What is it to be a Professor?

What is it to be a Professor? If you are like my old friend Mike Franklin, you sit in your bungalow on the banks of the Tawe in Wales—that principality that sits in awkward alignment to the Empire of the English euphemistically called the UK—and travel not as do sight-seers but in the mind.

Your travels have led you to a bangla on the bank of the Hugli in Garden Reach in 18th century Calcutta as well as to a getaway bangla on the Jalangi close to its confluence with the Bhagirathi. Here a fellow Welshman, William Jones, sought that expansion of the mind, that deepening of the consciousness that had caused Akbar's true spiritual heir, Dāra Shikūh, to call his Persian version of the Upanishads, the Sirr-i Akbar (The Great Secret). 

The realisation slowly creeps up on you that Jones owes much of his famous discovery to Europe of the riches of India's Hindu-based civilisation, as well as the further development of his own increasingly harmonious mindset, to prompts from several prominent Muslim intellectuals.

You note that the Sëir Mutaqharin by Jones' friend and fellow historian, Ghulam Husain, not only alerts him to the syncretism of Dāra Shikūh's other work, the Majma 'al-bahrayn or Mingling of Two Oceans, but itself speaks in the same vein of the way Hinduism and Islam in India have come together into a whole, "like milk and water that have received a simmering".

You begin to see the way Jones opened up his—and then the world's—mind to the comparative studies of linguistics and mythology as well as to other studies such as musicology and botany receives strong impetus from the approaches of a couple of earlier Muslim poets who were forced to enrich and extend the idea of Islam as a result of their encounters with India. 

The year is 2005. Why should these dusty academic references from the distant past matter at all? For this reason. Your train of thought has been triggered by the current news reaching you that the tomb of Amir Khusrau at Hazrat Nizamuddin has been desecrated. 

Like yourself, like your own mentor, William Jones, Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) was a foreigner so enamoured of the multifariousness of Hind he is credited—whether reliably or not is beside the point—with inventing the vina, together with new strains of Indo-Persian music and poetry, naturalising ghazals and qawwalis alike. 

Even if Khusrau's Paradise of Hind may strike some as essentially Islamic, he is instrumental in foreshadowing how a more expansive, hybrid culture might come into existence in the future—as it did several centuries later when Akbar, his great-grandson Dāra, and others actually realised that possibility. 

You remember reading in an old leather-bound notebook belonging to Jones his record of how Khusrau delighted in the word-play that took him into new countries of the mind by using two or even several languages within the same poem, the same line even—and, oh, quite wonderfully, within one phrase:

The poet encounters a Hindu woman on the—as ever fluent and fluid—bank of a stream. "My idol", he asks, "what is the price of your curly locks?" She cries out: "Dur dur múy": that is, in Hindi, "Keep your distance, sirrah!" In Persian: "A pearl for each hair".

For you this exciting engagement across and within language is not just an academic game but an opening up across cultures—even across genders, since gendered Urdu allows for a male poet to show a woman giving as good as she gets.

Your dismay at the desecration of the tomb of such an early exemplary figure as Khusrau—apparently at the hands of a Bengali madman, though possibly a fundamentalist—is as nothing to your disgust at the destruction three years earlier of not only human lives but of, among other Indo-Islamic monuments, the tomb in Ahmedabad of Vali Gujarati (1667-1707).

Vali's work, that did undeniably establish the widespread diffusion of a hybrid music and poetry imagined so long before by Khusrau, was being read, translated and published—in the Devanagari script—by enthusiastic members of the nascent Asiatic Society of Bengal in the 1780s. Through their early publications, you have come to know of Vali as the promoter of the use and development of Rekhtah, a word for a Hindavi language whose name means "mixture". 

You recall how Vali, like Khusrau, making good use of the gendered distinction allowed to him by Urdu, asserts that however perfect the beauty of the beardless boys in Surat, this cannot match that of its young women, Krishna's amorous gopis being but a pale imitation of them. 

More in anger now than sadness, you think how ironic it is that Vali should have lighted on the young people of what has become today's modish Surat as a symbol of beauty.

Iron enters your soul as you think of the fanatics and fundamentalists of all persuasions who wish to polarise us and force us into a single confining identity. How they hate such poets as Amir Khusrau and Vali Gujarati for opening up to the kaleidoscope of cultures of the subcontinent, creating admixtures, multiple new possibilities.

As a Professor sitting in your little Welsh bungalow, you know your words have no more weight than a tiny diya floated down one of those distant rivers of Bengal once traversed by your mentor, William Jones. No matter that, you pick up your pen and write…

Professor Michael Franklin's engaging—at once readable and monumental—biography of Sir William Jones, Oriental Jones, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

John Drew is an occasional contributor to The Daily Star. A collection of his articles, Bangla File, was published this year by ULAB Press.