Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam 0520046609, 9780520046603

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Moral Conduct and Authority THE PLACE OF ADAB IN SOUTH ASIAN ISLAM

EDITED BY

Barbara Daly Metcalf

Sponsored by the JOINT COMMITTEE ON SOUTH ASIA of the SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL and the AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

Contents University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1984 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Preface List of Contributors Note on Transliteration Introduction

vii xi xv 1

BARBARA DALY METCALF

PART ONE: CLASSICAL ADAB 1. Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and Contrasts

23

PETER BROWN

2. Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam

38

IRA M. LAPIDUS

3. The Adab Literature of Classical Sufism: Ansari's Code of Conduct

62

GERHARD BOWERING

PART TWO: ADAB AS ISLAMIC IDEAL Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title:

4. The Tuhfa i na$a'ih of Yusuf Gada: An Ethical Treatise in Verse from the Late-Fourteenth-Century Dehli Sultanate

91

SIMON DIGBY Moral conduct and authority. Papers presented at a conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, June 7-9, 1979, sponsored by the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Islam—India—Congresses. 2. Religious life (Islam) —Congresses. I. Metcalf, Barbara Daly, 1941II. Joint Committee on South Asia. BP63.I4M67 1984 297'.5 83-1361 ISBN 0-520-04660-9

5. Adab al-Muftr, The Muslim Understanding of Values, Characteristics, and Role of a Mufti

124

M. KHALID MASUD

6. The 'Ulama' of Farangi Mahall and Their Adab

152

FRANCIS ROBINSON

7. Islamic Reform and Islamic Women: Maulana Thanawi's Jewelry of Paradise

184

BARBARA DALY METCALF

8. Morality, Personhood, and the Exemplary Life: Popular Conceptions of Muslims in Paradise RICHARD KURIN

196

CONTENTS

VI

9. Shrines, Succession, and Sources of Moral Authority

221

Preface

DAVID GILMARTIN

10. A Note on Adab in the Murshid-Mund Relationship

241

MOHAMMAD AJMAL

PART THREE: ADAB AS COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE 11. Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers

255

J. F. RICHARDS

12. Prize-Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahahad Government Gazette Notification

290

C. M. NAIM

13. The Adab of Musicians

315

BRIAN SILVER

PART FOUR: ALTERNATIVES TO ADAB 14. The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid

333

RICHARD M. EATON

15. Malangs of the Punjab: Intoxication or Adab as the Path to God?

357

KATHERINE EWING

Glossary of Selected Terms Index

373 381

The papers in this volume, first presented at a conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, June 7-9, 1979, deal with issues related to the personal and moral qualities characteristic of authoritative figures in South Asian Islam. This is not to say that the corrupt and worldly have not here, as elsewhere, claimed authority; nor that authority based on descent, control of resources, and personal contacts has not been a constant. But behind all, and strikingly pervasive in the modern period, has been a concept of the well-constructed life, the harmonious life of a person who knows his relationship to God, to others, and to himself, and who, as a result, plays a special role among his or her fellows. The concept of moral discrimination and behavior embodied in the term adab (and its plural, adab) is a key to one central, recurrent vision of what the qualities of that life ought to be. One unusual aspect of our attention to this issue was that we students of the "peripheral Islamic lands" found ourselves taking up a classical concept of unquestioned importance that has been significantly neglected in studies of the Muslim heartland. There is singularly little writing on adab, and some of it, at least, reduces the richness of the term to a single dimension. It may be that for various historical reasons cultivation of adab has been particularly prominent in South Asia, notably in the modern period, when pervasive movements of religious reform have focused on the moral responsibility that adab fosters. South Asian Muslims are known for their identification with Islam and their personal cultivation of the norms of propriety and decorum. The topic, however, is not only significant in itself, but reflects the program of its primary sponsor, the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.1 The Committee has hoped through a series of projects to set aside the concepts of Western intellectual and aesthetic systems in order to seek out systems of meaning and organization from 1. These are described in "South and Southeast Asia: New Concerns of the Council," by David L. Szanton in Items, 30:2 (June 1976), pp. 13-17, and in "The Study of South Asian Conceptual Systems," by Stanley J. Heginbotham, in Items, 31:3 (September 1977), pp. 34-36.

Vlll

PREFACE

within South Asia's own cultural systems.2 Adab is not a concept easily related to any convenient comparative category. It encompasses sociologically distinguishable groups, multiple domains of social life and psychological experience, and periods of history that are often seen as discrete. The effort to use this system was not easy, but we believe its meaning was not wholly "lost in translation." We had approached the conference tentatively, conscious of the difficulty we faced in working on a concept so polymorphic and often, at its most important, only implicit. In our conversations, we moved steadily farther toward seeing the implications of the concept and the interrelations of our disparate topics. As our sessions concluded, there was a sense of something like wonder at having approached—however haltingly—the core of what has given the Islamic tradition its richness and resilience throughout times and places of such unceasing diversity. The excitement of that sense lies behind the decision to publish both the papers and an introductory summary of the themes of the discussion. We seek to share our work with people interested in Islam and in great traditional civilizations, with those interested in concepts and methods of personality formation, and with those seeking some background for comprehension of the important developments taking place in the Islamic world today. For all the participants, the three days spent together were days of deep, shared learning and exchange. The Muslims we study, as discussed below, know that one is what one knows, and that whatever one does "colors the soul." They are right. On this occasion there was an adab of civility and intellectual generosity worthy of the concept itself. Participants in the conference included not only those who gave papers (listed below) but many who contributed as chairmen and discussants. William Roff (Southeast Asian History, Columbia University) played a particularly important role by providing a coherent and insightful overview of what he saw to be the theories and assumptions in the papers as a whole. The other chairmen and discussants from the University of California included Hamid Algar (Islamic Studies), Talal Asad (Anthropology), Edmund C. Burke III (Middle Eastern History, UCSC), Mark Juergensmeyer (Religious Studies), Satti Khanna (Hindi Literature and Film), Thomas Metcalf (South Asian History), and Paul Rabinow (Middle Eastern Anthropology). Their contributions were unfailingly stimulating. The conference owed much to the generous help of many people. David Szanton of the Social Science Research Council not only pro2. The members of the Joint Committee at the time of the conference were Stanley J. Heginbotham, chairman, Marc Galanter, McKim Marriott, Michelle B. McAlpin, Barbara D. Metcalf, Wendy D. O'Flaherty, Karl H. Potter, and John Richards.

PREFACE

IX

vided practical administrative support, but in a planning meeting and in the conference itself took a lively interest in our substantive concerns as well. The same was true of Bruce R. Pray of the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies at Berkeley and of Mark Juergensmeyer of the Graduate Theological Union, who together provided us with an institutional base. Lee Bean and Hafeez Malik facilitated the support of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, thanks to which we were able to invite two Pakistani participants. Sandria Freitag, organizer, critic, and gourmet, handled the administrative arrangements for the conference and made a contribution that was uniquely hers. Warren Fusfeld and Peggy Sanner, both of the University of Pennsylvania, ably undertook the difficult task of standardizing the transliteration in the manuscript and seeing to its final preparation. Richard Adloff edited the manuscript with erudition and tact. Phyllis Killen anticipated and solved a variety of problems as she saw the manuscript through the stages of publication at the University of California Press. To them all: our adab and thanks. B.D.M. Philadelphia September 1980

Contributors

MUHAMMAD AJMAL, a Jungian psychologist, has served as Director of the National Institute of Psychology, Islamabad, Secretary of Education (Pakistan), Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Punjab, and Principal of Government College Lahore. He is currently Iqbal Professor at the University of Heidelberg. He has published widely on psychological theory and on psychological issues in relation to Islam and Pakistani culture. GERHARD BOWERING is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in sufism and Qur'anic exegesis. His publications include The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam (1980); The Dreams and Labors of a Central Asian Sufi (forthcoming); and a series of articles on the history of Islamic ideas in the Near East and South Asia. PETER BROWN, formerly Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of Modern History, Royal Holloway College, University of London, is now Professor of Classics and History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the American Association of the Arts and Sciences; Doctor of Theology, honoris causa, Fribourg en Suisse; and Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Chicago. His publications include Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967); Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972); The World of Late Antiquity (1972); The Making of Late Antiquity (1978); The Cult of Saints (1980); and Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982). SIMON EVERARD DIGBY has been a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, since 1969 and he is a member of the Oriental Faculty at the University of Oxford. He has been honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London, since 1971. From 1973 to 1977 he served as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Eastern Art, the Ashmolean Museum. He is the author of a series of papers discussing aspects of sufi organization and hegemony in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as of a monograph, War Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies (1971), and an extended chapter on the maritime trade of

Xll

CONTRIBUTORS

India (twelfth to fifteenth centuries A.D.) in the Cambridge Economic History of India. RICHARD M. EATON received his training in history at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin and obtained his Ph.D. from the latter in 1972. He is Associate Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His major research interest is the evolution of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India and has contributed papers to professional journals and symposia volumes. KATHERINE EWING received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1980. Her dissertation, "The Pir or Sufi Saint in Pakistani Islam," was based on eighteen months of research in Pakistan. She has taught social sciences at the University of Chicago and is currently receiving training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. DAVID GILMARTIN earned the doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley and has taught Indian and Islamic history at the Universities of Arizona, California at Berkeley, and Washington. He also directed the Berkeley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan. He has published articles on Punjab politics and on the creation of Pakistan. RICHARD KURIN received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1981 for a dissertation entitled "Person, Family and Kin in Two Pakistani Communities." He is interested in the analysis of indigenous knowledge systems and has published articles on Pakistani social structure, religious behavior, and rural development. He has been a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and community development at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale since 1979. IRA M. LAPIDUS is Professor of History and Chairman of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages and many articles on social organization and religious values in Muslim societies. MUHAMMAD KHALID MASUD, formerly reader at the Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, is now a member of the Centre for Islamic Legal Studies at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. His main interest is Islamic law, history, philosophy, and sociology. He is the author of Islamic Legal Philosophy, Mutala'a Fikr-e-Iqbal (Urdu), Iqbal ka Tasawwur-e-Ijtihad (Urdu), and Deoband and Social Change. BARBARA D. METCALF, a research associate at the center for South/ Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley, has

CONTRIBUTORS

Xlll

taught history and South Asian studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (1982) as well as of articles on religious change in South Asian Islam. C.M. NAIM is Associate Professor of Urdu, University of Chicago, and editor and publisher of the Annual of Urdu Studies. He has written a number of articles on the Urdu language, Urdu literature, and the cultural history of Muslim South Asia. J.F. RICHARDS, Professor of History at Duke University, is a specialist in the history of Mughal India. His publications include Mughal Administration in Golconda-, an edited volume, Kingship and Authority in South Asia-, and many articles on Mughal India. He is now editing a volume devoted to the monetary history of Mughal India. FRANCIS ROBINSON, sometime Prize Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, is now Lecturer in History, the Royal Holloway College, University of London. His publications include Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces' Muslims 1860-1923 (1974), Twentieth Century World History: A Select Bibliography (1979), and Atlas of the Islamic World since 1500 (1982). His current work is on learned and holy men and the transmission of Islamic culture in South Asia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. BRIAN SILVER, Senior Preceptor in Urdu at Harvard University, has studied sitar with Ustad Ghulamhusain Khan of the Indore Gharana, and has performed in concert, and on radio and television, in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Pakistan, and India.

Note on Transliteration

The system of transliteration used in this volume is based on that used for the Arabic language as given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica ("Arabic Language," volume 2 of the 1972 edition, pp. 182-184). Other letters have been added to represent the non-Arabic sounds of Persian and Urdu. The full set of consonants used, leaving out the alif, is as follows (in Urdu alphabetical order): b, p, t, t, th,}, ch, h, kh, d, d, dh, r, r, z, s, sh, s, d, t, z, c , gh, f, q, k, g, 1, m, n, w, h, y, ' It should be noted that the symbols for non-Arabic sounds correspond relatively closely to the English sounds of the letters used for them, with the exception of the letters t, d, and r, which have been used to represent the retroflex sounds of Indie origin. These are used in place of the more usual t, d, and r so as to avoid confusion of Indie sounds and the "dark" sounds of Arabic. It should also be noted that the ta marbuta of Arabic words has been universally dropped, including those words that have, in Urdu, come to be written with a ta. This leaves us with, for example, sunna rather than either sunnah or sunnat. By this means, all words of identical Arabic origin will appear in the same form in transliteration despite differences in writing or pronunciation. As a further consequence of this method of transliteration, the case indicators of Arabic words have been dropped, and the vowel of the Arabic definite particle has been left as a. The assimilation of the lam of the definite particle has, however, been indicated, as in the title Tauba an-nasuh, or Munqidh min addalal. The only exception to this form of transliteration is that used for the term of address, hadrat, which should properly be rendered hadra, but would then be virtually unrecognizable to those familiar with the actual use of that form among the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.

Introduction BARBARA DALY METCALP i

The musical metaphor is ... much more apt for Muslim psychotherapy than the scientific metaphors of biology, psychology, or information processing that govern contemporary Western psychotherapy. With his self as the musical instrument whose many strings have been tuned to the required pitch, when Baba plays the healing raga he is not practising^ science but what Auden called "the intuitive art of wooing Nature." The success of the "wooing" depends . . . on the person of the healer. . . . In Baba's world-view, shared by his patients, a pir must develop certain essential qualities if he is to be a successful wooer of nature and a musician of healing. First, he must cultivate certain virtues of character—purity of mind and body, truthfulness, a definite detachment.2

Muslim societies have in certain historical settings formulated theories of the development of personal character and put great emphasis on the importance of its realization. Islam itself is a religion permeated by the importance of moral exemplification, above all, thai presented by the lives of prophets and saints. The all-important, all-encompassing religious law of Islam is the codification of the practice of the Prophet, who realized in his life, more perfectly than other humans ever could, the revealed truths of the Qur'an. Islam holds, in fact, that there were a series 1. I am grateful to Gerhard Bowering, Sandria Freitag, Warren Fusf eld, William Graham, Ira Lapidus, Gail Minault, and William Roff for careful reading of drafts of this introduction. 2. Sudhir Kakar, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), p. 38.

2

INTRODUCTION

of perfect revelations, culminating in that entrusted to the Prophet Muhammad, and that each revelation brought not only a book but a prophet who was its exemplification, so that its meaning would be intelligible and manifest. Later Muslims, remembered in pious anecdote and story, created a living tradition of prophetic realization by their approximation to the ideal. Moral fulfillment in this religious perspective, however, is not limited to great figures of the past but is expected of those in the present. Nor is it limited to those in inherited or appointed positions of power. In the quotation above, it is a humble and pious healer, ministering to the poor, who has sought and is understood to have achieved the character and characteristics that set him apart and that are the basis for the respect and authority he enjoys. It is his transformed being that permits him to be effective in what he seeks to do. At the basis of the valuation of moral character is the conviction that Islam alone defines what humans ought to be. Those who fulfill Islam are most fully human. The papers in this collection were conceived of as part of a project to examine the 'bases of authority in South Asian Islam. Of the many sources of authorltyT^this one of exemplification of moral qualities seemed to us. of considerable importance. It is potentially characteristic not only of religious leaders'in formal positions* but of leaders in all realms, great and small, of social and individual life. We approached this subject by singling out a word that is at once a concept, a literary genre, and a quality of personality, The term adab directed us toward consideration of codes of behavior and values as well as of methods of personal formation. By orienting our attention in this way, we were able to explore core values of Islam as well as what are often implicit theories of the way those values are apprehended and embodied. Three-papers-okthe- collection included here .treat«ffdai>~in*its classical-context. The^other^eoncelnft.he'Muslimsiof-South'^sia. Of necessity, they only sample this large subject. They describe adab as expressed in Persian, Urdu, and Panjabi; they focus primarily on the literate and elites; and they exclude many occupational groups, among them the military, merchants, artisans, physicians, and even kings. The topic invites further work, but certain themes are already plain. Adab in all its uses reflects a high valuation of the employment of the will in proper discrimination of correct order; behav-

INTRODUCTION

6

ior, and taste.3 It implicitly or explicitly distinguishes cultivated behavior from that deemed vulgar, often defined as pre-Islamic custom. Moral character is thus the fruit of deliberation and effort. Adab means discipline and training. It denotes as well the good breeding and refinement that results from training, so that a person who behaves badly is "without adab" [be adab}. Adab is the respect or deference one properly formed and trained shows to those who deserve it. Thus the term is first encountered by the Western visitor to South Asia in its form as-a greeting: "Adabl"—"my respects." In other contexts this form, the plural, generally defines rules or codes of behavior. In many modern Muslim languages, adab has come to be used exclusively for literature—a derivation, presumably, from some original sense that literature conveys proper knowledge for the cultivated. We found this ideal of adab to be strikingly pervasive. The articles that constitute the second section of this book stress the dimension of the ideal that calls for personal and psychological transformation toward an Islamic standard of values and behavior. It finds its richest development in sufism. Inscribed on the conference program was the following couplet, cited approvingly by a late-nineteenth-century sufi: turuq al-ishq kulluha adab addib an-nafs ayyuha al-ashab All the paths of love are adab O discipline the will, Companions!4

Here true a dab in the idiom of mysticism are nothing less than the way to the Divine. The person most fully realized is the person closest to God. The term in this usage is difficult for us to grasp because, although adab seems to refer to external behavior, it in fact encompasses inner qualities as well. Muslims argue that one can start with any Islamic tenet or body of religious literature or ritual practice and be led unerringly to the same fundamental teachings of Islam. This cohesion and replication is one dimension of the unity that is the fundamental symbol of Islam. We were somewhat surprised to find 3. For a general introduction to the term and bibliography of classical sources, see R Gabrielli, "Adab/' El2. 4. Muhammad Ashraf CAH Thanawi, Adab i zindagi (Delhi, n.d.), p. 100.

4

INTRODUCTION

that even such a concept as a dab, often used so narrowly by Western scholars, offered us this same range and richness. Expressed in sufi writings, implied in the practices of scholars and saints, embedded in the widely varied literatures of the adab of kings and courtiers, the adab of judges and muftis, the literature of everyday pleasurable instruction, and manuals of religious and moral advice for ordinary people, the concept of adab proves to be a key to central religious concepts of South Asian Islam. Two'themes seemed to us particularly noteworthy about these Islamic notions of moral conduct. The*fir-st was the radical comprehensiveness of the concept. It is comprehensive in the sense that its rules address all domains of life; it is also comprehensive in its relentless desire to bring all society and all sorts and conditions of humans into consonance with a common core of values underlying all social roles. A smond^impoEtant theme was the pervasiveness of theories of the person and of psychology evident in the concept and literatures of adab, a reflection of the fundamental point that e,thical norms in this perspective are defined as the development of personal character. The comprehensive application of adab is evident in the categories of works of this genre. Books of adab, if not written for Muslims in general, are addressed to particular social groups. Thus there are works on adab or adab for princes, courtiers, legal scholars and judges, physicians, musicians, housewives, and, above all, sufi saints. The rubric has thus the value of encompassing groups of people who are often studied separately. It encourages one to suspend judgment on the commonly held assumption that there is a great gap between elite and popular Islam. Indeed, we assume on this point the opposite, that there is a general adab shared widely in Muslim society that underlies the norms and activities of all other roles. As evident in the example of Baba above, there is no notion that moral exemplification, as in the Christian monastic tradition, comes only from religious specialists set apart from the faithful. In fact, Islam ^cherishes the notion that the most perfectly realized person of the age may be anyone—an artisan; a wandering, unkempt faqli; a woman. The theory of adab at least assumes all Muslims capable of spiritual discipline and realization. The importance of the all-encompassing scope of adab was particularly illuminated in the paper of Peter Brown, which compared Islamic adab with Graeco-Roman and early Christian

INTRODUCTION

paideia. Both were comprehensive in the detailed domains of life they addressed: "Far from being an exclusively intellectual grooming, Graeco-Roman paideia was expected to show itself immediately in body-posture, in the inflexion of the voice, in the restriction of gestures, and even in the control of breathing." Yet the striking difference, Brown argued, was that Islamic adab was rooted in religious sanctions, as paideia was not, so that adab not only required the internalization of norms from all spheres of human activities but involved the inner and the spiritual life in its fulfillment. In further contrast to later Christian notions of personal transformation, Islam never opted for ascetic with- , drawal and abstention from aspects of worldly life, but rather saw spiritual development as possible only through full experience of everyday life. Such comprehensiveness of scope and application may, Brown tentatively ventured, in fact account for the continued momentum and possibilities for growth and adjustment evident in Islam. Brown also speculated that the distinctiveness of Islamic adab may perhaps be the result of the historical experience of Muslims as a dominant ruling minority throughout the world. In such a situation, the comprehensiveness and depth of the culture that defined the ruling elites would be of particularly great importance. This theory is suggestive for the history of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. If adab evolved in part as the culture of rulers over plural societies, that situation long continued in India. Moreover, in the modern period, when Muslims have lived in the presence of not one but two alternative cultural traditions — the Hindu and the British — concern with adab has become assertive and pervasive. As is well known, the loss of political power for Muslims in India was particularly early and complete, and subsequent efforts at cultural renewal and selfconsciousness were many and diverse. Concern with issues of personal embodiment of cultural ideals is a major strand in many modern Indo-Muslim movements. Though further comparative work would of course be required to demonstrate it, our impression is that a particularly strong cultivation of adab and valuation of those embodying it is a hallmark of South Asian Islam. The theme of adab appears at an early period in the study presented here by Simon Digby of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih of Yusuf Gada. Although written in the late fourteenth century to set out ethi-

4

INTRODUCTION

that even such a concept as adab, often used so narrowly by Western scholars, offered us this same range and richness. Expressed in sufi writings, implied in the practices of scholars and saints, embedded in the widely varied literatures of the adab of kings and courtiers, the adab of judges and muftis, the literature of everyday pleasurable instruction, and manuals of religious and moral advice for ordinary people, the concept of adab proves to be a key to central religious concepts of South Asian Islam. Two-themes seemed to us particularly noteworthy about these Islamic notions of moral conduct. The*fir-st was the radical comprehensiveness of the concept. It is comprehensive in the sense that its rules address all domains of life; it is also comprehensive in its relentless desire to bring all society and all sorts and conditions of humans into consonance with a common core of values underlying all social roles. A sgeond«impor:tant theme was the pervasiveness of theories of the person and of psychology evident in the concept and literatures of adab, a reflection of the fundamental point that ethical norms in this perspective are defined as the development of personal character. The comprehensive application of adab is evident in the categories of works of this genre. Books of adab, if not written for Muslims in general, are addressed to particular social groups. Thus there are works on adab or adab for princes, courtiers, legal scholars and judges, physicians, musicians, housewives, and, above all, sufi saints. The rubric has thus the value of encompassing groups of people who are often studied separately. It encourages one to suspend judgment on the commonly held assumption that there is a great gap between elite and popular Islam. Indeed, we assume on this point the opposite, that there is a general adab shared widely in Muslim society that underlies the norms and activities of all other roles. As evident in the example of Baba above, there is no notion that moral exemplification, as in the Christian monastic tradition, comes only from religious specialists set apart from the faithful. In fact, Islam cherishes the notion that the most perfectly realized person \f the age may be anyone—an artisan; a wandering, unkempt \fagli; a woman. The theory of adab at least assumes all Muslims capable of spiritual discipline and realization. The importance of the all-encompassing scope of adab was particularly illuminated in the paper of Peter Brown, which compared Islamic adab with Graeco-Roman and early Christian

INTRODUCTION

5

paideia. Both were comprehensive in the detailed domains of life they addressed: "Far from being an exclusively intellectual grooming, Graeco-Roman paideia was expected to show itself immediately in body-posture, in the inflexion of the voice, in the restriction of gestures, and even in the control of breathing." Yet the striking difference, Brown argued, was that Islamic adab was rooted in religious sanctions, as paideia was not, so that adab not only required the internalization of norms from all spheres of human activities but involved the inner and the spiritual life in its fulfillment. In further contrast to later Christian notions of personal transformation, Islam never opted for ascetic withdrawal and abstention from aspects of worldly life, but rather saw spiritual development as possible only through full experience of everyday life. Such comprehensiveness of scope and application may, Brown tentatively ventured, in fact account for the continued momentum and possibilities for growth and adjustment evident in Islam. Brown also speculated that the distinctiveness of Islamic adab may perhaps be the result of the historical experience of Muslims as a dominant ruling minority throughout the world. In such a situation, the comprehensiveness and depth of the culture that defined the ruling elites would be of particularly great importance. This theory is suggestive for the history of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. If adab evolved in part as the culture of rulers over plural societies, that situation long continued in India. Moreover, in the modern period, when Muslims have lived in the presence of not one but two alternative cultural traditions—the Hindu and the British—concern with adab has become assertive and pervasive. As is well known, the loss of political power for Muslims in India was particularly early and complete, and subsequent efforts at cultural renewal and selfconsciousness were many and diverse. Concern with issues of personal embodiment of cultural ideals is a major strand in many modern Indo-Muslim movements. Though further comparative work would of course be required to demonstrate it, our impression is that a particularly strong cultivation of adab and valuation of those embodying it is a hallmark of South Asian Islam. The theme of adab appears at an early period in the study presented here by Simon Digby of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih of Yusuf Gada. Although written in the late fourteenth century to set out ethi-

6

INTRODUCTION

cal principles for the children of the ruling elites, it appears to have had its greatest currency in the Deccan. There one can imagine the need for such a text because of the shallower roots of the Muslim cultural traditions and because of the great political instability of the times. The author, Yusuf Gada, was a disciple of the great Chishti saint, Nasir ad-din Mahmud. His work, however, exemplifying Brown's point about the inclusiveness of adab, reflects the piety and religious values expected even of a man of the world. The treatise opens and closes with vivid eschatological descriptions in order to give a high seriousness to all the teachings it imparts. In between, with seemingly a "single level of meritoriousness," are linked injunctions on religious observances, including sufi disciplines, on attitudes and values, on worldly success, and on manners. A typical teaching partakes of all. For example, with the adab of eating are coupled what we can distinguish as medical advice ("if you eat when you are sated, that food eats your heart and liver"), social propriety ("don't stretch out your hand in front of others"), and piety ("eat food with reverence, speak the name of God over each mouthful"). This is a work that envisions an active and prosperous worldly life. Yet one is to measure every action, to seek religious knowledge, and to live humbly: "He who performs service becomes a lord with a crown on his head." In a period of political fragmentation and geographic mobility, the measure of one's life was ultimately what in oneself one was. The importance of shared norms of personal cultivation is evident throughout the papers here. A group for whom these norms were especially important was that of the mufti or legal advisor, discussed in a paper by Khalid Masud. Examination of the adab of the mufti is striking because of the revisionist argument put forth here that the authority of the mufti in fact rested wholly on his personal qualities. Most historians have assumed the mufti to have been an appointed official of the Mughal court, whereas in fact, Khalid Masud argued, his authority rested precisely on his knowledge and his character. This persistent error may be a reading back of British practice to an earlier time; it may also be an inability to see the potential authority«that moral attainments alone command. Respect for the mufti derived from respect for the Law which he knew and, most explicitly in the modern period, was expected to embody. The ideal mufti was to discriminate proper hierarchy in all its forms: to know his own

INTRODUCTION

/

place in relation to God, to knowledge itself, to great teachers of the past, and to the petitioner. He was to value his own role, for authority and respect were owed to him as they were to the Law. The mufti was therefore enjoined to assert himself symbolically over against all worldly powers, never giving them precedence nor accepting office from them. The same ideal of realization of Islamic qualities is evident in material related to saints and princes, even though in both cases, of course, personal distinctions were also inherited or transferred and status was derived from institutional position. But embodiment of the human ideal obviously was expected, particularly in the case of the religious leadership, for Islam holds in contempt the person who claims to have intellectual knowledge but does not realize it in his own life. Despite the division of function between the religious and the political leader, however, the ruler was often expected also to manifest Islamic qualities in himself. A bad king is a bad Muslim. A good king is ascribed saintly qualities. The relation is closer than metaphor, for the ideal is that of the Prophet himself, leader in all aspects of life. The ideal is approximated in Islamic movements that are led by warriors or revolutionaries who embody the religious ideal. The collection includes no papers on princes, but in our discussion we noted that the idiom of personal realization is often used by rulers themselves and by those who wrote about them. A tyrant, wrote Maulana Ismacil Shahid, is a ruler in whom the nafs, the self that incites to evil, is preeminent.5 In contrast, the sovereigns of the Delhi Sultanate were described by their chroniclers as men of moral perfection. Baba Farid, as Eaton's paper notes, bestowed turbans, the sign of spiritual perfection and succession, on two of the Tughluq rulers. The writers cAfif and Barani each depicted Firoz Shah as the qutb of his age.6 In Mughal India the spiritual perfections of the monarch appear to have been an important theme. John Richards's presentation on the emperor Babur stimulated a lively discussion of the renunciation of wine upon his entry into Hindustan.7 Whatever value 5. Quoted in Muhammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London, 1967), pp. 391-92. 6. Peter Hardy, Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical Writing (London, 1960). 7. John Richards has not included his paper, which he presented for discussion, in this collection. The memoirs are available in translation as Zahir ad-din

g

INTRODUCTION

wine-drinking might have in some contexts, it was not fit for a great king; and the Mughal renunciation of wine became an inseparable element of imperial succession. The later Mughals sought even more clearly some kind of religious role. Akbar's claims are best known. Initially he acted in a caliphal role, mediating among the 'ulama' and leading the prayer. Later he drew more on the sufi tradition and the tradition of the immanence of the Prophet's light; his chief publicist described him as a sufi PIT, a qutb, hinting even that he might be the mahdi who would restore mankind at the end of time.8 Using the theory of moral perfection described below, Abu al-Fadl wrote of Akbar: "He puts the rein of desire into the hands of reason. He sits on the eminence of propriety."9 The king himself was thus a moral exemplar. Princes and saints share a stock of metaphors. If the prince is described as a saint, the saint in turn is also a prince. The great shaikhs were entitled shah; their hospices were known as dargah; they were understood to exercise authority over a territorial area, a wilaya. Holy men, like rulers, formed a hierarchic order, but at their peak stood the qutb, the axis around whom the universe revolved. Indeed, part of the respect accorded sufis came from the very fact that they were seen as an alternative to a temporal power that could press very heavily on all the king's subjects. They always had, moreover, the potential of taking on a political role, as exemplified by the eighteenth-century successor of Baba Farid noted by Richard Eaton. This is not to say, as Eaton's paper makes clear, that the ideal was always central, but it was at least in the background. Not only for king and saint, but for teacher, master craftsman, and family head alike there were common moral expectations. This is evident for those in authoritative positions within the family, as suggested in the paper on the Bihishti zewar, as well as for those in authority in teaching crafts and arts, as illustrated in the paper on musicians. This indeed is one aspect of what we Muhammad Babur Padshah Ghazl, Babui-Nama, translated from the original Turiri text by Annette Susannah Beveridge (New Delhi, 1970), reprint of 1922 edition, two volumes in one. 8. See Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: History and Conscience in a World Civilization (Chicago, 1974), 3:67-80. 9. Abu al-Fadl, the A'ln i akbari, trans. H. Blochmann and H. Jarrett (Calcutta, 1948-49), 5:3, 173.

INTRODUCTION

9

assume to be common expectations for leadership and common modes of establishing authoritative relationships in all domains of life. In all cases, leaders establish relationships with followers through gifts, provision of food, bestowal of turbans, and taking of oaths. At a symbolic level, authority at every level is one. What were the moral expectations that were articulated for all Muslims and, above all, for those in positions of authority? How were they to be achieved? Reflection on these two questions provided a second major theme of our discussions. Both in the teachings of Islam conveyed in adab and in the method of their realization we found unity, again, to be our central theme, both coherence of all domains which are taught and coherence in the intellectual, emotional, and physical experience of what is learned. The teachings of Islam are one. Thus there is no parallel to (what is said to be) the theory in Hinduism that one can reach salvation through different paths—of action, of knowledge, of devotion. Here one can define three domains, shari'a (the Law), tariqa (the way of the sufis), and adab, that are analytically distinguishable, that have their respective specialists, that can be seen in tension with each other. Yet since all emerge, at core, as attempts to codify and embody the practice of the Prophet, they are ultimately the same in mainstream Islam. As Khalid Masud argued, they share a common idiom and systernatization. All three use the terminology—usul, furuc, ijtihad, ijmac—developed in the central system, that of shari'a. Adab became the vehicle for transmission of training in sufism, and as adab i din, a way of reaching toward greater completeness in Law by elaborating the sunna beyond what is legally required. Adab itself is based on the teachings of the other two domains. Further aspects of unity in these teachings were evident in our discussions of how this training is attained. Whether one begins with the Law, the Path, or Manners, each of necessity includes the others. As Ira Lapidus argued in his paper, although major classical thinkers of Islam may analytically distinguish among an outer emphasis on the Law, an inner ethical disposition, and the spiritual vision of God, it is clear that none is possible without the others. Knowledge, they hold, is not true knowledge unless it is realized, for there is no concept of the detached intellectual. Nor can one's inner self be untouched by what one knows and hence by what one does. Consequently, adab may "mean"

10

INTRODUCTION

correct outer behavior, but it is understood as both cause of and then, reciprocally, fruit of one's inner self. Knowing, doing, and being are inescapably one. The relation between the physical and spiritual self is closer than one might expect. Several of the papers describe a theory that humans possess two important faculties: caql, the faculty of moral discrimination shared with the angels, on the one hand, and nafs, the self in the sense of the will or, more typically, willful principle, on the other. Both, generally speaking, are expected to coexist. Man's realization comes through cultivation of caql and the consequent disciplining of the nafs. One seeks to refine, not destroy, the nafs. It is the very tension, the process of discrimination, the fact that there are choices to be made and control to be exercised, that gives man's life its value. It is this, not holy war, that is the "greater" jihad: .unceasing effort to discriminate the boundaries set forth in the Qur'an and relentless self-control in eschewing excess and living within them. Thus Nadhir Ahmad (the late-nineteenth-century novelist discussed by C. M. Nairn) echoed the widespread interpretation that the Qur'anic "trust" given to man alone in all creation is precisely the exercise of caql. Training in this discrimination presupposes a subtle relationship between the outer act and inward self. The central metaphor for personal development is that of habit or malaka through which outer action transforms or colors the soul. Actions reflect true knowledge and actions create that truth. Divinely revealed ritual actions, above all the attestation of faith, prayer, fast, alms, and pilgrimage, act on man in ways beyond his comprehension, exactly, notes al-Ghazzali, as do magic charts and the position of the stars.10 Obedience to legal injunctions generally is both a good in itself and the means to self-transformation, for moral choices create a pattern that ultimately, if repeated often enough, ideally makes it possible to act correctly without even the process of reflection. Even feigned emotions serve a legitimate end, for the Prophet himself taught that one should pretend to weep if one did not do so naturally, in order to cultivate the appropriate emotion. These theories recur in South Asian Islamic texts. Shah Wall 10. W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali (Lahore, 1963 reprint), pp. 79-80.

INTRODUCTION

11

Allah, the great intellectual of eighteenth-century Delhi, wrote that it is the Law that is the remedy for the nafs: The human species combines two opposing faculties, the angelic and the bestial. . . happiness lies in strengthening the former. . . . the creation of man is such that his self readily accepts the impressions of his actions done with full deliberation. These very impressions cling to his mind, constitute a part of it, continue with it even after his death, and become part of his reward and punishment. Contrary is the case of the animals. Whatever they do, the effect produced therefrom does not cling to their minds."

And Richard Kurin, analyzing popular contemporary views of heaven in Karachi and rural Panjab said, in discussion, much the same: If life in heaven illustrates anything, it is that actions make for new people, and new people make for new actions. . . . In this light the distinction between internal and external, or inward and outward, is obfuscated. The practice of good habits or proper action in this world which stamp the soul and transform the person reaches apotheosis in the next world.

Whether one is learning a craft, or poetry and language, or music, or moral and spiritual qualities, the process of outer practice, the creation of habit, and finally a realization of that process in one's being is precisely the same. In paper after paper, the central strategy for achieving this discipline was seen as the relationship to a worthy teacher. The relation of sufl master and disciple is the model for the relation of teacher and student in everything else: in crafts, in music, and in religious scholarship. The relationship was most fully discussed in the paper by Dr. Mohammad Ajmal, the psychologist, who argued the importance of discipleship for the focusing of oneself through the elimination of distraction and conflict. Detailed adab define the closeness and reciprocity of the relationship, as Gerhard Bowering commented, "to the point that the ideal of the master as a perfect man is internalized . . . and becomes something like an inner guide." Dr. Ajmal analyzed the classic relationship of the poet Rumi and his beloved Shams i Tabriz in these terms, explaining that Shams i Tabriz had been a potentiality within Rumi, externalized then later drawn back into him11. From the Altaf al-quds, quoted in G. N. Jalbani, The Teachings of Shah Waliyullah (Lahore, 1967).

12

INTRODUCTION

self, at which point he needed Shams i Tabriz no longer. The goal of the training is not merely unity with one's shaikh, but unity between God and theomorphic man: tauhid, Gerhard Bowering suggested, on the level of experience. The shaikh is only one of a company of great holy men who have lived before and who still present a living reality for those who share in this tradition. We were disabused of the assump1 tion that the Muslims we study share our view of the past. For j^tljem, like medieval Christian thinkers, the past "differed from the present only by being better."12 The culama of Farangi Mahall, as described by Francis Robinson, live in the company of their forebears. The followers of Baba Farid, described by Richard Eaton, knew him still to be present: Ibn Battutah "met him" long after his death. The Tuhfa i nasa'ih was attributed to Gesu Daraz (and not to the disciple who wrote it). By belonging to the company of living saints, Peter Brown noted, men otherwise enmeshed in the complex ties of patronage and hierarchy basically belonged to no one. It was in fact this psychological freedom, offered by disciplined training, to which we circled back again and again in our final discussion on the papers of Dr. Ajmal and the musician Brian Silver, for there we saw music as analogous to mysticism. Specific codes of conduct, of discipline, of grammar and rules, far from being repressive, were seen to permit one to transcend one's self, to lose one's self in favor of creativity and true freedom. It is that transcendence, that freedom from confusion, conflict, and conscious deliberation, that is understood by one's audience as the very basis and source of moral authority. The perfected individual represents not only the embodiment of the received tradition, but by interpretation and choice of elements within its repertoire confirms its current relevance and immediacy as well. In our papers and discussions we thus focused primarily on that style of adab that represents an Islamic ideal. Three papers included in this volume (those of Richards, Nairn, and Silver) remind us, however, that in many settings the content of adab is cosmopolitan and shared by non-Muslims as well. It is this dimension of adab that in fact is best known. This cosmopolitan adab defines the proper discrimination of social order, behavior, 12. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1974 reprint), p. 185.

INTRODUCTION

13

and taste? it espouses principles of breeding and nurture; and it is sustained by deference toward those who embody its norms. Its norms may at times be unself-consciously assimilated into a Muslim religious style. Indeed, Muslims may sanction the same codes by Islamic norms that others sanction by Hindu or other norms. Adab typically includes strands that can be identified as un-Islamic and that are at times condemned as contradictory to the Islamic ideal. From Mughal times on, India has been particularly distinguished by its association of Muslim and non-Muslim ruling elites in a common Persianate or Indo-Muslim cultural style. The Persianate theory of kingship has been especially problematic in Islamic religious thought. Its glorification of the ruler can be seen as an affront to the humility and deference that are described above as quintessential to the moral perfections of Islam. At times this contradiction has been ignored, and at other times thinkers have sought resolutions. Barani, the fourteenth-century courtier, argued that the salvation of the king was in fact in peril precisely because he had to wield absolute power. His only hope was to use his powers for the purposes of Islam. Bichitr, the artist, portrayed a solution to this tension, one might argue, by showing Jahangir gazing transfixed at the successor of Khwaja Mucin ad-Din Chishti, to whom he is handing a book, while the cherubs bearing instruments of war flee and worldly monarchs stand humbly by: the inner Jahangir is absorbed in the lift of the darwesh.13 In Barani, non-Islamic behavior is used to good ends; in Bichitr, the royal and the spiritual are compartmentalized. A third and pervasive solution is simply to subject the non-Islamic to relentless Islamicization, as John Richards illustrated by his examination of the Suluk al-muluk, a text for princes written in the unstable world of sixteenth-century central Asia.14 In one manuscript the work is tellingly subtitled Adab al-qadi, for it is largely directed to educating the king to provide a framework for Islamic justice. The shared court ethic of the elite is illustrated in John Rich13. Richard Ettinghausen, "The Emperor's Choice," in De Artibus Opuscula (XL), Essays in Honor of Irwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York, 1961), 1:98-120. 14. The work is available in English translation: Muhammad Aslam, Muslim Conduct of State, based upon the Suluk al-muluk of Fadi Allah ibn Ruzbihan IsfaMm; Islamabad, 1974.

14

INTRODUCTION

ards's paper on the Hindu Rajput mansabdar Bhimsen. Bhirnsen valued certain qualities of honor, pride, deference, and loyalty that he held in common with his fellow Muslim courtiers. He attributed a divine, albeit not Islamic, sanction to this system of values and to the existing political system. Rajput and Persian norms overlapped and were legitimized by all in some transcendent system. The same Aurangzeb was an Islamic exemplar to Muslims and a noble Rajput to Bhimsen. However legitimized, shared customary norms united the ruling class. The adab of musicians discussed by Brian Silver seems much the same in its comprehension of values that could be shared by Muslim and non-Muslim and yet could be infused by religious values and norms. The ideal personal qualities, the relationship of the teacher and pupil, the particular rituals that mark instruction are part of a shared musical culture. Some of its aspects are potentially problematic. As in the culture of courtiers and elites generally, the adab of musicians can be characterized by the pride and hauteur of the noble sharif, an element in conflict with religious norms of humility but susceptible to rationalization in this milieu as in the princely. Some customs, like the thread-tying of initiation and other rituals, can be seen in conflict with Islamic norms. Some lyrics could no doubt be judged unacceptable. The adab of musicians illustrates particularly well the diverse strands characteristic of any form of adab that can coexist despite potential tension. As a whole the system can unite a group while at the same time having somewhat different meaning for its various members. Tensions do at times prevail as is evident from the discussion of the late-nineteenth-century novels of Deputy Nadhir Ahmad by C. M. Nairn. The Tauba an-nasuh in particular rejects the shared cultural values of the Persianized Hindu-Muslim elites as exemplified in the life of the ne'er-do-well Kalim. His poetry and games and pigeons, each the product of cultivation and refinement of a particular sort, are deemed as outmoded as the princely state where Kalim meets his end. In part, Nadhir Ahmad seems to hold out in contrast the adab of the Islamic ideal in which the goal is a disciplined life of religious obligation and ritual to define relationships to God and to other humans. But his is adab with a difference. In contrast to other contemporary thinkers like Ashraf cAli Thanawi, he values elements of British culture. This does not mean only, however, that the cosmopoli-

INTRODUCTION

15

tan non-Islamic element in adab has shifted from Persian to British. Instead, by incipient suggestions that all religions are of equal value—translate Tauba into Panjabi and change a few words to make it suitable for Sikhs—he steps outside the traditional valuation of Islam toward a more relative or pluralistic one. And secondly, by attempting, as Nairn describes, compart mentalization of domains in his books—ethics in one, practical wisdom in another, religion in a third—he hints at the contraction of religious principles to a separate domain that has been a major theme in the history of the Christian West. Here is indeed a cosmopolitan adab. If adab is shaped from above by a superregional, cosmopolitan culture, it is also shaped from below by the local and regional. This, as C. M. Nairn noted, is often "one's past." Even if legitimized in part as customary law (cada or curf) or by other rationalization, local practices carry with them the ambiguity that the phrase implies. For South Asia this would be particularly true of what is seen as Hindu or regional in origin. Richard Kurin made the striking suggestion that the contrast is sometimes seen as similar to that of caql and nafs, with the regional culture seen as the more impulsive, more childlike, more in possession of nafs than of iation>. Although Yusuf Gada expressed the hope that it would 8. For the India Office Library holdings, see A. J. Arberry, Catalogue of the Library of the India Office, II (pt. VI): 542. Arberry does not note the places of printing of a number of editions, but the I.O.L. does not appear to have received copies from Bombay or Hyderabad, Deccan. The place of printing affords only approximate evidence of the market for which the edition was intended. Thus many lithographs printed in Bombay were intended mainly for the market in Hyderabad state, in some cases being actually commissioned from there, whereas the Lahore printings with Pashto translation must have mainly circulated in the North-West Frontier Province and Afghanistan. Modern Iranian bibliographers, following Khan Baba Mushar, Fihiist i kitabha i chapi (Tehran), 2d ed., p. 812, do not indicate to what extent their list derives from Arberry's catalog or is based on copies held in Iranian libraries. No manuscripts from Iran appear to be recorded. In the later nineteenth century, lithographic editions of specifically Indo-Muslim texts reached the Persian booksellers from India, and introduced such works for the first time to an Iranian readership.

THE TUHFA I NASA'lH OP Y U S U P GADA

97

attain a world-wide reputation, it was written for his young son, called in the text Abu al-Fath Rukn i Din (Rukn ad-Din). The son is called "my pretty-faced boy" (022 walad i khwush laqa), "new moon" (mah i nan), and "soul of his father" (jan i pidai); he is not yet pubertal (baligh). Given that Yusuf Gada was a disciple of Nasir ad-Din Mahmud (d. A.H. 757) and that the poem was written thirty-eight Muslim years later, this suggests that he became father of this son at a moderate age. Yusuf Gada was unlikely to have been accepted as a rauiid of the Shaikh before he was twelve or thirteen years old. If his son was fourteen years old or younger in A.H. 795, he must have been born in A.H. 781 or later. At the nearest perimeter, Yusuf Gada would have been thirty-seven Muslim years old at the time when this son was born to him, which is well within the bounds of probability. 'If we take into account Yusuf Gada's extremely unfavorable sentiments towards women, which are examined below, it is not unlikely that these reflect a late marriage or previous marital experience. The date of composition and the age, of the author- are important in enabling us to reject two false ascriptions of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih, which may have played a role in its subsequent popularity among Indian Muslims, particularly in the Deccan. Yusuf Gada would have been acquainted with other disciples of Shaikh Nasir ad-Din Mahmud, and therefore with Sayyid Muhammad Gesudaraz, who claimed to be the principal heir of the Shaikh's baiaka (spiritual authority). Gesudaraz left Dehli shortly before Amir Timur's invasion on his progress to the Deccan capital of Gulbarga. Yusuf Gada's work would have been in circulation as a recent composition in the same Chishti circles. It is probable that one or more manuscripts of the Tuhfa i nasi'ih accompanied the entourage of Gesudaraz on his southward migration and would have been placed in the khanqah library at Gulbarga. In one of the manuscripts in the Mulla Firuz Library at Bombay there is apparently an ascription to Sayyid Muhammad Gesudaraz himself. This may be rejected on the following grounds: 1. Gesudaraz was the author of numerous Persian compositions, the highly literate style of which is in total contrast to that of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih. 2. In his elegant Persian ghazals he most frequently used the takhallus

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ADAB AS ISLAMIC IDEAL

Muhammad; and there is no record of Yusuf among his personal names.9

An attribution that is found beside all the notices in the Asafiyyah catalog is to Sayyid Shah Yusuf, known as Raja or Raju Qattal, the father of Sayyid Muhammad Gesudaraz. This is repeated in the Peshawar catalog. Against this ascription the following evidence appears decisive: According to Gesudaraz' own testimony, recorded in early-fifteenth-century sources, he was born in A.H. 721, and became a disciple of Shaikh Nasir al-DIn on 16 Rajab A.H. 736, after the death of his father.10 He would therefore have been seventy-four Muslim years of age at the date of the composition of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih—and his father already fifty years in his grave. The popularity of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih in the Deccan is attested not only by the numerous copies in the Asafiyyah Library in Hyderabad, but also by its translation into Dakni verse by Qutbi, one of the court poets of the seventeenth-century Sultan cAbd Allah Qutbshah of Golkonda. Apart from the false sanctity conferred by these ascriptions, an independent reason for the popu> larity of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih is that it provided for South Asian Muslims with a lower1 level of education; and especially for^the childrenCoi 'such 'Muslim's^ Ja! comprehensible guide- to the good Iife4n an* easy 'mnemonic verse forrrf. It can be classified with numerous other short verse treatises, mostly of later date and often bilingual vocabularies, under the heading nisab as-sibyan (the capital stock of children). One may contrast the fate of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih with that of a longer prose work with a similar 9. In his Dlwan called Anis al-cushshaq, Gesudaraz often does not append any takhallus to his gbazals. Apart from Muhammad, he also refers to himself as Abu al-Fath and Muhammadi, if all the ghazals in this brief Dlwan are correctly ascribed to him; see Anis al-cushshaq, ed. M. H. S. cAta Husaini (Haidarabad [Dn.]: A.H. Fasli 1360). The presence of the kunya Abu al-Fath among the personal names of Gesudaraz, which is also that of the young son of the author mentioned in the Tuhfa i nasa'ih, probably aided the identification, which we reject below, of Yusuf Gada with the father of Gesudaraz, particularly if, as we conjecture, a manuscript of the work was carried by the entourage of Gesudaraz to the Deccan and later formed a part of the khanqah library at Gulbarga. The coincidence of kunya also suggests that, in the naming of his son, Yusuf Gada may have been influenced by the presence of Gesudaraz at Dehli. 10. Muhammad cAli Samani, Siyai i muhammadi (Allahabad: A.H. 1347), pp. 3, 6, 10-11.

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99

melange of contents, written in the fourteenth-century Dehli Sultanate, the Miftah al-jinan [The key of paradise] by Muhammad Mujlr, which appears to have survived in a single manuscript.11 A critical edition of the Tuhfa i nasa'ih is a desideratum; it would not be a work requiring great labor as it is a comparatively short poem. For the purposes of this paper I have collated readings from an old manuscript, unfortunately defective at the close and therefore lacking a colophon, but probably of sixteenth/ seventeenth-century date, as well as another of seventeenth or early-eighteenth-century date, with the readings of a lithograph published by the Haydari Press of Bombay in 1289/1872-73. From this brief collation points of interest emerge. Some variant readings may be second thoughts of the author in copies which he circulated, e.g., in the lithograph, he cites as his authority 'ulama'i mu'tabar (reliable 'ulama')-, but in the two manuscripts consulted, he cites Nucman i namwai (the famous Nucman, i.e., the jurist ash-Shibli). Secondly, a number of phrases and baits, which would have been immediately intelligible in the Dehli Sultanate, were not equally so in later times; there is a tendency on the part of copyists to amend the phrases or drop the bait.12 Thus, in a passage discussed below, the manuscript (f. 16b) 11. British Museum Ms. Egerton 691; see the notice in Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 1:40-41. 12. The first Ms. (Digby no. 59) was acquired by A. H. Harley, Principal of the Anglo-Muhammadan Madrasah, Calcutta, in 1928, probably in eastern India. It measures 6Vi by 3% inches and is written in a minute, rather archaic nasta'liq hand, twelve lines to the page, breaking off at the fortieth bob, twenty-nine folios. The second manuscript (Digby no. 170), which the writer acquired after the initial draft of this paper, bears a note saying that it was "bought at the sale of Mr. Orme, May 1796." Mr. Orme may be the historian Robert Orme (17281801), though if this is the case the manuscript must have entered his possession after he finally returned to the United Kingdom. Below the colophon it bears an owner's note dated in the twentieth year of Shujac ad-Daula, NawwabWazir of Awadh (A.D. 1773-74). The manuscript was copied for a sayyid (name erased) who was resident at Kalpi, an old fortified Muslim settlement in southern Uttar Pradesh, which for a brief period in the early fifteenth century was the center of an independent sultanate established in the aftermath of the downfall of the Dehli Sultanate; the manuscript may therefore represent a local tradition of Muslim learning. The author is described as "Makhdum ala'zam . . . Yusuf Gada," a curious example of exaggerated reverence for the written word. The manuscript measures 9% by 6 inches, and is written in clear, broadly spaced nastacllq, nine lines to the page, 95 folios and 4 blanks from an earlier rebinding. Spaces for the rubrics are blank, but the titles of the

Serve all, and without doubt you will become one who is served; He who performs service becomes a lord with a crown on his 42. Ms. A, fol. 21b, omits second bait; litho., p. 54; Ms. B, fol. 55b, reads badani for baiam in the first bait, manifestly incorrectly, and also omits the second bait, which, as in other cases quoted in this paper, appears to be a late addition by the author. 43. Ms. A, fol. 20b; litho., p. 52; Ms. B, fol. 53a-b. B again omits the last couplet, which concludes the bob.

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ADAB AS I S L A M I C IDEAL

THE TUHFA I NASA'lH OF YUSUF GADA

Consider good him who gives honor to his parents; Such a man has honor in the two worlds, and is respected among all men.44

therefore, Yusuf Gada means the scholastic sciences. They were to be acquired for their own sake, not for the limited number of prospects of employment that they would open to his son:

Yusuf Gada exhorts his son to acquire cilm (knowledge?—section 4). From his remarks it is clear that he had in mind "education" in the narrow sense of the scholastic sciences which down to the present day form almost the whole curriculum of Muslim madrasas and were also the main subjects in which individual teachers instructed their pupils. What we should nowadays call the humanities, as well as most useful arts and sciences and works on sufi practice and self-discipline, were extracurricular. Yusuf Gada himself possessed some grounding in cilm of this kind. His extracurricular education was much slighter. He had some knowledge of ^nujum, (astrology—on the borderline of the medieval curriculum) and probably also with /a'7 < and talbn (omens and the intepretation of dreams). At one point he urges his son to acquire a smattering of astrology:

If you learn cilm for the sake of God, without doubt it will save you, Not to pronounce fatawa (legal opinions) nor to act as a.,qadi, (religious judge); nor for bread in another employment.47

If a man acquired much cilm and yet performed little^worship (fibada], he was nevertheless closer to God* than pious ascetics The superior grace which a learned man (calim —ci/zn) has over the pious and the ascetics Is like the superior grace which the Prophet had over the very least of mankind.48

not; in Yusuf Gada's opinion, a^suitable'-means for gaining a livelihood. As we see below, he regarded with disfavor all forms of official employment under the Sultan. His eleventh section is on "professions, contentment, and beggary." In it he displays a fairly coherent succession of thought regarding what was an honorable way for the individual to survive in society:

Learn enough astrology for you to know the time For marriage, and the direction of prayer; and also when to go on a journey.45 I find no evidence in the Tuhfa i nasa'ih of Yusuf Gada's familiarity with Persian akhlaq literature. Of Persian poetry within the high literary canon (including Amir Khusrau and other poets of note in the Dehli Sultanate) there is a single echo of a very well-known couplet by Sacdi: If you wish to dwell a while beside anyone, If he says that day is night, show him the Pleiades and moon.46 44. Litho., pp. 40-41. This brief bob, followed by an illustrative anecdote of one of the Prophet's companions, cAlqama, and his behavior toward his mother, is absent from both manuscripts at this point. However, Ms. B includes three out of the four baits with some variant phrases on fols. 83b-84a, after which the tale of cAlqama follows. 45. Litho., p. 82, bob 45. This is the last bob of the work. Ms. A is defective after bob 40/41; in Ms. B, bob 45 is absent, replaced by couplets on a variety of topics, which have been incorporated under their appropriate headings in the text represented by the lithograph. Despite this, Ms. B concurs in the statement that the poem was to consist of 45 babs-, see note 11. 46. Ms. A, fol. 20b; litho., p. 52; Ms. B, fol. 53b. Cf. Sacdi, Gulistan, bob 1, hikaya 32: If he himself says that day is night, One must say, "Behold the moon and Pleiades!"

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so that you find the key to the treasure of gnosis. Hold the guide's garment, O traveller; sacrifice all you have in his way. If you travel for a hundred years in the path without a guide, Useless is the fortune. Anyone who traveled in the way of love without a companion did not gain true knowledge of love. Regard your mentor as your ruler, so that you recognize God in the awareness of your own faqr (poverty, worthlessness). Obey him in all matters— Cast away the pupil of your eye in dust when he speaks, become all cares. Unless he asks you to speak, you remain quiet. But these adab are to be observed only in the presence of the shaikh i kamil, the perfect master. Some of the marks of the perfect master are as follows: 1. He should be more popular among scholars and fuqaia' than among the common people. 2. His company alone should direct your attention to God and away from mundane worries. 3. His conversation should resemble the words of earlier masters. 4. He should have authorization from some great spiritual master. 5. He should observe the shari'a in all its aspects. Maulana Jalal ad-Din Rumi also warned against false masters. He called them "devils" and felt that the world was full of them. Hafiz issued a similar warning to shun the company of the profane. These a dab are really attempts at eliminating vanity and egoinflation. The assumption is that unless vanity or kibi is eliminated one cannot be prepared to surrender oneself to God. Vanity is associated with Satan, and no one can reach God without true humility. The opposite of vanity is surrender. For the beginner it is necessary that he should surrender to some person who has attained the state of health, that is, to one who has experienced unity with the Godhead. The process of surrender may be irksome and painful in the beginning, but soon it shatters the disciple's mask and creates a protective, healing image, the image of the mentor, the shaikh. The disciple is caught in the vicious

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circle of thought, meaningless memories of a meaningless past, vain and empty dreams of the ever-desiring, ever-unfulfilled future. It is only the image of the mentor that can break this circle an image that one does not consciously direct, but that moves and develops with its own dynamic, and becomes an answer to questions and a fulfillment of prayers. Only through the image of the shaikh can one break the coils of vanity and begin to experience love. Maulana Ashraf eAli Thanawi distinguishes between true humility and false humility. False humility is inverted vanity. If a man with apparent humility says, "I am an ignorant fool," the best test for assessing the authenticity of his humility is to agree with him and say outright, however boorish it might appear, "Yes, you are an ignorant fool." A man with true humility will in all probability remain unruffled by this blunt confirmation of his self-assessment, but a man suffering from false humility or inverted vanity will take umbrage. He had made the statement in the hope that others would contradict it. Vanity, whether open or disguised, will always preclude spiritual development. In modern times, the ego has come to occupy a pivotal position in intellectual development which is related primarily to business and technology. Ego generates vanity and vanity strengthens the ego. Spiritual transformation demands the elimination of vanity, which is equivalent to ego-inflation and glorification of one's self. Every ego-inflation involves non-ego-deflation, or devaluation of all that is not I, me, or mine. The stronger the ego, the stronger becomes the conviction that the non-ego is hostile or weak. The I-hostility generates and then encounters the non-I hostility. One is thus engaged in the defensive armor of the ego. It is an armor that wages war both against the self of the vain person and against other people. The first condition for spiritual transformation is thus the demolition of vanity—which is the defensive armor of the ego. From the psychological point of view, the concept of adab derives its salience from the distinction between the sacred and the profane. In a social situation where that distinction has been blurred or obviated, the concept of adab has scarcely any meaning. The true relationship of adab is very much like the emotion of awe, which is a blend of fear and love, a sense of inadequacy mingled with a sense of profound longing. Adab is both an attitude and a relationship. As an attitude it

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means the emotion of awe and respect in the presence of an elder, especially a parent or grandparent. In sufi folklore it is the "Wise Old Man," or the spiritual guide, who gives direction to the tempestuous figures of the unconscious. In the realm of the unconscious, this guide resolves a crisis, saves the hero or the heroine from the edge of a precipice, and creates order and balance in a state of chaos and turmoil. Avicenna's Hayy ibn Yaqzan is a good example of the Wise Old Man. The point is that this attitude is generated over the entire range of "elderliness." The elderly person deserves respect, but it is not a one-way obligation. The elderly person has to respond with shafaqa, affection and kindness. The interesting aspect is that whereas adab has a formal code of behavior, shafaqa is informal and spontaneous; it radiates from the elderly person to the young. As a spiritual relationship between the mentor and the novice, adab is the precondition for the establishment of this relationship. Adab are preconditions, not the principal causes, of spiritual transformation. Following bai'a the muzid must report everything he experiences and then obey all the murshid's instructions. His transformation involves two kinds of self-scrutiny. One is the scrutiny of his own faults and the attempt to remove them (takhliya). The other is kindling an awareness of one's virtues and strengthening them (tahh'ya}. In some silsilas (orders), takhliya and tahliya are encouraged at the same time, but in most only one is prescribed in accordance with the temperament of the murid. This process of purification has to be accompanied by aurad (spiritual disciplines), which foster the necessary withdrawal from worldly attachments of the heart. The aurad generally have three phases: (1) istighfai, seeking forgiveness; (2) durud; (3) nafi wa ithbat, nay and yea. But the real transformer of energy is dhiki, or the orison, the repetition of the supreme name. The supreme name, being the effect of the supreme being, carries within it the glow of the substance. Each repetition of the supreme name is like looking at a sanctuary, gazing at the unfolding of a new aspect of its beauty and grandeur. Some sufis, however, believe that the orison must be accompanied by meditation, fiki. That is, that during the orison one also meditates upon the virtues, which according to Schuon constitute six themes of meditation. These six themes are based upon either the three planes of makhafa (fear), mahabba (love),

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and ma'rifa (knowledge) or the planes of the will, of love, and of knowledge. Each plane in turn presents two poles, passive and active. Meditation on these different themes at different times, either preceding, during, or after the orison, leads to a regeneration of imagination and the development of moral qualities that are necessary for the attainment of beatitude. The negative mode of the plane of the will implies detachment and renunciation. It is symbolized by crystal, snow, the solitary mountain heights, cold and pure. The affirmative mode of the will implies action and power, symbolized by lightning and the sword. The passive mode of love implies contentment and beatitude and is symbolized by calm water, the white lotus. The active mode is faith and mercy, symbolized by fire, blood, and the red rose. The negative mode of the plane of knowledge is unity, symbolized by the sun. These modes of meditation are related to the orison. The first formula of the wild, astaghfim allah, evokes the symbolism of the mirror without the sun. It is the heart while it is still impure and blind; traditionally it is likened to a mirror covered with rust. It cannot reflect the divine sun and must therefore be cleaned, which is what the first formula of the wizd represents. The second formula, allahumma salli cala sayyidina rauharamad, evokes the symbolism of the mirror reflecting the sun. It is the purified heart that has become fit to receive the rays of the divine sun. In the Prophet, on whom be the peace and blessing of God, the purity of the mirror symbolizes the quality of the cabd (slave), and the reflection of the sun symbolizes the quality of the msul (prophet). The mirror likewise represents, from God, the gift of salam, the balancing and stabilizing grace that is also peace-giving, whereas the sun represents the divine gift of salat, the sharp, sudden, and illuminating grace that is also lifegiving. The purity of the mirror will be the faqi (awareness of dependence) together with the grace of peace that it brings; and the light reflected in the mirror will be the dhiki itself together with the grace of joy that it brings. Here together are the four themes of abstinence, accomplishment, contentment, and trust. The third formula of the wild, la ilah ilia allah, evokes the symbolism of the sun without the mirror. It is God considered in Himself and apart from the human subject. The divine reality is apart from human consciousness; before the creation of man it

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was; even after that creation it is without man, for God is He who is whereas man is he who is not. The symbolism of the themes of meditation in the amad echo the symbolic meaning of the formal adab. For example, Maulana Thanawi says that the murid should not spread his feet toward the murshid's seat. This reminds one of the old sufi adage that one who does not have to spread his hands towards anyone (begging or asking) can spread his feet towards him (i.e., be independent of him). Spreading one's feet toward someone symbolizes defiance or independence. In the case of the relationship between novice and mentor, the rule symbolizes a constriction of every impulse to defy and revolt and a suppression of doubt and unlimited curiosity. One must not be misled by the novice's resort to what is apparently impertinence. In fact the intention is so pure that the shaikh may not regard it as a violation of adab, as in the case of Shah Mahbub 'All's impertinence to Shah Tawakkul. In Sayyid Mihr cAli Shah's Panjabi poetry one sees the line, "My impertinent eyes look lovingly into the eyes of the Beloved." Here "impertinence" is a flaunting of the misconception of the non-su/J that the Beloved is inaccessible. There are, of course, numerous such references in Iqbal where his expression of closeness to God borders on impertinence. The injunction about not casting one's shadow on the shaikh's shadow also seems to symbolize something important. Thanawi thinks that casting one's shadow on the shaikh's shadow may cause actual irritation to the latter. This explanation seems to be meant for the common reader; there is doubtless some deeper meaning as well. Ibn cArabi, in his Fusus al-hikam, says: God is, in relation to a particular shadow, small or large and more pure or less pure, like the light in respect of a filter of colored glass, which tints the light to its own color whereas it is itself without a color. The determination of each shadow is different in apparent multiplicity of existence, which seen from the point of view of Essence is a Unity.

One may conjecture that the shadow of a man less pure than the shaikh may cause annoyance to the shaikh, about whom Ibn 'Arabi says, "For there exists among us someone for whom God is His hearing, His sight, His faculties and organs, according to the signs which the Prophet gave in his message to God."

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One gets a further confirmation of this view when one considers the injunction, "Do not offer prayers on the shaikh's prayermat." The prayer-mat symbolizes the intimate communion with God which makes the shaikh into His hands, His hearing, or His sight. It is this communion between the shaikh and God that demands some distance between him and the novice, because a closeness and intimacy between them is not possible because of their different stations. It has been reported in su/J literature that it is mortally dangerous for a novice to be physically close to the shaikh when he is absorbed in orison. The novice may collapse into a state of unconsciousness. The prayer-mat is the temenos, the spiritual space, in which the shaikh lives. Any disturbance of the equilibrium of the space may well irritate the shaikh but may also be perilous for the novice, because the latter has not yet learned to breathe at those heights. Adab, therefore, also dramatizes the fact that distance is necessary between the shaikh and the novice in the early stages of their relationship. This distance is symbolized by the physical distance necessary between the shaikh and the murid. Conclusion

V 1*.

In discussing these religious symbols I have taken the Jungian position that a symbol has of course a reductive aspect, but it has a teleological aspect as well. It is, moreover, never a mere sign of something else but is in itself a transformer of energy and a means of changing the personality from one level to a higher one. In following Freud, one can talk about religious acts as obsessional neuroses or defense mechanisms if one wants to use reductive explanations. One can talk of "religion as an illusion." But does that sufficiently explain the religious experience of being in tune with the Infinite, of that oceanic feeling that overtakes the believer? Freud replies, "I have never had such an experience." For those who have, however, a critical distinction can be made. On the one hand, the experience clearly is grounded in the earliest symbiosis between the mother and child, when the child, in the lap of the mother, is wholly secure. The religious experience is a reassertion of that feeling. But the later religious experience is not the same. In it, in the oceanic feeling, one is not only whole, but one is a creative individual. The umbilical cord is broken. In it there is expression of one's total personality,

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of what Carl Rogers calls "the availability of the self." One has— as is evident in the symbol that precedes the symbol of rebirth— killed the dragon, the mother who holds you back from developing your individual self. If not the mother, then is the sense of being in the presence of God to be reduced to identity with a father? Again, the symbol transcends the developmental experience of the child. The father holds the child to customs and imposes ambition and success. The father emphasizes the conventional role. We outgrow that, moving toward a sense of individuation. It is this that makes a symbol a symbol. A symbol at one level can be explained and can, following Levi-Strauss, be analyzed for structural coherence. But a symbol, as fully understood, has as well a dynamic role to play in the transformation of the self.

Part Three ADAB AS COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE

Sir •*, f

II-

11 Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers J. F. RICHARDS

By the early seventeenth century, the Mughal sovereigns had successfully resolved a major organizational problem. Building upon the cumulative experience of centuries in the construction of Indo-Muslim states, they created a reliable political-military administrative elite, or as it is usually termed, a nobility. The Emperor Akbar had succeeded in melding a heterogeneous collection of Central Asian Turanis, Persians, Afghans, Abyssinians, Arabs, Indian Muslims, Rajputs, and Khatris (among others) into a service nobility of generally consistent reliability. In so doing he had at least partially solved the problem of how to deal with great men. Akbar and his successors bent Rajput chiefs, Afghan leaders, and Persian aristocrats to their will. But the emperors also devolved enough responsibility, independence, and power upon their nobles to allow them to remain great men, to grow rather than decline in imperial service. The result, by Shah Jahan's reign, was a confident, highly visible, able elite that took great pride in a tradition of hereditary service to the emperor and pride in a new definition of honor.1 By the early seventeenth century the Mughals had perfected 1. See M. Athar All, The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb (Aligarh, India, 1966), for a detailed treatment of the imperial elite.

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another reliable instrument of rule. By that time, a skilled professional corps of lower- and middle-status officials had emerged to service the imperial machinery. Again drawing on the continuous experience of Indo-Muslim state building, the emperors recruited men whose ancestors had served preceding Muslim dynasties in India. The great north Indian scribal castes, Kayasthas and Khatris, as well as groups of Indian Muslims, supplied recruits for what became a pool of well-trained subordinate imperial officers. Such men possessed and refined demanding skills in bookkeeping, auditing, minting, correspondence, procurement and supply, record-keeping, information retrieval, and office, stores, and industrial management. Not set by formally established examinations for entry and advancement, necessary skills and training were provided within the family before employment, and on the job after employment. Whether employed and given ranks (mansabs) directly in imperial service, or employed in a private capacity by the nobility, the professional administrators came, like their superiors, to have a growing sense of corporate identity, of uniform standards of conduct and good administration, and of strong loyalty to the empire. They were also increasingly prosperous. As the empire expanded east and south, Kayastha, Khatri, and Muslim subordinate officials moved into Bengal, Orissa, Gujarat, and the Deccan. The usual picture of administration through chains of official positions (provincial governor, faujdaz, etc.), though accurate, is misleading in that it falls far short of describing the actual operation of the imperial system. Prescribed authoritative relationships did exist among incumbents of official positions.2 However, overriding all other relationships within the system were direct personal links between the emperor and all officials. As is well known, every office holder or official in the imperial service was a mansabdai. This meant that he held a personal rank (dhat) expressed in numerical terms that determined his pay, his status, and the type of responsibility and position he could expect to hold. For many mansabdars a second or trooper (suwar) rank denoted, according to intricate rules, the number of fully equipped cavalrymen and their mounts that he was required to recruit, 2. For the standard description of the structure of the offices and functioning of the imperial administration, see I. H. Qureshi, Mughal Administration (Karachi, 1966). See also J. F. Richards, The Official Structure of a Mughal Province (forthcoming).

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command, and pay. As the source of all authority in the system, the emperor personally approved the recruitment, advancement in rank, and posting of all but the lowliest of mansabdars. For nobles, service to the emperor alternated among three principal modes of activity. Attendance upon the emperor at court or in the imperial encampment emphasized the element of personal subordination to the imperial dignity of the emperor himself. Nobles arrived punctually to line up in ordered rows in open court, to guard the palace in fixed rotation, or to participate in royal recreations and diversions upon command. On campaign and in battle, the nobles as warriors, as soldiers under military discipline, were expected at any time to ride unflinchingly into battle. Ready acceptance of great personal risk in war—the quality most rewarded by the emperor—was a certain path to promotion. The latter mode of service stressed for all nobles the devotion of the warrior to his master, the emperor, in both victory and adversity. Finally, nobles were posted to responsible administrative positions or to army commands. They were governors, envoys, fortress commanders, city prefects. One of the great strengths of the system was the relatively constant movement of nobles between service at court, military action, and administrative posts. Paradoxically, the intensity of this direct personal relationship with the emperor at times encouraged the grandees of the empire to ignore formal lines of subordination in favor of direct personal appeals to the throne. The Mughal nobility constituted a political-military elite, not a disciplined service of greater and lesser officials rigidly obeying chains of command. Cross-cutting affinities also affected the responses of the nobles. We find several broad ethnic/religious divisions within the upper strata of the mansabdari corps. By the mid-seventeenth century, sunni Muslim, Turkish-speaking "Turanis" from Central Asia constituted perhaps 14 percent of the cadre of nearly five hundred amirs-, sunni Muslim, Persian, or Pashto-speaking Afghans, perhaps 9 percent; sunni Muslim, Persian-speaking "Shaikhzadas" or long-domiciled Indian Muslims, about 13 percent; and shH Muslim, Persian-speaking "Iranis," about 28 percent. Hindu, old Rajasthani-speaking Rajput nobles held nearly 15 percent of the noble ranks at mid-century; and Hindu, Marathi-speaking Maratha chiefs (recruited in substantial numbers after A.D. 1600 from the Deccan) formed 6 percent of the

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total.3 Subsumed within each of these ethnic/religious divisions were clear-cut lineage and familial ties, for these divisions were bounded by place of origin, group endogamy, sharply demarcated social customs and habits, and severe religious differences. No one group within the nobility—even the highly favored Iranis was so numerous or powerful that it could dominate the others or challenge the authority of the emperor. Despite such cleavages, the essential solidarity of the elite and its deference to the throne was demonstrated and reinforced by factional alignments that were not confined within the broad ethnic divisions. That is, informal networks of obligation between nobles of higher rank and status (patrons) and lesser rank and status (clients) often appeared. Such factions frequently coalesced around mature princes of the dynasty who held provincial governorships or field-army commands. Putative emperors, possessors of familial Timurid dynastic charisma, the princes acted as secondary centers of centralized authority. But if a prince's attractive power became too obvious, or if he became identified with a policy stance contrary to that of the emperor, considerable political tension ensued. Resolution of the crisis often meant imprisonment or exile for the prince. The sharpest delineation of nonethnic, nonsectarian factional division can be seen in the major crisis at the death or faltering of the emperor and the ensuing war of succession. The most dramatic of these was the four-cornered struggle among the sons of Shah Jahan and the commensurate division of the nobility in the 1656-58 war that brought Aurangzeb to the throne. Based on a myriad of favors (including recommendations to the emperor for promotion), shared experiences, and reciprocal obligations, factional ties were relatively loose and, although important in certain circumstances (as in a war of succession), were not primary relationships in the informal authority system. Instead, the basic units within the system were "clusters," tightly organized and controlled by the nobles. The most prominent example of a cluster was the establishment of a great amir or noble. Typically this included the amir or noble at the apex, a smallish group of his sons, other more distant kinsmen, and possibly several unrelated senior officers in his service. Each of these

men held a less imposing rank as a mansabdai in the imperial service and held jagiis or direct pay from the treasury. The remainder of the noble's entourage consisted of persons in his private service or in the private service of one of his subordinate mansabdars. A numerous body, perhaps several hundred or more, of cavalry troopers met the obligation to field heavy cavalry as set out in imperial regulations. Each subordinate mansabdar also met his own suwai obligations as well, thus swelling the number of cavalry mustered by the noble. In addition to cavalrymen, the amir paid and employed his own military officers to command his small army, military technicians such as gunners for his artillery park, musketeers and swivel gunners, mounted and foot, watchmen, spies, and others. The administrative staff of a great noble for both his military and household establishment was also considerable: private secretaries, treasurers, accountants, stewards, managers, storekeepers, and stablemen, as well as the agents (gumashtas) with their staffs who traveled to collect the revenues from the jagiis of their master. Other professional services were supplied by a personal pli if the noble were Muslim, a Brahmin if he were Rajput, by one or more astrologers, physicians, huntsmen, architects, and jewelers, as well as dancers, musicians, painters, and the workers in other workshops producing luxury goods for the noble household. The numerous women of the noble household necessitated a large cadre of female attendants and servants, and often eunuchs as guards. Beneath these groups, of course, could be found large numbers of menial servants of all categories, many of whom were slaves. Finally, in this list should be included the swarm of petty shopkeepers, merchants, peddlers, craftsmen, and the like who supplied the needs of the sizeable populace of this great establishment. These persons, although not formally employed by the noble, did live in the compound or in the area adjacent to the noble's city mansion or followed the noble's camp when he was on tour.4 The establishments of the larger nobles can quite properly be seen from a number of perspectives: As residential, household establishments they were obviously important as economic units

ADAS AS C O S M O P O L I T A N

3. See Ali, Mughal Nobility, pp. 10-37. Regarding endogamy within the ethnic divisions of the elite, see Afzal Husain, "Marriages Among Mughal Nobles As an Index of Status and Aristocratic Integration," Proceedings, Indian Historical Records Commission, 1977, 33d sess., pp. 304-12.

4. A full discussion of the establishments of the great Mughal amirs and the function of nobles' mansions in the social structure of the imperial capital cities is to be found in Stephen P. Blake, "Dar-ul-Khilafat—Shahjahanabad: The Padshahi Shahar in Mughal India: 1556-1739" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1974). See also Ali, Mughal Nobility, pp. 161-70.

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of consumption, production, and exchange. As socioeconomic units within the Mughal capitals, the mansions of the nobles supplied a focus for social organization within the city. However they can also be seen as basic political, administrative, and military units within the imperial structure. That is, quite apart from any direct administrative tasks that the noble might carry out in his various assignments, he headed an administrative unit (a cluster) which organized and sustained a several-hundred-man army unit and which organized and carried out revenue collection over areas sometimes including thousands of villages. Given these responsibilities, the number and variety of authoritative relationships focusing on the noble himself, at the apex, obviously was complicated. Domestic slaves, free servants, some of the soldiers, professional men, and others were integrated by the varying ties of employment and servitude. But at the heart of the noble establishment lay the ties between the noble and his closest advisors, confidants, and officers. Many, if not most, of these relationships were buttressed by, and originated in, kinship and lineage affiliations. Mughal mansabdars tended to employ men of the same racial background and usually of the same or closely related lineages. (Indeed, imperial regulations demanded that a minimum proportion of a mansabdar's followers be of the same race or tribe.) That a kinship idiom buttressed and shaped the authority exercised by a majority of mansabdars over men in their private service seems relatively certain. The clustering or clumping tendency of the Mughal system became most noticeable in a military context. When the noble establishments were stripped down to their military elements and sent on campaign in field armies, a significant change occurred. What had previously been informal lines of influence, patronage, and power now were formalized into lines of command. At war, the prime business of the empire, the emperor utilized the clustering of the nobility in his military organization. A general muster abstract for the field army of Ghazi ad-Din Khan Bahadur Firoz Jang, a leading commander under Aurangzeb (and later head of the Turani faction), provides a valuable illustration of the lines of military authority and command.5 Dated January 25, 1689, in the thirty-second year of Aurangzeb, the abstract states the total strength of Firoz Jang's army to

be 33,621 men. Just over 6,000 were musketeers, gunners, and other specialists; the remainder, 27,497 men, consisted of mansabdars and their followers (tabi'an). These were divided into unnamed divisions placed under the command of Firoz Jang and nine of his highest-ranking nobles. Each noble commanded a division of the arrny ranging in size from approximately 1,500 to 4,000 men. The first division, under Firoz Jang himself (rank 7,000 dhat, 7,000 suwar) comprised 3,700 cavalry of his own contingent, and that of Qamar ad-Din Khan Bahadur, his associate, with a rank of 1,500 dhat/1,000 suwai, leading 603 mixed cavalry and infantry. In this division also was a body of several hundred infantry commanded by nine Muslim and three Rajput man$abdars bearing ranks ranging from 600 dhat to 150 dhat. The organization of the second division, commanded by an Indian Muslim noble, Neknihad Khan, was as follows:

5. The Mughal document from which the following analysis is drawn is published in Yusuf Husain Khan, ed., Selected Documents of Auiangzeb's Reign, 1659-1706 A.D. (Hyderabad, 1958), pp. 200-11.

Neknihad Khan 3,377 men The aforementioned, i, etc. 2,413 men Miran, Fixed for brother of the above: Neknihad Khan: 5,000 dhat 4,000 dhat 5,000 suwai 4,000 suwar 1,376 men 661 men Nur Singh Rao: Fatah, 500 dhat brother of Neknihad Khan: 100 suwai 45 men 2,500 dhat 1,500 suwai 331 men Mirand, son of Neknihad Khan: 2,000 dhat 1,000 suwai 221 men Raghu: 400 dhat 150 nafai (foot) 34 men

Mir, etc. 630 men Barhe, son of Mir, son Miran: of Miran: 1,000 dhat 3,000 dhat 2,000 suwai 500 suwai 111 men 441 men Nirmal Rao: 500 dhat 200 suwai

45 men

Siddi Ibrahim, son of Siddi cAbd ar-Rahim: 400 dhat 100 nafai 23 men

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This portion of Firoz Jang's army was clearly a family cluster in which the main body of horsemen and infantry were under the command of Neknihad Khan, his two brothers, and his son. The lesser body consisted of troops under Mir and Barhe, the nephews of this noble. Two presumably Ethiopian (possibly slave) and one Maratha mansabdars held command positions. Other Muslimdominated clusters had similar mixed compositions, but those commanded by Maratha or Bedar nobles were staffed solely by Marathas or Bedar mansabdar subordinate commanders, many being specifically identified as brothers or sons of the leader. From one perspective, the decentralization, revealed in a close examination of the noble establishments, might seem a reflection of imperial weakness and lack of centralized control. Yet as long as the emperor maintained the active loyalty of his nobles, the system seems to have been compatible with the concentration of active executive authority in the person of the emperor. That is, by requiring the nobles and higher-ranking mansabdais to carry out simultaneous fiscal, military, and administrative functions and to maintain large private organizations for that purpose, the Mughal emperors achieved a workable balance between centralized power and decentralized responsibility. The nobles could accumulate wealth, rise in power and status, and attain greater jagirs and greater military followings—subject to rigorous scrutiny and control by the emperor and the officers of the central administration. The practice of escheat ensured that these estates would be pared down to modest proportions when a son succeeded his father in imperial service. Devolution of the managerial skills of the nobles also correspondingly reduced the demands and pressures exerted upon the central administrative structure. At the foundation of the dyadic emperor-noble relationship was a common notion of ideal comportment shared by the grandees of the empire.

as its prerogative. Newly recruited entrants to that service—aristocratic or royal emigres from Iran or Central Asia, local warrior aristocrats from the Deccan—could be fully assimilated into the imperial nobility only by accepting and displaying the qualities demanded of khanazads.6 The essential prerequisite for all nobles was acceptance of a notion of aristocratic and military honor compatible with dignified personal subordination to the person of the emperor, as symbolized in the ritual at court. Personal, lineage, and martial honor thus came to be identified with acceptance of discipline and service to a wider goal and a larger structure for both Muslim and Hindu warrior aristocrats. In addition to such qualities as devotion, loyalty, and courage set out above, full acceptance within the system demanded assimilation to the polish and sophistication of Indo-Persian courtly culture and etiquette in circumstances ranging from the hunting camp to the full panoply of a ceremonial royal audience. The ideals of the khanazad seem to have two discrete origins. The first was the dynastic ideology elaborated for the emperor Akbar by his ideologue and propagandist, Abu al-Fadl, and the order of discipleship for select members of the nobility associated with this ideology.7 Abu al-Fadl's depiction of Akbar's possession of the divine light of esoteric knowledge from the East, and his divinely ordained ancestry from a Mongol princess, provided a rationale for the creation of bonds of worship and discipleship between each noble-initiant and the master-emperor. Fully effective only through the reign of Jahangir (to A.D. 1627), the values of imperial discipleship did form one important basis for the wider notion of the hereditary servant expressed in the term khanazad. Although muted in emphasis, the Timurid dynastic ideology continued to shape and influence the near-sacral qualities ascribed to the Mughal emperor.

A Mughal Code of Behavior

'

ILS^.

In the early years of the seventeenth century, proper behavior and attitude for the Mughal nobles or amirs had come to be evoked in a single term: khanazadi, or devoted, familial, hereditary service to the emperor. Those nobles who called themselves khanazads were gradually forming a cohesive, identifiable group that viewed imperial service and preference within that service

6. By mid-century the total number of khanazads (including those recruited from local or regional aristocracies) was 213, or approximately 44 percent of the total number of amirs. The remainder were either foreign aristocrats from other Islamic territories in the Middle East or Indian Muslims and Hindus absorbed for political purposes as the empire expanded toward the extremities of the subcontinent. Despite their slight numerical inferiority, however, it is clear that the status of the khanazads and their standards were those that set the norm for comportment and behavior. See Ali, Mughal Nobility, pp. 11 — 12. 7. See J. F. Richards, "The Formulation of Imperial Authority Under Akbar and Jahangir/' in J. F. Richards, edv Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin, South Asia Center, 1978), pp. 252-85.

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The second source for this idiorn is found in the institution of Muslim corporate military slavery. The term khanazad itself (literally, son of the house) is commonly translated as "offspring of a slave." Usage of the term banda ("slave") or banda i daigah ("slave of the court") by Mughal officers in general further suggests a terminological affinity to the role of a slave.8 The tightly controlled personal service of the Islamic military slave (often charged with responsibilities for guarding the person of the ruler) is much in evidence in the Mughal case. When resident at court each Mughal noble was under a rigidly enforced obligation to attend the public court audiences twice a day, morning and evening, standing in ranks before the emperor. As invariably enforced was the rotating obligation of each principal noble at court to mount guard with his troops at the emperor's palace, when the noble was required to reside in the palace guardrooms for a full week with his troops. Another major legal attribute of Muslim servility also attached itself to imperial nobles. The master's right to full disposition of his slave's property, one of the three restrictions on slaves imposed by the shari'a, can be seen in the Mughal system of escheat. Until the reign of Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperors asserted their right to seize the estates of their nobles and to dispose of them as they saw fit. The emperor appropriated money and goods to meet whatever claims he and the imperial treasury might have against the deceased noble and distributed the remainder amongst the heirs. In so doing the emperors could and did completely ignore provisions of either Muslim or Hindu laws of inheritance to favor one heir as against the other claimants.9 Aurangzeb somewhat modified this policy by setting out regulations that prohibited the previous practice of routine confiscation of estates. Only if an outstanding debt to the treasurer existed could the estate be seized by imperial officials so that the amount owed could be realized. The remainder was to be handed over to the legal heirs. The emperor did not commonly exercise the legal right of a master to regulate marriages among his nobility. However, strong

traces of the third right of a master, control of his slaves' progeny, who became slaves as well, are present. In what appears to have been a form of dedicatory practice, nobles, on the birth of a son, sent the news to the emperor accompanied by a gift and requested that the son be named by the emperor, who obliged.10 On reaching adulthood, nearly all sons of khanazads were enrolled as mansabdars in imperial service. All of these vestigial practices suggest the origins of the Mughal system in that of the peculiarly Islamic form of military slavery. Basic to this system was the reciprocal relationship of master to slave. In return for service and devotion, the khanazads expected, and obtained, continuing expressions of the emperor's concern for their welfare (as well as his intense interest in their performance). Increments to dhat rank, robes of honor, bejeweled swords, all bestowed personally by the emperor in open court, met both needs. But more tangible evidence of the emperor's solicitude for his servants was the provision of reliable, revenue-producing jaglis or tracts of land for salary purposes. The security of the khanazads (save for the Rajputs who held landed domains under their personal control) lay in their access to jagns. As hereditary servants of the Timurids, they expected to receive preferential treatment in the assignment of lands for salary purposes. An indication of the growing corporate identity of the khanazads, and a further impetus, came when in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, large numbers of Deccani, i.e., former Golconda, Bijapur, and Maratha officers, were enrolled in Mughal service for political reasons. The struggle between the khanazads and the new entrants for lucrative jagirs is a major theme in the contemporary chronicles.11 Clearly, the

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8. See the articles '"Abd" and "Ghulam" in the Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden, 1954-). 9. See Athar Ali's analysis of the principle of escheat and the royal right to determine the disposition of the wealth of his servants, Mughal Nobility, pp. 63-66.

10. For examples of this practice, see Saqi Must'ad Khan, Maasir-i-'Alamgiri, trans. Jadunath Sarkar (Calcutta, 1947), p. 235. See also Bhimsen, Taiikhi-Dilkasha, ed. V. G. Khobrekar, trans. Jadunath Sarkar (Bombay, 1972), pp. 175, 178, 206. 11. Cf. Ali, Mughal Nobility, pp. 92-94, 169. Another element in the selfperception of the khanazads might have been a strong emphasis on lighter skin color as a proper attribute for a Mughal noble. Tolerable shades extended to the common north Indian "wheat-colored" complexion, but usually not darker than that. As Francois Bernier observed, the Mughal nobility was anxious to marry lighter-skinned women in order to retain or improve its light complexions: "The people of Kachemiie are proverbial for their clear complexions and fine forms. . . . The women especially are very handsome; and it is from this country that nearly every individual, when first admitted to the court of the Great Mogol, selects wives or concubines, that his children may be

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master's obligation to provide both material and emotional security was at stake in the "crisis of the jagiis" of the late seventeenth century. The authoritative relationship between emperor and servant, with its strong emphasis on martial values and service, extended through the lifetime of the khanazad, despite any vicissitudes of favor or disfavor. On the occasion of the death of one of his nobles, or even lesser mansabdars, the emperor sent robes of mourning to the bereaved and later confirmed the sons of the deceased in imperial service. A dramatic deathbed meeting between the Emperor Aurangzeb and Khan Jahan Bahadur Zafar Jang Kokaltash affords a view of the highest ideals of this relationship at the very apex of the system. Zafar Jang Kokaltash, a Persian khanazad, one of the most eminent nobles in the empire (ranked at 7,000 dhat, 7,000 suwai], had been one of Aurangzeb's adherents in the 1656-59 war of succession. Although frequently differing with Aurangzeb on policy issues, he had nonetheless remained in the imperial favor. In November 1697, after learning of the severity of his illness, Aurangzeb visited the dying amir at his home:

The extremity of his situation might be expected to meet the charge that such expressions of sentiment on Zafar Jang Kokaltash's part were prompted only by the conventional demands of high court etiquette or by self-serving motives. Yet even if the Khan's speech were indeed prompted by a mixture of motives (such as the desire to remind the emperor of past service for the sake of his heirs), the recitation by the chronicler neatly sets out the essentials of the relationship: for the master, undivided concern; for the khanazad, lifelong service, the sacrifice of the warrior, and personal sacrifice. The Rajputs, nearly all khanazads, in imperial service were a special case. The relationship established between the emperor and various Rajput nobles was based on the peculiarly Rajput ideal of personal service to a ruler, as a form of worship or devotion. By the seventeenth century, after Akbar's initiatives, the Mughal emperors, by virtue of their manifest power and sovereignty, had come to be regarded as essentially Rajputs. Indeed, in some local traditions, the Mughal emperor was equated with Rama himself.13 At the same time, the compact arrived at with Akbar in the sixteenth century allowed the dozen or more leading Rajput rajas continued secure possession of their patrimonies, the lands of their kingdoms in Rajasthan. Along with local security went opportunities for employment as Mughal governors and commanders throughout the empire. That the Mughal emperors succeeded in eliciting extreme loyalty from the Rajputs is a matter of record.

The Khan was confined to his bed and could not rise; the Emperor sat on the masnad, and the Khan continued to lament that he could not kiss the imperial feet. He said, "I had wished to die in battle and thus be of service to Your Majesty." The Emperor replied, "You have been devoting yourself to my service all your life, and yet your desire for it is not satisfied!" Behold a servant's devotion and a master's favor! On Tuesday, the 23rd of November, 1697719th Jamad A., the Khan died. He was a grand amir, full of piety and virtues, and a great commander.12 whiter than the Indians and pass for genuine Mogols." Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogol Empire, trans, and ed. Archibald Constable, 2d ed., revised by V. A. Smith (London, 1914), p. 404. That these concerns probably engendered some prejudice against some Hindu nobles from the Deccan, although not necessarily those Persian or Afghan nobles of Golconda and Binjapur, is clear from the reception accorded Padiyah Nayak, the dark-skinned Bedar chief, in 1688. Cf. J. F. Richards, "The Imperial Crisis in the Deccan," Journal of Asian Studies 35 (February 1976): 245-46. 12. Saqi Must'ad Khan, Maasii-i-'Alamgiri, p. 237. A similar scene at the death of Ruhullah Khan Bakhshi is cited by Saqi Mustcad Khan and independently by Bhimsen in his unofficial memoir. Bhimsen writes: Ruhullah Khan was ailing and the time of his death arrived. He wrote to the Emperor: In the night of parting, the distracted lover to whom Death has arrived. How sadly win he die if he does not see you!

[(

,,, V J5

Shared Values At first glance, it is not easy to identify the divide between the imperial political-military elite and the technicians of the empire. Military officers holding ranks well below 1,000 dhat (or personal decimal rank), the cut-off point for noble status (that of The Emperor went to his house. It was his last breath. As soon as the Emperor entered, he spoke extempore: With what pride fnaaz) will this servant (nayazaud) leave the world. That thou hast arrived at his head at the time of his giving up his life.

Bhimsen, Taiikh-i-Dilkasha. 13. See Norman P. Ziegler, "Some Notes on Rajputa Loyalties During the Mughal Period," in J. F. Richards, ed., Kingship and Authority.

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an amir], were nonetheless men of great power and influence. They served as faujdars, as fort commanders, or as subordinate field commanders in prominent and responsible positions with ranks as low as 300 to 500-plus dhat. Simultaneously, the most able and successful technical-professional officers serving as diwans of provinces might hold similar ranks and possess similar prominence and visibility. Both types of officers could well be known personally to the emperor and have been recognized by him at court or in the imperial camp. Both types of officers were predominantly men whose families had been actively committed to imperial service for two, three, four, or more generations by the reign of Shah Jahan (1627-56). As such they both subscribed to the ethos of the khanazad or fully committed life servant of the emperor (see below).14 Both were intimately tied to and dependent upon one or more great noble patrons for jobs and preferment. Consequently, the connections and interaction between and among the greater and lesser nobility and the technical professional cadres of the empire were continuous and intimate. Nevertheless, the distinctions between these groups were also significant and well known to all members. Hindu and Muslim familial groups who supplied the bulk of recruits for positions in the imperial mints, treasuries, customshouses, and arsenals specialized in administration and management, especially in fiscal matters, rather than in military affairs and governance. Occasionally an especially able officer might rise to 500 dhat or above, but generally the ranks of this group reflected their subordinate status, ranging from 20 to 200 dhat. Officers in this cadre were not ostentatiously wealthy in the style of the grand amiis, but were prosperous because they received generous cash salaries or assignments of villages or portions of villages, or both, as jagus. They did not usually command bodies of troops, although they could be and often were engaged in active military service. In general, however, we might argue that the nonmilitary role of these technical administrators was predominant. They were 14. As we shall see below, Bhimsen often described himself and members of his family as a khanazad. By that time, other subordinate or service groups apparently had appropriated the term and the ethos implied by it from the nobility. For example, the seventeenth-century artist Daulat uses the term in his signature to a miniature painting prepared in the royal atelier. Milo Beach, The Grand Mogul—Imperial India, 1600-1660 (Williamstown, Mass., 1978), p. 116.

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involved in and concerned for administrative efficacy in the consolidation of imperial control over newly conquered territory. They maintained peace, order, and prosperity in the older provinces by means of a smoothly-running regulation imperial system. We might therefore assume that their ethos and comportment, although expressed within a shared framework of hereditary service to the emperor, would reflect this emphasis.15 Nor should these free officers be confused with the numerous slave officers found within the imperial system. The latter were invariably owned by and served Mughal nobles and officers in various domestic, administrative, and even military capacities.16 Their juridicial status as slaves was sharply demarcated by Muslim law, and was often emphasized by mutilation in the form of castration. More capable eunuchs often rose to highly responsible positions as assistants to their masters, but rarely if ever did they become mansabdais holding dhat ranks within the system. By and large, the domain of the professional-technical officers was that of the structured array of subordinate formal offices. Such positions as secretaries to provincial fiscal officers, or superintendents of mints, treasuries, and the like, were filled by men from this group who held rank as mansabdais. In these posts, literacy and technical competence in administration and finance were primary attributes. The same qualities also meant that men from this group found ready employment in the household, military, and administrative organizations of individual nobles or lesser mansabdais. Possibly somewhat less prestigious, in that private officers serving individual nobles ordinarily did not receive mansabs or imperial ranks, this was still a most lucrative and rewarding source of employment. In either case a detailed knowledge of imperial regulations and procedures was essential for successful performance. The unobtrusiveness of the middling technicians of the empire and the paucity of surviving source material largely explain the relative lack of scholarly attention directed at this group in recent years. The nobility, zamindais, and others have been far more favored. We are fortunate, nevertheless, that a private, au15. See Bhimsen's views on this point, below. 16. See Gavin Hambly, "A Note on the Trade in Eunuchs in Mughal Bengal," Journal of the American Oriental Society 94 (1974): 125-30, for much useful information on the practice in Mughal India.

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tobiographical memoir, Bhimsen's Tarikh i dilkasha, does supply unsurpassed detail about the behavior and beliefs of both the nobility and the technical-professional cadre in the last half of the seventeenth century. The author, who refers to himself as a khanazad, was a member of a long-established, officially employed, extended family of Hindu kayasthas belonging to the subordinate official class of the empire. The Tankh i dilkasha, the "heart-revealing" or "heart-expanding" history, is thus more than the statement of a single individual; it may be read as a credible summary of the ethos of a numerous, widely dispersed, and successful family in imperial service. Based upon direct observation, Bhimsen's memoir is also a detailed recounting of high politics and military affairs in the Deccan during Aurangzeb's long reign (A.D. 1658-1707). Since its first discovery and utilization by Jadunath Sarkar in his massive history of Aurangzeb's reign, the Dilkasha has been used by many historians for data and insights into imperial political and military history during that period. As a result, the veracity and accuracy of Bhimsen's factual statements have been generally accepted,17 The voluminous memoir has not been read and analyzed for what it might disclose regarding the behavior and beliefs of the servants of the empire—especially the nobility and its supporting professional cadres. A close study of the Dilkasha does give us a number of insights into the attitudes and actions of both groups. In it, for example, we can trace a distinct shift in the attitudes and behavior of the imperial servants in the Deccan during the latter decades of Aurangzeb's rule. This change is reflected as well in a major shift in Bhimsen's career. During the first three decades of his imperial service (circa A.D. 1658-89), Bhimsen held a succession of respectable posts as a lower- and middle-

ranking imperial mansabdar. For this period, he gives an account of a generally prosperous imperial structure. The empire confidently expanded into the Deccan at the expense of the two remaining Muslim sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda and successfully absorbed the rural aristocracy of western India, the Marathas, into its service. For the latter two decades (circa 1689— 1707), Bhimsen, after a brief retirement, accepted an appointment as a secretary and deputy of Dalpat Ra'o Bundela, the Raja of Datia. The latter was an extremely capable Rajput field commander who followed his family's tradition by becoming a highranking Mughal noble in the emperor's service. From this vantage point, Bhimsen's account becomes much more sober. He describes the steady demoralization, the general devastation, and the disarray of the imperial territories in the south as the endless wars against the rebellious Marathas dragged on. Before the downward spiral of imperial power culminated in the post-1690 debacle of Aurangzeb's Deccan policies, Bhimsen and his family and colleagues, all khanazads, served the empire and the emperor with energetic loyalty in a confidence born of the continuing success of the imperial system. As we can see from the events of Bhimsen's life and work before his first retirement in 1689, his family's willingness to adapt to the demands of Indo-Persian official and secular culture derived from a collective prosperity and success in filling the subordinate offices of the growing imperial machine. Bhimsen was born a kayastha of the Saxena exogamous section, in A.D. 1649 in Burhanpur, capital of Khandesh, the northernmost of the Deccan provinces.18 Bhimsen's father and his five uncles, as well as numerous other members of the family, held subordinate positions in the imperial service. All skilled in Persian and assimilated to the official Indo-Persian culture of the court (save for their Hindu religious beliefs), this family of Saxenas thoroughly lived up to the chameleon-like attributes of this secretarial caste.19

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17. Bhimsen, Dilkasha. This translation is adapted from that originally made by Jadunath Sarkar for his own use some years ago. Apart from what appear to be one or two very brief omitted passages, the translation is extremely reliable. Khobrekar, as did Sarkar, used the British Museum Oriental 23 ms. for his translation, but did not consult or collate this with the Bibliotheque Nationale ms. or the partial text in the India Office Library. A note on the flyleaf from its British donor states that this is the copy given to Captain Jonathan Scott in 1781-82 by the Raja of Datia, grandson of Ra'o Dalpat Bundela. Scott, who served as a military interpreter in the Anglo-Maratha wars, made his own abridged translation of the text. I have consulted a film of the British Museum ms. in order to verify the passages cited or used in my essay. As the foliation of the British Museum manuscript seems to vary somewhat from that given by Khobrekar, I have cited what I found in the manuscript in English numerals.

18. A brief biography of Bhimsen appears in Jadunath Sarkar, "A Great Hindu Memoir-Writer/' Studies in Mughal India (Calcutta, 1919), pp. 236-41. Sarkar, who became thoroughly convinced of Bhimsen's veracity, relied upon him heavily for both facts and insights into the history of Aurangzeb's reign. 19. See Karen Isaksen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978), pp. 12-14, for a summary of the generally accepted cultural attributes of the twelve subcastes of north Indian kayasthas, all said to be descended from the mythical Chitragupta, recordkeeper for Yama (the

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In 1636, Bhimsen's eldest uncle, Bhagwandas, began a connection with Aurangzeb, then prince, which was to continue until the latter's death in 1707. Bhagwandas (presumably with his other brothers) moved south with the Mughal prince to the Deccan when Aurangzeb became viceroy of the Deccan. The uncle, first an assistant of the dlwan of the Deccan, in 1657 became dlwan himself with the honorable title of Dianat Ray (the Ray of Probity).20 In 1658, obedient to Aurangzeb's orders Bhagwandas left his family and household in Aurangabad and marched north to assist the prince in his struggle for the throne in the war of succession. Thereafter Bhagwandas served Aurangzeb personally at court while Bhimsen's father Raghunandas, remaining in the south, became a mansabdar of 150 dhat employed at Aurangabad as inspector and auditor (mushairaf) for the imperial artillery of the Deccan.21 Bhagwandas, given the further honorific of raja during Aurangzeb's coronation, remained dlwan of the Deccan, administering the post through a deputy. Shyam Das, the third brother, returned from the court in 1659 to serve as secretary for the bakhshi (army inspector general) of the Deccan.22 This was the apogee of the family's fortune in the

brief years until the death of Bhagwandas (Raja Diyanat Ray) in A.D. 1664. Writing forty years later, from the perspective of a much more perilous time, Bhimsen saw the peace, prosperity, and order of his childhood, his family, and the empire as intertwined. His father, Raghunandas, was posted first to Burhanpur, provincial capital of Khandesh, and later to Aurangabad, capital of the Mughal Deccan. Until his health began to fail in the mid-1660s, Raghunandas, although not holding more than a modest rank, was responsibly employed and well rewarded for his efforts. In 1664 he supervised the recruitment and organization of a tenthousand-man army to be employed under Jai Singh in the first Mughal campaign against Shivaji.23 At Aurangabad, Raghunandas constructed a large house with a spacious garden irrigated by a water channel leading from the river. As Bhimsen nostalgically wrote: "At that time my father held the rank of 150 and he led a very decent life with all the suitable luxuries and prosperity."24 From his earliest years Bhimsen absorbed from the example of his father and uncles the values of the professional administrators in hereditary service to the emperor. Until the age of thirtynine, Bhimsen's career in imperial administration seems to have been typical. His first experience and training came in service for his father. From as early as age fourteen until the age of twenty-one, Bhimsen assisted his father in the latter's post as inspector of imperial artillery. During the last years he did all the work for the post as his father aged and weakened. In this period Mir cAbd al-Macbud, the superintendent (daiogha) of the artillery, a mansabdai of 500 dhat, treated the young Bhimsen very kindly, allowed him to carry out his father's duties without objection, and even taught him official skills. Finally, in 1670, Bhimsen's father resigned his post, forcing Bhimsen to search for other employment. His next position was as inspector and auditor for his old patron, Mir cAbd al-Macbud, now inspector general and intelligence officer (bakhshi} in the army of Daud Khan Qureshi, a high Afghan noble serving in the Deccan. In this capacity, Bhimsen survived a sudden falling out between Daud Khan and Prince Mucazzam which sent him and his immediate superior to the

god of death of the good and bad deeds of men). As Leonard points out in her summary (pp. 14-15), the kayastha community was heavily Islamicized, despite its Hindu beliefs: "Boys were well educated in Persian and Urdu and . . . Arabic. They, like Muslim boys, were taught by moulvis (Muslim clerics). . . . Their education commenced with the ceremony called bismillah (part of the Islamic life cycle). Kayasth men . . . wore the customary court dress and could converse fluently in Persian and Urdu, following the conversational and social mannerisms appropriate to Mughal court society. Kayasthas prided themselves on their literary skills and made substantial contributions to prose and poetry of the Mughal period. "Some of the essentially occupational patterns followed by kayasth men carried over into domestic life, especially in nomenclature, diet and manner of eating, and amusements. Kayasthas often took personal names customarily used by Muslims, as in Jahangir Prasad, . . . Kayasth diets [included] . . . meat regularly (usually a high-caste Hindu prohibition) and [they] enjoyed a reputation as gourmets of Mughali cuisine. They were famous wine-drinkers too;. . . characteristic of the court culture under most of the Mughal emperors . . . Feasting and wine-drinking were major elements of Kayasth entertainments. Weddings featured the Hindustani classical music and dancing patronized by the Mughals." Unfortunately, despite its importance, Leonard's study does not deal with the Kayasths under the Mughals, but only under the Hyderabad regime. 20. Bhimsen, Dilkasha, p. 19; text, fol. 15a. 21. Ibid., p. 20; text, fol. 15b. '* 22. Ibid., p. 31, text, fol. 21b-22a. "''

23. Ibid., p. 34; text, fol. 23b. 24. Ibid., p. 31; text, fol. 21b.

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service of Maharaja Jaswant Singh for a few months. Then, in 1670, Shivaji's raid on the port of Surat restored Baud Khan to favor as he led a punitive expedition against the Maratha king. As clerk (peshdast) to Mir cAbd al-Macbud, the imperial bakhshi, Bhimsen, deputed once again to Daud Khan's army, capably organized and directed the army spy system. He also gained his first battlefield experience fighting desperately with his patron at the Mughal defeat of Vani-Dindori. In early 1671, after further active campaigning against the Marathas, Daud Khan Qureshi was transferred north to Hindustan. Bhimsen, although promised a promotion by Daud Khan if he went north, refused, "as I had the responsibilities of my dependents," presumably including his aged father.25 His position terminated, Bhimsen's powerful patron Jaswant Singh proposed his name for the post of inspector and auditor (mushmfi) over the Deccan field armies. The recommendation was accepted by the emperor even though "in those days the names of Hindus were never recommended," because Bhimsen was "an old servant [khanazadi maurathi] of his [Aurangzeb's] court/'26 Despite the emperor's favor, Bhimsen endured more than a year of uncertainty and unemployment when a rival family group outmaneuvered him and preempted the position. Finally, in mid-1672, through the intervention of a noble whom he had met and impressed at the battle of Vani-Dindori, Bhimsen obtained his longsought position of inspector and auditor under the bakhshi for muster and branding of horses of the cavalry in the Deccan field army. He held this office continuously for the next eighteen years, until 1698. Now solidly established, Bhimsen, although far from having noble status, was a man of consequence, holding a mansab rank in imperial service. He headed his own cluster of agents, servants, clerks, secretaries, and accountants in his own employ. (During the dark days of his unemployment, Bhimsen records that "many old servants in my private service became very restless and anxious.")27 He was also linked by family ties to a number of officials holding similar posts and responsibilities in the 25. Ibid., p. 82; text, fol. 51a; the term translated as "dependents" is muta'alliqan, which generally connotes kinsmen and domestics. 26. Ibid., p. 83; text, fol. 51a: "ba wujudike dai an waqt tajwlz ba nam hinud namlshud, be ma'azai khanazadi mamuthi." 27. Ibid., "mardum-i qadim."

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Deccan and in north India. His third uncle, Shyam Das, was, for example, head clerk of the bakhshi of Aurangabad province. Brothers and cousins were scattered in like positions. Although spatially extended, this family constituted a recognizably distinct group of imperial servants. A familial tradition of commitment to official service, of competence and honesty, and of personal devotion to the emperor encouraged Aurangzeb's favor and employment and patronage by senior nobles. If necessary, these kayastha officers were also prepared to serve actively on the battlefield. Although Hindu in private belief and practice, the Saxena kayasthas seem to have assimilated, along with fluency in Persian and Muslim dress, the idiom of hereditary service as khanazads.28 Their loyalties were first to the emperor and the system that he symbolized and secondarily to their successive noble employers and patrons. Between 1672 and 1686, Bhimsen carried out his official duties under a succession of superintendents (daroghas) of the bakhshi's office. Although he built a new residence in Aurangabad, he spent much of his time on tour to various forts and army installations. During these years, Maratha raiding of Mughal provinces continued. Intensified imperial military responses increased the burden on the Deccan military administration. At an unspecified point during that period, Bhimsen renewed a familial tie with the Rajput house of Datia. Datia was a small Rajput kingdom situated just to the south of Agra and Etawah, the original home in Hindustan of Bhimsen's family and still the residence of many of his kinsmen. During the war of succession, Bhagwandas (Dianat Ray), Bhimsen's uncle who was diwan of the Deccan, had served Aurangzeb beside Subhkaran Bundala, the raja of Datia. The two officers had traveled north together to support their master in the great conflict. Two decades later Bhimsen renewed this old connection with Dalpat Ra'o Bundela, the then raja of Datia. Like his father a mansabdai in Mughal service, Dalpat Ra'o was employed in the punitive Maratha operations in the western Deccan. The Bundela chief, a contemporary of Bhimsen's and a fellow countryman, seems to have found a congenial companion in Bhimsen, despite any ostensible differences in their personal status (although Dalpat Ra'o, ranked at 28. Bhimsen used this term to describe himself and to explain his favor at court; see note 26.

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only 500 dhat at that time, was not highly advanced in the imperial service).29 This connection enabled Bhimsen to place his younger brother Hamirsen (Bhirnsen's own closest confidant) in Dalpat Ra'o's service. However, despite what appears to have been able work, Bhirnsen's career did not advance. Finally, in 1686, disgruntled and dissatisfied with his lack of promotion, he resigned and withdrew to retirement.

does not try to create destruction, but rather to foster peace and prosperity. These are the fruits of the empire or its synonym—successful, meaningful human activity. It is only God's kindness that permits this to happen in this the Kalyug, the last of the four periods.32

Applying a Code of Behavior

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In his opening invocation to God, Bhimsen explicitly sets out his highest beliefs. In praise of that Beloved God who created human beings, Bhimsen writes that He hoisted the banner of love in the field of the human body by making the heart the ruler of the empire of physical body of man and He gave orders to the other parts and the limbs of the body to abide by the commandments of the heart. In the same way, the wisdom and intellect were made to decide about the affirmations and negations of things. Thus the true, sense of slavery and obedience is that each limb should have a definite work to do and must have clear significance and not a single moment should be wasted in having the responsibility entrusted to it so that the said limb should become useless and crippled.30

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In this passage Bhimsen sets forth the metaphor that informed his life of service. As a minor but essential "limb," he and his fellow family members and their dependents and employees served God by serving the emperor, who was the "heart" of the body, which was the empire. Such service was arduous: it demanded "firmness of [one's own] heart, consolidation of the inner self, purity of deeds, and [an attempt to] improve general conditions."31 The true servant acts with detachment by ignoring the accumulation of worldly things. The true servant of God and his agent, the Emperor, 29. When Dalpat Ra'o brought the army treasure for the payroll on one mission, Bhimsen records that they held "certain mutual meetings and entertainment." Bhimsen, Dilkasha, p. 133; text, fol. 80a. 30. Ibid., p. 1; text, fol. 4a. Another remark of Bhirnsen's is as revealing: "I became permanent in my post and had collected sufficient money to indulge in luxuries. I treated both friends and strangers very kindly and showed them favors. The way I used to show my benevolence was extraordinary and superior to that of the high class nobles." Ibid., p. 95; text, fol. 63a. 31. Ibid., p. 2; text, fol. 4b. ' ~J

And it is through God's help that Bhimsen has recorded "[his] impressions which [he] constantly gained by experience or observations" and which "have been recorded without any omission" in the memoir of his life.33 The setting for this metaphor of service was the Deccan: that vast area reaching south from the Narmada River to the Kaveri River. During the first decades of Bhirnsen's active service, he saw the gradual culmination (by A.D. 1689) of the protracted imperial effort to conquer the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan. Imperial objectives in the south, as perceived by Bhimsen, did not arise from ignoble desires for aggrandizement and plunder, but rather from hopes for fulfillment of the divine wish for peace, order, and prosperity for mankind. It was only under the dispassionate administration of the empire that these ideal conditions could be sustained. The process of invasion and conquest was a distasteful but necessary precondition to that end. Consequently the individuals, social groups, and events described by Bhimsen in his autobiographical statement are, to our eyes, strangely restricted. Only those groups and events that are directly important for the imperial effort are described: the emperor's actions and statements; the career of Dalpat Ra'o Bundela, Bhimsen's patron; the actions and words of various nobles whom Bhimsen encountered or worked for; his male kinsmen and their colleagues in official service; and (rarely) ordinary soldiers, servants, or clerks. Bhimsen omits virtually any reference to his wife or female kin and any discussion, save the most general, of his domestic life. Even his often moving statements regarding his spiritual life, worship, and events such as pilgrimages are couched in terms of the overall metaphor of divine service as expressed in his performance of his duties for the empire. Periods of unemployment recurring in the first part of his career were especially distressing, not simply because of lack of pay and work, but because this was a sign of the emperor's indifference and, ultimately, divine indifference to his devotion. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 5; text, fols. 3b-4a.

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From his childhood on, Bhimsen marked his life by salient events in the life of his master, Aurangzeb. During Bhimsen's early childhood in Burhanpur, Aurangzeb served as governor of the Deccan provinces. Later, in 1656-58, Bhimsen's father and other members of his family loyally campaigned with Aurangzeb in the long-drawn-out four-part war of succession for the throne. After Aurangzeb's coronation, Bhimsen's father, suitably rewarded, moved to Aurangabad, the city founded by Aurangzeb near Daulatabad fort to become the capital of the Deccan. Thereafter, the mileposts of Bhimsen's life, which also divide the sections of the narrative, were the fifty regnal years of Aurangzeb. His active career and narrative both culminate in the near-simultaneous deaths of the emperor and of his patron, Dalpat Ra'o Bundela, in A.D. 1707. Bhimsen consistently portrays the emperor as the active mover of the imperial system. In keeping with official ideology, Aurangzeb as scion of the Timurid line was divinely illumined: "He came on the throne like the Sun and the sky prepared itself strongly to obey him."34 Thoroughly familiar with the Akbar nama of Abu al-Fadl, Bhimsen refers to the light-illumined Mongol line of descent for Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb's father.

The emperor displayed a detached, dispassionate sense of duty and divinely inspired mission in his relationships with his servants of all ranks and with the ordinary subjects of the empire. His duty was to so direct his servants that they secured the prosperity of all subjects—not for reasons of personal glory, but for the sake of God's wish for all mankind. To achieve this end— above all else—the emperor must cherish and reward his faithful, efficient servants with advancement in rank, title, position, and salary. He must chastise ineffective, corrupt servants by removal of these benefits. The emperor should not succumb to unseemly anger or tyrannical behavior and in doing so, treat his servants badly. Generosity and benevolence encouraged proper performance far better than severity and parsimony. When the Dlwan of the Deccan provinces, acting under direct orders from the emperor, investigated and dismissed or reduced the rank of a number of nobles and lesser mansabdars, and numerous complaints reached the emperor, "he lost his temper" at the Diwan's excessive zeal, for "most of the servants who had been removed or suspended had a long record of loyalty and obedience."36 In this memoir, Bhimsen is preoccupied with the behavior, character, and performance of the amirs or great nobles serving in the Deccan. To Bhimsen, the nobles are "limbs" of the empire but clearly are also living simulacrums of the emperor himself. Each noble, like the imperial master, must be a "heart" that provides active energy for the imperial enterprise. Each great noble must display royal virtues in terms of dispassionate action, benevolence, courage, and sagacity. In his comportment the noble must be dignified, courteous, and well-mannered in the IndoPersian style. He should display these attributes in the largess of feasts and entertainments. He should not greedily demand or accept bribes in the performance of his duties. Bhimsen's close study of the nobles also, of course, reflects his own and his family's dependence upon the personal support and patronage of one or more grandees for preferment and jobs. More than merely opportunistic, however, men like Bhimsen could not perform effectively in their tasks unless they were assured of the active personal support of a noble, or better, a group of nobles. If provincial governors or field generals or provincial fiscal

As the second Timur (Sahib Qiran) Shah Jahan [is] the son of Jahangir, the son of the king Akbar, the son of [king] Humayun, the son of the king Babar, . . . the son of Sahib Qiran, the king Timur Shah whose genealogical tree goes up to the Adam (Hazrat Adam) and this all is clearly illustrated in the Akbar nama.35

Aurangzeb was thus truly the legitimate "heart" and guiding intellect of the imperial body politic. Throughout the first three decades of Aurangzeb's reign, virtually all events occurred as a consequence of the imperial will. An edict from the emperor arrived and action was taken. Only occasionally, as in the series of misadventures with the Maratha king Shivaji, did anything occur that was beyond the emperor's control. Certainly all true khanazads governed their lives and actions in response to the emperor's will. '+•'

34. Ibid., p. 25; text, fol. 18a. 35. Ibid., p. 7; text, fol. 8a. This is the line of descent (silsila) of the Timurids from the light-impregnated Mongol princess, Alan-qo a, which provides Akbar and his successors with esoteric knowledge and powers. For a full account of this dynastic legend and the ideology of rule that it buttressed, see Richards, "The Formulation of Imperial Authority/' in Richards, ed., Kingship and Authority.

36. Bhimsen, Dilkasha, p. 59; text, fol. 36a, "az qadim dai bandaglya wala baigah."

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officers lacked the qualities valued by Bhimsen, the effectiveness of all imperial servants would be lost in the political struggle and confusion brought on by venality and corruption. For highly intelligent and able men like Bhimsen, proud of a long familial tradition of capable performance, personal subordination to "unnoble" amirs was dismaying. One suspects as well that the qualities valued by Bhimsen included as well a consistent loyalty toward able subordinates that would lessen the risks of the ongoing struggle between various technical-professional family groups in imperial service. For himself, his male family members, and fellow officers of the same stratum, Bhimsen's notions of proper comportment follow from his expectations for the emperor and the nobility. A continuing need to interact with the nobles and other highranking mansabdars meant that men such as Bhimsen must themselves be dignified, well-schooled in proper Indo-Persian etiquette, and able, in short, to carry on in sophisticated company from a position of relative weakness. To obtain ready personal access to a nobleman or his deputy was a constant goal for Bhimsen and his fellows. Only personal influence could ensure a ready reception for advice and for the exercise of one's technical skills and experience. When circumstances permitted, Bhimsen and his colleagues tried to enhance their influence and standing by imitating, so far as possible, the lifestyle and entertainment habits of Mughal amirs.

In this sphere, a reputation for qualities of resourcefulness, managerial and organizational skills, reliability, and honesty served to further the individual's career. Effective performance also rested on lateral and downward ties and linkages quite distinct from those extending to the emperor through the nobility. Bhimsen stresses the importance of familial loyalties and support in all aspects of obtaining and carrying out the duties of royal posts. Younger men accompanied their elder kinsmen as apprentices and assistants until suitable employment could be found for them. Established elders always took great care to introduce their kinsmen to men of affairs and influence. As we have suggested earlier, competition for place and preferment was between family groups—not individuals. Bhimsen's notions of proper comportment extended as well to his own role as a master and patron. To refer to Bhimsen as an individual filling an office is somewhat deceptive in that he clearly headed a section of perhaps a dozen men who were his personal assistants and servants. When Bhimsen obtained a posting, he expected to use the services of these dependents in carrying out the duties of that office and to obtain pay for them. Some of these employees were kinsmen; some were not. To use his establishment effectively, and thus to make his own tiny group of servants happy and prosperous in service to him and to the empire, was part of Bhimsen's ethos.

Shaikh Abdul Wahid, the Munshi [secretary] of the Amir ul-Urnara, who had a lot to say in the affairs of the royal court, was getting only one hundred rupees monthly but the way he was leading his life he could easily match with most of the renowned and major nobles. Namdar Khan and Sarbuland Khan often used to pay him visits at his house and he used to give them parties and feasts and it was not difficult to accommodate the mansabdars of five or six hundred [personal or dhat rank] in his house. He had won the hearts of the people around due to his good manners and attractive behavior.37

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Bhimsen and his fellows also were royal officers who were not completely at the mercy of noble caprice. Senior men in this category occupied highly responsible positions. Most bore a badge of royal office: metal ink seals that stamped their name, office, and date of entry to that office on all documents endorsed by them. 37. Ibid., p. 31; text, fol. 18b. Literally, the "means and expenditures" (auqat o ikhrajat).

After two years of life in a village located opposite Naldurg fort on the Bori river (near Sholapur), Bhimsen, at the urging of his friends, sought and obtained restoration of his previous position and returned to active service with the Mughal armies. At this juncture, Dalpat Ra'o Bundela offered Bhimsen a lucrative position in his private service.38 As the Rajput commander's personal assistant, Bhimsen was to receive 12,000 silver rupees a year paid from revenues of villages in Bundelkhand, Dalpat Ra'o's home territory. Bhimsen accepted this generous offer with high praise for his new employer and patron. He also, through the assistance of his cousin, Sukhraj (son of Bhagwandas), who was in the emperor's service at the imperial camp, obtained Bhimsen's old position and mansab for his younger brother, Hamirsen. 38. Ibid., p. 176; text, fol. lOla-b.

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In thus shifting to Dalpat Ra'o's private employment, Bhirnsen, no longer an imperial official, adopted a new and, in many respects, far more demanding role as Dalpat Ra'o's deputy. The Kayastha administrator now served as his master's personal confidant. The role of a deputy was a position long recognized as absolutely necessary for the smooth functioning of the establishments of higher-ranking imperial officers. The need for reliable, effective advice and assistance in their personal and administrative affairs led all nobles and most mansabdars to form a close personal bond with a deputy. They needed someone who could act in their interest at all times and who could be completely trusted in all matters, not simply those of the battlefield. Intralineage disputes and friction or interfactional conflicts all engendered insecurities and worries about loyalty. Therefore, to have one person counted as fully devoted to his master's interest was essential. For the most part, wives were prevented from filling this role because of polygyny and the seeming distance of malefemale relationships in high-status marriages within the imperial official elite. One option, if the nature of the relationships permitted it, was to employ a son in this capacity. Such examples can be readily found. Perhaps the most common solution to this problem—even if sons were loyal and capable—was to employ a trusted slave in this role. These were usually eunuchs, purchased in early life after they had survived mutilation and sale, who won the trust of their master.39 A slave-confidant of this type frequently engaged in a sexual relationship with his master, which could intensify the affective tone of the relationship. Such alter egos also acted as personal bodyguards by staying constantly in their master's company. Although unquestionably a relationship with two well-defined roles of super- and subordination, it can also be argued that in many instances such a tie came close to idealized patterns of friendship or even marriage. That is, both partners placed full trust in one another as a result of extended and intimate acquaintance and each was concerned, often selflessly, for the welfare of the other. The master or noble assured full sustenance and honorable responsible employment to his alter ego, who in turn took his master's affairs as his own. Perhaps most significantly in a system of considerable uncer-

tainty, the deputy also accepted his master's trust in adversity as well as success. From Manucci's account of the mid-seventeenthcentury war of succession comes an anecdote of a eunuch having such trusted relationships with one of the Mughal princes contending for the throne. When Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh were ostensibly in alliance for the struggle, the latter's eunuch Shahbaz, "seeing clearly that Aurangzeb was deceiving his master, . . . and that certainly he would lose his life by such deceits, made up 'his mind . . . to commit a terrible act." Shahbaz was fully prepared, according to Manucci, to sacrifice his own life in the killing of Aurangzeb and "would die content, having put to death those who meant to kill his master."40 Much of the work of the empire was carried out by trusted deputies acting for nobles and other mansabdais, in the most intricate and difficult of assignments and circumstances. These were not mansabdars, formally enrolled in imperial service, but they often acted with great power as surrogates for their masters. Each noble or other mansabdai gained in operational efficiency to the extent that he could successfully employ a trusted deputy. The interpersonal authoritative relationship between emperor and noble, the fulcrum of the imperial system, was extended in another direct paired relationship to the deputy. Failing the juridical distinctions of slavery, or the weight of kinship obligations, the entrance of a free officer into this alterego relationship was somewhat unusual. For a once relatively independent officer to sustain the intensity of such a relationship seems unlikely. On the whole, however, one suspects from the tone of his account of these years that this role was far from uncongenial for Bhimsen. To serve as Dalpat Ra'o's deputy and, on occasion, his surrogate was highly satisfying. So long as he held his master's confidence, Bhirnsen could count on a form of security for himself, his family, and his dependents that he had never before enjoyed in imperial service. Bhirnsen's entrance into the Ra'o's service and the seeming ease with which he retained his master's good will emerged from the long-standing fa-

39. See Hambly, "A Note on the Trade in Eunuchs."

40. Niccolao Manucci, Storia Do Mogor (London, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 249, 253, 263. Shahbaz ranked as an amn of 5,000 dhat. For another example of a close, affective tie between a Mughal noble and a slave eunuch, see Mirza Nathan, Baharistan i Ghaybl, ed. and trans. M. I. Borah, 2 vols. (Gauhati: Assam, 1936), for the role of Mirza Nathan's slave-confidant in Bengal in the early seventeenth century.

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milial relationship between the rajas of Datia and the kayastha family, all of whom were hereditary khanazads in the imperial service, from a shared north-central Hindi-speaking culture, and from the same Hindu cultural and religious identity. In the confusion of Aurangzeb's last years, all of these shared identities were coming under increasing pressure. Members of khanazad families felt threatened by the entrance of "Deccani" Muslim and Maratha recruits into imperial service. Hindu officers felt threatened by the pro-Muslim policies of the emperor. Such pressures probably encouraged the sense of companionship and solidarity between the two officers, who were clearly compatible on a personal level. Aurangzeb's obsessive policies in the south placed unprecedented demands on his nobles for sustained campaigning under difficult conditions never before seen by the nobility. Between 1690 and 1698, Dalpat Ra'o, one of the leading commanders and adherents of Dhu al-Faqar Khan, son of the imperial wazir, served at the protracted siege of Jinji fortress, refuge of Rajaram, the Maratha king. Between 1699 and 1707, Dalpat Ra'o remained consistently faithful as he assaulted Maratha-held hill fort after hill fort in the last years of Aurangzeb's reign. Finally, in June 1707, the Bundela raja, a supporter of Prince Azam in the war of succession following Aurangzeb's death, was killed on the battlefield. Bhimsen, wounded in the same battle, burned his master's body and retired to obscurity thereafter.41 Although probably hired for his administrative rather than his military qualities, Bhimsen through necessity became a hardened soldier. He was almost constantly in the company of Dalpat Ra'o Bundela as the latter led his Rajput soldiers on increasingly arduous, bitter, and ultimately futile campaigns in the south. When they were not besieging forts, Dhu al-Faqar Khan's armies were rapidly pursuing raiding Marathas. Bhimsen records that in a six-month period in A.D. 1701 the exhausted imperial army covered nearly three thousand kuioh (over seven thousand miles) and fought nineteen large battles.42 The intrepid administrator rode into battle seated behind his

master on Dalpat Ra'o's elephant. When the Mughal camp at Jinji broke under a Maratha attack in 1692, Dalpat Ra'o, trying to rally his troops, was fired upon: "As the rain of the bullets was heavy I from behind the Rao on his elephant seized the shield and held it before the Rao for his protection. Although God is the protector of every one, two bullets successively hit the shield near my shoulder."43 When Jinji was finally taken in 1698, Bhimsen and his master scaled the wall of the fort together under fire. Bhimsen was trusted as Dalpat Ra'o's deputy in all his personal affairs. These ranged from sheltering the Ra'o's wives and youngest sons at Naldurg under the care of the reliable Hamirsen to finding a competent physician for his master and to traveling to the emperor's court to plead for a mansab for the younger son of Dalpat Ra'o. In 1698 Bhimsen carried out an extremely delicate mission for the Ra'o when Ramchand, Dalpat Ra'o's oldest son, tried to seize the throne at Datia. Ramchand, in league with the Mughal faujdar of neighboring Etawah, brought false charges to the emperor that his father had ordered the murder of Rarnchand's mother and seventy of her retainers and had illegally seized lands of a Mughal zamindar. Aurangzeb angrily demoted Dalpat Ra'o by 500 dhat instead of rewarding him for the final occupation of Jinji fortress. Upon the intercession of Dhu alFaqar Khan, the emperor agreed to appoint an officer to investigate the charges. Dalpat Ra'o sent Bhimsen north, "crossing the Narmada for the first time in my life," to Agra to meet with the faujdai of Agra, who was to conduct the inquiry. At an audience with the arrogant faujdai, Bhimsen, "Out of my regard for the Ra'o made such entreaties as I had never before done in my life." In company with the agent sent by the imperial faujdai to Datia, Bhimsen took depositions (mahdars) that proved the accusations to be false. Aurangzeb restored the rank of Dalpat Ra'o on receipt of the official report from the investigation.44 The challenge that Dalpat Ra'o faced from his son for control of the Datia gaddi resulted, in part, from his prolonged absence on Mughal service—an absence enforced by Aurangzeb's new and excessive demands on his nobles for extended military service. But Dalpat Ra'o's attitudes toward Aurangzeb's demands scarcely wavered for nearly two decades. He consistently re-

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41. Sarkar, "A Great Hindu Memoir-Writer/' p. 239. 42. Bhimsen, Dilkasha, p. 233; text, fol. 141b. This figure, which Bhimsen states as "about [qanb] 3,000 kuioh" at 2.59 miles per unit, is probably something of an exaggeration. It may have been a total for several divisions of the army.

43. Ibid., p. 187; text, fol. 109b. 44. Ibid., pp. 211-13; text, Ms. 125b-28b.

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cruited and led more Bundela troops than his suwai rank demanded, simply as a matter of his own honor. At the darkest moments of the siege of Jinji, Dalpat Ra'o offered Dhu al-Faqar Khan thirty to forty thousand rupees from his own funds for the pay of the army in order to keep it from retiring in disgrace. At the same time, when false rumors of the death of Aurangzeb had swept the camp at Jinji, Dalpat Ra'o, "as required by his hereditary servantship and true fidelity, had given up bearing arms and decided that if, God forbid it, the news turned out to be true, he would give up service and his rank."45 Conclusion

jj ii

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For nearly a decade after the fall of Jinji, Dalpat Ra'o, and with him Bhimsen, rode at the head of his army contingent against the marauding, rebellious zamindars and chiefs of the Deccan. Dalpat Ra'o brought his troops against fortress after fortress in a series of costly, bitter operations directed personally by Aurangzeb. He persisted, without relief, without returning for respite to Datia, enduring fiscal and supply shortages which in earlier times would have been regarded as intolerable for an imperial field commander. A growing sense of futility arose from widespread public disorder. In 1706, as food grains became scarce in the Deccan, Dalpat Ra'o sent his family, along with Bhimsen's, north to Datia to take refuge in the care of Hamirsen, Bhimsen's younger brother. Bhimsen, writing his memoirs, in a series of often-quoted passages reflects that sense of helplessness and bitterness. He comments: "I have found the men of the world very greedy, so much so that an Emperor like Alamgir who is not in want of anything, has been seized with such a longing and passion for taking forts that he personally runs about panting for some heaps of stone (i.e., hill forts)."46 The failure of Aurangzeb's policies caused a decline in the standards of performance and conduct for all imperial servants—to the detriment of the gen45. Ibid., p. 190; text, fol. Ilia. The Ra'o uses the term khanazadi, which Sarkar renders as "hereditary servantship," and the term naukanioi "service." 46. Ibid., p. 233; text, fol. 134b. In the same passage Bhimsen also comments: "At this time . . . little money came from my jagiis and outwardly I suffered from lack of resources. But I did not feel downcast, because I formerly had no love for money, and now too I did not care for it. Men do not look at money, but at their name and honour."

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eral population in the Deccan and indeed in the north. Bhimsen was most offended by the displacement of the hereditary professional writers and accountants, whose "posts have been given to unprofessional men." The latter had no norms of proper conduct, for "having learnt the art of arithmetic [they] have become masters of authority, and engaged in plundering the public."47 The ultimate failure was the inability of the imperial system to impose and sustain peace and prosperity for its subjects. In a famous passage, Bhimsen contrasts the situation in the Deccan under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, who placed conquered territories under "high grandees at the head of large forces who controlled them effectively." At present, under Aurangzeb, no such nobles were left to carry out these tasks. The Marathas, as well as lawless men of all sorts, had rebelled and plundered the countryside. Zamindais no longer kept their obligations, but "assumed strength, joined the Marathas, enlisted armies, and laid the hand of oppression on the country." The agents of the jagirdars oppressed and abused the peasantry as they collected taxes. The peasants themselves "procured horses and arms and joined the Marathas."48 Returning to his theme a few pages later, Bhimsen defined the central problem: When the aim of the ruling sovereign is the happiness of the people, the country prospers, the ryots are at ease, and people live in peace. The fear of the king's order seizes the hearts of high and low, and also the royal agents are cured of their wicked desires as said in old books. Now that the last age (Kaliyuga) has come, nobody has an honest desire; the Emperor seized with a passion for capturing forts, has given up attending to the happiness of the subjects. The waziis and umaia have turned aside from giving good counsel.49

As a technician, a member of the professional castes and groups of the empire, Bhimsen was disturbed that the technical processes of imperial administration were not operating properly. With the king distracted, the imperial machinery did not produce its necessary products: peace, order, prosperity, and justice. That degree of meaning—beyond provision of a comfortable life—which service to the emperor had previously provided was no longer apparent. Despite this growing sense of futility and loss of meaning, the 47. Ibid., p. 240; text, fol. 141a. 48. Ibid., p. 230; text, fol. 139b. 49. Ibid., p. 24; text, fol. 146b.

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relationship between Aurangzeb and Dalpat Ra'o (emperor and noble) and that between Dalpat Ra'o and Bhimsen (noble and deputy) continued. In these two authoritative relationships— which as types were essential for the operation of the imperial system—the norms, or code of behavior, of mutual responsibilities were not violated. Here we may well ask why in view of the difficulties of Aurangzeb (which included in his final days such indignities as the insolent operations near his headquarters of parties of Marathas), did Dalpat Ra'o and his deputy continue to serve the emperor? As a Rajput chief, with a homeland, Dalput Ra'o could have made excuses and retired to Datia. Rejection of an assignment did occur as he himself had demonstrated in 1698 when he refused the commandership of Adoni fort (near Jinji). In attempting a reasonable answer, we obviously should not overlook the force of a lifetime of military service: habit and the unwillingness to break it. It is clear also that Dalpat Ra'o was punctilious in the matter of his Rajput honor. Having committed himself to his master, to the empire, and to the Maratha wars in the south, he was unwilling, for the sake of his name, to reject lightly a sacred obligation to the service. He termed himself a khanazad or hereditary servant of the Mughals. Another possibility that must be considered is that in personally taking command and keeping a number of his most able nobles (notably Dhu al-Faqar Khan and Firoz Jang) in the field under his eye, Aurangzeb limited for those nobles and their subordinate amirs their modes of action. That is, by confining these men to arduous military service under his personal command, Aurangzeb may have intensified the element of personal loyalty to himself and to his throne as the locus of all authority. Simultaneously, however, he cut off the opportunities for those nobles in the Deccan to undertake and carry out independent operations, away from his direct or near-direct supervision. But the consequence of this policy was to leave a larger number of nobles in independent commands for long periods of time without bringing them back to court to wait personally upon the emperor. In so isolating many nobles (such as Amir Khan, the governor of Kabul for nearly twenty-five years), the emperor lost the continuing affirmation of their active personal loyalties, as well as the information and insights to be gained from their direct observations elsewhere in the empire. In other words, in Aurangzeb's last decade or so, the nobility divided into one group, perhaps a minority,

that intensified its relationship and ties with the emperor, and a second group that found these ties to be atrophying. There may be a number of other possible reasons as well for the connection between Dalpat Ra'o and Bhimsen. The position was clearly lucrative, allowing Bhimsen to support his family and himself better than did his former position in imperial service. The personal sympathy and liking of each for the other is also noteworthy. As we noted earlier, Bhimsen, although born in the Deccan, belonged to a kayastha family originally from Etawah in the vicinity of Dalpat Ra'o's territories. They were fellow countrymen. Moreover, Rajput rajas had a long tradition of employing administrators, many of whom were kayasths in the seventeenth century. But the impression one gains from reading Bhimsen's memoir is that the transfer from the emperor's service to the private employ of Dalpat Ra'o did not change his status as a khanazad. He still served the emperor and the empire and still followed his profession as a middling imperial administrator. The symbols of imperial rule suffused and sustained Bhimsen's relationship to Dalpat Ra'o. Bhimsen was serving a lesser Rajput ruler, but also a king of kings, a ruler with far greater power and sovereignty.

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The officers of the British East India Company had started taking interest in the education of Indians even in the eighteenth century but it was not until 1813 that a clear mandate in that regard was announced. That year, for the first time, a clause was inserted in the East India Company Act, declaring that "it shall be lawful for the Governor-General in Council to direct t h a t . . . a sum of not less than one lac of rupees (Rs. 100,000) in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India." ' Although ten years went by before any action was taken, the next four decades saw the rapid development of an educational system that included both private and government institutions, catering to the traditional literary classes of both Hindus and Muslims. A major controversy developed, during this initial period, on the question of the medium of instruction. A group of so-called "Orientalists" wanted to continue with the traditional medium of classical languages (Arabic, Persian, and

Sanskrit), whereas another group of "Anglicists" wished to use English. Eventually, the "Orientalists" lost to the "Anglicists" at the level of higher instruction. At the levels of primary and secondary education, they lost to regional vernaculars that, in turn, remained inferior in status to English. In 1854, the Education Despatch from the Board of Control in London further directed the East India Company to expand its efforts, leading, among other things, to the establishment of regional departments of public instruction and the institution of universities in the Presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. The despatch emphasized the "importance of encouraging the study of the vernaculars as the only possible medium for mass education. . . . [It] further advocated the promotion of female education and Muslim education, the opening of schools and colleges for imparting technical instruction, and insisted on a policy of perfect religious neutrality."2 In North India, the effects of these policies were felt with the extension of the British authority over Delhi and the North-Western Provinces after 1803, over the Punjab after 1849, and over Oudh after 1856. The abortive revolt of 1857 did not significantly slow down the process; the policies of the Company were affirmed and continued by the Crown. The decline of "Oriental" learning, the increasing awareness on the part of literate people of the range of scientific knowledge available in English, and the need to provide school texts in regional vernaculars, led a number of individuals and associations to produce translations as well as original works in Urdu in the realm of what was seen as cilm (knowledge; science), as opposed to shici and dastan (poetry and tales). It is interesting to note that just when the teachers and students at the famous Delhi College (for the instruction of the natives) were engaged in translating into Urdu books on analytical geometry, optics, and galvanism, Goldsmith's History of England, selections from Plutarch's Lives, and Abercrombie's Mental Philosophy,3 the traditional munshis at the equally famous College of Fort William (for the instruction of British officers) were busy putting into simple Urdu the Gulistan of Sacdi, the Tale of the Four Dervishes, the Tale of Amir Hamza, Singhasan Battisi, the Shakun-

1. Quoted irf Y. B. Mathur, Women's Education in India, 1813-1966 (New York: 1973), p. 4.

2. Ibid., p. 7. 3.