The Hindu : The qasbah culture

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Monday, Jul 22, 2002

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The qasbah culture — I

By Mushirul Hasan

Even if `Islam' cemented the qasbah structure... pluralism and syncretism were the bricks of which it was built.

QASBAH AS a social and cultural entity is not only a lost idea but has vanished without leaving behind any substantial legacy. I invoke a fragment of Awadh's past and present to indicate how popular culture produced a favourable environment for the steady but often contested emergence of assimilative thought and secular convictions.

`Qasbah' has no English equivalent. A court judgment relating to land rights stated that a qasbah was a Muslim settlement created after having seized the proprietary rights of the surrounding villages. Abul Fazl, the 16th century historian, described Bilgram, as "a small town the air of which is healthy and its inhabitants are generally distinguished for their quick wit and their love of singing". Shah Jahan, the Mughal Emperor, used to say, "the eastern areas are the Shiraz of my empire".

Kakori, about 10 or 12 miles from Lucknow, had more educated men in the 1850s, filling high and lucrative positions in the civil establishment, than any other town in India, except Calcutta. Private libraries dotted the countryside. In Sandila, the libraries of Kunwar Durga Parshad and Munshi Saiyyid Fazal Rasool stocked 18th and 19th century texts on theology and jurisprudence.

The Mughal Empire's decline made some qasbahs the involuntary heirs of the once-powerful Indo-Persian culture, whose gifts they were to pass on in one direction or another. Although the city came to be seen as an oasis in a wilderness and the city wall as the bulwark of culture against a surrounding barbarism, Sufis, theologians, poets, writers and administrators thronged the qasbahs to recreate a world in their own image. Nourished by a fertile popular imagination and providing a link with the wider world, they formulated ideas that the urban middle classes, with their literacy and intellectualism, sometimes made their own. They did not cloister themselves from the outside world to which, on the contrary, they were wide open.

It is true that attempts were made to develop and broadcast a discourse centred on `Islam' as a universal faith rather than `Islam' practised in numberless congregations. Religious beliefs in qasbahs were diverse and sometimes contrary to the fundamental texts of Islam. Religious texts were themselves open to reinterpretation in different historical situations. The fact is that politics shaped `Islam' quite as much as `Islam' shaped politics. Even if `Islam' cemented the qasbah structure — in the sense that Christianity did in developing the associational make-up of city life in Europe — pluralism and syncretism were the bricks of which it was built.

While Muslim religious orientations were as diverse as the forms of organisation, the mutual interpenetrating of Sufi ethics and the Hindu way of life was more intense in qasbahs than in urban centres. In fact, the gentry's patronage and the common man's veneration of Muslim shrines and holy men enhanced the qasbah's solidarity as a unique entity. In some ways, the qasbahs shaped Lucknow much more than the other way round. Landed groups and service families built a partnership to manage their lives, and invested in strategies of collective action where mutual commitments overshadowed distinctive identities, outlooks and communitarian pursuits. Conscious of having fashioned a civilised world as opposed to the materialism of city life, they interacted with one another in the high tradition of a specifically Indo-Persian culture. Peasants and craftsmen created, at the same time, bonding through festivals, melas and shared religious traditions.

While negative social stereotypes and attitudes regarding the other religious group existed, specific strategies evolved by individuals enabled them to avoid conflict whilst interacting in mixed social contexts. An Awadhi culture expressed through an Awadhi dialect cut across the religious divide. Thus basant and diwali were celebrated with much fanfare in the prominent service families. Among such families there existed a much longer tradition, provided both by structural and liminal artefacts, of aiding the process of acculturation and extending its reach among the masses. Religious attributions were more often than not banners under which different economic and social groups organised, whose motives had little to do with religion.

The young men whose lives I have studied combined feudal graces with modern education. Graduates of an expanding network of educational institutions, they were the best and the brightest of their generation. They worked in politics, business, the professions or moved among several of these fields. They possessed a self-assurance that was unique to their generation — not found earlier or thence. There was no profound sense of being a minority grafted on Indian soil and doomed to remain as such.

Such men neither created heroic historical narratives nor were they all engaged in the nationalist project of inventing symbols of Hindu-Muslim amity. Their self-conception was that of being intertwined with a distinct Awadhi culture. The pattern of life they aped and gradually made their own was that of 19th century Awadh, the graces of which they were to perpetuate in a modern world. They saw themselves as the embodiments of Awadh's pluralist values, and, for that reason, affirmed continuity. Pluralism was no more than an ideology of accommodation with firm historical and philosophical roots, and it served as a guide that allowed them to manage their right to be `different'.

A fair number of such individuals gathered around their favourite places towards the end of the 19th century. Here they combined serious political discourses with much fun and laughter, satire and lampooning. They sat cross-legged on Persian carpets or relaxed in easy chairs reflecting on the fast-changing world around them. Filling the air with the smoke of scented tobacco, they quoted the writers of antiquity, bandied Urdu or Persian ghazals, recited or read their own compositions in verse or prose, or shouted at each other in violent, political argument. All they needed in those days to win admiration and social esteem was the ability to amuse, to provoke, to embarrass or to abash others with wit, irony and sarcasm.

Sons of the feudal families whose earlier generations had never earned their own living, they were no lean and hungry carcasses with dire intents against the colonial regime. The nationalist stir had gained a firm foothold outside the presidency towns, but it was still an affair of the educated middle class. Freedom's battle was still fought with words. Words and ideas under control versus words and ideas out of control was often the primary issue on the extraordinary stage on which the national struggle was being played out. It was the kind of political setting in which the writer and the speechmaker rapidly came to the forefront.

Generally speaking, their eyes remained turned to the past in which many of their ideals had been set. They adopted the leaders of the Young Turk Revolution as their heroes and, with these as their ideological props, laced with a romanticised pan-Islamic vision, they aimed to challenge Pax Britannia. For Aligarh's first generation, the figures of Islam loomed large on their intellectual horizon. For the second generation, however, Asoka and Harshavardhan were just as much a part of their history. The stupa at Sanchi was as much part of their heritage as Delhi's Jama Masjid. There are, after all, good reasons for prying into this past with the historian's telescope, and trying to see more clearly what happened rather than remaining content with simplistic theories and magisterial generalisations.

(Excerpted from the Durgabai Deshmukh Lecture delivered on July 17 at the India International Centre, New Delhi.)

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