Over the past decade or so there have been major steps forward in our understanding of Mughal history. Among them were: Ruby Lal's Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge, 2005), which demonstrates that the women of the Mughal royal family, although confined to the women's quarters were nevertheless major players in the family business of imperial rule; Munis Faruqui's The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1500–1719 (Cambridge, 2012), which argues that the rebellions and internecine wars of succession, which were such a prominent feature of Mughal rule, far from being a source of weakness which historians supposed them to be, were actually a means by which Mughal rule was spread and deepened through widespread networks of friends and allies; Evrim Binbas's Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Din Yazdi and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2016), which shows how important an understanding of the Timurid past may be, in particular its political ideas, for understanding the practice of Mughal sovereignty; and Azfar Moin's Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York, 2012), which, although written a little before Binbas's book, has demonstrated how these Timurid ideas came to be realised in a fruitful intermingling of dynastic culture and shrine-based Sufism under the Mughals. To these we should add Muzaffar Alam's The Languages of Political Islam (Delhi, 2005), which shows how rulers and institutions adapted themselves to a variety of Indian contexts over 600 years and became deeply Indianised. Such interventions have brought much that is fresh to Mughal history. Rajeev Kinra is a pupil of Muzaffar Alam. His Writing Self, Writing Empire is another intervention, which turns much conventional historiography on its head. His focus is Chandar Bhan Brahman (c. 1600-c. 1666/70), a Punjabi Hindu who held high office under Jahangir and Shah Jahan and in retirement as the administrator of the Taj Mahal corresponded regularly with Aurangzeb. He was one of the great prose stylists of his time which is one of the reasons why his memoir of life at the Mughal court, Chahār Chaman (Four Gardens) and his separate collection of personal letters, often known as Munshaˀ at-i Brahman, have come down to us in numerous manuscripts. Kinra uses these documents as the prime focus both of his explanation of the culture of Mughal governance, broadly construed, and of an assessment of emerging strands of ‘modernity’.
Kinra begins by setting out Chandar Bhan's world: his rapid rise as an administrator, his period as secretary of Shah Jahan whom he would attend in his most private room, his ghusul khana or bathroom, the importance of his literary gifts in contributing to his success, and the fact of his being a Brahman being irrelevant in the Mughal context. This said, this last fact was important to Chandar Bhan, who emphasised it by using the pen-name ‘Brahman’ and felt that his Brahman background gave him insights into the Sufism which dominated the seventeenth-century Mughal world. His was an environment in which poetry was circulated amongst the top administrators, including the emperor – Chandra Bhan himself produced over 300 ghazals – and tolerance and level-headedness were valued as key qualities. The Munshis, as they were known, were a special breed of men.
Kinra goes on to show how the Chahār Chaman can be regarded as a ‘Mirror for Munshis’ So Chandar Bhan comments not only “on the ideals of Indo-Persian secretarial conduct . . . but also on broader issues like the nature of political leadership, the social value of civility and gentlemanly conduct, on the role of literature and mysticism in public life and the importance of refining the mechanism of Mughal administration in order to better serve the public good”. In the process Chandar Bhan provides examples of the good administrator at work from his own experience in court assemblies, relationships with leading Mughal officers, his involvement in military campaigns and his engagement in diplomatic missions. He demonstrates that successful government was not just about military power “but also a matter of balanced temperament, managerial skill (wizarat), a keen mystical and literary sensibility (maˀrifat), and a deep concern for the public welfare above one's own”.
From assessing administration Chandar Bhan moved to assessing kingship. He locates Mughal kingship in the genealogy of Indian kingship going back to mythic times. The arrival of Muslim rule did not appear to represent any radical break with Hindu cultural memory and ideas about kingship; it was simply a continuation of an Indian tradition of rule. Chandar Bhan follows this with a discussion of the Emperor, his daily routine and the atmosphere at court. Shah Jahan, the Emperor he knew best, he tells us, was busy from “the crack of dawn until the middle of the night”. We see how much this Emperor wished to increase the productivity of the peasantry, how concerned he was with the administration of justice, particularly with humanity, and how he maintained oversight of all aspects of the administration. We are given a picture of a really active administrative culture and one which was the better because the Emperor himself was capable of himself performing all the administrative tasks.
After focussing on the Emperor, Chandar Bhan produces a gazetteer of the empire. He begins with Shah Jahan's great new capital of Shahjahanabad, moves to the earlier centre around Nizamuddin and then produces descriptions of cities and provinces from Bengal and Allahabad through to Balkh and Badakhshan. Kinra notes that the gazetteer contains “some of the most vivid first-hand descriptions we have of the everyday atmosphere of urban public space such as the bazaars, gardens, shrines and grand boulevards like Chandni Chowk”. He suggests that the gazetteer itself may have had the purpose of being a kind of Baedeker guide for those from Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia who flocked to Delhi to enter the service of the richest court of its day.
Kinra now moves to examine Chandar Bhan's personal and private world and the way in which he fashioned himself with his pen. He turns to the third, autobiographical, garden of the Chahār Chaman and his substantial collection of letters. In the process he reminds us that in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indo-Persian world, as in the West, there was a massive growth of letter and life writing, a fact that is not properly understood because “so few of the scores of personalized letter collections and prose miscellanies that were produced in this period have received any critical scrutiny”. He tells us that Chandar Bhan might use several different registers in his writing, comparing him interestingly with his near contemporary senior administrator, Samuel Pepys, and enjoying the fact that the Brahman was much more influential on his immediate posterity than Pepys. Beyond these glimpses of an ‘Indo-Persian modernity’, however construed, Kinra is also concerned to emphasise that these prose works of Chanda Bhan, along with his poetry, reveal his ecumenical approach to religion, drawing heavily on Islamic and Hindu mysticism, weaving the ideas both of Sufism and Vedanta into his writing. One “would actually be hard pressed” he declares, “to find a single passage in any of his surviving works that does not bear evidence to their effect on his personality and worldview”. This fact about this central figure of the seventeenth-century Mughal empire tells us much about the nature of the society in which he moved.
Kinra emphasises strongly the centrality of poetry to Chandar Bhan's world. ‘Poetry’, he declares, “was the language of politics”. This raises the issue of how we should interpret the much-discussed Sabk-i Hindi, or Indian Style, adopted by Chandar Bhan and his contemporaries. Kinra argues that Mughal poets must be seen against the backdrop of the great tradition of Persian poetry from Firdausi to Jami, of which they were powerfully aware. Chandra Bhan and his contemporaries wanted to distinguish themselves from these ancients (mutaqaddimi); they wanted to speak with a new voice, appropriate to their time. “Across the seventeenth-century Persianate world”, he tells us, “speaking the fresh” (tā zā gū ī) emerged as a conscious aesthetic goal. . . .’Sabk-i Hindi has been variously criticised as a dilution of the pure Persian idiom, as a wallowing in an artificial complexity and as a consequence of the impact of the ‘Indian mind and its pleasure in abstraction’. Kindra will have none of this. What Chandra Bhan and his fellow Persian poets were expressing “was an exuberant sense of the novelty of the historical moment, one that cries out for examination as part of a larger conjunction of global early modern literary consciousness”. As good as his word, he suggests that suitable comparators might be contemporary intellectuals in Europe such as the ‘mannerists’ or those engaging in the ‘quarrel between ancients and moderns’. I suspect that we are the beginning of a long conversation on this issue. But Kinra's discussion of Sabk-i Hindi as a serious attempt at innovation, and one that should be seen as a response to the anxieties of the time, makes more sense than much that has been written about it.
Kinra rounds off his study by considering the afterlife of Chandar Bhan's reputation. He notes the late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century tazkirahs (collective biographies) the focus is almost entirely on his relationship with Dara Shikoh and to a lesser extent that with Shah Jahan. There is little or no mention of his long and distinguished career as a Mughal civil servant or his literary contributions. Some writers seem to find it difficult to allow him real worth, suggesting that his achievements were entirely consequence of Dara Shikoh's patronage. He then shows how he became subject to the requirements of colonial and nationalist historiography, in the case of the latter being seen both as a proto-nationalist figure who in a verse exchange was cheeky to Shah Jahan and as a champion of Hindu-Muslim rapprochement and composite culture. Nor was he able to escape the politics of language, being made into a progenitor of modern Urdu and the writer of the first Urdu ghazal. Indeed, he has suffered frequently from the outrages of politically-driven historiography. Amongst these outrages one of the greatest has been the dismissal, until very recently, of his considerable literary output, and that of his class, as having little of any value. Kinra has demonstrated how much there is to learn about the Mughal world from the output of just one of its civil servants, although admittedly a most gifted one. Much more literature of this kind remains to be studied.
Two major themes run through this book. The first is Kinra's concern to rescue the Mughal past from the distortions of nationalist/Hindu-Muslim historiography. At times one feels he might be trying too hard, but the task is so important that the obtrusiveness of the effort can be overlooked. A second, and connected, theme is the general importance of historiography. Everyone is coming from somewhere and Kinra is an astute and alert guide through the traps set by past angles of vision.
The outcome is a wonderful book which takes the reader into the culture of Mughal government in the seventeenth century as never before. As we go we are given new insights into subjects such as Sabk-i Hindi and the possible meaning of the proliferation of tazkirahs in the eighteenth century, alongside thought-provoking speculation about the ‘modernity’ of the Indo-Persian world and its comparators in the West. This is a book which no one who is teaching or studying Mughal India can be without.
