A
Kashmiri Pandit On The Pulpit For Moharram
Saeed
Naqvi
Dated:
08.11.2013
“Aashura”, the tenth day of Moharram or
the day of Imam Hussain’s martyrdom, will be on November 15 this year. All of
us, seven brothers and sisters, will be in Mustafabad, the Qasbah in Rae Bareli
where we have our family home. This will be a particularly poignant get
together because this will be our first Moharram without mother who passed away
with as much sweetness as she had lived, at the age of 94 with forty of her
children, grand and great grand children in and out of her cheerful hospital
room. Lucky, ma.
She would have gently rapped me on the
knuckles at this parochial narrative, for my having restricted the circle of
her affections to the immediate family. She knew no nuclear family, having
spent the most impressionable years of her childhood with the children of nine
brothers and sisters. The eldest cousin was automatically the eldest sister or
brother.
The turnstile of her much smaller house
in Lucknow was in constant rotation. This network and their progeny were always
in attendance. One of my brothers, the real one, often complained of having
experienced a sense of neglect because of this invasion by the extended family.
The family was not the only culprit, neighbours were too. Every year they
invited my father to be the President of the Neighbourhood Association. A
detail which never occurred to my parents may be inserted here in deference to
the foul times we live in: the neighbourhood was 100 percent Hindu.
A great deal of this Catholicism was
passed onto the choreography of Moharram in the Qasbahs of Awadh. For instance,
Pandit Trilok Kachru would sometimes turn up for the climactic days of the
solemn observance. In Iran, Southern Lebanon, Najaf and Karbala, some Shias
including Clerics were intrigued by my descriptions of Moharram in Avadh, but
they understood its syncretic elements. What flummoxed them totally was
something else. That the sermon from the pulpit even on the most important days
of Moharrram could be delivered by a Hindu, a Kashmiri Pandit to boot, was
something they could not digest. Well, I said to them, come with me to
Mustafabad, and you will see outside the main Imambara, a large white placard
with uneven lines of amateur calligraphy:
“Kehte hue jannat mein chaley
Jaaen ge Mathur,
Shabbir ke Qadmon ke Nishaan
Dhoond rahe hain.”
(I shall walk into paradise. If checked,
I shall tell them that I am following the footsteps of Imam Hussain)
The poet, Mathur Lucknawi, is one of a
handful who have survived the assault on composite culture. Another, Sanjay
Mishra “Shauq”, my mother invited last year to be the main poet at Hazrat Ali’s
birthday. She personally supervised all the ceremonies for his vegetarian meal.
Haziest outlines of our composite
culture were available in the early Urdu poetry in the Deccan, but this culture
was institutionalized in Awadh, as an elaborate choreography around Moharram.
Hindus and Muslims participated in each
other’s festivals and observances was common and understandable. The rulers
took the lead in this regard. This generated a two-way traffic in the arts:
from the highest to the popular level and the other way around.
There is no higher form of Urdu poetry
than the Marsia or an epic in “Musaddas” or sestet, dilating on incidents which
go to make up the tragedy of Karbala. A trained performer reciting the greatest
poet of Marsias, Mir Anees, can keep an audience spellbound like no other
performance can. Even though the dramatis personae are Arabs, that is Hussain,
his sister Zainab, his brother and a host of relatives and friends, the
characters Anees sketches are, in their carriage, demeanour and speech
embodiments of Lucknow culture, representing mixed Hindu Muslim traditions.
Indeed, the poet of Marsias who chronologically precedes Anees, happens to be
Munshi Channu Lal Dilgir. His dirge or “Noha”, “Ghabraaye-gi Zainab” (Zainab
will be lost without Hussain) is one of the world’s great melancholic songs,
generally recited after Shaam-e-ghareeban, depicting the night in the open
after the tents on the banks of the Euphrates were burnt following Hussain’s
martyrdom.
Soz and Salaams, which set the tone for
the Majlis are always set to appropriate ragas. Words need not be in Urdu but
in folksy Brajbhasa and Awadhi.
In no part of the Muslim word has
Moharram been more harmonized with indigenous traditions. The tragedy of
Karabala was a matter of faith for Anees but his creation enriches a much wider
secular constituency, just as Michaelangelo, Bach, Tulsidas, Mira created art
which transcended their respective faiths.
My mother had mastered all this choreography.
Let us see who carries the tradition forward keeping an unerring eye on details
which kept together the family, the clan, and indeed, the society we lived in.
A pity is that the political class around us is totally bereft of any knowledge
of the culture which embellishes our observance of Moharram.
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