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Bankim’s Mughals and Ours: Nationalism and The Dialectic of Appropriation of Pre-colonial History

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.


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