Foundation of Manipuri Muslim History
By Farooque Ahmed
Jyotirmoy Roy writes (A History of Manipur, 1958): “The beginning of the 18th century saw the dawn of a new era in the history of Manipur. When the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 A.D. left India in a state of political chaos, the dark cloud overshadowing Manipur slowly became clear. Those who are engaged in reconstructing the history of Manipur find their task easier from this period. They have no longer to grope mostly in the catacomb of myths and legends. Reliable materials in increasing quantity are available from this time.
Manipur was waiting for a strong and able guide to bring her latent energy to fruition. It was at this time that Garib Niwaz Pamheiba with a revolutionary outlook and the zeal of a conqueror, assumed the political leadership of Manipur. In one hand, he carried his victorious arms to the imperial city of Ava (of modern Myanmar) and in the other he affected a religious revolution within his own country”. According to J. Roy, “His (Garibniwaz) activities paved the way to rapid cultural integration of Manipur with the rest of India. Had the people of Manipur not received the guidance of such an able personality they could not probably have reached their present level of culture than other backward communities in the neighboring states”.
Ruling between 1609- 1748, Pamheiba alias Garibniwaz made Hinduism the state religion and banned Sanamahi. He also
mooted contacts with Muslims in other parts of India and got as an honorable epithet, Garibniwaz from the Mughal Empire. Roy tells us more, “Shantidas Adhikari, a Vaishnavite came during his time and converted this King and most of the Meiteis into Hinduism...there is no reason to rule out its (origin of the word “Garibniwaz”) source from Persian…..which means “kind to the poor”. In the beginning of the 18th century, when the major portion of eastern India was still under Muslim domination, percolation of a Persian word Garib Niwaz into Manipur...is not at all an impossibility… Similarly the influence of the Islamic civilization might not have left her completely.
In the year 1667 the eastern boundary of the Mughal Empire under the generalship of Mir Jumla extended as far as the Darrang district in Assam. Sylhet and part of Cachar district continued to be ruled by Muslim Amirs appointed by the Nawab of Dacca till 1765 A.D.; Muslim traders and artisans began to enter into Manipur long before the time of Garib Niwaj”, Says Roy. Atul Chandra Roy (1968) and Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1973) note that Bakhtiyaruddin Khilji conquered East Bengal in 1204 A.D. and first Muslim incursion in Sylhet was in 1303 A.D. R. M. Nath writes (Background of Assamese Culture, 1948) that Pamheiba “ascended the throne of Manipur in 1709 A.D. at the age of 20 and assumed the surname Gharib Niwaj, a honorific epithet given to him by the Emperor of Delhi… undoubtedly Manipur maintained connections through religion and commerce, with the neighboring Muslim province at the time of Gharib Niwaj. Hence there can be little doubt that the word Gharib Niwaj used by Pamheiba belongs to the Persian vocabulary”.
R. K. Jhalajit Singh notes (A Short History of Manipur, 1992) that the epithet “Garib Niwaz” given to the king as an honorary is Persian origin. At the time of Garib Niwaz “we were on the threshold of Modern Age of the history of Manipur, which began in 1819”, says Gangmumei Kamei (History of Manipur, 1991).
Sir Jadunath Sarkar (History of Bengal, 1973) explains: “We know nothing definite about the state of civilization and the conditions of the people in East Bengal in the Hindu Period. There were no doubts rich Courts with a developed culture and the art of their own in the southern and more civilized portion of it, such as Dacca, Comilla and Chittagong”. But in other parts of north East India, Mughal civilization could not reach till then, and the people were obscurantists” embedded in animist faiths. Manipuri plainsmen “Meiteis however got converted into Vaishnavite Hinduism, started by Chaitanya in Bengal under the universalizing and pacifist environment of Mughal influence and administration-like the Sufis that started among the Muslim peers as a secular and all embracing Islamic ethos, and brought it (Vaishnavism) into Manipur by Shanti Das Gosai”.
As G. Kabui writes that J.P. Wade an Englishman surgeon who accompanied Capt. Welsh in his expedition in Assam in 1792-94 mentions the Mughal-Muslim connection with Manipur which was written in his (Wade’s) account on Assam.
He also writes that the first Muslim settlement in Manipur valley was made in 1606. Jhalajit Singh (1992) notes: “A certain Muslim ruler wrote a letter to the Manipuri king Lamkyamba 1512-1523 A.D.). It was, we believe, in Persian script. The book says that no one at the court of Manipur could read it. The king therefore sent three persons to Tripura to fetch a scribe able to read it”. This denotes prior to their settlement, Manipuri contact with them and the Mughal Empire, dated earlier by a century or so. When Muslims began to be in Manipur, Sylhet was ruled by Nawab Naziri at Pratapgarh in Taraf region. Muhammad Sani, who came as the leader of those Muslims- first batch, was appointed as Qazi (the Imam) - the religious head for them by king Khagemba. The genesis is given below (F. Ahmed: Muslim & Arab Perspectives, Vol. 4:1-6 (1997):
Mirza Muhammad Turrani, grandson of Shaikh of Mirza Khukkan Turrani who came from Turan (Central Asia), married a daughter of the Tripura king Puraraj named Umabati and five sons were born to them. They are- 1. Mirza Malik Muhammad Sani, 2. Mazkur, 3. Junaid, 4. Qourif and 5. Qulsum. Muhammad Sani later ruled in Pratapgarh of Taraf region with Ilhail as his capital. To the north of his territory was Amosi, Surkhai (Taka Dakshin) to the west, Badarpur in the east and Katsil (Lushai Hills) in the south. A famed pond named Mungomala, built by Sani, still exists in Ilhail. Sultan Bayazid (1574-1612), the chief Sylheti Nawab was a contemporary of Sani, remarks A. C. Roy in his “History of Bengal”, 1968.
The Karranis, better known in Afghanistan as Karlani, are one of the branches of Pathan race. They hailed from Mangash (modern Kurram). Their eponymous progenitor was the first cousin of the founder of the famed Tarin clan.
They like the Turks who were already in Sylhet, have the characteristic virtues- as indomitable will, reckless, bravery, resourcefulness and boundless ambition, notes Sir J. Sarkar (History of Muslim Period-Bengal, 1973).
Muslims originally came from Cachar and Sylhet that naturally leads us to go back to some relevant background history of Bengal so as to construct a proper Manipuri Muslim history and indeed for understanding the root of Vaishnav Hinduism of the Meiteis.
The Land and Peoples:
Bengal is about a people connoted to by a common language, Bengali, a common social structure, a religious mixture of Hindus and Muslims, and a largely shared history from where the religion of Islam in the early 17th century and Vaishnavite Hinduism in the 18th century arrived in Manipur. The different peoples in Bengal: Pundra, Gauda, Radha, Sumha, Vajra (Brahma), Tamralipti, Samatata, Vagga were being referred together already in the middle of the sixth century as the Gauda peoples. From the eighth century onwards they were being referred to by the names Pundra, Pundravardhana, Gauda, and Vagga, even though the local names like Harikela, Chandradvipa, Samatata in east and south Bengal, Barendri in north Bengal, Dandabhukti in Tamralipti, and Radha in west Bengal continued to be in use. Finally, the name Vagga won over the name Gauda in the Pathan (Muslim) period, although this supremacy was properly established only when it became Subha Bangla (Bengal province) under Akbar.
Ethnic origin and Civilization:
Little is known about the prehistory of Bengal. Archaeology shows that parts of this land supported an agricultural culture since at least 1250 B.C. However, the identity of these people can only be gauged from anthropological and linguistic evidence. The historic period of Bengal is usually classified into the Ancient, Medieval and Modern periods; the customary beginning of the medieval period in Bengal starts with the period of Muslim domination. And Bengal civilization can be traced from 300 BC as depicted from the excavation of Mahasthan (in Bogra District). But the continuous and regular history of the country is known from the Pala rule in seventh century AD. The earliest inhabitants of this land were Austro-Asiatic (shortly Austric) people.
Later, the Dravidians from Western India joined them. Gradually people of other races like Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid migrated to this area one after another, who settled here permanently and lived together with its earlier inhabitants. In course of time mixed-marriages occurred among them, which resulted in the creation of Bengali race. The culture of the peoples finds its rudiments in the society of its original Austric people. Later, with the influx of alien races of different creed and culture, added more elements to it. Religious belief of the rulers of different dynasties also played a great role in the formation and development of the culture of this soil.
The Buddhist influence in the Pala period (750-1160 A.D), the Hindu influence in the Sena Period (1095-1205 A.D) and the Muslim influence in the Sultani and Mughal period (1205-1757 A.D) are of great importance. Thus Bengal had a diverse historical and cultural past, combining Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Mongol/Mughal, Arab, Persian and Turkic cultures.
About 1200 AD, Muslim rulers, under Sufi influence, supplanted existing Hindu and Buddhist dynasties in Bengal. That led to the conversion to Islam of most of the population in the eastern areas of Bengal, and created a sizable Muslim minority in the western areas of Bengal. Since then, Islam has played a crucial role in the region's history and politics.
Bengal was absorbed into the Mughal Empire in the 16th century, and Dhaka, the seat of a Nawab (the representative of the emperor), gained some importance as a provincial center. But, it remained remote and thus a difficult-to-govern region especially the section east of the Brahmaputra River outside the mainstream of Mughal politics.
In the heyday of the Mughal Empire, Persian- the language of governance was used by the upper class, Hindus and Muslims alike as later English was to be. Urdu (basically a mixture of Arabic, Persian, Turkish and some Sanskrit) began as a product from the days of Muslim supremacy in India and used as the language of Indian Muslims. Greetings and salutations became consciously Muslim. This view of the language was not appreciated in East Bengal where Bangla was in common use. Urdu, basically the vernacular of Delhi and Lucknow, (the political and cultural center of the Mughal dynasty) is spoken both by the Hindus and Muslims of Bengal as well.
Semantics and Language:
Col. John Briggs, writes (History of the Rise of the Muhammadan Power in India, 1829), "Mughal is the appellation given by the Dekhani historians to all the foreign Muslims, whether Arabs, Persians or Tartars Turks)."
Ethnologists from William Irving to Col. John Briggs note that the South Asian Muslims are predominantly Mughal-Muslim. They are predominantly the descendants of immigrants from Turkistan, Persia and the Arab World. This is in contrast to the converted Muslims, who retain their Prakritic or Dravidian mother tongues.
Mughal-Muslim refers to the South Asian Muslim of predominantly Immigrant Islamicate descent who speaks Urdu or any of the dialects of Mughali (Colloquial Urdu).
Colloquial Urdu includes Muslim Bengali, Muslim Sindhi, Oudhi and Punjabi (the very name is of Persian origin). Thus, although Muslim Bengali is not a dialect of Urdu, yet it is a dialect of Colloquial Urdu that is historically referred to as Mughali. Hence, the entire arch stretching from Kashmir to East Bengal represents one cohesive linguistic unit referred to as Mughalstan. “Mughalstan” is mentioned in the Babur Namah; the terms ‘Indian Union’ and ‘Pakistan’ did not exist prior to the advent of the British.
The legendary Orientalist, Dr. E. C. Sachau, notes that Urdu evolved in the courts of Mahmud-e-Ghazni, whence it came to be called `Zaban-e-Urdu'. It is thus a derivative of Ghaznavid Persian, and evolved as a mixture in the war-camps of Ghazni, where Persian, Afghan, Turkic and Arabic warriors intermingled with one another. Urdu thus evolved outside the Indo-Aryan linguistic region, and the Sanskritic derivation as many people believe is unfounded. By the 12th century, waves of immigrants from Turkistan and Pharsistan had settled in the Punjab and Delhi regions, slowly extending to Rohilkhand. By the 14th century, they had reached Oudh, and Rohilkhand had become a Muslim-dominated region. By the 15th century, Eastern Bengal - depopulated by the Brahminist extermination of Vanga Buddhists - was colonized.
Meanwhile, waves of Arabs immigrated into East Bengal; this unique Arab admixture is what sets off East Bengal from the rest of Mughalstan. Little surprise then, that Bengali Urdu has a higher percentage of Arabic words than Standard Mughali. Muslim Bengalis speak Islamised Bengali, written both in Bengali and Islamicate scripts - as noted by linguists as Dr. S. K. Chatterji and Sir G. A. Grierson.
The Advent of Islam in Bengal:
In undivided India, Islam was a newcomer. The first Muslims came to India in the eighth century and reached Bengal in the thirteenth century. They came to a country that had already absorbed a variety of different beliefs and settlers.
In his study of religion and development in Pre-Muslim Bengal, Abecassis (Identity, Islam and Human Development, 1990) reckons that in Bengal the first cultivators came from South Asia, bringing with them not only their skills, crop cultivation and their cattle (buffalo), but also their religious beliefs which emphasized the cult of the dead and grove worship. In 1000 BC, when people from the Gangetic plain began to spread into Bengal bringing with them, inter alia, Hindu beliefs and culture.
The same happened to Buddhism nearly 1,000 years later when it reached Bengal.
Abecassis quotes Ramkrishna Mukherjee: "Buddhism contended itself with superimposing a new religion upon the existing tribal societies from which it did not uproot animistic practices." Abecassis goes on to quote Maloney and others: "Thus Brahminical Hinduism, Vajrayana Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism from north India and Theravada Buddhism from Burma, all mingled under the aegis of various kingdoms, while the peasant reverence for bamboo groves and ghosts of the dead continued at the village level." He adds, "The world view of the people at the time of the first coming of Islam was, therefore, the result of a continuous process of conflict and assimilation over the preceding millennia."
Various Muslim' conquistadors' slowly established their rule in India. At the same time the religion of the conquerors was being spread by the traders and Sufis who brought Islam with them. The peculiar configuration of Pakistan into its eastern and western wings on the east and west coasts of northern India in testimony that Islam spread over India less by conquest than by conversion. The Muslim rulers brought with them an administrative system and a language, but apart from the isolated zeal of some, for most of them it was not part of the policy to convert the indigenous population.
The Islam that was preached by the Sufis was not orthodox. It emphasized a spiritual union with God and did not require its newest adherents to jettison their traditional culture while requiring to follow the faith of Islam. Thus, in its early days, Islam in Bengal became part of the syncretic tradition of the area. This faculty of Islam known as Sunnite of Hannafi school of thought is the one that reached Manipur as well with the incoming of Muslims.
It was only in the wake of the Islamic revivalist or reformist movements, which started in India from the sixteenth century and spread to Bengal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the conflict between religion and custom arose for the Bengali Muslims resulting later to the rise of east Bengal and later Bangladesh. Then Manipuri Muslims were so much entrenched in local culture and embedded in native affairs that they were not aware of other political developments or religious issues outside Manipur. They became simply Manipuris.
(The author is a former Senior Researcher at the Center For Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and hails from Manipur)
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