1

Pearls and Dung

‘Seldom in the history of mankind has the spectacle been witnessed of two civilisations, so vast and so strongly developed, yet so radically dissimilar as the Muhammadan and Hindu, meeting and mingling together,’ observes John Marshall, distinguished early twentieth century British archaeologist-historian. ‘The very contrasts which existed between them, the wide divergences in their culture and their religions, make the history of their impact peculiarly instructive . . .’

Such civilisational confrontations have indeed been very rare in world history. But what is even more curious is that though Hindu and Muslim civilisations coexisted in India for very many centuries, there was hardly any creative interaction between them, no significant change in either, in response to the challenge by the other. The two coexisted, but did not interact. They were like water and oil in the same pot.

The entire early medieval period in India was culturally quite barren, in sharp contrast to the lush cultural efflorescence of the preceding classical period or the succeeding Mughal period. Except for the patronage of Indian culture by a few provincial sultans, the explorations into Indian heritage by a couple of Persian scholars and writers like al-Biruni and Amir Khusrav, the conservation of some ancient Indian monuments by a few sultans like Firuz Tughluq, and the construction of a few grand monuments like Qutb Minar, there was nothing notably positive in the cultural history of the Delhi Sultanate and its provincial offshoots.

Nor was there any notable creative response by Hindu civilisation to the challenge of Islam, except the superficial adoption of a few Persian cultural modes and lifestyle by some rajas. For many centuries, roughly from the sixth to the eleventh century, Indians had lived hermetically sealed within the subcontinent, with virtually no contact with the outside world. There were no major invasions or racial migrations into India during this period, unlike in the previous periods. The only exception to this was the Arab conquest of Sind in the early eighth century, but that was a peripheral event, more important in what it portended than in what it achieved. As for Indian kings, they had never-ever, in the entire long history of India, ventured outside the subcontinent for conquest.

Because of all this, Indians of the late classical period had hardly any knowledge of the outside world. And they in their ignorance viewed all foreign civilisations as contemptibly inferior to their own civilisation, and held that any contact with foreign people would be degrading.

THE CULTURAL INSULARITY and torpor of medieval India was appalling. ‘I can only compare their mathematical and astronomical literature, as far as I know it, to a mixture . . . of pearls and dung, or of costly crystals and common pebbles,’ comments al-Biruni, an exceptionally liberal-minded and perceptive early medieval Iranian intellectual, who was a keen student of Indian civilisation. ‘Both kinds of things are equal in their eyes, since they cannot raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.’ This lack of discrimination, the blind acceptance of whatever ancient knowledge had come down to them, often in a corrupt form, and disdaining even to look at the achievements of other civilisations, characterised the Indian cultural elite of the early medieval period. Equally, Indians were averse to share their knowledge with the people of other lands, scorning them as unworthy of such knowledge. And even among Indians themselves caste rules restricted the dissemination of particular fields of knowledge to particular castes.

‘Hindus believe that there is no country like theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs,’ continues al-Biruni. ‘They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner. According to their belief . . . [no people] besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever . . . [And if you tell them of the achievements of other civilisations] they will consider you to be both an ignoramus and a liar.’ All these were fatal flaws in the Indian civilisation of the early medieval period. With no challenge to stimulate creativity, Indian civilisation had over many centuries become comatose, while most of the rest of the world woke up from their medieval slumber and surged ahead.

According to al-Masudi, a tenth-century Arab scholar, ‘India was the portion of the earth in which order and wisdom prevailed in distant ages.’ True indeed. But the scene in medieval India was entirely different from that. India at this time had hardly any creative vitality in any field of culture. Not surprisingly, India’s primary response to the Turkish invasion and the challenge of Islam was to defensively curl up tighter into itself. In the Sanskrit literature of the age there is virtually no mention of the establishment of the Turkish rule in India, and no indication of any socio-cultural response by Indians to the challenge of Islam.

TURKS WERE ORIGINALLY a wild nomadic people of mixed racial and tribal origin, spread over a vast area in Central Asia. But gradually, from around the eighth century, they became Islamised in religion and Persianised in culture. And by the time they invaded India, they had become an urbane, sophisticated people, though some of their old feral nature still persisted in them. Several of their sultans, in Delhi as well as elsewhere in India, were ardent patrons of culture, and some—Firuz Tughluq, for instance—were themselves respected writers. According to Afif, a fourteenth-century chronicler, Firuz Tughluq spent a vast sum of money on allowances to scholars; further, according to Mughal chronicler Ferishta, the sultan encouraged scholars to fan out in his empire and spread learning. There were said to have been as many as a thousand educational institutions flourishing in Delhi during the Tughluq period.

Intellectuals and creative people from many regions of the Muslim world migrated to India at this time, for the Delhi Sultanate was one of the most powerful Muslim kingdoms of the age, and most of the sultans were generous patrons of scholars and writers. A notable exception to this was Ala-ud-din Khalji, who considered cultural pursuits a waste of time and resources. But even during his reign, Delhi continued to attract cultural leaders from around the Muslim world, drawn by the great prosperity of the sultanate at this time. ‘During the time of Sultan Ala-ud-din, Delhi was the great rendezvous for all the most learned and erudite personages,’ writes Abdul Hakk Dehlawi, a chronicler of the Mughal age. ‘For, notwithstanding the pride and hauteur, the neglect and superciliousness, and the want of kindness and cordiality, with which that monarch treated this class of people, the spirit of the age remained the same.’

The benefaction of Delhi sultans, as had to be expected, was primarily for Muslim scholars and writers, but some of the sultans also extended their favour to Hindu scholars and to the promotion of the traditional knowledge of India, particularly to the study of secular subjects. And they took the initiative to get several ancient Indian texts on scientific subjects, such as medicine, translated into Persian. Thus when Firuz Tughluq found a vast collection of manuscripts in the temple of Jvalamukhi at Nagarkot (Kangra) in Himachal Pradesh, he took care to have several of them translated into Persian. ‘In this temple was a fine library of Hindu books, consisting of 13,000 volumes,’ records Ferishta. ‘Firuz sent for some of the wise men of that religion and ordered some of the books to be translated, and especially directed one of those books, which dealt with philosophy, astrology and divination, to be translated [into Persian] . . . It is in truth a book replete with various kinds of knowledge, both practical and theoretical.’ According to Mughal historian Badauni, some ‘unprofitable and trivial works on prosody, music and dancing’ were also translated under the sultan’s patronage.

The patronage of culture by kings was an ancient tradition in India, and even in medieval times, despite the general decline of Hindu political power, there were several rajas who had serious cultural interests and accomplishments. Particularly noteworthy among them was Rana Kumbha of Mewar, who, notwithstanding his many military engagements, found time and interest not only to earnestly promote culture, but also to turn himself into a distinguished scholar in several fields, from ancient Hindu scriptures to political theory, grammar, literature, and music. He also wrote four plays, three texts on music, and had to his credit the writing a highly regarded commentary on Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda. Unfortunately he went insane towards the end of his life, and was murdered by his son.

SUCH EARNEST SCHOLARSHIP and creativity as that of Rana Kumbha were relatively rare in Hindu society in medieval times, compared to its marvellous cultural luxuriance in the earlier age. Even the study of the ancient Indian systems of knowledge was in a dismal state of decay at this time, particularly in North India, though there were some lingering sparks of vitality in them in South India. Generally speaking, the purpose of scholarly pursuits by Indians in this age was not for advancing knowledge, but almost entirely for learning old texts by rote. And since many of the old texts had become hopelessly corrupt over the centuries, this mode of learning meant the perpetuation of flawed, decayed knowledge.

There were however still a few major centres of traditional learning in India at this time. Varanasi (Benares) was one such centre. The city specialised in the gurukula system of education, of eminent scholars taking under their care a few chosen students. ‘The town of Benares situated on the Ganges . . . in the midst of an extremely rich and fertile country may be considered the general school of gentiles,’ writes Bernier, a late seventeenth century French physician in India. ‘It is the Athens of India, whither resort Brahmins and other devotees . . . The town contains no colleges or regular classes as in our universities, but resembles rather the schools of the ancients, the masters being dispersed over different parts of the town in private houses, principally in the gardens of the suburbs, which the rich merchants permit them to occupy. Some of these masters have four disciples, others six or seven and the most eminent may have twelve, but this is the greatest number.’

Varanasi was a Hindu centre of learning, but there were also a few major Buddhist and Jain centres of learning in early medieval India. These, unlike the guru-centred Hindu educational system, provided institutionalised education, in large university-like campuses, which had a good number of teachers in diverse subjects. The most renowned of the Buddhist educational centres of the age was the University of Nalanda in Bihar, which, because it was a walled campus, was mistaken for a fort and was destroyed by Turkish commander Bakhtiyar Khalji in the early thirteenth century, during the reign of Qutb-ud-din Aibak. ‘Most of the inhabitants of the place were Brahmins with shaven heads,’ writes Siraj, an early medieval chronicler, mistaking Buddhist monks for Brahmins. ‘They were all put to death. A large numbers of books were found there, and when the Mohammedans saw them, they called for some persons to explain their contents, but all the men had been killed. It was then discovered that the whole fort and city was a place of study.’ There were several other such instances of wanton destruction of Indian cultural and religious centres by Turks.

ON THE POSITIVE side, one of the major cultural developments of the early medieval period was the spread of Persian language and literature in India. Persian was the favoured language of the sultans and the Muslim elite in India, for official business as well as for cultural pursuits. The language was also increasingly cultivated by upper class Hindus—especially by those who were in any way connected with the administration of Muslim kingdoms—somewhat in the same manner in which many Indians would later take to the study of English during the British rule. And, along with the use of Persian language, the adoption of Persian dress and lifestyle became the mark of high culture among the political elite—among Muslims as well as Hindus—in most regions of India, except in the deep south, which was outside the pale of Muslim rule and direct Muslim cultural influence.

A number of books on India were written by Muslim scholars in the early medieval period, and they provide invaluable information on many aspects of life in India in that age. One of the earliest and finest of these works is al-Biruni’s Ta’rikh al-Hind: Chronicles of India. Hardly anything is known about al-Biruni’s family background or about his early life, except that he was a Persian by birth, and spent his early life in Khwarazm. He was a contemporary and one-time colleague of Avicenna, the renowned intellectual and physician of the age. When Mahmud Ghazni conquered Khwarazm, he induced or forced al-Biruni (along with several other scholars) to move to Ghazni, and there the young scholar immersed himself in his studies under the patronage of Mahmud and his successors.

Al-Biruni, according his medieval biographer Shams-ud-din Muhammad Shahrazuri, was so dedicated to his studies that ‘he never had a pen out of his hand, nor his eye off a book, and his thoughts were always directed to his studies . . . [He had no interest in temporal acquisitions, and was content with] procuring the necessaries of life on such a moderate scale as to afford him bare sustenance and clothing.’ Once when sultan Masud rewarded him with an elephant load of silver, he politely declined to accept the gift and returned it to the treasury. This indifference to temporal gains was a major factor that enabled al-Biruni to be totally unbiased in his works—he did not write to please anyone but himself. He had ‘a most rigid regard for truth,’ comments Baihaqi, who lived half a century after al-Biruni.

Al-Biruni does not seem to have had a family of his own—he probably never married—and his single-minded devotion to scholarship, and indifference to wealth, were probably in part because he did not have to provide for a family. The absence of family also enabled him to travel freely, wherever the pursuit of his studies took him. He spent several years in India, in Punjab, interacting with Brahmin pundits there and translating into Persian or Arabic some Indian books, such as on Samkhya and Yoga, the principal Indian philosophical schools of the age. A facile linguist, he knew several languages, including Sanskrit and Greek, but wrote mostly in Arabic.

One of the most brilliant polymaths of the medieval world, al-Biruni is said to have written over a hundred books—a camel load of books, it is said. Of them only twenty-two books are extant now, but even these cover a wide range of subjects, including various sciences, as well astrology, history, sociology, geography, philosophy and theology. There was hardly any field of contemporary knowledge that al-Biruni did not deal with. He was the first scholar anywhere in the world to study Indian culture methodically, and he may be rightly considered the patriarch of Indology. His treatment of Indian culture was fair and objective, almost entirely without racial or religious prejudice.

ANOTHER VERSATILE GENIUS of early medieval India was Amir Khusrav. He, like al-Biruni, was a prolific writer, and is credited with writing a large number of books—there is tradition that he wrote 99 books, on different subjects and in a variety of literary modes—and also some 400,000 verses. He is also said to have introduced several innovations in music. We do not know whether all the achievements attributed to him are true—it is not impossible that he did all that, but we have to also bear in mind that there was a tendency in India at this time to attribute innovative works to some renowned person, in order to gain general acceptability for the innovations.

Khusrav was born in 1253 in Patiali, a small town near Delhi, and he died in 1325, aged seventy-two. His father was a migrant Turk, but his mother, according to some accounts, was a Hindu convert to Islam, and it is probable that it was this genetic and cultural hybridity that enabled him to smoothly blend Hindu and Muslim cultural traditions in his works.

Khusrav was a child prodigy, and wrote his first collection of poems in his teens. He then went on to serve eight successive Delhi sultans, from Balban to Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq, as their court poet, and he kept himself in royal favour by writing panegyrics on all those sultans. He was particularly favoured by Jalal-ud-din Khalji, who, according to Barani, a fourteenth century Delhi chronicler, ‘was a great appreciator and patron of talent . . . [The sultan appointed Khusrav as] one of his chosen attendants . . . [and] invested him with such robes as are given to great nobles, and girded him with a white sash.’ He was also given generous cash awards. Ala-ud-din Khalji also favoured Khusrav, and appointed him as his court poet. On the whole Khusrav had a remarkably smooth and successful career in those turbulent times. But in his old age he abandoned all temporal pursuits, became a follower of the Sufi saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya, and lived a cloistered life, though he still wrote poetry.

Khusrav wrote mainly in Persian, but he freely used Hindi words in his compositions, as in the mixed Hindi-Arabic-Persian-Turki language called Hindawi, the precursor of Urdu, that was taking form in the region around Delhi in his time. He often set his poems to music, and is thought to be the father of Qawwali, the Sufi devotional music.

Khusrav’s works are characterised by luxuriant literary flourishes, and are marvellously mellifluous, qualities which were greatly admired in medieval times, but are mostly lost in English translation, as of these verses:

Bakhubi hamcho mah tabindah baashi;

Bamulk-e dilbari paayindah baashi.

Man-e darvish ra kushti baghamzah;

Karam kardi Ilahi zindah baashi.

Jafaa kam kun ki farda roz-e mehshar;

Baru-e aashiqan sharmindah baashi.

Ze qaid-e dojahan azad baasham;

Agar tu hum-nashin-e bandah baashi.

Barindi-o bashokhi hamcho Khusrau;

Hazaran khanuman barkandah baashi.

May your charming face ever shine like the full moon;

May you hold eternal sway over the realms of beauty.

By your amorous glance you have killed me, a vagrant;

How generous of you? May god give you a long life.

Pray do not be cruel lest you feel ashamed of yourself

Before your lovers on the day of judgment.

I shall be set free from the bonds of the two worlds

If you become my companion for a while.

By your wanton playfulness you must have destroyed

Thousands of hearts of lovers like that of Khusrav.

AN IMPORTANT CULTURAL development of the early medieval period was the translation of several Sanskrit works into Arabic and Persian. The first book thus translated was Suka-saptati (Parrot’s Seventy), a circa twelfth century compilation of amusing ancient Indian tales, told by a clever parrot to a forlorn woman (whose husband was away), to distract her from straying. This was translated into Persian by Zia Nakhshabi in the early fourteenth century. The Persian book, titled Tuti-nama (Book of the Parrot), gained wide popularity in India and the Middle East, and was in time translated from Persian into Turkish and several European languages. Zia Nakhshabi also translated Koka-shastra (also known as Rati-rahasyam: Secrets of Love), a popular early medieval Sanskrit work on erotica written by Kukkoka. During the reign of Firuz Tughluq, a number of other Sanskrit works on a variety of subjects were translated from Sanskrit into Persian under royal patronage. Similarly Mahabharata and Kalhana’s Rajatarangini were translated into Persian under the patronage of Zain-ul-Abidin, a mid-fifteenth century sultan of Kashmir. Such liberal royal patronage of the ancient Indian cultural heritage would continue till almost the very end of the Delhi Sultanate, with Sikandar Lodi commissioning the translation of several Sanskrit works into Persian.

In contrast to this vigorous Sanskrit-to-Persian translation activity, there was hardly any attempt at this time to translate Persian literature into Sanskrit or any other Indian language. The Indian intelligentsia, in their characteristic cultural insularity, almost totally ignored the dominant Muslim cultural presence in India. The Turkish invasion of India, as Kosambi comments, did not make ‘the slightest impression upon the mannerisms or complacency of the local intelligentsia. The last great Sanskrit literature, written about this time . . . contains not the slightest mention of contemporary events.’ Thus even when the Turkish advance was threatening to overwhelm Jayachandra Gahadavala, king of Kanauj, the last great Hindu ruler of North India, his court poet Sriharsha was turning out self-indulgent romances and lyrics in Sanskrit.

The cultural scene was not much different elsewhere in India either, with the court poets of the rajas continuing to indulge in their ‘mannered stupidities,’ as Kosambi describes it. Typical of this was ‘the Rama-charita of Sandhyakara-nandin, [which] reduced Sanskrit poetry to the level of an acrostic . . . In effect, it cannot be understood at all,’ comments Kosambi. Hardly any of the Sanskrit works of the medieval period had any merit, they being mostly mediocre reworkings of old classics. The preoccupation of the Sanskrit writers of medieval India was with form, not substance.

The dreary state of Sanskrit literature at this time was not surprising, for it was then the dead language of a comatose civilisation. What mainly sustained literary activity in it in medieval times was the pretentious patronage of Sanskrit writers by the rajas, for whom it was prestigious to patronise literature in India’s classical language. But as most rajas lost their power consequent to the Turkish invasion of India, Sanskrit scholars and writers lost their main source of patronage, and that led to a sharp decline in the quality and quantity of Sanskrit literary output in medieval India.

Still, some amount of Sanskrit literary activity continued at this time, mainly in regions outside the Muslim rule, particularly in Vijayanagar, under the vigorous patronage of its rajas, some of whom, like Krishnadeva, were themselves literary figures of merit. The old Indian tradition of poets writing panegyrics in Sanskrit on kings also continued during this period, and such poems were written even on sultans, like the one on Mahmud Begarha of Gujarat. In fact, similar eulogies continued to be written in modern times too, such as Victoria-charita—on Victoria, queen of England and empress of India—published in Dacca in the late nineteenth century. But none of these works had any literary merit compared to the Sanskrit classics of the ancient period.

A positive consequence of the decline of Sanskrit in medieval times was that it opened up literary space for regional Indian languages to grow and flourish. Sanskrit, or rather Prakrit, had spawned a number of regional offshoots in North India in the late classical times, and from around the eighth century on some of these regional languages began to produce their own literatures, and this gathered considerable momentum over the years. Many of the early writers in these languages were Buddhists and Jains, as they sought to reach out to the common people by writing in their languages, rather than in Sanskrit, which was understood only by the erudite. Buddhists in particular made major contributions in promoting regional languages—the earliest writers in Bengali, for instance, were Buddhists.

The spread of the Bhakti movement in Hinduism at this time was another factor that stimulated literary activity in regional languages—as Bhakti was a movement of the common people, it used the language of the common people for its devotional literature. At this time there were also several translations of popular Sanskrit works, like the Puranas and the epics, into regional languages, and that greatly enriched the literature in these languages.

IN CONTRAST TO the moribund state of Sanskrit literature in medieval times, Tamil, the only other ancient Indian language which had a literature of its own, remained vibrantly alive during this period. But the ethos of Tamil literature in the medieval times had changed altogether from what it had been in the classical period. While Tamil in the classical period produced sensitive secular literature, depicting the chiaroscuro of everyday life, its miseries and pleasures, mainly under Buddhist and Jain influence, its emphasis now shifted to religious literature, both devotional and expository, under the influence of resurgent Hinduism and its devotional cults. Religious fervour now replaced the calm reflectiveness that had earlier characterised Tamil literature.

The golden age of this new Tamil literature was the imperial Chola period, from the mid-ninth to the late twelfth century, when a great amount of Shaiva and Vaishnava texts, and even a few Buddhist and Jain texts, were written. The age also produced a few quasi-historical works in the style of the Puranas, mainly describing the legends about prominent South Indian temples. A few secular works on the exploits of local heroes, and some anthologies of old Tamil works, with commentaries appended to them, were also compiled at this time. A major lexicographic work on Tamil, Nigandu-cudamani by Mandalapurusha, a Jain scholar, also belongs to this period. But the best known Tamil literary work of the age is the Ramavatharam, popularly known as Kambaramayanam, a retelling of the story of the Ramayana by Kamban in the twelfth century. Its story is drawn from the Sanskrit epic, but Kamban enriches it by introducing a good amount of local flavour into it.

This emphasis on local flavour is particularly evident in the literature of the regional offshoots of Tamil that appeared in the late classical period, around the same time when literature in the regional offshoots of Sanskrit appeared. Tamil spawned three offshoots—Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam—and these in time produced impressive literatures of their own in the medieval period, each distinguished by the distinctive flavour of its region. As these offshoots of Tamil evolved, their literature came to be heavily influenced by Sanskrit, while Tamil literature itself remained relatively unaffected by it. In fact, a major part of the early literature in these regional languages consisted of reworked old Sanskrit texts. But in time these languages developed distinctive literatures of their own. The individuation of these languages, and the growth of literature in them, were facilitated by the use of these languages by Bhakti sages, and by the patronage of the literature in them by local rulers.

The earliest of the offshoots of Tamil to develop a literature of its own was Kannada, in which literary works began to appear around the middle of the first millennium, and by around the tenth century it produced some major works. The oldest extant literary work in Kannada is considered to be Kavirajamarga (Royal Path of Poets) of around the ninth century, its very title indicating the existence of older literature in the language. Most of the early works in Kannada were by Jains, and this was followed by the contributions of Vira-Shaivas, a sect of Shiva devotees.

A fascinating development in Kannada literature at this time was the introduction in it of a folksy style known as vacana, using simple, clear prose without any literary flourishes. The pioneer of this style is thought to be Madara Chennaiah, an eleventh century cobbler-sage. In the following century, this form of literature flourished under the patronage of Basava, the chief minister of the local kingdom, and himself a distinguished poet.

Early Telugu had a very close affinity with Kannada, and the two shared virtually the same script. But by around the fifth or sixth century, Telugu acquired many distinctive characteristics of its own, and it gradually grew into a separate language. The first major literary work in Telugu is Mahabharatam, written by Nannaya in the early eleventh century. But Nannaya died before he could finish the work. Two centuries would pass before the gargantuan task of completing the work was taken up by another poet, Tikkana, the greatest Telugu poet of all time, who, because of his brilliant literary skills, came to be known as Kavi Brahma. But even he left out a portion of the epic, and it was Yerrapragada (Errana) of the fourteenth century who finally completed the translation.

Around this time Telugu developed its own distinctive script, in the place of the Kannada script it had been using all along. Further, literary Telugu then began to diverge from the language of the common people, because of its heavy Sanskritisation. The high period of Telugu literature was the early sixteenth century, during the reign of Krishnadeva of Vijayanagar, who was himself a noted writer.

The last of the Dravidian languages to break free from Tamil was Malayalam, the language of Kerala. This separation began around the sixth century, and in the following centuries the language in its literary form became heavily Sanskritised, and came to have a very large number of its words drawn from Sanskrit. Its script however remained a variant of the Tamil Grantha script. It is believed that Malayalam began to evolve a distinct literature of its own by around the eleventh century, but the oldest extant literary works in the language are only of the fourteenth century, the best known among them being Unnuneeli-sandesam, an anonymous work modelled on Kalidasa’s Megha-sandesam, and uses a rich mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam called Manipravalam: ruby-coral.