Muzaffar Alam

The Making of a Munshi

The difficult transition between the information and knowledge regimes of the precolonial and colonial political systems of South Asia was largely, though not exclusively, mediated by scribes, writers, statesmen, and accountants possessing a grasp of the chief language of power in that time, namely Persian. More than any vernacular language or Sanskrit, it was in Persian that the officials of the English East India Company conducted its early rule, administration, and even diplomacy in the years around the seizure of the revenues of Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century. Hence they naturally had to come to terms with the social group that was regarded as most proficient in this regard.1 To be sure, the Mughal aristocracy and its regional offshoots provided them with certain models of etiquette and statecraft, and various “Mirror of Princes” texts attracted the attention of Company officials. But the pragmatic realities of political economy that had to be dealt with could not be comprehended within the adab of the aristocrat, and the representatives of Company Bahadur were, in any event, scarcely qualified themselves to claim such an unambiguous status. The real interlocutor for the Company official thus was the munshi, who was mediator and spokesman (vakil), but also a key personage who could both read and draft materials in Persian, and who had a grasp over the realities of politics that men such as Warren Hastings, Antoine Polier, and Claude Martin found altogether indispensable.2 Though the term munshi is recognizable even today, it has shifted semantically over the years. Aficionados of Hindi films since the 1960s will recognize the character of the munshi as the accountant and henchman of the cruel and grasping zamindar, greasily rubbing his hands and usually unable to protest the immoral demands of his master.3 Specialists on colonial surveying operations in the Himalayas and Central Asia will recall that some of those sent out on such ventures were already called “pundits” and “moonshees” in the mid-nineteenth century.4 But the latter set of meanings is not our concern in this brief essay. Rather, we shall look at how, in the high Mughal period, one became a munshi, what attributes were principally called for, and what the chief educational demands were. The sources with which we approach this problem fall broadly into two categories. Relatively rare are the first-person accounts or autobiographical narratives that will be our principal concern here. More common are normative texts, corresponding to the “Mirror of Princes” type, but which we may term the “Mirror for Scribes.” Thus, in the reign of Aurangzeb, just as Mirza Khan could pen the Tuhfat al-Hind (Gift of India), in which he set out the key elements in the education of a well-brought-up Mughal prince,5 others wrote works such as the Nigarnamah-’i Munshi (Munshi’s Letterbook), which were primarily concerned with how a munshi was to be properly trained, and which technical branches of knowledge he ought rightfully to claim a mastery of.6 Earlier still, from the reign of Ja -

The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation

This essay places Mughal–Sufi relationship within a larger sixteenth century context, focusing on the strategies the early Mughals adopted to build their power in India. It reviews the positions of the two important sufi groups, the Indian Chishtis and the Central Asian Naqshbandis, juxtaposing the political benefits or the loss that the Mughals saw in their associations with them. While the Naqshbandi worldview and the legacy of the legendary Ubaid Allah Ahrar clashed with their vision of power, in the Chishti ideology, on the other hand, they found a strong support for themselves. The Chishtis then had an edge at the time of Akbar. But the Naqshbandis under Khwaja Baqi Billah (d. 1603) continued in their endeavour to reinstate their place in Mughal India. The paper thus provides a backdrop and makes a plea for re-evaluating the debate on the ideology and politics of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624).

Frank disputations Catholics and Muslims in the court of Jahangir (1608–11)

The essay sets out to re-examine the relations between Catholics and Muslims in the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century, during the reign of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27). It does so by confronting two sets of source–materials, namely the letters of the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and Persian–language texts from the Mughal court. In particular it focuses on the important and neglected figure of Maulana ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, an intellectual who worked with and also studied the Europeans. The recent publication of a hitherto unknown text by him, under the title of Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, is in part the occasion for us to return to this classic theme in the historiography of cross-cultural encounters.

Discovering the Familiar: Notes on the Travel-Account of Anand Ram Mukhlis, 1745

Despite its considerable production of literary and historical texts in a vast variety of genres, the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period appears a relative wasteland where the setting down of travel accounts is concerned. Searching through the Indian vernacular languages, one is hard pressed to come up with travel texts that are comparable to those produced in East Asia, or in the Arabicspeaking world, until at least the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, as we are frequently reminded, the genre of ’travel-record literature’ (yuchi wen hsfeh) had flourished in China from at least Song times, even if it was not necessarily known by that name.3 By the Ming and Ch’ing eras (what we might call the early modern epoch), travelogues were a perfectly common form of literature, so much so that almost any litterateur of the epoch in Chinese worth his salt considered it de rigueur to leave behind a travel-account of some kind. In contrast, the South Asian landscape appears regrettably bleak. The best that

The debate within: a Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India

This essay is an effort to understand the position taken by the celebrated seventeenth-century Chishtī Sufi ‘Abd al-Rahmān Chishtī in his Mir’āt al-Asrār, a hagiographical dictionary (tazkira) of past Sufi holy men. I have read this tazkira together with ‘Abd al-Rahmān’s other writings but focused in particular on his long preface to this work in which he elaborates his definition of tasawwuf and asks what the real religion of the Sufi should be. ‘Abd al-Rahmān also undertakes a far-reaching reassessment of key elements in the wider traditions of Indian Islam. Drawing on a range of Indian and Middle Eastern influences, he rejects the narrow law-centred formulation of the Naqshbandīs and offers a distinctive vision of Chishtī spiritual support at the heart of the Mughal political order. His work opens up for us the wider landscape of religious debate and contestation that characterized Indian Islam during the Mughal era, which later generations of historians have overlooked in their preoccupation with more ‘conservative’ strains of Muslim thought.

Strategy and imagination in a Mughal Sufi story of creation

This article examines a seventeenth-century text that attempts to reconcile Hindu and Muslim accounts of human genesis and cosmogony. The text, Mir’āt al-Makhlūqāt (‘Mirror of Creation’), written by a noted Mughal Sufi author Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, purportedly a translation of a Sanskrit text, adopts rhetorical strategies and mythological elements of the Purāna tradition in order to argue that evidence of the Muslim prophets was available in ancient Hindu scriptures. Chishti thus accepts the reality of ancient Hindu gods and sages and notes the truth in their message. In doing so Chishti adopts elements of an older argument within the Islamic tradition that posits thousands of cycles of creation and multiple instances of Adam, the father of humans. He argues however that the Hindu gods and sages belonged to a different order of creation and time, and were not in fact human. The text bears some generic resemblance to Bhavishyottarapurāna materials. Chishti combines aspects of polemics with a deft use of politics. He addresses, on the one hand, Hindu intellectuals who claimed the prestige of an older religion, while he also engages, on the other hand, with Muslim theologians and Sufis like the Naqshbandi Mujaddidis who for their part refrained from engaging with Hindu traditions at all.

Envisioning power The political thought of a late eighteenth-century Mughal prince

The article reflects on the first part of the memoirs of a late eighteenth-century Mughal prince, Mirza ‘Ali Bakht Azfari, who was held prisoner in Shahjahanabad-Delhi until well into his adult years. Later, after he had made his escape from there and gone on after long travels to settle in the territories of the Nawwab of Arcot, Azfari had occasion to look back on his days as an imprisoned prince in a sort of gilded cage. His backward glance takes in such questions as astrology, the thaumaturgical character of members of the Mughal lineage, and other issues—some of which are peculiar to him, while others seem to have been shared in the milieu from which he came. The work thus allows us to reflect on the mental world and categories of political reflection of a would-be Mughal statesman, who never quite managed to seize the reins of power.

A View from Mecca: Notes on Gujarat, the Red Sea, and the Ottomans, 1517–39/923–946 H.

This article examines the history of Gujarat-Red Sea relations in the first quarter of a century after the Ottoman conquest of the Hijaz, in the light of Arabic narrative sources that have hitherto been largely neglected. While earlier historians have made use of both Ottoman and Portuguese archives in this context, we return here to the chronicles of Mecca itself, which prove to be an unexpectedly interesting and rich source on the matter. Our main interest is in the figure of Jarullah ibn Fahd and his extensive annalistic work, Nayl al-munā . A good part of our analysis will focus on the events of the 1530s, and the dealings of Sultan Bahadur Shah Gujaratis delegation to the Ottomans, headed by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Asaf Khan. But we shall also look at the longer history of contacts, and conclude with brief remarks on the relevance of the career of the celebrated Gujarati-Hijazi intellectual, Qutb al-Din Muhammad Nahrawali. We thus hope to add another important, concrete dimension to our understanding of Indias location in the early modern Indian Ocean world, as a tribute to the career and contribution of David Washbrook, our friend and colleague.

Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor

The chapter looks at Jesuit interactions with the Asian world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in particular at the idea of the exchange and circulation of political models. It focuses on the treatise Ādāb al-Saltanat, written by Jeronimo Xavier (with ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri). It shows how the Jesuit attempted to pick and choose examples both from the distant Mediterranean past (Greece, Rome, the Bible and Byzantium), and a more recent one (medieval and early modern Iberia, France, Italy and even England), to provide a certain image of the functioning of politics. While trying to over-emphasise the “idealistic” side of European politics, Xavier was nevertheless unable to prevent his examples from often sliding into a more “realistic” register, thus revealing the influence of Machiavelli.