Saquib Salim

"The Maharaj himself even gives in to this ridiculous custom, and is a Fuqeer during the whole of the Muharram."

Thomas Duer Broughton, an English officer stationed at the court of Maharaj Daulat Rao Sindhia, wrote these words in a letter to his brother in 1809. The word that demands attention is "ridiculous." That a British officer found it absurd for one of the most powerful Hindu Maratha rulers of the early nineteenth-century India to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussain tells us far more about the Englishman than it does about the Marathas. Broughton's letters, for us, are a window into the syncretic culture of an India that colonial power was systematically set about dismantling.

It is often argued that Muharram, the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, was always and exclusively a Muslim, or specifically a Shia, observance. But a reading of history, from archival census monographs to the private correspondence of European officers, shows that Maratha chiefs participated in azadari for centuries with a devotion that left colonial administrators bewildered.

Broughton was travelling with Sindhia and his army through Rajasthan when he witnessed this. He noted with some disbelief that Muharram and Holi had fallen together that year, describing them as "two most opposite festivals." He could not understand how Hindu Marathas would mark both with equal sincerity. Sindhia himself came out wearing green clothes, setting aside every customary ornament of his royal rank, and visited each Taziya in the camp. A Taziya represented the tomb of Hussain, before which a person would recite Marsiya. Broughton also witnessed the ceremony of chest beating, which he called "quite frantic" and "impressive in the highest degree."

On the tenth day of Muharram, the Taziyas were taken to a nearby river. Each procession passed through the camp of Sindhia. Broughton recorded the scene with barely concealed astonishment, writing that "there were more than a hundred Taziyas, each followed by a long train of Fuqeers, dressed most extravagantly, beating their breasts, and loudly calling upon the prophet and his grandson." He noted the flaming torches, the firing of matchlocks, and the drums and trumpets, concluding that it was "the most extraordinary scene I ever beheld." The Maratha Surdars, who were not Brahmins, constructed Taziyas at their own tents and spent large sums of money upon them. Hindus and Muslims alike arranged Sherbats for the mourners. Royal women took part in these events.

In fact, Broughton was witnessing all of this when Sindhia and his army were on an armed expedition through Rajasthan. Allama Saiyyid Sibtul Hasan Fāzil-i Hanswi, in his book on Muharram processions, points out precisely this. If this was the scale and intensity of Maratha azadari while marching through enemy territory, one can only imagine how much grander it must have been in their capitals during peacetime.

Interestingly, this tradition was not merely a matter of court pageantry or political accommodation. It was rooted in personal vows, family histories and generations of lived devotion. Nowhere is this clearer than in the story of Raja Rao Rambha Jayawant Bahadur Nimblakar, the highest commander of the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad in the early nineteenth century.

One of the monographs attached to the Census of India 1971 recorded that Raja Rao Rambha kept aside allowances for Tazia processions on the tenth of Muharram and for marsiyakhwans, the singers of lament who led them. He took part in the processions himself. The monograph notes that Raja Rao Rambha, who had no male heir, made a vow on the seventh day of Muharram that he would offer Niaz and keep the Tazia in the name of Imam Hussain in exchange for a son.

 When a boy was born the following year, he constructed an Ashurkhana in his palace for keeping Alams and Taziyas during Muharram. All family members wore green clothes and offered Fateha before the Alams. Food, sweets, Sherbat and milk were distributed among the poor. The night procession on the seventh Muharram continued long after Raja Rao Rambha's death, preserved as a living tradition by his descendants.

The origins of this association go back even further. The Nimbalkars were Kshatriyas of the Suraj Bansi clan of Maharashtra, their name deriving from a place called Nimbala near Delhi. They were related to the family of Raja Sivaji Chhattrapathi Bhonsle of Nagpur. Raja Rao Rambha's great-grandfather, Rhambaji Baji Rao, was born at Sagnapur and rose swiftly to prominence before rival Maratha chiefs, through political machinations, imprisoned him at the Red Fort in Delhi by Mughal Emperor Alam Shah.

K Krishna Swamy Mudiraj, in his book Pictorial Hyderabad, published in 1929, recorded what happened inside that prison. Close to the cell where Rhambaji Baji Rao was held stood an Imam Bara with Alams installed within it. Looking upon those Alams, the prisoner made a vow: should he be freed, he would celebrate Muharram every year, though a Hindu. The Emperor ordered his release the very next day. Upon returning home, he bought Alams and performed all the necessary ceremonies in fulfilment of his vow. Mudiraj records that since then, the Nimbalkar family has observed this every year, spending one thousand two hundred rupees annually on illumination and the feeding of the poor during the ten days of Muharram.

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Today, Muharram is presented as a Muslim festival with which Hindus have no meaningful connection. The India of Broughton's letters, the India of the Nimbalkar palace's Ashurkhana, the India of more than a hundred Taziyas winding through a Maratha army encampment, has been reduced to a curiosity at best and a fabrication at worst. The men who erased it did not do so out of carelessness. A society in which a Hindu Maratha general constructs an Ashurkhana in his ancestral palace, and a Hindu Maratha king dons green rags in mourning for the grandson of the Prophet, cannot easily be made to hate itself along religious lines.