A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  There is a very large oil refinery in the area, and my two companions, with cameras, are understandably nervous about being questioned by police and taken for Pakistani spies.

  On our way out from Jamnagar we meet a young man at a gas station (or “petrol pump”), a Khoja who peddles stuff from his motorbike. Yes, he knows where the khano is. He leads us past a Hindu then a Shia area, through ever-narrowing and seemingly numberless gulleys, to the local khano, an old and rather grand structure at the end of the maze, looking rather out of place in an extremely poor, stench-ridden area. A couple of little shops are open selling small items and vegetables, goats stand perched on the ledges outside the closed doors of the homes. In the courtyard of the khano we meet an old woman who says she has a relation in Paris. She has the same family name as my mother’s father; yet how is one to tell if we are related? A wedding took place here last night and the cleanup is in progress, along with the dismantling of the stage and decorations. A board on a wall announces upcoming events. Our guide presses us to come to his home for a meal, but we are late and depart on the road to Junagadh.

  The village of Khoja Gaum, along an unmarked, unpaved side road off the main highway, looks more prosperous than I recall from before, when I saw it during a drought. Close to the entrance is a temple, a few people sitting idly outside it. We ask about the Khoja area and they tell us to keep going. After a couple of turns ahead, on rather neat but still unpaved roads, some kids inform us we’ve found it. We get out of our car, greet a few curious people who begin to gather. Talk to the kamadia, someone says, pointing to a man approaching. The kamadia, who could be in his mid-thirties, after the customary greeting begins to walks with me. We stare at each other. You look familiar, he says, curiously. I’ve seen you before. I tell him, Nine years ago? Of course!

  Early one morning, I was at the Jamnagar bus station, inquiring about buses to Khoja Gaum, when a young man came up to me and said, I am going there, I will take you. We left together, and on the way, Nizar, which was his name, told me Khoja Gaum was one of a group of nine villages. He kept a motor scooter in one of them and every day rode to a few to teach the kids. The Khoja Gaum that I recall was poor, suffering a drought, but I had been treated well. The women wore saris, the men shirts over pants; I had been served tea in saucers at several houses, shown family albums. There had been old framed photos on the porches of the houses as well; in them, the women wore the odhani, which we called the pachedi, over their heads or shoulders, and I was surprised that the villagers did not know the term “pachedi.” Their knowledge of ginans, our traditional hymns, also seemed rudimentary to me, a tradition which we in East Africa had been able to nourish. There had been a religion teacher of sorts, who had complained about village squabbles; his teaching material had been a couple of tattered books. All in all, I had met a rather dejected, hopeless-looking people, and I came away with the bitter impression that my parents’ generation, having done much better in Africa than their kinfolk in Gujarat, had turned their backs on them. Not once do I recall hearing from them about cousins, aunts or uncles, grandparents in India.

  I recall sitting in Nizar’s local classroom. The children, ranging in age roughly between six and twelve and including Khojas and other castes, had sat before us on the floor, mesmerized by the apparition that I was. I was touched to see them recite the national anthem and a song in praise of Gandhi, to start with. Then Nizar gave them a lecture about who I was, where I came from, why I was one of them.

  Now the village looks more prosperous, and Nizar is the kamadia, assistant headman. He tells me that after the earthquake of 2001 they received some assistance. He has moved into the village, is married, and has a child. He proudly takes me to look at three computers sent from Calgary by a well-wisher with past connections to the village. They are kept in a special room where young people receive computer training. There is a new khano beside the old one, which I had visited before. Then we go to sit in the yard of Nizar’s house, an almost idyllic-looking area shaded by trees. Several men sit with us, on charpais and chairs, and the women hover at the edge, participating at times in the conversation. The fact that I am visiting a second time gives me a certain status. The local woman whom I had seen in Dhroll has returned.

  A wedding is to take place, and some relations are in town for the event. I ask them what they know of the village history, and they look lost. Apparently, the man who could have told us has left for Rajkot; his mind is like a computer, he knows a lot. His brother is here, called Kassam. He is a strongly built man in his fifties, and he is from Porbandar; he wishes we could go there. There are many ways of speaking Gujarati, of course; these people, like the Somanis from Dhroll, speak in a manner familiar. It is a bantering style, informal, suited for discussions just such as this one. You heard it in the chai shops, outside apartments, outside the khano, at family gatherings. You still hear it, in Dar es Salaam, in Toronto.

  Gradually, in the friendly, fraternal atmosphere that has emerged with my acceptance as one of these people, they open up and recollect.

  They tell me their ancestors had come from Kutch with the Jam, who had given them this village for services rendered and consented to the description “Khoja” in its name. They can all speak Kutchi, of course, as a private language, though Gujarati is the formal language.

  I ask about the town of Jam Jodhpur, where my maternal grandmother hailed from. The town apparently had been a local centre for Khojas, they tell me, but in recent times it has almost completely been abandoned by them.

  Why was it abandoned? There were conflicts with the local Patels, Kassam says. One day they came in a horde and asked to check out the khano. They were told they could come, but in small groups. Fighting broke out, Kassam says, with relish. He happened to be visiting the town and was young and hot-blooded. And so he was drawn in and managed to beat up a couple of people. He had to leave town that same night, the Patels in hot pursuit bearing swords. He slipped onto a train awaiting to depart for Porbandar, and that is where he is settled now. I gather that he cannot go back to his town, because he would be found out. And of course I wonder how much of the story is true. This is the kind of chai gup-chup where embellishment is a sine qua non.

  Khoja Gaum and its neighbours had once been Khoja villages. This comes as hugely surprising. In Africa we had been town folk without land, and here, to be told that we had land, entire villages, of our own; to discover that there is a way of speaking and bantering that I share so easily with the people before me. An elder from the local Patel community is brought to meet me, for, after all, I am a symbol of Khoja success and possibility. He is the former headman, the sarpanch, of the village, and is dressed in traditional white dhoti and turban, unlike the Khojas in loose-fitting shirts and trousers. The man confirms, yes, this was a Khoja place, his ancestors had been “nabda”—weak, in straitened circumstances—when they arrived, and they had been welcomed and assisted.

  How a Khoja village then came to be dominated by Patels must be a story in itself. I can imagine lack of unity and foresight, perhaps the politics of post-Partition India. I recall the previous time hearing of a land conflict over a grave site. The drought had been crushing, people were ready to sell their land; some had taken to hawking on the highway and working in brass factories in the city. Now only a few of the Khojas own land.

  A remarkable thing now happens as we sit chatting. Kassam once, then again, refers to a Kul Devi, the family goddess. My ears prick up, I ask him who this Devi is. It turns out his family has a goddess they call Mata, Mother. There is a shrine to her, here in the village. Can we see it? Off we go, the lot of us, to a relation’s house; a few of us take off our shoes to enter a small room that faces the yard. A large number of people have gathered outside to watch.

  On a wall hangs a brightly painted picture of a pretty Indian woman in sari. Her face is fair and long, her bosom pointed and pronounced. She has some jewellery on. The portrait is roughly eighteen by twelve inches and a garland hangs ar
ound it. Below is a niche in the wall stuffed with colourful ornaments, including what looks like a paper garland. This is where the Kul Devi resides.

  From somewhere one of the men brings out a faded little picture in a metal mount grey with age, about an inch by an inch and a half in size. It is the original, and looks like nothing more than a trinket, perhaps a token in a cereal box some decades back. It was while family members were digging at this site that they found the little picture, and were convinced that it was of their Kul Devi and began to worship her. Then one day, Kassam says, in his relishing manner, he took it to a portraitist, bargained hard, and commissioned the copy which hangs on the wall. He paid four hundred rupees for it. How good a reproduction it is I cannot tell, I can hardly make out the original.

  However crudely superstitious this looks, for me it is a marvel to witness yet again the persistence of old indigenous Indian traditions away from the eyes of stern orthodoxy or divisive modern ideology.

  We cannot accept the villagers’ enthusiastic invitations to stay for the wedding the next day, promising me a night under the stars; time is pressing, and we head out for Jam Jodhpur.

  Jam Jodhpur, my maternal grandmother’s birthplace, is indeed a disappointment. It is a featureless town with a main street of low brick buildings and not much else besides. We have an excellent thali, however, at a “lodge” on the main street, in the front room of an apartment on the second floor of a building. The inner room has two or three charpais without mattresses, on which the owner and his son sit, perhaps waiting to take a nap after we leave, for it is a little late. There are one or two Khoja families around, and across from the lodge we meet one at their home; their business is selling peanuts at a stall. The house is a nice bungalow, however, and we are invited to sit in the front living room, an enclosed verandah looking out on the main street. They have four daughters, two of them married away; of the two remaining, the older one is a beautician practising from the home. It’s hard making ends meet, they say. There is a distinct feeling of having been left behind, with no extended family around anywhere to rescue them from their plight.

  We head for Junagadh.

  It is impossible not to feel a sense of wonder and exhilaration, driving by the coast, skirting the blue Arabian Sea under a bright sun, our young driver in his baseball cap and dark shades having quietly turned off our bhajans to play something more appropriate to his age. He is being indulged. And truly, there is no disappointment, everything is experience. What did I expect at Jam Jodhpur? I couldn’t say, I had to see it. Dhroll and Khoja Gaum were an unexpected treat.

  The countryside here is farming, there is no heavy industry as in the south; traffic is moderate, even absent at times. Junagadh lies some distance inland, but we decide to continue further down the coast to the southwestern tip of the peninsula, to visit the famous temple of Somnath, the political and historical significance of which cuts through from the tenth century to ours. Its reigning deity is Shiva, Lord of Soma, “the moon.”

  Past the dreamy little coastal town, once the thriving ancient port, of Veraval, comes an almost fairytale-looking place, an ornate white building shimmering in the distance. This is Somnath, the temple. Outside its gates the atmosphere is that of a funfair, buses unloading people, stalls selling all manner of items, vendors hawking postcards and mementoes. Long lines of pilgrims have queued up on the paved walkway through the lush green lawns to get the darshana of the lingam in the temple, a sandstone structure designed meticulously in the medieval style. But the overriding impression here is that of the clean, the new, the beautiful; indeed, this is a memorial to a destroyed ancient temple. For me it lacks the immediacy, the excitement, of the messier, dirtier, timeless temples such as the one at Puri, in Orissa. The visit inside, after a long queue to get in, is brisk and formal. Behind the temple lies a beach where visitors stroll about and children are at play. It is a peaceful scene; the policeman in khaki at the entrance could be one of the worshippers, the guns behind the sandbags at the outer wall could be part of the temple decor.

  But they are not. What, then, is the story?

  In 1026, Mahmud of Ghazna, in what is now Afghanistan, descended into Western India with a large army and plundered the wealthy and powerful temple of Somnath. The sacred lingam is said to have been crushed to pieces, vast amounts of gold and silver were taken away, along with the gates. Somnath’s status was due to its strategic location, close to the important port of Veraval, which traded with places as far away as China, Arabia, and Zanzibar. Its most lucrative trade was in horses, and it counted among its residents a thriving community of Hindu, Muslim, and Jain businessmen, as well as priests, sailors, and others. At various times after Mahmud’s attack, the temple was successively rebuilt by the Hindus and destroyed by the sultans and their armies, including Alauddin Khilji of Delhi.

  In recent times Somnath has become a symbol and a rallying cry for militant Hindu nationalism. It was from Somnath in 1990 that L. K. Advani, a leader of the right-wing nationalist BJP, began his infamous Rath Yatra, a chariot procession, to end at that other “Muslim” insult, the mosque in Ayodhya built by the Mughal emperor Babur on the site claimed to be the birthplace of the god Rama. One of the aims of such yatras involving Somnath has been to unite diverse Hindus, including the lower castes, into a “Hindutva,” a Hindu-ness. This would make alien minorities of all the others, beleaguered under a shrill, belligerent, and highly organized nationalism calling for a Hindu state. But India is not simple, it has a million parts. Diversity, even to the point of tolerating the bizarre (as I write this, the wedding of two monkeys is being celebrated somewhere), is its nature, and democratic secularism its strength. In contrast, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are Islamic states, hardly to be emulated.

  But Somnath irks the nationalists, who are only too ready to take on the onus of collective shame and retribution on behalf of Hindu-ness, to the point of encouraging their wilder adherents, who went on the killing and raping rampages in the violence of 2002.

  K. M. Munshi, a littérateur and politician, wrote in 1951, “For a thousand years Mahmud’s destruction of the shrine has been burnt into the collective sub-conscious of the [Hindu] race as an unforgettable national disaster.” Calling Hindus a race is in itself wrongheaded, doing away with regional, linguistic, and cultural differences across India, and overlooking the fact that the Muslims are as Indian as anyone else, with a diversity reflecting India’s own. It is as if the Catholics of England were to be called a different race, or foreigners. Munshi made it a lifelong project in his Gujarati histories and romances to evoke the glories of pre-Muslim Gujarat, as idealized in the reign of the Solankis of Anhilvada. It would surprise—and perhaps offend—him that I take as much pride in Gujarat’s past glories as he did. It was Munshi who led the drive to rebuild the temple, which was completed in 1951. It was a brand-new temple, the existing medieval structure having been completely dismantled in the service of the reconstruction, an act that in itself was controversial.

  Munshi’s plot-driven romances are continuously reprinted, still popular a hundred years after their first publication. They paint a pink picture of the past, in which the protagonists are all of the high castes and extremely conscious of that fact; they are observant, chaste, intelligent, brave, and chivalrous; even their Hindu antagonists have the same qualities. It is the Muslims who are barbarians.

  Romila Thapar, a highly respected—and therefore also much vilified—liberal historian, in contrast to Munshi, provides a complex picture of Somnath in its heyday, and examines at the same time many of the interpretations of Mahmud’s attack in the millennium that followed. Making extensive use of Persian and Arabic sources, Sanskrit inscriptions, Jain biographies, folk traditions, and other sources, Thapar gives us a Somnath that was a prosperous trade and pilgrimage centre, and a mixed community where Jains competed with Brahmins for ascendancy and Muslims were already present, living as merchants, sailors, and artisans who worshipped in their mosques. There is evi
dence of coexistence and mutual respect in the mercantile society of the pilgrim port: the building of a mosque by a Jain merchant for his trading partners from the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf; the striking of bilingual Arabic-Sanskrit coins, some bearing the image of Shiva’s bull, Nandi; a coin carrying the Muslim kalima in colloquial Sanskrit, “avyaktam ekam muhammada avatara nripati mahamuda,” “the unmanifest is one, Muhammad is his incarnation and Mahmud is the king.” (A remarkable illustration, incidentally, of how the Islamic faith could get transformed in the Indian context.)

  Moreover, the temple and its pilgrims at this wealthy centre were already subject to plunder by pirates from the sea and by neighbouring Indian rajas. The attack on Somnath by Mahmud, says Thapar, was one event among many, in a complex historical situation. Post-1026 Sanskrit inscriptions written at or about Somnath do not mention Mahmud at all, raising questions about the actual magnitude of Mahmud’s assault and its importance.

  According to Thapar, it was the British who instigated the idea of the eternal wound on the Hindu psyche caused by Mahmud’s attack, and sought, in the words of a parliamentarian in a House of Commons debate of 1843, to “relieve that country, which had been overrun by the Mohammadan conqueror, from the painful feelings which had been rankling amongst the people for nearly a thousand years” a thought that Munshi echoes to the point of mimicry in his 1951 statement. With much fanfare the British brought from Mahmud’s tomb in Ghazna sandalwood gates purportedly plundered by him from Somnath, only to have it be discovered that they were Egyptian in origin and could not have been from Somnath at all. They were quietly put away in a storeroom in Agra Fort, where they presumably rotted.