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| Sunday, January 4, 2004 |
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| Sunday, January 4, 2004 |
|
Medieval India: Essays in
Intellectual Thought and Culture (volume I) Is
"medieval India" in the middle of anything other than
confusion? Look how comfortably historians contributing to this volume
use the word "medieval" to refer to a slice of time that is
lying in one corner of Indian history. One would imagine that the
medieval India, with its reference to ‘middle’ would mean somewhere
in the middle of Indian history, but the time period covered by the
essays in this book covers just one recent corner of Indian history. It
includes essays from the 11th century to the second half of the 18th
century. This period, commonsense would suggest, falls either in the
fourth quarter or the last decimal of known Indian history. If, as many
of our textbooks tell us, the history of India begins from circa 2000
BCE [before current era], then the period circa 1200 AD to 1800 AD
definitely does not fall anywhere in the middle. It falls in the fourth
quarter, much after any halftime in Indian history. It would fall even
later, in the last tenth quarter of Indian history, if we were to take
that the history of India begins from 5000 BCE, when the first of the
river valley civilisations came up in north-western India in the valleys
of the Saraswati and the Sindhu. Why persist with calling it
"medieval India" when it is not in the middle of anything? If
it is a book on the history of Islamic India and its transformation from
a vibrant thinking society to an inward-looking one, then why not simply
have that in the title? The book having begun with such confusion, the
11 essays, written by seven eminent historians provide considerable
insight into diverse areas of the Indian past. The editor, Professor I.H.
Siddiqui, presents five essays. Two of these essays present critical
appraisals of Al-Beruni of Khwarazm [11th century] and Qaiam Chandpuri
of Rohilkhand [18th century] and their works. Another is on 13th century
Indo-Persian poetry and a couple of essays are on the intellectual life
among Muslims. Afzal Husain, S.A.A. Rizvi, I.A. Zilli, William Chittick
and Ziauddin Desai write introductory commentaries on various other
individuals and texts. The story of Khwaja Shah Mansur, the erstwhile
finance minister of Akbar, who was executed at emperor’s behest, is
told here with great verve by Afzal Husain and gives us an insight into
the intrigues in the Mughal court. Rizvi discusses a little known text,
Munajat, written by Abul Fazl. In this text, says Rizvi, Fazl was at
pains to say that while emperor Akbar was open to discussions and ideas
from many other religions, he continued to be true to Wajibul-ul-Wujud
(God). After all, in the mind of Abul Fazl, the most important reporter
of the emperor of India, it was necessary to clarify that the emperor
was true to his own religion even though he interacted extensively with
members of other religions. Even though there was pressure to prove
truthfulness to the original faith, says Peter Hardy in his interesting
essay on the concepts of time, the Muslim experience of life in India
was much different from that in West Asia. "In South Asia,"
Hardy notes, "Muslims could dominate, or create great city centres;
physically damage "Hindu" centres of worship and learning; and
apply or divert revenues to the support of the teachers and maintainers
of the religion and culture of Islam, but the countryside remained
profoundly "Hindu in sentiment". Did this peculiar experience
of living with the Hindus have much impact on the manner in which
thought was organised? Hardy gives a categorical answer: No. If
anything, even when Muslim power in India was on the decline in the 18th
century, Hardy says, "many believed the solution to lie in a
renewal of true Islamic belief and practice (rather than, say, search
for structural or economic explanations)". Once beliefs get
fossilised and enquiring ideas get truncated by the pressure to confirm
to the Great Tradition of a religion, societies do have a tendency to
stare, dazed like a deer before a searchlight, waiting for the hunters
to make their move. Is there a lesson for contemporary India in all
this? Only a reader of this volume would be able to say that. |
