The Hindus (97 page)

Many of these stories are still told, indeed performed, in Rajasthan today, where the gods’ priests and the storytellers (
bhopas
) are drawn from among villagers of the lowest castes.
⁷⁰
Recently the patron of these performances explained why they were beginning to die out: “When the stories used to be told, everyone had a horse and some cattle. . . . Now, when a
bhopa
tells stories about the beauty of a horse, it doesn’t make the same connection with the audience.” Yet the epics are surviving in places where “the pastoral context of the story”—of cows and horses and heroic cattle herders—is still intact.
⁷¹

One strong hint that much of medieval Hindu horse lore comes from Muslims is the gender of the horses. Arab horsemen generally rode mares and told stories about mares, while the Hindus before the Mughal period generally preferred stallions. Vedic symbolism had predisposed Indian horsemen to admire stallions, and Hindu mythology is all about stallions, epitomized by the male horse killed in the horse sacrifice, with all its positive symbolism kept entire (virility, fertility, aggressive volatility). Stallions dominate the depicted Hindu battle scenes, hunting expeditions, and court ceremonies. And there are still tales of Rajput stallions, such as Chetak, a gray stallion that sacrificed his life for Maharana Pratap, the last Rajput to succumb to the Mughals, in the 1576 battle of Haldighati.
^jt
The females of the species, on the other hand, mares, are regarded as wild animals never tamed, symbolic of wild women who deceive and leave their husbands, a pattern exacerbated by the image of the submarine mare, symbolic of dangerous lust and anger that will inevitably erupt to destroy the world at doomsday.

A dramatic change takes place in the Hindu equine epics, where many of the horses are good mares, such as Gugga’s mare and the celestial mare that the Telugu hero Peddanna inherits from his foster mother. Dev Narayan, hero of yet another epic, rides a black mare named Tejan.
⁷²
In the epic of Pabuji in Rajasthan, Pabuji has a splendid black mare named Kesar Kalimi (“black saffron”), who dies with him.
⁷³
In some versions, the mare is an incarnation of Pabuji’s mother, Kesar Pari (“the saffron nymph”), an Apsaras, who abandons him shortly after his birth but returns to him in the form of a mare when he is twelve. Although Tecinku rides a stallion, Tej in contemporary Hindi folklore rides a mare named Magic Mare (Lila Gori);
⁷⁴
the force of the mare paradigm in the Hindi version seems to have overridden the earlier and more historical Telugu version, about a stallion.

The many benevolent mares in the oral epics therefore stand in opposition to the enduring Vedic and Puranic stallion tradition, arguing, subversively, for a positive valence for the demonic mare of the Sanskrit epics and Puranas. The authors of the regional equine epics were either ignorant of the Puranic bias against mares (which is unlikely) or chose to ignore it in favor of an imported Arabic pro-mare tradition, a narrative pattern of considerable detail repeated in many different stories.

MUGHAL WIVES (AND SAINTS)

Like mares, women, or at least some women, did rather well under the Mughals. From female Sufi saints
⁷⁵
and the women of the royal harem down to the wives of the lowest administrators, as we saw in the case of the poached peacocks, women exercised great powers behind the throne.
⁷⁶
Despite being generally confined in harems guarded by eunuchs, a few princesses had their own libraries, and the women of the harem learned Persian poetry, were often able to sign away land grants (the
uzuk,
the round seal, was kept in the harem), and could have abortions.
⁷⁷
Though hardly typical (education for girls was rare, and they married too early to have much time for it in any case
⁷⁸
), these women were at least
possible
, and they expanded the boundaries of the possible for their sisters in their day.

Babur’s maternal grandmother managed everything for her young grandson, and his mother accompanied him on many of his campaigns. Hindal’s mother, Dildar Begum, restrained him from at least one attack on his brother Humayun, when he was nineteen, by putting on mourning and telling him she was mourning for him, bound as he was on the path of his own destruction. (He listened then but tried it again later, and Humayun killed him.
^ju
) Akbar’s mother, Hamideh Banu, was in charge of the empire while Akbar went off on military campaigns, and Akbar gave each of his concubines her own house and her own day of the week reserved for him to visit her; he also constructed an entire, strictly regulated city district for the prostitutes, called City of Satan (Shaytanpura). The cash allowances that Akbar’s wives received were called pan (betel leaf) money (
barg baha
), a rough equivalent of what Euro-American women used to call pin money. Akbar also had female bodyguards, with archers in the front lines.
⁷⁹
He took an interest in the education of women and established a school for girls in Fatehpur Sikri.

One woman who opposed Akbar was Chand Bibi (“Lady Chand”), who was regent of Bijapur (1580-1584) and regent of Ahmednagar (1595-1599). A fine horsewoman, who knew many languages (including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Marathi, and Kannada), she took part in the defense of the fortress of Ahmednagar when forces under orders from Akbar led an attack and siege against it in 1595. But when she began to negotiate a treaty with the Mughals, rumors circulated that she was in league with them, and her own officers murdered her.
⁸⁰

One of the few prudent things Jahangir ever did was to marry a very capable woman, Nur Jahan, the thirty-four-year-old widow of one of his Afghan amirs; she was also the daughter of his chief minister (whose large estate she inherited) and sister of his leading general. A first-class rider, polo player, and hunter, she was a “cunning and energetic woman,” who exploited the Mughals’ weakness for drugs and alcohol. She became the de facto regent on those many occasions when Jahangir was too smashed to function. As Jahangir himself put it, mincing no words, “I have handed the business of government over to Nur Jahan; I require nothing beyond a
ser
of wine and half a
ser
of meat.” Coins were struck in her name, and she could sign mandates granting rights. She built many gardens and a gorgeous mausoleum at Agra. She cleverly managed to have her niece (her brother’s daughter) Mumtaz Mahal marry Shah Jahan and her own daughter by her first marriage marry one of Shah Jahan’s brothers. Other women of Jahangir’s harem encouraged the design and building of mosques when he himself did not.
⁸¹

Mumtaz Mahal (“the palace favorite”) is surely the most famous of the Mughal women, the one for whom Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal. She was the mother of Dara Shikoh and his older sister, Jahanara. Jahanara was initiated into a Sufi order and wrote about it and about her pilgrimage to the shrine of the Indian Sufi Mu’in ud-Din Chisti in Ajmer; she also wrote a biography of him. She was immensely wealthy, both from half of her mother’s fortune and from trading with the Dutch. Jahanara drank wine and inspired many rumors; she was said to have hidden young men in her house, sometimes disguising them in women’s clothing and riding with them on an elephant.
⁸²

There was, as we have seen, a great deal of intermarriage between Rajputs and Mughals: Mughal men married Rajput women, and to a lesser extent, Rajput men married Mughal women. Intermarriages of both sorts were also common among the nonroyal classes. Mirza Aziz Koka (governor of Malwa, Akbar’s foster brother) wrote a poem comparing the members of the multiethnic harem: “Every man should have four wives: a Persian, with whom he can converse; a woman from Khurusan for the housework; a Hindu woman to raise the children, and one from Transoxiana, whom he can beat as a warning to the others.”
⁸³
And Urdu poets composed romantic Hindustani poetry on an ever-popular theme, “Muslim boy meets Hindu girl, with fatal consequences.”
⁸⁴

Many heroines among the Rajput princesses fought against the Mughals in battle, rather than marry them. Tulsibai, a Maharashtrian woman, led a great army into battle, and Rani Durgawati of Gondwana was famous for her courage. The widow of the Raja of Srinagar ruled with an iron hand during the reign of Shah Jahan; she often ordered the noses to be cut off convicted criminals,
⁸⁵
a punishment traditionally meted out to unchaste women.

There were also brave women in religious literature of this period, the most famous of whom was Mirabai (c. 1450-1525). According to the earliest version of her life story, she was forced to marry a king’s son but preferred the company of wandering mendicants and devotees of Krishna; the king (either her husband or her father-in-law, according to various stories) tried, in vain, to kill her; she left her marriage to join the devotees of Krishna. In later tellings, however (including the Amar Chitra Katha comic book, India’s version of Classic Comics), it is her husband’s brother who tries to kill her; her husband conveniently dies soon after the marriage, and Mirabai is depicted as “an ideal Hindu wife.” Although her poems are the most quoted and her life story the best known of all the North Indian saints, few of her poems were anthologized in her time. Perhaps this is because her poems mock both marriage and asceticism,
⁸⁶
leaving her few allies.

Mirabai composed a poem based on a story that Valmiki, Tulsi, and Kabir told about a tribal woman (Shabari) who offered Rama fruit. Mirabai adds a woman’s touch. The tribal woman (here a Bhil) first tastes the fruit herself:

Mirabai asks, about the Bhil woman, “What sort of a Veda could she have learned?”

Another poem by Mirabai is about Krishna, whom she calls Mohan (“the deluder”):

The mother-in-law, a figure who also plagued another woman devotee, Mahadevyyakka, is still around, though no longer analogized to illusion (
maya
); now it is the god himself who is the deluder, capturing Mirabai’s eyes in the binding gaze of love (darshan).

There were also a number of women saints in the Maharashtrian tradition, including Muktabai and Janabai, whose verses to the god Vithoba sometimes address him as a woman, Vithabai, and refer to him as a mother, though he is generally male. Yet despite this female presence, other poems about Vithoba project negative images of women, as temptresses who distract men from their path of detachment.
⁸⁹

The fear that widows too might become temptresses was one of the factors that promoted suttee, the Hindu custom of burning the widow with her husband’s body.

Akbar opposed suttee but did not abolish it or use the power of the state to suppress it.
⁹⁰
In 1583, Abu’l Fazl reports, Akbar decreed: “If a Hindu woman wished to be burned with her husband, they should not prevent her, but she should not be forced,”
⁹¹
and women who had children were not allowed to burn themselves. Elsewhere Abu’l Fazl quotes Akbar as saying, “It is an ancient custom in Hindustan for a woman to burn herself, however unwilling she may be, on her husband’s death and to give her priceless life with a cheerful countenance, conceiving it to be a means of her husband’s salvation. It is a strange commentary on the magnanimity of men that they seek their own salvation by means of the self-sacrifice of their wives.”
⁹²
Jahangir demanded that any women who intended to commit suttee must come to see him personally, whereupon he promised them gifts and land in order to dissuade them.
⁹³
He also complained bitterly that even Hindu converts to Islam, still marked by “the age of ignorance,” persisted in burying
^jv
women beside their dead husbands.
⁹⁴
Under Aurangzeb, a Muslim man dissuaded a Hindu woman from burning herself with her husband’s corpse and suggested that she convert to Islam, “which had no provision for this horrendous practice.” She did so. But no other man would accept her, as her body was covered with the lesions of leprosy.
⁹⁵

Yet the Mughals’ hostility to suttee, which some of them regarded as a byproduct of Hindu idolatry, was undercut by their deep respect for the values that they thought it represented
⁹⁶
—courage, loyalty, even love—and Akbar too admired those qualities in the women who committed suttee.
⁹⁷
A Sufi in the time of Akbar regarded suttee as a example of “burning human love” and used it (as Kabir had done) as a symbol of the affection of the soul toward god.
⁹⁸
An epidemic of suttees took place in Vijayanagar in the late sixteenth century, when the Deccan sultans destroyed it, and another occurred when the Rajputs fell under the control of the Mughals.
⁹⁹
When Man Singh died in 1614, six women committed suttee.
¹⁰⁰
Clearly whatever Muslim opposition there had been had not made a serious dent in the Hindu commitment to it.