A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  The shrine is called Sahaji Sawai no Dero, and it lies in Champaner behind Mahmud’s Shehr-ki Masjid.

  As you approach along a dirt road, you come across a gate, in front of which is a very unusual sign warning that there are dogs. Such signs are found outside the gates of wealthy fenced houses in the large cities, not in a village. We see no dogs, and it would appear that it is not robbers but other intrusions that are feared. The shrine is in fact a communal one, though open to the public. A well-dressed man waits outside the gate, with a well-dressed boy; a little further away, in the shade of a tree, sits a woman in burqa, the wife and mother. The man says that he is an auto-rickshaw driver; his father died recently, and on his deathbed he asked the son to visit the dargah of Sahaji Sawai. The man’s wife suffers depressions and the family cannot make ends meet.

  Inside is a large open compound, paved, and since we have had to remove our shoes and socks, burning hot to our feet, so we have to take rapid steps as we walk. There is a storage area at the far end and a guest house, for the community’s own pilgrims, which is empty. To the right is the entrance to the shrine. It turns out, and this my companion had roughly guessed, that Sahaji Sawai was a descendant of Pir Imamshah, a member of the saintly pantheon whose teachings and songs I was brought up with. I had not heard of Sahaji Sawai. It turns out that the sultan, Mahmud Begada, had been a disciple of Sahaji Sawai and married a woman from his family.

  There is an inner chamber in the shrine that contains the grave of the holy man. A corridor, a sort of verandah, runs between the inner chamber and the outside wall, and on the walls of the corridor are framed paintings of the ten avatars of the god Vishnu. The faith represented here is therefore akin to the one I was brought up in, based on the worship of the ten avatars, the first one of which is a fish and the final one a man. Also on the walls are verses handwritten in Gujarati; and I don’t know whether to find this astonishing or not, but I can not only read them but also derive meaning from them, because they are in the language and form of the ginans of my childhood. A few verses I can even recognize. One speaks of a devotee woman who breaks her necklace so that in picking up the pieces she can secretly bow to her lord who is passing by.

  This shrine leads into an adjoining inner courtyard, which is the residential section, where the caretaker lives. There are three rooms to one side, and a kitchen and prayer hall to another. In the kitchen area there are some women on their haunches, attending to chores. The prayer hall is empty but contains a paat, or seat of the pir, where there are two trays of food offerings, an arrangement similar to one we had in our prayer hall, which we called the khano. There is an entrance out from this courtyard where there is a tap for washing.

  I emerge quite shaken. What I have seen, evidently, and by accident, is a shrine and prayer hall of a group related to my own. And what had seemed a distant history of medieval sultans and rajas has been connected back to me through the sultan’s relationship to the saint buried here, a descendant of the pir whose songs I sang. To see such immediacy with one’s ancestral and spiritual past in this place where a holy man, a mystic, lies buried and is worshipped, begins to give me an understanding of the dynamics by which my own community of the Khojas might most probably have evolved.

  We depart towards Dabhoi, another ancient town. The road is straight and narrow, one lane each way, cultivations on either side. On the way, the odd motor vehicle, a tractor patiently chugging along, bearing passengers, all women, another bearing bales of cotton. Two women rise up from a small roadside shrine, a grave. There are countless small shrines in India: a little temple, a stand, or a grave at the roadside, in a village, or in a cultivated field. They fascinate me, for in East Africa we hardly had any, though a portion of our prayer house often functioned as a shrine of the temple variety. On an impulse we stop to inquire what kind of shrine this one is and who tends to it, but the women hurry away. Just then a scooter with two men comes by, and when we repeat our inquiry, they tell us to ask at the nearby town, called Jambu Ghoda.

  The town is essentially one street. We are guided to a shop, where a rather thin middle-aged man with no front teeth greets us from behind a table that is his desk. He dismisses the men sitting on the chairs in front of him and asks us to sit. He is an estate agent, he says, his name is Mehrally Bhai. He tells us the story of the shrine, which is not very old. Someone in the town had a dream that at that location there was something mysterious; people went and dug there and found a grave. According to an old resident of the area, a fakir—a holy man—had sat at the place. He had never gone hungry, presumably because his needs were miraculously met. The villagers decided to build a shrine there, but a Public Works official was against it and would put all sorts of obstacles in the way; there was no way he would allow a shrine at the spot. One day, however, while driving on the road, a snake crossed his path; the man veered and ran into an oncoming truck and was killed. The shrine got built.

  Yes, says Mehrally Bhai, when asked about the violence; there were disturbances here in 2002, and in nearby towns. He was not affected, but he points to one of the men he had been talking to and tells us he lost all his property. The modus operandi of these attacks seems to have been that the Muslims would be frightened into leaving their property, which then in their absence was destroyed using explosives (gas tanks for cooking) and fire. He acknowledges that the Adivasis, aboriginal people, were used to perpetrate the violence. The Adivasis, the so-called tribals, live close to forests and traditionally had animistic forms of worship outside the Hindu system. There are many in this region, which is thickly forested and a conservation reserve, and elements among them seem to have been incited with drinks and bribes, and by being convinced that the Muslims were their competitors, to attack them. It was not necessarily a case of neighbours turning against neighbours; but of course they had to look the other way, or else come to help.

  I ask Mehrally Bhai if he is a Sunni Muslim. I don’t know why I do this, but, no, he tells me, he is a Khoja. He is from Kutch, and we begin to speak Kutchi. This is not a Khoja area, though they do travel all over for business purposes. They went all the way to Africa for this reason, and he knows about where I hail from. There is now a bond between the two of us, and we converse like brethren, his language, his manner of speech, so familiar. We are given drinks, and he tells me about Khojas who suffered losses in the area, including his sister. There is a town nearby called Bodeli, where there is a khano and a small community, he says. You should go there.

  What I find remarkable about this accidental meeting and others like it is the easy camaraderie, the trust. Why should Mehrally Bhai want to speak to a snoopy foreigner who’s stepped off the road? I could be a spy. But he’s judged that I’m not a foreigner, my snooping is justified interest.

  As we enter Bodeli, a small but noisy wedding procession is under way in the heat of the afternoon, led by a small decorated flatbed truck carrying a few young men and the sound system. Behind it rides a rather cowed-looking groom on horseback, wearing a suit, his face uncovered, the white horse draped on the face and flanks, and all around on the road are more young men, some playing on drums and tambourines. We ask, as instructed by Mehrally Bhai, for the shop of one Firoz, and somewhat curiously are pointed to a shop across the street. There is a reticence about visitors in the area, it having been deluged by the media after the violence.

  The shop is an all-purpose convenience store: an open window, some feet from the ground and almost the entire breadth of the shop, from which the proprietor supplies daily needs such as matches, packets of tea, soap, oil; a few items hang from the top of the frame. Firoz’s father stands inside, attending to a customer on the sidewalk. The mandatory weighing scale of such establishments sits before him on the counter. And again, it is amazing how simple queries, using the right key words, establishes instant trust even in these suspicious and tense times. He is a quiet man, looks around nervously before replying; his shy smile, which could imply anything, reveals bad and missing tee
th. The family is originally from Kathiawar in the peninsula. No, he says, they did not suffer harm in the recent riot. People in outlying areas did. There were a few Khoja shops up the hill on Pavagadh, but they had been driven away and not allowed back.

  Firoz himself arrives on a motorbike and joins in the conversation. His little daughter, perhaps six, is with him. Soon afterwards he gets back on his bike, his daughter sits in front of him, and—as if this were the most normal thing in the world—he tells me to get on behind him. And away we go, up the hectic street to take her to a private school. The school has been set up by some Patels from overseas. As we drop the girl off, Firoz places a cell phone in her hand.

  The khano is round the corner in a side street, and I go to take a look at it. It is a green, modern box with stucco exterior, solidly locked, carrying no identifying sign.

  Go see the mukhi, Firoz and his father tell me, and off we go by car and motorbike to the mukhi’s house, perhaps a mile away.

  The mukhi runs a pipe factory at his property, which stands by itself, bordered by a wall. In front of the house are rows of concrete irrigation pipes, about a foot in diameter. The family is disappointed that the mukhi has missed us; he is away at a meeting. Perhaps we can stay longer, perhaps we could spend the night? Unfortunately that’s not possible. There is the mukhiani—the mukhi’s wife—their two sons, one daughter-in-law (these three seem to be in their twenties), a little girl, and the mukhi’s brother’s widow, the latter silently tending to the kid and perhaps with a lower status.

  They were attacked, yes. A mob of a few hundred approached the property, but their Hindu neighbours saved them; someone fired a gun.

  Were you scared? I ask, more to gauge the reaction.

  Of course we were, the mukhiani exclaims in surprise. What could we do but pray?

  One Holy Man…Three Contending Shrines

  He puts ashes on himself

  He plays the flute to tame your ear

  But knows not the meaning of jog

  IMAMSHAH

  WHEN I WAS A BOY in colonial Africa, history began and ended with the arrival in Zanzibar and Mombasa of my grandparents or great-grandparents from Gujarat. Beyond that, nothing else mattered, all was myth, and there was only the present. After a few years in North America, I came upon the realization that that ever-present, which had been mine, my story, had itself begun to drift away towards the neglected and spurned stories of my forebears, and I stood at the threshold of becoming a man without history, rootless. And so origins and history became an obsession, both a curse and a thrilling call.

  When I first came to India I did not know my family’s precise origins, what places they came from. These I’ve gradually discovered and intend to visit. There is also another origin, and that is the history of my community of people, the Khojas—how they began. The physical link to that origin, I’ve discovered, are a few shrines, where are buried our holy men, called pirs, whom my Kathiawari Gujarati ancestors followed.

  I was brought up in an Indian mystical, or bhakti, tradition. Every day, we went to a prayer house, called the khano, where we sat on mats and sang at least two hymns, called ginans, in an archaic language that was mostly an old Gujarati, but sometimes Sindhi. We did not always completely understand these ginans, but we knew they were beautiful; they defined our spiritual life and sensibilities. Many of them were about personal salvation of a mystical sort, or about Krishna-devotion, similar in content to the bhajans of the more famous Mira or Kabir, or those of any number of India’s devotional saints. We had two formal recitations of a prayer in the evening that was (until the 1950s) in Kutchi and so difficult to learn that students who recited it in the khano always received a gift. There was also a ritual ginan that was often sung, called the “Das Avatar,” about the ten avatars of Vishnu, one of the three gods of the Indian trinity.

  The ginans, according to their signature lines and according to tradition, were written for their followers by a line of pirs, whose ancestry was Persian Ismaili but who, except for the first one or two, were all born in India. The most prominent and prolific of these pirs, Sadardeen, also went by the name Guru Sahdev and Satguru. He is said to have lived in the fifteenth century and visited Benares. An antecedent of Sadardeen, an Ismaili called Nur Satgur, is said to have arrived in the twelfth century, from Fatimid Cairo, in the liberal and learned court of the Rajput king Jaisingh Siddhraj and made him a disciple. One of Sadardeen’s grandsons was the famous Imamshah, one of whose descendants was Sahaji Sawai, whose grave I had visited in the remains of Mahmud Begada’s capital Champaner, and who may have been related to that sultan.

  Were we Hindu or Muslim? I believe both; some would say neither. But from the late nineteenth century onwards, we had identified ourselves as Ismaili Muslims, followers of the Aga Khans, the first of whom arrived from Persia in that period and declared himself the Ismaili Imam.

  In Gujarat we have been traditionally called the Khojas. Our family names—ending typically with the sound ani—indicate our origins in the Lohana and Bhatia castes of western Gujarat and Kutch. The first names used by our people right up to my grandfathers’ generation were purely Indian, in contrast to the Persian-and Arabic-origin names of typical Muslims, and indeed shared with Hindu communities. Older people among the Hindu Lohanas and even among the Khojas know of the ancestral unity of the two groups. According to the stories told by the Lohanas, their ancestors come from a Kshatriya group who had lived in the north, in the areas occupied by modern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and had migrated to the south in the eleventh or twelfth centuries during the period of massive unrest there. Mythologically, the Lohanas, like other Indian groups, trace their ancestry to a personality from the epics, in their case to Rama through his son Luv.

  The history of the Khojas, except for this connection, is murky, much of it myth and legend. There were no written records until recent times; the earliest handwritten ginan manuscript dates only to the eighteenth century and is of the canonical “Das Avatar.” There has been all the room, therefore, for manoeuvring a history and identity for modern times: forgetting, eliding, rewriting.

  A different process of revisionism is very much in evidence when I visit the shrine of Imamshah, a grandson of Sadardeen, in central Gujarat some ten miles out of Ahmedabad. The context is very much political, in the climate of the day. The BJP is in power in Delhi and, at least according to that party’s politicians and their euphoric pre-election slogans, India is shining.

  Down a paved though narrow and rough road off the Baroda–Ahmedabad highway, after a couple of factories, past extensive wheat fields, comes the village of Giramtha. It is, essentially, about a quarter-mile of road; a sign outside the village put up by the communalist VHP welcomes you if you are a Hindu. Beyond that we see a clock tower, yellow in colour, and soon we have arrived at an elaborate, massive gate, flanked on either side by a life-sized stone statue of a guard wearing a traditional uniform standing beside a lion. This is Pirana, the shrine to Imamshah, grandson of Sadardeen. I was here nine years before but cannot recall the site being so heavily built up. Past the gate, we walk into an unpaved parking area of sorts, though there are no vehicles around, and thence enter the compound of a two-storey hostel-like building. A fair number of people are going in and out. A woman usher in white sari greets us and directs us down a corridor, at the end of which is a heap of removed footwear. We enter a paved compound containing a number of graves of various sizes, some of them large and prominent, in front of a square white building with a dome, which is the mausoleum of Imamshah. The place is active with worshippers, the atmosphere calm, almost torpid; a group of Muslim men, kerchiefs over their heads, stands around one of the larger graves, placing the traditional offering of a chaddar, a coloured cotton sheet, and flowers over it; then, palms open in front of them in the conventional gesture, they whisper their prayers, in Arabic, I presume.

  The mausoleum has the structure of any number of dargahs, burial places of Muslim holy men. A few s
teps lead up to the verandah, which goes all around an inner chamber containing the grave. As in all dargahs, women cannot go inside. On the floor at the top of the steps, on either side of the doorway leading inside, sit two functionaries in white overshirts and trousers, white pandit caps on the head, and before them come to sit the supplicants. I walk past them through to the inner room, removing my socks (my shoes already removed), and come upon three graves overhung with intricately carved and painted canopies supported on silvered wooden posts. An odour of incense and perfume hangs in the air. Behind the graves, in the centre, burns an old wick lamp. Imamshah’s grave is the middle one, on his left is that of one of his sons, and to his right that of his wife. All three graves are heaped with flowers and chaddars, and at the heads of the two men’s graves have been placed crowns wrought of a dark metal, most likely silver.

  What do I feel here, at this shrine of a holy man, a pir, whose ginans I can quote? Whose wanderings I had only imagined before, with all the distant reality of the comic book “classics” of a child? At any dargah, a shrine of this kind, and even at a temple before a priest, I cannot help but allow in me a solemn feeling, some respect and humility, for I stand alongside others in a symbolic place that in some manner reflects human existence and frailty, our smallness and exaltedness, and our striving for understanding. I cannot beg for a favour, as others do, as I might have done in another life that is long gone. Here stands a rational, a rationalized being who is acquainted with spiritual longing but cannot yield to it.

  But this place is particularly special, because it connects me historically; I stand before a physical memento, a memorial over the buried remains of a personality who influenced and preserved the lives of my ancestors for generations in this part of the world. In some strange manner I feel I have a claim to the place that I have not felt elsewhere. My bearing, the quick confidence in my step, says so, and I am surprised at myself.