The Hall of a Thousand Columns

Title: The Hall of a Thousand Columns

Author: Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Publisher: John Murray, 2006 (First published 2005)

ISBN: 9780719565878

Pages: 333

Making history was a favourite pastime of Indian rulers, but writing it was never even a hobby. As the Hindu rulers fell one by one against the invading Islamic might, things changed. Muslim nobles and courtiers produced journals and panegyrics of their patrons. This was a period in which travelers through the land recorded their observations. Ibn Battutah (1304 – 69) was a noted Moroccan religious scholar and world traveler, who visited India during the reign of Muhammed Shah Tughluq and stayed in the country for eight years beginning in 1333. He was made a religious judge by Tughluq, but soon lost his favour. When at last he regained it, the assignment was to serve as ambassador to the Chinese emperor’s court. He travelled from Delhi, via Aligarh to the Gujarat coast. He covered the western coast in a flotilla and reached Calicut. Not content with the idea of staying put in a port town, he sailed the entire Kerala coast up and down. Back in Calicut again, his ships and the sovereign’s gifts to China were lost in a storm from which ibn Battutah escaped as he was attending Friday prayers in a mosque on the shore. Afraid to go back to Delhi, he did some island hopping and visited China and Indonesia eventually.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is a British author who has settled in Yemen. He is a well known writer, traveler and lecturer. In this book, he retraces the footsteps of ibn Battutah, whose name he shortens to IB, which adds intimacy for the medieval traveler on the readers’ minds. He is accompanied by Martin Yeoman, illustrator of the book, who is also a painter, draughtsman, sculptor and etcher. The duo virtually lives in the Indian countryside, assimilating personal interactions with local scholars. He finds ready acceptance among Islamic scholars with his mastery of the Arabic language and literature. The title of the book is derived from the exaggerated description of Muhammed Shah Tuguluq’s famed audience chamber, in which he received the traveler.

Ibn Battutah spent several years of his Indian sojourn at the court of Muhammed ibn Tughluq, called zalim (the tyrant) by his hapless subjects. The author lets out IB’s narration only selectively, but whatever is available paints a scary picture of the tyrant. Religious scholars commanded respect from all, but even they were not immune from the whims and fury of the ruler. We read about a Muslim saint who disobeyed Tughluq forcibly fed excrement for hours and then beheaded. When he transferred the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in Deccan, a few chose not to go there. They were inflicted with model punishment. One was blown from the mouth of a cannon and a blind man was dragged by horse to the new capital city. When it arrived there 40 days later, only a part of the leg by which the poor guy was secured to the horse remained in place. Such was the cruelty of this sultan, which was excessive even by medieval standards. Slavery was widespread in the sultanate with the full sanction of religion. The price of a pre-pubescent slave girl quoted in the book is about half of a goat and about a quarter of a cow. Conquests in the country ensured a continuous supply of men and women in the ranks of slaves with the additional burden of sexual servitude on the latter. The author identifies the genre of tyrants like Muhammed Shah by the sheer force with which the throne was held up and he was no different in caliber than Ahmed Shah Masoud, the former warlord of Afghanistan. Muhammed Shah distrusted Muslims of Indian origin and filled the nobility with people invited from all across the Islamic world. That was the reason why the traveler ibn Battutah was appointed as the religious judge of the Maliki sect. Nobles from the entire Islamic world flocked to Delhi like moths to a candle.

The author travels through Muslim India. He is in search of places built by sultans, their graves and other memorabilia. In this sense, a similarity may be established with William Dalrymple’s works. The occupations, concerns and worries of the Indian Muslim community are expressed by the people the travelers meet on the way. Irfan Habeeb, the noted Islamist historian of Aligarh Muslim University suggests that central rule had failed in India ages ago as it still does. In this era of demanding more decentralization and devolution of powers, the historian’s remark is way off the mark. The author is surprised at the fact that many inmates of the Aligarh University cheer the Australians in a cricket match against India! The reason for doing so was that the fascists would take over in case India wins! Even die hard religious fanatics masquerade as leftists in this university. Mackintosh-Smith returns the grooming he received there with the remark that ‘he could see why the staff of Aligarh, most of whom Muslims, all of whom have brains, were worried by the BJP and its saffron flag’. But this stark separation and victimization claimed by the Muslim elite is not visible in the villages. There, the Hindus routinely visit Islamic holy places and revere sufis and pirs as they do sanyasis. The Muslim conjurors depicted in another part of the book use the image of Kali to pay respects.

Mackintosh-Smith’s visit to the South coincided with the Godhra riots of 2002, which might be one reason why he was denied permission to visit Anjidiv near Goa, which IB had visited and met a mysterious yogi, but the place was since taken over by the Indian navy to construct a naval base. Though the conclusions reached by the author upon visiting places or meeting descendants of the people mentioned by IB may seem farfetched, it is pleasurable for readers to enjoy the supposed charm of finding a thread unbroken in the past seven centuries or so. Everywhere he visits, the author is reminded of the syncretism of the land’s assimilating spirit. He comments that ‘India as a whole had a habit of sliding in and out of that borderland between faith and faith, creed and conjury’.

The book is, however, not easy to read. Mackintosh-Smith had used a little too much eloquence for a work of this kind. His adroitness in finding synonyms in its multitudes baffles the readers as does his penchant for using colloquial terms liberally. The work’s overarching sense of humour is sometimes eclipsed by this play of words. The author’s observation is sharp and noteworthy. He describes Malabar (Kerala) as a vast inhabited garden and expresses rage at the Portuguese for destroying the maritime prosperity of the land. Regarding sati, the age-old Indian custom of widow burning, he remarks that ‘it was a custom religiously followed by a few, toed halfheartedly by rather more, sidestepped by many and ignored by most’. The book is adorned with hand sketches by Martin Yeoman and sports a fine index, but curiously, no Notes.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star