White Mughals (30 page)

Aristocratic Mughal women also tended to be much better educated than their Iranian cousins: almost all of them were literate, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or ‘learned matrons’; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry and astronomy.
²¹
As a result there were many cases of highly educated Indian Muslim princesses who became famous writers or poetesses: Gulbadan, the sister of the second Mughal Emperor Humayun, wrote her brother’s biography, the
Humayun Nama,
while her great-great-great-niece Jahanara wrote a biography of the celebrated Indian Sufi, Mu’in ud-Din Chisti, as well as several volumes of poetry and her own epitaph.
²²
More scholarly still was Aurangzeb’s daughter, Zeb un-Nissa. According to the
Maasir i-Alamgiri,
the history of Aurangzeb’s reign, Zeb un-Nissa had learned the Koran by heart and ‘completely mastered the Arabic and Persian languages, as well as the art of writing all the various styles of calligraphy. Indeed her heart was set on the collection, copying and reading of books. The result was that she collected a library the likes of which no man has seen; and a large number of theologians, scholars, pious men, poets, scribes and calligraphists by this means came to enjoy the bounty of this scholarly lady.’
²³

This sort of thing was dangerous enough, thought Shushtari; but more shocking still was the way these over-educated and independent-minded Indian women behaved. He was particularly horrified at the number he came into contact with on his travels who had had affairs—or even intermarried—with the English:

This approach was not in fact some radical colonial departure, but was part of an old Indian tradition: providing wives or concubines for rulers had long been a means of preferment in courtly India. As the British rose to power across the subcontinent it became increasingly politically opportune to marry princely Indian women to them, so binding the British, and especially the British Residents, into the Indian political system and gaining a degree of access and leverage over them: William Linnaeus Gardner for example is quite open about the fact that his application to marry his Begum was ultimately agreed to by her family as ‘on mature deliberation, the ambassador [i.e. Gardner] was considered too influential a person to have a request denied, and the hand of the young princess was promised’.
²⁵

Behind these frequent liaisons between British men and Indian women—and Shushtari’s horrified attitude to such connections—lay not just different approaches to gender, but radically differing approaches to both romantic love and sexuality between India and Iran. Sexuality in India was always regarded as a subject of legitimate and fascinated enquiry, and looked upon as an essential part of the study of aesthetics:
srngararasa
—the erotic
rasa
or flavour—being one of the nine
rasas
comprising the Hindu aesthetic system. Such was the lack of embarrassment in both Hindu and Muslim courts that numerous miniatures were commissioned and painted showing exactly how the fullest possible pleasures of this
rasa
might be attained. It was a world away from the rigid ban on the depiction of images of any sort that defined the strictest interpretations of Middle Eastern Islam.

Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries many of the classics of Hindu writing on love and eroticism were translated into Persian for the use of the princes and princesses of Indian Muslim courts. Significantly, it was in the more cosmopolitan and less comprehensively Islamicised courts of the Deccan such as Bidar, Bijapur and Golconda that much of this work of translation and dissemination took place: erotic treatises such as the famous
Kama Sutra
and the
Srngaramanjari
(literally ‘The Bouquets of Sexual Pleasure’) were translated into Persian or Deccani Urdu, while Indian Muslim authors added new studies to the erotic shelves of the palace libraries such as the
Lazat al-Nissa
(or ‘Delights of Women’) and the
Tadhkirat al-Shahawat
(‘Book of Aphrodisiacs’), both of which were much read and copied throughout the eighteenth-century Deccan.

Other texts advised on how to plant a pleasure garden with sensually stimulating plants as an aid to seduction, or even, in the case of the
‘Itr-i Nawras Shahi,
how to ‘charge’ a palace bedroom with scents appropriate to prolonging and heightening sexual pleasure: as well as placing bouquets of tuberoses and other strongly scented flowers at varying heights in the room, the writer suggests burning varieties of citron- and jasmine-derived incense, and lifting the bedspread so that the sheets can absorb the fragrance, which will be ‘enticing, invigorating, and pleasure giving’.
²⁶

Nor was it just a matter of erotic theory: judging by the evidence of travel accounts, sexuality played a significantly more open role in daily life and gossip in India than it did in Iran. Travellers to the subcontinent regularly brought back tales of romantic liaisons in the palaces of the Mughals, especially with the
khanazads
or
salatin,
the palace-born princes who moved freely about the harem as children and whose entry as adults was restricted but not entirely forbidden. The
salatin,
who tended to marry into the royal household and lived in the precincts of the Mahal, were said to have taken full advantage of their status: certainly, according to the seventeenth-century Venetian quack Niccolao Manucci, ‘under cover of this title, these princesses and many great ladies gratify their desires’.
²⁷

If this is true of Mughal India in general, it is especially true of late Mughal India between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. After the end of the enforced puritanism of Aurangzeb and Nizam ul-Mulk’s period, attitudes changed completely: Nizam Ali Khan even founded a department of his civil service to oversee and promote the business of dancing, music and sensuality, the
Daftar Arbab-i-Nishaat
(the Office of the Lords of Pleasure).
²⁸
At the same time there was an explosion of unrestrainedly sensual art and literary experimentation: in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, poets at this time wrote some of the most unblushingly amorous Indian poetry to be composed since the end of the classical period seventeen hundred years earlier.

This was the age of the great courtesans:
^cg
in Delhi, Ad Begum would turn up stark naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one would notice: ‘she decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in place of the cuffs she draws flowers and petals in ink exactly as is found in the finest cloth of Rum’. Her rival, Nur Bai, was so popular that every night the elephants of the great Mughal
omrahs
completely blocked the narrow lanes outside her house; yet even the most senior nobles had to ‘send a large sum of money to have her admit them … whoever gets enamoured of her gets sucked into the whirlpool of her demands and brings ruin in on his house … but the pleasure of her company can only be had as long as one is in possession of riches to bestow on her’.
²⁹

Nur Bai’s counterpart in Hyderabad was Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the mistress of Mir Alam, and the most celebrated beauty of the age.
³⁰
She was as renowned for her intelligence as her matchless dancing; and on meeting her, according to Shushtari, the young Mir Alam immediately ‘fell in love with this moon-faced beauty
^ch
and threw off the gravitas of the scholar. In the days of the full springtime flush of his youth, his mind was unsettled by her seductive beauty and ravishing charm, so that he could only think of love and poetry, and soon fell ill. It took him more than three months to recover and get back to studying and teaching the Islamic curriculum.’
³¹

Mah Laqa Bai was not just glamorous and seductive: she was widely regarded as Hyderabad’s greatest contemporary poet, whose works were collected as far away as Delhi and Lucknow. She built a famous library filled with books on the arts and sciences, and commissioned the
Mahanama,
a major new history of the Deccan; later she became an important patron of poets in her own right.
³²
Such was the Nizam’s reliance on her wisdom that alone of the women of Hyderabad she was given in her own right the rank of a senior
omrah,
so that she could attend the durbar and advise the Nizam on state policy.
³³
She also accompanied him to war, dressed in male clothing, and gained a reputation for her riding skills, her accomplishments with the bow, and even with the javelin. No wonder Kirkpatrick’s Assistant John Malcolm called her ‘an extraordinary woman’, or the Hyderabadi sage Qadrat Ullah Qasim wrote that she was ‘a unique combination of body and soul’.
³⁴

The poetry of Mah Laqa was typical of much of the verse of the period in being concerned largely with the joys of love. At this time a whole new specialist vocabulary of Urdu and Deccani words and metaphors developed to express the poet’s desires: the beloved’s arms were likened to lotus stalks, her nose to a champa bud, her thighs to banana stems, her plaited hair to the Ganges, and her
rumauli
—a word that was coined to describe the faint line of down which ran from below a woman’s navel—to the River Godavari. In this spirit, the Avadhi poet Shauq (1783-1871) wrote a whole series of
masnavis
on amorous subjects entitled
Fareb-i-Ishq
(‘The Wiles of Love’) and the
Bahar-i-Ishq
(‘The Spring of Love’), while his contemporary Nasik summed up his life’s work with the epitaph:

This sort of thing was not to everyone’s taste: the great Delhi poet Mir expressed his view that most Lucknavi poets could not write verse, and would be better-advised to ‘stick to kissing and slavering’. But this mood of fleshy decadence crossed from the
mushairas
(poetic symposia) of the poets to the workshops of other artists: to the tailors, for example, where
derzis
laboured to produce ever more transparent and revealing
cholis
with weaves of wondrous lightness named
baft hawa
(‘woven wind’),
abe-rawan
(‘running water’) and
shabnam
(‘evening dew’).

Similar concerns inspired the scriptoria of the miniaturists. In Hyderabad, the artists of Nizam Ali Khan’s period were producing miniatures that tapped into the old erotic pulse of so much pre-Islamic Indian art and which were concerned above all with the depiction of aesthetic bliss in the Arcadia of the scented Deccani pleasure garden. Here courtesans as voluptuous as the nude
yakshis
^ci
and
apsaras
^cj
of south Indian stone sculpture attend bejewelled princes who seem to have walked off the walls of the ancient Hindu cave sculptures of nearby Badami. These women smoke hookahs and swim in long garden pools, they drink wine and play with pigeons or while away the moonlit monsoon nights on swings, listening to music and carousing in marble pavilions. The hunting and battle scenes of high Mughal art have disappeared. As one rather surprised Indian art historian has commented, ‘it is difficult to account for their sudden absence from the painters’ list of themes, but it shows that women and not hunting or war were important for their patrons’.
³⁵

There was nothing to compare with this pleasure-loving spirit in Shushtari’s Persia. For in strong contrast to the sensual decadence of late Mughal India, the Iranian and Middle Eastern attitude to romantic love lay much closer to Eastern Christian notions (the environment in which so many early Islamic attitudes developed), which emphasised the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and even, in extreme cases, the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity. In Iranian literature love is usually portrayed as a hazardous, painful and dangerous condition: typically, in the great Persian epic
Layla and Majnun,
Majnun is driven mad by his love for Layla, and ends up dying wasted, starving and insane.
^ck

This is the attitude to romantic love that Abdul Lateef Shushtari subscribes to, and the
Tuhfat
contains a discussion of the subject in which he emphasises the derivation of the Persian word for romantic love—
’Ishq
—as coming from ‘the bindweed that strangles … doctors call it a melancholy distemper of black bile, curable only by sexual union with the desired object’.
^cl

As Shushtari wrote on this subject, the notorious affair between his cousin’s granddaughter Khair un-Nissa and James Kirkpatrick must have been at the back of his mind. At the time he was writing the affair had led to the destruction of all his hopes—and those of much of his family—of wealth, success and power in India: romantic love and sexual fulfilment had indeed turned into a kind of poisonous bindweed dragging down all who had become entangled in it.

The liaison was thus a most sensitive and scandalous subject, and Shushtari refuses to discuss it directly, remarking only that ‘a detailed account of this notorious affair is not appropriate to these pages, indeed even a summary mention of it would provoke horror and disgust in the reader’; but what is intriguing about his account is the fact that he clearly does not in any way blame Kirkpatrick for what happened. Instead he describes him in the warmest terms: ‘The Company representative, Major James Kirkpatrick, is a man of good character and firm friend of mine. He has made a garden on the outskirts of Hyderabad where he lives: it is a beautiful garden and I occasionally went there in his company and found him a man of great intuition and understanding, second only to my older brother.’ As far as Shushtari is concerned, James did not initiate the affair, and so was not responsible for what happened.