Who Lost, Who Gained; at Who’s Fault?

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               Who Lost, Who Gained; at Who’s Fault?

Partition time pandemonium saw the final nail being struck in the coffin of two-nation theory. Baffled and staggering principle of peaceful co-existence, which had been brutally maimed during the last four decades, finally gave in to the jangling, deliriously deafening communal crescendo.

With a super effort the Mahatma continued to play the band of secularism and non-violence, long after the chorus colleagues had left the scene to revel in the suzerainty of newly dawned principles of religion, nation, Hindustan for the Hindus, Pakistan for the Muslims and countless other eristical symbologies meant to fracture apart the different tissues of a single muscle. Melodiously pure voice of Hindustani culture became inaudible in the pathologically dangerous toot. Terrifyingly raw riots occurred. A gracefully reflective socio-cultural set up suddenly turned irascible, blood thirsty, rumour-monger mob. Toplofty as well as melodiously light parameters of a composite culture changed. They now counted how many drops of blood from the other religion dropped in the reploughed soil to decultivate the cultural crop of last seven centuries. Melliferous, melic and soft words of yore turned to the cries of kill, kill....

A wholesome socio-cultural entity ruptured apart to emulate the geographical tear apart. Fissured hearts. Massy gastronomical mastership resulting in visceral chaos in the same abdomen. These were the moments when even the time looked askance to escape future generations’ criticism.

There were so many hands drawn to the butcherly hilt. Whose intrigue it was? Was it Jinnah, the Britishers, or the Mahatma and Nehru as the Pakistanis swear? And who lost how much? Perhaps, losses were too many to be judged by a comparative mode. Then who was the gainer? For sure, it was just the list of countries in the world.

In sheer exasperation the time during those rancorously tensioned moments of the freedom struggle’s final phase lost its countdown cadence and went astray. Millions caught in communal beguilement thought freedom meant partition. Furious renegades ran to catch a genocidal mirage in the dusty deserts of inhumanity. Freedom’s quintessence was lost in this sandy melee. All that remained was just a mass migration of fearful, destitute people ceaselessly running to cross the dreaded line. Humanity was mercilessly head-hunted. And quite ingeniously history wrote another bloody chapter in its big book of tragedy and farce.

It was really a spuriously defining moment in history. An eerie silence which calmatively prevailed over the common citizenry of two religions from the medieval times was broken by the political noise. Two religions glared hills apart. The subdued savage speech of yore got a political medium. Mob in its full verbosity and rioty ardour broke time’s euphemism and danced with timeless sovereignty. True religion faced a fatal dilemma––religion as provender for the politicians. Propagators of two-nation theory decreed a glorious destiny to the exclusive fate of their coreligionists. Sluggard monster opened its redsearing, furious eyes to create a mad stampede. Secularism standing on the edge of a precipice was pushed down. Ideal neighbours of yesterday became Hindus and Muslims overnight. People doomed to two destinies ran to escape the other’s archfiend. Deathless Gods, meanwhile, mourned over the unclaimed corpses in the demonically possessed battlefield of religions.

The village elders’ eyes still penetrated the scotomy and saw the honeymoon happenings after the midnight’s conjugal bliss. Without any heavy-heartedness they still got rejuvenated while recounting the tales how the malicious vibes of communalism had brutally spread in the area. If they pestered their old senses for the sake of history, the cries of communally charged throats still echoed in the streets which though muddy seemed nonetheless so calm and clear of the communal virus now.

Oh, the bald and barren statistics of communalism in this bucolically basking countryside! So aesthetically decorated Muslim cultural sinews were hurriedly patched out of the beautiful composite carpet by the errant crowd of an errant time. Muslim families in the villages of the district were attacked by rampaging Hindus. Some escaped, many were butchered. Fuelling agents of the fire were the uncountable tales of numerous atrocities heaped upon the unfortunate Hindus fleeing for life from the pak land, the land of Islam; the land of new political prophet, Jinnah.

Mighty Jat farmers of the village, so old and still holding on to the fluctuating fort of life, still recounted through their fluffy-grey minds how the first unfortunate Muslim was killed at the fresh and virgin altar of countryside communalism. Majority of the villagers had resisted the communal temptation at first. After all, such lubricious, good neighbourly relations take a little introspection before the brutal beheading. For generations their house walls had stood supporting each other. But then stories from Pakistani sides kept pouring in and their minds were crammed to the gills. Communal virus struck. First blood drop of the enemy soiled the revenge-pleading motherland. We’d call it the Muslim blood––specifically––not of a human being, not of a neighbour, because the propagators of two-nation theory were hell bent upon categorising their fellow religionists in terms of bones, blood, politics, culture, nation, history....

We don’t know which is more tragic. Is it the geographical partition of a unit, or a religion excluding another set of beliefs from its operational sphere, or a neighbour of yore turning out to be a killer of someone with whom he’d shared countless moments of peaceful coexistence in courtyard, beneath a tree, around hookah in a chaupal? Any decent, diplomatic euphemism deployed in any probable answer won’t be sufficient to hide the fundamental fallacies of a human acting on reaction. The independence eve, or the partition time, is such a delirium that all such answer-finding-reflectivism fails miserably.

There were some fortunate Muslims in the village who got mercy from the gods of death. The reason for this hairbreadth escape? To escape the bursting furore they took shelter in the majority’s religion as converted ‘Mulla Jats’. When the tempestuous virus subsided there was a gradual recovery of communal peace. Sturdy farmers walking along the long and winding furrow of survival slowly slowly forgot the talk of religion and riots. While the rustic life caught on rickety agricultural wheels the Mulla Jats reverted back to Islam. Thanks to some common, religionless God we could sometimes hear the names like Jalauddin and Gulamdin from the tongues of these ruralites!

Raise a toast to communal convalescence! Nearest villages still retained their names like Fatehpur and Mohmdabad. No rechristening urge to rename these old names still paying some lip service to the pre-independence period? No, it wasn’t completely so. The brave son of resurgent Hinduism, Ram Ratan MLA to be exact, was trying to create a mini-storm in the cup from the ambitious aegis of his ministry of cultural and youth affairs. But how can one expect these careless farmers to turn renaming bigots overnight! The people who have to drench their souls with the blood of their sweat possess no time to fall in line with such merely cosmetic tidbits. ‘What is there in a name?” they pay ultimate homage to Shakespearian soul. So, far away from the politico-religious chatter-boxes, whose endless talk of religion in danger, patriotism and nationalism gets front page finery in media, these hard farmers had no urban, cultural sophistication to  follow the path of ‘fire and sword’, while valiantly toeing the patriotic command. Heedless head of the rural society was just looking out for ways and means to survive in a fastly changing world.

Even during the partition time riots the plunder of other religioners’ chattel was the main appetence which far outweighed the thirst for rival blood as ordained by the itching fingers of two-nation theorists. In Kharkhoda, the sleepy town to the west of our village, fortress like core of the town was fully crammed with Muslim families. Its narrow alleys were fraught with numerous deadly crossroads as thousands of villagers from the surrounding countryside tightened up the communal noose. However, more than anything else the attackers were interested in plundering the Muslim gold coins said to be hidden somewhere among the Muslim bodies.

Those who’d taken part in the carnage, when made to recall this fact, might now try to look through their fingers. But their pretension not see or hear can’t negate the fact that two gallant martyrs in the religious war from the village were in fact killed while laying their hands upon petty objects. One had jumped down the wall. The reason? Was it to slay as many foes as possible? No. The poor fellow wasn’t able to resist the temptation of an ookhal, a big stone bowl used to pestle coarse grains. This glint of mundane ambition brought his fall. The defenders were firing from their bastion. He was shot and heaped under the sixty kilograms stony temptation he was carrying on his shoulder. The other one, who’d till then fought expeditiously, was finally taken in by the decorum of a shining new bicycle cajoling him from a backyard. While he was fleeting with his booty a bullet pierced his chest and he slumped on the ground. The bicycle fell at a distance from him as if running out of fear. Immortal inertia of the plunderer carried it a few paces further than his mortal remains.

Such things never happen on account of one religion or the other. Because religion consists of spirit, not matter. Similarly, the irreligious, materialistic, plundering urge was totally extraneous to Islam when the medieval barbarians plundered India with such ferocity that its immensity still enlivens in its dangerous finitude here and there. While the religionless plunderers were hurrying back with their bags full of plunderage––women, gold, cattle or for that matter anything possible to carry with them––leaving death and destruction in their trail, some religious seeds fell on the ground and a new flowering plant blossomed in the Indian Diaspora.

It’s only the lamenting impudence of our desires which throws materialistic bricks in the spiritual orchard of God. Lavation, incense burning, anointing, oblations and hundreds of other rituals smack of such hollow plausibility when performed by the hands which an instant back were holding the vivisecting sabre to cut apart humanism’s body and spirit. Even the deity appears trapped in a time’s warp. And when the same cockery echoes in the dank rooms of a jehadi factory its catchpenny waves harp on the strings of young, diffluent souls, who hypnotized listen the medieval call of haggish pagans:

“Annihilate all civilizational and cultural progress irreligiously befallen on earth during the last thousand years!”

Facelessness of meanest of human instincts trying to put a mask over His primordial face!

Let’s catch up with the forgiving and forgetting pace of time after the independence of India. Time, of course, is a close-to-flawless healer. The independence eve traumatized social set up got on to the sluggish wheels of natural recovery. At most of the places the wound had changed to an indifferent scar. Still, maimed radicals on both sides kept on crying due to the nonhealing nature of their injuries. So, efforts were on to institutionalise this digression for the revival of ghastly bipolarity which entailed the independence. Political tongues were wagging to make the voters see the purple flesh beneath the scars. With judicious guile the communal virus was being spread in monopolised madrasas to revive the medieval principle of ‘sword and fire’; the trumpcard of this sectarian hagiology being the effort to keep a vast section of Islamic society backward and incapable of coping with the dynamics of modernity.

Politico-religious noises were now increasing the pitch of the communal song. Petty local level politicians and cynically doubting mullahs were crying religio-political cockery. But there were places where people’s souls didn’t boil with communal blood. At such places countryside cart laden with rural-rusticities lurched forward ignorant of these firebranding agendas. Though they heard it, sometimes read about it in local newspapers and even discussed it, but did not feel it. In desperation the rejuvenating virus was trying to make people realise and feel its presence so that their natural immunity, unconcernedness, could be attacked at the infesting cusp of an opportune time. Thus the scathing ashy critique of the whimpering volcano was vainly falling over the cultivated fields.

Despite the MLA’s pungent communal rhetoric on that temple inauguration day, most of the villagers didn’t feel communally about the fact that a Hindu temple was being constructed after shifting a Muslim hut from the place. For the would-be priest too it was just a little, curt land-grabbing step in his happily doddering, holistic journey on the worldly path after that begging, lonely, linear journey on the path of asceticism.

So, brick by brick the temple tinselness kept on rising in its worldly exquisiteness above the unseen foundations of spiritual and religious folklore. Every up going inch on the curvilinear shikhara took the passion of his clingy soul to His doors. We don’t know what was God thinking about this new addition to His homes on earth? Whatever might be His unknowable take on this, but one thing is crystal clear, given the truthfulness of His facial grace and look of empathy for these toiling masses He surely must’ve felt a genuine pleasure for the fact that at least many poor labourers were earning bread from the brickwork in His name. Cosmically pious expression on His true face wouldn’t have stinted even a bit after looking at the worldly joyous face of the lame child having soul-satisfying pot-shots at the rising symbol of his long penanced aspirations. After all he was just an unfortunate way-farer of decades on the path of mendicancy, poorly measuring his asceticism’s success only in terms of how many kilometres he’d lumbered on his legs and crutch; and in the process always missing the point that even a single spiritual footstep can take one to the infinite bliss of His realisation. By the grace of God the sultry walker had at last reached a little flowery orchard of his passions after a purposeless wandering amidst huge patches of barrenness. At this newly emerging shrine of God he could at least have some rest for his troubled physical as well as religious self. His eyes had the glint of a child when it gets a new toy––a neophyte dreaming about viviparous prospects.

Murmurous haunt of the construction work, chirpy and chiseling roundelay of bricks, lime, stone as well as the workers’ chit-chat working tirelessly for the house of God sometimes turned his galloping worldly senses somewhat inertly static. At such times his soul caught some haphazard, unclear signals agelessly emanating from the cosmic station. It was just like a radio for some audible moments gets some misty, feeble signals from a distant radio station on the short-wave band. Then with hairbreadth of a disturbance the weakest of a spiritual magnet in his soul lost it; lost in the vast deluge of human illusions and cravings. Once free from this momentary cosmic tug at his ascetic apron his soul once again took its free flight in the sky of material cataclysm. Material self once again took up the gauntlet to lay bricks, mortar and plaster to erect an edifice around his already imprisoned self, so that it couldn’t see the vast emptiness and soul didn’t crave for the cosmic emptiness. The divinity shut off from the limited self!

His erstwhile neighbour, meanwhile, sinewed together the scattered pieces of his demolished shelter with the spiritual ease of a seasoned soul. Under the care of his unhurried self the hut-making process progressed so naturally! Completely hurryless! Just motivationless like the birds; doing it just for the selfless sake of doing it. Hut as a God; the process of erecting it the religion; and he, the priest. Such process is accomplished only by the soul’s peerless capacity to create flawlessly. Its only analogues perhaps would be a flower blossoming from a bud, a butterfly pollinating from flower to flower, honey-bees day in and day out engaged to fill up the nectar in beehives––doing it just for the sake of beauty and truth, and consequently the divinity itself.

In perfect symmetry with the curvaceously arching arcades of the cosmic structure his sinewy endeavour was totally free from the plucky pushes by the worldly asymmetry. Snaily movements of his frail figure had a mystique cadence which made him appear deeply religious to the soul’s dim: a human religioner, even though he hardly followed any religious injunction. Before this old sage all the versified, altruistic talk of institutionalised religion seemed a mere doggerel. Watching this poet mystic working on that sinewy poem only the God would’ve come to know how his reborn soul was implicitly enjoying the boisterous compassion of an unbounded self.

When the hut was completed it appeared a little hermitage of this pond’s mystic. It was conspicuously different from his earlier one, which looked so cowed down and spiritless, not just on account of the humble constructing material and poor design, but more so due to the absence of a soul’s urge to have a courageously cozy shelter from the vagaries of a scorching sun, cold rainy nights and spiteful dust storms. And crouched in it an intimidated soul, lost in a desultory world, putting even its physical attire on the path of abnegation: demotivated, dispirited, unresponsive to the world around. The new one which he made under the ordainment of primordial, patriarchal spirit of God appeared capable of defying the thralldom of climatic vagaries. The dweller’s despondence, which made him look a walking dead body inanimate to the whole world except the pond, fish and dog, too packed its bags from the new hut. It corroborated the fact that those new vibrant raylets of extroversion, which shone upon his soul on that day when he came across the nature’s perfumery, were no curt flashes in a pan. Rather it was something more substantial and significant enough to make its presence felt at the operational level in his daily life.

His effort to set up a beautiful hut was no pageantry; rather it was the effort of a common, simple human spirit trying to find its dignified place under the endless overcast of the sky above, whose infinite cosmic extension was proved by this spirited shelter over a needy head. Facing north the new home appeared a place of his rebirth. Yes, the frail old man had been reborn in more than one ways. His former neighbour, meanwhile, was constantly gazing heavenwards with an intent to create a niche in the sky by piercing it with the pointed shikhara.

Which structure is loftier in the eyes of God: a pompous shelter trying to touch His kingdom above the sanctum-sanctorum (or for that matter any religious structure belonging to any faith) or a shrine-like holy heart appertaining to a humanistic body? The former is just a brick and mortar structure; its strong walls trying to limit (or capture?) the infinite to get a finitude of Godhood. Happily imprisoned inside this cellar the godhead tries to make it the magnetic core of his cravings to attract the regal earthliness strewn around. The latter, meanwhile, is just a dignified, humanistic hutment meant to shelter pious, pure emotions and intentions. It is the compassion’s lofty shrine wherein truth, beauty and reality slowly and silently beat in consonance with wispily pristine soufflés in the owner’s heart. Here love glimpses like the ecstatic leaps of slippery eels in mirth waters.

In deliriously-desirous dissertation with time, the foundational glint of the Sadhu’s ambitions saw the accomplishment of temple construction. Pretentiously pondering outer walls, a courtyard studded with the untamed myth of the mighty banyan, residential rooms of the priest and his rowdy bunch of rascals (propaganda was that they were now reformed disciples) were the religious designs in the purfling around the shriny symbology of His presence on earth. With it came the most favourable draw in lotto for the priest and his coterie: enough money in the temple’s treasury, social and religious respect as well as an awe of the priest’s supernatural powers and the political patronage. These were in fact the hugely belated fruits of the religioner’s toil on the path of mendicancy.

Thanks to his guru’s dilated digression, the true disciple’s responsibilities mutated into a backbreaking load of work. His flawless and divinely close-grained faith found him a donkey laden with the mound and the temple on it. Under the mountainous weight of this religious rhapsody he---Bhagat Ram---was somehow managing a walk over the testing tightrope of his faith linking his ever-obedient heart to the ever-ordering mind of the guru.

There at the pond’s other end, on the fringe of countryside wilderness, was the little heritage. Etched in invisible colours, the sweet indifference of its existence made it look monumentally composed: a little shelter under starry skies where two souls passed their old days with the instantaneous ease of time. Incandescence of the immortal love in the father’s heart deathlessly glinted in the eyes of the fish playing daughterly below the water surface. Above, the old hero, ageless like the banyan, was masterfully trying to save them from the predator’s clutch.