A Place Within (33 page)

When Irfan plays for India against Pakistan, some months later, I read that Mr. Khan and his wife have flown to watch him in Lahore. It feels I am living a dream, he says to a reporter. It is the first time
the couple have flown in an airplane; they go to visit, of course, the ancestral homeland next door in Afghanistan. Mrs. Khan appears in a photograph completely covered in a burqa.

Later still, a newspaper reports that Mehmood Khan has been asked to vacate the mosque apartment for allegedly damaging the old copy of the Quran. He has moved to the better Muslim neighbourhood of Tandelja by now, but has filed a suit nevertheless against the mosque committee.

And finally, during my most recent visit to India, I read that Yusuf Pathan has been selected for the Indian 20–20 team along with Irfan, to play a world series in South Africa. Their father, Mehmood Khan Pathan, is elated. “Team India gets a pair of Pathans,” says the
Times of India
proudly.

A woman reporter called Manju, a former student of Priya, meets us to show us the site of a Jewish cemetery, which had apparently been “encroached.” A committee consisting of a local Jew and his family had sold off the property, claiming to have permission to do so, using forged signatures. The man had then emigrated to Israel. Manju, a young, petite woman from the south and a recent graduate of the MS University, works for the
Times of India
. She and a few others had heard about the cemetery’s plight and agitated to have it declared protected.

The site is at a busy intersection and the graves are dated starting 1950 or thereabouts. A few of them belong to children. The ground is used by a local family as a grazing site for their bullocks, though there is hardly any grass left. The family goes by the name Vaghela, a royal name, far above their occupation and caste. There isn’t a Jewish community left in Baroda, but Manju gives us a few phone numbers to call in Ahmedabad, where there is a synagogue and a small number of Jews still reside.

The Road to Champaner

In Samvat fifteen hundred and forty-one,

in the month of Posh, on the third day,

the day of the sun, six rajas perished…

When Mahmud Shah, the great king, took Pavagadh.

“
THE BARDS
,” quoted by Alexander Forbes

FROM A STOREFRONT
at the busy Baroda bus station, beside a barber shop where a client is receiving a haircut and a head massage, we hire our taxi to take us to Champaner, a historical area that’s been in the news recently. Our driver is a thin young lad barely out of his teens. His is a lankiness that seems to be an example of the long-legged look of a new generation of Indians. Although he is reluctant to talk about his family, it turns out that his brother is a barber, and he himself plans to join his maternal uncle in Dar es Salaam, where he will drive a taxi. He of course does not know I come from that city, and so this is quite a coincidence, but only the first of several that await me this day. I recall that my barber in Dar es Salaam, when I was young, had returned to Gujarat; and during a recent visit back, I had noticed taxi drivers of Indian origin, when traditionally the occupation was that of Africans.

Less than an hour northeast of Baroda on the Godhra road, through an almost blinding haze appears a significant protrusion in an otherwise flat, scrubby landscape. This is the Pavagadh hill, which appears as a series of rising plateaus, on the highest of which
is a knobby protuberance, beyond which the hill falls down steeply. Further along the highway, beyond the bustling, open little town of Halol and closer to the base of the hill, we come to an arched gate in a fragment of a massive ancient brick wall. It is the outer wall of the fifteenth-century city of Champaner. Past the gate, to our left, appears a more solid, more massive wall of cut stone, which must have enclosed the inner fort. Two arched gates lead inside, one following the other, the inner of which is almost intact and decorated with circular floral motifs of the Indian style and Arabic calligraphy. On one side past the entrance lies a deserted old mosque, the Shehr-ki Masjid, behind an ample green garden enclosed by a fence. Across the road is a small well-tended temple with the date 1946 upon it, very much in use; within its gate, in the yard, a woman draws water from a pump. Further along the road lies the modern village of Champaner, with a population of some hundreds—a typical rundown place of a few dirt roads, with ramshackle houses and a few shops, one of which has a long-distance telephone service.

The importance of this location is the ancient Kalika Mata (or Kali) temple atop Pavagadh hill, which can draw thousands on important occasions or even on a weekend, and the remains of the medieval city of a Muslim conqueror. Therefore a place of contention. In spite of its small size, it’s been in the news recently.

In March 1483, Mahmud Begada, the grandson of Ahmed Shah, founder of Ahmedabad, arrived by way of Baroda with half a million men according to legend and laid a long siege to the area, at that time under the domain of Chauhan Rajputs. Two previous sultans had marched against Champaner not long before; in the second case, the siege of Pavagadh, where the Chauhans had their fort, had been lifted when the raja sought help from the sultan of Malwa, a neighbouring region to the east and an opponent of the Ahmedabad rulers. This time, however, Malwa’s current ruler fret
ted before Mahmud’s might and withheld assistance. After a twenty-month siege, on November 17, 1484, Mahmud’s army gained access to the fort. In the ensuing battle, says Alexander Forbes, “a Muslim shell—emblem of Kali’s anger—fell upon the palace of its sovereign.” The goddess had been angered, for the king of Champaner, during a Navratri celebration, had cast lustful eyes upon her as she appeared in the form of a beautiful maiden. He had even laid hold of her headscarf. But the Rajputs fought valiantly. In the end, in an act of jauhar, a funeral pyre was raised, upon which went the women and children and the wealth of the Rajputs. When the raging fire had consumed its human sacrifice, the warriors, bathed and dressed in saffron, came out to fight. A few of them survived, including the king and one of his ministers. Refusing to embrace Islam, they were both executed.

There are many stories about Mahmud, considered the greatest of the Muslim rulers of Gujarat. His rule lasted fifty-three years and his military campaigns were many and impressive, including a naval defeat of the Portuguese on the west coast of India, near the present city of Diu, with the assistance of the sultan of Turkey. His nickname “Begada” was due, some say, to his conquest of two (in Gujarati,
be
) prominent and well protected mountain forts (
ghad
), so he was Mahmud Two-Forts. He had immense moustaches, long and twisted like the horns of a cow (
bighad
), which he liked to twirl; this is the second explanation for the nickname. He came to the throne at the age of fourteen and immediately and with patient cunning thwarted a palace coup, meting out punishment according to the standards of the day. (One of the rebels was crushed under the foot of an elephant.) He had an immense appetite, his daily serving of food approximating forty pounds. Poisons had no effect on him—in fact, it has been said that he fed daily on them, so that if a fly happened to alight on his skin it would immediately die, and if he spat a scornful spray of paan juice on a prisoner, it was enough to produce death.

Mahmud, who had already constructed a mosque during the long siege of the Pavagadh fort, decided to build a new capital at the base of the hill, which he called Mahmudabad. It was an opulent city, much of it now buried under and around the present-day squalid village of Champaner. Some impressive and intriguing structures remain. Through the efforts of an architect at the MS University in Baroda and a local trust, the area has been declared a
UNESCO
World Heritage site, creating some local excitement at the prospects of increased tourism, though not everyone is happy with the idea.

The Shehr-ki Masjid near the town entrance is a low, wide building without the traditional mosque courtyard. There are five arched entrances on the east side, corresponding to the five round domes, and two tall minarets flanking the centre doorway. No one else can be seen as we enter the site, except a very shy courting couple, whom we’ve disturbed. The mosque is an example of Indo-Saracenic architecture, a combination of traditional Indian and Islamic—or, as some would put it, Hindu and Muslim—styles. (The Indian style is indicated by detailed, especially floral, patterns; the Islamic style is starker. The arches in the two traditions are also different, the Islamic arch representing the “true” arch which has come down from Roman times.) All old mosques hit the unwary visitor by the profusion, indeed a forest, of stone pillars inside the prayer hall, emphasizing from the beginning a geometrical aesthetic. There are five mihrabs, niches, in the western wall, the direction of Mecca. Though the pillars are square and plain, the mihrabs, each situated between two pillars, are intricately adorned with carvings, the Indian contribution to the aesthetic. Above each niche is a carved pattern with a shape that could be the head of a cobra.

This was the people’s mosque, and once upon a time how it must have thronged with worshippers; after the prayers they would have flowed outside to the street with the well-being of those who had gone to remember their God. What confidence must have
exuded here, and hubris, at this site now silent like so many others the triumphant sultans built.

On the far side of the town comes another city gate, which opens at a road crossing the main highway. Here stands the magnificent Jama Masjid, the main and largest mosque of the old city, with two tall minarets at the entrance and one at each corner. Here, every Friday, the grand khutba would have been delivered by the chief mullah, praising Mahmud, linking his name to God. There are seven mihrabs, and the high central dome rises above succeeding layers of pillars. Here, too, we come upon a couple courting. Our driver jokes that in the countryside they seem bolder than in the cities. All around us is a vast and dry brown plain, remnants of the old city wall visible, with mounds that could be sites for future archaeological diggings. Further up the road comes a talav, a small artificial lake beside which is a pavilion—the spot where apparently the ladies of the court came to bathe. Across the lake is where, my companion Raj Kumar tells me, the army could have camped. The pavilion is a ruin, partly excavated, the road rather
thoughtlessly passing right through it. Next to the lake is a cube-shaped red-brick structure, across the road is the ruin of something more elaborate. Pieces of marble revealed by excavations indicate some sort of courtyard. A path leads up from here to the Khajuri Mosque, only a forest of pillars standing, and one elaborately carved column that could be the base of a minaret.

The modern village of Champaner itself contains a number of ruins, some of which evidently belong to mosques. There are also a few modern Hindu temples, and a Jain centre and dharamshala, guest house, for pilgrims who come to go up the Pavagadh hill, which has Jain temples along the way.

Champaner lies in the Panchmahal district of Gujarat, where the bloodiest incidents of the 2002 violence took place. Some Muslims lived here, but they were driven away during the violence and fled to nearby Halol. One of the town’s well-known residents is an extreme Hindu communalist, Prahlad Shastri by name. In a fiery speech, recorded on video, that he gave to a large public gathering after the Godhra train incident, eerie by its hateful tone and incitement, he calls upon the young men, calling them lions, to take “action.”

“They set a train compartment on fire. Why did they set it on fire? Because someone did not pay two rupees for tea. What is the price of fifty-eight Hindus’ lives? Two rupees!…I beg you, Hindu youth, the nation needs you! Your nation is your mother, and your mother is being raped every day. Rush to defend your mother if there is a drop of blood left in you. Many of you think you will get into trouble if you do all this. Well, you are already in trouble!” He proudly declares, “There are no Muslims in Pavagadh…all purged! [laughter and applause] When the collector asked me to let the Muslims resettle, I told him, ‘Go to Kashmir first! Let my twenty-three thousand Hindus of Kashmir first be allowed back…. Just try! [laughter and applause] ‘Hindus have beaten the Muslims, Hindus have beaten the Muslims,
Hindus have beaten the Muslims…’ After fifty years we have our turn to bat. [laughter and applause]”

Mother India evidently does not embrace Muslims. Nor Sonia Gandhi, for if she wants to be a Christian, he adds, she has no right to live in this country.

And so we decide to pay Prahlad Shastri a visit. His house is a modest one, with a verandah in front; as we step into the front room we see a very tan, tight-bodied man in his late thirties, perhaps, attired in a saffron dhoti with a white shirt on top. He has a thin face and protruding ears, short-cropped hair, and an earnest look. There are two young men with him, in dhotis but bare-chested, and the room exudes a distinct and sweet perfume. On the front wall are prominently displayed photographs of Indian nationalist heroes: Vivekananda, Subhaschandra Bose, Bhagat Singh; no Gandhi. On other walls are photos of Shastri himself on the stage at various functions, or shaking hands with notables. Apparently a vain man, for as we sit on a mat against bolsters, he passes around an album of other similar pictures of himself. There is a TV in the room, and a display of electronics—tape recorder, phones.

Our excuse for wanting to see him is to ask his opinion about the recent “disturbances.”

Prahlad Shastri, in this private setting, comes across as an earnest, soft-spoken man, with an intense look in his eyes, reminding me of a student activist. He opens his mouth to reveal a rather crooked set of crowded teeth. He speaks about the goodness of all religions, and modesty in behaviour, condemns Western influence and politicians. He is worried about Champaner being declared a World Heritage site for what it would do to the livelihood and morality of the place. People come here, he says, to visit the pilgrimage site at the Kali temple of Pavagadh, not to see the medieval ruins and the mosque. And tourists come with their dubious morality, wearing immodest clothes. Muslims never
lived here, in his memory, he says, which contradicts flatly what we have just been told by some of the townspeople, and what has been caught on video. But somewhat hesitantly, with a gleam in his eye, he suggests, Let’s assume they were not here and not talk about it.

There is an unmistakeable sense of homoeroticism in the perfumed air, the two handsome youths in dhoti hovering about their master.

And the recent violence?

Hindus are killed in Godhra, he says, their train compartment set on fire, and Muslims celebrate. It rains in Pakistan and they hold up umbrellas here; when their hearts are elsewhere, you can’t be surprised if some people are induced to commit acts of violence.

The idea of the beleaguered Muslim minority celebrating at such an atrocity is outlandish; but it is the familiar blood libel.