“Of course,” said someone, trying to be conciliatory, and before we knew it, Lakshman and Gurinder were laying down conditions. We could march, but we must not beat drums or cymbals near the mosques. We could shout slogans, but they had to be moderately phrased, and not inflammatory. We could carry placards, but no weapons. Conditions he was entitled to impose on us by virtue of the power vested in him as district magistrate. We had to agree, or his smiling Sikh accomplice could withdraw the police permission we had to march. Surely they wouldn’t dare? We could have called their bluff, but there was nothing to be gained by confronting them. We agreed.
“I want it in writing,” Lakshman said, biting a lower lip.
These overeducated college types. They want things in writing, as if the magic of a few words-turds on a page would cast some sort of spell on us peasants. We looked at each other; Sharma shrugged. Gurinder wrote down his rules on a sheet of police stationery, and we all signed.
We knew it would make no difference. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen.
And we were prepared.
from Priscilla Hart’s scrapbook
July 16, 1989
Learned something interesting about the Hindu god Ram, the one all the fuss is about these days. Seems that when he brought his wife Sita back from Lanka and became king, the gossips in the kingdom were whispering that after so many months in Ravana’s captivity, she couldn’t possibly be chaste anymore. So to stop the tongues wagging, he subjected her to an agni-pariksha, a public ordeal by fire, to prove her innocence. She walked through the flames unscathed. A certified pure woman.
That stopped the gossips for a while, but before long the old rumors surfaced again. It was beginning to affect Ram’s credibility as king. So he spoke to her about it. What could Sita do? She willed the earth to open up, literally, and swallow her. That was the end of the gossip. Ram lost the woman he had warred to win back, but he ruled on as a wise and beloved king.
What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. She has no way out other than to end her own life.
And I’m in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.
~ ~ ~
Professor Mohammed Sarwar to V. Lakshman
August 26, 1989
Thanks for receiving me. It’s flattering to think I made enough of an impact in college that you still remember me.
Yes, I’m at the Univ now, good old Delhi University, teaching in the History Department. Actually, I’ll be here for a few weeks. Trying to do some research in my period that seems oddly topical right now. I’m working on the life of a man called Syed Salar Masaud Ghazi, popularly known as Ghazi Miyan, a hugely revered Muslim warrior-saint in these parts. You haven’t heard of him? So you see why my research is necessary.
The fact is that we have, especially in North India, an extraordinary tradition of heroes, whether warriors or saints or, in this instance, both, who are worshipped by both communities, Hindu and Muslim. You hear a lot about the “composite culture” of North India, but not enough about what I tend to call its composite religiosity. A number of Muslim religious figures in India are worshipped by Hindus — think of Nizamuddin Auliya, Moinuddin Chishti, Shah Madar, Shaikh Nasiruddin who was known as Chiragh-i-Delhi, or Khwaja Khizr, the patron saint of boatmen, after whom even the British saw fit to name their Kidderpore Docks in Calcutta. Ghazi Miyan is in this league.
But it’s not enough to hail composite religiosity, to applaud complacently the syncretism of Hindu-Muslim relations in India. Of course we have to keep reminding people that tolerance is also a tradition in India, that communal crossovers are as common as communal clashes. But we mustn’t abdicate the field of religious conflict to the chauvinists on both sides. What we need, as my friend and fellow professor Shahid Amin, whom you knew at college, likes to say, are “nonsectarian histories of sectarian strife.”
Ghazi Miyan, according to popular belief, was a great Muslim warrior who was killed on the field of battle in A.D. 1034 fighting a bunch of Hindu rajas not that far from here, a bit to the north, at Bahraich. Soon after his death he was canonized in popular memory; people began gathering regularly at his tomb; ballads of his exploits were composed in both the Awadhi and Bhojpuri languages, and he is mentioned in a number of Persian and Urdu histories, though if I were writing this Id put “histories” in inverted commas — some of them are little better than unsubstantiated hagiographies. But what’s interesting is that the Ghazi Miyan of the historical texts was no apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity. He was a warrior for Islam. In one seventeenth-century text he’s even described as the nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni, that notorious invader who destroyed the fabled Somnath temple in the eleventh century. And as a soldier, the texts say, he went about his business slaying infidels and smashing idols with the worst of them. When he died he was a martyr on a jihad, and his soul may be assumed to have gone straight to an Islamic heaven with no vacancies for Hindus.
So why is this same Ghazi Miyan worshipped by the very Hindus he apparently attacked? Why do Hindu women pray at his tomb for a male child of his noble qualities? Why are songs and ballads to him sung by Hindus? And they were — in fact many of these songs were collected by British colonial ethnographers in the late nineteenth century across a wide swath of North India from Delhi to Varanasi. Now, what’s interesting about them is that they tell a different story, of a warrior born with the curse that he would die unwed, who was killed on the day of his wedding when he went forth to protect his herds and his herdsmen from the marauding Hindu Raja Sohal Deo.
And what did his herds consist of? Of cows! Now, doesn’t that ring any bells for you? Does the youthful warrior defending his cows not remind you of Lord Krishna of Hindu legend, seducer of milkmaids and protector of cows? In fact, in one of the popular ballads, it is Krishna’s foster mother, Jashodha, who makes a dramatic entry into the wedding celebrations of Ghazi Miyan, drenched in the blood of cowherds slaughtered by Raja Sohal Deo, and pleads with him to rise to the defense of the cows. Imagine the scene as this young Muslim bridegroom rises, casts aside his wedding finery, begs forgiveness from his mother, straps on his sword, and walks out to do battle against the killer of kine. It’s stirring stuff, I tell you, and there’s more in the songs and ballads I’ve collected: tales reinventing episodes from the Ramayana, tales featuring Krishna himself, all wrapped up in the life of Ghazi Miyan, and sometimes in the miraculous powers of his tomb.
What explains these contradictory legends, of the martyred jihadi revered by Muslim fundamentalists and the noble cow-protector worshipped by ordinary Hindus? Extremists of both stripes have sought to discredit the secular appeal of Ghazi Miyan. The Hindu fundamentalists have attacked the ballads as fraudulent tales made up by scheming Muslim tricksters to hoodwink gullible Hindus. They’ve also given much circulation to the jihadi versions of Ghazi Miyan’s story. And as to the episode of the cows, they argue that the cows had actually been earmarked for slaughter at Ghazi Miyan’s wedding feast, and that the reason Raja Sohal Deo attacked the Ghazi’s cowherds was in order to liberate the cows from certain death at the hands of the Muslims. Hindus, they say, have been duped for centuries into worshipping an oppressor, and a foreign invader at that. The Hindutva types lament that the offerings made by Hindus at the Ghazi’s tomb go to support Islamic schools, hospitals, and mosques — the very fact that the secularists hail as evidence of composite religiosity.