Yoga
As Part Of The Matrix which Links India
Saeed
Naqvi
Ayurveda entered our lives as tiny,
plastic vials of Amritdhara, three drops in a teaspoon of sugar, the panacea
for all stomach ailments. Yoga followed in its earliest manifestation as
photographs of Pandit Nehru doing a head stand, or sees aasan.
“Don’t try it without being guided by a
guru” elders would warn. “It can be dangerous.” We were tempted because we
imagined headstands would make us brainy like Pandit Nehru.
India’s first Prime Minister would have
been the perfect poster boy for yoga because not only was he supple and
therefore adept at it but he also had the charisma, an essential requirement
for successful marketing. Narendra Modi must be given marks for all the
hullaballoo which has, lets face it, given yoga renewed global notice.
Would this not have been a wonderful
occasion to focus on the late Guru Aiyangar’s institution. The yoga ashram in
Monghyr, Bihar set up by Swami Satyanand sends thousands of Yoga teachers, one
of whom guides me and my family. From him I learn of the precarious existence
of many, serious yoga teachers.
It was never brought to our notice that
yoga or indeed, Ayurveda were Hindu. Likewise, the Unani system of medicines,
the one which Hakeems practiced, was certainly not Muslim. It could not have
been. Unani means Greek which would suggest it was part of the traffic of neo
platonic ideas in medieval time across Arab lands.
The trajectory ideas take is often unpredictable.
The late Hakeem Abdul Hameed, founder of Hamdard, which became part of our
lives, actually came from a family from Kashgar in the Xinjiang region of
China, which clearly links up with Central Asia and clarifies the narrative so
much more.
In north India, the Hakeem became more
than just a medicine dispenser. He became something of a cultural institution.
In addition to the human body, he knew languages, philosophy, art, music.
Ghalib’s contemporary Momin was actually
Hakeem Momin Khan Momin, whose ghazals surpass Ghalib’s in some instances. It
is generally not known that poet, lyricist, Majrooh Sultanpuri was a Hakeem by
training. While Hakeems and Vaids represented two cultures with a common purpose,
there was actually nothing quite like yoga. It was exceptional.
Some Muslims thought that anyone who
said his Namaz five times a day would never be an invalid. This made immense
sense. If you stand upright, bend, rest on your knees, then go down placing
your forehead on the prayer mat, and repeat the reverse process as well in five
sets of exercises five times a day everyday of your life, you will keep nimble
and fit. At the end of the Namaz drill, you must also rotate your neck in both
directions ostensibly to keep the devil away but actually to protect yourself
against spondylitis.
Namaz, therefore, would both prayer and
light exercise. But Namaz is a religious ritual. It is denominational. Yoga in its
conception is not.
And this brings me to my theory of the Triple
‘S’ Matrix to which yoga may be added as the forth ‘S’, possibly as “Sadhna”.
Long years ago, after a conversation
with the late Abu Abraham, I had acquiesced in the theory that Sanskrit, and
not Hindi, should have been the national language, because every Indian
language, except Tamil, has anything between 50 to 75 percent Sanskrit words. Tamil
too could be cajoled because both Karuna and Nidhi are Sanskrit words after
all. This would have placed equal pressure on all regions to study and master
the new national language. This would have served and important, additional purpose:
it would have obviated the adversarial Hindi-Urdu equation, one of the
ingredients in the simmering communal cauldron.
So, in this theory, Sanskrit became the
first ‘S’.
Two important ‘S’ in the national chain are
‘Saree’ and ‘Sangeet’.
A country with seventeen regional
languages on every currency note is held together by the most exquisite Kancheepuram,
Kota, Patola, Janmdaani, Baluchari, Dhaka and a thousand even more exquisite
designs of Sarees. This is the great national heritage which deserves to be
preserved and protected from market predators peddling other apparel.
Ofcourse nothing links the country quite
as stoutly as Hindustani (music) sangeet does. Let me conclude this section with
a story.
Vinod Kapoor, connoisseur and patron of
Hindustani sangeet, was introducing a singer from Dharwar. “Jaipur-Autrauli,
Kirana, Agra – all well known schools of music are next of door to
Delhi. And yet the practitioners of this
music come from northern Karnataka and Konkan. What is the explanation?” Kapoor
was asking a simple question, with a sense of irony because he knew the answer.
But an audience in today’s vitiated
atmosphere may be forgiven to arrive at biased conclusions. Marauders from outside
pushed the thriving enclaves of sangeet to the south of Maharashtra.
The real story is quite different.
Ustaad Alladiya Khan, Ustad Abdul Karim
Khan, founders of Jaipur-Autrauli and Kirana gharanas were invited by promoters
of Natya Sangeet in the Hubli, Dharwar and Pune region to train their young
musicians. This was before musicals became popular on Broadway and the West End.
Land owning patrons of music retained the Ustads to train singers in their
courts. Kishori Amonker’s mother, Mogubai, visited Alladiya Khan’s grave in
Mumbai every year on his death anniversary.
That extraordinary evening at Vinod
Kapoor’s ‘baithak’ the singers from Dharwar retained the audiences were regaled
to two compositions by Adarang and Sadarang, an uncle and nephew team whose
real names were Niyamat Khan and Firoz Khan. This duet transformed the Khayal
style of singing in the court of the great patron of music, Mohammad Shah
Rangila.
All of this is part of India’s soft
power which deserves as much attention from Narendra Modi as Yoga does.
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