A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  How important Mahmud’s attack was and what it meant, over the millennium since, depended on who was telling the story. Any understanding of the event, insists Thapar, “should be historically contextual, multi-faceted, and aware of the ideological structures implicit in the narratives.”

  Nevertheless, while acknowledging the manipulation and selectiveness of memory and history in the service of chauvinism, com-munalism, and colonialism, the devastation of Mahmud is surely undeniable. What evokes wonder is how potent its memory is kept today. And not only by the Hindu nationalists: the Pakistan army has named its short-range ballistic missile “Ghaznavi” that is, Mahmud of Ghazna.

  Shortly before Junagadh, there comes a side road leading into a town called Paneli. Small and neat, Paneli is the ancestral home of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan. The birthplace of that other great leader, Mohandas Gandhi, who was so much against the Partition, is less than a hundred miles away. I know that Jinnah was a Khoja, though not a practising one. I can see a Khoja calling for Hindu-Muslim unity, as Jinnah earlier did—he had been one of the party who welcomed Gandhi back from South Africa in 1915—but how a Khoja could lead a bitter campaign for a Muslim homeland has always mystified me. What he really desired, however, and what he believed, are matters of intense controversy. Speaking to Pakistan’s constituent assembly in August 1947, he said, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques, or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan…. You may belong to any religion or casteor creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” This statement hardly describes an Islamic nation. He died an enigma, in 1948, barely a year after Independence. His wife, a Parsi, and his daughter, their only child, did not accompany him to the new state.

  Jinnah’s father’s name was Jinnahbhai Punja Meghji (or Meghani), a typical Khoja Kathiawari name (megha means “cloud” in Sanskrit). Of Jinnah’s Khoja background, his biographer Stanley Wolpert says, “Khojas fled Persian persecution to Western India, among other regions, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries.” There is no evidence of any sort whatsoever, in fact, of Khojas having fled from anywhere to India; it is well known in Gujarat that they are from the Lohana and Bhatia castes. This is what the Lohanas say; it is what other Jinnah historians say; it is what is told at Pirana to this day; and in my childhood, full of Khoja legends, I never heard of an Iranian origin. It is remarkable how a prominent historian could accept without question such a cock-and-bull story, evidently invented in Pakistan to give the country’s “Great Leader” a more prestigious—that is, Persian and Arabic—Islamic heritage. Wolpert also seems to have been told that “Mamad” was Jinnah’s pet name at home, when in fact it is how all Khojas, by the very nature of their language, pronounce “Muhammad.”

  Our mistake upon entering the town of Paneli, of such historical connections, is to stop and openly inquire of some people standing around a tree where Jinnah’s family house is. From the responses we receive, it seems it might be right across from where we have stopped. But while we are still conversing, and just as a finger points us to a building, a policeman comes by on a motorbike. What Jinnah? he shouts angrily. There is no Jinnah here! If his house were here, we would have burnt it! Go! And he escorts us on his bike right out of Paneli like a small-town sheriff in a movie. Knowing the level of corruption of the police, this is Gujarat after all, we believe we have had a narrow escape. We also surmise that others must have come around over the years to look for Jinnah’s ancestral home. This Gujarati Gillespie takes us right back to the highway before turning around.

  End of the Road

  The sun soon began to warm, and at the same time to remind me that I had yet much to see; but it was not easy to resist the influence which enthralled the senses in such a scene. I pity the man who has never felt the luxurious languor of undisturbed cogitation, to which for a while I surrendered my entire energies…. But there must bean end to all things, and retracing my steps, I at length regained the temple of the more beautiful and more amiable “Universal Mother.”

  JAMES TOD, Travels in Western India (1839)

  JUNAGADH, OLD FORT, lies at the foot of the Girnar hill, towards the southwest of the Kathiawar peninsula. It is an ancient city, one of the few places in India where the stone edicts of Asoka (250 BC) have been found. In the twelfth century it was ruled by the Chudasama rajas. According to legend, the last of these rulers, Ra Khengar, pledged to his dying father to carry out four acts of revenge against neighbouring kingdoms for the insults he had suffered. To carry out the last two of these tasks, the Ra attacked Anhilvada, the Solanki capital; the king, Siddhraj, was not present, but the Ra managed to destroy the eastern gate of the city and take away Siddhraj’s betrothed, whom he married. There followed a war that lasted twelve years, at the end of which Ra Khengar was killed and Junagadh fell to the Solankis. The queen, formerly betrothed to Siddhraj, committed sati, joining her husband in the funeral pyre.

  In 1467, the intrepid Sultan Mahmud Begada wrested Junagadh from its Rajput rulers, thus making it the first of the two “ghads,” the mountain fortresses, he conquered (the other being Pavagadh). Subsequently he invited the nobility and scholars from other places to settle in the city, built his own palace there, and changed its name to Mustafabad. The older name, however, prevailed after his death. Mughal rule, beginning in 1573 with the defeat of the Gujarat sultans, lasted a long time, until the mid-eighteenth century, when one Sher Khan Babi took control and started a dynasty that later received protection from the British as an independent princedom. Its modern history is contentious. Although overwhelmingly Hindu in its population, its ruler, known as the nawab, opted to join Pakistan in 1947. This would make the state a Pakistani territory surrounded on three sides by India, with the Arabian Sea on the fourth. Intense agitation followed; neighbouring areas of Kathiawar began a boycott of Junagadh, and there were threats of an armed struggle. Finally the dewan, the prime minister, of Junagadh handed over control of the state to the Indian government. The nawab fled to Pakistan, taking with him the state treasury, and Junagadh came under Indian rule.

  The last dewan of Junagadh was the father of the future prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged by the generals in 1979. His granddaughter Benazir was assassinated in 2007 by Muslim extremists.

  Junagadh, at 7 a.m. from my hotel balcony. It’s dark grey outside, a sliver of moon in the sky, the rest of the disc dimly perceptible. It all looks rather drab down below, at this intersection on the Ring Road called Kalwa Chowk: walls blackened with age, cars hunched in the shadows, pavement broken, no sidewalk. Ten-foot doors, wood or metal, grimly protect the stores. Litter lies thick on the ground.

  Last night, though, we arrived in the midst of an explosion of noise and light, the streets thick with traffic and people, the shops brilliantly ablaze; restaurants, sweet shops, at least ten barbershops, dolled-up pavayas, eunuchs, standing at corners. African-looking men, who must be the Sidis. This is a pilgrim town, which explains this conglomeration of people.

  Women—of the sweepers’ caste, I surmise—appear, sweep the litter up outside the shops. Soon the street looks neat, but for the broken paving. The shops begin to open. Traffic slowly picks up, heading for the tumult and climax of the evening.

  The hotel is modest—somewhat dark, and the hot water has to be brought in buckets for the private bathroom.

  Delhi is far away (as the Sufi said to the sultan). In this quietude, every place seems far away. I have brought papers from Delhi, but they are like news from another planet. “Women on Top: Bread-maker to Bread-earner, Here’s Looking at You, Lady!” says the front page of the Times of India in one of its tabloid moods. The Hindustan Times gives the results of a poll on adultery. Seventy per cent of Delhiites would give their spouses a second chance. What segment of society does this represent? There is excitement about an impending cricket series between India and Pakistan. Hindu women activists in Gujarat are pro
testing against the observance of Valentine’s Day.

  Four roads leave the Kalwa Chowk junction, heading parallel to each other up the length of the city, through its heart. The closest one to us passes the old palace, then proceeds through an elaborate and decorative arched gate into a decrepit wonderland with the stately name of Diwan Chowk. This is a circle with three gates leading out, described by once-elegant buildings that could have been the administrative offices of the old regime, now in grimy disrepair, or gracelessly rebuilt. The principal motif here, where not vandalized, is the pointed arch, flanked by circular Indic emblems. One imagines state processions, guards of honour, foreign dignitaries greeted, under the handsome facades now blotted by parking sheds, warehouses, and small stores. Reinforced metal doors and square windows occupy arches like ill-fitting false teeth. The left gate leads into a neighbourhood street of old decaying buildings with trellised balconies bespeaking an age long gone. A crowd of young men stands intently around some roadside gamblers throwing dice. We return to the main road—across from us a balcony where dignitaries might have stood; underneath, a bank. We proceed through the third gate, and turn into a crossroad.

  Ambling along, we sight an old faded board announcing a cemetery. The entrance is behind a sidewalk stall, and in answer to our curious inquiry the vendor comes out to tell us brusquely there is nothing there. What to make of this? But he’s only whetted our interest. A man sitting at the entrance says certainly we may enter and opens the gate. Behold, then, a beautiful necropolis, sad as a widow in purdah. It takes the breath away. An overgrown grave-yard, some of the graves ancient and covered with chaddars, a few recent; from their midst rise faded, discoloured monuments, among them two ghostly mausoleums wonderful in structure, ornately carved, tragically going to seed. One of them is that of the “first nawab,” a woman with a child tells us, and is dated in the seventeen hundreds. We come back out into the street, feeling dejected. My friends tell me perhaps the neglect we’ve seen represents a different sense of history than I am used to. Different in what way? In North America we treasure the past, strive to preserve it; but perhaps there is not that much of it anyway. Here, there is a glut, enough to be neglectful, or selective. The last nawab of course did not endear himself to much of the population here.

  There is the city library close by, an impressive structure, built about 1900, but otherwise a disappointment. Most of the books—dusty, broken-spined, aged in content—stand behind glass, inside locked cabinets. There is a newer shelf of Gujarati novels, and of course the newspapers are current. That’s where the public goes.

  The former palace, now the museum, is closed today.

  It’s not hard to conclude that for all its ancient history and its renown to my young ears in East Africa, this is a small city that time has left behind. Its population, when I check, has grown far less than the national average over the last hundred years. The present population is less than two hundred thousand. This is a city, or town, you abandon eventually, for Ahmedabad, Bombay, Africa. My antecedents left here and developed Dar es Salaam and Nairobi almost from scratch. Now the populations of those cities outnumber Junagadh’s ten to one. The Indian downtown core of Dar es Salaam, where I spent so much of my young days, was, I am convinced, simply another Jamnagar or Junagadh. And it is not surprising anymore to realize that my people, the Khojas, with their odd, syncretistic faith, would thrive here in relative isolation, far away from the political and commercial centres of the land.

  We stop to chat with a friendly chap who describes himself as a sayyid (a descendant of the Prophet) and says yes there is a settlement of Sidis in the area. The Sidis are African Indians. Their origins are steeped in legend, which is not surprising because they came to India in a variety of ways, over land from the north with the armies, as soldiers and musicians, and by sea as servants, slaves, and perhaps also as sailors and traders. The connection of Gujarat with the East African coast across the Indian Ocean is ancient, of course, and the 1901 census shows some three hundred Swahili speakers here. The features of the Sidis are so distinctly African they are startling. In Nairobi I was told an amusing story about how a group of visiting Sidis was detained by Kenyan authorities, who would not believe them when they said they were Indians, regardless of their passports. I can imagine them saying contemptuously, “Eti, mnajidai Wahindi,” “So, you think you are Indians.”

  We follow the sayyid into a warren of streets turning progressively squalid—dilapidated structures, open drains, one being cleaned by a woman, animals and animal shit and refuse on the narrow road, no businesses—until we reach the end of the maze. We walk through a corridor to the back of a house, where there is a rather modest shrine: a grave inside a small enclosure of unpainted brick, with a grille door. It has been in the keep of a succession of women, the current one of whom is called Haluma, a friendly woman of dark though not completely African features, with henna in her hair, prominent brown teeth, smiling mouth. There is a tin box by the shrine for donations; it does not seem much used.

  We ask Haluma if she can tell us about the history of her people. I tell her that I come from Africa, near Zanzibar, but my pardada—my ancestors—were from around here. Did hers come from Africa? She doesn’t know what I am talking about. She speaks in Gujarati and Hindi. Another woman comes by, says a brief prayer in the direction of the shrine. She looks more African and is an in-law. The two tell us their history is in India and Pakistan. Their ancestors, some seven generations before, came from near Surat, in southern Gujarat.

  There are children about, home from school. A woman in a colourful sari arrives, and I could swear from her features she could be from Zanzibar, where one finds people of African, Indian, and Arab blood combined. Similarly a man, right down to his white singlet and brown trousers and curly hair, his very posture. I imagine this, partly, of course. I cannot help feeling a rather silly closeness with these people.

  A cart of small-scale items indicates their trade, peddling on the streets.

  To the right from the main road, a branch climbs up to Uppar Kot, the massive old fort of Junagadh on a hill, conquered in the twelfth century by Jaisingh Siddhraj and three centuries later by Mahmud Begada. At the entrance below, we have to give our names and addresses to two men seated at a rickety table with a register; women have been abducted and brought here, they tell us, and so everyone who goes up has to be accounted for. Much of the fort area is overgrown, though the thick grey crenellated walls and towers are visible standing intact and strong in the midst of bushes when viewed from the upper levels; outside the walls and partly surrounding the fort lies the modern city of Junagadh. The principal structure inside is a former mosque, now a mere husk and no longer in use, its three domes collapsed, the three mihrabs mere shadows on the western wall. A staircase leads up to a terrace, from which is visible the entire city clothed in a haze; on the opposite side, the imposing sacred hill of Girnar looms up through a gap in the raised foreground. Outside the mosque entrance, occupying a part of the courtyard, are some graves covered in chaddars and a small shrine with a lonely-looking man sitting outside on the ground, for no one seems to visit it. The man tells us the grave in the shrine belongs to the pir of the last nawab of Junagadh. The nawab’s family is in Pakistan and does not come here. The man is the voluntary caretaker of the shrine, though he tells us he himself is a Hindu.

  At this fort site there is also an ancient Buddhist cave, two millennia or so old, its meagre sculptures on walls and columns almost erased with wear; and a very deep medieval step-well open at the top. There is nothing here to explain them, put them in a context; the visitor must come armed with his own information.

  Finally, the climb up Girnar, a pilgrimage to the gods. This is why most people come to Junagadh.

  Four in the morning at Kalwa Chowk; cows and dogs sleep side by side on the roadside; the restless among the dogs are already trotting about. A man prepares to open his stall in the distance, another heads off on a motorbike; otherwise, the street,
the intersection further away, are empty. The air is cool yet somehow feels exhausted.

  Later, as we turn in to the road that heads towards Girnar, a furiously barking dog breaks the stillness and chases us for a good couple of hundred yards. What offence have we caused? Before us a formation of bright lights marches up into the sky, an awesome ladder-galaxy, the path to the various peaks of the mountain.

  We stop at a tea stall by the roadside, next to a Rajput hostel. The area is full of such hostels, or dharamshalas, belonging to various communities whose members regularly make the pilgrimage; it is more convenient and economical to stay in them than in the city. There is an air of anticipation about, where we sit with a bunch of other people in a silent fellowship. After tea and biscuits, we drive on towards the entrance to Girnar. Whereas the city streets are only just astir, over here hundreds are walking up to the entrance. It’s still dark, 4:30 precisely, as we take our first step up. A stall shrine is open to our left, playing a well-known bhajan that’s a film staple.

  Lampposts light our way up; it’s these lights that make the ladder-galaxy seen from a distance. It extends now ahead of us, winding along. Noisy kids go racing past us. People barefoot, in chappals, girls in sandals, some even in heels. My companion, only a year younger than I, is straining at the leash; I on the other hand would like to keep a steady pace, not get breathless too soon. The steps are numbered at intervals; the journey up is ten thousand steps, we have been told, and takes eight hours, there and back. It’s cool, but at eight hundred steps I am sweating. The city lights are visible below, and the path seems endless.