I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

Lamb Cutlets and tomato sauce mmmmm – now that is a fond memory that is safe to have now – but perhaps in the future , thoughts of eating meat will be frowned upon.

Lamb Cutlet – minced lamb ( or meat of various origins, perhaps even road kill ) fried with any spices to hand – ccoled and then wrapped in mashed potatoes and then bread crumbs and then fired again. I can taste it right now – mmmm. I have tried to replicate this here in the UK but it just has never tasted as good as I remember as a child when travelling around the Dak houses of UP and HP.

Justforfun

“Unless you were tortured and murdered by him. Then he was a bad ruler. Call it the sub-altern view of Indian history. Sikh history provides many grass roots report of life around that time under the Mughal rule.”

Life was by no means perfect. In terms of religious toleration however, the fact was that under Jahangir you could be of another religion and worship freely, or even hold high office. How many other contemporary states could boast that? England? France? Spain? the Ottoman Empire?

And Jahangir was a good ruler

Unless you were tortured and murdered by him. Then he was a bad ruler. Call it the sub-altern view of Indian history. Sikh history provides many grass roots report of life around that time under the Mughal rule.

As long as Wolves are above West Brom I’m staying sane.

“I understand you’re explaining it Rumbold, but it doesnt need explaining, we all know why that prick did what he did.”

Yup- as a punishment for rebelling. And Jahangir was a good ruler.

“You are William Dalrymple, aren’t you?”

There is more than one person in the world who thinks fondly of aspects of the Mughal Empire, though if you think that I am an award-winning writer who am I to argue with you.

Perhaps supporting Wolves has finally pushed you over the edge, though as my team could be bottom of the Conference National by tomorrow I cannot really make fun of Wanderers.

You are William Dalrymple, aren’t you?

“Oh dear Rumbold, major load of bollocks being talked by you here. Yeah, “treason”, torture and behead them if they refuse to convert to Islam, the treasonous bastards.”,/blockquote>

Sorry, where is the evidence that people were tortured for refusing to convert to Islam in Jahangir’s India? As I said before, I am not defending the contemporary attitude to rebellion, just explaining it.

someone (natty) asked on the other thread about the following:

So how did the European Jews ie. white skinned and blue/green eyes become Jewish? Did they convert? They are not from the family of the prophets or are they?
well, it is an assumption of course that nobody in the family of the prophets had blue or green eyes, or whatever, but the usual explanation given is, often, “cossacks”. actually it’s a bit more complex than that – because judaism has at least since first Temple times been used to quite a lot of admixture both voluntary and involuntary, “alexander” is another good word to drop, as are “khazars”, “hellenisation”, “christians”, “kashmiris” and so on. mrs bananabrain certainly doesn’t look like me, whereas i wouldn’t be out of place anywhere in the mediterranean, middle east, central asia or northern india/pakistan/afghanistan.

as for the african jews, some of them converted, but so long ago that it barely makes any odds – suffice it to say that all the kohanim (priestly families) from wherever they are in the world share certain male-line genes, or so i am given to understand.

and lol @ j0nz for once for spotting the “damn, i had to save it to notepad” issue!

b’shalom

bananabrain

There’s an interesting book about the treatment of the Irish in the USA called How the Irish Became White. If you’ve ever had an application form for anything in the UK you’ll notice that there’s “White British”/”White” and “White Irish”.

Just an aside, from G. E. M. Ste de Croix’s Christian Persecution, Martyrdom and Orthodoxy:

One of the essays is a classic paper from 1963 on Christian persecution under the Romans. From it, I learned this:

It was not so much the positive beliefs and practices of the Christians which aroused pagan hostility, but above all the negative element in their religion: their total refusal to worship any god but their own. … I shall call this exclusiveness, for convenience, by the name the Greeks gave to it, ‘atheism’ (ἀθεότης); characteristically, the Latin writers refer to the same phenomenon by more concrete expressions having no philosophical overtones, such as “deos non colere” (not paying cult to the gods): the word atheus first appears in Latin in Christian writers of the early fourth century, Arnobius and Lactantius …

… [U]ntil the advent of Christianity no one ever had any reason for refusing to take part in the ceremonies which others observed—except of course the Jews, and they were a special case, a unique exception … [because] their religious rites were ancestral, and very ancient. … The gods would forgive the inexplicable monotheism of the Jews, who were, so to speak, licensed atheists … Matters were very different with the Christians, who had ex hypothesi abandoned their ancestral religions … The Christians asserted openly either that the pagan gods did not exist at all or that they were malevolent demons. Not only did they themselves refuse to take part in pagan religious rites: they would not even recognize that others ought to do so. As a result … the mass of pagans were naturally apprehensive that the gods would vent their wrath at this dishonour not upon the Christians alone but on the whole community; and when disasters did occur they were only too likely to fasten the blame on to the Christians. …. Tertullian sums it all up in a brilliant and famous sentence in the Apologeticus: the pagans, he says, “suppose that the Christians are the cause of every public disaster, every misfortune that happens to the people. If the Tiber overflows or the Nile doesn’t, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or pestilence, at once the cry goes up, “The Christians to the lion.”

The essential point I want to make is that this superstitious feeling on the part of the pagans was due above all to the Christians’ “atheism,” their refusal to acknowledge the gods and give them their due by paying them cult.

… We must not confuse the kind of atheism charged against the Christians with philosophical skepticism … The vital difference was, of course, that the philosophers, whatever they might believe, and even write down for circulation among educated folk, would have been perfectly willing to perform any cult act required of them—and that was what mattered.

“Are you aware of the historical accounts from that time describing the extent to which one of Jahangir’s wives, Noorjahan, was the de facto ruler of the Mughal Empire?”

She certainly had a great deal of influence, but I would describe them more as joint-de facto rulers, with even a bit of de jure thrown in (Jahangir ordered the minting of coins with both of them on it; an unprecedented honour).

“The accounts of what occurred are not from the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the contents of this text, but it is not an account of the Gurus’ lives (or historical events from that time), just their teachings.”

I am not really familiar with the Guru Granth Sahib, but I shall go and read it. What I meant was that there were other Sikh records of Guru Arjan. If you have access to JSTOR, or the actual journal, read:

‘Martyrdom and the Execution of Guru Arjan in Early Sikh Sources’ by Louis E. Fenech
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 121, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 2001), pp. 20-31.

“Jahangir’s own memoirs state clearly that he ordered the execution of the Guru.”

I never denied that. What I was arguing was that Jahangir never ordered Guru Arjan to be tortured so that the Guru would make changes to the Sikh holy book.

“Furthermore, the first paragraph in the quote also makes it clear that Jahangir’s own actions were motivated to a considerable extent by religious factors.”

I read it in the opposite way. Jahangir was unhappy that Muslims were converting to Sikhism, but did nothing about it, and only moved against Guru Arjan when the latter rebelled.

“Any popular grassroots movement which potentially encourages a lack of loyalty or submission to Mughal rule — and especially which involves Muslims falling under the influence of non-Muslim religious figures — would be a threat.”

Why did Jahangir let the sixth Guru go then? I think that you are overestimating Sikhism’s impact on early 17th century Mughal India. Looking at contemporary accounts, there is very little mention of it. If it had been a threat, more people would have picked up on it.

“I think there are some fundamental teachings of Sikhism which you may be unaware of. Firstly, the Sikh Gurus did not believe they were under the “overlordship” of the Mughals or anyone else “

I never questioned what the Sikhs taught or thought. My point was that if you rose against your prince you were considered a rebel, and so could be executed without bother. I was explaining the situation, not justifying it.

“You may be in danger of over-romanticising the Mughals, even though reading about their lives and exploits is indeed very interesting when we have the luxury of our detached 21st-century perspective (speaking as someone who has an interest in the era myself).”

Compared to the Ottoman Empire or Christian Europe, Jahangir’s empire was a beacon of tolerance. That is not me romanticising it.

“As I said in one of my previous messages, I think you need to read up thoroughly on the lives of the Gurus. Regardless of whether you believe they were literally divinely inspired, you need to gain an understanding of the ideals they stood for and exactly what motivated their actions.”

I shall Jai. And just let me add that this debate, with you and Sukhi, has been an incredibly enjoyable and civilised one.

Jahangir, though fond of drinking, was actually incredibly hard-working, often spending most of his day dealing with administration and issues of justice. This is not apparent just from his own memoirs, but also in accounts from foreign visitors, who had no reason to praise Jahangir in such a way.

Are you aware of the historical accounts from that time describing the extent to which one of Jahangir’s wives, Noorjahan, was the de facto ruler of the Mughal Empire ?

Well, torture is wrong but I am always slightly sceptical about the validity of information coming from any religion’s sources. Is it possible to get an accurate picture of Jesus from the Bible, or Muhammad from the Qur’an?

The accounts of what occurred are not from the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the contents of this text, but it is not an account of the Gurus’ lives (or historical events from that time), just their teachings.

I am not saying that Guru Arjan was not tortured, just that Jahangir ordering the torture of a person who believed something different and wrote it down never happened before or after this incident, which makes me a bit wary. I suspect that Murtaza Khan overstepped the mark and ignored his orders.

Jahangir’s own memoirs state clearly that he ordered the execution of the Guru, as confirmed by the extract posted by Sukhi. Furthermore, the first paragraph in the quote also makes it clear that Jahangir’s own actions were motivated to a considerable extent by religious factors. You may wish to consider that he was subsequently just looking for a pretext to get rid of the Guru. With the possible exception of Akbar, Mughal Emperors were not exactly thrilled about the prospect of Muslims in particular falling under the influence of non-Muslim religious figures (especially those they regarded as Hindus), regardless of how much they indulged their own interests in comparative theology out of intellectual curiosity.

There is no evidence to suggest that Jahangir considered Guru Arjan a threat to the regime.

Any popular grassroots movement which potentially encourages a lack of loyalty or submission to Mughal rule — and especially which involves Muslims falling under the influence of non-Muslim religious figures — would be a threat. Of course this was exactly what happened, especially during Guru Gobind Singh’s time.

It is not an attempt to justify it, it is an explanation of how rulers viewed rebellion, and those who helped rebels.

Arjan was not stupid- he knew the message he was sending out by openly helping Khusrau.

You may wish to consider exactly why Guru Arjan apparently gave his support to the “rebel” Khusrau.

They could either ‘accept’ Mughal overlordship, or rebel.

I think there are some fundamental teachings of Sikhism which you may be unaware of. Firstly, the Sikh Gurus did not believe they were under the “overlordship” of the Mughals or anyone else — as far as they were concerned, the “True Emperor” was God Himself, and they were acting under divine inspiration. Any “earthly ruler” was therefore regarded as being under a moral obligation to God and humanity as a whole to rule fairly and humanely. They were not supposed to abuse that power or indeed seek it for self-aggrandisement. Anyone who violated this “covenant” would have been regarded by the Gurus as having defaulted on their obligations and, if they did not change their ways, to have forfeited their right to rule.

Secondly, according to Sikhism, absolutely everyone is intrinsically equal in the eyes of God, regardless of whether you are a “commoner” or an Emperor. Nobody is actually subordinate to anyone else. There are a number of ramifications here which you may wish to consider.

Too often people look back and apply 21st century values onto historical periods, such as the right to reject one’s prince. At the time of Jahangir (1605-1627), there are almost no theorists arguing this (the exceptions being a few Calvinist thinkers and the odd ultra-Catholic).

From a theoretical point of view, that was the situation at the time. You would have found few writers who wrote in support of rebellion.

The “right to reject one’s prince” isn’t just a “21st century value”, it’s a basic concept the Sikh Gurus also taught, as I explained earlier.

I’ve already stated that “theorists” are irrelevant to the lives and teachings of the Gurus, so I’m not sure why you keep referring to them. The Gurus were not engaging in idle metaphysical speculation or detached academic philosophising, and in fact actively warned of the dangers of excessively indulging in such overintellectualised activities.

It is the absolute power which fascinates, and the extent to which he could indulge both his good and evil desires.

I’m sure it is all very fascinating for you, but you may also wish to bear in mind that we’re talking about real historical events which negatively affected huge numbers of people (including the ancestors of many commenters on this blog and indeed many British Asians as a whole) and, in this case in particular, involved revered and respected religious figures. You may be in danger of over-romanticising the Mughals, even though reading about their lives and exploits is indeed very interesting when we have the luxury of our detached 21st-century perspective (speaking as someone who has an interest in the era myself).

As I said in one of my previous messages, I think you need to read up thoroughly on the lives of the Gurus. Regardless of whether you believe they were literally divinely inspired, you need to gain an understanding of the ideals they stood for and exactly what motivated their actions.

“I find Jahangir’s account fascinating not only as historical record, but as an insight into the capriciousness, arrogance and cruelty of a ruler with absolute power, and the ease with which a man in such a position can exercise that power.”

Agreed, but he was also capable of great compassion and fine justice. It is the absolute power which fascinates, and the extent to which he could indulge both his good and evil desires.

“Speaking in terms of somebody not accepting the rule of a Mughal tyrant as having an option to emigrate is amusing.”

From a theoretical point of view, that was the situation at the time. You would have found few writers who wrote in support of rebellion.

And, thanks for reprinting the passage; it shows that Jahangir only moved against Guru Arjan when the latter aided the rebellion. Arjan was not stupid- he knew the message he was sending out by openly helping Khusrau.

As for the concept of the Mughals being the “legitimate rulers”, bear in mind exactly how they came to power (starting with Babur)

Indeed Jai. One of the earliest Sikh writings is Babar Vaani, written by Guru Nanak, where he reflects on the depredations, misery and violence wrought by the first Mughal Babar, whose invasion of India took place in Guru Nanak’s era. This ground level view and perspective was therefore innate in Sikh consciousness from the very beginning of the religion.

Sunny and Jai have answered your questions succinctly.

I find Jahangir’s account fascinating not only as historical record, but as an insight into the capriciousness, arrogance and cruelty of a ruler with absolute power, and the ease with which a man in such a position can exercise that power. Speaking in terms of somebody not accepting the rule of a Mughal tyrant as having an option to emigrate is amusing. The language of tyrants, despots and the intolerant is rife with assumptions and designations of the ‘treasonous’ — this is the syntax of power and intolerance.

++++

From Tuzuk-i-Jahagiri — the memoirs of Jahangir

In Gobindwal, which is on the river Biyãh (Beas), there was a Hindu named Arjun, in the garments of sainthood and sanctity, so much so that he had captured many of the simple-hearted of the Hindus, and even of the ignorant and foolish followers of Islam, by his ways and manners, and they had loudly sounded the drum of his holiness. They called him Guru, and from all sides stupid people crowded to worship and manifest complete faith in him. For three or four generations (of spiritual successors) they had kept this shop warm. Many times it occurred to me to put a stop to this vain affair or to bring him into the assembly of the people of Islam.

At last when Khusrau passed along this road this insignificant fellow proposed to wait upon him. Khusrau happened to halt at the place where he was, and he came out and did homage to him. He behaved to Khusrau in certain special ways, and made on his forehead a finger-mark in saffron, which the Indians (Hinduwän) call qashqa, (Tilak) and is considered propitious. When this came to my ears and I clearly understood his folly, I ordered them to produce him and handed over his houses, dwelling-places, and children to Murtaza Khan, and having confiscated his property commanded that he should be put to death.”

“But the Gurus were not required to accept them as such.”

They could either ‘accept’ Mughal overlordship, or rebel.

Too often people look back and apply 21st century values onto historical periods, such as the right to reject one’s prince. At the time of Jahangir (1605-1627), there are almost no theorists arguing this (the exceptions being a few Calvinist thinkers and the odd ultra-Catholic).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchomachs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_League_%28French%29

Most thinkers, including Luther and Calvin, said that, at best, subjects who did not want to live under a certain prince’s rule could emigrate.

“Jahangir was a person of lax morals, pleasure loving and fond of drinking. He left much of the administration duties of running his kingdom to others. Because of his lax morals Jahangir set out to please the orthodox Muslim clergy which he knew did not approve of his actions, or the tolerant attitude that his father Akbar had previously displayed to other religions.”

Jahangir, though fond of drinking, was actually incredibly hard-working, often spending most of his day dealing with administration and issues of justice. This is not apparent just from his own memoirs, but also in accounts from foreign visitors, who had no reason to praise Jahangir in such a way.

Jahangir was not particularly bothered about pleasing the orthodox ulema too much, as his power did not rest on a religious foundation, but a secular one. As long as his name was read out in Friday prayers (to show he was the legitimate ruler), that was good enough. Just look at the utter indifference to the Turkish claims that the Ottoman Sultan was the Caliph, or the use of the old Mongol ‘son of sun’ routine.

Jahangir believed himself to be a good Muslim, but was intelligent enough to recognise that the Mughal power structure rested on the support of the Shias, Rajputs and other none Sunnis. Later Mughals failed to realise this, which was one of the reasons why the empire began to break up.

”Murtaza Khan immediately jailed the Guru, and ordered the Guru Arjan Dev to be tortured to death if he did not agree to remove the alleged derogatory references in the Holy Granth.”

Well, torture is wrong but I am always slightly sceptical about the validity of information coming from any religion’s sources. Is it possible to get an accurate picture of Jesus from the Bible, or Muhammad from the Qur’an? I am not saying that Guru Arjan was not tortured, just that Jahangir ordering the torture of a person who believed something different and wrote it down never happened before or after this incident, which makes me a bit wary. I suspect that Murtaza Khan overstepped the mark and ignored his orders.

Jahangir’s memoirs were not sanitised (though there are obviously events missing), so it makes no sense why he would invent the treason claim when he could have had Guru Arjan killed anyway.

”Like any paramount power which rules by force (and certainly not with the consent of the subjugated people), Jahangir would have viewed anyone and anything which could potentially undermine him as a threat to his continuing authority and, on a larger scale, as a threat to the established Mughal political, military and theological infrastructure.”

There is no evidence to suggest that Jahangir considered Guru Arjan a threat to the regime. The only actual threats during his reign came from his son Khusrau’s rebellion, and later his son Khurram’s (Shah Jahan) rebellion. The Sikhs were never a threat in that way.

”The fact that this kind of imperialist mentality was an accepted and widespread way of ruling in that age globally (including, increasingly, in Europe) does not justify it, certainly not from a Sikh perspective, because a) wars of aggression and conquest and b) forcible rule over others are both violations of some of the most fundamental Sikh principles for ideal human conduct.”

It is not an attempt to justify it, it is an explanation of how rulers viewed rebellion, and those who helped rebels.