History was made at the Freedom to Write awards last week when, for the first time in the contest's history, the winner turned up. Novelist and dissident Rakhim Esenov made a surprise appearance at the New York ceremony following a week of intense diplomatic negotiations prompted by the award sponsors, writers' organisation PEN America.Bamber Gascoigne paints a wonderful picture of Bayram Khan in his 'A Brief History of the Great Moghuls'. Khan is portrayed as the lynchpin to securing emperor Akbar's magnificent reign whilst acting as regent during Akbar's infancy by some cunning diplomacy backed up with exceptional military prowess. He was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed Khan-Khanan (Lord of the Lords). According to Gascoigne, Khan - as a Shi'a - was outnumbered amongst the Moghul nobles but was not particularly backward in coming forwards, "appointing an insignificant Shia divine, Shaikh Gadai, to the office of Chief Sadr, one of the two highest ecclesiastical positions in the land."
Esenov, 78, had been under house arrest in Turkmenistan since 2004, when he was charged with smuggling 800 copies of his banned novel, The Crowned Wanderer, into the country.
According to PEN, Esenov was accused of inciting ethnic and religious hatred because his novel portrayed the 16th-century Turkmen hero Bayram Khan as a Shia rather than a Sunni Muslim.
However, he makes it quite clear that the mirage of religious hostility was a convenient peg upon which the gentry could hang their deeper resentment of Khan's power. Harem intrigue coerced Akbar into parting with his tutor when he came of age and Khan was offered the Moghul version of ostracism by being invited to go to Mecca for the pilgrimage. Khan was murdered in Patan, the ancient capital of Gujarat, by an Afghan warlord keen on exacting revenge from a previous military encounter.
No comments:
Post a Comment