Nine Lives (22 page)
Mahavir and Shrawan were now beckoning for Mohan to return to the
phad
to continue the performance. Mohan smiled, and held up a single finger to indicate that he would come in just a minute. ‘For myself, all my life my heart has been bound up in the
phad
and its stories,’ he said. ‘I have never had any real interest in agriculture or any other work. Pabuji has recognised this, and has guarded us. We none of us have ever had a serious illness.’
‘Every day, I get up hungry in the morning,’ he said, picking up his
ravanhatta
, ‘but thanks to him, neither I nor my family ever go to bed on an empty stomach. Not everyone in the village could say that, even the Brahmins and Rajputs.’
‘It is Pabuji who does this,’ said Mohan Bhopa, walking back to the
phad
and strumming the first note with his thumb. ‘It is he who looks after us all.’
Postscript
About a month after my trip to Pabusar, Mohan and Batasi came to Jaipur and we did another event together, at the literary festival there. Mohan was in his usual sparkling, mischievous form, dancing as flirtatiously as an eighteen-year-old despite his advancing years. Then a fortnight later, back in Delhi, I heard he was dead.
After his performance at the festival, Mohan had complained to a mutual friend of stomach pains, and had been taken to the main state hospital in Jaipur. Advanced leukaemia was diagnosed within a week, but owing to some bureaucratic tangle, Mohan had been directed first to a small hospital in the Shekhawati, and then on to Bikaner. At each of these he had been refused treatment, for bureaucratic or financial reasons, and sent on to another place. It is the sort of thing that often happens to the poor and powerless in India. When he died, still hospital-less in Bikaner, ten days after the first diagnosis, he had received no medical treatment whatsoever, not even a painkiller.
His body was taken home, and he was cremated in Pabusar, with wood picked from the sacred
oran
grove of Pabuji.
In her widowhood, Batasi continues singing the
phad
,
and has begun to perform with her eldest son, Mahavir, who had earlier given up performing for lack of a tuneful partner. The two, mother and son, now sing the
Pabuji ki phad
together, keeping the family tradition alive until Shrawan finds a suitable wife and succeeds in teaching her the
phad
, or perhaps until Mohan’s grandson, Onkar, is ready to tell the tales of
Pabuji to a new generation.
Rural Sindh is a province of dusty mud-brick villages, of white-domed blue-tiled Sufi shrines and of salty desert scrublands broken, quite suddenly, by tropical floodplains of almost unearthly fertility. These thin belts of green fecundity – cotton fields, rice paddies, cane breaks and miles of chequerboard mango orchards – snake along the banks of the Indus as it meanders its sluggish, silted,
café-au-lait
way through southern Pakistan to the shores of the Arabian Sea.
In many ways the landscape here, with its harsh mix of dry horizons of sand and narrow strips of fertile soil, more closely resembles upper Egypt than the well-irrigated Punjab to its north; but it is poorer than either – in fact, one of the least developed areas in South Asia. Here landlords with their guns, and private armies, and feudal prisons, still rule over vast tracts of country; bonded labour – a form of debt-slavery – leaves tens of thousands shackled to their place of work. It is also, in parts, lawless and dangerous to move around in, especially at night.
I first discovered about the
dacoits
–
or highwaymen – when I attempted to leave Sukkur soon after twilight. Asking for directions to the great Sufi shrine town of Sehwan, a three-hour drive away along main roads, I was warned by passers-by huddled in tea stalls under thick shawls that I should not try to continue until first light. There had been ten or fifteen night robberies on the road in the past fortnight alone.
The same untameable landscape of remote desert and rocky hills that has made Sindh so difficult to govern, and so hospitable to brigands and outlaws throughout its history, has also turned it into a place of refuge for heterodox religious sects, driven here from more orthodox parts of the region. This, and its geographical position as the bridge between Hindu India and the Islamic Middle East, has always made Sindh a centre of Hindu–Muslim syncretism, with every kind of strange cult, part-Hindu, part-Muslim, flourishing in its arid wastes.
Much of this intermixing took place in the Sufi shrines that are still the main focus of devotion in almost every village here. For Sufism, with its holy men and visions, healings and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual’s search for direct knowledge of the divine, has always borne remarkable similarities to certain currents in Hindu mysticism.
All religions were one, maintained the Sufi saints, merely different manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque or temple, but to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart – that we all have Paradise within us, if we know where to look.
The Sufis believed that this search for God within and the quest for
fana
– total immersion in the absolute – liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrow orthodoxy, allowing the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. This allowed the Sufis for the first time to bring together Hindu and Muslim in an accessible and popular movement which spanned the apparently unbridgeable gulf separating the two religions. The teachings of Sufi poetry and song also provided a link between the devotions of the villagers and the high philosophical subtleties of the mystics. For the Sufis always wrote not in the court Turkish or Persian of the Muslim immigrants, but in the Sindhi, Punjabi or Hindi vernacular used by the ordinary people, drawing on simple rural symbols taken from dusty roads and running water, desert thirst, the dried-up thorn bush and the blessings of rain.
If the Sufis brought many Hindus into the Islamic fold, then they also succeeded in bringing an awareness of Hinduism to India’s Muslims. Many Sufis regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired, and took on the yogic practices of the Hindu sadhus: sitting meditating before a blazing fire in the heat of summer or hanging themselves by the feet to recite prayers – a practice that is still performed by South Asian Sufis, who sometimes use the hat racks or luggage rails of trains from which to hang.
This sectarian ambiguity is particularly in evidence in the writings of the Sufi mystics of Sindh, not least that of the greatest poet of the Sindhi language, the eighteenth-century Sufi master Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Shah. Latif came from a relatively orthodox Muslim background, but during his youth, on the rebound from a failed love affair, he set off wandering through Sindh and Rajasthan in the company of a group of Hindu sadhus and Nath Yogis, a sect of ash-smeared Shaivite mystics who invented hatha yoga in the twelfth century, and who claimed that their exercises and breathing techniques gave them great supernatural powers – to fly, to see into the future, to hear, to see over great distances and finally, if the techniques were fully mastered, to turn devotees into immortal beings, or
mahasiddhas
, who had powers greater even than the Hindu gods. The experience of travelling with these holy men profoundly altered Shah Abdul Latif’s religious outlook.
One of the most famous chapters of his great verse collection, the
Risalo
,
is the
Sur Ramkali
, in which he reflects on the three footloose years he spent wandering the deserts with these yogis, visiting both Hindu and Muslim pilgrimage sites. For Latif, there is no distinction between the two different faiths; the divisions, as he sees them, are between the bigoted and orthodox, on one hand, and itinerant free-thinking mystics on the other. It is these that Latif wishes to be back among:
Yogis are many, but I love these wandering sadhus.
Smeared with dust, they eat little,
Never saving a grain in their begging bowls.
No food in their packs, they carry only hunger,
No desire to eat have they,
Thirst they pour and drink.
These ascetics have conquered their desires.
In their wilderness they found the destination
For which they searched so long.
On the path of truth,
They found it lay within.
Hearing the call,
Before the birth of Islam,
They severed all ties,
And became one with their guru, Gorakhnath.
Now, sitting by the side of the road, I look for them.
Remembering these
sanyasis
, tears well up.
They were so very kind to me.
They radiated brightness.
Yogis are many, but it is these wandering sadhus that I love,
Says Latif.
A few years ago, while making a documentary on Sufi music, I visited the tomb of Shah Abdul Latif during its annual
’Urs
. The wild and ecstatic night-long celebrations marking the anniversary of the saint’s death were almost a compendium of everything of which Islamic puritans most disapprove: loud Sufi music and love poetry was being sung in each courtyard, men were dancing with women, hashish was being smoked, huge numbers were venerating the tomb of a dead man and all were routing their petitions through the saint, rather than directly to God in the mosque.
But for the Sindhis attending the
’
Urs
, it was not they who were the heretics, so much as the stern Wahhabi mullahs who criticised the popular Islam of the Sufi saints as
shirk
,
or heresy: ‘These mullahs are just hypocrites,’ said one old fakir I talked to in the shrine. ‘Without love, they distort the true meaning of the teaching of the Prophet. They are just interested in themselves. They should all be jailed for life.’
It was while talking to the pilgrims in Bhit Shah that I heard about a Sindhi shrine, or
dargah
, that sounded even more wildly syncretic than that of Shah Abdul Latif. The
dargah
of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander, ‘The Red Royal Falcon’ of Sehwan Sharif, lies barely a two-hour drive through the desert to the north of Bhit Shah. Sehwan was once a major cult centre of the great Hindu god Lord Shiva; indeed the town’s original name was Sivistan, the City of Shiva. Here, sixty years after Partition and the violent expulsion of most of the Hindus of Pakistan into India, one of the
sajjada nasheens
, or hereditary tomb guardians, is still a Hindu, and it is he who performs the opening ritual at the annual
’Urs
. Hindu holy men, pilgrims and officials still tend the shrine, replenish the lamps and offer water to visiting pilgrims. I was told that it was only in the 1970s that the central Shiva lingam, long the focus of veneration in the saint’s tomb, was discreetly removed to a locked annexe.
The old fakir at Bhit Shah who had ranted about the hypocrisy of the mullahs was adamant that there were two things I should not miss when I visited Sehwan Sharif. The first was the daily
dhammal
, or devotional dance to the saint, which took place each evening at sunset, after the end of Magrib prayers. The other, he said, was a famous lady fakir who lived in the shrine, and was said to be the most passionate of all the saint’s devotees. Her name, he said, was Lal Peri Mastani, or the Ecstatic Red Fairy. I asked how I would find her amid the crowds.
