A Place Within (40 page)

Across the bridge from the old city, on Ashram Road, which runs beside the Sabarmati river, is the site of Gandhi’s first ashram, named after the river. The road is a mix of residences and businesses, which stop a little way before the ashram, now the Gandhi Museum, opened in 1963 by Nehru, who planted an ashok tree at the gate. A couple of kiosks outside are the only signs of business in the area. The place is quiet and shady, has the feel of a university campus on a summer’s day. There are a couple of rooms with somewhat patronizing tutorial-style questions and answers about Gandhi’s philosophy displayed on the walls. The questions are posed in three languages, and below each one is its answer, a saying of Gandhi. The quotations are pithy, of course; and some of them are shown in enlarged specimens of Gandhi’s handwriting. A room contains almost life-sized and vivid paintings depicting important episodes from Gandhi’s life, for example the Salt March to Dandi, which gives the impression that Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley might have spent some time doing research here for their epic film on the Mahatma. The exhibition, and the film, spend little time on the personal side of Gandhi’s life; this messier and personally painful aspect is depicted in a more recent and quite gripping Indian film,
Gandhi, My Father
, about the tragedy of his eldest son, Harilal, who started out by ably assisting his father in the South African struggles. A gift shop sells a few books and kitschy Gandhiana; for example, a pen with Gandhi’s head at the top.

The residences from Gandhi’s time, including his own with his few possessions, including his spinning wheel, have been preserved close to the river. The houses, of a red brick coated with
white plaster, the wood all red, look plainly handsome and sturdy. Ashok trees proliferate, with some palm and peepal. Langurs sit quietly in the shade.

There are only a few people about, this weekday. A Japanese girl sits in the Mahatma’s verandah learning to use a spinning wheel.

An altogether simple but necessary experience, and a moving one.

The well-known sweetmeat shop Kandoi’s has been in operation since the 1840s, and now you can also order over the Internet. My companion has a new obsession—his in-laws, now that his daughter is marrying, and he has to bring back something for them. We had sweetmeat shops in East Africa, of course, and our mothers also somehow found the time to make all variety of sweets, when not tending to shops, teaching, or cooking meals. But the display here is bigger than anything I’ve seen, and there are specialty items, too; churma laddoo, for example, which I had not expected to see again in my lifetime. Mahesh and I taste the samples placed without question or hassle before us and make our selections, and we emerge with more than two pounds of goodies, in beautiful gift boxes wrapped up in silver paper.

Road to Road: The Places We Came From

Have I come back in truth to my home island?

HOMER,
The Odyssey
XXIII

A
FEW PLACES IN
G
UJARAT
were sometimes mentioned in my childhood, and I knew they were the places where my people came from. They included the city names Jamnagar and Junagadh, and Mandvi and Mundra. For some reason the names of the latter two cities were often twinned with the region in which they belonged. Thus: Kutch-Mundra, and Kutch-Mandvi. The other two were in nearby Kathiawar. Kutch and Kathiawar make up the elephant-ear-shaped peninsula in western Gujarat, and are separated by the narrow Gulf of Kutch. Kutchis and Kathiawaris did not intermarry, my mother would say, a taboo which was gradually lifting in my time; their languages were related but different, though some families, including mine, were bilingual. Bombay, in addition, was always a presence in our imaginative lives; it was the city of the movies. For the Africans, Bombay was the metonym for India. For the Indians, it was the port you left from and to which you returned, if you ever did. Many did, on “home leave,” the long periodic vacation that was an entitlement when in government service. Any further details would have slipped my child’s mind, which looked to the future and away from both the colonial present and the Indian past. But these names carried the ring of ancestry and origins, just enough to
live by, in the embrace of East African small towns and cities that allowed us, and other Indians, to retain wholesome but not static identities. From the seashore of Dar es Salaam, I could look north-eastwards to India without wishing to live there.

During my initial visits to India, it was enough for me to say that my ancestry was Indian, or Gujarati; the precise locations carried no importance or urgency. There were no relations I knew of, so what would I look for? And where exactly? I had a community, the Khojas, but how would I relate to them in India? I made one very brief exploratory visit to Jamnagar, when I did not yet know Gujarat outside Baroda. And, as I have said, what I did know of modern Gujarat since my first Indian visit made me nervous, so I always looked elsewhere, where I felt comfortable and had formed close friendships.

A tour of Kathiawar remained pending, until I was ready for it.

This time I come armed with a more precise knowledge of ancestral coordinates, gleaned from an accidentally discovered second cousin and from my mother. From the cousin I have learned the name of the village near Junagadh from where our great-grandfather came; and my mother has told me the name of a small town near Jamnagar from where her own mother came. I have two companions with me. They come with cameras, which can be intrusive; but they can also open up possibilities, for in my experience Indians (unlike the Masai of my youth) do not suspect the camera of robbing them of their personalities but rather love it, sometimes to the point of stealing into the frame. Perhaps that is the influence of Bollywood.

But before we head westwards for ancestral places in the peninsula, there is a detour to make, to another city I would hear of in childhood, in a few of the ginans we sang. It was called Patan. To those willing to listen to the meanings of those songs, Patan was the city where the king lived. One such monarch was the famous
Jaisingh Siddhraj. Patan’s other ancient name was Anhilvada, I read much later, along with all its history and legends.

From the bus depot in Baroda we hire our taxi.

The glory of Anhilvada reached its zenith during the reign of the Solanki dynasty (942–1242), and especially in the reign of its greatest king, the legendary Siddhraj (1094–1143).

Of Anhilvada at its height, Alexander Forbes quotes the
Kumarapala Charitra
:

Unhilpoor [Anhilvada] was twelve coss in circuit, within which were many temples and colleges; eighty-four squares; eighty-four marketplaces with mints for gold and silver coin…. There was one marketplace for money changers; one for perfumes and unguents; one for physicians; one for artisans; one for goldsmiths and another for silversmiths; there were distinct quarters for navigators, for bards, and for genealogists. The eighteen wurun [varna, or castes] inhabited the city; all were happy together. The palace groaned with a multitude of separate buildings—for the armoury, for the elephants, for horses and chariots, for the public accountants and officers of state. Each kind of goods had its own custom-house, where the duties of export, import, and sale were collected—as for spices, fruits, drugs, camphors, metals, and everything costly of home or foreign growth. It is a place of universal commerce…. The population delights to saunter amidst the groves of champas, palms, rose-apples, sandal trees, mangoes, etc, with variegated creeper, and fountains whose waters are umrut [amrat, or ambrosia]. Here discussions take place on the Veds, carrying instruction to the listener. There is no want of Jain priests, or of merchants true to their word and skilled in commerce; and there are many schools for teaching grammar. Unhilwara is a sea of human beings.

This great city was conquered by the army of Alauddin Khilji of Delhi in 1297; Anhilvada remained the capital of Gujarat for another hundred years, though shorn of its prestige, before the capital moved to Ahmedabad.

Alexander Forbes, having described the glory of Anhilvada in his nineteenth-century
Ras Mala
, relates thus the state in which he saw it:

Of all this splendour, it is melancholy to relate, hardly a vestige remains. The relics of Anhilvada lie in a flat country within and around the walls of the modern city of Patan…six centuries and the fury of the Mohammedans have done their work…. [A]nd the poor cold ashes of Anhilvada are sold for a pitiful gain by her vulgar Maratha lords, ignorant as they are alike of her glory and of their own dishonour.

Now Patan is a small, dusty market town in a flat, arid landscape. The once-famed Sahasralinga Talav, the water tank with a thousand Shiva lingams, is a forlorn rectangular basin amidst a grove of small trees, with a few structures outside, a few inside. There is not another visitor in sight as we walk about its edges, our driver waiting impatiently for us, having given only a cursory glance at the object of our interest. The tank was built by Jaisingh Siddhraj. The king is said to have become enamoured of a beautiful woman of the low-caste Oduns who had excavated the tank, and when he pursued her as she tried to escape, she plunged a dagger into her belly, putting a curse on his tank. The tank dried up, and the curse was lifted only upon the sacrifice of an outcaste Dhed. The Rani ni Vav is another ancient ruin here, but more intact. It is a step-well of several storeys and elaborate structure, so intricately carved that there’s not an inch that is not a piece of art. Some of the carved female figures are also preserved, the sense of perfect beauty embodied in them—the curvaceous body,
the round, tight breasts, the long, sharp nose, the wide-drawn eyes, and the provocation in the mouth—truly awesome. There are a few city gates left from ancient times, but not a trace of the royal palace, the houses of the nobles, the fortresses. To see what these might have looked like, Forbes advises us to look at the few ruins in some of the other cities.

The town is perhaps better known now for the hand-operated looms that make the famous weave called Patan Patola, using silk threads and natural dyes derived from plants, minerals, and insects. These enterprises are run by a few old families, known as the Salvis, brought from south India centuries before. A line I was taught to sing, to say that the body may break but the devotion of the faithful will not yield—“
Paadi, paadi patole bhaat-re, teto faate parn-re fite nahi, ho-ji
” (“The patola will tear, but its print will not fade”)—is also, I see to my great surprise, pasted on a board in the factory which we visit. It is a modest enterprise, one or two looms operating, the dyes or raw materials kept in small bottles. The Patola saris, with their intricate designs, often using a lot of red and black, take days to finish, and the clientele of this humble-looking establishment is worldwide. You could not give a bride—or bring home for your wife—a better present than a Patola sari.

Thus Patan, which I had been craving to visit. Only scraps to see. A sobering discovery. There is nothing else to keep us here. We head west, towards Jamnagar on the Gulf of Kutch, in the Arabian Sea.

The land is hot and dry, with little cultivation on the way; trees sometimes shading the quiet road; camels, cows, trucks. Often on such journeys, between places, there comes a numbness in the mind, for the places we have visited cannot but leave their echoes behind. Inevitably there are questions, regrets—perhaps we should
have tarried. But there is not enough time. We are pinned by our reservations, on trains, on planes. There is never enough time.

A short distance west of Patan we stop at the Sun Temple of Modhera, built by the Solanki king Bhimdev in the early eleventh century, before the reign of Siddhraj, and akin to the Sun Temple at Konark in Orissa. The Modhera complex consists of a rectangular water reservoir called the Surya Kund, which leads up to an unattached mandap, directly before the temple, all three built of red sandstone and aligned with one another. The domes of the temple and mandap are missing, though the rest of the buildings stand almost intact, solid on the ground and exquisitely carved. The steps of the surya kund, along all its four sides, are relieved with small shrines placed along them at regular intervals, and aligned so as to form a checkered pattern, and in addition to these, larger, spired shrines stand at the centres of three sides.

This site is used to hold festivals, but all is quiet as we walk around.

Further on our way we stop at a place called Becharaji, known for its famous Kali temple. Praying to the goddess (in the form of Bechar Mata) at this temple is believed to cure ailments. Numerous people are about, the road in leads through a gauntlet of stalls, the atmosphere as festive as that of a country fair, loud religious music playing over the loudspeakers. Vendors converge upon us, holding out little aluminum squares impressed with the shapes of human body parts; you pick the one that represents the diseased or aching part of your body to take as your offering to the temple. I will learn later that this tradition is relatively modern and may even have been imported from overseas. Ever the agnostic, I cannot resist participating in ritual, and buy an impression of two legs for the sake of my knees.

Outside the temple, in a large covered mandap, some priests conduct a ritual over a havan, a holy fire, blessing a harvest. The temple itself is multicoloured in oil paint, with an imposing porched
entrance, and does not look ancient. It was in fact built—presumably on an older site—by Sayajirao, the maharaja of Baroda, in whose domain this region, Mehsana, was located. Inside the temple, we find Bechar Mata, plump, surrounded by flowers, sitting on the back of an elephant.

An interesting story is told regarding this temple. When the sultan of Delhi, Alauddin Khilji, attacked the area in the thirteenth century, informers told him about the wealthy temple of Kali at Becharaji. He dispatched there a contingent of his army, presumably to loot and destroy. Some of his soldiers, seeing the goddess’s chickens in the grounds, summarily slaughtered and ate them. At night, however, these chickens tore at the bellies of the slumbering soldiers and emerged alive and clucking. Alauddin’s commander was duly impressed, and he departed, leaving the temple unharmed.