Introduction
This article addresses the subject of Muslim elephant keepers in South Asian society and the use of Persian pseudonymous writing and Islamic traditions as devices to endorse claims made by this professional group. It intimates that pseudonymous authorship was a literary stratagem that channelled different aims associated with the acculturation process of Muslim groups to the Indian environment and its fauna. In addition, it examines this technique of writing in the context of translation as a tool for producing semantic shifts in features of both the translated and the translating cultures.Footnote 1 In the Risāla-yi kursī-nāma-yi mahāwat-garī (Treatise on the Genealogical Tree of Mahout Practice)Footnote 2—a text about an uncertain period about the elephant and the elephant keeper—pseudonymous writing functions as a device to Islamise professional and technical skills acquired from the Indian environment. This is achieved by making them consistent with the Muslim view of the origin of scientific and technical professions as practices dating from the time of the ancient prophets of Islam. The Kursī-nāma thus creates a legend about the mahout as a profession dating back to the three sons of Maḥmūd, himself Noah’s son. At the same time, this narrative contains a reflexive meaning: it introduces a significant shift from the earlier negative Muslim view of the elephant and provides a new cognitive framework for Muslim professional groups involved in the care of this animal.
Recent scholarship on elephants in South Asia has focussed on the use of this animal in war and its link to kingship, in particular in Thomas R. Trautmann’s Elephants & Kings: An Environmental History.Footnote 3 A few studies have dealt with the role of elephants in Muslim kingdoms of South Asia. Simon Digby wrote a pioneering work that chiefly studies the elephant in the army of Indian sultanates. Possessing a large number of these animals became a symbol of the royal power of Muslim dynasties in India. The stables of Muslim rulers reserved for these animals, called fīl-ḫāna, had the capacity to contain hundreds and sometimes thousands of them. As Digby points out, many of these animals were not intended for war. The use of elephants in battle had well-known disadvantages—in particular, the difficulty in controlling them when they were injured.Footnote 4
Ali Anooshahr investigated the role of elephants in the imperial ideology and the army of the Ghaznavids (977–1186). The Ghaznavids developed an elaborate symbolism associating the elephant with royal power, which already held an important place in Indian political culture. At the same time, Anooshahr looks at the way in which the Ghaznavids had to mediate between the incorporation of this Indic symbol of power and the Muslim view of the elephant as an emblem of satanic violence and pride.Footnote 5 In a subsequent article, Anooshahr further analysed the ambivalent views about elephants in Persian chronicles and their function in Muslim sovereignty during the sultanate and the Mughal periods, up until Akbar’s reign (r. 1556–1605).Footnote 6 The negative Muslim view was particularly associated with the Quranic chapter (105) ‘The Elephant’, which relates the story of a Christian king who failed to take Mecca by force with an army that included elephants.
This article investigates elephants in Muslim society beyond the angle of warfare and kingship. It explores new paths of inquiry, shifting the focus from kings’ ownership of elephants and the military use of elephants to their keepers, who lived a quasi-symbiotic life with these animals and created an elaborate set of codes, values, and rituals to interact with them. First and foremost, this requires taking into account a broader range of Persian documents rather than relying chiefly on chronicles of kings and other forms of courtly literature, which doubtless provide relevant accounts of elephants in Indian Muslim kingdoms. This article examines a type of source chiefly regarded as negligible and suggests that reading it requires contextual hermeneutic criteria detached from those of Western philology.
By the end of Akbar’s rule, the Mughal empire had established vast apparatus to manage royal elephants, employing thousands of elephant attendants and fostering a set of internal hierarchies among them. The account given in one of the main chronicles of this period, the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, allows us to draw some rough estimations. These would suggest that about 5,000 mahouts, plus many hundreds of high-ranking mahouts and a much higher number of low-ranking elephant attendants (probably about 15,000), worked at Mughal elephant stables.Footnote 7 To these numbers should be added the thousands of members of staff who must have found employment at the elephant stables of contemporary powers, such as the Vijayanagara kingdom (1336–1646) and the Deccan sultanates (which emerged from the end of the fifteenth century). Cohesive sets of beliefs, narratives, practices, and codes about the elephant were shared and canonised within these communities. Also, managing a large number of elephants involved a precise hierarchy of tasks and posts among mahouts, which consolidated internal elites. High-ranking mahouts may have been closely associated with the project of writing down the mythical history of the profession and the code of mahouts’ practices, which are recorded in the Kursī-nāma.
Although it is unclear as to when the Kursī-nāma was written, the available manuscript copies indicate that it circulated chiefly during the eighteenth century and the following century. Should the agenda of the professional group associated with the Kursī-nāma be read within the broader process of the transformation of Indian economic and labour markets that occurred during the late Mughal period, with the weakening of Mughal hegemony and the rise of competitive political powers? As pointed out by Susan Bayly, ‘[t]hese changes in economic and political power gave rise to the phenomenon of so-called caste headmanship, or at least gave greater definition to the guild-like forms of organisation and leadership which had apparently been common among traders and artisans in earlier centuries’.Footnote 8 Also, the history of caste was intertwined with the history of professional communities.Footnote 9 The main stratagem of the Kursī-nāma, in alleging an ancient sacred origin, fits in consistently with the strategies used by Hindu and Muslim communities who claimed social mobility for their group or were involved in caste consolidation. The author of the Kursī-nāma used shared narrative topoi. Texts associated with emerging professional practices in Indian Muslim society adopted analogous devices, such as the rifleman’s case, which is mentioned below. Later Urdu texts written within communities of scribes, tailors, blacksmiths, and carpenters still adopted the same topoi as found in the Kursī-nāma, such as dating the origin of labour to the time of the prophets and creating a set of Islamic prayers to be recited during work tasks; these communities were often involved in the assimilation of new Western techniques, such as the lithographic press and electroplating.Footnote 10
Elephants and mahouts in Persianate South Asia
The taming of the subspecies Elephas maximus indicus and Elephas maximus maximus of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) started in India during the first millennium BC, and war elephant techniques spread from India to other Asian regions and to the West.Footnote 11 The link between the elephant and the mahout is one of the most sophisticated forms of animal–human interaction and the mahout’s work involves the acquisition of complex skills in order to control elephants. Ghaznavid sultans, whose kingdom extended from Iran to north-west India, were the first Muslim rulers to make significant use of elephants in their army. In 422/1031, the sultan Mas‘ūd (r. 1030–1040) inspected 1,670 elephants in Kabul. The royal elephant stables in the capital Ghazni were run by a staff of Hindus headed by the muqaddam-i pīlbānān (commander of elephant keepers), who held the rank of a court official (ḥājib).Footnote 12 The stables could house 1,000 animals and must have employed hundreds of elephant keepers. Does the dearth of Muslims among the staff indicate that they were still less familiar with the care of this animal?
Sanskrit textual culture included many studies on the elephant and its management, one of the most representative of them being the Hastyāyurveda—a treatise on elephant diseases and their treatment ascribed to the sage Pālakāpya.Footnote 13 Texts in Sanskrit, such as Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra and Nīlakaṇṭha’s Mātaṅgalīlā, also include sections on elephant keepers and their duties.Footnote 14 Sanskrit texts on elephants were produced up until the Mughal period (1526–1857), such as the Hastividyārnava, written in 1734 for the Ahom king of Assam Siva Singh and his wife Ambika Devi, which contains some Persian terms and was illustrated by Muslim artists.Footnote 15 By contrast, earlier Arabic and Persian zoological literature featured nothing comparable. Although the elephant (fīl) was not foreign to Muslim scientific texts, when Muslims arrived in South Asia, their scientific tradition did not include studies on this animal in the form of monographs.Footnote 16
The production of texts on the elephant, often called fīl-nāma (treatise on the elephant), emerged as a new feature of Persian texts written in South Asia.Footnote 17 This appeared in a context in which different layers of Muslim society interacted with this animal and needed to acquire knowledge on it from the Indian environment. Different types of texts providing accounts of elephants became accessible to Persian-language readers in South Asia. Describing elephants is a composite activity that involves texts of a historical, biographical, encyclopaedic, and medical type. Chapters and descriptions about the elephant appeared in historical and encyclopaedic works that were written and translated in the courtly environment. Among these are the Nuh sipihr by Amīr Ḫusraw (d. 725/1325), the Persian translation of Varāhamihira’s Bṛhatsaṁhitā undertaken for Sultan Fīrūz Šāh Tuġluq (r. 752–790/1351–1388),Footnote 18 the Ā’īn-i Akbarī by Abū al-Fażl (d. 1011/1602), and the Nujūm al-‘ulūm, written in the sixteenth century at the court of the sultans of Bijapur.Footnote 19 Descriptions of elephants are found in the memoirs of Muslim rulers, such as in the Bābur-nāma of the Mughal Emperor Bābur (r. 1526–1530) and the memoirs of his descendant Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627).Footnote 20
The length and depth of these accounts vary. Some are rather succinct descriptions provided in accounts of Indian fauna, such as in Amīr Ḫusraw’s historical poem Nuh sipihr and Bābur’s memoirs.Footnote 21 The Ā’īn-i Akbarī offers a much more extensive and accurate narrative of elephants. Abū al-Fażl provides a meticulous first-hand account of the imperial fīl-ḫāna (elephant stables) under Akbar’s reign, which are said to have included some 5,000 animals, each with a different name.Footnote 22 By the time Abū al-Fażl was writing his work, the South Asian environment had utterly transformed the Mughals’ involvement with elephants. Bābur, the founder of the Mughal Dynasty, was born in Central Asia, where he spent much of his life; in his memoires, the elephant is still an exotic object of curiosity. Seventy years later, his grandson Akbar has become one of the main owners of elephants in South Asia—if not the foremost owner—which means on a global scale.Footnote 23 According to Abū al-Fażl, Akbar was also the first ruler to breed elephants; this practice was previously considered to be unlucky. Abū al-Fażl writes about the elephant stables, the ranks (marātib) of the emperor’s elephants and their food, the elephant keepers, the elephant’s harness, the elephants for Akbar’s personal use, the inspection of elephants, and the methods used by Indians to hunt them. He also discusses Indian concepts such as the link between the character of the animal and the three guṇa (qualities) of Hindu philosophy (sattva, rajas, and tamas).Footnote 24
Travelogues (safar-nāma) of Muslim voyagers visiting South Asia describe this animal, such as in the travelogue of the Timurid ambassador ‘Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandī (d. 887/1482), who visited the Vijayanagara capital Hampi, and the Tuḥfat al-‘ālam, written by ‘Abd al-Laṭīf Ḫān Šūštarī (d. 1220/1805–1806). The latter—an Iranian scholar, who was born in Shushtar, educated in Shiraz, and settled in India—lived in Bengal before moving to Hyderabad, where he wrote his travelogue and provided an account of Burma.Footnote 25 The eastern regions were the primary habitat of elephants in South Asia. Moreover, manuscript copies of historical works of the Mughal period were illustrated with miniatures depicting this animal, such as in the Bābur-nāma and Abū al-Fażl’s Akbar-nāma, as well as in Persian translations of Sanskrit texts, such as the Razmnāma.Footnote 26
Different types of Persian works dealt exclusively with elephants. Some were translations of Sanskrit sources. Sa‘d Akbar ibn Awliyā’ ibn Ḥasan Ḥakīm compiled the Fīl-nāma wa šikār-nāma-yi Šāh-Jahāndat—a handbook of elephant care and treatment of an uncertain date, which was chiefly based on the translation of parts of Bṛhaspati’s Bṛhaspatimata Footnote 27—and Pālakāpya’s Hastyāyurveda.Footnote 28 New compendiums were written, such as Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl—a handbook on caring for elephants, which, in manuscript copies, circulated together with the Kursī-nāma. Other texts include maṯnawī poems on hunting elephants, which became a favourite activity among Muslim rulers in South Asia,Footnote 29 and works featuring fictional accounts of the profession’s origin, such as the Kursī-nāma and Gajrāj-nāma, the latter being associated with Ibrāhim Quṭb Šāh, who allegedly lived during the time of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BC). Most of the texts devoted solely to elephants, such as the Kursī-nāma, were written when the strategy of using elephants in battle had become antiquated. This took place during the course of the sixteenth century with the improvement of muskets and firearms.Footnote 30 Elephants were then primarily used for other activities, such as carrying noblemen, ceremonial events, and transporting heavy materials. Beyond the courtly environment, the production and reception of these texts were undoubtedly associated with circles of Muslim elephant keepers and with Muslim veterinary surgeons.
Indian Muslims gradually became experts in the field of elephant care. Some Muslim physicians of the Mughal period were known for their skills in looking after elephants, such as Šayḫ Bīnā ibn Ḥasan and his son Ḥasan Muqarrab Ḫān (d. 1056/1646). Šayḫ Bīnā was a surgeon for the court of Akbar and he compiled a Persian text on Ayurvedic medicine: the Ḫulāṣa-yi Bīnā. Muqarrab Ḫān became an influential nobleman and was appointed as the governor of several provinces of the Mughal empire during Jahāngīr’s reign.Footnote 31 It is likely that, due to his position, Muqarrab Ḫān possessed some specimens of this animal. Moreover, experts in elephant care compiled texts of the remedies that they used and had learnt from their colleagues, such as the unknown author of Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl and Šayḫ Nyāz ‘Alī Ṣiddīqī, who left a short tract on the treatment of camels and elephants.Footnote 32
Persian ethnographic and encyclopaedic works written in the nineteenth century provide noteworthy insights into the role assumed by Muslim mahouts in South Asian society. The Tašrīḥ al-aqwām is a treatise on Indian castes and professions that was compiled for James Skinner (d. 1841)—an Anglo-Indian officer in the Bengal Army. The treatise was chiefly based on Sanskrit sources, translated at Skinner’s request. This illustrated work, completed at Hansi in 1825, included accounts of scientific and technical professions. At the end of the chapter on the elephant keeper (fīl-bān)—the first part of which describes Indian traditions concerning this topic—the text explains that, in the Muslim age, which corresponds to the kalī-yuga, many fīl-bān abandoned Hindu law (dharma) and converted to Islam. Thus, in some places, such as the Deccan and Jaipur, there are still Hindu fīl-bān, whereas, in other regions, they are all Muslim.Footnote 33
The fact that Muslim elephant keepers had outnumbered Hindu elephant keepers was most likely information that Skinner had obtained from the Hindu informants whom he relied on for his book. Even if this information may not have been entirely accurate, it testifies to a significant change in the social background of those practising this profession. Skinner’s informants would not have had reason to falsify or alter ‘what they knew’, given their negative perception of the Muslim takeover of the profession, which is directly associated with the dark age (kalī-yuga) of humankind. Neither the Tašrīḥ al-aqwām nor the other Persian sources analysed here provide further discussion of the reasons behind this phenomenon, leaving it unclear as to when and how it took place. This process was probably shaped by a combination of environmental and socio-economic factors. Elephants were widespread in northern, central, and north-eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent.Footnote 34 The majority of Muslims came to live in regions that overlapped the area inhabited by these animals, especially in northern and north-eastern parts of India. This cohabitation lasted for centuries and fostered, in an unprecedented manner, growing interaction between Muslims and elephants.
Moreover, Persian sources comment on the social rank of mahouts. In the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, Abū al-Fażl writes that elephant caretakers (tīmār-dārān) are highly respected by kings.Footnote 35 The Maṭla‘al-’ulūm wa Majma’ al-funūn, which is an encyclopaedia of sciences and professions written by Wājid ‘Alī Ḫān in around 1261–1262/1845–1846, devotes a chapter to elephant keepers (fīl-bānān). The second part of this work, the Majma‘al-funūn, deals with professions and crafts that are divided into high-, middle-, low-, and lowest-ranking according to their social status. The fīl-bān features among the high-ranking (aʻlā) occupations. Wājid ‘Alī Ḫān explains that ‘this art (fann) is among those honourable (muʻazzaz) and noble (mukarram)’ and this is because, while driving the elephant, the fīl-bān can turn his back to kings and sit in front of them. Thus, elephant keepers ‘are always honoured and revered (muḥtaram)’.Footnote 36
Due to its close association with rulers, the job of mahout acquired a respectable position in Indian Muslim society and this factor contributed to sustaining growth in the number of Muslim mahouts. Elephants were the property of kings and mahouts were in charge of one of the most expensive items in the kings’ possession. Besides, certain rulers used to drive elephants in South Asia, such as the Mughal Akbar.Footnote 37 This profession could also be a means to climb the social ladder, as shown by the career of Malik Sarwar (r. 1394–1399), who was in charge of the elephant stables for the sultan of Delhi before establishing an independent sultanate at Jaunpur, where he became the first ruler.Footnote 38 During Akbar’s reign, Fatḥ Ḫān Fīlbān (d. after 994/1585–1586) was the emperor’s elephant driver before he was promoted to the rank of amīr (commander).Footnote 39 The term for elephant keeper used in the title of the Kursī-nāma is not the Persian fīl-bān, but the Hindi mahāwat (mahout in English), which is derived from the Sanskrit mahāmātra, meaning a person of high status.Footnote 40 Why would the anonymous author of the Kursī-nāma, who strove to Islamise the profession, choose the Hindi term? Did the difference in meaning that the two terms conveyed to readers and the fact that the standard Persian term did not allude to the nobility of the profession influence the author’s decision?
The system for managing elephants, set up under Akbar’s rule, consolidated an elaborate hierarchy of internal ranks among elephant keepers. Mahouts oversaw low-ranking elephant attendants, experienced mahouts were appointed as overseers of groups of elephants and their mahouts, and a high-ranking elite commanded the overseers. The mahout was at the head of a group of elephant attendants of inferior rank. Abū al-Fażl relates that a group of attendants was assigned to each elephant.Footnote 41 Strong elephants were attended by five, or five and a half, persons. This is probably because one low-ranking attendant was assigned to two animals at the same time. The mahāwat was in charge of driving the animal and sat on its neck. He received a monthly salary of 200 dām,Footnote 42 which rose to 220 for animals that were difficult to control. The second in rank was the bhūʼī, who assisted the mahout in combat and in controlling the animal’s pace. He received a salary of 110 dām; many of them could do the work of the mahout.Footnote 43 The other three assistants, called mīṭ, performed tasks such as collecting food and tying up the animal.Footnote 44 For negligent attendants who harmed an animal or caused its death, a comprehensive list of sanctions (gharmat) was envisioned; those who administered a stimulant to an animal and caused its death could even receive a death sentence.Footnote 45
The most knowledgeable mahouts were appointed as fawjdār, the ‘overseer’ of elephants. Abū al-Fażl explains that the fawjdār was in charge of groups of 10, 20, or 30 elephants. He was responsible for fattening (farbihī) the animals, their training (hunar āmuzī), and their performance, such as standing in front of fire. The monthly wage of a fawjdār in charge of 20 animals, called bistī, ranged from 20 to 30 rupees. The highest position was the hazārī, the commander of 1,000 elephants, followed by the ṣadī, who was in charge of 100. These commanders-in-chief, who supervised lower-ranking fawjdārs, had 25 or 30 elephants for their personal service, and they had to pay the stipend of the mahout and of one lower-ranking attendant of the animals assigned to them. Abū al-Fażl does not specify the remuneration of commanders, but remarks that their salary was not comparable (tafāwut) and that they rose to the highest ranks of the empire (pāya-yi amārat).Footnote 46 The fawjdār system encouraged the consolidation of elites among mahouts. From Abū al-Fażl’s account, one can infer that 500 dāh-bāšī (those in charge of 10 elephants), 250 bistī, and 166 overseers of 30 animals were employed at Akbar’s stables. The 50 ṣadī and the five hazārī were situated at the top of this pyramid.
In Mughal India, the family circle and the sphere of private training constituted the principal framework for the transmission of knowledge about elephant care. Up until today, inheriting the profession from father to son remains common practice among mahouts in India.Footnote 47 Besides, the case of Šayḫ Bīnā and Ḥasan Muqarrab Ḫān suggests that ensuring medical treatment for elephants became part of the knowledge handed down within families of Indian Muslim doctors who were trained in veterinary medicine. This phenomenon is further illustrated in the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl. The text documents remedies for elephant diseases that were used by three generations of elephant keepers belonging to the same family—a certain Jān-Muḥammad, his father Mūsā Ḫān, and his grandfather Imām Baḫš.Footnote 48 Though direct evidence is lacking, it would no doubt imply that the family’s key position in this context was linked to the creation of sacred genealogical documents—such as that provided in the Kursī-nāma—which would legitimate a mahout’s professional status in Muslim society according to Islamic views. Families and corporations of Muslim mahouts by and large constituted the group that might have benefited the most from the creation and circulation of glorifying accounts of their professional lineage.
Functions of pseudonymous writing
Was the Kursī-nāma purposely conceived of as a pseudonymous work? This undoubtedly seems to be the case. The hypothesis that most scribes deliberately altered or misread the alleged author’s name in the same way when copying manuscripts is not consistent with textual evidence. The unknown author of the Kursī-nāma used the conventional devices of a pseudonymous work, which consists of writing under a false name and concealing the author’s identity.Footnote 49 He fashioned the text accordingly and ascribed its authorship to Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr, a fictional character. The incipit of the text openly claims that ‘The Risāla-yi kursī-nāma-yi mahāwat-garī is by Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr’.Footnote 50
The ways of reading and interpreting pseudonymous texts and pseudographs depend on the reader’s epistemic view.Footnote 51 The decrypting of this type of work can be a challenging task that requires selecting and collating fragments of internal and external evidence in order to formulate—when possible—satisfactory hypotheses on what has been deliberately hidden or altered, especially the identity and aims of the authors, the place and the period of writing, and the commissioners of this kind of text. It is typical, in philological and historical scholarship, to regard these works as minor or unreliable sources because of their lack of authentic authorship. Pseudonymous authors’ false statements about authorship pervert reality or part of it and mislead the reader. The dichotomy between authentic and alleged authorship generates a hierarchy in the reliability of textual sources, which is meant to distinguish the truth from falsehood when interpreting the past.
Nevertheless, this apparently sound form of reasoning proves to be problematic. A text is made up of parts that can be of uneven value. What is to be considered fake or inexact in a pseudonymous text and true or accurate in an authentic work? The whole text or just parts of it? Do impermeable boundaries always separate authentic and invented narratives, or could these overlap within texts? Histories of rulers, hagiographies of Sufis, memoirs of travellers, and other kinds of texts written by known authors may use hyperbolic or fictional accounts or provide inaccurate versions. Besides, known authors may relate events by deliberately hiding some of them to mislead the reader. A rather delicate case is the biography of Šāh ‘Alī Riżā’ (d. 1215/1801)—the reformer (mujaddid) of the Ni‘matullāhī Sufi order in Iran—which was substantially reformulated by Iranian biographers in order to legitimate the claims of ‘Alī Riżā’s successors, who had migrated from the Deccan to Iran.Footnote 52 On the other hand, fake authorship does not imply that what is described in the text is also falsified or inaccurate. Several authoritative texts on East Asian Buddhism, such as Fan-wang ching, are emblematic in this regard; they claim to be written in India but are in fact later works that were produced in China. These texts were written in a very precise style, and provided truthful and profound accounts of Buddhist thought. One of their aims was to reconcile Indian philosophical concepts, which have proven problematic for believers in East Asia.Footnote 53
The aforementioned case leads us to ponder how Muslim readers would distinguish authentic from fabricated sources, bearing in mind that most authors of the latter set out to create texts that do not appear to be fictitious. Indeed, erudite Muslims were familiar with methods of recognising authentic and fake sources.Footnote 54 Early Islamic scholars had already had to examine a large number of traditions (ḥadiṯ) ascribed to the prophet Muḥammad (d. 11/632), many of which were of uncertain authenticity. This led to the creation of precise procedures to distinguish between authentic (ṣaḥīḥ), acceptable (ḥasan), and weak (ẓaʻīf) traditions and their transmitters. An analogous method for imams’ traditions was created in the Shiite community.Footnote 55
Nonetheless, to what extent did recognising the pseudonymous character of a text prevent scholars and readers from using it? For instance, early Twelver Shi‘a scholars were aware of the fact that the Risāla al-ḏahabiyya—a medical treatise ascribed to the eighth imam ‘Alī al-Riżā’ (d. 203/818)—had not been written by him, given that al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067) had already attributed the work to Muḥammad ibn Jumhūr, one of the companions of al-Riżā’.Footnote 56 Nonetheless, a later influential scholar, al-Majlisī (d. 1110/1699), did not hesitate to use the Risāla al-ḏahabiyya as an authoritative source to discuss Galenic–Avicennian ideas; the text was widely copied and read by Muslim readers, from Arabic-speaking countries to South Asia.Footnote 57
The Kursī-nāma is explored here from the perspective of inquiring into the function of the pseudonymous text and the way in which its social environment shaped the given function. Enquiring into the specific function and context of the text is one of the few consistent methods of raising hypotheses about why a pseudonymous text was made. This implies considering the narrative of the Kursī-nāma as a specific type of document that reflects the socio-historical reality in which it was produced.Footnote 58 Also, although pseudonymous authors use a similar device—which consists of concealing their identity from the reader—their endeavours may be motivated by various aims, which may also coexist within the same text. Besides, the role of a potential commissioner and their objectives have to be taken into account. The text of the Kursī-nāma can indeed be read from different angles. It was not planned to perform a single limited function. Instead, a set of overlapping reasons seems to underlie its writing, which can be broadly schematised as follows: (a) to illustrate the Islamisation of practices assimilated through contact with Indian society, (b) to legitimate the status of the professional group involved in the transmission of these practices, and (c) to provide a concise handbook of notions about the mahāwat’s tradition and its codes to be learnt by apprentice mahouts.
Seen from this point of view, most parts of the Kursī-nāma do not alter the reality of the phenomena that they describe (the beliefs and practices of the mahout) but instead testify to a reality that has changed—that is to say, the role and perception of the elephant and the mahout in Muslim society. Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that the author and the commissioners did not want to deceive readers about the elephant-related beliefs and codes provided in the text because they sought legitimation for them. From this perspective, the Kursī-nāma offers a unique insight into the transformation of a professional group assuming its place in society. The Kursī-nāma, along with other Persian pseudonymous writings on technical and scientific knowledge composed in South Asia, are fundamental texts for understanding the emergence of economic and professional phenomena shaped by cross-cultural contacts.
The author of the Kursī-nāma used a conventional stratagem to claim authority over Muslim textual culture that Muslims had assimilated from pre-Islamic societies. The production of pseudonymous texts was already an established practice in the Greek scientific tradition—which played a key role in shaping Muslim philosophical and scientific thought—as well as in Jewish and Christian literary cultures.Footnote 59 Muslim literary culture appropriated earlier pseudograph texts from Greek sources and created new works, such as tracts on the horse ascribed to Aristotle (d. 322 BC), which exist in Persian.Footnote 60
A specific function of some pseudonymous texts, such as the Kursī-nāma, is to systematise, within an Islamised framework, materials that were assimilated from the lore of other groups. This device dates back to the early production of Arabic writings on Greek sciences. An exemplar text of this kind is the Risāla al-ḏahabiyya, which was allegedly written by ‘Alī al-Riżā’ after a medical debate that he had with non-Muslim physicians at the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma‘mūn (r. 813–833). This text is devoted to Galenic medicine and does not deal with Islamic prayers for healing. The Risāla al-ḏahabiyya is a pivotal work for drawing a more accurate picture of the early circulation of Greek knowledge within Islamic circles.Footnote 61
In South Asia, pseudonymous writing became a tool to Islamise knowledge acquired from the Indian sphere. The attribution of fabricated texts to Indian Sufi masters is a device used by various authors, such as in the case of the Risāla-yi wujūdiyya—a short treatise on yoga allegedly composed by Mu‘īn al-Dīn Čištī (d. 633/1236), the eponymous master of the Čištiyya order in India.Footnote 62 The same kind of stratagem is used in the Haft aḥbāb—a treatise dealing with Indian alchemy (rasaśāstra) and mercurial and metallic formulas. The text is ascribed to a group of seven authors, including the Suhrawardī master, Ḥamīd al-Dīn Nagawrī (d. 643/1246). Here, the narrative of conversion to Islam functions as a stratagem to appropriate Indic knowledge: the longest chapter is attributed to Gyān Nāth Sa‘ādatmand—a yogi converted to Islam who presents the alchemical techniques of his Nāth masters.Footnote 63 When the Haft aḥbāb was written, between circa 1537–1538 and 1094/1683, mercurial and metallic drugs were in great demand on the Indian medicinal market. Their production was a lucrative business and Muslim scholars were eagerly engaged in translating materials on rasaśāstra from Sanskrit sources.Footnote 64
This device was even used to domesticate technical-military knowledge borrowed from the Western world, as shown by the Tufang-nāma—a short treatise on the rifle, which, in the only copy known to date, is ascribed to Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), who was a figure with whom many pseudonymous texts are associated in the Muslim world.Footnote 65 In the Tufang-nāma, the origin of the rifle is attributed to the prophet David. The text is written in the same dialogic style as the Kursī-nāma. The invocations of the rifleman given in the text suggest a resemblance with the invocation of Sufi orders, which is also a feature of the mahout’s prayers presented in the Kursī-nāma.Footnote 66 Pseudonymous texts such as the Kursī-nāma, the Haft aḥbāb, and the Tufang-nāma share a significant feature—they attest to meaningful changes in the technical knowledge acquired by professional groups, such as Muslim soldiers who had to master a new weapon that changed methods of fighting. War elephants transformed the way in which Muslim armies fought in India, and then firearms rendered the use of the latter an obsolete strategy.
Therefore, to ask why the author of the Kursī-nāma decided to hide and wear the garbs of someone else would not be the only relevant question. He used a conventional device to create a text that conveyed new views on a specific topic. However, why choose one specific garb instead of another? The Kursī-nāma is a specific kind of pseudonymous text. It does not use the name of a real eminent personage known to readers, such as Avicenna, to whom many spurious texts were attributed.Footnote 67 Neither does it claim to be written by a Sufi master, as other pseudonymous Persian texts in South Asia are. The author or his commissioners used an otherwise unknown character—Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr, allegedly presented as Noah’s grandson.Footnote 68
The Genealogical Tree of the Mahout: reshaping Muslim views on elephants
An anonymous composite handbook on elephant care
Several clues suggest that the Kursī-nāma may have been written sometime during the Mughal period, including what is known from the circulation of other Persian texts that deal with the elephant. The manuscript copies of the Kursī-nāma that are known so far date mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 69 None of the copies of which I am aware is dated, except for one late illustrated codex.Footnote 70 The copies available suggest that the Kursī-nāma was thought to be a prologue to other texts, although, in a few copies, it is also found at the end of the codex.Footnote 71 Most copies of the Kursī-nāma include two other texts, showing that they circulated together as a composite work on elephant care. The second is the anonymous Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl, which is usually divided into 17 chapters and is also circulated as an independent work.Footnote 72 The third text, usually placed at the end of the codices, is a multilingual glossary of Arabic–Persian and Indic terms, which includes names of remedies.
At the beginning of the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl, the unnamed author writes that he gathered the knowledge that he had acquired from his grandfather and other masters for the benefit of the students in the field (ṭālibān-i īn fann). Some copies were illustrated with drawings of elephants and mahouts. A particular feature of this text is the mention of the names of many mahouts, both Muslims and Hindus, who have used and passed on the remedies described within. Some of them were not ordinary mahouts, but held the higher-ranking position of fawjdār, such as Šāh Muḥammad Fawjdār and Sayyid ‘Alī Fawjdār.Footnote 73 The chapters of the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl provide a precise idea of the ailments that mahouts dealt with, such as stomach diseases, and in particular constipation and diarrhoea, genital diseases, different kinds of wounds and swellings, broken teeth and nails, and diseases affecting the eye, the skin, and the soles of the feet. Indic terms and remedies are used throughout the text, although it does not refer to Sanskrit textual sources.
A reaction against earlier negative views?
The sūrat al-fīl, the sura of the elephant, played a foremost role in shaping pejorative views of the elephant and the mahout in Islam. Can the need to create a eulogistic account of the profession’s origin be read as a reaction against earlier negative views? Direct accounts about how this sura was perceived and interpreted within mahout groups are lacking. However, Muslims knew its content well and they could use it by analogy as an Islamic discourse to blame Indian elephants, as does Bābur in his memoires. When he narrates the battle of Khanwa, which was fought against the army led by the Mewar’s ruler Rānā Sangā (r. 1508–1528), Bābur makes a direct analogy between the demon-shaped elephants in the enemy’s army and the masters of elephants mentioned in the sūrat al-fīl.Footnote 74 It would be hard to imagine that mahout circles, or at least those mahouts who were literate, were not aware of—if not concerned by—the disdainful way in which the Qur’an talks about their profession.
The sura of the elephant is particularly harsh with masters of elephants (aṣḥāb al-fīl), whom God severely punishes. This brief chapter of the Qur’an is generally thought to refer to the failed attack on Mecca attempted by Abraha, who was then the Christian ruler of Yemen. Abraha intended to destroy the Ka‘ba but was defeated by God, who sent birds to throw stones at his army of elephants. According to later traditions, the lead elephant stopped at the boundary with Mecca and refused to advance any further; this elephant was known as Maḥmūd, which is also the name of the enigmatic son of Noah mentioned in the Kursī-nāma. This event is significant in the Islamic tradition because it is believed to have occurred in 570–571, which was the year of Muḥammad’s birth, and therefore called the year of the elephant. However, the association between these two events is an invented tradition.Footnote 75
Other Muslims, such as ‘Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandī, evoked the resemblance between elephants and demons in their writings.Footnote 76 The Kursī-nāma even goes on to provide an account of elephants’ demonic ancestry, which could also be read as a way of glorifying Noah’s grandsons’ and mahouts’ mastery over this animal. Furthermore, demons were portrayed as mahouts. Miniatures of the Mughal period show demons leading elephants as mahouts do, such as those illustrating the composite elephant motif.Footnote 77 In addition, Indian Muslims had concerns about the purity of the elephant’s body, to which the Kursī-nāma testifies. Moreover, ulama of all the Sunni schools of Islamic law considered elephant meat as forbidden food for Muslims.Footnote 78
Ambivalent views about the elephant also existed in Indian culture. A demon could assume the shape of an elephant, as in the account about Śiva killing Gajāsura (elephant demon), which is a motif in Indian iconography.Footnote 79 According to a story associated with the sage Pālakāpya, elephants used to fly in the sky. However, because of their insolent behaviour, they were cursed by a holy man on whom they had fallen. Some of their physical features, such as internal testes and sweating, were also interpreted as the result of gods cursing elephants for their transgressions.Footnote 80
The layered dialogic narrative
The Kursī-nāma is a short manual about the elephant, the mahout, and their interactions. Most of the text is structured as a dialogue. The sets of questions and answers (suwāl-jawāb) cover the origin of the mahout and the elephant and other topics, including Islamic invocations to be recited by elephant keepers, such as the ḫuṭba (lit. sermon), and the mahout’s genealogical tree. The use of the dialogic style (saṃvāda) is a feature of Sanskrit texts. For instance, the Gajaśikṣā, which is a treatise on elephant lore ascribed to the wise Nārada, is written as a dialogue between Nārada and Indra, the God who rides the elephant.Footnote 81 This device was not unknown in the Arabic and Persian tradition, although it was less common than in Sanskrit culture.Footnote 82 In South Asia, several Persian texts dealing with Indian sciences borrowed the dialogic style of narrative from Sanskrit sources.Footnote 83
However, the Kursī-nāma uses a peculiar form of dialogue that combines levels of subjectiveness and allows the fictional author to ask questions of the reader and the listener—that is to say, to apprentice mahouts—and to teach them the correct replies. At the beginning of the text, the Kursī-nāma is attributed to Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr, who is also soon identified as one of Noah’s descendants who were mahouts. Each question is introduced by the formula ‘if they ask you’ (agar turā pursand) and each reply by the imperative ‘say!’ (bigū). The imperative form recalls the way in which the imperative qul (say!) is used in some chapters of the Qur’an. In this manner, the text creates a meta-temporal setting that allows Noah’s grandson to speak directly to the mahout, the former being the narrator and a character of the legend narrated in the text. The pseudonymous author who is wearing the garbs of Aḥmad Kabīr speaks for both the one who asks the questions and the one who replies: he is like the master’s voice when training his disciple. Readers and listeners would easily identify with the one who answers; the latter replies and learns by reading the text, or rather by listening to it, as the majority of mahouts most likely did. Listeners learnt and interiorised the mahout’s legend and could retell it within their social milieu.
Noah’s grandsons and the mahout’s archetype
The first two questions concern the origin of the mahout. The first is about who the first mahāwat was, with the answer explaining that he lived during the time of Noah and that, before that, the warlike elephant (fīl-i jangī) was a demon (dīw). The second question enquires about who was a mahout at that time, and the answer is that the first three mahāwat were Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr, Ḫwāja Sulṭān Aḥmad, and Ḫwāja Aḥmad, who were the sons of Maḥmūd and Noah’s grandsons according to the genealogy presented at the end of the text, which goes back to Adam. The narrative therefore sets the taming of the elephant at a crucial moment in ancient history, when men and animals could set foot again on Earth after the Flood.
The story of the Flood was well known to Muslims and was narrated in the chapter about Noah (71) in the Qur’an. This sura tells of God warning Noah about the Flood and announces the punishment for unbelievers who did not accept God’s message, notwithstanding Noah’s efforts to persuade them. The event is also related in other parts of the Qur’an (11:32–48, 23:23–30) and, in one of the verses, Noah’s ark (safīnat) is referred to as a sign of God (29:15). However, who was Maḥmūd, the son of Noah mentioned in the Kursī-nāma? According to the Qur’an (11:42–43), Noah had a fourth unnamed son who did not board the ark and decided to seek refuge on a mountain, where he drowned. Would readers be aware of any such incoherency?
The view that the elephant was among the animals rescued in the ark is readily attested to in Muslim culture and literature, as shown in the descriptions of the ark provided in Arabic texts about the stories of the prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’), which were a popular genre of religious tales.Footnote 84 The elephant is also represented in various illustrations of the ark, such as in a miniature of Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū’s (d. 833/1430) historical work, Majma’ al-tawārīḫ, which is kept in the David Collection in Copenhagen.Footnote 85 Another miniature of Noah’s ark that is attributed to Miskin—one of the leading painters of the Akbar imperial atelier—attests to the circulation of this motif in the Mughal realm. In this miniature, a couple of elephants appear in the lower part of the hull near a couple of camels and two men rescue another man from the water.Footnote 86
The story of Noah’s grandsons that features in the Kursī-nāma was probably related to, if not inspired by, other narratives about Noah’s offspring reaching India. These accounts are referred to in Persian historical sources and were probably popular among Indian Muslims. Their main feature is to include India among the countries repopulated by Noah’s descendants after the Flood. Muslim writers quote different and more or less elaborated versions of this account.Footnote 87 The historian Firišta (d. circa 1033/1624) included the genealogies of Noah and his son Ham in his history of the Muslim dynasties of India. This comprised a preface that dealt chiefly with the Indian kings before the arrival of the Muslims. The genealogy is placed at the beginning of the preface before the histories of Indian kings, so that the latter become part of the Indian lineage of Ham’s descendants. The story relates that Ham had six sons: the two eldest were named Hind, who came to India, which was named after him; and Sind, who went to the region that took his name. Here, the cities of Thatta and Multan were named after Sind’s sons. Firišta further recounts how the four sons of Hind settled in different regions of India that were named after them and their respective sons.Footnote 88
Firišta, who spent most of his life serving Muslim sultans, interprets with specific intention Indian political history through the lens of Ham’s lineage. Genealogy provides the writer with an ancient chronology that ranks the descendants of an Islamised prophet as the earliest Indians. Genealogy is a discourse about power over the Indian environment, whether natural, animal, human, political, social, or economic. The author of the Kursī-nāma interprets genealogy in a similar fashion—as a discourse to claim legitimate Muslim authority over a professional and economic field that was created by the interplay with the Indian environment. To ascribe the text to a medieval Muslim scholar or a Sufi master would not have allowed the same claim. The creation of Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr—a character crafted from the pre-Islamic age—allowed the start of the profession of mahout to be backdated to a past that readers would perceive as being older than, or at least as old as, the Indian tradition. The author of the Kursī-nāma does not need to claim that the profession is Islamic; genealogy makes this concept implicit for readers. Genealogising the past is a tool for reshaping readers’ present-day perception of a given phenomenon.
Also, the narrative told in the Kursī-nāma adapted for its own purpose a well-established expedient to domesticate foreign knowledge, which consists of attributing it to the ancient time of prophets. The use of such narratives is already attested to in the Jewish tradition, as shown in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, in which the origin of medicine—which was considered a form of illicit magic in other sources—is ascribed to Noah.Footnote 89 Similarly, Muslim scholars used this device to integrate Greek scientific materials into an Islamic framework, such as in the texts on the ṭibb al-nabawī (prophetic medicine) produced from the medieval period onwards.Footnote 90 In South Asia, a similar stratagem was used to assimilate Indian knowledge, such as in Ġulām Imām’s Mu‘ālajāt-i nabawī, which dealt with Muḥammad’s traditions and the properties of Indian drugs.Footnote 91 Likewise, it served to Islamise technical knowledge from the West, such as in the case of the Tufang-nāma.
However, the Kursī-nāma introduces an unusual variant in this topos. The primary focus of the narrative shifts from the prophet to his descendants, while the former becomes a relatively secondary character in the overall account. Why did the author decide not to ascribe the practice to Noah or to another prophet, as was more common in analogous cases? Wouldn’t that represent a more authoritative source? The rewriting of this theme was deliberate and probably aimed to further emphasise the role of descendants and lineage in a context in which family played a hegemonic position in the transmission of the profession and lineage was intimately linked to social status. In the Kursī-nāma, authority no longer directly depends on the prophet’s deeds; instead, his descendants become the new archetypal figures of the profession. Lineage was called upon to legitimise itself.
The ambivalent features of Muslims’ views on the elephant
Other issues dealt with in the Kursī-nāma are the origin of the elephant and the purity and impurity of its bodily parts. As indicated in the first answer, before being tamed by Noah’s grandsons, the elephant was a demon. This is further discussed in the following sets of questions and answers. The third question enquires about the colour of the elephant and the reply explains that the elephant was green but then it became black because of its sin (gunah). The following questions–answers explain that this was the fault of a feminine demon (dīw) named Barnānūs (برنانوس in Persian script), who fell in love with an elephant. Barnānūs had intercourse (ṣuḥbat) with a white elephant and became pregnant. A black elephant was born from this union and, from that moment on, the elephant was black.
Furthermore, fornication (zinā’) with Barnānūs is presented as the reason why the elephant would have an ashamed (šārmanda) and reserved (maḥjūb) character. The reader would also infer that this union occurred before the elephant was tamed by Noah’s grandsons—that is to say, when it was still a demon. Barnānūs and the baby elephant are often depicted in the miniatures that illustrate the text. The name of this demon is enigmatic.Footnote 92 The narrative of the newborn, who is black because of its parents’ sin, recalls the story of Noah’s son Ham. Noah forbade him to have intercourse on the ark, but Ham disobeyed the order and, as punishment, his descendants were born black.Footnote 93
The ambivalent ways in which Muslims perceived the elephant are particularly evident in one of the following questions about which parts of the elephant are pure (pak) and which are abominable (makrūh). The answer reveals that the animal’s forehead is pure, the teeth are impious (kāfir), and the tail is abominable. Could such segmentation mean that caring for the back part of the elephant’s body was a task for lower-ranking attendants, and not for mahouts? Whatever the case, the fact that the author felt compelled to make such a distinction indicates that this was indeed a real concern for elephant keepers, and the text sets out to establish a clear rule on this issue. The concern about impurity could also be the reason why, in the manuscript kept in Tonk, which includes both the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl and the Kursī-nāma, Barnānūs and the elephants are depicted intentionally without heads.
The Islamised jargon of Muslim mahouts
Several questions and answers in the Kursī-nāma are intended to teach the mahout the verbal idiom for controlling the elephant.Footnote 94 Sanskrit texts about this animal also dealt with this topic, such as the Mātaṅgalīlā by Nīlakaṇṭha, who probably lived in Kerala in the sixteenth century.Footnote 95 The Hastividyārnava provides mantras in different languages, to be recited during the elephant’s training.Footnote 96 Foreign travellers who visited India were particularly impressed by how mahouts spoke to elephants. The Catalan missionary Jordanus, who travelled in India in the first half of the fourteenth century, writes in his Mirabilia Descripta that ‘[t]his animal does nothing without a word; therefore, its master has nothing to do but say to him once: do this, and it does it’.Footnote 97 The Kursī-nāma shows that Muslim elephant keepers developed their own Islamic jargon to communicate with elephants. Sanskrit mantras are not part of this jargon.Footnote 98 The Islamic invocations provided in the text are chiefly meant to be recited in connection with mahouts’ main activities involving interaction with the elephant.
These invocations are mainly in the Arabic style and they include Quranic formulas, divine names (yā Allāh, yā Ḥanān, yā Mannān, yā Dayān, yā Subḥān, and others), and the names of angels (Jibrā’il, Mīkā’il, and others). For instance, the answer about the purity/impurity of elephant body parts also instructs the mahout to recite ‘yā Dhū al-jalāl’ (oh Lord of majesty) on the right side of the animal and, on the left side, ‘wa al-ikrām’ (and generosity), which is an honorific appellation of God. The formula to mount the elephant is made up of typical Islamic invocations, such as ‘yā Allāh al-‘Alī al-‘Aẓīm’ (oh Allah, the Highest, the Greatest) and ‘Huwa al-Ḥayy al-Qayyūm’ (He is the ever-Living, the all-Sustaining), the latter taken from the sura al-Baqara of the Qur’an (2:255). The formula called bastan-nāma, which is used to tie up (bastan) the elephant, is also made by combining the conventional Islamic incantations ‘subḥān Allāh wa al-Muḥammad, wa lā ilāha illā Allāh, yā Ḥayy yā Qayyūm’ (praise be to God and Muḥammad, there is no god but Allāh, the ever-Living, all-Sustaining).
Other formulas have to be recited when attaching the kalāwa—the Indic term for the band around an elephant’s neck where the driver puts his feet. One invocation is used when feeding the elephant. Another, the niyat-i ġusl, has to be recited before the elephant bathes (ġusl), which was one of the mahout’s duties and is depicted in the drawings that illustrate the manuscript copies of the text. These and other similar formulas were no doubt part of the oral instructions that apprentice mahouts received from their masters during training. The collection of formulas recorded in the Kursī-nāma shows that earlier jargon of Indian elephant keepers was replaced by heavily Islamised jargon suited to Muslim mahouts.
The ḫuṭba and the genealogy of the mahout
This process is further emphasised by the two foremost essential prayers for the mahout, which are described in the last part of the text: the ḫuṭba of the elephant keeper (fayyāl) and the kursī-nāma. The so-called ḫuṭba-yi fayyālūs is ascribed to the same alleged author of the text, Aḥmad Kabīr, and it is thought to bestow divine mercy and grace. In the copy of the Gajrāj-nāma in Jerusalem, Fayyālūs is the name of the white elephant mounted by Ḫwāja Aḥmad.Footnote 99 The ḫuṭba begins with the Islamic formula al-ḥamdu li-llāh ḫāliq al-samāwāt wa al-arḍ, min al-ẓalmāt ilā al-nūr (praise be to Allah, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, from darkness to light) and it ends with the invocation of God’s name (yā Allāh), of the names of specific angels (yā Jibrā’il, yā Mīkā’il, yā Isrāfīl, yā ‘Azrā’il, and others), and, lastly, of ‘all the angels from the East to the West and from the South to the North’.
The text provides precise instructions about the mahout’s ḫuṭba. First of all, the mahout has to recite it while he is mounting the elephant and after he has made a circumambulation (ṭawāf) of the Ka‘ba, which seemingly means in the direction of the Ka‘ba, which is the direction of the five prayers performed daily by Muslims. Moreover, the text stresses the normative character of this ritualised prayer. It warns that practising the profession of mahout (kasb) without knowing the ḫuṭba is ḥarām—that is to say, ‘forbidden’ or ‘unlawful’. Moreover, if the mahout does not know how to read—as was indeed the case for the large majority of mahouts—he has to write it down and keep it with him.
The main purpose of the Kursī-nāma is to create a sacred pedigree of the profession, which is presented in the concluding part of the text. In early modern South Asia, the creation of genealogies (vaṃśa in Sanskrit) was a rather customary device through which ascending social groups claimed to legitimise their status in society. As Dirk Kolff observed about the Rajputs, although the idiom of lineage was deeply rooted in Indian royal tradition, from the sixteenth century onwards, the new political context within the Mughal empire and the emphasis that the Mughals placed on genealogy gave it new vigour and prompted Rajput warriors to create genealogies of their clans.Footnote 100 The mahout was a profession with no noticeable tradition in Muslim societies, and the Kursī-nāma was primarily meant to fill this void.
The term kursī-nāma means ‘genealogical tree’. The mahout’s kursī-nāma consists of a list of names that begins with Sulṭān Aḥmad Kabīr, followed by his alleged father Maḥmūd, then by Noah, and goes back in the same way until the first prophet, Adam. The text specifies that, in total, this genealogy includes 52 kursī (lit. thrones) or ranks. Each name, except for Adam, is followed by the Arabic term bin (son of), which explains that the following person is the father of the preceding person. Nevertheless, many of the names provided in this genealogy are obscure. Noah’s father is usually known as Lāmik (Lamech) in Islamic tradition, whereas, in the kursī-nāma, it is written as نردی or نروی in the Arabic script, which does not resemble any recognisable name. Similarly, Noah’s grandfather is called Matūšalaḥ (Methuselah) in Muslim tales about pre-Islamic prophets, while the kursī-nāma refers to him as مروق or مردق, which is another unidentified name. By contrast, some of these personages bear typical Muslim names and titles, such as Ḫwāja Manṣūr, Ḫwāja Ṣādiq, Ḫwāja Mīr Ḫān, and Ḫwāja Ašraf.
The text also instructs mahouts on how to use the kursī-nāma. This practice is presented as a duty, as in the case of the recitation of the ḫuṭba. The passage before the genealogical tree warns that, if one wants to practise the profession (kasb) of mahāwat, then one has to bring the kursī-nāma to the pīr each year—that is to say, the Sufi master, or his descendants and ḫalīfa (the ‘successor’ of a Sufi master)—and recite the opening sura of the Qur’an. Some manuscript copies include a gloss clearly explaining that the mahout has to give the kursī-nāma to the pīr so that the latter can read it for the mahout.Footnote 101 These copies also reiterate the aforementioned instruction concerning the ḫuṭba: if the mahout is illiterate, then he has to keep a written copy of the kursī-nāma on his person. All copies state that listening to the recitation of the kursī-nāma is obligatory (lāzim) practice for the mahout. After the genealogy, the text ends with another warning stating that it is not admissible (rawā nabāšad, or ḥarām in some copies) for one who does not know the kursī-nāma to earn a living from this profession, and therefore he should not mount the elephant.
The style of this kursī-nāma can be likened to that of the silsila (lit. chain) of Sufi orders. The silsila is a spiritual genealogy of Sufi masters that links a living master and his disciples to the order’s founder and to the prophet Muḥammad. The recitation of the masters’ silsila is a ritual that is practised by most Sufi groups in South Asia during collective gatherings. Groups of Muslim elephant keepers probably developed analogous practices, considering that the text instructs the mahout to bring the kursī-nāma to the pīr. Associating elephant keepers with the Sufi environment is further suggested in the text by another question–answer that comes just before the one on the ḫuṭba. The question asks who the pīr of the elephant (pīr-i fīl) was, and the answer explains that his name is Šāh Kālā, which means the ‘Black King’. The text does not provide any other clue as to the identity of this character. However, it directly postulates the existence of a spiritual master who was somehow associated with the protection of elephants.Footnote 102
Besides, mahouts were not the only Muslim animal keepers who developed these types of ritual practices in South Asia. Similar forms of Islamic devotion developed among Muslim farriers (sālotar), as shown in some copies of the Tarjuma-yi Sālōtar—a Persian translation of the Śalihotra, which was a Sanskrit text on hippology and hippiatry. This translation was undertaken in Gulbarga by ‘Abd Allāh ibn Ṣafī at the request of the Bahmanī Sultan Aḥmad Walī (r. 1422–1435). The oldest-known copy (produced in 1058/1648) is illustrated with more than 30 coloured drawings of the horses of Muslim prophets. The captions for these drawings are similar to the text of an Islamic prayer addressed to the prophets—including Ḥasan and Ḥusayn—that is found at the end of other copies of ‘Abd Allāh ibn Ṣafī’s translation. This prayer consists of repetitive invocations to the prophets and their horses, and its pattern closely resembles that of the Sufi silsila.Footnote 103 Did the practice of such rituals among Muslim farriers provide an example for the emergence of similar forms of devotion among elephant keepers, bearing in mind that farriery was a much older occupation in Muslim societies?
The caliph of the mahouts: a rival or intertwined narrative?
The text mentions a few other enigmatic characters. One question enquires about who the caliph of the mahouts (ḫalīfa-yi mahāwatān) was, and the reply indicates that the caliph of the mahāwats was Quṭb Šāh. The following question inquiries into who were the ḫalīfa’s apprentices (čākar), and the answer is that the first was Ḫwāja Sa‘īd, the second was Šayḫ Ya‘qūb, the third was Ḫwāja Ra’uf, and the fourth was Ḫwāja Šu‘ayb. The text provides no further details about them. It is likely that more elaborate narratives about these mysterious characters and Šāh Kālā circulated in oral form within groups of mahouts. Nevertheless, we know from other sources that Quṭb Šāh was associated with another fictional account about the mahāwat’s archetype, which circulated among Muslims in South Asia.
The Gajrāj-nāma presents Ibrāhim Quṭb Šāh as the ḫalīfa-yi mahāwatān (caliph of mahouts) at the time of Alexander the Great.Footnote 104 In this case, the fictional device creates an association with the age of a pre-Islamic king who was well known in Muslim culture and the main character of Persian tales known as Iskandar-nāma (Book of Alexander).Footnote 105 Alexander’s army, which conquered Iran and the Indus Valley, included elephants. The position of elephantarcha (commander of elephants)—to which perhaps the title ḫalīfa-yi mahāwatān refers—was also established within the army.Footnote 106 The contents of the Gajrāj-nāma and the character of Ibrāhim Quṭb Šāh require a more detailed study. Nonetheless, the creation of different prototypical characters would suggest the existence of different groups of Muslim mahouts who were competing, or perhaps cooperating, to fabricate and disseminate ancient genealogies of the profession.
The afterlife of the text
The Kursī-nāma benefited from widespread circulation, judging from the manuscript copies that have been preserved. These indicate that the text was read and used until the colonial period. Most known copies are illustrated with miniatures or coloured drawings that depict Noah’s grandsons, the green elephant, the demon Barnānūs, and the white elephant; the intercourse between them; Barnānūs and the newborn black elephant; mahouts bathing an elephant; a mahout mounting the elephant; and other scenes depicting elephants with mahouts. Some of these are illustrated with Kashmiri-style miniatures, such as the copy in the Salar Jung Library at Hyderabad.Footnote 107 Illustrated copies were certainly produced for wealthy owners who could afford such items. For instance, the copy kept in the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum is part of the collection that belongs to the royal family of Jaipur. The Kursī-nāma is included at the end of a codex, which contains a lengthy Persian treatise on birds, other animals, and how to treat them, including tigers, leopards, dogs, and horses. The codex is richly decorated with more than 300 miniatures, and four of them adorn the Kursī-nāma.
The demon Barnānūs, rather than Noah’s grandsons, is the most-frequently portrayed character in the illustrations that accompany the text. In the copy in Jaipur, three out of four illustrations represent Barnānūs, her intercourse with the elephant, and Barnānūs with the baby elephant. Barnānūs is depicted with specific details such as scars on her body, feet resembling those of a fish, and a tail and horns on her head.Footnote 108 In the copy kept at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester, Barnānūs’s skin is pink, she wears a green earring, and, in one drawing, she is breastfeeding the black elephant.Footnote 109 In one of the copies kept at the Telangana Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research Institute at Hyderabad, she has black skin and reddish palms, she wears a necklace of pearls, and one illustration depicts her playing with the black baby elephant. In the same copy, Noah’s three grandsons are depicted with a halo around their heads while sitting under a tree; they wear coloured clothing and necklaces of pearls, like the mahouts in the illustration showing an elephant bathing.Footnote 110
The Gajrāj-nāma manuscript, which is kept at the National Library of Israel, mentions some of the characters in the Kursī-nāma, Ḫwāja Aḥmad and his father, and Ḫwāja Maḥmūd, as the son of Noah. One miniature portrays Ḫwāja Aḥmad mounting the white elephant named Fayyālūs and another shows Ḫwāja Aḥmad meeting the mystical sage Ḫwāja Ḫiżr in green clothing.Footnote 111 Moreover, the text gives the name of Ḫwāja Aḥmad’s mother, Malika Jahān Afrūz Bānū, as well as the latter’s mother’s name, and so on for several generations. The first part of the text is structured as an extended dialogue between Malika Jahān and Ḫwāja Maḥmūd, and includes elements taken from the Kursī-nāma. Could the emphasis on Malika Jahān, as well as the reference to her female ancestors, indicate that Muslim women became increasingly involved in elephant care and needed a parallel account to legitimate their practice? Whatever the case, these cross-textual references suggest that the Kursī-nāma inspired emulators, who developed the main narrative about Ḫwāja Aḥmad by providing additional details. This process most likely took place when a growing number of readers and auditors became interested in this type of tale.
The genealogy of the Kursī-nāma is reproduced in the last part of the chapter about elephant keepers in the Maṭla‘al-‘ulūm wa Majma‘al-‘funūn, which was printed several times during the nineteenth century. Wājid ‘Alī Ḫān writes that elephant keepers believe that the first mahout was Sulṭān Aḥmad and that the silsila of his house goes back to Adam. Following the list of names in the genealogy, he further states that, according to elephant keepers, each mahout has to learn the kursī-nāma by heart.Footnote 112 Wājid ‘Alī Ḫān undoubtedly had access to a manuscript of the Kursī-nāma, from which he copied the genealogy. The fact that the kursī-nāma is referred to in an encyclopaedia of sciences and crafts suggests that the narrative about Noah’s grandson circulated beyond mahout communities and became a rather standard account about them, shared by other groups in society.
Conclusion: the search for the legitimation of a Muslim professional group
The Kursī-nāma suggests that pseudonymous texts can be crucial sources for understanding cultural and economic changes that take place when segments of society are involved in the assimilation of a particular knowledge through cross-cultural contacts. The fictional account of the Kursī-nāma is meant to prompt a shift in the way in which Muslims might regard the elephant from an Islamic viewpoint. Moreover, the creation of a written genealogy and of an Islamised ritual associated with it is intended to control and claim authority within both professional groups and their social environment. In Persianate South Asia, pseudonymous writing was a flexible device that was used to update textual culture with concepts and techniques drawn from the non-Muslim environment and to make them fit in with the beliefs of Muslims involved in their practice. Furthermore, pseudonymous writing allows a reshaping of knowledge in a format that can readily blend together heterogeneous layers of materials and time. The Kursī-nāma combines diachronic registers in a single, more or less coherent discourse: the post-diluvian age of Noah’s offspring, the local domesticated background, and the pseudonymous author’s contemporary Islamised setting in which the practices described in the text were performed.
The author of the Kursī-nāma creates a new religious discourse to replace an old discourse. From being cursed in the Qur’an, mahout became a respectable occupation in Mughal India. Linking the archetype of the profession to the age of the Flood—an event narrated in the Qur’an—helped to cast a very different light on the elephant and the mahout as creatures saved by God. Moreover, this account relegated the elephant’s demoniac origin to being a feature that predated and is somehow erased by the taming achieved by Noah’s grandsons. The elephant was a demon before being tamed by Aḥmad Kabīr and his brothers. To place this event just after the Flood was a way of making it part of the Islamic mainstream view of the pre-Islamic age. For Muslim readers, the age of the prophets was not a category relegated to the legendary realm of the past, but a living semantic category that could be used to shape and reshape the understanding of human interaction with nature and technology. Besides, the main stratagem used to craft the mahout’s genealogy was to shape it in a format that resembled that of a Sufi silsila—a well-established device to create and transmit authority within social groups.
The Kursī-nāma was thought to both create and control authority within overlapping social groups. It was intended not only to provide a sacred pedigree to legitimise a mahout’s practice in Muslim society, but also to normalise practices and beliefs within the professional group. The Kursī-nāma was crafted and circulated in a context in which many Indian mahouts had become Muslims. One of the primary purposes of this text is to create shared concepts and norms for their practice. Most of the instructions for the mahout in the text relate to his practice and his interaction with the elephant. The Kursī-nāma records practices that were seemingly already established among Muslim mahouts and, at the same time, provides a set of beliefs for the training of future mahouts. In addition, it was conceived as an introduction to a larger Persian handbook for teaching practical elephant care and treatment. The normative aspect of the Kursī-nāma is rather obvious. According to the text, learning and listening to the recitation of the kursī-nāma and the ḫuṭba are not an option for the mahout, but an obligation, and negligence of this duty on the part of a mahout is even decried as being ḥarām. Furthermore, the text explicitly aims to establish common Islamised jargon for Muslim mahouts and their interaction with the elephant.
The text of the Kursī-nāma, and especially the last part presenting the genealogy, was not only destined to be read. It was written in a context in which orality and textuality were intertwined and could be used as complementary rather than mutually exclusive cultural techniques.Footnote 113 A primary objective of the Kursī-nāma was to create a set of norms to be heard and learnt by auditors, who were often illiterate. The format of the text implies that, on hearing the questions and answers, the mahout would have identified with the answerer who was learning the tricks of the trade. The narrative about Aḥmad Kabīr is thought to have been memorised by aspiring mahouts. The genealogy is thought to have been recited and listened to by mahouts. Moreover, the text aims to establish a shared ritual practice based on the recitation of the kursī-nāma and the ḫuṭba. The ḫuṭba is a supplication invoking the mercy of God and angels—a prayer that is meant to interconnect human and spiritual realms. The mahout had to keep with him a written specimen of the ḫuṭba—a standard instruction for talismanic prayers. The passage in the text instructing the mahout to bring the kursī-nāma to the pīr every year suggests that the mahout was thought to hear the recitation of the genealogy from a figure endowed with religious authority. Like a ritual, the recitation of the kursī-nāma was thought to shape shared social and emotional beliefs among its auditors. Although the text does not offer any additional information, it is likely that attending the reading of the kursī-nāma was not, or perhaps not only, an individual practice and that the genealogy was recited during gatherings of mahouts.
The Kursī-nāma was devised for different categories of auditors and readers. Indeed, mahouts were not the only group targeted by the text. If the crafted text aimed to claim the legitimisation of the profession in Muslim society, then it is reasonable to assume that its contents, or a proportion of them, were intended to not only remain confined within mahout circles, but also circulate outside them. The perception of mahouts in Muslim society would not have changed without readers from outside. It is unclear how this claim was received beyond mahout professional groups. Nevertheless, the fact that Wājid ‘Alī Ḫān mentions the kursī-nāma shows that its readership was not limited to mahout groups. It could also suggest that it gained a certain resonance, given that Wājid ‘Alī Ḫān decided to include it in his encyclopaedia of sciences and professions.
Furthermore, illustrated copies of the Kursī-nāma and the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl were produced for members of the upper strata of society. The commissioners of these copies were probably Persian-speaking aristocrats who owned elephants and were interested in this animal, and who would also have had personal contact with the mahouts in charge of their elephants. These would have been chiefly elites of Indian princely states, considering that known illustrated copies date back to this period. Besides, although one can assume that many mahouts were illiterate, some of them, whether Hindu or Muslim, were not. The figure of the literate mahout has even become a character of William Browne Hockley’s novel Pandurang Hàrì, which was published in 1826.Footnote 114 Some illustrated copies of the Kursī-nāma and the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl may have been commissioned by wealthy fawjdārs who owned elephants and were in charge of the animals that belonged to rulers. The Ā’īn-i Akbarī indicates that, during the Mughal period, the profession of mahout had become a multilayered and vertical kasb in which certain fawjdārs occupied a much higher rank than the average mahout in charge of a single animal.
There is no direct evidence that the Kursī-nāma was written at the request of one or more commissioners. Nevertheless, several clues suggest this hypothesis. The beliefs and norms presented in the text and their function would indicate that the commissioners were Muslim fawjdārs or leading members of mahout circles, who became influential due to their association with royal power. High-ranking fawjdārs who had ascended the social ladder would have been those who would have gained the most from legitimising the status of their profession—which lacked pedigree in Muslim society—through a genealogy, in a context in which owning a genealogy is a requisite for occupying a high social status. Moreover, high-ranking fawjdārs would have been those most interested in creating a set of normative notions for low-ranking Muslim mahouts who worked under their orders.
As with other pseudonymous works, the Kursī-nāma is a cryptic text that raises several unanswered questions. The first of these concerns the relation between the text and the oral tradition. Was the text a compilation of traditions that had already circulated among mahouts via oral accounts? Could this be one of the reasons why the author remained anonymous? However, would the whole text rely on oral sources or only parts of the text—especially the narrative about Noah’s grandsons? Furthermore, were the contents of the text accompanied by oral narratives that would have had additional details about Aḥmad Kabīr’s family, the identities of Šāh Kālā and Quṭb Šāh, and further explain the practical instructions given in the text? How was the text read? Were its contents recounted to mahouts? Did this process rely on elderly or literate mahouts who had already learnt its contents? Finally, a crucial question is the link between the Kursī-nāma and the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl. Could the commissioners of the Kursī-nāma also have been involved in the compilation of the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl and its glossary? Or could the Mu‘ālajāt-i afyāl have been added later or vice versa? Regardless, it is hardly likely that the two texts that largely circulated together as a single manual in the field were completely unrelated. Besides, if commissioners of the Kursī-nāma were fawjdārs, then these would also be those most concerned with compiling a handbook on the care and treatment of elephants.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful remarks; his thanks also go to Ali Anooshahr, Ali Gibran Siddiqui, Stefania Cavaliere, Andrea Acri, Asad Ahmed, Dominik Wujastyk, Kenneth Zysk, Michael Willis, Mohammad Soleymani, Pegah Shahbaz, Sanjay Garg, Lingli Li, Bernadette Sellers, Chander Shekhar, Rima Hooja and the curators of the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum for their comments and suggestions on the topics of this article. The subject of this article was presented during lectures at the University of Delhi (26 February 2021, online), the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in Jaipur (22 February 2023), and at King’s College Cambridge (1 December 2023, online).
Conflicts of interest
None.
