a slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century hindustan_indrani chatterjee

http://ier.sagepub.com/Review

Indian Economic & Social History

http://ier.sagepub.com/content/37/1/53.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/001946460003700103 2000 37: 53Indian Economic Social History Review

Indrani ChatterjeeA slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century Hindustan

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Indian Economic & Social History ReviewAdditional services and information for

http://ier.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://ier.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

What is This?

- Mar 1, 2000Version of Record >>

at SUB Goettingen on March 13, 2014ier.sagepub.comDownloaded from at SUB Goettingen on March 13, 2014ier.sagepub.comDownloaded from

A slaves quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century Hindustan

Indrani ChatterjeeMaulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank my colleague, Mr Sabir Hasan, who collaborated with me inreading and translating the Persian manuscripts. My interpretation of the slaves narrative owesas much to him, as it does to the discussions with Shamsur Rehman Faruqi and Saiyid AkhtarHussain Kazmi, and with Professors Muzaffar Alam, Anisuzzaman, Barun De, Gautam Bhadra,Sunil Kumar, Sumit Guha and Joseph Miller. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of ProfessorsUjjvala Rajyadhaksha, Sunil Kumar and Paul Lovejoy in procuring certain unpublished essays aswell as those from journals published overseas.

Historians of the late eighteenth century or of the Mughal Panjab have often con-sulted the manuscript/transcript of Kitab-i-Qissa-i Tahmas Miskin, written byan ex-slave, for its authors participant witness description of the political af-fairs of the time and region. In this manuscript, the needs of Turko-Persian

1 All unattributed folio references in my text belong to manuscript no. 174, in the Jadunath SarkarCollection, National Library, Calcutta. This is a copy of the British Museum Mss. no. 1918, whichwas gifted to Jadunath Sarkar by the Habibganj Library in 1932. Another manuscript copy, under thename of Tahm&amacr;sn&amacr;ma in the Abdus Salam Collection at Aligarh University, Mss. no. 135, has re-mained outside this survey due to unforeseen circumstances. An edited version which collates boththe Aligarh and London manuscripts is Muhammad Asiam, ed., Tahm&amacr;s N&amacr;m&amacr;h by Tahm&amacr;s BegKh&amacr;n, Lahore, University of Punjab, 1986. All unattributed page numbers in my work are to theEnglish translation: P. Setu Madhava Rao, abridged and tr., Tahmas Nama: The Autobiography of aSlave, Delhi, 1967, which, while editing out key passages delineating the authors purpose and innerworld, is closer to the original than Sarkars translation. A Bengali translation by LutfunnesaHabibullah, Ek Moghol Kritod&amacr;ser &Amacr;tmak&amacr;hin&imacr;, Dhaka, 1982, has followed Pagdis abridged Englishtranslation. Wherever previous translations have been inadequate for my purpose, I have used thosedone jointly by Sabir Hasan and myself, and have provided the folio numbers of the manuscript.

2 See Hari Ram Gupta, Adina Beg Khan: The Last Mughal Viceroy of the Panjab, Lahore, 1943,pp. 19-23 and passim; idem, Studies in Later Mughal History of the Panjab, 1707-1793, Lahore,1944, pp. 109-56; Ganda Singh, Ahmad Shah Durrani: Father of Modern Afghanistan, Bombay,1959, pp. 93-142 and passim; J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab: The New Cambridge History ofIndia, Vol. II(3), Cambridge, 1994, pp. 87-91.

at SUB Goettingen on March 13, 2014ier.sagepub.comDownloaded from

54

aesthetics3-allusions and quotes from Sadi, Rumi and Hafiz and literary formslike metaphor and pun-as well as the remembering of the self as the protagonistof the tale are resolved, first by adopting a takhallus (a device common to poets)and by simultaneously speaking of the narrator-self as a humble and lowly thirdperson (Miskin). This then aligns the text simultaneously with the Turko-Persianliterary tradition, as well as with a historiographical one.&dquo; There is a narrative ofevents, of wars and skirmishes between the Mughal forces and the Sikhs, theAfghans, the Marathas and the Jats, on a grand landscape lined with poetry. Yet,as far as I am aware, the threads of this grand fabric have never been unpicked fora historical study of slave-consciousness in northern India, nor has the text itselfbeen incorporated into literary studies of the autobiographical self.How should we explain this oversight? As a mere accident? For the time being

let us leave alone the interconnected complex of issues such as the histories ofPersian and English literature in the subcontinent, the different and changing con-ventions of historical and literary selfhood, as well as the later exclusion of theself as the object of history writing in India. In addition to the demands made

3 For a summary of such canons, see E.G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, first edition,1924; reprint New Delhi, 1997, Vols I-IV, esp. Vol. II, pp. 19-83; and Shafii Kadkani, PersianLiterature (Belles Lettres) from the Time of Jami to the Present Day, in George Morrison, ed., His-tory of Persian Literature from the Beginning of the Islamic Period to the Present Day, Leiden-Koln,1981, pp. 135-206. For a study of such canons in the development of early Mughal writing, seeStephen F. Dale, The Poetry and Autobiography of the Babur-nama, Journal of Asian Studies(hereafter JAS), Vol. 55(3), 1996, pp. 635-64; and for the opposite argument of the de-naturing ofboth Ottoman-Turkish speech and Indo-Persian literature by such canons, see Victor Kieman, Per-sian Poetry and Its Cosmopolitan Audience, in Christopher Shackle, ed., Urdu and Muslim SouthAsia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell, Delhi, 1991, pp. 9-18. For a comparative development inTurkish literature, see Cemal Kafadar, Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in SeventeenthCentury Istanbul and First-Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature, Studia Islamica, Vol. 69, 1989,pp. 121-50. For a later period, see David Lelyveld, Eloquence and Authority in Urdu: Poetry, Ora-tory, and Film, in Katherine P. Ewing, ed., Shari at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, Delhi,1988, pp. 98-113.

4 In addition to footnote 3, for the outlines of the historiographical tradition, see Peter Hardy,Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical Writing, London, 1960; ZahiruddinMalik, Persian Historiography in India During the 18th Century, and Jagadish Narayan SarkarPersonal History of Some Medieval Historians and their Writings, in Mohibbul Hasan, ed., Histori-ans of Medieval India, Meerut, 1968, pp. 142-55, 166-97 respectively; also Kumkum Chatterjee,History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-CenturyEastern India, Modern Asian Studies (hereafter MAS), Vol. 32(4), 1998, pp. 913-48; and Sudipta Sen,Imperial Orders of the Past: The Semantics of History and Time in the Medieval Indo-Persianate Cultureof North India in Daud Ali, ed., Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, New Delhi, 1999,pp. 231-57.

5 This refers to the historiographical discussion around the individual in Persian and Arabic litera-ture. One group represented by G.E. von Grunebaum, argues that Islam prohibits self-adulation andvanity and thus retards the articulation of individual personality in literature, while another group ofscholars, represented by Marshall Hodgson, Rosenthal and others, argues that Muslim preoccupationwith personalities is evidenced by the flourishing of biographies and attests to an effort to understand


55

upon the student by the literary depth and forms of a language, the shrinking of aPersian-reading intelligentsia in post-colonial India has proved to be fairly criti-cal. For entirely historical reasons, generations bom after Independence have beenrendered dependent upon English and vernacular translations done by an earliergeneration of scholars. Hence many of those bom after Independence have inherited,along with the translations, the mimetic and nationalistic readings of that earliergeneration of scholar-translators. The analysis of intellectual trends thatSubrahmanyam and Alam have recommended recently for the construction ofMughal history must surely now extend to a history and politics of such readingsand translations.6 Hence I propose, in the first section of this essay, to analysesome of the more influential translations of the Kitab-i-Qissa-i Tahrnas Miskin. Inthe subsequent sections, I propose to retrieve the self-in-history outlined by anex-slave in the eighteenth century.

Translators and Historians

Jadunath Sarkar, the first translator of the manuscript, began his translation withfolio 44-right in the middle of Ahmad Shah Durranis early attacks upon theMughal forces in Panjab, and the assumption of the subahdari of Lahore by aparticular governor. This sets the tone for the passages that were to be translatedand used as eyewitness evidence for Sarkars history of the decline of the MughalEmpire. From the opening paragraph of the translation, it is clear that Sarkar had aspecific agenda for this manuscript. This was to provide empirical information onthe various battles between Mughals and Afghans and between Mughals and Sikhs,as well as on alliances between Marathas and Mughals, and on various kinds ofmilitary technologies and the formation of armies. Clearly setting great store byMiskin eyewitness account, Sarkar once demanded from another historian ofthe Marathas:

the real power in human accomplishments. For a survey, see R. Sandler, The Changing Concept ofthe Individual, in R.M. Savory, ed., Introduction to Islamic Civilisation, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 137-45;and Julie S. Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, Princeton, 1987, pp. 131-79. For Persianliterature in eighteenth-century India, it is noteworthy that the voluminous growth of biography (tazkira)has been represented in the famous autobiography of Muhammad Shaikh Ali Hazin, Tazkir&amacr;t-alAhw&amacr;l, Sarfaraz Khattak, ed., Lahore, 1944 and M.C. Master, tr., T&amacr;r&imacr;kh-i Ahhw&amacr;l, Bombay, 1911, butto a much lesser extent in Mirs, for which see C.M. Naim, ed., tr. and annotated, Zikr-i Mir: TheAutobiography of the Eighieenth Century Mughal Poet: Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir (1723-1810),New Delhi, 1999.

6 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, The Mughal State 1526-1750, New Delhi,1998, introduction.

7 Sir Jadunath Sarkar, tr. and abridged, Memoirs of Tahmasp Khan by Miskin, Sitamau, 1937. Ithank the librarian, M.K. Kulkarni, of Deccan College, Pune, for helping me procure a copy of thisextremely rare work.


56

Where is Peshawar mentioned as occupied by a Maratha garrison? Not cer-

tainly in any Modi letter. If in a Persian akhbarat, I ought to examine it beforeaccepting this flat contradiction of the eye-witness Miskins statement.

Despite the great store that Sarkar put by Miskins eyewitness narrative, hehad an ambivalent and contradictory attitude to the manuscript and to its author.All his published references to Miskin describe the author as page, never asI slave. It is hard to explain the historians squeamishness about calling a slave aslave, especially since the particular passages that provided the basis for an entirechapter of Sarkars five-volume history-that on Panjab between 1753 and 1757-referred to the time in Miskins life when he was a slave. However, this evasion/suppression of the narrators status went along with the almost total appropriationof the narrative voice when it came to specific personalities. This is notably thecase with the representation of Mughlani Begam, the woman who acted briefly asregent of Mughal Panjab, and then went on to be the Afghan viceroy for a while.Sarkars misogynistic representation of Mughlani Begam, and the explanation ofher arrest by Ghazi al-Din Imad al-Mulk, the Vazir of the Mughal Empire wentthus:

She was, after all, a Muslim woman, but used to do the work of a provincial

governor in the manner of males, before the public gaze. This part of a viragothat she played, quite apart from the stories about her loss of character, was feltas a personal disgrace by Imad, because she was his mothers brothers wifeand also his prospective mother-in-law. His family honour demanded that shebe removed from Lahore, where she was enjoying unbridled liberty of action .... 10

This was an almost verbatim appropriation of Miskins representation of MughlaniBegam-except that Miskins misogyny was rooted in his own reconstruction ofthe sexual and material manipulation of a slave by his mistress. Of this relation-ship Sarkar said nothing. So the subtle revenge that the freedman-author extractedthrough remembering, in minute detail, the ignominy and humiliation of the erst-while mistress, was written out of Sarkars history. Having appropriated the slave-authors voice for representing the virago, as well as his explanation for a Vazirs s

8 Sarkar to Sardesai, 11 August 1943, in Hari Ram Gupta, ed., Life and Letters of Sir JadunathSarkar, Panjab University, 1958, pp. 237-38; for his belief in the empirical value of Miskins manu-script, see also Jadunath Sarkar Musalman-Yuger Bharater Aitihasikgan, Sahitya Parisat Patrika,Vol. 46(2), 1346 B.S./1939 C.E., pp. 73-78.

9 See Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Vol. II, 1754-1771, first published, 1934;fourth edition, New Delhi, 1991, p. 31. All subsequent references are to the fourth edition. GandaSingh, more sceptical of the narrators reliability, also referred to him as page in Singh, Ahmad ShahDurrani, p. 136, footnote 1.

10 Sarkar, Mughal Empire, Vol. II, pp. 34-35. Ganda Singh reiterates this representation of MughlaniBegam by referring to Miskins manuscript in Ahmad Shah Durrani, p. 141.


57

political actions, Sarkar then dismissed from history those segments of thenarrative in which Miskin only tells us of Mughlani Begams activities and ofhis own sufferings.&dquo;

In Sarkars scheme of The Corrupt and Oppressive State, there may have beenonly collectives (like nations);2 the slave, or ex-slave, the individual and his heroictale of rectitude in the face of sufferings formed no part of History. While theoriginal manuscript was replete with references to the tensions in the relationshipswithin the governors household,&dquo; relationships between slaves, servants and non-slaves, structures of learning, and the religious aspirations of slaves, Sarkars track-ing of a narrowly circumscribed politics in Misklns narrative meant a fairlyruthless omission of everything except wars and factional conflicts-the supposedfacts of eighteenth-century North India. In this, it may be surmised, Sarkar wasmerely replicating what Devji has called the condescension of legalists towardsthe domestic realm of the za ij (weak), 14 a condescension which conditioned manysecular projects of history writing as well. Miskln autobiographical writing neededto be read precisely for the desire of a singular za if to cross multiple boundaries,and, as he himself insisted, to achieve immortality by inscribing a private selfonto written records, and hence into public gratitude and memory (folio 351).

In addition, as the verses of the munjt explain, the autobiography is meant to beread as a revelation of the signs of God (folio 4). Hence, in the prose-autobiography,the timeless truth of a particular Quranic prohibition is underlined by attributingthe sins of Pride, or of Greed, to particular historical persons, upon whomRetribution, either in the shape of Abdalis invasion, or another enemy, is visited.Together, these transform the narration of memory into a laying down ofparables, in itself an act of courage by an ex-slave. The very organisation of themanuscript bespeaks this resistant writing back of an invisible being into his-tory, and of the experience of alienation and indigence into serious moral instruc-tion. Thus, chapters alternate between the story of the authors personal life andthose military and political events which occurred in North India. Both kinds of

11 Sarkar, Mughal Empire, Vol. II, pp. 48-49 (footnote) explaining the neglect of the manuscriptfor writing the history of Afghan invasions from 1759 to 1761. However, Sarkars misogyny led himto supplement Miskins evidence from other sources to darken his depiction of Mughlani Begam(ibid., p. 53)

12 Barun De, Problems of the Study of Indian History: With Particular Reference to Interpreta-tions of the 18th Century, Occasional Paper no. 116, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1989,pp. 29-37.

13 For the longevity of an error of reading, one can refer to the commonest one regarding the son ofMuin al-Mulk. Both P. Setu Madhava Rao, Tahmas Nama, p. 18, and Ganda Singh, Ahmad ShahDurrani, p. 42, attributed a son to Mughlani Begam, whereas the manuscript Qissa-i Tahmas Miskinclearly attributes two daughters to one wife, Mughlani Begam, and a son and a [missing word:daughter?] from a woman in the mahal of the Begam in Lahore in folio 81-82.

14 Faisal F. Devji, Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Womens Reform1857-1900, in Zoya Hasan, ed., Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State, New Delhi,1994, p. 26.


58

chapters are then tied together in the deliberate literary style required of the personwith adab.1s Some, like those on the revolt of a trusted lieutenant of a Mughalgovernor after his death (folio 102), or one describing the behaviour of some mem-bers of the entourage towards their mistress (folio 190), even carry keywords likenamak hareimi (disloyalty) and bi-adabi (incivility) in their captions.Begun during the month of Ramazan (either in 1780 or in 1782),6 with chapters

sometimes coming to a hurried close as the narrator heard the call to eveningprayers, the writing of such a manuscript was located within a larger purificatoryenterprise revolving around the remembering of the Divine in all matters. Thus thesuffering of a lifetime as well as the life of suffering had to be recounted in orderto reveal the steadfastness of the devout souls submission to Gods will, as well asto praise the power of a God who could elevate and transform a particle of dust(the author) into an exalted and distinguished human being. This tale is hencewritten in a mode outside calendar time;&dquo; the manuscript is completely devoid ofdates or seasons. However, Sarkar-and following him, P. Setu Madhava Rao inEnglish and Lutfunnisa Habibullah in Bengali-incorporated a series of dates intothe body of the text(s) translated by them. These dates were often as precise as 6March 1752, and formed the organising boundaries between chapters of the trans-lated texts; the insertions, however, spoke of a very different notion of time andhistory from that of the author.

Despite their great sensitivity to measurable time, historians like Sarkar, Guptaand Singh most often erased the effects of time in their own use of the manu-script. They cited this autobiography for a time (childhood as household slave) inthe authors life which was most remote to the vantage point from which he beganwriting. They also disregarded it generally for the period of his freedman andmature years. In their largely mimetic readings, they thus overlooked the play ofmemory-as-parable in the reconstruction of history. This was due partly to theneglect of culture. While the eighteenth-century narrator had composed his ownverses, and embedded these in the text as signposts of the moral and ethical pathstaken, the twentieth-century translators completely overlooked these literary cues,and concentrated entirely on the prose.

15 For a discussion of adab as a literary genre, a set of rules, and a quality of personality, seeBarbara D. Metcalf, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam,Berkeley, 1984. I suggest that adab comprises the whole system of injunctions, prescriptions andvaluations, a moral repertoire, that enables the techniques of memory and assembling of a self asthe bearer of ethics. The source of my analogy is Nikolas Rose, Assembling the Modern Self, inRoy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London/NewYork, 1997, pp. 224-61.

16 In the munajat, the author writes A.H. 1194 (A.D. 1780) as the date of his composition: however,his narrative ends with the death of Najaf Khan, which occurred in 1782, that is A.H. 1196. It ispossible that the manuscript is made up of two separate fragments, one of which was begun at theearlier date and the other written over nine months in 1782.

17 For the poetic and general connotation of time as fate and time as passing circumstance, and forthe religious and social tension which might have resulted in exorcising time from such narratives,see Franz Rosenthal Sweeter than Hope: Complaint and Hope in Medieval Islam, Leiden,1983, pp.4-17.


59

Ironically, Sarkar had been an undergraduate student and subsequently, a teacherof literature;g his failure to appreciate the intensely ethical purpose as well as theliterariness of the narration sat heavily on his recovery of historical facts. Myfocus is not merely the accuracy or otherwise of Sarkars translation. Other scholarshave analysed his omissions and commissions in the translation of other Persianmanuscripts.9 What concerns me in this essay is the neglect of the working ofadab in historical self-presentation and in the disciplining of memory, as also thesilence of the historians regarding the significance of this manuscript for a re-appraisal of slave-as-alien cultures in Mughal India.

Both the poetry and the prose offered many clues about literary genealogies:one for Miskins own status as a poet, and another for a significant Rekhti poet ofthe early nineteenth century, Saadat Yar Khan Rangin, who was Miskins son,20Misklns own preference for poetry was stated clearly in the untranslated mundjatthus:

man avval _khwastam ahvcil-i khud ra .chit dar sazam ba-tir nazm-i zebachit man didam keh darin daur-i akhirsukhan fahm ast kam bi-fahm aksardigar man ham nachandan andarin fanabure ddram andar sh er guftanazan man kardamash dar nasr taqrir (folio 4)(I had first wished to write my storyIn strings of beautiful verseBut I saw that in these timesComprehension is scarce, incomprehension abounds,Besides, being hardly proficient in the art of poetryI wrote this in prose) .

More significant than the comment on the uncultured audiences for whom hewrites, this verse alone inspired me to search for his poetry and to read it againstthe condescension of the cognoscenti, both of his century and of ours.2 However,

18 Kiran Pawar, Sir Jadunath Sarkar: A Profile in Historiography, New Delhi, 1985, pp. 4-5;Nurul Islam Manjur, Bangalir Itihas Charchar Dhara (Trends in Bengali Historical Writing1901-1950), Dhaka, 1997, pp. 14-15.

19 Abdus Subhan, tr., Tarikh-i Bangala-i Mahabatjangi of Yusuf Ali Khan (An EyeWitness Ac-count ofNawab Alivardi Khan of Bengal and His Times), Calcutta, 1982.

20 Syed Masud Hasan Rizvi, ed., Majalis-i Rangin, Lucknow, 1929, p. 2; Syed Muin-al Haq,Akhbar-i Rangin, Karachi, 1962, pp. 20-21, 75; Muhammad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature,second edition, New Delhi, 1984, p. 197.

21 Diwan-i Miskin, a compilation of approximately 18,630 verses in Persian, whose language,concepts and content are identifiable as authored by Tahmas. A manuscript copy of Diwan-i Miskinis in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, under accession number P.S.C. 921. I am not aware ofany tazkira of the eighteenth or nineteenth century that lists Tahmas Khan Miskin. Evidence of theabsence of Tahmas Khan Miskin from biographies of Persian poets was provided by Muzaffar Alam


60

the prose-autobiography also spells out the effort invested by Tahmas in his owneducation and in the training of his sons. Many issues about the constitution andtransmission of culture in northern India, given the radically different literary stylesof father and son, await further exploration here.22

Comparative Frames

To my mind, the double neglect of adab and of the slave-individual has had aseriously debilitating impact on the historiography of slavery. The possible unique-ness of slave narratives produced within an Islamicate-Mughal milieu could noteven begin to be outlined, leave alone initiating a comparison with Afro-Americanslave narratives. The problem was suggested by the publication of Michael Fishers smarvellous study which attempted to raise the issue of self-identification of a mar-ginal figure like Din Muhammad.23

In terms of chronology, the two authors, Tahmas (or as he refers to himself,Miskin) and Din Muhammad, were contemporaries: Tahmas was bom around1738-40, and Din Muhammad around 1759. While Tahmas adopted the well-established narrative structure of a history, Din Muhammad wrote his autobiographyas a narrative of travel. Unlike Tahmas who was snatched from his brother andmother during a raid by Persian soldiers, Din Muhammad joined the house-hold of his English master, Captain Baker, just as famine was beginning to strikeeastern India in 1769-70 (and desperate families were selling their children). LikeTahmas, Din Muhammad too was very young-11 years old-at the time of thisrelocation. However, unlike Tahmas who spoke clearly of his slave status, per-

(personal note), Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (personal note) and Saiyid Akhtar Hussain Kazmi, whoalso brought to my attention Nabi Hadi, Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature, New Delhi, 1995, pp.356-57. The explanation for this oversight may well lie in the kind of elitism articulated by Mir forwhich see Naim, Zikr-i-Mir, pp. 180-82, or in the greater prestige of Urdu poetry generally, forwhich see Khurshidul Islam and Ralph Russell, Three Mughal Poets: Mir, Sauda, Mir Hasan, Ox-ford, 1969. For the comment characterising Tahmas verse as distressingly verbose and common-place, see W. Ivanow, Concise Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Collectionof the Asiatic Society of Bengal, first published, 1925, reprint Calcutta, 1985, p. 418. A fuller treat-ment of Miskins poetry is under preparation.

22 I have drawn inspiration for posing this question from Tirthankar Roy, Music as Artisan Tradi-tion, Contributions to Indian Sociology (ns), Vol. 32(1), 1998, pp. 21-41; from the ongoing work ofAmlan Dasgupta, Words for Music Perhaps: Reflections on the Khyal Bandish, Paper at the Centrefor Studies in Social Sciences, 18 June 1999; and from Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Constructing aLiterary History, a Canon, and a Theory of Poetry: Ab-e Hayat (1880) by Muhammad Husain Azad(1830-1910), Social Scientist, Vol. 23(10-12), 1995, pp. 70-97.

23 See Michael Fisher, The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759-1851) in India,Ireland, and England, New Delhi, 1996; and also, idem, Representation of India, the English EastIndia Company, and Self by an Eighteenth-Century Indian Emigrant to Britain, MAS, Vol. 32(4),1998, pp. 891-911.


61

haps because he had so successfully re-made himself as a free man, Din Muhammadspoke only elliptically of this crucial, and life-changing, moment.24 Once Bakermoved away from Bankipur (near Patna), the young adolescent never saw hismother or brother again. When Baker resigned from the Companys Bengal army,the cadet-cum-servant followed suit; in 1784, both left India for Cork. So why didDin Muhammad not identify himself as a slave in his own writing?

The answer may well lie in the myths and stereotypes of African slaves in Englishsociety in the eighteenth century, and in Din Muhammads unwillingness to asso-ciate himself with these images.&dquo; Fisher, however, notes that unlike the slave andex-slave narratives published in English at the end of the eighteenth century, theTravels made no explicit reference either to enslavement or to a religious conver-sion to Christianity, the two standard themes in such literature .26 Is it appropriateto measure historical literary forms produced by South Asians with yardstickstaken from the literary history of Afro-American slaves? Can the latter supplycomparative models for reading narratives from slave systems in South Asia?Did slaves have comparable forms for constructing the self and for emancipat-ing it through the written word? The answers would all be in the affirmative,if historians of slavery in eighteenth-century America or Britain had researchedthe local cultures and regions from which slaves were drawn, before constructingand defining the characteristics of the canon of slave narratives. 21 In the light ofpresent work, this canon itself needs to be re-cast in terms of time (eighteenth/nineteenth century) and generation (first/second) as well as in terms of the genderand cultures of (remembered) origin. If one were to do this, then the differencesbetween first-generation slave writing in the Americas or in South Asia will notappear to be so starkly exclusive of each other.

Apparent Oppositions

There were, apparently, significant differences in the conditions of production ofthese differing narratives. Afro-American narratives presumed upon a fairly largeand literate white readership from the eighteenth century itself, and on the existence

24 Fisher, The First Indian Author, pp. 22-24.25 See James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery, Washington, 1994; and Norma

Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780-1830, London, 1996, pp. 38-55.26 Fisher, The First Indian Author, p. 214.27 For recent work on these lines, see Michael A. Gomez, Muslims in Early America, Journal of

Southern History, Vol. 60(4), 1994, pp. 680-710; Sultana Afroz, The Unsung Slave: Islam in Ja-maica, Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 41(3-4), 1995, pp. 30-44; Paul E. Lovejoy, The Muslim Factorin the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Conference on West Africa and the Americas: Repercussions ofthe Slave Trade, Mona, February 1997; and idem, Situating Identities in the African Diaspora: Islamand Slavery in the Americas, Haifa, Israel, January 1998.


62

of a print culture.28 In eighteenth-century South Asia, however, while Persian andUrdu both proliferated as languages for literary production, literacy itself was notwidespread, nor was print a given medium. The transmission and diffusion ofculture in oral forms-poetry, sermons, commentaries or expositions of variouskinds, like songs, to name only one-was unlimited. Miskin lived and wrote withinthis milieu. Din Muhammad originated from this but wrote in another. ManyAmerican slaves could have originated from similar cultures in western, northernand sub-Saharan Africa, and written in a much more literate one, thus condition-ing their choice of forms (like the address to the reader).As a literary genre, the American slave narratives have been identified by clear

chronological and episodic structures moving from capture to freedom, through aseries of exciting or dangerous events. A central element of this pattern, to quoteCostanzo, is the developing characters search for freedom. However, the man-ner in which he seeks it is important to his education as a human being.19 Theslave autobiographers, we are told, were aware of the demeaning stereotypes attachedto their state-deceit, subterfuge and the wearing of masks being some of the mainones. It is equally possible that since a majority of first-generation slaves wereadults, many remembered something of their pre-enslavement cultures and faiths.Thus, the multiple crossings, the looking at ones self through the eyes of othersand the double-consciousness that scholars of these narratives have noticed mayactually be even more complex than established so far.

It is believed that the authors of American slave narratives took great pains toconvince readers of their mental and spiritual talents, their fitness for emancipa-tion and the veracity of the story. Their frequent use of stock literary conven-tions-the dialogue directed to readers, the citing of authorities and testimonies,or what Stepto3 has called the authenticating narrative-is, as a convention,common to many older traditions and cultures as well. For instance, it is found inthe citing of traditions (bad

63

stand assertions of humanity and the denial of thingness, (by evidencing ofmemory as a faculty) in American slave narrative. As Fleischner puts it:

Given that the ideology of racism, extending well beyond the slavery years,argued that African Americans were not fully human, to show that one didsuffer ... from reminiscences (one of Freuds earliest psychoanalytic formu-lations) was to make both a political statement against bigotry and abuse, and apsychological one, against suffering.&dquo;

Memory was venerated, and its techniques and skills taught, in different ways indifferent proto-literate cultures. 31 Perhaps, one may argue, much more attentioncould be paid to the weight of oral, cultural and religious exercises that contri-buted to the making of different kinds of memory in historical situations. Equally,attention to distinct linguistic and literary forms in each locality and region (likethe empirical and descriptive safarndma, and the didactic qissa in Persian)33 willgive a better idea of the articulation of memory, and the subsequent recovery ofbelonging-ness, by slaves and ex-slaves. Both American slave narratives as wellas those of South Asian provenance can eventually share the same frame-for it isscholars, and not the slaves, who have made the canon hermetic.

Learning as Axis of Difference

It is however undeniable that the slave systems that existed in the eighteenth cen-tury on the Atlantic coast and in the Indian subcontinent differed in the use towhich slaves were put. Plantation slaves were denied access to literacy and to thelanguage of high culture in plantocratic societies. On the other hand, at least someslaves in West, Central and South Asia were consciously trained in the highliterary and administrative cultures of their masters.34 In the older slave systems

31 Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Womens Slave Narra-tives, New York, 1996, p. 135.

32 See Francis Robinson, Islam and the Impact of Print in South Asia, in Nigel Crook, ed., TheTransmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics,Delhi, 1996, pp. 62-97.

33 See C.A. Baylys three-fold classification of the ecumene in Empire and Information: Intelli-gence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 21-26,Frances W. Pritchett, Marvelous Encounters: Folk Romance in Urdu and Hindi, New Delhi, 1985,pp. 1-36, 144-78.

34 There are a number of studies which have defined the field for the West and the Central Asiansystems, chief amongst which are Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the IslamicPolity, Cambridge, 1980, M. Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, New York, 1989; H. Inalcik, Stud-ies in Ottoman Social and Economic History, London, 1985; I. Metin Kunt, The Sultans Servants:The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650, New York, 1983; Daniel Pipes,Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System, New Haven, 1981; D. Ayalon, Islam andthe Abode of War: Military Slaves and Islamic Adversaries, London, 1994; and Samuel S. Haas, TheContributions of Slaves To and Their Influence upon the Culture of Early Islam, Ph.D. thesis, Princeton


64

which prevailed in eighteenth-century South and Central Asia, as in the OttomanEmpire, the exclusion from literary or religious training was not necessarily afeature concomitant with being a slave.3s

Indeed, the evidence for Mughal India indicates that a high premium was placedon skilled and trained slaves, both male and female. For example, in a Portugueseaccount of the siege of Hughli by Mughal forces in A.D. 1632, the Portuguesesurrendered 90 of their slaves, but;

The Moor only laughed when he saw their small number. People of that kind,he said, were not so scarce .... Let them send him their black women, theirclever cooks, their dancing girls, their confectioners, their seamstresses, and soon. Such were in special demand.36

Some of these skilled slave-cooks were working in the garden-house of Asaf Khanwhere a banquet was given for Emperor Shahjahan .31 The same was true for otherslaves. Ishwardas mentions Murad Bakhshs eunuch, Khwaja Shahbaz Khan, en-titled Saiyid Rustam Khan, who was despatched with a force of 6,000 horsemen toconquer the well-fortified town of Surat.3s The skills mentioned in the case ofmale slaves and eunuchs are both diplomatic and military. Their association withwarriorhood, as well as with writing and reading, is clear from several accounts.Shahjahan wrote to Aurangzeb from his prison asking for an eunuch to be placedat his disposal for writing his letters.39 Another eunuch, Bakhtawar Khan, associ-ated with the authorship of MirC7t-i Alam, according to the preface of the work,was fond of historical studies.4 A eunuch named Yaqut, titled Mahram Khan,

University, 1942. For the persistence of patterns of enslavement and recruitment to an administrativecorps, despite the abolition of the system of devsirme, see Stanford J. Shaw, History of the OttomanEmpire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge, 1976, Vol. I, p. 236; and Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in theOttoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909, London/New York, 1996. For military slavery in otherregions, see Douglas H. Johnson, Sudanese Military Slavery from the Eighteenth to the TwentiethCentury, in Leonie Archer, ed., Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, London/New York,1988, pp. 142-56; and Recruitment and Entrapment in Private Slave Armies: The Structure of theZaraib in the Southern Sudan, in E. Savage, ed., The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, London, 1992, pp. 163-73. For accounts of adult males enslaved in eigh-teenth-century Central Asia, see The Travels of Filip Yefremov, in P.M. Kemp, tr. and ed., RussianTravellers to India and Persia (1624-1798), Delhi, 1959, pp. 45-93.

35 For studies of Ottoman slave-poets Fevri and Yahya Bey, see Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Blackand Mehmet Kalpakli, Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology, Austin, 1997, pp. 64-65, 100-1, 232-33,241-44.

36 Letter of Father John Cabral in C.E. Luard, tr., Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique, Oxford,1927, Vol. II, Appendix, p. 405 (emphasis in original).

37 Ibid., p. 218.38 Ishwardas Nagar, Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, Tasneem Ahmad, ed. and tr., Delhi, 1978, pp. 8-9.39 S. Moinul Haq, Khafi Khans History of Alamgir, Karachi, 1975, p. 106.40 H.M. Elliott, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, J. Dowson, ed., London, 1877,

Vol. VII, p. 150.


65

held the post of tutor to a son of Aurangzeb, Kam Bakhsh. This tradition appearsto have continued into the eighteenth century as well, both at the imperial court inDelhi (where we read of literate slave-eunuchs like Javed Khan, and somewhatlater, of Najaf Quli Khan and Afrasiyab Khan, the slaves of Najaf Khan Zulfiqar al-Daula)2 as well as in other courts like that of the Ruhela rulers of Katihar 41 theBangash rulers of Farrukhabad, and Awadh,&dquo; and in Haidarabad.Documentary evidence speaks of the learned nature of specific skills, whether

military or literary, or both. That the training imparted to such slaves was rigorous,is evidenced by an eighteenth-century document, in which an official in charge ofthe natakshala of the Peshwas (rulers of western India) complained against theman who was to train the slave-girls in dance. Instead of training them for five toseven ghatikiis in the morning and for the same period in the evening as wasrequired of him, this trainer only did ton-ton for one ghatikii.4s The letter howeverabsolved the tutor for music and literary composition of such dereliction of duty:the girls received their required hours of training in these departments. The exist-ence of skilled slave-poets and slave-composers is again highlighted by a docu-ment of the Kishangarh state. Discussing certain stanzas attributed to Rasik Bihariin the work of the Bhasha poet, Nagari Das, this document states clearly that: TheKavitas and padas bearing the poetic name Rasik Bihari ... are the compositionsof his khavasa pasvdn yan upastri. 146

This kind of training is certainly spoken of by Tahmas: training was particularlysuccessful when it earned encomia from the masters social peers. Therefore,Tahmas recalls that in the household of the Mughal governor at Lahore:

The Nawab ordered that we should spend our time in picking up arts and craftsat the rate of two months for each craft ....

41 Moinul Haq, Khafi Khans History, pp. 432-33.42 Muhammad Umar, Muslim Society in Northern India During the Eighteenth Century, New

Delhi, 1998, p. 533; for the royal eunuchs Javed Khans and Basant Khans patronage of poets, seeIshrat Haque, Glimpses of Mughal Society and CultureA Study Based on Urdu Literature in theSecond Half of the 18th Century, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 24, 38.

43 For Daud Khan, a slave of Shah Alam Khan, who was the grandson of a Qadiriya saint of theBadalzai Afghans, and for the captured lad who succeeded Daud Khan, see Iqbal Husain, The Rise &Decline of the Ruhela Chieftaincies in 18th Century India, Delhi, 1994, pp. 36-39, 41-60. Jos J.L.Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710-1780, Leiden/Oxford, 1999, calls DaudKhan the adopted son of the saint, and only Ali Muhammad Khan is referred to as having been aslave, pp. 116-19.

44 William R. Pinch, Who was Himmat Bahadur? Gosains, Rajputs and the British in Bundelkhand,ca. 1800, Indian Economic and Social History Review (hereafter IESHR), Vol. 35(3), 1998, pp.293-335.

45 Letter of Atmaram Rajaram in G.S. Sardesai, ed., Selections from the Peshwa Daftar (hence-forth SPD), Bombay, 1931, Vol. IV, p. 147. The editorial dating of this letter is 1761. Each ghatika ismade up of 24 minutes, so that a span of 5-7 ghatika is approximately 2-3 hours. I am grateful toSumit Guha for this reference.

46 Pandit Mohanlal Vishnulal Pandia, The Antiquity of Poet Nagari Das and his concubine RasikBihari alias Bani Thani, in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 66(1), 1897, pp. 63-75.


66

One day he was inspecting some drawings and paintings .... He then said tome, You should acquaint yourself with all the arts so that you could pleasepeople in the assembly. (kasab-i kaml kun ke a~i~-i jahal shui, (folio 58).

Since people in the assembly were normally powerful, success in pleasing theassembly heightened the honour of the master or mistress because it displayedthe latters capacity to invest in such education. At the same time, military trainingwent to qualify the household boys for appointments to the governorships suchas those of the Doba, four Mahals, Multan or Kashmir (p. 14), and thus pro-vided for the needs of the masters government.47

Yet even though the slaves training was to serve diverse masterly ambitions,the elderly narrator was emphatic about the slaves own agency in acquiring wis-dom and social graces. Hence Tahmass emphasis turned this acquisition of know-ledge into a conscious act of self-development:

I was undisceming (hichmanddn), illiterate (nakhwandan) and innocent (ndn).... From the conversations of the knowledgeable, and the company of intel-lectuals (sahibdn-i zfan), I could derive good examples ....I stored in my heart the pearls of knowledge gathered from reading books onancient and later histories (kutb-i tawarikh) (folios 8-9).

Though no historian is cited, this learning is skillfully worked into the historyTahmas writes: there are large sections narrating events and processes to which hecould not have been an eyewitness. This includes instances like the events in Tabrizfollowing Nadir Shahs death (folios 17-20), the affairs in Lahore and Delhi afterthe deaths of Zakariya Khan and Emperor Muhammad Shah (folios 39-46), oreven events like the capture of the Afghan commander Samad Khan by the erst-while Mughalfau jdar of Jalandhar, Adina Beg Khan, the Marathas and some Sikhs

47 For this reason, the institution of slavery provided for a continuity of social and administrativetraditions across political boundaries and into the mid-nineteenth century. Examples are those ofLashkar Beklarbegi the slave from Chitral, who served in the Khokand administration till 1841 andwas reputed to have established the dominance of Khokand over Kazakhstan according to T.K.Beisembiev, Farghanas Contacts with India in the 18th and 19th Centuries (According to the KhokandChronicles), Journal of Asian History (hereafter JAH), Vol. 28(2), 1994, p. 126. Vambery remem-bered a Persian slave who had become the commandant of artillery (topchibashi) in the fortress ofKerki in 1863; see Armenius Vambery, Travels in Central Asia being an Account of a Journey fromTeheran across the Turkoman Desert on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian to Khiva, Bokhara andSamarcand Performed in the Year 1863, London, 1864, p. 229. Another such slave dancing-boy ofthe Khojas in Khokand, who rose to the post of fort commander (kilaochi) and eventually estab-lished control over Kashgar as its Guardian Warrior (Ataliq Ghazi) was Yaqub Beg; see Ram Rahul,Central Asia: A Historical Survey, New Delhi, 1996, p. 72. For a number of ghulam bachas sent bythe Shughnani chiefs after the conquest by the Amir of Afghanistan, and put into military school inKabul to form a royal army; see Hafizullah Emadi, The End of Taqiyya: Reaffirming the ReligiousIdentity of Ismailis in Shughnan, BadakhshanPolitical Implications for Afghanistan, Middle EasternStudies, Vol. 34(3), 1998, p. 109.


67

(folios 167-68). It is this sense of learning, of both ethics and history, that theauthor was to invoke again and again as the marker distinguishing his self fromother personalities, both slave and non-slave, around him.

Hence his emphasis right from the opening folios on the reading of the Quran,believed to be the source of all ilm. While an erstwhile master, Muin al-Mulk,4sis remembered approvingly for having insisted on the religious and moral trainingof the slave-boys (folios 50-52 and 57-59), the reading and learning itself is repre-sented as the act that separated the men from the boys:

A tutor (atdliq) was appointed to train us. Many amongst us would miss theirlessons on the plea that the Governor wanted us .... Unlike other children Igenerally kept away from mischief and childish pranks. During seven years Icompleted a considerable portion of the Quran, while the others could noteven finish one para (p. 10).

This, then comprised training in a language (Arabic) and in a skill (memorising),as well as in a manner of conduct and belief characteristic of a large politico-cultural realm.49

Remembered Friends, Parables of Betrayal

This training was, however, also one which simultaneously generated intra-slavedistinction at the same time that it promoted political and cultural assimilation.This commandeered and double-edged training is hinted at thus: We were not tofamiliarise ourselves with Hindustani, only Turkish. No others were to come nearus (sivay zaban-i turki ba-zaban-i hindustdni dshni na shavand va kasi ra nazd-i ishan na guzashtah bashand [folio 5 1 ]). The twin processes of distinction andassimilation are highlighted explicitly in the autobiography, which cites many in-cidents of slaves in the same household turning against each other. The thought ofconstructing a community with other slaves in the new household is rememberedboth as a faint possibility and as an ever-present desire. For instance, though wethree slaves soon grows to a party of sixteen boys (p. 10), treachery from hisfellow-slaves (p. 40) and a continuing vulnerability to the elder eunuch-slaves(pp. 48-49, 67) is the dominant theme of the first half of this text, the period of thenarrators youth.What is distinctive however is the great value placed by the narrator upon male

friendship. Thus, there runs through this memoir an adults lament for the friend-ships of youth and of old age. Consider the response of the adolescent and virginalnarrator to the entreaties and taunts of his young male friends-all slave-boys in

48 Muin al-Mulk, also referred to as Mir Mannu, was the son of Qamaruddin Khan, the Vazir ofEmperor Muhammad Shah, and was appointed as governor of Panjab. He died in 1753.

49 See Francis Robinson, OttomansSafavidsMughals; Shared Knowledge and ConnectiveSystems, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 8(2), 1997, pp. 151-84.


68 /

the same household-to experience the great boon of sensual gratification (bshi)with courtesan-prostitutes:

I replied that these detestable and hateful activities are shameful, and wrong ...yet, since they were intimate friends and sincere companions, not to complywith their wishes appeared ungentlemanly (dur az muravvat). I accompaniedthem (folio 100).

Individual moral sensibility was subordinated to the need to honour the claimsof friends in enacting masculine virility. The author appears to be underlining themoral lesson that it is not as much the acts but the intentions of the individual thatshould be judged. If the intention is pure, no harm (as in the loss of reputationexpressed in the phrase rusvdhi na gasht) can ensue. But such bonds appeared tobe crucial precisely because they had serious political resonances, as in the narratorsreminiscence of Qasim Khan, a young and talented man from Balkh: He said I amalso from your province (vilayet-i shum). Since we were very young, we under-stood his words to be the truth (folio 66). Having made favourable representa-tions on Qasim Khans behalf to their Mughal master, the slave-boys ensured hisappointment to the governorship of Panni. When the master died, some of theslave-boys, including the author, accompanied Qasim Khan, to his post with in-structions to quell the ascendant Sikhs. Having failed in that, as well as in his bidto set up an independent province, Qasim Khan was imprisoned. Again, the inter-vention of the slave-boy T imur (Tahmas, Miskin) ensured a degree of comfort forthe prisoner. When Qasim Khan was eventually released, albeit without any re-sources to make a fresh start, it was Tahmas who advanced him money (without abond) on the grounds that: If he is a man he will not forget it; if he does, I willaccept that I have fulfilled the claims of old friendship (haqq-i shni addsakht[m) .... (folio 157). Anxious masculinity, and the honouring of friend-ship are tied together intricately in the representation of adult male adabiyat inthis narrative. The old friendship appeared to have been reciprocated fully when,as a freedman, Tahmas went in search of employment, and Qasim Khan spoke upfor him as one of my four brothers (in ham barddar-i man ast va myn chaharbardarim), The freedman was employed by Qsim Khan as a jam adar in thetroop he raised and maintained for the imperial army. However, this source ofsuccour soured quickly. Not only did the old friend and new employer not pay arupee towards wages, worse still, he made assiduous enquiries regarding any jewelsand precious metal that the ex-slave might have carried with him from the house-hold of his previous mistress.

This outlines a larger lesson on the burdens of intimacy between a slave/ex-slave and a master/mistress. In this narrative, the treacherousness of male friendsis contraposed to the intimacy reconstructed by the narrator with his master (andafter the masters death, with his widow). This intimacy is necessarily skewed bygender-that between the master and a male slave is intense enough for the latter


69

to dream of the master (p. 56), and to pray at his grave. The intimacy between thewidowed mistress and the male slave is, however, based on a kind of personaltorment and abuse which the narrator cannot describe, except elliptically.

Having described an ordinary working day-attendance on the Mughal Em-peror and the Afghan Vazir in Delhi, then reporting the proceedings in detail to hisown mistress till the third quarter of the night-the narrator then digresses:

On some nights there was no permission to depart from the Begams presence.Instead certain words and expressions would be uttered that were unimagin-able.... But she was considered a mother; not a disrespectful or faithless wordpassed these lips (b a~-i shab td alas sabah ham az J;1uzr-i begam rihai mishudbalke aksar b a~-i sukhnha ke aqal hargiz qab/ na kunad bar zuban miavardan ... hamwdr khudrd bajye madar ushan angashtah J;1arafi bajuz aqidatva fidwiyat bar zuban nivard (folio 159).

To one well-versed in the Qur an, the resonance of this passage with the story ofthe slave Yusuf (Joseph of the Bible) withstanding the seduction of his masterswife, Zulekha, would have been immediate and transparent. The mistresss sexualmanipulation of the slave-youth (which begins with her insistence on his marryinga slave-girl of her entourage) is narrated in the third person; the I is completelyabsent from this passage, while at the same time a benevolent mother is invoked inorder to evade the responsibility of resistance. Though enslavement as an infanthad obviously separated the child from its living mother, a synergistic mixture offantasy and memory of unthreatening femininity was called upon to incorporatethe demanding mistress as well.

Perhaps the attempt to conflate the sexually active adult woman with an asexualone was unbearable. This may explain the absolute silence on affective relationswith women in the text from this point onwards. However, it is much more prob-able that a code of decorum based heavily on the segregation of gender is enacteddeliberately in this silence. Certainly, it is a code that the adult narrator was toremember as a privilege not extended to male slaves like him: for instance, in thenarration of how he resigned from the superintendence of food arrangements as itwas womens labour and hence unbecoming (pp. 48-49), and also in the advicethat he, the slave, gave to his mistress about not letting those with beards andmoustache enter her precincts (p. 53). As in the hinting at rumours of illicit rela-tions between the author and the Begam which make Ghazi al-Din conspire to killthe slave (p. 37), Tahmass narration recounts the costs of the conflict betweenintimacy and moral personality. It explains that the price of the mistresss trust hasto be paid in the inability of male slaves to maintain the segregation of spaces (andtasks); further that it is precisely this trust, and intimacy across segregated rolesand spaces that is fatal for the slave. Hence, in writing of the Mughal Vazirsattack upon the Begam as attempting to right a moral and social infringement,


70

Tahmas Miskin clearly places responsibility for such infringements (of sexual andsocial order) on the Begam, infringements for which slaves like him had paidheavily.The narrator evidently attempts to tread a fine line in this representation of treach-

erous friendships: between the claims of an emotional selfhood (in enacting friend-ship with young men who turn out to be reckless, evil and the embodiment ofignorance or jahiliya) and his historical and social persona as the mistresss erst-while confidante, trusted agent and administrator. The years of youth are repre-sented as a struggle for separation and individuation in the eyes of his powerfulmistress; in contrast to other slaves, the narrator has more understanding than theother boys (p. 34), is more ready to comply with her orders (p. 43), and above all,shows the greatest fidelity. At a time when noble and non-noble alike wavered intheir loyalties, changing sides repeatedly in the fierce warfare in northern India(pp. 12-13, 54-56), the slave-narrator never remembers imitating them. Evenwhen other slaves, like the eunuch Muhabbat Khan or the maidservant who wasreputed to be in love with him, flee from the governors household at Jammu, andthe enraged mistress turns upon the narrator, his loyalty never wavers (pp. 82-83).In the report of the maidservant who was beaten to death by the enraged Begam, aclear hint is offered for why even impoverished and disgraced slaves like Tahmasstay solidly on the side of the mistress, refusing to take employment with the richeunuch accused of harbouring a runaway.

However, Tahmas takes this emphasis on constancy onto a different explana-tory path altogether. It is used to underline heavily the narrators discipline andwill in the discernment of correct behaviour (adab). It is to embody moral characteras the fruit of deliberation by the author, both in youth and adulthood, and it isoffered as legitimation for the authors emancipation from slavery. Having suc-ceeded in bringing away his mistress and her daughter, kept as hostages in thecamp of the Afghan Vazir Jahan Khan, the slave earns the gratitude of his mistressas well as his freedom (p. 70). Yet what does the declaration of his freedmanstatus mean for the narrator? The narrative itself is not structured as a protractedstruggle for emancipation, though instances of soul-murdering abuse are plentiful.There are no effusions of joy, and no celebratory tone that would lead the reader toflesh out the meaning of this emancipation.

Instead, the point of freedom is precisely the moment from which the conflictsof the relationship between mistress and slave begin to surface within the memoir.Till the emancipation, the relationship is structured formally as one of secret andintimate violence. After the emancipation, the violence is both open and acknow-ledged, with the Begam being represented as a person of outer power, which masksher foolishness (nadani), caprice and inner weakness, while the author is revealedto be a poor man, with reserves of immeasurable inner strength and wisdom.The culmination, again a psycho-sexual one, comes when the Begam, enamoured

of another male slave-servant, Shahbaz, marries him, and demands that Miskinoffer homage to her new husband. Miskin did not just refuse. In a narrative modeloaded with irony, the ex-slave represents this episode as yet another genealogical


71

and moral lesson. He reminded his mistress of her distinguished genealogical andaffinal status, which was besmirched by this lowly match. The mistress retaliatedwith an attempt on his life, which was, however, foiled by the intervention of theascetic (ba iragi) warrior-landlord of the village.soTahmas repeatedly underlines the irony of life, both as a slave and as a freed-

man : intimacy with a mistress is a murderous burden. While the ex-slaves burdenis that he must pay for proximity to a mistress with the currency of old friendshipstaken hostage by greed (Qasim Khan), it is also clear that it is in speaking aboutancestry that freedom is finally asserted.

Freedom as Attachments?

Freedom has been interpreted to mean different things in different hemispheresand different kinds of texts.5 Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers have argued that,in African societies, where the dominant social and legal unit was the kin group,the rights over the acquired person were in various ways vested in the acquisitors skin group, so that freedom involved various degrees of belongingness in and tothat or another kin group. 52 Undoubtedly, it is this search for belonging that unitesall the narratives to each other, irrespective of the hemisphere one studies. Thestriking difference, however, lies in the different sets of relationships that are acti-vated as markers of belonging.

In American slave narratives, the notion of belonging is always with a com-munity outside the masters and mistresses household and kinship circles. Thiscommunity, according to historians of slavery in the Americas, is recoverable onlyif we pay sufficient attention to the origins of enslavement within Africa. Onlythen can we recover the ethnic, linguistic and religious communities that slavestried to reconstruct in the face of attempts by masters to erode or marginalise theheterogenous African cultures by endowing their bearers with only a racist iden-tity, that of colour (black).

In the narratives of first-generation slaves in South Asia, like Tahmas Misk-in,the attempt to imagine and belong with a community is equally important. How-ever, the attempt is fraught with tension since the authors memory of his origin isfaint, and his experience of communion in later years is remembered as alternatingbetween opposing group affiliations. Misk-ins text also makes it clear that the

50 Nothing can be specified about the religious persuasion of this figure, though evidence aboutVaishnava akharas in the Panjab in this period abound in B.N. Goswamy and J.S. Grewal, TheMughal and Sikh Rulers and the Vaishnavas of Pindori, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla,1968.

51 For a theoretical overview of the concept, see Franz Rosenthal, The Muslim Concept of Free-dom Prior to the Nineteenth Century, Leiden, 1960, pp. 2-30; and Orlando Patterson, Freedom:Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, 1991.

52 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, African Slavery as an Institution of Marginality, in idem,eds, Slavery in Africa, Madison, 1977, pp. 3-81; also see Igor Kopytoff, The Cultural Context ofAfrican Abolition, in Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds, The End of slavery in Africa, Madi-son, 1988, pp. 485-503.


72

community that is imagined cannot be outside the community of the master, par-ticularly in eighteenth-century northern India, where people from many parts ofCentral and West Asia had settled.The impossibility of belonging to any one discrete and finite community is clear

right from the outset of the autobiography. A specific identity is erased almost assoon as the child is snatched from the arms of its brother. Hence, the assertion ofidentity begins with the statement:

The home of my ancestors is Turkey.53 There is a city known as Bayazid. Eightkos east of that city is the village of Arzat. This village is my birthplace andhome (p. 1).

It very soon fades into: .

... I do not remember what name I had been given. I have also forgotten thenames of my parents.

... some feel that I might have been an Armenian; while according to someI must have been a Karji [Georgian]. Some say that I come from the Kurdstock. Still others say that I must be belonging to the I[U]smalu tribe ....As I was separated from my parents during my childhood, I remember nei-

ther my origin nor my community (p. 1).

Since he had been deprived of the memory of original names, either of kin, clanor qaum, it is pertinent to question whether the specific mention of Bayazid andArzat in the account cited above indicates a subsequently learned origin story.In the eighteenth century, the city of Bayazid was part of a long and fluctuatingfrontier between the Ottoman Sultanate and Safavid Persia. Indeed, as part of thevast province of Azarbaijan, it was claimed for Persia by Nadir Shah once in theperiod 1729-30 and again in 1742-44.54 While political jurisdiction over this re-gion shifted between the two great powers, presumably during Miskins child-hood, its demographic and cultural mosaic was equally complex.55 Alongsidenumerous Tajiks were considerable numbers of Turks and Turkman peoples likethe Qizlbash, Afshar and Qashqais (people who would be clubbed together asTurani in contemporary writing), Afg_hans, Arabs and Georgians (and followers

53 The word in the manuscript is Rum, which had different connotations at different points oftime; see M.T. Houtsma, A.J. Wensinck, H.A.R. Gibb, W. Heffening and E. Levi-Provencal, eds,Encyclopaedia of Islam Leiden/New York, 1987, Vol. 6, pp. 1174-75. P. Setu Madhava Rao hasclearly fixed the meaning according to the later meanings of the word. Similarly, in the absence ofshort vowels in Persian, Rao may have misread another term like Usmalu as Ismalu in the text.

54 Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville, eds, Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. VII:From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 44, 297-313.55 For the homelands of Turkic peoples stretching from border of China in the east to Byzantium

in the west, see Iqtidar Hussain Siddiqi, The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Indo-Persian Sourcesof History and Culture in Central Asia, Islamic Culture, Vol. 68, 1994, pp. 31-46.


73

of the Orthodox Christian Church) who were enrolled in the Persian armies andseveral Armenians (followers of the Gregorian Church). Besides, Nadir Shahspolicy of transporting and relocating specific groups from the north-western frontiersof Persia to the eastern frontiers (referred to in Misk-ins manuscript also [folio38]) further complicated the patterns of growth, fragmentation and reconstitutionendogenous to each group of people.56 Hence the incorruptible Turkish ancestrythat the ex-slave invoked (in the place names) was certainly more complicatedthan the simple assertion that it appears.

Furthermore, this Turkish identity is not imagined as an outright rejection of aPersian social heredity: in such a kaleidoscopic period and region, multiple cul-tural lineages and polyglossia was a distinct possibility, even perhaps a tradition, 57Thus, in Tahmass construction of home, this multiplex genealogy is reflected inthe diversity of cultures summed up in Armenian, Georgian, Kurd, Usmalu Turk,all of which people lived in the region, and moved both within and away from it.

This kind of conflicting engagement with issues of uncertain identity is hardlynew. For historians of slavery, it has been one of the thornier issues around whichdebates about the assimilation-resistance of slaves has been formulated. In thecontext of the North American system, where most slaves moulded themselvesinto being through their relationships with whites, indigenous Americans, and one .another, an important conceptual key has been the notion of a diaspora-the notionof one people bound by filial ties to an original homeland.&dquo; Earl Lewis, in hisanalysis of the African-American historiography of slave-consciousness, arguedthat the tensions between assimilation and separation experienced by slaves, shouldnot be framed within psychological studies of personality, nor within models ofautonomous communities, but instead located within notions of relational andoverlapping diasporas.59 As a historian of the African diaspora in America puts it:

A diaspora ... requires the recognition of a boundary; those on one side areassociated with the homeland, if there is one, and those on the other side, are inthe diaspora. Individuals define themselves in opposition to their, often manyand varied, host societies through the identification with the homeland ... thediaspora ceases to have meaning if the idea of an ancestral home is lost. 60

The idea of the ancestral home is present in Tahmass narrative, even though itsterritorial contours turn out, on closer inspection, to be somewhat hazy. The attempts

56 Avery et al., Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. VII, pp. 508, 514-15, 530.57 From the outset, the Mughals appeared to have practiced polyglossia, for which see Annemarie

Schimmel, Islamic Literatures of India, Weisbaden, 1973, pp. 24-26.58 See for instance, Alusine Jalloh and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds, The African Diaspora, Arlington,

1996.59 Earl Lewis, To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping

Diasporas, American Historical Review, Vol. 100 (3), 1995, pp. 765-87, esp. 773.60 Paul Lovejoy, The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Re-

ligion Under Slavery, unpublished paper, 1997.


74 /

to fix the territoriality of the homeland, as evinced by Arzat and Bayazid, areundone by different sections of verse that Tahmas himself composed and insertedinto the narrative. In one (folio 35), revolving around the destiny (metaphoricallydepicted as a river) that brought him from the Maghrib to the Mashriq, the east isclearly named as Hind, but the meaning of the west turns on a pun on the wordSham (representing both evening and present Syria).

These verses appear, at first glance, as comments on the dystopia of the narrators spresent. In one, early in the narrative, Tahmas compares the homeland and familyof his imagined past with his present:

... kuja an maskan o maulid kuja inkujd an mdar o pidar haqiqi,kujd in wdlid-i wam shaji-qibagardan rishtah ra afgand chan dostburd anja keh harja khatir-i ost6!bagiriyah madar o pidaram cheh joyidkeh farzandam kuja shud kas cheh goyidagarcheh man khusham hdlash cheh bshadbeyadam vaye ahwalash cheh bshadmagar sabrash dahad taskin bahalashkeh razi bar riza gardad k~dlashta ham Miskin sabr ra pesh gardnhamisha bar rizyish bash shadansitye Gildn indn-i rakhsh kun tundazimat bahr-i roz hast khursand (folios 22-23)(There the place of my birth and here this dwellingThere the rightful parents and here a kindly father on loanTying a relationship around my neck, he bears me alongMy parents weep, search, ask for news of their sonEven if I am happy, consider their conditionIf patience has been their consolation,And the will of the Invisible acceptedYou too, 0 Miskin, forever content in that beWait for the day when to Gildn you turn your steed.)

As the mirror image of his own inconsolable longing for home, it is the epitome ofmourning. Yet, the poetry does not seem to reorient its author (or reader) for anactual, physical return. It is a counsel of patience (qabr), of an uncomplaining

61 These two lines of verse circulated in Miskins own text, for instance, in folio 279, referring tothe authors move to Najibabad. It also appears to have been used by Ghalib in his childhood, thoughthe latters biographers attribute this to a classical Persian poet; see Ralph Russell and KhurshidulIslam, Ghalib: Life and Letters, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 24. The translation of the verse isdone jointly by Sabir Hasan and Indrani Chatterjee.


75

acceptance of Gods will-a deeply religious value, according to which complain-ing about ones misfortune would have been equivalent to complaining againstthe Lord.62 At the same time, home is referred to not in terms of place-names(Gilan is, spatially speaking, far-removed from Bayazid), but people.

Far more important to Tahmas diasporic identity, I think, is a sense of affectivegeography: the ancestral home is where he imagines he is loved enough for hisabsence to be mourned. Yet if relationships of affect outline a homeland, theysimultaneously mark the memory of each stop on the road between the myriadunhomely lands. Secular geography and filial-familial metaphors converge as muchas they conflict, through the narrative as well as through the life of the child-captive-tumed-slave. Hence, the captor of the child turns the new loot over to hisbrother, a captain in Nadir Shahs cavalry, who called me his own son (farzand-i khud khwand [folio 22]), renamed him Zakir, sponsored and celebrated his cir-cumcision, and appointed two tutors for him. When this adoptive father was capturedin a civil war after Nadir Shahs death, the child-slave, who appears to have beenfond of his patron and his wife (for whom he uses the term validah-i khud [folio27]), was rescued by an adoptive brother of his erstwhile master and eventuallyhanded over to another Uzbek chieftain, who then gifted him to the Mughal governorof Lahore.

This memoir then helps the historian to deepen Orlando Pattersons character-isation of the slave as the person whose conditionally pardoned life is to be livedin terms of permanent natal alienation, with no socially recognised existence out-side that of the saviour/master.63 Not all such persons were denied claims on, andobligations to, other relations, since an alternative set of kinsmen were availablefrom within different groups of the masters kin. Thus Tahmas notes carefully thata woman among the Mughals who had brought him from viliyet to Hindustanthought of the young slave as her brother, and that he responded by adopting heras a sister (hamshira khwandam). During the detention of his mistress by herpolitical rivals, he stayed with this family: this is the Uzbek sister upon whosecounsel he agrees to espouse the maidservant chosen by his mistress (folio 118),even though his personal wish is to marry outside Hindustan (dar hindustanshdi-i khud na khwaham [folio 117]). Having failed to fulfil his desire as a slave,his narrative suggests that he was more successful as a freedman. For his secondmarriage, he took as wife the daughter of a Kabuli Afghan soldier (during hisservice with Zabita Khan), noting as an attribute of the wife that she was onewhose parents were living. In the affinal network built through the marriages ofhis children during his freedman days, too, he appears to have successfully con-tracted alliances with families hailing from Azarbaijan (p. 132), Badakhshan andSamarqand (p. 151 ), who were living in Hindustan. It is for this reason that he

62 For a similar assertion in quite another context; see Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Diaspora:Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity, in K.A. Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Identities,Chicago, 1995, pp. 305-37.

63 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Harvard, 1982, p. 5.


76/

consolidates the relationship with his adoptive sister by giving his eldest daughterin marriage to her son, his nephew by adoption. Ties that began with capture couldvery well be transmuted into a binding and affective network of kin, especially ifthe freedman was trying to construct his own community within overlappingdiasporas.

Having established these relationships, the history that he proceeded to write is,not surprisingly, acutely responsive to claims to kinship, to metaphors offamiliality,and to real conflicts within these categories of people. For instance, the whole ofthe involvement of the older Mughal governors household with Afghan marchesinto North India before 1761 is represented as a drama in the extended family. Thedramatis personae are the called-son of Abdali, Muin al-Mulk; his widow, calleddaughter by Abdali, is represented as appealing to Abdalis family honour, andasking for Abdali forces because she had been removed forcibly from her positionand capital by her actual son-in-law, Imad al-Mulk. The advisers of the MughalVazir are also represented as having recognised Mughlani Begams claims of kin-ship upon the Afghan chief, and even the conflict between the Vazir Jahan Khan,deputy of T imur Shah, (the son of Ahmad Shah Abdali and the formal governor ofPanjab after Abdalis departure) and Mughln Begam is represented by Miskin asone between siblings.

The predicament of the narrator is that the above-mentioned attempts to con-struct a community, of widening circles of relatedness, are premised upon memo-ries of loss, absence and departure. Psychoanalytic insights tell us that childrenwho have experienced the loss of parental love transfer affective value to objects,which are hoarded not for monetary worth but for a sense of emotional selfhood. Itis also in the precarious, dependent nature of a slaves life that this should be so.This is the only strand in the narrative where Tahmass vulnerabilities slip throughthe persona of the disciplined, austere and high-minded noble required by adab.The adult narrator is fully aware that indifference to worldly wealth is a prerequi-site of the independent personality (revealed by appropriate verses from SadisGulistan), and yet he remembers a fierce desire for accumulation during his child-hood and youth. In the process of acquiring a narrative identity, Tahmas keenlyaccumulates things, remembering each theft, loss and sacrifice of his little hoard.Indeed, he even reports threatening another slave-boy with death and extortingtwo seers (4 lbs) of plundered silver, cash and promissory notes from his victim(p. 44). However, on closer examination, it appears that the items that the narratoremphasises on are objects whose symbolic and sentimental value are greater thantheir pragmatic worth. A bejewelled armlet (bzband) or a pair of pearl ear-ringsare precious because they are customary adornments of children in the imaginedhomeland (dar vildyet-i ma dastr ast keh dar aiydm-i tufuliyat tdviz bar bz odar gosh mf andozand) (folio I 10). Whether pearls and diamonds, kalgi and turra,names and titles, or horses and houses, they are all collected and treasured forbeing rewards for faithful service, but in all cases, as registers of relational warmthand depth. By relating to worldly wealth in this way, the narrator explains his ownsilence on matters that have hitherto been of great importance to empirically-


77-

-

-

-

-

inclined historians of India-like the structural details specific to the collection ofrevenue in thejczgirs of Jammu or Sialkot, under his supervision. Tahmas howeverrecords all the major expenses that were incurred by a father for the weddings ofhis children, even presenting the loans through which these sums were raised asmeasures of trust. Appropriately, it ends with recording the praise of the city forthe expenditure that a noble and forgiving ex-slave incurred in restoring to mate-rial comfort an erstwhile tormentor fallen into destitution, and for the marriage ofthat mistresss granddaughter (folio 350).

Selective Communities

If a jewelled armband is written of as a symbol of culture and of affect simul-taneously, there are other signs invoked by the text of this cultural community.Writing from the vantage point of his later years, Tahmas was to suggest that itwas the Turkish language that was the touchstone of the community. Recalling thechild-slaves first impression of the Mughal governors household as one tingedwith fear and bewilderment (hairat), he remarks on the reassurance provided byspeaking to a Turkish-speaking slave-eunuch. Did language retain for him thesounds of home?The reconstruction of a linguistic identity may have been particularly important

for the attempt of an ex-slave to establish his origins, particularly when he couldnot remember anything else. There were historical contexts for his choice of lan-guage. Cultural self-identification, as other aspects of self-identification, is alsoengaged in a dialogue with identification by others; specific identities can havemeaning only when it is possible to establish both finite boundaries and differ-ence. In his work on the Mughal nobility, Athar Ali has shown how, by the seven-teenth and early eighteenth century, cultural factions of Turanis (originating fromCentral Asia), !ran! (from the Safavid domains), Afghan and Shaikhzada (Indian-bom Musalmans) were clearly identifiable.~ Though direct recruitment of foreign-bom nobles appears to have declined by the early eighteenth century, large numbersof soldiers, generals, Sufis and others continued to pour into Mughal India fromCentral Asia.65 Perhaps, as the opportunities for ennoblement shrank, cultural

64 M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility UnderAurangzeb, Bombay/Delhi, 1966, p. 15; Satish Chandra,Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, I707-1740, New Delhi, second edition, 1972, pp. 242-56.There is a careful disavowal of ethnographic fixity in the discussion of categories like Mughal, Iraniand Turani in W. Irvine, Later Mughals, Jadunath Sarkar, ed., reprint Delhi, 1971, Vol. I, pp. 272-73.The cultural attributes of each may have shifted according to specific political circumstances assuggested by Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, Asian Balance of Power in the Light of Mughal-PersianRivalry in the 16th & 17th Centuries, Calcutta, 1975, pp. 11-13. The possibility of some Iranisbeing Tajiks is argued in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration andEarly Modern State Formation, JAS, Vol. 51(2), 1992, pp. 340-63; and Masashi Haneda, Emigra-tion of Iranian Elites to India during the 16-18th Centuries, Cahiers D Asie Centrale, Nos 3-4,1997, pp. 129-43.

65 T.K. Beisembiev, Farghanas Contacts with India in the 18th and 19th Centuries (According tothe Khokand Chronicles), JAH, Vol. 28(2), 1994, pp. 124-35.


78

differences were enhanced in order to separate, more firmly, groups that wereotherwise indistinguishable in terms of lifestyle or habitus.1 What appear to beconflicts between the Persian-speaking (largely Shii), lranls and the Turkish-speak-ing (mainly Sunni) Turanis may have actually been attempts at refashioning, cre-ating and enacting distinguishing signs, those of cultural difference.

Tahmass text is trapped in the glare of two distinct, and perhaps contradictory,searchlights: one that is trained on him by various (presumably pedigreed) noble-men around him who question him on his origins and his lineage, at the same timethat it tries to negotiate the loss of it. Another is the inner vision of identity that isderived entirely from the Quran. There is some evidence-albeit from a differentsource-that Tahmas may have been uncomfortable with questions of ancestryand identity. In a small book of lessons written for his young sons, there is animaginative reordering of the great sins (gundh-i kabira). The sins included anyinfringement of the prohibition on sakhr or ridicule, which vexed or brought sor-row (fasus) to anothers heart.6 The specific ayat quoted alongside (Oh believers,beware the mocking of each other for matters of qaum)6g makes this ridicule spe-cific to issues of cultural and ethnic differences among believers.Though the autobiography does not specify it, the Mughal governors of Lahore

and Multan whom Miskin served, came from the Turani group of intermarried andrelated families at the Mughal court in the first half of the eighteenth century.61 Aswe see from Tahmas own description, he was enslaved as a child, when he wouldprobably have little knowledge or appreciation of either belonging to a particularqaum, or of the specific symbols and practices taken to be the badges of that cul-tural and political identity. It is from the vantage point of his later days as a freed-man that he fixes language as the sign of his ancestry. It was meant to provide bothcontinuity and depth in communication with ancestors and descendants. Tahmasreminds the reader of this by stating at the outset that he had written two books-one on Turkish grammar for teaching (his sons), as well as a Turkish autobiography-previous to the Persian-language autobiography. Though there is nothing to indicatewhether this was Chaghtai or Usmanli Turkish, the emphasis on consolidating hisknowledge ofTurki, and passing it on to his sons, may well have been a freedmans

66 I have relied heavily on Jo-Ann Gross, Approaches to the Problem of Identity Formation, inidem, ed., Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change, London/Durham, 1992, pp.1-23.

67 This is in folio 9b of a 10-folio booklet in verse, titled Asbab-ul-Nijat, bound along with anothermanuscript in Asiatic Society Collection, P.S.C. 922. Though it is difficult to fix the date of thiscomposition, there are two important clues about the author. These are (a) the language is identicalwith that of the Diwan; and (b) a self-description of a saut- and harf- knowing ghulam in folio 3b,i.e. one who knows the recitation of the Quran. In this masnavi, the word abd is used for angels (asservants of God) and the term ghulam appears to have been used for slave, as in the phrase no liar,magician, woman or ghulam can be a prophet in folio 4a.

68 This is the first line only of verse 11, Sura 49 of the Quran, of which I have consulted theArabic/English edition; Ahmed Ali, Al-Quran: a Contemporary Translation, Delhi, 1987, p. 444.

69 See Muhammad Umar, Muslim Society, pp. 250-304, for the Turanis.


79

attempt to reconcile the social pressures upon him to establish an ancestry, and toestablish a notion of belonging with overlapping diasporas of free men of Turaniancestry living in Hindustan.

In highlighting Turki, he was thus also constructing his own personal history:(a) by aligning it with that of the household in which he spent the years of youthand early adulthood, and was definitively trained in, and (b) through the constructtion of cultural difference from his erstwhile Ruhela and Durraiii Afghan employers.At the same time, one can notice this autobiography itself as an attempt to recon-cile the apparent differences between both !ran! and Turani since it is written inPersian-a language that he does not mention learning-and hence aligned with amuch larger cultural region between Hindustan, Persia, Central Asia and Turkey.It thus signals the ex-slaves location within the Mughal cultural order within whichhe began this writing.10As the text unfolds, Tahmass own absorption with a Mughal identity becomes

clearer. Of course, the meanings of terms differ between the eighteenth and thetwentieth century: hence the category Mughal in Tahm~ss own text sometimesrefers to soldier or trooper and sometimes to a cultural group. Since punning andplaying with words was a hallmark of literary skill, at some points, the ambi-guity of the term Mughalia appears quite deliberate. It is hard to pinpointwhat this means for the narrator; presumably this too is an identity that is learntfrom the words of others around him, that is, from the living cultural matrix of thehouseholds he found himself in. Captured by the Persian armies of Nadir Shah, asa child he spent two years in the house of a man from Bukhara, whose followerswere Uzbeks from there. In the wake of a civil war in 1747, the child-captivepassed from one Uzbek master to another till he was gifted to the Mughal governorof Panjab, Muin al-Mulk. So if he had to select his identity from among masters,it could have well been as Uzbek as it was Mughal.

Yet he selected one over the other. Why? As is well known, the derogatorystereotypes about Uzbeks that were dominant in northern-Indian courts from atleast the fourteenth century onwards, endured for many centuries thereafter. 71 Onthe one hand, constructing an Uzbek identity may thus have meant inviting the

70 Though Turkish poetry remained a significant cultural artefact among the higher circles inMughal India, and Arabic remained significant among theologians and to a group ofpoets in Golconda,Persian was the most important language for literary work throughout the entire period. See MohammadAbdul Ghani, A History of Persian Language and Literature at the Mughal Court with a BriefSurvey of the Growth of Urdu Language, (2 Vols, Allahabad, 1929-30; G.L. Tikku, Persian Poetry inKashmir 1339-1846: An Introduction, Berkeley, 1971; Annemarie Schimmel, Pain and Grace: A Studyof Two Mystical Writers of Eighteenth-Century Muslim India, Leiden, 1976; Muzaffar Alam,

a slave's quest for selfhood in eighteenth-century hindustan_indrani chatterjee

Documents