Unveiling India Page 3

  I travel to Bidar, the stronghold of Muslims who, I am told, continue to live as they did in Bedouin times. Driving three hours from Hyderabad is like driving back across three centuries. I go to meet Jalaluddin Changezi, keeper of the Muslim faith that he has ringed around with dogma in the manner of the massive fort walls that hem in the town. He shuffles out of the shadows, holding in his hand a hurricane lantern that sheds light, vaguely revealing his face and form. It is unmistakably one of a man of religion—saffron robes, a long reverent beard, kind eyes. What brings a Muslim woman without a veil to him? ‘A search’, I tell him, as he looks away unconvinced. Women from long distances, hidden behind veils, come on Sundays to hear him preach. He brings to them the word of God and tells them how to be a dutiful wife, a good mother, a good neighbour.

  ‘Times have changed but the written word has not,’ he begins, in the manner of an oration. ‘Look around you. There is more greed, more want. Man struggles shamelessly to fulfil these wants, though his needs are few. He can meet them with what he honestly earns. If he can fulfil his wants with ten rupees why does he want to earn fifty? Why does he seek from a wife a dowry that his religion prohibits? What did the Prophet give his daughter when he married her? A wooden bowl, twelve small clay bowls to serve guests, a camel skin, a pillow of grass and a chakki to grind the grain. God grants the children and provides the bread to feed them. No one can interfere with the will of God. Interference accelerates the degradation of man. And of woman. Today you see women walking down streets with their heads bare, their faces revealed. A woman’s place is not in the street but in the home. She is made different from man. If a man stays at home he loses his vitality. A woman does not. She is like a diamond. If you have something precious you don’t wear it on your cap and show off. You preserve it, guard it. And if you have a wound you don’t expose it. You bandage it, look after it, hide it. That is the way a woman is. In the Koran she is described as afitna, one who tempts man and brings trouble. She should stay where she belongs, within the walls of her home.’

  But haven’t times changed? Does woman not need to step out, see and understand the complexities that are now part of a world in which she too lives? Isn’t this the world in which she makes a home, raises a family, makes friends? If this world has begun to surround others will it also not impinge on her? ‘Yes, the world has changed. But the word of God has not,’ repeats the reverent old man. His voice is friendly but non- commital. The essence of his teaching is solely religious, based on the precepts of a book that, according to him, is changeless. Though he lives in a time that has changed, he continues to live outside it. The large white house, seemingly sturdy in the shadows, is the root of his world. He was born in it, has aged in it and will probably die in it. Like his forefathers. But the veiled women who come to him on Sundays have begun to live in houses whose walls have begun to crumble. Their courtyards have shrunk. Their children have been pushed to play in streets that have other sounds. The words of God though continue to be recited in the madrasas of every mohalla in Bidar. The Koran was first spoken not written. When recited from memory it had power; it conveyed not just the meaning but the vital energy of the person reciting it. The speaker’s personality and his tone altered the meaning of the text. Today, when it is read, not recited from memory, the text is less alive, more literal.

  For maulvi Karamatullah neither the tone has changed nor the meaning. He kept alive the word of God in madrasa Mahmud Gawan, built 500 years ago, until he was driven out by the archaeological department which was more keen to preserve the monument than the word of God. Gathering his brood the respected teacher retreated into a tin shed that became one of the twenty-five madrasas donated by the city to the community. On its paint-peeled wall hangs a tarnished frame that encloses an image of Kaaba, the holy shrine in Mecca. In a corner amid a cluster of worn-out sandals and shoes rests a well-used earthen pot that cools water for the thirsty young. Young boys wearing round, white caps on their heads squat on the mat- covered ground and chant the Koran in small, shrill voices. Young women their heads draped, crowd the other half of the room. Their eyes move from right to left over the ornate Arabic script that flows into their lives like an eternal poem whose beginning they have yet to fathom. The maulvi’s pride in this class of hundred is a young girl who is blind. Conscientiously she chants the holy verse in the manner of a divine performer. Like the other girls she too comes to the madrasa in a curtained rickshaw. But she is blind, I tell myself. ‘But the world is not,’ says the maulvi, as if he has read my thoughts. For she has the body of a woman. And like a diamond, or a wound, she should be hidden, not exposed, as said Jalaluddin Changesi in the light of the half moon.

  At the edge of Golasangi village in Bijapur, an ancestral kingdom of the Bahmanis the women continue to hide themselves as if they were diamonds. Ragged in discoloured saris, they are gathered in the bare verandah of a stone house, one that belongs to the most important Muslim family in the area. They are the former jagirdars to whom the village was gifted by the Mughal Emperor. The jagir entitled the family to land, money and privilege, isolating them from the life of the village. The jagir was sold a long time ago but the aura it once bestowed on the recipients continues to cling. In the small stone houses that tumble into each other live the descendants of the feudal overlords—six greying brothers and their wives with forty children and relatives. No man is allowed beyond the door on which hangs a burlap curtain.

  ‘The women of our household observe strict purdah. None of them has stepped out of this house, not even to vote,’ says the eldest brother as if he is recording a feat. I feel I have achieved another by taking my photographer in, the first man and outsider to enter these guarded premises in a hundred years. Our entrance does not stir the women out of their entranced condition. With heads draped and bodies garbed they move in a monotonous rhythm, reciting verses in praise of a saint whose tales of miracles have acquired the sanctity attached to the word of God. An elderly woman takes me aside and tells me a tale as if it has happened in her lifetime. ‘We may not go out of our houses but we are educated women,’ she says, in the manner of an assertion. ‘We can read the Koran and the hadith, understand Arabic and Persian. Everything that needs to be known is in these books.’ She withdraws when she realizes that I am a Muslim who does not swear by the Book. ‘Who is the man with you,’ she asks, looking suspiciously at the photographer. ‘He is my brother,’ I lie, putting her mind at rest.

  ‘Do you go around without a veil?’ she questions.

  ‘Purdah is a state of mind’, I tell her, repeating my father’s words.

  In Islam, the veil is not just meant to hide a face but cover a woman’s body in a modest fashion—leaving the face, the hands and feet open. ‘The Book,’ I tell her, ‘allows a man to see a woman’s face before he marries her. Even the Prophet saw Khadija and, later, Ayesha, whom he married. Does the woman cover her face when she goes on the Haj pilgrimage?’

  She stares and says nothing.

  I then pull out of my bag a copy of the Koran and read out to her a verse that pertains to purdah. ‘The rule of modesty applies both to men and women. A brazen stare by a man at a woman is a breach of refinement. Where sex is concerned, modesty is not only good form, it is not for the good of the weaker sex but also to guard the spiritual good of the stronger sex. The need for modesty is the same both in men and women.’ That is in English.

  The word of God is in Arabic, she says, in the manner of a dismissal. ‘Why were girls buried among the Arabs?’ she asks.

  ‘Because of dire poverty, because of their inability to earn, because there was compulsion to sell them as slaves and because they could not be married,’ I tell her. At a time when women were treated as chattels, the Prophet endorsed the view that women should seek knowledge, go with their men to war and help nurse the sick and the wounded.

  The woman listens and looks blank.

  ‘Why so many children?’ I ask, as a trail of unkempt, unwashed children circles me.


  ‘Can anyone stop nature? It is God who gives and God who takes. To tamper with one’s body is against the word of God,’ says the woman.

  Why then did she pierce her nose, her ears, and have her sons circumcised? Did that not amount to tampering with the body?

  ‘But sterilization is another matter,’ she rejoins, ‘It amounts to killing life.’

  ‘Azal, or coitus interuptus, was practised even in the days of the Prophet, and at a time when the Koran was being revealed to him,’ I tell her. ‘The Prophet and his four Caliphs advocated azal. Nine hundred years ago Imam Gazali preached that azal was good for the health and beauty of a wife, for safeguarding children and the slave girl from getting pregnant. The Prophet blessed a family with children only when they were not a burden on the parents. If a man recognizes his inability to support his children and decides not to have them, he is doing the right thing, according to Islam. After your prayers, go and look for a job, a way to live. Work according to your ability. Only then does God bless you, said the Prophet.’

  ‘Our times have changed,’ say the greying brothers. ‘What work can we do in a place where we once ruled?’ It is time for me to withdraw. I leave them clustered behind the burlap curtain of their house, cloister kept intact by the inspiration of a Holy Book. Wrapped in a heavy velvet cover, that has lost its colour and texture with time, the Book embodies a God who for this family is changeless in a changing world. Within this ghetto they live trapped by God not inspired by Him.

  *

  The pattern repeats itself. The great traditions of religion that thrive across the land appear to have closed their doors to the free movement of gods. I seek out Bhalchander shastri in a dark, forgotten building behind the main bazaar of Dharwar. Guardian of an ancient lore, he has been teaching the shastras in this Sanskrit patashala that prides itself on having kept alive a tradition for more than a hundred years. Women do not come to him to seek knowledge. The learning of the shastras is confined to men. When I ask him why women are barred from his school, he looks away, seeking a distant focus.

  ‘A woman does not have the necessary detachment to commit herself to a goal, a discipline or a journey. She is blessed to bear life, to nurture and sustain it whatever its form or shape; be it good, evil or indifferent. She cannot renounce that life. A man can separate himself from the world. That is his nature. That does not make him superior to a woman. Each has its nature. Each is important. Young men who have divorced themselves from the world come here to live and learn, to look upward; not to die into life but after life.’

  His voice is friendly but impassive, reminiscent of the old maulvi in Bidar contained and secluded by his own faith. They speak different languages but project a sensibility that has decided not to bare itself. Unlike the maulvi, the shastri seems to be a man who has reflected on the nature of experience, though his lifetyle has not varied much in forty years. The shastri, a tall, trim man, has walked one way, a kilometre each day, from his home to the school. He has not seen a modern university nor felt the need to read a newspaper, listen to a radio. The building where he spends his days wears a deserted look: one of majestic quiet, almost impenetrable. The pace inside is unhurried. A dark wooden staircase leads one up the school’s tiered heights—a level for astronomy, a level for logic, a level for poetry and the roof, open to the heavens, for meditation. This is the world of Bhalchander shastri, one that has contained him and given him his peace.

  ‘I do not have enough time to understand what is in front of me. Why should I clutter my life with things that only confuse and distract.’ His voice is calm, his manner unperturbed. Keeping out the world, it seems, is the price of his serenity. The shastri, I learn, is a married man.

  What is his ideal of a family?

  ‘One in which a man lives a life of dharma, a woman is a good housekeeper and the children are pious,’ he propounds. ‘The first son is dharmaputra, the one who keeps the family line. The rest are born out of lust. It is essential to have a daughter in the family. It is she who perpetuates it. If there is no son, a daughter has the right to perform the last rites of the parents.’

  Who is more important of the two?

  ‘In a train, is the guard more important than the driver?’ asks the learned man.

  Do the shastras endorse a planned family?

  ‘All life is sacred. At no point should life be tampered with,’ he pronounces gently. ‘Life enters the foetus during the seventh month. Until then it is a body waiting for life. If you kill the foetus you are destroying the house in which life would have dwelt. That amounts to violence. After the seventh month it is a total manifestation of life. It starts from the cloud in the sky. It then rains on earth and a flower blooms. Its seeds become the grains which man eats. There is life in every grain that in turn nourishes the semen, the life force. At no stage is there no life.’

  The words of the shastri return to me in a field of mustard where I meet a ploughman joyous in song:

  With a pure heart a peasant sweats

  the drops fall on earth

  the rain clouds burst

  the land turns green

  the flower blooms

  the grain ripens

  I knead my bread

  that gives me life.

  What the teacher preaches, the peasant sings. The teacher’s god evolves out of books. The peasant’s god is everywhere—in land, in cloud, in rain, in sun, flower and grain. His is a daily worship that stems from the earth, is groomed by the seasons.

  For a sanyasi, who lives by the river, God lies in renunciation. In a sanctum on a hill, where he has raised his own temple he lives divorced from a family, friends, attachments. A sadhu does not get attached to anything. When asked about the place where he was born he looks away, says nothing. For twenty- five years he has lived on fruit. He will not allow anyone to cook for him lest he gets attached to their service. ‘Like the lotus that has its roots in water and yet remains above water, a sadhu remains detached from life, is in life but is not immersed in it.’ The words of the Dharwar shastri return and reinforce man’s ability for renunciation.

  I meet women, on a desolate hill in Palitana, who too have renounced a home, a family, a past. They are sadhvis of the Jain faith. Their dress is white, their heads bald, each hair has been plucked out meticulously. All that they own, they carry in their two hands—a walking stick and a red lacquered pot, in which they receive the food they beg for daily. During the day they move like the wind. As the sun sets they withdraw into ashrams that have no light—wisps of white crouched in darkness, some in silence, some in song. They call me in, question me about my home, my city. Night permeates their life. Their eyes, though, betray a buoyancy which one associates with women, with caring, with love. Though detached these women, it seems, have not shut themselves out from a world where there is light and colour, where journeys have goals. A Jain sadhvi’s journey is like water. If it stops, it stagnates. In its movement lies its essence.

  Faith, whether it travels or stays rooted, pervades the life of India. It is pivotal to the lives of men, more immediately of women. ‘A faith that accepts and raises no questions is in itself a therapy,’ says a male doctor, who has come to a mountain retreat to pay obeisance to a sturdy hill woman whom he reverently calls Mother. She looks like a middle-aged housewife, with eyes that have a glazed expression. ‘She is a woman who knows, who has seen the Light,’ says the doctor, seated amidst an assemblage of devotees. She gazes at them with indulgence. They offer her flowers. With short plump fingers she touches them and gives them back. Her touch, it appears, transforms the flowers. It becomes prasad, an offering that is blessed. ‘A flower touched by Mother is no ordinary flower,’ the doctor confides, ‘A petal a day keeps the ulcer away, makes a lame one walk, a barren woman fertile.’ The doctor, like the rest, has surrendered his will to a woman who he believes is invested by a divine power.

  ‘Rituals have a root. They are visible ways of reaching God,’ says another doctor, who I meet
in Bombay. We are driving up the Western Ghats to Pune. The road ascends, twists, makes hair-pin turns, revealing hazards, visions of green valleys. The driver makes a sudden halt, throws a coin in a shrine tucked away in a hillside. He folds his hands, closes his eyes, moves his lips, and starts the car. ‘We stop here to bow to God, who presides and protects travellers on these hills. The stop automatically slows us down for this is a hair-pin turn, very dangerous,’ says the doctor. ‘It is the same with prayer. When we briefly leave our preoccupations to concentrate on God, we are really concentrating on the centre within ourselves. That, in turn, gives peace and strength.’

  Being doctors or scientists does not deter the faith of men in a country run by gods. I see this again in the Sunderam home, which has the distinction of being the most modern house in the sleepy town of Nagercoil. The house bears an air of religion, not of science—though both the husband and wife are doctors. The most resplendent room in their home is the puja room. Its walls are crowded with pictures of gods and goddesses, the air is fragrant with incense. Here Indira Sunderam, a gynaecologist, meditates an hour every evening. ‘I learnt to meditate when I was a girl of four,’ she says, in a voice charged with the quality of achievement. ‘My mother had told me that if I closed my eyes and thought of nothing I would see Krishna. I continue to do that. Meditation keeps me fit. I do not feel tired even after 14 hours of work in the hospital.’ Her husband, who is a psychiatrist, has his own way of penance. For 45 days he does not eat rice and curd, an exercise necessary to purify and prepare a man for the pilgrimage to the temple of Ayyappa, the celibate god who resides on the top of a wooded hill.