What do people really believe? The question has bothered me all day since a conversation I had in the morning. Given the ubiquitous intensity of religion in this country, I have given surprisingly little thought to the issue (and that fact has been bothering me today as well), although on my earlier visit I probed people obsessively, if never very successfully. The external signs of piety themselves are fascinating and sometimes puzzling. Passengers on the bus to Delwara are a good example: when we pass Eklingji, the family temple of the Maharanas, many of the old men do namaste and often pilgrims board the bus and distribute prasad, consecrated food, in the form of sweets or fruits. On one occasion the driver nipped into a stall to buy a garland of flowers for the front of his bus and indeed, all buses, taxis and rickshaws tend to have religious paraphernalia, often involving green chillies, at the front. I found it surprising when I saw that Mohan – admittedly a Joshi, a Brahmin, but always rather secular in manner – always stops to namaste the little shrine just down the road from the Nagrik Vikas Manch. And Madhu’s mother, the Bengali Brahmin, always does a puja after my lesson (to purify the house?!) which involves blowing a conch shell twice or thrice, during which Nirmal and Madhu will immediately break off their conversation and put their hands together in a namaste.
The conversation I alluded to earlier was with Dinesh, the Baluchi bookseller, who I have come to like and respect a lot. He told me some interesting things about Udaipur’s growth and tourism, but he also told me about his personal faith. He has his own creation story involving a lotus, which he appears to accept as literal truth. He believes that gods and goddesses are real and has no truck with the notion that Hinduism is a convoluted form of monotheism. This viewpoint is somehow reconciled with the idea of an all-pervading god that is in everything. Everything, therefore, is a god - he used the example of the half-empty bottle of water on his desk: “Even this is a god.” He also told me that if you concentrate hard enough on someone, you will be able to see their “glow”, which I suppose corresponds to an aura or halo. Now, I’ve made him out to be a total basket case, but he really has a great air of common sense and a charming frankness in everything he says. In any case, when people reveal such alien views, especially when they seem to be the product of faith rather than reason, it seems inappropriate to argue with them in the way one might with somebody who claimed that globalisation was entirely a force for good or that climate change was simply a political money-making exercise.
External piety, albeit at a frenetic level of fervour, was all I could grasp from this evening’s Mohurram celebrations that I came across in an unfamiliar part of the old town. Although Mohurram is strictly the name of a month in the Islamic calendar, in India it is often used to refer specifically to the tenth day of that month. Elsewhere in the Islamic world this day is known as Ashura and, while for the Sunnis it is a day of fasting associated with Moses and the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, for the Shia it is an important day of mourning for the martyrdom of Mohammad’s grandson, Hussain, at Karbala. The mood in the streets was frenzied - somewhere a group of drummers were pounding out a startlingly powerful beat, while a group of men in white kurtas and prayer hats danced and chanted “Hussain! Hussain! Hussain! Hussain!” in a way that reminded me of BBC news bulletins from Palestine and Iraq.
These people were Daewoodi Bohras, a subset of the Ismailis, who are in turn a subset of the Shia, who have divided and subdivided throughout history due to disputes over who should be the next in a succession of imams, the spiritual and political successors to Mohammad. The Bohras believe the twenty-first imam went into hiding, and has ever since governed through is vice-regent, or dai. The community is largely restricted to India and Yemen and, in India at least, Bohras are notorious for their business acumen. My only friend from this community is called Abbas, a rather puckish character in his early twenties with curly hair and a very self-assured sense of style. He works in a tiny ready-made clothes shop down the road from Vikas Samiti, and is often trying to lure me in with the promise of “branded goods”. I get the impression that as well as being one of the cool kids he is also deeply religious, and in his Mohurram togs he cut an unexpectedly serious figure.
Next Post - Friday 26th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 26th January 2012)
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