A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  My friend who picked me up at the railway station brought along the umbrella I had left behind, and I take it now and set off to explore the old haunts.

  The Sahnis’ bungalow has been partly renovated but looks as dilapidated as before, and so strangely familiar. Here, she stood before her easels, painting; this was the kitchen; here, Bhishm-ji and I would sit on a sofa while she worked. The Institute library looks as distinguished as I’ve remembered it, hushed, spacious, and solidly furnished, its precious hoard of publications for the use of a favoured few. I introduce myself and sit at a table to read up on medieval Delhi history, later walk outside to the old chai shop at the cliff edge from where I would watch the sunsets. Mist covers the distant peaks. The tables are wet, but I have my cup of tea and samosa anyway, for old times’ sake. Afterwards, beyond the lawn, along the way down to the local market of Boileau Ganj, I notice that the hill of refuse which had begun to rise and stink during the last days of my stay has disappeared.

  On the way to the Mall, I see that the century-old Cecil Hotel at Chaura Maidan, where the Partition lines were drawn, and which had been undergoing renovation during my fellowship, is up and running now. Recent roadside signs prohibit littering and even smoking, and they seem to be obeyed. Prominent buildings are posted with their former names and brief histories where available. The town now knows on which side its bread is buttered: its English heritage. My first stop as I enter the Mall area is the Indian Coffee House, which looks exactly the same, and as always with hardly a place to sit. Further on are some of the old eating places, the three bookstores, Fook Cho’s shoe store, and some new additions—two Chinese fast food restaurants, Dominos Pizza, Citibank, a coffee franchise, which by its ambience and loud music is more a hangout for rich Indian teenagers than anything else. Nonveg food is served freely now on the Mall; before, there was not a single place here that did so. And now they no longer call this shopping promenade the “Mal” in the English and Hindi way, but “Mall” as in North America, the land of shopping malls. The Lower Mall looks unchanged.

  But do the climbs seem steeper now, ten years later, or do I imagine it?

  At the Guest House, the staff is new, but the menu and food—the daal and sabzi, the rice and chappati, the rice pudding and the morning porridge—have not altered in the slightest. Here I meet two scholars from a college in Uttar Pradesh. One of them speaks irately and unprovoked about the “diaspora” (a current academic buzz word meaning Indians abroad), and some strain develops at our table, which over the breakfasts I share with them during the next few days is happily overcome. They speak about the bleakness beneath the globalization veneer, the plights of the colleges and teachers in the smaller cities, the corruption. The phrase “Neolithic syllabuses and teaching methods” sticks in the mind.

  I ask an attendant called Emmanuel about the church I had visited at the back of the Guest House. It’s very much there, he says, giving an appreciative smile, then adds that it is closed for now. Apparently the reverend had laid claim to the property and lost.

  Later I take a walk to have a look. There’s been some construction in the area, the church appears hemmed in by new dwellings, and it’s not so easy to reach the entrance. The sign board on the door is missing, as is the cross.

  Gujarat: Down Ancestral Roads, Fearfully

  Small of body, big of mind…

  the lover is a Gujarati

  AVINASH VYAS, song

  I see phantoms of hatred and of the heart’s fullness and of the coming emptiness

  W. B. YEATS, “Meditations in Time of Civil War”

  These Moon-faced Ones

  It is not hidden from knowing, intelligent men…that the kingdom of Gujarat is one of the greatest provinces of Hindustan whose ruling planet is Jupiter in the second clime…. Its inhabitants, male and female…are handsome and delicate who rob persons of life with a sight and bestow upon them by talk. How nicely it has been said

  What can one say about these rose-faced Gujaratis

  That comely beauty is God-given to these moon-faced ones.

  ALI MUHAMMAD KHAN, Mirat-i-ahmadi (Persian history of

  Gujarat, c. 1756–61)

  THE IMAGE OF GUJARATIS that I grew up with was that of essentially a mercantile people, soft, yet adventurous, ready to pick up and set up business elsewhere. All they required was to be left alone. Clannish, yes, but you would expect such people to be, by and large, tolerant. Perhaps ethically slack, for business practices require shortcuts. But brave, for in East Africa—Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar—they would set up shop in the remotest places, in small numbers, sometimes singly or with just their family with them, so that they became indispensable to colonial expansion and administration. My grandparents were among these entrepreneurs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. European explorers depended on them for supplies, and indeed took credit from them, and when they returned home—as I learned when I read their accounts—ungratefully turned around and wrote about them in the most unflattering terms as unscrupulous Shylocks. You would not think of them as a violent people; in East Africa, when confronted with violence as a community or individually, they were more likely to make a run for it or hide behind closed doors. Bollywood, thriving on stereotypes, enjoys casting the Gujarati man in comic roles, with his funny, infected Hindi and slightly effeminate manner. Mahatma Gandhi of the Banya (merchant) caste epitomized the Gujarati character: the nonviolence, shrewdness, self-effaciveness (or at least a show of it), and sense of humour. He came from the same place as my maternal grandfather, the port town of Porbandar.

  And yet, in recent times, the bloodiest communal violence, with the most hideous attacks on the human person, especially on women and children, has taken place with some regularity in this ancestral homeland, among these people I thought I knew, whom I have called—culturally, ancestrally—my people. For me to come to this realization has been profoundly shocking. If anything makes me feel alien here, it is my utter incomprehension of such violence, my inability to shrug it off. My generalization of Gujarat, too, was naive, I realize; but there it is, in tatters.

  Mira Kamdar, American author of the book Motiba’s Tattoos, which explores her Gujarati heritage on her father’s side, writes in a paper for the World Policy Institute, “My father, who loved Martin Luther King, hates Muslims. He hates them blindly, viscerally, categorically.” She adds, “My immigrant Gujarati father is both a liberal democrat and a supporter of Hindu fascism.”

  One could argue that the homesick expatriate exhibits a more extreme form of nationalist passion and zealotry. But that is not the case; the violence unleashed in Gujarat during the so-called communal riots is so giddyingly intense and horrific that the country simply shakes its head and watches and waits for it to spend itself and subside like some natural disaster. But natural disaster it is not, for it is inspired and fuelled regularly and systematically by the politics of hateful bigotry.

  Kamdar goes on to quote in her paper a well-known pledge distributed by the communalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council):

  I will not buy anything from any Muslim shopkeeper

  I will not use those traitors’ hotels or their garages

  Boycott movies casting Muslim heroes and heroines

  Never work in Muslims’ offices and do not employ Muslims

  During my first visit to India, bloody riots were in progress in parts of Gujarat, following the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In Bhubaneswar, Orissa, receiving solicitous advice to take care of myself during my travels, I had joked that with a turban I could easily pass as a Sikh. In the jocular atmosphere of that precious moment, our Sikh friend duly removed his headgear and placed it ceremoniously upon my head, and it was affirmed by all present that I could indeed pass as a Sikh, and a photo was taken as proof. Since then, it was always with a little sadness and a tangible nervousness that I would travel in Gujarat, with nightmarish visions of rampaging mobs drunk on violence, of
getting caught in a train by such a mob and being asked to prove physically my communal affiliation. And yet, I have always felt a sense of wonderful elation while travelling in India. It has helped that I remain, and indeed feel, communally anonymous and ambiguous, identifiable only by that cipher of my very Gujarati last name.

  To introduce Gujarat this way is painful. Its language I speak, its food I eat, its dances I danced as a child. I could start with the romance, the exotic: the colours of the saris, the sweets, the fields, the arrival of the rains. The galloping new economy. The lavish, colourful weddings. All these would make my account more palatable. But this current reality seems to overshadow every other: two cultures, two peoples so close to each other, yet so apart; and I, by my traditions and history, straddling the two.

  After my first Indian visit, I would be asked, back in Toronto, why I let the violence bother me. I did not live there after all, had never lived there, and I was safely here, anyway. I could have said that surely all violence anywhere should affect us; what came to mind instead was that I could not accept India’s embrace and turn away from the violence. It must in some way be a part of me.

  Two necessary disclaimers.

  I have already said that I find the labels “Hindu” and “Muslim” discomforting, because they are so exclusive. They have not defined people for me in Africa (where we were simply called “Wahindi,” Indians), in the United States (where I lived for some years), or in Canada. I refuse to use them this way, perhaps naively and definitely against a tide; but I am not alone. I use the distinction of “Hindu” or “Muslim” only in context, and especially when it has been used by people for themselves or others, as in the Gujarat violence.

  So deep is the suspicion when one talks of conflict, that one has to state over and over that to describe the murder of a Muslim here is not to deny, let alone justify, the murder of a Hindu elsewhere, that a fanatic group does not represent an entire people, and there is no entire people, Hindu or Muslim, anyway. Attempts to create them, of course, have always been there.

  Gujarat lies in the northwest of India, bordering that part of the Indian Ocean called the Arabian Sea, a region where the Indus Valley pre-Aryan civilization once prevailed, four thousand years ago. Many of its towns and cities are of ancient provenance, their silent ruins witnesses to the rise and fall of kingdoms, the clash of immense armies on elephant, horse, and foot. Shrines casually litter its landscapes, memorials to its holy men great and small, comfort to the needy. According to legend, Krishna, the dark sage-god and the charioteer in the Gita, ruled in the region of Dwarka in peninsular Gujarat (known as Kathiawar or Saurashtra). The temple at Dwarka at Kathiawar’s northwestern tip beside the Arabian Sea is today one of the great Indian pilgrimage sites. The Maurya empire in the time of Asoka, who ruled from 263 to 222 BC, extended all the way west to Kathiawar, where one of Asoka’s rock inscriptions—upon which are etched his principles of Buddhist dharma, or right moral conduct—is displayed at the outskirts of what is now the city of Junagadh. Asoka, remorseful at the suffering caused by his bloody conquest of the Kalinga kingdom in the east, in what is now Orissa, had become a follower of the path of the Buddha. Eight centuries after Asoka, the celebrated Chinese Buddhist traveller Hiuen Tsang would describe the city of Vallabhipur in Gujarat as containing more than a hundred Buddhist monasteries and a few thousand monks. Buddhism disappeared soon afterwards from this region and from much of India. Various other peoples ruled here, including Greeks and Gujjars, a northern people of Eurasian origin, who gave the area its name. A race of rulers of Central Asian origin known as the Kshatrapas ruled parts of Gujarat as the satraps of Persian kings roughly between the first and fourth centuries AD, minting their own coins with inscriptions in Greek, Brahmi, and Kharosthi scripts.

  From about the ninth century onwards there came into prominence in north and west India, including Gujarat, a number of small kingdoms belonging to related clans going under the name Rajput (from the Sanskrit for “son of king”). Rajput origins too may lie, at least partly, in the north, a claim naturally dismissed by those of Rajput ancestry, for it would place them among the class of “foreign invaders.” Whatever the truth, it was these Rajput kingdoms that bore the onslaught of the invading armies from present-day Afghanistan, which finally defeated them. Delhi’s Tomar Rajput king Prithviraj was defeated by Muhammad of Ghur in 1192 in a battle that changed the face of India; from that strategic northern base invading armies of Delhi sultans overran the various Rajput kingdoms scattered throughout Rajasthan and northern Gujarat, including Kathiawar.

  The Rajput kingdoms of India are renowned for their civilization and culture, their patronage of the arts and learning. They are also the subject of a great deal of legend and folklore describing the honour and courage displayed by their noble warriors who set off from their forts to do battle, especially in the tragic and climactic confrontations against the Muslim hordes from the north. It is said that when defeat was inevitable, the Rajput womenfolk, rather than face dishonour at the hands of the enemy, collectively immolated themselves in a fire, in a practice called jauhar, before their men set off to fight the enemy to the death. This practice, highly romanticized, not to say politicized in the Hindu-Muslim context, was not universal; and the Rajput kingdoms, of course, had been constantly at war against each other, and later allied themselves when necessary with Muslim armies. In present times, Rajput courage and honour, pitting good against evil in the setting of the beautiful Rajasthan desert, has become a staple of the Bollywood “masala western,” though it also provides the stereotype of archaic and dogged old-fashionedness and male patriarchy.

  Perhaps the most glorious Gujarati Rajput kingdom was that of the Solanki dynasty, from 942 to 1242, which ruled from Anhilvada (at present-day Patan, sixty-five miles northeast of Ahmedabad), and more precisely during the reigns of Jaisingh Siddhraj and his successor Kumara Pala, in the twelfth century. Much of the history of this period still comes down in the form of bardic lore, folk legends, and inscriptions. Two nineteenth-century British administrator-scholars, James Tod and Alexander Kinloch Forbes, trekked through the forests and byways of western Gujarat collecting stories and manuscripts, and describing and even rediscovering monuments and ancient ruins. Forbes, a reserved man who did not mix much with other Englishmen, produced a book called Ras Mala (translated as “garland of stories”) which he published at his own expense, and he also founded the Gujarat Vernacular Society in Ahmedabad. It was Tod who in 1822 discovered Asoka’s rock inscriptions at Junagadh (in the ancient Brahmi script, though he believed they were in Greek). He produced two tomes based on his travels, one of which is Travels in Western India. Despite the colour of their bias, the enthusiasm of these two Englishmen for Gujarati history and their achievements in recording it are remarkable. Their books are still in print and serve as valuable repositories of folkloric history.

  Anhilvada, so Forbes tells us, basing his account on the poetic history Ratna Mala of Krishnaji, was founded in 746 by a forest foundling called Vanaraja (“forest king”), descendant of the kings of Vallabhipur, which city had converted from Buddhism to Jainism before being overrun—at the paid instigation of a vanity-wounded local Marwari businessman—by “barbarians.” The so-called barbarians are presumed to have been Arabs from Sindh. (Jainism and Buddhism were both founded before 500 BC in reaction to Brahminism, the faith and practices associated with the Indo-Aryan Vedas that developed into present-day Hinduism.) Anhilvada during its heyday under Siddhraj and Kumara Pala was the capital of a large empire, a great centre of trade, learning, and culture. Jainism was a strong force at the court and competed fiercely with Brahminism. While the Rajput kings generally ate meat and partook of alcohol, the Jains forbade them. (Today, Gujaratis are by and large vegetarian, and alcohol is prohibited in the state, with the result that it is a much-appreciated gift.) Priests of both religions were in attendance at the court, including the great monk and scholar Hemachandra, whose Dvyashraya was composed to serve as much
as a primer on Sanskrit as a history of the kings. Such was the esteem of scholarship in the kingdom that when the book was completed it was taken around the city in a procession on the back of an elephant. Learned debates were common. A famous one reportedly took place between the representatives of two Jain sects, the Svetambara, whose monks wore white garments, and the Digambara, whose monks were clothed by the atmosphere, that is, went about in the nude. In the contest, the Svetambaras (the home team, as it were) were led by Hemachandra and Dev Suri, and their opponents (the visitors) by the awesome Kumud Chandar of Karnat, reputed winner of eighty-four previous contests. The party of the nude monks was, however, defeated and, as was the custom for losers, had to leave the kingdom, their tails between their legs.

  The tolerance of Jaisingh Siddhraj (1094–1143) is one of his many enduring legends. Arab traders (in contrast to the constantly threatening Afghans and Turks in the north, who had made several destructive forays into Gujarat) lived in the coastal towns, and there are reports of a Muslim embassy in Anhilvada. Once, there was a riot in the ancient port of Cambay involving the local Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims, in which the local mosque was destroyed. The mullah wrote a petition to Jaisingh, a patron of poetry, composed in the form of a poem, as a result of which the king gave funds to rebuild the mosque. According to the Khoja tradition, in which I was raised, an Ismaili mystic called Satgur Nur arrived at the court of Jaisingh from Egypt and was welcomed. Satgur Nur is a pir of the Khojas, and a has a divine status among several syncretistic (nominally Hindu) sects who worship him at his dargah in the southern city of Navsari. According to the tradition, Nur outwitted the king’s magicians and priests with a display of his own powers, as a result of which the king became his follower. The Bohras, a Shia sect who escaped persecution and arrived from Yemen, also claim to have received hospitality from Jaisingh and converted him to their ways. And the Parsis, who escaped persecution in Persia, also lay claim to him.