From Babur to Mirabai

Mysticism 

and Medieval India

finding harmony amid conflict

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

The 16^th Century in India was bookmarked by two important events: the invasion by Tamurlaine in 1398 and the conquest of India by the Mogul dynasty headed by Babur, Tamurlaine’s grandson in 1528. During this time there was a constant struggle for power that transformed the sub-continent. The Sultanate of Delhi represented the old-school, established center of Islamic power in India. This center was displaced and defeated by the invading Babur, who began the Mughul empire.

The warrior King Babur rose from the principality of Farghana in Afghanistan to control the area. When he was forced to retreat by his rivals in the Fergana valley, he marched his men across the rugged passes of the Hindu Kush towards Hindustan. India’s greatest protection was natural; this mountainous terrain is practically impassable. And once this natural defense was breached, Babur had to confront the formidable armies of the Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodi, who ruled the Gangetic plain from Delhi to Kooch Bihar. 

1st Battle of Panipat

The  powerful armies of the Sultan Ibrahim Lodhi outnumbered Babur’s hardened Afghan, Persian, and Arab fighters.  The Sultan had nearly 100,000 men, armored elephants, cavalry archers, and infantry. But Babur’s gunpowder stampeded the elephants. His tactics were superior. He had been fighting with cannon and matchlock rifles for over twenty years from Samarqand to the Khyber pass. The Sultan’s forces were no match for Babur’s conquering hordes. The Sultan himself was killed in battle and Babur took Delhi.

The Delhi Sultanate’s rule was finished. Babur began consolidate the power of the Mughals throughout Northern India. 

So it was that when Babur finally defeated the Sultan at the First Battle of Pranipat in 1526, India was effectively his. 

But while the Mughals had begun consolidating political power in Delhi and its vassals, they were not alone on the subcontinent.

At that time, the most powerful opposition to Islam and the Mughals came from the Rajput kings and princes who controlled the "Hindoo" areas of the subcontinent. These were led by Rana Sanga of Mewar. So it was that the soul of India was caught in a tug-of-war between "Hindoo" and Muslim cross-currents. 

It’s important to keep in mind that the nation state had not achieved the same ascendancy in Asia as it had in Europe. Westerners and Europeans often make the assumption that kings enjoyed monolithic power in the past. In fact, the power of the Sultans and Maharajas was fragmented and might have been limited to the particular City-State over which they ruled. Outside their immediate influence, rural areas may have been treated with a great degree of laissez-faire, as long as taxes or tribute was forthcoming. 

The tug-of-war between "Hindoo" and Muslim influences is often seen as a brutal and bloody conflict. Writing about the Lodi Sultanate and its cruelty at the end of the 15^th Century, Táríkh-i Dáúdí remarks

He [Lodi] was so zealous...[as a Musulman] that he utterly destroyed diverse places of [infidel] worship... he entirely ruined the shrines of Mathura, [and] the minefield of heathenism. Their stone images were given to the butchers to use...as meat weights,[and all the Hindus in Mathura were strictly prohibited from shaving their heads and beards, and from performing ablutions. He stopped the idolatrous rites of the infidels there. Every city thus conformed as he desired to the customs of Islam.

Certainly, atrocities were performed. But, a generation later, the grandson of Babur, Akbar, proved to be capable of harmonizing the different communities. Akbar the Great is considered to have been a strong but benevolent ruler, perhaps the greatest of all the Mughal Kings. He knew how to make allies and was both an expert 

Babur

It was his son Akbar, who proved to be the greatest Mughal ruler. An able governor and astute leader, under his authority the Mughal empire grew to include almost two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent. Among one of his tactics was to create alliances through marriage with the Rajput kings.

Akbar, of course, comes later than the period under examination. He ruled India for the second half of the 16^th Century from 1556 to 1605. But his effective rule may be seen as the culmination of a centuries-long process of syncretism.  The extremism within both Islamic and "Hindoo" communities became tempered by the need for cooperation. 

Akbar’s rule is exemplary in that his governance became successful not by annihilating the "Hindoo" communities and the Rajput kings but through coexistence with them. One wonders how this might be possible, given that Islamic extremism and Hindu fanaticism seem so mutually exclusive.  But the ascendancy of Akbar in the 1550s was made possible by a trend that began in the generation before him. 

Both Islam and Vedic dharma have strong ethical and moral traditions, expressed in Islam through Sharia law and in Vedic tradition through the laws of Manu. These often come into clash, as for example the Vedic insistence on vegetarian diet or the Muslim insistence on the law of the Prophet. 

Scriptural considerations of sin and piety and good and evil drive the ethical and moral considerations that control daily life. I this way ur values, and ideas of right and wrong are integrated with our standards of behavior in the community.

But above and beyond what we accept as law, tradition, and “religious” conduct, there is our own personal spiritual experience. In all religious communities there are men and women whose experience of spirituality is especially profound. These “saintly” persons and their experience have created an entirely distinct response to both Sharia law and Vedic dharma. They are mystics, and the religious experience of mystics works outside the tradition even while reinforcing it.

In early 16^th Century India, mystics within both Islamic and “Hindoo” traditions became prominent. Of course, such mystics had always existed, but it was as if their poetry, music, and profound spiritual understanding was being discovered for the first time by a larger society. 

The constant seesaw between Vedic dharma  and Islamic culture apparently had an effect on the very soul of India, making people question the superficiality of both traditions and spurring them to seek something deeper-a more direct connection with divinity.

Beginning with the latter half of the 15^th Century in India and running through the reign of Akbar, then, there was a rise to prominence of Saints and mystics in India within both Islam and Vedic dharma that transformed daily life and led to a great degree of harmony between the two communities. This harmony made it possible for Akbar’s rule to promote coexistence between Hindoos and Muslims—even to seek alliance by marriage with Hindoo kings and princes and Muslim princesses.

History and politicians often lose sight of this harmonic relationship. During the worst of the atrocities committed by Aurangzeb, Akbar’s descendant, it was reported that he not only destroyed many Hindoo temples, but ordered his men to bring him a pound of brahmin threads before breakfast every morning. There have been numerous examples of extremism on both sides that have led to fragmentation—but any attempt for harmony profits by studying examples of what has worked.

It may be argued that the fundamentalism we have seen from both communities in these times has uprooted the essential syncretism that runs deep in the soul of India. But Indian civilization was profoundly affected  by the mysticism of both these cultures. Perhaps this is best seen during the rule of Akbar, but the movements underlying this synthesis emerged in the generations before his rule. 

In the generations just before and after the beginning of Mughal rule, the most powerful mystic tradition operating within the Islamic  was that of Sufism. And the most powerful trend within Hindoo dharma  was that of bhakti-marg,  the path of divine love, especially with reference to the followers of Krishna. 

In his article, “Hindu-Muslim Syncretism in India,” JJ Roy Burnan cites the work of Rasheeduddin Khan:

“According to Rasheeduddin Khan, Indian civilisation has been profoundly affected by two fundamental traditions: the Indo-Aryan cultural stream which provided Vedic philsophy, and the Indo-Muslim strand of culture—based on the intertwining of ‘bhakti marg’ and Islamic Sufism. ‘It is not surprising, therefore, to realise that the composite culture in in India originated in an environment of reconciliation, rather than refutation, co-existence rather than mutual annihilation of the politically dominant Islamic strands.’ Khan, thus, strongly refutes the history advanced by the orthodox scholars who view the medieval period in India as being marked by religious intolerance and communal wars between the Hindus and Muslims.”

While there were certainly territorial wars in the seesaw of power between different principalities, Sultanates, Mughals, and even Bandit Kings, One cannot assert with certainty based on the historical literature available that these were based on religious hate between the communities. Rather they were economic struggles where the real conflict was local and financial.

I use the word “Hindoo” advisedly and so have left it in quotes and archaic spelling. This is a term widely bandied about by the Arabic, Persian and British conquerors to make the people of India sound more exotic, weird, and superstitious.

In the above-cited article, Khan points out that the notion of Hindu religion is a misnomer. According to him, the term includes peole of different religious ways, “which gives Hinduism a flexibility and resilience and a tradition base wide enough to cover the syndrome of Indian culture.”

More to the point is how the insight of the 15^th Century saints and mystics transformed India, especially with the development of the bhakti-marg. The Muslims recognized the validity of Pirs or Sufi mystic saints—who didn’t necessarily follow all the tenets of the Sharia law, but who clearly had spiritual vision. This recognition spilled over to a wider acceptance of sādhus, or those who had been accepted by the Hindu community as saints.

Burman’s article goes on to point out that “Many scholars feel that the bhakti movement in India has been to a large extent responsible for promoting eclectic faiths and lessening the religious orthodoxy. Lokhand states,  ‘The Sufi and bhakti movements blurred the differences between the two religions so much that it was very common till very recently to have a sadguru or a pir having a common following of Hindus and Muslims. And no Pir or sadguru ever forced a Hindu or Muslim to give up his religion for any other. The medieval age was the period when sufi and bhakti thought coalesced at many points.”

In my own experience, I found that when I visited Shridhar Maharaja, a well-known sadguru in Bengal, his advice and opinion was often sought out not only by his Hindu followers, but by the Muslim chieftains of local villages whenever they had to resolve a difficult dispute. 

Shridhar Maharaja was a modern follower of the most prominent of all the saints and mystics of the late 15^th and early 16^th Centuries in Bengal. This was Shri Krishna Chaitanya, who established the path of divine love for Krishna as the highest yoga-marg throughout India. His followers were legion.  Many of them wrote important books, creating the first true literature in the Bengali vernacular. Among them were Vrindaban Das, whose Chaitanya Bhagavat is not only a record of the life of Shri Chaitanya and his fellow spiritual revolutionaries such as Nityananda, Adwaita, Shrivas, and Gadadhara, but also an authentic record of quotidian life in India and Bengal at the beginning of the 16^th Century. Shri Chaitanya’s followers included Sanatana and Rupa Goswami who lived in Vrindaban and composed in Sanskrit.  A renaissance in Bengali literature was led by  Krishna das Kaviraj whose Chaitanya Charitamrita is a classic theistic thesis in Sanskrit and Bengali. 

If the spiritual revolution brought about by bhakti-marg was led from Bengal, it found other manifestations in other parts of India as well. 

The most prominent among the Hindu devotional poets of North India were Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir. Surdas wrote scores of lyrical poems in Hindi glorifying Krishna. Kabir’s work is mysterious and seems to be a synthesis of Sufi mystical values and Krishna bhakti. While the original texts of Chaitanya’s followers were carefully preserved, the same cannot be said for these North Indian poets. Their work has traditionally been passed down through the oral tradition, so critical editions are nearly impossible. We know Kabir almost exclusively through the translations offered by Rabindranath Tagore, or through the Kabīr Granthāvali. 

In the case of Mirabai, recent scholarship by C.L. Prabhāt and Kalyāṇsiṃh Śekhāvat is responsible for bringing out a 1999 critical edition called Mirā: Jīvan aur Kāvya. But since Mirabai failed to publish any authorized version of her own poetry during her lifetime in the 16^th Century, many of these poems are as apocryphal as the bad Quartos of Shakespeare. It is literally impossible to define what is “interpolation” what was truly written by the hand of Mirabai and what are merely traditional songs attributed to her.

One of the problems of assessing Mirabai’s theistic contribution is just this: while the poems attributed to her may express a certain passion about the “Dark Lord,” or Shri Krishna, it’s hard to know what exactly was her mystic experience. And the very syncretic tradition that may have led to greater harmony between different religious communities may weaken her message. The poets who copied her style may have also contaminated her message by making it blander and more acceptable. We may admire what is represented as fragments of her poetic sentiment but we may never truly know her inner heart. Just as India itself is a riddle inside an engima riddle wrapped in mystery, the poems of Mirabai reveal many different “Miras.”

To be continued…