When I was in class 7, my father decided to give up his private practice in Allahabad and join the public sector hospital that was coming up in Bhilai. Since this was in the middle of the school year, it was decided that I stay back in Allahabad with my uncle for a few months and join my parents after giving the final exams. My uncle, who taught English at the university, lived in 20 Hastings Road in a house that had many rooms, most of them furnished with bookshelves. One day I felt like touching a book. It was not a storybook for preteens but a fat elderly book by the historian Ishwari Prasad. I took it out of the shelf and spent the morning turning its clean, irresistible, wide-margined pages. It was called A Short History of Muslim Rule in India: From the Conquest of Islam to the Death of Aurangzeb, published by The Indian Press, Allahabad, in 1931. It had black and white plates.
Living in Iowa City in the early 1970s, in an apartment building called The Mayflower on North Dubuque Street and feeling disconnected from the Midwestern landscape and the ice-jammed Iowa River, I wrote a poem in which I remembered my boyhood in the Gangetic plains and the day I first looked into Ishwari Prasad’s Short History:
In September I collect my cousins’ books
and find out the dates of the six Mughals
to secretly write the history of India.
My interest in medieval India could not go beyond writing down the dates of the Mughal emperors in a ruled exercise copy and chanting their names as though they were the many names of God – Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jehangir, Shahjehan, Aurangzeb. The only other names that I found as melodic were those of Allahabad’s roads:
The first words I mumble are the names of roads:
Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton.
Both the quotations are from the same poem, ‘Continuities’.
After returning to Allahabad in 1973, when I finally sat down to become an historian, even if an historian in verse, I presumed that history could only be tackled chronologically. I started with Babur and the death of his father, who was attending to his pigeons when the dovecote crumbled under him and he fell into the ravine below. Babur was 12 at the time. Forced by circumstance to skip his teenage years and attend to military affairs in the Ferghana Valley, he had to grow into an adult overnight. While I was still contemplating my Babur poem, over several decades before I finally abandoned it, Dom Moraes and Vikram Seth came out with their own Babur poems; a new translation of The Baburnama by Wheeler Thackston appeared; and I read EM Forster’s essay ‘The Emperor Babur’. ‘At the time that Machiavelli was collecting materials for The Prince,’ Foster wrote, ‘a robber boy, sorely in need of advice, was scuttling over the highlands of Central Asia. His problem had already engaged the attention and sympathy of the Florentine; there were too many kings about, and not enough kingdoms.’
Confined to the Timurid outpost of Kabul, having lost and won Ferghana and Samarkand more than once while still in his teens, the restless, ambitious ‘robber boy’ in search of a kingdom turned his attention to India. Likewise, abandoning my poem on the Mughals, I turned my historical attention to other periods: to Mahmud Ghazni, to the Slave Kings, to Ghalib in old age. It was translation that brought me back to my first love, the Mughals.
I’d read Rahim’s dohas in the school Hindi reader, just as I had those of Kabir. There must have been a headnote to him, but I have no memory of what it said. He had become another name; a blank. I couldn’t recall any of the dohas either. Recently, I saw advertised Khan-i-Khanan Abd al-Rahim aur Sanskrit [Khan-i-Khanan Abd al-Rahim and Sanskrit] (2007). Audrey Truschke’s Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (2016) had not aroused my curiosity as much as this book. It was part of a series, Muslim Contribution to Sanskrit Learning. The author was Pratap Kumar Mishra and it was published by Akhil Bhartiya Muslim-Sanskrit Sanrakshan evam Prachya Shodh Sansthan [All India Institute of Sanskrit-Muslim Relations and Oriental Research], Varanasi. Rahim aur Sanskrit is dedicated to Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni.
It is unusual for a contemporary book, especially one written by an Indian, to be dedicated to an Iranian scholar who lived more than a thousand years ago and accompanied Mahmud Ghazni on his military expeditions into India. It is even more unusual for a book to carry, on the back cover, an endorsement by the Mughal emperor Jehangir: ‘Hindi aur Pharsi mein kavita achhi banata tha’ [The poems he composed in Hindi and Persian weren’t bad at all]. Most of the book’s 350 pages are taken up by an overview of Rahim’s life, beginning with his ancestry, followed by summaries of his work in the three languages he wrote in – Persian, Sanskrit, and Hindi – though his poems in Hindi are what he is best known for. The text of Rahim’s Sanskrit work, including variants, takes up less than 50 pages. It was Mishra’s book that got me interested in Rahim’s dohas.
When I searched for the dohas online, they were often to be found in the same desultory readers that were no different from the ones I’d studied in school. One doha seemed as familiar as ‘Humpty Dumpty’, only I’d forgotten who it was by. It had become part of everyday speech. Though they were not wisdom poems, they’d been absorbed into folk wisdom:
“बड़ा हुआ तो क्या हुआ, जैसे पेड़ खजूर।
पंथी को छाया नहीं, फल लागे अति दूर।”
What if you are
the tallest of men
and like the date palm.
It gives no shade to birds
and the fruit’s out of reach.
The advantage in translating dohas from schoolbooks is that they come with a pony. The flip side is that they’re followed, in stern Hindi, by a moral. When in doubt, I stole a look at the literal translation, as though I was writing an exam and cheating. Rahim’s images are drawn from things that we touch, consume, or see every day – ants, flowers, water, milk, thread. Occasionally, the dohas refer to the mind, especially the mind that is ill. He brings up addiction, but then makes it part of an unusual list that includes happiness and a bad cold. The commonplace acquires the sharpness of a knife edge. Dull familiar things begin to glint. Rahim’s tone is playful rather than admonishing, and in play he lights a long fuse. When you hear the doha explode like a firecracker, the response is an uneasy smile.
बिगरी बात बने नहीं, लाख करो कीं कोय।
रहिमन फाटे दूध को, मथे न माखन होय।
When things go wrong
they keep going wrong.
When milk spoils, Rahim says,
no amount of churning
will turn it
into butter.
*
रहिमन धागा प्रेम का, मत टोरो चटकाय।
टूटे पे फिर ना जुरे, जुरे गाँठ परी जाय।
Don’t break
the thread of love,
Rahim says.
Broken, it cannot be
fixed. Fixed,
the knot shows.
*
रहिमन विपदा ही भली, जो थोरे दिन होय। I
हित अनहित या जगत में, जानि परत सब कोय॥
Once in a while
it’s good to be
in a spot
of trouble.
You know
who is with you
and who is not.
*
खैर, खून, खाँसी, खुसी, बैर, प्रीति, मदपान।
रहिमन दाबे न दबै, जानत सकल जहान।
Well-being, upbringing, a cough,
happiness, enmity, alcoholism, and love:
You cannot hide them, Rahim says,
even if you tried.
*
छिमा बड़न को चाहिये, छोटन को उतपात।
कह रहीम हरी का घट्यौ, जो भृगु मारी लात।
The elderly
should forgive.
Kids will be kids.
Does god
diminish,
asks Rahim,
if an ant
kicks it?
*
मन मोटी अरु दूध रस, इनकी सहज सुभाय।।
फट जाये तो न मिले, कोटिन करो उपाय।।
The mind, pearls, flowers, milk, and fruit juices
are good till they are good.
Once they spoil,
a thousand tricks won’t save them.
*
सदा नगारा कूच का, बाजत आठों जाम।
रहिमन या जग आइ कै, को करि रहा मुकामII
The eight watches of the day,
Rahim says, beat a single drum:
You are not here for long.
In a few weeks I had put together enough dohas to fill a booklet. By then they had unlocked the door to four of the six Mughal emperors.
***
‘Just as our ancestors were hereditary kings’, the first Mughal emperor Babur is reported to have told his son Humayun, ‘so his [Bairam Khan’s] ancestors were also sultans.’ Bairam Khan was Rahim’s father. They were Baharlu Turks, successors of the Timurids in western Persia. Among their ancestors was Ali Shukr Beg, a feudatory chief who ruled over an extensive territory covering Hamadan, Dinawar, and Kurdistan. In the Haft Iqlim, a late 16th c Persian encyclopedia, the territory is referred to as ‘the country of Ali Shukr Beg’. Bairam was the fifth in descent from him. Ali Shukr’s daughter, Pasha Begum, was married to one of the Timurid princes. This is how Bairam came to be related to the Timurids. She was also Babur’s paternal aunt as well as his mother-in-law. In 1512, when he was 16 years old, Bairam joined Babur’s service, as his father Saif Ali Beg and grandfather Yar Ali Beg had before him.
For close to 125 years, from around 1505, when Babur appointed Yar Ali to the governorship of Kabul, to 1627 when Rahim died, their family had been associated closely with the Mughals. In Kabul, Bairam Khan had been a companion to Prince Humayun and accompanied Babur into India. After Babur’s death, when Humayun was driven out of his kingdom by the Afghans and was hiding first in Sind – where Akbar was born – and then in Persia, Bairam Khan, at a time when the Mughal empire had almost come to an end even before it had begun, strategised his return. Appointed Akbar’s atālīq (tutor), he was with him in Kalanaur, Punjab, when news came that Humayun had died of a fall while coming down the steps of his library. Seeing the great consternation this caused among the ‘Khans and Sultans’ of the court in Delhi, the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali Reis, who happened to be visiting Humayun at the time, suggested that the announcement of the death be delayed till the khans had gathered their wits about them. The suggestion was immediately acted upon and ‘a man called Molla Bi, who bore a striking resemblance to the late Emperor, only somewhat slighter of stature, was arrayed in the imperial robes and placed on a throne specially erected for the purpose in the large entrance hall.’ As this charade was going on, Bairam Khan, in Kalanaur, completed the arrangements for young prince Akbar, who had just turned 13, to be crowned emperor. When Akbar and Bairam Khan had a falling out, Bairam, then in his early sixties, was forced to go on hajj and was murdered en route by Afghan bandits in Patan, Gujarat. Akbar married Bairam’s widow and had the five-year-old Rahim brought to court to be raised. Rahim become one of its Nine Jewels and, like Bairam, was elevated to the rank of Khan-i-Khanan, or Commander-in-Chief. As Bairam Khan was to Akbar, Rahim was atālīq to Prince Salim, Akbar’s successor, the future emperor Jehangir, and these two had not one but several fallings out. A point came when Rahim ‘feared to go to court lest he be poisoned at Jehangir’s order’, thus reported Thomas Roe, a British emissary. Jehangir, in his autobiography, said of Rahim, ‘When nobles like the Khan-khanan, who had been distinguished with the rank of Atalik [guardian] and arrived at the age of seventy years, made their faces black with rebellion and ingratitude, how could one complain about others? It may be said that his very nature was seditious and ungrateful. His father (Bairam Khan) at the end of his life behaved in the same unbecoming way towards my reverend father.’
***
Intrigues, treachery, marches, wars, victories, beheadings, and blindings were a feature of imperial Mughal life. Though described as a man ‘with a fluid identity’, Rahim’s dohas and the Mughal court seem to have little to do with each other. For us, they belonged to the timeless realm of school readers:
वे रहीम नर धन्य हैं, पर उपकारी अंग।
बाँटन वारे को लगे, ज्यो मेहंदी को रंग।
Blessed are those
for whom benevolence is a habit.
When you give henna,
Rahim says,
your own hands turn
the henna’s colour.
In 1583, Rahim was appointed viceroy of Gujarat. He defeated Muzaffar Shah in the battle of Sarkhej and for a second time near Nadot. With them the Gujerat Sultanate came to an end and the rebel province that Akbar had annexed ten years previously was restored to the Mughal empire. Rahim has been described as an intrepid general, and many of his successes, like Sarkhej, attributed to his ‘quick decision and crafty maneuverings’. ‘For these two victories,’ Abu’l Fazl writes in Ain-i-akbari, ‘Akbar made [Rahim] a commander of Five Thousand, and gave him the coveted title of Khan Khanan.’ He then goes on to describe what the victorious general did next:
When Gujrat was finally conquered, M. Khan Khanan gave his whole property to his soldiers, even his inkstand, which was given to a soldier who came last and said, he had not received anything.
Fobbed off with a tawdry inkstand, the soldier would have felt cheated. For Rahim, who’d kept the inkstand till he had nothing else to give, it would have meant parting with something he was attached to. Unlike the dates of battles, the dates of poems are seldom known, recorded, or remembered. In whichever year the doha may have been written, it is reasonable to assume that Rahim’s hands were frequently dark with henna.
The merchant-poet Naziri, who had come to India from Nishapur sometime in the 1580s and was the first Persian-born poet to join the court of Rahim, once asked the Khan-i-Khanan what a lakh of rupees looked like. He was not only shown the pile but also ordered to take it with him. Naziri later became a wealthy man himself and settled in Ahmedabad where he died. He has been described as ‘a powerful and aggressive player in the highly competitive literary world of early Mughal India.’ Perhaps the best known anecdote illustrating Rahim’s generosity is his exchange with Gang, Akbar’s court poet. As a tribute to his generosity, Gang reportedly said
sikhe kahan navab-ju aisi deni dain
jyon kar uncho kare tyon niche nain
Where did my lord learn such generosity?
The more your hands are raised [to give],
the lower your eyes are.
To which Rahim responded
denhar kou aur hai bhejat so din rain
log bharam mo pe dharai yate niche nain
The giver is someone else—He bestows continuously.
But people think it’s me, hence my lowered eyes.
The medieval world does not in lack lurid stories any more than the modern. Gang somehow managed to displease Jehangir, who condemned him to what can only be called death-by-elephant. He had him trampled under one.
***
Benevolence is one thread that runs through Rahim’s life. The other is grief.
Keep grief
to yourself, Rahim says.
Sharing doesn’t help.
It only leaves
chinks in your armour
that others exploit.
According to Ain-i-akbari, Rahim had four sons. Mirza Irij distinguished himself by his courage but ‘died of excessive drinking’. Mirza Darab Darab-Khan was executed and his head was sent to Rahim wrapped in a tablecloth ‘as a present of a “melon’”. His third son, Mirza Rahman Dad, was his father’s favourite. No one dared to tell Rahim of Rahman Dad’s death ‘till people sent at last the famous saint Hazrat Isa of Sindh on a visit of condolence.’ His fourth son, Mirza Amrullah, ‘grew up without education, and died when young.’
Rahim kept the grief over their deaths to himself. He built them no memorials but he built one for Miyan Fahim. ‘People said, he was the son of a slave girl; but he appears to have been a Rajput’ Fazl writes about him. ‘He grew up with Mirza Abdur Rahim’s sons, and was as pious as he was courageous. Mirza Abdur Rahim built him a tomb in Dihli, which is now called Nilah Burj, near Humayun's tomb.’
Once you remove the patina of familiarity, you begin to notice, in the impersonal folksy dohas, the lineaments of a particular life. What we know of it comes from Abu’l Fazl and Abd-al-Bāqī Nihavāndī’s Maʾāṯer-e Raḥīmī. The latter book, written by a Persian immigrant who came to Rahim’s court in Burhanpur, runs to 1,500 pages and was completed in 1616. It is one of Fazl’s sources and like many other Persian texts, still to be translated into English.
***
From Nihavāndī we learn about the public works that were carried out in Burhanpur under Rahim’s patronage. The hammam he built for the citizens still survives, and of its garden, La’l Bagh, Nihavāndī says, there’s nothing comparable to it in Iran. The Elizabethan traveller William Finch, who arrived in Burhanpur a little before Nihavāndī, disliked the city – ‘This citie is very great, but beastly, situate in a low, unwholesome air, a very sickly place, caused especially by the bad water’ – but he praised the garden. ‘Within it are divers faire walkes,’ he wrote, ‘with a stately small tanke standing square betweene foure trees, all shaded and inclosed with a wall.’
The centre of intellectual life in Burhanpur was the library. It’s where the Persian translation of the Ramayana, now known as the Freer Ramayana, was illustrated. Rahim’s Burhanpur library, Nihavāndī says, employed some 95 people and had a hundred daily visitors. He gives the names of those who worked there and the capacities they worked in. One of the names he mentions is Miyan Fahim. His brother, Miyan Nadim, is described as ‘an efficient painter. Often, the names incorporate the names of the places or regions the employees came from: Shiraz, Kashmir, Herat, Khurasan, Hamadan, Kashi. You begin to ask yourself who these people were. Their descendants would still be among us.
Who Were These People
Burhanpur, 1615
Who were these people,
where have they gone,
the papermakers,
the calligraphers,
bookbinders,
illuminators,
the gilders and architects
who made this the Iran
of the Deccan?
Where are the shops
they bought the colours from,
the nibs and brushes?
Where are the workshops,
the floor desks,
the mats they sat on?
Where are their shoes
outside the door?
Where’s the door?
Passing through
the Ruby Garden
they’d have stopped
by the lotus pond,
square as a chess board,
surrounded with trees,
and looked at themselves
in the rippled mirror.
Where have they all gone?
No likenesses survive
and what if they had?
They looked like you and me.
They were you and me.
***
It was a circular path I had travelled. The door through translation that Rahim opened led me to the poems that I wanted to write in my 20s. And that led to the opening of another path, this time a short cut. Once a large and imposing edifice, Raḥīm’s mausoleum had by the mid 19th century fallen into ruin. By the 1950s, it wore a deserted look. My grandparents, with whom I spent my school vacations, lived in Nizamuddin East. The mausoleum stood at the end of the lane. I’d hurriedly cut across it to reach Mathura Road and from there would continue on to Bhogal, where the shops, compared to Nizamuddin’s, were more enticing. To a 10-year-old, with a four anna coin in his pocket, which is what a bottle of Coca-Cola cost, the mausoleum was just another ghostly Delhi monument in the middle of almost nowhere.
Even if Rahim had written no poetry, we would remember him as the Persian translator of the Babur-nama. The original is in Chagatay Turkic, the home language of the Mughals. Made at the command of Akbar, to enable Abu’l Fazl write about his grandfather in the Akbar-nama, which is Fazl’s account of Akbar’s reign, it was presented to Akbar in the last week of November 1589. The recipient seems to have been pleased with the translation, which was not always the case. Akbar, being unlettered, had books read out to him. Listening to the historian Badauni’s translation of a section of the Mahabharata, Akbar, in Badauni’s own words, ‘took exception to my translation, and called me a Harámkhur and a turnip-eater, as if that was my share of the book.’
Perhaps to underplay the frankness with which Babur writes about certain moments of his life, where he comes across not as the founder of one of the world’s great empires but as a lunatic, Abu’l Fazl, keeping his imperial listener in mind, calls the Babur-nama ‘a Code of practical wisdom’. A better description would be something that Rousseau said in the opening words of Confessions, ‘[T]he man I shall portray will be myself.’ In the passage below, Babur recounts his first love. Married at 17, he was unwilling to sleep with his wife. ‘Then my mother Khanim’ he writes in Annette Beveridge’s translation, ‘used to send me, once a month or every 40 days, with driving and driving, dunnings and worryings.’ ‘In those leisurely days’, the memoir continues,
I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay! as the verse says, ‘I maddened and afflicted myself’ for a boy in the camp-bazar, his very name, Baburi, fitting in. Up till then I had had no inclination for anyone, indeed of love and desire, either by hearsay or experience, I had not heard, I had not talked. At that time I composed Persian couplets, one or two at a time; this is one of the them :—
May none be as I, humbled and wretched and love-sick;
No beloved as thou art to me, cruel and careless.
From time to time Baburi used to come to my presence but out of modesty and bashfulness, I could never look straight at him ; how then could I make conversation (ikhtildt) and recital (hikdyat)? In my joy and agitation I could not thank him (for coming); how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away? What power had I to command the duty of service to myself? One day, during that time of desire and passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. To look straight at him or to put words together was impossible. With a hundred torments and shames, I went on. A (Persian) couplet of Muhammad Salih’s came into my mind :—
I am abashed with shame when I see my friend ;
My companions look at me, I look the other way.
That couplet suited the case wonderfully well. In that frothing up of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, bare-head, bare-foot, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard. I shewed civility neither to friend nor stranger, took no care for myself or others.
(Turki) Out of myself desire rushed me, unknowing
That this is so with the lover of a fairy-face.
Sometimes like the madmen, I used to wander alone over hill and plain; sometimes I betook myself to gardens and the suburbs, lane by lane. My wandering was not of my choice, not I decided whether to go or stay.
(Turki) Nor power to go was mine, nor power to stay ;
I was just what you made me, o thief of my heart.
In another life, Babur would have been Agha Shahid Ali and buried not in Kabul but Amherst.
As for Rahim, had he lived in Rome in the last century before Christ, he would have been Gaius Maecenas (born c. 70 BC- died 8 BC). Maecenas was counsellor to the Roman emperor Augustus and generous patron of such poets as Virgil and Horace. The comparison with Maecenas, though it is in the Ain-i-Akbari, is not Abu’l Fazl’s. It has been inserted by the translator, Heinrich Blochmann (vol 1, p. 338):
People said, Mirza Abdur Rahim’s motto was ‘people should hurt their enemies under the mask of friendship,’ and all seem to have been inclined to blame him for maliciousness and faithlessness. He used to get daily reports from his newswriters whom he had posted at various stations. He read their reports at night, and tore them up. But he was also proverbial for his liberality and love of letters. The Maasir i Rahimi is a splendid testimony of his generosity; it shews that he was the Mecaenas of Akbar’s age. People, by a happy comparison, called him Mir ’Ali Sher. Mirza Abdur Rahim wrote Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi with great fluency. As poet he wrote under the name of Rahim.
***
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's recent books are Book of Rahim & Other Poems (Literary Activism/Westland India and Shearsman Books UK) and a translation of Vinod Kumar Shukla's poems Treasurer of Piggy Banks (Literary Activism/Westland India and Circumference Books US).