Aaskaran

The soldier standing in the shadowed doorway of the little hill-fort shrine could not make sense of what his own eyes were showing him. His Badshah, master of Delhi, had walked in alone with his sword still wet at the edge, and the man lying prostrate before the deity on the stone floor had not so much as turned his head. Blood was spreading in a thin dark line from his heel across the swept floor, and still he lay there, arms stretched forward in sashtanga pranam, as though the blade that had just opened his skin belonged to someone else's body. Outside, an entire imperial army sat idle at the foot of Narwar's ridge, its commanders furious and baffled, because for the better part of a day nobody in that fortress, not a minister, not a guard, not the king's own name, had been able to interrupt whatever it was that was happening inside that one small room.

The man on the floor was Raja Askaran, and by the time this scene took place he had already lived through enough ambition, bloodshed and reversal of fortune for several lifetimes. He was a Kachhwaha prince of Amber, son of Raja Bhim Singh and grandson of the old warrior-king Prithviraj Singh, born into a family whose fortunes rose and fell in that unsettled generation with an almost dizzying speed: Bhim Singh had himself come to Amber's throne after his elder brother Puranmal fell in battle, and when Bhim Singh died the crown passed to Askaran's own elder brother, Ratan Singh. The chronicles of Amber, which were seldom kind to the men who lost, do not fully agree on how the throne then passed from Ratan Singh's hand into Askaran's, only that it happened amid the kind of bloodshed that royal succession too often demanded in that age, and that Askaran's own hold on the seat he had seized lasted barely more than a fortnight before his kinsman Bharmal, the same Bharmal whose daughter would later be given in marriage into the Mughal house, moved against him and pushed him aside in turn. It would have been easy for that chapter to be the whole of Askaran's story: a minor prince, briefly a usurper, quietly removed. Instead, to close the matter without more killing, Bharmal granted him the distant hill fortress of Narwar to rule as a consolation, a settlement meant to end an embarrassment. Nobody expected what Askaran would do with it.

Narwar stood on a high spur of the Vindhya hills above the Sindh river, an ancient and famously unconquerable fort that local memory already wrapped in legend, some said it had first been raised by Raja Nal himself, the righteous king of the old Nala-Damayanti story who lost his kingdom at dice and won it back through faithfulness. Whatever the truth of that older tale, it was a fitting place for a man who had lost one throne to learn what a kingdom was actually for. Askaran did not spend his years at Narwar nursing the humiliation of Amber. He built, inside that hill fort, a life organized entirely around a small shrine room where two forms of the one Beloved were installed side by side: Sitapati, the Lord of Janaki, and Radhavar, the Beloved of Radha, Ram and Krishna held together under a single name his household used for them, Yugalmohan, the two enchanters. The commentators who later wrote of him could not resist the pun folded into his own name: Askaran, they said, the one whose entire karan, his very reason for being, was asha, hope, fixed without division on the mingled lotus feet of both Mohans. He had not merely inherited that name. He had grown into it.

His discipline was exact and unbending. Each day, for ten ghadis, roughly four hours by the reckoning still used in his household, Askaran shut himself into that room with his Thakur and would not be disturbed for any reason whatsoever. A guard stood posted at the outer door for the entire span, not to keep the king safe, but to keep the world out of the one part of his day that belonged wholly to God. Ministers with urgent business learned to wait. Petitioners with grievances learned to wait. It is said that even the routine business of a small kingdom, the disputes, the requests, the ordinary friction of governing people, simply queued itself up outside that door and was attended to only once the appointed hours had closed. The commentators praised him as a rajarshi, a sage among kings, a great Bhagavata devoted to righteous conduct, generous, humble, and unusually gifted with words, for Askaran was himself a composer of devotional verse, a poet-king whose padas were sung in praise of the very deity he served behind that closed door. He was not a man performing piety for an audience. There was, by design, no audience at all.

It was this very discipline that brought the Badshah to Narwar in fury. The Badshah, whichever paramount ruler of Delhi the tradition has in mind, for the surviving accounts do not trouble to name him precisely, arrived at the fort one day on some errand of state and sent word that Raja Askaran was to present himself at once. The messengers reached the door of the shrine and were turned away by the guard, told plainly that the raja could not be disturbed during his hours of worship. The Badshah, unused to being kept waiting by anyone, sent the order again, more sharply. Still no one inside would break the rule, not out of defiance, but because it had simply never occurred to anyone in that household that any command, even an emperor's, outranked those four hours. A full army was mustered outside the walls. The commander, driven half to distraction, finally sent word to the Badshah himself: if the raja will not be brought out, let us begin the assault, since no one here will carry our message past that door. It was this, more than anything, that turned the Badshah's anger into curiosity. A kingdom that would rather face an invading army than knock on one door was not behaving like a kingdom protecting a coward.

His own ministers, unwilling to see Narwar burned over what looked increasingly like devotion rather than insolence, begged the Badshah to go in and see for himself. He agreed, and went alone into the shrine, and found Askaran stretched full length on the floor in prayer, having just finished the day's worship of his Lord, so lost in that final prostration that the arrival of the most powerful man in the region registered on his face as nothing at all. What the Badshah did next, tradition tells two closely matched versions of, but both agree on its heart: he tested him. He drew his sword and brought its edge down against the raja's heel, hard enough to cut it open, standing over him to see whether pain, or fear, or fury at such an insult would finally break that stillness. Blood came. Askaran did not flinch, did not cry out, did not so much as tighten his brow. He rose in his own time, completed the closing gestures of his worship exactly as he had performed them every day of his reign, and only then, carefully, first drew the chik, the woven screen, across the doorway of the inner sanctum to shield his Thakur from view, before at last turning to see who stood behind him.

What happened between the two men in that room afterward is remembered as gentle rather than triumphant. Some accounts say the Badshah, astonished and ashamed of what he had done, knelt down himself and bound the wound in Askaran's foot with his own handkerchief, telling him that his eyes had that day been blessed to see a true devotee, one neither proud nor resentful, and asking where such strength could possibly come from. Others, closer to the Bhaktamal's own telling, have the Badshah simply sitting with him afterward and asking searching questions about bhakti and bhava, the feeling-life of devotion, and being so moved by Askaran's answers that his heart, in the old phrase, turned soft and sweet before he took his leave. Perhaps both are true in their own register: an emperor who arrived ready to punish insubordination left instead asking a smaller king to teach him something about love. There is an old chaupai the tradition sets beside this scene, one that explains without any need for further comment why the sword drew blood and nothing else: the mind dwells there where Raghubar and Videhi dwell, and what awareness does such a mind still keep of the body's pain or pleasure? Askaran's body had been cut. Askaran, wherever he actually was in that hour, had not been touched at all.

He lived out the rest of his years at Narwar under an understanding that the Badshah, so moved by what he had witnessed, no longer summoned him on ordinary business, leaving him free to keep his four hours as he always had. When death finally came for him and he departed, in the phrase the old commentators use with real tenderness, to his Lord's own abode, word reached the Badshah and he grieved for him as one grieves a friend rather than a distant vassal. Some time afterward, hearing that the temple's daily offerings had grown thin without the raja's personal wealth and attention behind them, the same Badshah who had once put a blade to Askaran's heel wrote out a grant of villages to the Brahmins who kept that shrine, with the instruction that the beloved Lord of Askaranji should still be worshipped, still be adorned, still be loved exactly as his devotee had loved him while he lived. The Brahmins carried out the order. However history chooses to weigh a Muslim emperor's grief over a Hindu king's private god, the chroniclers record only that it happened, and that it pleased everyone who heard of it.

Devotional memory in the centuries since has continued to add to Askaran's story, the way memory does around a life that has already proven itself capable of holding wonder. It is told, in the households that still keep his name alive, that once when fever kept him from rising for his morning service he despaired at the thought of missing it, and that his Lord sent word through a servant in the night telling him to drink charanamrit, the water that had bathed the deity's feet, and that his fever broke before dawn so that he could rise for worship as always. It is told, too, that an enemy king once marched on Narwar, and that Askaran, unwilling to lift a sword himself, gathered his soldiers to march out chanting the Lord's name instead of battle cries, and that hailstones fell without warning on the invaders while Askaran's own men were only lightly rained upon, so that the attacking king fled and later came in person to beg forgiveness at Askaran's feet. These later stories cannot be checked against the Bhaktamal's own spare verses, which say nothing of fever or hailstorms, and they should be received as the tradition's own way of saying what it believed about him, rather than as settled history. But the core of his life needs no embellishment to earn its place among the great bhaktas: a man born into the ordinary violence of a princely house, given a small fort as a consolation prize for a throne he had lost, who turned that consolation into four unbroken hours a day so completely surrendered to Sitapati and Radhavar that an emperor's sword could open his flesh and find no one home to feel it. Nabhadas, in the old doha that first set his name down for later generations, says it as simply as it can be said: that Askaran stood in loving meditation on the Divine Pair with tears falling free from his eyes, and that such devotion, Narayan himself would tell you, is exceedingly rare to find in this world.