Published in the Hindu dated 25 August, 2016
When Saadathullah Khan, the new Nawab of Arcot
created a beautiful garden in his capital city Arcot, and was looking for a
suitable name, Jaswant Rai, his chronicler presented him with the name ‘Humayun
Bagh,’ meaning ‘Auspicious Garden.’ The Nawab was very impressed and mighty
pleased as he also understood that his chronicler had offered him much more
than a name.
Earlier the Nawab had gone to great lengths in
adorning Arcot with stately buildings. What was missing was the gardens. Being
a Mughal protégé, the Garden was important. And so next to the river he laid an
extensive garden with flower beds and fruit bearing trees of different kinds.
He further decorated it with one hundred and fifty fountains that were
perennially fed by a system of waterworks.
Keeping the climatic conditions of Arcot in mind the
Nawab ordered for trees from Telengana to be planted in the garden. Once the
work was done, he was equally keen to have a worthy name for his royal garden.
That was when Jaswant Rai pleased him not just with a name but a skilfully
composed ‘Chronogram’ which, when carefully read, also revealed the year of its
(Garden) creation in the Islamic calendar of Hijri as 1,113 (corresponds to
1,701 CE).
Before the Indo-Arab numerals came into wide use, it
was common to assign numerical value to alphabets as the Greeks did.
Chronograms essentially took it one step further where the numerical value
assigned to each letter in the text when added, the sum total reflected the
year of the event on which the chronogram is composed. Essentially the word
“Chronogram” meant “time writing,” derived from the Greek words chronos
(“time”) and gramma (“letter”).
Typically the chronograms could be just one word, a
verse or verses including those from the Holy Scriptures of any of the
Abrahamite religions. The Jews composed chronograms using Hebrew numerical
system and it was known as Gematria. The Abjad system assigns numerical value
to the Arabic letters and it is common to see the important Islamic phrase, a
phrase with which Muslims begin their prayer or any good deed - ‘Bismillahir
Rahmanir Rahim’ (“In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most
compassionate”) – with a numeric value of 786.
Though this tradition of composing chronograms was
prevalent among various societies, it came into its own during the medieval
period with the Jews, Christians and Muslims taking to composing ‘chronograms’
to commemorate events. It could be a victory of an army, inauguration of a
palace, a church, a mosque or could be even death.
When Begum Sahiba, the Nawab’s companion of many
years, died during the month of Muharram, many a poet in Saadathullah Khan’s
court wrote elegies and as was the tradition some of them attempted composing
chronograms. The most appropriate one was of course composed by the Nawab’s
elder brother Ghulam Ali Khan. It was a verse from the Holy Quran, Wadhkhuli
Jannati (“And enter my Paradise”). It gave the year of her death as 1114 Hijri
era, which in Gregorian calendar translates to 1702 CE.
A year after her death the Nawab built another
garden of the same dimension as the Humayun Bagh. Jaswant Rai called the new
garden the ‘Nau Jahan Bagh,’ which when read as a chronogram, revealed the year
of opening the garden as 1115 A.H (corresponds to 1703 CE).
In Madras, we do have a number of mosques that have
their year of construction beautifully camouflaged in chronograms. Nawab
Muhammad Ali Walajah, another celebrated Nawab of Arcot, was equally known for
his liberal donations cutting across religions. The Kapaleeswarar temple tank
at Mylapore was his donation. He moved the court to Madras and built a palace
for himself at Chepauk. When the Muslim merchants of George Town approached him
for a mosque, he built the Masjid-e-Mamoor mosque for them on Angappa Naicken
Street. From the chronogram composed in Persian and inscribed inside the
mosque, it is understood to have been constructed in the Hijri year 1199, which
corresponds to 1784 CE.
A little later when the Nawab wanted to build a Big
Mosque in Triplicane, nearer to his palace at Chepauk, he held a competition
for the best chronogram to be inscribed. Interestingly it was won by Raja
Makhan Lal Khirad, a Hindu who was a munshi and in the employment of the Nawab.
His chronogram, ‘Dhikrullahi Akbar’ (Remembrance of God is great) is inscribed
above the Mihrab (a semicircular niche in the wall of the mosque that indicates
the qibla; that is, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca and hence the direction
that Muslims should face when praying) and gives us the year of construction as
1209 Hijri which translates to 1794 CE.
These are just a few examples of the many
chronograms that dot our landscape. The chronograms of the Arcot Nawabs were
not just about the art of writing time but also a reminder of our secular past
we can be rightfully proud about.
