One Holy Man…Three Contending Shrines
He puts ashes on himself
He plays the flute to tame your ear
But knows not the meaning of jog
IMAMSHAH
WHEN I WAS A BOY in colonial Africa, history began and ended with the arrival in Zanzibar and Mombasa of my grandparents or great-grandparents from Gujarat. Beyond that, nothing else mattered, all was myth, and there was only the present. After a few years in North America, I came upon the realization that that ever-present, which had been mine, my story, had itself begun to drift away towards the neglected and spurned stories of my forebears, and I stood at the threshold of becoming a man without history, rootless. And so origins and history became an obsession, both a curse and a thrilling call.
When I first came to India I did not know my family’s precise origins, what places they came from. These I’ve gradually discovered and intend to visit. There is also another origin, and that is the history of my community of people, the Khojas—how they began. The physical link to that origin, I’ve discovered, are a few shrines, where are buried our holy men, called pirs, whom my Kathiawari Gujarati ancestors followed.
I was brought up in an Indian mystical, or bhakti, tradition. Every day, we went to a prayer house, called the khano, where we sat on mats and sang at least two hymns, called ginans, in an archaic language that was mostly an old Gujarati, but sometimes Sindhi. We did not always completely understand these ginans, but we knew they were beautiful; they defined our spiritual life and sensibilities. Many of them were about personal salvation of a mystical sort, or about Krishna-devotion, similar in content to the bhajans of the more famous Mira or Kabir, or those of any number of India’s devotional saints. We had two formal recitations of a prayer in the evening that was (until the 1950s) in Kutchi and so difficult to learn that students who recited it in the khano always received a gift. There was also a ritual ginan that was often sung, called the “Das Avatar,” about the ten avatars of Vishnu, one of the three gods of the Indian trinity.
The ginans, according to their signature lines and according to tradition, were written for their followers by a line of pirs, whose ancestry was Persian Ismaili but who, except for the first one or two, were all born in India. The most prominent and prolific of these pirs, Sadardeen, also went by the name Guru Sahdev and Satguru. He is said to have lived in the fifteenth century and visited Benares. An antecedent of Sadardeen, an Ismaili called Nur Satgur, is said to have arrived in the twelfth century, from Fatimid Cairo, in the liberal and learned court of the Rajput king Jaisingh Siddhraj and made him a disciple. One of Sadardeen’s grandsons was the famous Imamshah, one of whose descendants was Sahaji Sawai, whose grave I had visited in the remains of Mahmud Begada’s capital Champaner, and who may have been related to that sultan.
Were we Hindu or Muslim? I believe both; some would say neither. But from the late nineteenth century onwards, we had identified ourselves as Ismaili Muslims, followers of the Aga Khans, the first of whom arrived from Persia in that period and declared himself the Ismaili Imam.
In Gujarat we have been traditionally called the Khojas. Our family names—ending typically with the sound ani—indicate our origins in the Lohana and Bhatia castes of western Gujarat and Kutch. The first names used by our people right up to my grandfathers’ generation were purely Indian, in contrast to the Persian-and Arabic-origin names of typical Muslims, and indeed shared with Hindu communities. Older people among the Hindu Lohanas and even among the Khojas know of the ancestral unity of the two groups. According to the stories told by the Lohanas, their ancestors come from a Kshatriya group who had lived in the north, in the areas occupied by modern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and had migrated to the south in the eleventh or twelfth centuries during the period of massive unrest there. Mythologically, the Lohanas, like other Indian groups, trace their ancestry to a personality from the epics, in their case to Rama through his son Luv.
The history of the Khojas, except for this connection, is murky, much of it myth and legend. There were no written records until recent times; the earliest handwritten ginan manuscript dates only to the eighteenth century and is of the canonical “Das Avatar.” There has been all the room, therefore, for manoeuvring a history and identity for modern times: forgetting, eliding, rewriting.
A different process of revisionism is very much in evidence when I visit the shrine of Imamshah, a grandson of Sadardeen, in central Gujarat some ten miles out of Ahmedabad. The context is very much political, in the climate of the day. The BJP is in power in Delhi and, at least according to that party’s politicians and their euphoric pre-election slogans, India is shining.
Down a paved though narrow and rough road off the Baroda–Ahmedabad highway, after a couple of factories, past extensive wheat fields, comes the village of Giramtha. It is, essentially, about a quarter-mile of road; a sign outside the village put up by the communalist VHP welcomes you if you are a Hindu. Beyond that we see a clock tower, yellow in colour, and soon we have arrived at an elaborate, massive gate, flanked on either side by a life-sized stone statue of a guard wearing a traditional uniform standing beside a lion. This is Pirana, the shrine to Imamshah, grandson of Sadardeen. I was here nine years before but cannot recall the site being so heavily built up. Past the gate, we walk into an unpaved parking area of sorts, though there are no vehicles around, and thence enter the compound of a two-storey hostel-like building. A fair number of people are going in and out. A woman usher in white sari greets us and directs us down a corridor, at the end of which is a heap of removed footwear. We enter a paved compound containing a number of graves of various sizes, some of them large and prominent, in front of a square white building with a dome, which is the mausoleum of Imamshah. The place is active with worshippers, the atmosphere calm, almost torpid; a group of Muslim men, kerchiefs over their heads, stands around one of the larger graves, placing the traditional offering of a chaddar, a coloured cotton sheet, and flowers over it; then, palms open in front of them in the conventional gesture, they whisper their prayers, in Arabic, I presume.
The mausoleum has the structure of any number of dargahs, burial places of Muslim holy men. A few steps lead up to the verandah, which goes all around an inner chamber containing the grave. As in all dargahs, women cannot go inside. On the floor at the top of the steps, on either side of the doorway leading inside, sit two functionaries in white overshirts and trousers, white pandit caps on the head, and before them come to sit the supplicants. I walk past them through to the inner room, removing my socks (my shoes already removed), and come upon three graves overhung with intricately carved and painted canopies supported on silvered wooden posts. An odour of incense and perfume hangs in the air. Behind the graves, in the centre, burns an old wick lamp. Imamshah’s grave is the middle one, on his left is that of one of his sons, and to his right that of his wife. All three graves are heaped with flowers and chaddars, and at the heads of the two men’s graves have been placed crowns wrought of a dark metal, most likely silver.
What do I feel here, at this shrine of a holy man, a pir, whose ginans I can quote? Whose wanderings I had only imagined before, with all the distant reality of the comic book “classics” of a child? At any dargah, a shrine of this kind, and even at a temple before a priest, I cannot help but allow in me a solemn feeling, some respect and humility, for I stand alongside others in a symbolic place that in some manner reflects human existence and frailty, our smallness and exaltedness, and our striving for understanding. I cannot beg for a favour, as others do, as I might have done in another life that is long gone. Here stands a rational, a rationalized being who is acquainted with spiritual longing but cannot yield to it.
But this place is particularly special, because it connects me historically; I stand before a physical memento, a memorial over the buried remains of a personality who influenced and preserved the lives of my ancestors for generations in this part of the world. In some strange manner I feel I have a claim to the place that I have not felt elsewhere. My bearing, the quick confidence in my step, says so, and I am surprised at myself.
I come out and ask one of the two functionaries at the steps if they could tell me about Imamshah. Certainly, he says, call your friends. Like the other one, he is clean-shaven and fair. He looks a little uncomfortable. I sit down cross-legged on the floor before him, and my friends—who don’t know this tradition and are somewhat hesitant—join us and do likewise, but we have to wait for the second functionary to finish hearing out the petition of a Sikh boy, who looks about sixteen and has come with his mother (a Hindu, we learn, though get no explanation). The functionary, as if to make sure the pir in his burial chamber is paying heed to the full details of the boy’s pleas, leans forward and turns his head searchingly towards the open doorway and even occasionally repeats after the boy: “…help me get to Australia…Imamshah Bawa, help me with my studies…help me find a good job…and I will give you half of my first month’s salary.” The boy’s mother places a thick wad of hundred-rupee notes in the functionary’s hand, then mother and son get up.
The functionaries now explain to us that Imamshah was born in Uch, Multan (now in Pakistani Punjab), his sons were so-and-so, etcetera. He narrates a miracle by which the lamp that burns inside the mausoleum was lit. When Imamshah was ready to depart the world, he sat on his seat, still preserved at this site, and instructed his followers to place a lamp some distance away. As he breathed his last, the lamp lighted up. It has continued to burn since then without input of any oil. I ask about Imamshah’s ancestry. They say, somewhat uncomfortably, that it is not known and give me two pamphlets.
A woman comes and supplicates on behalf of her son-in-law; they tell her, rather brusquely, that he has to come himself, and can he afford to pay?
In the distance, the Sikh boy has put on a pair of anklets so that his legs are cuffed to each other. The functionaries explain to me that if the anklets on the boy come apart as he hobbles forward, his wishes will be fulfilled. The sooner his legs are released the sooner the fulfillment. As it happens, the anklets come apart in two or three hobbles. The boy is lucky, he should get to Australia soon.
This blatant monetary theme is unsettling. To my understanding, the message of the pirs is spiritual. It is about the soul’s release from the bonds of the material world. I do not recall functionaries being present the previous time I was here, nor do I remember crowds this large. There are Om signs painted in various places, but then there are the Muslims who come to pray, and the graves with Arabic script on them. There is a policeman on the premises.
The woman with the Sikh boy tells me that she and her husband are Hindus and come once every few months to the shrine because they believe in Imamshah; the boy says fervently that he will continue to come even if his wishes are not fulfilled, because he finds something inspiring here. We do not ask why the parents of a Sikh boy are Hindu. Whatever else may be going on here, this liberality of attitude, this spiritual laissez-faire is one of the joyful aspects of India that one hopes will prevail over the rabid antics and murderous forays of the fanatics who seek purity.
I ask one of the ushers if I may see the Kaka, the head of the shrine, half expecting the request to be denied. To my surprise I am told to climb some stairs to where the Kaka is sitting. Perhaps my garb—walking shoes, short-sleeved shirt, khakis—and manner have given me away as someone from abroad, a potential donor of dollars.
The Kaka sits with a few men at the far end of a long anteroom upstairs, a row of high-backed red-upholstered chairs on either side of him. He wears a white robe, with a saffron sash around his neck, his head is bare, his hair sparse; he is fair in colouring, has baggy eyes and seems to be in his sixties. There is a benign look to him. His name is Nanji Bhai, or Nanakdas. He had been preceded by Karsandas. There are framed photos of the previous Kakas on the walls.
I go forward hesitantly and greet the Kaka the way one would a Khoja mukhi, a headman, in our khano, with a pranam and a shake of the hands. He gives me a blessing. He tells someone to show me the kursi, the “seat,” inside. I am taken by the attendant to an adjoining room and shown a seat consisting of an embroidered white silk cushion, which will be the throne of the tenth avatar of Vishnu, called the Nishkalanki (“spotless”) avatar when he comes. Beside it is a seat of worked metal, perhaps silver, given to the Kaka upon his recognition as a mahant, a major guru, at a great meeting of Hindu priests.
I nod appreciatively at these exhibits, don’t quite grasp when the grand meeting of gurus took place, and return to the front room and sit down with the Kaka. One of his companions, dressed all in white with close-cropped hair, does most of the talking.
He says this Imamshah centre serves numerous communities without discrimination. There are centres worldwide and more than a million followers. People come with their problems or wishes, concerning a business venture, for example, or standing for election for the BJP. Imamshah was born in Uch, Multan, of Brahmin parents; they died when he was young and he was brought up by neighbours, a Muslim family, descendants of the Prophet. In the space of a week, before he was ten, he had learned the Vedas, the Upanishads, the shastras; he performed miracles—made the blind see, the sick well, and so on—and was recognized as a great soul.
The man says he is from the United States, sometimes comes to Toronto. My companions ask to film the scene and are granted permission. The Kaka for the occasion calls for his turban and puts it on, then speaks to the camera.
Before we leave, I cannot resist telling the Kaka that I am a Khoja. Yes, he says, Khojas do come here.
Could I be mistaken in thinking what I saw here some nine years ago was a much older-looking place? There had been only a minor attendant then, who had shown me a board on which the genealogy of the pir had been written down, including the name of his father (Hassan Kabirdeen) and grandfather (Sadardeen), so well known to me. The ginans of both of them were on my tongue, having been heard daily and drummed further into our heads by a certain Karim Master, who made us recite them in religion class at school. Hasan Kabirdeen sang the most beautiful, plangent devotional verses in the persona of a woman, and Sadardeen, besides the mystical verses also left behind cosmological and theological verses, one of them a life of the Buddha. Imamshah had performed a miracle at this site and converted some pilgrims of the Lohana caste to his teachings. Closing their eyes and without moving, they had completed their pilgrimage to Kashi (Benares).
It seems that a complete usurpation has been made, a clean takeover, with a new origin and new stories, new rites, new look, a lot of money, all to convert it into a Hindu site. Back on the main floor there is a ritual room, empty but for some paraphernalia to one side. On the walls are newly painted pictorial depictions of the life of Imamshah that we just heard.
This is still not a Hindu site, not that it matters what you call it. The tradition has been syncretistic, anyway, and to some degree it still is. One wonders what changes await. The Arabic inscriptions in places, the graves themselves, depicting Muslim burials, must be disconcerting to some.
On the way out, I buy a few mementos at a gift shop: three cassettes of ginans (CDs are out of stock), a book of ginans, and a small photo of the Kaka mounted inside a clear plastic stand. I also pick up a pamphlet, which reproduces a painting of Imamshah. He is depicted sitting on a cushion on a tiled floor, wearing white pyjamas and tunic, over which is an open white jacket with gold piping; he has a white and gold turban on his head, a black beard, and a tilak on his forehead. His right hand is raised in a blessing, the palm facing outwards, the fingers tight. The caption underneath says, “Sadguru Shri Imamshah Maharaj.” The term “pir” is not used, but the biography inside refers to him as a Sufi saint who was born in 1440.
The police on the premises are an indication that a conflict is in progress. Next door to this shrine, beyond a barbed wire fence, we see an old mosque. The fence must have a tale to tell. We resolve to visit the other side. The only way is to go outside and around.
It is not easy to find the entrance. People stare at us, give vague answers to our queries; evidently there is much animosity around. One person points to a door that is very obviously closed permanently and says that’s it. As we walk on, we realize to our surprise that a man is following us on a motorbike. We persist, walking up the road in a dilapidated section of the town, then turning to the right, until we finally arrive at a gate in a wall, with a sign. We enter through the gate and immediately a man appears dressed in ordinary shirt and pants. He says he is a sayyid, Imamshah’s progeny and descendant of the Prophet. This place looks familiar to me, it was a part of Pirana when I last came here. The mosque is old but seems well tended, with a large open shed next to it. The man speaks slowly and gives me the genealogy of Imamshah I am familiar with, at least up to a few generations back. He says he had seen us on the other side; he himself goes there every day to pay respects to the grave of the pir and other holy men. He invites us to his home, a well-built though modest single-storey house, with a small living room in front where we sit on low sofas. We have water, then tea, we use his washroom. I ask him about the etched slab of wood or stone I had seen before, on which Imamshah’s lineage had been inscribed. He tells me that it and several other items had been removed or destroyed. Literature as well. I am not oblivious to the fact that he has his own interests to promote, yet there seems to be some truth to what he says.
He brings out a chart that traces his family back to Muhammad and includes, of course, Sadardeen, Hassan Kabirdeen, and Imamshah.
He has sued the Kaka’s group and the case is in court. But he does not expect an early resolution. I ask him about other Imamshah descendants, surely they must be around? He is vague about them—there are many, he says. His brother lives next door. His son is a manager of a communications company in Ahmedabad. And he confirms the story that one of Imamshah’s progeny married a daughter of Sultan Mahmud Begada.
The next day, standing outside the Imamshah centre, observing. It is Thursday, one of the “big” days. A woman with her family walks in, the mother carrying a baby completely draped in gunny cloth. A grimness to her look. People bring their problems here, their dearest wishes. How close was my own upbringing to worshippers of this kind: my mother asked to be blessed so she could have children, was given an apple to eat, and conceived; my unmarried aunt would stand on one foot daily, praying fervently, and finally got married, but the man turned out to be a drunkard. I, too, was taught to pray for benefits. No longer do I hold such belief, though I cannot help but empathize with those who arrive here, so openly bearing their desperation.
An SUV passes by us slowly, inside is the Kaka’s companion from the United States who gave us the story of Imamshah’s Brahmin origins. He waves briefly and formally from the air-conditioned interior. He must know by now that we have been to see the Muslim contender next door and are, at best, curious busybodies.
There is a certain naïveté about this renovated shrine and its refurbished story, a certain hubris, perhaps due to the nationalist rise in the country; there are BJP posters around the village. The fact that the heirs to a syncretistic, mystical tradition uniting Hindu and Muslim elements would seek comfort from such politics is perturbing. Surely past visitors have written about Pirana and recorded the previous character of the shrine?
And so while my people, the Khojas, have been cleansing their heritage of Indian, so-called Hindu, elements, here at Pirana essentially the same heritage is in the process of being cleansed of its Islamic connections and history. But such cleansings cannot be complete, there is always evidence left behind, questions that remain.
One thorn in the flesh for the Pirana site is the mosque next door and the Muslim claim to the identity and heritage of Imamshah. We soon discover another.
As we prepare to depart from this town, someone asks us if we know about a stone that moves when you make a wish. This sounds intriguing in the extreme, and in spite of time constraints we decide to go and have a look.
Behold, then, a new spiritual wonderland.
We walk into an unpaved alley leading from the main road into what looks like a separate community: women at the doorways of their shacks, seated on the ground, working at some kitchen task, children playing about. We reach a gate with a sign announcing the Bakarshah Bawa Mandir—a temple, as the name indicates, to a Muslim saint. The people who worship here are another distinct Imamshah group. A modest but more spacious, open site; no new constructions here, no gift shop selling religious memorabilia. There are rooms at the sides along a wall for pilgrims to sleep in. The compound is paved, and roughly in the centre of it is an oblong-shaped black stone on the ground, about a foot long, some five hundred years old, we are told. A priest sits next to the stone, and a few other men are also about. The ritual is that you make a wish, then crouch upon the stone; if it turns, taking you with it, the wish will be fulfilled. A young man’s wish has just been promised fulfillment as we arrive, and he gleefully gets up. One of my companions takes his turn; the stone turns for him, too.
I enter the main building, which houses the graves. Next to the entrance, on a board mounted on the wall, is a rather colourful and elaborate chart written in Gujarati. It lists the avatars of Vishnu, starting with the fish, but there are eleven of them here instead of the usual ten. The tenth avatar, according to this list, is “Muhammad dur rasoolilah,” the Islamic prophet. The eleventh avatar is named as Nishkalanki, the Pure One, who was number ten for the other Imamshah group, as he has been for the Khojas. According to the story told here, he had been born but then disappeared. He is Bakarshah Bawa, the thirteenth descendant of Imamshah, and he died at the age of one. His body is believed to have turned into flowers, and he is the avatar to come.
There is a small child’s grave, belonging to Bakarshah Bawa, to one side.
This is a complete fusion of Hindu and Muslim beliefs. Moreover, it identifies the Muslim origins of Imamshah, which is the genealogy as I learned it, contradicting the one described at the big shrine across the road. How will these two shrines continue to coexist side by side in the future?
In a small room at the far end of the grounds, facing the main building, is a gallery of painted illustrations. Here are bright paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, their creator oblivious to injunctions in the Islamic world; the Imam Ali; Fatima, his wife, daughter of the Prophet; the grandsons Hassan and Hussein. There are also portraits of Bakarshah and of a few other Bawas and their wives who, I am told, look like beautiful Brahmin ladies.
And so, a simple, modest place—no sophistication, no special garb, nothing fancy. A forty-rupee contribution is considered generous. The jemadar, caretaker, who is not a priest, is a volunteer, a retired railway civil servant. He comes six days a week, has a very simple room on the premises, with hardly anything but a rolled mattress and some personal items. He takes Sundays off.
5:25 a.m., in my hotel room in Ahmedabad.
I wake up to an azaan from a mosque, a beautiful clear sound, high and always rising…
And then, a little later, the silence is broken again, this time by a sound that couldn’t be more different: a bhajan from a nearby temple, almost like a ginan from childhood. I try and grapple with one from my memory that I think comes close to it, at least in a musical phrase.
Finally, the sounds of morning and a warm light suffuses the room.