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When I was asked recently to make a presentation as part of what was going to be a ‘Sufi’ event, I had my moments of doubt. Did I know enough? Was this anywhere near my area of competence, I wondered? The subject is so subtle, so arcane, esoteric, if one so likes, that to enter it was not going to be without hazard. But then, I remembered words that I took some courage from, words of that great mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi: "Come, come,
whoever you are
The relatively simple thing for me to do then, I said to myself, was not to see myself as a traveller on the road to despair but to go into the world of painting, something that I was more at home in. And, once there, to see how the painters of the past in India saw and rendered Sufi saints. There were riches here, I was aware, and even perhaps some glimmer of that enchanting, mystifying world of silences which Sufi thought often endeavoured to reach. Men of God I went first in my
mind to that enticing group of paintings in which the painters often
show a small cluster of Sufis — poets and thinkers — sitting on
the floor or on a simple rug, forming what can be seen as a circle,
with the empty space between them filled only by a small, low table on
which sometimes a few books lie piled up. The men are by no means
related to one another, except through the domain of thought, of
course, and could come from any region, any time. There is a wonderful
lightly tinted drawing in the Chandigarh Museum, for instance, in
which Hazrat Dastgir, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, Hazrat Qutbuddin,
Nizamuddin Auliya, Farid Shakarganj, Bu Ali Qalandar — all drawn
from different periods of time, from the 13th to the 18th century, and
from places as far from one another as Ajmer and Pakpattan and Delhi
and Srinagar — sit, some lost in thought, some looking over their
shoulders as if hearing voices that no one else can. There is no
conversation among them; no one really meets another’s eyes.
There is also that great, crisply painted work in which, similarly, eight men of god are seen seated on a terrace, directly in front of a waterfall — somewhere in Kashmir perhaps: two of them hold books in their hands, one of them makes a gesture as if about to address another, two men look into each other’s eyes, one huddles with a coarse blanket draped over his knees, looking into nothingness. It is easy enough to see that they are not necessarily engaging each other: their engagement seems to be with the riches that are inside them, essentially with that world of silence that they have created around themselves. The men are not identified through any inscriptions but one can be certain again that they come from different times and different places. Dervishes and faqirs they might not be — they are too well dressed for that — but then who are they? What, in any case, is the painter trying to say by bringing them together here? Is he creating an image of auspicious presences by merely looking at which is akin to receiving their benediction? Is he, in his own fashion, leading us, the viewers, into the domains of thought that might be our own? A prince and a recluse It is not only great Sufis — from the world of Islam — that the painters rendered with deep feeling and understanding, I hasten to add, but also sanyasis and sadhus of different persuasions, different beliefs. Those penetrating studies of sadhus by the Mughal painter Govardhan come easily to mind, as do renderings of sages in meditation that un-named painters turned out in the tiny Pahari states of Mankot and Bandralta in the Jammu region. Along with all this, however, my mind went also to images in which a prince and a recluse come together: the classical encounter between a shah and a gadaa, between worldly power and spiritual majesty. A large number of studies have survived, some charged with extraordinary intensity. Surprisingly, one of the most engaging images from the period of Jahangir (ruled 1605-1627) — surprising because he was no Akbar — is that in which he is seen visiting the Hindu sanyasi, Jadrup Gossain. There is a record of the visit in the emperor’s own words in his Memoirs. Thus, to quote him: "I had frequently heard that an austere sanyasi of the name of Jadrup many years ago retired from Ujjain to a corner of the desert and employed himself in the worship of God. I had a great desire for his acquaintance, and when I was at the capital of Agra, I was desirous of sending for and seeing him. In the end, thinking of the trouble it would give him, I did not send for him. When I arrived in the neighbourhood of the city, I alighted from the boat and went… kos on foot to see him. The place he had chosen to live in was a hole on the side of a hill which had been dug out and a door made. At the entrance, there is an opening … and the distance from this door to a hole which is his real abode is 2 gaz … A person of thin body alone can enter it with a hundred difficulties. It has no mat and no straw. In this narrow and dark hole, he passes his time in solitude. In the cold days of winter, though he is quite naked, with the exception of a piece of rag that he has in front and behind, he never lights a fire." The Mulla of Rum (Jalal-ud-din) has put into rhyme the language of a dervish: "By day our clothes are the sun, By night our mattress and blanket the moon’s rays." The emperor, then, goes on to say about the sanyasi that "he does not desire to associate with men. He … has thoroughly mastered the science of the Vedanta, which is the science of Sufism. I conversed with him for six gharis; he spoke well, so much so as to make a great impression on me." The emperor’s visit — he must have gone to the sanyasi, one can be sure, not only out of curiosity but to seek answers to troubling questions — is recorded by the painter in his own fashion. He creates a deeply moving image in which — like many other painters — he is asking the viewers to judge for themselves: who in this encounter is the Shah, Jahangir or the ascetic? And who is the gadaa: the lean ascetic or Jahangir?
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