The Solitude of Emperors (18 page)

The most serious threat had come in recent times. When the Babri Masjid was demolished, just as scores of holy places elsewhere in the country were besieged, so Meham’s shrine was also targeted. A group of hooligans, most of them loafers and petty criminals from around the district led by a local MLA, had marched on the shrine a week after the destruction in Ayodhya, but the tough-minded inspector in charge of the Meham police station had denied them entry. He was transferred soon after by the government, whose sympathies clearly lay with the fundamentalists, but the nationwide outrage at the wave of violence unleashed by Ayodhya and the prevailing mood in Meham, which was against the shrine being taken over, forced the government to change its stance. A permanent police picket to safeguard the shrine was duly installed.

But just a few weeks ago, on the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, a better-planned attack had almost succeeded. It had been announced with a great fanfare by the Kadavul Katchi, a right-wing political organization headquartered in Coimbatore that had links to national parties, and this time the agitation was led by Rajan, the Bombayite I had been hearing so much about. Rajan was a bit of an insider because he had lived in Meham during his youth. The professor said he would have succeeded in occupying the shrine if it had not been for the weather. ‘It had rained heavily for three days before the attack,’ Professor Menon said, ‘and there was a steady drizzle on the chosen day, so it would have been suicide for anyone to try and climb the last 108 steps to the shrine.’

‘There are 108 steps?’

‘Yes, thambi, the saint’s Hindu devotees made sure there were precisely 108; it’s an auspicious number. Another reason, by the way, for the fundamentalists to say it’s actually a Hindu temple, although it is one of the few claims that can actually be refuted as the steps were carved by the owner of a stone quarry when he was cured of leukaemia after praying at the shrine. In rainy weather the steps are so slippery that until the district authorities took steps to prevent people from making the ascent, pilgrims would die regularly.’

There was something that didn’t make sense to me, and I asked the professor why Rajan had chosen to telegraph his intentions ahead of the attack, when it would have been so much easier for him to march in unannounced with a few supporters disguised as pilgrims.

‘Wouldn’t it have been very difficult to dislodge him after that, especially if he could actually provide some proof to back his claims that it was a Hindu shrine?’

‘He wouldn’t do that,’ the professor said. ‘It would do him no good to take it over quietly; he needs the publicity, he wants to get people worked up. For him the question of whether that piece of rock is Hindu, Christian or animist is not about religion, it’s a means to an end, and that end is Rajan’s rise to power. He dons the garb of a religious fanatic because it is useful to him, not because he is any more religious than the next man. No, Rajan is as secular as any secular person you know, and uses religion in a purely secular way to achieve his goal. And so if he were to take over the shrine he would have to do so in a blaze of publicity. That is why he pressed ahead with the attack on the sixth of December, knowing there would be people watching. And when he retreated, vowing to take back the shrine for Hindus everywhere, he ensured he would have an even bigger audience the next time he tried. He had one reporter present a few weeks ago, next time he’ll have eight.’

‘So is he going to wait a year before he tries again?’ I asked.

‘No, he said in an interview with a Tamil newspaper that he was going to stage a dharna on Republic Day, asking for the shrine to be handed back,’ the professor said.

‘That’s less than a month away,’ I said.

‘Precisely. That’s why I am worried. Brother Ahimas is so unworldly that he thinks we shouldn’t take any extra precautions, but I am really glad you’re here to write about it, thambi, we need all the help we can get.’

~

Noah dropped me off at the foot of my hill, and as I trudged up to the house I was filled with misgivings. Until I had met Professor Menon, I had thought about the shrine solely in terms of the story I was going to write about it—Mr Sorabjee’s instructions had been explicit—but that evening as I mulled over everything I had heard I wondered if there might not be a way in which I could help while doing the research and interviews for my article. I wasn’t sure how effective I would be but I decided I’d try and set up a meeting with Rajan both to interview him for my story and to ascertain his real intentions regarding the shrine. I would also try, as unobtrusively as possible, to see what precautions were being taken to ensure the situation did not explode out of control. That would mean talking to the Collector in Ooty, the inspector of the Meham police station, and prominent local citizens like Brigadier Sharma. I wrote up my notes, made my preparations for the visit to the Tower of God the next day, and then, just before going to bed, I picked up Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript, as I had the previous two nights.

SHAHENSHAH AKBAR

Emperor of Faith

Elephants in musth are very dangerous. This is a condition that affects male elephants during the breeding season from about twenty-one to eighty years of age. An elephant in musth displays several symptoms—the temporal glands, located between the eye and the ear, become engorged and start discharging a strong-smelling brown fluid and the animal dribbles urine constantly. It becomes extremely aggressive, charging anything that moves without provocation; it is sensitive to the slightest noise, and even its mahout cannot approach it safely. For this reason, domestic elephants in musth are usually securely chained to trees to prevent them from damaging themselves or those who tend to them.

I am over eighty now, but when I was young I felt the urge to push life to the limits, something I am sure you will be familiar with. A friend and I would get on my motorbike and drive up and down Marine Drive as fast as we could in an attempt to impress the girls from Wilson College. It was the most reckless stunt we could think of. I am sure young people today would find it tame but I am inclined to think that even the most daring of you wouldn’t attempt what Emperor Akbar did as a youth—he rode great musth-maddened war elephants, including those that had recently killed men, for sport. It was typical of the man. He thrived on challenges and the adrenalin rush of activities that put him in physical danger. To the consternation of his generals, he was always at the forefront of the various battles he fought, lopping off heads to join the towers of severed body parts the Mughals left on the field of battle. It was a custom handed down from their forebears, the Mongols, the tribes that the world had come to fear when they were ruled by the legendary Genghis Khan.

Akbar (1542-1605) was fourteen years old when he became emperor of Hindustan, the third to accede to the Mughal throne after his father Humayun and grandfather Babur. Unlike his predecessors, Akbar was the first Mughal truly to call the country his homeland, and he devoted all his energies and attention to what had hitherto just been a possession. The empire he inherited was by no means secure because the emperor’s hold on many of his territories, especially in the farthest reaches of the subcontinent, depended entirely on the goodwill and fealty of the powerful amirs and his relatives, who controlled various important kingdoms. But Akbar proved to be a strong and decisive ruler, and he soon brought the state under his control.

Nothing in Akbar’s early upbringing gave any hint of his revolutionary thinking about faith and spirituality. His father and grandfather had been aesthetes who took an interest in religion as men of culture were expected to do, but Akbar displayed no such inclination when he was young. He preferred to hunt and learn the art of combat, both of which he soon excelled at. Few men could match the emperor’s physical feats of endurance and his marksmanship was spoken of with awe. But as he grew older, his passion for the arts of war and sex and his physical prowess began to decline and he became increasingly preoccupied with the welfare of his subjects and the duties of a ruler. Although the Mughal empire was the richest in the world at this time (by contrast, the total revenue of the king of England was only about one seventeenth that of Akbar’s) it was a land of stark inequalities. The emperor, his princes, amirs and noblemen were prodigiously wealthy but there was also widespread poverty and famine in the land. Exercised by this, Akbar began to devote a lot of his time and resources to improving the lives of his people; a natural corollary of this shift in the emperor’s priorities was a growing interest in the variety of faiths that his subjects followed, for Hindustan was already home to many religions. Akbar had Hindu wives but this was not unusual—like other emperors of the time, he had entered into marriage alliances with princesses belonging to vassal kingdoms—but what marked him out from his predecessors and other Muslim rulers was the unusual interest he took in Hindu theology, festivals and rites. This incensed the orthodox Muslim clergy, but he didn’t pay them much heed and continued with his heretical ways; he was after all God’s chosen representative on the planet.

In time, Akbar began engaging with holy men from every faith, and even convened regular meetings at a centre of religion and philosophy he’d set up called the Ibadat Khana. Initially, the holy men who debated the intricacies of faith at the Ibadat Khana were drawn from the various sects of Islam, but soon the Emperor opened up the forum to learned men of every religion: Hindus, Parsis, Jains and Jesuits. The Ibadat Khana, according to historians, was a tower from which walkways radiated to platforms embedded in an outer structure that encircled the core. The emperor sat in the middle of the inner tower while the wise men were placed all around him. Once everyone was settled the discourses on the true meaning of faith would begin. The sea of rhetoric would ebb and flow, controlled by the man at the centre, a man who would in time confound the Gods themselves with his thinking about faith. But that lay in the future.

In 1579 Emperor Akbar was at the height of his power, ruling an empire larger than any that had existed before or since in the subcontinent. He was not yet forty years old. For some time now, as we have seen, he had been annoying the orthodox Muslim ulema, who were technically in charge of all religious matters, but he angered them still further by formally making known his respect for all faiths. He celebrated Diwali, wore Hindu caste marks on his forehead, participated in Parsi and Jain rites and proclaimed that all religions were equally true.

And then, in his thirty-seventh year, he took the enormous step of promulgating a syncretic faith for his land of a thousand faiths, a religion that cobbled together the best of all the religions and attempted to do away with divisions based on faith. He called the new religion Din-i-Ilahi or Divine Faith. He did not give up Islam, nor did he require any of his subjects to give up their beliefs. ‘No man should be interfered with on account of his religion,’ he said, ‘and anyone should be allowed to go over to any religion…’ Din-i-Ilahi would be an additional faith that people could subscribe to. But even though he was the most powerful man in the land, literally with the power of life and death over his people, Akbar’s Din-i-Ilahi was a doomed enterprise because few of his subjects, non-Muslim or orthodox Muslim, could see themselves switching to a new faith or adding it to their own religion, especially as it was centred on a man, no matter that he was their emperor. However, for a brief instant, the country had been led by someone who genuinely believed in coming up with a faith or philosophy that would include all its people.

Akbar’s vision, though short-lived, should be an inspiration to us all in this moment of crisis. We cannot do without religion but it cannot be left in the hands of small-minded men who will use it to advance their own petty ends. What we need is a man of God who is also a ruler of men, who can release faith from the squalid prison it has been locked into by the fundamentalists and, through his own example, show us how it can bring us together, not divide us. Our need is for an Emperor of Faith.

9

The Tower of God

Noah and I had arranged to meet at ten so that we could be at the shrine a little after noon, when Professor Menon was expecting us. He had told us Brother Ahimas would be free then and had invited us to stay on for lunch. I had intended to set off from Cypress Manor a little later than I would have normally done in order to give Noah an extra half-hour for any extra-curricular activities he might have planned, but just as I was closing the gates behind me, I heard an engine labouring up the hill. Within minutes the priest’s scooter came into sight. Noah pressed the horn in welcome and it gave a weak chirp. He looked slightly less scruffy than usual having swapped his lungi and old T-shirt for jeans and a T-shirt with a faded picture of Jimi Hendrix printed on it. When I complimented him on his appearance, he laughed and said, ‘I had to freshen up or your neighbours would have set their dogs on me. First time I’ve come up this hill in years, so I thought I’d break out my favourite T-shirt featuring Shri Hendrix.’

‘My room-mate’s a fan…’

‘And you’re not? Come on, da, he just happened to be the greatest guitarist who ever walked the earth.’

I confessed that I didn’t know too much about rock music, whereupon he leaned over, almost toppling the scooter, grabbed hold of me, and said sternly, ‘OK, you’ve got to make me a promise. When you go back to Bombay, I want you to listen to your room-mate’s Hendrix tapes…’

I laughed and said I’d do as he suggested. It took a little manoeuvring to turn the scooter around, and as he did so he told me a story about Hendrix. ‘You know, the guy was re-imagining the way the guitar was played, taking it places that hadn’t even been thought of let alone tried before, so on his first visit to England, all the great guitar gods of the time, Clapton, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, the Led Zep guy, you know fuckers of that calibre, trooped over to the club where he was playing to check him out. During the intermission Richards went to the loo to take a leak, and the guy in the stall next to him asked what the superstars who were all bunched up next to the stage thought of the show.