, Jews,
… The annals of Turks do not mention any revolt excited by any of these religions. Go to India, in Persia, in
Tartary. You will see the same tolerance and the same tranquility.” (Voltaire, 1763, my translation)
So
much for the idea that the non-West “borrowed” the tradition of tolerance from
post Enlightenment Europe!
For
all that, however, the entire system of the Sultanic or Mughal state revolved
around a sovereign who could only be
Muslim according to Islamic conception of sovereignty. The Raja Ganesh crisis in Bengal or the vicious
polemic directed at Akbar’s liberal and critical approach to theological issues is a manifestation of
this limit posited in Islamic conception of sovereignty. We should however guard against taking these
thetic assertions as categorical, because all
political ideas were shot through a prism of negotiation with the
diktats of pragmatism.
There
was a vague and diffuse conception of collective subservience or heteronomy
in premodern Bengali literature of 18th
century. Bharatchandra Ray’s (1712–1760) Annadamangal contains a famous episode of a face-off
between Emperor Jahangir and the Bengali Brahmin cum throne-aspirant Bhabananda. Jahangir is shown
clearly averse to non-Muslims, expressing his
wish to circumcise and administer to them the oath of allegiance to God.
The Emperor also opposed vesting
kingship in a Hindu Brahmin, until Bhabananda invoked the goddess Annada
to wreak havoc in Delhi (sic) and forced
the Emperor himself to submission.
A
few decades later, Ramram Basu (1751–1813) wrote his hagiography of
Pratapaditya, one of the earliest and
finest works in Bengali prose literature, in which the author digs at the
question of heteronomy versus autonomy
more than once. As in classical Muslim political theory, in Basu’s work, the relationship between self
and other is here crossed with the binary of friend vs. enemy. Thus, Daud Karrani is depicted as a
just and benevolent ruler under Mughal suzerainty who is friendly to his Hindu men. Daud
considered his officers Hari and Janaki as his friends and brothers. With the passage of time, Daud
began hatching a plot of declaring sovereignty.
Ramram Basu renders Daud’s reflections on the question of sovereignty as
follows:
“My
treasury is full. If I manage to amass more resources, I will build up a larger
military force. If the Lord of Delhi
practices injustice, what is the harm if I act accordingly? This is not an
unnatural act. This is the land of
Hindus. It belongs rightfully to them. Muslims have got hold of this domain by
their force. The Lord of Delhi is
Muslim, and I belong to the same nation. Hence on what ground can he extract
revenue from me, and on what ground do I
pay him? The coins are struck in his name; he sits on the throne, and I remain his servant – how unbecoming is it! I
will not pay him tax any more. I will reign in my domain and keep my own army...” (Basu, p. 5, translation
mine)
In
this reflection, the Hindu populace as a community have a natural political
right to sovereignty over the land of
Bengal, while the Muslims have gained the right of rule by violence. The right
is however shared by all Muslims, and
therefore Daud is equally entitled to rule as is Badshah Akbar himself. As Daud implements his plan of
declaring and practicing sovereignty,
Bhabananda prognosticates that this would bring Daud’s downfall, since
Akbar is the mightiest king of
Hindustan, which is identified as a distinct empire beyond Bengal, a bidesh.
When eventually Akbar sends his army to
invade Bengal, the friendship between Daud and his Hindu officials is ripped apart. The Mughal Hindu
general Man Singh coaxes Hari and Janaki to
collaborate with him under the pretext of shared Hindu “varna”, while
the fugitive Daud becomes suspicious of
his men as naturally “ill-natured” Hindus. The rest of the narrative does not concern us at present.
Ramram
Basu is a transitional figure between the late Mughal early modern era and
colonial modernity, an interstitial
scholar between Persian, Sanskritic and European institutions of knowledge. If we draw a line from
Bharatchandra to Ramram Basu, we could probably see a continuity of a tradition in late Mughal
Bengal of conceiving the Mughal rulers as terrible and mighty aliens who were yet in some ways close
and accessible. The interaction probably created in the Bengali Hindu notables a certain
pressure of assimilation under conditions of inalienable differences of language, religion, and power.
It is debatable whether it was this legacy of a
sensibility which devolved upon Bankim, whose own maternal ancestor
Raghudeb served in late Mughal
administration. It is the nature of ideology that it overcodes: A given
contradiction is overlaid or
overdetermined by other, sometimes unrelated or spurious contradictions, in
a dynamic process of amplification.
Bankim had to draw up a litany of ethno-cultural contradictions to drive home his ideological
variant of nationalism.
What
was at stake in this debate between Tagore and Bankim was how to appropriate
pre-British Indian history in fashioning
a political and cultural approach towards the British Empire as well as to preceding Muslim rule. British rule thrust
upon Bengali society questions of self and other, people and aliens and such questions would
have to be dealt with within a historicist framework. Tagore and Bankim, both were working on a
concept of Indian nationalism. Tagore represented an ecumenical conception of Indian
nationalism in which domination was justified by enlightened benevolence as the saving grace.
In Tennyson’s language, the empire was a “vast
dominion” where “a sword only conquers men to conquer peace.” Today when
the ultra nationalist dispensation in India has turned hostile to the
historical traces of the grand Mughal,
Tagore’s appreciation of Akbar bears critical examination. Much earlier
than Tennyson, the colonial British
rulers such as Warren Hastings, as well as certain orientalist scholars used
to conceive enlightened British
administration as a successor to Akbar’s legacy (Vasunia, 2018). In today’s South Asia, what to make of such a
legacy carried forward in later Indian nationalist historiography is not a simple question.
Bankim,
on the other hand, voiced a revindicationist and nativist conception of
nationalism in which religion, ethnicity
and nation closely overlap. Bankim considered the Bengali identity as a racial-linguistic projection of the
Sanskritic Aryan civilization of India. The protagonism he thus ascribed to the Bengali in spearheading Hindu
India’s autonomism was later lost on his
community, but subsequent Indian nationalism took a page or two from his
ideas.
We
will leave our exposition at that and instead of offering a didactic lesson for
today's Bangladesh, would only make a
small quip by way of conclusion: As right-wing Islamist politics has found a strong footing in a significant
part of Bangladeshi youth, sections of the secular literati and dabblers in politics find the
allure of such mythological politics riveting. It is thus less than strange that Bankim’s oeuvre remains a
fount of jouissance for a would-be militant Bengali nationalism of a professedly secular variant.
The wager of such a politics that has risen in West Bengal is that: without affective identification
with nationalism, the right wing will hijack the displaced affective energy with the lure of
enjoyment that it offers. Bankim was the finest artist as well as the mightiest theoretician in 19th
century Bengali literature. Believe it or not: the figures of his identitarian and
revindicationist thought are replicable for both Hindutva and Islamism. We should know better than to yield
to the seduction of his reaction which would
beckon us into ghost alleys.
Tahmidal
Zami is a writer. He can be reached at tmz.dhaka@gmail.com
References
1.
Phiroze Vasunia, “Akbar’s Dream: The Mughal Emperorin Nineteenth- Century
Literature”, in Renaud Gange, Simon
Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloud, eds., Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History,
Religion, and Anthropology. pp. 284-317. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
2.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra, “Akbar’s Dream: Moghul Toleration and
English/British Orientalism”, Modern
Philology , Vol. 104, No. 3 (February 2007), pp. 379-411.
3.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Akbar’s Dream”,
<http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/tennyson/index.html
>
4.
Rabindranath Tagore, “HinduMusolman: Shri-jukta Kalidas Naag-ke Likhito”, 1329
Bengali Era.
5.
Ramram Basu, Raja Pratapadityacharita, 1801.
6.
Bharatchandra Ray, Annadamangal.
7.
Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, 1763.
8.
Gopalchandra Ray, Bankimchandra O Rabindranath, Kolkata : Sahitya Sadan,
1960.
9.
Rabindranath Tagore, "Gronthoshomalochona 2 [Review of Bharatbarsher
Itihash by Hemlata Debi]",
originally published in Bharati, 1305 Bengali Era [1898 CE].
10.
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Bankim Rachanabali.
11.
Abul Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, vol. I, trans. and ed. H. Blochman, p. xxxi.
[i]
Enlightenment historicism historicized cultural difference in a way that
European identity was defined in terms of
its differential development over others conceived as teleological
superiority. This conception was built upon the
foundation of empire, creating a synergy between knowledge and power.
Yet, the relation between power and
knowledge is never totalizing: thus, knowledge produced by the empire’s
scholars were not irreducibly false
consciousness (Sapra & Stevens, 2008). The contrast between the
orientalists and occidentalists in early 19th century India represents the internal incoherence of
the knowledge regime under the empire.
[ii]
Decades later, the Muslim politician Ismail Hossain Shirazi would dabble in
writing novels to avenge this perceived
literary inequity: he would have a Hindu princess fall in love with a Muslim prince in Raynandini, a poor apology
of a novel.