A short history of the rasgulla

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First published on Scroll.

There are many important, even vital things that Bengal claims to have contributed to India. Number-1-all-time-best Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, Indian nationalism and the bottom line of the WellSpring Pharmaceutical Corporation (makers of Gelusil antacid) all owe their existence to Bengal. But more than anything else, however, Bengal has touched India via a soft, pearly white globe of cheese, dipped in thick sugar syrup.

The rasgulla, ladies and gents, is as Bengali as Communism. However, just like some reactionaries claim foreign origin for Marx babu, an extra-Bengali source is being claimed for the rasgulla. Odisha (earlier Orissa and even earlier Kalinga) has staked a Geographical Indication claim on the confectionery.

Odiya claim

This bold assertion rests on the fact that the Jagannath Temple in Puri uses rasgullas as prasad during the Rath Yatra. Laxmidhar Pujapanda, public relations officer of the temple, is quoted by the Times of India arguing: "Rasgulla has been part of Rath Yatra rituals ever since the Jagannath temple came into existence in the 12th century."

Unfortunately, this claim doesn’t have much by way of backing. The Chhapan Bhog (ritual offering to Lord Krishna) of the temple does not mention the rasgulla and there is nothing to say that the tradition of offering the sweetmeat didn’t originate sometime in the recent past.

There is also the fact that, as noted food historian KT Achaya points out, cheese was taboo in Hinduism since the act of splitting milk was seen as profane. A logical extension from the sacred status that milk held in the religion. Offering up a sweet made of cheese (in this case cottage cheese or chhana) as a Brahmanical offering in the 12th century seems highly unlikely.

The real cheese

In fact, before the 17th century, there are no references to cheese in India at all. As food writer and historian Chitra Banerji says, “It is notable that in all the myths about the young Krishna [a later incarnation of Vishnu], who was bought up by foster parents among the dairy farmers of Brindaban [in the state of Uttar Pradesh] there are thousands of references to milk, butter, ghee and yoghurt, but none to chhana.”

Not only in mythology, chhana (cottage cheese, the base used in the rasgulla), is conspicuously absent even in medieval Indian history. Banerji has studied the medieval Hindu reformer Chaitanya’s food habits and while he seemed to have a great fondness for sweets, including dairy-based ones, there is no mention of sweets with chhana as a base. In medieval Bengal, in fact, the sandesh was made out of khoa, or condensed milk solids. Only later did it come to use cheese.

How then did Bengalis come by cheese?

In medieval India, if you lived by the coast, very often the most impactful power wasn’t the Mughal emperor far out in Delhi or even your local king. Instead, the very distant Portugal might have been more important to you.

Portuguese India

Sealed off from the land route to Asia by the powerful Arabs, the Portuguese turned this adversity into profit and poured all their energies into the sea with the aim of becoming a major naval power.

In 1498, Vasco Da Gama “discovered” India via a route the Arabs had been using for at least two millennia before him. The Portuguese, though, meant business and their superior naval firepower soon displaced the Arabs from India’s west coast. Not long after, the Iberians had the entire Indian coast at their disposal, from Chittagong in Bengal to Bombay (as they named it) in the Konkan.

These Portuguese newcomers had a massive influence on India’s coastal cultures. Though mostly forgotten now, this age is quiescently preserved in the languages that came into contact with Portuguese. Since this was the first European power India experienced on a large scale, a large number of Western concepts use Portuguese loans. Both Bengali and Marathi, for example, use the Portuguese word pao for western-style bread. Marathi borrowed the Portuguese name for a new, brown tuber imported from South America: batata. Almari (almirah), chaabi (key), girja (church), istri (iron) and Ingrej (English) are all words that the Bengalis took from the Portuguese. Even “harmad” a Bengali slang word meaning “ruffian”, comes from the word “armada”, referring to the poor reputation of the Portuguese sailors who mostly came up the riverine Bengal delta as pirates and raiders.

Another significant addition was made in cuisine. The Portuguese loved their fresh cottage cheese, which they made by adding citric acid to boiled milk. KT Acharya writes: “This routine technique may have lifted the Aryan taboo on deliberate milk curdling and given the traditional Bengali moira [confectioner] a new material to work with.”

The three cheeses of Bengal

This link to the Portuguese has another strong source: Francois Bernier. Bernier, a Frenchman, was the personal physician to the Mughal price Dara Shikoh and he left behind a highly influential record of his travels in India. He mentions that “Bengal likewise is celebrated for its sweetmeats, especially in places inhabited by the Portuguese, who are skillful in the art of preparing them and with whom they are an article of considerable trade”.

The Portuguese, in all, ended up introducing three types of acid-curdled cheeses to Bengal. One is obviously the basic chhana, milk split with citric acid, consumed fresh. The second is the incredibly tasty smoked Bandel Cheese, an Anglo-Indian favourite which is still available in a few shops in the British-era New Market of Kolkata. The third is today called the Dhakai Paneer. Food writer Kalyan Karmakar explains that Dhakai Paneer has “nothing to do with ‘paneer’” and is “more like a tight feta”. It is now only found in Dhaka.

Chhana, of course, also spread to North India, where it was compressed into blocks and given the Persian name for cheese – “paneer” (a name that Turkish also borrowed).

Now how this chhana was fashioned into the rasgulla is the bone of contention. While we can be pretty sure the Jagannath temple story is not true (given that there was no cheese in India before the Portuguese), who first thought of forging this stuff into those small heavenly little globes is not known.

The Steve Jobs of rasgulla

Maybe it was invented in Bengal and taken to Odisha. Maybe Odiya cooks, very common in rich Bengali households, bought it to Bengal. Given the lack of records, it is impossible to tell.

However, one thing is more certain: the modern method of rasgulla preparation owes its genesis to a Bengali gentlemen from Kolkata called Nobin Chandra Das. He basically boiled the chhana balls in the syrup, making it spongier and, more importantly, from the point of view of commerce, gave it a longer shelf life.

It is this Nobin Chandra Das rasgulla that spread throughout India. While Das is often credited as the inventor of the rasgulla, a title that many Odiyas take great umbrage to, at the very least he is to the confectionary what Steve Jobs was to the smartphone. Even if Das didn’t invent the original rasgulla, it was he who tweaked it and took it to market, making it the popular sweet that we all love.

Given this history, and also the fact that it is now almost a pan-India food, any Geographical Indication claims that Odisha might make on the rasgulla would be just a little unfair.

Babur, Timur and Shastri: as Modi visits Tashkent, a short history of Indo-Uzbek ties

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi kicks off his tour of Central Asia on Monday with a visit to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is a speck in modern India’s view of the world but the subcontinent's history has greatly been influenced by a man who was born here in 1483: the founder of the Mughal Empire, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur.

Given the saffron turn in events, many Indians actively revile Babar. But Uzbekistan celebrates the founder of the Mughal Empire as a national hero. Babur’s home is now a museum. Parks and monuments are dedicated to him. The Uzbekis even have an organisation – the Babur International Foundation – expressly devoted to the study of Babur’s history.

Despite this retrospective adulation, Babur didn't have an easy time in his homeland. Although Babur is descended from the fearsome Timur, he was himself born to a rather modest father, the ruler of the small principality of Fargana. Babur struggled to gain a toehold in his home and was eventually forced into neighbouring Afghanistan. It was here that his military genius flowered and he ruled Kabul for more than a decade. He loved his time in Kabul and after he died, his body was buried in the city. His tomb is still there in the city and in fact, the Kabulis see him as a hero too.

Babur could never go back to his land of birth. Instead, he came to India, where the empire he founded is often seen with hostility in modern times, in spite of being a seminal influence in the formation of modern India.  The influence of the Mughal empire can be seen from the fact that in 1857, when the Indian soldiers of the British army revolted, the first place they headed for was the Mughal palace in Delhi. The emperor, although powerless and poor – he received a pension from the British – was still seen a symbol of national unity and thus provided the sepoys the legitimacy they needed.

The Mughals

When Babur first came to India, though, he didn't like it very much. He pined for the mountains and melons of Central Asia, even though he noted how much Indians liked the mango but churlishly added, “It is not so good as to warrant such praise”.

His descendants, however, quickly took to the subcontinent and, of course, the mango. Babur’s grandson, Akbar, planted the “Lakh Bagh”, a mango orchard containing one lakh trees in Darbhanga, Bihar.

While they might have taken to Indian fruit, the Mughals always had a desire to take back the birthplace of their founder. At the height of Mughal power, Shah Jahan sent his sons, Murad and Aurangzeb into Central Asia, with the ultimate aim of conquering the legendary city of Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan. The Mughal army never did reach the city, being furiously tormented by the Uzbek tribes in a land that was, after more than a hundred years, now completely foreign to them.

Historian Abraham Eraly writes that in spite of spending Rs 20 million on this campaign, the Mughals gained nothing from it.

Timur’s sack of Delhi

While the Delhi Mughals had great trouble in trying to reach Samarkand, their ancestor, Timur, the ruler of Samarkand reached Delhi with relative ease in 1398. And like in Baghdad and Damascus, Timur sacked Delhi with brutal ferocity. While he did not much like Delhi’s citizens, he did warm to the city’s architecture, making sure to take back a great many builders and architects back to Samarkand.  It also seems that Timur so impressed with the Jami Masjid in Feroz Shah Kotla that he copied a large part of its design to build Samarkand’s greatest mosque, the Bibi Khanum.

Timur is also a national hero in Uzbekistan and Modi might even catch a glimpse of his statue as he is being driven around Tashkent.

While that might be terrible enough, Tashkent has even more recent bad memories for India. In 1966, the Soviets moderated peace talks between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the 1965 War. The Indian delegation was led by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who died a sudden death immediately after the peace agreement was signed. His official cause of death was a heart attack but his family suspected foul play. Nothing, however, could be ascertained since no postmortem was conducted.

On his Facebook wall, Modi said that he would pay his tributes to Shastri during this Tashkent visit.

Rajnath's Maharana Pratap vs Akbar diatribe marks the complete communalisation of Indian history

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Of the many ways a sidelined minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party government can grab some attention, nothing seems to be more effective than stirring the communal pot. That’s exactly what Home Minster Rajnath Singh did on Sunday, hinting at a grand epithetical conspiracy to deny Mewar’s ruler, Maharana Pratap Singh his due, even while setting up a comparison with Pratap’s contemporary, Mughal emperor Akbar, who fought Pratap in the Battle of Haldighati in 1576.

Our text books have not been able to fully recognise Maharana Pratap's contribution and significance in India's history.

— Rajnath Singh (@BJPRajnathSingh) May 17, 2015

If Akbar can be called 'Akbar the Great' for his contribution then why can't Maharana Pratap be recognised as 'Maharana Pratap the Great'

— Rajnath Singh (@BJPRajnathSingh) May 17, 2015 

Maha meaning

Secret conspiracies and shadowy visions of victimisation are, in many ways, the bread and butter of the Hindutva ideology that Rajnath Singh subscribes to – a rare case of a majority group running afraid of a minority. In this case, though, the patent absurdity of Rajnath’s Singh’s victimisation complex can be seen from the fact that "maha"’ – the prefix in Pratap’s title of "Maha-rana" – in a number of Indian languages, including Singh’s mother tongue of Hindi, literally means “great”.

@BJPRajnathSingh there's already a Maha in his name. Do you propose calling him Ultramaharana Pratap?

— oculus (@daddy_san) May 17, 2015 

Great Rana Pratap The Great... This changes everything! https://t.co/YYYnB11WUc

— Ashwin Mushran (@ashwinmushran) May 17, 2015

Like the absurdity of the accusation that the descriptor “great” isn’t associated with Pratap Singh’s name, the underlying charge that somehow India’s official histories give more primacy to Akbar, over his adversary Pratap is absurd.

Akbar forgotten, Pratap remembered Far from mollycoddling Akbar, modern-day India, in a willful act of amnesia, seems to have completely forgotten one of its most impactful rulers. Let us take public works, given their high visibility: there seem to be no roads, roundabouts, airports or museums named after Akbar, post-1947. There is an Akbar Road in Lutyens’ Dehi but credit for that goes to the British, who made sure that their new capital city embedded the historical memory of the seven cities of Delhi. Akbar might have been one of the most enlightened rulers of his age whose actions would shape the subcontinent for centuries, but for the modern Indian state, he seems to be a persona non grata.

In comparison, the Indian state takes great care to publicly remember Maharana Pratap. Kolkata has a park named after him, Mumbai a chowk and Lucknow a road. Udaipur’s airport is called the Maharana Pratap Airport and Delhi’s interstate bus terminal is named after the Rana. Equestrian statues of Pratap abound across India, with one even making it to Parliament – one of only three medieval rulers to be so feted (the other two being Ranjit Singh and Shivaji).

Clearly then, Rajnath Singh’s paranoia of Akbar swamping Pratap in India’s historical memory is just that – paranoia.

Material impact

What is interesting in this massive imbalance in the way India fetes Pratap over Akbar is, materially, how much more impactful the latter was compared to the former. Akbar laid the foundation of an empire that ruled the subcontinent for three centuries. The structure of governance he set up was adopted by the Raj and elements of it still exist today. The musicians he patronised fundamentally impacted Indian music and our modern songs and films still feature tunes composed in Akbar’s court. The religious scholarship that was undertaken in his kingdom defines our theology today: Tulsidas was a subject of Akbar’s.

Pratap, on the other hand, was the rule of small principality which, soon after his death, merged with the Mughal empire. The material sphere of his impact, by extension, will obviously be magnitudes smaller than Akbar’s.

But, it might be argued, material impact isn’t everything. Pratap’s tale of holding out against an overbearing foe is a gripping and inspiring tale. Fair enough.

Some heroes are more equal than others

But India has a rich history and there are other tales of valour: one is the story of Chand Bibi, the remarkable Queen Regent of Ahmednagar, a Sultanate in the Deccan. Chand Bibi, like Pratap, also defended her kingdom against the forces of Emperor Akbar in the face of overwhelming odds. And she did it as a woman, with all the difficulties that would entail. In a fascinating bit from historian Richard Eaton’s book, A Social History of the Deccan, a Mughal general mocks Ahmadnagar’s diplomat, Afzal Khan, calling him a “eunuch” for fighting under a woman. In a line that Bollywood would take up after four centuries, Khan simply stated that he had “eaten the salt of the Sultans of the Deccan” and would die for them.

In spite of this, Chand Bibi is a forgotten figure. There are no airports, roads or bus terminals named after her for her courage. No roundabouts with her perched atop a rearing steed.

We see the same dialectic at play with Shivaji in his battles against Aurangzeb. Chand Bibi was the first of many powers in the Deccan to resist Mughal supremacy. Five sultanates in the Deccan countered Mughal belligerence as part of a long drawn out war and it was only Akbar’s great-grandson, Aurangzeb who was able to subdue them. Yet of all these tales of Deccan resistance, why is Shivaji the only one played up in the state’s histories and in the popular realm? Why is, say, Malik Ambar, Peshwa of Ahmednagar, who pioneered the light cavalry guerrilla tactics that Shivaji would use later on, forgotten?

Hindu-Muslim narrative

If the unique key to being remembered in modern India is not material impact or even intangibles like valour, what is it? What separates out Shivaji from Chand Bibi or Malik Ambar in the Deccan. And from the Battle of Haldighati, why is Pratap remembered but Akbar and the general commanding the Mughal army, Man Singh of Amber, left to fade out?

The answer it seems is a narrative that sets up a millenarian belief in communal conflict – a largely imagined Hindu-Muslim crusade. Anything that can be force-fitted into this narrative seems to be worth celebrating as a part of the history of modern India. Anything that doesn’t is forgotten. Shivaji versus Aurangzeb plugs in to this narrative as does Maharana Pratap against Akbar. Both Pratap and Shivaji are presumably glorified for supposedly fighting Muslims. Man Singh, Akbar’s general is forgotten. As are the exploits of Chand Bibi and Malik Ambar in the absence of any overarching narrative of Hindu-Muslim conflict.

History is often seen as a passive recording of events gone by. Far from it, it is an active process of creating a past and is informed as much by our present as by previous events. It seems that when we create our national histories, we require a mirror of our 20th century obsession with communal categories.

Jinnahesque gesture

This is something that Muhammad Ali Jinnah had bought up in 1940 as he laid out his arguments for what he believed would prove the existence of the “Two Nation Theory”.

“It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different, and different episode[s]. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. “  

There are a great many ideas that have been relegated to obsolescence since 1940 but Jinnah’s malevolent history lesson still rings true, it seems. Rajnath Singh’s Pratap versus Akbar is a small illustration. Narendra Modi himself made his views quite clear when he announced, soon after being sworn in as prime minster, that he considers the past “1,200 years” of Indian history a period of “slavery”. For Modi, literally not a single Indian Muslim ruler could be a positive part of the nation’s history. Moreover, to mark Modi’s first anniversary in office, the BJP is planning a celebration of India’s Hindu historical icons.

The Jinnahesque prescription of deriving inspiration from different sources of history, one apparently Hindu and the other apparently Muslim, it seems has now taken root in the highest echelons of India’s government. Acche din, indeed.

India-Bangla land swap: was the world's strangest border created by a game of chess?

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Parliament on Wednesday passed the historic Constitution (119th Amendment) bill, which will put in effect a four- decade-old agreement between India and Bangladesh to redraw their shared border.

Some people have claimed  that the bill will resolve a border dispute between the two countries. This is not so. Unlike its relations with China or Pakistan, India has no boundary squabble with Bangladesh. Each country is in perfect agreement over where the border lies. The issue is that this mutually agreed-on border is ridiculously complex, causing difficulties to not only the two governments but also the people trapped inside this cartographical maze. The bill seeks to swap land and redraw a more normal border.

What was wrong with the border?

The northern part of the India-Bangladeshi border is dotted with hundred of enclaves, called chhits in Bangla (meaning fragments).

An enclave is a little pocket of land surrounded completely by another country’s territory. Enclaves aren’t that rare and there are a few around the world, mostly in Europe. The most famous enclave probably is the Vatican City, surrounded completely by Italy. And some of them have played a historical part: one of the reasons why the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, setting off World War II, was due to tensions over East Prussia, a German enclave in Poland.

Nowhere, however, are they as numerous as in north Bengal. India possesses 106 enclaves of territory inside the Bangladeshi mainland. Bangladesh has 92 little pockets inside India. Most of these are ridiculously small and their total area is a little above 100 square kilometres. The smallest enclave, Upan Chowki Bhaini is all of 53 square metres – about the size of an average Mumbai flat.

It gets more complex: of these, 24 are counter-enclaves. Which means, an enclave within an enclave. So, for example, you’ll have a piece of Bangladeshi within Indian which, in turn, is within Bangladesh, a little like a Russian matryoshka doll.

But there’s still one more level: one of these is a counter-counter-enclave, the only one of its kind in the world. Dahala Khagrabari is a piece of India within Bangladesh, which is within India which, in turn, is within Bangladesh.

If this is too complex, here’s a schematic diagram.

How did it get to be like this?

Local legend has it that three centuries ago, the Raja of Cooch Behar and the faujdaar of a district in Mughal Bengal played chess with local villages as wager. These matches must have been closely fought, since neither player won a clean victory and pockets of land were left behind in Mughal and Cooch Behari territory.

More boringly, but also probably more accurately, academic Brendon Whyte from the University of Melbourne, describes how a war between the Mughals and the north Bengal princely state of Cooch Behar might have led to this peculiar situation. The war ended with a peace treaty in 1713, an overall Mughal victory, but it seems the Mughals were unable to evict some of the more powerful Cooch Behari zamindars from their lands, even as they had conquered the territory around those lands.  Conversely, in some cases, Mughal soldiers had captured some estates within the kingdom of Cooch Behar, whom the king did not have the power to expel.

Since Cooch Behar had now, to use RR Martin’s term, bent the knee and was paying tribute to Delhi, these enclaves didn’t bother the Mughals that much. Mughal India was a feudal empire, not a modern nation state. Land was not really imbued with any sacredness for it, and as long as the Emperor was getting his tribute, he was fine with the way things were.

Soon enough, the British Raj took over the possession of the Mughals. Which wasn’t really an issue either, since Cooch Behar was subordinate to the British Raj, another Empire.

An international issue

These dormant enclaves suddenly turned out to be an international flashpoint when the British left India. In 1947, when Sir Cyril Radcliffe was slicing up the cake of British India between India and Pakistan, he didn’t tamper with these enclaves since Cooch Behar was a princely state, not a part of British India. In 1947, therefore, the Cooch Behari enclaves which were once in Mughal India and then in British India, were transferred to India and Pakistan. In turn, Pakistan and India ended up with enclaves, once owned by the Mughals, in Cooch Behar.

The Indian enclave issue was solved in 1949, as Cooch Behar acceded to Delhi, one of the last princely states to do so. Now this was well and truly an international issue with Indian enclaves in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and Pakistani enclaves in India (earlier Cooch Behar).

Efforts to solve it

Logically, India and Pakistan exchanging their enclaves was a patently obvious solution to the issue. Enclaves (in all cases other than one) meant the country which had sovereignty over the land had no de facto control over it anyway. Moreover, it made the lives of people living in those enclaves terrible since they were, in effect, stateless.

Logic, though, is usually in short supply when it comes to Indo-Pakistan disputes and the issue has festered right up till now. Obtuseness in this matter is typified by Dohogram, a Pakistani enclave in India, the only one in which the state was present. Pakistani policemen were stationed there with India’s permission. In times of tension, when India did not give permission, Pakistani police would simply scoot over, dodging Indian fire, given that the enclave was only 85 metres from the Pakistani mainland. An international game of tag, with its own safe zone.

In 1965, in fact, the two nations fought a two-week battle over this small parcel of land. In the end, Pakistan surrendered, a ceasefire was negotiated and Pakistani citizens were allowed back into the enclave.

This jingoistic belligerence meant that this simple issue became intractable. Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani Prime Minister Feroze Khan Noon did arrive at an agreement in 1958, which was later ratified by Pakistan. However, writes historian Willem Van Schendel from the University of Amsterdam, “it became a sensitive political issue in India, where oppositional parties branded it an unconstitutional act”. The subsequent 1965 war meant that an agreement with Pakistan was politically untenable for any Indian government.

Indira-Mujib Agreement

Another chance came in 1974, after the creation of Bangladesh, with the signing of the Indira-Mujib Agreement, which negotiated a swap of enclaves. The agreement was ratified by Bangladesh’s parliament but, just like the Nehru-Noon Agreement, it became a victim of internal politics in India, as state leaders in West Bengal and Assam forced Delhi to not operationalise the treaty, which has hung in limbo till the present.

India was intransigent on this issue since the land swap would mean a net loss of land for it, about 40 square kilometres, equal to the size of a city neighbourhood. Of course, this area  is insignificant compared to the benefits a conventional border would bring. But land is an emotive issue and an easy target for politicians looking for a handle. “We shall not allow an inch of Assam’s land to be handed over to Bangladesh,” thundered Chandra Mohan Patowary, president of the Asom Gana Parishad, in 2011, illustrating the political difficulties that crop up in such a situation.

In opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in fact, opposed moves by the Manmohan Singh government to ratify the Indira-Mujib Agreement in 2011. Narendra Modi, however, changed his mind when he came to power, telling Bangladesh Prime Minster Sheikh Hasina, “aap mujh pe bharosa rakhiye” (trust me), on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting last September.

Like every Central government before it, though, Modi faced tough opposition from West Bengal and Assam. In fact, till the last moment, Assam was to be excluded from this present deal, given pressure from the state BJP unit. However, last minute firefighting meant that Modi got everyone on board and managed to iron out a 300-year old problem.

 First published on Scroll.

Bengali New Year: how Akbar invented the modern Bengali calendar

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First published on Scroll.

April 15 was the Bengali New Year (in West Bengal; 14th in Bangladesh), known in Bangla as Pohela Boishakh. A number of Indian calendars, of course, have their new year around now: the Punjabi, Assamese and Tamil, to name a few. The modern Bengali calendar though is unique amongst these, given that it was introduced by the Mughal Empire.

More than two decades into his rule, Emperor Akbar, third in the Mughal line, had set up, what was at the time, the most powerful empire on Earth.  Secure in his power, the emperor’s attention shifted to the more intellectual side of things: religion, philosophy and the arts. Amartya Sen’s book, The Argumentative Indian, mentions how Akbar's interest in various religions led him to dabble in the calendars of various faiths as well. As a result, as Sen put it, he invented “a combined calendar which paralleled his interest in floating a combined religion, the Din-e-Ilahi”. This calendar, modestly titled the Tarikh-e-Ilahi, calendar of God, was introduced in the year 1584 AD.

Taxman

Many historians believe, however, that Akbar chose the calendar not out of any interest in theology but in response to a much higher power: taxes. In their compendium, the Historical Dictionary of the Bengalis, Kunal Chakrabarti and Shubhra Chakrabarti write that earlier, the Mughal Empire was having trouble collecting land revenue since they followed the Islamic Hijri calendar. Given that the Islamic calendar is lunar, it did not coincide with the seasons, leading to much confusion.

Akbar therefore asked his royal astronomer to devise a new calendar which merged together the Islamic calendar, the historical Bengali calendar (based upon a Sanskrit astronomy text, the Surya Sidhant) and Akbar’s own date of coronation. The last point might sound a bit pompous but, as anyone who’s seen Mughal-e-Azam would attest to, Mr Akbar did have a bit of an ego problem.

The new calendar that was devised was a bit complex. Its first year, just like the Islamic calendar, was the date of the Hijra, Prophet Mohammed’s emigration from Mecca to Medina. From this year 1 to Akbar’s coronation (in 1556 AD), the calendar ticks off the years as a lunar calendar. Up till here, the Tarikh-e-Ilahi and the Islamic calendar are in step: for both, Akbar's coronation occurs in the year 963. From this annum onwards though, things change – after all, it’s a big year: the Emperor's coronation. From the coronation onwards, the years start to tick off as per the old traditional Bengali calendar, which was a solar one, and solves the problem of mismatched seasons.

Bengali year 1422

The “formula”, as it were, for calculating the Bengali year, therefore is: Islamic year at Akbar’s crowning (963) + current Gregorian solar year (2015) - Gregorian solar year at Akbar’s crowning (1556).

This gives us 1422, which, voila, is the Bengali year which starts today.

The Tarikh-e-Ilahi was introduced for the entire Mughal Empire and, like the Din-e-Ilahi, it really didn’t last much beyond Akbar’s lifetime. The one exception was in Bengal, where it became integral to both agriculture as well as the Hindu religion. As a result, it is interesting to note that when, say, Durga Pujo dates will be calculated for the Bengali year 1422, the two events referenced (unknown to most Bengalis themselves) will be the migration of Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina and Akbar’s coronation.

On that terribly syncretic note, here’s Tarikh par Tarikh wishing its readers shubho noboborsho. Happy new year.

Mercenaries and merchants: A short history of the strong ties between India and Yemen

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First published on Scroll.

As Houthi rebels overran the Yemeni capital of Sana’a in March, the embattled government shifted its capital to Aden. For many Indians, and especially for residents of Mumbai, the name of the city has an unusual ring of familiarity to it. It is evoked, for instance,  in the name of major thoroughfare in the Central Mumbai neighbourhood of Matunga: Adenwala Road is a the leafy symbol of a deep if forgotten connection between India and Yemen.

The road gets its name from a Parsi family that had such strong business links with Aden, they decided to make it part of their identity. But trade wasn't the only bridge between India and Yemen.  Islam has long bound the two countries, with clerics and lay people travelling back and forth from the medieval age.

The strategic location of Yemen, close to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, means that it has always been an important centre of Islamic theology. As a result, the medieval age saw Islamic saints come down from Yemen to India, especially the Deccan. The most significant transfer of this sort might have been the migration of the spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community to Gujarat in the 16th century.

Yemenis in India

Yemen also exported fighters. Mercenaries from Yemen were well known for their skills of war and were in great demand, especially in the Deccan. Bahadur Shah, the Sultan of Gujarat in the 16th century had 10,000 Yemenis in his army and and Nana Phadnavis’ Maratha empire employed 5,000 fighters who were the highest paid soldiers in the entire army. Later on, with the fall of the Marathas, these Yemenis would serve the Hyderabad Nizams, where they were just as well regarded: they often served as guards of the Nizam’s palace.

The descendants of those soldiers still live in India. On the Konkan coast, there are Marathi-speaking Muslims of Yemeni descent. They are called Jamaatis and their Marathi is heavily influenced by Arabic loanwords, reflecting their origins. In Hyderabad, they are called the Chaush and many of still live in the Barkas neighbourhood.

The traffic between India and Yemen intensified greatly after 1839, when the British conquered Aden and declared it a free port. The city came to be used as a coal refuelling station for steamships sailing  between India and Europe. The building of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the city into a entrepot for trade between Europe, Asia and Africa.

Cowasji Dinshaw (the name “Adenwala” would be added later), a Parsi merchant of Mumbai, saw this potential early on and arrived in Aden in 1845. He proceeded to remodel the port to make it capable of handling the steamer traffic between the Indian Ocean and Europe, turning Aden the Singapore of its age. At the turn of the century, his son, Hormusjee, expanded the business, eventually acting as bankers, naval agents, shipowners, managing agents for mills and steamship companies. When the Suez Canal, the world’s largest shipping company at the time, the British India Steam Navigation Company, hired the Adenwalahs as their agents in Aden.

Uncrowned kings of Aden

Vispi Dastur, postal historian and president of the Bombay Parsi Association, says that the family were at the time knows as the “uncrowned kings of Aden”. In 1911, King George V was hosted by the Adenwalas in Aden as he travelled to India for the Delhi Durbar in order to celebrate his coronation. The chairs that were used in that function, says Dastur, are still used by the family's descendants in their Adenwala Baug mansion in Tardeo Road.

Aden wasn’t done with giving India tycoons. In 1950, a 16-year-old boy named Dhirubhai Ambani made his journey to Aden, a city still ruled by the British, to work as a clerk for Besse & Co. Later on, Besse & Co. would become distributers for Shell and their petroleum products and it was here that Ambani first came up with the (at the time crazy) idea of building a oil refinery back home in India.

While most Indians are unaware of these centuries of interaction with Yemen, a rather delectable result of this connection is much more familiar: haleem.

Hareesah to haleem

The 10th-century Arab scribe Abu Muhammad al-Muzaffar ibn Sayyar wrote down a recipe in the Kitab al-Tabikh (The Book of Recipes) for a meat porridge that he called hareesah. The Kitab was a collection of recipes from the kitchens of the "kings and caliphs and lords and leaders" of Baghdad. It mentions a number of meat and wheat porridges and says that "if the wheat was beaten to a smooth paste" it was to be called hareesah.

Hareesah has survived well into the modern age, and is still popular in the Middle East as an staple during Ramzan. The Yemen mercenaries who came to the Deccan in the medieval age bought it with them. Sometime in the 1930s, Sultan Saif Nawaz Jung, a Hyderabadi Yemeni-origin noble in the Nizam's court, popularised hareesah by having it served at his feasts.

This hareesah was slowly Indianised in Hyderabad. The original dish contained only meat, wheat, cinnamon and ghee, cooked on a slow fire till everything turned to a mash. The Hyderabadis added a variety of dals. And, of course, masalas, India's secret weapon,  found their way into the dish.

This modified dish took the name “haleem” and was by the 1950s being sold in Hyderabad’s restaurants, especially during the Islamic fasting month of Ramzan. Soon, it spread to other parts of the country and became a Ramzan staple.

Shivaji, Afzal Khan and the Assembly Elections

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The Shivaji statue inside the fort,
inaugurated in the '50s by Nehru

The Shivaji-Afzal Khan encounter is Maharashtra’s most evocative tale and was used to the hilt in the Assembly Elections. In the midst of the polls, Tarikh par Tarikh travels to the venue of the battle and discovers the history that still lives and breathes there.

[An edited version of this piece was first published in the Hindu Business Line]

The recently concluded Maharashtra assembly elections saw an interesting intra-saffron contest, as the BJP and Shiv Sena ended their 25-year old alliance. Break-ups, though, are hard. So bitter was Uddhav Thackeray over being dumped, he even compared the BJP to the army of 17th century Bijapuri general, Afzal Khan. This might not seem like much at first glance, but if you’re acquainted with Maharashtra, you’ll know that Khan is the state’s most-hated villain.

His unpopularity stems from the fact that he was the main antagonist in the Battle of Pratapgarh against Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire. The status of Shivaji in Maharashtra has no parallels in any other part of the country. Every school child in the state learns of his heroic exploits and the traditional histories of Maharashtra (called bakhars) treat Shivaji as a quasi-divine figure, often inspired directly by the Goddess Bhavani. Each town in Maharashtra will have an equestrian Shivaji statue in its main square and in the capital city of Mumbai, its airport, its largest train station, largest park and principal museum, are all named after the Chhatrapati. Not surprisingly, the story of Shivaji’s encounter with Afzal Khan is known throughout the state and is one of its most enduring tales.

The Battle Site

The town closest to Pratapgarh fort today is the colonial-era hill station of Mahabaleshwar. Situated on a plateau, Mahabaleshwar has various “points” which overlook the valleys below. At Bombay Point, once I had zoned out the boisterous families, the valley that stretched out before me appeared gorgeous. Everywhere the eye could see, there were rolling hillsides of lush monsoon green interspersed with large splashes of canary yellow, courtesy the Graham’s Groundsel, a flower that’s aptly called the sonki (golden) in Marathi. If you were at Bombay Point on 8 November, 1659, however, a less pretty sight would have greeted you. In the Radtondi pass below, you would have watched the massive Bijapuri army rumble by, headed to the Pratapgarh fort where Shivaji was.

For a long time, the Bijapur Sultanate—the Deccan’s most powerful state—had been forced to ignore Shivaji, as the Maratha captured one Bijapuri fort after another in the Sahyadri hills. Bijapur’s internal strife and conflict with belligerent Mughal prince, Aurangzeb meant that Shivaji got a free hand. Finally in 1659, Bijapur dispatched one of its top generals, Afzal Khan, to confront Shivaji. To note one of the many ironies of that period, Shivaji’s father, Shahji, one of Bijapur’s most powerful nobles, had served alongside Afzal Khan in 1641, as Bijapur endeavoured to crush an uprising of rajas in Vellore.

As Afzal Khan marched to Pratapgarh, he 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. Today it is probably Maharashtra’s most popular temple, a status it had even in the 17th century.  Furthermore, as Stewart Gordan points out, “this behaviour was unprecedented for a Bijapuri force” given the kingdom’s past history of syncretism.

Not only was this act morally unconscionable, it was also highly impolitic since it served to alienate the bedrock of Bijapur's civil and military bureaucracy, Marathi Brahmans and Marathas. In the end, the strategy behind the destruction, that of forcing Shivaji to come down from the hills was also a failure. Shivaji knew his forces would be no match for Bijapur’s well-equipped army on the plains and, wisely, did not budge.

Khan, on the other hand, rashly, decided to pursue Shivaji, who then immediately retreated to his fort at Pratapgarh. Like many Deccan forts, Pratapgarh is perched on top of a hill. When I drove up to the fort, it loomed up sharply, its sheer black stone walls enclosed in mist, making it look ominously beautiful. As was obvious at first glance, the fort would be impossible to break into.

Afzal Khan was therefore forced to wait at the foothills of the Sahyadri in Wai. Time however was running out both for Shivaji, who had limited food supplies in the fort, and Khan whose massive army needed to be fed.  Khan therefore sent his envoy, Krishnaji Bhaskar to promise that Shivaji would be treated with respect and rewarded if he surrendered. Shivaji agreed to meet with Afzal Khan, but at the base of Pratapgarh fort, deep in the ghats. In this terrain, Bijapur’s heavy artillery would be useless and Shivaji’s men, who knew the Javli forest around Pratapgarh intimately, would have a tactical advantage over the Bijapuris.

The Encounter

Greatly underestimating Shivaji, Khan accepted this stipulation. He moved his massive army within a few miles of Pratapgarh in the village of Par, deep inside the Sahyadri hills.

Par is today a small village of about 30 shingle-roofed houses and one convenience store. The store stocks five-rupee bags of potato chips, Coke, hair oil and fairness cream. Unfortunately, I arrived just after lunch time and found the attendant asleep at the counter. The rest of the village was deserted, the afternoon siesta apparently being a popular Par tradition. Gingerly, I woke the attendant and asked him about Afzal Khan. Thankfully, he was a good-natured chap and didn’t mind his nap being interrupted. “There is an old mazaar from that period. Ramzaan is the caretaker,” he said, pointing me to Ramzaan’s house. In gratitude, I bought a bag of chips and a small tube of fairness cream.

Ramzaan, a man of about 70, and his wife were the only two Muslims in Par. The mazaar, he informed me, was the tomb of Amir Shah Bijapuri, the maternal uncle of Afzal Khan. Amir Shah had died the day the Bijapuri army reached Par and was buried there on top of a hillock. Unfortunately, by now, nothing remained of the original tomb, which had collapsed around 50 years back and a new modern structure built in its place. It was surrounded by graves, which, Ramzaan claimed, were of the Bijapuri soldiers killed in the battle.

As I chatted with Ramzaan, I discovered he knew an incredible amount about the history behind the battle. He rattled off the names of the Bijapur sultans, the names of Afzal Khan’s entourage and even the exact date of the battle itself (in the Islamic calendar). Amazed, I asked him how he knew so much. As it turned out, Ramzaan was a descendant of one the aides of Amir Shah, or so he claimed. “I am the 15th generation of my family to act as caretaker of this dargaah,” he informed me, a note of pride creeping into his voice.

While Amir Shah is not mentioned in the histories of Pratapgarh, it is recorded that Afzal Khan waited for two days in in Par before going off to negotiate terms with Shivaji. The two were to meet in private, unarmed, at the base of the Pratapgarh fort and discuss the terms of Shivaji’s surrender.
What happened next, however, is a Rashomon-like tale which depends greatly on which source you believe. In the Marathi bakhars, it is recounted that Khan resorted to treachery, attacking Shivaji with a hidden kataar (dagger). Parrying his blow, Shivaji hit back, disembowelling Khan with a hidden weapon of his own: a set of tiger claws. In the Persian accounts of the Mughals and Bijapuris, however, historians such as Khafi Khan claim Shivaji attacked first.

No matter the means, the end result was that Shivaji ended up killing Afzal Khan. As soon as Khan was dead, Shivaji’s forces attacked the unsuspecting Bijapur army in Par. The ensuing Battle of Pratapgarh was short and decisive as Khan’s leaderless troops were routed. This would be one of many instances in the career of Shivaji when his intelligence combined with his remarkable personal bravery would result in an improbable victory.

Modern Politics

Shivaji had Afzal Khan buried at the base of the Pratapgarh fort and, chivalrously, even had a tomb constructed for his vanquished opponent. As time passed, the local Muslims of the area, as is common across the subcontinent, started to treat the tomb as a mazaar. All this came to grinding halt in 2004 when, just before the General Elections, the VHP made the existence of the tomb into an issue. They even threatened to demolish the structure. It was a tense time and “for months no tourists came to Pratapgarh because of these politicians,” angrily remarked my Pratapgarh fort guide, Tanaji.

The police at the time managed to protect the tomb but, bowing to pressure, closed it to visitors and it remains shut to this day. I had barely walked up to within 50 metres of the tomb when 3 policemen all but pounced on me and forced me to leave the area. Amazingly, a garrison of 30 policemen has been maintained outside Afzal Khan’s tomb for the past decade in order to guard against further trouble.

After the VHP’s shenanigans, there is much sweet irony in the fact that today its close partner, the BJP is being associated with Afzal Khan. Of course, both incidents indicate how the history of this period has been completely distorted, being moulded, twisted and contorted into shapes which conform to the politics of the 20th century, either as a Hindu versus Muslim contest or a Maharashtrian versus non-Maharashtrian one.

Both Bijapur’s and Shivaji’s armies contained a mixture of faiths as was the norm in the Deccan at the time. Shivaji’s military commander-in-chief was Nurkhan Beg and the Maratha handpicked a Muslim, Sidi Ibrahim as one of the ten trusted commanders who were his first line of defence at the meeting with Afzal Khan. And while Shivaji’s army was largely Maratha so was Bijapur’s, the composition reflecting the martial traditions of the Maratha castes since the time of Malik Ambar and had nothing to do with a 17th century “sons-of-the-soil” policy. Similarly, on the Bijapuri side, religious identity was delinked from political loyalty. Afzal Khan’s trusted envoy, Krishnaji Bhaskar was a Marathi Brahman. Analogous to Shivaji’s faith in his Muslim soldiers, Khan had no issue in trusting his life with a Hindu and Bhaskar was one of the ten Bijapuri commanders at the meeting. In fact when Bhaskar saw his general rush out, severely wounded, he immediately sprung to Khan’s defence only to be cut down by Shivaji’s men.

Our politicians may not care much for history but this is one comparison that Uddhav Thackeray might regret making. Afzal Khan’s army came to Maharashtra only to be soundly defeated — the BJP, on the other hand, has swept the state.

Afzal Khan's tomb

The Pratapgarh fort 

The Pratapgarh fort

The Pratapgarh fort 

The Pratapgarh fort 

The mazaar of Afzal Khan's uncle

The Portuguese Influence on Bengali Cuisine

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"The two basic ingredients of Bengali sweets are sugar and milk. The milk is thickened either by
boiling it down to make a thick liquid called khoa, or by curdling it with lemon juice or yogurt to
produce curds, called channa. There is some debate as to whether the latter was a traditional
technique or a Portuguese contribution. Portuguese cheesemakers in Bengal used to produce
curds by breaking milk with acidic materials. One of their products was a salted smoked cheese
called Bandel Cheese, which is still made and sold in Calcutta"

This an excerpt from a lovely paper outlining the the Portuguese influence on Bengali cuisine presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery [which you can read here].

I also might add that I love Bandel cheese and make it a point to get some discs wheneuver I am back in Calcutta. If you're in the city, make sure to drop by the dairy section of New Market and have some.

The History of the Bengali Calendar

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Today is the Bengali New Year, 1421, so Shubho Nobo Borsho from Tarikh Par Tarikh! 

The Bengali Calendar, introduced by Mughal Emperor Akbar, has an interesting history. Here is an excerpt from Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian on the topic:

Akbar's attempt at introducing a combined calendar paralleled his interest in floating a combined religion, the Din-ilahi. On the calendrical front, Akbar may have begun by just taking note of various calendars (Hindu, Parsee, Jain, Christian and others), but he proceeded then to take the radical step of trying to devise a new synthetic one. In 992 Hijri (1584 CE, Gregorian), just short of the Hijri millennium, he promulgated the brand new calendar, viz. the Tarikh-ilahi, God's calendar - no less. The zero year of Tarikh-ilahi corresponds to 1556 CE (the year in which Akbar ascended to the throne), but that is not its year of origin, which was 1584. It was devised as a solar calendar (like the Hindu and Iranian/Parsee calendars of the region), but had some features of the Hijri as well, and also bore the mark of a person who knew the calendrical diversity represented by Christian, Jain and other calendars in local use in Akbar's India. The Tarikh-ilahi became the official calendar, and the decrees of the ruling Moghal emperor of India (the farmans) henceforth carried both the synthetic Tarikh and the Muslim Hijri date, and occasionally only the Tarikh.

Even though Tarikh-ilahi was introduced with a grand vision, its acceptance outside the Moghal court was rather limited, and the subcontinent went on using the Hijri as well as the older Indian calendars. While Akbar's constructive calendar died not long after he himself did, his various synthesizing efforts left a lasting mark on Indian history. But has the calendrical expression, in particular, of Akbar's synthesizing commitment been lost without trace?

Not so. There is a surviving calendar, the Bengali San, which was clearly influenced by Tarikh-ilahi, and which still carries evidence of the integrating tendency that is so plentifully present in many other fields of Indian culture and tradition (such as music, painting, architecture, and so on). It is year 1407 now (as I write in 2000 CE) in the Bengali calendar, the San. What does 1407 stand for? Encouraged by Akbar's Tarikh-ilahi, the Bengali calendar was also 'adjusted' as far as the numbering of year goes in the late sixteenth century. In fact, using the zero year of the Tarikh, 1556 CE (corresponding to year 963 in the Hijri calendar), the Bengali solar calendar, which has a procedure of reckoning that is very similar to the solar Saka system, was 'adjusted' to the lunar Hijri number, but not to the lunar counting system. That is, the 'clock' of this solar calendar was put back, as it were, from Saka 1478 to Hijri 963 in the newly devised Bengali San. However, since the Bengali San (like the Saka era) remained solar, the Hijri has marched ahead of the San, being a lunar calendar (with a mean length of 354 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes per year), and the Bengali San - just turned 1407 - has fallen behind Hijri as well.

  

This (somewhat complicated) combination of the lunar Muslim Calender and the solar Hindu system means that every Bengali year references two events: One, the Hijra or the migration of Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina, which is the year 1 of both the Islamic as well as the Bengali Calendar. The other event the Calender references is Akbar’s coronation, at which point the Mughal Empire retrospectively changed its official calendar from Islamic (lunar) to Akbar's own Tarikh-ilahi (solar).

The “formula”, as it were, for calculating the Bengali year, therefore is: Islamic year at Akbar’s crowning (963) + Current Gregorian (solar) year (2014) - Gregorian (solar) year at Akbar’s crowning (1556)

This gives us 1421, which, voila, is the current Bengali year today.

As Sen himself points out later on, it is fascinating to note that when, say, Durga Pujo dates will be calculated for the Bengali year 1421, the two events referenced (unknown to most Bengalis themselves) will be the migration of Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina as well as Akbar’s coronation.

It sometimes gets a bit tiresome when people drone on about how diverse and multicultural India is. Examples like this, though, do make it a difficult point to refute.

The Maratha Invasion of Bengal

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Road names often have a story to tell. In Calcutta, given its long continuous history, even more so (New Delhi, in contrast, although nominally a part of ‘Delhi’ does not really have a history continuous with the old city).  One of those is the curiously named Marhatta Ditch Lane in Baghbazar in North Calcutta.

The lane refers to an actual ditch built in the 1740s along what was then the northern extremity of Calcutta. Its purpose? To stop the marauding bands of Maratha cavalry who were pillaging Bengal at the time.

In 1741, the cavalry of Raghoji Bhosle, the Maratha ruler of Nagpur, started to pillage western Bengal under the command of Bhaskar Pandit. Bengalis called these Marathas “Bargis” which is a corruption of the Marathi word, "bargir" (etymology: Persian) which means “light cavalry”. Malik Ambar, the celebrated Prime Minister of Ahmadnagar Sultanate, had instituted the Deccan practice of guerrilla warfare, which at that time took the name bargir-giri¹. These swift hit-and-run guerrilla tactics became a part of the military heritage of the Deccan, being used to great effect by Shivaji and, eventually, by the Marathas against the hapless residents of Bengal.

In the 1740s, the bargir-giri of Bhosle’s army confounded the forces of Nawab Alivardi Khan, the ruler of Bengal. While the Bengali army tried its best and even defeated the Marathas in the few times they fought head-to-head, most of the time, the Marathas cavalry would simply skirt the Khan’s slow-moving infantry, being interested only in looting.

In the 10 years that they plundered Bengal, their effect was devastating, causing great human hardship as well as economic privation. In the Maharashtra Purana, a poem in Bengali written by Gangaram, the poet describes the destruction caused by the raiders in great detail:

“This time none escaped,

Brahmanas, and Vaisnavas, Sannyasis, and householders,

all had the same fate, and cows were massacred along with men.”

So great was the terror of the Bargi that, in a Gabbar-esque twist, lullabies were composed in which mothers would use the fear of a Maratha raid to get their children to go to sleep. These poems are still popular amongst Bengalis even today. One of them went something like this:

Chhele ghumalo, paada judaalo bargi elo deshe 
Bulbulite dhaan kheyechhe, khaajnaa debo kishe?
Dhaan phurolo, paan phurolo, khaajnaar opay ki?
Aar kotaa din shobur koro, roshoon boonechhi 

(A very inelegent translation:

When the children fall asleep, silence sets in, the Bargis come to our country
Birds have eaten the grains, how shall I pay the rent (to the Bargi)?
All our food and drink is over, how shall I pay the rent?
Wait for a few days, I have sown garlic)

Not only did the Bargis loot the countryside, but in a sign of their effectiveness, managed to raid the capital, Murshidabad and even sack the house of one of the richest Indians at the time, the Marwari banker, Jagat Seth.

In spite of this, the Marathas never did attack Calcutta, in all probability being paid off by the British. The ditch, though, did serve to provide citizens with a nickname: ditchers, i.e everyone who lived south of the ditch, in "proper" Calcutta. Eventually the ditch was filled up and was made into what is now Upper Circular Road. A concrete architectural record of British efforts to guard against Bargi raids, though, remains in the existence of Semaphore towers which dot the countryside of Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand. A system of communication which predated the telegraph, it consisted of towers which basically sent out smoke signals to the next tower and so on and served to warn off an impending Bargi raid.

After a decade of pillage, the Marathas eventually stopped their raids after the harried Nawab, accepting defeat, handed over Orissa to Raghoji Bhosle.

¹ "-giri" is a common suffix in Marathi and Dakhni which converts a concrete noun to an abstract one. Analogous in some ways to "-ism" in English. Given the fact that the Bollywood is located in the Dakhni-speaking city of Bombay, the suffix has been made comprehensible to most standard Hindi-Urdu speakers. Some common examples being "dādāgirī" (gunda-gardi) and, most recently, "Gandhi-giri".

Chai, Autos and Sher Shah Suri

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Nothing good comes of having your status as capital snatched from you by Delhi. As a Calcuttan I know the pain. Of course, my city’s had it relatively easy when you consider the fate of Sasaram in Bihar. That’s where Afghan warlord (what a useful phrase: right from Bihar in the 16th century to the US invasion in the 21st) Sher Shah Suri had his capital, as ruler of Bengal and Bihar,  before he overthrew Humayun and moved shop to the Purani Qila in Delhi. Unlike the Afghan warlords of today though, Sher Shah was a pretty impressive ruler. He introduced the rupiya which was the predecessor of the modern rupee. More interestingly, he introduced a small denomination coin called the dam which probably gave rise to the English phrase “I don’t give a damn”. The administrative set-up introduced by him was so impressive that Akbar copied liberally from it and Sher Shah’s ideas therefore ruled India for centuries after the man’s death.

Six hundred years later though, Sasaram is yet to get over the rejection of being passed over for Delhi (that three hundred years later, yet another empire would use Bengal and Bihar as stepping stones to capture Delhi is something that we will get into—to use an Ayesha Jalal phrase, Bengal has always been a “milch cow” for Delhi). The town is, to not put too fine a point on it, in shambles. It’s congested, ugly, has no power or water and, most egregiously, has no good food. All you get in restaurants is a really bad Punjabi/Mughlai pastiche: Do-Pyazas, Mattar Mushrooms and Dal Tarkas. (I don’t mind Punjabi but India’s self-destructive obsession with it baffles me.) The only exception to this was the chai I found at a roadside stall quite by chance. It was boiled just the right amount with not too much milk (the bane of chai in small town India). And while it was too sweet for my comfort, a little bit of cajoling and a small white lie (“I have diabetes”) later I had them brewing me a fresh sugarless pot.

Sadly there is no place to enjoy that chai in comfort. The town centre is a seething mass of chaos: Cars. Samosa shops. Banana vendors. Autos. Children. Lorrys.

The bloody autos in Sasaram insist on putting in the shrillest horns they can find and then blow them CONTINUOUSLY as they pass through. In spite of all this effort though, they are pretty much blown out of the water when a lorry passes through blowing its shrill horn CONTINUOUSLY.

The day I visited, just in case there it wasn’t chaotic enough, there was an RJD politician berating Nitish Kumar for, interestingly, being a casteist. “Doesn’t a poor child of a forward caste feel hungry”, thundered the man on a very loud mic to make himself be heard over all the noise. Shoe on other foot and all that I thought through my headache.

***

Unfortunately, going through the town square is a must in order to visit Mr. Suri’s impressive tomb. Placed in the centre of an artificial lake, the first thing that strikes you is its lack of ostentation. Pretty is not a word you would use to describe the tomb. More like spartan, rugged or muscular. If the Taj Mahal were Chitrangada Singh, pretty and elegant, Suri’s Maqbara is more Schwarzenegger. The closest structure it reminded me of are the tombs in the Lodhi Gardens in Delhi, the Sasaram tomb of course being far more impressive and has far fewer rich Delhi-ites jogging around it.

Made of sandstone, the tomb’s pretty big, around 150 feet high. It stands on a square platform which leads down to the water in the form of steps. The domed chamber itself is octagonal and has entrances on seven sides the eighth being a Mehrab sort of wall niche.

The chamber is surrounded by a pillared verandah of sorts decorated by the usual graffiti you find at monuments.

The abusive: Maadar Chod, Gaand, Ch**th

The banal: Sasaram

The romantic: Rohan hearts Pinki

The forever alone: Ayub (whoever he is, hope he finds that special someone to carve his name along with)

The most interesting piece of "graffiti" though is a stone plaque put up by the British in 1882 which boastfully proclaims that the tomb was repaired by the British Government.

The chamber houses a number of graves the largest being Sher Shah’s. Interestingly, Suri’s grave has been mazaar-ified. There’s a rich red-rimmed green chadar spread over it which is in turn covered with small change (the highest denomination note was a 20). The guard later explained that this wasn’t because people weren’t generous but it was because it’s tough to keep an eye on things all the time and some people have frisky fingers. There were also a couple of chaadars on the wall in case you wanted to do a bit of spreading yourself “all free of cost”, said the guard in a tone which was to indicate he expected to be tipped.

While I’ve seen this happen elsewhere (Mehrauli and Hauz Khas for example) the tomb of so un-religious a man being turned into a mazaar confused me. So I asked the guard, Bindeshwar Singh, to explain. Tall and strapping with a handlebar moustache to die for, he listened to my question, looked at me as if I was retarded and asked me whether I wanted to put some money on the grave. I turned down this invitation to tip a long dead emperor and asked him again. In what was becoming a worrying trend he again replied with a question:

“Are you a Hindu or a Muslim?”

Not wanting to colour his answer, I prevaricated and mumbled something unintelligible.

Cornered by my persistence and forced into answering Singh told me: “See Saheb, it is very simple. This man, Sher Shah was a man favoured by the fates. Uski taqdeer achhi thi. He was the most powerful man in India. Did he or did he not become badshah of Hindustan? If so what is wrong if people ask wishes of him. If he had so much power during his lifetime maybe he can still spread some of it around.”

I nodded. This was sound logic; couldn't argue with it.

“Look at his pitaji’s tomb (Sher Shah’s father’s tomb is located about a kilometre from his), would anyone do prarthana there? Of course they wouldn't. He was a nobody.”

(Bindeshwar was right. I visited Hasan Khan’s tomb after that and it’s far from being treated as a religious place. In fact, children were using the courtyard to play cricket.)

Turning down yet another offer to tip Sher Shah Suri and impressed by Bindeshwar’s theory of the fundamental relationship between power and religion I headed back to the city—I could hear the autos of Sasaram beckoning shrilly to me.

A slightly edited version of this piece was first published on Kafila

A Trip to Bijapur with Shivaji and Afzal Khan

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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].

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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 11^th centuries, the name Bijapur is the local Kannada/Dakni version of the Sanskrit Vijayapura, or city of victory. It was in the 16^th and 17^th 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 6^th 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 17^th 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 20^th 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.

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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

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[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, this constant shifting of sides was rather common in the Deccan at the time.