On the Grand Trunk Road (34 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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The history involved is the kind you could bump into unexpectedly all over South Asia: mythical, preindustrial, emotional, vivid, manipulated, and above all, alive and well in the imperatives of ongoing violence. It was not the history of Nehruvian facts and textbooks, of five-year plans and bureaucratic commissions, but rather of ancient storytellers and demagogues. Some of the history was true, some of it was not, but the surrounding public debate rarely focused on the difference. The Hindu revivalists as well as their opponents in the Muslim clergy needed history desperately to justify their present battles, so they took what they could find in the texts and blithely made up the rest.
 
We were anxious to hear a dose of this mythmaking firsthand, in the hope that it would help to explain, at least in part, why so many Indians were fighting and dying over places of worship. My researcher, Rama Lakshmi, and I embarked on a winding tour of North India, stopping in city slums to watch the riots and visiting the sites of disputed mosques and temples to talk with local preacher-politicians about their causes, their faiths, and their versions of history. In teeming Varanasi, we were told that the Man Who Kept the Crows, a local Hindu archivist and activist, had all the answers. It turned out, actually, that the Man Who, etc., was long dead, but his grandson Somnath Viyas was very much alive, and while he did not claim to have any answers at all, he did urge us to listen carefully to his story, which he felt would unveil the origins of religious violence in India’s religious heartland.
 
Across from Viyas’s sheltered front porch where we sat one misty morning to hear his tale rose the whitewashed walls of the Gyanwapi, or “Well of Knowledge,” Mosque, a seventeenth-century Mughal structure surrounded by clusters of Hindu temples. The mosque’s minarets competed with conical temple domes, including one of shimmering gold, for dominance of a dense skyline. Barefoot Hindu pilgrims with painted faces, ragged beards, and spindly legs splashed through puddles in cobblestone lanes. Perhaps thirty yards from the mosque’s walls was the reputed Well of Knowledge itself, a dark hole into which one could not see very far. Tape-recorded Hindu chants and religious folk songs screeched from a multitude of speakers. Our host, Viyas, summoned a rope cot and a small straight-backed wooden chair for us to sit on. Then he began the story of the Gyanwapi Mosque, and how thousands of human corpses supposedly came to lie buried beneath it. As he spoke, Viyas acquired the flowing, rapturous voice of a storyteller, but also, at times, the halting manner of a rational man forced to recount a particularly bizarre dream.
 
This ambivalence, it seems to me and to many secular Indians, is the essence of religious history as it is mustered and manipulated in the present volatile climate: it is the point of departure from the rational to the irrational. The way history is seen—something different, to be sure, from what history may actually be—is the source of the distortions that religious-minded politicians find necessary to organize violence.
 
Viyas began that morning with what he knew was true: a 1929 court case that landed in steamy summer on the desk of a British colonial officer in Varanasi in the last days of the British Empire. The plaintiff was Viyas’s grandfather (the Man Who Kept the Crows, so named by his neighbors and so known today throughout Varanasi for his habit of feeding local birds). One day, Viyas watched a party of Muslims carry a corpse to the Gyanwapi Mosque for burial. They dug a grave, recited prayers, and lowered the body. Grandfather Viyas was appalled—there was supposed to be an informal treaty in place between local Hindus and Muslims under which the Muslims had agreed not to bury their dead at the mosque in exchange for permission to conduct regular Friday religious services. Introducing burials was an affront and a provocation, Viyas thought, so he filed papers with the British, seeking an imperial injunction to stop it.
 
Here we can imagine the beleaguered district magistrate, some middle-class Welshman far from home in service of the king, whose name is today only vaguely recalled by Varanasi locals. The magistrate’s primary job was to prevent rioting. The petition before him urged that he stop the Muslim burials at Gyanwapi as a means to this end. An easy call—petition granted. But now the Muslims were affronted, and they filed their own petition against the magistrate, the secretary of India, and the British Empire. Their argument was that in the sixteenth century, the precolonial Muslim emperor Aurengzeb, and heir to the Mughal Muslim invaders of India, officially granted Varanasi Muslims the right to offer prayers, including burial prayers, at the Gyanwapi Mosque. Moreover, the mosque was at present in the possession of Muslims, so they had the right to do whatever they wished within its confines.
 
The British magistrate now felt that he had a potential religious brawl on his hands. Accordingly he stepped up to the best traditions of British imperial mediation. He consulted lawyers and preachers and community elders. He received long petitions and recitations of precolonial historical disputes. Among the evidence he considered was a lengthy petition submitted by a Hindu historian from Orissa who claimed to have examined archives in London and to have discovered there letters from provincial princes to the seventeenth-century Muslim emperor Aurangzeb which made clear the Well of Knowledge’s true history.
 
According to this (Hindu) version, a modest Hindu temple was erected on the site of the Well of Knowledge at some point back in the misty recesses of the tenth century or earlier. Local Brahmin preachers, or pandits, maintained the temple, performed the religious rituals, and otherwise offered themselves up as fonts of spiritual wisdom to the local Hindu community. Then harmony was disrupted by hordes of invading Afghan Muslims who poured into the Gangetic plains from the Hindu Kush mountains to the west. In the suspiciously poetical year of 1111, a local Muslim warrior-prince by the name of Qutubuddin Aibak, the general of an Afghan king, smashed the Hindu temple at the Well of Knowledge to prove the superiority of his faith and his tribe. (The date of 1111, at the least, does not add up, since Aibak was not active in north India until the last quarter of the twelfth century at the earliest. But Viyas and his intellectual brethren prefer numerology to fact.) The temple, in any event, lay in ruins for several centuries.
 
In the suspiciously poetical year of 1555, a Hindu pandit by the name of Narayan received permission from the Muslim emperor Akbar to rebuild the temple. Emperor Akbar’s relatively pluralist religious outlook, which he acquired somewhat later in his reign, has made him a popular icon of recent Indian historiography. Narayan persuaded Akbar to authorize a new temple because northern India was suffering from a terrible drought and the pandit felt that if the Hindu gods could be assuaged, rain would fall. Akbar, perhaps concerned about the food riots that routinely accompanied drought, apparently considered this a reasonable hope, so the temple was reconstructed and the rain-inducing rituals were duly performed. Lo and behold, the rains came, and as our storyteller, Viyas, said, “It was a very good rain and all the farmers were very happy.”
 
Akbar, being mortal, passed on to the great beyond, and two generations later the evil emperor Aurangzeb took the throne. In Hindu historiography, Aurangzeb is the malevolent “fundamentalist” opposite of the pluralist Akbar. As Viyas put it, Aurangzeb was “a very staunch Muslim and a blind follower of Islam who killed his three brothers, imprisoned his father and sister, and took the rein of administration by dint of cruelty and force and violence. He declared, ‘I do not recognize any religion in India but Islam. It will be the state religion of India.’ ” Aurangzeb’s representatives in Varanasi asked His Exaltedness what, specifically, they should do about the rebuilt Hindu temple at the Well of Knowledge. According to the letters supposedly dug up at the London School of Economics, these local Muslim warrior-princes accused the temple’s Hindu preachers of engaging in idolatry and “wicked sciences.” In possession of these accusations, Aurangzeb ordered that Hindu teaching centers be demolished and replaced with Islamic schools that would instruct the populace in Persian and Arabic. To carry out his order Aurangzeb dispatched to Varanasi his greatest and most terrible general, Khala Pahar, or Black Mountain.
 
Black Mountain, Viyas told us, “was six feet tall, black in color, and rode a black horse. He was a Brahmin from Bengal. He commanded a great army in Aurangzeb’s service. Aurangzeb had given him two or three Muslim ladies and made him a general. Since he was a Brahmin, he knew where all the money was kept at the temples. He destroyed all the temples he could find. Wherever a temple was destroyed, Black Mountain was there.” In 1669, another year with a certain ring to it, Black Mountain supposedly arrived at the outskirts of Varanasi. Local Hindus rallied to battle against him. They fought for up to ten days. But Black Mountain had in his arsenal cannons of some sort, or so the story goes, and with this superior weaponry he overwhelmed the defenders.
 
As the evil general neared the Well of Knowledge, the temple’s Hindu priests prepared for their fate. Among the valuables in their possession was one of the most spectacular jewels in all of India, an emerald in the shape of a Shiva lingam, or phallus, a symbol of the creator-destroyer god Shiva’s potency. The emerald phallus had been shipped secretly to the temple by the king of Kota, who feared that if Aurangzeb found it in the Kota court, he would steal it. Now, as battle raged in Varanasi, with thousands of Hindu fighters falling bravely before Black Mountain’s cannons, one of the Hindu priests, Sukhdev Viyas—ancestor of the Man Who, etc.—gathered the glistening phallus into his robes and, just as enemy soldiers reached the temple, leaped to his death down the Well of Knowledge. The next day, amid the smoldering ruins and scattered corpses wrought by Black Mountain’s triumph, Viyas’s corpse was pulled from the well and cremated at the holy ghats on the banks of the sacred Ganges River. Viyas’s bereaved widow hurled herself onto the burning funeral pyre, performing the traditional suicidal act of
sati.
But the emerald phallus was never found. It was presumed to have washed into the Ganges.
 
In the aftermath of this terrible battle, Black Mountain’s lieutenants constructed a Muslim mosque on top of the ruins of the former Hindu temple—the same Gyanwapi Mosque visible from the Viyas’s front porch today. Portions of the old Hindu temple were used in the walls of the mosque—indeed, Hindu carvings are still visible in the mosque’s walls—to emphasize the Muslim emperor’s triumph. Ten to twelve thousand dead Hindus were supposedly buried beneath the mosque, their bodies rotting symbols of the futility of resisting Islam. “Today,” Viyas told us, leaning forward solemnly toward the mosque, “if you removed the stone and dug four to five feet, then you would get some portion of a dead body.”
 
For more than a hundred years afterward, chastened Varanasi Hindus worshiped modestly at the surviving Well of Knowledge and at a few trees surrounding the new, dominant mosque. Then, in the suspiciously poetical year of 1777, in a kingdom far away, a princess named Ahiliyabhai had a dream.
 
In her dream Ahiliyabhai swam in the water. A mysterious voice said, “Come and take me.” When the princess awoke she went bathing in the Narmada River, which ran through her kingdom. There, as she swam, naked, a Shiva phallus “came into her lap,” as Viyas put it. It was not the missing emerald but it was nonetheless an inspiration. Ahiliyabhai traveled to Varanasi and decided to erect a Hindu temple to Lord Shiva on the site next to the Well of Knowledge Mosque. She studied the designs of the previously smashed Hindu temples and authorized one of her own with a golden roof. For the gold she turned to Ranjit Singh, the rich Sikh ruler of Punjab, who owned seven gold mines and who sent the requested roof on a white mare he had bought from the emir of Saudi Arabia.
 
Inspired by the rebuilt temple, mobs of local Hindus broke into the Gyanwapi Mosque in 1810 bearing pictures of Lord Shiva. Muslims moved to defend the mosque and a riot ensued. British soldiers charged in with their rifles, shot dead a few stragglers, and finally bought peace by asking the Hindus to carry their garlanded pictures out of the mosque to the young trees beside it.
 
Thus the present scene in the crowded square around the Well of Knowledge in bustling downtown Varanasi: on one side the dominant seventeenth-century mosque with its painted minarets, on the other the conical, glistening dome of the Golden Temple, and in between a few old shade trees garlanded with flowers and photographs. And, milling around, a lot of young Hindus and Muslims with grievance on their minds.
 
Back now to 1935 and our beleaguered British magistrate at his desk piled high with petitions, not least among them the carefully scrawled Hindu accounts of this epic history. The colonial magistrate read the material, consulted Varanasi elders further, and decided somewhat wearily that the best he could do was to preserve the status quo. He formally ordered the Muslims to stop burying their dead at the mosque and instructed the Hindus to leave the Muslims alone. This peace lasted two decades. “It was a sound sleep,” Viyas told us.
 
Then the Hindus awoke. A Hindu revivalist political party, in possession of the scrawled “history” of the Well of Knowledge, organized a campaign to tear down the mosque and shift the princess’s temple to the proper site. Thousands of Hindus flocked from all over India in 1958 to demand redress. Local Muslims, deprived in independent India of both Mughal emperors and British arbitrators, shrank from a major confrontation, but scattered riots ensued nonetheless. Prime Minister Nehru sent in the troops just as his British predecessors had done. Thousands were arrested and jailed.

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