Killer Khilats, Part 2: Imperial Collecting of Poison Dress Legends in India

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Michelle Maskiell, Adrienne Mayor

The changing contours of Western historiography over the last three centuries and the creation of a separate discipline of folklore studies in late nineteenth-century Europe determined how Poison Dress legends would be collected in English-language literature. British preconceptions about the use of poison in "Eastern" cultures led them to notice tales that conformed to stereotypes of "Oriental" duplicity and cowardice, notions that existed in ancient Greek literature. Lore about exotic Eastern poisons had circulated in the West since ancient Greek times (Penzer 1952, 3-5, 8-10 and 12-29). Stories of deliberate poisoning and poisonous individuals appeared by the seventh century AD in India, with parallels to classical Greek legends about Mithradates, the ancient Persian (Iranian) emperor who lived on poisons, and the poison damsels sent to infect Alexander the Great in Asia. For example, European adventurers circulated popular tales about the Turk Mahmud Shah I ("Begada"), "the Poison Sultan," who was ruler of Gujarat in 1458-1511 and the model for the English satirist Samuel Butler's seventeenth-century lines: "The Prince of Cambay's daily food/ Is asp and basilisk and toad" (cited in Commissariat 1938, 1:231). William Crooke noted in 1897 that early European travellers to India frequently wrote of "the poisoning of princes," and he asserted that "secret poisoning" increased during epidemics "which supply favourable chances of evading detection" (Crooke 1972, 135). Dread of pernicious "miasmas" and tropical fevers in India was another factor in the British preoccupation with infected clothing (Arnold 1993, 8, 32-9 and ch. 3; interestingly, the early Mughals believed that the air of Bengal was "poisonous"--see Arnold 1998, 6 and 15). Early twentieth-century Indian historians such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar, who wrote voluminously about medieval India and completed a five-volume treatise on the reign of Emperor Aurangzeb, and Zahiruddin Faruki, who wrote to counter Sarkar's representation of Aurangzeb, generally followed the methodological paradigms of books published by British contemporaries such as Stanley Lane-Poole and William Irvine (see Lane-Poole 1908; Irvine 1971) All early twentieth-century historians of India thus privileged the accounts of European travellers, which gave these accounts, with their Eurocentric contexts and references, continual citations in historical narratives (Philips 1961).

During British rule, the Rajputs and their British supporters consistently portrayed themselves as past defenders of Hindu tradition during foreign Muslim invasions and rule. Rajput bardic literature and oral lore recounted how their ancestors were forced by the Turkish Muslims to the poorer lands around modern Rajasthan, where these "uprooted royal clans" preserved "age old traditions" of the last Hindu kings of north central India (Ganguli 1983, 96 and 89). The British colonial-era interpretation of Turkish invasions and Rajput displacements developed within the complex power politics of the weakened Mughal Empire and aggressive British commercialism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The collectors interpreted the information they gleaned from indigenous records according to the European paradigms of human evolution, history and religion, and they cast the Indian Poison Dress tales to conform to their preconceptions about Muslims and Hindus (Pandey 1990, 1-65; Thapar 1994, 1-22).