Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

"In a sense, this book follows on Truschke’s study, with the important difference that Truschke was looking only at Sanskrit intellectuals who were affiliated with the court, and not those involved with the empire’s administrative machinery. Kinra, on the other hand, is interested in the empire’s cadre of munshi s, that is, the many thousands of clerks and writers who actually ran the empire, and most particularly, the secretaries who oversaw those clerks. Conventional scholarship understands the Mughal Empire as a Persian-using empire, and it’s true that Persian was the language of administration used by those many munshi s. But British Orientalists like Henry Elliot and Indian nationalist scholars like Jadunath Sarkar assumed that Persian was an essentially ‘Muslim’ language, which would be like construing English as a ‘Christian’ language. So, in the scholarship of men like Elliot or Sarkar, any Hindu who wrote in Persian was, implicitly, a traitor to his own religion. One of Kinra’s points, then, is that Persian was an unproblematic neutral language, accessible to anybody, used for everyday discourse, and that—unlike Arabic—it was not a language of religion. This was why non-Muslims were in no way disqualified from entering clerical service. On the contrary, the Brahman secretary that this book highlights argued that it was precisely because he was a Brahman that he had the sensibility to align himself with Sufi ideas of worldly detachment, so critical for effective governance. Thousands of Hindu clerks learned Persian in order to get a job in the bureaucracy, just as they would do later on with English under the Raj. But Persian was more than just a medium for pen-pushing clerks. Owing to its rich literary canon, it also informed and promoted a refined and cosmopolitan sensibility for a myriad of Indians, no matter what their personal religion. To illustrate this point, Kinra focuses on a single administrator, Chandar Bhan Brahman, whose lifespan extended from Akbar all the way through Jahangir, Shah Jahan and ‘Alamgir. For 30 years he was the principal secretary to prime ministers or other high officials for the last three of those emperors. That placed him near the very top of the empire’s administrative structure. Kinra’s book analyzes the correspondence, the documents, and most importantly, the treatises that were written by this Brahman—all of them in Persian. Here was a man who not only mastered the Persian language but was thoroughly steeped in Persian literature and thought. The heart of Kinra’s book is his analysis of Chandar Bhan’s treatise titled Chahar Chaman , or ‘The Four Gardens’. The treatise’s first chapter, or ‘garden’, elaborates the qualities that any Indian administrator—implicitly, Persianized Hindus—must have. These include a balanced temperament, managerial skills, a mystical sensibility, and a concern for public welfare. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In another chapter, Chandar Bhan takes the reader on a geographical tour of the Mughal empire, starting in the capital Shahjahanabad and then moving through each of the empire’s provinces in a literary analogue to the classic Indian digvijaya , or ‘conquest of the quarters’, in which a raja would manifest his claim to sovereign territory by undertaking a military conquest of regions surrounding his political core. This chapter of Chandar Bhan’s treatise, then, is not simply a gazetteer that describes the empire’s regional flora, fauna, economy, society, and so forth. By displaying the vast extent of the Mughals’ constituent provinces, it aims to project their power and majesty. In another chapter, Chandar Bhan discusses and illustrates the forms of Persian prose composition that a proper munshi must master. Kinra closes his book by suggesting that a study of how the Mughal Empire actually operated compels us to expand our notion of modernity and its relationship to ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ culture. For many years, historians have understood modernity in terms of the European Enlightenment , nation-states, capitalism, secularism, and so forth. More recently, it has been understood in terms of individual self-fashioning, something that is often presumed to have begun in Europe with the advent of letter writing and personal correspondence, which subtly induced people to articulate their sense of personhood. Kinra’s point is that this same tradition is amply present among Mughal literati and ordinary civil servants. One of Chandar Bhan Brahman’s four gardens is entirely autobiographical in nature. In it, he doesn’t even bother to describe important political events of his day, such as the sickness of Shah Jahan, which led to a great war of succession, or that war itself, which brought ‘Alamgir to the throne. Rather, it is his own life, his own experiences, his own relationships with members of the nobility and other imperial officials, that drive the narrative. In other words, one sees in this book a distinctively modernist sensibility. That, I think, is another reason that Kinra’s book is important. It enriches our understanding not only of the Mughal Empire, but of modernity itself."