Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Abstract

The aim of Rajeev Kinra’s Writing Self, Writing Empire is to address the gap in knowledge pertaining to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal world by “examining the life, career, and cultural milieu of a prominent court insider, the Mughal poet and state secretary (munshī) Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. ca. 1666–70)” (2). For Kinra, the Brahmin-born Chandar Bhan is the participant-observer par excellence of the world of Mughal politics and culture. Chandar Bhan’s professional affiliations, personal experiences, literary tastes, mystical sensibilities, and social interactions—all of which can be found in his work Chahār Chaman (The four gardens)—serve as gateway to exploring the Indo-Persian ecumene during early modern times.The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter is not simply an exposition on a major element of Chandar Bhan Brahman’s life and legacy—as expressed in Chahār Chaman—but a remarkable demonstration of how a close examination of this participant-observer of Mughal civic life exposes different historiographical problems plaguing the study of the Mughals and early modern South Asia. In exploring the details of Chandar Bhan’s life and the eclectic features of his writing, whether in terms of style or topoi, Kinra offers a road map for new methodological opportunities and the pursuit of underexamined topics in Mughal history.Following a brief introduction, chapter 1 presents the general historiography of the Mughal empire and a primer on the personality of Chandar Bhan. The chapter begins by problematizing the narrative that depicts Mughal history as one “culminating” with the rule of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and rendering everything after his reign as the inexorable descent into an intellectual, cultural, and political abyss. Akbar, in this typical retelling, as many popular depictions and museum exhibitions can attest, is presented as the epitome of Muslim pluralism, civility, and religious enlightenment. Kinra righty questions this image of Akbar as the “good” Muslim for the way it creates a false dichotomy with the reigns of subsequent Mughal rulers and simply assumes “that values like pluralism and civility went into a steady state of decline after Akbar’s death in 1605” (17). Chandar Bhan—whose career spanned across the reigns of Akbar’s three successors, Jahangir (r. 1605–28), Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707)—serves as the perfect foil for Kinra: his biographical details, professional advancement, intimate relationships, and, of course, literary output, will testify to the cultural dynamism of the post-Akbar Mughal realm. The chapter provides a preview of topics to come by introducing Chandar Bhan’s position at the court, the general role of the Mughal secretary, social networks inside and outside the court, and the how letter-writing and poetry can express notions of literary civility and serve important didactic purposes. Instructors of undergraduate courses in South Asian and Islamic history should find this chapter particularly useful in how it carefully unravels some myths about the Mughals and Islamic societies by focusing on a lesser-known historical persona.The subject of chapter 2 is how Chandar Bhan understood the profession of munshī and conceptualized Mughal civility in the first chaman of his text. Chandar Bhan notes how the elite munshī must not only be well versed in Persian, scribal techniques, letter-writing, and accounting, but also get his hands dirty by leaving the confines of an office and heading out into the field. In addition to these more programmatic duties, the ideal civil servant should also strive to cultivate “a refined habitus of mystical disinterestedness amid the bustle of worldly activity,” which Kinra denotes as “mystical civility” (62). As Chandar Bhan makes clear in a series of anecdotes and selections about the wazīr Afzal Khan Shirazi, who was also the munshī’s beloved patron, it is just as incumbent, perhaps more so, upon powerful and high-ranking wazīrs to develop this crucial character trait of the “Mughal gentlemen” as it is for the dutiful secretary. In presenting such information to the reader about what constitutes a good civil servant and civic ethos, Kinra notes how Chahār Chaman served an important didactic purpose and can be connected to akhlāq (ethics) literature. But for Kinra to make this claim—and unearth the way Chandar Bhan was directing his readers to recognize and develop important character traits—one needs to engage with layers of flowery prose and the ornate language of praise. Kinra artfully decodes such language to arrive at the kernel of an author’s observations. Kinra’s approach is a reminder that one must often work to understand the norms and conventions of what appears to today’s reader as an encumbering style—and recognize its intimate relationship with a text’s meaning—rather than simply discard it as mere rhetorical artifice. This should be a lesson of equal value for those studying the texts of functionaries in the early modern era as it is for those wishing to better understand the observations of functionaries at White Hall or Foggy Bottom today, no less beholden to their own particular writing style.Chapter 3 provides a close reading of the second chaman, as well as one of Chandar Bhan’s lesser-known works, to answer the question of how a Brahman secretary of the Mughals came to view the nature and legitimacy of Muslim rule in India. With vivid descriptions of Shah Jahan’s daily routine, his imperial court, urban public culture, and a general presentation of Mughal splendor, Chandar Bhan gives a thorough accounting of a Mughal way of life and governance that sought to maintain a cosmopolitan ethos and project a worldly perspective. Contrary to the belief that the end of Akbar’s reign spelled the death knell of cosmopolitanism, Kinra is able show—much like in chapter 1—that it was indeed alive and well during the reign of his successors. In Chandar Bhan’s lively depictions of a Mughal courtly life and culture constantly attuned to the global commercial aspects and eclectic religious activities of its sovereign realm, one has a sort of advertisement of Mughal cosmopolitan sensibilities. In this way, Kinra argues, Chandar Bhan was not only using this portion of the text to convey the wonderful nature of Mughal rule—perhaps too much so as the ever-eager imperial employee—but doing so for the benefit of a cosmopolitan readership across the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds. But more than just an advertisement for the Mughal way of life, Kinra understands this section of Chahār Chaman as also fulfilling an important tactical function: it was “a clear invitation to traders, poets, mystics, and other talented people across the Persianate world to travel to India and settle there—so they could, in turn, add to the existing dynamism of the empire’s commercial and religio-cultural life” (158).Chapter 4 addresses the third and fourth chamans to demonstrate how the autobiographical sections of the text articulate both the author’s own vision of self and that of the ethical Mughal subject. In letters to his sons, brothers, and colleagues, Chandar Bhan offers esoteric reflections and references to Sufi spirituality that provide personal insight into his vision of a virtuous and humble self in an ephemeral, material world. They also provide a snapshot into his own personal relationships. But for Kinra, these letters should be read for more than the mere philosophical musings or autobiographical details they provide. Instead, they serve as yet another reminder that Chahār Chaman was intended to serve a larger didactic purpose for its readers. Kinra explains: “It is precisely in his repeated calls to abnegate the self that Chandar Bhan winds up, ironically enough, giving us powerful insight . . . into his wider views on the nature of Mughal service . . . recognizing the dreamlike, illusory nature of the empirical reality was not an excuse to withdraw entirely, as the hermit does, but rather an ethical demand placed on the Mughal gentleman—to avoid greed, to work hard, to cultivate one’s moral self, and to make the most of life” (199). Kinra reaches such a conclusion by choosing to read the autobiographical sections of Chahār Chaman as more than a place to mine facts or his letters as merely tiring examples of overwrought and flowery prose. In the latter case especially, Kinra convincingly argues that the often-neglected genre of Persian inshāʾ (epistolography) can provide deep insight into early modern notions of self, social intimacy, and community interaction. Students and scholars of South Asia would do well to take note of this chapter in how giving Persian inshāʾ its fair shake and carefully reading letters between intimates can open up exciting research possibilities.Chandar Bhan’s poetry is the focus of chapter 5. While other chapters presented examples of Chandar Bhan’s verse, most often to demonstrate how the secretary employed poetry for a variety of purposes in different public and private contexts, the focus of this chapter is to understand his poetry in connection to the greater aesthetic and literary trends of the day. Chandar Bhan’s poetry was representative of a contemporary poetic style of the transregional Persianate world that sought to enliven classical themes and tropes by invoking ingenuity and freshness (tāzagī). Practitioners of this “fresh style” (tāza-gūʾī), which included some of the most renowned poets of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Indo-Persian world, developed innovative poetry by redeploying old themes of the Persianate literary tradition in new and elegant ways or by combining several classical themes to create new and “fresh” themes altogether. It was a style at once groundbreaking for the way it created new and imaginative poetic meanings, and conventional for the way it continued to echo with traces and resonances of classical uses of language, prosody, and rhymes. But as Kinra points out, as he has done in other previous writings, this innovative style of poetry and the socio-intellectual culture that nurtured it has gone underappreciated at best and totally disregarded at worst. Instead of recognizing how this “fresh” style reflected a dynamic and intellectualized literary scene, it has been relegated in historiography as the “Indian Style” (sabk-i Hindī), a complicated and retrograde poetic style that purportedly “ruined” Persian poetry and requires little serious engagement. The denigration of the tāza-gūʾī style in such a way, Kinra notes, has contributed to “the era’s entire literary culture be[ing] virtually banished from modern Indo-Persian literary historiography” and has distracted modern scholarship “from the actual social, cultural, and historical dynamics that animated Indo-Persian literati of the early modern period” (204–5). Kinra’s polemical engagement with the notion of sabk-i Hindī continues to generate scholarly debates in the field of Persian literature about the validity of the category. Nonetheless, in problematizing the “Indian Style” paradigm, providing a genealogy of the “fresh” style, and offering examples of the style itself, Kinra demystifies and normalizes the era’s dominant literary trend. The chapter offers one of the best primers to date on the tāza-gūʾī style. It should find a receptive audience in scholars of South Asia Studies, Persian literature, and comparative literature.Chapter 6 turns its attention to how Chandar Bhan came to be remembered through his affiliation with Dara Shukoh (d. 1659), the ill-fated son of Emperor Shah Jahan, who lost the battle of succession to his brother Aurangzeb (d. 1707). Kinra recounts how a “peculiar, though largely fanciful, memory of Chandar Bhan’s relationship with Dara Shukoh came into being, and its crucial significance as a key building block in the larger modern historiography of Mughal imperial decline” (241). In essence, because historiography has created a “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” dichotomy between the “tolerant and intellectually curious” Dara Shukoh on the one hand, and the “austere and intolerant” Aurangzeb on the other, the Hindu secretary Chandar Bhan has necessarily come to be seen as the natural affiliate of the former. For who else but a religiously curious “good” Muslim like Dara would tolerate and co-mingle with a member of the Hindu faith? Kinra dismantles such a reading of Chandar Bhan’s association with Dara Shukoh through a careful assessment of how different tadhkiras (biographical anthologies) and other sources (mis)represented the event that then drew the Hindu secretary and Muslim prince together. While the historiography surrounding the relationship is incorrect—”Dara was clearly not the only Muslim with whom a prominent Hindu administrator and intellectual could find camaraderie” (254)—that does not mean that all subsequent anthologists remembered Chandar Bhan’s life in a similar fashion. Kinra shows how anthologists employ different methodologies, utilize sources differently, and harbor their own set of biases when crafting tadhkiras, which in turn can lead to divergent depictions of a figure like Chandar Bhan. Kinra presents the tadhkira genre as a dynamic textual tradition with its own set of internal norms that requires more careful consideration, an argument that resonates with his earlier calls for scholars to more fruitfully engage with letter-writing (chapter 4r) and poetry (chapter 5) from this period. Like those earlier chapters, students and scholars of the Persianate world are treated to how a careful reading of often-neglected sources can yield new approaches for research. Indeed, the last several years have witnessed a major growth in studies using tadhkiras of Persian poets to address a wide-range of topics in social, cultural, and literary history.At book’s end, one may be left wondering whether there is some element of Mughal political and cultural life that Chandar Bhan’s legacy cannot explain, some enlightened literary or mystical sensibility that his work does not represent, or some historiographical barrier that he is not well disposed to shatter. In Chandar Bhan’s experiences and writing does one really have such a key to explain so many cultural, political, and social features of the Indo-Persian world, as Kinra seems to imply? If so, then that makes his experiences rather unique and begs the question as to whether he was experiencing elements of the Indo-Persian world uniquely too? Put differently, do we have in Chandar Bhan’s writing’s a reflection of the world in which he (like others) lived or a world that was unique to his life alone? The answer to this question need not exclude one possibility over the other: just because Chandar Bhan was uniquely positioned to make observations about the Mughal world does not mean his observations necessarily were unique to his own lived world and experiences alone. Yet the question still lingers: Was Chandar Bhan more of a prototypical Mughal functionary or an outlier? A similar question may be posed with regard to his Chahār Chaman: was the text more concerned with presenting the ideal Mughal self and subject or concerned with describing behaviors as they were actually observed? Kinra is not always clear where the line of demarcation lies between these two sets of counterposed possibilities and how they may differentially impact our general understanding of Mughal cultural and political life. But then again, it may be that Chandar Bhan was not so sure himself, as his opus continually blurs the lines between self and empire, and idealism and reality. In this case, Chandar Bhan could not have hoped for a more adept and careful reader than Kinra to navigate and explore the multiple worlds of the early modern Mughal universe in which he lived and chronicled. For that matter, neither could we.