by M G Vassanji
Buses blaring their horns, grinding their way along highways that were streets once, through towns that were villages, racing back and forth past each other. Even over long distances it’s standing room only, and more difficult getting off than getting on, because you work against a clamouring incoming tide. One understands overpopulation in such a setting—town upon town thronged with people. Poor fishing villages with large new structures built with Gulf money from émigrés working abroad—mosques, houses, a brick factory along the beach. New Muslim houses tend to use arches where they can, and sometimes boast a decorative crescent and star; Hindu houses seem more square. These are pointed out to me by Hussein on our way to Allepey from Varkala, the urban centre near his village. We pass a village that seems more together than most, more residential, less split apart by the highway and attendant business; less crowded. Here, my friend tells me, the Muslims have a matrilineal system; their neighbours are Nairs, who traditionally have the same system. The Muslims must have converted, I say. He is reluctant to admit that, says they just copied their neighbours. I point out to him that Muslims don’t drop fully formed from the sky, they grow from the same soil.
There is a certain reluctance to speak about Muslim conversion (as there is among Hindus to talk about caste). It’s like a family secret. Yet the outward manifestations of Muslim-ness I’ve been shown here are so few. No salaam alaykum, no cap, no beard. No sign of Arabic script. Their kids’ names—Sophia, Sonia, Sarin, Suja—are hardly the traditional Muslim names, which, Hussein tells me, are considered old-fashioned. I get a sense of an identity without root, a certain insecurity.
If Keralan reserve extends to the Muslims keeping mum about who exactly they are, the literature about them is also essentially uninformative. One imagines the Keralan Muslims as different and detached from the North Indian Muslims, with whom they share only a little of language and literature, roots and history. The northerner is associated, directly or otherwise, with the religious traditions of Iran and Afghanistan. He is linked—in my opinion, often very dubiously—to the conquering Turks and Mughals, and can point to the monuments and shrines among which he lives, and the poetry and music of high culture and draw real or fanciful pride from them. The Keralan Muslim has little of that calibre to point to; the Muslims had a very strong commercial and seafaring presence in Kerala but produced no court culture. Perhaps here lies the root of the embarrassed silence. I interpret, of course.
M. Mujeeb’s tome The Indian Muslims spares but two lines for the Keralan. The old, detailed, though flawed survey by Murray Titus, Islam in India and Pakistan, gives them a paragraph, only to illustrate their backwardness and fanaticism, referring to a revolt of 1921. The eminent Aziz Ahmad’s Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment has not even a word. These are all books from the north.
A good number of Keralan Muslims are descended from a mix of the early Arab merchants and local Keralans; others are descended from those who converted. A caste system of sorts has also existed, the fisherfolk and barbers, for example, lower down on the ladder. Keralans of the Brahmin and Nair castes are also known to have converted.
The term “Mappila,” or “Moplah,” has been used to describe Keralan Muslims. Unfortunately the exact definition of the term is elusive; it is sometimes used to refer to the earliest Keralan Muslims, but then slithers into a vagueness defining all of them, and one learns that there are also Mappila Christians. The Keralan Muslims have been associated with a martial tradition (as have some of the Christians) and a certain element of militancy, which gave rise to the “Moplah Rebellion” of 1921 in the northern parts of the state. One of the main causes of the “rebellion,” which lasted six months to a year and involved more than a million people, is said to have been poverty.
I can not imagine a less militant group than that of Hussein and his friends from Varkala.
We arrive at the bus station in Allepey, where my local host, a young college teacher called Rajan, picks me up and Hussein says goodbye and returns to Varkala. I get on behind Rajan on his motorbike and we head off to his suburban house; on the way we wait for a temple procession with an elephant to pass. Rajan is a Brahmin with two young children, and that evening at his house there is shyness all around. English is our common language; but that’s an exaggeration, for English in Kerala can sound foreign if you are not used to it.
The next morning Rajan and I go to Kavalam, Paniker’s village, by boat.
Like Venice—with which it’s been compared, Rajan tells me—the Allepey district is full of canals that connect inland lakes and are used for rural travelling. We take one of the boats, which function like buses on a rural route, transporting people to and from their villages. Hardly Venice, but beautiful all the same.
There are paddy fields on either side of us. We pass a few modest houses and shacks. Occasionally, men and women washing themselves on the banks; it’s an art to do so without exposing oneself. In India sometimes, after the throngs and bustle of the city, filled with life to the brim, one yearns to escape into solitude. This boat ride through a quiet tropical paradise is a wonderful interlude. My companion is unobtrusive. Coconut palms loom overhead. There are red mangoes just ripening, bananas hanging from trees. And flowers, red, orange, yellow, and blue, bougainvillea, hibiscus, water lilies. At regular stops a few people get off onto a small jetty, and soon disappear. Habitation is sparse, such a huge contrast from the bus route on which I came hurtling to Allepey. Now and then the canal opens into a large body of water, then becomes a canal again. Narrower channels head off, perhaps for local use. Then a few entire villages appear—a church, a school, a banner for a Marxist splinter group.
Our destination is the farthest village on the route, two hours distant, the family home of K. Ayyappa Paniker. It’s a quiet place, hardly a business in sight. We follow a trail through a thicket, stop at a country restaurant for lunch, and arrive at a large dilapidated house, where we meet Paniker’s sister and her husband. There’s nothing much to say, we don’t have a language in common, and the woman evidently doesn’t know what to do with us. We have imposed. We decline tea and walk back to the jetty, await our ride. It’s a disappointing visit. Perhaps some communication was lost somewhere. What did I expect here, except to see something different?
The next morning, looking out from the balcony, I watch an elephant plodding on the road on its way to the temple. It’s one of those moments of solitude and silence when I wonder whether I am in the real world or in a dream; if there truly is another world I have left behind. How distant it seems. After breakfast we go by taxi to Thakazhi, but first we stop at the Shrikrishna Temple of Ambalapuzha. The temple, situated in a complex next to the water-side, is several centuries old and quite modest, with a sloping slate roof. It is famous for its milk porridge, but this is not the time for it.
We arrive in the village of Thakazhi, still in the Allepey district, where Paniker has sent me to meet the famous writer.
Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai is one of the most celebrated of the older Keralan writers, and we sit with him in his living room, which faces the street. “I am a farmer,” he says modestly in response to my question as to which of his books is his favourite. A silly question, really, which he doesn’t answer. “I felt like writing, and so I wrote.” There is still mud on my feet, he is reported to have said to the guests at the ceremony where he received the Gyana Pith, the country’s highest award. The citation, on a wooden plaque, is brought for me to see.
At more than eighty, he is suffering the effects of diabetes. Weakness in the bones, bad eyes and ears. He is barefoot and bare-chested and sits straight up, wearing a blue dhoti round the waist, his cropped hair, abundant chest hair, and face stubble all white. There is a string of beads around his neck, a caste mark on his forehead. He is a fairly big man, fleshy though not fat, and has a strong, impressive head. He speaks clearly, and like his friend Paniker’s, his English is better expressed and better pronounced than that of the younger generation. Of
the Nair caste and a small landowner, he was trained as a lawyer, his biography says, and his father was a gentleman scholar. His uncle was one of the great Kathakali dancers of his time. So he is not exactly a peasant; the modesty is a typically Indian one and not to be taken seriously. This ancestral village where I have come to meet him is, like most villages, hostage to heat and dust and modest circumstance, not unlike the area I grew up in; unpaved or partly paved streets, boys playing in the dust, small shops selling small items, bunches of bananas hanging on display from their door frames, poster ads on the walls outside. Only four years ago he stopped working on his farm. Now “it lies fallow” the son can’t or doesn’t want to manage it. As we sit, a nurse comes to administer insulin. The son is visiting from Trivandrum, a doctor. A daughter and granddaughter arrive.
He represents the old India and is its quintessential revered wise old man, the pride of the village and the state. India has seen much, he says, it’s an old country. So it will survive. Troubles come and go. There are stop points in the country beyond which troubles—disturbances—don’t move, so that the entire country doesn’t flare up. But in his younger days, like many other Indian writers of his generation (including Bhishm Sahni, whom I met in Shimla), he was attracted by Marxism and its promise of social and economic reforms in an India for which there seemed little other hope.
Now he is a Gandhian. “He is still there [in India],” he says in answer to my question whether the Mahatma is relevant anymore. “When we are in trouble, despair, we think of Gandhi-ji.” Changes have been good for the country. The invasions, the religions, the mix. Indians have one ethos, in spite of north-south differences. The mix is extensive. It is when I ask about north and south that he gets a little impassioned, perhaps irate. He talks defensively, mentions other countries where differences still exist—the United States and France—but his knowledge and memory seem imprecise.
“Posterity will judge my work,” he says. “If they find it useful, they’ll keep it.” His influences are the Russians, mostly Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, and therefore, not surprisingly, his work tends to be epic in its concerns about land, families, and traditions, and the changes wrought upon them over time. He mentions Tagore among the Indians. And he is working on a book about the Indus Valley civilization and the arrival of the Aryans.
Ever the vain writer, in spite of the modesty, he wants to give me a book to take, despairs that I can’t read Malayalam. He possesses only one copy of the English translation of the classic Chemmeen, in a recent edition. I settle for a signed Malayalam novel.
It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion…. [It] has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India!
PLINY THE ELDER, Natural History
Colonial education inevitably influenced my generation’s perception of the world, how could it not? It bequeathed to us an inner compass, a bias to live with. The world was in its own image, London was its centre. In my schooldays Vasco da Gama’s voyage loomed large; he was the first European to round the Cape to reach India, arriving by way of Mombasa and landing somewhere close to Calicut.
I am in Kerala, I have to see Calicut.
In medieval times this city on the northern Kerala coast was one of the great entrepôts of the Indian Ocean, the others being Cambay, Bharuch, and Veraval-Somnath in Gujarat, Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea, and, on a smaller scale, Mombasa and Kilwa in East Africa. Because the Arab route to Malabar was from the north, Calicut always had a strong Muslim presence. The rulers of Calicut, called the zamorins, had cordial relationships with the Muslims, among whom were the prominent merchant princes of the domain, customs officials, and sailors. The great Chinese mariner and diplomat Zheng He, who visited Calicut in the early 1400s, observed,
Many of the king’s subjects are Muslims, and there are twenty or thirty mosques in the kingdom to which the people resort every seventh day for worship. On this day, during the morning, the people being at the mosques, no business whatever is transacted; and during the latter part of the day, when the services are over, business is resumed.
Zheng He himself was a Chinese Muslim, whose other name was Haji Mahmud Shams.
In 1340, before Zheng He’s, and more than a century and a half before da Gama’s, arrival, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who had visited the East African coast ten years earlier, arrived in Calicut from Delhi as an envoy of Sultan Muhammad Tughlaq. His mission was to board a junk for China with a message for the emperor of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. When the Moroccan arrived, the town’s dignitaries, Hindu and Muslim, came to greet him with “drums, trumpets, horns, and flags on their ships. We entered the harbour amid great ovation and pomp, the like of which I have not seen in these parts.” Tughlaq’s ambassador became a guest of the zamorin.
Calicut, says Ibn Battuta, “is…one of the largest harbours of the world. It is visited by men from China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Fars [Persia] and in it gather merchants from all quarters.” Arriving at the port, Ibn Battuta saw thirteen Chinese ships in the harbour awaiting the end of winter. Only Chinese ships, he says, could travel through the Sea of China. The largest of them, the junks, came equipped with twelve towering sails, their four decks “containing rooms, cabins, and saloons.” Each junk carried a thousand men, “six hundred of whom are sailors and four hundred men-at-arms,” in addition to the merchants, their families, and retainers. So wealthy were the merchants of the city that “one of them can purchase the whole freightage of such vessels put in here and fit out others like them.” The captain of such a ship was like “an amir” and went around on shore with a retinue of archers and men playing drums, trumpets, and bugles.
Today, Calicut is a modest little port city of roughly half a million inhabitants; it is Cochin, its ancient competitor to the south, that is the larger port, is more developed and attracts more tourists. Calicut has the added disadvantage that it is further away from the capital, Trivandrum. But its compactness makes it accessible, and it has a bustling market downtown which you have to wade through to get to the ancient spice market, the famous Big Bazar.
In the Big Bazar this late afternoon, just before sunset, the spice wholesalers relax outside the shops and warehouses. Business is over for the day. The Big Bazar has existed at this place for centuries. The spices sold in this market were craved by the Europeans. Pepper was like black gold. Towards the end of the street, and all along the beach road which it meets, are parked dozens of trucks in a row ready to take away the produce. But that will be tomorrow morning. There is a Gujarati school on the beach road and a few Gujarati businesses. Gujarati merchants, in numbers small and large, like the Arabs, have been ubiquitous in the Indian Ocean ports for centuries. I imagine the antecedents of the local Gujaratis going to welcome Vasco da Gama as he arrived, in 1498. Portuguese accounts mention the “Guzaratis” in various places as far as Macao. Vasco da Gama’s last stop before arriving here in India was Mombasa, where my mother grew up, where, according to legend, he picked up two Indians, presumably Gujarati, to guide him to their homeland. If not for them, would he have arrived here? There is a small, nondescript stone plaque to commemorate his landing on a beach called Kappad further up from the city. In Mombasa, the Portuguese built Fort Jesus and fought against the Arabs and the Swahili. In Malabar, too, they carried on a bitter rivalry against the Arabs.
As I walk along the road out of the Big Bazar and next to the beach, there occurs a coincidence, a personal little epiphany: two of the businesses facing the sea bear, as their proprietors’ last names, my own surname. What’s in a name? For me, much. Vassanji is not a common name, not even in Gujarat. What does it signify, here, on the signs of two businesses in this Malabar port? It is not a family name, being my grandfather’s first name, so I cannot claim a clan connection. The connection must be
regional (Kathiawar, Gujarat) and generational (my grandfather’s). Calicut, the ports of Kathiawar, and those of East Africa were all linked through the Indian Ocean trade. In my grandfather’s generation there were other Vassanjis, a few of whom travelled from Kathiawar to Calicut, others to East Africa.
The sun is setting and people are arriving to stroll down the boardwalk, or sit on the parapet looking out, as citizens of beach towns everywhere have always done. The ocean conveys a sense of faraway places. Young Muslim couples, the women in loose hijab, sit close to each other; this is their private space. Some of them couldn’t be more than teenagers. There is no abashedness, I observe; a couple fondle each other, another stare long into each other’s eyes. It’s only the headcover that gives them away. The sun goes behind clouds, sets, the crowds begin to thin.
A little further south from the Big Bazar is the Muslim area called Kuttichura. It is a quiet old village around a large pond; there is hardly any traffic, and the place seems curiously untouched by the bustling life outside. The only commercial activity is the odd village shop, a coconut stand, a fish market. The ocean is visible in the far distance. Here, the women are in full black burqa, many of the men wear white lunghis and Muslim caps. Features vary from the very fair to the typical dark that one associates with the south.