கார்த்திக் நீலகிரி
The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin
-Manu S. Pillai
While suratrana and padshah were titles related to dynasts and kings, foreign influences made their presence felt even at lower levels, travelling down to our own time. Scribes who worked for Muslim kings and wrote their letters in Farsi were called Parsnavis, from which emerged today's surname of Parasnis, just as the Maharashtrian name Daftardar is descended from an official bureaucratic title. Fard-Navis, or secretary/note-taker, is what birthed Fadnavis. The bharud drama-poems of Eknath, the celebrated Bhakti saint, are replete with words of Persian origin, while even personal names used by Marathas sometimes had a foreign provenance: names like Sahebrao, Serfoji, Rustamrao, and so on. Shivaji's own father and uncle, as we saw earlier, were named Shahaji and Sharifji to celebrate a Muslim pir called Shah Sharif, whom his grandparents admired.
Considering the plurality of influences that makes up Indian culture-a civilisation with no single origin-none of this ought to surprise anyone. By the nineteenth century, however, efforts were already under way to 'purify' languages and give them a classical pretence by overcompensating with Sanskrit words and trying to divert everything Persian and Arabic along religious lines to a specific class of people. In many respects, the project is still ongoing, and there is among certain sections of people even today a quest to find the 'true' essence or the purest version of the past. The irony is that such a past does not exist, and what exists is not 'pure' but rich and layered and marvelously complex-a past where there are Hindu sultans and Maratha padshahs, where the forebears of a Hindu king could seek the blessings of a Muslim pir.
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