A Pir and his Possessions

Amidst the crowded by-lanes of Old Ahmedabad city, in an obscure corner, lies the Pir Mohammad Shah Dargah Trust. You may almost miss its entrance – an ancient stone and mortar arched doorway, partly hidden by the motley shops sprawled around it. Inside the gate lie the dargah, masjid and qutubkhana (library) complex.

Born in 1689 in the Bijapur city of Karnataka, Pir Mohammad Shah was a Hussaini Sayyed and a well-respected sufi who lived in Ahmedabad during the rule of Aurangzeb. His parents emigrated from the holy city of Medina and settled in Bijapur where he was born. His father died before his birth and his uncle, Abd ur-Rehman – a sufi belonging to the lineage of Shaikh Abd ul-Qadri Jilani of Baghdad, trained the young Mohammad Shah in religious scholarship and practical Sufism. The Pir memorized the Quran at the young age of seven and became an accomplished qari, performed Haj at the age of twelve and thereafter stayed in Medina for several years pursuing higher learning. He spent his adolescent years visiting great centers of learning in the Islamic world and paying homage at the dargah of saints. He later returned to his home at Bijapur and from there moved to Ahmedabad. At that time, the Kalupur and Rajpur localities of Ahmedabad were well known for the prosperous trading communities of Sunni Bohras, who became his murids. In Ahmedabad, the Pir took up residence at the historical Jame Masjid. The Pir would regularly visit the dargah of Hazrat Shah Wajiuddin to pay his homage and obtain guidance from Hazrat Shah’s descendent, Hazrat Abdullah Gujarati. On his daily sojourns from the Jame Masjid to Hazrat Wajiuddin’s dargah, the Pir would rest a while on the way at an old widow’s front yard. After his passing away in the year 1750, as per his request, Pir Mohammad Shah was buried near the house of this widow. His dargah stands there today.

The Pir was a great lover of learning and possessed an extraordinary memory powers. During his lifetime, the Pir and his murids had amassed a huge collection of manuscrips and books of great academic and spiritual value. These are housed in the qutubkhana. This library has over 2000 original manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Turkish, which are 700 to 800 years old. Many of them contain hand written explainatory notes along the margins by the Pir himself. Among the prized manuscripts is the Mahabharat in Persian written by a Wadanagar Nagar Brahmin who worked in the courts of the Mughals, a copy of the holy Quran hand written by Aurangzeb, Al-Buruni’s ‘Gurt-ul Ziyaat’, and Radha Krishna Geet translated into Persian. The library has a treasure trove of over 10,000 books in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English covering diverse subjects. The trustees have prepared microfilms and photocopies of some rare books. Pir Mohammad Shah was a bi-lingual poet himself and wrote profusely in Persian and Dakhani. Among his many works, the best known is Nur ush-Shuyukh in Persian which is versified history in the Mutaqarib meter.

The qutubkhana has small museum show casing various belonging of the Pir, some of the ancient manuscripts and a human-size candle brought here from Mecca. The PMS library is considered on of its kind in western part of India – a treasure trove waiting to be discovered by lovers of Islamic science, literature and art. Rulers and wise men who came to this land are no more, but the knowledge they left behind still prevails.

In the words of the Pir himself:

Agar gaiti saraasar baad gard

Chirag-e-maqbula hargez namirad…..

Even if the world were to come to dust
The lamp (spirit) of the faithful will not die….

The Alchemy of Language

‘Do shambaa bhai doshambaa, daakiyon ne kya kiya…..’ the words of the song rose like bubbles from the depths of my childhood memories and burst at the surface as the irony of it dawned on me.I grew up in Lajpat Nagar – a south Delhi colony which originally began as a refugee colony during partition days, consisting of Hindu migrants from Pakistan. One of the many games that I used to play with my friends as a child was about a police and a thief during which the above song was recited. Except for the first few words, the remaining song was in Hindi. None of us knew or cared what these words meantForty years later, as I sat at a University in Gujarat learning Farsi, I realized that ‘Doshamba’ was a Farsi word meaning ‘Monday’. The children of partition refugees who had grown up on communal rhetoric, sang songs containing words which belonged to a language generally associated with a community they had learnt to hate – the Muslims.Yet again, in Gujarat, which has recently witnessed the worst form of communal violence, my Farsi teacher tells me that fifteen percent of the words in Gujarati language are of Arabic or Farsi origin. This is more or less true for most north Indian languages.The saffron brigade had, at one time, taken upon itself the task of ‘saffronising’ Hindi by ‘purging’ it of all the Urdu words and replacing them with Sanskrit equivalents. Some of them still insist on speaking a form of Hindi which sounds more like dialogues from Ramanand Sagar’s ‘Ramayan’, than the Hindi spoken and understood by the common man!Our languages have grown out of the life of our nation. They imbibe in them the struggles and triumphs of this country, the agonies and ecstasies of a history so rich and diverse that few nations can compare with it. Traders and travelers, conquerors and the conquered, all infused their own native tongues to the existing local languages and dialects. This alchemy of native and ‘foreign’ tongues made what our languages are today – a multicoloured tapestry. Language is a reflection of the culture and history of a region and does not belong to any religion. It enshrines the spirit of the people who speak it.
This write up has also been published in the 'Indian Express' .

Death of a Patriot

On the 24th of February, 2008, the body of a 94 year old poet prince was led to rest. He was Imamuddin Khan Babi, who wrote poetry by the pen name of Ruswa Mazloom, and was the erstwhile ruler of Pajod, a small jagir in Junagadh district of Gujarat. Few in India have heard his name, and even fewer know that in spite of being the jagirdaar of one of the smallest princely states in India he towered above the other princes of pre-independence India.

During partition, when almost all the rulers of the princely states of Junagadh region including Junagadh, Manavadar, Mangrol and Sardargadh, decided to go with Pakistan, Imamuddin said that India was his motherland and his subjects were like his children, and he could not betray his mother and his children. Imamuddin Khan refused to merge with Pakistan in spite of the fact that most of his relatives were leaving for Pakistan and he was also offered the governorship of Pakistan by the grandfather of the late Benazir Bhutto, who was also a Babi and Diwan to the then Nawab of Junagadh. Sardar Patel was touched by Imamuddin Khan’s gesture of patriotism and instructed the government to sanction an annual honorarium of Rs. 10, 000 to him, which Imamuddin Khan continued to receive till his death.

During the communal riots of 1947, a dargah in Pajod, was destroyed by rioters. Instead of rebuilding the dargah, Imamuddin Khan chose to build a library there. This library stands today as a lesson to every Indian who talks about destroying or rebuilding temples and mosques in disputed areas.

According to historical sources, the Babis came to India from Kanadhar in present day Afghanistan, at the time of Humayun. They worked with the Mughal emperors as their governors or generals. As a reward for their services, the Mughals gifted them with jagirs – large tracts of lands over which they ruled as jagirdars. After the fall of the Mughal Empire the Babi Pathans founded the Nawab dynasty of Junagadh in 1748, which continued up to 1947.

During his brief rule of twelve years, Imamuddin Khan provided his subjects with electricity, established a full fledged hospital in his mother, Zenab Bibi’s name. The doctors of this hospital would offer free services to their patients and even visit them at home. Imamuddin Khan also established a school for Harijans, started a sports club by the name of ‘Isharat’. He appointed a Harijan woman as its secretary. He also formed a volley ball team of his state and trained two Harijans to become a part of this team. At the time when the king was the owner of the entire land of his kingdom, Imamuddin Khan introduced a law whereby the farmer who tilled the land became its sole owner.

After independence, he became a member of Congress Seva Dal and continued to work for the progress of his erstwhile state. A lover of poetry, he wrote ghazals in both Urdu and Gujarati, and was popularly known as ‘Ruswa Sahab’. His Urdu collection is titled ‘Madira’ and his Gujarati collection ‘Meena’. His ghazals were based on love, compassion and humanitarian values. Imamuddin Khan offered royal patronage to poets like Amrut Bhatt alias Ghayal, and Ali Khan Baloch alias Shunya Palanpuri, who are now considered among the prominent poets of Gujarat. Several years ago Imamuddin Khan established an amateur association of poets called ‘Milan’. Imamuddin Khan is survived by his son Ayaz Khan. Ayaz works as a librarian at the Raj Kumar College in Rajkot and is married to a Hindu lady, who continues to retain her Hindu name – Kirtida.

One of Imamuddin Khan’s own couplet would be an apt epithet to his memory:

Aadmi amal se khud apna faisla kar le,

Ek kadam par dozakh hain, ek kadam par jannat


(Let man decide his own fate by his deeds
On one side is Hell and on the other Heaven)