Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  And now the final threshold.

  It was then that he came face to face with a law more immutable than any other he had known. The law that decreed that he could not step beyond the temple gate.

  Was he unaware of the law? No, his entire life had been about learning his limits. He knew by now that the entire world was chopped up into big fields and little fields and that he was entitled to neither. Even the sliver of space he was allowed to occupy was tenanted. It was space for which he would have to grovel, simper, apologize for as long as he lived.

  The big stone bull, Nandi, guarding the shrine, eyed him with insolent contempt. That wasn’t unusual. Contempt he was used to, he could handle.

  He craned for a glimpse. But the moment was inevitable. This was the instant he had always known he must confront but had preferred not to acknowledge: the fact that even an uncontainable thirst had to accept the limits of grace.

  Even Shiva could not transgress some thresholds.

  The tiller closed his eyes. The sun blazed on unrelentingly even behind closed lids. Gradually there grew within him something a little too large, too feverish, to be called prayer. Later, he said, the closest thing to it he knew was the ancient urgency of pre-monsoon crop. There was no hope in it. But there was wild clamorous demand.

  Then it happened.

  ‘You mean the pundits actually relented?’ his friends asked him later, disbelief writ large upon their faces. ‘You mean the temple priests actually allowed you … ?’

  ‘Nothing so dramatic,’ said the tiller or Nandanar, as he came to be known. ‘The priests didn’t budge. How could they? But Nandi, the stone bull, did. And my life’s desire was fulfilled. I glimpsed my Lord of Thiruppunkoor.’

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  Sources: Periyapurana and Gopalakrishna Bharati’s Nandanar Charitram.

  29.

  The Only Revolution

  J. Krishnamurti

  One of India’s foremost religious thinkers on the fear that so often lurks at the heart of the quest for the sacred.—Ed

  This temple is older than its gods. They remained prisoners in the temple, but the temple itself was far more ancient. It had thick walls and pillars in the corridors, carved with horses, gods and angels. They had a certain quality of beauty, and as you passed them you wondered what would happen if they all came alive, including the innermost god.

  They said that this temple, especially the innermost sanctuary, went back far beyond the imagination of time. As you wandered through the various corridors, lit by the morning sun and with sharp, clear shadows, you wondered what it was all about—how man has made gods out of his own mind and carved them with his hands and put them into temples and churches and worshipped them.

  The temples of the ancient times had a strange beauty and power. They seemed to be born out of the very earth itself. This temple was almost as old as man, and the gods in it were clothed in silks, garlanded, and awakened from their sleep with chants, with incense and with bells. The incense, which had been burned for many centuries past, seemed to pervade the whole of the temple, which was vast and must have covered several acres.

  People seemed to have come here from all over the country, the rich and the poor, but only a certain class were allowed into the sanctuary itself. You entered through a low stone door, stepping over a parapet which was worn down through time. Outside the sanctuary there were guardians in stone, and when you came into it there were priests, naked down to the waist, chanting, solemn and dignified. They were all rather well fed, with big tummies and delicate hands. Their voices were hoarse, for they had been chanting for so many years; and the God or the Goddess, was almost shapeless. There must have been a face at one time but the features had almost gone. The jewels must have been beyond price.

  When the chanting stopped there was a stillness as though the very earth had stopped in its rotation. In here there was no sunshine, and the light came only from the wicks burning in the oil. Those wicks had blackened the ceiling and the place was quite mysteriously dark.

  All gods must be worshipped in mystery and in darkness, otherwise they have no existence.

  When you came out into the open, strong light of the sun and looked at the blue sky and the tall, waving palm trees you wondered why it is that man worships himself as the image which he has made with his hands and mind. Fear, and that lovely blue sky, seemed so far apart.

  _______________________________________

  This extract is from The Second Krishnamurti Reader.

  30.

  Sri Guru Dattatreya Baba Budhan Dargah

  Yoginder Sikand

  It was in the winter of 1998 that I first heard of the Sri Guru Dattatreya Baba Budhan dargah. Reports of the five rath yatras organized by the self-styled Datta Peetha Samrakshana Samiti (Committee for the Liberation of Datta Peetha), an outfit floated by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to ‘liberate’ the shrine from Muslim control, were splashed prominently across the front pages of the local newspapers. I was in Bangalore at the time, visiting my mother and itching to get back on the road. So I decided to head off to the shrine to find things out for myself.

  The nine-hour bus ride to the town of Chikamagalur was largely uneventful. I tried to grab whatever sleep was possible amidst annoyingly boisterous Kannada disco music and the shrieks of a buxom woman bouncing on a flower-strewn bed on the television screen above me. The bus-stand was desolate and silent when we arrived early next morning. Cows munched on discarded temple garlands and a madman squatted on a banana leaf, admiring a ring of human refuse. The van heading for the dargah was waiting on the street outside, and pilgrims with their bedding and cooking utensils balanced on their heads were jostling with each other to grab the best seats.

  An hour later, the van purred gently up the road and out of Chikamagalur town. It began a gradual haul up the hills, passing by endless stretches of coffee gardens, their dark bushes groaning under the weight of their red, ripening beans. Cubes of light filtered in through thin wisps of mist, and it became colder as we turned at each hairpin bend. Further up, coffee estates gradually gave way to vast swathes of forest stretching into the horizon. The red and grey tops of the Baba Budhan hills remained shrouded in thick clumps of fog, towering defiantly against the clear blue sky.

  A mild drizzle had set in when we finally arrived at Dada ka Pahad, the hill of Dada the Sufi, at a height of 6214 feet above sea level, the highest peak in Karnataka. The bus stopped abruptly in a small clearing and the last remaining passengers got out. A couple of huts, a long dormitory-like building and a paan shop lay ahead, while a green tin board, with fading letters, announced in Urdu, Kannada and English the ‘Sri Guru Dattatreya Baba Budhan Dargah’. A heavy draught of breeze rushed in from the forest below, sending a group of pilgrims scurrying into the roadside shed that served as a makeshift bus-stand and an occasional animal pen. Women huddled in coarse woollen shawls and men peered from under their monkey caps and mufflers, waiting for the rain to subside.

  ‘Welcome to the abode of the Baba,’ a voice called out.

  I looked about me, but saw no one.

  ‘Here I am,’ said the voice.

  I scoured around, but still saw nobody. I was beginning to imagine it was a ghost.

  ‘Arrey, here!’ cried the voice. ‘Behind the bush with the cloth banners.’

  I turned around and spotted the bush, draped with strips of red and green cloth—votive offerings left behind by some absentminded pilgrim. Behind the bush, on a plastic packet, sat a curious apparition. His weather-beaten face suggested a venerable age, and his kohl-ringed, glassy eyes made him appear like some surreal wizard. He wore a long black robe and his messy, knotted hair was curled into a ball that sat precariously on his head. Strings of plastic beads garlanded his neck. In his hand he held a clay pipe from which rose a plume of grey smoke.

  ‘Ganja!’ he said, breaking into a laugh. ‘But you seem to be a good boy so I am not going to give you any of it.’

>   ‘I’ll make you some tea instead,’ he offered.

  He set a small tin can on a kerosene stove. The stove kept up a steady hiss and the tea bubbled noisily.

  ‘Come, share my blanket with me,’ he said.

  I declined politely. ‘I am warm enough,’ I replied, although the cold had got to my bones.

  He introduced himself as Hussain Sharif from Andhra Pradesh. He was a Qalandar, a wandering Muslim dervish, and spent his time travelling from dargah to dargah in search of the ‘Friends of God’, living off the munificence of the devout.

  ‘You must know of what’s happening in the dargah these days,’ he said to me grimly as I sipped syrupy tea from a clay pot.

  I remained silent, not wanting to influence his response.

  ‘This place is especially blessed by the Dada, and Hindus and Muslims all come here to worship together,’ he said, puffing away at his chillum and emitting a great cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. ‘Why can’t the netas let us be? They want to make this another Ayodhya. Don’t they have the fear of God in them?’ he thundered. His eyes turned into sharp shards of stone as he hurled imprecations against the politicians in his mind’s eye.

  ‘You’re not one of them?’ he asked me, as he tapped the chillum with a twig and set about preparing it for another round.

  ‘Oh no!’ I protested, ‘Not one of them at all! I am just a humble reporter.’

  That seemed harmless enough to him.

  ‘Come, I’ll take you to the Pir of the dargah and he’ll tell you all you want to know,’ he said. His eyes had now transformed themselves into little pools of soft light.

  He walked up the stony path towards the Pir’s house and I followed after him. He left me midway, pointing out the green door where an old man sat in an ochre robe, counting his beads. ‘That is the Pir himself. Now I must go, for my chillum beckons,’ he said with a childlike laugh, and turned around to head back to the bush where he lived.

  ‘Be careful,’ whispered a shopkeeper who called out to me after the Qalandar had left me. ‘This man is a jalali fakir, a particularly angry one at that!’

  ‘You must stay with us,’ insisted the amiable, silver-haired, middleaged Pir Sayyed Pir Muhammad Shah Qadri Qalandar, after I had introduced myself. ‘This is a Sufi lodge,’ he said, as we warmed ourselves in front of the log-fire in the kitchen, ‘and here everyone is welcome. You can stay for as long as you like. Subramaniam Shastri is here if you need anything,’ he added, introducing me, to a man in his early fifties dressed like a sadhu in a white veshti and vest, a thin cotton towel draped over his shoulders. A visitor from Mumbai was waiting outside, said the Pir. ‘We will meet for dinner and then you can ask me all you want,’ he offered. ‘Till then you can speak with Shastri. He knows almost as much about this place as I do.’

  ‘Come closer to the fire or else you’ll freeze,’ said Shastri, stirring a pool of thick, steamy dal cooking in a massive iron cauldron, after the Pir had left. Seated on a quilt on the floor, warming my feet in front of the pile of burning logs, I felt refreshed. Shastri busied himself arranging large pots of grain and oil on the shelves, as he answered my queries. He was, he told me, a Brahmin by birth and one of the closest disciples of the Pir. He had retired as a clerk in a bank and had then taken diksha from a sadhu, a certain Sridharswamy of Wardahally. After spending some years with the sadhu, he was instructed to go to a dargah for further spiritual training and, as he put it, ‘to serve the followers of Dada, irrespective of caste and creed’.

  ‘My guru,’ he said, as he bundled himself next to me and adjusted the folds of his veshti, ‘once visited this shrine many years ago during Dada’s annual urs. He distributed money among the fakirs who had gathered there. They all took the money willingly, but one of them declined, saying that he relied only on God to feed him.’

  ‘Guruji,’ he added, shaking his head approvingly, ‘was so overwhelmed by the fakir’s total dependence on God that when he returned he ordered me to shift here, thinking that this was the ideal place for me. And that is how I am here. It is been almost four years now,’ he said with a chuckle that lit up his otherwise stern, wrinkled face. What did he think of the recent events at the dargah, I asked him hesitatingly, not knowing how he would react.

  ‘Don’t talk about it, my son,’ he answered, curling his eyebrows into a worried knot. ‘It is all politics. Do you think these VHP leaders are really religious? Doesn’t Dada belong to all? Doesn’t God lie in every heart?’

  Dinner at the khanqah was a simple fare-—thick, spicy dal and mountains of boiled rice flavoured with freshly prepared coconut chutney. We seated ourselves in two rows along a long plastic sheet, with the Pir at the head. His disciple from Bombay, a Roman Catholic, sat opposite me, and the Qalandar from the bush sat at the far end, next to Shastri. The meal ended with a prayer by the Pir. ‘Oh Allah!’ he said, his palms stretched out, ‘Thank you for whatever you have given us today,’ followed by an incantation in Arabic that no one but he seemed to understand. ‘Ameen,’ intoned all of us after him, cupping our hands over our faces in gratitude.

  That evening I walked down with the Pir to the dargah. A comet raced through the star-littered sky and packs of jackals howled in the distance. We passed through an ancient burial ground. ‘Generations of my ancestors rest here,’ said the Pir, pointing out each grave and identifying its occupant. A band of fakirs huddled together under a tree smoking their chillums. A bearded man bent with age wobbled out of an ancient whitewashed mosque. Trailing the thin stream of light from a torch I followed the Pir down a flight of steps into a narrow-mouthed cave. It was dark and cool inside, like some primeval womb. The torch cast tall eerie shadows, and the Pir’s soft whispers echoed loudly as they bounced off the walls.

  Inside, on an elevated mud pedestal stood four raised stone structures covered with swathes of embroidered silk and great heaps of jasmine flowers. ‘The seats of four of the Baba’s closest disciples—Jan Pak Shahid, Malik Tijar Faruqi, Malik Wazir Isfahani and Abu Turab Shirazi,’ the Pir explained. A grilled door stood at the far end of the cave, behind which a rock opened out into a narrow tunnel. ‘Dada Hayat is said to have left the cave through this opening and travelled all the way to Medina,’ explained the Pir. On the other side, a little mud plinth marked the place where Mama Jigni, said to be a princess of the royal family of Tiruchirapalli, meditated for many years while training on the Sufi path under the Dada.

  It was this unassuming little structure that had now hit the headlines, as the VHP went ahead with its plans to ‘liberate’ it from Muslim control.

  As dawn broke the next morning, I walked up a stony goat trail into the wooded hills beyond the shrine. The sun remained veiled behind a stationary army of clouds, filtering through in soft, warm shafts. A cool breeze rose from the valley below. I stopped for a light breakfast at Palang Talab, the Pond of the Bed, a little lake ringed by gently rounded knolls. Pilgrims—Hindus outnumbering Muslims—were performing their early morning ablutions in its green, algae-rich waters. A boisterous young woman filled a tin from the pond and drank it greedily. ‘Holy water,’ explained a passer-by. A queue of worshippers stood with folded hands and bated breath outside the anthill-shaped shrine of Biru—a Hindu devotee of the Dada—at the edge of the pond. A Dalit priest, bathed in a river of sweat, cracked a pile of coconuts and distributed the fruit to the starry-eyed devout.

  After a two-hour trek I arrived at Manak Dhara. A noisy waterfall tumbled through thickets of ferns, sending up tall jets of spray. Men and women stood around in two separate pools in various states of undress, lathering themselves and beating soap bubbles out of their clothes. Piles of decorated underwear, torn blouses and shreds of dhotis and lungis lay about carelessly. ‘If you want to make your wish come true you must discard at least one piece of clothing here,’ a young man called out to me from inside the water.

  I sat on a rock, shamelessly watching the half-naked men frolicking in the water. A middle-aged man approached me, a thin flimsy sheet tie
d around his loins, his belly shaking like a pot of jelly. A thin cord snaked its way around his stomach, marking him out as a Brahmin.

  ‘Myself named Jagadeshwar Bhat, native of Mangalore,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘Why you not taking bath here?’ he demanded to know.

  ‘I don’t have any spare clothes to donate to the Dada,’ I answered.

  ‘What Dada?’ he asked angrily, as if I had taken the name of the devil himself. His face was now contorted with rage and had assumed the terrifying appearance of an evil-eyed asura on the gopuram of a south Indian temple.

  ‘There’s no Dada-Wada here,’ he insisted. ‘It is Swamy Dattatreya. And we must liberate him from the wretched Muslims.’

  Little is known about the life of Dada Hayat Qalandar, also known as Swamy Dattatreya. Like most other wandering dervishes, his story is wrapped up in layers of myth. He is said have been one of the three-and-a-half Qalandar masters—members of a Sufi order of considerable influence in South Asia. The principal shrine of the Qalandars is that of Lal Shahaz, the Red Falcon, located in Shehwan in Sind. Next in importance is the dargah of Bu Ali Shah in Panipat, in present-day Haryana. And then comes Dada Hayat’s dargah. The half Qalandar is Rab’ia of Basra who was denied full membership in the Qalandar order because of her gender.

  Local legend has it that the Dada’s real name was Shaikh Abdul Aziz Makki, and that he was born in the town to Ta’if in Arabia, sometime in the sixth century ce. He said to have been a companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Originally a Christian, he later converted to Islam and was blessed by the Prophet with a long life and the accompanying title of Hayatul Bahr-e-Zinda—The Living One of the Life of the Seas. He is claimed to have been the first of the Qalandars, although this must certainly be disputed by the follower of his two-and-a-half colleagues.

  The Dada’s hagiographers believe that he was especially commissioned by the Prophet to travel to Chandradrona Hill, as Dada ka Pahad was then known, to put an end to the oppression of the poor by the local palegar landlords. The palegars, write Abdul Wasi Asri and Abdul Jabbar in their Tazkira-e-Hazrat Dada Hayat Mir Qalandar, ‘had turned this natural heaven into a veritable hell with their oppression and cruelty … playing Holi with the blood of innocents every day’, sacrificing them to appease blood-thirsty goddesses. Moved to pity by the plight of the people, Muhammad had dispatched the Dada to rescue them.