Nine Lives(45)

His body was taken home, and he was cremated in Pabusar, with wood picked from the sacred oran grove of Pabuji.

In her widowhood, Batasi continues singing the phad, and has begun to perform with her eldest son, Mahavir, who had earlier given up performing for lack of a tuneful partner. The two, mother and son, now sing the Pabuji ki phad together, keeping the family tradition alive until Shrawan finds a suitable wife and succeeds in teaching her the phad, or perhaps until Mohan’s grandson, Onkar, is ready to tell the tales of Pabuji to a new generation.





The Red Fairy


Rural Sindh is a province of dusty mud-brick villages, of white-domed, blue-tiled Sufi shrines and of salty desert scrublands broken, quite suddenly, by tropical floodplains of almost unearthly fertility. These thin belts of green fecundity—cotton fields, rice paddies, cane breaks and miles of chequerboard mango orchards–snake along the banks of the Indus as it meanders its sluggish, silted, café-au-lait way through southern Pakistan to the shores of the Arabian Sea.

In many ways the landscape here, with its harsh mix of dry horizons of sand and narrow strips of fertile soil, more closely resembles upper Egypt than the well-irrigated Punjab to its north; but it is poorer than either—in fact, one of the least developed areas in South Asia. Here landlords with their guns, and private armies, and feudal prisons, still rule over vast tracts of country; bonded labour—a form of debt-slavery—leaves tens of thousands shackled to their place of work. It is also, in parts, lawless and dangerous to move around in, especially at night.

I first discovered about the dacoits—or highwaymen—when I attempted to leave Sukkur soon after twilight. Asking for directions to the great Sufi shrine town of Sehwan, a three-hour drive away along main roads, I was warned by passers-by huddled in tea stalls under thick shawls that I should not try to continue until first light. There had been ten or fifteen night robberies on the road in the past fortnight alone.

The same untameable landscape of remote desert and rocky hills that has made Sindh so difficult to govern, and so hospitable to brigands and outlaws throughout its history, has also turned it into a place of refuge for heterodox religious sects, driven here from more orthodox parts of the region. This, and its geographical position as the bridge between Hindu India and the Islamic Middle East, has always made Sindh a centre of Hindu-Muslim syncretism, with every kind of strange cult, part-Hindu, part-Muslim, flourishing in its arid wastes.

Much of this intermixing took place in the Sufi shrines that are still the main focus of devotion in almost every village here. For Sufism, with its holy men and visions, healings and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual’s search for direct knowledge of the divine, has always borne remarkable similarities to certain currents in Hindu mysticism.

All religions were one, maintained the Sufi saints, merely different manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque or temple, but to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart—that we all have Paradise within us, if we know where to look.

The Sufis believed that this search for God within and the quest for fana—total immersion in the absolute—liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrow orthodoxy, allowing the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. This allowed the Sufis for the first time to bring together Hindu and Muslim in an accessible and popular movement which spanned the apparently unbridgeable gulf separating the two religions. The teachings of Sufi poetry and song also provided a link between the devotions of the villagers and the high philosophical subtleties of the mystics. For the Sufis always wrote not in the court-Turkish or -Persian of the Muslim immigrants, but in the Sindhi, Punjabi or Hindi vernacular used by the ordinary people, drawing on simple rural symbols taken from dusty roads and running water, desert thirst, the dried-up thorn bush and the blessings of rain.

If the Sufis brought many Hindus into the Islamic fold, then they also succeeded in bringing an awareness of Hinduism to India’s Muslims. Many Sufis regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired, and took on the yogic practices of the Hindu sadhus: sitting meditating before a blazing fire in the heat of summer or hanging themselves by the feet to recite prayers—a practice that is still performed by South Asian Sufis, who sometimes use the hat racks or luggage rails of trains from which to hang.

This sectarian ambiguity is particularly in evidence in the writings of the Sufi mystics of Sindh, not least that of the greatest poet of the Sindhi language, the eighteenth-century Sufi master Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Shah. Latif came from a relatively orthodox Muslim background, but during his youth, on the rebound from a failed love affair, he set off wandering through Sindh and Rajasthan in the company of a group of Hindu sadhus and Nath Yogis, a sect of ash-smeared Shaivite mystics who invented hatha yoga in the twelfth century, and who claimed that their exercises and breathing techniques gave them great supernatural powers—to fly, to see into the future, to hear, to see over great distances and finally, if the techniques were fully mastered, to turn devotees into immortal beings, or mahasiddhas, who had powers greater even than the Hindu gods. The experience of travelling with these holy men profoundly altered Shah Abdul Latif’s religious outlook.