The Hindus (96 page)

There are some negative responses too: In the seventeenth century, for instance, a Hindu from Afghanistan insisted that when he died, he wanted to be buried where he couldn’t hear the hoof steps of Mughal horses.
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But despite or because of the political domination that the Mughals maintained, their contribution to the equine legends of Hinduism was generally positive, and the Muslims in the stories are often depicted in a favorable light, both because the Mughals strongly influenced Hindu horse lore and because some Hindus welcomed them as the bearers of the gift of horses. The shadow of the hated and loved Muslim horse may also fall across the highly ambiguous equine figure of Kalki.

Many Hindu rituals involve Muslims and horses. The Muslim saint Alam Sayyid of Baroda was known as the horse saint (Ghore Ka Pir). He was buried with his horse beside him, and Hindus hang images of the horse on trees around his tomb.
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In Bengal, people offer clay horses to deified Muslim saints like Satya Pir, and Hindus as well as Muslims worship at the shrines of other Muslim “horse saints.”
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Then there is the South Indian Hindu folk hero named Muttal Ravuttan.
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“Ravuttan” designates a Muslim horseman, a folk memory of the historical figure of the Muslim warrior on horseback, “whether he be the Sufi warrior leading his band of followers or the leader of an imperial army of conquest.” At Chinna Salem, Muttal Ravuttan receives marijuana, opium, cigars, and horse gram (
kollu
) for his horse. The offerings are made to an image of him mounted on his horse, sculpted in relief on a stone plaque, or to a clay horse (or horses) standing outside the shrine in readiness for him. The horse is canonically white and is said to be able to fly through the air.
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Muslims are deeply involved in the worship of the god Khandoba, an incarnation of Shiva, in Maharashtra, and many of Khandoba’s followers have been Muslim horsemen, though it is sometimes said that Aurangzeb was forced to flee from Khandoba’s power.
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In Jejuri, the most famous center of the worship of Khandoba, a Muslim leads the horse in the Khandoba festival and a Muslim family traditionally keeps Khandoba’s horses. The worshipers of Khandoba act as the god’s horse (occasionally as his dog
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) by galloping and whipping themselves,
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and at the annual festival in Jejuri, when, as in many temples, the worshipers carry a portable image of the deity in a palanquin or wheeled cart in procession around the town, devotees possessed by the power of the god move like horses in front of the palanquin.
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In the myth associated with this ritual, the god Shiva arrives on his bull Nandi
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before he mounts a horse to fight the demon Mani; some texts say that Nandi turns into the horse,
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while others
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say that Shiva ordered the moon to become a horse and, seated on it, cut off the head of the demon.
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The pan-Indian image of Nandi stands at the bottom of the hill at the shrine of Khandoba; the local horse of Khandoba stands at the top and is regarded as an avatar of Nandi, just as Khandoba is an avatar of Shiva. Both are waiting for Khandoba/Shiva to mount them. Khandoba is not a horse god or a horse; he
rides
a horse, which is, in this context, the very opposite of
being
a horse. In the myth, he rides a demonic horse; in the ritual, he rides his human worshipers. He is the subduer of horses, the tamer of horses. He makes demonic horses, like his worshipers, into divine horses.

A story about horses and Mughals is still prevalent both in oral tradition and in popular printed bazaar pamphlets in Hindi and Punjabi in the great Punjab area—Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Delhi—where real horses have remained important throughout Indian history. This is the story of Dhyanu Bhagat:

The devouring goddess appears both in the deity who demands blood sacrifices and, at the very start of the story, in the shrine of Jvala Mukhi, the holy place where she takes the form of a flame. For Jvala Mukhi (“Mouth of Fire,” a common term for a volcano) is the name of the submarine doomsday mare. In this story about her worship, the heads of the devotee and his horse are not transposed (as they are in Hindu myths about doubly decapitated women and men) but merely removed and restored in tandem, while Dhyanu asks for and receives a boon: that henceforth people can prove their devotion by giving the Goddess coconuts rather than their own heads.

Now, a coconut resembles a human head but does not at all resemble a horse’s head. The coconut, as essential to many
pujas
as animals are to a blood sacrifice, is a clue to the fact that this is really a myth about human sacrifice—perhaps a local myth—that has been adapted to take account of the more “Sanskritic” tradition of the horse sacrifice. There are changes: the horse beheaded in the story is not killed in a horse sacrifice, and it is beheaded rather than strangled as the horses in the horse sacrifice generally are (though they are often beheaded in the mythology). We might read this text as a meditation on the historical transition from human sacrifice to Vedic horse sacrifice to contemporary vegetarian
puja,
a progression already prefigured in the Brahmanas. Moreover, coconuts do not grow in the Punjab; the rituals specify that one must use
dry
coconuts for all offerings, presumably because they have traveled all the way from somewhere where they do grow, a long distance. Since these coconuts must be imported, they may therefore represent either the adoption of a myth that is “foreign” (i.e., from another part of India) or a local tradition about a “foreign” ritual that requires
imported
coconuts, appropriate to a ritual about imported horses.

A similar myth collected in Chandigarh substitutes a child for the worshiper himself:

We may see behind this story not merely the Vedic horse sacrifice but the South Indian story of Ciruttontar and the curried child and the well-known Puranic myth of King Harishchandra,
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whose son died and was eventually restored to him. What has been added is the horse.

A story about a low-caste travesty of a horse sacrifice was recorded in North India during the nineteenth century:

This is a horse sacrifice in the shadow world of the Pariahs, where Vedic traditions turn inside out. True, the horse comes back to life (like the horses in the tales of Dhyanu and Harichand), but not for long, nor does the priest fare well. The point comes through loud and clear: A horse is not a Pariah animal.

The long struggle and eventual fall of the Rajput kingdoms under the onslaught of the Mughal armies gave rise to a genre of regional, vernacular epics that evolved out of oral narratives in this period, taking up themes from the Sanskrit epics, the
Mahabharata
and
Ramayana,
but transforming them by infusing them with new egalitarian or pluralist themes, such as the figure of the hero’s low-caste or Muslim sidekick. The regional epics were nurtured in a culture that combined Afghan and Rajput traditions
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and much more. They embellish the trope of the end of an era, from the
Mahabharata,
with sad stories of deaths of the last Hindu kings. The bittersweet Pyrrhic victory of the
Mahabharata
heroes here becomes transformed into a corpus of tragic tales of the heroic cultural and martial resistance of the protagonists and their cultural triumph, despite their inevitable martial defeat. As Alf Hiltebeitel puts it, “A
Mahabharata
heroic age is thus mapped onto a microheroic age.”
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The Sanskrit epic supplies a pool of symbols,
⁶⁰
a sea of tropes, characters, and situations that form a kind of “underground pan-Indian folk
Mahabharata
,” feeding into a system of texts animated by a combination of Hinduism and Islam.
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Horses loom large in all of them.

The vernacular equine epics first moved from northwestern and central regions to southern ones and then carried southern religious, martial, and literary tropes back north, in a pattern we recognize from theological and philosophical movements. The irony is that Islamic culture contributed greatly to these grand heroic poems that people composed in response to what they perceived as the fall of a great Hindu civilization at the hands of Muslims. Two among the many heroes of these epics are Gugga and Tej Singh (in Hindi; also called Tecinku in Tamil country and Desingu in Telugu-speaking Andhra).

Gugga (also spelled Guga), a folk god, is said to have been a historical figure who lived, by various accounts, during the reign of Prithvi Raj Chauhan (the last Hindu king of Delhi, c. 1168-1192)
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or in the time of the last great Mughal, Aurangzeb (1658-1707)—that is, at either end of the Muslim reign. Gugga is a combination of a Muslim fakir (called Gugga Pir or Zahar Pir) and a Chauhan Rajput
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(that is, a Rajput warrior hero of the Chauhan clan in Rajasthan). According to one version of the story, Gugga, with his famous flying black mare, entered battle and beheaded his two brothers; when his mother disowned him, he converted to Islam and went to Mecca. When Gugga died, the earth opened and received him, still mounted on his mare.
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Another story tells of Gugga’s birth: A great yogi gave some
guggal
(a resinous sap used medicinally) to a Brahmin woman, a woman of a sweeper (Pariah) caste, and a mare, all of whom were impregnated.
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The horse, the Kshatriya animal par excellence, is here subversively paired with both Brahmins and Pariahs.

Raja Tej Singh was a historical figure, the son of the commander of the fort of Senji under Aurangzeb. When, in 1714, Tej refused to obey a summons from the nawab of Arcot, the deputy of the Mughal ruler (who was then Farrukhsiyar), the nawab waged war against him, in the course of which Tej rode his horse at the head of the nawab’s elephant; the horse reared and drummed his hooves on the forehead of the elephant, blunting the Mughal advance. A soldier sliced the hocks of Tej’s horse, unseating Tej,
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who died in the battle, as did his best friend, the Muslim Mahabat Khan. His queen, a beautiful woman aged sixteen or seventeen, “having embraced her husband, ordered with an incredible serenity that the pyre be lit, which was at once done, and she too was burned alive with him.”
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In Tamil and Telugu legend too, Tecinku’s best friend was a Muslim, while Tecinku was a devout Vaishnava.
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Yet despite the friendship between the Muslim and Vaishnava hero, this is not a simple story of communal harmony. Tecinku’s Muslim companion is a very Vaishnava sort of Muslim, who prays to both Rama and Allah on several occasions but goes to Vishnu’s heaven in the end; Vaishnavism encompasses Islam.
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