In 1674, Mahamat Prannath (1618–1694 CE) and his followers sought to find an audience with the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1619–1707) in the imperial capital of Delhi. Mahamat Prannath had recently split from other disciples of his sampradaya of Guru Devchandra over the question of succession and the audience with the Mughal badshâh was meant to resolve this difference, as was customary in such cases, in those times. Leaving Gujarat must have been hard for Prannath. He was born in Jamnagar and he had spent his adulthood living and travelling in Junagadh, Ahmadabad, Diu, Thatta, Muscat, Aden.
The regions of Sind, Gujarat and Aden shared networks of traders, merchants, mendicants and scholars living in port-cities and capitals. The religious orders present—Nizari Ismailis, Catholics, Jains, Vaishnavite and Krishanavite sants, Sufis or Sunnis—were just as diverse as political power in this intimate circuit with the Mughal, the Portuguese, the Gujarati and Sindhi Rajas.
This world of Mahamat Prannath is laid out in concise yet sensitive detail in Brendan LaRocque’s essay ‘Mahamat Prannath and the Pranami Movement: Hinduism and Islam in a Seventeenth-Century Mercantile Sect’ contained in Religious Interactions in Mughal India edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui (2014). Reading this excellent, timely and important volume is an odd sensation when, in India there are the ‘re-conversions’ (ghar-wapsi) and the ‘re-naming’ (of Aurangzeb Road in Delhi); in Pakistan, there are the targeted killings of Christians and Shi’a. Our contemporatry understanding of religious interactions is dominated by exquisitely drawn boundaries over rituals, sensibilities and texts with exclusive claims to truth. Faruqui and Dalmia have produced a compendium of the most current and sophisticated scholarship from the US, UK and EU that, in broad terms, helps us articulate what we do not remember and, hence, cannot understand.
The essays are divided under the themes ‘Of Intersections’ and ‘Of Proximity and Distance’. The opening essay by Eva Orthman locates the efforts of Humâyûn as the individual who creates a Mughal ecumene where the yogic and sufic texts offer equal opportunities to imagine a divinely sanctioned, astrally visible polity. There are two critcal essays engaging with the high politics of the Mughal court—focusing on the intellectual practices of the Mughal Prince Dara Shikoh. Munis Faruqui examines Dara Shukoh’s Sirr-i Akbar (1657) and the influences from Vedantic philosophy to argue for a gnostic reading of the Qur’an that would reveal both the perfect polity and (sub rosa) the perfect human to lead that polity. Supriya Gandhi looks at the translations of Yogavâsi hasâra under Akbar and Dara and the role of the dialogues of Dara Shikoh with Bâbâ La’l. Taken together, both essays detail an intellectually and theologically intimate world where discussions of faith, power and the self occupied the time of a significant number of elite in the seventeenth century.
Christopher Minkowski broadens the lens to show the presence of learned brahmins working within the Mughal bureaucracies and intellectual spaces. Minkowski details members of jyoti as families from Benares who worked for Jahangir, Shah Jahan and even Aurangzeb and produced both poetic and scientific works. Ramya Sreenivasan focuses on Rajasthan and examines conversion narratives in Persian, Brajbhasha, and Marwari to show how efforts for elite mobility and alliances were negotiated differently in the different sources. The essays of Francesca Orsini and Stefano Pellò focus on poetic traditions in Lucknow and Awadh in text and in performances intermixing Persian and Sanskritic literary cultures. Monica Horstmann and Heidi Pauwels individually focus on bhakti poets, Sundardâs and Kabîr, and their infusion of sant and sufi ontologies.
Shandip Saha takes hagiographic literature (vârtâ) of the Vallabha sampradâya to detail the depiction of Muslims—where Akbar’s favour to the non-Muslims could be explained via his previous birth as a brahmin ‘who unwittingly swallowed a piece of cow hair while drinking milk’ causing him to be ‘reborn as a righteous but still mleccha emperor’ (p. 335). The development and self-memory of the Pushti Marg (Vallabha sampradâya) is also the subject of the essay by Vasudha Dalmia—with the rare explication of how gender is a critical category of difference in the Vallabha responses to other Krishna devotees Chaitanya and Mira bai (p. 278–282). Each of the essays, in effect, brim with intertwined agencies, textual interpellations, ritual and blood interminglings. They cover vast swathes of geography and explicate the Mughal state in ways that remain occluded in contemporary scholarship.
Prannath or his followers were having a difficult time finding the Emperor. The streets of Delhi were filled with hundreds of thousands of protestors who had gathered to plead the case against a tax on non-Muslims by Aurangzeb. Prannath had had a revelation on the way to Delhi, after reading an esoteric Persian sufi commentary on the Qur’an Tafsir-i Hashmi. Prannath realized that the messages of Krishna, of Devchandra, of Muhammad, of Imam Mahdi were all congruent and the Vedas, the Vedantas and the Qur’an could all be used to ‘reveal the essence of love veiled by external rituals’. This essence, if properly understood by the Mughal Emperor, would allow him to set an equitable and just policy for all of his subjects. Prannath or his followers did not manage to have an audience with the Emperor and they soon left Delhi for Udaipur, Ujjain, Burhanpur, and ended up in Bundelkhand where Chhatrasal (1649–1731) listened to Prannath and became his disciple. Prannath composed a number of texts—bhakti poetry, commentaries—dedicating his Sananadh to Hindustan’s Muslims. As LaRoque writes, ‘Prannath’s religious claims were able to account for observable, worldly differences, yet at the same time could deny that these differences existed in a more meaningful, ultimate reality’—one could transcend ‘the boundaries of religious difference’ through justice (p. 375). His disicples, and the order grew to great strength, and continues to this day, were able to draw upon these differences as sources of strength and Prannath is now remembered as one of the last great sants. His contemporary iconography has him sitting on a throne with his hand raised, five fingers up, palm exposed—akin to the Ismaili panja.
Yet to recognize this connected past we need LaRoque’s essay; and similarly the other essays in this volume which explicate the shared history of making, and recognizing difference. This is the critical role of scholarship for our particular imperilled times (reading this volume will acquaint anyone that perils are not unique to us). The work of historians, philologists, literary and religious scholars represented in this volume is a contribution not only to our scholarly body but to our civic body. My regret is that this volume is expensive, does not contain any maps, basic glossary or chronology, and does not have a unified transliteration schema which would help it reach a wide and diverse audience.
Manan Ahmed Asif teaches in the Department of History, Columbia University, USA.