BY MUSHTAAQUE B BARQ
By what means were they glued together, and Akbar, the great (so called) by what means, prevailed as a hero-villain among lovers?
A question that at times tickles the free end of my rib-cage and at times pierces the broken edge of the rusty sword through my diaphragm to leave a mark on the mount of my pulsating heart that often finds me peeping down the annals of history. The love saga that echoed in the recesses of Akbar’s Royal Court, who later, on the strength of his wealth and power, obstructed in matters of faith by proclaiming his own created religion, ‘Din-i-Illahi,’ in 1582. His intention was to merge some of the elements of the various religions practised by his subjects to reconcile the differences that divided his subjects. His objective turned against him on all fronts for the reason that it had some hidden agendas. “Reconciliation” of this sort hardly feeds my imagination for the reason that he failed to reconcile two human hearts within his own court, but sent all his messengers and verdicts across the country to find a general mass so as to be lured by his own claims in the garb of faith. Leaving aside his promotion of ‘Din-i-Illahi’, as no religion has ever been created on the earth to govern the race of the Lord. I’m very interested in learning the truth about Salim and Anarkali, whose actual name in records is Nadira Begum or Sharf-un-Nisa.
The name Anarkali appeared for the first time in the journal of English tourist and trader William Finch, who visited the Mughal Empire on August 24, 1608. William Finch, in his study, reveals that Anarkali was romantically involved with Prince Salim (Jahangir), and King Akbar ordered to ensepulchre Anarkali alive in a wall of his palace where she died. As a sign of affection, Jahangir had a stone tomb erected in the middle of a wall to eternalize Anarkali and ordered that the tomb’s dome be made of gold. Another visitor, Edward Terry, who visited a few years after William Finch, wrote that Akbar had threatened to disinherit Jahangir for his relationship with Anarkali, but on his death-bed he revoked the warning. But Professor Lisa Balabanlilar, Department of History and Department of Transnational Asian Studies Chair, Department of Transnational Asian Studies Director, and Chao Center for Asian Studies, in her accounts, denied all these captivating romantic legends and declared these speculations unverifiable and not likely to have happened. So I’m going to debate or at least put forth whether or not what our fiction writers have in their works made us read is relevant or not. They have fictionlised the story and ‘Mughal-i-Azam’ is one such attempt. Taking recourse from chronicles, a fiction writer may take a myth or a rumour beyond the border lines of logic, but at the same time, what encourages me to think is that they can create a parallel history of their own imaginations and how far these ‘flights of fancies’ would be acceptable to the historians or how long our younger generation would react to the fiction flights.
Contemporary realistic fiction writers have always pegged their tents on the terrain of historical responses, and yet they, in their world of re-creation and synthesis, have modified the faint impressions occupying the postscripts of the past. Salim, for that matter of fact, is the hero; Akbar, despite tall claims of historically great, is a merciless villain in the garb of might; and Anarkali is a tragic heroine like any celebrated tragic queen of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Then what encourages me to write a tragic drama about Habba Khatoon and Yousuf Shah Chak, taking recourse to pure historical data by casting Akbar once again as a villain who abducted Yousuf, leaving Zoon, later called Habba Khatoon by chroniclers, as the nucleus of the poetics of our culture. Fiction, thus, can regroup some of the faint facts from postscripts to further distort what was once called Akbar the Great.
Is Pran Kishore’s “Moon of the Saffron Fields” to be considered as a first step in this regard? This novel has encouraged me to scratch the walls of many houses and huts to find countless Anarkalis’ ensepulchred for ages and many Akbars of this sort to historians till date are only hazy figures, but to fiction writers only that hitherto unexplored Akbar has already taken so many forms. To Amar Malmohi, this Akbar is a house servant exhuming the virginity of a daughter of the house. In his short story ‘Tchuss’, Amar Malmohi has well proclaimed the lethality of Akbar’s effigy. In Rafi Wali’s “Daisee”, Akbar, in the guise of a father, has mutilated a daughter. Rafi’s Anarkali in “Daisee” has yet again raised a wall of defamation to authenticate the might of Akbar, whose deadly serpent infused venom into the very nerves of a daughter who later dashed down the wall of Anarkali to liberate her mutilated body, which she sincerely submitted to a man of different cast and colour. Rafia’s Anarkali is a woman of this era. Unlike Amar Malmohi’s submissive heroine, who only evoked a sense of guilt that resulted in the protagonist’s death, Rafia’s Anarkali has taken on the uphill task of believing in her own prescribed protocols to expose Akbar only to make him carry the burden of his own fragmented consciousness. Thus, Rafia, like a warrior, has elated a fallen fairy, which was not the case in most of the short stories written during the pre-90s. This shift of power and penetration is the outcome of the sensitive and proactive methodology of writers whose contributions have been shadowed by a few master pieces written before the 90s.
Mushtaq B.Barq is a Columnist, Poet and Fiction Writer. He is the author of “Feeble prisoner, “ Wings of Love” and many translation works are credited to the author like “ Verses Of Wahab
