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A FEW years before her departure from our world, Amma began to express her avid desire to quickly move on, claiming with a secretive smile that Gangubai Hangal was waiting to sing for her in the hereafter. In her list of musicians who she would meet in the magical rendezvous, thumri singer Rasoolan Bai ranked high at par with khayal exponent, the peerless Kesarbai, which one found somewhat curious.
She had become equally fond of M.S. Subbalaxmi, however, after meeting the southern Indian singer at a performance in Lucknow’s historic Baradari in the 1950s. But Gangubai was her priority. We naturally had an absorbing time trying to divine the list of ragas our mother would carry to her new world with her disproportionately eager sense of anticipation. She was interred at 97, according to her will, in her ancestral village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, beside her husband, and Askari Mian, her father, a music buff himself as recorded in Josh Malihabadi’s colourful memoir. Amma was also looking forward to being among a host of siblings and elders she shared her love of music and literature with.
According to the puritan canons of the Tableeghi Jamaat, poisonous snakes and scorpions should have stung Amma in her grave and others who blended music with their piety. We figured this out from an intelligence recce Indira Gandhi dispatched to The Markaz in the 1970s, the global headquarters of the Tableeghi Jamaat in New Delhi.
How was the incident turned into a communal accusation against millions of Muslims?
The assignment was to watch whether the international cluster of orthodox Muslims posed any threat to the Indian state. The sleuths returned with a disarming discovery. The gist was: “The Tableeghi Jamaat is not interested in this world and, therefore, poses no threat to any country, even to India. Its members are more worried about how to salvage themselves from the probability that their bodies would be exposed to snakes and scorpions six feet under the ground, should they fail to stay away from sinning, and their souls would perish in hell should they err, which again doesn’t seem to be a reference to our mortal world.”
Regardless of what the tableeghis may have believed about her love of Gangubai, Amma was confident that her reasonable piety and love of Hazrat Zainab, who she saw as a hero of Islam, had reserved her seat at the jalsaghar, an unending soirée that she dreamt of in the hereafter. So as not to neglect her lifelong piety, she would take along marsiyas of Mir Anis that she had woven into a book as Gulzar-i-Anis a few years before her death. A woman who shared Amma’s love of the great Urdu poet published the book in Pakistan.
The Tableeghi Jamaat has been in the news recently as one of the major carriers of the coronavirus. This was a kind of indiscretion they are less known for, not unlike the secretive Christian church in East Asia that was found responsible for spreading the virus. However, while Indian TV channels used the incident to tar the entire 150 million Indian Muslim population as carriers of disease, nobody in South Korea blamed Christians for the serious lapse of the church. Hundreds were pulled out from The Markaz while other members had already travelled, thoughtlessly, of course, to different destinations with the disease as healthy or sick carriers. Several died and many were hospitalised.
How was the incident turned into a communal accusation against millions of Muslims? TV channels that had in the past named Muslims as anti-national were at it again. But the channels had goofed up. The fact is that the Tableeghi Jamaat, which has a loud presence in Pakistan and Malaysia, has thriving bases in Israel and the United States as well, where it is deemed an ally in the battle against Palestinians and their global supporters, including countless Indians of different faiths. Why else would a Hindu revivalist government that studiously stalls visas for Christian missionaries be generous with visas for Muslim congregations?
‘Markaz’ is Urdu for a centre, any centre. Dharwar on the border of Maharashtra and Karnataka is the markaz of Hindustani classical music, mainly its vocal rendition. JNU before the advent of Narendra Modi was regarded globally as a grand markaz of intellectual inquiry and higher learning. Nagpur is often seen as a markaz for vending blind faith among ignorant masses. Tableeghi Jamaat opened a similar markaz nearly a century ago in New Delhi. Let’s look at the dark expediency that motivated it.
Sunday marked Punjab’s colourful festival of Baisakhi, also revered as the anniversary of the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. The victims included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, predominantly the latter two communities. This was 1919. The solidarity between Hindus and Muslims had been sealed at the Lucknow Pact in 1916. The British saw the threat from the bonding, the first serious attempt to bring major communities in a battle formation against colonialism since 1857.
In 1923, Swami Shraddhanand founded the Bharatiya Hindu Shuddhi Mahasabha (Indian Hindu Purification Council). The move eventually created a flashpoint between Hindus and Muslims. The Tableeghi Jamaat was founded in 1927, two years after the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh came into existence. None from the group joined the anti-colonial struggle. The Tableeghi Jamaat pitched its camp in the area baldly known as Nizamuddin. Mrs Gandhi’s sleuths missed its strategic purpose. A hundred yards from The Markaz is the grave of the iconoclastic poet Mirza Ghalib, and another 200 yards through a meandering alley is the landmark shrine of Amir Khusrau and Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, venue of intense music and revelry, shut down currently by the coronavirus outbreak.
Amma would be smiling at the frustrating time the Markaz has every day at the sight of so much joy, music, and what puritans believe to be irreverence. Her point though is too nuanced for communal TV channels, obsessed with their Hindu-Muslim binary, to begin to understand.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2020
