Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (68 page)

The dynasty of Bahawalpur, through various accidents, of geography and history, had in the end lasted for two centuries. It had never been grand or (apart from the Sutlej Valley Project) creative; but romantic tales had begun to attach to it. It was said that it was descended from the Abbasids who had ruled gloriously in Baghdad until the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. One line of the Abbasids had then fled to Sindh, which was part of the Abbasid empire; and there—in this romance—they had kicked their heels for five centuries or so, before making their play for the big patch of desert that became Bahawalpur.

The recently updated
Encyclopaedia of Islam
dismisses this story: it says that the Abbas of Bahawalpur is not the Abbas of the Abbasids. In a way it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not; what matters is local belief, and the angle it puts on local history. The old Hindu kingdom of Sindh was the first territory in the subcontinent to fall to the Muslims. It was conquered by the Arabs in the eighth century. The conquest, done principally for loot, was quite a deliberate and methodical business. The first expedition was in 634, just two years after the Prophet’s death, and three years before the conquest of Persia. There were eight further attempts on Sindh, before the final conquest in 710. This last assault was controlled from Syria by the caliph himself. The thirteenth-century text that celebrates this conquest, the
Chachnama,
fanciful and poetic as it is in parts, is as dreadful an account of blood and loot and enslavement as Caesar’s
Gallic War.
But the conquest of Sindh can be considered in more than one way, and the Bahawalpur claim on the Abbasids is also a link to the birth of Arab and Muslim power in the subcontinent. It is like the primary neurosis of the converted.

Whatever the truth of the Abbasid story—and whatever was happening elsewhere in the world in the twentieth century—the last Nawab of Bahawalpur was fanatical about the ancestry he claimed. In Bahawalpur and Pakistan and the subcontinent he was an Arab of the Abbasids and a conqueror, a man drawing his wealth from the country, but not part of it. He wore the fez to make the point; he made his courtiers wear it to keep them in their place (and, until you had acquired the knack, it wasn’t easy to keep the flower-pot-shaped hat on your head). The Nawab, driving out one day, saw one of his courtiers far off on the road without his fez. The courtier saw and began to run. The Nawab gave chase in his car. The poor courtier, forgetting dignity, fearing the Nawab and his famous stick at that
moment more than anything else, ran off the road and into a sugarcane field, with its razor-edged grass, and hid there.

The Arab faith, the Arab language, Arab names, the fez: twelve hundred years after the conquest of Sindh, this affirmation of separateness, of imperial and racial and religious authority: there probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after five hundred years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn’t died; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of the faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honor Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to.

The Nawab saw himself as an Arab and a conqueror. With another side of himself he understood true authority. And just as he made his courtiers abase themselves before him, so he was willing to abase himself before the paramount British power. There would have been a British Resident, generally to oversee things. The Nawab, in addition, had British people fill important official posts.

And, noticeably dark-skinned (he was called “Brownie” at school, or so I was told), he was obsessed with white women. He, in one mode fierce about the ancestry he claimed, wished in another mode to be racially abolished. He wished passionately to have white children or hybrid children. Three of his wives were English (and a fourth was Anglo-Indian). In this he set a fashion; many people went abroad and came back with white wives. The last English wife of the Nawab was known locally as Lady O, because the British officials and the Bahawalpur gentry judged her to be common.

He sent all the sons he recognized to Aitchison College, the British-established school for the sons of princes in Lahore (where as a boy he was called “Brownie”). But it was known that for him his hybrid children were special, magical. There is a story that he took two of his sons by local concubines to a shrine somewhere in the desert and left them there to grow up as grave-keepers. He could have done it; his power in his state was absolute. But the story may not be true. The Nawab had many wives, many concubines, many children; their jealousies and pain would have seeded many stories.

A journalist from Bahawalpur who had got to know one of the women of the Nawab’s harem told me: “In the palace he had a separate building for the English wives and their children. The Indian wives knew about the English wives, but the Englishwomen never knew about the Indian wives. When he wanted to go to the harem he would say he was going on a tour. Sometimes it would be for three days, sometimes for a week. And there
would be a proper escort: the guards, the Rolls-Royce, the camel corps, who were his personal bodyguard. And all he did was to go round to the back of the palace, which was quite enormous, like an old fort, and enter the harem. The harem was at the back.”

He had had more than three hundred and ninety women. Most of them had slept only once with him; but then they could sleep with no other man. Some of these women developed a kind of hysteria; some became lesbians. Always in the harem he had sixteen or eighteen women on whom he could call.

“When he entered the harem he had a stick. The women would pounce on him and pull him, and he would keep them back with his stick, until he saw the one he wanted, and then he would tell the eunuch. After his foreign trips he would enter the harem with tin trunks, and the women would go crazy. They had asked for chemises and chiffons and feathers, and they would fight for these things. For the English wives he would shop at Tiffany’s, Cartier, Garrard. The salesmen would come to him when he was in England and show the jewels. For himself he bought English country scenes, and he always had English portrait painters come to paint him.”

One day a letter on a silver tray—the detail suggests palace intrigue and excited gossip—told the favorite English wife that the Nawab had an Indian harem. And when the poor man went to that wife he found all the harem sitting with her having tea.

“When the army took over the durbar palace they found a whole collection of dildos. About six hundred, some made of clay, some bought in England and battery-operated. The army dug a pit and buried these dildos. A lot of dirty magazines. He needed them, to use the dildos. He became impotent very early. His appetites were sated. Someone who went into the harem at the wrong time one day saw the Nawab using a dildo on a screaming woman.”

The main palace had been closed for eleven years and was now in decay. Like some other princely property in the subcontinent, it was the subject of litigation, and legally sealed; the Nawab’s numerous heirs were fighting over it. The façade of the palace still looked good, but termites were eating away at its insides; the mound of their droppings over the years had forced the front door open a crack and wedged it tight. There were said to be nineteen vintage cars in the garage; five of them were custom-built Rolls-Royces from the 1930s; rust had got to them all and they were on bricks.

When I left the drive and began to go around to the back the guards shouted at me. I was able to see why. On the upper floor at the back a bedroom window had been broken, and the screen pulled away: pilferers, looters
at work: the theme of the subcontinent. The gardens were overgrown: desert thorn trees, tall elephant grass, date palms growing in the pipes and guttering: like a surrealist garden now, like something designed for the decaying palace, with a surrealistically clean and well-edged drive.

Far out in the desert was the desolate enclosure—tended by families of grave-keepers—with the heavy, rhetorical tombs of the fourteen rulers of Bahawalpur and their wives. The favorite wives had marble tombs that were like gazebos, with Mogul-style marble latticework with inlay and raised floral patterns. Two of the Nawab’s English wives had these marble tombs.

It was the grandson of one of those wives who took me to the tombs. The Nawab adored his grandmother, Azhar Abbasi said; she helped him, too, with certain affairs of state. Later he showed a small faded photograph; because of the laws of purdah there were almost no pictures of his grandmother. The photograph, which might have been taken professionally (or in a studio) before she married the Nawab, showed a slender woman in a calf-length dress of the 1920s or 1930s, seated, legs crossed, turned to one side; she was fine-faced, self-possessed. She was the daughter of a British army officer in India. It was strange to think of what she had chosen, this particular deal with life, so to speak, which for her had meant a kind of disappearance; and then of her tomb in the desert. She might have died from poison, because of jealousy in the court; or she might have died after an operation carried out, because of the Nawab’s purdah anxieties, not in a hospital theater, but on the palace dining table. Again, there were many stories.

The Nawab had ten sons whom he recognized. Azhar Abbasi, who had shown me the tombs, was the son of the third son, who had himself had four wives. Azhar was burdened by all the resulting family property problems. These multiple Muslim marriages, though often comic to people outside, caused untold pain to many of the people involved, and the pain could travel like disease from generation to generation, with people seemingly driven to pass on the abuse—the jealousy, the torment, the neglect—from which they had suffered.

Azhar was still Muslim, though by intermarriage down the generations he was virtually white, and Australian. I asked him what he—so far removed racially now—thought of his background.

He said he wanted to migrate to Canada or Australia. “My grandfather was an Indian prince. It’s over. An Indian prince: that’s no big deal.”

And it all rested on serfdom. The opening up of the desert, the harem, the more expensive English wives, the jewels from London, the house in Surrey,
the Rolls-Royces rotting in the palace garage, the pictures of English country scenes: they represented the accumulated tribute, penny upon penny, like the termite droppings, from the poorest of the poor. The people in the villages belonged to their landlord, and his power over them was almost as absolute as the Nawab’s over his subjects. These people could be whipped at will; their daughters and women abused at will. The serf knew he was not to turn his back on his master. He backed away from him or he moved sideways past him. Generations of servitude lay in that instinctive crab-like dance, disconcerting at first to the visitor.

Bahawalpur had been only a British protectorate; the British had never imposed their laws here. The sharia always ruled; and an antique cruelty—hidden away in the rags and huts of the countryside, and looking only like poverty—had survived the century of the British presence. The stories here could be like the stories from the Caribbean plantations in the late eighteenth century or from Russia in the early nineteenth century. Even in the Nawab’s time—and the Nawab was always watchful for this kind of abuse—the wife of one of his officials had whipped a twelve-year-old boy to death.

This was a current story:

“This woman was a Baluch. She had been a serf and had been literally bought by this feudal landlord when she was ten. She had been his mistress, his son’s mistress, and finally, when his grandson wanted to possess her, she ran away with her lover and sought refuge on our farm. We were also feudals. She ran from one feudal to another. There was a lot of heat on us to return her. I knew that if we returned her they would punish her in the most bestial manner. This feudal raped serf women, humiliated them when they disobeyed, killed them sometimes, and destroyed their bodies. He humiliated them by tying them in the pens like animals, having them sodomized, and making them eat excrement. He was in his sixties.

“I knew that if we returned this woman to him they would cut her nose and hamstrings. And she knew this. She begged us not to send her back. During the negotiations with the landlord, who was politically very powerful and, ironically, belonged to the liberal party, they said that she had to give up her six-year-old son. They said, ‘It’s a matter of honor for us. If you don’t give us the woman, you give us the boy.’

“I had to persuade the woman to send the boy back. She started crying. She grabbed my feet and said, ‘You are powerful. You can get my son back.’ I told her I couldn’t.

“She gave that boy away. It was unbelievable how she dressed this little boy. And two total strangers came for him. She dressed him up and said to
him that he had to go with them, and that she would follow, and that he mustn’t be afraid. Whenever he cried she said she was going to follow, she would come. She pushed him towards the men. They were tall, with their
lungis,
and with their big mustaches. She said, ‘Go with them. I will be right behind you. You are going to meet your father’s family.’ The boy was scared. He kept looking back. She was impassive. No tears. She said, ‘Go. I’m coming.’ She kept saying, ‘I’m coming,’ until the boy disappeared. Then she started screaming. They weren’t going to kill the boy. They would let him grow up on the farm. He would grow up as another serf.”