Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

  February 1998

  The Taj Mahal

  [Written for a National Geographic survey of the great marvels of the world]

  The trouble with the Taj Mahal is that it has become so overlaid with accumulated meanings as to be almost impossible to see. A billion chocolate-box images and tourist guidebooks order us to “read” the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan’s marble mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, known as Taj Bibi, as the World’s Greatest Monument to Love. It sits at the top of the West’s short list of images of the Exotic (and also Timeless) Orient. Like the Mona Lisa, like Andy Warhol’s screenprinted Elvis, Marilyn, and Mao, mass reproduction has all but sterilized the Taj.

  Nor is this by any means a simple case of the West’s appropriation or “colonization” of an Indian masterwork. In the first place, the Taj, which in the mid-nineteenth century had been all but abandoned, and had fallen into a severe state of disrepair, would probably not be standing today were it not for the diligent conservationist efforts of the colonial British. In the second place, India is perfectly capable of over-merchandising itself.

  When you arrive at the outer walls of the gardens in which the Taj is set, it’s as if every hustler and hawker in Agra is waiting for you to make the familiarity-breeds-contempt problem worse, peddling imitation Mahals of every size and price. This leads to a certain amount of shoulder-shrugging disenchantment. Recently, a British friend who was about to make his first trip to India told me that he had decided to leave the Taj off his itinerary because of its over-exposure. If I urged him not to, it was because of my own vivid memory of pushing my way for the first time through the jostling crowd, not only of imitation-vendors but also of prescribed readings, past all the myriad hawkers of meaning and interpretation, and into the presence of the thing-in-itself, which utterly overwhelmed me and made all my notions about its devaluation feel totally and completely redundant.

  I had been skeptical about the visit. One of the legends of the Taj is that the hands of the master masons who built it were cut off by the emperor, so that they could never build anything lovelier. Another is that the mausoleum was constructed in secrecy behind high walls, and a man who tried to sneak a preview was blinded for his interest in architecture. My personal imagined Taj was somewhat tarnished by these cruel tales.

  The building itself left my skepticism in shreds, however. Announcing itself as itself, insisting with absolute force on its sovereign authority, it simply obliterated the million million counterfeits of it and glowingly filled, once and forever, the place in the mind previously occupied by its simulacra.

  And this, finally, is why the Taj Mahal must be seen: to remind us that the world is real, that the sound is truer than the echo, the original more forceful than its image in a mirror. The beauty of beautiful things is still able, in these image-saturated times, to transcend imitations. And the Taj Mahal is, beyond the power of words to say it, a lovely thing, perhaps the loveliest of things.

  June 1999

  The Baburnama

  Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, is best remembered for three things: the story of his death, the controversy over his mosque, and the extraordinary reputation of The Baburnama, his book.

  I first heard the legend of Babur’s death when I was still a boy. His son and heir Humayun was ill, the story went. His fever rose and the court’s doctors despaired of saving him. Then Babur, after consulting a mystic, walked three times around Humayun’s bed and offered himself to God in his son’s place. Whereupon Humayun strengthened and recovered, and Babur weakened and—on December 21, 1530—died. This story struck me with an almost mythic force. I remember being horrified by Abraham’s unnatural readiness to sacrifice his allegedly beloved son—Isaac according to the Old Testament, but Ismail in the Muslim version. Was that what the love of God made fathers willing to do? It was enough to make one regard one’s own parent with a somewhat worried eye. Babur’s story served as an antidote. Here the love of God was used to make possible the opposite and somehow more “natural” sacrifice: the father dying that the child might live. Babur and Humayun’s story lodged deep within me as the paradigmatic tale of fatherly love.

  These days, Babur’s name is still associated with legends, but of a different and more controversial kind. The Babri Masjid, the mosque he built in Ayodhya, a city in what was once the kingdom of Awadh (Oudh) and is now the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh, was demolished in 1992 by Hindu extremists who believed that it had been built on the ruins of a Hindu temple sacred to the mythic hero of the Ramayana, Lord Ram (or Rama) himself; a temple, moreover, which had been constructed to mark the site of the Ramjanmabhoomi—the actual birthplace of the hero-god.

  Ayodhya was indeed the name of Ram’s city, whence he set forth to rescue his beloved Sita from her abductor, Lord Ravan. But there’s little reason to believe that modern-day Ayodhya stands on the same site as the Ramayana’s fabled realm. And, at the risk of rousing the ire of militant Hindus, there is no real proof that the mythological Lord Ram, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu, was a historical personage at all. Even the simplest facts remain in doubt; archaeologists disagree about the site, and as to it being the “real” Ramjanmabhoomi, that’s about as likely as Christ being born in modern Bethlehem’s Manger Square. (It is also pointed out that many Hindu temples in India are built over the ruins of Buddhist shrines.)

  All these doubts and caveats are swept aside by the zealots’ wrath. Babur, the bloodthirsty slayer of infidels, the devoted destroyer of temples, is in their eyes guilty as charged, and all India’s Muslims are indirectly tainted by his crime. (There’s a Hindu nationalist view that India is a country of many peoples: Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Buddhists, Jains, Christians—and Mughals.) They claim, moreover, that the Babri Masjid is only the first of the mosques on their hit list. In Mathura, they allege, another mosque stands on the demolished birthplace of another divinity—another incarnation of Vishnu, actually—Lord Krishna, he of the milkmaids and the lustrous blue skin.

  The autobiography that is Babur’s third and most enduring claim to fame is inconveniently silent—or, in the opinion of his more strident critics, conveniently so—on the time Babur spent in and around the Ayodhya region. In all surviving manuscripts there’s a five-month gap between April and September 1528, the period during which Babur was in Oudh, and during which the Babri Masjid was built. Thus there’s no proof that anything at all was demolished to build the mosque, or, alternatively, that it wasn’t. In our paranoid age it’s perhaps necessary to point out that there’s nothing suspicious about this gap. Four hundred and seventy-plus years is a long time. Things get lost in four and a half centuries, sometimes the things (Thomas Kyd’s Hamlet, for example) that we most want to find.

  A man’s character can get blurred by the passage of time. Where facts are insufficient, what fills the space is interpretation. Take two recent depictions of a single scene from the emperor’s life: the temporary capture in the Punjab of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, by Babur’s conquering army. The critic N. S. Rajaram, a deconstructionist of Indian “secularist myths,” an apologist for the destruction of the Babri Masjid, and in general no fan of Babur’s, writes that “in his Babur Vani, Nanak denounced him in no uncertain terms, giving a vivid account of Babur’s vandalism in Aimanabad.” Against this, Amitav Ghosh tells us in a recent essay that Sikhs

  have long cherished a story, preserved in their scriptural tradition, about an encounter between Babur and the founder of their faith, Guru Nanak. . . . Learning of a miracle performed by the Guru, Babur visited him in prison. Such was the presence of the Guru that Babur is said to have fallen at his feet, with the cry: “On the face of this faqir one sees God himself.”

  Ghosh concedes that Sikhs became “dedicated adversaries of the Mughal state in the seventeenth century” but argues powerfully that the flowering of Hinduism, including the Vaishnavite development of the theology and sacred geography of Krishna-worship, which took pla
ce in northern India under Babur and his successors, would have been impossible in a climate of persecution. “Hinduism would scarcely be recognizable today,” Ghosh writes,

  if Vaishnavism had been actively suppressed in the sixteenth century: other devotional forms may have taken its place, but we cannot know what those would have been. It is a simple fact that contemporary Hinduism as a living practice would not be what it is if it were not for the devotional practices initiated under Mughal rule. The sad irony of the assault on the Babri mosque is that the Hindu fanatics who attacked it destroyed a symbol of the very accommodations that made their own beliefs possible.

  Rajaram argues back, with almost equal force, that Babur

  was more than ordinarily ruthless. He pursued to the limit the concept of Jihad—a total war for the annihilation of his adversaries as prescribed by Islam of which he was a practitioner. He was a product of his age and his environment, and that is exactly how we must see him. Whitewashing his blood-soaked record to turn him into a figure of chivalry and prince charming is an exercise in juvenile fantasy. Babur saw ruthlessness as a virtue, and terror as a useful tactical tool. In this he was a true descendant of Timur and Chengiz Khan—both of whom were his ancestors. Guru Nanak’s eyewitness account gives a better picture of Babur and his methods than almost any modern history book. The same holds true for The Baburnama: it is a primary source of great importance that goes to demolish romantic tales about him.

  (Somewhat coarsely, Rajaram reminds us that the phrase Babur ki aulad, “offspring of Babur,” is a common term of abuse leveled at Indian Muslims.)

  How contemporary this dispute sounds! Today, once again, we are tossed between Islam’s apologists and detractors. In part because of these modern disagreements, those who would defend India’s Muslims against the accusations of Hindu nationalists naturally stress the civilization and tolerance of Mughal Islam. As many writers have said, the dynasty Babur founded—his true aulad—was noted for its polytheistic inclusiveness. At the height of the Mughal Empire, Babur’s grandson Akbar went so far as to invent a new creed—the Din-i-Illahi—that sought to be a fusion of all that was best in Indian spirituality. Against this, however, it’s argued that the last of the so-called Grand Mughals, Aurangzeb, did his iconoclastic best to undo his predecessors’ good work, rampaging across the country destroying temples. (Some of India’s most precious antiquities, such as the temple complex at Khajuraho, survive only because in Aurangzeb’s time these extraordinary edifices with their famous erotic carvings had faded from prominence and weren’t marked on his maps.)

  Who, then, was Babur—scholar or barbarian, nature-loving poet or terror-inspiring warlord? The answer is to be found in The Baburnama, and it’s an uncomfortable one: he was both. It could be said that the struggle taking place within Islam in our own era, the struggle which has, I believe, been a feature of the history of Islam from its beginnings to the present day—between conservatism and progressivism, between Islam’s male-dominated, aggressive, ruthless aspect and its gentler, deeply sophisticated culture of books, philosophers, musicians, and artists, that same contradictory doubleness which modern commentators have found so hard to understand—was, in the case of Babur, an internal conflict. Both Baburs are real, and perhaps the strangest thing about The Baburnama is that they do not seem to be at odds with one another. When the book’s author looks inward and reflects, he is often melancholy, but the dark clouds that gather over him do not seem to be the product of a storm within. Mostly, they have to do with his sense of loss. The first Mughal emperor of India was also an exile and a homesick man. His soul pined for what we would now call Afghanistan.

  Afghanistan’s new significance in the world after September 11, 2001, changes the way we now read The Baburnama. Hitherto, the book’s Indian section has been of most interest, with its firsthand account of the birth of an empire that lasted two hundred years, until the British supplanted it. But suddenly it is the work’s “Afghan” beginnings that fascinate us. Place names from Kunduz to Kabul, made newly familiar by the bulletins of a modern war, leap out at us. The ancient treacheries of the region’s warlords seem to have things to teach us about the power struggles of today. Babur is fascinatingly frank about all of this. (It’s plain that in his time the best response to the death of a parent was to dive for cover and plot your siblings’ death, knowing that those siblings would be filled with similarly loving thoughts about you.)

  Yet this treacherous land was the place Babur loved. Read him on Kabul, “a petty little province,” and vivid detail enlivens his simple declaratory sentences. “At the end of the canal is an area called Gulkana, a secluded, cozy spot where much debauchery is indulged in.” The Baburnama, not unattractively, finds sex and booze wherever it goes. “Kabul wine is intoxicating. The wine from the slopes of Khwaja Khawand Sa’id mountain is known for being strong.” Tropical and cold-weather fruits are eulogized, melons are disparaged, meadows are praised for being free of flies while others are flyblown and to be avoided. Mountain roads and passes, which became the subjects of nightly analyses on the world’s media during the recent battles against the Taliban and Al-Qaida forces, are here meticulously described. Muskrats scuttle and partridges rise. A world leaps into view.

  In India, which he so famously disliked, Babur’s powers of description grow, if anything, stronger. Sometimes he succumbs to fantasy. “It is said that . . . there are elephants ten yards tall.” Usually, however, he confines his remarks to what he has seen with his own eyes. “[Rhinoceroses] wield their horns in an amazing way. . . . During one hunt a page named Maqsud had his horse thrown a spear length by one. Thereafter he was nicknamed Rhinoceros Maqsud.” He describes the cows, the monkeys, the birds, the fruits of India; but in spite of his evident respect for the “excellent” system of numbering and the “wonderful” systems of weights and measures, he can’t resist going on to the attack. “Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people . . . the arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. . . . There is no ice. . . . There are no baths.” He likes the monsoon, but not the humidity. He likes the winter, but not the dust. The summer isn’t as hot as it is in Balkh and Kandahar, and that’s a plus. He admires the “craftsmen and practitioners of every trade.” But what he likes most is the wealth. “The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots of gold and money.”

  The contradictions in Babur’s personality are well illustrated by his account of the conquest of Chanderi in 1528. First comes a bloodthirsty description of the killing of many “infidels” and the apparent mass suicide of two or three hundred more. (“They killed each other almost to the last by having one man hold a sword while the others willingly bent their necks. . . . A tower of infidels’ skulls was erected on the hill on the northwest side of Chanderi.” Then, just three sentences later, we get this: “Chanderi is a superb place. All around the area are many flowing streams. . . . The lake . . . is renowned throughout Hindustan for its good, sweet water. It is truly a nice little lake.”

  The Western thinker whom Babur most resembles is his contemporary the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli. In both men, a cold appreciation of the necessities of power, of what would today be called realpolitik, is combined with a deeply cultured and literary nature, not to mention the love, often to excess, of wine and women. Of course, Babur actually was a prince, not simply the author of The Prince, and could practice what he preached; while Machiavelli, the natural republican, the survivor of torture, was by far the more troubled spirit of the pair. Yet both these unwilling exiles were, as writers, blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a clear-sightedness that looks amoral, as truth so often does.

  The Baburnama, the first autobiography in Islamic literature, was originally written in Chaghatay Turkish, the language of Babur’s ancestor Temur-i-Lang, “lame Temur,” better known in the West as Tamerlane. Wheeler M. Thackston’s translation replaces the inadequate Beveridge version, and is so fluently readable, and so thoroughly backed up
by the detailed scholarship of Thackston’s many annotations, as to feel definitive. From Thackston’s footnotes we learn about much that Babur leaves unsaid—about, for example, Persian verse forms such as the qasida and the ghazal; or peaked Mongolian caps; or the place in the heavens of the star Canopus. He is not afraid to argue with Babur. When Babur speculates that the name of a province, Lamghan, is derived from the Islamic version of the name of Noah, “Lamkan,” Thackston ripostes: “He is quite mistaken in this, for the -ghan and -qan endings on so many toponyms in the area are of Iranian origin.” Babur should feel well pleased to have so unsubmissive a translator and editor. A great translation can unveil—can, literally, dis-cover—a great book; and in Thackston’s translation, one of the classic works of world literature arrives in English like a marvelous discovery.

  January 2002

  A Dream of Glorious Return

  THURSDAY, APRIL 6

  I have left India many times. The first time was when I was thirteen and a half and went to boarding school in Rugby, England. My mother didn’t want me to go, but I said I did. I flew west excitedly in January 1961, not really knowing that I was taking a step that would change my life forever. A few years later, my father, without telling me, suddenly sold Windsor Villa, our family home in Bombay. The day I heard this, I felt an abyss open beneath my feet. I think that I never forgave my father for selling that house, and I’m sure that if he hadn’t I would still be living in it. Since then my characters have frequently flown west from India, but in novel after novel their author’s imagination has returned to it. This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never really leave.