New Delhi: Varanasi is known around the world as a testimony to the longest unbroken Hindu cultural tradition, and is referred to as a holy Hindu temple town in travel books. While the city is primarily celebrated for its rich Hindu heritage, its Mughal history is mostly spoken about in terms of conflict and temple demolition.
So, a talk titled ‘Mughal Banaras: An Exploration’, in the heart of intellectual Delhi at the India International Centre, is almost counter-intuitive. Such is the hold of popular memory.
“It is not that there is no work on Banaras. [But] The greater proportion… looks at Banaras only as a sacred space and that too as a Hindu sacred space,” said Malavika Kasturi, a University of Toronto professor who is researching for a book on the city.
It isn’t her mission, however, to puncture Varanasi’s Hindu city narrative. Instead, she wants to look at the diversity of built histories, spaces, and memories. Her research findings can be a potential antidote to the popular but reductive one-history-one-city approach to historiography.
Also read: Badass Begums — A new heritage walk of Old Delhi is all about Kothas…
There’s more to Banaras
Held under the broader ambit of IIC’s ‘Frontiers of History’ series, the session drew a large, diverse audience, including academic scholars, government officers, heritage enthusiasts, and a scanty number of young people. The hidden histories of the pilgrimage city, especially of the later Mughals during the colonial period, are what Kasturi shined a light on — or, to borrow from American anthropologist Robert Redfield, the classification of Indian culture into ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions.
“I found it interesting to connect the history of the later Mughals in a city where the Mughals are part of, what we shall say, everyday conversation, but where nobody knew about the later Mughals,” Kasturi said at the talk. She pointed out popular spaces in the city like the Gyanvapi Masjid and Dharara Masjid, which are associated with the Mughals, particularly Alamgir II. “The conservations around this, as we know, have been framed in ways that are extraordinarily divisive and polarising,” she added.
In particular, her subjects of interest are Mughal pensioners and descendants of Alamgir II, who lived in Varanasi from the 18th century to 1947 and were protected by the British.
“Banaras was not just an economic and trading centre…it was also a political centre, a place for intrigue…[The] Mughals are my way of sort of pointing to Banaras’ immense political importance in the colonial period as a place for ‘political pensioners’,” said Kasturi.
“Political pensioners” included those defeated by the British in war, brought by force, or placed under house arrest. They also included those who came voluntarily or had allied with the British.
“Pensioners added to the diversity of Banaras,” Kasturi told ThePrint. “Among the many pensioners who lived in Banaras during the 18th century to 1947, the British particularly focused on the Mughal families.”
Also read: An old Delhi heritage walk that’s not about Jama Masjid, Red Fort. It tells…
Tracing the roots
Shahzada Jahandar Shah, a military commander and poet also known as Mirza Jawan Bakht, was the eldest son of Shah Alam II, the 17th sovereign of the Mughal Empire. In 1787, he arrived in Banaras for a short stay. His primary objective was to utilise Banaras as a strategic hub for amassing a formidable army to support his father.
The British asked the Shahzada to live in the Chait Singh Palace or the Raj Mahal, along with his retainers and armies. At the time, the palace lay outside the precincts of Banaras city. Additionally, the Nawab of Awadh increased Jahandar Shah’s peshkash (tribute) and bestowed upon him a substantial expanse of land adjacent to the revered Dargah-e-Fatman.
After his death in 1788, the Shahzada’s family stayed on as political pensioners and eventually moved to the Shivala Mohalla. Even today, many families living in the neighbourhood claim to be Jahandar Shah’s descendants. This is where the tradition of making the women of the families responsible for pension distribution began.
“By the 1830s, quarrels about pensions, in fact, were about moving them out of Raj Mahal, which created an interesting spatial geography in the city, particularly by the late 19th century, about who lived in which area,” Kasturi said.
Over the years, Jahandar Shah’s family, like other pensioner families, became more ‘banarasi’ as the city expanded. “There were many families who claimed to be Bakhts and lived in different parts of Banaras,” she said, adding that their story is more nuanced from the standard ‘riches to rags’.
Jahandar Shah’s descendants were active participants in the socio-political life of Banaras. Throughout the 19th century, they were involved in the city’s local political strife and intrigue.
Various structures associated with the Bakhts such as the Shahi Masjid in Shivala, the Shahi Masjid in Badshah Bagh, and Dargah-e-Fatman, where the stories of the presence of Bakhts are most prominent, are still remembered by residents. A ‘selective amnesia’ marks the history of later Mughals in Banaras. While the Chait Singh Palace has a plaque commemorating the 1781 heroic act of the Maharaja, “the memories associated with the space do not include those who lived there for nearly a hundred years,” according to Kasturi.
‘Selective curation, selective memory, and selective conservation of heritage’ are the reasons behind the perilous state of Jahandar Shah’s tomb and other buildings in Varanasi.
At the IIC event, some audience members lauded Kasturi’s study for bringing new knowledge to light amid the “amnesia about not just Mughals but about Muslim populations in general”. Meanwhile, one opined that “using Mughal history” to understand Varanasi is misplaced.
Kasturi’s research aims to stir conversations about conservation, narratives, erased histories, and heritage. “I am not here on a ‘retrieval project’…[All] I am trying to suggest [is that] one can actually look at urban spaces like Banaras in a different spirit and shine the torch on different forms of social, religious and political life,” she said. “I think that (research) is very important at this point in time when there is an attempt to simplify history or to make parts of history disappear.”
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)