A trip to
Bijapur gets me some Dakni Biryani, tales of mano-a-mano combat, mass graves
and equestrian statues
When I eventually broke though the thicket, all my struggle and
exhaustion gave way to an overwhelming feeling of eeriness. In front of me lay
9 rows of graves. Symmetrically arranged, this was not a regular graveyard
since each of the grave markers was identical. All these people had, in all
probability, been buried here at the same time.
Something terrible had happened here.
This rather morbid historical monument, situated around 10
kilometres east of the city of Bijapur in Karnataka, is called Sāth
Khabar (sāth meaning 60 and Khabar being the local Dakni
pronunciation of qabar or grave). R
and I had gotten here with much difficulty, hiring an auto rickshaw to take us
to this place. And while communication in Bijapur was hardly a problem, the
city being mostly Dakni speaking, once out in the countryside, Kannada took
over and we had to search for Sāth Khabar
using Umar, our auto driver as our Urdu-Kannada translator—an irritatingly laborious
process. Even when we did get to the monument, as it turned out, we would have
to trek the last kilometre on foot, there being no road. And trek we did
dutifully, through thick bush, scrub and bramble. Halfway through this trek, unsure of whether we were even headed anywhere, we came across the corpse of
decomposing goat—an image (sign? warning?) that would play itself up greatly
when we were in the middle of 60 graves out in the middle of nowhere.
The name
Sāth Khabar
though was a slight misnomer or approximation, if one were to be charitable. There
were actually 63 graves mounted on a plinth a foot high. On the eastern side of
the graves stood a typical Bijapuri pavilion. Behind this pavilion was a well,
choked up with weeds but still filled with water. If legend it to be believed,
it was here that Bijapuri general Afzal Khan had drowned each one of his 63
wives just before he rode out to battle a recalcitrant Shivaji. Khan had
volunteered for this battle but had also been told by an astrologer that this
encounter would be his last. In an act of pre-posthumous jealousy, he killed
his wives, drowning them in the well, so that they would be unable to remarry
after he was gone. It was this mass burial ground that is now called
Sāth Khabar[i].
***
Bijapur today is a small town in the north-west of the state of
Karnataka, very close to its border with Maharashtra. Unlike towns of a similar
size in North India, Bijapur is rather clean and well-organised with a
surprising amount of infrastructure. The roads are well maintained and
adequately lit, the place is dotted with open areas and parks and, surprisingly
for an Indian town of only 3 lakh, it has a bus service. Just one stroll around
the city though will tell you this is no ordinary mofussil town. Bijapur is absolutely dotted with monuments;
masjids, tombs, gateways and dargāhs pop up with every turn you take. Markers
of past greatness, strewn around like so many pebbles on a beach.
Founded in the 11th centuries, the name Bijapur is the
local Kannada/Dakni version of the Sanskrit Vijayapura, or city of victory. It was in the 16th and
17th centuries though that this city, as the capital of the
remarkable Bijapur Sultanate, achieved its greatest glory.
The most amazing Bijapur
The Bijapur sultanate was a break-away from the first Muslim
kingdom in the south, the Bahmani sultanate which in turn was carved out of the
Delhi Tughlaq sultanate as it struggled to hold on to its southern regions.
For much of the reign of the Adil Shahis, the dynasty that ruled
Bijapur, the kingdom was actually more prosperous than its Sunni counterpart in
the North. That prosperity meant that the city of Bijapur was, till the reign
of Shahjahan, far grander than the urdus
(or cantonment cities) of North India such as Delhi, Agra or Lahore.
This wealth resulted in a fantastic intermingling of
cultures—Persianate (which included the ethnicities of Afghan and Turk), North
Indian (mainly Muslims from Delhi and its surroundings), Siddi, Maratha, Telugu
and Kannada—to produce a sparkling syncretic Dakni culture well before a
certain Jalaluddin Akbar could begin his project up North.
Dakni zabaan
Arguably the greatest outcome of this syncretism is the local
language of Dakni, spoken in urban centres across the Deccan in places as
varied as Bijapur in Karnataka, Hyderabad in Andhra (Telengana?) and Beed in
Maharashtra. The language was first bought into existence as the armies of
Khilji and subsequent North Indian rulers rumbled into the Deccan to try and
annexe it for Delhi. These immigrants from the North carried with them dialects
such as Khadi Boli, Haryanvi and early forms of Punjabi
[ii]
which, in the cities of Deccan, mixed with Marathi, Telugu and Kannada to give
rise to Dakni. Existing only as a street patois today, Dakni was the first
formal literary expression of Khadi Boli, the local dialect of Delhi and West
UP. The Sufis of the Deccan used it as a utilitarian tool to preach their creed
and in the hands of poet-kings such as Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (founder of
Hyderabad) and Ibrahim II of Bijapur it reached the dizzy heights of literary
expression.
Anecdote has it that a Dakni poet, Wali Mohammed, displayed his
poetry to the literati of Delhi who were impressed by this new literary language,
most composition in Delhi at the time taking place either in Persian or other
Hindustani dialects such as Braj and Awadhi
[iii].
In this way, Dakni gave rise to modern North Indian Urdu in the 18
th
century and 150 years later, North Indian Urdu would in turn give rise to Shudh
Hindi, making Dakni a grandfather of sorts to India’s current official
language. Of course, once Urdu and Hindi had established their sway, they
deposed their once grand predecessor and Dakni was stripped of its status as a
literary language, left only as a street argot in cities across the Deccan,
right up to Madras. Given the status of the language today, in a fittingly
symbolic gesture, the tomb of Wali Dakni—the man who reintroduced the language
to the North—situated in Ahmedabad, was razed to the ground in the 2002 Gujarat Pogrom.
The Dakni Akbar
The most remarkable work of Dakni in Bijapur was also composed by
a remarkable man, the 6th sultan of the dynasty, Ibrahim Adil Shah
II. Ibrahim II would be the Deccan’s Akbar, a
philosopher king with an eclectic taste in spirituality. An intense lover of
music, his book Kitāb-e-Nauras is a
treatise on Indian classical music which opens with an invocation to Saraswati.
Much like Akbar, he founded a new city, Nauraspur, around 10 kms east of the
original city. Very little of it survives now; when I visited the place, there
were only two buildings, each in an advanced state of decay, the Sangeet Mahal
and the Nari Mahal. The ASI was carrying out work there and the supervisor of
the team, Anil was kind enough to show me around. As per him, Ibrahim II had
only built Nauraspur in order to visit the ancient Narasimha Temple, situated
nearby, in peace, away from the watchful eyes of the city’s orthodox ulema.
Narasimha had cured Ibrahim’s daughter’s blindness and ever since then, he was
a bhakt, informed Anil.
The orthodoxy of Bijapur, it seems are still fighting a losing battle, even after 400 years. The city has a thriving Sufī culture, consisting
mainly of the Chistī, Qādri and Shattarī orders. On a visit to the popular mazār of Abdul Razzaq Qadiri
(commonly known as the Jod Gumbaz or
“twin domes”) I was intrigued to see women queuing up at the back with coconuts
in hand. As their turn would come, a chap would take it from them, crack it
open with practised ease and pour the water over the dehlīz (threshold) of the dargāh.
“Isse mannate pūri hotī hain, betā,” a woman, who was
probably younger than me, said by way of explanation, maybe being obligated to
add the betā as a mocking response
to my somewhat daft query of why she was doing this. All dargāhs in Bijapur also have a jot/deep/charāgh lit constantly. At the Ameen-ud-din dargāh, when I asked the sajjādā nashīn
what the significance of the lamp was, he just nodded sagely and said, “Yahi dakkan ka rivāj hai” (this is the
tradition of the Deccan).
 |
| The naryal-breaker hard at work at the Jod Gumbaz |
 |
| The charagh inside the Ameen-ud-din dargah |
The Empire's Maharashtrian backbone
In the 17
th century, this syncretism also extended to
the bureaucracy and army of the Bijapur Empire, in a form much deeper and more
stable than seen in Delhi. Much of the Bijapur Empire was run and administered
throughout its length and breadth by Maharashtrian desais and deshmukhs. This
was due to a confluence of factors such as it already being an existing
practise under the earlier Bahamani sultanate as well as the ethnic
factionalism within the Bijapuri
[iv]
court itself. The court in Bijapur has always seen a tug of war between Deccan
Muslims and foreign Muslims (such as Turks, Persians and Afghans). As Eaton
points out, whenever Deccan Muslims have gotten a chance, starting from Ibrahim
I, they have always appointed Maharashtrians to key position in order for it to
act as a check against the foreigner class.
Linguistically, the result of this large scale intermingling meant
that Marathi was inundated with Persian loan words, the language of the
Bijapuri court along with Dakni. In fact, As GH Khare points out, this
resulted in a distinct register of Marathi being born (which Khare called Perso-Marathi)
which was used to administer the Bijapur Empire. Rajwade’s analysis of the
documents of the period reveal that nearly 40% of the words used in the Marathi
used by the upper classes of the period were of Persian origin; an
astonishingly high number
[v]. And
in what is probably one the most telling legacies of Bijapur, around 10%
[vi]
of the lexicon of modern Marathi is derived from Persian
[vii].
Bijapuri general Shahji's son, Shivaji
One of the key examples of how important Maharashtrians were to
Bijapur was Shahji Bhosle, the father of Shivaji, who was a key general in the
Bijapuri armies (and had earlier served both Ahmednagar as well as the Mughal
Empire
[viii])
and responsible for conquering much of Karnataka for the Empire. In fact, to
note one of the many ironies of that period, Shahji, had served under Afzal Khan in
1641, as the armies of Bijapur endeavoured to crush an uprising of Hindu Rajas
in the general region of Vellore.
In the late 1650s, though, Shahji’s estranged son, Shivaji was
creating ripples in the Bijapur court for his temerity of taking over a number
of Bijapuri forts as well as capturing the lands of a prominent feudal family,
the More’s. However, caught up in the
problems of succession (the emperor, Mohammed Adil Shah was on his death bed)
as well defending itself from the armies of the belligerent Mughal prince, Aurangzeb, the
empire did nothing and Shivaji got a free rein to build up his power. In 1659, however, with a new emperor in place, Bijapur decided to act. It marshalled one
of its most capable generals, Afzal Khan to capture Shivaji. Khan already had a
reputation for being a tyrant—in another story about his cruelty, he had once threatened
to have officials squeezed to death in a mill for dereliction of duty—so
combined with his combat with Shivaji, it is little surprise that legends like Sāth Khabar have sprung up.
Afzal Khan marches to Shivaji
As he marched from Bijapur to Pune (which is where Shivaji was)
with a force of around 10,000 troops (a massive force by the standards of the depopulated, famine-stricken Deccan), Afzal Khan decided to adopt a policy of
intimidation of the worst possible kind by destroying a number of Hindu temples
on the way, the most important of which was the Vithoba Temple in Pandharpur. Till
today, you see advertisements of tours to Pandharpur all over Bombay and it is
probably Maharashtra’s most popular temple, a status it had even in the 17th
century. Though, as Stewart Gordan points out,
“this behaviour was unprecedented for a Bijapuri force” given the Empire's past history of syncretism. And not only was this act by Afzal Khan morally unconscionable, but it was also highly impolitic since it served to
alienated the bedrock of Bijapur's civil and military bureaucracy who were, as
pointed out earlier, largely Maharashtrians. In the end, the strategy behind the
destruction, that of forcing Shivaji to come down from the hilly Ghats to meet Khan’s
large army on the plains was also a failure—Shivaji, wisely, did not budge.
Once Khan reached Pune, he found Shivaji had retreated to his fort in Pratapgarh. Shivaji dare not take on Bijapur's massively larger force on the plains and Khan did not have enough siege equipment to force Shivaji out of his fort. Sieging was a core part of medieval Indian warfare and the two sides settled down to 5 months of a protected cat and mouse game. Supplies though were a factor for both sides—food was running out for Shivaji, trapped inside his fort, and there was only so much the ghats could throw up for Khan's massive force. Both sides therefore engaged in protracted negotiations
leading up to a truce meeting between Shivaji and Afzal—probably the
single-most celebrated incident in Maharashtrian history. In the meeting, as is well known, Shivaji
killed Khan. What is hotly contested, though, is who attacked first, a point on
which there is little agreement between primary sources of that period. Marathi
sources such the bhākās attribute the
treachery to Khan. Mughal and Bijapuri sources such as Khafi Khan accuse
Shivaji of premeditated murder. From a historiographical point of view, most colonial
historians such as James Grant Duff and Stanley Lane-Poole blame Shivaji while
nationalist historians such as Jadunath Sarkar blame Khan (naturally, it is this version
which is disseminated in India).
Shivaji, a brilliant tactician
This, of course, is a ridiculously minor point. Both Khan and
Shivaji had committed many deeds prior to this which would be considered highly
immoral by today’s standards, including premeditated murder; you did not become a solider in
the medieval Deccan by being any sort of mahatma. The morality (or lack thereof) displayed in this particular incident is immaterial. The issue should purely
be seen from the point of view of strategy—an angle from which Khan comes out
to be an overconfident fool and Shivaji a brilliant tactician—rather than any
woolly notions of ethics. The problem is that the history of this period and
this incident in particular has been sharply communalised and Shivaji and Afzal
Khan are forever being moulded, twisted and contorted into shapes which conform to the
Hindu-Muslim communal politics of the 20th century. Remarkably, as
late as 2009 (three and a half centuries after the incident took place), the issue led to communal violence in the town of Miraj in southern
Maharashtra as Hindus and Muslims clashed over the ostensible provocation of a welcome
arch, put up by the Shiv Sena, depicting Shivaji killing Afzal Khan. In
response to the bungling efforts to bring peace, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray
attacked the government asking whether “Afzal Khan [was] a relative of the
government” and in true Thackeray-style opined that “had it not been for
Shivaji Maharaj, we all would have been reading namaaz today”.
Unaware of the controversy that this would generate 350 years
later, the real Shiv Sena, on a
signal from their commander, attacked the unsuspecting Bijapur army. The
ensuing Battle of Pratapgargh was short and decisive as Khan’s leaderless
troops (composed largely of Marathas, it might be noted, fighting loyally for
Bijapur as they had done for centuries) were routed. This would be one of many
instances in the career of Shivaji when his razor-sharp intelligence combined
with his remarkable personal bravery resulted in an improbable victory.
***
On the way back from Sāth
Khabar, we asked Umar to take us to the best biryani joint in town, rather
than back to the hotel. The Kutchi Biryani of the Deccan is a marvellous creation and
takes the standard the North Indian dish and adds some Dakni masalas to it, to make it far spicier than anything found in, say,
Delhi or Lucknow. As we stood at a crossing, waiting for the light to turn
green, I looked out and saw a magnificent bronze statue of Shivaji astride a rearing
horse, bang in the middle of the capital of his greatest foe, the Bijapur Empire. An old rotting
garland was dangling from his neck, no doubt the result of the last political
function.
References:
Shivaji and His Times, Sarkar, Jadunath
The Marathas, Gordan, Stewart
The Mughal Empire, Richards, John
The Value of Dakhni Language and Literature, Mohamed, Sayed
A History of the Mahrattas, Duff, James Grant
Aurangzib and the Decay of the Mughal Empire, Lane-Poole, Stanley
The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700, Eaton, Richard Maxwell
A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761, Eaton, Richard Maxwell
[i] Jadunath Sarkar had visited the
place in 1916 and also noted the “utter desolation” of the spot (Shivaji and
His Times). In his time though the story was still alive. When I visited it
almost a 100 years later, none of the farmers in the area knew anything about
the legends associated with Sāth
Khabar other than its name.
[ii] Sufis of Bijapur, Richard Eaton.
Eaton mentions that the language bears far closer resemblance to Punjabi than does modern Hindi-Urdu
[iii] Other people telling us about our
own culture seems to be a rather entrenched Indian habit. See the urban
popularity of yoga after its popularity in the West.
[iv] A practice inherited by all the
Deccan Sultanates, not only Bijapur. Stewart Gordon, for example remarks that “virtually
all of Malik Amber's [of Ahmednagar] troops were Marathas”
[v] Since this analysis was done using
documents, the amount in in spoke speech would be lower. Perso-Marathi might
have been a ‘high’ written register.
[vi] Joshi, “Kingdom of Bijapur”
[vii] I am not a Marathi speaker but
having lived in Bombay some words I have picked up are phakt (faqat), jakāt (zakāt),
bajār (bāzār), majā (mazā), rajā (razā). Of course, given Bombay’s status as a large city, a
lot of them might have come in via Dakni/Hindi-Urdu rather than directly from Persian
as such.
[viii]
In the absence of any Anti-Defection Law like instrument, t
his constant shifting of sides was rather
common in the Deccan at the time.
