Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  I wander all night, as circles of spectators form and disperse–around a hijra dancing with tinkling bells on her ankles, around a flute-player sitting on the ground, around dancers gaudily enacting Latif’s stories with gestures as well as words. In Latif’s mud-walled chillah, the room where he sat and meditated, black-clothed musicians from the local village are quietly practising ‘Sur Sohni’. In the street beneath the devotee-crowded house of the Sajjada Nasheen, faqirs are smoking marijuana together and catching up on each other’s news. In the space before the shrine, drums are being banged for the ecstatic dancing of the dhammal. At Bhitshah, the best of Sindhi society has assembled. There is freedom here, during the three days of music and celebration; a stubborn resilience to Pakistan’s social hierarchy and religious homogeneity. Perhaps because the social organization is dominated neither by the Sajjada Nasheen–as at Jhok–nor by the government (official events are held at the other end of the village), the atmosphere is that of a carnival or medieval mummers’ fair.

  On the morning of Latif’s death-anniversary, the Sajjada Nasheen puts on Latif’s cloth cap and cloak and progresses towards the shrine, as his urban devotees weep. That afternoon, a group of youthful green-turbanned missionaries with wispy beards run towards the shrine chanting ‘Allah-hu, Allah-hu’. Late that night, through the noise of the urs, I hear the beat of a mugarman, and run towards the shrine, to find that a party of Sheedis has transfixed the crowded courtyard with their energetic crouching and jumping, as they dance towards Latif’s tomb to the pounding of their tall wooden drums. All of Sindh is here, and everybody has a place.

  The non-sectarian harmony indulged at Bhitshah would appal the newly-conservative, Wahhabi-ized sections of society. Late one night, I meet a Baluch journalist who tells me that he comes here every year, ‘leaving my middle-class prejudices behind in Karachi’. He wrote an article about the urs once, the first line of which was cut: ‘A Hindu untouchable family sleeping in the Sunni mosque of a Sufi shrine dominated by Shias.’ I walk into the mosque to check, and it is true: in the prayer hall I step over sleeping families, men and women. It is as if society has suspended its usual pettiness and comprehended this mosque for what it is: a space to accommodate devotees. On the second night, I stray into an annexe of the shrine and find a host of government officials from the Auqaf Department, which deals with religious affairs, sitting around a gigantic green pile of small-denomination rupee notes, all mixed up with pink rose petals, as they sleepily count the money that has been donated by pilgrims. (Officials say that a well-attended urs can bring in ‘Rs 30 lakh’–£30,000.) I spend a second night listening to musicians singing the Risalo, and at dawn return to the Syed-house where I am staying with relatives of the deceased saint.

  The Syed women are still dressed in black, because Muharram, the month of mourning for the Shia heroes, has only recently ended. They never leave the house; they never clean or cook–their murids do that; they just sit all day long in their lacquered wooden swings, rocking backwards and forwards and gossiping, like plump spiders in a web.

  It seems perverse that the women should remain inside while this pageant celebrating their ancestor swells on their doorstep. But when I talk to Latif’s relatives–including the Sajjada Nasheen–I discover that they do not consider him to be an inclusive and all-welcoming Sufi. For them, he was ‘a Shia through and through’. Wishing to claim him for their own particular sect, some of Latif’s relatives regard the unregulated urs with ambivalence. While the literary festival in the village celebrates Latif as a poet, and the masses revelling outside regard Latif as the ecumenical voice of Sindh, for the Sajjada Nasheen the Risalo is primarily a religious text–a Sindhi version of the Qur’an. In most Muslim homes, the Qur’an is set apart from other books, such is its sacred importance. But in the Sajjada’s house, the Risalo is actually placed on a par with Islam’s holy book. Both texts are wrapped in gilt cloth and laid like babies–like the Baby Krishna–in a cradle.

  Whatever Latif was, his Risalo is not the work of a dogmatist. It contains few tenets of any kind, whether Sufi, Shia or Sunni. It is certainly the work of a Muslim–but no more stridently than Shakespeare’s plays are coloured by Christianity. Just as Shakespeare has been called a Protestant, Catholic, atheist, and the inventor of romantic love, so, according to the Sindhi historian Hussamuddin Rashdi, the same fate has befallen Latif:

  Shah was the crown of the Sufis, Shah was a folk poet, Shah was the master of ragas, Shah was a patriot, Shah was a Congressman, Shah was a Muslim Leaguer, Shah was Rumi, Shah was Goethe…in short, Shah is the medicine for every illness.

  Shah Abdul Latif has always been as beloved by Sindhi Hindus as by Sindhi Muslims, and every year Hindu scholars from India are invited to the government-sponsored literary festival, held during the urs. Latif himself spent some three years in the company of Hindu yogis, and he praises them in his poetry:

  I find not today my Yogi friends in their abodes;

  I have shed tears all the night, troubled by the pang of parting;

  The Holy Ones for whom my heart yearneth, have all disappeared.

  (These verses are also interpreted as a secret dedication to the martyred Shah Inayat.) Latif’s Risalo, then, exemplifies the easy spiritual interaction that exists between the two faiths, an easiness that has been acquired after centuries of cohabitation. This legacy is an irony in a country based on the separation of Muslim and Hindu, and it is wonderful that this syncretism has survived.

  With its piecemeal structures of authority and idiosyncratic attitude to canonical religions, Sindh is a fecund place, and there were periods during the past millennium when the closeness of Hinduism and Islam even resulted in the two faiths’ identification with each other. In the holy book of the Ismailis, a breakaway sect from Shiism that arrived in Sindh in the ninth century CE, the Prophet Muhammad, or alternatively his son-in-law Ali, is hailed as the tenth avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. At the time, Ismailism was under attack from Sunni hardliners as well as recalcitrant Hindus, and in order to conceal their religion from suppression, they developed a way of camouflaging their missionary activity in Hindu forms. This, at least, is how Shias have always explained away these potentially heretical doctrines: as a form of taqiyya–the legitimate concealment of one’s inner faith in order to escape persecution–or as a method of canny proselytization, of making their preaching acceptable to the Hindu ear. (The early Jesuit missionaries in India practised a similar form of ‘accommodation’ when they dressed like sadhus–Hindu holy men–and called themselves Brahmins from Rome.)

  But the holy texts of the Ismaili Satpanthi community, published around 1757 and stored in their headquarters in Karachi, do not give this impression. The sacred Dasa Avatara begins conventionally with an exegesis of the ten avatars of Vishnu. By the ninth incarnation, however, conventional Hinduism has warped into surreal burlesque, as a maverick ‘Buddha’–bandy-legged, facially deformed, Persian-speaking–preaches to Hindus that the Prophet Muhammad was the avatar of the Hindu god Brahma. Buddha persuades the Pandavas–heroes of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata–that they should violate their religion by killing a cow. The Pandavas become his converts, and they parade down to the bazaar wearing the head and legs of a dead cow as hats. There, the dismembered cow’s parts turn to ‘glittering gold crowns’ and the anger of the Brahmins in the marketplace to envy. They too rush to wrap themselves up in the cow’s intestines. Anyone who believes, the Dasa Avatara claims, will go to Amarpuri, the jewel-filled Eternal Abode.

  This is an extremely transgressive text, which breaks the major taboos of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Yet until recently, the Ismaili Satpanthi community in Karachi would sing it ‘standing up’, on all festival occasions, to the tune of ‘Kedara’–the raag which Shah Abdul Latif used for his Muharram poetry.

  Obviously, to an orthodox Muslim, the notion of reincarnation is anathema. But in Sindh, as the Sajjada of Jhok demonstrated, such ambivalence is common; how different is the
Hindu philosophy of reincarnation from the idea that an eleventh-generation grandson of Shah Inayat might actually be Shah Inayat? Muhammad is lauded by Muslims as the last and greatest of all the prophets. If you include the Hindu ‘prophets’, then Muhammad is also the last and greatest of the avatars of Vishnu. Seemingly irreconcilable ideas merge by the simple osmotic process of being in close contact with each other.

  Many of the proselytizing saints who arrived in Sindh from Iran or the Middle East gave their mission a boost by putting down roots in ancient Hindu places of worship, or even by allowing themselves to be identified with Hindu gods. Sehwan Sharif, where Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s tomb is located, is the site of an important Shiva centre. The name Sehwanistan, as it was known until recently, derives from Sivistan, city of Shiva, and the modern faqirs still dress like Shaivite yogis, in torn clothes, with matted hair. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar also used to be called Raja Bhartari by Hindus; and when I visit his shrine I see, flashing in red neon Urdu script above his tomb, the words Jhule Lal, one of the many Hindu names for the god of water. At least until the nineteenth century, it was believed by Muslims and Hindus that the Indus waxed and waned according to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s whim.

  Time and again during this journey up the river I find that the Indus is still–as it has been for centuries–a place where people, ideas and religions meet and mingle. In a desert, a river is an innate hub, crossing-point and natural resource, and with so many people congregating around its waters, neither Hinduism nor Islam managed to retain its original purity. There never were many Brahmins in Sindh–the centre of Hinduism, its clergy and texts, shifted to the Ganges two millennia ago–and cults always multiplied and thrived here. One of these is the Daryapanthi sect, whose adherents revere the Indus itself. Even today, the Indus is worshipped by Muslims as well as Hindus at two places in Sindh: the village of Uderolal near Bhitshah, and much further north, near the famous riverside town of Sukkur.

  I arrive at Uderolal at dusk. As I climb down from the bus I can hear that the mela, the fair, has begun: through the loudspeakers mandatory to any subcontinental religious event, bhajans–Hindu devotional songs–are being chanted; and in the background is a steady wall of noise, the coming and going of pilgrims. The Muslim-occupied village of Uderolal rises out of the plain, a cluster of simple rural houses collected here for no other reason than that the Indus once flowed nearby. Then I turn the corner in the road and see the massive Mughal fort, with its five-foot-thick walls, which enclose a mosque, a temple, and the tomb of a man whom Muslims call Shaikh Tahir and the Hindus call Jhulelal or Uderolal–and whom everybody calls Zindapir (Living Saint). Today it is Zindapir’s birthday.

  To the Hindus, the tomb actually represents Zindapir’s asthana, his seat, for he never died, he is a god; to the Muslims he was a great saint born in 952 CE. The Muslim legend–related to me by the Muslim Sajjada Nasheen–is elastic: it stretches across seven centuries. Fished as a baby, Sassui-like, from the Indus, Zindapir was brought up by Hindu parents, but his great spiritual power was only exposed by chance during his childhood, when (two hundred years later, technically) four thirteenth-century Muslim saints–Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and his friends–met him as he was playing ball by the Indus. Realizing that his shakti (‘power’: itself a Sanskrit-Hindu word) was being stifled by his Hindu upbringing, they readopted him. Four centuries passed, however, before Zindapir really made his mark, after he convinced the puritanical Emperor Aurangzeb to cease his oppression of Hindus. He thereby stands as a classic figure in the harmonious coexistence of Sindh’s Hindus and Muslims.

  In 1938, perhaps encouraged by separatist demands elsewhere in British India, the Hindus and Muslims who worshipped here quarrelled. ‘The Hindus put a bhoot [ghost] on the shrine,’ says the Muslim Sajjada, and pulls out of his wallet a much-folded document. It is a copy of the British-stamped court order dating from 1938, which settled the debate over which community–Hindu or Muslim–could pocket the donations accruing from the mela. The colonial court decided in favour of the Muslim landlords, and ever since then every rupee deposited in the collection boxes during the mela is taken by the Muslim Sajjada.

  The court also ruled that the Hindus should have separate facilities for eating, sleeping and worship, and so a complex was built adjacent to the fort, enclosing Zindapir’s sacred well. Any money that Hindu pilgrims leave there goes to the Hindu Sajjada, currently a woman known as ‘Mata’ (mother). The net result of the firman was a loss of income for the Muslims.

  Despite this division, nobody ever suggested establishing two different festivals, and the birthday party in Zindapir’s honour is still held on the date of Cheti Chand, according to the Hindu–not the Muslim–calendar. The Sajjada Nasheen may be sulking in his guesthouse, Mata may lurk beside her holy well, but the fort belongs to pilgrims of both faiths.

  The shrine is undergoing extensive renovation, financed by a Hindu merchant from Karachi. As always in Pakistan, the old but interesting is being destroyed to make way for the shiny new. Frescoes–painted, at a guess, a century ago, by somebody with eclectic tastes: there are Dutch windmills, Chinese willow-pattern boating scenes as well as Mughal-esque vistas–have already been disfigured probably beyond repair by the whitewash splashed on to the domed ceiling, and will soon disappear altogether under the onslaught of expensive marble and mirrored tiles.

  As I am circumambulating Zindapir’s tomb with the crowd, a Hindu family arrives, bearing a traditional green Muslim cloth, inscribed with Qur’anic verses, which they drape over the tomb in thanksgiving. In the adjacent room, devotees are queuing up to pray to a roomful of Hindu images. In the room next to that are the graves of the four Muslim Shaikhs who–according to the Hindu legend–granted Zindapir the land, free of charge, on which to build a temple in the tenth century. Outside in the courtyard is a tree the branches of which are hung with pieces of coloured cloth, the wishes of supplicants of both faiths. (The tree grew from the cast-off toothbrush of Zindapir, who, whether Hindu or Muslim, established admirably high standards of dental hygiene.)

  I have been invited to the Hindu-only festivities by Diwan Lekraj, a member of the Evacuee Trust Property Board set up after Partition to protect the monuments of the absent ‘minorities’. Diwan is a Hindu, but he is almost indistinguishable from the Muslims around him. There is nothing in his dress (shalwar kameez) or his language (Urdu) or his car or his house to draw attention to his ‘minority’ faith. Perhaps the horrors of Partition taught Pakistan’s Hindus that it was wiser thus. Or maybe there really is not much to distinguish them after all, as the story of Zindapir’s two faiths suggests.

  From Uderolal it is a long journey north along the Indus Highway to Sukkur, Zindapir’s other shrine in Sindh. Standing as it does on a tiny island in the middle of the river, this is the smallest, least frequented and most pleasing of all Sindh’s Sufi enclaves. With the town of Sukkur on one side, Rohri on the other, and the larger island of Bukkur a few feet away across the water, the shrine exists in watery isolation, a nonchalant synthesis of all Sindh’s cultures, suspended dolphin-like above the river, in contravention of time’s gravity.

  The Indus is at its narrowest here, hemmed in by limestone, and unlike all settlements to the south, which are constantly in danger of being flooded, comparative riparian stability has given these towns a chance to luxuriate in their semi-aquatic character. Mohanas, Indus boat-people, still live on the river in wooden sailing boats. All day long, flat-bottomed skiffs float past Zindapir’s island, carrying workers to the vegetable plantations upstream, or pilgrims to the island shrine, or sacks of rice and bags of spice from the bazaar to the shrine’s kitchen. During the urs at a shrine on the Rohri side of the river, even I am awarded my own Sufi silsila: ‘Zabardast kism ka naam,’ I hear the Sajjada’s son remark to a friend when he hears what I am called: An amazing kind of name. And he spells it out, making the last two letters sound like the Urdu word se, ‘from’, thus giving it an Islamic etymology: Ali-se, from Ali, the Sufi father
of them all. (‘He’s spared you the expense of a family tree,’ a friend jokes later when I tell him: ‘Now that you’re a Syed, where are your murids?’)

  The Sajjada’s son also tells me that until recently, palla fish would swim up the river from the sea in order to salute the panoply of Indus river saints at Sukkur. Every Sindhi has emotional memories of the palla, Tenualosa ilisha, or hilsa as it is known in Bengal: one of the herring family, and in Sindh the ancient symbol of a vanished riverine paradise, its national dish, and now endangered (because dams on the river prevent it from migrating up and down the Indus to spawn). South of the shrine, and visible from Zindapir island, is the cause of the palla’s demise: Sukkur barrage, the dam built by the British in 1932 to feed a network of irrigation canals. The barrage has vastly increased the agricultural potential of Sindh–but it has also trapped the blind Indus dolphin upstream of Sukkur. Resident here since the river was formed millions of years ago, this glorious mammal is only now facing extinction.

  Islands are an intrinsic part of the character of these towns. A majestic, white marble Hindu temple dominates the southernmost island in the river. Between it and the shrine of Zindapir to the north, is the island fort of Bukkur, the most important military settlement in this region until British times. Of these three islands, Zindapir’s shrine to the north is the smallest–there is barely space for Zindapir’s smooth stone asthana, a few palm trees, and a hut made of leaves under which the faqirs sit all day, preparing bhang, the thick marijuana infusion that they politely tell me is ‘green tea’. And yet for centuries this little piece of land in the middle of the Indus thronged with Sindhis who gathered here to reverence the river.

  I spend many days on Zindapir’s island, talking to the faqirs, easily the most laid-back Pakistanis I ever meet. They have their own stories about Zindapir’s origins, but despite the historical dates assigned to the stories by folklore, it is impossible to tell how old the cult of the river saint really is. There is a theory among some Muslims today that the Hindu story was only concocted after Partition; but colonial-era biographies of Zindapir, written by Sindhis, disprove this. The Hindu variant simply gives a human face to the primordial worship of the river and may have its roots in Rigvedic times, or before. The Muslim option is comparably ancient in terms of the history of Islam, for few other saints claim to have arrived here earlier than 952 CE.