Title: Farzana – The Tempestuous Life and Times of Begum Sumru
Author: Julia Keay
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2013 (First)
ISBN: 9789350297094
Pages: 338
The British emerged as the foremost territorial power in India in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This was facilitated by the disintegration and fractionalization of the Mughal Empire. Provinces like Bengal and Awadh came into prominence which accepted Mughal sovereignty only in name. The British also decimated French colonial ambitions in the Deccan peninsula around this time. At this point, the French bowed out of the race and settled contentedly with whatever little possessions they enjoyed. A lot of Frenchmen and other Europeans had fought in the French army in India when they battled against the British. The French fiasco dashed their career prospects but they were not willing to go back home empty-handed. Many drifted to interior kingdoms and took up employment with Indian princes and the Mughals who were also eager to take them on to train their forces in European drill and discipline. These jobs were lucrative and these foreigners were not averse to mix with local people. Many of them married Indian women and even practised polygamy. Living in the style of local aristocrats, these mercenary troops was a passing phase of India’s march to modernity. We see a fusion of civilizations in this era. The Muslim empire had fallen and the British one not yet reached ascendancy. The ancient spirit of India to absorb everyone and everything once again shone through. May be this was how the Sakas got interwoven in Indian society around the beginning of the Common Era. This book is the story of a Muslim nautch-girl who came into the possession of a European military commander. She steadfastly stood by him and his troops to gain leadership of the brigade and administration of his estates after his death. Her exploits around Delhi in giving protection to the weak Mughal emperor Shah Alam II is recorded in history. As the British tightened their hold on Delhi, she transferred her allegiance to them and was allowed to keep her estates till her death. She is known by her Mughal title Farzand-i-Azizi (beloved daughter of the state), shortened to Farzana. This story is refreshingly told by Julia Keay, wife of the famous historian John Keay, and herself the author of many historical books. The text of this book was completed just before her death in 2011.
Our heroine was the daughter of an Arab father and a Kashmiri dancing girl. The father died when she was only six and the mother and child were thrown out of the establishment by the senior wife. Being a courtesan once, her mother returned to that profession and settled in Delhi. But a young daughter is jetsam for a mother trying to swim for her life in the turbulence of Delhi. Under the doleful eye of the Mughal ruler, a thriving trade on child virgins was being conducted. Mothers did deeds on the virginity of their daughters, sometimes three or four years before they reached puberty. When the time came, they delivered their children to the purchaser to fulfil the terms of the deal (p.18). It was the time when the Jats of Bharatpur made an incursion on Delhi under their leader Jawahar Singh and the little dancing girl caught the eye of Walter Balthazar Reinhardt, a European mercenary described as a morose, ill-conditioned ruffian. It’s not known how exactly Farzana came into his possession, but slowly she became his consort. Because of his unusual mood, he was often called General Sombre which was Indianized to Sumru and so our lady came to be called Begum Sumru. A mercenary was always ready to change sides and cheated on their masters without batting an eyelid. When a reinforced Delhi attacked the Jats back, Reinhardt defected to the Mughal side and became a servant of the emperor Shah Alam II. He entrusted the jagir of Sardhana on him. Farzana had meanwhile charmed the emperor himself with her demeanour and became indispensable to her troops by riding and fighting with them. As a result, when her master died, Shah Alam conferred the jagir on her and allowed her to remain as the leader of the military brigade. In 1781, after Reinhardt’s demise, she converted to Christianity and assumed the name of Joanna at the age of thirty.
The role of European mercenary soldiers in Indian history is not generally discussed and remains unknown to most people. Their interactions with native sepoys were much more cordial than in the English East India Company’s army. In the armed forces of native principalities, a Christian contingent of European descent was always available. The nawabs and rajas realized the superiority of European tactics and discipline in firing drill in the unsettled political conditions of north India. Keay provides a very good overview of the state of various armies. Fifty odd warring factions had regular units and mercenaries who possessed a professional dedication to fight for whoever would pay them with a further recompense in victory – a euphemism for loot. But they were notoriously unreliable for changing sides in the thick of battle or retreating to save their skin. Poor state of transportation technology was what tied these vagrants to India. However, with the rise of smoother and faster sailings, better domestic sanitation, the strictures of evangelical missionaries and a heightened sense of moral purpose and racial superiority, prevented liaison with native women in the nineteenth century. When white memsahibs took over the residences, native bibis were banished.
Though the Mughals had ruled roughshod over India for close to two centuries, their end was very pathetic and evoking sympathy. Keay gives a detailed but gruesome account of the conquest of Delhi by Ghulam Qadir in 1788 and the blinding of the emperor. Qadir was a Rohilla Afghan and of course, the Mughals were Chaghtai Turkish. The Afghan-Turkish rivalry was itself centuries old. Babur writes in his journal about how he made Afghan nobles who surrendered after a battle to approach him on all fours with grass held in their mouths as if to signify they are his humble cows. It was another Afghan – Sher Shah Suri – who had defeated Humayun to bring about a brief interlude of Afghan supremacy. With Ahmed Shah Abdali’s raid in 1761, Afghans again claimed prominence, but the Mughals managed to side-line them soon. Ghulam Qadir was determined to humiliate Shah Alam II. At a time when the Marathas – who protected the emperor – were away, Qadir occupied the Red Fort and took Shah Alam prisoner. He used to sit down by the emperor’s side on the throne, pass his arm familiarly round his neck and blow tobacco smoke into his sovereign’s face (p.169). Qadir asked the venerable old man to hand over the hidden treasure. Either there were none or Shah Alam didn’t want to part with them, so he refused. Qadir thoroughly searched the palace and the zenana and took away personal treasures and family jewels. Ladies of the harem were dishonoured and degraded by the brutal Rohillas. Asking to disclose the hidden wealth, Qadir flogged the emperor. When this failed to elicit any information, Shah Alam’s daughters were brought out of their private apartments and made to dance naked in front of their father for the entertainment of the leering Afghans. Eternally disgraced, many women threw themselves over the ramparts and drowned in the Yamuna river. After his daughters, it was the turn of his sons. They were brought from prison and made to dance to the merriment of the Afghans. When they protested that dancing was for women, noses of some were cut off. Still finding no treasure, Shah Alam was again brought to the palace and made to kneel before Qadir. He drove two red-hot needles into the unfortunate emperor’s eyes. Writhing in agony, the old man was then taken away. By the evening, he was brought back and Qadir had arranged a court painter to depict the scene which was to follow. The Afghan then knelt on the lying Mughal emperor’s chest and with his dagger scooped out one of his seared eyeballs. He then handed the dagger over to one of his lieutenants to repeat the procedure on the other eye. The light of the Timurid royal house went out that day in India forever. The dynasty groped their way in the darkness for seven more decades to their eventual doom at the hands of the British.
Farzana’s service to the Mughal emperor reached its peak after his blinding at which time she was not present in the capital. Her brigade did faithful service to the emperor till he died. She also assumed responsibility of Reinhardt’s jagir after his death. However, her martial and administrative talents withered after some time and she entered into many amorous liaisons with European officers in her brigade. She also swayed with the wind and served the Marathas and the British who established their ascendancy over the Mughals. She married a stubborn officer in her army who was resented by others. They rose in rebellion against both of them. It was by pure luck that she could escape with her life. As years went by, she faded into irrelevance, but kept her estates till she lived. Her adopted son dissipated the inherited wealth and died penniless in London.
The book is adorned with an excellent foreword by William Dalrymple both because of his physical presence in Delhi and also due to his own interest in eighteenth century India. His book ‘The Anarchy’ (reviewed earlier in this blog) also covers the period in question. There is an afterword by the author’s husband John Keay as she died in 2011, immediately after the first draft of the book was completed. Just like Dalrymple does in his works, Julia Keay also keeps the native powers at arm’s length with a touch of contempt and disdain. The desperate efforts of the Marathas, Jats, Sikhs and Rajputs to assert their power in their own homeland is portrayed as aggression and transgression on rightful authority. Even though with a disapproving heart, she grudgingly accepts their military might and de facto supremacy on the land. The book displays a remarkably masterful use of language full of aphorisms that condense the character of the protagonists aptly in a few words. Delightful word play is also seen in many places. Eventually, the author has done her duty in full to present a historical personality in rich colours and sharp focus. To readers who find travel close to their heart, I would suggest to take a day’s trip to Sardhana when they are in Delhi to visit the church which is still intact and the palaces built by Farzana around 230 years ago.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 4 Star
Title: The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras 1930-1947
Author: J B P More
Publisher: Orient Longman, 1997 (First)
ISBN: 8125010114
Pages: 272
When Muslims demanded creation of a new Islamic state of Pakistan in the 1940s by dividing India, it evoked a range of emotions on Indians. For some, even the idea of vivisecting the motherland – Akhand Bharat – was anathema. Some others evaluated the Muslim demand on the basis of two-nation theory and looked at the scenario in a dispassionate way. The question was whether the two largest religious communities in India formed two separate nations. Eminent statesmen like Dr. Ambedkar studied the problem in detail and confirmed that there are no common historical antecedents which Hindus and Muslims shared together as matters of either pride or shame. In fact, one party’s episode of shame was the other party’s moment of pride. The invasions of Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Timur, Babur, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali and the ensuing devastation are matters of glory for the Muslims as these helped to implant the religion firmly on this ground. In the absence of a common feeling, Ambedkar rejected the Hindu view that the two communities formed one nation. The focus of the studies on the radicalization of Muslim politics and the accentuation of Muslim separatism during the 1930s and 40s were mostly north Indian Muslims. This book supplies that deficiency and is an analysis of the political evolution of the Muslims in the Tamil districts of the Madras Presidency under British rule. J B P More – Jean-Baptiste Prashant More – Is a French historian of Indian origin. He was born in Pondicherry and stays in Paris. His specialization is south Indian history. He has authored many books.
More introduces the historical background of the Muslim community from very early on and how they influenced politics in the region. Apart from brief incursions during the Sultanate period and in the Mughal era, the land was comparatively peaceful. On account of this short duration of Muslim political domination and the small Muslim population of 7 per cent of the total, division between Hindus and Muslims on the basis of religion did not appear to be very glaring. Two different streams of Tamil-speaking and Urdu-speaking people together formed the community of Muslims in Tamil Nadu. The cultural and social milieu of the Muslims was dominated by the Urdu-speaking aristocrats like the Nawab of Arcot while the Tamil-speaking faction was mainly traders or merchants, often very rich. The Nawab of Arcot owed his throne to the British and moved his seat to Madras in 1767 where the British were headquartered. However, the British abolished the Nawabship in 1855 and reduced him to the degree of a mere pensioner with a grand title of the Prince of Arcot. He was the president of the Madras unit of the Muslim League. The shortage in numbers was sought to be made up with conversions from Hindus which frequently caused social tension. The community was backward by the end of the nineteenth century as the Muslims did not opt for modern secular education introduced by the British, but resented the Hindus taking part in it and occupying positions in government. The Urdu-speaking Muslims were nostalgic about their past glory and regarded the British as usurpers. Times were changing however. English, Tamil and Telugu assumed more importance at the expense of Arabic, Persian, Urdu and the study of the Muslim religion.
In the description of the development of political awareness among Muslims, lack of meticulous depth is seen. Whatever he has included is provided in other books on this subject and nothing new is found. As an example, the continuous defeats and side-lining of Turkey in European politics which earned it the sobriquet of the ‘Sick man of Europe’ in the mid-1860s elicited anger and unrest in Indian Muslims, but this episode which is a harbinger of the Khilafat movement half a century later, is not at all considered for discussion. Even though Muslims constituted only 7 per cent of the population, communal riots occurred intermittently though not on the scale and severity of north Indian riots – except perhaps the 1921 Malabar riots which reached genocidal proportions. The Muslim League was formed in Madras as a sequel to the parent organization’s birth at Dhaka and it was led by Urdu-speaking aristocratic-merchant elite. They were part of the Deccan and north Indian Muslim tradition. The Urdu press of Madras tried their polarizing campaign by describing the Congress as a Hindu gathering, working in the interests of the Hindus. The Tamil- and Malayalam-speaking Muslims were said to be impervious to pan-Islamic sentiment and usually kept a low profile in politics until the launching of the Khilafat movement. Their behaviour underwent a sea change thereafter and became more conscious of their Islamic identity. This was the state of affairs when Indian politics was entering an explosive phase in the 1940s.
The development of the anti-Brahmin movement in the Presidency and its steadfast alliance to British interests and the Muslim League are clearly explained in this book. This was the precursor of the Dravidian movement which is still flourishing in Tamil Nadu today. A political set up known as the Justice Party contested elections from 1919 under British rule and formed ministries in Madras. This was while the Congress was boycotting these powerless legislatures. The Justice Party always sided with the British, but their government did not satisfy Muslim aspirations. Even though the Justice Party constituents were non-Brahmin but higher caste Hindus, their hatred towards Sanskrit and the Hindu religion was legendary. E V Ramasamy, the leader of the Self-Respect Movement, asked the untouchables to convert to Islam in 1919. Large scale conversions from lower castes to Islam began to take place in the 1930s. Muslim leaders made it a practice to celebrate such events in villages (p.91). This spawned a lot of communal unrest. An interesting thing to observe is that when communal disturbances occurred, the Muslims treated the entire Hindu community as one in inflicting damages. Several instances are recorded in this book involving Muslims fighting the Brahmins, intermediate castes and Dalits separately.
External observers of Islamic societies are usually reluctant to countenance the level of bigotry and fundamentalism that dictate those societies’ actions. Instead of examining whether a particular act was caused by any specific religious injunction or not, they assume economic/political factors behind it and arrive at very wrong conclusions. Instead of studying the target society comprehensively, they attempt to define those societies based on what they have learned as part of a western liberal education. This timidity bordering on fear of consequences is a characteristic of the scholars who try their best to avoid offending Muslim hardliners who are easily enraged by the slightest of provocations, however benign they might be. This author is also not different. However, he points out that the idea of secularism directly threatened Muslims’ historical conditioning where Islam occupied the central place which sought to control the actions of the believers individually as well as in groups. The author also makes a crucial observation that the population factor played an important role in communal riots. In all places where Muslims were concentrated or in sufficient numbers to form a compact block, there were systematic instances of riots (p.98). The book also includes a survey of the growth of educational institutions in the Presidency with special focus on how the Muslims utilized them in the twentieth century. The government went out of its way to establish separate schools for Muslims in addition to admitting them in common schools. Muslims, as a community, was lagging behind only the Brahmins but was far ahead of other Hindu communities. Further yielding to Muslim pressure, the government provided religious instruction for Muslims in common schools at taxpayers’ expense. The Hindus or Christians did not demand any such facilities and instead, high castes like Brahmins readily partook in modern education (p.86).
The Khilafat Movement viciously roused the communal sentiment among Muslims. Their political consciousness was again revived with the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s. When Congress changed its strategy to demand complete independence instead of dominion status, the true colour of nationalist Muslims came out. Yakub Hasan Sait severed his connection with Congress because he feared that Muslims won’t have the commanding position in an independent country the Congress was contemplating. Muslim leaders collectively condemned the Gandhian movement to be inimical to Muslim interests. Jamal Muhammad opposed the boycott call of foreign goods as they were sold in the shops owned by Muslims. In the 1937 elections, Muslim League won 6 out of 8 Muslim seats it contested in Madras. Jamal Muhammad, the leader of the Muslim League, contested from the general constituency of commerce and was soundly defeated by T T Krishnamachari, an independent candidate. The author then claims that Congress’ assuming office in 1937 without a coalition with the Muslim League was a blunder which contributed to radical Islamization of Muslim politics that led finally to the religious assertiveness of Muslims (p.151). This is plainly wrong and a stout refusal to see the elephant of Muslim fanaticism in the room. It won’t be mollified by anything other than total control of the society of believers and submission of unbelievers to it. Muslims then objected to singing Vande Mataram in the assembly and opposed the ban on cow slaughter proposed by the Congress. The party meekly yielded to Muslim demands and stopped singing of the patriotic song after a few weeks. Even the usually stubborn Dravidian leaders were also willing to bend over backwards to satisfy Muslim claims. When P. Khalifullah chided the Self-Respect Movement for being atheistic, E V Ramasamy capitulated and submitted that atheism was not part of the official program of the movement which in fact was garlanding Hindu idols with strings of footwear.
The author elucidates the bitter tale of how the South Indian Muslims eagerly supported the call for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. During World War II, the Madras Muslim League joined the pan-Indian struggle for Pakistan and extended support to the British war effort which the Congress boycotted. The Leaguers wasted no opportunity to seed discord among Hindus by carping on caste differences. They joined the Dravidian campaign against Brahmins and also against the ‘Aryan’ influence in Congress. Finding the time ripe for extracting his pound of flesh, E V Ramasamy came out with an outrageous demand for a new nation called Dravidastan roughly coterminous with South India to which Jinnah expressed his tacit backing. The entire Muslim community in Madras voted for Pakistan in 1946 as the Muslim League won all 29 Muslim seats in the assembly, securing 99 per cent of the votes in most constituencies. But it soon became apparent that the newly created Pakistan is intangible for Madras Muslims as they would not migrate to it. The Muslim leaders then put up a bold face and declared their unflinching loyalty to their religion. Mohammed Ismail, the President of the Madras Muslim League, boasted that ‘a Muslim is always a Muslim, a Muslim first and a Muslim last’ and that he was proud of being part of creating Pakistan (p.203). Ramasamy added fuel to the fire by observing India’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, but Muslims cleverly dissociated from him after 1947. The Muslims in Malabar was also wholeheartedly in favour of Pakistan. When it was clear that they will not be a constituent part of it, they demanded a separate state of Moplastan. The campaign included observing May 23, 1947 as Moplastan Day.
The depth of research in this book is quite shallow and never goes much lower than skin-deep. The author sidesteps the issue of fanaticism and believes that the Muslim community responded in ways put forward by European social theorists without any basis in fact. He claims that after 1930, general economic decline of Urdu-speaking Muslims led to their influence dwindling and economic prosperity of Tamil-speaking Muslims increasing. This assertion remains pure speculation and never substantiated. This might also be a feeble attempt to introduce an economic factor in the transformation of a Muslim society. More seems to be unaware of the people he was handling in this book. On page 215, he states that ‘if low caste Hindus were a majority in the border areas like the Muslims, they too would have demanded partition’. The stupidity of this comment is mind-boggling because the low-caste Hindus are indeed the majority not only in border states but in other provinces as well, except perhaps Uttarakhand. On the other hand, this is a wily argument to weigh in a geographical ballast into the Pakistan demand rather than the purely religious which it was. The author mentions the many ways in which conversion to Islam was being continuously taking place in the Presidency. The duplicitous nature of Sufis comes out in the open. They outwardly preached eclectic values but strictly maintained their Islamic identity and indulged in conversions on the sly. The copy of the book which I had used had 16 pages (p. 113-128) missing. Instead, a duplicate copy of pages 129-144 was found inserted.
The book is recommended.
Rating: 2 Star
