Day 12: Mosques, politics and the quest for identity

Locations: Jhang, Toba Tek Singh, Pir Mahal, Abdul Hakeem, Rehmangarh

(Click on images to enlarge)

 

Sipah-e-Sahaba flags and posters dominate the urban scape here.

I decided to have a day's break at Jhang to get my bike fixed, my bruise tended and all my batteries fully recharged. Over the past three nights, I have been staying at places that get electricity for just a few hours and I would leave before my gadgets were recharged. The weather has been exceptionally pleasant and night temperatures were very comforting but I could not do the writing regularly as I had to save whatever energy my equipment had for the next day's travel. It was now time to recoup the deficit.

I was tempted to go out in the city, Jhang, and talk to people here but my hands were already full. I forced a curfew upon myself and stayed shut indoors to concentrate on clearing the back log. The next morning too, I went straight out of the city as if I haven't been here. Sorry, Jhang.

The road from Jhang to Toba Tek Singh is very smooth and it seemed that I got there in no time; that also meant that all the required energy levels were refreshed completely. This small town looked cleaner and better planned than the many that I have already visited on this journey. Another uniqueness of Toba Tek Singh for me was that the campaign of a Jamaat-e-Islami candidate here was quite visible.

Pir Mahal, my next stop, was even more pleasant a surprise. The small town looked quite affluent as it has branches of all the large banks, many of them stood in a row. This simply implies a lot of expatriates sending back money. Another sort of corollary to this is that you will find an enthusiastic PTI campaign here.

I spent sometime with Mian Javed Akhtar, the PTI candidate for PP 89. He was preparing to go to a village, that was located at quite a distance, accessible through a kacha road. I wanted to go with him but decided against as it could delay my journey towards the night stay spot. Travelling on these roads at night is never a good idea.

Javed is quite an enterprising agro-industrialist. His campaign and members records were, however, kept in a register. I have seen the similar munshi khata everywhere. I have yet to see a candidate or a campaign manager using computer technology to organise the complex task better. May be we need a campaign software or a phone application!

But I am not sure whether even a super computer will be able to handle the complex class and cultural relationships that bind and also disconnect the electors from each other. The election candidates have to tread very carefully on this treacherous path.

There is nothing simple or linear about these relationships. Most of these are wrongly identified as biradaris with exotic tongue-twisting names Jhandeer, Langrrial, and lots of others that I have been seeing on posters everywhere. They can't be taken as one block behaving in a predictable way but it can't be utter chaos either. The people certainly align themselves along some identity markers and around some class and community interests. How can we then get a sense of this alignment or organisation? This was in my head when I hit the road to my night stay spot, and that evening and the next morning in this village offered me a glimpse of what this complexity might be about. And, I must share it with you.

The name of the village that I was supposed to reach was not marked on Google Map but it did show a square-shaped settlement situated just before Kacha Khooh and exactly where my friend had described it would be. My friend had asked me to watch out for the Rehmangarh sign on the road. I stopped to ask a baba ji resting on a charpoy under a tree. He gave it a thought and after a while, asked, "There is a Hanumangarh on this road, are you inquiring about that?" I wasn't sure and went ahead to find it myself. I wondered why he didn't know about a place this close.

The confusion was cleared when I reached the village. The place actually has three names: Chak 7/9R, Hanumangarh and Rehmangarh. Chak means a village founded in the colonial era on the land irrigated by the new canal system. They were laid on a set plan and there names too, were decided by the civil engineers and draftsmen. Some people did not like the 'number plate' and replaced it with a more sociable identity.

The name Hanumangarh implied that the dominant community living here before 1947 was not Muslim, which also meant that they must have migrated from here and been replaced by Muslim landlords. Then, the Partition introduced a new identity paradigm. It evolved over the next many decades and took various forms.

I found out that this small village has four mosques and two functioning places where the village children come to learn the Quran. A third such madrassah for girls only was yet to become functional. This village's economic growth and quest for identity are amazingly mixed up with the history of these four mosques. I met village elders related to all four mosques to discuss when and why the villagers thought they needed these.

In this village all the zamindars were Sikhs and Hindus and only the low cast were Muslims. All the Chaks have a separate lane reserved for these non-land owning service providers, described by the derogatory term kamee. They built themselves a kacha mosque in that lane in 1938. Fida Hussain, the prayer leader and the custodian of this small mosque told me that it is visited by followers of the Hanafi/Barelvi sect.

In 1947, the village got its new zamindars, Rajputs and Arain migrants from India. The Rajputs were dominant, with a bigger share in evacuated agricultural lands. By 1960 they were well-settled and prospering. They thus decided to build a new mosque. The mosque of the kamees was anyways too small, in every aspect of the word, and many already prayed in separate, open compounds. Though no one would accept it as such, it was a clear class divide. Earlier, the poor were Muslims and the rich Hindus so their separate places of worship represented both, the difference of faith and class. But now, both the rich and the poor were Muslims and the class distinction wanted to express itself.

The village thus had its second mosque built in 1960. There is another intriguing dimension to the divide. The new mosque belonged to emigrants, mohajirs, both Rajputs and Arains, while the smaller and poorer ones were of the old inhabitants. One accomplice told me that the new mosque was built on the design of a mosque in Saharanpur, India from where most of the Rajputs had migrated.

Over the next decade, Arains with a smaller share in the village's livelihood resource, the land, exhibited greater entrepreneurship and became very prosperous. They now wanted an identity distinct from other rich mohajirs. One of their haji sahibs found a good reason to build a new mosque. This is what an elder told me about the incident after which the village got its third mosque in 1971.

(In a petty dispute related to renting out of the shops entrusted to the mosque, a Rajput elder taunted that Arains were trying to get a hold of the mosque. The Arains saw this as an insult and a challenge to their status, which probably had gotten at par with that of the Rajputs. So they decided to make a bold statement by never returning to the old mosque.)

The minaret of this mosque is the tallest of all. It's walls are covered with glazed tiles from top to bottom and it also has an air conditioning system installed. The structure stands witness to the new found wealth of its founders, the agro-business class. The distinction between the two post-Partition mosques was ethnic, the Rajputs' mosque and the Arains' mosque. Many still name these accordingly.

No one remembers exactly when it happened but some time in the 1980s, the Rajputs' mosque became associated with, what they term the Deobandi maslak and the Arain one with the Barelvi. The ethnology-economic distinction translated into a sectarian difference which got deeper over the next decades and then surpassed its founding factor, the ethnicity. Now the Barelvi Rajputs go to the Arainian wali masjid and the Deobandi Arains pray in the old Rajput mosque.

Then came the fourth Adday wali masjid that is situated on the main road that passes by this village. It was initiated by a shopkeeper at the bus stop 'for his own convenience', as he puts it, on the land attached to a mazaar. The project was supported by many, following different sects. Some of them belong to the village's old wealthy families, while others are the employed new middle class in cities. This place, however, owes its character to the well meaning and pragmatic person of it’s custodian. Meet Zaheeruddin: