Will anybody believe that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, the Hindutva forces’ primary target of attack, wrote poetry praising the Hindu trinity of Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh as well as other gods and goddesses? If this is true, will it not undermine the very edifice of the Hindutva project that exists and thrives solely on the basis of painting the Muslim rulers in blackest of colours as oppressors and destroyers of the Hindu religion and culture?
Manager Pandey
A recently released book does exactly this and takes the wind out of the sail of those who never tire of dividing the Indian society and its past on the basis of “mutually exclusive” religious identities of the Hindus and the Muslims. Published by Rajkamal Prakashan, “Mughal Badshahon Ki Hindi Kavita” (Hindi Poetry of the Mughal Emperors) has been compiled and edited by well-known critic Manager Pandey, who retired as professor of Hindi from the Jawaharlal Nehru University some years ago. He has heavily drawn upon a musical treatise “Sangeet Ragakalpadruma” that was written by Krishnanand Vyas Dev Ragasagar. It was a three-volume tome whose first, second and third volumes came out in 1842, 1845 and 1849 respectively. His attention was drawn to this voluminous work when he read Chandrabali Pandey’s book “Mughal Badshahon Ki Hindi” (Hindi of the Mughal Emperors) that was published by Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha in 1940.
IN A NEW LIGHT A gold coin with the image of Aurangzeb
As Pandey has noted, nearly all the Mughal rulers wrote poetry and Shah Alam II had, in fact, published in 1797 a collection titled “Nadirat-e-Shahi” containing his Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hindi poems. These poems include some folk forms too that have now become almost extinct. They are Seethne, Dohra, Kabat and Dohra Nayakabhed. Seethne are the songs that women used to sing on the occasion of a wedding. They include very explicitly erotic expressions suggestive of sexual dalliances between the father of the groom and the mother of the bride or mother of the groom and father of the bride and so on.
Pandey quotes eminent historian Harbans Mukhia who informs in his book “The Mughals of India” that by the 18th Century, this wedding music had reached the Mughal court and Emperor Shah Alam II had composed some songs in this genre too. “Sangeet Ragakalpadrum”, besides discussing ragas, talas and other technical aspects of Hindustani music, has a compilation of Hindi poems of Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb and subsequent Mughal rulers right up to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last of the Timurid line.
While Pandey claims that the authenticity and authorship of these poems are incontestable, one cannot help accepting this with a pinch of salt because Krishnanand Vyas collected the poems purportedly written by the Mughal emperors in the course of touring the entire country. As this exercise was undertaken in the 19th Century, there is an intervening gap of several centuries between the poems’ composition and compilation. Pandey himself admits that textual variations and changes could have crept into these compositions as a large number of them have been drawn from the vocal tradition. Therefore, one is compelled to say that their authorship can never be incontrovertibly confirmed because the court poets often put their patrons’ names in the laudatory poems they composed in their honour.
Allison Busch’s “Poetry of Kings” is another work, which Pandey has relied on a great deal. Busch opines that the Mughal court played a “pivotal” role in the rise of Braj literature which “would never have attained the status it came to enjoy without the sponsorship of Mughal patrons.” Thus, one thing is certain. Contrary to the general impression created by the Hindutva propaganda about the Mughal rule’s oppressive role in subjugating the indigenous religion and culture, the Mughal court patronised and practised syncretic multiculturalism. Audrey Truschke’s “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” too had made a similar point.
Even if the poems purportedly written by Aurangzeb may have been actually written by his court poets, it however goes to show that his court poets could invoke Hindu gods and goddesses in their poems to celebrate his ascension to the throne or other such auspicious occasions and there was no narrow-minded religious censorship. Hindu religious symbols have also been used in the poetic works associated with the names of other Mughal rulers.
However, Pandey seems to have committed a major faux pas by thinking that Mohammad Shah Rangila and Sadarang were the same person and the Mughal emperor used ‘Sadarang’ as his nom de plume. Sadarang was, in fact, the nom de plume of famed dhrupad singer and veena player Nemat Khan who was Mohammad Shah’s court musician. He composed a large number of khayals and used the ‘mudra’ of Mohammad Shah Sadarangile to show respect to his patron. A large number of poems credited to Mohammad Shah in this compilation seem to be the khayals composed by Nemat Khan ‘Sadarang’. His nephew, disciple and son-in-law Feroz Khan ‘Adarang’ was another famous composer of khayals.
At a time when India’s pluralistic culture is facing an unprecedented challenge, Manager Pandey’s book reinforces the secular and syncretic nature of Indian society by making us familiar with the significant literary contribution of the Mughal emperors who patronised all faiths, languages and cultures without much prejudice.
