A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  Of all this splendour, it is melancholy to relate, hardly a vestige remains. The relics of Anhilvada lie in a flat country within and around the walls of the modern city of Patan…six centuries and the fury of the Mohammedans have done their work…. [A]nd the poor cold ashes of Anhilvada are sold for a pitiful gain by her vulgar Maratha lords, ignorant as they are alike of her glory and of their own dishonour.

  Now Patan is a small, dusty market town in a flat, arid landscape. The once-famed Sahasralinga Talav, the water tank with a thousand Shiva lingams, is a forlorn rectangular basin amidst a grove of small trees, with a few structures outside, a few inside. There is not another visitor in sight as we walk about its edges, our driver waiting impatiently for us, having given only a cursory glance at the object of our interest. The tank was built by Jaisingh Siddhraj. The king is said to have become enamoured of a beautiful woman of the low-caste Oduns who had excavated the tank, and when he pursued her as she tried to escape, she plunged a dagger into her belly, putting a curse on his tank. The tank dried up, and the curse was lifted only upon the sacrifice of an outcaste Dhed. The Rani ni Vav is another ancient ruin here, but more intact. It is a step-well of several storeys and elaborate structure, so intricately carved that there’s not an inch that is not a piece of art. Some of the carved female figures are also preserved, the sense of perfect beauty embodied in them—the curvaceous body, the round, tight breasts, the long, sharp nose, the wide-drawn eyes, and the provocation in the mouth—truly awesome. There are a few city gates left from ancient times, but not a trace of the royal palace, the houses of the nobles, the fortresses. To see what these might have looked like, Forbes advises us to look at the few ruins in some of the other cities.

  The town is perhaps better known now for the hand-operated looms that make the famous weave called Patan Patola, using silk threads and natural dyes derived from plants, minerals, and insects. These enterprises are run by a few old families, known as the Salvis, brought from south India centuries before. A line I was taught to sing, to say that the body may break but the devotion of the faithful will not yield—“Paadi, paadi patole bhaat-re, teto faate parn-re fite nahi, ho-ji” (“The patola will tear, but its print will not fade”)—is also, I see to my great surprise, pasted on a board in the factory which we visit. It is a modest enterprise, one or two looms operating, the dyes or raw materials kept in small bottles. The Patola saris, with their intricate designs, often using a lot of red and black, take days to finish, and the clientele of this humble-looking establishment is worldwide. You could not give a bride—or bring home for your wife—a better present than a Patola sari.

  Thus Patan, which I had been craving to visit. Only scraps to see. A sobering discovery. There is nothing else to keep us here. We head west, towards Jamnagar on the Gulf of Kutch, in the Arabian Sea.

  The land is hot and dry, with little cultivation on the way; trees sometimes shading the quiet road; camels, cows, trucks. Often on such journeys, between places, there comes a numbness in the mind, for the places we have visited cannot but leave their echoes behind. Inevitably there are questions, regrets—perhaps we should have tarried. But there is not enough time. We are pinned by our reservations, on trains, on planes. There is never enough time.

  A short distance west of Patan we stop at the Sun Temple of Modhera, built by the Solanki king Bhimdev in the early eleventh century, before the reign of Siddhraj, and akin to the Sun Temple at Konark in Orissa. The Modhera complex consists of a rectangular water reservoir called the Surya Kund, which leads up to an unattached mandap, directly before the temple, all three built of red sandstone and aligned with one another. The domes of the temple and mandap are missing, though the rest of the buildings stand almost intact, solid on the ground and exquisitely carved. The steps of the surya kund, along all its four sides, are relieved with small shrines placed along them at regular intervals, and aligned so as to form a checkered pattern, and in addition to these, larger, spired shrines stand at the centres of three sides.

  This site is used to hold festivals, but all is quiet as we walk around.

  Further on our way we stop at a place called Becharaji, known for its famous Kali temple. Praying to the goddess (in the form of Bechar Mata) at this temple is believed to cure ailments. Numerous people are about, the road in leads through a gauntlet of stalls, the atmosphere as festive as that of a country fair, loud religious music playing over the loudspeakers. Vendors converge upon us, holding out little aluminum squares impressed with the shapes of human body parts; you pick the one that represents the diseased or aching part of your body to take as your offering to the temple. I will learn later that this tradition is relatively modern and may even have been imported from overseas. Ever the agnostic, I cannot resist participating in ritual, and buy an impression of two legs for the sake of my knees.

  Outside the temple, in a large covered mandap, some priests conduct a ritual over a havan, a holy fire, blessing a harvest. The temple itself is multicoloured in oil paint, with an imposing porched entrance, and does not look ancient. It was in fact built—presumably on an older site—by Sayajirao, the maharaja of Baroda, in whose domain this region, Mehsana, was located. Inside the temple, we find Bechar Mata, plump, surrounded by flowers, sitting on the back of an elephant.

  An interesting story is told regarding this temple. When the sultan of Delhi, Alauddin Khilji, attacked the area in the thirteenth century, informers told him about the wealthy temple of Kali at Becharaji. He dispatched there a contingent of his army, presumably to loot and destroy. Some of his soldiers, seeing the goddess’s chickens in the grounds, summarily slaughtered and ate them. At night, however, these chickens tore at the bellies of the slumbering soldiers and emerged alive and clucking. Alauddin’s commander was duly impressed, and he departed, leaving the temple unharmed.

  Alauddin Khilji himself never came to Gujarat, of course. But his name as the conqueror is still remembered seven hundred years on.

  I come out of the temple hoping the best for my knees.

  There is another small temple to Kali at the side of the main one. It is sacred to everyone, of course, but especially to the pavayas, the eunuchs. There are three of them about, calling to us, one of them slim, long-faced, and pretty, wearing a black dress patterned with yellow flowers and a stud in the nose; he seems about thirty. Of the other two, one seems fifty or thereabouts, says he came here forty-five years ago; and the third one is old and wrinkled, silent. If you give them money, they bless you to produce boys. These pavayas were presented to Kali, or the temple, as young boys, when the “call” came for them. The pretty one had no parents when called. Perhaps the boys are consecrated when they arrive, perhaps abused. They brazenly ask us for money, of course—it seems to be expected of them—in their typical teasing, mischievous manner. Give us some American or Japanese coins, the pretty one says, moving his head from side to side, flashing a smile, eyes atwinkle. This is their public life, a performance—calling out to the people, clapping hands sharply in the characteristic manner of their kind.

  What usually gives pavayas away is the slightly overdressed and overmade-up look to them, the false jewellery. The younger one is dressed this way, but if I did not already know otherwise I would swear the older two were just ordinary women.

  The story about this little temple (which is essentially a stall), through which an ancient tree grows, is that once in ancient times two local kings took vows that their expected children would be married to each other. Unfortunately both children were born girls. One of the kings decided to mislead the other and ever since her birth dressed his child as a boy. The wedding day approached. Someone discovered the groom’s secret and reported it to the bride’s father, whose wedding party then demanded that the purported boy be seen undressed before the ceremonies proceeded. Meanwhile the child, upon passing the site of the temple, where there was a spring at the time, saw a bitch bathe in it and emerge a dog; a female horse similarly turned into a male one. And so the princess took a dip
in the spring and came out a prince and was happily married.

  Bhajans of the Kathiawari style blare out from speakers in the long line of stalls outside the temple gate; the food stalls display colourful mounds of gathias, jelebis, bhajias freshly removed from the fryers. We buy gathias for some children and an old woman and sit down and have our own meal. Then we depart, one Ashok Goswami blaring out of our tape deck.

  The dhabas on the way are simple shacks with charpais in front to sit on, or sticky tables and wobbly chairs and benches inside. Outside, a standpipe sometimes for a wash, a car or truck parked. Tea is instantly made fresh on smoky stoves, with minimal tea and plenty of sugar. The fare consists of rich paranthas, vegetable curries, and here in Kathiawar, the specialty, looking so homely—the bajra (millet) roti, a thick, grey, and granular version of the usual refined wheat roti that only a Gujarati can consume. When I was young bajra roti (called rotlo, perhaps because of its masculine coarseness) was the poor man’s bread, which you had with a simple curry or even just yogurt. You could make a laddoo with it, after mixing it with green garlic and ghee, to have with yogurt. We did not like it. My mother would say that when she was little the wheat-flour white roti was so exceptional a treat in her home in Mombasa that the children, and they were plentiful, would cry out in joy when it was available. Now the grey, unwieldy bajra roti is a delicacy. The children still don’t like it. Here the dhaba serves it with an oily, spicy curry of a simple vegetable, eggplant or squash perhaps, and the local kadhi, the tangy curry made with mustard seed and yogurt, thickened with chickpea flour, which is drinkable and quite different from the dumpling-filled thick Punjabi karhi of the north.

  As we approach Jamnagar we see devout-looking Muslim young men walking beside the road outside some of the towns, dressed in long white robes and caps, bearded, and holding Qurans or readers in their hands. I recall having been to a Khoja village outside Jamnagar some years before, and so we stop and ask some of these men if there are any Khojas in the area. We are outside a village called Dhroll, and the young men, returning from a Muslim school, a Dar-ul-ulum, tell us, yes, there are some Khojas here.

  We turn in to Dhroll, a rather drab-looking place with broken dirt roads, garbage heaps, and very modest shops and houses. What do people do in such a place? They perhaps go to the city to work, or sell things from handcarts on the road; and they service local needs. We ask around about the Khojas and are pointed to a small paan stall. Again the simple trust, the familiarity. The young man behind the window treats us each to a paan at once and directs us up the busy street. People stop to gape at us. Finally we arrive at a small but busy shop selling small grocery items through the open front. We sit or stand outside and chat with the Khoja owner sitting on the ground at the doorway, who tells us there are some hundred people in the community here. Presently a man comes strolling by, having heard we are in the town. He is the local kamadia, the assistant Khoja headman, and he walks us to his home, which is reached through a small alley.

  The front yard of the house is strewn with metal junk, car parts and the like, attended to by a young Muslim in a beard. Some substantial business evidently goes on here, explaining the high local status of the head of the house. But the house, a suite of rooms side by side, is modest and dark and cluttered. There are a few women about and a man. I am told that all the Khojas in the town are of the Somani clan. I recall that the name comes from the Sanskrit, referring to the soma juice and also to the moon. A girl has recently got married, will soon be off to Kinshasa with her husband. Kinshasa, despite the bloody situation in the Congo, seems to be the new Eldorado, the frontier; people have also gone to Maputo, in Mozambique, and Kampala. All these places in Africa were recently devastated and are in need of small entrepreneurs. When I was in Nairobi once, I was told about such entrepreneurs, who were introducing simple items like soap in Uganda after the ravages of Idi Amin. A hundred years ago, Zanzibar was the Eldorado for enterprising Gujaratis from the peninsula escaping a dreadful famine; they went also to Mombasa, Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam. One of the women here is on a visit from the village of Khoja Gaum, which I now recognize as the town I had visited nine years before. It is on the other side of Jamnagar.

  I am taken now inside a room to meet a hundred-year-old woman. The exact number of her years is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. She lies in her bed against a wall, a shrivelled little woman with a deeply worked small face, extremely fair. Ma’s brother died four months and a few days ago, I am told. Much to my astonishment, I am also informed she has been to Dar es Salaam, was in Zanzibar during the war, though she can’t tell me which one, and no one else knows. She returned here after her husband died. My hosts ask me to say something in the African language of “there,” to humour her, and to their delight I say, “Jambo, Ma,” a simple “How are you?” in Swahili. “Ma, did you hear him? Say something in reply,” the kamadia says. Remarkably, she’s heard me and answers faintly, with a surprised look on her face, “Jambo,” and explains to the others what it means. It’s made their day. After all the stories of Africa she must have told them, now an authentication, walked in from the blue—or the dust, as it were.

  We depart for Jamnagar, walking through an ancient stone gate on the way that, we are told, partly crumbled in the earthquake of 2001.

  A couple of years later I read in a history of Gujarat that this obscure little town of the Somanis was where in 1592 the last independent sultan of Gujarat, as a captive of the Mughals following a campaign of resistance, alighted from his horse, went behind a tree, and slit his own throat.

  If Jamnagar was the Indian city name I heard most often as a child (besides Bombay) this is hardly surprising when I see it. Parts of it bear an uncanny resemblance to the Indian section of downtown Dar es Salaam when I was growing up. The low buildings, the tiled roofs on the older ones, the casement windows, the oil-painted green shutters and frames, the assorted shops—paan, snacks, tires, newspapers, a barber, a shoemaker. The names on the shops—Lakhani Shoes, Lalji Virji, Bhatia Stores, Rawji Jetha. And the easy pace of life in a city by the sea. All this is enough to make me nostalgic, imagine a boyhood here, traipsing off to school early in the morning, like the kids I now see on the sidewalks, or to khano in the evening. The only visible difference would be that I’d be swinging a satchel in my hand, while these kids carry backpacks. In Dar es Salaam, the buildings have been mostly torn down or reconstructed to produce ugly structures; streets are chaotic during the day and quiet at night. Here, before me, there is the typical Indian touch: bicycle and scooter, horse-drawn cart, Ambassador car, old bus, all in a row on the road. And in the manner of Indian cities, the streets are more chaotic at dusk, and brightly lit, when people come out to shop for groceries and other essentials.

  The city was founded following a family feud in the royal house of Kutch, the region across the narrow strait from it. In 1535, Jam Rawal (“jam” meaning prince or king), having murdered an elder of the ruling clan, rather than fight his nephew (or cousin) who had sought assistance from the Mughal viceroy in Ahmedabad, crossed the strait into Kathiawar. This, according to a history of Kutch by James Burns, first published in 1839 and reissued in 2004. Five years after the crossing, the Jam founded the city of Navanagar, meaning “New City,” which was renamed Jamnagar in the early twentieth century. The Jam, descended according to Burns from Rajput Muslims, though he was a Hindu, brought with him many families. This would explain why many people from this area, including my family, are bilingual, easily switching between Kutchi and Gujarati. Among the places conquered by the Jam was the town of Dhroll, which we visited on our way.

  One of the greatest players ever of cricket was Ranjitsinhji (1872–1933), called Ranji, from Jamnagar’s royal house. Starting out as a student at Cambridge, he played for both England and Sussex, his career lasting from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It has been said, and often quoted, somewhat vaguely, that “when he batted, a strange light was seen for the first time on English fields.
” The Ranji Trophy, much coveted in India, is named after him.

  It turns out that the hotel owners where we are staying are Muslims whose family came over to Saurashtra, or Kathiawar, with the Jam, and they speak Kutchi at home. Not only that, they have run dhows between Gujarat and East Africa for many decades; the business is still in operation, though now they carry only cargo and use an engine as well as the usual sail.

  The young man who speaks to us, together with his father in the office, is in his twenties and intelligent and eloquent. He offers to take us to look at an old dhow being repaired. After about half an hour’s drive, at a rather quiet part of the coast, we are welcomed by a short, dark, muscular man, with the weathered, scruffy face of an old sea dog. The dhow is nearby, and not very large. Painted black and white, with a gold streak, it stands propped up with logs on a patch of shore from where the sea water has been drained. We follow the captain up a wooden ladder to the deck of the ship, clamber down into the hold. As we sit on makeshift benches, the captain orders tea, which comes in a kettle and is served black. The ship’s hull is in the process of being repaired with new wood. The front has been cut away, and the sides will be extended to lengthen the ship from roughly forty to sixty feet. Where we sit, the owner’s son tells us, is where the passengers would have been quartered for the duration of the voyage in olden times. The ship hands all speak Kutchi.

  In such a dhow my paternal great-grandfather, Nanji Lalji, went to Mombasa, then proceeded to the interior of what is now Kenya. He settled in a trading village called Kibwezi and became the local mukhi. My maternal grandparents went to Zanzibar some years later. The journey would have taken about two weeks, and as far as I know, as for most other migrants, it was a one-way trip—though some men did return to marry, and they returned in style, newly wealthy. The old dhows were carried back and forth by the trade winds. The young man’s father told us that pot makers (the kumbhad) would depart with their clay pots in little boats and let the trade winds take them to the East African coast, where they would sell their wares and return to Gujarat when the winds reversed. But many of the kumbhad did emigrate, and in Dar es Salaam they had their own settlement, or wadi, where as children we would go and buy clay from them to make models for school projects. Some of their descendants are now mechanics.