I mostly share history, art, culture, food, attire, traditions, and heritage of the Indian Muslim community. Sometimes I delve into politics & current affairs.
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The Ballad of Nawab Hyder Ali.
George Washington reportedly ordered an artillery salute for Nawab Hyder Ali, who aided the American revolution and inspired the revolutionaries, who named a warship after him and sang ballads in his honor. This was one such ballad.
Yes, the Indians (Muslim leadership) played a crucial role in aiding the American freedom struggle.
There is a reason why George Washington fired a salute for Nawab Hyder Ali and American revolutionaries named a ship after him, idealised him, & sung his praises.
Apart from this economic factor, Nawab Hyder diverted crucial manpower, which was to be utilised by the British monarchy against the infant American state.
Apart from the East India Company Europeans, a force from His Majesty's Troops (the King's Army), comprising 8,575 rank and file, 429 officers, and 64 surgeons, was dispatched to India.
These forces would go on to meet a disastrous fate and suffer failure in India. At Bednore, Nawab Fateh Ali (Hyder Bahadur's son) captured some 1,022 Europeans.
This thinning and stretching of resources and crucial manpower was felt on American soil.
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Indian Muslim Archives retweeted
Bhaskar Rao, the Maratha governor of Bharuch, issued an edict ordering lower caste Hindus to remain indoors after 9 a.m., on the grounds that their presence would "pollute" the air and atmosphere for the upper-caste Hindus.
No such law existed in the Mughal era, btw.
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Meat prices in Bharuch city, India - 1782 CE:
Beef - 2 paisa per seer
Veal (young calf) - 3 paisa per seer
Mutton - 4 paisa per seer
Kid (young goat) - 72 paisa per seer
Lamb - 72 paisa per seer
Fish - 3 paisa per seer
#Note:
64 Paisa = 1 Rupee
1 Seer = 0.933 Kilograms
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The purest diet a man could consume, according to the Brahmins (Hindu scholars and priests), was grain that had passed through a cow and was then separated from its dung.
Rajah Narayandas of Idar ate nothing but this.
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From 1679 to 1707, Jodhpur remained under direct imperial Mughal administration.
In 1679, its Qiladar (fort commandant) was Khidmatguzar Khan (Islam Ali Beg), a Bundela Rajput convert to Islam. He died in 1684, leaving behind a son, Muhammad Quli.
#Ref: Tazkirat-ul Umara
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About the Rajah Ranjit Singh’s famed elite Hindustani Muslim soldiers (Najeeb Paltan). [1/3]🧵
Since 1740–1760, the Hindustan and Deccan regions of India were exposed to intense, European-standard gunpowder warfare, forcing the natives to adapt and evolve.
Najeebs (“the noble”) were a product of that evolution. They were elite Muslim soldiers drawn from the Hindustan (i.e. Gangetic Plain) region, who had incorporated the European discipline, while retaining the older Mughal outlook.
They formed an aristocratic, knightly, privileged regiment, as opposed to commonfolk soldiers. They were often called "Mian Saheb" ("my lord gentleman").
How elite and well-trained they were can be understood from the contemporary stereotype that 100 Najeebs could perform what 1,000 Telingas (men trained in the British EIC Bengal sepoy manner) could.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh lived in the Indus Valley, a region unexposed to this kind of warfare. His country still preferring cavalry bands.
European-style warfare had rendered Persian or Indo-Islamic cavalry increasingly inferior to infantry, let alone a mounted cavalryman cum infantryman like the Najeeb. We find this observation ("inferiority of horses") in the accounts of British EIC officers as well as Indian rulers, including Hyder Ali.
As a Misldar (one of the 12 Sikh supreme warlords), he was clever enough to recognise this and decided to fully incorporate such infantry.
He recruited Hindustani Muslims, who formed the Najeeb Paltan. This would help him achieve mastery over the surrounding Sikh, Rajput, Khyberi Pashtun, Kashmiri and Punjabi warlords and rulers, eventually allowing him to become supreme overlord of the Indus region.
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A number of historians (eg: Kaushik Roy) have, whether through ignorance or deliberately to advance Punjabi ethnic nationalism, misrepresented the Najeebs of Maharaja Ranjit Singh as Punjabi Muslims.
Take the Guru Nanak Dev University translation of Lafont’s work. It states that General Barr wrote that 6,000 out of the 10,000 men who crossed the Khyber Pass were Punjabi Muslims.
Let’s see how accurate this claim actually is. [2/3]
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When we look at General Barr’s original account, he nowhere states that those 6,000 soldiers were Punjabi Muslims. He simply describes them as Muslims.
In fact, these 6,000 men were Najeebs of Hindustan under Colonel Sheikh Basawan (himself a Hindustani Muslim), who was given supreme command over all the Najeebs after the departure of General Ventura. [3/3]
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Sir Thomas Rumbold:
“During the War with Haider Ali, it was often heard that our failure proceeded from not having horses; so I entertained Morari Rao (Maratha), Fazil Beg (Mughal) and Dragoons (German), but the enemy's were greatly superior... although the charge of maintaining them (horses) was great, they were of little or no use.”
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Do you remember when I mentioned finding a contemporary London newspaper reporting that British mothers frightened their children with the name of Hyder Ali, while stockbrokers invoked his name to influence the market -- and then I lost the source?
Well, I found it again (1781).
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Sharjeel Imam is accurate in calling Muslims as the most homogeneous group in Indian subcon.
This is not a new observation either. European travellers and observers in India wrote extensively about it.
Islam in India spread in a remarkably spiritually centralised manner. This helps explain why Urdu (emerging from Northern Hindavi) first attained status of a language of high culture and was patronised early in the Deccan, where the local population was completely alien to it.
And this sense of civilisational commonality is not merely historical. Even today, a Gangetic Hindu and a Kannadiga Hindu may share little in terms of cultural experience, whereas a Muslim from UP/Delhi visiting Karnataka/Hyderabad, or vice versa, feel at home with the other.
Kerala and Tamil Nadu are exceptions, because Islam developed there through somewhat different historical trajectories. But their exceptionalism does not negate the broader pattern.
Even in Tamil Nadu, we see a significant chunk of Muslims who are a product of that centralised Hanafi/Urdu/Farswani mileu.
Critics bringing up fringe Shafi'i-Arabi Malayali and Tamil (some sections) Islam as a counterargument is futile.
Read the sharjeel imam piece.
1. Full of Marxist goyslop with words like brahminical capitalist order trying to control India
2. His attack on secularism is false because I consider Nehruvian secularism to be fake.
3. He sees only Muslims in India as a modern nation , which is false in itself , there is no Similarity between a Malayali Muslim and a Gangu Muslim
4. He wants communitarian groups based rights for Muslims. Well we already have this for certain communities. This is nothing new.
5. He is although correct on centralisation tendencies of Nehru and Co. The team he calls as capitalist class are basically crony class who supported him in his Fabian socialism project
Overall none of the sides are interested in individual rights , so they keep talking about minority rights , etc. Yes we definitely need to decentralise a lot to get away from the excess right harming ability of this republic.
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The Muslim lords of Junagadh, Khambat (Cambay), Bharuch (Broach), and Surat - all of them styled themselves as fidvis ("devoted servants") of the Emperor-Caliphs of Delhi and sent nazars and (some form of) peshkash every regnal year.
Realising the Mughals were finished, the Mughal commander at Junagadh declared independence and founded Junagadh State.
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I believe that the story of Char Sahibzadeh being "bricked alive" was a popular 'tragic end' that got adopted by many community legends, with the Sikh version becoming most famous.
Multiple accounts from the same period associate this tragedy to their heroes.
The earliest Sikh account to mention the four Sahibzade being bricked alive, as far as I know, is Koer Singh’s Gurbilas Patshahi 10, which is generally dated to the post-1750 period.
For instance, I came across an account of the Pathans of Farrukhabad recounting the tragic fate of their heroes - the five brothers of and five lieutenants (the Indo-Aryan chelas, also raised as brothers to) Nawab Qaim Khan Bangash - calling the former Panch Sahibzadeh and latter Panch Chele, and stating that they were bricked alive in the Allahabad Fort.
When Nawab Qaim Khan was killed, these 10 people were taken as hostages as security by Nawab Safdar Jung, and later all of them were executed when Nawab Ahmad Khan Bangash rose against Nawab Safdar.
The most famous martyr among them was Shamsher Khan Chela (the lieutenant), about whom the legend continues that, as he was being led to his execution, he was offered a palanquin, as befitted a nobleman, but refused it.
As he was being executed, Jalaluddin Haider (the future Shuja-ud-Daulah) asked him where his sword was. He replied with the following verses:
Haman sher-o shamsher-e burran manam;
Chi sazam, keh qabzah nadarad sar-am!
Va gar nah tura khanamanat haris,
Ba yak dam tah-e kha k kardam adam.
Rough tr: "I am that very lion and razor-sharp sword; but what can I do, for my head lacks a hilt. Otherwise, you greedy one, I would have reduced you and your entire household to non-existence beneath the dirt in a single breath."
A Mughal standing nearby weeped and reportedly cried out that one of the greatest saints of the age has been executed.
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Pathans of Farrukhabad aren't the ones who incorporated this legendary tragic fate, it existed in Gwalior and many other places.
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Islamic civilisation stretches all the way from Morocco to the Philippines, and all its subdivisions have their own male dances.
Yet there is only one (Hindustani/Urdu Muslim) subculture, that has none and looks down grossly upon men dancing.
A civilisation so hetrosexual that when the world traveller and observer, Richard Burton mapped his "Sotadic Zone" (the regions where homosexuality was prevalent), it stretched all the way from France, Spain, Morocco, narrowing eastward through Afghanistan, Sindh and Punjab, and again reappearing across the Central Asia, China and Japan.
The zone encompasses all major Islamicate lands excluding India.
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It is very easy to understand why India is left behind - a civilisation that carries such refined and absolute notions of masculinity that it is completely deprived of a male dances. In fact, the trait of men dancing ("nachaniya") is a grave insult, and a man who does so is considered to have been stripped of his masculinity.
Dancing is cringe no matter who does it, but when men engage in this behaviour it's borderline homosexual
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