In Bhakti tradition, it is often a sound, or a Word or ‘Shabd’, which hits you, wounds you, and changes you. This ‘shabd ki chot’, a wound that transforms your heart, can come from anywhere: a song, a poem, a guru’s reproach, a friend’s rebuke. It can come from the sky, the ocean, maybe even from within.
Kabir has taught me that the path to God—this place we seek beyond words—can sometimes begin with language.
The chot is not necessarily a one-off encounter. I am personally of the belief that one must keep getting wounded. Last year, the chot showed up in the shape of Shah jo raag. I have spent many days, pulled by something, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, taking the bus to Bhit Shah to listen to the raag, to be wounded, willingly, over and over. Most days it starts at 9.30 am and goes on till sunrise. If you stay long enough, you might fall asleep listening to it. And wake up to the sound already inside you.
You can call it aqeeda (faith). You can call it, as one fakir said, therapy. Whatever the case. Afternoons and evenings and nights in Bhittai’s darbar, sitting there like hundreds of others, my heart opened, mind resisted, and body fell to ease. This aqeeda I can claim: the aqeeda of coming to knowledge outside of books—through people, through music, through the music of the land. By music I mean the bhajans and raags as much as the music of body brushing into new combinations of eyes and feet. Like falling asleep on a bus, I don’t know where in Sindh; or waking up on the floor of a darbar and it is sunrise; or the bright green of banana leaves whizzing past from a qinqi.
Then, a volley of chots came from the land itself… and I realized that a wound can be, is often, a name. Shabd ki chots in the shape of names… names of places, of languages spoken, of roads, water bodies, villages. Names-as-wounds that made me think, in guilt before joy, But I know nothing of this land that I am tracing God in.
A shayr intervention here:
sar jhukaya tou pathar sanam ban gaye
ishq dharka tou haqq aashnaa ho gaya
(you must hear it in Maulvi Haider Hassan Vehranwale’s voice)
when i bowed my head [in prayer], even stones became gods
when love drummed in my heart, truth revealed itself to me
For pathar to become ‘sanam’! —When a faceless pathar, stone, turns into ‘sanam’, a god or beloved, a naming happens, and in the naming, a widening of worth, of care. Suddenly I had names for places, for the languages heard. Uttar, Lar. Dhatki, Marwari, Kolki. We went to Sohni’s mazaar in Shahdadpur, drove past the qila that Marui was kept in, and overnight, Shahdadpur and Umarkot gained solidity in the map of my mind. With each wound-name, the map grew. I could draw it for you now… Mithi, Islamkot, Nagarparkar. In the other direction from Mithi, Diplo—the closest to the Indian border I’ve been in Sindh, and the closest to my grandparents’ city, Bhuj, which would be a drive straight South if there were no border in between. This steady connecting, linking, mapping, naming… is a growing ishq borne of recognition; a growing God music.
Much of what fascinated me in Sindh and Balochistan, what pulls so many of us I think, is the interwovenness of religious practices. The mandir and masjid still standing beside each other. The ‘Ya Ali Madad’ sticker on a bhagat’s harmonium. Meera sung at a Shia shrine, a Muslim saint revered at a Hindu festival. There are endless examples of this, of how syncretic our land is, how unbounded, how porous. Yes, Guru Nanak said (or was it Kabir?)—har ghat mein Ram!—God in every heart!—and how wonderful it is to see such a God worshiped openly.
This was the more unmappable music that I fell in love with. The way religious traditions and devotional practices slipped into each other, coexisted without censure or worry, did not need explaining, or worse, neatening. People aren’t neat; devotion certainly isn’t. Something about this felt true as far as God went. At least the God I wanted to believe in: one who would not be contained by a single source or practice, one who could flit about as easily as people’s own faiths and doubts do.
Such a God is overwhelmingly attractive. Such a God is also dangerous to romanticize in a country that keeps reminding its people that no, har ghat mein Ram bilkul nahin hai—there is only one God, called Allah, but a particular fixed imagination of him, and one that does not love everyone, not even all Muslims, the same.
Another way to put this: when I started observing Muharram two years ago, a friend’s comments on Twitter caught me in my tracks. Shia culture isn’t just about wearing black and saying Ya Ali madad, she noted. Her point was that people like me will never have to bear the innate fear that comes with being a minority in this country. I have not spent nights worried for a loved one’s safety because of what they worship. It doesn’t matter what I observe now, because I was raised Sunni. My life has this privilege: fear has never adulterated what I hold sacred.
I am reflecting here upon the privilege and convenience of applauding syncretism. The impulse to say out loud that wow, how beautiful yaar, this coexistence, this sheer diversity of religious practices that we can borrow and choose from, mix and match as we always have in this porous land. It isn’t untrue, but it is an incomplete, idealistic reading. The facade drops quickly. Hindus will call themselves faqirs and Sufi (syncretism or assimilation?) but Muslims will never call themselves bhagats. Mandir and masjid stand in the same building, sure, but the mandir is locked most of the day, and requires a special caretaker to come and open it for you, and even when he does, the Muslim caretaker keeps speaking over him.
As for the Muslim saint at the Hindu festival? Only Hindus paid respect at his grave. Muslims were not in attendance, because for security reasons it was closed to anyone outside the Hindu community. My sibling and I were snuck in by Hindu friends, who introduced us as Sikh family visiting from abroad.
It’s all cool to celebrate syncretism until we have to consider who has to cut back their practices and public devotions, who has to privatize worship. Mazaars installed metal detectors and brought in rangers and policemen after the 2017 Sehwan blast. The church I grew up alongside, turned me away apologetically when I recently tried to visit. ‘I’m sorry,’ the man at the gate said, ‘But you know how it is now. Those were different times.’
Similarly, when I first visited the Bhit Shah gurdwara last year, my friends and I just walked in. This January, exactly a year later, we were stopped by a guard. I was taken aback, but then I thought, of course.
Here are some stories we heard on the road this past year:
1.
Guru Nanak is walking with a student. Har ghat mein Ram hai, says Nanak. The exasperated—or curious—student asks, If you say God is everywhere, why can’t I see him?
Nanak asks for a bowl of buttermilk. A bowl of buttermilk is brought. Nanak points to it and asks: “Where is the butter in this? I can’t see it.”
2.
Someone asked Bhittai if he is Shia or Sunni.
Neither, he said, I am something in between.
But there is nothing in between, the person said.
Then, said Bhittai, I am nothing.
3.
… Then the Mullahs came and we had to shut down the satsang. They had weapons.
You’re not recording this, right?
Another thing I have been thinking about, is how easy it is to come from the city, to dip in and out of shrines and villages, and put faqirs and mystics on some mantle of devotion and Bhakti. To look at the rituals and music of mazaars and temples and say, Yes, this is where one finds God. Away from the tainted, polluted, troubled city.
… See the problem? It is true, yes, that I have found God, that I have experienced something of the divine in and through these traditions. But these very traditions have also forced me to find God exactly where I am. A dear friend once said to me that Karachi is godless but I am ready to fight him: I have found God in the city. I have also found God in friendship, in falling in love, over meals with beloveds, in the middle of charged protests… in any kind of coming-togetherness, whether with people or the self, that stills you long enough for the fog to lift and… there! There’s a light, some desire found or met, something that you call God. When I have the exact words, I probably haven’t. But the point is, really, I could find God in a cricket stadium. Sounds insane but one of the most electric moments of surrendering to God was at a religious festival last year, some 10,000 people, and at a particular moment when everyone stood up and yelled and a current passed through the crowd in the same instant, I thought: It’s just like cricket.
Sacred sites can be stepping stones (more on this another time). But to fix them as the way to reach God would be to fix God in one place, one source. You could. But when these sites are faraway from the city, and you’re from the city, then you risk a different kind of, extractive kind of, romanticizing: one that goes and takes and brings back: one that cites the landscape outside the city as some singular keeper of divine knowledge (the wilderness vs civilization): one that marks the open land as untouched, untainted, and perfect.
These places are as complicated and contaminated as anything in the world. And they are interwoven with communities and people whose lives are not necessarily made any better by our devotion to their poetry. To take the music and mysticism and landscape out of context, to see any of this poetry outside the communities that make the poetry possible, is the same urban impulse that flattens everything outside of itself into a remarkable, notable experience. I did, at first. Was bewitched by the sur (melody) alone, cared for nothing that made it happen except that it happened. Then someone said to me, The raag isn’t just the music. It is also the lives and the conditions of people who make it happen.
And when I started looking closely at the lives and relations of these communities, it wasn’t pretty. Most of the Bhit Shah faqirs are poor. Many of the Kabir bhagats belong to scheduled castes. In Sindh, one of the first questions anyone asks you is, What is your caste? This was a revelation for me. Taking offense at this question, though, is the same as pretending there’s no such thing as race. Caste shapes power and relations, it helps people place each other socioeconomically. I have learned to answer it, and watch as people’s eyes comprehend: of course, I am upper caste, and I am from the city. That’s why, even though I am a woman, I am able to roam around Sindh like this.
I think about God everyday. I think about what it means to live a God-full life and I know that I fail, daily. Because the inward journey, it seems, is useful only when it steers us towards a collective meaning making together… and it is the collective that first propels us inwards. All this traveling around Sindh would be impossible without the friends who accompany me, without the bhagats and faqirs and random strangers who host and guide us. If the journey within does not lead us to think back to the collective, then it is a godless one.
The day I started writing this entry, 6 Shia teachers were killed in Parachinar. So much of the music I have fallen in love with is the music of maulayi ibadat, of the Shia community. What do I owe that community then? Can I observe Muharram without mourning the deaths and disappearances of Shias, not just in Parachinar, but daily? Without naming—oh, the wound here!—my Sunni privilege that still keeps me safe, while they are dead underground? 6 teachers—all Shia—killed. Poetry does not prevent their death, it cannot bring them back.
God, may I never think that a poem or song can take the place of a life.
That last thought is so important. Thank you for bringing it to the forefront of my thoughts again
Thank you Sadi, this is beautiful.