The Converted Coast, the Singing Plain

Thursday night. Nizamuddin (source). Marigolds in the lane, shoulder to shoulder, incense.Seven hundred years they've sung here every Thursday. Tonight's no different.Somebody sits at the harmonium. Somebody claps once.We start at the beginning.

छाप तिलक सब छीनी रे मोसे नैना मिलाइके।چھاپ تلک سب چھینی رے موسے نیناں ملائکے۔Stamp and mark, you took them all, just by meeting my eyes.Chisht (source). Ajmer (source). Delhi. Pakpattan (source).

There's a village near Herat called Chisht. A handful of houses, a thousand years back.A man teaches there, and his students carry the village off as a surname.One of them walks into India. Moinuddin (source). Ajmer. The twelfth century.Walks in with nothing and means it. No gold, no sword, no letter from a king.

Four rules, give or take.Take nothing from the sultan. Never go to his court. Feed whoever comes to the door.And listen — سماع — because music gets to God faster than argument.The scholars hated that last one. The poor loved all four.Eight hundred years on they still queue at Ajmer, every faith in the one line,and the cauldrons are on.

छाप तिलक सब छीनी रे मोसे नैना मिलाइके।چھاپ تلک سب چھینی رے موسے نیناں ملائکے۔Stamp and mark, you took them all, just by meeting my eyes.Chisht. Ajmer. Delhi. Pakpattan.

The chain's called a silsila. سلسلہ. Teacher, student, teacher, student.Ajmer hands it to Delhi. Delhi hands it out along the Sutlej to Pakpattan,to Farid (source) — گنج شکر, Ganjshakar, the treasure of sugar —shakar, the same word the wind carried west to your kitchen.

Farid writes in Punjabi, the language of the fields, not the court.Three hundred years on, the Sikh gurus take his verses into their own book (source).Same words, different letters. ਫਰੀਦਾ in one script. فریدا in the other.A Muslim saint inside the Sikh scripture, more than a hundred verses, still sung.

Farid hands it back to Delhi, to a young man called Nizamuddin,and the sultans come calling, and Nizamuddin says:my house has two doors — the king comes in at one, I leave by the other.One sultan sends word: wait till I'm back in Delhi, I'll deal with you.The saint says هنوز دلی دور است — Delhi is still a long way off.The sultan never makes it. A pavilion comes down on him (source) on the road home.

छाप तिलक सब छीनी रे मोसे नैना मिलाइके।چھاپ تلک سب چھینی رے موسے نیناں ملائکے۔Stamp and mark, you took them all, just by meeting my eyes.Chisht. Ajmer. Delhi. Pakpattan.

At the saint's feet, the parrot of India. Amir Khusrau (source).Son of a Turk who ran from the Mongols — the saint's own family ran from them too.Two refugee households, and between them the loudest music Delhi ever heard.Persian for the court, Hindavi for everybody else, and he stirs the two togethertill out comes the language that'll be Hindi and Urdu and one day argue which it is.They'll credit him with everything — qawwali (source), the sitar, the tabla —and some of it might even be true.

When the saint dies, spring of thirteen twenty-five,Khusrau sits by the grave: the fair one sleeps, her hair across her face —go home, Khusrau, night has fallen on the world.Six months later he's gone. They bury him beside his teacher.Seven hundred years of Thursdays, and they're still side by side.

आज रंग है, ऐ माँ रंग है री।آج رنگ ہے، اے ماں رنگ ہے ری۔Today there's colour, mother — there's colour.Chisht. Ajmer. Delhi. Pakpattan.

The chain doesn't only run to Delhi.Farid had a grandson, Tajuddin (source). He went south, over the Sutlej, to the edge of the desert,and they buried him there. His people built a village by the graveand gave it the order's name.Centuries later, engineers bring a canal through the sand,and the village becomes a market town.

Chisht. Ajmer. Delhi. Pakpattan.Chishtian (source).

Before the school got you, before the passport, before the forms,you had me. I'm the language your mother sang you to sleep in.And every few hundred years, somebody important tries to shut me up.

ਮਾਂ ਬੋਲੀ — ماں بولی — माँ बोली —they said God only heard Sanskrit. Then Persian. Then Latin.I'm the one you cry in. I'm the one you pray in.I'm the one you swear in when you stub your toe.

Kashmir, fourteenth century. A woman walks out of her husband's house and doesn't go back.Lalla (source). Barefoot. Singing in Kashmiri (source) — kitchen talk, the language of her mother-in-law's insults.The Hindus call her Lalleshwari. The Muslims call her Lalla Arifa.Six hundred years, and both of them still sing her.

Varanasi. A weaver. Kabir (source). Thread in one hand, a line in the other.He tells the pandits: पोथी पढ़ि पढ़ि जग मुआ — the world died reading booksand not one of them got wise. ढाई आखर प्रेम का —two and a half letters, love. Read those, and you're a scholar.

ਮਾਂ ਬੋਲੀ — ماں بولی — माँ बोली —they said God only heard Sanskrit. Then Persian. Then Latin.I'm the one you cry in. I'm the one you pray in.I'm the one you swear in when you stub your toe.

When Kabir dies, the story goes, they fight over the body.The Hindus want to burn him. The Muslims want to bury him.They pull back the sheet and there's nothing underneath but flowers,so they split the flowers. Half in a grave, half in a fire. Both still standing at Maghar (source).

Punjab. Nanak (source) comes up out of the river after three days gone,and the first thing he says — ਨਾ ਕੋ ਹਿੰਦੂ ਨਾ ਮੁਸਲਮਾਨ — no Hindu, no Muslim.Then walks twenty years with a Muslim on the rebab, Mardana (source), at his side,and opens a kitchen (source) where the king and the sweeper eat off the same floor.

Rajasthan. A princess who will not stop singing in the street. Mirabai (source).The in-laws send her poison. The song says it went down sweet.मेरे तो गिरधर गोपाल, दूसरो न कोई — mine is the cowherd, nobody else.Not your palace. Not your name. Not your caste. Nobody else.

ਮਾਂ ਬੋਲੀ — ماں بولی — माँ बोली —they said God only heard Sanskrit. Then Persian. Then Latin.I'm the one you cry in. I'm the one you pray in.I'm the one you swear in when you stub your toe.

Maharashtra. Tukaram (source), a grocer, writing God in Marathi,so the priests make him throw his notebooks in the Indrayani (source).Thirteen days he sits on the bank and won't eat,and the story says the river hands them back dry.

Kasur (source). Bulleh Shah (source), a Sayyid, dancing in the street for a gardener's son,his family furious, and he sings — بلھیا کی جاناں میں کون —Bulleh, how would I know who I am?Not an Arab, not from Lahore. Not from here. Not from there.

Goa, sixteen sixteen. An English priest (source) writes the gospel as a Marathi purana (source),eleven thousand verses, because nobody on that coast would sit still for Latin.And seventy years on, his own church will ban the local language (source).

And you. In London.Can't hold a conversation with your own grandmother.Doesn't matter.When it really hurts, you still say ہائے.

Te Deum laudamus.

(What the devil brought you here?)Cristãos e especiarias.(What the devil brought you here?)Christians and spices.

Tordesillas (source). Seventh of June, fourteen ninety-four.Two crowns sit down at a table in Castile and cut the world in half.A line, three hundred and seventy leagues west of Cape Verde.Everything west of it, Spain's. Everything east of it, Portugal's.India's on the east side. No Portuguese has seen India yet.The paper gets there four years before the ships do.

Calicut (source). Twentieth of May, fourteen ninety-eight.Three ships in the roads, and the first words anyone says to them are Spanish,from a merchant out of Tunis (source): the devil take you — what brought you here?They bring the Zamorin (source) gifts. Striped cloth. Six hats. Six washbasins. Honey.His men laugh. The poorest trader from Mecca brings better.So they sail home, and come back with guns.

(What the devil brought you here?)Christians and spices —(What the devil brought you here?)and a paper for your sea.

Fifteen hundred and two. The paper's called a cartaz (source).Any ship on this ocean — a thousand years of sailing it —now needs a pass from Lisbon to be on it.Sail without one and they take the cargo, take the crew, and sink the rest.They call it mare clausum. The closed sea. As if water had a gate.

Third of October. Off the Malabar coast. A ship called the Miri (source),pilgrims coming home from Mecca, and they offer everything —the gold, the cargo, a ransom for every soul on board — and the admiral says no.Women holding their children up over the rail.He burns it with them on it.And one of his own clerks (source) writes it all down.

(What the devil brought you here?)Christians and spices —(What the devil brought you here?)and the city. And the city.

Goa. Bijapur (source)'s port. The best horse market (source) on the coast —Arab and Persian horses in off the boats, because horses die fast in the Deccan heatand every army in the south needs more.Afonso de Albuquerque (source). They call him the Terrible. They call him the Lion of the Seas.Takes the city in March, fifteen ten. Loses it in May.Comes back on the twenty-fifth of November (source), and this time he stays.

Six thousand of nine thousand defenders — dead in the streets, or drowned in the river trying to get across.He spares the Hindus. He needs somebody to run the place.Then a policy: marry them off (source). His soldiers, local women, a dowry from the crown.On this coast people used to marry because the wind kept them waiting.Now it's an order.With a stamp on it.

Te Deum laudamus.Fifteen forty-three: the land across the river — Bardez, Salcete (source) — signed over too.Another paper.And a hundred years on, a Dutch lawyer (source) writes a book called The Free Sea,for the next company that wants the ocean.

Fernandes (source). It's Portuguese. It means son of Fernando.There was no Fernando.At the font a convert took a godfather (source), and the godfather gave his surname —a soldier's, a clerk's, a fidalgo's — to a family that had never met him.

Bardez goes to the Franciscans (source) in fifteen fifty-five.Thirteen years later, a church in a village called Siolim (source).And the temples come down. Not all at once. Enough of them.The language hides in the kitchen, till sixteen eighty-four (source),when the Viceroy bans that too: speak Portuguese inside three years,or go to prison.

Tujem nanv kitem? तुजें नांव कितें?What's your name?They wrote down Fernandes. Son of Fernando. There was no Fernando.Who was holding the pen?

Fifteen forty-five. A priest writes to the king: send us the Holy Office (source).Francis Xavier (source). They'll make him a saint. He lies in Goa now, in a silver box (source).Fifteen sixty, the inquisitors land.And now it isn't only the temples. It's the kitchen. It's the wedding.It's the thread (source) on a boy's shoulder. A tulsi (source) plant in the yard.Rice cooked without salt (source). The wrong fast on the wrong day.Sixteen thousand people through the court.Fifty-seven burned alive.Sixty-four burned as dolls, because the real ones were dead or gone.

And in eighteen twelve (source), when it's finally shut down,they burn the files.Some people never write it down, so nothing can be burned.These people wrote down everything.Then they burned it.

Tujem nanv kitem? तुजें नांव कितें?What's your name?They wrote down Fernandes. Son of Fernando. There was no Fernando.Who was holding the pen?

Tujem nanv kitem? तुजें नांव कितें?What's your name?They wrote down Fernandes. Son of Fernando. There was no Fernando.Who's holding the pen?

Panipat (source), fifteen twenty-six. Babur (source) comes down from Kabul with cannon and wins in half a day.Then writes in his diary (source) that Hindustan has no good melons. No grapes. No ice. No cold water.The first Mughal, homesick from day one.A hundred and thirty years on, Babur's throne is up for grabs.Shah Jahan (source) falls sick. Four sons. Two of them matter.

Two seas meet —and between them is a barrier.Two seas meet —and neither one may cross.مجمع البحرین. Same verse. Two brothers. One chair.

Eldest son. The heir. Father's favourite — ask anyone at court.Great-grandfather Akbar (source) couldn't read a word, and he built a house for arguing (source):Jesuits, Jains, Zoroastrians, Shias, Sunnis, all shouting in one room,and him in the middle, listening.I inherited the listening. You inherited the sword.

I brought pandits up from Benares and sat with them for months,fifty Upanishads (source) into Persian — سرّ اکبر, the Great Secret.A hundred and fifty years from now a Frenchman (source) turns my Persian into Latin,and a German (source) reads it and calls it the consolation of his life.Brother. What will they call yours?

You write poems. I learned the Book by heart.You sat with yogis. I sat for years with generals in the Deccan.You translate the Upanishads. I translate orders into provinces.Father loves you. Fine. Love has never held a frontier.An empire isn't a salon, brother. It's a wall, and somebody has to stand on it.You'd trade the faith for a pretty metaphor.They'll call me عالمگیر. Alamgir. The one who takes the world.

Two seas meet —and between them is a barrier.Two seas meet —and neither one may cross.مجمع البحرین. Same verse. Two brothers. One chair.

I wrote a book. The Meeting of the Two Seas (source).Sufi on one bank. Vedanta on the other.I spent years looking for the difference between them,and apart from the words, I couldn't find one.You call that heresy. I call it reading.

Samugarh (source). Twenty-ninth of May. Your elephant in the middle of the field.You climb down to get on a horse, and your whole army sees an empty seat,thinks you're dead, and runs.I didn't beat you. Your own men did, looking at a chair with nobody in it.

And Father? He can have a window in the fort at Agra (source).He loves that building so much, let him look at it for the rest of his life.When I go, don't build me anything. Bury me under the open sky,paid for with caps I sewed myself (source).

August, sixteen fifty-nine. They sit Dara on a filthy elephantand walk him down Chandni Chowk (source). A French doctor (source) in the crowd writes that people wept.The clerics sign that he's an apostate. Within days, he's dead.Sixteen years later, on the same street, they behead Guru Tegh Bahadur (source) —who died, the Sikhs say, for other people's right to their own god.There's a gurdwara on the spot (source) now.

Two seas can touch, and neither one goes cloudy.He wrote that down, and they killed him for it.