by M G Vassanji
There is a story about Ahmedabad’s legendary prosperity. One evening, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, came to the gate of the old city intending to leave it. The guard informed her he had to ask the sultan’s permission to allow her to go. Certainly, the goddess told him, I’ll wait. But the guard did not see the sultan, who surely could not have denied the goddess; instead, on the way, he cut off his own head. And so Lakshmi was left permanently to tarry in the city awaiting the guard’s return.
This story is told to us by a half-mute man outside a dilapidated shrine which, he informs us, belongs to the guard who made Lakshmi wait. It seems odd for that hero of Ahmedabad to receive such shabby treatment. The shrine sits next to the imposing Bhadra Fort of the sultans, now in ruins. Stalls cling to its side like parasites, and it contains a government bookstore. The famous Lal Darwaja, the Red Gate, is a part of the fort, and not far is the sultans’ private mosque. This is an exquisite structure, some of its pillars beautifully carved and others not. The beauty is marred by electric cables, ceiling fans, the ubiquitous ugly clock.
The cell phone is a sign of modernization, obviously, but it’s also keeping families together over long distances—the ties, the obligations, the formalities—and therefore serves a function very Indian and traditional. Mahesh, speaking to me about something across the table in a restaurant, on impulse interrupts himself to call up his daughter in London, to greet her for the Holi festival, his voice rising several decibels, everyone staring at his English admixed with Hindi and the unabashed endearments. And later, Holi greetings come in from all over India by text message. Happy Holi!
What an afternoon.
The mosque of the shaking minarets is called Sidi Bashir’s Mosque. If you shake one of the minarets, presumably at the top, the other one will shake too, while the intervening structure remains undisturbed. A civil servant called Colonel Monier Williams, who conducted an almost microscopic topographical survey of Gujarat, reports in 1809 this same phenomenon regarding the two minarets of the Jama Masjid, which were destroyed ten years later. Monier Williams lay down on the roof halfway between the minarets and observed that, when one minaret “communicated” its motion to the other, he could not feel anything where he was. Of the original Sidi Bashir’s Mosque, only the two tall, carved minarets remain, with the gate in between. According to one legend, the mosque was commissioned by one of Ahmed Shah’s slaves, Sidi Bashir. According to our rickshaw driver, Amir Khan, Sidi Bashir was from Africa; in Gujarat, “Sidi” refers to a member of the people who came from Africa. After the earthquake of 2001, climbing up to the top of the minarets was prohibited, the stairs having been closed off, and so there is not much else to see. The British had removed a brick from the structure, informs Amir Khan, and sent it to England to check it for hidden springs or other evidence of a mechanism that might make the minarets shake. The same way they stole the Kohinoor diamond, he adds.
As we leave the shaking minarets, we see rising from behind the buildings two similar tall brick minarets. According to local legend (that is, Amir Khan), these are the original minarets of the Jama Masjid, carried to the railway station by magic one night. We stop at a dargah close by, where is buried a saint called Kalu Sayad Pir. The place is right behind the station, and across from it are railway offices. It dates back to ancient times, according to a simple-looking old shaikh who meets us. The original stone structure has been covered with tile, but still manages to peer out in places. According to the shaikh, the visible structure is only part of the site, the rest is underground and sealed off now by the government for security reasons, for there are passageways extending a couple of miles right beneath railway property.
The man is soft-spoken and unassuming, and his presence has managed to create a lingering impression on us. He is short and scrawny, barefoot, with a long scraggly beard on a longish face; he wears a cap, a long white shirt over a green dhoti, and a checkered red and white cloth thrown around the shoulder like a shawl. He says the pir has no family member looking after his shrine; he himself is a volunteer and has been serving here for fifteen years.
What did you do before? asks Mahesh.
With a thin, diffident smile, the man turns stiff and answers in perfect monotone English, Please don’t ask me this question.
We are astonished. Mahesh is thoroughly embarrassed, holds his ears in the traditional demonstration of shame, apologizes profusely. We should not have presumed. Forgive us. My friend does tend to dramatize, but he is sincere in his apology.
But the shaikh is forgiving, asks us to sit down on the stone bench next to the wall of the verandah outside the burial room. When we tell him why we are so shamelessly inquisitive, he bends his reserve and says softly that he worked for many years with the Times of India, in several cities. He was a special correspondent with his own byline. His name is Rahim.
He orders tea, sits between us. In his soft voice he tells us, to our further astonishment, that he was born in London, where he was partly brought up. His father was a doctor, a graduate of Bombay University, and was sent to England by the British government. What stories lie buried in this simple biography. What complexity in this simple-looking, humble man who humbles us in turn. One day he simply decided to give everything up and serve this ancient grave and its mosque. Perhaps some calamity befell him. He is not going to say. And we are not going to ask. But this truism keeps playing on my mind, as it has many times before: This country that I’ve come so brazenly to rediscover goes as deep as it is vast and diverse. It’s only oneself one ever discovers.
According to Rahim, there was once a Marwari woman who was possessed. Every day, leaving her child to the mercy of the blazing sun, she would perform her antics before the Kalu Sayad dargah, leaping and somersaulting from early in the morning till three in the afternoon. One day, the child died of exposure, but the woman paid no heed to it; the people and the police finally got the woman to realize that the child was dead and that if it was not disposed off, the dogs and crows would eat the body. That broke her trance, and she began to grieve. She picked up the child’s body and flung it towards Kalu Sayad’s grave, shouting, “You called me, and I came. What wrong did my child do?” At this point the child began to cry, very much alive.
The somewhat Bollywood logic of the story eludes me, but obviously it means a lot to Rahim and to the people who have gathered here as we are finishing our tea. It is late afternoon, and the men and women have come to pay respects to the pir in his inner room, and Rahim, the former Times of India correspondent and son of a wealthy doctor, gets up to cut open a coconut and hand the two halves to a devotee, who will offer it to the pir.
There are actually two inner rooms, one an anteroom, the other the burial room. The former has niches in the walls and the grilles at the windows are stuffed with coloured cloth fragments left by devotees, especially the women. The burial room has a dome built on a typical octagonal structure and lavishly decorated on the inside. The dargah has evidently received some handsome donations from its worshippers.
Outside the shrine a few men have gathered to sit on their haunches and chat. They wave us over, tell us to go see the shaking minarets. A short distance from them, sitting on the ground against a wall, is a dark woman with a pathetic, beseeching look on her face, apparently begging, a disconcerting reminder of the Marwari woman of Rahim’s story. There is no child.
Making inquiries of the men, we head off towards the main road on foot and find the entrance to the station. A train is about to depart from the nearest track, and an announcement is coming over the loudspeaker, but the crowd is not too heavy. Across from the train in an enclosed compound next to an office, two tall brick minarets rise in isolation directly from the ground. It’s an uncanny sight, and it seems as if the rickshaw driver’s story is correct, that the towers of the ancient Jama Masjid had flown through the air by magic and landed at this place. But short fragments of wall attached to either minaret reveal the obvious fact that they were part of the entrance to a m
osque that existed right here. And indeed the entrance can be seen to have faced east-west, as required.
From here, Amir Khan takes us past a dead industrial area full of defunct cotton mills (the industry died with the advent of synthetics) to the Asarwa area to look at a vav, or step-well, a deep stone construction of several storeys in which you go down a series of steps to the level of the water. It and the mosque beside it are under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India but carry no description and are in utter neglect. At the entrance to the well, on facing walls are two inscriptions, one in Arabic, the other in a Nagari script. Outside, boys, some of them actually young men, enthusiastically play cricket.
The sun has set, the street lights are on, and we sit like two vagrants on a sidewalk at a busy intersection in the Astodia area, hundreds of autos and motorcycles passing us by the minute, spewing thick, choking exhaust into the air. At times such traffic reminds me of a rushing torrent, at other times of a buffalo charge. You cross at your peril. There are other intersections, here, where in the evening the signals are off, and the traffic simply, miraculously, proceeds in all four directions simultaneously.
We are waiting for one Johnny Jacob to return from work and talk to us. He looks after the Ahmedabad synagogue across the road.
The Magen Abraham synagogue of the Bene Israel Jews is a tall, solid structure that stands out from its neighbours by its size and its typical, though modest, temple architecture. It was built in 1934. Its main entrance, kept closed, is on a narrow street, across from a Parsi agiary, or prayer house, and settlement. The facade is adorned on the left and right with Jewish motifs and panelled windows, a tall front arch in the centre embraces the entrance, leading between two columns on either side into the recessed porch and the door. According to my reading there are four thousand members of the community in India, though a few decades ago there were as many as thirty thousand.
Further up the street from us is the entrance to the busy market for vegetables and fruits, where people of all backgrounds mingle. Mr. Jacob’s apartment is on the main road, behind an open unpaved space that seems to have become a parking area for auto-rickshaws, though there is a solitary bench in the middle. An old man wearing a kippa, at the behest of Mrs. Jacob, had earlier opened the side door of the synagogue for us, assuming, we soon realized, that we were from Israel. Past this entrance, in the corridor leading inside to the prayer hall, we saw plaques commemorating donations, including one from an association of Indian Jews in Israel. On the notice board were announcements for a Jewish camp in Israel, a book launch, and a film series with Fiddler on the Roof and Samson and Delilah on the program.
Mr. Jacob has still not arrived. Behind us where we sit is a makeshift road shrine, now preparing to close. A board with some announcement on it is taken inside, the floors are washed. It’s a simple shrine, a small room. We take a rickshaw back to our hotel.
India has had four prominent Jewish groups, the Bene Israel, the Cochin, the Sephardic (European), and the Baghdadi (from the Near East). There is also a fifth group from the east, called the Manipuri Jews, whose Jewishness has been disputed by some rabbis. The Bene Israel claim to be descended from the tribes of Israel, their ancestors having been shipwrecked off the Konkan coast of Maharashtra more than two thousand years ago. According to the tradition, exactly seven couples survived and swam to the village of Navgaon, where they settled. From here the community spread to other places. They worked as oil-pressers, and because they did not work on the Sabbath they came to be called Shaniwari Telis, or Saturday Oilmen. Thus they fitted readily into the Indian caste system. They speak Marathi and have Marathi surnames. Many have emigrated to Israel in recent times, where apparently they were not initially readily accepted as Jews, until the rabbis decreed them as authentic.
We meet Mr. Jacob the next day at 3 p.m. He is waiting for us on his scooter outside the apartment building in front of the synagogue side entrance. His wife, whom we had seen last evening on her balcony, is fair, but he is darker, and small. His family has lived in the Ahmedabad area for a hundred years, he says. They still speak Marathi at home. This is the only synagogue in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, even villages had synagogues in the past. There are some 150 Jews in Ahmedabad, whereas there had been as many as 650. He lets slip that “Israel is our home,” though he also quickly adds that he feels completely at home in India. Obviously, he could do better, materially. He runs a canteen in a school and goes to another job after that. He has a son and a daughter and is a vegetarian, though his family eats kosher meat. There is a local Jewish man who slaughters for them. One problem the community faces is that the only person who can do circumcision is an office worker in Bombay, who has to be brought in for the occasion. Jacob himself tried to learn the procedure when he was in Israel, but he was there only six weeks and the course lasted a full year. He can recite Hebrew prayers and read Torah, but he doesn’t know the language. If they get ten people, a minyan, on Friday, they can say their prayers. They don’t mind converting people to Judaism for the sake of marriage.
The above history of the Bene Israel is perhaps too easy, too clean. The oral tradition seems sparse, and one wonders about the written tradition, in any language. Two thousand years ago, India was a very different place. In the first millennium, many groups migrated into India, integrating into its cultures and evolving with them; few if any carry memories of the migration, let alone admit to it. Buddhism was robust; it has almost vanished. Islam arrived over several centuries in a major way. The languages and cultures of today have evolved through long processes from those of the past. In what manner did the Bene Israel evolve, if they did arrive that long ago? How old are the earliest synagogues? Was this community of Saturday oilmen ever nominally Hindu?
Still, there is a range of theories as to who the Bene Israel, or the original immigrants, were.
An interesting story from the tradition of these Jews is the arrival of a scholar called David Rehabi sometime between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Rehabi is believed to be the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. He picked three men from the Bene Israel and taught them about Judaism; thus the revivification of this community as Jews began. The three men were called kajis, from the Arabic qadi, meaning a judge and scholar. Maimonides (1138–1204), as is well known, lived much of his life in Fatimid Egypt. By the nineteenth century, the Cochin Jews and the Baghdadi Jews had begun to interact with the Bene Israel and provided religious teachers for them. Christian missionaries also reinforced their Jewish identity and brought them into their English schools.
The Bene Israel have produced two well-known Indian writers: Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), one of India’s major poets in English, and Esther David, who has written a lyrically evocative novel, The Walled City, about a Jewish girl growing up in old Ahmedabad.
David’s novel brings vividly to life the area of Relief Road, Delhi Darwaza, and Khamasa in an impressionistic, finely detailed account of a Jewish girl coming of age in her extended family in a neighbourhood full of Hindus and Muslims as neighbours, domestics, and vendors. So closely does it stay to the lived experience that, remarkably, there is no awareness in it of the larger political movements of the nation or the state. It is not even dated, though the period it covers seems to be the 1950s and onwards. The children of the family go to convent schools—England and English ways, the legacy of colonial rule and patronage, are preferred—yet among members of the family there is also a yearning to belong and be like the others. The narrator, who is unnamed, wishes she were born a Hindu like her friend Subhadra: “I dread to tell him [her uncle Menachem] that I find the colourful and noisy Hindu temple an easier place to pray in.” When she falls in love with Raphael, without actually speaking to him, instead of the Hebrew prayer, she murmurs a song to Krishna under her breath, as his lover Radha had done. Raphael is from the community of Baghdadi Jews, who are supposedly superior to the Indian, Marathi-speaking Bene Israel. There is a scarcity of Jewish partners and a fear of
marrying cousins lest it lead to genetic defects in the offspring. There are the family oddballs, the family secrets. And the call of Israel plays constantly in the background. Throughout the novel there exists an underlying sense of hopelessness, as the community dwindles through death and departure. At the end of the novel, of the extended family two girls remain, now women, looking after their old folks. The Walled City observes not only the Jewish family, but also the larger community in the Ahmedabad it is set in. One of its most poignant moments occurs as Mandakini, a Jain girl whom Cousin Samuel loves, is taken away dressed like a bride, in a silver chariot pulled by white horses, in a procession led by musicians, to a place where her hair will be shorn and she will become a barefoot homeless nun.
Constantly in the novel there are hints of a certain lurking danger. Yet when that danger, a riot, materializes, four times to my counting, Esther David’s reference to it is oblique, almost reluctant. They are simply bewildering events, the murders and rapes carried out by mysterious strangers: “I think Ahmedabad is…always throbbing with a sense of danger…. Swords are drawn. The creepers and flowers in the stone carving are dying. The walled city is under curfew. There are guns and rifles. Outsiders, say the newspapers, are creating the disturbances…. Doors locked. What is your religion? Who are you? From where do you come? We are burning in the fires of hell.” No more.
Uncle Menachem decides to move to a housing colony with Parsis and Christians as neighbours. And then, some unspecified amount of time later: “The riots have erupted again and the poison creepers grow like huge fishing nets in the rivers and in lakes, devouring the last of the dying fish.”
Emmanbaba, a relation, is found dead on a street, stabbed in the stomach.
