Passage to India

One of the first things I learned from the India institute about Islam, a point emphasized by Dr Sunil Kumar, historian at the University of Delhi, MJ Akbar, a leading Indian journalist and editing director of India Today, and Ashgar Ali Engineer, an internationally known activist against communal violence, is that Islam did not become a part of India as a byproduct of violence. Indeed, all three of these speakers began their talks by pointing out the oft overlooked early history of Islam in India, which came on the boats of peaceful Arab traders settling in Southern India in the early 7th century. The more dramatic (and still politically acrimonious) arrival of Muslim armies in the 11th century is the typical starting point in conventional narratives of Islam in India. Also problematic is the oversimplification of “Islamic rule” often listed alongside with “British rule” of India although the two eras cannot really compare. “Islam” is not a homogenous entity. It is a religion varied by language, cultural norms, sect, and textual interpretations. The Muslim rulers of India were from different cultures, tribes, and clans, and did not represent a single continuous line of rule. They were a varied and diverse group and none of them imposed blanket religious law on their subjects. Also, particularly during the era of the Delhi sultanate (discussed in my first three entries), these rulers fought more with each other than they did with the Hindu masses, a reality which contrasts with the stereotype of a “clash of civilizations” situation with the invading forces of Islam battling the heroic defenders of the Hindu homeland. Real history is always far less simplistic.

(Photos of our visit to the stunning Jama Masjid or “Friday Mosque” in Delhi. Built by Shah Jahan (who also built the Taj Mahal for those of you who didn’t read my last entry), it is the largest congregational mosque in India which can hold up to 25,000 worshippers at one time!)
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(Photos courtesy of Mark Thomas who provided these as I had left behind my memory card that day!)

("Foreign ladies" had to wear these modesty muumuus to gain entrance to the mosque. One of the guys who was handing them out was pretty adorable though. He fancied himself as a stylist and tried to pick the color gown which would best suit the wearer's eyes, complexion, or head scarf. The zeal and enthusiasm with which he transformed what would otherwise be a pretty mundane task, handing out gowns to tourists, was nearly worth the experience of having to wear an additional layer of body-covering of polyester in 105 degree, 90% humidity heat. Nearly.)

(The painfully drawn out experience of kneeling for at least 20 shots on burning hot pavement....)

This emphasis on the arrival of Islam and conversion as a forced product of aggression is found in the earliest European accounts. This “religion of the sword” conversion theory, which historian Richard Eaton calls the oldest and weakest theme of Western historiography of Islam with a “long and weary history dating to the Crusades” is a narrative still advocated today by Hindu nationalists (Eaton, 106). An idea perpetuated most strongly by British colonial histories of India which depicted the 19th century pseudo-scientific (i.e. racist) archetypes of the Turkic-Afghan Muslims from cold mountainous areas which the British belived had produced an extremely virile “race” which could hardly be restrained from their violent excesses, partly because they were faced by the Indian “race,” bred in the tropics and characterized by a lazy, apolitical, and effeminate nature. The British saw themselves as ushering in a new era of India, from the Dark Ages of “Islamic rule” to the enlightenment of British rule. While Hindu nationalists today don’t characterize themselves akin to the British tropes, they certainly do maintain sensationalistic narratives of Muslim aggression and terror. Ali Ashgar Engineer told us that in his experience, communalism and prejudice is stronger among the educated than the rural illiterate, in part due to the pervasiveness of such historical narratives of Muslim conquest which still rankle in the minds of many Hindus. He estimated that the notion of Muslim brute force emerged prominently in the British practice of educating the elite of India to serve the Empire. Here the British emphasized the evil doings of Islam in order to justify their own conquest as a benevolent act which saved India. In doing so, the Hindu upper caste gained consciousness of a double humiliation of conquest and rule by “foreigners.”

Forced conversion, is unsupported by any historical sources and the concept itself is never defined or explained mechanistically by its proponents. Indeed, the earliest Sultan/military commanders actually came from a military-slave class (mamluks), useful to the royals for their familial detachment. Any land they seized would not have to be divided among family members back home. For India, this meant the original Muslim leaders were not nobles- they were considered “uncultured” by the scholarly elite of Dar-al-Islam (the Islamic world) and their focus remained strictly in military conquest and its economic profit. Generally, they proved pretty disinterested in promoting Islamic conversions. Dr Kumar points out that even after the establishment and annexation of the Delhi Sultanate, Muslim immigrants from Persia and Central Asia were an extremely varied and diverse group, who didn’t share the same class, ethnic, or language ties, making it difficult to cohesively define an “Islamic” community of rulers in India. Interestingly, scholars have demonstrated that the biggest flaw in the “sword” theory is found in the geographical distribution of Muslims in medieval India which does not line up with the Muslim power centers. Curiously, Muslims lived the most densely in peripheral areas away from the Islamic ruled cities, suggesting forces at play other than military or political coercion.

A newer theory in the historiography of Islam in India suggested “political patronage” or the conversion of Indians in order to gain perks from the ruling class like tax breaks, promotions, etc. While this happened (likely mostly in the form of acculturation rather than true conversion) it doesn’t explain the mass conversions of peasants in the peripheral regions, especially cultivators who wouldn’t really gain politically from changing religions. The third historical explanation tried to bridge the gap of the “patronage” theory with “social liberation theory,” the notion that Islam’s ideology of social equality offered relief from the oppressive discriminatory practices of the Hindu caste system. (Needless to say, this particular interpretation gained popularity with Indian Muslim scholars!) Eaton amusingly points out that this concept is pretty anachronistic. It assumes that the Dalits (Untouchables) of India’s Middle Ages were sitting around reading and discussing the ideals of universal human equality that their society was lacking. Actually, back to demographics, it turns out the densest regions of Islamic conversion were in far regions of the Punjab and with the indigenous people of Bengal. These were largely people not yet integrated into the Hindu social and literate-Brahmatic system, mostly because these were forested or herding areas on the outskirts of the important agricultural regions. In contrast, conversions were relatively low in the “heartland” regions of Islamic rule and urbanization. So what gives?

Eaton proposes a new theory which he calls “accretion and reform.” In the first stage, stories, deities, and supernatural attributes are “grafted” onto the “existing cosmology” in a syncretic blend which explains the new religion in the cultural and spiritual terms and categories of the indigenous beliefs. In India, this could mean poets referring to the Prophet Mohammad an “avatar” of God, drawing from Hindu cosmology, or calling his daughter Fatima “mother of the world” in order to identify her with the mother goddess worship of India. (Both examples from Eaton’s article referenced below).
(Remember those Hindu images I keep showing from most of the Muslim sites I visited? This one was at the Qutb Minar complex).

Accretion spread Islam gradually into peripheral regions of India from the 14th to the 17th centuries, transforming them into agriculturalists associated with Islamic state rule (made possible by spreading Persian technologies and natural riverine shifts). This also created a very loosely defined and flexible community of people who identified themselves as Muslim based on their worship of Allah, but who were rarely exclusive in their religious practices. Eaton goes so far as to describe Islam for India as a “religion of the plough” rather than the sword.

Only much later, reform movements sought to separate the original cosmology from the doctrines of Islam and gave Allah all of the attributes and agencies of the former pantheon of deities, thus modifying local practice to something that more closely resembled Islam, but as a new variation. (Indian variations would of course prove to be contributions to the overall hugely diverse religion of Islam, with variations in schools of theology and law, cultural applications, language, etc). For example, if a Sufi leader declared a non-Arab, pre-Muslim practice of Indians to be “Islamic” this was accepted as such and folded into the constantly fluxing idea of Indian Islam. The community gradually became a more distinctively defined both internally and externally. The ebb and flow of such concepts of exclusivity and differentness are seen all the way into the 20th century. While the British imperial policies of divide and rule certainly enhanced the tendency of distinctions between Muslims and Hindus, it was also Muslim elites who then pushed for a separate Islamic state in the disastrous Partition of 1947. According to Eaton, this could be viewed as the next stage in a reform process stressing community separateness, which began centuries earlier.

So who exactly spread these new religious ideas into India if not military or political leaders per se? One of the most important agents of both overlapping processes is found in the role of rural village Qadis or judges in creating informal customs of adherence to Islam and who stood as powerful representations of literate Islam, promoting, though not enforcing, sharia law and education in the rural sectors. Also of great importance was Sufism. The Sufis adhered to a particular dimension of Islam which practiced a mystical and completely personal connection to God through the purification of one’s inner self, development of the heart, and drawing nearer to the presence of God through esoteric practices. Generally, scholars account the Sufis as playing a major role in spreading Islam into India and throughout Southeast Asia, largely because of their veneration of saints helped with the "accretion" process in syncretic blending with polytheistic and animistic religions, and that (with exceptions of course) Sufism tended to be less dogmatic than other branches of Islam and more flexibility in its cultural applications, which also aided in conversions. Ali Engineer added to this conception that in his interpretation, the Sufis were not necessarily active missionaries, but holy men who attracted converts through treating the lower castes with dignity (which sounds to me, suspiciously like the “social liberation theory” discussed above) and by making an effort to assimilate into regional cultures through speaking and writing local dialects rather than Arabic or Persian. Dr Kumar also suggested that the Sufi role in India as intentional missionaries of Islam may have been exaggerated, but there is certainly strong evidence for the role of Sufi shrines in influencing local populations as powerful religious centers.

One striking example of religious commonality I observed as a traveler in India was in the similarity of Hindu tree shrines and Sufi shrines. In both, you can cheaply purchase a red thread and tie it to the shrine in symbolism of the wish of your heart. This practice is surely a relevant example of the accretion process, and the Indian-ness of local customs which transformed both Hinduism and Islam.

(Wishes tied to the sacred banyan tree at Jyotisar in Kurukshetra, the spot venerated as the place where Krishna delivered the Bhagavad Gita sermon to Arjuna).
(Wishes tied on a screen inside the tomb of the Sufi Saint Salim Chisti in Agra)

Sources:

Asghar Ali Engineer. “Secularism—Indian Dimensions”. (Unpublished Article), 2011.

Asghar Ali Engineer. “Socio-Political Context” (Chapter 2) in Muslims and India. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing, 2006.

Romila Thapar. Narratives and the Making of History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Richard M. Eaton. “Approaches to the Study of Conversion in Islam in India” (Chapter 3) in Religious Movements in South Asia 600-1800. Eds. David N. Lorenzen. (2004).

Sunil Kumar. “Politics, the Muslim Community and Hindu-Muslim Relations Reconsidered: North India in the Early Thirteenth Century” in Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilization (2005).

Sunil Kumar. “Courts, capitals and kingship: Delhi and its sultans in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE” in Court Cultures in the Muslim World. Eds. Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

M. J. Akbar. “The Realism of Tomorrow” in Nehru, The Making of India. London: Viking, 1988. 480-506.

I was quite surprised to learn that each of the Mughal emperors demonstrated deep identification and personal interest in the entire process of monument building and it is to them that the ultimate designs are attributed- each with a slightly different twist. Akbar “The Great,” is known for his patronage of the arts, education, and public works, his promotion of religious tolerance, and his blended government of Hindus and Muslims. He is lauded for rolling back more extreme interpretations of sharia law, encourgaging (and modeling) intermarriages and alliances between Hindu and Muslim noble families, abolishing the tax on Hindu pilgrimages, and donating state funds for construction of Sikh and Hindu temples and Christian churches. I had a great conversation with our Delhi guide Gaurav Dayal about Akbar. Gaurav pointed out that although Akbar holds an almost saint-like reputation of a reasonable and progressive man who humbly sought the advice of others, there are historical clues that underneath this exterior may have been a rather calculating person who followed his own course but took care to listen to the opinions of others, even if he had no intention of changing his plans. Perhaps the greatest expression of power is the quiet power of one who promotes the appearance of collaboration and persuasion without ever really compromising at all. In any case, architecturally speaking, he produced the “Akbari synthesis” which reflected an amalgamation of his Timurid heritage (blend of Persian and Turkic-Mongol influences), the previous styles of the Delhi Sultanate, and regional Indian styles (particularly of Gujarat and Bengal). His two masterpieces which reflect his ability to synthesize regional influences are the tomb of his father Humayun (my favorite and discussed in the previous blog entry) and the royal city of Fatephur Sikri, now in the boundaries of Agra. This is a beautiful but sort of strange city, built in 15 years and then abandoned only 14 years later. (Low water supply? Sifting locus of power? A need to control the nobles? Historians don’t agree on this one).
(The famed central pillar of the Hall of Private Audience, the Diwan-i-Khas, where Akbar met leaders of many different faiths. The pillar is meant to symbolize a synthesis of multiple Indian religions.)
(Everyone loves a good pillar.....)
(One-time reflecting pools)

(Elizabeth overlooking the grounds)

(In the outdoor library!)
(The hall for court ladies)
(A Hindu image of Krishna, possibly commissioned by one of Akbar's Hindu wives or consorts. Akbar's marriage to one Rajput princess in particular is depicted, probably with great creative license, in the gorgeous epic Jodhaa Akbar)

Of course, by far the most well known monument of the Mughals is the Taj. This tomb is very unique as it was built by Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan for his favorite wife Mumtaz, rather than as a tomb to honor his father and God. Ebba Koch pointed out to us that this indicates that “religion was not such a defining characteristic as we are led to believe of Muslims.” This romantic context and the pure perfection of the aesthetics were first captured in the Western imagination by the British colonialists and this notion has endured until today in its commercial appeal and as part of global popular culture. I had always personally suspected that the romantic angle of the story had likely been overblown by European fantasy and that the true intent of the building might lay more in its symbolism of Mughal absolute rule. Ebba emphasized that the political importance of the Taj is undeniable and that she too was quite skeptical of the “monument of love” idea. But when she began to study the history of the Taj she was quite shocked to find how much the chroniclers of Shah Jahan emphasized and carefully recorded his intentions- that the Taj Mahal stand as a testament of his love for his dead wife.

Mumtaz Mahal is an honorific title meaning “chosen of the palace” and “Taj” is a corruption of “crown.” Born as born as Arjumand Banu Begum, Empress Mumtaz was one of several wives, but according to Shah Jahan’s chroniclers, she became his true partner and friend. After bearing a requiste heir, his other consorts became wives in name only, living in separate residences as Mumtaz had no rivals in her husband’s affection. She bore him 14 children (7 of whom survived) and the chronicles report not just an enduring sexual passion between husband and wife (in itself remarkable!) but a complete intellectual and spiritual companionship. After her death in childbirth, the Sultan made no did not give audience for a week which was a violation of both custom and court protocol. Then he reportedly gave up listening to music for two years, abandoned jewelry, fragrance, and colorful clothes. The histories go on to say that his eyes weakened from constant weeping and that his hair turned white overnight. (These last two bits are surely exaggeration.) He then focused all his energy and attention on her mausoleum which emerged as the ultimate culmination of Mughal monumental architecture.

The day I visited the Taj Mahal (ahem, known as “regarding the Taj” by those of us privileged with familiarity) I steeled myself for at least a slight let down. The Taj Mahal comes with SO much hype I assumed it couldn’t really live up to its reputation. But it did. The most marvelous thing about travel is seeing the sights that just cannot be captured by still or moving image alone. Something you must see in person to know that it truly exists in all its glory. Something that fills the eye, that moves and sparkles in the sunlight, that takes your very breath away. A monument that in the words of Dr. Koch represents, “a reverse Platonic concept,” in which the perfect, the ideal, is not divorced from the physical world. Here, the universal becomes the particular as the ideal is made real.
img=http://photos.travellerspoint.com/396694/DSC07477.jpg] (Image of jewels prized out by British officers looking for a trophy)

Now that I have my “oohing and ahhing” out of the way, a more personal revelation. In all the art-history and architecture focus of our Mughal unit I realized a couple of things. I am definitely a historian at heart and my purely aesthetic interest for objects and architecture has limits. So for me, I guess the Platonic ideal cannot be abstracted from the reality of its context. I found myself wanting to know less about the detailed components of the buildings and objects and more about why they actually matter in the larger context. All of our lecturers are esteemed and brilliant academics in their own right. But different disciplines ask different questions and not all our presenters interrogate the past in the same sort of way I am interested in doing. Some of our lecturing art historians made a point to historically contextualize everything (this is something I now really appreciate about the art historians in my own department- shout out to Cristina and Sandy!), but others were far more aesthetically and detail focused. This approach holds a valid and important its place within art history, but left me with many questions. How did they raise funds for these magnificent buildings? How did these projects effect local populations? Did they change or influence trade routes? What kind of diplomatic relations did they engage in? Good thing for books! I’m still working on the answers, but the process is so interesting I can’t complain. I got a fabulously unique introduction to the topic which piqued my interest.

The second thing I learned about myself, probably related to the first, is that there is only so much similarly amazing and gorgeous architecture I can reasonably appreciate in a short amount of time before I hit overload. The second weekend of the trip, I visited five major Mughal monument sites (four of them World Heritage sites!) which turned out to be a bit much for me. The next to last Mughal site we visited on our Agra trip was the Agra Red Fort, where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb. As prisons go, not too shabby, and at least he had a nice view of his beloved Taj.

But, by the time we got to the Agra Fort I just couldn’t really take it in any more. I knew perfectly well that what I was seeing was breathtakingly beautiful but I just could no longer be moved by the lovely contrast of white marble and red sandstone, the perfect symmetry of every single view, the stunning marble inlay work, and the outrageously intricate carving work.



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I know I’ve hit this "overload" point when I start to take photos of people, animals, and signs, rather than the site itself.

(Ok, she's so adorable, who wouldn't have taken her photo?!)

I guess I need either a bit of the chaotic beauty of nature thrown in every now and then, or more contextualization about why the objects I’m looking at matter for the big historical picture. For example, I knew the Agra Fort has multiple historical meanings, and a lesser known history is its role in the 1857 Indian Rebellion against the British. I would have loved to learn more about that. (Still looking for the right book!) Without historical context (or nature) I seem to hit a saturation point in which I can no longer aesthetically appreciate what I’m viewing For me, there are two kinds of travelers. Those who are tourists- who view sites superficially and leave them with no greater knowledge or understanding, and those travelers who experience a site as a gateway to a deeper comprehension of the world. I’m so glad I was able to travel India with a group of the latter type.
(The institute crew resting from the brutal heat with our guide, the aformentioned Gaurav.)

Sources:
Ebba Koch. “The Taj Mahal: Architecture, Symbolism, and Urban Significance” in Muqarnas. Vol. 22. (2005). Web. 128-149.

So getting back to the Mughals, (there were lots of tangents in my last blog about them, but hey, that’s India for you- convoluted but delightful when you learn to go with it!) their most immediately visible imprint on India is in their architectural remains. The best known Mughal achievement is of course the Taj Mahal, but Mughal treasures in North India are many and all are spectacular. And we saw MANY of them: tombs, forts, and mosques.
(Taj)
(Humayun's Tomb)
(Sikandra)
(Agra Red Fort)
(Delhi Red Fort)
(David, Meena, and Bryan at the Jama Masjiid of Fatephur Sikri)

Aside from the Taj, my favorite proved to be Humayun’s tomb.



(I later learned this was our Taj expert, Dr Ebba Koch’s favorite as well!) Partly I loved it for its exquisite beauty and peacefulness, (it was blessedly uncrowded) but also its operational workshops fascinated me. When I walked up through the first gate of the complex, the air was filled with the little "tink tink" sounds of the stone hammers, an unexpectedly enchanting addition to the atmosphere of the place.
These workshops make lime mortar and sandstone bricks using Mughal-era craftsmanship to preserve the history of process.

Mughal sites reflect a blended heritage of Hindu-Indian stone carving craft layered with the aesthetic building and garden styles of Persia. The common “Timurid” (ancestor of the Mughal founder) combination of white marble and red sandstone reflected not only Persian and Turkic artistic sensibilities, but also related to the highest caste of Hinduism, the Brahmins, who favor these two colors as important chakras. Thus, the combination of art forms and meaning was both aesthetic and political in gaining the respect and recognition of Hindu elites.
(Humayun's Tomb)
(Krishna- Fat. Sik.)
(Fatephur Sikri)
(Taj off the beaten path) (Taj geometric red and white) (Agra Fort Rajastani style Hindu carving)

Mughal mausoleums are always perfectly symmetrical and balanced and highly, intricately decorative, but with elegant subtlety and restraint. The Mughal complexes embrace a love of open space, pools of water, “floralization” of décor, and Persian-style rectilinear grid gardens.
(Vladimir at Taj)
(Fat Sik)
(Hum. Tomb)
(Ilyse at Sikandra)
(Robin at Fat Sik)
(In the Sufi shrine at Fat. Sik.) (Taj outer grid gate) (Taj) (Taj) (Cristin at Taj) (These last two are forbidden photos I took clandestinely INSIDE the Taj itself. I'm very sneaky. Never speak of this.)

Even our lovely hotel in Agra mimicked these aesthetics.
(lobby bathroom!)

Typically, to visit a Mughal mausoleum, you first have to travel though a massive grid which usually contains gates and structures in every quadrant with the tomb in the exact center of the complex.
(Very old side gate at Hum. Tomb) (Sikandra front entrance gateway) (One of the Taj front gateways) (View of the central gate with my back to the Taj)

Only the Taj differs in this center placement of the mausoleum convention due to its riverside location in Agra overlooking the water. Shah Jahan designed it to be seen and entered from the river.

This cosmological layout has the effect of creating a sense of anticipatory journey before you can actually regard the tomb itself. This builds as you move through the complex, finally coming through a second set of gateways with the tomb in its entire splendor lying before you.

The sense of passage culminates with a trek up the stairs at the tomb’s base.
(Hum. Tomb) (Taj)
The passageway is dark and narrow, almost womb-like, and you emerge into the sunshine in the top pavilion platform, like a journey into heaven, with the face of the tomb entirely filling up your gaze as your pupils rapidly dilate to take it all in, a second sudden impact of viewing.

We viewed four major sites in the city of Agra with Dr. Ebba Koch a fascinating art historian from Austria and the world’s foremost scholar on the Taj (for those interested, she has written the bible on it) and is a leading authority on Mughal architecture at large. She was cited this month in the Smithsonian Cover story on preserving the Taj. She is a delightful scholar and educator with an interesting personality. When we first met her she seemed rather world-weary and a bit taciturn to me, but as soon as she began speaking about these monuments, she lit up like someone had flicked a switch and showed us both her absolute passion for Mughal architecture and her droll sense of humor. As you're reading this, you should imagine her saying "floralization" and "Akbari synthesis" in a very charmingly thick Austrian accent. I'm a sucker for accents. (While we're at it, you should also imagine that the sun is beating down on you and the sweat is dripping liberally down your back and everywhere else while you take in all these sites. And one at which you forgot to bring water or eat breakfast and there is nothing available inside. I can't really convey the important element of North India's summer heat through photography...)

We were doubly fortunate to have her guiding our visit since we got to go to a couple spots closed to tourists which was definitely a highlight. (Thrilled to be at the Taj Mahal complex on a Saturday and yet, a total miracle......not a tourist in sight!)

One of the spots was the mausoleum to one of Shah Jahan's OTHER wives, one who died long after the Empress Mumtaz who inspired the Taj. So my first sighting of the Taj was from the courtyard of her memorial which was a completely unique opportunity never available to tourists. (Awesome). Though, it kinda makes you wonder what she thought of having to look at the first wife's glorious monument for all eternity??

One of the more interesting things I took from her lectures were the variable purposes and intents for the mausoleums. Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors, built the Tomb of Humayun to honor his father while his own son Shah Jahan build the great tomb at Sikander for Akbar. As the dynastic tombs were always built for fathers by their sons, (the Taj of course as a notable exception) this is the first of their layered purposes- they honor a family memory as well as God. My favorite Mughal-era tomb inscription (by Abu’l Fazl in Kashmir) contains multiple possible interpretations: “Sometimes I withdraw to a monastery (dair) and sometimes I stay in a mosque, but it is you whom I search from house to house.” Of course the tombs are also a show to the world of the power and splendor of the Mughals, and Dr Koch pointed to the systematization of the architecture as an instrument of rule. But she also argued that ultimately, the rulers gave a great deal of thought to the long-term universal appeal and posterity of these constructions, seeing them as an image of the heaven prepared for believers and an eternal sight of inspiration for mankind.. Ebba suggested to us that as contemporary viewers of the monuments we automatically fulfill the intentions of their makers- they hold a lasting and universal appeal of sublime, unmatched beauty.

In the story of the Delhi Sultanate, like all good dynasty histories, the last Lodi sultan Ibrahim Lodi proved much less popular and effective than his father Sikander. The Sultanate began to crumble under the pressure of plotting and disgruntled nobles (also a popular theme in dynastic cycles!) and someone stronger stepped in. Babur, Turkic/Mongol/Persian ruler of Kashmir in the north of the subcontinent, descended from the aforementioned Timur on his father’s side and Chinggis (Genghis) Khan on his mother’s side, decided Ibrahim was a wimp and he was going to kick some Lodi butt, which he did thanks to the Ming Chinese invention, the matchlock musket.
Unlike his famous plundering ancestors, however, Babur took care to pacify local populations with restoration projects and care of widows and orphans of war, envisioning something far more ambitious than the bloody short-term raids of Timur’s rampage through India. In taking control of both Delhi and Agra in 1526, Babur launched one of the great empires of India and one of Islam’s pre-modern superpowers, the Mughal Empire. In doing so he also ushered in a golden age of Indian art and architecture which reflecting the diverse blend of influences from Indians, Turko-Mongols, and Persians.

But this entry is about the cities of Delhi you say? Well skipping a few, (you didn’t really want to hear about all the other Sultanate forts, right?) the 7th city of Delhi is ShahJahanabad, or Old Delhi, built by Shah Jahan, the great-grandson of Babur and son of Akbar the Great.

I guess he is also known for building the Taj Mahal which is kinda famous, as well as the largest congregational mosque in India, the Jama Masjid.

We visited the Red Fort on our first full day of the institute and I ended up going to the same part of the old city on my last day with a small group which felt very full-circle as my experiences were so different. It was 110 degrees on the day we went to the fort and it surely felt like the inside of a tandoori oven, the heat just pouring off the beautiful red sandstone.
Yeah, it was really freaking hot. On the plus side, no need to use the public restrooms when you are sweating out all the liquids in your body.

We drove through Delhi to the fort, fully insulated in our air-conditioned tour bus, in a literally elevated position through which to watch the city. (Just in case you couldn't tell by looking at us, we have a clear label to set us apart).
View from the bus.

Entering the Red Fort
We viewed the complex with a guide, mostly together as a group of about 25 people (more on these awesome folks later). In comparison, on the last day of the trip a handful of us went to Chandni Chowk ( “Moonlight Bazaar” which is not at all an apt name today) to shop and visit a Sikh Temple and museum.
(Photo courtesy C. Cash)
(Sikh Temple) (A tiffin for Daylen's kindergarten lunches!)
We traveled with the locals on the metro and on foot, while navigating traffic and handling monsoonal rains, aggressive touts, and begging children, like true Delhiites. Or more appropriately, Delhi-wallahs!

One of the benefits in living in a city for a whole month is you are able to grow very comfortable getting around and doing what you need to do, and just living. I remember quite distinctly watching the chaos of the traffic from the height of my bus, watching pedestrians zip around, weaving in and out of moving streams of cars to cross roads and marveling at their boldness.

I became accustomed to this in Chinese cities (to the point of being chided by Chinese colleagues for a lack of caution), but it an even more extreme game of Frogger to navigate the mean streets of Delhi.

Yet a couple weeks in, I found myself blithely doing the very same thing, darting across major streets with my crew and little concern for getting run over.
With my feet in the mud, the rain falling on my bare head, part of the city’s daily press of people and constant movement, I looked across the intersection at the Red Fort at the place where I had first stepped off the tour bus, nearly a month previously on my first day. This was a very satisfying sense of closure to my journey of acclimation of the previous four weeks.
(Looking across the Red Fort intersection the first day)
(Looking from the opposite direction across the street on the last day)

But life in Delhi can be brutal, and my familiarity on the last day contrasted sharply with my first time on the street in which, despite having STEELED myself against the emotional impact of the plight of India’s beggar children, I identified with the first child who sensed my empathy (aka “weakness” when you’re on the street) immediately glommed onto me with her charming and appealing ways. I actually began to tear up thinking about how much I could change her life if I could take her home with me. The strength of my response completely caught me off guard since I’m not much of a softie and also, I had completely mentally prepared for this type of scene. But when a child you just know is probably controlled by a vicious beggar mafia looks into your eyes, you find it is much harder cope with the injustice of global disparity than on paper. Delhi actually has far less beggars now than in decades past due to a city crackdown of beggars, cows, and trash in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth games the city just hosted. But you are still sure to see them in certain places, or sometimes at traffic lights when you least expect it. I got much better at emotionally disconnecting over time (which is sad in itself) although I did have one other soul-sucking moment when a child of 4 or 5 approached my “tuk-tuk” or auto-rickshaw, holding a skinny baby who reached out and grasped the skirt of my colleague and didn’t let go even as our vehicle started to pull forward. This was a terrible moment. The children ended up moving away safely (for the time being), but that episode stayed with me, casting a shadow over the day.

The Old City of Shahjahanabad is pretty dichotomous to the wealth and wide boulevards of the 8th City, New Delhi (which I’ll discuss in Part Four). Today, while it is a vibrant urban space, the formerly elegant and sophisticated capital once filled with the havelis (mansions) and gardens of the Muslim intellectuals and elites is now somewhat dilapidated, densely crowded, and punctuated by occasional squalor. Although I have to say after the glut of perfect and pristine monuments we visited, I really dug Chandni Chowk for its life and vibrancy.
Chandni Chowk in 1858

I am currently working my way through William Dalrymple's "City of Djinns." While I sometimes find him to be overly amused by Indians, his descriptions of the city are beautifully evocative (though the city has changed a great deal in the nearly 20 years since he wrote the book), and he has a knack for capturing fascinating characters. In one chapter, he discusses decline of the Old City in which he traces its sharp economic downturn to the British Partition of 1947 just following independence.
25 million people in India became refugees (half of these long-term) and around a million were slaughtered in riots and massacres. Of these, some of the worst excesses of violence took place in Delhi, with Hindus targeting the city’s Muslim poor and illiterate who did not have the resources to flee like the wealthy Muslims who went to Pakistan. Delhi, receiving the largest number of refugees in the country, doubled in size due to the flood of incoming Hindu and Sikh Punjabis, fleeing Muslim attacks in the north. This economic sifting process of the original Muslim community of India, with the well-to-do bailing and the poor left behind, coupled with the ongoing violence waged against the current Muslim minority, has left them in the lowest socioeconomic bracket in India. In Delhi, the numbers of poverty-stricken Muslims is swollen further by ongoing refugees from Bangladesh.

One of our speakers Ali Ashgar Engineer author and activist for Hindu-Muslim relations, recently launched his autobiography in a fete hosted by the Vice-President of India. (An event our group got to attend!) I was surprised to learn from him that a recent broad government report found that Muslims have slipped below the Dalits ("Untouchable" Hindu caste) in government services, employment, and education. Partly this is due to decades of “reservation” programs for Dalits, the equivalent of affirmative action with no parallel for the Muslim minority. He argued that there remains a sense among the Hindu majority that Muslims were responsible for Partition and that they need to be punished by not being allowed to prosper or be educated (and they are further incensed by government allowance of sharia (religious) laws for the Muslim community in India). Engineer pointed out that while Jinnah, elite land-owning Muslim nobles (mindars), and the British, all supported Partition, the majority of Muslims in India remained indifferent or opposed to the idea as they had little to gain and lacked the resources for re-location. But nationalist education in India promotes and perpetuates notions of a “Hindu” India constantly victimized by Muslim “invaders.” The first website I googled on Hindu history illustrates this theme - scroll down to the middles ages. [I should note this "history" site is wildly inaccurate, not just in interpretation - aka Malaysian prince "forced" to convert which is wrong, but in historical dates- this has Tang Dynasty Empress Wuzetian ruling in first century BCE...whaaaat??] Moreover, Engineer suggests that this narrative of the brutality of Islam is so powerful, educated Hindus have stronger communal identities and anti-Muslim sentiments than the illiterate. The teaching of history can be a dangerously powerful force, especially when used for a nationalist agenda. We got a little taste of fervent nationalism at the "Mother India" Temple in Varanasi, which is a nationalist site imbued with religious imagery and association. Such as Mother India personified as Durga who is the demon-fighting bad-ass personification of Shiva's wife Parvarti (who is also pretty bad-ass, but in a yoga-meditative sort of way).



The center piece of the "temple" is a giant topographical map of India. Whether I'm in India, China, or the US, extreme shows of nationalism are always just weird to me. Of course, every now and then it can be charming. (Photo courtesy C. Cash)

Sources:
Asghar Ali Engineer. “Secularism—Indian Dimensions”. (Unpublished Article), 2011.
Asghar Ali Engineer. “Socio-Political Context” (Chapter 2) in Muslims and India. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing, 2006. 56-91
William Dalrymple City of Djinns: A Year Living in Delhi. New York: Penguin, 1993.

The Tughlaq dynasty who held the Delhi Sultanate for a time, build the 3rd city of Delhi Tughlaqabad in 1321 and abandoned it only six years later.

While I enjoy pristinely preserved monuments (aka all the World Heritage Sites we visited) I have a soft spot for a really good crumbly abandoned ruin.
Tughlaqabad Fort definitely qualifies. You climb the old steps of the circular bastions, some two stories high and topped by battlemented parapets, high up on a hill top.
There you find grassy open spaces where cows meander, littered with stone walls, rainwater tanks, gateways to nowhere, and stone circles for making limestone cement.
Archways lead into tunnel–like passageways reeking with the smell of squeaking bats.

We climbed the highest summit point, to listen to Dr Kumar explain the Tuqhlaq’s role in the Delhi Sultanate era while hawks swooped overhead. At one point a glittering swarm of black bees or hornets, seemingly rising out of nowhere, hovered above us, catching the full light of the sun overhead before they flew directly over us and out of sight. (That probably would have been scary except I didn’t have enough time to realize what they were until they were gone). The only drawback of the visit for me was we didn’t have much time to explore the ruins on our own which I was itching to do.

Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq overthrew his predecessor, Khusro Khan, who supposedly made too many Hindu political alliances and not enough with the Muslim nobles and military commanders. In any case this episode followed a string of overthrows, but Ghiyas ud-Din proved to be a standout visionary. He is remembered as a generally tolerant ruler who implemented many reforms and reducing land taxes for the cultivator class. He built the citadel, imagining an impregnable fortress from the continued threat of Mongol invasions.

This dream did not come to fruition. The sultan in his zeal to build the fortress with great haste ordered all the laborers of the city to be diverted to the project. So legend goes, one of the most globally famed Sufi mystics Nizammudin (now a saint- more on him and Sufism later), is said to have been so frustrated by the drain of labor for his well project that he cursed the king: “Ya rahey hissar, ya basey gujjar!” (May it [the fort] remain unoccupied/infertile, or else the herdsmen may live here). This is certainly a romantic version of history, but Ghuyas ud-Din did die a couple of years later, some say crushed in a collapsing tent ordered by Nizammudin, others say heat stroke, during a military campaign. The city was soon abandoned after his succeeding son Muhammad, a great intellectual full of harebrained schemes earning him the nickname “The Wisest Fool,” decided to move the capital to the Deccan Plateau, 700 miles to the south. This didn’t work out well due to lack of water supplies and luxury accommodations for the nobles and officers during a wickedly hot summer. Many died, officers plotted to return to their comfortable Delhi homes and so Muhammad moved the capital back to Delhi at great personal expense, all part of the convoluted saga of the Delhi Sultanate.

While the Delhi Sultanate succeeded in insulating the subcontinent from the Mongol invasions for over a century. They later developed diplomatic relations with the khanates of China and Persia. One of the world's greatest travelers, Ibn Battuta, (featured in a recent article in Time magazine) was sent by the Sultanate as an ambassador to the Mongol ruled Yuan China.
Things changed when in 1398 Timur attacked the Delhi Sultanate, claiming a revival of Mongol power (although his most brutal campaigns were actually waged against other Islamic-Mongol khanates) and using the excuse that the Sultanate treated its Hindu subjects with excessive toleration (again, he killed lots of Muslims in his lust for war so this doesn’t really make sense).

The real reason? You guessed it…lots and lots of money in Delhi. The sacking of the city resulted in massacres and atrocities on a huge scale and Timur was actually declared an enemy of Islam, because he was attacking, um MUSLIMS in addition to all those "infidel" Hindus he slaughtered.
After looting what he wanted, Timur left a ruined city and a seriously weakened Sultanate which briefly revived under the Lodi Dynasty which was eventually conquered in 1526 by the first ruler of the Mughal empire, Babur. Is this yet convincing you of Delhi's awesomeness? I mean, EVERYONE wanted to be there.

Lodi Gardens, houses the mausoleums of the Lodi dynasty, the last rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, a 10 minute walk from our hotel.