Ajmer and Me

- Anjum Hasan
Courtesy of New Quest, NQ 161.

I undertook my first and only religious pilgrimage in a spirit of incomprehension and awe. I lived in Shillong then. My mother and an aunt decided to visit the dargah of Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer, and I was elected from among three bored teenagers to go along. I didn't have a clue about why Ajmer was important. My mother had, years ago, promised to herself to revisit the shrine if a certain wish of hers, a kamna, was fulfilled. That endowed the whole idea with the vaguely mysterious significance that all things religious or converging on the religious had for me then.

So off we went to ‘India'. Why I remember anything at all about the trip is also because it was a virtually first-time journey into the big country. Coming from the somewhat dwarfish highlands where you were statuesque at five-and-a-half feet and traversing ten kilometres in any direction would take you outside town, India's largeness was disturbing. This was not merely a matter of physical size; it was attitude too, an assertion, a claim – the benevolent smile of a giant mother combined with the disapproving growl of a giant father. The shockingly hill-less landscape that unfurled kilometre after barren kilometre through the train window was an aspect of this immensity. As was our co-passenger, a large and expansive man who handled the English language with vernacular panache, repeatedly referring to an ‘inferiority complex' as an ‘ inferiority complexion'. The huge red-fleshed guavas we ate in Allahabad seemed like grandfathers of the small, white Shillong versions. I was going to be swallowed up.

Once we got to Ajmer my story of diminishment was complete when a bunch of North Indian boys – of the kind genetically predisposed to sadistic humour, leavened with which their sexual repression acquires savage forms – harassed me for two days in a row. All I experienced of the dargah itself, still smarting from the jabs and jeers of those misled youths and trying to keep my dupatta from slipping off my head, was a disorientingly large pot with a tiny puddle of coins and notes at its base, cool white tiles under our bare feet, the gentle voice of the Khadim who showed us around, and a wall of filigreed marble on which people with wishes had tied hundreds of little red threads, some still new, some faded with age. My mother untied one of the threads thus fulfilling the purpose of the journey. How do you know this is exactly the one you had tied all those years ago, I asked her. It doesn't matter, she said. You can untie any of them. This seemed not quite logical and on that somewhat unsatisfactory note, the pilgrimage ended.

But when I revisit it now I realise the story runs into other chapters, all of them to do with what it means to be a Muslim who is not quite a Muslim. Bangalore, where I now live, is perhaps the most hospitable city in the country but trying to rent a house sometimes means dealing with landlords who wish to first get the matter of religion out of the way. Now wait a minute, I have wanted to say to the house-owner who asks me on the phone if I'm Muslim. I know he is drawing on a pre-existing mental picture. I want to answer him in the negative and hope he gets the implication, which is that not everyone with a Muslim name is ‘Muslim' . But if he misses my subtle point, I will only be encouraging him to continue discriminating against those who conform to the image in his prejudiced head. Better, then, to say – ‘Yes, I am' and try to get across the subtext – ‘And so what?' Which possibly means losing the house, which seems eminently unfair.

In between the pilgrimage to Ajmer and the conversation with the difficult landlord is a narrative not so much of a turning away from religion as finding that it hardly matters in the first place. I grew up with the tacit understanding that there was something vaguely crass about religion. One didn't exactly proclaim one's religious feelings, if they existed at all, and those who did were either simple-minded or antagonistic to other religions or both. Secularism meant silence. This is not an unusual story – many of us secularists are comfortably a-religious and for a long time it seemed to work. Today there are questions being asked about why secularism has not stood us in good stead. Personally I find that instead of doggedly holding on to my unconcern about and distance from religion, I've grown interested in positions of equivocation with regard to it. I find it useful to place alongside the large narratives of established religious identity that I was first exposed to on the trip to Ajmer, the small narratives about a lack of fixity that need to also be claimed as part of religious experience. I realise that I would rather stay uncomfortably in this amorphous zone than declare religion regressive.

I don't want to suggest that it is only the sceptical or the tentative whose positions are important to acknowledge. As important is the legacy of figures from the opposite end of the spectrum – those who can claim a cultural inheritance that is intimately connected to religion but enriched rather than limited by it. Qurratulain Hyder, for instance, many of whose stories have to do with the charmed and long gone world of aristocratic Muslims in North India, has been subjected to a familiar stereotyping, and has written about how pained she is when people ask her – how did you overcome the ‘restrictions of your society' to become a writer? Her family history reads like the history of that forgotten mid-19th to early-20th century time in the subcontinent when it was possible to be anglicised and yet write in Urdu, secular and yet a strong believer, bourgeois and yet radical, Muslim and yet Indian. ‘My family was among those good people who were also fiercely proud of their own Indian civilisation. They continued to live in a cultural half-way house till the partition of the country upset the apple-cart,' she writes.

To come back to Ajmer: there is a significant parallel between travelling into India from the small town of my childhood and being on a journey whose goal was religious. Both were first-time experiences. I remember writing a poem when I came back that was simply and unselfconsciously titled ‘India'. All the unique images I encountered on the journey – the starkly white tombs of the dargah, gigantic fields of mustard flowers in the winter sun, beggar girls with babies in their arms, men in turbans riding camels, the dried rose petals of the tabarruq – were catalogued in this poem. Its title was not meant to be plainly descriptive and so I didn't think of it then as audacious or naive. From my position, this spice- and poverty- and colour-ridden country that I had experienced could manageably be described in a single poem because my relationship to it was a vicarious one. This was true too of my awareness of religion – it had a metaphorical rather than literal presence. India, like Islam, could be dangerous from close up, but from a safe distance it was full of innocuous charm.

In the kind of upbringing I had, religion never quite acquired the status of culture. My parents treated Islam like an eccentricity of my grandfather's with the result that there would always be attached to it the air of the irredeemably quaint. The Maulvi whom my grandfather engaged to teach us children the Urdu alphabet was treated by everyone but him with amused indulgence. We never quite made it past the Urdu alphabet into the Arabic one, and so remained shut off forever from the hallowed green leather-bound book of all books. It was only as an adult that I realised that the men constantly and casually effecting miracles in the bedtime stories my grandfather told us were Sufi saints. Each time I try to dive back into the past and retrieve something, anything, that gives flesh to the idea of my being a Muslim, I come up with fragments – a haunting line from a marsiya about the Battle of Kerbala being sung in a darkened mosque, the taste of dates eaten after a token day of fasting during Ramzan, the image of my grandfather praying in a silence so deep it seemed scary. Yet I am reluctant to give up these fragments, just as I am reluctant to give in to the Bangalore landlord who feels he can wipe out my context by ascribing a religion to me.

This is perhaps a poetic relationship with religion, not a moral one. But when I place it alongside the idea of returning to the shrine of a person dead for eight hundred years to untie, symbolically, a thread that was once tied, again symbolically, to represent the expression of a secret desire, the metaphorical force of practised religion seems as strong as the metaphorical force of religion interesting only for its place in private memory. Ajmer – and Sufism – seems an especially appropriate context against which to think about this. For the overriding impression one carries back from Ajmer, even though it takes a while to unravel it, is the opposing pull of ritual and poetry, the strangeness of a formalised relationship to religion set against an essentially mystical one. The Khadim who was our guide, despite his majestic bearing and dignity, seemed reduced in the face of people absorbed in the act of untying sacred threads, or the ecstatic singing of the qawwals, or the woman weeping outside the sanctuary where Chisti sleeps. There was an element of lunacy in the passion of these figures, a sense of concern not with right and wrong but with the self and the ‘out there'. Poetry could well approximate to this.

But the moral question cannot be evaded, and neither can the cultural or political one. Who is a Muslim and can you be one even if you are unable to fully claim spaces like Ajmer? Is the Bangalore landlord right in supposing that religion presupposes cultural practices, that one's being Muslim necessarily implies not just private thoughts but also public actions? If push comes to shove, like it did in Hitler's Europe, and one is pigeon-holed in one's inherited religion, how would one then sustain a fluid relationship to religion such as the one I am proposing?

These questions are easier to answer from an impersonal and general perspective, and that is certainly a valid perspective because it is not always essential to bring oneself into the frame. One does not need to be a believer to argue against religious bigotry, just as one does not need to be an atheist to be secular. It is important to keep that principle at the centre at a time when the tendency is to flatten multifaceted cultural identities into one-dimensional allegiances.

But this not withstanding, there is an argument to be made for the inevitability and the necessity of understanding the parts we have privately played – actively or passively – with regard to religion. If communalism and its opposite were both not such terribly vital issues in contemporary India, I would not need to ever think about my relationship to religion. Given that they are, I cannot but. A pilgrimage is a good place to begin because pilgrimages, even ones undertaken half-unwittingly, inevitably give you a pre-determined public role to play but they don't regiment you. If journeys can be allegories for a movement towards self-knowledge, I am glad I made my somewhat farcical pilgrimage to Ajmer. The images of Ajmer are images that I cannot completely internalise and yet cannot dismiss. Their relevance to me is part of a way of being an Indian Muslim which is full of hazards and pockmarked with ignorance and doubt, but which is still a way of being an Indian Muslim.