Contested Sites of History in Delhi and Hyderabad

Sometimes you find famous historical sites from a tourist guide and other times you realize how historically significant a site you visited was by doing reading. The latter often comes as surprises and it recently happened to me twice. I am currently researching on urban spaces and Muslim identity in India for a term paper.

Two separate articles mentioned a shrine near Mandi House, Delhi, and a Hindu temple under Charminar in Hyderabad. The shrine of Baba Sayyid Nanhe Mian Chishti was very famous for thwarting government attempts of demolition. (See article here: Jinnealogy Everyday life and Islamic theology in post-Partition Delhi by Anand Vivek Taneja) Anwar Sabri, the old caretaker of this mazar, took care of the place since the 1970s. He claims that

there have been no accidents at the Mandi House circle, where seven roads come together. The municipal authorities often gave him trouble, not wanting him or the grave here, and he has spent at least one night in jail. But the baba appeared in a dream to an engineer with the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, who was planning a “beautification” of the area that would led to the demolition of the grave to make way for a fountain. After the baba appeared to him in a dream, the engineer begged his forgiveness, moved the fountain in his plans to accommodate the grave, and even presented the baba with bags of cement to make the grave pakka, permanent... Many of the devotees, including many actors and staff from the nearby National School of Drama, have been coming here for the past thirty years, Anwar Sabri says. The baba has granted the wishes of many.

 Photo credits: Anand Vivek Taneja

When I was reading about the shrine, I kept on thinking whether or not I had seen it. Finally, I saw the picture on the next page and had the a-ha! moment. It was indeed the one I saw. Suspense was cleared. At that time, Deepak and I bought some snacks to eat before the main theater event. I asked whether or not we should sit on the ledge (where the yellow and black stripes are painted). I didn’t notice the shrine behind us, I just wanted to grab the nearest clean place I could sit. He noticed and said we could not because it was a holy site for Muslims. After reading the amazing story, I wondered if Deepak knew about it.

Picture I took at Mandi House while waiting for the play to start. The circle connects six big roads and one small road; it understandably attracts a lot of traffic and it is said that ever since the shrine was taken care by Mr. Sabri there have been no accidents. 

I also noticed the Hindu temple after visiting Charminar in December, 2015. This architecture is known for its Islamic legacy from the times of the Nawabs. I was a bit surprised to find a Hindu temple near it. Aesthetically, the two did not mesh together. But many visitors of Charminar were Hindu and paid their respects at the site. I thought this was probably an example of secular India, in which people of different religions want their religion represented everywhere. I read about this temple later in Dr. Zehra Fareen Parvez’s thesis: “the makeshift Hindu temple that was illegally constructed at the floor of the Charminar.” She explains that this construction was exchanged for Muslims’ unwritten right to use amplifiers for call of prayers or other announcements in Hyderabad. “Although amplification is banned in the city, there is a mutual understanding between the police and Muslim neighborhoods that the law will not be enforced.” I chuckled at this peculiar but quintessentially Indian arrangement. There are also people who falsely claimed that this temple existed before 1960s and clashes occurred in 2012 over this issue.

Bhagyalakshmi Temple which started as a shrine. Photo taken by Ayush Nadimpalli

To quote an anonymous Quora answer,

The Archeological Survey of India, in a [Right to Information] reply, finally conceded that the controversial Bhagya Laxmi Mandir, adjacent to historical Charminar is a recently constructed ‘unauthorized’ structure. Claims of this temple existing before 1960's is also rubbished by the following picture taken from The Hindu archives of 1957.

 I have much more respect for the Archeological Survey of India after reading about this dispute. The scholar in the article about the Delhi shrine lamented the lack of care for Muslim shrines and restricted access to the ASI files. But given that in India history is everywhere, involving lively debates (and sometimes physical fights), it is indeed a very tough task to treat all of them with due discretion.

Methods and Religious Studies

More than two years ago, I presented a paper on the medicine Buddha in pre-Republican era China at my liberal arts college. Without the adequate tools, I could not present the significance of the combination of ritual and medicine beyond the realm of superstition. I read this following passage and had an a-ha moment about religious studies--

A second approach to the question of cultural difference starts from a different assumption, namely, that “real,” substantive, and “immiscible” cultural differences constitute an actually existing dimension of human experience that needs to be dealt with in our analyses. While some analysts have argued that rendering “untranslatable” cultural practices transparent within the hegemonic languages of Western academia amounts to an act of “epistemological violence,” others have argued for the ethical necessity of doing just that. While keenly sensitive to processes of historical transformation in the constitution of modern subjectivities, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, for one, is unwilling to dismiss the existence of (and constitutive role played by) radically different life-worlds within modernity. Self-critically reflecting on his own previous research into the history of factory labor in Bengal, where laborers commonly invoked the agency of Hindu gods to facilitate a range of tasks at hand, Chakrabarty writes that “a secular subject like history faces certain problems in handling practices in which gods, spirits or the supernatural have agency in the world.” Chakrabarty’s solution to these problems is not to cease and desist from writing history, however; nor is it to abandon altogether the task of “rough translation” required to make differences intelligible in academic writing. The latter choice Chakrabarty refuses largely on ethical grounds: “It may be legitimately argued that the administration of justice by modern institutions requires us to imagine the world through the languages of the social sciences,” he reasons, since “one cannot argue with modern bureaucracies and other instruments of governmentality without recourse to the secular time and narratives of history and sociology” (72, 86). At the same time, Chakrabarty urges historians to acknowledge both the “finitude” of history’s secular outlook and the “scandalous” nature of “rough translations” required to render radical forms of cultural difference intelligible in social-scientific discourse (90).

This theoretical analysis by William Glover from Making Lahore Modern’s Introduction (p xvi-xvii) explains precisely the difficulty I faced when writing about Buddhism and medicinal practices in history. It is very difficult to comprehend the development of medicine (and technology) other than a road of teleological progress. Without a broader understanding of medicinal practices at large at the period I was looking at, one can only compare to then-Buddhist practices of medicine and now. This would undermine the credibility of Buddhist tradition of that particular time. If a doctoral and above level work in social science can only amount to “rough translation,” I had an even coarser translation at the time. Is writing religious studies academic papers from a historical viewpoint at the liberal arts level ever possible? (This question is a reflection of my frustration towards historical methods at present; I do not want to question the wonderful aptitudes that religious studies introduced to me two years ago.)

Another question, If one uses history and historicizes religion, how can religion occupy a distinct theoretical space than from culture? I had a conversation with a Buddhist monk recently at JNU. He has completed his MPhil and will start his doctorate soon. He has read extensively and is well-learned in Sanskrit; he plans to tackle Tibetan next. His English conversation skills were limited and we talked in Mandarin. He was easygoing but still assumed more authority in the conversation. We talked about Buddhism both as an academic subject as well as a subject that carries inherent truth that we accept while others may not accept (I am a Buddhist, but for length-sake I will not get into whether or not we should call it a “religion” in this post). I tread lightly when we started historicizing Buddhism, since it was my first time meeting him and he was senior to me--I had no idea if he would at one point abruptly object to the secular social science assumptions which I might impose on the discussion. He never did, but the testing-waters feeling of having social science discussions with people of a religious identity remained.

tomb of Jahangir in Lahore

Another similar challenge that faced Islamic historical writing in the 19th century, also presented by William Glover (p187-188)--

One of the earliest was Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Asar-us-Sanadid (Manifestations of the Noblemen), an account of the city of Delhi composed in the Urdu language. Sayyid Khan first published his history in 1846, illustrating the book’s six hundred pages of text with more than a hundred lithograph prints. The book described Delhi’s historical palaces, shrines, and religious buildings and included a 250-page account of “cultural life” in the city that described the city’s fairs and festivals, bazaars, and places for community gathering. Shortly after the book’s initial publication, Sayyid Khan presented a copy to A. A. Roberts, Delhi’s district magistrate and collector. Roberts, in turn, presented the book to the Royal Asiatic Society in London. On the suggestion of a member of the society, Roberts undertook an English translation of the book that for unknown reasons was never completed. In the preface to a later edition, however, Sayyid Khan claimed that the process of translating the work into English brought out “defects” in the original.

...

Put another way, the broader significance of the details recorded by Sayyid Khan—a significance that his British readership found missing— needed little elaboration for an Indian readership, since the mode of description he used established the context automatically. That context drew on an earlier tradition of IndoIslamic historical writing, in particular a mode Christopher Bayly has described as “genealogical.” This historiographic tradition assumed that certain known families and individuals embodied innate moral and spiritual qualities and that these qualities could be invoked for a reader simply by reciting lines of descent. More importantly, perhaps, the qualities did not need to be specified: Listing the names was enough to invoke them.