The Idea of India-5

Plassey

If France suddenly decided it should become a monarchy once again, and were to search for a Bourbon to take the crown, last worn more than one and a half  centuries back, the search team may have to fly down to Bhopal, capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, infamous for the Union Carbide gas tragedy.



The coat of arms adopted by the Bhopal Bourbons

For the only surviving Bourbons live there, in a palatial house which proudly has engraved above its main door, the French royal  fleur-de-lis, flanked by two Indian elephants. Their ancestor - Jean-Philippe de Bourbon - arrived in 1560 at the court of Emperor Akbar after various adventures on the way including being kidnapped by pirates. The young 16^th century royal was from an elder branch of France’s ruling family and had to flee his home after a duel gone wrong.

It was a time when many a young European out to make a fortune, would turn to India – which in their eyes was the `Golden Bird’.  As the Mughal Empire crumbled, the Bird once elusive and ruled by haughty princes became vulnerable. Mughal subalterns in various provinces, each the size of a major European nation or larger, continued to pay homage to the Imperial Throne at Delhi, but ruled in their own way, more often at loggerheads, than in alliance with each other.

Europeans traders backed by their Monarchs, had initially set up Mughal sanctioned portside factories. But with the ebbing of Mughal power, they gradually gained greater influence by controlling more and more land and sizable armies which were often lent out to short-sighted warring princes to settle matters in a manner ultimately favourable to the outsider. In the words of one Urdu humourist, “they (Europeans) were granted  firman (grant) for as much land as could be covered by a tent. Little did the Emperor know that their tent was made of stretchable rubber.”

The Europeans were also fighting their own battles on the cold continent and this was carried to the high seas and to the tiny bits of India they controlled.  In mid-18^th century Bengal, then ruled by a young and impetuous Mughal lieutenant, Nawab Siraj-ud-Dowlah, both the French and English fortified their trading posts against each other. Siraj demanded  these fortifications be dismantled. The French complied. However, the English did not heed Siraj's warnings. An angry Nawab then ordered a successful punitive raid to bring the rebel English post on the river Hooghly, Calcutta, to its knees.

Fort St George, the headquarters of the `Honourable Company', sent Robert Clive, a young Englishman who had come out as a clerk to find his fortune in India,  and had risen to be a celebrated young General in the company’s army in Madras, to win back Calcutta.

Clive as versed in the ways of war as in intrigue, bided his time after landing in Bengal. Emissaries were sent to win friends with the many noblemen and tycoons who had grudges against Siraj, or had ambitions to the gaddi (Subaltern throne) themselves, before the Madras force ultimately advanced towards Murshidabad, the capital of Bengal.

The map of the Battle of Plassey

The two sides met in the Mango groves of Plassey on the 23^rd of June 1757. Siraj’s uncle and Commander-in-Chief of his army, Mir Jaffar and several deputies were already in league with the English and these worthies who personally commanded three-fourths of the Bengal Army of 50,000, made no attempts to engage with Clive. Jaffar's canons stayed silent on the plea that the gunpowder was “wet”, while several infantry regiments simply idled around the mango orchards.

Only an advance force under two Brigade commanders, Mir Madan and Mohanlal, remained true to the hapless Siraj. Even their tiny combined forces were enough to make Clive retreat early in the battle. However soon after, Madan fell to a stray shot, while Mohanlal was forced to retreat on repeated orders of Jaffer, just as he was on the cusp of victory.

To his horror, the young ruler, Siraj, saw his army dissolving as a disgusted Mohanlal left the battlefield. An Indian chronicler of that time, Ghulam Hussain, says “Siraj … fearing not only the English in his front, but chiefly the domestic enemies about his person, lost all firmness of mind … (and) joined the runaways himself.” Only to be caught and condemned to a fate of blinding and eventual death.

Jaffar, became the next Nawab (Governor). But the Company, became the real rulers of Bengal with its untold riches. Jaffar in turn was pensioned off to be replaced by his ambitious son-in-law, Mir Qasim, who chaffing under the English tutelage, attempted a short-lived revolt, only to be replaced by old Jaffer once gain.

The Battle of Plassey was, in the words of eminent historian R.C.Majumdar:  “hardly more than a skirmish but its result was more important than that of many of the greatest battles of the world.” True, for it opened the way for the conquest of India, the brightest jewel in England’s crown, by the employees of arguably the world’s first successful transnational corporation. The revenues of the rich province of Bengal, funded the conquest of India. The money, which the sub-continent earned for the English in turn helped fund the establishment of that island nation's global Empire `Over Which The Sun Never Sets.'

In another sense, Plassey was not about military defeat but rather the defeat of an antiquated feudal order up against a new European order welded by the ideas of a New Age, of an India which had started crumbling into blind sub-states, which could not see reason to unite against a common enemy. In a manner it was also the story of when the Idea of India faltered.

A Map of the British Empire in India

(portions shown in pink are British ruled, yellow ruled by Indian Princes)

Previous Blogs in the series : Idea of India , Idea of India 2 , Idea of India 3, Idea of India 4

The Idea of India - 4

The wedding procession of Prince Dara Shukoh

Read also : The Idea of India ; The Idea of India-2 ; The Idea of India-3

 

Prince Dara

When in 1657, Emperor Shah Jehan fell critically ill, three of his sons declared themselves Emperor – Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad. Only one son – the eldest – remained true to him, nursing him by the bedside – Dara Shukoh.

Forgotten today by history, Dara was a great scholar and a secular prince with a modern outlook.  Along with the sciences and administration, Crown prince Dara Shukoh had studied the Vedas, the Talmud, the New Testament and the works of Sufi mystics, much to the consternation of orthodox Islamic clergy who rushed to support his younger and sterner brother Aurangzeb.

The battle for succession saw the Imperialists led by Dara, defeating Shuja but in turn being defeated by the combined rebel armies of Aurangazeb and Murad, partly by treachery. Soon after, Aurangzeb, whose name strangely meant `throne’s decoration’ turned to crush his youngest brother and former ally Murad and to imprison his father at Agra fort, before usurping the throne of India.

Dara himself was eventually brought to Delhi, a captive, much to the lament of the common people with whom he was popular. In the words of Francois Bernier, the French traveller, physician and writer, who was witness to the scene “everywhere I observed people weeping and lamenting the fate of Dara in the most touching language…” Rioting broke out soon after in the city and Aurangzeb put an end to the rightful claimant to the throne of Akbar and Shah Jehan.

Thus began the unravelling of the Empire.

The Moghul Empire had been formed as a confederacy – a secular compact between Muslim rulers with Hindu princes, with whose support the Mughals who traced their roots to Central Asia, ruled a land that had once again started believing it was one after being wrecked asunder by medieval wars.

Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur before his martyrdom

It was to be wrecked apart again, this time by bigotry. Aurangzeb, in the words of historian R.C.Majumdar, “tried to enforce strictly the Quaranic law, according to which it behoves every pious Muslim to ‘exert himself in the path of God’ or in other words to carry on holy wars (jihad) against non-Muslim lands till they are converted into the realms of Islam”. As Emperor, in the very first year of his reign, Aurangzeb banned music and dancing from his court, to be practised only in secret, in the homes of a few fun loving nobles! Wine and opium too were banished. Soon after, he imposed a hated tax, Jizia, on all non-Muslims, who accounted for most of his subjects. The state was from then on to be run according to the King’s views of what constituted religion and not on what was politic.

Revolts sprung up in many corners of the empire. The Sikhs in Punjab, whose holiest site – the Golden Temple - had been built on land gifted by Emperor Akbar, rose up in arms after their sixth guru Teg Bahadur was executed for his faith by Aurangzeb. The Rajputs, bound to the Mughal throne through matrimonial alliances, rose up in ferment. The ruler of Marwar, Jaswant Singh had died in battle fighting for Mughal India in a campaign in Afghanistan. Aurangzeb, who seemed to have coveted this strategic little principality, which sits astride the route to Gujarat, made Jaswant's grandnephew nominal ruler and took over the actual running of this desert state. Alarmed by this perfidy, the Sisodia Rajputs of Mewar joined the ever rebellious Rathore Rajputs of Marwar in turning the  land of Rajputana into a bloody battlefield against the Mughals.

But it was in the Deccan that Aurangzeb faced his biggest challenge – Shivaji Bhonsle followed by able sons, led the Marathas, warriors from the crags of the Western Ghats in a series of guerilla battles against the Mughals which drained the empire of men and money. Unpaid armies mutinied, nobles cast off their imperial chains and general lawlessness flourished, ultimately wearing out the man who had killed his own brothers for the Peacock throne.

The Emperor had not only broken his compact with his subjects, in a sense, he had broken with the idea of India as a secular nation. His death was a lonely and unsung one. In a letter to his son Azam, he wrote “I came alone and am gone alone. I have not done well to the country and the people, and of the future there is no hope.”

Aurangzeb’s successors inherited but a hollow shell of an empire, with fires raging on all sides. Their nobles were a divided house -  with Indian Muslim and Hindu nobles ranged on one side and freebooter emigre’ nobles from Central Asia and Persia on the other. Invasions with an eye on loot, by Persian king Nadir Shah and Afghan chief Ahmad Shah Abdali, weakened their rule further, leaving them at the end, rulers of but the city of Delhi and few districts surrounding it.

A far cry from the Empire of India, wrought as much by the march of armies as by the march of ideas and indeed a lesson to future rulers on the need to preserve the secular fabric of the continental nation state.

Continued : The Idea of India-5

Previous : Idea of India , Idea of India 2, Idea of India 3

The Idea of India – 2

Gupta Era Gold Coin 

Continued from Idea of India - 1

The Golden Age

After the Mauryan Empire fell to the vagaries of time, weak successors and rise of feudal overlords, India found itself divided by a chaotic medley of regional satraps. Rise of Brahmanical rulers also saw Buddhism, which under Ashoka had spread to the Greco-Bactrian ruled states of Central Asia, to Sri Lanka and Indian Ocean islands in the south and Burma in the east, slowly losing influence in the land of its birth.

For a while, this slide towards feudal chaos was stemmed by the rise of a new Indian Imperial dynasty – Guptas who ruled over the Indo-Gangetic plain between 320- 550 A.D. A strong unitary empire which promoted trade, the arts, science, medicine, astronomy and scholarship in general, gave rise to what later historians have described as a `Golden Age’, helping weld better, people still divided by fault-lines of caste, creed, language towards “Indianness”.

It was never truly a political pan-Indian empire of the kind that the Mauryans were able to establish. However, this empire of the North was in some ways even better in carrying forward the idea of India by influencing not only those within its boundaries but also the smaller though powerful kingdoms of the Deccan as well as lands far away to the East. Exporting abroad India’s thoughts, culture and religions and projecting to these countries, the idea of an India, which for many in South East Asia became a role model.

Sometime soon after Christ died, one of his apostles, St Thomas, was said to have landed in Southern India, probably in a spice trading Dhow, to spread the word of Jesus. Islam, was another religion not born in the sub-continent, borne again by spice traders who travelled across the Indian Ocean with the Monsoon winds, to the Malabar shores. Christianity and Islam preached an egalitarian society different from the caste ridden  Hindu four-fold’, created by religious and social orthodoxy which abandoned the Early Vedic principle that caste would determined by a man’s choice of profession  and instead turned into a rigid, divisive hereditary status in society.  Both found roots in South India, and were in turn `Indianised’ with adherents bringing in Indian traditions into the rituals surrounding the new faiths. 

Even before Thomas, Jews, had been visiting India as traders and some had settled down as refugees and émigrés. Followers of another religion, Zorastrianism, fled Iran after their faith was banished there in the 10^th century A.D.  Both Zoroastrianism and  Judaism were not proselytising religions, but their adherents rapidly Indianised, adopting Indian customs, dress and languages, over the centuries.

To come back to the Guptas, repeated invasions by Huns, who were plundering almost every civilisation in Europe and Asia, near bankruptcy from a rash of military campaigns coupled with fiscal profligacy saw the empire crumble and replaced again by a feudal order of regional satraps who constantly jostled for influence and power among each other. Trade suffered, scholarship was constricted, yet `Indianness’ flourished as people moved long distances to survive the turbulent times, carrying with them unitary cross currents amidst rising regionalism. Bengal was ruled by Sena rulers, who claimed descent from military adventurers from the Karnatic. `Gaud’ (Bengali) Brahmins travelled to dominate parts of North India, Kannauji (from Kannauj in modern Uttar Pradesh) Brahmins and Kayasthas travelled east to dominate Bengal’s society, Rajputs travelled long distances to grace courts in Bihar and Orissa, to give a few examples of intra-Indian migrations which despite the divisiveness of the times, helped promote unitary tendencies in Indian culture and society.  

Reform movements within the main religion of the country – Hinduism – also tended to be pan-Indian, carrying with it not only religious messages but also `One India’ stories. The Adi Shankaracharya  (788-822 A.D) from Kalady in modern Kerala, travelled the length and breadth of India to not only take his theological message but also to unite people culturally.  This man, often called the St Thomas Aquinas of Indian thought, unified two seemingly different disparate philosophical doctrines – Atman and Brahman, and through a brilliant debating tour of the country unified warring sects within the Hindu-fold and re-established the Vedic foundations of the religion.

But that was perhaps not his biggest contribution to India - The four Mathas he set up in four parts of the sub-continent brought rare socio-cultural unity at a time when the land was riven by feudal overlords at constant war with each other, bent on creating sub-nationalism. His disciples ran these mathas and took the message of `One India’ to Himalayan principalities in the north, through a Matha at Joshimath in Garwhal, in the rich western coast through a Matha at Dwarka in Gujarat, to the eastern kingdoms through a Matha at Puri and to the powerful South through a  Matha at Sringeri in the Karnataka.

After this: Idea of India-3 ; Idea of India-4 ; Idea of India-5
Before: Idea of India

The Idea of India

    Mauryan Empire Circa 265 B.C

Mahabharata

The Indian republic maybe just 64 years old, however India as an idea has existed for nearly 5,000 years. When chiefs who ruled over the scores of tribes which inhabited India met in the battlefield outside Hastinapur (today’s Delhi) to decide who would rule over that city state – the Kaurava clan or the Pandavas, they called themselves princes of Bharat (India) and named their battle Maha- Bharata (Great Indian war).

Recent archaeo-astronomical studies, results of marine-archaeological explorations tends to place the year of the legendary war, chronicled as an epic Sanskrit poem as probably the year 1478 BC. There is still debate over that result, but more or less the epic is placed around that time and indicates that people from various parts of India shared a similar culture and considered themselves one people as early as then.

Being a sub-continent, bound by deserts to the west, high mountain ranges in the north, seas in the south and thick almost impenetrable rainforests in the east, India not only became a single geographic  entity but also a single cultural entity.

Long before the Aryans (historians place the advent of Aryan tribes at around 2,000 B.C) appeared in this sub-continent,  there was a civilisation which had advanced cities, whose ships plied the seas to connect with Egypt and Babylon, supported huge grain silos linked to ports, the people themselves (of proto-Austroloid extraction) had  fine taste in sculpture, coinage and pottery, had changing women’s fashion styles and  worshipped gods now found in Hinduism (Pashupatinath or Shiva, Mother Goddess – revered now as Tara, Durga or Kali). 

The people who lived in this civilisation (Circa 3300-2,500 B.C) spread over modern Pakistan, Gujarat, Indian Punjab, Haryana and parts of western Uttar Pradesh, were one people, if not one nation. They could be called the earliest Indians.

However, the spread of one unitary culture, socio-religious beliefs and belief in a single national identity had much to do with the Aryan tribes who seemed to have come from the Noth West, and spread through length and breadth of the sub-continent from Himalayas in the north to the forests of Assam, Manipur and Tripura in the North east to the seas of South India. They sometimes defeated indigenous tribes, sometimes assimilated them through a web of marriages and a process described as Aryanisation – co-opting local chiefs by cooking up Aryan ancestry for them drawn from the Sun or Moon gods and assimilating local religious and cultural beliefs within the umbrella of a pan-Indian religio-culture. The unitary religion created for want of a better name was called Dharma/Dhamma (meaning: Religion) and the culture Bharatiya (Of India).

Over centuries, the Aryans mixed with the original inhabitants – a people anthropologists call the Proto-Astroloids. To this mixture were added over time sprinkling of Mongol blood (mainly from Tibet, but also from Burma, Thailand, Central Asia), Negroid blood, Semitic, Iranian-Aryan and later European blood. As a result of  this intermingling, all Indians have at least two building blocks – Proto Australoid and Aryan and possibly a third – Mongol. Most have many more ingredients. The admixture over the centuries has been such that no caste or region in India can claim to be pure this or pure that - India, the melting pot has created a unique new race – Indian.

Legends which originated in one part of India (such as Ramayana and Mahabharata or Durga), became pan-Indian with translations in local languages and dialects. Architecture, arts, dance, music and drama forms followed prescribed similarity, with local variations and embellishments.  The dress all over the country was a variation of the same dhoti and saree. The court language in principalities and chieftaincies all over the country tended to be Sanskrit or its derivative Pali. Even texts on sexual practices prescribed for the sons and daughters of the rich were the same -Kama Sutra!

When the original Aryan religion which believed in a single nameless and shapeless God who encompassed all that was within the cosmos and beyond (defined as infinity) and who could be reached through simple prayers and contemplation of nature was replaced by the new myriad worship of local  deities (co-opted by the Aryan priests) who were believed to represent the original infinite god and when simple prayers were replaced by complex rituals, animal sacrifice and possibly priestly corruption,  religious challenges came forth.

The two main early challenges came from a school called the Jaina school of philosophers – who built an austere version of the original Dharma – which has now metaporphosed into Jainism, a separate pan-Indian religion – and from Prince Siddhartha of  a little principality in the foothills of Nepal (who became Gautama Buddha after his ascetic contemplations in eastern India).

Buddha (Circa 56—480 B.C ) and his new religion (he did not describe it as a new religion or call it Buddhism, his followers eventually did and even then for a long time they too called their belief simply Dhamma, forcing adherents of the earlier religious belief to call their belief – Sanatan (eternal) Dhamma/Dharma ) soon became a pan-Indian religion, which again reinforced  a sense of oneness among Indians.

A century and a half after Buddha, India faced its first European invasion. Alexander the Great invaded the tribes living in north west India ( modern Pakistan to be precise). The short lived invasion touched just the fringes of India but impacted India greatly. The greatest power in India at that time was Magadha (modern day Bihar and parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh) – which had a huge disciplined army with separate elephant, horse and infantry corps, whose strength, some chroniclers said was one of the reasons why Alexander did not try to reach the “farthest end of the world”.

A Brahmin scholar who lived through the war in the university town of Takshshila or modern Taxila, Chanakya or Kautilya, propounded the theory that the culturally similar India needed to now politically unite as one nation to face external and internal threats. He picked as his candidate for the job of the first emperor of India, an unknown Magadhan – Chandragupta. Somehow the dreamer and schemer managed to combine and were successful in overthrowing the Nanda dynasty ruler of Magadha.

However, Chanakya’s aim was not just the throne of Magadha for his disciple, but the unification of his beloved motherland. What Garibaldi did several millenniums later, Chanakya did for India in the third century before Christ – united it under one emperor.  Chandragupta reigned over much of modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, Baluch province of Iran, the whole of the Gangetic plain and parts of modern Assam province. His descendants who together came to be known as the Mauryan dynasty extended this first Indian Empire to cover almost the whole of South India, except the tip near Sri Lanka.

For the first time, India experienced political unity which lasted for several centuries (321 B.C – 185 B.C). This facilitated commerce on a larger scale, prosperity and a pan-Indian ethos. The spread of Buddha’s teachings by Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, helped unify the country to an even greater extent. For Buddhism was not merely a religion, it was a way of life. The traits which the world now associates with an Indian’s were helped formed by this religion, which India later kept aside.

Ashoka perhaps built the first highways which linked the southern corners with the north, the eastern epicentre of the empire with the western borders, bringing India and Indians nearer to each other. He gave the land a single set of just laws, brought law and order to furthest corners of his realm. Importantly for a country of this continental size, he also preached tolerance to his subjects, enjoining them to respect each other's religious beliefs and to live together without acrimony.

Missionaries and traders sent out by him to Central Asia and South East Asia not only brought fresh converts to Buddhism and riches to India's coastal provinces, but also projected the `soft power' of the great empire and civilisation he had wrought - which to the world was known as Indica, Indo, Indu, Hindu - names derived from one of the principal river systems of the country - Sindhu or Indus.   

Continued : The Idea of India-2 ; The Idea of India-3 ; The Idea of India-4 ; The Idea of India-5