The witches’ song
WATCHING the dimple-cheeked Saif Ali Khan rock to his guitar in a TV commercial or when he belts out a maudlin number to woo Kareena Kapoor, his sweetheart and reigning beauty of Indian cinema, I can’t help smiling at the contrariness of the young actor’s Wahabi Muslim origins.
Just a few days ago, in a similar vein, when the ageing thumri singer Girija Devi etched out a rarely heard stanza from a mid-19th century love song at a concert in Delhi she threw her listeners into a reverie of the last Shia ruler of Awadh who composed it, like the several other ballets he devoted to Lord Krishna.
All this as the world silently watches the dismantling of the secular Nasserite order in the neighbouring Arab world, one by one, replacing it by indoctrinated Muslim mobs. Iraq, then Libya and now Syria are venues of a desperate thrust to supplant palpable motifs of Arab modernity with studied mediaevalism.
In the Afghanistan-Pakistan region too there are dark rumours of a search on for good Taliban. Tunisia and Egypt are other examples of secularism being shown the door by western-backed Salafi powerbrokers. Fanaticism once uncorked is not easy to put back into the bottle.
There was a terrifying resemblance in the brutality between the televised murders of Najibullah of Afghanistan and Qadhafi of Libya. And when the same killers turned on an unlucky American ambassador in Benghazi, we witnessed an appalling all-round reluctance to see a sobering lesson in it.
If we look carefully the sudden rush of love for democracy in the Middle East is a rehashed relic of Kipling’s prescriptions about the White Man’s Burden — exigency of loot wrapped in moral platitudes. Why would a poetry-humming Mughal ruler of Hindustan need lessons in governance from a society steeped in Victorian prudery?
Moreover, how did he pose any threat to the East India Company before he was provoked into taking a stand? When they dismissed a thumri-singing king of Awadh for alleged incompetence, presumably because they didn’t like his Kathak dance, how did another Shia patron of music and the arts — the Nawab of Rampur — end up as a British ally against another music buff?
To borrow from Marx, the tragic events of mid-19th century India got repeated 100 years later as farce in Iran where the British toppled yet another popular Muslim ruler, the community’s only elected liberal leader until then. Iran’s Mosaddegh may not have been as gifted in the liberal arts as Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh, but he was as good a Shia intellectual with a syncretic Persian background.
Embedded historians (why should only journalists be given the epithet?) have sought to explain the current standoff between the West and Muslims as located in the rise of Wahabism in 19th-century India. I will need Saif Ali Khan’s help to show this was an exaggerated claim.
If anything, an admixture of Salafism and the orthodox doctrine of Ahl-i-Hadith ran through the arteries of Saif’s forbears, the erstwhile rulers of Bhopal, who were among the closest allies the British had against the rebels of 1857. So much for Wahabism’s fabled contradiction with colonial rule.
Look anywhere, in any post-Mughal princely state of India, be they Shia or Sunni, Hindu or Sikh, you will in all probability find some patronage of music and the arts as their defining feature. And though quite inexplicably there is a raag called Bhopali, there was just no music in Bhopal.
Its dominant motif was Quranic. Subsequent history of Western alliances with orthodox Islam (for example, with the puritan House of Saud) was in this sense not different from the policy pursued by the rulers of Bhopal towards their colonial allies.
I recently came across a documented account of the Bhopal connection in Pervez Bari’s analysis of the Muslim role in the great Indian revolt. Sardar Dost Mohammad Khan, an Afghan chieftain of Aurangzeb’s army, had established the Bhopal state after the Mughal emperor’s death in 1707.
Sikandar Jahan Begum, a successor to the Dost Mohammad Khan dynasty and the second of the four Begums who ruled Bhopal from 1819-1926, held the reins of power from 1844-1868 under patronage of the British — the period when the mutiny broke out.
Bhopal’s surrounding regions were inflamed by rebellion that erupted at Neemuch on June 3, 1857. In the beginning of July 1857, Bakhshi Murawwat Muhammad Khan informed the Begum that the rebel forces were marching towards Bhopal from those territories. Bakhshi was told to repulse the armies.
The Begum also strictly banned the circulation of seditious notices surreptitiously stuck on the walls. She instituted an inquiry against Maulvi Abdul Qayyum, darogha of Fatehgarh Fort who was charged for distributing 500 copies of a pamphlet issued by the rebels of Cawnpore (Kanpur). He had incited Hindus and Muslims to overthrow the British. The Begum published a pamphlet to blunt the maulvi’s gambit.
Bhopal’s infantry had been raised under the Anglo-Bhopal Treaty of February-March 1818 and put under the direct command of the British officers. But when the mutiny broke out most of the sepoys disobeyed their British masters and their allies. The rebel sepoys of the Bhopal contingent were seen as a threat to the British officers who exited, leaving the matters under the direct charge of the Begum.
Rumours played a role in the mutiny. The way sugar was said to be processed with animal bones became a source of a whispering campaign. There was the distribution of mysterious messages through chapatis (a forerunner to Twitter) by the insurgents in the villages. The Begum of Bhopal notified all her district collectors to put a ban on their further distribution from village to village.
As we can see, colonial policy has been firmly rooted in expediency of trade and plunder, not in matters of faith of the subjects. Nor did the subjects allow their beliefs or eclectic interests to determine their own political stance.
Saif Ali Khan played the role of Iago in the Hindi version of Othello. He could nicely interpret the witches’ song from Macbeth as a metaphor of colonial politics: “Fair is foul and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.