Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  The rite which visibly seals the bond of equality is the shaving of the pilgrim’s head and the ritual bath in the sacred Ganges, in whose waters all distinctions dissolve. Like a baby, born again, shorn of status, the shorn pilgrim symbolically possesses natural blessedness. And like a child, he is, temporarily at least, absolved of his obligations to kin and caste. Freedom from care, restoration to the child’s state, abolition of gender distinctions, equality in lowliness, simplicity of speech and manners, trust—all these concern the inner meaning of pilgrimage, involve the relation of the whole person to other whole persons, and instil an awareness of an unseen order. All comes to rest in one very simple common feeling: the certitude of being at home in one’s own soul.

  A seeker asked the great sage of Benares, Anandamayi, if she thought pilgrimage could be a way to find truth.

  There are two kinds of pilgrims on life’s journey; the one like a tourist is keen on sight-seeing, wandering from place to place, loving first one thing then another, flitting from one experience to another for the fun of it. The other treads the path that is consistent with man’s true being and which leads to his real home, to Self-knowledge. He lets God speak within him and his thought grow silent. Every step leads homeward into his own heart. So long as one’s real home has not been found there will be suffering; the sense of separateness is the root of misery and is founded on delusion, on the idea of duality. This is why the world is called duniya—‘based on duality’. But home is neither here nor there; it is either nowhere at all or within you. The true pilgrim is he who seeks darshan—that energy which emanates from the holy. To be a pilgrim is to be always ready for the miracle which overtakes you, to glimpse the hem of God’s robe. Not all who come face to face with the holy can actually receive benefit. Many remain, as it were, dry even as they plunge into the waters.

  To have Kashi darshan at the Manikarnika Well, centremost point of the holy city, is to be in touch with Ultimate Reality. This is why the dead are cremated by the Manikarnika Well. Every step of the pilgrim is death, every step is birth. The distance beckons, longing awakes. The pilgrim does not seek, he finds. Whoever tries to grasp the goal of pilgrimage with his mind, sees it slip from his grasp.

  _______________________________________

  This is an extract from Benares Seen from Within.

  6.

  Fear No Fall

  A.K. Ramanujan

  1

  Arunagiri,* rich and spoiled, spent

  his youth and old money,

  heirlooms and a sister’s dowry

  on medieval liquors, honeymead and coconutarrack,

  pressing Arab wineskins into his mouth

  in coastal shipyards,

  and on women

  till one of them sucked him dry

  of all his juices,

  gave him syphilitic sores

  in all the wrong places,

  and threw him out, a peel of many colours

  on the garbage heap.

  Unhoused, he roamed

  through the town, a target

  for moralists’ fingers,

  a lesson for future generations,

  dripping with diseases

  for which they had no names yet

  though quacks offered arsenic and antidotes.

  His despair deeper than his wounds,

  he struggled with bush and rubble

  up a cliff, surveyed the world

  he had lost in the valleys

  of light and shadow, towers

  and gardens and treetops,

  and just threw himself down.

  Yet he woke up, strangely unsurprised,

  smooth and whole again in every limb,

  lying in the lap of a very old man

  who smiled at him, wrinkled,

  through white hair on a dark

  face, ten white strands

  on his chin like a Chinese sage,

  who said to him, ‘Sing now of Murugan!’

  Arunagiri, truant extraordinary,

  escape artist, burglar of hearts,

  guzzler on all good things,

  who didn’t have an alphabet

  in his past nor ever a tune in his head,

  hated temple bells and hypocrisies,

  asked, ‘How can I? Unlettered, worthless?’

  The old man who was really the Old Man

  of the oldest Novas, gave him his first line

  of verse, and while Arunagiri

  turned it round and round like candy

  in his mouth, new lines forming

  all around the Old One, the Old Man

  melted away like a figure in a fog,

  leaving Arunagiri a lifetime

  of seeking and finding and losing Him

  again and again in a labyrinth

  of winding words, his songs

  twining around trees, ensnaring

  passersby, unlocking cages

  even for mynahs and parrots.

  2

  That night

  I was tottering without a foothold

  on a ramshackle pyramid

  of all my books piled any which way

  on to a horse cart

  and me slipping on top of it,

  without a door or a wall to my name,

  moving through a market town,

  looking for a place,

  dropping books in several languages

  all along the way,

  in a panic fear of falling and breaking my neck

  in the gutters below

  when a voice both within and without

  said, ‘Fall, fall,

  you’ll never fear a fall again,

  fall now!’

  _______________________________________

  This poem is from The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan.

  * Arunagiri: a Tamil saint

  7.

  Akbarnama: Chapter LXXI

  Abu-L-Fazl (16 century ce)

  Translated by H. Beveridge

  There are pilgrimages, and there are pilgrimages. This account may tell us more about the munificence of the pilgrim than the object of his devotion. But then every pilgrim is not an emperor. This chapter, for all its triumphalism of style, is about a man’s thanksgiving journey made on foot to the shrine of the great Sufi saint of Ajmer.—Ed.

  H.M. THE SHAHINSHAH’S JOURNEY FROM THE

  CAPITAL TO AJMIR, AND HIS BECOMING SUCCESSFUL

  IN THE FIELD OF FORTUNE, BOTH SPIRITUALLY

  AND PHYSICALLY.

  As the holy understanding of the King desires inspiration from saints, he, at the time when he was seeking for a son, had made a vow to his God that if this blessing should be attained, he would perform an act of thanksgiving which should be personal to himself, viz., that he would walk from Agra to the shrine of Khwaja M’uinu-d-din Cisti, and there pay his devotions to God. It was settled in Rajab The Akbarnama. (the 7th month), which was the month of the saint’s anniversary (uras), that this intention should be carried into practice. When such a night-gleaming jewel of the casket of the Caliphate arrived at the shore of hope, he recognized his obligation and set out on foot from Agra on the day of Aban 10 Bahman, Divine month, corresponding to Friday 12 Shaban (the 8th month), 20 January 1570, and traversed stages and deserts. Each day he journeyed ten or twelve kos, less or more.

  The following is the list of the stages of the journey from Agra:—

  Mandhakar

  Fathepur

  Passed Khanwa and halted near Juna

  Karoha

  Basawar

  Toda

  Kalawali

  Kharandi

  Disa

  Passed Hansmahal and encamped near Phulmahal

  Sanganir

  Near neota

  Jhak near m’uizzabad

  Sakhun

  Kajbil

  The holy dwelling of the Khwaja in Ajmir

  Then he straightway went to the shrine and placed the forehead of sincerity on that spot and implored help. He
spent several days there in devotion and good works. He distributed gifts among the attendants of the shrine. As on the occasion of the division of the gifts, which came to a large amount, those who claimed to be descendants of the Khwaja, and who had the superintendence of the shrine—their chief was Shaikh Husain—took possession of the whole of the money, and there were disputes and quarrels between him (Shaikh Husain) and the attendants on the shrine, and there was the allegation that the Shaikhs who had charge of the shrine had told falsehoods with regard to their descent, and as this dispute had gone on a long time, H.M. appointed trustworthy persons to inquire into the matter and to report thereon. After much investigation it was found that the claim of sonship was not genuine. Accordingly the charge of the shrine was made over to Shaikh Muhammad Bukhari, who was distinguished among the Saiyids of Hindustan for knowledge and fidelity. H.M. also arranged for the management of the shrine and for the treatment of pilgrims and for the erection of mosques and khanqas in the territory. In fine, after having made over the presents he set out on his return and proceeded to visit the shrines of the saints of Delhi. He went there, and in Isfandarma, Divine month, corresponding to Ramzan, February–March, 1570, he arrived at Delhi. He spent some days in that pleasant spot, in visiting the shrines and in the administration of justice, and gladdened the hearts of friends and strangers.

  _______________________________________

  This is an extract from The Akbarnama.

  8.

  Ajmer and Me

  Anjum Hasan

  I undertook my first and only religious pilgrimage in a spirit of incomprehension and awe. I lived in Shillong then. My mother and an aunt decided to visit the dargah of Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer, and I was elected from among three bored teenagers to go along. I didn’t have a clue about why Ajmer was important. My mother had, years ago, promised herself that she would revisit the shrine if a certain wish of hers, a kamna, was fulfilled. That endowed the whole idea with the vaguely mysterious significance that all things religious or verging on the religious had for me then.

  So off we went to ‘India’. Why I remember anything at all about the trip is also because it was virtually a first-time journey into the big country. Coming from the somewhat dwarfish highlands where you were statuesque at five-and-a-half feet and traversing ten kilometres in any direction would take you outside town, India’s largeness was disturbing. The shockingly hill-less landscape that unfurled kilometre after kilometre through the train window was an aspect of this immensity. As was our co-passenger, a large and expansive man who handled the English language with vernacular panache, repeatedly referring to an ‘inferiority complex’ as an ‘inferiority complexion’. The huge red-fleshed guavas we ate in Allahabad seemed like grandfathers of the small, white Shillong versions. I was going to be swallowed up.

  Once we got to Ajmer, the story of my diminishment was complete when, walking around the town, I was harassed by a bunch of boys for two days in a row. All I experienced of the dargah itself, still smarting from the jabs and jeers of those sadistic youths and trying to keep my dupatta from slipping off my head, was a disorientingly large pot with a tiny puddle of coins and rupee notes at its base, cool white tiles under our bare feet, the gentle voice of the khadim who showed us around and a wall of filigreed marble on which people with wishes had tied hundreds of little red threads, some still new, some faded with age. My mother untied one of the threads, thus fulfilling the purpose of the journey. How do you know this is exactly the one you had tied all those years ago, I asked her. It doesn’t matter, she said. You can untie any of them. This seemed not quite logical and on that somewhat unsatisfactory note, the pilgrimage ended.

  But when I revisit it now I realize the story runs into other chapters, all of them to do with what it means to be a Muslim who is not quite a Muslim. Bangalore, where I now live, is one of the most hospitable cities in the country, but trying to rent a house sometimes means dealing with landlords who wish to first get the matter of religion out of the way. Now wait a minute, I have wanted to say to the house-owner who asks me on the phone if I am Muslim. I know he is drawing on a pre-existing mental picture. I want to answer him in the negative and hope he gets the implication, which is that not everyone with a Muslim name is ‘Muslim’ in the way he imagines. But if he misses my subtle point, I will only be encouraging him to continue discriminating against those who conform to the image in his prejudiced head. Better, then, to say—‘Yes, I am’ and try to get across the subtext—‘And so what?’ Which possibly means losing the house, which seems eminently unfair.

  In between the pilgrimage to Ajmer and the conversation with the difficult landlord is a narrative not so much of a turning away from religion as finding that it hardly matters in the first place. I grew up with the tacit understanding that there was something vaguely crass about religion. One didn’t exactly proclaim one’s religious feelings, if they existed at all, and those who did were either simple-minded or antagonistic to other religions or both. Secularism meant silence. This is not an unusual story: many of us secularists are comfortably a-religious and for a long time it seemed to work. Today there are questions being asked about why secularism has not stood us in good stead. Personally I find that instead of doggedly holding on to my unconcern about and distance from religion, I have grown interested in positions of equivocation. I find it useful to place alongside the large narratives of established religious identity that I was first exposed to on the trip to Ajmer, the small narratives about a lack of fixity that need to also be claimed as part of religious experience. I realize that I would rather stay uncomfortably in this amorphous zone than declare religion regressive.

  But I don’t want to suggest that it is only the sceptical or the tentative whose positions must be acknowledged. As important are the experiences of those from the opposite end of the spectrum—those who can claim a cultural inheritance that is intimately connected to religion but enriched rather than circumscribed by it. The Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder, for instance, many of whose stories have to do with the charmed and long-gone world of aristocratic Muslims in north India, has been subjected to a familiar stereotyping, and has written about how pained she is when people ask her: how did you overcome the ‘restrictions of your society’ to become a writer? Her family history reads like the history of that forgotten mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century time in the subcontinent when it was possible to be anglicized and yet write in Urdu, secular and yet a strong believer, bourgeois and yet radical, Muslim and yet Indian. ‘My family was among those good people who were also fiercely proud of their own Indian civilization. They continued to live in a cultural half-way house till the partition of the country upset the apple-cart,’ she writes.

  I see a significant parallel, then, between travelling into India from the small town of my childhood and being on a journey whose goal was religious. Both were first-time experiences. I remember writing a poem when I came back that was simply and unselfconsciously titled ‘India’. All the unique images I encountered on the journey—the starkly white tombs of the dargah, gigantic fields of mustard flowers in the winter sun, beggar girls with babies in their arms, men in turbans riding camels, the dried rose petals of the tabarruq—were catalogued in this poem. From my position, India could manageably be described in a single poem because my relationship to it was largely a vicarious one. This was true too of my awareness of religion; it had a metaphorical rather than literal presence. India, like Islam, could be dangerous from close up, but from a safe distance it was full of innocuous charm.

  In the kind of upbringing I had, religion never quite acquired heft. My parents treated Islam like an eccentricity of my grandfather’s, with the result that there would always be attached to it the air of the irredeemably quaint. The maulvi whom my grandfather engaged to teach us children the Urdu alphabet was treated by everyone but him with amused indulgence. We never quite made it past the Urdu alphabet into the Arabic one, and so remained shut off forever from the hallowed, gre
en, leather-bound book of all books. It was only as an adult that I realized that the men constantly and casually effecting miracles in the bedtime stories my grandfather would tell us were Sufi saints. Each time I try to dive back into the past and retrieve something, anything, that gives flesh to the idea of my being a Muslim, I come up with fragments—a haunting line from a marsiya about the Battle of Kerbala being sung in a darkened mosque, the taste of dates eaten after a token day of fasting during Ramzan, the image of my grandfather praying in a silence so deep it seems scary. Yet I am reluctant to give up these fragments, just as I am reluctant to give in to the Bangalore landlord who feels he can wipe out my context by ascribing a religion to me.

  This is perhaps a poetic relationship with religion, not a moral one. But when I place it alongside the idea of returning to the shrine of a person dead for 800 years to untie, symbolically, a thread that was once tied, again symbolically, to represent the expression of a secret desire, the metaphorical force of practised religion seems as strong as the metaphorical force of religion interesting only for its place in private memory. Ajmer—and Sufism—seem an especially appropriate context against which to think about this. For the overriding impression one carries back from Ajmer, even though it takes a while to unravel it, is the opposing pull of ritual and poetry, the strangeness of a formalized relationship to religion set against an essentially mystical one. The khadim who was our guide, despite his majestic bearing and dignity, seemed reduced in the face of people absorbed in the act of tying and untying sacred threads, or the ecstatic singing of the qawwals, or the woman weeping outside the sanctuary where Chisti sleeps. There was an element of lunacy in the passion of these figures, a sense of concern not with right and wrong but with the self and the ‘out there’. Poetry could well approximate to this.