Author: Sunil Khilnani
Category: Nonfiction
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Does Basava sound worried, though? It’s as if he has known the answer all along: that in exceptional cases like this one, words outlast the great constructions of kings.
The rich
Will make temples for Shiva.
What shall I,
A poor man, do?
My legs are pillars,
The body the shrine
The head a cupola
Of gold
Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
Things standing shall fall,
But the moving ever shall stay.
11
AMIR KHUSRAU
The Parrot of India
1253–1325
Night’s just falling over a green and tranquil stretch of South Delhi—one of those enclaves where serried ranks of Audis and BMWs stand ready behind driveway gates. You’d never guess, pausing outside the five-star Oberoi Hotel, that you’re a short walk from the still-beating heart of a medieval city.
Across a busy overpass, through a maze of thrumming byways, you’ll find hawkers selling prayer caps and shawls, rose petals and kebabs. As the lane narrows, the crowd grows conspicuously poorer, with many people begging for alms. At a canopied gully that feels like a tunnel, the pace of footsteps starts to quicken, and suddenly a green archway appears. It opens into a courtyard of carved pillars and filigreed screens. Hidden at the center of this old labyrinth, this irruption of history, is a tomb: the dargah of the thirteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau.
Khusrau called himself Tuti-yi-Hind, the “Parrot of India.” The title hints at his ability to flit between roles and voices during his long life. By turns warrior, court poet, and passionate Sufi devotee, he was above all a quick-witted literary survivor. His sensitivity to the tastes of all manner of patrons and audiences, added to his faith in Sufism, have helped his words endure for seven hundred years.
He was a poet of profound ambiguity. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, who ruled a vast dominion from Delhi three centuries after Khusrau’s death, was said to joke about a court singer who, asked to explain one of Khusrau’s lyrics, perished from the exertion. In those lyrics, layered with meanings, perspectives suddenly shift, much as they do in the imperial metropolis that was Khusrau’s home:
There is a prosperous and populous city
Where fragments of moon gleam at every turn.
Each fragment holds a shard of my shattered heart.
A man of many names, he was known also as Amir Khusrau Dihlavi, “one who belongs to Delhi.” He was the first to bring the city into the literary imagination—and to give it one. Khusrau’s Delhi was compared by one of his contemporaries, the historian Ziya al-Din Barani, to Baghdad and Cairo, Constantinople and Jerusalem. As it would become again after the Partition of 1947, it was in large part a refugee city: a beneficiary in its day of an influx of émigrés from West and central Asia, fleeing the Mongol conquests. Scholars, religious thinkers, artisans, and poets settled there in such numbers that it came to be known as the Qubbat al-Islam, the “Dome of Islam.” And Delhi had riches, too—plundered bounty that fed the Persianate tastes of the successive Afghan and Turkic sultans who sat atop a North Indian culture strongly, though by no means unequivocally, Hindu.
In this culturally layered and mobile society, Khusrau was a marvel of linguistic and social dexterity. So artfully did his verses, composed in Persian and in the local language of Hindavi (the precursor to modern-day Urdu), seem to integrate the traditions of Sufi Islam and Hindu India that, in the twentieth century, the founding fathers of the modern Indian state made him a mascot of cultural harmony. Yet his style wasn’t about reconciling differences between Hindu and Muslim cultures; rather, it spoke across beliefs and traditions.
* * *
There’s a cinematic quality to the story of Amir Khusrau’s life: it is outsize, overdramatized even, but it nevertheless captures something about the often violent flux of his time. From his writing, we know his father was driven from his home in the Turkic regions of central Asia by Mongol invasions and brought to India, possibly as a slave; he later became a devout soldier in the ranks of a Delhi sultan. Khusrau’s mother, born a Hindu, had converted to Islam. A decade or so after the marriage, her husband died in battle, and Khusrau, their precocious second son, now eight, was sent to Delhi to live with his prosperous grandfather.
There, the story goes, he met a man from the same region as his father who would eventually change his life: Nizam al-Din Auliya, one of the great saints of India’s Sufi tradition. Nile Green, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains, “According to tradition, Amir Khusrau meets Nizam al-Din Auliya when he’s a child, and even as a kind of child protégé, if you like, a kind of medieval Persianate Mozart. He’s said to have improvised for Nizam al-Din the verse:
Tu an shahi ke bar aiwan-e-qasrat
Kabutar gar nashinad baz gardad
You are the great king that,
if a pigeon should sit on the roof of his palace,
it will become a hawk.
This fabled meeting would help secure Khusrau’s place in Indian history—but not before he had lived through religious war, imprisonment, innumerable wine-induced hangovers, and unparalleled celebrity as a poet in the royal courts.
Although Khusrau started composing verse when very young, like most poets, then and now, he had to make a living. So he followed his father’s example and became a fighter for Muslim rule. He was just five years old when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the center of the Abbasid Caliphate, which at one point ruled from North India to Algiers. As a young man, Khusrau took part in several campaigns against the Mongols and for the expansion of Islam, before he was captured—a traumatic experience that he later tried to put into words:
The Muslim martyrs dyed the desert with their blood, while the Muslim captives had their necks tied together like so many flowers into garlands. I was also taken prisoner, and from fear that they would shed my blood, not a drop of blood remained in my veins … My tongue was parched and dry from excessive thirst and my stomach seemed to have collapsed for want of food. They left me nude like a leafless tree in winter or a flower that has been much lacerated by thorns.
Eventually Khusrau escaped, returning to Delhi and transforming himself from a soldier into a poet. He used family connections to enter the shahi majlis, or “royal gatherings,” where, in the company of musicians and young boys, poets extemporized, competing with one another in a sort of medieval poetry slam. Nile Green describes the milieu:
The king and his closest companions are gathering round, no doubt drinking a great deal of wine—wine is one of the key subjects of the poetry that Amir Khusrau and other Persian poets of the period write about. And while they’re sitting there getting drunk and listening to music, Amir Khusrau or other nadim, other drinking companions, would simply improvise on a theme that the sultan or another patron would throw out. “Improvise me a poem on the mole on the cheek of this beautiful boy sitting here!” Immediately, they’d have to improvise in that way. If it was a good line, a good bait, a good couplet, then perhaps the king would throw the poet a gold coin or two. And indeed Amir Khusrau gets his first pen name, Sultani, precisely after the name of one of these gold coins.
The Persian poetry of the court reveled in multiple registers, winking between worldly passion and spiritual ecstasy. Khusrau fast became an adept, weaving subtle innuendos into his popular songs. There is plenty of homoeroticism in his verse, which endears him to modern social progressives, and certainly pleased those sultans with a taste for young boys, though the more puritanical might choose to hear it as innocent praise of the city:
O Delhi and its artless idols,
Who wear turbans and crooked beards,
They drink the blood of lovers openly,
Although they drink wine secretly.
They do not obey commands because
They are made wilful by their extreme beauty.
Muslims have become sun-worshippers
Due to these saucy and innocent Hindus.
These pure Hindu boys
Have caused me to go to ruin and to drink.
Ensnared in their curly tresses
Khusrau is like a dog with a collar.
Khusrau’s playfulness flowed from his use of a rhetorical device he claimed to have invented: iham, meaning “of the imagination.” For Khusrau, the poet must unveil the multiple meanings of words, so as to stimulate the audience’s imagination. Equally, though, the audience must bring to the poem enough subtlety of intelligence to uncover the poet’s intended meaning.
* * *
Khusrau was entertaining royals at a particularly turbulent period in the history of Delhi; in his adulthood, five sultans would rise and fall. As he sycophantically celebrated the virtues of patron after patron, he was invited to join ever-larger courts. The last one he served was centered at Tughlaqabad, a once-grand fortified city, now a hauntingly desolate place surrounded by modern-day Delhi’s relentless sprawl. These were courts rife with feuds, betrayals, and murder—not the best environment for writerly contemplation. Still, somehow he continued to be inventive in his work, writing poems and verse in every genre he knew.
Soon he became the most admired court poet of his time. Yet his words suggest a creeping exhaustion, the medieval equivalent of burnout. He wrote of being enslaved at his patron’s feet, of drinking his ruler’s dregs. The Parrot of India was rich, much admired—and seemingly depressed.
Composing panegyric kills the heart,
Even if the poetry is fresh and elegant.
* * *
Though Amir Khusrau is buried at the Delhi dargah, the larger shrine complex is dedicated not to him but to the man entombed beside him: Nizam al-Din Auliya, the Sufi master whom Khusrau first met in his grandfather’s house. Sufism flourished in India during the era in which Khusrau lived. It offered mystical unity with God, with different Sufi masters teaching their own paths, or tariqa, to that end. The mystic states and secrets of Sufism could not be learned from books, however—only through the close bond between spiritual teacher and devotee.
When Khusrau was aged around fifty, he turned to Nizam al-Din for spiritual strength. The mystic had a compound, a sort of parallel court, in Ghiyaspur, a village on the edges of Delhi. Among his many devotees were other artists and intellectuals who sought refuge from palace politics. There, under Nizam al-Din’s protection, Khusrau finally found a stable home.
Nile Green believes the tenuousness of life at court may have broken Khusrau. “He was working in that extremely tense environment, with a couple of quite psychotic sultans, very bloodthirsty figures,” Green says. “I can’t help but think that it was the stress of that environment that drove Amir Khusrau—not as a poet, but as an ordinary human being trying to do his job in court—to the solace and the comfort and the sympathy of the Sufi environment.”
Increasingly, Khusrau seemed to consider himself a Turk-e Hindi, an “Indian Turk.” When accused by a contemporary of stylistic blemishes in his verse, Khusrau struck back with pride and irritation:
I am an Indian Turk, I reply in Hindavi;
I have no Egyptian candy with which to speak to an Arab.
It was a signal that the ethnic origins he shared with his master were becoming more important to him. His work expressed what would come to be seen as the ideal of Sufi devotion: a merging of identity between master and follower. In some of his best-known lyrics, there’s also a sense of rich friendship with Nizam al-Din, an equal relationship of the sort that would have been unimaginable with the sultans:
I have become you, you have become me.
I have become life, you have become body.
From now on, let no one say that
I am other and you are another.
* * *
Even more than Khusrau’s Sufi devotional poems or Persian verses, his popular songs—qawwalis and lyric ghazals he composed in Hindavi—have sustained his fame over the centuries. Through many generations, Khusrau’s songs were transmitted orally; by the time they were written down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a huge body of songs, poems, and verses had been attributed to him. In the decades after India’s independence, many of them, rearranged, became staples of Indian cinema. Although a fair number might not actually have been composed by Khusrau, they were nevertheless absorbed into his legend.
Javed Akhtar, a poet and master songwriter of contemporary Indian cinema, emphasizes how embedded Khusrau—“an intellectual giant with a multi-faceted personality”—has become in the Indian imagination. “This concept of Sufi poetry, this concept of an amalgamation of dialects and a language called Urdu—it has all started from Khusrau,” he says. “And we’ve internalized what he started so much that we are not even conscious that we are doing it.”
Partly as a result of the fluent combination in his lyrics of Persian tropes and imagery, and metaphors drawn from the Indian landscape, Khusrau became an embodiment of the nation’s unofficial motto, “Unity in diversity.” When Mohandas Gandhi (38) listened to Hindu and Muslim musicians playing and singing Khusrau together, he would ask, “When shall we see the same fraternal union in other affairs of our life?”
Today in India, Khusrau’s Persian is read by only a handful of scholars. In Iran and Afghanistan, where he might find many more readers, the Parrot of India is seen as too Indian a writer to be part of the literary canon. His is the fate of those whose linguistic universe, or cosmopolis, has been chopped up by the boundaries of national identity. Across North India, however, millions of people still turn for comfort to the melancholic beauty of Khusrau’s Hindavi songs, and his tomb, in the city he loved, is very much a living shrine.
Like Khusrau’s poetry, Delhi, too, remains ambiguous in its cultural mixing—not a melting pot, but home to hundreds of different communities, living adjacent to one another, often with benign indifference. As with Khusrau himself, a certain vision, often brittle, of a cosmopolitan, tolerant nation has been projected onto the city. But Delhi is also a hard place, marked by gross inequalities, spasms of communal violence, and the peremptoriness of political power—a city that requires you to speak in different voices to different people, and that might, as Khusrau said, break your heart.
Every Thursday, in the dargah’s enclosure, musicians in shimmering turquoise kurtas, their fingers bejeweled with bling, perform qawwalis attributed to Khusrau, in rapturous, resonant voices for worshippers and visitors of all backgrounds. Beyond the dargah, though, and in the medieval warren in which it sits, North India’s present-day politics can be a good deal less accommodating of religious diversity. As elections approach, tensions among religious communities get exploited by major political parties. Newspapers tell of riots over the desecration of a mosque, of a church destroyed, of forced conversions in neighboring states.
The world of cultural amalgamation and mixing that some think Khusrau inspired can seem illusory, even unnecessary, to many people in power today. It is a troubling thought—one that makes me reach back for Khusrau’s artful straddling of awkward differences. His faith in the civility of this city rings in my head, and has me hoping that he’s right:
If a Khurasani, Greek, or Arab comes here
he will not face any problems,
for the people will treat him kindly, as their own,
making him feel happy and at ease.
12
KABIR
“Hey, You!”
c. 1440–c. 1518
The Jaipur Literature Festival, held every winter in the capital of Rajasthan, is the world’s largest free literary festival, and perhaps the most freewheeling. In 2015 a quarter of a million people came to hear some three hundred writers speak. At a time when free expression in India is under pressure from many directions—heavy-handed governments, thin-skinned communities of caste and religion, offendables of all sorts—the podiums and shamiana tents of the Jaipur festival have become pop-up shops for thinkers with contrarian positions.
/> To judge by how often he’s invoked, the festival’s guiding spirit is the fifteenth-century poet Kabir, a man who is also venerated across northern India as a saint, almost a god. It’s a rare being who manages to be claimed by conservative religious sects and the liberal literati alike. Yet the broad-spectrum adulation might have made him uneasy: Kabir was an aggressive critic of institutions and orthodoxies in pretty much any form, a debunker of humbug in an unadorned poetic style. There is no other voice from the Indian past quite like his:
Strutting about,
A smirk on your face,
Have you forgotten
The ten months spent
In a foetal crouch?
Cremation turns you to ashes,
Burial into a feast
For an army of worms.
Your athlete’s body’s only clay,
A leaky pot,
A jug with nine holes.
As bees store up honey,
You gathered wealth.
But after you’re dead,
This is what’s said,
“Take away the corpse.
It stinks.”
Death undermining mortal follies and pretension: one of Kabir’s favorite themes. These are his verses in translation by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Like many of Kabir’s poems, they are directed straight at you. “Kabir challenges us,” says Linda Hess, a professor at Stanford University and a Kabir scholar. “He says, ‘Hey, you! Listen!’ Hey, you saint or you truth-seeker or you idiot or you brother or you mother or you priest, you mullah. Sometimes he challenges our foolishness, our blindness, our ignorance, our hypocrisy, our pretentiousness—all those kinds of things. And when we first encounter it we think he’s talking about those other idiots, and it’s not about us. But of course he is talking about us.”
* * *
Benares, or Varanasi, is India’s holiest city. Built on the western banks of the Ganga as the sacred river curves northward through the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh, it’s one of those places that seem to hold the whole world. In its streets and lanes you’ll find relentless commerce and the pursuit of pleasure and perfection, from the finest betel leaf to the most refined classical music. Deep learning and deep poverty intermingle. Death is ever present in cremation rituals and, over loudspeakers or in concentrated silence, the living are everywhere at prayer. Hindus call Benares Kashi, the “City of Light.” It is said to be the god Shiva’s favorite spot, and the great Kashi Vishwanath Temple here is consecrated to him.