OPED | Tuesday, August 11, 2009 | Email | Print | 
The month we lost Dara
Ashok Malik
Dara Shikoh was killed on an August night 350 years ago, and with him died hopes of a lasting Hindu-Muslim compact. It was the partition before Partition. Today Dara lies forgotten in his own country, reduced to a fringe figure by politicians too embarrassed to acknowledge him
August is India’s month of myth, memory and anniversary. The three are not unrelated. The past is often not what was but what we make of it, or want to make of it. In this country — as elsewhere — historical remembrance is an inherently political act. It so often becomes a reflection of current affairs or contemporary political innovation.
This month is packed with such landmarks. Some, like August 15 or August 9 — Quit India Day — come every year. Some — like book releases and revisionist accounts of the founder of Pakistan — are perhaps custom-created for August 2009. Discussants tend to see the past only as it is expedient. Anniversaries are not cherished moments. Rather, they are reduced to symbolism and point scoring.
An example would help. Earlier this month, the Times of India carried a bizarre report that confidently predicted there would no official celebrations in early 2011 of the 600th anniversary of Ahmedabad’s founding. It made this assertion a good year-and-a-half in advance because “Now that the BJP is in power both in Ahmedabad and Gujarat, it is not enthused by the idea of recognising and celebrating the birth of the city under Muslim rule.”
Was this report motivated by delicate concern for a milestone in the evolution of Indian urban planning? Alternatively, was somebody resting a gun on history’s shoulder to fire a bullet at the Narendra Modi Government? In India, if a historical anniversary has not been politicised, somebody will rush to make amends.
On the other hand, there are some dates that are subjected to only collective amnesia. They fall in the blind spot of the prevailing consensus. This month has one such: The 350th anniversary of the murder of Dara Shikoh. As per the Julian calendar, it took place on August 30, 1659. If one were to follow the modern Gregorian calendar, the date would move 10 days to September 9, but that wouldn’t remedy its neglect.
Why was Dara Shikoh’s departure so significant? It signalled the partition before Partition. His death ended old India’s final chance to bequeath succeeding generations a post-denominational legacy. It extinguished hopes of a genuine and lasting Hindu-Muslim compact.
Dara was Shah Jahan’s first son, a compelling, charismatic character. The French traveller Francois Bernier wrote of him as “courteous in conversation, quick at repartee, polite and extremely liberal”. He was the Barack Obama of his age — the cerebrally-gifted member of a minority who positioned himself beyond faction.
The Mughal dynasty produced warriors and intellectually curious men such as Akbar. Dara Shikoh was its lone scholar, a PhD in a family of school drop-outs. He studied the Quran, as well as the holy books of the Jews and Christians. He was an authority on the Upanishads, translating them from Sanskrit to Persian in his Sirr-i-Akbar. He was a devotee of Mian Mir, the Sufi spiritualist who laid the foundation of Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Harmandir Sahib.
Dara’s Majma-al-Bahrain (Mingling of the Oceans) was an interrogation of the philosophies of Hinduism and Islam and sought to synthesise these. It could have been the inspirational text of a new India.
This was not to be. A few months before his death, Dara was defeated by his brother, Aurangzeb. Victors write history. Aurangzeb painted Dara as a villain. As Abraham Eraly recounts in The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of the Great Mughals, Aurangzeb’s official chronicler wrote of Dara: “He was constantly in the society of Brahmins, yogis and sanyasis, and he used to regard these worthless teachers of delusions as learned.”
Dara’s theological inquiry and his commissioning of a Persian translation of the Vedas were disparaged as “perverted opinions”. The consequences of Dara becoming emperor were assessed as catastrophic: “The foundations of faith would be in danger and the precepts of Islam would be changed for the rant of infidelity and Judaism.”
A mix of treachery and ill-luck lost Dara his crucial battle against Aurangzeb, despite a combined army of Muslims and Rajputs fighting desperately for a prince they saw as the moderate face of Indian Islam. When eventually captured, Dara was tried for apostasy and sentenced to death.
Aurangzeb, the brother Dara often dismissed as a “namaazi”, a zealot only obsessed with the outward appearances of religion, took charge of the Mughal Empire. Midway through his reign he imposed the jizya tax on Hindus, over a century after Akbar had abolished it. Dara was physically dead; now his spirit had been crushed too.
For a certain type of historian, it is fashionable to present Dara as a bookish weakling whose ascension to the Peacock Throne would have enfeebled the empire and thrown it into anarchy. This is not necessarily correct. His father trained Dara as an administrator, rarely sending him on military expeditions but realising perhaps that his reasonableness and learning were crucial to the governance of Hindustan.
The one campaign Dara did lead was an attempt to recapture Kandahar from the Persians in 1653. It failed and this is cited as evidence of Dara’s poor skills as a general. It is often forgotten that in the previous year Aurangzeb had done no better. He had also been humiliated in Kandahar.
The military setbacks suggested a broader message, one Dara instinctively understood. The Mughals had become an Indian people, far from their Central Asian roots. Their future, their culture, their very religiosity lay here, in the soil of India, not in some external homeland of the mind.
Unfortunately, we remember Dara today as only a fringe character. He features in popular culture — most recently in Mohsin Hamid’s novel Moth Smoke, an allegorical tale of Pakistan that names its tragic hero Dara and packages him as a sort of South Asian Jay Gatsby.
In India itself, the more visible socio-religious Muslim leadership has no time for Dara. ‘Secular’ politics rejects him as an embarrassment. Others do no better. When the NDA was in office, there was a proposal to name a park in Old Delhi after Dara Shikoh. BJP functionaries from Chandni Chowk protested it would be unpopular with Muslim voters and the idea was dropped.
It speaks of the times that Indian politics has place for those who stress Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s early role as “an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” but scarcely remembers Dara, the true embodiment of that synthesis. This August 30, spare a melancholic thought for that noble prince, and for the India that might have been.
-- malikashok@gmail.com
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