Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (18 page)

Take for instance the dogged resistance
to the Turks by the Rajput-ruled kingdom of Mewar in southern Rajasthan. The rulers
of Mewar did not see themselves merely as kings but explicitly as the custodians of
Hindu civilization embodied in the temple of Eklingji, a manifestation of Shiva. The
deity was considered the real king of Mewar and this is why its rulers did not use
the title of Maharaja (which means Great King) but that of Rana (i.e. Custodian or
Prime Minister). It is important to recognize this if one is to understand why Mewar
kept up continuous resistance to the Sultans despite suffering extreme hardship over
centuries. On three separate occasions, its capital Chittaur was defended to the
last man and, even after it fell, the struggle was sustained in the hills. One
cannot explain away this behaviour merely in rational political terms.

In order to comprehend this state of
mind, one must visit the shrine of Eklingji, less than an hour’s drive
from Udaipur. It is a thousand-year-old temple complex wedged into a hillside. If
one walks around in the surrounding Aravalli hills, it becomes obvious that they are
heavily fortified. The fortifications of Chittaur, Kumbhalgarh and even Udaipur are
within a few hours’ drive. Mewar must have been the most militarized place
in the medieval world. It tells of a population that considered itself under siege
and was prepared to hold out to the end.

By the time Akbar appeared on the scene,
however, centuries of conflict had left both sides exhausted. Thinkers like Guru
Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, had already put
forward arguments for civilizational accommodation. Emperor Akbar probably had a
naturally liberal disposition, but his thoughts also evolved with time. The tipping
point may have been the siege of Chittaur, the capital of Mewar, in 1568. The fort
fell after many months. The defenders fought literally to the last man and the
womenfolk committed ritual suicide (
jauhar
). Akbar massacred an additional
twenty thousand non-combatants. Like Ashoka, eighteen centuries earlier, he may have
been shocked by his own savagery.

We now see Akbar laying greater emphasis
on reconciliation between the two cultures. In 1555, the Mughal nobility or Omrah,
consisted of fifty-one foreign-born Muslims (Uzbeks, Persians, Turks, Afghans). By
1580, the number had jumped to 222 but included forty-three Rajputs and a similar
number of Indian Muslims.
²⁶
Not everyone was convinced. On one hand, the orthodox Muslims were very unhappy
with the emperor’s liberal attitude. On the other hand, the rulers of
Mewar would continue to view him with suspicion and keep up their resistance
(perhaps not surprising given their recent experience). The ballads of how Rana
Pratap and his army of Bhil tribesmen fought the Mughals can still be heard in the
Aravallis of Mewar. His coat of armour and that of his horse Chetak are prominently
displayed in the Udaipur City Palace Museum. It would be more than a generation
before Mewar would accept a non-antagonistic relationship with the Mughals.

Medieval Delhi

Sadly for Delhi, Akbar shifted the
capital south to Agra and then to a newly built city called Fatehpur Sikri. The
latter took fifteen years to build but it was abandoned after only fourteen years
because, like Tughlaqabad, its water supply
was deemed
unreliable. The capital moved back to Agra. Meanwhile, Delhi remained an important
city but would have to play second fiddle to Agra till Akbar’s grandson
built Shahjehanabad (Old Delhi) a century later. Akbar did, however, make one
important addition to Delhi’s skyline—the tomb of his father.
Humayun’s tomb is a grand affair and
an architectural
precursor to the Taj Mahal. Since it is not usually mobbed by tourists like the Taj,
it is a much more satisfying place to linger and retains the air of an
emperor’s tomb.

I do not want to leave the reader with
the impression that medieval India was only about the building, pillaging,
abandoning and rebuilding of cities. One must remember that most of the population
lived in rural areas. Babur tells us that Indian villagers rarely invested in either
irrigation or in building permanent homes. Instead, they were ever prepared to
abandon their villages and take refuge in the forests.
²⁷
This is how the common people had coped with the previous three centuries of
invasion and war. Much of the country remained forested and, in some cases, may have
reverted to wilderness after habitations were abandoned. There were forests just
outside Delhi, where its rulers indulged in hunting within a few hours’
ride from the city walls. Feroze Shah even built a number of hunting lodges along
the Aravalli ridges, including one in what is now the urban village of Mahipalpur,
very close to the international airport. Deer, leopards and possibly lions were
found where bright neon lights now announce budget hotels. British records speak of
the ‘Hurriana lion’ as late as the 1820s.
²⁸

Babur’s diary expresses his
disdain for the people of India in barely a couple of paragraphs but he was more
impressed by the flora and fauna of the country and spent several pages describing
them. Babur tells us about peacocks, elephants and
river
dolphins. He was particularly intrigued by the rhinoceros that he encountered in
forests near Peshawar. It is interesting that rhinos were found so far to the west
in the sixteenth century. They are now found only in the swampy grasslands of Assam,
North Bengal and Nepal’s Terai regions. Oddly, Babur does not mention the
big cats. It is possible that he had encountered lions and cheetahs in Afghanistan
and northeastern Iran and did not think of them as uniquely Indian.

The Mughals were enthusiastic hunters
whose expeditions are recorded in numerous writings and in paintings. They hunted a
wide array of animals including nilgai, blackbuck, birds and, of course, lions. Note
that there are relatively fewer accounts and paintings related to hunting tigers.
This may merely reflect the fact that the Mughals did most of their hunting in the
north-west of the country, which was lion, rather than tiger, country. We know that
there were important hunting grounds near Agra, Delhi, and Bhatinda in Punjab. Most
of these areas are now densely populated and intensively farmed but Bernier tells us
that there were large expanses of uncultivated land near Delhi and Agra as well as
on the road to Lahore. It is estimated that barely 27.5 per cent of Agra suba, at
the heart of the empire, was cultivated in 1600.
²⁹
The human population of India at that time was around 116 million. This means
that there were large areas that were available to wildlife and several tracts were
reserved exclusively for the royal hunt. The association of the lion with the power
of the State remained. The hunting of lions was reserved for the king and the royal
family and was closed to others, except by special permission.

There are many stories about Emperor
Akbar’s lion hunts.
On one occasion in 1568, Akbar
went hunting in the Mewat region near Alwar, south of Gurgaon. A lion emerged and
was quickly slain by a hail of arrows shot by his companions. Akbar was annoyed and
ordered that should another lion emerge, he would tackle it himself. At that very
moment, another lion did emerge and the emperor shot it in the eye with an arrow.
The enraged animal charged but Akbar could not get a good shot even though he had
dismounted from his horse. In the excitement of the moment, one of the courtiers
shot an arrow that infuriated the lion who mauled the man. The animal had to be
finished off by other courtiers.
³⁰

As one can see, Akbar was quite ready to
take personal risks and, in his younger days, would hunt on horseback or even on
foot. His main indulgence was the use of a large number of trained cheetahs to help
him in the chase. Later in life he would keep a stable of a thousand of these
beasts. Over time, however, the emperors grew used to hunting from the relative
safety of an elephant’s back and to the use of increasingly accurate guns.
In a single hunting expedition to Rupbas near Agra in February–March 1610,
Akbar’s successor, Jehangir, and his companions killed seven lions,
seventy Nilgai, fifty-one blackbuck, eighty-two other animals, 129 birds and 1023
fish—all this within a fifty-six day period. It was still a risky activity
as illustrated by a story from the same year.

On a hunt in 1610 in Bari near Agra, one
of Emperor Jehangir’s courtiers, Anup Rai, came across a half-devoured cow
and traced a lion in the thicket. The animal was surrounded and the emperor was
informed. Jehangir rushed to the spot and set up his musket on a stand. He fired
twice and missed. The lion charged and the emperor’s retinue bolted
and, according to him, even trampled on him in the panic! Anup
Rai saved Jehangir’s life by battling the lion to the ground with his bare
hands till Prince Khurram killed the animal with a sword. That a Hindu Rajput was
not just accompanying the royal family on a hunt but was willing to risk his life
for a Muslim king—Taimur’s direct descendant, no
less—shows how the relations between Hindus and Muslims had evolved over
the preceding half-century. Jehangir gave Anup Rai the title Ani Rai Singhdalan,
meaning Commander of Troops and Lion Crusher.
³¹

A few years after the above events, the
first English ambassador arrived at the Mughal court. Sir Thomas Roe was a
distinguished diplomat and was in India from 1615 to 1619. He became a close friend
of Emperor Jehangir and was even his drinking partner on several occasions. However,
this does not mean that he was given blanket permission to freely kill lions. In
1617, a lion and a wolf made nightly raids on Roe’s camp near Mandu and
killed a number of his sheep and goats. However, it was forbidden for him to hurt
the animals and had to send for the monarch’s special leave. It was
eventually granted but the lion escaped. The wolf was not so lucky.
³²

Roe tells us that the lion was a very
important part of royal imagery and one of the royal standards had a lion and the
rising sun. This symbolism was shared with both the Shahs of Iran as well as the
indigenous Hindu tradition. The Mughals were conscious that they were inheritors of
an ancient imperial dream and Emperor Jehangir inserted his own inscription in
Persian on the Mauryan pillar in Allahabad. Thus, the column has inscriptions by
three of India’s most powerful emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and
Jehangir—a continuity maintained
over eighteen
centuries! What is going on? Whether one takes Jehangir’s inscription on
the Mauryan pillar or the effort to link Akbar to Kalhana’s history of
Kashmir, the Mughals were trying to build the foundations of their empire in India
within the framework of India’s civilization. Therefore, they were
systematically inserting themselves into civilizational memory. Notwithstanding
Feroze Shah Tughlaq’s interest in Mauryan pillars, this was a radical
shift away from how earlier Delhi Sultans saw themselves.

While northern India was suffering from
waves of invasion from Central Asia, the world of Indian Ocean trade continued to
flourish. Both Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta were witness to this. However, under the
surface, the role of Indians in the network began to change from the end of the
twelfth century. Indian merchants had once been explorers and risk-takers who
criss-crossed the oceans in their stitched ships. They could be found in large
numbers in ports from the Persian Gulf to China. Buddhist and Brahmin scholars
sailed in large numbers to South-East Asia where they were in great demand.
Suddenly, a little over a century after the Chola naval raids on Srivijaya, they
almost all disappeared. What happened?

The proximate cause for this change was
the enforcement of caste rules prohibiting the crossing of the seas. However, the
caste rules were merely a reflection of a wider malaise. As I have argued in an
earlier book,
The Indian Renaissance
, there appears to have been a shift in
India’s cultural and civilizational attitude towards innovation and
risk-taking.
³³
This is not the
place to discuss the root causes of this
transformation, but there are many independent signs of the closing of the mind.
Sanskrit, once an evolving and dynamic language, stopped absorbing new words and
usages and eventually fossilized. Sanskrit literature became obsessed with purity of
form and became formulaic. Similarly, scientific progress halted as the emphasis
shifted from experimentation to learned discourse.

It is interesting that foreigners who
visited India at that time noticed the change and wrote about it. Al-Biruni, writing
at the same time that Mahmud Ghazni was making his infamous raids, commented that
contemporary Indian scholars were so full of themselves that they were unwilling to
learn anything from the rest of the world. He then contrasts this attitude with that
of their ancestors.