On any given day hundreds of Hindu pilgrims can be seen standing in the courtyard of Bet Dwarka’s famous Krishna temple. On the day of the annual festival, tens of thousands will congregate here. And on that special day, as on any ordinary day, the pilgrims would have been helped to cross the three kilometer stretch of the Arabian Sea that separates the island of Bet Dwarka from the Gujarati mainland by dozens of Muslim boat and ferry owners who are the predominate occupants of the four villages on the island.

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There are many Sufi dargahs on the island, including the near 500-year old Syed Haji Ali Dawood Shah Kirmani, revered by both Hindus and Muslims who can be seen quietly offering their offerings and asking for blessings at the shrine at any hour of the day. In fact, there are over seven different Sufi dargahs scattered about the island, a number of madrassas to cater to the educational needs of the Muslims who live in the four main villages on the island.

The close relationships between the island’s Muslim and Hindu communities in fact reveal a blurring of religious and spiritual lines, reminding us of the artificiality of the labels of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ and the ordinary human being’s ability to find accommodation and tolerance of the practices and values of his neighbors. Perhaps its finest embodiment is the continued performance of music at the Krishna temple by Muslim musicians, including the famous Fakir Mohammed Alia Mir. The temple’s pujaris are often seen at the shrine of Syed Kirmani and will also participate in the tazia processions during Muharram.

The heat of the days, at times reaching 40 – 43 C (104 – 110 F) made it difficult to fully explore the island in the three days that I spent there. But I am determined to return and explore this unique island further. Many pointed to the villages on the far side of the island that they thought I should visit and meet with the people there. Here, in this rather remote corner of Gujarat, there remains a community of people who have resisted the temptations and seductions of the sectarian extremists. Recognizing their mutual dependence, for life, spirituality and survival, members of Bet Dwarka’s communities continue to find ways to overcome suspicion and the interferences of the ‘purists’.

We hacked, we burnt, did a lot of that. We believe in setting them [Muslims] on fire because these bastards say they don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it, they say this and that will happen to them.

Babu Bajrangi, VHP and Bajrang Dal leader, speaks about events in Naroda, Gujarat in 2002, Tehelka Video Confessions Transcripts

If you are not paying attention, or are merely distracted by the splendor and dominating size of the 600 hundred year old Sant Devidas mandir, you would miss a small structure sitting alongside it that is the dargah of the Sufi saint Sailani Pir. In this large temple complex, some 30 odd kilometers from Junagadh, in the city of Parab, lies this rare example of a single complex structure accommodating both Hindu and Muslim elements. There are two smaller shrines to two other Muslim saints, Dana Pir and Karmani Pir, at the same complex.

On this blistering hot May day hundreds of people are moving through the temple and completing their rituals by praying at the shrine of the Muslim saint. The story goes that Sailani Pir was a disciple of Devidas Bapu – a deity in the form of a living saint from the village of Mungyasar in the Amreli district. Sailani Pir and Devidas roamed the countryside together. Later Sailani Pir – a Hapsi i.e. of black, African origin, initiated his own ashram near the town of Rajkot, returning to Parab only after completing nearly twelve years of meditation.

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Today the shrine to Sailani Pir is undergoing repairs and renovations. If there ever were domes and minarets around it – as we would expect in a tomb to a Muslim saint, they are gone. The new structure resembles and in fact mirrors the architecture of the Devidasmandir that dominates the compound. The workmen carefully apply plaster and paint to typical conical temple elements that now surround the tomb. The cool interior of the shrine however holds the grave, covered in typical green cloth and strewn with flowers. There was no mujawir (caretaker) to be seen, and most of the pilgrims – on this day at least most were Hindus, some from as far away as Ahmedabad on a pilgrimage tour towards Dwarka, quietly circumnavigate the tomb, bowing and kissing the grave as they exit the chamber.

J.J. Roy Burman, who has done extensive search on Gujarat’s shared sacred spaces, believes that few if any Muslims visit this complex anymore. On this day I too did not see any, though I did not actually inquire. I suppose it did not matter whether they came or not because the sites, one Hindu the other Muslim, remain side by side and welcome all.

The Sant Devidas mandir is that rare instance of a shared sacred space where both Hindus and Muslims can congregate, and seek spiritual salvation and solace. The shrine is being preserved and repaired and though may look increasingly like a Hindu mandir it remains the site and tomb of a Sufi Muslim mystic who found common ground with a Hindu deity and worked alongside him to spread the message of humanity and love.

I don’t remember the names of those Muslims… but the ones who were there… they were handpicked and killed one by one. There was one Katki in Madhopura… whenever a riot took place, he was the first to come out… That day we targeted him and killed him. There were two advantages to that… it boosted the morale of the Hindus… and damaged the morale of the Muslims…

Confessions of Ramesh Dave, VHP activist, speaking about events during the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, Tehelka Video Confessions Transcripts

I am in Junagadh, Gujarat and at the shrine of Jamil Shah Data Pir, a site sacred to both the Hindu and Muslim communities of the region. The Pir’s connections and relations to the Hindus are enshrined in a local legends. At least one legend speaks of how the Saint initiated four Hindus as his disciples after they refused to follow the orders of a local Sidh Guru and kill one of the saint’s devotees. The four men were given charge of various localities in the region and became followers of the saint.

Mahmud of Ghazni, a legendary looter, descended on Somnath from his Afghan kingdom and, after a two-day battle, took the town and the temple. Having stripped its fabulous wealth, he destroyed it. So began a pattern of Muslim desecration and Hindu rebuilding that continued for centuries. The temple was again razed in 1297, 1394, and finally in 1706 by Aurangzeb, the notorious Mughal fundamentalist.

India The Lonely Planet Guide 2008

Actually, it was not. In fact, there isn’t even evidence that it was really ever razed, but ransacked for its loot on at least one occasion. Aurengzeb’s orders were in fact never carried out. But I am getting ahead of myself. I will write a far more extensive piece on Somnath and how this once nondescript shrine on the far coast of Gujarat has been used by Muslims, Jains, Hindus and the British to further domestic political aspirations and objectives, and in the process been transformed from a provincial, largely forgotten temple into the definitive symbol of not only an imagined and imaginative Muslim iconoclasm of the medieval period, but  also Hindutva sectarian obscurantism and nationalism of the modern era.

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Now, standing in front of the lovely temple of Somnath (no photography please, this is a sensitive site!) I find it hard to believe that it carries within it so many histories, overlapping and contradictory, and that is became the symbol not just of Muslim religious zealotry but also of a Hindu religious resistance and resilience. This beautiful temple on the thrashing shores of the Arabian Sea has become the central motif of a resurgent Hindutva movement and as it had earlier, when in the 1950s it was ceremoniously rebuilt, of Hindu Indian nationalism. In fact, the road to Ayodhya and the destruction of the Barbri mosque, began here in this small, otherwise nondescript town as L.K. Advani began a rath yatra from here to rally the people and spread the message of the powerful Hindu right movement.

As K.N. Panikkar points out in a piece called ‘The Hindutva Ride’ in India’s Frontlinemagazine:

The nationalism that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement invoked had greater salience with religion than with the nation. It was basically a strategy of religious mobilisation using Ram as a symbol to attract the allegiance of the believers to a political cause shrouded in religious garb. The Hindu consolidation such a mobilisation would entail was expected to ensure easy access to power. Only Ram had to be taken to the people couched in an emotional idiom, which the Sangh Parivar did through a variety of programmes associated with the construction of the temple at Ayodhya.

The most effective of them was the rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya led by Lal Krishna Advani. It was communal in conception, aggressive in execution and religious in appeal. As a result, violence erupted along the entire route of the yatra, in which several people were killed and injured.

I am in Somnath, and as I walk through the desperately poor Muslim neighborhoods, with their many small, decrepit mosques and shrines, that sit around the magnificent temple, I can’t help but wonder how what was once just another small temple on the western shores of Gujarat because the central, defining symbol to for medieval Islam, and in a counter-reaction, to modern Hinduism. This question I will explore in a further piece.

The story of Somnath is not as simple as that of Muslim destruction and Hindu reconstruction. It is far more interesting than that, and more subtle in its texture. It is the story of the explicit use of religion for political power and legitimacy and a determination to use ideas of religious service and duty to inspire peoples to support leaders. Whether Mahmud of Gazni or L.K. Advani, they both were inspired to surround the idea of Somnath with aims and aspirations political. And in the process they erased the actually history not just of the region, but of the incredibly complex and involved social and economic history of Gujarat that linked it closely through trade and exchange with the Arab Gulf.

The temple was attacked and ransacked. That cannot be denied. But not for reasons we think. And certainlynot for intentions we now bestow.

The fire that broke out inside cabin S-6 and eventually killed nearly fifty-eight people would become not only the spark that would spread across India, resulting in Hindu-Muslim violence and riots in a number of cities, but also provide the pretext for the orchestrated, coordinated, and state condoned slaughter of nearly 2000 people in the modern, technology park littered city of Ahmedabad. In what would become one of the darkest chapters in modern India's history, mobs rampaged through the predominantly Muslim areas of Ahmedabad and burnt, stabbed, shot, raped and killed anyone and anything Muslim or associated with Muslims (including Hindus related to them by marriage or business). The police looked on, the state functionaries looked away, and India's democratically elected leaders offered pliant explanations and bromides. Not since the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 had India seen anything so well planned, so destructive and systemic. Its consequences, its wounds, and tremors continue to affect not just Gujarat, but the country as a whole.

Rakesh Sharma's documentary Final Solution, which can see by clicking here, tells the story that no nation will want to remember. But it cannot be forgotten.

No revenge. Only Justice. No retaliation. Only reconciliation.

My project now moves to Gujarat. I am there to explore the many instances of shared Hindu-Muslim religious spaces and site.  Perhaps now more than ever, these shared spaces can be a lifeline away from those moments of madness, and towards sanity. In a state now infamous for its Hindutva leanings, there remain a number of dargahs and pilgrimages where both Hindus and Muslims find a connection and shared sense of belonging. They hark back to a time when religion was not a divisive factor of identity, towards a time before our histories, our lives, our societies were re-categorized along simplistic and irresponsibly untenable 'monotheisms'. I will write about the legacy of the likes of Mill and others in later posts. In Gujarat many shared sites have of course been attacked by the fundamentalists, but a few still survive, testaments to a historical heritage now considered unworthy, but that may hold the keys to the future.

I now leave for Gujarat, taking to the road on buses to find these locales, and perhaps in some small way, remind us of how we can still return from this madness, still find a way back to ourselves. To India.

View Faded Testaments : Gujarat in a larger map

The project map will be updated as I arrive in various locations and begin to work there. This phase of the project will concentrate on Gujarat's shared sacred spaces. A subsequent trip later this year will take us into syncretic communities, particularly in the region of Kutch. I will write more about that in future posts.

You can follow the updates here, and also on the The Spinning Head blogsite

Oh, and the temperature in cities in Gujarat this morning was hovering around 44C, or ~ 108F.

Jab chhorh chaley Lakhnau nagari,

Kaho haal adam par kya guzeri…

(When we left our beloved Lucknow, See what befell us..)

Wajid Ali Shah

Its [British colonial education] cumulative effect was to be described…as nothing short of a chasm that…made it impossible for the new generation of the educated and the older generation of the traditional scholars to communicate with each other….It cut them off from their own traditions. By the same token, it also made their own past inaccessible to them as a history.

Guha, R An Indian Historiography Of India, page 25

Sad though it is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most – perhaps all – modern social scientists in the region. They treat these traditions as truly dead, as history. Although categories that were once subject to detailed theoretical contemplation and inquiry now exist as practical concepts, bereft of any theoretical lineage…contemporary social scientists of South Asia seldom have the training that would enable them to make these concepts into resources for critical thought for the present.

Chakrabarty, D Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Though & Historical Difference, page 6

She had told me to go to Lucknow. She had said that it was the city’s cultural and social heritage that had inspired her; compelled her; allowed her to create a unique form of Indian classical kathak dance that expressed the messages hidden in Sufi Islamic spiritual music and poetic verse. She was a high-caste Brahman Hindu woman (“Chaturvedi”, The Knower of Four Vedas), who devoted her life to the music and verse of Sufi Muslim saints and musicians because the cultural milieu of Lucknow permitted her to do so.

She was unique, she said, but not necessarily novel. She was a pioneer, but carrying forward ideas and possibilities given to her by her ancestors. She was innovative, but worked from some of the most exalted and complex cultural and musical traditions India had ever produced.

When I was first told about her I felt that she embodied in her life and art many of the ideals and ideas I was exploring in my travels, writings and photography. That heterogeneous, pluralist, accumulative propensity of India that produced remarkably beautiful and humanist realities. Its openness and sense of cultural strength that saw ‘the other’ as a source of creative possibilities, willing absorbing various traditions and heritages to produce something unique and far more than the sum of the parts. This openness so missing in the Europe I live in, where a defensive insecurity and paranoid fear of ‘difference’ so colors and constrains its society. This Europe that claims modernity for itself, but today seems trapped in exclusivist ideologies that compel it to fear the outsider, the different.

∞

I had never traveled to Lucknow. But I did go there once – in a movie theatre. Satyajit Ray’s classic “The Chess Players” is based in the city of Lucknow and reveals the story of Lucknow’s King Wajid Ali Shah and this cultured and anachronistic world of art, music, poetry, dance, etiquette, and refinement that had emerged there. One of my favorite moments in the film is the scene where the British colonial administrator, General Outram, is inquiring from one of his staff members, Captain Weston, about the strange proclivities and habits of this Awadhi King. The British are about to annex Awadh, and force Wajid Ali Shah’s abdication. The dialogue, based on a play by the writer Premchand, reveals the King’s unique character. We are in Outram’s office, it is the year 1856, and their discussion goes something like this:

General Outram: Weston!

Captain Weston: Sir!

General Outram: Have you ever seen a pigeon that has one black and one white wing?

Captain Weston: No, Sir!

General Outram: Well now….(reading a report) J. Khan the keeper of the royal pigeons received a kilat – areward I suppose, huh? …of Rs. 2,000 for producing a pigeon with one black and one white wing.

Captain Weston: Right, Sir.

General Outram: I find this a very revealing document, Weston. Its an hour-by-hour account of the King’s activities, dated the 24th of January….thats yesterday. Did you know that the King prayed five times a day?

Captain Weston: Five is the number proscribed by the Koran, Sir.

General Outram: Surely all Muslims don’t pray five times a day?

Captain Weston: Well not all Sir. But some do!

General Outram: The King being one of them?

Captain Weston: The King is known to be a very devout man, Sir.

General Outram: Is he? …um….His Majesty listened to a new singer, Mushtari Bai, and …hah!….afterwards amused himself by flying kites on the palace roof! Thats at….4:00 pm! Then the King goes to sleep for an hour, but he is up in time for the third prayer at 5:00 pm. And then…in the evening….er…now, where is it….ah, yes, His Majesty recited a new poem on the loves of the ….bulbul?

Captain Weston: A bird sir. The Persian nightingale.

General Outram: I see…at a mushaira. Whats a mushaira?

Captain Weston: A mushaira is a gathering of poets. They recite their new poems.

General Outram: I see….Tell me Weston…you know the language, you know the people here….I mean….what kind of a poet is the King? Is he any good or is it simply that he is the King that the people say he is good?

Captain Weston: I think he is rather good, Sir.

General Outram: You do, eh?

Captain Weston: Yes Sir.

General Outram: Um…do you know any of his stuff?

Captain Weston: I know some, Sir.

General Outram: Well, can you recite it? Do you know it by heart? I am curious to know what it sounds like…I like the sound of Hindustani. Are they long, these poems?

Captain Weston: Not the ones I know Sir.

General Outram:  .Well…go on then. Out with it.

Captain Weston: Ahem..Sir…

Wound not my bleeding body,

Throw flowers gently on my grave.

Though mingled with the earth, I rose up to the skies.

People mistook my rising dust for the heavens.

General Outram: Is that all?

Captain Weston: Thats all Sir.

General Outram: Hum…doesn’t strike as a great flight of fancy, I am afraid.

Captain Weston: Doesn’t translate very well Sir.

General Outram: What about his songs? He is something of a composer, I understand. Are they any good, these songs?

Captain Weston: They keep running in your head Sir. I find them quite attractive, some of them. He is really quite gifted, Sir. He is also fond of dancing, Sir.

General Outram: Yes, so I understand….with bells on his feet like nautch (dancing) girls. Also dresses up like a Hindu god, I am told.

Captain Weston: You are right, Sir. He also composes his own operas.

General Outram: Doesn’t leave him much time for his concubines, not to speak of the affairs of State……Does he really have 400 concubines?

Captain Weston: I believe that’s the count Sir.

General Outram: Ummm…and 20 muta wives…er…what the hell are muta wives?

Captain Weston: Muta wives, Sir…they are temporary wives. A muta marriage can last for 3 days, 3 months of 3 years Sir. Muta is an Arabic word.

General Outram: Ah..it means temporary?

Captain Weston: No, Sir.

General Outram: No?

Captain Weston: It means….enjoyment Sir.

General Outram: Oh. Oh yes…I see….hum…most instructive…..What kind of a King do you think all this makes him, Weston….all these accomplishments?

Captain Weston: Rather a special kind, Sir, I should think.

General Outram: Special? I would use a much stronger word Weston. I would have said…a bad King! A frivolous, effeminate, irresponsible, worthless King! ­

∞

Satyajit Ray “Shatranj Ke Khilari” (The Chess Players) with English SUBTITLES Part 01_1271102815410

∞

…norms of sexual respectability were crucial elements of both British and German nationalism. People believed that their success as a nation depended on upholding ‘virtuous’ and ‘respectable’ norms of sexual conduct…The true man was not sensuous or pleasure-loving; he was duty-driven and self-controlled…Anyone who seemed too ‘soft’ or sensuous was branded as a ‘degenerate’, a label integral to the persecution of both Jews and homosexuals, who were believed to be subverters of the social fabric.

Nussbaum, M The Clash Within, page 197

The British called him effeminate. I find him evolved. The British mocked him as frivolous. I find him deeply engaging, serious and modern. They decided to cheat him of his crown, and betray his trust. He refused to raise the weapons of war against them and choose instead to appeal on the basis of justice and his rights. Some think him cowardly and weak. I can’t help but see eloquence and sensitivity. Can a set of traits be more anachronistic to an age, and our modern age, and yet seem so necessary?

…the struggle for domination can be quiet, systemic, hidden, all because discourse (which is always a symbol of victory in language) appears to be inevitable and systematic. Together…these two perspectives fairly describe the contemporary political scene, which itself encapsulates political history pretty much. There is an unceasing and meaningful interaction between forces – classes, nations, power centers, regions, whatever – seeking to dominate and displace each other; not what makes the struggle something more than a random tooth-and-claw battle is that values (moral and intellectual) are involved. One seeks domination over another, in order to dominate and also to exist

Edward Said, from Vishwanathan, G (ed.) Power, Politics & Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, page 15

I am drawn to this dancing poet of a King. I am aware of his anachronistic nature, his flawed character, his weaknesses and failures as a ruler. But something about his talent, and pursuit of the beautiful, is seductive. He appears as supremely modern – complex, nuanced, multi-faceted, cosmopolitan, talented, progressive, and a passionate lover of the higher achievements of human creativity. An European would admire him as a Renaissance man, and perhaps even offer him as a model to a new generation. He was a poet, an opera writer, a singer, an architect, a classical dancer, and a King. He sat atop one of the most sophisticated manifestations of Mughal culture that produced a sophisticated, complex, and syncretic cultural world.

“Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this, and the more I gaze the more its beauty grows upon me.”

Sir William Howard Russel, London Times 1857

∞

Question: In The Chess Players, the streets of the city are too unnaturally empty. Was the absence of crowds dictated by the budget?

Ray: No. Actually, there were very few scenes shot on location. Lucknow, where the locations were done, has too many anachronistic elements, so we couldn’t use wide shots there. We had to be very careful to avoid electric poles and things like that….I didn’t show any main streets because of all the things that would interfere, like wall posters, motorcars, bicycles. It was not possible. Perhaps that’s a shortcoming of the film.

Cardullo, B Satyajit Ray: Interviews page 72

As he was very interested in architecture he started to build Qaiser Bagh as soon as he came to the throne. His buildings…were certainly beautiful and splendid.

Sharar, Abdul Halim, Lucknow: The Last Phase Of An Oriental Culture page 63

Many kings have been interested in architecture but scarcely any other monarch can have built so many houses or established so many parks as Wajid Ali Shah during his unfortunate life and the short period of his so-called reign.

Sharar, Abdul Halim, Lucknow: The Last Phase Of An Oriental Culture page 77

I search for Qaiser Bagh and find nothing but hollow monuments. The grand buildings that once danced to the rhythms of a cultivated life, today stand silent, apart and out-of-fashion. Passerby barely glance at them. Those who I ask do not even know what they are. Graffiti marks the walls of the ancient mausoleums, litter decorates the small parks, dirt and spit color the delicate chhatris, hastily done ‘renovations’ scar ancient gates and buildings. Like unused decorative furniture, these monuments stand as a testimony to aspirations no longer relevant, and perhaps not even sentimental.

The residential neighborhoods of the old city survive – the tightly placed homes, narrow winding streets, and the decaying havelis betraying some of the imaginings that were once living and relevant. But there is no coherence. Motley repairs are the modern aesthetic – additions and renovations plastered over, boarded up, sheet-metal covered and cement and brick enhanced. Their elegance suffocating under convenience, affordability and modern efficiency. On a walk with a historian we come to a stop near a sewage gutter. He excitedly points towards the edges of the sewer and tells me that if I look carefully enough I will be able to see some of the original brickwork of the buildings of Qaiser Bagh – the Lakhauri. My heart sinks as I realize that I am searching for the last remnants of perfection next to a gutter!

Once a year a great fair was held in the Qaiser Bagh to which the public was admitted and they could then see the voluptuous style of living to which the King was addicted. The King had seen the rahas, theatrical representations of Sri Krishna’s dance, and was so pleased with Sri Krishna’a amatory dalliances that he devised a drama about them in which he himself played the part of Kanhaya (Krishna) and decorous and virtuous ladies of the palace acted as gopis, milkmaid loves of Krishna. Sometimes the ardor of youth impelled the King to become a yogi. Pearls were burnt and the King would cover his body with the ashes.

Sharar, Abdul Halim, Lucknow: The Last Phase Of An Oriental Culture page 64

There is a cultural festival at the city’s famous Bara Dari. An evening of dance – to celebrate Lucknow’s great kathak dance heritage is promised. I duly turn up and enter the interior of this still elegant, delicately beautiful building. There is a small crowd at the center, a spotlight highlights where the dance will be held. The corporate sponsors of the festival, who grab the center stage, forcibly depicting themselves as the patrons of the arts, betray the real forces of a modern India. This is business by other means. My mind drifts towards Adorno – that stern, critical voice warning us in his work The Culture Industry of our unthinking choices, our unconscious drift towards conformity and commodity:

…the concept of culture has been neutralized to a great extent through its emancipation from the actual processes of life…The process of neutralization – the transformation of culture into something independent and external, removed from any possible relation to praxis – makes it possible to integrate it into the organization from which it untiringly cleanses itself…Today manifestations of extreme artistry can be fostered, produced and presented by official institutions; indeed art is dependent upon such support if it is to be produced at all and find its way to an audience.

Adorno, T The Culture Industry, page 117

The dancer, a young girl – a novice? enters and takes her place. I look around for the musicians but see none. There is a sound of a cassette being dropped into its slot. Someone presses PLAY. The complex heritage of Indian classical dance, at the only cultural festival in Lucknow, will be presented by an indifferent kathak dancer tumbling her way through a recording! Caged in this location which once acted as a stage for great art, and that has today been reduced to a rent-able wedding hall, these ‘performances’ of song, dance or craft, were seemed not to belong to India.

Dance in Lucknow developed strongly and became a pre-eminent art…Genuine Indian dance occurs when the movements of the body conform to and fit in with the treble and bass notes of songs and intoned poems. This evolved into a great art for which hundreds of new gats (instrumental compositions without improvisation) and torey (a complete cycle of one rhythm patter) were created.

Sharar, Abdul Halim, Lucknow: The Last Phase Of An Oriental Culture page 141

I stand in the darkness and watch the crowd gawk in confusion at the dancer. Soon my attention drifts towards the world outside these mourning walls. Out to the streets, where Lucknow’s modern frenzy continues unabated. The noise of the traffic, of screeching car horns, the shouting cycle-rickshaw drivers all fight the music. Indoors, the dozens of arts and crafts stalls set up around the dance performance hall distract the largely indifferent crowd from the largely indifferent performance. This is not a cultural festival, but a bazaar. Convinced that no one will participate in a real cultural performance, the organizers have fallen back upon consumerist seduction. The Indian corporate priorities have defaced the elegant facade of the Bara Dari with bright banners and corporate logos. Its luminescent white walls and flowing arches acting as merely hanging conveniences. I leave.

∞

Sharar started his work Lucknow: The Last Phase Of An Oriental Culture in 1913 and produced a unique, historically relevant detailed description of the range and evolution of Awadhi culture and its refinements. A ‘veritable anatomy of the social and artistic life of Lucknow…covering an astonishing variety of subjects’ that include: Education, Art of Combat & Self Defense, Urdu Poetry, The Art of Story Telling, Calligraphy, Animal Combats, Bird Fighting & Pigeon Fighting, Parrots & Kite Flying, North India Classical Music, Light Classical & Instrumental Music, Kathak Dance, The Art of Soz – The Chanting of Dirges, Bands & Processions, Gastronomy, Delicacies and Confectionery, Food Refinements and Water Cooling, Evolution of Men’s Dress, Forms of Headwear, Forms of Trousers, Footwear and Female Fashion, Building of Houses, Etiquette, Social Gatherings & Forms of Greeting, Festive Celebrations, The Wedding Ceremony, Funeral Services, Religious Assemblies, Betel Lea & Tobacco, Utensils for Everyday Use, Conveyances & Dress for Outings, Pottery. The sheer breath of refinement seems to belong to a completely alien world, not because it was in the past, but because indifference and a new set of values will not allow it to be replicated in the present.

Our finest aspire to simpler things.

∞

At Deva Sharif I find solace. At this beautiful and delicate shrine on the outskirts of Lucknow, I enter a world thankfully of another time. As I sit in the main courtyard, amongst playing children and picnicking Hindu families, I sense that I am participating in a practice that dates back centuries to a time when we were neither Hindus nor Muslims. This fluidity, openness and accommodation was a hallmark of the Awadhi courts of the Muslim rulers which were staffed by a very large number of Hindu administrators, accountants, clerks in the revenue and finance departments and even commanders in the military. Members of the royal house participated in Hindu religious festivals. Awadhi rulers would personally intervene in financing and revenue issues that could disrupt important Hindu pilgrimages and gatherings. Their world view did not demand separation, and certainly did not demand oppression or negation of the other.

Here, sitting in the embrace of Syed Waris Ali Shah’s beautiful shrine, a sense of calm slowing enveloping me, I try to imagine how natural, unthinking it must have been. The ease with which these boundaries that so seem to divide us were breached. I watch a steady stream of Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and the curious, enter, pray and loiter around the shrine. Four elderly Sikh men are distributing prasad to anyone walking by. A Hindu family has returned to the shrine to make another offering as a thanks to an earlier wish fulfilled. On one corner of the main tomb a group of qawwals are taking a break, and counting their collections. Their gold-rimmed sunglasses and silk coats giving them the air of celebrities or pop stars. Men enter and leave an Imambara behind the shrine, while mothers and children relax. Shrines are centers of social gathering and family outings – and music. There is always the music. If it isn’t coming from the qawwals, then it is a local band hired by a group of pilgrims, or the melancholy sounds of someone lyrically reciting verses from the Koran. The shrine is a sanctuary. You don’t need to perform any rituals here, nor pray or make offerings. You don’t need to belong to a particular cult, sect, theology or creed. There are no other places like it in the world where one is reminded that our differences are so easily overcome, over divisions erased, and our suspicions allayed. The Sufis erased ethnic, religious, caste and class boundaries and stretched their minds and poetry towards the essence of the divine. Their words, poems, and message could never be contained within one religious tradition. Their ideas of the divine, ideas unique to India’s heritage, crossed not just the human sphere, but the divine as well.

Love is inaccessible, incomparable, immeasurable.

It is like ocean – He who comes to its shore will not go back.

When he drank the wine f Love, Varuna became the Lord of the Waters.

Because he drank poisons out of Love, the Lord of the Mountain [Shiva] is worshipped

Sikand, Y Sacred Spaces, page 183

These are the words of Ibrahim Khan, better know as Ras Khan. A Muslim he was perhaps the most famous of sixteenth century Uttar Pradesh’s Vaishnavite Sufis and venerated to this day for his compositions in praise of Krishna and his love for his gopis (friends, followers, lovers). Yogindar Sikand, in his book Sacred Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith in India, describes Ras Khan’s most famous work, written in Brij Bhasha, the Premavatika. Fifty-three verses of this work take the love of Radha for Krishna as the ideal. Ras Khan had fallen in love with the son of a Hindu man, but his love offended the orthodox, who mocked and shunned him. When one day he confronted one of his torturers in anger, his victim begged for mercy and told him that if only he loved God as he does this boy, he would find true salvation. Ras Khan was moved, and found his way to Brindavan where, after three days of fasting, Krishna appeared before him and accepted him as a disciple.

And he was one of many who did not search for difference, but rather attempted to find the shared.

∞

As I read about Ras Khan I receive an email from Manjari Chaturvedi. She is exploring new avenues in her dance and putting together a new piece that she calls the Radha Raas – the dance of Radha for Krishna. What excites me is that she reveals that during her research for this new work she discovered that so much of the poetry she wanted to use for the performance, poetry in praise of Krishna, was actually written by Muslim poets. She speaks of Mushtar Khairabadi from Khairabad, Rashid Safipur from Unnao, Nawab Sahab Rampur Syed Raza Ali Khan, Ustad Qayam Khan and Ustad Aqeel Ahmad Khan Saheb and perhaps the famous poet Raskhan. Her team of Muslim musicians, many from Deva Sharif, are now practicing the new music, singing in praise of Krishna, words that their Muslim ancestors composed in moments of devotion and love.

The cycle completes itself.

And yet I am struck by South Asia’s inability to reach back to its heritage for examples and ideas of how to overcome it’s current conflicts and divisions. There is something inexplicable, perhaps even egregiously irresponsible, about the desperate struggle to re-create not just our societies, but also our pathologies along European lines. Its as if we have relinquished our right to create, to suggest, or to innovate. And perhaps most importantly, to offer alternatives and counterpoints and not merely echoes and regurgitate. My mind returns to Chakrabarty’s insight that:

…one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most – perhaps all – modern social scientists in the region. They treat these traditions as truly dead, as history.

Our ancestors lie in their graves, our finest voices silent, our exemplars ignored. And yet it is in South Asian history that I continue to find answers. And it is in the detailed examination of our lived practices and cultural values that I find inspiration and optimism. Lucknow lives in the soul of its people, in the songs of its artists, and in the movement of its dancers. And far from being merely entertainment, it represents a life line to a world more beautiful and more creative than anything the sectarians, nationalists and imperialists have to offer. A world worth striving for, not just here, within ourselves, but there as well, where from once the so-called ‘civilized’ came. Pankaj Mishra in a recent piece titled Beyond Boundaries felt the same as he pointed out:

It may be useful to contrast India’s lived experience of pluralism with contemporary Europe, especially as the latter tries to renovate its faded ideals of secular citizenship while longing for its old cultural uniformity. The secular liberalism of the nation-state has demanded conformity and obedience from Europe’s citizens. Upholding an abstract idea of the individual citizen divested of his religious and ethnic identity, this liberalism has not had an easy relationship with Europe’s ethnic and religious minorities, to put it mildly; the current obsession with Muslims, for instance, betrays a deep unease with expressions of cultural distinctiveness (previously exemplified in Western Europe by Jews). The rise of right-wing parties across Europe shows that masses as well as elites are embracing majoritarian nationalism, recoiling from what, by Indian standards, seems a very limited experience of immigration, social diversity and political extremism.

Mishra, P “Beyond Boundaries” The National, November 26th 2009

It is India that is the exemplar of pluralism, secularism and tolerance. These values are inherent in every epoch of it’s history and remain so today. It has to be excavated because what lies underneath layers of indifference and ignorance is modern and necessary.

∞

She had asked me to go to Lucknow, but I did not quite understand why until now. It wasn’t the city that I was supposed to see, it was its legacy that though may not be evident in its architecture or its neighborhoods, but lives in song, dance, poetry, etiquette and literature. It manifests itself in its daily rhythm of its people, its streets, and the lives that unfold there each day.

Some three weeks after I first traveled there I watch her prepare for a performance in Delhi. She has the air of a goddess – one worthy of an heiress of a grand tradition – the kathak dancer of Lucknow. Her musicians, all from the area around Deva Sharif and passionate devotees of the Muslim Saint, discuss the final details of their compositions and dance. They are intimately familiar with each other’s world – she of their Sufic sensibilities and spirituality, and they with the meaning, imagery and nuances of her dance. To my untrained eye their discussions seem perfunctory, but I also know that they have developed an understanding over the many years spent practicing and performing together. Not much needs to be said, but all is understood. Later as I watch her dance – spinning, her eyes and hands and her musician’s voices reaching for the heavens, I can’t help but wonder if she is the last breath of the defeated or a reincarnated child’s first cry?

Further Readings

Sharar,Abdul Halim Lucknow: The Last Phase Of An Oriental Culture

Llewellen-Jones, Rosie Lucknow: City of Illusion

Llewellen-Jones, Rosie & Sharar, Oldenburg, Veena Talwar & Abdul Halim The Lucknow Omnibus

Llewellen-Jones, Rosie & Kapoor, Ravi Lucknow: Then And Now

A P Bhatnagar, Shubhi The Oudh Nights: Tales of Nawab Wazirs, Kings & Begums of Lucknow

Saiyed Anwer Abbas Wailing Beauty: The Perishing Art of Nawabi Lucknow

Sikand, Yogindar Sacred Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith In India

Robinson, Andrew Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye

Vallabdhas The Poems of Rasakhan: Treasure House Of Love

Links To Manjari Chaturvedi’s Website

The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this evil; in the name of brotherhood and in the arrogance of sectarian pride they have created misunderstanding. They make this permanent in their textbooks, and poison the minds of children.

Rabindranath Tagore “To Teachers” in Chakravarty, A (ed) The Tagore Reader, page 216

[Education]…stood not only for enlightenment but also authority…In other words, it was an ideological effect that made both the propagators and the beneficiaries of education regard the latter as a purely cultural transaction and ignore that aspect of it which related directly to power…At one level the content was culture, and at another, power.

[E]ducation related to colonial dominance not only as a means of persuasion, but as an arm of its coercive apparatus as well.

Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India, page 15

Our quest for peace, justice and reconciliation often begins in the gilded corridors of diplomacy, or the cynical bed chambers of the politicians. But there are some significant reasons to believe that these are not the venues by which South Asia will overcome regional pathologies and console its many communities of suffering. For by the time our citizens have ‘succeeded’ into the chambers of power – be they political, parliamentary or military, their world view is already too deeply colored by education and societal prejudices instituted and constructed by distorted and ahistorical ideas and histories. Their minds filled with false historical constructions and emotional nationalist imaginations, our ‘leaders’ are in fact educated to sustain and maintain the regional political and conflict deadlocks rather than discover new and creative ways to break them.

Instead, it would seem that we would do well to instead begin in the moldy, dank, dark classrooms of the nation’s ignored and underfunded education institutions where the foundations of suspicion, fear, loathing and anger are laid. The sheer simplicities and distortions that taint our children’s books would be reason enough to do this. But I would also add that our children’s education lack a focus on matters of reconciliation, historical re-consideration and revisionism, a need for a sense of identity and culture that transcends nationalist, ethnicity, creed, class, caste and color. Our education systems remain deeply provincial and in the most insidious and distorting ways.

Children’s textbooks remain married to ethnic glorification, nationalist triumphalism and divisive re-casting of histories along religious and ethnic lines. Those raised on such an education, and who later proceed to occupy the gilded chambers of power – political, military and economic, remain in the fear, suspicion and hatred of ‘the other. It is not just about the content of our children’s text books but also about the the ideas and ideals that inform the design, institution and execution of education policy. Much of these remain similar to, if not unthinking adoptions of, education policies and objectives defined and designed under the British colonial system for the ‘benefit’ of a Indian native class being reared to serve and protect the Empire and to see nothing but benefit and beneficence in it.

At first glance this may seem rather strange to say some seventy years after independence but the fact remains that modern education in South Asia is still less about creativity, experimentation, culture, exposition, exploration and questioning, and more about ideology, coercion and control. The latter were precisely the goals of British education policies and goals for ‘natives’ in India.

In his book An Indian Historiography Of India: A 19th Century Agenda And Its Implications the historian Ranajit Guha elaborated on the intents and implications of the colonial historiography and education project.

[Education] stood not only for enlightenment but also authority…In other words, it was an ideological effect that made both the propagators and the beneficiaries of education regard the latter as a purely cultural transaction and ignore that aspect of it which related directly to power…At one level the content was culture, and at another, power.

Guha, R An Indian Historiography of India, page 15

Guha continues and points out that the system was instituted with the goal of producing ‘native’ youths for participation at the lowest levels of the colonial bureaucracy. Its emphasis on the use of English, and its focus on a British historiography of India, – one that celebrated the beneficence of the presence of the British, was designed to culturally, ideologically and socially isolate the educated ‘native’ from the ordinary Indian. Guha quotes Warren Hastings, India’s first Governor-General, who wrote in a letter to Lord North, that:

If…the English language could be introduced into the transaction of business…it would be attended with convenience and advantage to Government and no distress or disadvantage to the natives. To quality themselves for employment, they would be obliged to study English instead of Persian. If schools were established in the districts…a few years would produce a set of young men qualified for business, whose example and success would spread, and graft the institutions gradually into the manners of the peoples.’

The system was designed produce collaborators, mediators and apologists for Empire. It instilled in the minds and souls of the educated ‘native’ a sense of his superiority to the rest, and the necessity of the coercive and unjust rule that prevailed over the land. I would argue that post-colonial education systems in South Asia have retained the intent of this system even if they have discarded the subject matter. That is, the new owners of power, the post-colonial elite made up of those very few ‘natives’ educated in the very colonial systems they overthrew, knew of no other way to structure education and hence simply continued it. After all, were they not living examples of it’s excellence?

Even a cursory examination of India’s and Pakistan’s elite institutions reveals their long colonial history and heritage. They still predominantly cater to the children of landed, military, political and bureaucratic elite of the nation. They may have substituted one set of histories (colonial, euro-centric) and readings for another (nationalist, sectarian) because the underlying objectives of their education centers on the same political objective – to produce collaborators, mediators and apologists for political power. As Guha summarizes with the utmost of clarity:

Indeed, what most of the 19th century beneficiaries of …[colonial]…education imbibed from it as a code of power was unquestioning servility to the ruling power.

Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India, page 18

Our intent to educate, certainly the formal, government supported structures of education, view the children of it’s citizenry as fodder for its ideological and political agenda. The idea that an education system as a system of state-centric indoctrination, nationalist and sectarian ideology, and a heavy handed contortion of all social and humanities subjects to perspective, is a direct inheritance of the politics, as Guha identifies it, of education policies designed and instituted during the British colonial control of India. Culture married to power.

And this is most apparent than on the pages of Pakistan’s Social Studies and Pakistan Studies textbooks, most of which were being taught in her schools up till at least 2002 if not later. In a study commissioned by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, titled The Subtle Subversion:The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan (direct link to .pdf file), the authors identified a long list of what can only be called hate material taught to high school children in Pakistan.

It makes for sobering reading that I share with you here.

• Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter the temple at a time. In our mosques, on the other hand, all Muslims can say their prayers together. – Muasherati Ulum for Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1996, p 109

• This division of men [among Aryans] into different castes is the worst example of tyranny in the history of the world. In course of time the Aryans began to be called the Hindus. – Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 59

• The Hindus lived in small and dark houses. Child marriage was common in those days. Women were assigned a low position in society. In case the husband of a woman died, she was burnt alive with his dead body. This was called ‘sati’. … The killing of shudras was not punished, but the murder of a Brahman was a serious crime. … However, the people of low caste were not allowed to learn this language. The caste system had made their life miserable.” - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 67

• Muslim children of India wear shalwar kameez or shirt and pajama and Hindu children wear dhoti also. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 79

• Hindus thought that there was no country other than India, nor any people other than the Indians, nor did anyone else possess any knowledge. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82.

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• Nehru report exposed the Hindu mentality. - Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 102

• The Quaid saw through the machinations of the Hindus. - Social Studies Class-VII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, ?, p 51

• The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women. – Muasherati Ulum for Class IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1995, p 81

• The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization. Hindi-Urdu controversy, shudhi and sanghtan movements are the most glaring examples of the ignoble Hindu mentality. - M. Ikram Rabbani and Monawar Ali Sayyid, An Introduction to Pakistan studies, The Caravan Book House, Lahore, 1995, p 12

• Hindu pundits were jealous of Al-Beruni. Since they could not compete against Al-Beruni in knowledge, they started calling him a magician. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82

• The Sultans of Delhi were tolerant in religious matters. They never forced the non-Muslims to convert to Islam. The Hindus embraced Islam due to the kind treatment of the Muslims. The caste system of the Hindus had made the life of the common people miserable. They were treated like animals. Nobody could claim equality with Brahmins. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 109

• The Hindus who have always been opportunists cooperated with the English. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 141

• The Hindus praised the British rule and its blessings in their speeches. The Hindus had the upper hand in the Congress and they established good relations with the British. This party tried its best to safeguard the interests of the Hindus. Gradually it became purely a Hindu organization. Most of the Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent. They demanded that the Muslims should either embrace Hinduism or leave the country. The party was so close to the Government that it would not let the Government do any work as would be of benefit to the Muslims. The partition of Bengal can be quoted as an example. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 143

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. – Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• The British confiscated all lands [from the Muslims] and gave them to Hindus. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 91 [This is stated despite the fact that all the large feudal lords in the part that later formed Pakistan were Muslims]

• Therefore in order to appease the Hindus and the Congress, the British announced political reforms. Muslims were not eligible to vote. Hindus voter never voted for a Muslim, therefore, … - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 94-95

• Hindus declared the Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104

• At the behest of the government [during the Congress rule], Hindu goondas (criminals, thugs) started killing Muslims and burning their property. – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104-105

• The British, with the assistance of the Hindus, adopted a cruel policy of mass exodus against the Muslims to erase them as a nation. The British adopted a policy of large scale massacre (mass extermination) against the Muslims The Muslim population of the Muslim minority provinces faced atrocities of the Hindu majority. [The Muslims] were not allowed to profess their religion freely. Hindu nationalism was being imposed upon Muslims and their culture. All India Congress turned into a pure Hindu organization. The Congress was striving very hard to project the image of united India, which was actually aimed at the extermination of the Muslims from the Indian society. The two Hindu organizations [Congress and Mahasabha] were determined to destroy the national character of the Muslims to dominate and subjugate them perpetually. - National Curriculum English (Compulsory) for Class XI-XII, March 2002, pp 6, 13, 31, 45, 7, 25, 8, 46, 48, 50

• While the Muslims provided all type of help to those wishing to leave Pakistan, the people of India committed cruelties against the Muslims (refugees). They would attack the buses, trucks, and trains carrying the Muslim refugees and they were murdered and looted. – National Early Childhood Education Curriculum (NECEC), Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, March 2002, p 85

• The Hindus in Pakistan were treated very nicely when they were migrating as opposed to the inhuman treatment meted out to the Muslim migrants from India. - Social Studies Class- IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p. 85

• After 1965 war India conspired with the Hindus of Bengal and succeeded in spreading hate among the Bengalis about West Pakistan and finally attacked on East Pakistan in December 71, thus causing the breakup of East and West Pakistan. - Social Studies (in Urdu) Class- V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 112

• Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam - Urdu Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 108

The dismaying simplicities and inanities are too many to list here. Suffice it to say that since the 1970s the children of Pakistan have been subjected to a systemic and comprehensive ‘poisoning’ of their minds when it comes to matters Indian, Hindu and the country’s Islamic heritage. The impact this has on the minds of the citizenry was succinctly summed by the writers of the report itself when they concluded that:

We have outlined…some of the main themes that we believe have been selectively and systematically omitted from our textbooks, mostly for narrow sighted ideological reasons and not for academic or pedagogical reasons. We have also attempted … to identify the specific outcome of such omissions in terms of the mindset and worldview that they generate by the failure to expose student to a humanizing and liberalizing intellectual atmosphere. We believe that the growth of intolerance, fundamentalism and extremism while having many other fundamental sources is however strengthened by such curricula and textbooks, operative in the very large public school system. (page 77)

Our historians have been ridiculed and abused, as in the case of the brilliant K.K. Aziz, author of the dismaying The Murder of History: A Critique Of History Textbooks Used In Pakistan, who was hounded into exile. K.K. Aziz wrote voluminously about the pathologies of history education in the country, the easy and distorting marriage between nationalism, sectarianism and education policy. I will write more about him in a separate post. Even today, brilliant and creative historians such as Ayesha Jalal face indifference at best, denigration at worse. One cannot deny the influence of text books, particularly in a nation with a long legacy of limited education. The few that learn, are precisely the few that will move into the seats of economic, political, military and bureaucratic power. It is precisely they, the few with the limited education, who pose the greatest danger since they pose in the seats of power.

In her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that:

The ability to accept difference – difference of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality – requires, first, the ability to accept something about oneself; that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life., that others outside oneself have a reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one’s own power or threats to that power.

Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within, page 336

And this ‘moral imagination’ is cultivated through an education system that, as Nussbaum elaborates in her work Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense Of Reform In Liberal Education, encourages students to develop three crucial characteristics as human beings and citizens.

• To have ‘…the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions – for living what…we may call “the examined life.”‘ (page 9)

• To develop the ‘…ability to see [oneself] not simply as citizens of some local regions or groups but also and above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern.’ (page 10).

• To possess ‘…a narrative imagination…[i.e.] the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.’ (pages 10,11)

These are precisely the values and ideals absent from education programs in India and Pakistan. Instead, our citizens are raised to eye each other with fear, loathing and suspicion. The idea of the other as the singular enemy, distorted in its hatred of ‘us’ and determined to do anything in its power to destroy ‘us’ is ingrained into our minds from an early age. At ages when children are still grasping to understand the fundamentals of Newtonian physics, they are subjected to historical, sectarian, and political indoctrination that they can neither comprehend nor question. In fact, they are encouraged not to question at all. And perhaps that is why this indoctrination must take place at so early an age – an age where critical thought could develop but instead unquestioning obedience and obeisance is encouraged.

The fact remains that in both India and Pakistan our child soldiers are being prepared as we speak. They, with their distortions and prejudices, will eventually man the corridors of diplomacy, politics, military and the citizenry. They will carry within them the lessons of their youth, the unexamined prejudices and hatred of their adolescence. To imagine that their distorted world views, developed under the authority of a state and its adult voices, will not color their engagement with ‘the other’ is to be naive at best, irresponsible at worse. It is a world view apparent in the language of our military and our politicians today – bent as they are on working with caricatures and generalizations that convince them that only barbarians and killers live on the other side of the borders.

Its time to read new books.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skins off, all that she violates and starves.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched Of The Earth, Page 51

Like the State, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own. As a means of record, it arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority to arrest, to picture and transform daily life…The is not the power of the camera but the power of the apparatuses of the … state which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or registers of truth.

Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation, Page 64

Paradise on Earth. The Mughal Emperor Jehangir bestowed this phrase on the Valley of Kashmir and forever cursed it.

Though uttered centuries ago, these words even then hid the inequities and miseries of life in the valley. Today they have become the siren song of tawdry mass tourism businesses and false-exotic traveler’s guide books whose glamorous and idealized depictions of the Valley distract visitors from the poverty, sorrow, hopelessness, fear, suspicion, numbness and sheer violent surrender that is life in the valley. To say nothing about the physical degradation and squalor that is Srinagar’s inheritance after decades of conflict.

I pick my way through garbage piled high on the street, eye with trepidation the many large, wild dogs that roam about in the early hours of the morning, I skip over open sewers that drain human excrement into the flowing waters of the once mythical rivers as women wash clothes downstream. I walk past the collapsing hulks of traditional Kashmiri homes, their filigree terrace decorations now largely gone, the wood rotting from neglect and exposure. I greet the many unemployed men standing about on street corners, and work out excuses for the beggars who will inevitably put out a hands for money. I give pre-prepared answer to questions about work visas to Sweden, expressions of compassion when yet another young man wheezes under his breath that he just needs to get out of here and that then all would be better.

But while the Mughal Emperor was bestowing garlands, many of the period’s poets were unable to turn the eyes away from a terrible reality

The path of poverty is evident from the road leading to Kashmir:
Its very first step means the renunciation of the world.
How can one pass this path with ease;
For the very first conditions means relinquishing life
How can a traveler escape this calamity
Except that a slip of the foot may become a cause of his rescue?

(From Zutshi, C Languages of Belonging, Page 31)

Or Wahhab Pare, a Kashmir Pandit, who wrote angrily asking:

How many oppressions of the time can I count?
The authoritarian rulers have stepped the Mulk into chaos.
Anyone who is employed has to pay tax,
The plundering department is called Nakdi Mahal [cash only]
How many oppressions can I count on my fingers?
Every lion here has a hundred or more dogs with him to rip the people apart.

(Zutshi, C. Languages of Belonging, Page 54)

The Mughals, who ruled the Valley from 1586 – 1758, looked out from their terraces and saw only beauty. And as all other rulers since, they preferred not to see those that lived off and struggled through this beauty. Their court poets composed numerous masnavis (narrative poems) in this period for presentation to the Mughal emperors.

This descriptive poetry was dedicated to glorifying the beauty of the Valley, establishing its geographical contours, and describing the gardens and buildings constructed by order of the Mughals. This was the period in which the lush meadows of the Valley, its snow-capped peaks and calm lakes, were immortalized in beautiful verse.

(From Zutshi, Languages of Belonging, page 29).

But the masnavis idealized and exaggerated. Often desperate and obsequious poets simply manufactured. As Aziz Ahmad pointed out in his essay “Epic & Counter-Epic In Medieval India” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Sep. – Dec., 1963), pp. 470- 476) that masnavis grew out of the tradition of the qasidas (panegyrics) and reflect an ‘…historical attitude rather than history’. A sentiment echoed by Richard Davis in his work Lives of Indian Images when he cautioned us that:

‘…because of the hyperbolic, and rhetorical character of these masnavis they cannot be viewed as transparent factual accounts.’

Even as Chitralekha Zutshi in her brilliant Languages of Belonging:Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir is incredulous:

The land of Kashmir, as articulated in the works of Kashmir poets of the Mughal period, may have existed for the most part only in the imaginations of the Mughal emperors and their court poets….

(Zutshi, Languages of Belonging, page 31)

It is an imagined Kashmir that is shattered by the likes of a different Mughal poet, Khwaja Mohammad Azam, who begged to an indifferent Emperor in a time of the 1733 famine:

So great is the distress of the people of Kashmir
That it escapes even their own comprehension
When the people were weakened by famine,
Chaos sprang up from town to desert.
No rice or grain can be found anywhere,
Except in the wheat-complexioned beauty of the beloved.
Bellies like ovens are heated to the grilling point,Yearning for a piece of bread.

(From Zutshi, C Languages of Belonging, Page 31)

Mridu Rai has argued in her PhD dissertation that she wrote when at Columbia University that the Mughals epitomized the practice of erasing Kashmiris from depictions of Kashmir.

“Therefore, in Mughal miniatures, Kashmir put an appearance either in the form of humanly manicured gardens or of scenery glimpsed incidentally through a window in what was otherwise predominantly the architecture of the Mughal city. The Kashmiris were barely deemed worth the wastage in paint.”

(Mridu Rai, The Question of Religion in Kashmir: Sovereignty, Legitimacy and Rights 1846 – 1947

from Zutshi, C Languages of Belonging, Page 30)

And it would be just a few decades after the end of Mughal rule that new conquerors would look through new windows and once again not only appropriate the imagery of Kashmir, but inflicted yet another erasure of the people of Kashmir.

∞

In the year 1863 Samuel Bourne, a young photographer from the Shropshire district of Nottingham in England traveled to India to build his career and fulfill his dreams of the perfect photograph. Bourne would create, as Ananya Jahanara Kabir discusses in her book Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir, a body of photographs that would define and influence the language, visual and literary, that would be used to describe the Valley of Kashmir for decades to come.

He would captured Kashmir on a plate of photo-sensitive chemicals. And he would cage it.

Kabir points out that Bourne’s was not a documentary venture, but a creative one. He was in the search of the what he himself said would be

‘… some magnificent autumnal landscape, in which were combined every element of the grand, the picturesque and the sublime, as seen in the bewitching light and soft effulgence of a gorgeous sunset, and in which the wondrous reality of every color, tint, and hue of the grant original was beheld.”

(Kabir, Territory of Desire, page 60)

But despite an initial euphoria at the discovery of such a rich subject, he soon laments that if only

‘…he [a photographer] could … transport English scenery under these exquisite skies, what pictures would he not produce!’.

(Kabir, Territory of Desire, page 63).

Kashmir wasn’t beautiful enough and had to be made so. And that is what he did. He transposed and reconstructed the perfect ‘picturesque’ based on an ideal of the English landscape and imposed its structure and aesthetics onto his photographs of Kashmir. And like the Mughal Emperors before him, he too looked through windows, in his case the viewfinder, and erased the Kashmiris from Kashmir.

In their work Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary David Sampson point out that Bourne’s notebooks are filled with descriptions of his experiences and interactions with the locals. But he carries an arrogant disdain and disregard for them. He criticizes their religious beliefs, judges them as wretched for the squalor of their living conditions, complains about their obstinate refusal to obey his commands. At one point he beats some coolies for their reluctance to go off on a trek with him (Haight & Sampson, Colonialist Photography, page 92). He met them. He spoke to them. He worked with them. He even wrote about them. But he would refuse to allow them to ruin his photographs, so he erased them.

Personal Diary Entry September 10th 2009: His photographs are stark – black and white, blurring, occasionally incomprehensible. The people represented, Kashmiris, are in various throes of sufferings, angst, discomfort and anxiety. Srinagar is enveloped by a death-like darkness. The images reek of danger, fear, anxiety, suffering and misery. The Kashmir portfolio. He talks repeatedly about being bored of photographing the same events, the same elements, but that he keeps returning because that is the story. There is a script somewhere, that he is working against; funerals, stone-pelting, protest marches, half-widows, shrines, mosques, soldiers with guns, the martyr’s graveyard, men praying. But who has written this script and why is it so consistent across so many photographer’s portfolios? The pictures have won awards, and he is pleased. More awards are wished for. Is that what these pictures are – mere stepping stones? Is that what the script is – about a career that has the Kashmir ‘conflict’ as a necessary milestone? A check mark. Been there. Done that?

What he and other colonial photographers created on their photographic plates, and what the consumers in the capital cities of empire most responded to, would be an idea of a pristine ‘paradise’. A ‘paradise’ manufactured to suit the tastes of an English citizenry.

∞

The Kashmiri’s resisted their representation and Bourne was frustrated by this. For him they were

‘…a constant factor of ambivalent regard; annoying for their frequent unwillingness to pose or stay immobile for the duration of an exposure…obstinate in their reluctance to bend to his will when hired to bear his equipment.’

(Haight & Sampson, Colonialist Photography, page 92).

The British faced this ‘lazy’ and ‘reluctant’ native all across an India they were incorporating into their Empire. In a series of lectures on India historiography, published in a book called An Indian Historiography of India: A 19th century Agenda & Its Implications Ranajit Guha points out that:

For the Western observer, whether he was there as a traveler, adventurer, scientist or administrator, regarded the withholding of an indigenous knowledge of any kind invariably as an assertion of ethnic identity, which excluded him, by that very gesture, as an alien. The fear and indeed the sense of humiliation generated by the want of access to what he thought was by his virtue of an undefined racial, cultural or spiritual superiority, or simply by right of conquest, as in the present case, could be compensated by generalizations about native character and society as devoid of all that stood for positive values in the alien’s own society and character….By blaming such inaccessibility on native cunning, secrecy and deception, they merely acknowledged defeat and accept that, as aliens, they would never qualify for initiates. (page 10)

Samuel Bourne was a child of the British colonialism adventure, and as Kabir explicitly points out in Territory of Desire, he arrived in India at a time when Kashmir was being incorporated into the Empire and the ‘great game’ – that struggle with Russia for control of Central Asia. And photography, much like history, became a tool of Empire. As Guha continues, the British, frustrated by the resistance of the native…

…turned to history – to history as ethnology’s surrogate. They realized that the Indian specialist would not share his knowledge with them, and decided therefore to acquire a knowledge of pre-colonial conditions…by a historical investigation of the Indian past. But such a recovery of the past was bound to make for a very different kind of knowledge from the one denied…The British had to historicize the Indian past in order to have access to it. But historicization…could not be achieved except by the operation of metropolitan rules and models on native material…[and it was]…complicit to a project that turned conquest into occupation.

(Guha, R. An Indian Historiography of India, pages 11-13)

And photography, much like history, was yet another weapon to create what could only be a knowledge very different from the one denied. It was a blatant act of power to describe and create, despite realities that pointed elsewhere. The Kashmir that the British would own would be the one they make in their own image. Kabir is vivdly clear about how the work was produced:

The photographers admit to its lanes and houses being fetid, foul, and cramped; its inhabitants are declared poor and unwashed. And yet, in photographs they are rendered dignified and attractive, their dwellings satisfyingly picturesque, a foil to the sublime that is generated by the photographs of the mountains, lakes, valleys, and rivers, and to the antiquity crystallized in Kashmir’s ruins. Kashmir emerges thereby as the perfect aesthetic composite.

(Kabir, A.J. Territory of Desire, page 69-70)

The photographers look past its reality to an imagined ideal, to a perfect, untouched physical and historical landscape that they then weave, through careful photographic cataloging and indexing, into the broader project of control and appropriation. The Kashmir they cannot control, the one that they are unable to find a connection to, is erased and a new, fresh, clean and perfect ‘paradise’ is offered as an object to be claimed.

And later they would simply re-sell this ideal back to the Indian. And tens of thousands would go on killing and dying for it.

∞

Personal Diary Entry April 12th 2009: He shows me his portfolio of photographs, produced over nearly 20 years of covering the situation here. Kashmir. Stark colors, stark actions, blood, grief, anger, tranquility, beauty, striking beauty, protests, policemen, soldiers with guns, bodies on streets, elegant orange saffron fields, shikaras (boats) on the Dal, politicians screaming, sunsets over Himalayan majesty, mothers grieving, bodies being buried, flower vendors against snow-capped mountains, magnificent wooden shrines, exotically dressed girls doing dances. In some way each set of images conforms to my ideas of the region. Each seems to fit nicely into a category that is known and now represented. Nothing jars the eye, nothing surprises the mind. It is all familiar before I have even had a look. I know this Kashmir before I even arrive here. And the photographs in front of me seem to confirm all that I know. There are no surprises, simply aesthetic gymnastics. Each image a cage that holds a well worn story and refuses to allow it to evolve towards something human, concrete and graspable.

The re-sale of the ‘paradise’ of Kashmir would arrive in the shape of colonial education. and along with it the prejudices and perspectives of ‘ownership’, control and appropriation. The post-independence generation, the heirs of the British education system, would continue to see the region, the people, and it’s meaning for India (here I refer to India as  region and include both the nation states of India and Pakistan) in precisely the same way as the previously colonialists had. We would continue the erasures, and maintain the fantasies. That is, the Kashmir ideal we were fighting to own is the same one the British were fighting to own. And the language, politics, tactics and attitudes with which we are doing it are the same as our last colonial masters.

[Education] stood not only for enlightenment but also authority…In other words, it was an ideological effect that made both the propagators and the beneficiaries of education regard the latter as a purely cultural transaction and ignore that aspect of it which related directly to power…At one level the content was culture, and at another, power.

[E]education related to colonial dominance not only as a means of persuasion, but as an arm of its coercive apparatus as well.

Guha, R, An Indian Historiography of India, page 15)

But Guha’s most powerful insight is offered when he wraps the consequences of this education, and the project to catalog and document India’s history back on itself:

What constituted the politics of such [education] was its attempt to persuade Indians to take pride in an event that made for their subjection to a number of Western powers culminating in the establishment of British paramountcy by an act of conquest. To teach Indians to appreciate that discovery as a triumph and an achievement the loss of independence, was clearly a lesson in power meant to educate the colonized to interpret the past not in terms of their own interest, but those of the colonizers. Education in history was thus designed as a servant’s education – an education to conform undeviatingly to the to the master’s gaze in regarding the past. It served the project of imperial dominance by annexing the past in order to preempt its use by the subject people as a site on which to asset their own identity. Any progress made by Indians in the study of this genre of history could only be a measure of the success with which they had been taught to yield to the processes of such colonialist appropriation.

Guha, R, An Indian Historiography of India, page 22)

India’s revolutionary generation – the post-colonial generation was equipped with the intellectual and political tools best designed to construct it’s own subjugation. It confronted the region of Kashmir and its inhabitants at a distance, as an alien presence, and determinedly erased them and their voices in the service of ‘the nation’, and ‘nationalism’. Precisely as they had been educated to do. Beneath their ‘modernity’ and new found sophisticated, remained the germs of a political and intellectual culture principally constructed for subjugation, appropriation and control of ‘the other’.

The process still continues.

Personal Diary Entry September 14th, 2009: Through the day, my cameras in my hands, I remain wary of the large number of military and police personnel patrolling the streets, their encampments and check posts scaring the face of the city and whose challenging stares and fingers on triggers suggest the easy resort to violence. I cringe at the smell of sewage pouring into Dal lake, it’s gray/green waters chocked with garbage and weeds. I struggle with the dismay I feel at the sight of the many ugly constructions that continue unabated the very heart of the lake. Why do people insist on calling it paradise? Do they not see a city and a people crushed, unable to live up to the cliches that they are garlanded with? In those distant mountains, so unthinkingly described as ‘majestic’, are hundreds of villages where thousands of encounters have led to tens of thousands of deaths just since the early 1990s, leaving entire villages cleansed of its men and boys, and tens of thousands of lives forever disrupted and destroyed because of murders, rapes, tortures, and disappearances. Does not, as someone I met in Srinagar said to me, the soil bleed red? Do not these souls, emptied of feeling and conviction, walk about like the dead?

∞

Ham ko ma’luum hai Jannat kii haqiiqat lekin

Dil ke khush rakhne ko Ghalib yih khayaal achchhaa hai

Mirza Ghalib

Ghalib’s timeless lament – The reality of paradise is known to us, but we indulge in fantasies to keep our hearts from sorrow echoes through my mind as I walk the streets of the city’s markets, neighborhoods and squares. Every conversation begins in suspicion and progresses only as far as tolerance. Behind the faces,  smiles, and gestures of hospitality lies another reality that I have read about, and sense but don’t want to know because I can’t alleviate it, absolve it, or share in it. I am the Kashmiri who is not from here. I do not have her sorrows etched onto my soul, skin and future.

There is a slow trickle of tourists returning to the city but its doing little to alleviate the gloom. There is a tinge of violent acquiescence to the demands of the tourists, a desperate tolerance for an important means of income that can be the difference between life and death. The house boats, many in disrepair, are desperately fighting for clients. The shikara oarsmen are bartering for pittances, the hotels are mostly empty, their staff lethargic from inactivity and indifference. The Kashmiri crafts shops go through the formalities of display, but within sit sullen and withdrawn men. A lifeless life, of a people waiting or perhaps simply surrendered.

I had hoped that the cliches would not be true – that the city would not be beautiful. Instead I found something worse; a beauty unrealized and perhaps unrealizable. As I stood on near the Shankaracharya mandir on top of a hill and looked out across the valley, allowing my eye to follow the slow curve of the Jhelum and come to rest on the peaks of the Pir Panjal mountains afar, my heart sank as Ghalib drowned out Jehangir.

Srinagar is not beautiful. It isn’t paradise. Srinagar is a wound – open, festering, and infected. Our view is blocked by gilded windows. Can we find a way to close them and look away?

Further Readings:

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, Territory of Desire: Representing The Valley of Kashmir

Zutshi, Chitralekha, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir

Rai, Mridu, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and The History of Kashmir

Tagg, John, Burden Of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories

Brothers, Caroline, War and Photography: A Cultural History

Eleanor M. Hight & Gary D. Sampson (ed), Colonialist Photography; Imag(in)ing Race and Place

Falconer, John, India: Pioneering Photographers 1850 – 1900

Rayner, H (ed), Photographic Journeys in the Himalayas 1863- 1866

I would not have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, and felt its power and passion within my own body and soul. But on a cold winter’s morning in the city of Erumeli while standing on a hill overlooking the Vavar mosque I saw it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, and felt the power of its convictions in my soul. Below me hundreds of half-clad, paint smeared, ecstatic men danced, pranced, and sang their way around the large, pink mosque and then made their way across the street to the Petta Sree Dharmasasta Temple. A continuous line of bodies created an umbilical chord between the temple and the mosque, the sounds of their songs and the rhythms of their dance suggesting a living connection transformed the two distinctly separate spaces into one. Hundreds more were streaming down from the bus stand towards the mosque and the temple that sits across from it. Policemen were futilely trying to control the traffic and the waves of pilgrims, as car horns and human shouts and songs compete for the right of way. On the other side of the city’s center I could  see a long row of pilgrims making their way on foot for the final journey to the Sabarimala mountain shrine. They carried cloth bundles on their heads and some were holding sticks and wooden swords.

Here, in this small town in Western Kerala, members of two communities have managed, through legend, lore and ritual, to create a shared spiritual and social space and bridged what many claim is an insurmountable divide. The Sabarimala pilgrimage, in the course of about forty days, will bring nearly 50 million pilgrims through this town, and to the Vavar mosque. The seventy kilometer trek from Erumeli to the mountain top shrine of the god Ayyappa at Sabarimala cannot be completed without first paying respects to his friend the Muslim pirate/saint Vavar and asking his permission to proceed.

Legend has it that the king of Pandalam said so.

And so it is for the millions who pass through here. And they do despite the attempts of the ‘orthodox’ to stop this unison and reduce a pilgrimage, one that theoretically sees not caste nor creed, into a ‘Hindu’ or a ‘non-Muslim’ one. The fundamentalists have petitioned, complained and attempted to physically stop the pilgrims from their homage to Vavar but to no avail. By the end of forty days as the pilgrimage comes to its climax on around January 14th – in the Hindu month of Markali (December 15th to January 15th) a most inauspicious time, millions will defy the divisions of caste and creed and complete the journey.

As I started to walk down from the hill towards the mosque I am struck by the festival like atmosphere that pervades the streets. I had expect sobriety. The air above the town is filled with the shouts, chants, ecstatic cries and chatter of the thousands that fill the streets, restaurants and shops of this otherwise nondescript town in Western Kerala. Buses continue to pull into the station and men continue to pour out, readjust their belongings and ask for directions to the mosque. As I begin my descent down from the hill and towards the center of town it starts to rain.

∞

There are no puranas to tell us the story of the god Ayyappa. The only Sanskrit text, according to Radhika Sekar who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the pilgrimage, that says anything about him is the nineteenth-century text Bhutanathopakhyanam.

And as Dr. Sekar describes it in her book The Sabarimala Pilgrimage & The Ayyappan Cultus, the story goes something like this:

After the asura Mahisasura was destroyed by the Goddess Camundi, his sister Mahisi was overcome with grief and anger. She was determined to avenge her brother’s destruction and so undertook severe penance and propitiated the god Brahma. Greatly pleased by here tapas Lord Brahma granted her a boon to the effect that she would attain her end only through a human incarnation born to two males.

Blessed by such a boon she thus became invincible and went on a rampage of destruction, overthrowing Indra, the king of the gods, and conquering the three worlds. The helpless devas (gods) were terrified and went to Siva and Visnu for help. Siva and Visnu decided to create a son who would eventually destroy her. Visnu thus assumed the form of Mohini – the Enchantress and bore Siva a son.

The child was left on the banks of the River Pampa in South India where he was found by the childless king Rajasekhara of Pantalam. The king took the child and adopted him as his heir. He wore a little bell around his neck when he was found so he was named Manikantham. Manikantham grew up to be a remarkable child and was loved by all.

Meanwhile the Queen conceived and bore a son of her own. Wishing her own son to succeed to the thrown she grew envious of Manikantham and plotted to get rid of him. Feigning illness, she ordered the court physician to say that she would be cured only if she drank tiger’s milk. As expected, Manikantham who was a dutiful son, set off into the forest to fetch the milk for her. He was only twelve years old at that time – a young brahmacharin. He took with him only a coconut, representing his family deity Siva and some food which he wrapped in a small cloth bundle.

In the forest he confronted and destroyed Mahisi in a fierce battle. The gods who had come to witness the destruction of Mahisi were overjoyed. They revealed to him his divine origin and mission that had now been fulfilled and Indra took the form of a tiger which the victorious Manikanthan rode back to the kingdom.

Seeing him thus on tiger back the king and his subjects realized his divinity. The terrified queen confessed her plot and was forgiven. He then instructed the king to build a temple to him and returned to devaloka (the abode of the gods)

(Sekar, R The Sabarimala Pilgrimage & The Ayyappan Cultus, Page 23-24)

But, as Dr. Sekar continues, it is in folk songs like Vavar Mahatmayam, Pantalasevam and Pulipalasevam extend this story, and the life of the god, into realms fascinating:

A princess of the Pantalam lineage was abducted by a dacoit called Udayanan who was terrorizing the region, looting and desecrating even the temples. She was rescued by a brahmin and taken to a sanctuary near Aryankavu where there is a Sasta temple. A son was born to them who grew up to be an able warrior and firm devotee of the deity Sasta. He was soon patronized by the weak Pantalam king and recognized as his grandson. Ayyappan for that was his name, was made Commander of the Pantalam forces and set out to restore order in the kingdom. One of his first adversaries was a Muslim pirate called Vavar. Vavar was defeated but was so impressed by the young Ayyappan that he became his friend and follower. The two formed a strong army in which men of all castes and creeds served and then set out to subdue and defeat Udayanan. After having restored order in the kingdom, Ayyappan began the restoration of the Sasta temple at Sabarimala. Once the temple had been completed Ayyappan instructed his men to leave their weapons at a peepul tree two kilometers from the shrine. From there they marched to Sabarimala changing Swami Saranam (seeking refuge in God). Ayyappan then delivered a sermon on equality and brotherhood and is then believed to have become transformed into a bolt of lightening and merged into the image of the deity.

(Sekar, R The Sabarimala Pilgrimage & The Ayyappan Cultus, Page 25)

And even more so, local descendants of Vavar tell another different story. Dominique-Sila Khan, in her book Sacred Kerala: A Spiritual Pilgrimage documents a dialogue with the local Musaliar (Muslim religious leader), a descendent of Vavar, as follows:

‘Some people portray him as a fierce warrior, and even worse, a pirate who, after being defeated by Ayyappa and repenting for his part sins, becomes Ayyappa’s ally and protector. This is not at all what my forefathers told me. I do not believe this. After all, why is Vavar called “Swami” by the Hindus? He was a holy man, a Sayyid or a Thangal, as we say in Kerala. At that time the Pandalam raja was ruing in this area, Ayyappa was a local chieftain…’

‘A chieftain? Not a prince? But still a divine incarnation?’

‘Oh no! Both Vavar and Ayyappa, who were very close friends, followed the same teaching, both practiced yoga and meditation. Yes, they were great yogis. Through yoga they had obtained extraordinary powers, which the populace interpreted as miracles. They aim, however, was to establish peace in a troubled area. The battles they fought were mostly spiritual battles.’

(Khan, Dominique-Sila, Sacred Kerala, Page 65)

The legends weave the communities together and they have changed and adjusted to reflect changing social and political realities.

∞

The rain has stopped but I remain standing under a store front awning. Gathered around me are young pilgrims, many on their very first pilgrimage to Sabarimala. They, along with their guruswami, had been waiting restlessly to begin their journey. At Erumeli they are at the threshold of the sacred, but the ceremony of irumuti kettal (tying of the bundle) must be performed before they can proceed further. The ceremony signals their entry into the sacred zone – the final stage of the yatra to the shrine. They all await their guruswami’s call.

The guruswami offers to buy me tea, which I refuse by insisting that I buy him one. The ritual that begins the final, most sacred stage of the journey will be completed by him, he tells me. There are twenty young men traveling together and he has accompanied them all the way from Tamil Nadu. We finish our tea and he turns his eyes towards the sky and whispers to one of the men to prepare to leave. A murmur spreads through the group as they start to gather their bundles. One of them begins a low toned chant – Swamiyee Saranam Ayyappan the guruswami says to me. I repeat the phrase and stand aside to make room for the men who are now gathering in front of him. He signals that he is ready, and the first of the young men, chanting Swamiyee Saranam Ayyappan , prostrates himself before the guruswami.

The irumuti kettal ceremony will be completed by placing crucial offerings in the cloth bundle each pilgrim must carry with him. The front of the bundle, called the mun muti, holds the offerings to Ayyappa and Vavar – usually camphor, incense, turmeric, pepper (for Vavar). The read of the bundle, the pun muti, is for the swami’s personal belongings to take on the yatra. Once the offerings have been made the bundle is tied. The guruswami places the bundle on the swami’s head and spins him around three times. The man is emotionally moved, his eyes are staring towards the temple, and appear oblivious to the final instructions being shouted at him.

‘You must go to the mosque first! You must seek the permission of Vavar first!’

The guruswami is concerned that the man is not paying attention and struggles to catch his eye. The young pilgrim nods his head signaling that he understands. He must now wait until each member of his group has completed the same ritual. He stares ahead, as if lost in a trance.

He is in the sacred zone.

∞

It is near impossible to find the single historical origin of the god Ayyappa and different sources tell different stories. Regardless his legend remains an essential part of Keralan folk lore and, as Dominique-Sila Khan points out, these should not be underestimated:

Some would object to saying that oral traditions have little or no ‘scientific’ value and should consequently be treated as matters of faith or folklore, or altogether dismissed. But legends should by no means be put on the same footing as historical records. It is not because they have nothing to do with reality, but because they express a different kind of reality…Their language is different and follows a different pattern and has little concern for Cartesian logic or chronology.

(Khan, Dominique-Sila Sacred Kerala, page 62)

In fact, I would go one step further; legends and folk stories may not be ‘official history’ but they reflect and reveal the ideals and aspirations of a people and a community. They are a reflection of the imaginative, the experienced, and the felt sensations that cannot be documented in ‘scientific’ texts. The capture, represent and express values and ideas that holds a community together, define its morality, express it’s accommodations, give flight to it’s ideals, and underpin its sense of its collective, diverse self.

In some ways hence they are even more crucial than academic history. The story of the warrior Vavar and his god friend Ayyappa achieves this in a powerful, emotional and expressive way. It is something the fundamentalists, trapped in their textual analysis and literal interpretations, fail to understand and appreciate. This tradition needs to be preserved because the diverse, mixed community it emerges from needs to be preserved.

∞

I am pushed against the outer walls of the Petta Sree Dharmasasta Temple that stands a mere ten meter in front of the Vavar mosque. Men rush in and out and find myself pushed towards what appears to be a small shrine in the outer wall. But bars protect it on all sides and i can only peer in. A green cloth is placed inside – reminiscent of cloths in Sufi shrines, and an inscription that reads “Vavaru Swami”. I notice that there is a similar one on the other side of the gates. It takes me another ten minutes to struggle across the sea of men to the ‘shrine’ on the other side and note that it has a red cloth placed inside with the inscription “Kadutta Swami”. Small candle lights and incense sticks have been lit within each, though strangely I cannot smell the aroma.

I will learn later what they mean – that the entrance of the temple is ‘defended’ by a shrine to the Muslim Vavar and another to Kadutta – ‘lord of the forest’. A statue of Ayyappa riding a tiger sits at atop of the gate, but am Om marks the center of each gate itself.

All the traditions come together here, all the stories are inter-woven at this point.

∞

Vavar’s mosque was designed and constructed by a Hindu.

R. Gopalakrishnan who is one of the most famous mosque architects in Kerala. His design of mosque domes frequently incorporate the lotus flower, which he defends by pointing out that it ‘…is our national flower and placing the dome inside it is a mark of respect, a symbol of religious harmony.’ The redesign of the Vavar mosque posed a unique challenge – he had to design it so that the Hindu pilgrims did not disturb the Muslim worshippers inside. His solution – the one that I stand on now and watch the pilgrims stream past with their offerings, was a roofed veranda around the outside of the mosque.

The caretakers of the mosque stand at a table at the entrance and hand out vibhooti (ash) that the pilgrims smear on their foreheads before starting their circumambulation of the mosque. The men are running through the veranda chant Swami Ayyappan though an occasion shout of Allah O’Akbar and Ya Allah can also be heard over the chanting. They continue their dance – the Petta tullal. It is part of an initiation ceremony compulsory for those making their first yatra. Smeared in color, stripped off most of their clothes, the men dance to reduce and erase their ego and reserve and surrender themselves in humility to the god. Towards the rear a few men are selling coconuts to the pilgrims. I lean against the outer wall and watch as the men, local Muslims from Erumeli as I later learn, take turns to enter the mosque’s inner sanctum and offer their afternoon prayers making sure that someone is always available to oversee the sales. The dancers dance on around us.

∞

Will you accompany us to Sabarimala? The guruswami and his group are beginning their walk across the mountains north of Erumeli towards the sacred shrine. I am surprised by his question and cautiously tell him that I am not Hindu. But this is not just for Hindus! He exclaims, giving me a look of disbelief. I can’t believe you came all the way here from Europe and did not know even this! My look of confusion has clearly dismayed him. Inner sanctums to Hindu temples are closed to non-Hindus, and even women are not allowed to participate in the Sabarimala. How could I make the journey? Where would it end for me? How would I, a non-Hindu, be part of this pilgrimage? I fail to comprehend his request, his generosity, convinced that his question was merely rhetorical. But I was wrong.

Dr. Sekar points out that:

…the emphasis at Sabarimala is equality and theoretically this even extends to non-Hindus participating in the event…caste and class rules are waived and equality is emphasized not only across caste barriers but also amongst people of all creeds. Thus Muslims and Christians who are otherwise barred from entering the sanctums of Hindu temples, are permitted to participate and allowed safe access to the shrines at Sabarimala.

(Sekar, R The Sabarimala Pilgrimage & The Ayyappan Cultus, Page 25)

I wish I had known that earlier. As he leads his group away from the city and towards the mountain shrine of Ayyappa he waves and says Maybe Ayyappan did not call you yet. When he is ready, he will ask you to come!

I hope he does.

Further Readings:

Khan, Dominique-Sila Sacred Kerala: A Spiritual Journey, Penguin Books India (January 2009)

Sekar, Radhika The Sabarimala Pilgrimage & Ayyappan Cultus, Motilal Banarsidass Pub; 1st edition (December 1, 1992)

Mathew, A. F. & Roy Burman, J. J. “Sabarimala: Symbol of Inclusive Syncretism” Indian Journal of Secularism 4(4) 2001