The Hindu : The mosaic cracks

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Thursday, May 16, 2002

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The mosaic cracks

By Shail Mayaram

The tragedy is that what happened involved the genocide not only of households, neighbourhoods and communities, but also of the idea of Gujarat.

MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbandar on the Gujarat coast, in a family of vaishyas, a merchant caste. His mother was a Parnami (a cult with a strong Islamic derivation) and he himself espoused Vaishnava dharma, a moral and religious philosophy with a highly incorporative vision. This economic and cultural context created an extremely fortuitous conjuncture that produced one of the greatest men ever. Gandhi could, arguably, only have been born in Gujarat.

Gujarat, of all the regions in the Indian subcontinent, is culturally and demographically one of the most complex. Its arid, coastal and forested areas provided ecological niches for several groups, their diverse livelihoods, cultures and institutional arrangements. Gujarat's ports find mention in the Mahabharata as the sites of a polity ruled by a clan called the Yaduvansh kshatriyas. The ports were not just junctures for trade and commerce. These ancient and medieval markets were the doors and windows of the subcontinent where India reached out to the world and obtained a thousand-fold in return. The exchange of goods and commodities was only one aspect of the transaction. There was also a simultaneous exchange of languages, of ideas, of literary genres and metaphors, of sciences and other aspects of cultural and intellectual life. Not surprisingly, Gujarat's kings financed and patronised shrines of different religions that had to do with the worship of the Sun, of the goddess, the Jain tirthankaras, Muslim saints.

The medieval-modern identity of the Gujaratis is derived from a vibrant relationship with their neighbours — Persians, Arabs, Baluchis, Sindhis and others. Gujarati traders and merchants were an eclectic community exposed to transcontinental trade and global cultures. Many converted to Jainism, the sramana tradition that involved a radical critique of caste hierarchy and the ritual dominance of the Brahman. And then there were the large number of Shiite communities also with commercial interests — the Bohras, the Aga Khani Khojas, the Isna-Asharis, the Memons and others. These groups contributed to the State's prosperity. The cultural encounter brought into being a region with an extremely complex linguistic, literary, sectarian, legal and politico-institutional diversity. In the realm of language and literature, for instance, Gujarat was one of the first areas of the subcontinent to develop a desh bhasha or popular language. The more popular Rajasthani and Gujarati replaced Dingal or the old bardic language sometime around the 13th century. These were the first languages of northern India to possess a rich literature in both prose and verse, which ranged across genres such as lok gathas, khyats (chronicles), vanshavalis and pirhiavalis comprising genealogies, clan, lineage and biographical histories. Many of these have been referred to as indigenous forms of recording history and are written rather than oral.

Gujarat is today one of the Indian States with the largest number of Muslim communities including groups that combined the idea of the worship of the ten avatars with Quranic cosmology. As Hindu and Muslim ideologies launched their competition over numbers early in the 20th century they sought to "convert" a large number of these "deviant" Hindu and Muslim sects. A century later, the language of these fundamentalist groups has changed. Gujarat's various Islamic ideologies stand totalised into caricatured versions of the Taliban. All Muslims stand collectively blamed for what happened at Godhra.

Gandhi died many times before Nathuram Godse actually killed him: once in Noakhali in 1946 and several times over during the Partition. He continues to suffer a cycle of ceaseless deaths in contemporary Gujarat as he is butchered time and again by Godse's successors, who call themselves Hindu. The tragedy of Gujarat, to my mind, is not only in terms of countless lives and the charred social fabric that our minds have hardly even begun to comprehend. The tragedy is that what happened involved the genocide not only of households, neighbourhoods and communities, but also of the idea of Gujarat. It is pointless quibbling about whether this conforms to the criteria of genocide in international law, which itself provides a highly limited definition and needs to be interrogated. After this genocide, Gandhi can never again be born in Gujarat.

The philosopher, Ramchandra Gandhi, sees in the Gujarat violence a recurrence of the Mahabharata, when the entire Yadava clan suffered the curse of Gandhari. Holding Krishna responsible for the wiping out of the Kuru clan, Gandhari pronounced: "So also will your people kill themselves in fratricidal frenzy!" Drunken Yadavas indulging in revelry further tested the patience of the irritable Guru Durvasa. The Guru cursed the man pretending to be a pregnant woman by clothing a mace over his stomach. In parodying reproductivity, life itself had been mocked. The Guru condemned the mace to a prolific reproductivity making possible the weapons of total destruction. The two curses devastated the Yadavas and their leader, Krishna.

Ramachandra Gandhi's reading of the replay of the Mahabharata in Gujarat can be further deepened. In the death of Krishna, from a hunter's arrow, died the androgynous self that has been so significant in the religious life of the subcontinent. Krishna had embodied two principles that bridged the limits of a simple, gendered self, conceived of as exclusively either male or female. Krishna with Radha is ardhanarishvar, together with Arjuna he is nar-narayan. The divine envisaged in an intimate relationship with the human: the god as both lover and beloved and the god as friend and confidante. The death of Krishna also meant the end of the ganarajya, Dwarka. It brought to a close the limited history of the republican principle that had competed with the monarchical in the political organisation of the subcontinent.

In Gandhi was reborn the subterranean principle of androgyny, for he celebrated the woman in himself. His elaboration of Vaishnava dharma made possible the presence of both Rama and Krishna. In his Ram dhun were also the strains of the distant devotional music of the Baul singers of Bengal. After all, medieval-modern Vaishnavism had travelled from Bengal to Braj and spread to the larger Brajbhasha-speaking area. In Gandhi's deeply Vaishnava and Hindu identity was also a celebration of the love and compassion articulated in Islam, Christianity and Buddhism.

Gandhi's strength came from the cultural resources of the region he was born into. Contemporary Gujarat has ensured that Gandhi will never again be born there. Lord Ram, the maryada purshottam, would never have allowed the praja of Ayodhya to desecrate a place of worship whether a mosque, church or ancestral shrine; Krishna would never have sided with the play of adharma in Gujarat. Hindus have today ensured that Ram can never again be born at the Janamsthan in Ayodhya and Krishna can never return to rule from Dwarka.

(The writer is Visiting Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.)

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