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 no touchi
no touching, no spitting, no praying
Visual & Media Histories
Series Editor: Monica Juneja, University of Heidelberg

This Series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing meanings,
maintaining aesthetic values and relations of power. Through individual studies, it hopes to chart the trajec-
tories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important premise here is the conviction that the
making, theorising and historicising of images do not exist in exclusive distinction of one another.

Opening up the field of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously anchors vision
to other media such as audio, spatial and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls for closer attention to in-
ter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing layers of readings and responses
are brought alive.

Through its regional focus on South Asia the Series locates itself within a prolific field of writing on
non-Western cultures which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies, and to perceive temporalities
as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe debates and conceptual
categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating the historical dimensions of
visual practice implies close attention to specific local contexts which intersect and negotiate with the global,
and can re-constitute it. Examining the ways in which different media are to be read onto and through one
another would extend the thematic range of the subjects to be addressed by the Series to include those which
cross the boundaries that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship — sculpture,
painting and monumental architecture — from other media: studies of film, photography and prints on the
one hand, advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings, and cityscapes on the other.

Also in the Series

Modern Art in Pakistan: History, Tradition, Place

Simone Wille
ISBN: 978-1-138-82109-5

Garden Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India: Histories from the Deccan

Editors: Daud Ali and Emma J. Flatt
ISBN: 978-0-415-66493-6

Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India
Editor: Sumathi Ramaswamy
ISBN: 978-0-415-58594-1 (Not for sale in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh)
 no touchi
no touching, no spitting,
no praying the museum in south asia

editors Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh

Routledge
ROUTLEDGE

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI
First published 2015 in India
by Routledge
912 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2015 Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh

Typeset by
Glyph Graphics Private Limited
23 Khosla Complex
Vasundhara Enclave
Delhi 110 096

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-138-79601-0
 conten
contents

Plates vii
Acknowledgements xi
Preface • monica juneja xiii

Introduction • saloni mathur & kavita singh 1

part 1 inaugural formations

1 The Transformation of Objects into Artefacts, Antiquities and Art in
19th-century India • bernard cohn 21
2 The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving,
Classifying • tapati guha-thakurta 45
3 Staging Science • gyan prakash 83

part ii national re-orientations

4 The Museum is National • kavita singh 107
5 Grace McCann Morley and the National Museum of India • kristy phillips 132
6 Museumising Modern Art: National Gallery of Modern Art,
the Indian Case-Study • vidya shivadas 148

part iii contemporary engagements

7 Museums are Good to Think: Heritage on View
in India • arjun appadurai & carol a. breckenridge 173
8 Remembering the Rural in Suburban Chennai: The Artisanal Pasts
of DakshinaChitra • mary hancock 184
9 Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of
Religious Revivalism • saloni mathur & kavita singh 203
 VI Contents

Museum Watching: An Introduction 221

tulay atak, rituparna basu, shaila bhatti,
hope childers, monaz gandevia, neelima jeychandran, brinda kumar,
ramesh kumar, sraman mukherjee, suryanandini narain,
ameet parameswaran, siddarth puri, akshaya tankha

About the Editors 265

About the Series Editor 266
Notes on Contributors 267
 plates
plates

1 Projected architectural plans for the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art, Kolkata 2
2 Entrance to the Hanuman Museum at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh 3
3 Pioneering ‘native’ art history: Title page of Rajendralal Mitra’s
Antiquities of Orissa, vol. I 6
4 Title page of Stella Kramrisch’s The Hindu Temple 8
5 After Independence: Crowds poring over displays of the newly formed
National Museum of India, former Viceregal Palace, New Delhi 9

2.1 The New Imperial Museum, Calcutta 46

2.2 Company painting of a ‘custard-apple plant’ commissioned by Sir Elijah
and Lady Impey from a native artist of Calcutta 49
2.3 Bird’s eye view of the exhibition grounds of the Calcutta International
Exhibition of 1883–84, held at the precincts of the Indian Museum 52
2.4 One of the regional courts (‘The Punjab Court’) within the Art-Ware Court
of the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 53
2.5a and 2.5b The two Patna Yakshas (buff sandstone, ca. 2nd century bce)
in the Indian Museum, Kolkata 55
2.6 Gopuram of the Great Temple to Shiva and his consort at Madurai 58
2.7 Carved pillars in the Sheshagiri Rao mandapam in the Great Temple
to Vishnu at Srirangam 59
2.8 Gandharan sculptures from Lorian Tangai, accumulated on-site,
before removal to a museum 64
2.9 Linnaeus Tripe, photograph of a panel of the Amravati sculptures
in the Central Museum, Madras, 1857 65
2.10a and 2.10b Two panels of the Amaravati sculptures (limestone, ca. 2nd century ce) 66
2.11 The miniature stupa in the Amaravati sculptures (limestone, ca. 2nd century ce) 68
2.12 The Bharhut railing pillars on-site 69
2.13 The reconstructed Bharhut stupa in the opening hall of the
Archaeological Galleries of the Indian Museum, Calcutta 70
2.14 The Besnagar Yakshi and friezes from Orissa and Bodhgaya in the
Asoka Gallery of the Indian Museum 73
 VIII Plates

2.15 Detail view of sculptures in the Gandharan Gallery of the Indian Museum, Calcutta 74
2.16 View of Buddhist statues in the Gupta Gallery of the Indian Museum, Calcutta 75
2.17 Sculpted frieze from Sarnath showing scenes in the life of Buddha in the
Gupta Gallery of the Indian Museum, Calcutta 77

3.1 ‘Kim’s Gun’: Canon (the Zam-Zammah) outside the Lahore Museum 84
3.2 ‘Exhibiting Science’: Steam pump machinery in action at the
Alipur Agricultural Exhibition, Calcutta, 1864 89

4.1 Façade of the newly constructed National Museum, New Delhi 108
4.2 Sculptures selected for the National Museum stored in the open air while the
galleries were readied before the new building opened in 1961 110
4.3 Bodhisattva Maitreya from Ahichchhatra, Kushana period, displayed at the threshold
between the Maurya–Sunga and Kushana galleries of the National Museum 113
4.4 View of the Kushana period gallery 115
4.5 Bodhisattva Padmapani from Sarnath, Gupta period, 5th century ce 116
4.6 Vishnu from Mathura, Gupta period, 5th century ce 116
4.7 Edwin Lutyens’ plan for central vista, showing the concentration of museums 123
4.8 View of the exhibition of ‘Masterpieces of Indian Art’ in Government House 128
4.9 The Indus Valley gallery of the National Museum in its initial quarters in
Government House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) 129
4.10 View of the Central Asian Antiquities Gallery, installed in the modern style
introduced by Grace Morley 129

5.1 Grace Morley showing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru around on his visit
to the National Museum, 1960 134
5.2 Long view of the Anthropology Gallery 140
5.3 A representation of Krishna and Radha 143

6.1 National Gallery of Modern Art, housed at the erstwhile winter

palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur 149
6.2 A press picture of two women encountering N. S. Bendre’s painting 157
6.3 Inauguration of NGMA at Jaipur House: Dr Humayun Kabir,
Secretary of Ministry of Education, explaining the sculpture
‘Toilet’ by D. P. Roy Chowdhury to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru 158
6.4 A press image of the Sher-Gil room which was described as the pride of the gallery 159
6.5 Display of Amrita Sher-Gil paintings from the NGMA archives 162
6.6 An installation shot of Sankho Choudhari’s sculpture displayed on the lawns of NGMA 164
6.7 Museum goes Public: In 1978, NGMA purchased a bus that could be converted
into a mobile exhibition 165
6.8 Director L. P. Sihare earnestly explaining Duchamp’s urinal, part of the exhibition
‘Dada Key Documents: 1916–1960’, organised in collaboration with Max Muller Bhavan
Goethe-Institut, to an amused Ram Niwas Mirdha, Cabinet Minister, and other dignitaries 166

8.1 Pathway leading up to the Crafts Bazaar 185

8.2 Conceptual Plan for DakshinaChitra by Laurie Baker 191
 Plates IX

8.3 An overview of the dense Tamil Nadu street 192

8.4 The Syrian Christian house in the Kerala section 192
8.5 The Coastal Area house in the Andhra Pradesh segment 193
8.6 Stringing flowers at the Chettinad house thinnai (porch) 194
8.7 A ‘Huli Vesha’ dance performance from Karnataka at the Tulu Festival 196
8.8 Ramu Velar, DakshinaChitra’s master craftsman at work 198

9.1 Sketch of the Maitreya Project 206

9.2a An exhibition of ancient and sacred Buddhist relics destined for the
Heart Shrine of the Maitreya Buddha 208
9.2b A poster advertising the Relic Tour 208
9.3 Visitors milling at Akshardham, New Delhi, and a sunlit view of the
elephant plinth prominent at the bottom of the structure 210
9.4 Detailed close up of the famed elephant plinth at Akshardham, New Delhi 211
9.5 Akshardham lit up at night, with a large-scale statue of Swaminarayan in the main shrine 211
9.6 Pramukh Swami Maharaj, Head of the BAPS, performing pujan,
blessing the Akshardham model 213
9.7 Postmodernist architecture at the Khalsa Heritage Complex, Anandpur Sahib, Punjab 215
9.8 An exploration of Sikh history and philosophy through a variety of media:
Inside the Khalsa Heritage Complex at Anandpur Sahib, Punjab 216

Museum Watching

10.1.1 Exterior façade of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya 224
10.1.2 People resting, in conversation, and watching as others pass by at one
of the museum’s lounging spots 225
10.1.3 The ritual Monday pooja performed for a mid-6th century Shiva sculpture from Parel 226
10.2.1 Panoramic exterior shot of the Bishnupur museum 227
10.2.2 Interior view of the museum at Bishnupur 227
10.3.1 Entrance to the Lahore Museum, Pakistan 229
10.3.2 Long view of the Freedom Fighters’ Gallery at the Lahore Museum 231
10.4.1 Side view of the Stok Palace Museum 232
10.4.2 Entrance to the Stok Palace Museum 233
10.4.3 View of the private quarters of the royal family at the Stok Palace Museum 234
10.5.1 A display of brass and bronze icons, ritual vessels and implements used in domestic shrines 236
10.5.2 A variety of paan containers 237
10.5.3 A supari-cutter in the form of a lady greeting viewers with a ‘Namaste’ 237
10.6.1 One of the famed Chola bronzes on display at the Bronze Gallery 238
10.6.2 Riding a heavily ornamented bull: Photo shoot at the Madras Museum 239
10.6.3 Picnic-ing on museum grounds 240
10.7.1 Exterior façade of the City Palace Museum, Jaipur 241
10.7.2 Tourists posing with ‘real Rajput’ turbaned attendants at the ‘Sarvatobhadra’ pavilion 242
10.7.3 Tourists relaxing at the Palace café, while ‘folk performers’ take a
break of their own on the side 243
10.7.4 A craftsman demonstrates his skills, displaying the tools of his trade to visitors 244
 X Plates

10.8.1 Display of the Painted Wooden Figures in the French African Room at the
Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad 245
10.8.2 The ‘Veiled Rebecca’ — one of the three most popular objects at the Museum 245
10.8.3 The famed double-statue of ‘Mephistopheles and Margarita’ 245
10.8.4 A shot of one side of the European Sculpture Gallery 246
10.9.1 Frontal shot of the temple, Bodh Gaya 248
10.9.2 Entrance to the unimpressive brick building that houses the Archeological Museum,
the Archeological Survey of India’s site museum at Bodh Gaya 248
10.9.3 The treasures of the Archeological site museum at Bodhgaya: sandstone and granite
railings from the Sunga and Gupta periods 249
10.9.4 Visitors at the mostly unfrequented ASI site museum walking in a file, Bodh Gaya 250
10.10.1 Entrance to the Hanuman Museum 251
10.10.2 Hanuman-related publications at the Museum 252
10.11.1 Visitors resting in the sheltered shade of a tree outside the museum entrance 255
10.11.2 Poomukham at the Padmanabhapuram Palace 257
10.11.3 Stone block at the Padmanabhapuram Palace 257
10.12.1 An oversized demon face protrudes out of the rocky façade, flanking one side of the
entrance to the ‘India Temple’ at Haridwar, Uttarakhand. A range of gods and
mythological figures grace the exterior of this temple. 259
10.12.2 Visitors at the entrance to the ‘India Temple’ 260
10.12.3 A display prominently showcases the three central gods of the Hindu pantheon —
Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva 260
10.13.1 Exterior façade of the Assam State Museum, Guwahati 261
10.13.2 The museum as an educational experience: An informative label
denoting a set of sculptures at the Museum 262
10.13.3 Exhibiting Culture: Murals and relief work on the walls lining the
entrance path to the heritage park, Kalakshetra 263

Part separators

Part 1 Inaugural Formations

Case full of broken sculptures of hands collected from Sahr-i-Bahlol,
Northwest Frontier Province; from the Archaeological Survey of
India Frontier Province Album, 1914–15 19
Source: Courtesy of the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi
Part 2 National Re-Orientations
M. F. Hussain on the steps of the National Gallery of Modern Art, 1993 105
Source: Photograph courtesy of Parthiv Shah
Part 3 Contemporary Engagements
Visitors at Anand Bhavan Museum, Allahabad, 2000 171
Source: Photograph courtesy of Dayanita Singh
 acknowl
acknowledgements

t his volume is the result of an extended, ongo-

ing exchange between its co-editors that began
approximately 10 years ago. In 2005, we received
hosted and supported our collaboration and served
as interlocutors, in particular, Thomas Gaehtgens,
Nancy Micklewright and Joan Weinstein at the
a multi-year collaborative grant from the Getty Getty Research Institute and Getty Grant Program
Grant Foundation for a project titled Museology in Los Angeles; Gerhard Wolf and Hannah Baad-
and the Colony: The Case of India. The goal was to er at the Kunsthistorisches/Max Planck Institute in
historicise and bring theoretical understanding to Florence; Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury
the unique 200-year trajectory of the museum in at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown; and the
South Asia. Together, we supervised a team of seven leadership and staff of our home institutions, Jawa-
South Asian studies scholars, and 13 graduate stu- harlal Nehru University and the University of Cal-
dents from India and the United States who set out ifornia, Los Angeles. Thanks also to Andrew Mac-
to compile an extensive empirical record of specific Clellan, Clare Harris, Deborah Swallow, Richard
museological sites in the subcontinent as the basis Davis, Geeta Kapur, Ashok Kumar Das, and Roma
for developing and theorising a new framework Chatterji for their intellectual support and stimulat-
for the museum in postcolonial society. Suffice it ing ideas.
to say that our activities and efforts have been vast We are especially grateful to Monica Juneja, edi-
and multiple, and have included over the years con- tor of the Routledge Visual & Media Histories Series,
ferences, workshops, fieldwork, case-studies, and for her substantive engagements with the project,
residencies, all directly and indirectly related to the and for understanding and defending the title of
development of this book. our book when the press felt, perhaps rightly, that
The nature and scope of this process means that it was too long and unfriendly for database searches.
that there are a great many people to acknowledge. It is a source of some pride that the final section
We are grateful to the scholars, critics and curators of this volume contains excerpts from the work
— spanning the fields of art history, literature, mu- undertaken by a team of student field researchers
seology, history, anthropology, and architecture — we assembled in 2005. A quick glance at their au-
who participated in the intellectual process in one thor bios reveals the many exciting directions these
way or another. They are Naazish Ataullah, Timo- young people have taken since then. They are now
thy Barringer, Rustom Bharucha, Deborah Cherry, curators, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral schol-
Annapurna Garimella, B. N. Goswamy, Tapati Gu- ars, assistant professors, and medical school candi-
ha-Thakurta, Salima Hashmi, Jyotindra Jain, Ka- dates, working at various places in India, Pakistan,
jri Jain, Partha Mitter, Aamir Mufti, Ruth Phillips, Britain, Canada, and the United States. We wish
Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Sinha, and Savia Viegas. to acknowledge their research and important roles
Thanks also to several people and institutions who in our work. Thank you: Tulay Atak, Rituparna
 XII Acknowledgements

Basu, Shaila Bhatti, Hope Childers, Monaz Gan- Finally, it is a rare and deeply sustaining experi-
devia, Neelima Jeychandran, Brinda Kumar, Ra- ence to have an intellectual partnership grow into a
mesh Kumar, Sraman Mukherjee, Suryanandini friendship after a decade of working together. We
Narain, Ameet Parameswaran, Siddarth Puri, and wish to thank each other, and our spouses and chil-
Akshaya Tankha. Thanks also to Vidya Shivadas, dren — Aamir, Jalal, Arunava, Aditya — for their
Kristy Phillips and Keelan Overton, for their en- love, patience and support.
gagements, and to Kajri Jain for her assistance in
supervising the team.
 preface
preface Monica Juneja

t he unbounded space enjoyed by the notion of art

in today’s world brings with it an equally open
definition of the sites that could function as a mu-
Is the museum a quintessential institution of
Western Enlightenment modernity — to para-
phrase Donald Preziosi — which then sits uneasily
seum. Indeed, as lively discussions of planned mu- in the societies to which it has travelled? The essays
seum projects such as the Louvre and Guggenheim presented here point to an institution that no longer
on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, or the Kolkata remains attached to its parochial origins, instead
Museum of Modern Art, rage through the media, takes on new forms animated by local and regional
it would appear that the site or architectural plan experiences, both subliminally present and freshly
or imagined vision of a future museum suffices to shaped through the encounter with cultural alterity.
stand for the museum itself. Or, that an individual As they trace the trajectory of the museum in South
collection and fictional story can grow in tandem to Asia, the editors of this rich volume make a histo-
create a dreamscape of objects whose material reali- riographical move to transcend the ‘getting-there’
sation is Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence, opened in mode that has characterised canonical narratives of
April 2012. The myriad and seemingly infinite re- modernity. The accounts we read here do not as-
incarnations of an institution once viewed primari- sume or propose a single or normative model of the
ly as a state-supported fixture in a nation’s cultural museum, whose variants in the colony they proceed
landscape, intended to document the nation’s his- to describe. The museum in South Asia emerges
tory, constitute its heritage and fashion its citizens, neither as an example nor an exception: we discover
pose a formidable challenge to art history, a disci- it within a field of specific negotiations, conceptual
pline whose formation was closely intertwined with tensions, improvisations, and unpredictable affec-
that of the museum. In this collection of essays that tive resonances, which make it a site that brings
forms the third volume of Visual & Media Histories, forth novel potentialities and the promise of a future
Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh have engaged with yet to be envisioned. As the individual contributions
these issues while investigating the history and var- set into motion standard concepts of rational order
ied modalities of the museum in South Asia. The and enlightened learning associated with the muse-
studies brought together in this book not only fill um, they point not towards disenchantment as the
a noticeable regional gap in the otherwise dense- dominant affect that comes in the wake of the mod-
ly-productive field of writings on the museum and ern, but invite us instead to view the museum as a
its practices, their import and insights rebound on space where new forms of wonder and enchantment
existing narratives of the museum, urging them to (ajaib ghar) reconfigure rational knowledge, where
pause in a moment of self-reflection over their ex- the classification and function of objects can gener-
planatory paradigms. ate curiosity and even magical (jadu) enjoyment.
 XIV Preface

At the same time, the wealth of empirical ma- between the ‘cult’ and ‘exhibition’ value of an object
terial brought forth by the studies in this collection and the transformation of one into the other ush-
come as a corrective to those almost formulaic mod- ered by modernity, when transposed to South Asia
els that place museums at the heart of an inexorable shows up as a rough, non-linear process, one com-
power-knowledge machine. It is refreshing indeed pelled to constantly negotiate multiple and slippery
to grapple, together with the authors of individu- temporalities within a single space. The changing
al articles, with a host of contingencies and factors fortunes of the museum today, it would seem, have
that emerge within the interstices of imperial intent worked towards even undermining the category of
(itself never really a well-orchestrated design), prac- an ‘art museum’ constituted by modernism’s valori-
tical execution and quotidian considerations that sation of a transparent and unmediated aesthetic
make the ‘museum in the colony’ a set of improvi- experience of the displayed object. The Maitreya
sations and surprises. The accounts we read here es- Bodhisattva discussed in Chapter Nine of this vol-
chew the poles of imperial pedagogy and subaltern ume, for instance, registers the dismantling of the
resistance, viewed as absolutes, and show instead the canonical idea of an art museum as a repository of
incertitude and messiness of both imperial govern- the nation’s heritage, to be replaced by a new forma-
ance and postcolonial projects of nation-building, tion that stands for the identity of a supranational
whose categories and epistemologies freely feed on community of believers-cum-visitors; its attributes
each other, once the crassest of colonial stereotypes are those of a shrine, exhibition, storehouse of relics
have been set aside. For all its success in drawing and technological marvel, allowing it to incorporate
crowds of visitors, the museum has remained an existing taxonomies that had once distinguished
institution that can never be fully conflated with museums as art, ethnological or industrial.
the popular, though it has throughout its history Since its inception the discipline of art history
drawn upon such sites as the department store, the has defined its function as that of placing an indi-
world exhibition, the library, shrine or theme park vidual work within historical time and a stylistic
and borrowed habits of looking and displaying. corpus of related works, thereby creating a narra-
The tension between significations and settled rep- tive of an evolutionary order of objects and styles,
resentations that accompanies us through the pages from which the truth of ‘cultures’ could be read and
of this book calls for fresh questions about the ways fixed, though such narrative principles often bore
of knowledge production and circulation which, as an uncanny resemblance to biological laws. In tan-
the book’s evocative title suggests, are not delinked dem with this process, the museum — be it the art,
from the senses, bodies and beliefs. ethnological or craft museum — became a crucial
The three sections, in which the essays are pedagogical site to fix these histories in a nexus of
grouped, are held together by narrative threads as synchronic and diachronic relationships, carried out
they trace the vicissitudes of the museum in South through various modes of framing and sequential
Asia — among these the exercise of ‘pedagogical’ juxtaposition. The museum’s refusal to be contained
and ‘performative’ citizenship (Dipesh Chakrabarty) within this mould, its unlimited and unpredictable
serves as an effective organising and explanatory capacity to travel, proliferate and morph into new
principle. Cumulatively the articles demonstrate forms, both in the locations where it was born as
the unruly domain and marvellous expressive va- well as the sites to which it has voyaged, means that
riety contained within the notion of the ‘museum’ it is now for art history to recast its fr ameworks and
and shake up existing models of explanation in the practices. The present volume furnishes an impor-
process. Walter Benjamin’s much quoted distinction tant impulse in this direction.
 introdu
introduction
Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

a s we prepared this volume for publication, the

ambitious plans for the new Kolkota Museum
of Modern Art (KMoMA) to be housed in the West
what its role in South Asian society might be, or
even what its collections may hold. Nonetheless,
KMoMA expresses a number of aspirations towards
Bengal city of the same name, were announced and that which is distinctly recognisable as a global
presented to the public with great flourish. The museological form: the project is simultaneously
expansive vision of this museum is to a spectacular bid for international visibility, a
powerful enactment of collective identity, memory
acquire, preserve and exhibit a national and global and history, and a bold exercise in 21st century
collection of fine art from the late 18th century to branding — a gesture that seems to be, increasingly
the 21st century, to provide a vibrant social and and definitively, a sign of our uncertain times.
intellectual forum in the region through the arena
of modern and contemporary art, and to elevate the In contrast to the ambitious plans for KMoMA,
urban center of Kolkata into a “major cultural hub of however, are a plethora of home-grown repositories
global reach”.1 in India that seem to occupy the other end of the
spectrum of museums. Consider, for instance,
The Swiss architectural firm of Herzog and de the Hanuman Museum in Lucknow: India’s only
Meuron, whose credentials include the spectacular museum dedicated to the widely-worshipped
‘Bird’s Nest’ from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, monkey-god and ally of the epic hero Rama. Located
and the gigantic Tate Modern in London — the in a small house in a narrow residential street, and
largest museum of modern art on earth — secured filled with plaster-cast and fiberglass reproductions
the commission for the building following an of Hanuman sculptures from temples all over the
international competition. Their plans boast an country — along with colour photocopies and
architectural complex with 55 galleries, a large postcards of paintings of Hanuman, calendar art
amphitheatre, a lecture auditorium, a separate prints of the deity, newspaper clippings of stories
research and academic wing, and extensive about Hanuman, and cassettes of devotional songs
commercial and dining spaces, all to be constructed sung in his honour (Plate 2) — this museum
on a 10-acre plot in the fast-growing township of filled with commonplace objects, replicas and
Rajarhat/New Town, on the north-east fringes of the commercially-produced goods is marked by
city of Kolkata (Plate 1). At this point it is difficult to its eclecticism and distance from standard
know how this project will unfold, let alone predict museological priorities and practices. In its scope,
aims and methods it could not be more different
from the KMoMA. This extraordinary museum is
1
See http://kmomamuseum.org/, accessed on 24 January in fact the home of a Hanuman devotee, who has
2014. amassed his collection out of religious sentiment
plate 1 • Projected architectural plans for the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art, Kolkata. SOURCE: courtesy of KMoMA,
Kolkata.

and personal obsession. When a newspaper report development projects, to answer a community’s
referred to the house as a veritable museum, the identity needs, to salvage ‘dying’ cultures, or to
owner was so inundated with inquiries from the house a collection of family heirlooms, cultural
public that he felt obliged to designate specific hours relics or devotional objects. These small museums
each week when he takes visitors through his living are the result of local and often individual initiatives
room and study, and eventually he even posted a and are seldom acknowledged within a reckoning
board to acknowledge that his home is, indeed, the of museums in the subcontinent. Yet, as this
‘Hanuman Museum’. volume suggests, vernacular appropriations of the
While the KMoMA, or the similarly ambitious idea of ‘the museum’, and the considerably more
Khalsa Heritage Complex in Anandpur Sahib, eccentric establishments they represent, are as
Punjab (discussed in Mathur and Singh’s essay in crucial to understanding the landscape of museums
this volume), can be immediately understood as in India as the impulse towards internationally
projects calculated to insert India into an evolving recognised museological models. The very use of
geography of globally visible mega-museums, the term ‘museum’ to designate seemingly disparate
the Hanuman Museum is one of the vast number collections of things testifies to the way the idea of
of small and unsung repositories scattered across the museum has percolated, widely and at many
the subcontinent. Housed in community centres, levels in India: when public access is granted to rare
administrative offices, police stations, monasteries and interesting things; when precious objects are
or temples, and private homes, most of these sought to be preserved; when a set of narratives wish
modest institutions were created to give shelter to present themselves as authoritative and true; then,
to accidental archaeological finds, to relocate it seems, the ‘museum’ is repeatedly mobilised by
objects and monuments that came in the path of groups and individuals to give their efforts a name.
 Introduction 3

The presence of museological phenomena

as wide-ranging as KMoMA and the
Hanuman Museum in the pantheon of
museums in contemporary India appears to
counter, at the very least, the perceptions of
inertia and stasis that have long dominated
writing about museums in the subcontinent,
particularly from the period following India’s
Independence.2 Although the institution of the
modern museum was born in the European
metropolis, today it clearly asserts itself as an
infinitely varied global form through which
the performative politics of late democracies
have been enacted in forceful, if unpredictable,
ways.3
The variegated phenomena of museums in
India thus ought to be understood alongside
the increased prominence of art museums in
general around the world, as manifested on
the one hand through the spectacular growth
of museums in the bourgeoning centres of
global capital, such as China and the Arab Gulf
states, and on the other hand, as part of the
increasingly urgent role played by museums
in asserting or making visible the rights
of minorities, Aboriginal or First Nations
groups, or other constituencies on the margins
of society. The museum’s capacity to shapeshift
and reinvent itself in ways that mirror the plate 2 • Entrance to the Hanuman Museum at Lucknow,
local processes of identity politics and the ebbs Uttar Pradesh. SOURCE: Courtesy of Suryanandini Narain.
and flows of global capital, suggests a pressing
need for more comparative approaches to the study No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The
of museums, and a rethinking of the available Museum in South Asia brings together a range of
analytical tools within art history, anthropology
and cultural studies, to name a few of the fields
4
of inquiry relevant to a cross-cultural account of Some important studies in this vein include Arjun Appadurai
4 and Ivan Kopytoff (eds), The Social Life of Things: Commodities
museums and their histories. in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1986; Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism
and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum,
London: Routledge, 1998; Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa:
2
See, for instance, Stephen Inglis, ‘Post-Colonial Museums: Museums, Material Culture and the Popular Imagination, New
Dead or Alive?,’ Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1989, Haven: Yale University Press, 1994; Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
pp. 84–85; and Rustom Bharucha, ‘Beyond the Box: Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial
Problematising The “New Asian Museum” in the Age of and Postcolonial India, New York: Columbia University Press,
Globalization’, Third Text, vol. 14, no. 52, 2000, pp. 11–19. 2003; Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material
3
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Museums in Late Democracies’, Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, MA:
Humanities Research, vol. 9, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–12. Harvard University Press, 1991.
 4 Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

essays, some previously published and some new, the British Museum, or in Paris in 1793, during the
to offer for the first time a wide-angle view on French Revolution, when the doors of the Royal
the dynamic history of the museum as a cultural Palace collections of the Louvre were thrown open
institution and object of study in South Asia. The to the public for the first time. The institution in
three major sections of this book are intended to its modern democratic form then continued to
follow the museum in the region: as it originated evolve and proliferate in the metropolitan centres of
as a tool of colonialism, was adopted as a vehicle Europe throughout the 19th century, supported by
of sovereignty in the nationalist period, and as it the rise of the disciplinary knowledges of art history
emerges in its present incarnations, reflecting the and the sciences and the interlinked phenomena of
fissured identities and neoliberal economy of India the ‘exhibitionary complex’, to serve, in increasingly
in the 21st century. Instead of judging the efficacy sophisticated ways, the formation of the new
of Indian museums by the standards of Victorian national and imperial identities of Euro-Western
pedagogy that brought them into existence, the nation-states.6
authors in this volume effectively deconstruct such The ‘birth’ of the museum in the former colony,
a master-narrative through a rigorous investigation by contrast, was not driven by the same historical
of a vast range of museum discourses and practices processes and democratising impulses that threw
in the subcontinent. Their accounts no longer lead open the doors of the Louvre to the citizenry, or
to the frustrations and paralyzing perceptions offered a triumphalist universal survey of a world
of lack that dominated the writings of an earlier of antiquities to the British metropolitan viewer.
generation; rather they point, with a critical eye, to The museum’s emergence in the colony was
the vibrancy and unconventionality of museums in undoubtedly bound up in this European story, but
the subcontinent, their tenacity and drive towards it was also viewed as a lesser counterpart to the
legitimacy and societal relevance, their paradoxical exemplary metropolitan institutional paradigm,
relationships with a diverse range of constituencies, defined as it was by the politics of colonial patronage
and their complex histories of participation in and the materialist–acquisitionist needs of the
colonialist, nationalist, regionalist, and global– great imperial knowledge-production project. The
capitalist projects. museum in the colony was, in fact, a museum of the
Under the banner of ‘new museology’, a diverse
body of scholarship that has proliferated in the past
two-and-a-half decades has presented a valuable 1991; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture:
Tourism, Museum, and Heritage, Berkeley: University of
intellectual critique of museums as institutions that California Press, 1998; Andrew McCLellan, Inventing the
reflect and serve the dominant culture.5 Its authors Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in
have generally located the ‘birth’ of the modern Eighteenth-century Paris, Berkeley: University of California
museum in London in 1753, with the founding of Press, 1994; Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping
the World: The Idea of the Museum, London: Ashgate, 2004;
Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums,
and the Phantasms of Modernity, Minneapolis: University
5
Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The of Minnesota Press, 2003; Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff
Anthropology of Museums, Vancouver: University of British (eds), Museum Cultures: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles,
Columbia Press, 1992; Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; Susan
Ruins, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993; Carol Duncan, Civilizing Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,
Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, London: Routledge, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University
1995; Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne Press, 1993; Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, London:
(eds), Thinking About Exhibitions, New York: Routledge, Reaktion Books, 1989; Stephen Weil, Rethinking the Museum
1995; Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of and Other Meditations, Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1992; Ivan Karp and Steven Press, 1990.
6
Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory,
Museum Display, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, Politics, London: Routledge, 1995.
 Introduction 5

colony, addressing not just Indian visitors but also exceeded the achievements of the museums of
imperial authorities, such as Orientalist scholars, colonial India.10 Perhaps the best known example
scientists of diverse descriptions, administrators, of this counter-colonial museological spirit can be
and agents of commerce.7 Moreover, the appearance found in the museum established by Sayaji Rao III
of Indians within the museum as objects themselves, Gaekwad, the Maharaja of Baroda. As Julie Codell
in the form of ethnographic specimens, ethnic types has argued in her study of the latter, the ‘strange
or nameless artisans, dramatizes the paradoxical arrangements’ and collecting activities of Sayaji
origins of the museum as an institutional form: Rao III were inseparable from his many reformist
the apparatus that allowed for a ritualised public projects and the context of the heated politics of
enactment of democracy in the metropolis nationalism in early 20th-century India.11
simultaneously functioned in the colony to position The somewhat eccentric title of this volume —
(in highly undemocratic ways) the public as a subject No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying — was in part
society outside the domain of citizenship and rights. derived from an actual sign at the entrance to an
And yet, as several authors in this volume will Indian museum announcing the rules of behaviour
demonstrate, the characterisation of the museum as to its visitors. However, the title also recalls the
a deracinated transplant scarred by its origins within ‘fingered glass, betel-nut spit and dirty marks on
the ‘civilizing mission’ denies the reality of a more the walls’ that Sydney Frank Markham and Harold
complicated history through which the museum and Hargreaves identified — in their 1936 survey of
its associated disciplines of archaeology, art history museums in British India — as symptoms of a
and Indology were seized for more unpredictable widespread problem for museology in the colony.12
ends by a range of Indian actors and agents. This For these colonial government bureaucrats, the
involves not only the stories of Indian scholars who museums of India served as indicators of ‘the cultural
struggled for recognition amidst their European level that country has reached’.13 Behaviours such as
peers,8 but also the less well-known stories of the wall-touching, case-fingering and the spitting of
Indian patrons — in particular, the rulers of several betel-nut juice reflected not merely the ill-mannered
princely states9 — who established exemplary nature of India’s uneducated masses, but something
museums, funded archaeological excavations and much worse: it signalled the country’s status as
provided for the conservation of monuments during ‘lamentably low’.14 The challenge, they argued, was
the latter part of the colonial period. These Indian to ‘awaken, inspire and teach’ the illiterate Indian
initiatives, some remarkably ambitious in scope, masses — who nonetheless flocked to museums
often received munificent support, and at times in record-breaking numbers and stood apart from
their collections and advanced display methods the English-educated Indian elite — who they
feared ‘do not really care for museums or believe in
them’.15 For our purposes, the title No Touching, No
7
See, for instance, Kavita Singh, ‘Material Fantasy: The
Museum in Colonial India’, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art
and Visual Culture in India, 1857–2007, Mumbai: Marg 10
Singh, ‘Material Fantasy’, pp. 50–51.
Publications, 2009, pp. 40–57.
11
8 Julie Codell, ‘Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collection
See for instance, Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects,
of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, and the
Histories, Chapter 3, ‘Interlocuting Texts and Monuments:
Cultural Politics of Early Modern India’, Journal of the
The Coming of Age of the “Native Scholar”’; and Bernard
History of Collections, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 127–46.
Cohn, this volume.
12
9 Sydney Frank Markham and Harold Hargreaves, The
The ‘princes’ were the colonial-period descendants of
Museums of India, London: The Museums Association, 1936,
traditional ruling families of India who were allowed to rule
p. 61.
their territories under the supervision of the British. They
13
exercised a circumscribed but not insignificant degree of Ibid., p. 3.
14
power. Ibid., p. 4.
 6 Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

Spitting, No Praying also confronts the idea of plate 3 • Pioneering ‘native’ art history: Title page of Rajendralal
the cultural difference of the museum as it has Mitra’s Antiquities of Orissa, vol. I. SOURCE: Courtesy of Shilpa
18

evolved in the context of modern South Asia, Vijayakrishnan.

viewed not through the pedagogic imperative
of Markham and Hargreaves’ evolutionary
frame, but through the conceptual prism and
theoretical lenses of new kinds of questions
and concerns. For instance: What are the
forms of difference, dissonance and alterity
that have shaped the formation of museums
in India? What are the culturally specific
behaviours and understandings — the social
and historical modes of viewing — that
Indians have brought to the display of art and
artefacts in the subcontinent? What kinds of
modernising impulses, institutional identities
and metropolitan landscapes have museums
embodied and helped to define? And finally,
if museums exist as ‘ritualized spaces’,16 then
what is the nature and character of the ritual
setting in the museum outside of Euro-Western
space?
If in its early years, the museum in India was
marked as a tool of colonial control, in the post-
colonial period it increasingly became the locus
of an official national culture. The museum in
the colony had been limited in its scope: being the
museum of the colony, its collections were confined civilisational history was produced for India — one
to objects produced or found within the territory that foregrounded the Nehruvian dictum of ‘Unity
of the subcontinent. This had made the museum in Diversity’ so critically needed in a troubled and
incommensurate with the grand, universal-survey fragmented post-Partition India.17
museums in the European metropolis. With the This appropriation of the museum to nationalist
arrival of Independence in 1947, however, the narrow ends was not easily achieved. In the colonial
focus of the museum’s collections was to turn from a
limitation into an advantage, for it would allow for 17 The role of the museum in propping up an official culture
the celebration of an exclusively national heritage can also be seen in the regularity with which museums have
through a narrative that traced ‘Indian civilization’ been founded in India in tandem with the reorganisation
as a primordial, enduring and materially manifest of its political–administrative units. Thus, if one wave of
museum-making swept over India in the 1960s in the wake
characteristic of the land through the ages. Here of the redrawing of internal boundaries in 1955, with a State
through systematic appropriations and erasures Museum being instituted for each State, then a second wave
of various regional and temporal phenomena, a washed over the North-Eastern states in the 1980s, shortly
after the division of greater Assam into smaller states in the
1970s; and a third wave is underway, with new museums
in the works for the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh,
15
Markham and Hargreaves, The Museums of India, which gained autonomy in 2000.
p. 95. 18
Rajendralal Mitra, Antiquities of Orissa, vol. I, reprint,
16
Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Calcutta: Government of India, 1961.
 Introduction 7

period, the emergence of a cadre of native scholars dominated by Indian scholars and began to serve
had already begun to disturb the scholarly and the needs of nationalism (not occasionally shading
administrative establishment of the era. For off into Hindu majoritarianism) remains an area
example, Bernard Cohn (in a pioneering essay for further research. Nonetheless, by the middle of
republished as Chapter 1 of this volume) traces the the 20th century, a generation of Indian scholars —
unfortunate case of Cavelly Venkata Luchmiah, the figures such as C. Sivaramamurti, V. S. Agrawala,
brilliant South Indian assistant of Colin Mackenzie, Moti Chandra, and Rai Krishnadasa, to name a few
the first Surveyor-General of India. In the 1830s — would become leading museum-makers in post-
Luchmiah’s career was dismissed out of hand by Independence India. They were, without exception,
colonial authorities because a ‘native could hardly be men who had trained as scholars of ancient Indian
pronounced equal to the task’. Half a century on, in history and literature; their education equipped
the 1880s, the Bengali polymath, Babu Rajendralal them to understand the historical and cultic
Mitra, an archaeologist, Sanskritist, Indologist, and significance of objects in their care, and they saw
photographer — and the first Indian member of the the task of Indian museums as the condensation of
Asiatic Society in Calcutta — was to become the their growing collections into a narrative useful to
subject of blistering critique by British Orientalists an emergent India’s needs.
when he would begin to publish writings that The museum thus helped to catalyse and
argued that the best qualities of Indian architecture crystallise an official culture for post-Independence
issued from indigenous rather than Western sources India, one which suggested that diverse artefacts
(Plate 3).19 Yet, 40 years later, the tables would be from different regions and epochs shared an
turned: by the second quarter of the 20th century underlying unity and harmony, and thus constituted
(i.e., a few decades before Independence), the field a shared glorious past. The dissemination of this
of Oriental scholarship would come to be so fully cultural message among the people became a
dominated and fiercely guarded by Indians that central preoccupation of India’s so-called ‘Museum
in the 1920s the Hungarian-Jewish scholar Stella Movement’ in the decades following Independence
Kramrisch, who was appointed the first professor in 1947. The challenge for these individuals, who
of Indian art history at Calcutta University in 1921, inherited — as the novelist Mulk Raj Anand once
was to complain of discrimination at the hands of complained — a ‘bunch of half-dead warehouses
her Indian colleagues. Only when she published her from the British’, was to ‘confront the stranglehold
monumental study, The Hindu Temple,20 did her of an obsolete system’ and to re-assess, and then
Vice-Chancellor commend her by saying: ‘Of the re-invent, the museum’s responsibilities to its new
two of us, you are the better Hindu’21 (See Plate 4). national public.22 The ideas of this generation of
While the colonial period and its iniquities museum-builders were debated at length at national
have been examined in considerable detail, the and regional seminars organised by United Nations
subsequent period in which the field came to be Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) and International Council of Museums
(ICOM), and in the Journal of Indian Museums,
19
See Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories; Peter which was published by the Museums Association
Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and
Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great
War, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Thomas Stella Kramrisch, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Press, 1983, p. 11. The Vice-chancellor in question was
University Press, 1997. Shyama Prasad Mookerji, who was himself the President of
20
Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (2 vols), Calcutta: the Mahasabha and the founder of Bharatiya Jana Sangha, a
University of Calcutta Press, 1946. right-wing Hindu party.
21
Barbara Stoler Miller, ‘Stella Kramrisch: A Biographical 22
Mulk Raj Anand, ‘Museum: House of the Muses’, Marg,
Essay’, in Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings by vol. 19, no. 1, December 1965, pp. 2–3.
 8 Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

plate 4 • Title page of Stella Kramrisch’s The Hindu Temple. SOURCE: Courtesy of Shilpa Vijayakrishnan.

of India from 1945 to 1984. Together, these activities museologists also sponsored ‘mobile museums’,
chronicle the shifts in emphasis and multifarious whether in the form of specially adapted buses
directions of museums during this sometimes- or exhibit panels that could be carried from place
haphazard-sometimes-systematic period of their to place. While the museum’s regular galleries
evolution. These records also reveal a persistent might continue to show ‘high arts’ of sculpture
concern with ‘adult literate and semi-literate and painting, exhibits specifically developed for
viewers’, or the ‘village folk’; for India’s large rural audiences usually focused on ‘health, hygiene,
illiterate masses, the museum was seen as ‘the most population growth, prevalence of superstition’, and
powerful media to create awareness and disseminate so on. The imperfect yet principled initiatives of
knowledge’.23 To take their collections to the this first generation of museum-makers in the new
most ‘downtrodden section of our society which nation-state to reach the widest cross-section of the
needs to be strengthened and enlightened’,24 these Indian masses thus reflect both an extraordinary

23
For instance, Satya Prakash, ‘Museums for an Illiterate Nigam, ‘Indian Museums and Their Public’, Journal of Indian
Public: Experience in Indian Museums’, Proceedings of Museums, vol. 39, 1983, pp. 43–47; G. N. Pant, ‘Museums and
the UNESCO Regional Seminar on the Development of Mass Education’, idem., vol. 38, 1982, pp. 92–97.
Museums, 31 January–28 February 1966, New Delhi; M. L. 24
Nigam, ‘Indian Museums and Their Public’, p. 45.
 Introduction 9

commitment to the secular ideals of modern social grammar that privileges the act of seeing as a form
democracy and a developmentalist pedagogy (not of contact, so that ‘seeing is a kind of touching’ and
unlike the generation that preceded them) that vice-versa: the two gestures of reverence towards the
framed India’s uneducated populace as a problem sacred thus become interrelated in a multi-sensory
for the museum in need of reform (Plate 5). apprehension of the divine.25 Christopher Pinney
The notorious unwillingness on the part of India’s has used the concept to explicate, for example, a
subaltern masses to follow the museum’s cultural more ‘sensory, corporeal aesthetics’ in South Asia,
script (to touch, spit and pray in its collections, as a ‘corpothetics’, in which seeing and touching are
it were), has been partly attributed to the idea of
darśan, the exchange of vision between a devotee
and a deity that lies at the heart of Hindu forms of 25
Diana Eck, Dars´an: Seeing the Divine Image in India, New
worship. Darśan has been defined as a devotional York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 9.

plate 5 • After Independence: A Museum of their Own. Crowds poring over displays of the newly formed National Museum
of India, in its early temporary quarters in the former Viceregal Palace, New Delhi. SOURCE: Courtesy of the National
Museum, New Delhi.
 10 Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

embodied and interrelated, in order to construct a come to characterise the field of seeing in India. This
‘countertheory of Western visuality’, one that is ‘less is so not because it is correct to diagnose religiosity
than universal and more than local’.26 as an inherent civilisational characteristic of Indian
The concept of darśan has thus increasingly publics; rather it is because it makes visible the
emerged at the centre of recent attempts by longstanding predisposition within scholarship to
scholars of South Asia engaged in the ‘visual interpret Indian behaviour as tied to sacrality. In
turn’ to apprehend the unique embodiments of reality, as we have seen, it was the museum’s distance
spectatorship in India, and to comprehend the from the realm of the ‘popular’ — not its parallels
popularity and riotous nature of certain forms of or logical similarities — that became the central
visual culture in the subcontinent — riotous not concern of an entire generation of museum-builders
only because of their vibrancy and dynamism, but in India, such as Pramod Chandra, Grace McCann
also due to their political power, and their role in Morley, Hermann Goetz, and L. P. Sihare, to name
the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in the region. but a few. Thus, the field of activity of the museum
Scholars of visual culture in India have thus begun in India cannot be said to belong in any historical
to trace darśan’s semantic operations in a variety of sense to the logic of the ‘vernacular culture industry’
20th-century cultural forms. The protocols of this or the popular space of the ‘bazaar’ that generated
spectatorial regime have been detected, for instance, the ubiquitous mass print culture known as
in Bollywood cinema, in calendar art, political calendar art.28 Nor do the modes of spectatorship of
posters, photography, billboards, indeed, the entire popular Indian cinema, where stunning song-and-
‘interocular’ arena of urban and rural visual forms. dance routines intermingle with the penetrating
The proliferation of this ‘darśan discourse’ has led gazes of darśan and nazar (in the Persian tradition)
Ajay Sinha to caution against the tendency of such to cue and harness sexual desire,29 appear relevant to
analyses to result in an essentialised and reductive understanding the visual pleasures of the museum
difference between Western and Indian aesthetic — the pleasure of ‘attentive looking’, in Svetlana
practices: the concept, when deployed over- Alpers’ terms.30 Indeed, the museum might be
zealously, has tended to over-determine all that viewed as a ‘hard’ cultural form, one that seems to
is ‘Indian’ about Indian visual culture.27 For our ‘encapsulate the core moral values of the society’ in
purposes, it seems important to ask: To what extent which it was born.31 Arjun Appadurai has argued
can the museum be seen to belong to this logic of that hard cultural forms are generally not susceptible
popular visual culture in India? And how might to radical reinterpretation as they cross social
these broader discussions about the specific scopic
regimes of the subcontinent be relevant for our
28
understanding of the museum and its conditions of Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian
spectatorship in its colonial and postcolonial career? Calendar Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2007.
It is apt that a term with religious overtones has 29
Woodman Taylor, ‘Penetrating Gazes: The Poetics of Sight
and Visual Display in Popular Indian Cinema’, in Sumathi
Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and
26
Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image Ideologies in Modern India, New Delhi: Sage Publications,
and Political Struggle in India, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, 2003, pp. 297–322.
p. 193. The notion of a ‘countertheory of Western visuality’ is 30
Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in
elaborated in his ‘Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics
Reproduction: Or, What Happens When Peasants “Get Hold” and Politics of Museum Display, Washington: Smithsonian
of Images’, in Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Institution Press, 1991, pp. 25–32.
Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, 31
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity: The
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 356. Decolonization of Indian Cricket’, in Carol Breckenridge
27
Ajay Sinha, ‘Visual Culture and the Politics of Locality (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian
in Modern India: A Review Essay’, Modern Asian Studies, World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995,
vol. 41, no. 1, January 2007, pp. 187–220. p. 24.
 Introduction 11

boundaries because the values they represent are ‘at bureaucrats and officials. However, a recent
their heart puritan ones’ in which rigid adherence study by Savia Viegas offers a rare glimpse into
to a moral code is the point: ‘Form closely follows some aspects of the relationship of contemporary
(moral) function here’, he has observed.32 And yet, subaltern groups to a museum in Mumbai.35 Viegas
the example of cricket, a sport that once embodied demonstrates how segments of an audience remake
the elite Victorian ideals of masculinity and which the museum’s meanings according to their political
has been superbly possessed and decolonised by the orientations, beliefs and caste. Thus in the arms
former colonies, points to the power of a process and armour gallery of the Chhatrapati Shivaji
of radical appropriation and ‘indigenization’ in Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay (formerly the Prince
the colonial context. Such phenomena, therefore, of Wales Museum), Viegas found crowds jostling to
represent, for Appadurai, ‘collective and spectacular be photographed next to life-size figures that they
experiments with modernity’.33 took to be local (Hindu) kings Shivaji and Sambhaji
We would be hard-pressed to report that the despite the museum’s labels identifying them
museum was ‘indigenised’ with quite the same as (Muslim) Mughal lords. For a group of rural
flair as cricket in India, or with a comparable visitors the museum visit had a ritual significance:
degree of populism and zeal. The makers of Indian these visitors were Dalits, members of the lowest,
museums did not appear, in other words, to fully ‘untouchable’ castes who have recently rejected
erode the Victorian moral and didactic structure Hinduism to embrace the more egalitarian faith of
of the museum, or completely hijack its ‘Western- Buddhism instead. On a special festival day, these
ness’ to make it entirely their own. Nonetheless, the visitors came to see the ancient Buddhist sculptures
instability of sacred and secular values accorded to that they consider ‘their’ heritage, and many
objects in the South Asian context, and the centrality were upset to see that the Hindu sculptures were
of the museum’s recreational function laid bare by accommodated in grand galleries while Buddhist
subaltern views of the museum as a house of ajaibs ones were relegated to the corridors. In the floor
(or wonders), do suggest a ‘collective and spectacular plan of the museum, in other words, these viewers
experiment’ of sorts, and appear to challenge the could see a map of their own marginality.36
premise of a stable, universal ‘museum-effect’, the In the manner of Viegas’ suggestive study,
notion at the heart of Alpers’ influential thesis that the essays that follow do not point to a single,
museums consolidate a specific ‘way of seeing’.34 alternative spectatorial contract emerging from
What allure, we might ask, did the museum have the space of display in the non-West; nor do they
for the vast subaltern audiences who were unable to reveal a wholesale reinvention of the museum’s
read its labels and taxonomies and yet still crowded post-Enlightenment stage. The contributions in this
(and presumably sought enjoyment in) its halls volume do, however, articulate and make visible
throughout the colonial period? a variety of contingent museum-effects, which
Alas, it is now difficult to recover what the are culturally and historically grounded in the
museum visit may have meant to these large paradoxical formations of colonial and postcolonial
audiences taking unaccustomed pleasure in the societal relations. Indeed, the story that emerges
marbled halls: descriptions of the phenomenon of from the writers in this volume is a highly ambiguous
subaltern visitorship from the period tend to be narrative of the museum’s formation in India; it is a
overwritten by the desires, anxieties, aspirations, story of reception and spectatorship in tension with
and projections of bourgeois museum-makers,

35
Savia Savia Viegas, ‘Rich Men’s Collections, A Nation’s
Heritage, and Poor Men’s Perceptions: Visitors at the Prince
32
Ibid. of Wales Museum of Western India’, Teaching South Asia,
33
Ibid. vol. 1, no. 1, 2001.
36
34
Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’. Ibid., see particularly fn 5.
 12 Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

alterity: of hits-and-misses at the level of practice and what James Fergusson definitively claimed to be a
ideas, of ambition and innovation constrained by scientific history of India.
historical limitations, and of instability and a lack of Cohn’s work, which has been seminal to
consensus across societal upheaval and radical social the anthropology of colonial knowledge, was
change. The essays make visible, in some cases for developed prior to the foundational insights into
the first time, a host of individual and professional the workings of power and knowledge formulated
activities in India — the practices of curators, by Michel Foucault and Edward Said, as Nicholas
directors, artists, critics, and cultural thinkers — Dirks has observed.37 For our purposes, Cohn’s
who pioneered new paradigms for the museum conceptualisation of early museology in the colony as
and debated the institution’s utopian ideals. Indeed, an ‘investigative modality’,38 linked to the European
the very idea of the museum as static, moribund, view of the country itself as a vast museum, is
irrelevant, and anachronistic, is resituated in the similarly foundational, and it led him to articulate
work collected here, by way of archival research colonial collecting practices in relation to other
and critical reflection, as itself an anachronism to be modalities of investigation, such as historiography,
productively engaged. enumeration, statistical survey, and textual
Section I of the volume, ‘Inaugural Formations’, translation. The project that Cohn understood as the
gathers together some of the most penetrating ‘objectification’ of India was thus enmeshed in all
observations on the colonial history of the museum manner of processes of interpretation that brought
in India and represents the work of scholars in value and meaning to a given object; objectification
historical anthropology, art history and history. was not merely instrumental but also unintended,
It begins with anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s and its results were always historically specific. As
pioneering account of how British conceptions of Dirks has noted, one of the accomplishments of
value were gradually imposed onto India as part of Cohn’s far-reaching analysis was the manner in
the larger European project to claim authority over which he moved from ‘limb to limb of the colonial
the history of the subcontinent. ‘Each phase of the elephant’, without arriving at closure or seeking the
European effort to unlock the secret of the Indian last word.39
past’, Cohn has argued, ‘called for more and more A degree of indebtedness to the work of Bernard
collecting, more and more systems of classification, Cohn is discernible in the two essays that follow,
more and more building of repositories for the study by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Gyan Prakash,
of the past and the representation of the European which further historicise the vast conceptual and
history of India to Indians as well as themselves’. institutional schema that brought the museum
Significantly, Cohn’s account of Colin Mackenzie’s into its fold. These authors, like Cohn, trace
‘almost demonic urge’ to collect the history of South the origins of the museum in India to the early
India for the imperial survey at the beginning of the collecting impulses of William Jones’ Asiatic Society
century emphasised the role of his Indian staff — the (founded in 1784), where a small constituency
‘native men’ who were enlisted to assist Mackenzie as of learned Orientalists began to institutionalise
writers, translators and interpreters, some of whom their knowledge through India’s material culture.
accompanied him across the country for decades —
which dramatised the discrepant subjectivities at
stake in this increasingly bureaucratic, yet intimate,
37
historical encounter. Similarly, Cohn’s account of Nicholas Dirks, ‘Foreword’, in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism
and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton,
the journey of a single collection, which started NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. ix–xvii.
with Colin Mackenzie in South India, showed how 38
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The
many individual interests, false starts, personalities, British in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
political agendas, and scholarly reputations were 1996, p. 9.
invested over the course of decades to produce 39
Dirks, ‘Foreword’, p. xvii.
 Introduction 13

Guha-Thakurta demonstrates how these early Madras Museum at the turn of the previous century
collecting activities became the basis for India’s first that were reported with a degree of discomfort by
museum, the Indian Museum in Calcutta (established Edgar Thurston, who served as its Superintendent
in 1814), and she skilfully maps how the latter from 1885 to 1910. Significantly, Prakash — a
converged with the parallel history of archaeology member of the influential collective of Subaltern
in the region. However, Guha-Thakurta’s essay Studies historians — reads Thurston’s account of
is not merely concerned with articulating the these rumours within the local population not as
role of the museum in these wider apparatuses of testimony of ‘the native’s point of view’, an approach
colonial knowledge. Instead, she investigates ‘the that regards history itself as something to be peeled
ways this project of producing and disseminating back in order to reveal the truth, but as constitutive
knowledge would be fractured in the course of its of ‘a moment of crisis in the representation of
enactment in Indian history’, and emphasises the difference’, one that can lead to the opening rather
field of ‘deviations and dissonance’ at work in the than closing of possibilities. As Prakash has argued
museum’s transplantation from metropole to colony. provocatively elsewhere, encased objects from the
Notably, for Guha-Thakurta, the tension ‘lodged at colonial world exert pressure on the frames that
the heart of the museum’s self-conception’, between contain them; neglected and fossilised displays
the museum as a domain for scholars and specialists (like those of the Madras Museum) can today be
and its status as an ajaib ghar (or ‘wonder-house’) for read as ‘meta-museums’; and curators can develop
the Indian masses, emerges as a space of ‘hybridity institutional strategies ‘to make appropriated objects
and difference’ in which the official, intended role tell “inappropriate” stories’.41 Not only, therefore,
of the museum is fractured by its many unintended do ‘museums matter’, but they appear to matter
meanings during the late 19th and early 20th more than ever before given the changed conditions
centuries. Thus, the profile that emerges of the of spectatorship and display in which museums
colonial museum is not that of a stable foundation operate in the world today.
with a single coherent direction: it is rather marred Prakash’s assertion that the museums of a by-
by various fault lines and flaws, ambivalences and gone era represent, in some sense, the ‘anachronisms
dissensions, anxieties and insecurities, and the of humanism’, is an insightful point of entry
‘contrary compulsions’ of science and magic, truth into Section II of the volume, titled ‘National
and myth, all of which left their mark in one way or Re-orientations’.42 For the profound symbolism
another on the museum’s institutional frame. of the museum to the ‘new nations’ of the 20th
Gyan Prakash similarly emphasises the century in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which
instability and indeterminacy of the museum, which led them to construct, in Kavita Singh’s terms,
is itself foregrounded, he suggests, by Rudyard ‘shrines to the national culture’, would seem to
Kipling in the opening scene of his famous novel, produce equally anachronistic effects. Singh’s essay
Kim.40 That museums and exhibitions in the colony reads the narrative of the National Museum in
functioned as signs of Western power is, by now, Delhi, inaugurated in 1949, as a reification of the
an ‘often-told tale’, Prakash admits. His interest, nationalist art history defined in the decades prior to
by contrast, is in the ‘distorted life of the dominant Independence, and also connects the institution to
discourse’, namely, the ‘subterfuges, paradoxes, an earlier plan for museums developed during the
distortions, and failures’ that punctuated this British Raj. Singh demonstrates how the displays
exercise of power. Prakash thus turns, by the end
of his essay, to the rumours circulating about the
41
Gyan Prakash, ‘Museums Matter’, in Bettina Massias
Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts,
40
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 208–15.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim, London: Wordworth Editions, 42
Ltd., 1993. Ibid., p. 213.
 14 Saloni Mathur & Kavita Singh

in the museum’s new galleries highlighted and achievement’ for the museum, this ambition — as
privileged the masterworks and periods promoted Phillips shows — was apparently not shared by
by such nationalist thinkers as E. B. Havell and her successors. The pre-Columbian gallery at the
A. K. Coomaraswamy. But she also argues that National Museum remains virtually unchanged
the museum answered to the specific needs of today: strange, dissonant and incongruent, the space
the post-Independence period by delineating a represents, according to Phillips, a ‘messy product of
continuous and unified high culture throughout tensions’ between nationalist expectations, political
Indian history, one that privileged stone sculpture experimentation and the uncertainties of India’s
as a primordial medium for the re-enactment of drive towards the modern.
India’s greatness while relegating other materials — The aspirations of another national institution
textiles, woodwork, jewellery, decorative arts, and in Delhi, the National Gallery of Modern Art
painting — to less central spaces. One consequence (NGMA) established in 1954 with German art
of this shift in the mode of display from ‘chronology’ historian Hermann Goetz as its first director, is the
to ‘material’, Singh suggests, was the dispersal of subject of the final essay in this section by Vidya
Islamic material across many galleries, effectively Shivadas. By turning briefly to the collections built
lifting India’s Islamic art from the chronological by E. B. Havell in Calcutta, Sayaji Rao in Baroda and
circuits of its cultural history. As Singh observes, Ravi Varma in Travancore during the first half of
the result — both startling and entirely normalised the century, Shivadas constructs a mini-genealogy of
— ‘is and was that one can walk right through the the public art gallery in 20th-century India. She also
National Museum and be only dimly aware of the locates the early bid for a national-level institution
fact the Mughals had been in India’. within a community of modern artists in the 1930s,
Kristy Phillips’ account of the National and shows how the vision for a public institution
Museum offers another chapter in the history of articulated by the artist-brothers, Barada and Sarada
this institution, one that emerges in the 1960s with Ukil (and their artist-based organisation All India
the arrival of Grace McCann Morley, the American Fine Arts & Crafts Society or AIFACS), would take
woman appointed first director of the new National a rather different course by the 1950s as it entered
Museum in 1960. Morley came to India after three the hands of the Nehruvian state. Shivadas then
decades of work in American museums; she was a turns her critical eye on NGMA’s acquisition of 96
student of Paul Sach’s Museum Course at Harvard paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil, which was celebrated
University (along with the likes of Alfred Barr, by the British modern art critic, W. G. Archer, as the
the first director of the Museum of Modern Art ‘solid core of greatness’ of the gallery. Although this
or MoMA in New York), and was recognised for collection would shape the institution in powerful
her pioneering exhibitions in America of modern ways, it was formed, as Shivadas notes with caution,
artists such as Klee, Miro and Kandinsky, and later, ‘as much by design as by default’. Her account
Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell. Phillips explains of how the NGMA embraced the shift towards
how Morley’s remarkable, yet under-examined, abstraction by the 1970s under the directorship
personal trajectory came to converge with the of L. P. Sihare (who served during 1971–84), and
modernising projects of Nehruvian nationalism, promoted the so-called Neo-Tantric art movement,
and she demonstrates how her self-conscious efforts offers a similarly sceptical narrative in light of
to reshape an enduring Victorian model of museum the aggrandisement of this movement within the
pedagogy into a distinctly American one emphasised, international art market. As Shivadas argues,
above all, the primacy of an ‘aesthetic experience’ and Neo-Tantric art presented a perfect fit between an
the formalist values of modern art. If the successful Indian visual vocabulary and international trends in
acquisition of a pre-Columbian collection of art and abstraction, even as it echoed Havell’s emphasis on
artefacts from Mexico, Central and South America the authentic spirituality and transcendentalism of
represented, for Morley, the ‘ultimate national Indian art, and was thus exported by the NGMA
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
elephant, which was perhaps originally a symbol of his sagacity, but
is accounted for in one of the later legends regarding this deity as
follows: The goddess Parvati wished to take a bath one day in her
mansion, Kailasa, during the absence of her lord, Siva. Her female
attendants were engaged in some domestic duties, but she must
have her bath, and there must be a servant to guard the door. So
Parvati rubbed her body with her hands, and of the scurf created a
man, whom she ordered to watch outside the door, and allow no one
to enter. It so happened that Siva returned before his spouse had
finished bathing, and he was opposed by the newly-formed man,
whose head he immediately struck off, and then he entered the
bath-room. This intrusion Parvati regarded as a very great insult,
and when she learned that her guard at the door was slain her rage
knew no bounds. She demanded that her first son, as she termed
him, should be restored to life, and Siva, vexed at his rashness, told
his ganas (armies of dwarfs: troops of celestials) to search for him
who slept with his head to the north, to kill him, and place his head
on the neck of the murdered guard. The ganas, after wandering long
and far, found only an elephant asleep in that position, so they
brought his head and fixed it on the neck of the man whom Siva had
slain, when, lo! he at once rose up alive, a man in body, with the
head of an elephant. Siva then appointed him lord of his ganas
(Ganesa) and adopted him as his son.—This curious legend is the
cause of all Hindús never sleeping with their heads to the north.
Ganesa is said to have written down the Mahábhárata from the
dictation of Vyasa, the reputed author of that epic. He is represented
with four hands, in one of which he holds a shell, in another a
discus, in the third a trident, or club, and in the fourth a water-lily.[6]

IV—The Rose of Bakáwalí was originally written, in the Persian

language, by Shaykh Izzat Ulláh, of Bengal, in the year of the Hijra
1124, or a.d. 1712. It was translated into Urdú in the beginning of
the present century, by Nihál Chand, a native of Delhi, but, from his
residence in Lahore, surnamed Lahorí. He entitled his version of the
romance Mazhab-i ’Ishk, which signifies the Doctrine of Love; but
when the Urdú text was first printed, under the care of Dr. Gilchrist,
at Calcutta, in 1804, it bore the original Persian title, Gul-i Bakáwalí;
the second edition, published in 1814, by T. Roebuck, bears the Urdú
title.
M. Garcin de Tassy published an abridgment (in French) of the
Urdú version of the Rose of Bakáwalí in the Journal Asiatique, vol. xvi,
1835, omitting the snatches of verse with which the author has
liberally garnished his narrative.[7] A complete English translation,
with the verses done into prose, by Lieut. R. P. Anderson, was
published at Delhi in 1851, and the Urdú version was again rendered
into English, with the poetry done into tolerably fair verse, by
Thomas Philip Manuel, and published at Calcutta in 1859. For the
version in the present work I have used both G. de Tassy’s French
abridgment and Manuel’s English translation, following the former
when the narrative seemed to be rather prolix, and the latter when I
found the French savant too brief in specially interesting episodes,
thus, I trust, making a readable version of this charming romance.
In the Appendix will be found copious parallels, analogues, and
illustrations of the chief incidents in the Rose of Bakáwalí, which
therefore calls for only a few general remarks in this place. It cannot
be said that there is much originality in the romance, most of the
incidents being common to the folk-tales of the several countries of
India, but they are here woven together with considerable ingenuity,
and the interest of the narrative never flags. It may in fact be
regarded as a typical Asiatic Tale, in which is embodied much of the
folk-lore of the East. Like all fairy tales, it has no particular “moral,”
for the hero achieves all his wonderful enterprises with the aid of
super-human beings and by means of magical fruits, etc. The
various and strange transformations which he undergoes in the
course of his adventures are still believed to be quite possible by
Muslims and Hindús alike. We very frequently read in Eastern tales
of fountains the waters of which have the property of changing a
man who drinks of them or bathes in them into a woman, and of
transforming a monkey into a man, and vice versa. But this romance
is, I think, singular in representing the hero, after having been
changed into a young woman, as actually becoming a mother! In the
account of his transformation to an Abyssinian, and beset by a
shrewish wife and a pack of clamorous children, there is not a little
humour. The magical things which he obtains through overhearing
the conversation of birds are familiar to the folk-tales of Europe as
well as to those of Asia, and I have treated of them fully in the first
volume of my Popular Tales and Fictions.
We must regard the first part of this romance—down to the end of
the third chapter—as belonging to the wide cycle of folk-tales in
which a number of brothers set out in quest of some wonderful and
much desired object, and the youngest is always the successful one;
but he is deprived of the prize by his envious and malicious brothers,
who generally throw him into a well, and returning home claim the
credit of the achievement. In the end, however, the young hero
exposes the fraud, and his rascally and cowardly brethren are put to
shame. Several of the incidents in the brothers’ quest of the magical
Rose with which to cure their father’s sight are paralleled in the story
of the Water of Life, in Grimm’s Kinder und Hausmärchen, and in the
Norse and German stories of the Golden Bird. Thus in our romance
the four elder princes, through their pleasure-seeking disposition, fall
into the toils of an artful courtesan, while the youngest pluckily
proceeds to fairyland and procures the Rose of Bakáwalí, of which
his brothers deprive him on his way home. In such stories as I have
mentioned the elder brothers, if not deservedly enchanted in some
manner on the road, waste their time at a wayside inn, and the
younger is aided in his quest by some animal, troll, or dwarf, to
whom he had done a friendly turn: in our romance the young prince
is helped by a good-natured dív, or demon.
The prediction of the astrologers, with which the romance begins,
that if the king should ever cast his eyes on his newly-born son he
should instantly become blind, has many analogues in other Eastern
tales. For example, in the Bakhtyár Náma we read that a king of
Persia, after being long childless, one night, in a dream, is addressed
by an aged man: “The Lord has complied with thy request and to-
morrow thou shalt have a son, but in his seventh year a lion shall
seize and carry him off to the top of a mountain, from which he shall
fall, rolling in blood and clay.” The vazírs say that the decrees of
Destiny cannot be withstood, but the king declares that he will do
so, and then summons his astrologers, who say that the king after
twenty years shall perish by the hand of his own son. The king
causes an underground dwelling to be constructed, in which he
places his child and the nurse. When the prince is seven years of
age, a lion rushes into the cave, devours the nurse, carries off the
boy, and drops him down a mountain. The child is found by one of
the king’s secretaries, who causes him to be properly educated. In
course of time the youth is appointed armour-bearer to the king,
who, of course, does not know that he is his own son, and in
fighting with an enemy who had invaded his kingdom, in the
confusion of the battle, the youth cuts off the king’s hand, supposing
him to be on the enemy’s side, and before dying the king ascertains
that his son had caused his death.
In the Bagh o Bahár (see the Appendix, page 478), a young
prince, in consequence of a prediction of the astrologers that he was
menaced with great danger until his fourteenth year, is confined in a
vault lined with felt, in order that he should not behold the sun and
the moon till the fatal period was passed. In Mr. Ralston’s Tibetan
Tales, the diviners declare to a king that he shall have a son who
shall take his life and usurp the royal power, setting the diadem on
his own head. And we have a familiar instance in the Arabian tale of
the Third Calender, where the astrologers having predicted that the
newly-born son of a jeweller should be killed when fifteen years old
by ’Ajíb the son of King Khasib, the child is placed in an underground
apartment in an island. In the Turkish story-book known as the
History of the Forty Vasírs, the soothsayers predict that a king’s son
shall be much afflicted and wander in strange lands, with tribulation
and pain for his companions, from his thirtieth till he has attained his
sixtieth year. In the Norwegian story of Rich Peter the Pedlar the
star-gazers foretell that his daughter should one day wed a poor
man’s son. And in classical legends we have the story of Danae, the
daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos, by Eurydice, who was confined
in a brazen tower because an oracle had said that his daughter’s son
should put him to death.

V—The Persian Stories have been selected from a collection

translated by Mr. Edward Rehatsek, and published at Bombay in
1871, under the title of Amusing Stories. They occur in the Persian
work, Mahbúb ul-Kalúb, of which some account has been given in
connection with the first two romances in the present volume. The
first of these stories, that of the Three Deceitful Women, is very
diverting, and, as I have shown in the Appendix, has its counterparts
in France and Spain. It belongs to the numerous stories of the
Woman’s Wiles cycle, and certainly represents the ladies in no very
amiable character. But as a set-off to this tale of the depravity of
women—the subject of many European mediæval stories and jests,
as well as of Asiatic fictions—we have also stories of the wickedness
of men, such as that of the Envious Vazír and that of the Kází of
Ghazní—“blackguards both”!
HISTORY OF NASSAR.
 HISTORY OF NASSAR, THE SON OF
KHOJA HUMAYUN, THE MERCHANT
OF BAGHDAD.
During the reign of the Abbaside Khalífs there lived in the city of
Baghdád a merchant called Khoja[8] Humáyún, who was very rich,
highly respected, and prosperous in all his dealings. The caravan of
his good fortune had for a long time travelled in the lands of
success; the hand of detriment was never extended towards the
skirts of his wealth; nor did the simúm of loss and misfortune ever
blow in the gardens of his prosperity; so that he passed all his days
in the cradle of happiness and content. One day he happened to
repose in a retired part of his mansion on the couch of gladness,
when he beheld suddenly two kites overhead contending for
something. After the Khoja had been looking at them for some time,
he perceived that from the claws of one something was hanging
which the other wanted to snatch away. Whilst he was wondering
the object fell to the ground, and on examining it he found it to be a
small bundle which contained three rubies, a diamond, and four
pearls, all of unequalled beauty and price. The Khoja was at first
highly pleased at this occurrence, and joyfully considered it as an
additional sign of his good fortune, and recited this distich:

Whom prosperity favours,

Jewels rain upon his head.

But, as he was a man of great discernment and experience, he

looked at this affair in another light, on second thoughts, and
considered it as a mystery, which made him uneasy. He had a grown
and intelligent son, called Nassar, whom he privately addressed thus:
“My beloved son, it is well-nigh eighty years since I began to
navigate the ocean of life in the skiff of prosperity, and it has never
deserted me, nor have the autumnal blasts of reverse ever withered
the freshness of my affluence. But as the splendour of every morn of
happiness is followed by the darkness and night of decrease and
misfortune, and the leaves of the rosy volume of comfort are
scattered by the whirlwind of distress; and as

Fate has not lit a lamp of content

Which the storm of adversity has not extinguished;

I conclude from this incident that as the humái[9] of my good

success has reached the zenith, the caravan of my prosperity will
soon deflect from the path of my destiny: the ship of my happiness
may become wrecked in the ocean of adversity; and, for all I know,
the treasure I possess may become a prey to the whale of reverse,
poverty and misery. This anticipation may be realised very soon, but
as I have spent a life of happiness and content, and have gratified
all the desires of a man, I wish for nothing more; therefore, if
misfortune beset me, I trust I shall be able patiently to endure its
bitterness. But since you have not seen the ups and downs of life, or
experienced any reverse, I do not think it fitting that you should
continue to live with me, and it is in conformity with the dictates of
prudence that you spend some time in travelling; for wise men have
said that travel is a polish which rubs off the rust of carelessness
from the speculum of a man’s mind and a sovereign cure for
inexperience:

Travel lights the lamp of perfection in a man;

When a pearl is taken out of the sea it is appreciated.[10]
In Shíráz, the seat of learning,” continued the Khoja, “I have a friend
named Khayrandísh, who was my companion in several journeys,
and to whom I have done some good. You must go to him and say:
‘I wish you to surrender to me the deposit my father entrusted you
with when you were companions on the road of Bahrayn.’ After
receiving that article from Khayrandísh, take prudence and caution
for your guide and go to the Maghrabí country,[11] because there is
much chance of acquiring worldly goods there, and no one ever
returned from it empty-handed. Consider that precious object as a
means to procure you a livelihood, for by presenting it to one of the
kings or grandees of those parts it will soon ensure you attention;
and I for my part shall make over all I possess to my relatives and
friends, and shall devote myself solely to the worship of God.”
Nassar made his preparations and departed for Shíráz, the seat of
learning; but he had scarcely proceeded two stages in that direction
when a eunuch in the Khalíf’s service, intending to abscond, had at
midnight absented himself from the royal haram with a casket of
jewels which he had abstracted. He walked with great apprehension
through the streets in search of the dwelling of his accomplice,
whence he intended to proceed farther at the break of day; but as
the night was very dark he missed the house, and, by the decree of
Fate, entered the mansion of Khoja Humáyún, which happened to be
open. On looking round he soon discovered his mistake, so he
wandered about the house trying to find his way out, but the Khoja’s
slaves having in the meantime locked the entrance as usual, he had
no alternative but to conceal himself in a corner and there remain till
morning.
But the Khalíf’s treasurer soon discovered that the eunuch had
decamped with the casket, and caused proclamation to be made,
that any person harbouring the culprit should at once hand him over
to the police, failing which his property should be confiscated. The
royal officials made fruitless search all night, but at break of day,
when the eunuch of night had retired and the prince of morn
established himself in the palace of the horizon, one of the
attendants of the court, who was a mortal enemy of Khoja
Humáyún, passing his house, perceived the eunuch and took him
before the Khalíf; and, considering this a good opportunity of
avenging himself on his foe, he said: “Khoja Humáyún, who trusted
in his wealth and dignity, has committed this crime by instigating the
eunuch to the deed and afterwards secreting him in his house.” The
Khalíf well knew the Khoja’s loyalty and honesty, had often bestowed
favours upon him, and was aware that such an act was not at all
consistent with his disposition; but as the sun of prosperity, in
consequence of the celestial rotations, had deflected from him and
set in the west of misfortune;[12] and the night of distress was intent
on obscuring the precincts of his comfort and destroying the volume
of his happiness with the scissors of extinction; and as the
stratagems of enemies have results like the bites of snakes and
scorpions, the insidious words of the adversary so inflamed the
Khalíf’s wrath that he ordered Khoja Humáyún’s property to be
confiscated, his house razed, and himself expelled from the city
without giving him the least opportunity of uttering a word in his
own defence.
On the same day when the simúm of this catastrophe destroyed
Khoja Humáyún’s rose-garden of prosperity, Nassar’s courser of
safety also met with an accident on his journey. In the vicinity of
Shíráz a party of robbers fell upon him and deprived him of
everything he possessed; and, exchanging the robes of affluence
and wealth for poverty and nudity, he arrived in the city in great
distress, and having found the dwelling of Khayrandísh, he made
him acquainted with his father’s injunction. Khayrandísh received
him in the most friendly manner possible, and said: “Dear youth, I
am entirely at your service, and was desirous to be honoured by a
message from your father, whose casket with his seal upon it is in
my charge. But the laws of hospitality require that a guest who
adorns my poor hut with the light of his presence should abide with
me during three days, in order that I may entertain him to the best
of my ability;[13] and this applies especially to you, whose presence I
consider as a great blessing. After the expiration of three days I shall
deliver the deposit into your hands.” To this proposal Nassar agreed,
and Khayrandísh rejoiced him with his amity, and provided him with
a very handsome wardrobe.
When the golden lamp of the glorious sun entered the lantern of
the west, and the amber-haired belle of evening removed the veil
from her face, Khayrandísh placed the best food and drink on the
table of intimacy, and after conversing on various subjects with his
guest, he spoke to him as follows: “Friend, it appears that worldly
prosperity has left Khoja Humáyún, and that he has sent you in
pursuit of it; for I have lately had a fearful dream and was very
uneasy about his circumstances. So tell me now what you intend to
do with the deposit.” Nassar acquainted him with his intention to go
to the Maghrabí country, and with the injunctions of his father.
Khayrandísh replied: “As the travellers in the path of rectitude and
probity ought to guide those who wander in the desert of error and
inexperience, and as I am under great obligations to your father, I
consider it my duty to be useful to you. Since you have never before
been from home and have spent all your days in affluence, I fear
you will not be able to perform the journey satisfactorily:

Travel is not easy—its dangers are boundless;

Difficulties accompany it in all directions.

But as divine grace is the escort of all who intend to journey in the
path of trust in God, I leave you to the guardianship of divine mercy
to protect you from all dangers. I shall, however, give you three
counsels, and hope you will profit by them.” Nassar rejoined: “It is
the first duty of young men to listen to the counsels of intelligent
and upright men; therefore speak, for I shall follow them.”
Khayrandísh then spake thus:

First Advice.
 “Though the deceitful bride of the world may look at you from the
corner of her eye, and may try to bias your mind by her coquettish
movements, lose not the reins of self-possession from your hands,
because worldly prosperity is unsubstantial as the mirage, and the
honey of its favour leaves only the bitterness of deception.

Give not thy heart to the love of the world,

For it has destroyed thousands like thee.

When the humái of worldly prosperity spreads its wings over you,
covet not its favours, for it will change at last and regret only will
remain.

Be not intent on riches and dignity;

For, like henna, they are not lasting.[14]

Prosperity is fickle, and when it has turned its back, all efforts to
recall it are futile. The favours and frowns of the world are the
harbingers of the caravan of prosperity and adversity, for both
depend in every individual case from the propitious or unpropitious
consequences of the rotation of the stars of the times, and are
connected with them like the sun with shadows;[15] nor can they be
altered by the foresight of Lukman, or by the wisdom of a thousand
Platos. And such efforts may be compared to the vain longings of
procuring spring in the depth of winter, or for the light of day at
midnight. Thus all the struggles of Shah Manssur were fruitless, and
he reaped only sorrow from them.” Nassar asked: “What is the story
of Shah Manssur?” Khayrandísh thereupon related the

Story of Shah Manssur.

 Once upon a time there was a man called Shah Manssur, from the
neighbourhood of Nishapúr, who lived in affluence, but deceitful
fortune had spread the chess-board of hypocrisy, had mated and
abandoned him in the desert of affliction. After he lost all his
property, he sat down in the lap of misery, and finding all his efforts
to better his condition fruitless, he set out for India. When he arrived
in Kabúl he was equally disappointed, so he went one day into the
bazár, hoping to find employment as a porter. There he waited till
evening, and every man found occupation excepting himself. He
began involuntarily to shed tears, and one of the principal
merchants, who was returning home from the palace of the Amír,
saw him, and, concluding that he was suffering from some wrong
done to him, asked him the cause of his distress. Manssur informed
him of his circumstances, upon which the merchant took him to his
house, and next morning told him that as he was in need of an
attendant he might stay until he could find something more to his
advantage. Shah Manssur accordingly entered into the merchant’s
service, and gained by his diligence the approbation of his master,
but raised the envy of his fellow servants and incurred the ill-will of
his mistress. One day he felt somewhat indisposed, and the
merchant’s wife sent him some poison as a medicine,[16] but as his
distemper was slight he made no use of the remedy, and kept it in
his pocket. Now the merchant had a little son whom Shah Manssur
was wont to carry about, and who was so much accustomed to him
that whenever he cried Manssur only could quiet him. It so
happened that this day the child would not cease weeping, and Shah
Manssur was obliged to take him into the street, hoping to divert
him by looking at the passers-by. Having a little business to
despatch, he set the child for a moment against a wall, which
unfortunately fell and covered him. Shah Manssur was in despair and
made a great outcry, whereupon the merchant came out and asked
him why he made such a noise. He told his master of the accident,
at which the merchant was disconsolate, and the people flocked
from all directions wishing to kill Shah Manssur. Meanwhile the ruins
of the wall were removed, and on the child being extricated he was
found alive and perfectly uninjured. The father and mother of the
child were in an ecstasy of joy at his fortunate escape, and all the
people wondered. Shah Manssur fell on his knees and thanked the
Most High, and everybody rejoiced. A man in the crowd proposed
that a medicine be administered to the child, and Shah Manssur
immediately produced from his pocket that sent to him by the
merchant’s wife, and handed it to his master, but as soon as the
child had swallowed it he fell into convulsions and expired. The
child’s parents were in despair, especially the mother, who
threatened to commit suicide if Shah Manssur were suffered to live,
because, as she said, he had poisoned her son. Hereupon the
merchant’s servants tied Manssur to a post, and ill-treated him so
much that he fainted, and was abandoned for dead.
In the evening he began to revive and moaned piteously. The
merchant was an intelligent man and could hardly believe Shah
Manssur to have been so ungrateful as to kill his child deliberately
with poison, so he approached the supposed culprit and besought
him to speak the truth. Manssur said that as he was deeply grateful
for the kindness he had received from his master and greatly
attached to the child, the thought of committing such a crime could
not have entered his mind; and that he had only given to the child a
remedy which had been sent to himself by his mistress when he was
slightly indisposed. The merchant at once perceived his wife’s
treachery and was convinced of Shah Manssur’s innocence; but
nevertheless he told him that he could no longer retain him in his
service; so he loosed his bonds and dismissed him. Naked and
wounded, as he was, Shah Manssur walked away and took refuge in
the outskirts of the city with an old woman, at whose house he used
to stay in better times when on his commercial journeys. Having
explained to her his case, she received him kindly and set about
curing his wounds. This old woman had a son who was carrying on
an amorous intrigue with a neighbour’s wife. He happened to be
absent on that night at a friend’s house, but his paramour was
ignorant of this, and having waited till her husband was asleep she
hastened to her lover’s house, which she found in darkness, and
mistaking Shah Manssur for him she approached his couch. The
wounded man thought it was his old landlady, and began to thank
her for her kind solicitude. In the meantime the husband of the
adulterous woman had missed her and made his appearance in the
old woman’s house. She had just got up to ascertain the cause of
the disturbance, and on perceiving a man standing with a naked
sword at the door, she concluded he was a thief, and at once ran up
to the roof of her house and raised an alarm, which caused all the
people of the district to sally forth with sticks and swords; but the
adulterous woman ran off by way of the river, which was the
shortest, to her house and went instantly to bed. In the confusion
her husband was struck by many stones thrown at him when making
his escape, but at last he arrived home and overwhelmed his wife
with reproaches; she, however, yawned, pretended to awake from
sleep, turned from one side to the other, and asked what was the
hour of the night. But the infuriated husband would not be deceived
by this subterfuge, but vehemently accused her of being unfaithful,
and even drew his sword. Upon this the woman cried aloud: “O
Muslims! my husband is killing me!” and the police officers, who
were at that moment returning from the alarm that had been raised
by the old woman, caught the words and ran to the house, when the
husband violently struck one of them with his sword, and after a
brief struggle was taken into custody.
After the woman had thus got rid of her husband the wasps of
lust again stung her, and being anxious to know whether her lover
was sick she once more approached Shah Manssur’s couch, awoke
him and began her overtures. The old woman’s son, who had been
at a neighbour’s, hearing of the disturbance in his mother’s house,
went home. On his way, however, when passing near the dwelling of
his paramour, he went in, and finding the house empty he concluded
that she had gone in search of himself. He was not aware, of course,
of Shah Manssur being the guest of his mother, and when he
reached home he lit a candle and went into his room, where
beholding his paramour with a strange man, he exclaimed: “I have
got a curious substitute to-night!” The woman fled in terror, but
Shah Manssur fell into the grasp of the young man. The noise of the
struggle again awoke the old woman, who, as before, thought that
thieves had broken into the house, and ran to the roof of the house
and screamed loudly. Her son, supposing Shah Manssur to be the
thief, told her that he had taken him. The old woman tried in vain to
undeceive him; but he, incited by his jealousy and rage, struck her,
on which she raised a great noise, accusing him of wishing to kill
her, till some neighbours came and dragged him off to prison.
Notwithstanding all that had taken place the adulterous woman
could not rest and again repaired to Shah Manssur, who was this
time frightened at her re-appearance, ascribing to her all the
mischief that had happened during the night, and believing her to be
an evil spirit was considering how he might get rid of her. The old
woman’s sister, overhearing the conversation, approached the door
to listen. Meanwhile the imprisoned husband had bribed his jailor,
escaped from custody, and made his appearance at the old woman’s
house, where mistaking her sister for his own wife he wounded her
with his sword. The noise again made the landlady get up, and in
the tumult the faithless wife took to her heels, as did also her
husband, who believed that he had grievously wounded her and
chuckled in his heart at the deed. She was, however, very swift-
footed, and when he reached home he found her again in bed and
to all appearance asleep. Pretending to be just awaking, she asked
what he wanted, and he told her he was greatly astonished to
behold her safe and sound after he had killed her at the old woman’s
house. The wife sarcastically remarked that men are once a-year
subject to lunatic influences which affect their minds. Quoth the
man: “Possibly this may be the case with me, as I have been greatly
disturbed in my mind during the last two days; you have done well
to inform me of this.”
When the old woman came out from her house she saw no one
except her sister, who was severely wounded. She was amazed, and
said to herself: “All the tumult and mischief of this night occurred on
account of the presence of this man.” So when it was morning she
spoke to Shah Manssur, saying: “Dear sir, as these misfortunes have
happened, my son has been thrown into prison, and my sister will
perchance die of her wound; and as, moreover, my son is very self-
willed and incensed against you, it will be best for you to remove
from this house.” Shah Manssur accordingly left the place and began
with great pains to travel towards Gaznín, bearing the load of misery
on the back of sorrow, and reading the threnody of his misfortunes.
[17]

After some time he was overtaken by a man riding on a camel,

who accosted him and had compassion for his wretched condition.
The man informed him that his name was Baba Fys, that his camel
was laden with silk belonging to Khoja Fyra, the vazír of the Amír of
Gaznín, who was of a very benevolent disposition and would no
doubt assist him. He then took Shah Manssur on his camel, and,
dreading the dangers of the night, he proceeded with great speed.
The swift motion and his wounds so distressed Shah Manssur that
he earnestly desired Baba Fys to set him down again, in order that
he might pass the night in tranquility and thus be able to continue
his journey in the morning. But his companion told him that to stop
at such a place was by no means advisable, since in the vicinity
there was a mountain pass to which many animals resorted under
the leadership of a monkey named Paykar, who had plundered many
caravans. By the prayers of the Lord Sulayman, they could now do
mischief only during the night, and therefore they kept the pass
obstructed all day, so that travellers must necessarily hasten through
it in the night, but after that the road was quite safe, and then he
might rest himself. Shah Manssur, however, was in such great
distress, and so determined to alight, that Baba Fys, unwilling to
abandon him to his fate, was obliged to comply with his request.
They agreed to sleep and relieve each other by turns, but had rested
only a short time when they perceived a camel approaching them,
ridden by a monkey and guided by a bear. Many other animals of
dreadful aspect also came running and attacked the camel.
Hereupon Baba Fys began to lament, and accused Shah Manssur of
having brought him into all this trouble. This attracted the attention
of the monkey, who made a sign to the wild beasts, which
immediately pulled Baba Fys to the ground, bit off his ears and then
retired. This incident so disconcerted Baba Fys that he was ashamed
to continue his journey to Gaznín, and, after bitterly upbraiding his
companion for being the cause of his mishap, he returned to Kabúl.
Shah Manssur, though wretched and on foot, resumed his journey,
and at last reached Gaznín. As it was winter and the city noted for
its coldness, he strolled about till he came to a bath-house, when he
said to himself: “This is a warm place, so I will spend the night in it.”
Accordingly, saluting the keeper, he walked in. The keeper said:
“Young man, you appear to be a stranger; where do you come from?
where are you travelling to? and what is your occupation?” Manssur
replied: “I am a traveller, and the caravan of misfortunes has
brought me to this country.” The bath-keeper then asked him: “Did
you happen to meet on your way a camel-rider named Baba Fys?”
He replied: “We were companions, but in the desert we were
attacked by wild beasts, who bit off his ears, and therefore he has
returned to Kabúl.” On hearing this the heart of the bath-keeper
became hot as a blacksmith’s furnace, seething from the flames of
grief, and he exclaimed: “What more distressing news could you tell
me? He is my brother; the camel was my property; and I borrowed
the price of the silk. I must of necessity go home to-night and
consult my relatives on this affair; and as the vazír, who is the owner
of this bath and is at present sick, intends to come here in the
morning, I was ordered to warm the bath well. Do you therefore put
fire into it, and to-morrow I will pay you for your trouble. Take care,
however, to stir up the fuel from time to time, so that the bath may
become properly heated.” After giving these instructions to Manssur,
he departed to his house. But as Manssur was fatigued and glad to
be in a warm place, he soon fell asleep; and on awaking he found
the fire was extinguished, so he got up, and in his anxiety and
inexpertness he stirred the fire so as to break part of the floor above
it, in consequence of which the water in the reservoir rushed down
and completely put out the fire again, at the same time scalding
Manssur, who fled from the place in great fear. When the vazír
arrived at the bath in the morning he began to tremble from the
cold, and his malady so increased that he fainted. His attendants
immediately seized the bath-keeper, who asserted, in excuse, that it
was all the fault of the fireman, who had run away. But the vazír
suddenly dying in consequence of having caught cold, his son gave
orders that both the bath-keeper and the fireman should be put to
death.
Manssur, however, had made good his escape from Gaznín, and
was journeying towards Lahore when he fell in with a caravan, of
which one of the merchants engaged him as his servant. As Manssur
was well acquainted with his duties, he diligently guarded his
master’s goods, and soon gained his confidence. When the caravan
had entered into one of the pargannas of Lahore, as all the
provisions were exhausted, each merchant gave his servant a
quantity of goods to exchange for victuals. Manssur bartered the
goods he had received from his master very profitably, and returned
with various kinds of provisions before any of his companions, at
which his master was so well pleased that he said to him: “I hear
that there are many wealthy persons in this parganna. Take
therefore some goods of high price and dispose of them, and I will
give you half the profits.” Accordingly, Manssur selected merchandise
of nearly the value of five hundred tománs,[18] which he sold for a
thousand and returned. His master gave him three hundred tománs,
saying: “Let this sum be the capital of your business, which you will
in a short time increase and be thus enabled to return to your own
country.” Shah Manssur gratefully received the merchant’s generous
gift, and, having bought suitable goods, again repaired to the
parganna, and hawked them about till he arrived at the gate of an
elegant and magnificent mansion, which he concluded to be the
property of some noble or grandee, and thought the owner might
possibly buy all his stock of merchandise. So he deposited his wares
in the shade of a wall and leaned against it, watching the door of the
house. Presently a maiden resembling a húrí[19] in stature, with the
serenity of the moon in her countenance, and with bewitching eyes,
came out of the house with a pitcher in her hand for the purpose of
taking water from the river; and Shah Manssur thus addressed her:
“I am at your service—

The glances of your eyes are wonderful;

Whoever beholds them is on the top of felicity.”

But the maiden replied:

“This is not the place where every caravan stops;

The lion of every desert is here distrusted.”

Having thus spoken the damsel went her way, leaving Shah Manssur
disappointed. But after a while she returned and inquired of him:
“Why do you stop here?” He answered: “I am waiting on rosy-
cheeked ladies, and my heart is stored with all sorts of services for
them.” Quoth the damsel: “Bring your goods into the house that I
may buy them.” So he took up his wares and followed the girl, who
walked very rapidly. They passed through a corridor with several
doors, and arrived in the court-yard of the mansion, which was a
great and lofty edifice of much beauty, having many apartments
elegantly furnished, but untenanted. When he had looked around
and rested himself for a while, he perceived that the maiden had
disappeared. At last he concluded it would be best for him to leave
the place; but as he was roaming from one apartment to another he
lost his way, and finding no way of exit became frightened, yet
continued his search until he reached a hall from the ceiling of which
a golden disk was suspended by chains encrusted with precious
stones. On both sides of the disk small globular bells were dangling,
and upon it there was a phial of glass. The statue of a lion of marble
bound in chains occupied one side of the apartment. While Shah
Manssur viewed this scene with amazement, the same girl entered
with a rod in her hand. As he was about to address her, she
exclaimed: “Ha! madman, you have walked into the trap at last!” and
struck the lion so that he began to roar, and the disk, the chains,
and the little bells shook and jingled, accompanied by great noises,
shoutings, and lamentations, which terrified Shah Manssur, who
anxiously wished to make his escape. Meanwhile the phial on the
disk emitted a green substance mingled with flames, which
ascended into the air and filled the apartment with darkness: Shah
Manssur almost fainted; and when the smoke and the flame had
subsided, a viper lifted its head out of the phial, from which it finally
emerged and entered the mouth of the lion. Soon after this the lion
sneezed, and from his brains a spider escaped, which gradually
increased in size until it became as large as a sheep; when it made a
still greater effort its skin burst, from which an old hag of miserable
aspect, dreadful as a goblin and ugly as a satyr, came forth,
embraced Shah Manssur very ardently, kissed him, and emitted from
her cadaverous mouth a disgusting liquid which covered his face.
Her putrid breath was like burning sulphur, and made him cough and
almost give up the ghost. This dreadful hag, however, doubled her
caresses, and would not leave him until he fainted away. When he
came to his senses he cried out piteously: “O most gracious lady,
deliver me from this calamity!” But she replied: “Your request cannot
be gratified;” and then, giving him a substance to smell at, he again
became unconscious.
Thus Shah Manssur continued during nearly forty days in the
grasp of misfortune. The wretched hag made her appearance once
every day, tormenting him, and causing him to faint for the
gratification of her wicked lust. One day, however, when she was
about the same business, she pulled out a mirror from her pocket
and looking into it with great consternation, was suddenly
transformed into a spider, crawled into the mouth of the lion,
whence she again issued in the form of a serpent, ascended to the
disk and disappeared in the phial. Then Shah Manssur went into the
court-yard and tried whether he could escape from the place. There
the girl met him and said: “I am astonished that she has not thrown
you into a trance;” upon which Manssur told her all that had
occurred, and the girl said: “She has a foe in Jábolká, whose
machination she learns from that mirror, because whenever he
attempts to ruin this wicked fairy his figure appears in it, and the
accursed one departs to combat him.” Then exclaimed Shah Manssur
bitterly: “O cruel and merciless woman! the torments which I have
suffered in this house are the consequences of my having by your
coquetry been decoyed into it; and now perhaps you will be
compassionate enough to let me depart.” The damsel replied:
“Young man, I have, like yourself, been caught in this shoreless
whirlpool, and have been made the instrument of alluring poor
victims, whom she was in the habit of using for the gratification of
her wicked desires and afterwards destroying. Whenever I disobeyed
her she punished me severely. Her name is Hennána the Witch, and
she is a descendant of the sorcerers of the time of Kolyas, whom the
accursed Pharaoh sent against the Lord Moses (salutation to him).
[20] This iniquitous wretch keeps a similar establishment in
Hindústán: she is able, like the wind, to transport herself in a
moment from the eastern to the western parts of the world, and to
carry the flames of misfortune to all places.”
Shah Manssur then asked the girl: “How did you fall into her
power?” She replied: “Know that my father is the chief of Agra and is
possessed of great wealth. He had betrothed me to my cousin, who
set out for Banáres to procure the paraphernalia of the wedding
ceremony; and when the report of my beauty and other qualities
had spread through that city, the Amír verified it, was desirous to
marry me, and said to my relatives: ‘I have heard that you have a
beautiful girl, and I wish to take her for a wife.’ My father and my
relatives consented; but as I was deeply in love with my uncle’s son,
I became very indignant and exclaimed: ‘To how many men will you
give your daughter? It is many years since you betrothed me to my
cousin, and though he is absent at Banáres for the purpose of
procuring the things needful for a household, I consider myself as
under his protection, and shall never accept of another husband as
long as I am alive. Do not try to force me, for I would rather commit
suicide.’ This resolute declaration had the effect I desired, and, after
holding a consultation with our relatives, my father determined that
we should all flee to Banáres. I was dressed in male garments, and
when night approached was taken out of the city and given in
charge of two confidential servants who were to explain everything
to my cousin, and we began our journey on fleet Arab steeds. After
we had travelled for three days a fearful wind and thunderstorm
overtook us in the desert, during which I became separated from my
escort and was left alone. As I was roaming about I arrived at a
green spot where I discovered a fountain, and feeling thirsty I
alighted from my horse, which at once took to flight, and in my vain
pursuit of it I chanced to meet an old woman who was weeping
piteously and crying aloud: ‘O unhappy fate! have you at last in my
old age and weakness thrown me into such a state that I must
become the prey of wild beasts? Would to God some friend could
take me by the hand and deliver me from this danger!’ I came
forward and said: ‘Old woman, what has happened to you?’ She
answered: ‘I was going on a pilgrimage to Makka, and when our
caravan entered this desert it was plundered by robbers. Here have I
been for two days without a morsel of food. Young man, have pity
on my age and helplessness; deliver me from this calamity, and
convey me to a place of security, that you may be rewarded for your
good act.’ I had compassion on the wretched old woman and was
considering what I could do for her, when she handed me an apple,
of which I had no sooner eaten a small piece than I sneezed and
fainted; nor was I sensible of aught until I again opened my eyes
and found myself in this place with that accursed witch. When she
saw me pale and frightened, she exclaimed: ‘Let nothing dismay
you, for your life is not in danger from me;’ and thinking I was a
man, she commenced to fondle me, but I soon undeceived her.
Since that time four years have elapsed, during which, being myself
miserable, I was compelled to entice helpless men into her snares.
Nevertheless, one day I conceived that I might escape and secretly
left the house, but I was instantly transformed into a she-dog, and
was pursued by all the dogs in the town, so that I was again obliged
to return to this place. But now I shall propose to you a means of
escape, on condition that you convey me in safety to my friends.”
Shah Manssur eagerly replied: “I promise to do whatever you require
of me,” and the girl went on to say: “When the phial is broken the
witch must die; request her therefore to give you tidings concerning
your family, and as soon as she disappears you must strike the phial
with a stone so as to break it.”[21]
Whilst they were conversing they perceived the accursed hag
approaching. So the maiden left the apartment; and when the witch
saw Shah Manssur weeping she asked him the reason, to which he
answered: “It is now a long time since I was separated from my
country, and I have had a fearful dream which afflicts me sorely.”
Quoth the hag: “Be not distressed; I shall instantly give you
information regarding your relatives;” so saying, she went to the
phial, disappeared and quickly returned, and minutely described to
him the dwelling as well as the condition of his parents and relatives.
Manssur was astonished at the accuracy of her description, but,
dissembling, said to her: “I cannot believe all this, because my
country is far distant and you have returned in half a minute. Unless
you bring me a token that you have really been there I cannot trust
you.” Quoth the witch: “What kind of token do you desire?” Manssur
replied: “In the garden of our house is a tree on which I once
climbed, when a portion of my belt was torn off, which I tied to a
branch. If you bring me a rag of the belt I shall then believe you.”
When he had said this the witch went again to the phial, and, as
before, disappeared. This time the girl brought Shah Manssur a
stone; he invoked the aid of God the Most High, and striking the
phial, it flew into pieces. Then the lion roared, the chains clanked,
the little bells jingled, a fearful noise was heard, some blood dripped
from the ceiling of the apartment to the ground, and the magical
apparatus, the furniture, the chambers, and the entire edifice
vanished, leaving Shah Manssur and the maiden standing together in
a cemetery, and both poured forth their thanks to the Most High.
Then the girl said: “My dear friend, from hence to Agra is ten days’
journey;” and handing him some costly pearls she added, “try to
convey me quickly to my parents, and buy with these pearls all that
is necessary for me on the way.” Shah Manssur purchased a camel
with a litter and a slave for the damsel, and sent her off to her own
country, after which he set out on foot, and in a destitute condition,
for Burhanpúr.
When Shah Manssur arrived at his destination he heard that the
Amír of Burhanpúr, while hunting, had lost a precious gem from the
hilt of his sword, and had issued an order that all the citizens should
go next morning to the hunting ground in search of it. So rich and
poor, gentle and simple, left the city and roamed about. Shah
Manssur joined the crowd, and was fortunate enough to find the lost
gem. On presenting it to the Amír he was highly pleased, praised
him greatly, and questioned him as to his connections and
circumstances; after which he gave him in charge of one of his
chamberlains to provide for him as soon as possible. It happened,
however, that the Amír died suddenly, and the reward promised to
Manssur came to nothing.
The son of the Amír succeeded his father. One day a merchant
presented him with a parrot that could speak with great eloquence,
and the new Amír entrusted it to the care of the chamberlain, who
took the bird home, and having sent for Manssur said to him: “Take
the utmost care of this parrot, for it may become the means of
introducing you to the Amír, and of your obtaining the reward which
his father promised you.”[22] Manssur took charge of the bird and
carried it away; but when he got into the street the people were all
so anxious to see it and pressed so much upon him that he thought
it would be better to take the parrot out of the cage and carry it in
his hand. But unluckily it escaped from his grasp and flew to the top
of the chamberlain’s haram. Manssur had great trouble in climbing
the wall, and just as he had succeeded the parrot again flitted away
and alighted on the roof of one of the haram apartments. Shah
Manssur was so frightened that he said nothing to the eunuch and
other servants, but threw up a cord, by means of which he contrived
to reach the spot; but once more the parrot started off, and in so
doing moved a tile which fell on the head of the chief lady of the
chamberlain’s haram and killed her there and then. The eunuchs and
maid-servants, on discovering this fatal mishap, raised their voices in
lamentation, which caused the chamberlain to leave his office and
run into the haram, where he found everyone in a state of great
agitation, and Shah Manssur a captive in the hands of the eunuchs,
and he at once ordered the culprit to be beaten and thrown into
prison, where the poor fellow was kept for some time and tormented
every day until he found a favourable opportunity and escaped.
Shah Manssur fled to Guzerat, where he wandered about in great
distress, sometimes hiring himself out as a labourer and sometimes
as a porter. One day, when he was unable to obtain either food or
employment, he determined to sell the ring with which the
neighbour’s wife had presented him.[23] He was chiefly induced to
take this step by sniffing the appetising fumes of roast meat in
passing a cook’s shop, the owner of which he approached, and
requesting something to eat offered the ring in pledge for the price.
But when the cook looked at the ruby set in the beazle and then at
the poverty-stricken figure of Shah Manssur, he felt sure that he
could not be the lawful possessor of such a gem but must have
stolen it, and that, not knowing its real value, he was ready to part
with it for a meal. Now it chanced that during the preceding night
some thieves had broken into the treasury of the Amír and stolen a
great quantity of gold, silver, precious stones, and valuables of all
kinds; and this audacious robbery had become known throughout
the city and the police were busy searching the bazárs and private
houses for the thieves. So the cook said to Shah Manssur: “Friend,
you do not look like the owner of such a ring as this;—come, tell me
where you got it?” “What business have you thus to question me?”
replied Manssur. “Either give me something to eat or return me the
ring.” These words gave rise to a dispute, which culminated in a
fight, wherein the neighbours took the part of the cook, and on the
arrival of the police on the scene they took the ring from the cook,
and thinking it to be one of the articles stolen from the treasury they
dragged Shah Manssur before their superintendent, and reported
that they had recovered a portion of the stolen treasure and
captured the thief.
 It happened that a notorious robber named Obayd was at that
time, with forty companions, carrying on great depredations which
the police were unable to prevent, and his fame had so widely
spread through Hindústán that day and night no one could breathe
in peace. It is even said that a few days before the robbery of the
Amír’s treasury Obayd sent a message to the police superintendent,
to be on his guard, as he was coming. Consequently, when the
superintendent saw Manssur he supposed him to be Obayd, loaded
him with heavy chains, and sent him to the Amír, together with the
ring, for the purpose of ingratiating himself and displaying his zeal in
the service. But when the Amír looked at Shah Manssur, he said: “I
have always heard that Obayd is a powerful and strong man; this
fellow is weak and looks like an arrant coward: he may possibly be
an accomplice, but he cannot be Obayd himself.” The
superintendent, however, replied: “May your highness live for ever!
This man, who seems so feeble, is strong and bold, and so nimble
that he can jump through a finger-ring. But now that he has been
captured by me his powerful limbs have shrunk together from fear;
and I shall put him to the torture forthwith to compel him to tell the
truth.” Said the Amír to Shah Manssur: “Who are you? and whence
have you obtained this ruby?” He replied, “May the Amír live long! I
am a stranger, and the ring is my own property. I have come to this
country on account of the great name and the good report which I
have heard of the Amír. I have fallen into the hands of the police,
but I have no knowledge at all of the robbery of your highness’
treasury.” The apparatus of torture was then brought, and Shah
Manssur, being suspended by the heels of punishment, forgot in his
misery the name of Obayd and said, “I am Zubayr, and have robbed
the treasury.” Now there was a famous robber of the name of
Zubayr, so the Amír believed the poor fellow’s statement and
remarked: “He may be Zubayr.” The superintendent said to his men:
“Take good care of this man to-night, and in the morning we shall
again examine him.” Accordingly they took Manssur to prison, all
believing him to be the robber Zubayr. On the way all the people
who had been robbed by Zubayr rushed up to Manssur and
demanded their property; but the superintendent said: “Do not be
uneasy. I shall get back to the last farthing everything he has taken
from you.”
When night set in special watchmen were appointed to guard the
prison, and vaunting their own bravery and fidelity, they took charge
of the four corners thereof. Shah Manssur was unable to sleep, and
was thinking how the morning would dawn on his innocent head,
when he heard sounds of striking and digging. It was midnight, and
he hearkened to the sounds with fear and trembling, till suddenly
the wall opened, from which a hand grasping a sword protruded, at
which Manssur became so terrified that he nearly fainted, for he
weened it was a man belonging to the police. A voice, however,
exclaimed: “Friend, be not afraid. I have come to save you. We have
no time to lose in explanations;” and with these words a strong man
seized Shah Manssur with his fetters and chains, carried him out of
the prison, let him down the wall of the fort by a rope, and conveyed
him quickly to a ruin at a distance of nearly three farasangs. When
he arrived there he placed Manssur on his feet, and raising a great
stone which covered the entrance to an underground chamber, they
descended into it, and there he set poor Manssur free from his
heavy bonds, after which he thus addressed him: “Young man, be
comfortable and rest yourself, for I know you have suffered much.”
Then placing before him different kinds of delicious food, he added:
“Eat cheerfully, for your misfortunes are now ended.”
After Shah Manssur had eaten he went to sleep; and when he
awoke he spoke thus to his deliverer: “Generous and kind man,
although honesty radiates from your august countenance and I feel
happy in your company, yet, as it is my fate to wander in the desert
of grief and to fall perpetually from one calamity to another, you
would greatly relieve my apprehensions by informing me of the
motives of your kind act.” The man replied: “I am the robber of the
Amír’s treasury! But when I learned that you, an innocent man, had
been imprisoned in my stead, I considered it my duty to liberate
you, and for that purpose I have been obliged to kill many of the
watchmen. To-morrow, when everything becomes known, there will
be great excitement and the police will be in pursuit of me. This is a
secure refuge where no one can discover you; and when the storm
is over I shall find means to convey you out of all danger.” Shah
Manssur replied by expressing his deep feeling of gratitude to his
deliverer.
Next morning at sun-rise the superintendent was informed that a
number of watchmen had been killed and that Zubayr had been
carried off through an opening in the wall. At this unpleasant news
he was much disconcerted, and ran at once to the palace to make
his report. The Amír was furious and exclaimed: “You rascal! is this
how you have taken care of your prisoner? This comes only through
your gross negligence. I shall hear none of your excuses. Produce
the man, else I shall punish you and ignominiously expel you from
my service.”
When the people of the town learned what had happened, all who
had been plundered by Zubayr accused the superintendent of having
connived at the prisoner’s escape and clamoured for the restitution
of their property. So he asked for a month’s respite and despatched
three thousand men in search of the robber. But after vainly
searching in all directions they returned, and those who had been
robbed confiscated the superintendent’s property, and the Amír
expelled him from the city.
Meanwhile the deliverer of Shah Manssur kept him company
during the day and went forth at night in order to ascertain what
was going on in the city; and when he heard of the superintendent’s
downfall he hastened back and said to Manssur: “Praise be to God!
the danger is over, and it is time for me to send you to your own
country.” But quoth Shah Manssur: “Dear friend, I have a difficulty
which I wish you to solve for me.” Said the man: “Speak.” Shah
Manssur continued: “Since I have had the pleasure of your
acquaintance, I have discovered nothing improper in your character;
but it is utterly incomprehensible to me how you, who are endowed
with such noble sentiments, can have selected the occupation of a
robber.” His liberator answered:
 “My occupation was formerly quite different. Know that my name
is Junayd Muhtashim, and I am a scion of a noble and opulent
family. In this neighbourhood there is a tract of country with flowing
rivers, spacious meadows, fertile lands, many houses and
numberless gardens. All that district belonged to me and was
inhabited by my retainers and servants, and I cheerfully paid all
taxes to the Amír, who was for many years my friend. In course of
time, however, the exactions of the government officials became
very heavy; judges, tax-gatherers, and accountants were sent to me
whose rapacity it was difficult to satisfy, and I became greatly
distressed. I repeatedly made complaints to the Amír, and
endeavoured to convince him that he could be powerful only so long
as he treated his subjects with justice, and that oppression could
result in nothing but unhappiness and confusion. But all my advice
proved futile, and when his delegates came again I took refuge in a
fort and answered therefrom. After several days had passed in this
way, I heard that it was the intention of the Amír to plunder me, so I
conveyed all my moveable property into the stronghold and
prepared to stand a siege. When the Amír became aware that he
could not very easily get at me, he seized the sheep and cattle which
I possessed outside of the city, and ultimately I was able to take
refuge with my retainers in Hyderábád, whither some persons came
and bought of me all the landed property I had in Guzerat; but as I
could in no other way recover the value of the goods and cattle
which the Amír had forcibly taken from me, I secretly returned to
Guzerat to pay myself from his own treasury or in any other way,
and no one has been able to interfere with me.[24] But you, my
friend, must no longer remain in this place. I have a courser, swift
like lightning, to whom fifty farasangs are an easy stage: mount and
ride on him to Hyderábád, where I shall induce my friends to send
you comfortably to Nishapúr.”
Having written a few words to his relatives, explained to Shah
Manssur the position of his house, and presented him with a costly
diamond, he took affectionate leave of him, wished him God-speed,
led him out of the underground apartment, and said: “Wait a
moment till I bring you a horse.” He presently returned with a steed,
which when Manssur had mounted, “This courser,” said his deliverer,
“well knows the road, and when you reach Hyderábád you must
throw the reins on his neck, and he will carry you without fail to the
threshold of my house;” so saying, he led him on to the highway and
again bade him farewell.
Shah Manssur prosecuted his journey with great rapidity till he
arrived at Hyderábád, and remembering the injunctions he had
received, allowed the horse to go where it pleased. Thus he rode
through the streets till suddenly a man recognised the horse, and
proceeding to Junayd’s house intimated that a stranger was coming
mounted on his horse. Some of Junayd’s relatives at once went out
and asked Shah Manssur where he got the animal he bestrode. He
replied: “The horse is my own, and you have no right to question
me.” These words so incensed the people that they instantly
surrounded him and pulled him off the horse, saying: “This animal
belongs to us. Come—tell us the truth as to how you obtained it.”
Shah Manssur, believing them to be a pack of rascals who wished to
deprive him of the horse, began to use insulting language towards
them. By this time a great number of people had gathered round the
horse and they cried out: “We know this animal: it belongs to
Junayd, and these are his relatives. You must produce some token of
your honesty.” As soon as Manssur learned that these were the
friends of Junayd he began to fumble in his pocket for the letter he
had received from him, but could not find it—on the road he had lost
both the letter and the diamond; so all his assertions that the horse
had been given to him by the owner were discredited. They declared
to him plainly that he had either killed Junayd or robbed him; and
then they beat Manssur most cruelly and imprisoned him until the
matter could be cleared up. He was kept in confinement till one of
his accusers fell dangerously ill, and tormented by the stings of his
conscience, when he was set at liberty.
Shah Manssur now reflected: “My remaining in Hindústán is of no
use, for calamities dog me at every step. Alas for the time which I
have lost in roaming about in this country! It were better that I
should return home, and if the Most High please, he can make me
happy and cause me to prosper there.” A caravan was proceeding
from Hyderábád to Irán,[25] and Manssur, sad and disappointed,
travelled along with it. On reaching the outskirts of Nishapúr, he said
to himself: “To make my appearance in this destitute and miserable
condition, after a journey from Hindústán, would distress my friends
and cause my enemies to rejoice. Therefore I will remain here until
nightfall and then enter the town and go to my friends.” He took
refuge in a dilapidated building, where he mourned and wept over
his sad fate. After a while an owl flew in, pursued by an eagle, and
sought protection of Shah Manssur, who took up a stone to throw at
the eagle. The stone, however, struck the wall and displaced a brick,
when a quantity of gold ashrafís[26] fell to the ground. Shah Manssur
ran to the place and there found a pot full of gold and silver. He
stuffed his pockets with gold coins and then concealed the pot in an
obscure corner of the ruin, fervently thanking God for this happy
termination of his travels and misfortunes.[27]
He remained in the ruin all night, and in the morning he did not
enter Nishapúr but went to Kazvyn, where he took an apartment in
the caravanserai, changed his habiliments, and bought a large
quantity of the finest merchandise, a string of camels, and three
slaves, and made his entrance into Nishapúr rejoicing. He was most
kindly received by his relatives and friends, and in course of time he
removed the whole of the treasure from the ruin to his own house.
Thus he lived in comfort and prosperity, made several journeys to
the country of Rúm and to that of the Franks,[28] by which he
obtained large profits, so that he finally became the owner of seven
hundred strings of valuable camels.
One day when he was sitting with his friends and relating his
unhappy adventures in Hindústán, he mentioned also the affair of
the witch, and asked whether they had seen her about the place.
They replied: “We were sitting together one day in this very house,
when a strange cat made its appearance, looked at each of us
attentively, and instantly vanished. Not long afterwards it came
again, ran with great speed up yonder tree, and immediately falling
down, seemed to be in the agony of death, but when we went up to
the animal it had already expired.” Quoth Shah Manssur: “That was
the same witch whose captive I had been for some time, until at last
I contrived to send her here and escape;” and at this explanation
they were greatly amazed.[29]
Shah Manssur once took a large quantity of merchandise, with
many attendants, to the country of Tabríz, which was at that time
under the Turkish government. He waited on the Amír of Tabríz,
associated with him, and so gained his favour that he made him his
vazír; and when the Amír died, the citizens, being pleased with the
kind and just disposition of Shah Manssur in his capacity of vazír,
petitioned the sultan to make him Amír, a request which was readily
granted, and Shah Manssur governed in Tabríz for many years until
he died.

“My dear Nassar,” continued Khayrandísh, “I have related this

narrative to make you understand that a man cannot attain the
object of his desires by irregular wanderings and inordinate
appetites; but if he be patient he will succeed. The world is a
coquette, and the more she is courted the more coy and prudish she
becomes, but if left unnoticed she will try to gain our favours.”

Second Advice.
“It is necessary to guard oneself from the wiles and snares of our
fellow-beings, and not to trust implicitly in persons whose character
is neither known nor tried. Whoever walks among thorns must do so
with great care and precaution. This world resembles a picture-
gallery with many apartments, each of which has its own peculiar
attractions; but a man who should spend all his time in the
contemplation and enjoyment thereof, to the neglect and disregard
of his daily avocations, would injure his own interests. Therefore he
is prudent who runs not after every fleeting illusion, but bridles his
desires lest he be disappointed and rendered unhappy, like the
geomancer, the washerman, and the painter, who lost control of
their passions and were drowned in the ocean of misfortunes and
errors, grieving over their troubles, which they were unable to
remedy.” Then Khayrandísh told Nassar the

Story of Hatim Taï and the Benevolent Lady.

It is related that when Hatim Taï[30] was dispensing his bounty

one day in a hall which had forty doors, by every one of which the
destitute might be admitted, a darvesh entered and thus addressed
him: “O vernal cloud of liberality! the mead of hope expects to be
irrigated by you. O husbandman of the field of beneficence, the
aspirants to your favours are in attendance to receive your
refreshing showers, and this gleaner from the store-houses of your
bounty was by the guide of hope directed to the prosperous mansion
of your generosity!

Bestow gifts, O noble individual,

For liberality is the lamp in the assembly of Faith.
Whoever gives a dirham to a mendicant
Is favourably regarded by God.
The umbrella of victory, in both worlds,
Overshadows the glorious heads of the liberal.”

Hatim ordered one hundred dínars[31] to be given to the darvesh,

who again entered by another door and reiterated his petition, and
again obtained one hundred dínars. Thus he repeated his request
until he had come in by all the forty doors, and had obtained the
same sum at each of them. After that he reappeared at the first door
and proffered the same request, upon which an attendant said to
him: “Darvesh, you have made the round of all the entrances and
were disappointed at none. How is it that your greediness is not yet
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