Introduction
British travellers, who ventured into Sindh in the nineteenth century, unfailingly noted the veneration that people reserved for Sayyids, the descendants of Prophet Muhammad. James Burnes, who visited the Talpur court in 1827–28, described “an unbounded and superstitious respect”.Footnote 1 He wrote, “No person under any provocation would dare to abuse or strike [a Sayyid], unless at the risk of being torn to pieces by the populace; and in consequence of the privileges and immunities they enjoy, they flock from all the neighbouring countries into Sinde, where, besides being the most insolent, useless, and lazy members of the community, they exercise a most baneful influence on the minds, and are a constant tax on the purses of the deluded inhabitants”.Footnote 2 Sayyids, in his formulation, held an elevated position in the social hierarchy in Sindh for reasons entirely undeserved. Their descent obviated any need for individual accomplishment. The outcome of such a system was the corruption of Sayyids and their followers.
Some years after the British conquest of Sindh in 1843, Richard Burton, the great nineteenth-century explorer, who was posted there for seven years, systematised these notions of lineage-based hierarchy.Footnote 3 He schematised the region as a motley collection of tribes and races in a book tellingly entitled Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus. He divided the people of Sindh into ʽstranger tribes’, Sindhis, and Hindus.Footnote 4 Each set was further divided and subdivided. Burton placed Sayyids at the head of the first group of stranger tribes, signalling their social priority. Sayyids were followed by Afghans, Baloch, Jat, Memons, Khwajas, Mohanas, and African slaves.Footnote 5 In turn, Sayyids, too, were divided into Hasani and Hussaini ʽraces’ and then by place of ancestral residence.Footnote 6 Burton notes that even though most Sayyids were Shiʻah and at odds with the Sunni beliefs more widely held in Sindh, “they were much respected by the commonality”.Footnote 7 He calls Sayyids a priesthood, while underscoring their heterodox beliefs, suggesting that descent was more important to Sayyid authority even than the beliefs that they espoused.Footnote 8
Descent in Burton's scheme was the general organising principle of society in Sindh. It facilitated group solidarities, but also marked the limits of social cohesion. Descent organised not just Sayyids, but also other groups. Ties of blood gave society in Sindh coherence and served as the basis for distinct customs and rituals. Yet, the presence of multifarious racial and tribal groups also implied that Sindh was socially and culturally fragmented, unable to transcend the hierarchies and divisions of descent. The role of British rule according to him was to mediate between antagonistic groups.Footnote 9 Burton's description, first published in 1851, attained considerable influence. By the turn of the century, it had become customary to describe Sindh as a conglomeration of different tribes and races, as also to accord Sayyids priority among these groups.Footnote 10
Two generations of scholarship have enabled a reading of these works not as empirical texts, but rather as products of nineteenth-century colonial thought, freighted with concerns about governance, control, and legitimacy.Footnote 11 These works in turn left an indelible mark upon the society they sought to represent. Ideas like tribe and race were part of the ideological and intellectual apparatus with which the British apprehended the world.Footnote 12 The scrutiny of this conceptual apparatus has exposed the limits of colonial sources and spurred a reconsideration of historical approaches, but questions remain about how society was organised and imagined before the ascendance of ideas of tribe and race, among others, under colonialism.Footnote 13 This article, in studying the place of Sayyids in eighteenth-century Sindh, contributes to the social history of early modern South Asia.
Tuhfat al-Kiram (Gift for the Noble) is a Persian text, a history, geography, and tazkirah or biographical dictionary of Sindh and the world, written in 1767. Its author, Mir ʻAli Shir Qaniʻ, was a Persian poet and scholar, who spent much of his life in Thatta, the largest and most important city of early modern Sindh. While Qaniʻ worked briefly for the Kalhora, the rulers of Sindh from 1737–82, Tuhfat al-Kiram was not a commissioned work. Containing over 1,480 biographical entries of notables of Sindh, it is a rich source on the social history of pre-colonial Sindh.Footnote 14 It opens a window on a society that was joined together by the ethical, social, and literary values of Persianate culture, which was the enduring legacy of nearly a hundred and fifty years of Mughal rule. It is a far cry from the visions of fragmentation and discord that colour colonial accounts.
At the same time, Qaniʻ, in his particular arrangement of biographical entries, puts forward his own hierarchical conception of social order. This model, like that of Burton a century later, accords the highest priority to Sayyids. Rather than take this as a confirmation of Sayyid eminence, this article reads Tuhfat al-Kiram as a normative text, in which Qaniʻ seeks to reimagine social order in post-Mughal Thatta and Sindh. Transformations in political and social relations in the eighteenth century had encouraged Qaniʻ, who belonged not only to the class of Sayyids but also to the larger group of the Muslim gentry of Thatta, to rethink the limits of Persianate society and also the sources of hierarchical social order in the city. Individual merit—a Persianate value that Qaniʻ continued to cherish—was tempered in his formulation by the reality of intergenerational transfer of power within families and by a defensive attempt to restrict social priority to descent groups like Sayyids alone.
In many ways, Tuhfat al-Kiram represents a unique text in the history of Persian literature in Sindh. Its sheer scale and ambition is evident across its three volumes. The first volume is a history of the world from the moment of creation down to Timur.Footnote 15 The second volume is a world geography, which describes the regions and cities of the world, as also its kings and notable peoples. The third volume is concerned with Sindh. Its first part offers a history of Sindh from the early Hindu dynasties down to the Kalhora. The second part is a geography and biographical dictionary of Sindh, proceeding city by city and town by town across the region, listing the notables of each place. While others in Sindh had penned both regional histories and world geographies before Qaniʻ, his text stands apart in its simultaneous attention to world and region and its keen interest in looking beyond the histories of kings.Footnote 16 Those writing in Sindh after Qaniʻ continued the Persian tazkirah tradition, but none returned to the social category of notables, turning instead to tazkirahs of Sufis or Persian poets of Sindh.Footnote 17
The social and political context of Thatta is crucial to understanding Qaniʻs project in Tuhfat al-Kiram. Thatta had been a seat of power since the end of the fifteenth century for the Samma, Arghun and Tarkhans.Footnote 18 Located on the Indus, at a three-day journey from the Arabian Sea and a two-day journey from its port, Lahri Bandar, Thatta was also a hub of trade, connected to ports in the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Gujarat, the Konkan, Malacca, Burma, Thailand, and Sumatra.Footnote 19 Even after its conquest by the Mughals in 1591, it remained an administrative and commercial centre, as also the seat of the provincial Mughal governor in lower Sindh. It was only in the eighteenth century that Thatta lost its administrative importance. At this time, an upstart force, the Kalhora swept away old zamindars or local power holders in upper Sindh. When efforts at suppression failed, they were inducted into Mughal nobility. In 1736–37, the Mughal emperor went a step further and turned over the administration of lower Sindh, and its capital Thatta, to the Kalhora, too.Footnote 20 The Kalhora were neither familiar with Mughal political culture nor with the Persianate elite in Thatta. Their followers were called sirayan after the siro or upper region of Sindh, to which they belonged.Footnote 21 They built a series of new capitals in their power centre in upper Sindh, which by one scholar's count add up to eleven.Footnote 22 Thatta, located in lower Sindh, was never again to be an administrative centre. Yet, in the vacuum left between the Mughals and the Kalhora, the gentry of Thatta was able to consolidate its social power in the city.Footnote 23 It was in this context of political isolation and social transformation that Qaniʻ embarked upon the writing of Tuhfat al-Kiram.
In reading Tuhfat al-Kiram, I make three historiographical claims. First, even as individuals of Sayyid background were important through the history of Sindh, the idea of Sayyids as a coherent social group, and one which could claim priority within Thatta and Sindh, emerged only in the second half of the eighteenth century, finding its clearest expression in Qaniʻs text. Even then, its acceptance remained less than universal. Second, even as Qaniʻ asserted the priority of Sayyids based on their descent, he continued to be invested in older values of individual excellence and accomplishment upheld by Persianate adab, which Mana Kia has vividly described as “the social ethics and sensibilities by which an individual could perceive the values, stakes, and significance of their ways of being in the world”.Footnote 24 Qaniʻ sought to reconcile this older meritocratic and open culture with the new social and political realities of Thatta. Tuhfat al-Kiram shows both the longevity and the limits of Persianate adab in the post-Mughal world. Finally, Qaniʻs attempt to close off upward mobility in Persianate Sindh by invoking descent was related to the rise of Hindu administrators whose access to employment, influence, and cultural capital threatened the older elite of Thatta.
Sayyid priority in Tuhfat al-Kiram
The literary genre Qaniʻ uses to construct social order in Thatta and Sindh is the tazkirah. Marcia Hermansen and Bruce Lawrence have theorised Sufi and poetic tazkirahs as memorative communications that by remembering heroes authenticate and imagine urban spaces as sites of Persian poetic culture or Muslim sacrality.Footnote 25 Mana Kia, in her study of eighteenth-century Persian poetic tazkirahs, argues that authors of these texts construct their poetic persona in relation to a self-selected aterritorial community of poets, both contemporary and historical.Footnote 26 Where the former draws attention to place-making, the latter looks at self-fashioning. What joins these works to each other and to this article is a common understanding that tazkirahs were not passive mirrors of social reality, but rather interventions seeking to shape the world.
The tazkirah in Tuhfat al-Kiram constructs a hierarchical social order in the city of Thatta, which in turn is positioned at the head of the region of Sindh. It stands apart from the tazkirahs studied by the aforementioned scholars in that it is not limited to Sufis or poets. Instead, the tazkirah concerns itself with the buzurg or the greats or elders of Sindh. The category of buzurg both encompasses and exceeds poets and Sufis. While Qaniʻ has written a tazkirah of Persian poets of Sindh and another of Sufis, his more expansive interest in Tuhfat al-Kiram relates directly to his concern with constituting social order in this text.Footnote 27 Rather than commemorate a specific community of poets or saints, he assembles the Persianate notables of Sindh with their diverse claims to social priority into a fixed hierarchy.
In the beginning of the third volume on Sindh, Qaniʻ declares it a compilation of earlier works, while also recognising the novelty of his effort. He writes,
It is brought to the attention of the people of knowledge that [Qaniʻ] did not find mention of the region [vilayat] of Sindh in its totality, and particularly of Thatta, anywhere in the books of contemporaries and predecessors, even though this land abounds in people of rational and esoteric knowledge. For this reason, I made efforts to bring together material from a number of different books along with some reliable reports into a separate volume as a gift for the gathering of friends.Footnote 28
Qaniʻs claim that his text on Sindh is unprecedented suggests that he found earlier Persian histories of Sindh, which are sources for Tuhfat, to be less than adequate. Perhaps, it is their overwhelming interest in political history and their lack of systematic attention to the people of Sindh that disqualified earlier works such as Chachnamah, Taʼrikh Maʻsumi, Taʼrikh-i Tahiri and Beglarnamah, among others.
At the same time, implicit in these opening lines is the acknowledgement that such texts already exist for other regions and cities, and that Sindh and Thatta, too, are worthy of attention. It is only if such texts existed for other places, that it would be possible for Qaniʻ to feel their absence in the case of Sindh and Thatta. There is, in fact, a long medieval tradition of Persian histories of cities and regions, particularly relating to Herat.Footnote 29 In the eighteenth century, too, such texts were increasingly being written for regions such as Kashmir and Gujarat.Footnote 30 Histories written at the Mughal court had also become regionalised, recasting the Mughals as north Indian kings rather than universal sovereigns, and attending closely to the places and people of that region.Footnote 31 Qaniʻs turn to the region of Sindh and the city of Thatta, therefore, are not indications of a turn inward, but rather a response to new trends across the Persianate world.
Finally, the correspondence between Sindh and Thatta in the opening lines is characteristic of Qaniʻs approach in this volume more broadly. Despite his gesture towards the entirety of Sindh, his history in the first part of this volume often slips into a history of Thatta and lower Sindh.Footnote 32 Moreover, Qaniʻ begins the second part of this volume with a similar pairing of region and city: “May it not be hidden that upon becoming free from the writing of the conditions of the ranks (tabaqat) of kings and rulers of Sindh and Thatta, it is necessary to mention some of the cities and villages, along with a description of their buzurg”.Footnote 33 Joining city and region, and using them interchangeably, is not uncommon within Persian writings of place.Footnote 34 In this case, it is an argument for the pre-eminence of Thatta within Sindh.
However, Qaniʻ is careful not to elide over other cities and towns of the region. The geographically-arranged tazkirah in the second part of the third volume moves across Sindh from north to south. For each of the approximately eighty towns, cities, villages, and sites of Sindh that Qaniʻ mentions, he offers first a brief description of the place and then a list of its notable persons. He starts at Multan and proceeds through the towns and cities of the districts of Bhakkar, Sewistan or Sehwan, Halakandi or Hala and Bathoro, culminating in the south in Thatta. Ending on Thatta is yet another indication of the priority of the city within Sindh. In sheer scale of information, too, Thatta stands apart from other places. Of roughly 1,480 biographical entries, a full 920, or around 60 per cent, are of people related to Thatta. Tellingly, no Kalhora capital gets its own entry, except Hyderabad, which is denoted by its ancient name Nerunkot, suggesting its inclusion was based on its historic importance rather than its association with the Kalhora.Footnote 35 This oversight is all the more glaring given that Qaniʻ spent time in various Kalhora capitals looking for employment.Footnote 36 The exclusion can only be read as a purposeful snub: marginalising the Kalhora in his text, even as they had marginalised Thatta in their kingdom. Kalhora capitals may be centres of administration and power, but for Qaniʻ, Thatta was the jewel of Sindh.
His description of the city leads to a similar conclusion. Qaniʻ describes Thatta as “the choicest and best city, the home of lords of esoteric knowledge and birthplace of masters of faith. In particular, its land is the mine of people of perfection”.Footnote 37 He gives a brief history of the city, whose land was initially submerged under water until the Indus changed course. The Samma ruler Jam Nizamuddin ordered the construction of Thatta in 1495.Footnote 38 Qaniʻ gives two stories for the name of the city. The first explains Thatta as a corruption ‘Teh Teh’ or ‘Lower, Lower’ referencing the migration of people from northern cities to Thatta. The second story suggests the name is derived from ‘Thatt’, the Sindhi word for a place of gathering. Qaniʻ quotes Hakim Mir ʻAbdul Razzaq Isfahani, a scholar in the employ of the Kalhora, who held that Thatta was a branch of the land of Greece, which is why so many people of excellence had been born there. He continues, “There is no other place in all of Sindh as pleasant and pure. Its mornings brighten the mirror of the imagination of sad hearts, and its evenings bring the joy of dawn to strangers. Its residents go every week, in groups upon groups, to the gardens of Makli”.Footnote 39
After this description of the city, Qaniʻ proceeds to its people, writing that he will “mention the families of Sayyids, saints, scholars and people of excellence by group (tabaqat)”.Footnote 40Tabaqat has in common with class the idea of a hierarchically-ordered society. However, tabaqat are not arranged by economic status, but rather by prestige or priority.Footnote 41 Qaniʻ moves systematically through seven different groups: Sayyids, qazis or judges, religious scholars and other pious people, Sufi saints and their deputies, people of renown, calligraphers, and poets.Footnote 42 In addition, he mentions people of spiritual power buried in Thatta, on the Makli Hills outside it, and world-renouncing dervishes. Each group is introduced with a line on its significance, followed by accounts of individuals and families included in it. The introductory lines with their explicit and careful reasoning suggest that Qaniʻs proposed order was not self-evident. He was not following an accepted logic in his arrangement, which is why an explanation was required.
For the first group, that of the Sayyids of Sindh, Qaniʻ writes, “[I] begin with mention of the selected group of the people of the house of the prophet because they are the opening of the book of creation (basmalah-i divan-i ijad)”.Footnote 43 He alludes to the cosmological idea that God's first act of creation, preceding even Adam, was the Muhammadan light (nur Muhammadi).Footnote 44 In his own account of the world's origin in the first volume, Qaniʻ notes a dispute among scholars about whether God first made the Muhammadan light, the intellect, or the pen. He resolves this question by proposing that the Muhammadan light was the first reality followed by the intellect and pen, which were the first incorporeal and corporeal creations.Footnote 45 Muhammad's cosmological priority serves as justification for the Sayyids’ social priority.
However, cosmology is not the only rationale invoked by Qaniʻ for his particular order. Individual excellence and religious endorsement figure as important claims of eminence. The second group—that of qazis—is introduced with the following words: “The group of the family of judges, which by its abundant virtue and excellence, was renowned among humankind and the refuge of the high and low”.Footnote 46 The group that follows is scholars (ʻulama) and the pious (sulahaʼ o ahl-i taqva). Qaniʻ justifies the priority of scholars on authority of Prophet Muhammad's saying, “The scholars of my people are like the prophets of Israel”.Footnote 47 Qaniʻ explains the eminence of the pious with a Quranic verse, “Indeed the most righteous of you is the most noble of you near Allah” (49:13), saying that by this verse's authority, the pious have “precedence over all the tribes (qaba'il) and the learned (shuʻur)”.Footnote 48 The next group, the people of Allah and the Sufi path, and their deputies, he describes as “associated with the grandeur of genealogy and acquirement, possessing the bounties of God and their own accomplishments, a blessing for the world, and a beautiful flower in the garden of knowledge and belief”.Footnote 49 The descriptions suggest the dual importance of individual accomplishment and God's favour in distinguishing these groups. Notably, Qaniʻ omits any reference to political authorities to ratify this hierarchical order.
Introducing the next group, Qaniʻ writes, “[They are those] who have been distinguished by circumstance or ability. Some belong to renowned families. Though the previous account has also included mention of these notables, several names are mentioned here separately so that the reader may become acquainted with the difference of ranks (maratib)”.Footnote 50 Three things become apparent here. First, Qaniʻ is interested in rank or hierarchy, rather than simply delineating different but equal groups. Second, he is making an argument for a particular order, which he does not believe to be self-evident. Third, this is the closest he comes to stating his method of arguing for this order through the inclusion of exemplary people of each group. Qaniʻ explicitly recognises overlap between these groups, yet keeps them distinct. For the last groups of calligraphers and poets, too, he admits that people have already been mentioned who excelled at both, but insists on noting a few people from each class.Footnote 51 A Sayyid may well be a calligrapher or a scholar a poet, but a calligrapher or poet without any other distinction could only be placed in the sixth and seventh ranks. This, Qaniʻ believes, would be evident upon perusing the exemplary individuals included for each group. His tazkirah was designed not to reflect social reality, but as an argument constructed in favour of his vision of social order.
Qanʻs arrangement, with Sayyids, judges, scholars, and saints at the front, stands in sharp contrast to the hierarchical order of Mughal courtly texts. The Institutes of Akbar or ʽAʼin-i Akbari, written by Abuʼl Fazl on the order of Akbar in the final years of the sixteenth century, is a fine counterpoint not because it is representative of Mughal vision of social order across time, but because it brings out the dilemmas that Qaniʻ was facing in the starkest possible terms. In ʽAʼin-i Akbari, Abuʼl Fazl fixes people around the axis of the emperor. At the end of the second book, he lists Mughal mansabdars or nobles, followed by people of learning, poets, and musicians.Footnote 52 The list is temporally limited to people of Akbar's reign and arranged to reflect their priority at court. The inventory of nobles is arranged by descending order of numeric rank from the commanders of ten thousand down to the commanders of two hundred. Their ranks and names are the only details noted. Abuʼl Fazl explains this by declaiming that “it does not suit the encomiast of the king to praise others”.Footnote 53 He argues that an honest appraisal of people is impossible because propriety would require that he only “mention that which is worthy of praise, and to keep silent on that which cannot be approved”.Footnote 54 As a member of the court, Abuʼl Fazl finds himself unable to assess the worth of his peers. The emperor alone, standing above the fray, can ascertain the value of people. Imperial rank, therefore, is the only way to describe the nobility. Imperial discernment is the singular source of hierarchical distinction in Abuʼl Fazl's schema.Footnote 55 No further examples or explication are considered necessary.
The Mughal sovereign's role of upholding hierarchical order was both theoretical and practical. He appointed nobles, elevated or decreased rank, transferred positions, and prevented office from passing unimpeded from father to son. Imperial recognition of individual merit was central to garnering political and social power. Yet, in Qaniʻs Thatta, such a sovereign had not existed even formally since 1739. Social order could not be constituted around the court or the sovereign's ability to depute power and dispense patronage. In this altered political context, Qaniʻ constructs his hierarchical order on the city and the region. Moreover, his groups are not limited temporally by a king's reign, but rather extend back in a continuous history. His categories do not include Mughal nobles or officials as a distinct group. Without sovereign discernment upholding them, his groups required new justifications. Assertions of Sayyid priority on the basis of descent from the Prophet is not enough on its own. Rather, the exemplary biographies that Qaniʻ offers valorise individual excellence and accomplishment. Sayyid priority could not be confirmed by political authority, but had to be argued from within the values of Persianate culture, which, with its emphasis on individual excellence, continued to shape post-Mughal Thatta. Qaniʻs biographies also introduce the family as a crucial means of intergenerational accrual and transfer of power and guarantor of social stability in the post-Mughal world. It is this tension between individual excellence and lineage in Tuhfat al-Kiram to which the next section turns.
Lineage and familial power in a society of individual excellence
The biographical notices of Tuhfat al-Kiram make clear that there was no dearth of Sayyids among the notables of Sindh. They constitute over 30 per cent of the entries on Thatta. However, the individuals noted were often renowned for reasons beyond prophetic lineage. Qaniʻ may have started his tazkirah of notables in Thatta with Sayyids, but which ones he included and why they merited individual mention did not relate to prophetic lineage in straightforward ways. Learning and spiritual power were two qualities that continued to distinguish individuals. Moreover, Qaniʻs tazkirah did not move through a series of individual Sayyids, but rather through Sayyid families. Arranged according to their arrival in Sindh, these families were identified by their historic place of origin as the Sayyids of Shiraz, Mashhad, Mazandaran, Sabzavar, Kashan, Bukhara, Astarabad and so on. This familial approach, which characterised the whole tazkirah, suggests that individual distinction intersected with lineage in ways that are not captured by the idea of Sayyid priority, even as Qaniʻ used both to argue for his conception of social order.
Qaniʻs description of the Sayyid family of the Anjavi Shirazi branch, which had the oldest roots in Sindh and constituted the first series of biographical notices in the Thatta section, elucidates the uneasy fit between Sayyid priority, individual merit, and familial power. Sayyid Muhammad and his son Sayyid Ahmad, Anjavi Shirazi Sayyids of excellence and greatness, came to Sindh in 1384 during the reign of Jam Salahuddin bin Jam Tamachi. Their date of arrival according to the Hijri calendar was 786AH, which Qaniʻ notes is the numerical value of the Basmalah, the first line of the Qurʼan, which is also recited at the beginning of every chapter of the book.Footnote 56 It means “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most kind”. The theme of Sayyids as an inaugural people is repeated in this manner and the auspiciousness of their advent in Sindh confirmed by this sign.
The emphasis on individual excellence is everywhere in these biographies. However, merit here is often validated by divine and supernatural signs whose logic confounds modern notions of rational verification.Footnote 57 While these signs are rendered incomprehensible and arbitrary today, the very opposite of merit that is earned and deserved, they testified to individual greatness, both earned and endowed, in pre-modern Sindh. After recounting the first sign of the auspicious year of their arrival, Qaniʻ narrates that Sayyid Muhammad and Sayyid Ahmad settled in the village of Murad Uthi in the parganah of Manchar, where Sayyid Muhammad passed away. Qaniʻ writes, “It is enough as evidence of the greatness of this man that when his descendant Sayyid ʻAli II built a tomb on the Hills of Makli, there was no spirituality or purity here and it did not become a place of pilgrimage for people of God till he received instructions in a dream to transfer this great man's body from Murad Uthi”.Footnote 58 A disenchanted, interests-based reading of this anecdote would ascribe agency to Sayyid ʻAli II, who would have strategically shifted his ancestor's body to his new but floundering construction. Conversely, Qaniʻs telling ascribes agency to Sayyid Muhammad, whose greatness is confirmed by his posthumous dream communication.Footnote 59 Another notable element of this story is the additional role of people in confirming Sayyid Muhammad's excellence. It is ultimately their endorsement of Sayyid ʻAli II's shrine after the re-interment of his ancestor that distinguishes Sayyid Muhammad.
Sayyid Ahmad's greatness, too, is illustrated by such signs. He continued to live in Sindh after the death of his father, spending his time in the company of people of God. Qaniʻ writes:
He once travelled to Samui to meet Shaikh ʻIsa Languti. Qazi Niʻmatullah ʻAbbasi, a learned man of perfection, was seated before the shaikh. The shaikh gave the Sayyid much honour and respect upon his arrival, but the qazi did not move at all. Upon the end of the Sayyid's visit and on his departure, the shaikh gave him greater and greater respect. The qazi asked why the shaikh gave him greater respect when the Sayyid turned. The shaikh replied, “I saw the axis of time (qutb-i zaman) from his posterior. If I am alive, I will pledge my loyalty to him and become his follower.” [Meanwhile] the Sayyid had been hurt by the qazi and cursed him. When the qazi returned to his home, he lost his eyesight and could not understand the reason. At night, his daughter Fatima had a dream that she had married the Sayyid and had four star-like jewels, one of whom lit the skies with its light. The qazi brought these two incidents before Shaikh ʻIsa. On his instruction, he gave his daughter's hand in marriage to the Sayyid and brought him to live in his own house. As had been decreed, Fatima had four sons according to their own time: Sayyid ʻAli, Sayyid Jaʻfar, Sayyid Muhammad Sharif, Sayyid Muhammad Hussain. In the end, according to the custom of creation this great person died on 1 Muharram 845ah/1441ad. He was buried in the graveyard of the qazis, which later became the graveyard of his Sayyid descendants.Footnote 60
Miracles perform a central function in producing greatness. Sayyid Ahmad's curse upon the qazi is one such sign. The story also illustrates that respect for Sayyids was neither standard nor universal. ʻIsa Languti's excessive obeisance to Sayyid Ahmad is occasion for surprise. Languti in turn explains his actions not by invoking deference due to all Sayyids, but rather as a mark of respect for the son that Sayyid Ahmad was to have. In Languti's vision and Fatima's dream, Sayyid Ahmad's eminence is guaranteed not by his ancestry, but rather by his exceptional progeny. Moreover, miraculous signs also require a sage like Languti to recognise, interpret, and announce. Just as people had verified Sayyid Muhammad's power by coming to his shrine, ʻIsa Languti affirms and prophesies the power of Sayyid Ahmad's son.
Miracles were not the only means to ascertain individual merit. The life individuals led, the people they associated with, their literary, architectural, material, and spiritual accomplishments were all part of a matrix that rendered individual accomplishment meaningful. Qaniʻ proceeds to narrate the lineage of Sayyid ʻAli, Sayyid Ahmad's first son, down eight generations to the eighteenth century. Sayyid ʻAli's grandson, Sayyid ʻAli II, is described as “exalted in the path of the nobles of piety”.Footnote 61 He excelled in the Sufi path and performed the hajj many times. He is distinguished by his association with other great Sufis, such as Darvish Achar and was also a disciple of the renowned Sufi, Makhdum Nuh. What Mana Kia has called “lineages of learning and service” figure here as important markers of distinction.Footnote 62 Sayyid ʻAli II's worth is determined not only by his descent, but also by voluntary associations with Sufi masters, teachers and lords. Qaniʻ continues to mention his architectural and literary accomplishments. Sayyid ʻAli II built the tomb on the hills of Makli, where Sayyid Muhammad's body was reinterred. Qaniʻ says, “A large unparalleled group comes to receive its grace”.Footnote 63 Sayyid ʻAli II has also left behind Adab al-Mursalin, a religious manual, as a yadgar or memorial. He died in 1563–64.Footnote 64 These markers of individual excellence, which adorn Sayyid ʻAli II, are not specific to his Sayyid lineage and in fact are very close to the notable accomplishments of other non-Sayyids in Tuhfat al-Kiram.
Discernible in the shorter biographies of Sayyid ʻAli II's six subsequent descendants is Qaniʻs interest in narrating the transfer of social power across generations. Each descendant is noted as the successive trustee of Sayyid ʻAli II's shrine down to Mir Lutfullah, who was its head in the eighteenth century. Sayyid ʻAli II's son, Sayyid Jalal II, married a Tarkhan princess and was sent as an ambassador by Mirza Muhammad Baqi (r. 1567–85) to Akbar's court.Footnote 65 The family's position as custodians of an influential shrine appears to have been consolidated by their marriage to the Tarkhan rulers and their influence continued till the eighteenth century.Footnote 66 The spiritual accomplishments of Sayyid Muhammad and Sayyid ʻAli II are affirmed by their followers and pilgrims, who, by visiting their shrine, make it a site through which social power is accrued and transferred within the family. Qaniʻs scrupulous list of successive custodians affirms his interest in documenting social power. The only lateral line he includes within Sayyid ʻAli II's descendants enjoys a separate following among the Nehmardi hill tribe because of the spiritual power and miraculous nature of one of the descendants.Footnote 67
Other Sayyid biographies in Tuhfat continue to braid individual distinction with familial power. The Mashhadi Sayyid Abuʼ Mukarram (d. 1655) became a khalifah of a Qadiri saint, who was a descendant of the founder Shaikh ʻAbdul Qadir Gilani. Mukarram's affiliation with this Sufi order was not based on ties of blood, but of discipleship. Moreover, Jahangir gave him tax-free lands (madad-i maʻash) on account of his excellence in religious knowledge (zahiri ʽilm). When Khusraw Khan Charkhas, a Tarkhan noble in Mughal service, built a Friday Mosque next to his mansion in Thatta, he appointed Abul Mukarram as its manager (mutavali). Posts and awards from the Mughal emperor and nobles continue to be remembered and celebrated in Qaniʻs times, even after Mughal rule. However, only the Qadiri khilafat, according to Qaniʻs biographies, was transferred down five generations to his own times, serving as the enduring institution to preserve and transfer power from father to son.Footnote 68
The Sabzvari Sayyids of Thatta had in their family the post of shaikh al-islam or the chief of muftis, who offered opinions on matters of Islamic law. This position was given by the Arghun rulers to Mirak Shaikh Mahmud in the early sixteenth century and was passed down across generations and political epochs to his descendant in Qaniʻs time.Footnote 69 Mir Ghururi, a Kashani Sayyid, moved to Thatta in the early seventeenth century and was made the superintendent of the mint by Jahangir. This post was passed from Mir Ghururi to his son and then to his son's nephew, who died in the eighteenth century.Footnote 70 Qaniʻ was acutely aware of the multiple sources of social power, deriving not merely from Sufi but also from political institutions.
Qaniʻs attention to lineage speaks to a time when power and authority in the city was not directly derived from a central political authority, but rather accrued and passed within the institution of the family. Memories of old Mughal connections and access to Mughal posts remained important markers of power and distinction, but there is no sense in Tuhfat al-Kiram of a contemporary political power, Mughal, Durrani or Kalhora, shaping social order in the city. Non-hereditary delegation of authority, which had kept power centralised and built imperial order on individual merit rather than familial prerogative under the Mughals, is all but gone from Qaniʻs Thatta.
Moreover, it is not simply that office in the city had become hereditary, but also that power in the city derived from the followings families enjoyed as Sufi saints and custodians of shrines. This power was by no means new. Families like that of Sayyid ʻAli II had enjoyed a following since well before the advent of Mughal rule in Sindh. However, with the attenuation of the king's power in the city, it may well have gained in importance. Certainly, authority derived from Sufi institutions has an overweening importance in Qaniʻs work. Individual excellence and spiritual power are key explanations for this authority. However, rather than these merits being verified by the king, they are verified by followers. This sanction from below is latent in the story of the success of Sayyid ʻAli II's shrine, whose improved spirituality after the re-interment of Sayyid Muhammad is attested by the people who begin to visit the site. Similarly, Qaniʻ repeatedly confirms spiritual power of various individuals and families by mentioning their following. While this does not by any means signal a democratisation of power, it does suggest that influence over people was seen by Qaniʻ as an important testament of merit and a crucial ingredient of social power.
Despite his interest in social power, Qaniʻ continues to valorise scholarly and literary accomplishments as markers of individual excellence. He scrupulously notes when people composed good verse, wrote a text, or excelled at various forms of learning.Footnote 71 Poets and calligraphers are accorded their own ranks, even if they are the lowest of the seven. Qaniʻ had also penned a biographical dictionary of Persian poets of Sindh some years before writing Tuhfat al-Kiram. Yet, these accomplishments do not map clearly on to the acquisition of power, particularly in a time when patronage for literary activities had all but dried out. However, these are values that Qaniʻ cherishes. In the preface of Tuhfat al-Kiram, he introduces himself through a review of his education in history and geography, as also his experience of writing letters, poetry, and history. As models, he mentions his ancestors Mir ʻAbdullah Asil and Mir Jamaluddin, who had both written Persian histories.Footnote 72 However, nowhere in the introduction does Qaniʻ mention his own Sayyid status.Footnote 73 In individuals, including himself, Qaniʻ values literary and cultural accomplishments, even as he documents social power.
One crucial question remains unresolved in this account of Qaniʻs construction of social order. If social power and individual distinction are central to the text and neither relates directly to Sayyid descent, then why is Qaniʻs social order nevertheless built upon this category? It is not clear from Qaniʻs text how and whether Sayyids constitute a coherent social group. The relationship between for example the Mashhadi Sayyid family and the Anjavi Shirazi Sayyid family or the Shukrullahi Sayyid family is not described. Where Burton's account of Sayyids a century later identifies endogamy as the key practice giving Sayyids social coherence, Qaniʻ makes no comment on marriage practices, nor does he provide any other account of group coherence.Footnote 74 Moreover, people included in other groups in Qaniʻs text derive social power from similar sources. The group of scholars are largely holders of office such as a judgeship in various parts of the Mughal empire.Footnote 75 The group of people of Allah draw authority from Sufi institutions such as shrines.Footnote 76 Some were also accomplished in Persian literature and learning.Footnote 77
This contradiction between Qaniʻs closed system of hierarchy and common sources of authority that cut across these groups can best be understood if Tuhfat al-Kiram is read as a prescriptive rather than a descriptive text. Through the exemplary biographies for each group, Qaniʻ is making an argument for the position of the group within his social order. Sayyids are accorded the highest priority because of their social power and individual merit. The biographies are meant to persuade the reader of Sayyid eminence. With the biographies of each subsequent group, social power and individual merit diminishes, even if the sources of both remain theoretically open and shared. Anyone with spiritual authority could attain a following, anyone with political authority could become powerful, and anyone with a Persian education and learning could become culturally accomplished, but Qaniʻs biographies propose that Sayyids have been preeminent on all counts. This is their claim to priority, not a straightforward appeal to their prophetic lineage.
In fact, Qaniʻ proposes his closed hierarchical model to manage the openness of a city, which offered people many different routes to social power and distinction. Stability of social power had been worked out through its transfer within the family from generation to generation. Yet, these old families of Thatta remained under threat from Kalhora rulers, who were not particularly interested in incorporating them into government. Kalhora power was itself partly rooted in their own claim of spiritual power and Sufi institutions.Footnote 78 Moreover, their rule over Thatta and Sindh was conducted primarily through officials from northern Sindh and through an increasingly important group of Hindu administrators arriving in Sindh from the Punjab. While Qaniʻ could do little to halt their rise or reverse Thatta gentry's own exclusion from power, he could in his work argue for a social order that in theory, if not practice, would guarantee the old guard of Thatta primacy on the basis of descent. Individual merit and social power are celebrated by Qaniʻ, even as he uses them to claim eminence for specific descent groups. In doing so, he reformulates these values as the preserve of a fixed group of people, inaccessible to the new political power on the scene in Sindh. While Qaniʻ remains studiously silent on these figures of power, his male, Muslim, closed social order cannot be understood without reference to the new Kalhora political order. It is to Hindus and women, the groups absent from Tuhfat al-Kiram, that the final section turns.
Hindus and women in Thatta
The eighteenth century has been dubbed the Golden Age of the Scribe, particularly of the Hindu scribe.Footnote 79 This was as true in Sindh as anywhere else. Hindu scribes, known as amils, rose up within the governments of the Kalhora and their successors the Talpurs. Their star remained ascendant into the nineteenth century. In his account of Sindh, Richard Burton claimed that twenty Hindus had administered Sindh for their Talpur masters.Footnote 80 “The princes had degenerated from the hardy savage virtues of temperance, sobriety, and morality affected by their progenitors”, wrote Burton, “They required for pleasure the time demanded by business, and willingly intrusted to the hands of Hindoos—most unjust stewards—the management of their estates, and, in some cases, of their subjects”.Footnote 81 He simultaneously drew a picture of amils as a persecuted group, subject to arbitrary punishments, including death, torture, and forced conversion.Footnote 82 While colonial accounts of Hindu oppression appear overblown, they were not off the mark about their power.Footnote 83
Hindus have long been a part of the social and economic fabric of Thatta.Footnote 84 Hindu merchants, called Bhaibands, had much of Thatta's trade in their hands. Though demographic estimates made by travellers are not exceedingly reliable, Alexander Hamilton, who visited Thatta in 1699, claimed that there were ten Hindus to every Muslim in the city.Footnote 85 When Henry Pottinger travelled across Sindh and Balochistan in 1809, he found communities of Hindu traders and moneylenders in every town and city, including Kalat, Karachi and Sonmiani.Footnote 86 These men were linked to the network of merchants based out of Multan and Shikarpur, which financed much of the trade between India and Central Asia.Footnote 87
Under the Kalhora, a wave of immigration of Hindu scribes appears to have begun from the Punjab. This may well have been because of political dislocation in the Punjab or because the Kalhora, belonging to upper Sindh, were closer to the administration in Mughal Punjab. Bherumal Maharchand Advani, who penned a Sindhi history and biographical dictionary of Sindhi Hindus in 1946, identifies Aurangzeb's persecution of Sikhs and Hindus as a chief impetus for migration into Sindh starting in the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote 88 It is likely that as the Kalhora fought against Mughal control, they were eager to recruit qualified administrators and allies who were both familiar with Mughal administration but also not loyal to the Mughals.
The Advanis, who comprised some five hundred families by 1946, began their career in Sindh with Divan Adumal, who moved from Multan in the first half of the eighteenth century to serve in the Kalhora army. His descendants went on to attain high posts in the government.Footnote 89 The Ahujas also moved from the Punjab during Kalhora rule and were given land to cultivate in Naushahro Abro near Shikarpur.Footnote 90 Other Hindu and Sikhs, who arrived in Sindh, found employ with the Kalhora, too. Amils soon came to hold many high positions in government. Divan Gidumal was the minister of various Kalhora and Talpur administrations.Footnote 91 Divan Jethmal served as the governor of Shikarpur.Footnote 92 He operated his own mint and struck coins in his name.Footnote 93 Munshi Wali Ram Advani served as the chief minister for a Talpur ruler, Mir Nasir Khan, while Munshi Autra Malkani served as the revenue minister of another Talpur, Mir Sobedar Khan.Footnote 94
Despite their growing numbers and influence, Qaniʻ does not mention a single Hindu in the 1,480 biographical entries for Sindh. The closest he comes is to mention Shaikh Badiyah Virdas, a Brahmin buried on Ganjah Hill, who is described as “one of those who has renounced the world in favour of the One God”.Footnote 95 This indicates that Virdas was a convert to Islam. Cultural facility in Persian and Persianate values does not appear to be an adequate criterion for inclusion of Hindus in Tuhfat al-Kiram. Many Hindu administrators were accomplished Persian poets and writers.Footnote 96 Shaivak Ram ʻUtarid, a son of Thatta and head secretary (mir munshi) of two Kalhora rulers, left behind Persian poems and a volume of Persian letters.Footnote 97 Qaniʻ organised poetic gatherings (mushaʻarah) with ʻUtarid.Footnote 98 He also included an entry on ʻUtarid in his dictionary of Persian poets, where he described their relationship as friendly (rabita-i dustana) and preserved a poem to convey the depth of their affection (ikhlas) for each other.Footnote 99 Qaniʻ was also on friendly terms with at least two other Hindus, Daulah Ram and Lala Asaram, and notes conversations with both in his dictionary of Persian poets.Footnote 100 Yet, he passes over his accomplished friends in silence in Tuhfat al-Kiram.
Qaniʻ explicitly admits his intentional exclusion of Hindus in his political history of Sindh in Tuhfat al-Kiram. He complains that for over twenty years, between 1749 and 1770, all governors but one appointed to Thatta have been non-Muslim. In an act of defiance, he refuses to name any of the non-Muslim governors, resuming his list only with the Muslim official appointed in 1770. Qaniʻ ends his political history with a prayer, “May God continue to bless this city of Muslims with Muslim governors”.Footnote 101 This religious particularism stands in contrast to Qaniʻs friendships with Hindus. Moreover, Qaniʻ does not shy away from mentioning 23 Hindus in his dictionary of Persian poets of Sindh.Footnote 102 This suggests that while Persianate culture and community continued to be open and non-denominational for Qaniʻ in theory and practice, he was reconceptualising social and political order in the city as led singularly by Muslim men.
Tuhfat al-Kiram's Muslim order was not descriptive, but rather prescriptive, consciously excluding some of the most powerful and influential people in Sindh. This order was further closed off by reserving the first rank for the Sayyid lineage group and the next three ranks for Islamic judges, scholars, and saints, blunting the openness of the existing social order in Sindh. Qaniʻs commitment to individual excellence was curbed by the political situation he found himself in. In other words, Tuhfat al-Kiram is Qaniʻs response to the predicament of the old elite of Thatta, who had been shut out of state power by the Kalhora.Footnote 103 While they had been able to retain and even consolidate social power in the city after the end of Mughal rule, they were helpless to prevent the rise of new groups patronised by the Kalhora, except by rethinking social order itself.
Qaniʻs social order was also remarkably male. He mentioned only one woman, Bibi Nur Bahari, in the biographical entries on Sindh. Nur Bahari was a saint buried in the market of Nasarpur and is remembered as the second Rabiʻa, evoking the most famous female Sufi saint in Muslim history.Footnote 104 This constitutes a marked shift from earlier texts. Bakhtavar Khan's seventeenth-century history, Mirʼat al-ʽAlam, which was a major source for Tuhfat al-Kiram, has an entire section devoted to female saints numbering nearly thirty entries.Footnote 105 Fakhri Haravi had compiled a dictionary of female Persian poets for Mah Begum, the wife of a sixteenth-century Arghun ruler of Sindh.Footnote 106 Qaniʻs exclusion of women is all the more striking since it is precisely in the eighteenth century when literary production by women and about women grew, even as women assumed positions of political eminence and as literary patrons in the Persianate world.Footnote 107
Qaniʻs silence on women is unusual even in eighteenth-century Sindh. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Shah ʻAbdul Latif Bhittai (d. 1752) composed verse on mystic love in Sindhi, which would later become the most significant work of literature in the language. The ideal subject for Shah Latif, the lover par excellence, was either female or Hindu.Footnote 108Tuhfat al-Tahirin, a dictionary of the saints buried in Thatta written by Muhammad Aʻzam in 1776–77, mentions five shrines of women in the city.Footnote 109 Given his intimate familiarity with Thatta, it is unlikely that Qaniʻ was unaware of these sites. Rather, he chose not to include them. On the other hand, in Maklinamah, his poem in praise of the Hills of Makli, Qaniʻ mentions women and describes women's religious practices.Footnote 110 Looking at other historical sources also suggests a prominent role for women in the politics of Sindh. Miyan ʻAbdul Nabi Khan Kalhoro's mother Bahu Begum played an important role in defending Hyderabad against the Talpurs.Footnote 111 Maryam Udheja, Miyan Sarfaraz Khan Kalhoro's wife, who was called Sindhrani or the Queen of Sindh, also captured popular imagination.Footnote 112 Despite the active engagement of women in the political and social worlds of Sindh, Qaniʻs deliberate omission suggests that his ideal social order had to be male and Muslim. Qaniʻ enacted these closures in his text precisely at a moment when the old guard in the city felt under threat from new groups such as Hindu administrators in the Kalhora government. Hierarchical social order, according to Qaniʻ, had to be led by Sayyid and other Muslim elite families. In turn, these families had to be led by men and men alone.
Conclusion
A close and contextual reading of Tuhfat al-Kiram in this article has revealed a city in flux. Qaniʻs Sayyid-led hierarchical vision of social order was a response to the great uncertainties of eighteenth-century Thatta. The end of Mughal dispensation in the city had snapped ties of patronage and power enjoyed previously by its Persian-speaking elite. The new Kalhora political system was cobbled together from commanders and administrators from northern Sindh and Punjab, leaving out the gentry of Thatta. Nevertheless, the Kalhora were not a centralising power. This afforded the Muslim gentry of Thatta the opportunity to consolidate power through local state and Sufi institutions. Yet, people with access to political power such as Kalhora governors, administrators and revenue collectors, many of them Hindus, rose rapidly and unimpeded in eighteenth-century Sindh.
It was in this context that Qaniʻ compiled his biographical dictionary of Thatta and Sindh, claiming the centrality of Thatta as a bastion of individual accomplishment, both cultural and religious, and of social power vested in old families. Qaniʻs claim of pre-eminence for Thatta gentry ignored the rulers and reformulated social order as the preserve of classes such as Sayyids, judges, scholars and Sufi saints. He recognised that without political patronage the sources of power to which the gentry had access included the cultivation of individual merit within Persianate values and the consolidation of familial control of local political and Sufi institutions. However, both these bases of power were open to newcomers, threatening the old elite's already uncertain position in the city. In response to this dilemma, Qaniʻs conception of social order restricted claims of merit only to groups that had historically possessed it. This was the argument advanced through his exemplary biographies. By articulating their claim to power as deriving from belonging to these groups, Qaniʻ sought to exclude Kalhora newcomers, at least in theory. His tazkirah was a normative text to be read not as a description of Sindh, but rather as a project to rearticulate social order in Sindh and centre the claims of leadership of the Muslim male gentry of Thatta.
In Tuhfat al-Kiram, the values of Persianate culture, which emphasise individual excellence and denominational openness, are curtailed. Yet, Qaniʻs attempt to claim Persianate culture as the singular preserve of the Thatta gentry was not universally recognised. Hindu amils, Kalhora kings and Talpur rulers participated to varying degrees in Persianate cultural and literary activities. This stands as testimony of the influence and endurance of Persianate values, which continued to shape the social and cultural world of post-Mughal Sindh. In this context, Tuhfat al-Kiram cannot be read as a decisive turning point for the history of Persianate culture in Sindh. It is not an indication of the closure or restriction of the community of Persian in Sindh. Rather, it is a symptom of the social and political transformations taking place in eighteenth-century Sindh, whose cultural consequences were far from settled by Tuhfat al-Kiram.
In the years that followed, no one else reproduced this vision of a Sayyid-led social order in Sindh.Footnote 113 However, Tuhfat al-Kiram became an important and widely-read text on Sindh. It found diverse audiences, including the Talpur rulers, a Hyderabadi Hindu and others.Footnote 114 The text's circulation exceeded its own restricted vision of social order. The openness of the Persian-speaking community remained robust through the nineteenth century, at a time when colonial officials were busy reimagining Sindh as a society fractured along lines of tribe, race and religion. Even as Tuhfat al-Kiram makes an argument for Sayyid priority, it reveals, through a contextual reading, the open society and culture that shaped it. Sayyid priority in Thatta and Sindh was not a transhistorical fact, but rather a historically-specific argument in eighteenth-century Sindh, where political power in fact resided elsewhere, with the Kalhora, their commanders, and their Hindu administrators, and where the social world continued to be joined together by the values of Persianate culture.
