These Moon-faced Ones
It is not hidden from knowing, intelligent men…that the kingdom of Gujarat is one of the greatest provinces of Hindustan whose ruling planet is Jupiter in the second clime…. Its inhabitants, male and female…are handsome and delicate who rob persons of life with a sight and bestow upon them by talk. How nicely it has been said
What can one say about these rose-faced Gujaratis
That comely beauty is God-given to these moon-faced ones.
ALI MUHAMMAD KHAN, Mirat-i-ahmadi (Persian history of
Gujarat, c. 1756–61)
THE IMAGE OF GUJARATIS that I grew up with was that of essentially a mercantile people, soft, yet adventurous, ready to pick up and set up business elsewhere. All they required was to be left alone. Clannish, yes, but you would expect such people to be, by and large, tolerant. Perhaps ethically slack, for business practices require shortcuts. But brave, for in East Africa—Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar—they would set up shop in the remotest places, in small numbers, sometimes singly or with just their family with them, so that they became indispensable to colonial expansion and administration. My grandparents were among these entrepreneurs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. European explorers depended on them for supplies, and indeed took credit from them, and when they returned home—as I learned when I read their accounts—ungratefully turned around and wrote about them in the most unflattering terms as unscrupulous Shylocks. You would not think of them as a violent people; in East Africa, when confronted with violence as a community or individually, they were more likely to make a run for it or hide behind closed doors. Bollywood, thriving on stereotypes, enjoys casting the Gujarati man in comic roles, with his funny, infected Hindi and slightly effeminate manner. Mahatma Gandhi of the Banya (merchant) caste epitomized the Gujarati character: the nonviolence, shrewdness, self-effaciveness (or at least a show of it), and sense of humour. He came from the same place as my maternal grandfather, the port town of Porbandar.
And yet, in recent times, the bloodiest communal violence, with the most hideous attacks on the human person, especially on women and children, has taken place with some regularity in this ancestral homeland, among these people I thought I knew, whom I have called—culturally, ancestrally—my people. For me to come to this realization has been profoundly shocking. If anything makes me feel alien here, it is my utter incomprehension of such violence, my inability to shrug it off. My generalization of Gujarat, too, was naive, I realize; but there it is, in tatters.
Mira Kamdar, American author of the book Motiba’s Tattoos, which explores her Gujarati heritage on her father’s side, writes in a paper for the World Policy Institute, “My father, who loved Martin Luther King, hates Muslims. He hates them blindly, viscerally, categorically.” She adds, “My immigrant Gujarati father is both a liberal democrat and a supporter of Hindu fascism.”
One could argue that the homesick expatriate exhibits a more extreme form of nationalist passion and zealotry. But that is not the case; the violence unleashed in Gujarat during the so-called communal riots is so giddyingly intense and horrific that the country simply shakes its head and watches and waits for it to spend itself and subside like some natural disaster. But natural disaster it is not, for it is inspired and fuelled regularly and systematically by the politics of hateful bigotry.
Kamdar goes on to quote in her paper a well-known pledge distributed by the communalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council):
I will not buy anything from any Muslim shopkeeper
I will not use those traitors’ hotels or their garages
Boycott movies casting Muslim heroes and heroines
Never work in Muslims’ offices and do not employ Muslims
During my first visit to India, bloody riots were in progress in parts of Gujarat, following the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In Bhubaneswar, Orissa, receiving solicitous advice to take care of myself during my travels, I had joked that with a turban I could easily pass as a Sikh. In the jocular atmosphere of that precious moment, our Sikh friend duly removed his headgear and placed it ceremoniously upon my head, and it was affirmed by all present that I could indeed pass as a Sikh, and a photo was taken as proof. Since then, it was always with a little sadness and a tangible nervousness that I would travel in Gujarat, with nightmarish visions of rampaging mobs drunk on violence, of getting caught in a train by such a mob and being asked to prove physically my communal affiliation. And yet, I have always felt a sense of wonderful elation while travelling in India. It has helped that I remain, and indeed feel, communally anonymous and ambiguous, identifiable only by that cipher of my very Gujarati last name.
To introduce Gujarat this way is painful. Its language I speak, its food I eat, its dances I danced as a child. I could start with the romance, the exotic: the colours of the saris, the sweets, the fields, the arrival of the rains. The galloping new economy. The lavish, colourful weddings. All these would make my account more palatable. But this current reality seems to overshadow every other: two cultures, two peoples so close to each other, yet so apart; and I, by my traditions and history, straddling the two.
After my first Indian visit, I would be asked, back in Toronto, why I let the violence bother me. I did not live there after all, had never lived there, and I was safely here, anyway. I could have said that surely all violence anywhere should affect us; what came to mind instead was that I could not accept India’s embrace and turn away from the violence. It must in some way be a part of me.
Two necessary disclaimers.
I have already said that I find the labels “Hindu” and “Muslim” discomforting, because they are so exclusive. They have not defined people for me in Africa (where we were simply called “Wahindi,” Indians), in the United States (where I lived for some years), or in Canada. I refuse to use them this way, perhaps naively and definitely against a tide; but I am not alone. I use the distinction of “Hindu” or “Muslim” only in context, and especially when it has been used by people for themselves or others, as in the Gujarat violence.
So deep is the suspicion when one talks of conflict, that one has to state over and over that to describe the murder of a Muslim here is not to deny, let alone justify, the murder of a Hindu elsewhere, that a fanatic group does not represent an entire people, and there is no entire people, Hindu or Muslim, anyway. Attempts to create them, of course, have always been there.
Gujarat lies in the northwest of India, bordering that part of the Indian Ocean called the Arabian Sea, a region where the Indus Valley pre-Aryan civilization once prevailed, four thousand years ago. Many of its towns and cities are of ancient provenance, their silent ruins witnesses to the rise and fall of kingdoms, the clash of immense armies on elephant, horse, and foot. Shrines casually litter its landscapes, memorials to its holy men great and small, comfort to the needy. According to legend, Krishna, the dark sage-god and the charioteer in the Gita, ruled in the region of Dwarka in peninsular Gujarat (known as Kathiawar or Saurashtra). The temple at Dwarka at Kathiawar’s northwestern tip beside the Arabian Sea is today one of the great Indian pilgrimage sites. The Maurya empire in the time of Asoka, who ruled from 263 to 222 BC, extended all the way west to Kathiawar, where one of Asoka’s rock inscriptions—upon which are etched his principles of Buddhist dharma, or right moral conduct—is displayed at the outskirts of what is now the city of Junagadh. Asoka, remorseful at the suffering caused by his bloody conquest of the Kalinga kingdom in the east, in what is now Orissa, had become a follower of the path of the Buddha. Eight centuries after Asoka, the celebrated Chinese Buddhist traveller Hiuen Tsang would describe the city of Vallabhipur in Gujarat as containing more than a hundred Buddhist monasteries and a few thousand monks. Buddhism disappeared soon afterwards from this region and from much of India. Various other peoples ruled here, including Greeks and Gujjars, a northern people of Eurasian origin, who gave the area its name. A race of rulers of Central Asian origin known as the Kshatrapas ruled parts of Gujarat as the satraps of Persian kings roughly between the first and fourth centuries AD, minting their own coins with inscriptions in Greek, Brahmi, and Kharosthi scripts.
From about the ninth century onwards there came into prominence in north and west India, including Gujarat, a number of small kingdoms belonging to related clans going under the name Rajput (from the Sanskrit for “son of king”). Rajput origins too may lie, at least partly, in the north, a claim naturally dismissed by those of Rajput ancestry, for it would place them among the class of “foreign invaders.” Whatever the truth, it was these Rajput kingdoms that bore the onslaught of the invading armies from present-day Afghanistan, which finally defeated them. Delhi’s Tomar Rajput king Prithviraj was defeated by Muhammad of Ghur in 1192 in a battle that changed the face of India; from that strategic northern base invading armies of Delhi sultans overran the various Rajput kingdoms scattered throughout Rajasthan and northern Gujarat, including Kathiawar.
The Rajput kingdoms of India are renowned for their civilization and culture, their patronage of the arts and learning. They are also the subject of a great deal of legend and folklore describing the honour and courage displayed by their noble warriors who set off from their forts to do battle, especially in the tragic and climactic confrontations against the Muslim hordes from the north. It is said that when defeat was inevitable, the Rajput womenfolk, rather than face dishonour at the hands of the enemy, collectively immolated themselves in a fire, in a practice called jauhar, before their men set off to fight the enemy to the death. This practice, highly romanticized, not to say politicized in the Hindu-Muslim context, was not universal; and the Rajput kingdoms, of course, had been constantly at war against each other, and later allied themselves when necessary with Muslim armies. In present times, Rajput courage and honour, pitting good against evil in the setting of the beautiful Rajasthan desert, has become a staple of the Bollywood “masala western,” though it also provides the stereotype of archaic and dogged old-fashionedness and male patriarchy.
Perhaps the most glorious Gujarati Rajput kingdom was that of the Solanki dynasty, from 942 to 1242, which ruled from Anhilvada (at present-day Patan, sixty-five miles northeast of Ahmedabad), and more precisely during the reigns of Jaisingh Siddhraj and his successor Kumara Pala, in the twelfth century. Much of the history of this period still comes down in the form of bardic lore, folk legends, and inscriptions. Two nineteenth-century British administrator-scholars, James Tod and Alexander Kinloch Forbes, trekked through the forests and byways of western Gujarat collecting stories and manuscripts, and describing and even rediscovering monuments and ancient ruins. Forbes, a reserved man who did not mix much with other Englishmen, produced a book called Ras Mala (translated as “garland of stories”) which he published at his own expense, and he also founded the Gujarat Vernacular Society in Ahmedabad. It was Tod who in 1822 discovered Asoka’s rock inscriptions at Junagadh (in the ancient Brahmi script, though he believed they were in Greek). He produced two tomes based on his travels, one of which is Travels in Western India. Despite the colour of their bias, the enthusiasm of these two Englishmen for Gujarati history and their achievements in recording it are remarkable. Their books are still in print and serve as valuable repositories of folkloric history.
Anhilvada, so Forbes tells us, basing his account on the poetic history Ratna Mala of Krishnaji, was founded in 746 by a forest foundling called Vanaraja (“forest king”), descendant of the kings of Vallabhipur, which city had converted from Buddhism to Jainism before being overrun—at the paid instigation of a vanity-wounded local Marwari businessman—by “barbarians.” The so-called barbarians are presumed to have been Arabs from Sindh. (Jainism and Buddhism were both founded before 500 BC in reaction to Brahminism, the faith and practices associated with the Indo-Aryan Vedas that developed into present-day Hinduism.) Anhilvada during its heyday under Siddhraj and Kumara Pala was the capital of a large empire, a great centre of trade, learning, and culture. Jainism was a strong force at the court and competed fiercely with Brahminism. While the Rajput kings generally ate meat and partook of alcohol, the Jains forbade them. (Today, Gujaratis are by and large vegetarian, and alcohol is prohibited in the state, with the result that it is a much-appreciated gift.) Priests of both religions were in attendance at the court, including the great monk and scholar Hemachandra, whose Dvyashraya was composed to serve as much as a primer on Sanskrit as a history of the kings. Such was the esteem of scholarship in the kingdom that when the book was completed it was taken around the city in a procession on the back of an elephant. Learned debates were common. A famous one reportedly took place between the representatives of two Jain sects, the Svetambara, whose monks wore white garments, and the Digambara, whose monks were clothed by the atmosphere, that is, went about in the nude. In the contest, the Svetambaras (the home team, as it were) were led by Hemachandra and Dev Suri, and their opponents (the visitors) by the awesome Kumud Chandar of Karnat, reputed winner of eighty-four previous contests. The party of the nude monks was, however, defeated and, as was the custom for losers, had to leave the kingdom, their tails between their legs.
The tolerance of Jaisingh Siddhraj (1094–1143) is one of his many enduring legends. Arab traders (in contrast to the constantly threatening Afghans and Turks in the north, who had made several destructive forays into Gujarat) lived in the coastal towns, and there are reports of a Muslim embassy in Anhilvada. Once, there was a riot in the ancient port of Cambay involving the local Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims, in which the local mosque was destroyed. The mullah wrote a petition to Jaisingh, a patron of poetry, composed in the form of a poem, as a result of which the king gave funds to rebuild the mosque. According to the Khoja tradition, in which I was raised, an Ismaili mystic called Satgur Nur arrived at the court of Jaisingh from Egypt and was welcomed. Satgur Nur is a pir of the Khojas, and a has a divine status among several syncretistic (nominally Hindu) sects who worship him at his dargah in the southern city of Navsari. According to the tradition, Nur outwitted the king’s magicians and priests with a display of his own powers, as a result of which the king became his follower. The Bohras, a Shia sect who escaped persecution and arrived from Yemen, also claim to have received hospitality from Jaisingh and converted him to their ways. And the Parsis, who escaped persecution in Persia, also lay claim to him.
Thus the liberality of Gujarat’s greatest king. He endowed temples and reservoirs throughout his kingdom, and against his enemies fought like a lion. “O sea, make a swastika of pearls! O moon, shine in full splendour,” wrote Hemachandra in praise once, “conquering the earth, Siddhraj arrives.” He was slight in stature and fair, and enjoyed going about incognito in the night to mingle with his subjects (and no doubt hear good things about himself) and visit popular entertainments. He was indifferent to religion. Legend reprimands his lustiness and intrigues with Brahmin women. And due to a curse from a low-caste woman called Jasma, he could not have a son to succeed him.
A curious story was told to Forbes about Kumara Pala, who succeeded Jaisingh, and Hemachandra. According to this legend, the king and his priest-scholar both became Muslims, through the wiles of a Muslim magician. A more mainstream tradition says that the monk Hemachandra and the monarch Kumara Pala once visited together the great temple of Somnath by the Arabian sea. While the two sat in the inner sanctum of the temple, through the power of the monk’s meditation Shiva himself appeared and instructed the prostrate king to learn the true path from the monk. Thus Kumara Pala was converted to Jainism and forbade the slaughter of animals in his kingdom.
Hemachandra is an attractive, enigmatic character: a scholar, a poet, and an ascetic, as well as a trickster, and surely political? Having held influence in the courts of Gujarat’s two great kings, at eighty-four years of age he prepared himself to die, and abstaining from food gave up his last breath.
But legend presents two quite delicious alternatives regarding his end.
The Jains had gained ascendancy in the kingdom, and there were already a hundred thousand of their monks in Anhilvada. There was much hatred between them and the Brahmins, who, having lost an argument (due to an illusion produced by Hemachandra), were preparing to leave the capital. However, just at this time the great Brahmin and pan-Indian ascetic Shankaracharya happened to be in the area and was asked to assist his coreligionists. In the morning, when Kumara Pala called the Brahmins and ordered them to leave the kingdom, Shankaracharya stepped forward. What’s the need to expel anyone from the kingdom? he asked. At nine o’clock the ocean will rise from the west and swallow up the entire country. Hemachandra denied this could happen, for according to Jain doctrine the world had no beginning or end. When nine o’clock arrived, Kumara Pala, Hemachandra, and Shankaracharya climbed to an upper storey of the palace and looked out the western window and beheld the sea approaching in waves. On and on the waves came, until Anhilvada began to drown. The three climbed still higher, until they reached the seventh floor. Water had submerged everything in the capital, even its tallest spires and trees. Kumara Pala turned in terror to Shankaracharya and asked, Is there no escape? Is this the end? Shankaracharya told him, A boat will come this way from the west, whoever jumps into it will survive. Soon enough, a boat appeared, and came closer, and the three prepared to jump. But just when the time was right to leap, the wily Shankaracharya stayed the king with his hand and let Hemachandra go first. The ocean and the boat turned out to be illusions, and Hemachandra fell to his death on the pavement below.
Another story describes how Shankaracharya stirred with his little finger a glass of milk destined for the old Hemachandra. The Brahmin’s fingernail, however, contained a poison. The monk died.
All communities have such folk histories. Delightful stories, they are also propaganda, repeated generation to generation, with variations. But as soon as you remove them from the realm of the imaginary, they become dangerous messengers of communal divisiveness.
The Solankis were followed by the Vaghela dynasty, whose rule came to an end in 1298, when the armies of Alauddin Khilji of Delhi conquered Anhilvada. The last of the Rajput kings of Anhilvada was Karan, known to posterity by the unfortunate title of Karan Ghelo, or Crazy Karan, who is said to have wrought his own tragedy.
The bards tell of how Karan had stolen the wife of one of his ministers, Madhav, and killed Madhav’s brother, Keshav. Madhav, whose wife happened to be a Padmini Brahmin—that is, of the highest order—vowed that he would not touch food in Gujarat until he had avenged himself and brought back the “Turks” to destroy Karan’s kingdom. Therefore he went to Alauddin in Delhi and enticed him with the prospect of Gujarat’s conquest. There is no doubt, according to the historian S. C. Misra, disputing the counterclaims of modern revisionist historians who see in this bardic tale an aspersion on the Hindu character, that Madhav did collaborate with Alauddin. Madhav had been a powerful minister, second only to the king. Evidently, he must have been provoked. Karan abandoned his capital to the enemy, offering no resistance.
When Alauddin’s generals Nusrat Khan and Ulugh Khan took Anhilvada, “the treasures, elephants, and women-folk of Raja Karna [Karan] fell into the hands of the army of Islam,” according to the contemporary Delhi historian Zia Barni. Karan’s queen, Kanvala Devi, was taken to Delhi and joined Alauddin’s harem. She became his favourite queen. A few years later, instigated by Kanvala Devi, the sultan asked Karan, who was back in Anhilvada, to send Kanvala’s daughter Deval Devi to be a wife of the heir apparent, Khizr Khan. Karan seems to have agreed joyfully but perhaps had treachery in mind, for when Alauddin sent his army under the former slave “thousand-dinar” Malik Kafur (later to earn infamy for his dark treachery at the Delhi court) to Gujarat, Karan had fled. The Delhi army found the young Deval Devi on the road among a party fleeing Anhilvada. Disguised as a young man, she was almost killed by the soldiers before her identity was discovered. She was taken to Delhi posthaste and married to Khizr Khan.
The passion of Khizr Khan for Deval Devi moved Amir Khusrau of Delhi, a friend of Khizr, to depict it in an epic poem written in 1316 in Persian, which he called Ashiqa, “The Lovers.”
The story is controversial.
For many, even to this day, the thirteenth-century story of Rajput defeat and humiliation festers in the mind, writ large as a chapter in the continuing saga of Hindu-Muslim enmity, and as one more invasion that Mother India had to endure in the travail that has been her history. A Rajput-Turk war becomes one pitting Hinduism against Islam. In this tragic nationalist scenario, the Gujarati kingdom at Anhilvada becomes a Camelot where wise kings ruled harmoniously over their people, and culture and learning prevailed. There was no crime to speak of: the lower castes lived as good neighbours next to the upper castes and not out of sight, and presumably the rajas fought each other in the best traditions of chivalry. A historian writes, “Amir Khusrau seems to have been suffering from a delusion that the Hindus had no sense of honour and their women no sense of chastity.” By such history is extreme nationalism backed. Even the existence of Kanvala Devi and Deval Devi has been doubted. S. C. Misra, on the other hand, after considering claims and counterclaims, has little doubt about the basic authenticity of the story of Deval Devi and Khizr Khan. Khusrau was not only a poet but also an able historian.
Getting on with the story, the young Gujarati princess’s ultimate fate in Delhi, in a court teeming with ugly intrigues, was a tragic one.
Having had Alauddin’s queen put in prison, Malik Kafur, the evil schemer of the palace, had Khizr Khan imprisoned and blinded, his only solace his beloved Deval. The ailing Alauddin himself was possibly poisoned by Malik. He was succeeded by Qutbudin Mubarak, another of his sons, who had Khizr Khan executed. In this bloody dungeon scene the devoted Deval, clinging to her husband, had both her hands cut off by the murderers and was wounded in the face. An alternative ending has Deval Devi ending up in the harem of Qutbudin, who was subsequently murdered by his favourite companion, a Hindu convert, who for a short time ruled as Nasirudin and took Deval Devi into his harem.
One shudders.
Amir Khusrau claims to have been told the story by his friend Prince Khizr Khan: “My head was exalted by the honour of my selection, and I retired with the narrative in my hand.” He was not beyond embroidery, of course.
Timur’s (Tamerlane’s) sacking of Delhi at the end of the fourteenth century considerably weakened the Delhi sultanate, whereupon in 1407 Gujarat’s governor, Zafar Khan Muzaffar, asserted his independence and began a local dynasty of Muslim kings. Zafar Khan was himself a Hindu of the Tank caste who had converted to Islam—such are the wonderful ironies that India throws up. The portion of Gujarat actually ruled from Delhi and later independently from Anhilvada, increasingly called Patan in the accounts, was a strip stretching from Patan south via Baroda, including the wealthy ancient ports of Cambay and Broach. To the east, west, and the north lay independent or semi-independent Rajput kingdoms and military garrisons of the sultanate. There were frequent rebellions and acts of defiance, the Rajputs and the Muslim generals often at war against each other, or in alliance with each other against the king in Patan. Also to the east was Malwa, another province of Delhi, whose governor often became involved in plotting against his rival in Patan. Much of the sultan’s energy was therefore taken up marching across the land subduing rebellions or extending his conquest. Understandably, some of the dispossessed Rajputs had taken to banditry or guerilla warfare. Palace intrigues continued, here as in Delhi. It would appear from the histories that more rulers died by poison than any other means. Zafar Khan received his cup of poison from his grandson Ahmed Shah, for allegedly having put to death (by poison) Ahmed’s father, Tatar Khan. Ahmed Shah (1411–1442), on his way back from campaigns to the south, established Ahmedabad as the new capital. Anhilvada receded into insignificance and is now no more than the small regional town of Patan, known more for the exclusive weave of cloth made there than for its early history.
The Mughals had arrived in India with Babur and were extending their reach south from Delhi. In 1573, Akbar, the third Mughal, wrested Gujarat from its sultan and annexed it to the Mughal empire, of which it remained a province for two hundred years. It was during this period of Mughal ascendancy that the future masters of India took their first steps on the subcontinent, in 1608, when an English ship arrived at the wealthy Gujarati port of Surat under Captain Hawkins, envoy of King James I. Jehangir was the emperor. Shortly thereafter, by a treaty of 1613, signed in Agra, the English were given permission to trade and open factories in Surat, Gogha, Cambay, and Ahmedabad. Surat became the most important port of Gujarat.
Akbar, whose memory is beloved to Indians of all backgrounds, began a period of Mughal rule that was tolerant, and in his own time indeed benevolent, towards religious differences. He was a great conqueror, a stern and just ruler, and a pious worshipper of the Sufis, whose wives were from the Christian, Muslim, and Hindu faiths. He attempted to found a universal Indian religion, and in his new capital of Fatehpur Sikri, outside Agra, he had three prayer rooms for his wives of three faiths. His great-grandson, the stern, bigoted Aurangzeb, however, repressed both Hindus and nonorthodox Muslims. Aurangzeb ruled for almost fifty years, during which time he carried out lengthy campaigns across India. After his death in 1707, the Mughal empire lay exhausted and in a state of centrifugal decline. The Marathas, a group of Marathi-speaking warrior clans from Maharashtra, after a few decades of battling against and sharing power and alliances with Mughal remnants, finally, by about 1760, established themselves in parts of eastern and central Gujarat, including Ahmedabad. The rest of what we know as Gujarat broke up into local kingdoms.
With Mughal decline and Maratha ascendancy, the British began to exert a greater influence and gradually took control, first of Surat, and later, defeating the Marathas, of most of Gujarat. Five districts were ruled directly by the British, the remaining areas made up of princely states ruled under supervision of British Residents. This was the political situation that prevailed at Independence in 1947.