A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  I have often put up at the university guest house. It is a large, old-fashioned building in quiet grounds dotted with large trees, with the sedate look, from the outside, of a country club. Inside, it is refreshingly dark and high-ceilinged, providing a cool respite from the bright sun and the heat; the rooms are large, though the bathrooms are wet, the drain holes not covered, threatening rodent or reptile invasions, the mosquito net old, bloodstained, and punctured, the light not enough to read by. But cheap, secure, and convenient. To sleep, you simply pinch the net at the larger holes hoping to close them, light a couple of mosquito coils next to the bed, put up with the smoke and hope for the best. The last time I stayed there I was given a super deluxe room, which was new and large, but except for the bed and a chair it was empty, with the smell still fresh of cement and paint. With so many dark empty corners, a haven for mosquitoes. If Indian houses are so cluttered, how can a super deluxe room be so empty? Guests at this modest abode range from the country’s top academics, to the lowly lecturer hunting for a job, to the foreign visitor putting on a brave face for the sake of his hosts who have kindly put him up here. The central hall is large, spread out with tables laid with plastic sheets, and tea can be had at almost any time, brought in from the dark, spare kitchen inside, with puris if you wish. But after two days of my super deluxe room, despite the anytime tea and puris, I decided that over the years I had paid my dues to modesty and politeness, and acting spoiled, took a room in a simple, quiet hotel across the road. Productivity increased.

  The Lakshmi Vilas Palace was built by Maharaja Sayajirao as his residence, using the same British architects who designed the university, but where the latter has an elegant simplicity, the palace has a baroque, somewhat gaudy opulence both inside and outside. Stones from various places in India and marble from Italy were used in the construction, which took twelve years. Like other Indian princes of the time, Sayajirao was much taken with the culture of Europe, where he travelled extensively and bought art, good and bad, judging by the exhibits on display. In the palace grounds, next to a golf course, is a medieval step-well, still in use, with an Arabic inscription still in place. The maharaja’s family occupies a part of the residence.

  Baroda, therefore, has all the feel of an eminent university town, a small former princedom with ancient beginnings. Its attractions are modest but solid—its few historical buildings, its annual Navratri garba dances, its cricket team (the cricket club is next to the palace), its renowned university and diversity of students. But for all its cultural pride, it is also a site of frequent communal violence, small and large. As I write this, I read of an outbreak of violence due to the razing of a two-hundred-year-old Muslim shrine by the civic authorities, the stated purpose being the easing of traffic in the congested old city; a few people were shot dead by the police. During an earlier visit, my host, seeing my alarm at his mention of the threat of a riot in the city, tried to reassure me. Don’t worry, it only takes place out there, he told me, naming an area, it won’t reach here. To me that knowing calmness—and he was no exception among his class, I was certain—was astonishing. That was ten years ago. And now it’s impossible to go anywhere in Gujarat and not be aware of the violence of 2002. Two years after its occurrence, it was still on the mind, very much in the air. The Best Bakery case has become celebrated. Located in a settlement on the outskirts of town, the bakery was set ablaze with more than a dozen people inside, who all burnt to death. Neighbours watched.

  Communal violence is set off sometimes in the simplest of ways: some fellows drive a pig into a Muslim area; some others slaughter a cow and dump the remains in a Hindu neighbourhood. At other times, events play into the hands of more malign and organized forces lying in wait. This happened when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984; it happened when the Babri Mosque was demolished in Uttar Pradesh State in 1992; and it happened in 2002 in Gujarat when a train compartment caught fire, killing all the people inside.

  On February 27, 2002, a compartment of the Sabarmati Express, a train bound from Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, to Gujarat, was apparently set on fire outside the station of Godhra. The compartment contained Hindu activists returning from the site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, and they all burnt to death, some sixty men, women, and children. The fire was believed to have been set by Muslims of the town—Godhra has old Muslim communities not known to be docile, indeed the town has been prone to communal violence, Muslims having lived in the area at least since the time of Mahmud Begada the conqueror, who has not been forgotten—but no charges have been laid so far, and there are those who claim that the fire started inside the compartment. Whatever the case, the horrors of these deaths cannot be minimized.

  The Babri Mosque was built by the first Mughal emperor, Babur, in the sixteenth century on a site at Ayodhya that many Hindus believe is the birthplace of the god Rama. Whatever the birth of the god means, “Ayodhya” of Indian mythology is a venerated city; in my childhood we sang a verse in which it was called Ajodha Nagari. The issue is therefore extremely contentious—mythology, legend, and devotion intersecting with premodern history, not an unknown configuration in our world—and the fate of the site is still with the courts. Many Muslims I have heard or read have no problems with the mosque being turned into a temple; after all, in the past, mosques had been converted or built from temples, and Hindu temples had displaced Buddhist temples in still older times. Many others, of course, will not hear of it. In December 1992, however, supporters of right-wing organizations, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), destroyed the mosque and set up a Hindu shrine at the site. In the riots that followed, several hundred people were killed and tens of thousands became homeless.

  What followed the Godhra train incident, ten years later, was a statewide orgy of violence perpetrated upon any Muslim in sight by fanatical Hindu mobs goaded on by members of the right-wing Gujarat government. Claims have been made that this was a planned uprising, with weapons and bomb-making materials ready in advance, and mobs arriving with electoral rolls to ascertain the identities of their victims. According to the national, English-language, print media, the police looked away, in a few cases even fired at escaping Muslims; in one famously reported instance, the police informed the victims, “We have no orders to defend you.” Not surprisingly, incidents were not recorded by police, or were recorded improperly so that charges could not later be laid. The response of the populist Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, to the conflagration was to blithely quote Newton’s law, that to any action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But the scale of the violence became a national embarrassment, for it was reported widely abroad, and a political football. On the basis of an Indian human rights report and pressure from American groups, the United States government a few years later refused Modi a visitor’s visa. More recently, in an irate moment, in response to calls by the opposition BJP for his resignation, India’s prime minister is reported to have referred to “the holocaust in Gujarat” as having occurred under its watch; most obviously not to be taken literally, but indicative nevertheless of the gravity of the violence that took place.

  As many as two thousand people died in the violence, and more than a hundred thousand were rendered homeless, their houses or shanties—a large number of them were slum-dwellers—destroyed. What was truly horrifying was the quality of violence perpetrated, especially on the women, which cannot be quantified, unlike the numbers of the dead. Not surprisingly the middle classes, the moderates, shudder and look away. It is as if a horrifying wind, a natural, uncontrollable disaster is passing. It’s happened again, it always happens elsewhere. A man burnt to death; a woman horribly violated; a child’s head smashed.

  Baroda, 4:30 a.m., jet-lagged and looking out from a hotel balcony It’s pleasantly cool and the dark is illumined by the odd bits of dim light scattered all around. Life begins early here. A few auto-rickshaws, a few motorbikes, the occasional car horn, engine sounds; at the foot of the lighted, fenced Sardar Pat
el statue in the centre of the raised roundabout below me, lie four homeless people, two within the fence, two outside. One wonders what territorial dynamics are at work. The two outside the fence are covered head to toe, each in a blanket, like corpses. Sardar Patel, a Gujarat hero, one of the leaders of the Independence struggle; in Attenborough’s Gandhi he was played with panache by Saeed Jaffrey.

  A few teenage boys come sauntering along and get into a parked bus—some kind of school trip must be under way. A cleaner of sorts goes around the area selectively putting things into the large bag on his back; later it appears that he is picking up plastic bags and containers. Ganesh Tea Stall, a sidewalk booth, opens. It makes good tea, cheap, and I usually have two cups of “special.” Two old men sit on the edge of the roundabout, taking a break from their walk. Street dogs already trotting about, busy with whatever it is they do.

  On weekend evenings, boys arrive at the statue on their motorbikes, park all around the circle, chat with their buddies for hours on end. Very few girls with them.

  This cultured city was ruled once by a visionary Hindu maharaja among whose master musicians were Muslims; the grave of one of them is a small shrine that was recently desecrated during the communal violence. I cannot help recalling the giant Shiva statue on the Sursagar lake, a public space; it shouldn’t offend, surely, Shiva is an Indian symbol. If anything, it’s gaudy. And yet its presence is provocative in a secular country.

  But what is secularism, this much-touted word? It is not atheism, says the philosopher S. Radhakrishnan, but a belief in “the universality of spiritual values. It is spiritual consciousness.” This in his foreword to the excellent The National Culture of India by Abid Hussain, a brave book that looks at a single Indian culture in its diversity, and dismissing the silly notions of non-Muslims as infidels and non-Hindus as foreigners.

  I’ve been told repeatedly of housing segregation in the city, both for reasons of safety and because of plain prejudice. There is safety in numbers, you live among your own kind, move out of mixed neighbourhoods to do so. The Mughal-wada area is an old neighbourhood, a warren of narrow streets through which cars, motorbikes, people, and goats negotiate. It is not quite poor but feels claustrophobic; one might grow up with tender and colourful memories of this place, but one gets out. It used to be a mixed neighbourhood, says a denizen, but after the riots of 1969 it became progressively Muslim. And he bewails that fact. He himself is a Gandhian and runs an ashram outside the city. The Tandelja area is another Muslim neighbourhood, with newer, wealthier houses.

  My friend Mohammad, a professor of literature, speaks of traditional patterns of public and private spaces that I find familiar from the neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which I grew up. People of all the communities would mingle in the public or market space, Mohammad says, but they went home to their communal spaces where they did their own thing. This was mutual segregation based on the idea of comfort zones; not unlike the idea of neighbourhoods in Western cities. In his town, my friend says, there was friendly interaction at festivals and celebrations. His father, when he set off for hajj, was bid farewell and given presents by all communities. But nowadays in the cities the segregation is of a different sort, enforced by fear and hatred. He has built a new house in the Tandelja area, though he still lives in a mixed university neighbourhood. If he wanted a house in the same area as his Hindu colleagues, he would never be able to find one.

  Yet he is married to a Hindu woman; his only child, a daughter, was brought up as a Hindu and recently got married to a Hindu boy. His only demand on the suitor was that he come and formally ask for the girl’s hand, in the old-fashioned way; which of course the young man readily did. Both are studying medicine in the United States. It’s a good thing they got away, Mohammad says. I do not ask him, but I wonder if Mohammad belongs here anymore. A product of an English-style private school, he talks in such a rapid manner he can wear out anyone, and not only the time-wearied traveller; and he can become abrasive without thinking. His manner reflects, I have long ago concluded, a large but frustrated intelligence. Immediately after I first met him, thirteen years ago in Bhubaneswar, we had started speaking in Kutchi, and this is how we’ve gotten along. The last time I saw him he had been working with resettling victims of the violence of 2002. I ask him about this. He’s given it up, partly because he got depressions from hearing their horror stories; and partly because he became frustrated with the favouritism and corruption and fanaticism that he came across. He does not want to move into his large modern house in Muslim Tandelja because he does not think he would belong there. His wife certainly would not. Recently he’s taken to translating modern Gujarati poets into English.

  “Out there,” where the riots take place, is where my host, Raj Kumar, takes me one day. We go on his motorbike, not the Czech Java he once had, but a new and lighter Indian Bajaj. It’s a nerve-wracking experience, in the noise and heat and dense traffic, with its law of push and go through if you can, the driver in his helmet, of course, the passenger, I, without one.

  At the Sursagar lake, with its large gaudy Shiva statue in the centre, we park opposite the elegant nineteenth-century Nyaya Mandir, the Palace of Justice, another of the enlightened maharaja’s gifts to the city, and walk through the Lehripura Gate, with shrines set up in its carved wall niches, a ladder indicating that the flowers and bright sandalpaste are recent. Just outside the gate is the elegant Khajuri Mosque, newly painted green and white with, for some strange reason, a prominent panel in front depicting palm trees. An Arabian oasis? A modest stall outside sells small spicy chicken samosas and lamb pakodas, which Raj Kumar as usual cannot resist; I am wary due to a queasy stomach, but they don’t sell vegetarian here. The street, MG Road, is closely packed with shops; there is an old, perhaps ancient, quite beautiful and recently painted small Jain temple, with a modern iron gate, squeezed in between businesses. A crowd of decrepit, wobbly old structures, with trellised broken balconies and prominent uprights, desperately holding on to each other for support. Clothes, utensils, hardware, motor parts. Shopkeepers hopeful at the doors. Narrow streets lead off into neighbourhoods, known as pols, which in olden times would be guarded by their residents.

  A newly painted white clock tower is the centre of the old city. From here are visible, with some straining, the four city gates: the Lehripura Gate, the Pani Gate, the Gendi Gate, and the Champaner Gate. We choose to walk towards the last one, which recently gained some notoriety. On the way comes an old two-storey structure, a wide building with corrugated roof, which is the Central Library, founded by the maharaja. The more one learns of him the more impressive he seems.

  Outside the library, on the lower of two verandahs, behind an iron railing, a few men read the daily papers on ancient wooden stands. Everything about this library suggests a bygone era. The assistant librarian, who escorts us after we introduce ourselves, says the holdings number three hundred thousand. There are indeed a lot of shelves assembled on the two floors. The library, inaugurated in the early twentieth century, moved into the present location in the thirties. Its construction received the enlightened maharaja’s personal attention. The inside is metal and glass throughout to render it fireproof, the numerous windows and skylights ensured illumination at a time when electricity was scarce, and the ceilings are high to keep the place cool. The shelves were brought all the way from Belgium and suspended from the ceiling as a precaution against earthquakes. Finally, an American called Mr. Borden was convinced by the maharaja to come all the way to Baroda to be his first librarian, and his cataloguing system is still in place. A framed portrait of him shows a lean bearded man in collar and tie; beside him is a portrait of the maharaja, in a tight, buttoned-up tunic and a turban, somewhat full in the face. Except for the staff of three and the two of us, there is not a soul in sight; the old holdings, tight on their shelves, are dusty. But the books are in six languages, including English. The assistant librarian takes us to the absent chief librarian’s office (where there is
a desk and a bed) and shows us a cabinet containing miniature books, a set of which apparently is the complete works of Shakespeare; a few other miniatures are dictionaries. There is a small bust upon the cabinet which the librarian says is of Shakespeare, but it looks like Byron. All these were gifts received by the maharaja when he toured abroad. In the maharaja’s vision was a school for every village and a library for every school; it was to a large degree implemented. The man who implemented this policy was one Motibhai Amin, who I am told would go around the public park nearby carrying a bag of shoes and a bag full of magazines. To anyone without shoes, he would hand a pair; to others he would hand out magazines and tell them, Read.

  The librarian invites us to have tea and we sit down with him. Three small glasses of tea soon appear. He is a slim white-haired man of medium height, with some front teeth missing. His father had been a Sanskrit professor and, he says with a laugh, gave him such an odd first name that he couldn’t find it in a book of first names. Apparently there are government grants to renovate and modernize the library. Plans include a children’s and a ladies’ section. One wonders if the shopping, travelled classes of Alka Puri will make it all the way to here.

  We come out onto MG Road and keep going. Just inside Champaner Gate, two blue police vans are parked on the contentious spot where the grave of a Muslim saint was razed by local authorities, which led to a riot and shooting, in which a few men were killed. We turn at the gate, come upon a segment of one of the ancient city walls, of red brick; in a cavity inside the broken end of the wall is a rudimentary shoe stall. Across from that we pause for soft drinks. The sight of a police van driving by suddenly brings forth the choicest invective from a couple of contorted angry faces nearby, and one sees a glimmer of how a riot can erupt. We walk back in the direction of the Lehripura Gate from which we entered the old city. Along the site of the ancient wall runs the colourful clothing market street called the Nawa Bazar, displaying fabric and clothing of all kinds, hung like banners in stall after stall.