A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  1. The Mohammedan

  Your next driver is a Mohammedan, I am told by the long-legged youth bringing me back from Champaner. I did not know the term was in use any longer anywhere in the world, it sounds medieval, but in Gujarat, much to my surprise, it is current. The Mohammedan driver turns out to be one Sharif Bhai, a middle-aged man (a surprising contrast to the near-teenagers I have had before) who lost his home during the violence and lives in the Tandelja area of Baroda with his brother-in-law. His house was gutted and even his safes were mutilated, he complains forcefully. It’s the latter offence that irks him more. He seems rather dense at times but knows his way around the state because he used to drive a “luxury” (a tour bus) for ten years, and he takes Raj Kumar and me to a few more places of interest in Kathiawar. The frequency of his swearing increases the more he gets to know us. His taste in hotels runs to dharamshalas, in the search for which, once at Somnath, he lands us in a ditch; and he has a predilection for stopping at the worst eating places. As soon as we’ve eaten some tasteless food at a desolate dhaba, we drive past restaurants bustling with custom. He acknowledges with a kiss of the hand and touch to the forehead any roadside shrine we pass.

  2. The African Indians

  Jambur is a village in the back of beyond, almost at the end of a coastal road from Somnath. The town just before is Sasan, and already here we see the presence of the Sidis—a few young men sitting at a roundabout (it’s Sunday), a man in the pilot seat of a tempo full of people. And as we proceed further along an old and narrow road, we know we are in Sidi territory. So as not to seem inquisitive—which is what we are—and rude, we ask for a dargah, a shrine; there’s bound to be one.

  We head off towards where we are directed, and come to a green and white building, people walking in and out the courtyard through a gate. A “maanta” is in progress, we are informed, and we throw off our shoes and hurry into the courtyard. A crowd has gathered, through which African-looking boys run chasing each other. In the middle of the crowd a black goat wearing a garland of marigolds and roses is being prodded towards the dargah entrance by a Sidi man. The majority of the people are not Sidis, however; they have come from outside with a maanta, a prayer to be answered and offerings for the pir, Hazrat Nagarchi Baba, who is buried here. Now the doorway to the mausoleum is crowded with women offering prayers to him, while outside the reluctant goat is being cajoled towards the steps. If the goat goes up, the pleaders’ desires will be fulfilled, the maanta will have been accepted. But this goat refuses to budge. A young boy pushes it with some violence and is scolded.

  Four black men appear at the outside gate, two playing drums, one, who is blind, playing a flute, all smiling and laughing. An old black woman among the bystanders begins to dance by herself, in slow and understated but very deliberate motions. The fourth man, who is without an instrument, also begins to dance; as he does so, making leaps and bounds, he collects money from the people, snatching bills in his mouth, handing them to one of the drummers, who seems to be the leader. People give money to their kids, from whom this young man accepts them; if the child is small, he picks it up, dances with it. Some people now place bills on the ground, which with a somersault the dancer snatches in his mouth, hands them to the leader.

  The drumbeat is loud, the compound now packed with people.

  A small white goat is pushed in through the gate, washed at the taps, garlanded. It steps up to the mausoleum.

  We learn that the goats will be slaughtered and eaten. A young man sits down to chat with us outside the gate on a stone bench. His name is Abdulrazak, his family is from Junagadh, and he is doing his FYBA at a college in Veraval. What’s that? First-year B.A.

  3. Ghadiali Bawa—The Pir of the Clocks

  Sharif Bhai our driver brings us back to Baroda through Rajkot. On the way we treat ourselves to Kathiawari cuisine: bajra rotlo, bhinda, daal, bateta, khichdi, and papad. Later the driver stops at a place at a highway junction which he says makes the best burfi in Gujarat. Gujaratis living in America buy kilos of it to take back. And so we buy a couple of pounds.

  The final stop before we reach Baroda in the night is the roadside dargah of Ghadiali Bawa. It’s dark and raining, the traffic heavy, headlights hurtling past reflecting off the tarmac. The shrine is modest, open at the sides, consisting of a green latticed fence around a grave. Above, in a haze of incense, hangs a tube light, and still higher, from the beams under the corrugated metal ceiling hang a few square and many round clocks of all sizes; in their midst a framed photo of a bearded man, the Bawa. You can buy garlands and such to place on the grave, but many people give clocks. Some of them have been placed on shelves further from the grave. This Bawa is a favourite of taxi and truck drivers—perhaps because they work to time, in a sense they live by it.

  4. And on and on, this endless quest. Dholera, Jaffarabad, Somnath, Karimabad, Rajkot, Siddhpur, Bharuch, Navsari, Sarkhej, Godhra…Dholera, once upon a time a thriving port that boasted eighty thousand souls; now with a mere three thousand. Its harbour silted up, and the once-elegant, now tottering wooden houses tell the tale of its demise. A solitary Khoja family plies its vegetable trade and has its own private shrine. We can’t refuse to share a meal. Jaffarabad, a thriving fishing village of picture-postcard beauty. The young Khoja mukhi begs us to spend the night, but we can’t. Somnath, a late-night arrival, when Sharif Bhai through sheer obstreperousness runs into a ditch. Karimabad, a Khoja colony in a large city, guarded by two vicious dogs; the friendly retainer at the gate lets me in quickly enough, tells me to go to the khano, but confesses a niggling doubt to Raj Kumar, who is waiting outside, that my beard looks somewhat Christian to him. Rajkot, the great city where I once spent only a few hours, and another time missed an appointment I needed to keep. Siddhpur, the ancient and lively city where a wedding procession is on when we enter, a uniformed band playing at the main intersection and a young man lip-synching to an old film song; sitting in the verandah of a house, some Momins tell me the story of their banishment here by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (for heresy, what else). Bharuch, once a great port, now famous for the peanuts sold outside. Navsari, where a Hindu group (if labels mean anything in the context) worship a medieval Ismaili missionary in a modest temple; a ginan book lies open on a podium; the furtive priest says they have to worship with some caution. Sarkhej, a great complex with marvellous buildings, containing the tombs of Mahmud Begada and the Sufi Ahmed Khattu. It’s hot, and the marble floors burn our bare feet. Godhra, the tinderbox that set off the Gujarat violence; I visit three schools, feel much apprehension, see some hope, and fear.

  In East Africa my community and other Indians, mostly Gujaratis, were scattered around similarly, sometimes a family or two to a village or town. Thus, endlessly: Babati, Mengo, Tororo, Mpwapwa, Songea, Singida, Kilosa, Lamu, Machakos, Kibwezi…We were a small minority, sometimes fearful. My ancestor Nanji Lalji left from Gadhada for Africa. Did he know, I wonder, that the Sidis living nearby were from that same part of Africa he was heading for?

  Kerala: The Goddess’s Footprint

  Everything there is different from what it is with us and excels both in size and beauty. They have no fruit the same as ours, no beast, no bird. This is a consequence of the extreme heat. They have no grain excepting only rice…. All that a human body needs for its living is to be had in profusion and very cheap with the one exception of grain other than rice.

  MARCO POLO

  The Malabar Coast

  Three days later we reached the land of Mulaybar [Malabar], which is the pepper country. It extends for two months’ journey along the coast from Sandabur [Goa] to Kawlam [Quilon]. The road over the whole distance runs beneath the shade of trees, and at every half-mile there is a wooden shed with benches on which all travellers, whether Muslims or infidels, may sit…. On this road…there is not a foot of ground but is cultivated.

  IBN BATTUTA (1304–1368)

  THE VEGETATION IS GLORIOUSLY TROPICAL and the sea is never far off in Kerala. The p
eople are polite and reserved—proud, is their own description—and the houses are beautifully painted in shades of blue, green, and pink, many of them with the traditional red-tiled sloping roofs. There is a sense of the small here, and a slower pace, yet any shopping area in the evening is as busy and noisy as anywhere else in the country. In the capital, Trivandrum, prominently facing each other at a busy intersection next to the university stand a mosque, a temple, and a church, a coexistence that is emblematic of the state’s cordial diversity. It is pointed out to me with a barely suppressed pride. At the beach, fishermen and-women, of strikingly beautiful and unusual dark brown complexion, sell their catch next to their boats; groups of men play cards further away; and women sell tea under an ancient stone pavilion once used by the royal family. A persistent rolling sound on a busy street suggests to me balls or some other soft objects bouncing about in a closed box; when I inquire, it is identified for me, much to my embarrassment, as a voice on a loudspeaker reciting lottery numbers in a musical, typically southern voice. It all feels wonderfully foreign, yet, equally wonderfully, not quite so. This is still India.

  Elsewhere in India, in the north, it is the people and language, the sight and sound of a place—a residential neighbourhood in Delhi or a street in Jamnagar—that have reminded me of the East Africa of my childhood. Here, it is the balmy salty air and the trees: the groves of coconut palms waving in the breeze, the banana stands, the mango giving shade to a house. Standing at the beach I cannot help but throw a glance out across the ocean, half expecting that other homeland to loom distantly in the mist. It was from there that the first European had arrived at this shore in India, brought across the ocean by two Indian guides soon after Columbus’s blunder and discovery of America. And speaking of people and distant connections, I’ve realized after coming to Kerala that some of the Indian teachers at my school—a string of Thomases, Johns, and others—were in fact Keralan Christians.

  They say of Kerala that it’s the gods’—and perhaps also, for the monotheists, God’s—country, and they boast a 100 per cent literacy rate. Book and magazine stores abound, selling mostly Malayalam literature, which is impressive. The communists are often in power, but there is a free economy, and during my later visits the effects of the current economic boom are evident. Among the newly affluent, I am told, weddings can draw two thousand or more guests, and the gold passing hands is measured in kilos. The dowry custom persists among all the three major religious groups. There are churches everywhere, though the recent upsurge of Christian evangelism is a cause of some resentment. The population is 21 per cent Christians, 25 per cent Muslims, and the rest Hindus. During my first trip, a nationwide leftist student congress was in progress and there were the red flags and banners of protest everywhere on the main highway leading out of Trivandrum. As I write this, in Cochin, some two thousand Christian college students have gathered out-side my hotel to protest a contentious government measure. They include both men and women, some chanting, many bearing flags, and all shepherded by their teachers, priests and nuns in cassocks and habits. This is a highly politicized state, and that goes with the literacy. At such a rally the typical Keralan reserve seems to yield a little.

  The thin stretch of palm-fringed land along the Arabian Sea in the southwest called Kerala forms but 1 per cent of India’s land mass. To the east, on the other side of the Western Ghats, lies Tamil Nadu, with which it shares a common ancient Dravidian past. The region of Kerala comprised in ancient times a number of small independent kingdoms that were all part of a larger South Indian Dravidian culture. The name itself (pronounced “Kair-al-ah” by the natives) means, according to one version of its origin, the land of the coconut. Another version has the region named after the Cheras, kings who ruled this narrow strip in ancient times, from a few centuries BC to the ninth century. The early history of that rule is cloaked in legend. In later centuries, the southern kingdoms on the coast were consolidated into Travancore, its capital Trivandrum; to its north was another kingdom, Cochin, and further north, Malabar, which included the cities of Calicut and Canganore. By the time the British ruled India, Travancore and Cochin had joined the ranks of the Indian princely states—ruled by local dynasties but under British protection and dominance—and Malabar was part of the Madras Presidency, ruled directly by the East India Company, and later the British government. Kerala obtained statehood in its present political and geographic form in 1956, made up essentially of these three territories.

  Kerala’s language, Malayalam, like Tamil, is Dravidian, and at first encounter sounds as different from the North Indian family of languages as Swahili. But its vocabulary is heavily influenced by the northern Sanskrit, and it takes only a little tutoring to discern the Sanskrit-based words: puram (pura), dasan (dasa), thiru (shree). Malayalam and Tamil have similar-looking scripts, both from the same family as Devanagari, in which Hindi and related northern languages are written, though this is far from obvious to the uninitiated eye. The ancient Brahminism of the Aryan Vedas was native to the north of the subcontinent and did not penetrate much to the south. Jainism and Buddhism both thrived here in ancient times, believed to have arrived from the north in the third century BC during the period of the Maurya empire, which extended all across India except a small portion at the southernmost tip. Statues of Jain Tirthankaras and the Buddha continue to be discovered to this day in rural areas of Kerala, sometimes standing in for Hindu deities. Hinduism arrived with the emigration of Brahmins from the north. It was in the eighth century AD that it properly took hold, and by the ninth century the other two faiths had almost vanished from the land. Many of the old Hindu temples are believed to have been Jain and Buddhist in origin. The great synthesizer of Hindu philosophy, Shankaracharya, was born in Kerala, though presumably of northern ancestry.

  Facing the Arabian Sea in the west, Kerala has since ancient times had seafaring contact with other lands across the ocean—Greece, Rome, Arabia, and China. From the fifteenth century onwards, the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, in that order, successfully rounding the formidable Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s tip, arrived on its shores and dominated the region. Islam had already arrived by the eighth century, brought soon after the death of Muhammad by the Arab merchants already trading on the coast, at a time when, interestingly, Hinduism was still taking hold. Thus the advent of Islam in Kerala is remarkably different from its arrival in northern India. Sufism, though present, was never a big force as it was in the north.

  Christianity, according to legend, was brought by the Apostle Saint Thomas, who landed in 52 AD, near the town of Muziris; in the fourth century arrived a group of Christians from Syria, giving rise to the distinct group of Syrian Christians of Kerala. There is a tiny community of Jews left in Kerala; they could have come here very early, and travellers through the centuries have commented on the existence of Jewish communities, but details of their arrival vary. The synagogue in Cochin is from the sixteenth century.

  This unusual provenance of its several faiths—Christianity and Judaism predating Hinduism proper, an Arab presence predating the advent of Islam—and the arrival of diverse peoples upon its shores must surely have contributed to the more accepting attitude among the Keralans. For one thing, there is no single villain to easily point to. Indeed for many southerners it is the northerners who are the villains. The communal strifes of the north, therefore, do not hit Kerala with the same savagery, if they do at all. On the other hand, the viciousness of Kerala’s traditional caste system has been noted in the past by many travellers. The great reformer Vivekananda, passing through the region in the early twentieth century, called it a “madhouse of caste.”

  Immediately after my arrival in Trivandrum, once, I receive a phone call in my room. A very warm and rich voice welcomes me with familiarity. It is the doyen of Malayali literature, K. Ayyappa Paniker. A little more than a year ago, upon hearing that I edited a literary magazine, he called me from Boston and told me about the Oriya poet Jayanta Mahapatra. Since then I ha
ve had the opportunity to visit Mahapatra at his home, and met a man as graceful as his sinuously beautiful poetry, which I published, along with an article by Paniker on the great Malayali novelist Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. I meet Paniker the following day at his office. He has recently retired from the local university and is compiling a Malayali contribution to a national project on the Indian literatures. He is a short dark man with a milk-white beard and a wide toothy grin, and surprisingly (I was expecting a South Indian professor in a grey suit) is attired in a black shirt over a traditional white dhoti, with slippers. He has a wonderfully understated humour, delivered in his low voice and easy manner of speech, keeping me on constant guard against his meanings. (Complaining about Indian typesetters: “If they can’t find a letter, they will substitute another…after all, there are all of twenty-six letters to choose from.”) Tongue always in cheek, eyes twinkling, and a mysterious man, too, difficult to know even after several meetings. A Keralan trait. It takes me some years to discover that this man, who looks like a pilgrim, completed his graduate work in the United States, in Indiana, and is a modernist poet in English of no mean stature. And yet he is constantly promoting other writers, never attempts to press his own publications upon me, a tendency very much present in the north. He has a much younger, though not very glamorous-looking, woman assisting him on his project, the mention of whom brings smiles of tolerant understanding among his admirers. During one of my visits he invites me to see his village in the famous Kerala backwaters, and to meet Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, who comes from the same area as he does.

  My guide in Trivandrum is Hussein, who first brought me on a two-day train journey across the subcontinent to this city on my first visit. He is a student of Michael Ondaatje, who, he is convinced, has based one of his books on the life of the playback singer Muhammad Rafi. His one ambition is to make it to Canada on one of those fellowships that entice scholars to study Canada. One has the impression with him of a life burdened by a limited village background, a traditional family, and responsibility for growing children, with an underpaid job in a drab college in a small town. But he has this one ambition for a shot at excitement and freedom, to elaborate his thesis on Ondaatje’s book while visiting faraway Canada—to rise above his poor Muslim background just this once and be somebody in the wide world. The contrast between him and the better-placed academics from wealthier backgrounds is touching.