Victory City(23)
Why had he changed? (The road to war was long and allowed much time for introspection.) He had not forgotten his hilltop conversation with Bukka on the day of the magic seeds. “Those people down there, our new citizens,” Bukka had wondered, “do you think they are circumcised or not circumcised?” And he had added, “The truth is, I don’t really care. It’s probably a mixture, and so what.” And they had both agreed. “I don’t care if you don’t care.” “Then so what.”
The answer was: he had changed because the sage Vidyasagar had changed. At the age of sixty the seemingly humble (though secretly predatory) cave dweller had grown into a man of power, who would have been called Hukka’s prime minister if the term had existed in those times, and was no longer the pure (but also the impure) mystic of his youth. In the would-be revolutionary pamphlet known as the First Remonstrance—probably the work of the underground radical (and overground drunkard) Haleya Kote himself—Vidyasagar had been criticized by name for his proximity to the king. Nowadays he began his days neither in prayer, meditation, and fasting, nor in contemplation of the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy, but performing the duties of the senior lord of Hukka Raya I’s bedchamber. He was the first person to see Hukka every morning because the king was obsessed with astrology and needed Vidyasagar to read the stars and tell him what the day held in store, even before he had breakfast. It was Vidyasagar who told the king what the stars said he should think about each day, and who should have access to the royal presence and who would be better avoided on account of an unhappy configuration in the heavens. Bukka, in whose less superstitious opinion astrology was a pile of bunkum, had begun to dislike Vidyasagar heartily, seeing his prognostications as plain political maneuvering. If he was the one who decided who the king could see, if he was the gatekeeper of the royal bedchamber and the throne room too, then his power was second only to the monarch’s, and Bukka suspected the sage of using that power to oblige the king’s ministers and supplicants to make large donations both to the Mandana temple complex and also, almost certainly, to himself. This was a power that already rivaled and might at some point be capable of overthrowing the monarchy. Hukka would hear no criticism of his mentor, but Bukka told Pampa Kampana, “When it’s my turn I’m going to clip the priest’s wings.”
“Yes,” she said with a vehemence that startled him. “Be sure that you do.”
The newly politicized Vidyasagar expressed strong disapproval of Hukka’s early embrace of a kind of syncretism, which had made him willing to embrace persons of all faiths as equal citizens, traders, governors, soldiers, even as generals. “There’s no accommodation to be made with that Arab god,” Vidyasagar told him firmly. However, the holy man was attracted to the uses of the monotheistic principle, and had elevated the adoration of the local form of Lord Shiva above all other deities. He had also watched with interest the large prayer gatherings of the followers of the Arab god. “We don’t have anything like that,” he advised Hukka, “but we should.” The introduction of mass collective worship was a radical innovation which was beginning to be known as New Religion, and was much disapproved of by the Remonstrance, supporters of Old Religion whose pamphlets insisted that in Old and therefore True faith the worship of God was not a plural but a singular matter, an experience linking the individual worshipper and the god and nobody else, and these gigantic prayer meetings were really political rallies in disguise, which was a misuse of religion in the service of power. These pamphlets were largely ignored except by members of small intellectual coteries who lacked the common touch and therefore, being almost impotent, could be allowed to exist; and the idea of mass worship caught on. Vidyasagar murmured to the king that if he led these ceremonies there would be a valuable blurring between the worship of the god and the devotion felt for the king: which proved to be true.
The march against the sultan of Madurai was in line with the attitudes of Vidyasagar’s New Religion. It was time to teach the upstart princeling, and his upstart religion, a lesson whose symbolism would reverberate around the land.
All of this had pushed Bukka and Hukka further apart than they had ever been, which was why, when Pampa Kampana kissed the crown prince in the green tunnel, he made no protest, but returned her affection with enthusiasm. For her part, she saw the rift between the brothers very clearly, and she had made her choice.
* * *
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The global traveler to whom Domingo Nunes sometimes compared himself, the Moroccan wanderer Ibn Battuta, had paused on his meandering way to China—after being robbed in the Khyber Pass, and seeing a rhinoceros grazing on the banks of the Indus, and being kidnapped by bandits on his way to the Coromandel coast—to marry a princess of Madurai, and was therefore able to record his eyewitness account both of the hideous atrocities committed by the Madurai sultans and of the kingdom’s fall. The short-lived Madurai sultanate was a quarrelsome place, the eight princes following one another onto the bloody throne by murdering their predecessors, one after the other, in rapid succession, so that by the time Hukka Raya I’s armies arrived the sultan who defeated the Hoysalas—and whose daughter was now Ibn Battuta’s wife—was long gone, and since his time Madurai had been the scene of repeated power grabs, assassinations of the nobility, and public impalings of the common people, grisly acts intended to show both the nobles and the common people who was boss, but resulting in a level of hatred so profound that the army of Madurai rebelled and refused to fight, so Hukka’s victory was achieved without bloodshed, and nobody mourned the last execution, which was of the last and most murderous of the octet of bloody sultans.