A Place Within (34 page)

Prahlad Shastri is finally provoked when the issue comes to caste. All our discussion so far has been conducted with the most formal politeness. At his mention of Muslims we have not blinked. We are aware of the possibility of danger, are in the lion’s den, so to speak; all he has to do is accuse us of something, call a mob together.

Social interactions across caste lines are fine, he says, and they do happen. But intermarriage is wrong; castes should remain distinct, caste purity and identity are essential. That is our heritage. It is a sin to call the reformed Hindus who live in the West Hindus. Then, oblivious of the contradiction, he adds, In twenty years the world will come to the Hindu way of life.

I must confess to a sense of voyeurism on my part at having desired such a meeting, to see what a real extreme communalist, who calmly explains mass murder, looks and speaks like. The man we have met is a picture of reasonableness, until you pay attention to his words, until you watch the video in which, in the heat of a public meeting, he lifts that mask—and what he reveals is frightening.

When I return to Baroda a year later, I discover that Prahlad Shastri hanged himself some months before from a tree near a Hanuman temple in Champaner.

The walk up Pavagadh to the Kalika Mata temple is a long one, of three miles. There used to exist a rope lift here, called Udan Khatola, to carry the pilgrims up in a few minutes, but it was broken in a recent accident. (According to newspaper reports, several people died in the mishap, for which the lift company conveniently blamed “outside agitators” but has been charged nevertheless with negligence.) The Bollywood classic
Udan Khatola
was filmed here, among the ruins, starring the legendary heartthrob Dilip Kumar. The hill is the only raised land mass for miles around. As we walk up we pass ruins of the old Chauhan Rajput fort. The path is well paved, and a festive atmosphere prevails: vendors on both sides aggressively calling out, selling coconuts to take up to the temple, as well as samosas, bhajias, gathias, tea, and soft drinks, and toys, music, and videos. Bhajans play loudly on the way, videos depict beautiful lissome girls dancing the garba to the accompaniment of folk songs, the movements evidently modulated by Bollywood and frankly erotic. Smaller shrines appear intermittently, offering extra blessing in advance of the main one awaiting at the top. An ancient granary is used as a urinal on the way by the men.

At one turn in the path we are trapped by a charismatic young sadhu seated at a stall, asking for merely a rupee to give us blessings. This is a well-rehearsed act, and we know it, yet foolishly we relent, if only out of curiosity. He is bearded, lean, and muscular, with the most intense, glistening eyes I have ever seen, and he sits erect, wearing only a white loin cloth. I want nothing from you, I have nothing, he says, but out of respect for the women folk, I would not possess even this (his loin cloth). He has us mesmerized. When he sings his
incantations to Devi, “Jai Mata!” obediently we repeat after him. He takes our willing hands one by one, places limp flowers in them. Takes the flowers in his own hand, crushes them, then opens his palms and pours out red “sindoor” powder. Magic. He displays an empty hand, closes it into a fist: drops of water come trickling out. “Jai Mata!” I have nothing, I need nothing—but we are constructing an ashram nearby, we need ghee and other things. He snatches five hundred rupees from me, having seen it as I opened my wallet to search for suitable, smaller currency to give him.

The ruins we pass, witnesses of so much history, are of little interest to the pilgrims, who pass them by without as much as a pause; many of these worshippers are familiar with the route, having been here many times before, and the goal is the Mother at the top, who will provide blessings. The climb gets progressively steeper.

It takes one and a half hours of steady climbing before we reach a sheer rock, egg shaped, up which we climb via steep steps. The crowds are thicker now, people paused for rest on the way. We begin to get breathless. All around us is an open panorama, the falling hills, the open flat land for miles around. From here the Rajputs would have seen the massive army of Mahmud laying siege to them, realized there was no hope. At one of the sites here their royal women and children would have walked into the fire, before the men went down to fight their last battle. Among us, couples, kids, entire families, old folk, cripples. A couple pauses at each step to paint on it the auspicious swastika with red paste, and drop a few flower petals on it. All the way to the top. Giving thanks for what relief, or bringing what pain to be assuaged? I recall being told how my mother performed a similar act to give thanks for the birth of my sister, seven years after her wedding; she went up the steps of the prayer house, placing a coin at each step.

Finally we arrive at a place where the shoe stalls begin, at the base of what appears to be a rectangular stone block, with some construction on top. The climb here is the steepest; the crowd is
even thicker now; and gets thicker still, until the way is so close-packed you have to push and are pushed. You find a toehold and push your way up to the next step. If you fail to close the space before you, someone else is there. One begins to understand vaguely why Indians don’t like to queue, or don’t believe in queuing; the idea is to push, push, push. There is total individuality here, there’s you and the Goddess at the top. No offence is taken by anyone. Push, push, push. But gently. Squeeze past someone, find the next toehold. A young woman, sixteen, maybe, tries to hold her purse behind her to prevent her bottom from getting touched, and she’s given the inch of space she needs, this is sacred space, after all. We are all barefoot, the steps are of stone, and wet, and one can imagine the stampedes that take place at shrines, where many lives are lost. If a rush were to begin now, a panic, there would be no hope of escape. There are iron railings at the sides of the steps to hold the crowd in and provide support, but there are those who climb up even these to get ahead of the rest.

And so what is the worship for? For gain, surely, or relief, which is also gain. Not for renunciation or selflessness. But not an unhappy or angry face is here in this crush. A visit to the temple is a joyous occasion.

To climb up about sixty steps takes us an hour.

And then we are at the door of a modest white building that is the Kalika Mata temple; we touch the icon at the lintel, ring the bell at the entrance, give twenty rupees to the priest inside, say Jai Mata! as asked. And leave.

There is a Sufi shrine atop the temple, and there are steps at the side leading up, a thin but steady stream of people choosing to take them. The Sufi’s name was Sadan Shah. When we get upstairs, however, we find a small domed structure that, an usher tells us, is a shrine to the Goddess, and someone tries to sell us Goddess charms called tawiz. It seems that the famous Sufi shrine was replaced during the recent violence.

When we reach ground level we inquire at the village about information regarding the Kalika temple and are directed to a local information office run by a volunteer who was previously a teacher. He is away on his motorbike fetching his granddaughter from school, but his son gives us a small booklet and tells us there was never a Sufi shrine on top of the Kalika temple. He tells a garbled story. The little structure on top was simply put there by the conquering sultan, Mahmud, to indicate his supremacy after he had been advised—beseeched—by a Muslim holy man—who might actually have been a Hindu—not to destroy the temple.

A proposal for the development of this World Heritage site produced by the Heritage Trust of Baroda suggests turning it into a recreational theme park following the American model, with facilities for hiking, yoga clubs, and the like. Essentially, putting it onto the world tourist map. Fast food would follow, one presumes. And so while the glory of the sultan’s city would receive world attention, the local colour and isolation of the pilgrimage site—a distinction of all such sites located across India on top of hills far away from the busyness of daily life, making the effort of the climb to see the Goddess part of the supplicant’s pleasure and satisfaction—would certainly be lost. And so, to be fair, the fears of Prahlad Shastri, it seems to me, were not entirely unfounded.

On the other hand, the
Times of India
recently reported that a stampede on the steps of the Kalika Mata temple on Pavagadh caused eleven deaths.

As we stroll back through the double gates of Champaner to the highway, juice, food, and tea stalls ply their trade by the roadside, buses drop off passengers. It is time to rest. We sit on rickety chairs provided for us at a tea stall, and a sadhu seated nearby accepts a treat from us. A small dark man with an amused look on his face,
he is dressed in a white dhoti and has a long white beard. He is a Punjabi, he says, who stopped here some twenty years ago and decided to settle. He lives close by in the woods and does not accept disciples, he tells us, twice. We have no intention of applying anyway. He lectures us on psychology (his word); that is, the concept that there is no limit to what a mind can do, and there is no understanding of it. Sages of the past could accomplish feats that seem impossible today. He illustrates his point with an example. Recently he was at the Kumbh Mela—the annual pilgrimage where millions gather on the banks of the Ganges—and there he had occasion to see the famous Electric Bawa, who from two wires emerging from his mouth can produce an electric current to light a bulb. Electricity simply from the body. That is the power of the trained mind. But the Bawa has been demonstrating these electrical feats for a long time, and his energy must be running out, the sadhu says. Raj Kumar, a university professor, agrees, though I can’t tell how seriously. We ask the sadhu about Prahlad Shastri and he flashes an enigmatic smile and says nothing.

We get up and Raj Kumar tells me there is a small shrine nearby that I must see. Must I, really? After the climb up Pavagadh and back, in all this blazing heat and dust? I have had enough, feel saturated with history and phenomena, the newness. All I want is to escape in order to reflect and write somewhere in a shady room with a drink at hand. Having already declined a visit to see a spiral step-well from Mahmud Begada’s time, apparently quite unique, I relent, only because the shrine Raj proposes to visit—a dargah, burial place of a holy man—might be of special interest to me. He knows my background, of course.

The shrine is called Sahaji Sawai no Dero, and it lies in Champaner behind Mahmud’s Shehr-ki Masjid.

As you approach along a dirt road, you come across a gate, in front of which is a very unusual sign warning that there are dogs. Such signs are found outside the gates of wealthy fenced houses in the large cities, not in a village. We see no dogs, and it would appear that it is not robbers but other intrusions that are feared. The shrine is in fact a communal one, though open to the public. A well-dressed man waits outside the gate, with a well-dressed boy; a little further away, in the shade of a tree, sits a woman in burqa, the wife and mother. The man says that he is an auto-rickshaw driver; his father died recently, and on his deathbed he asked the son to visit the dargah of Sahaji Sawai. The man’s wife suffers depressions and the family cannot make ends meet.

Inside is a large open compound, paved, and since we have had to remove our shoes and socks, burning hot to our feet, so we have to take rapid steps as we walk. There is a storage area at the far end and a guest house, for the community’s own pilgrims, which is empty. To the right is the entrance to the shrine. It turns out, and this my companion had roughly guessed, that Sahaji Sawai was a descendant of Pir Imamshah, a member of the saintly pantheon whose teachings and songs I was brought up with. I had not heard of Sahaji Sawai. It turns out that the sultan, Mahmud Begada, had been a disciple of Sahaji Sawai and married a woman from his family.

There is an inner chamber in the shrine that contains the grave of the holy man. A corridor, a sort of verandah, runs between the inner chamber and the outside wall, and on the walls of the corridor are framed paintings of the ten avatars of the god Vishnu. The faith represented here is therefore akin to the one I was brought up in, based on the worship of the ten avatars, the first one of which is a fish and the final one a man. Also on the walls are verses handwritten in Gujarati; and I don’t know whether to find this astonishing or not, but I can not only read them but also derive meaning from them, because they are in the language and form of the ginans of my childhood. A few verses I can even recognize.
One speaks of a devotee woman who breaks her necklace so that in picking up the pieces she can secretly bow to her lord who is passing by.