Arabs, Jains, Mammon and Osama

Bhatkal is an interesting point of confluence locked away in India’s mangled west coast, the geography of which is dotted with some of the most remarkable immigrations since before Christ. There were two kinds of immigrants who washed up on the west coast of the sub continent. Wandering seamen, washed ashore mostly by wanderlust, with a bit of business lust; and those fleeing persecution.

While the Christians of Kerala were those who were converted by Saint Thomas of the Bible in 52 AD, the Jews had fled persecution following the destruction of the First Temple of Judea by the Babylonians or the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. Evidence of Jewish settlement in Kerala is dated 68 AD. Similarly, Parsis landed in Sanjan on the coast of Gujarat in 716 AD, another version puts the year at 936 AD. There is another wave of Jews that landed on the Konkan coast in Maharashtra.

Most of these historical arrivals are marked in the memory of the folk along the coast more through folklore than documented history. What is common in this folklore is the hospitality of the small time potentates who ruled where these desperate asylum seekers landed. The fabulist streak is consistent in all these stories. The leader of the Parsis persuaded the King of Sanjan through the story of sweetened milk. Legend has it that the King Jadhav Rana welcomes the leader with a cup of milk filled to the brim. He tells him his Kingdom is like the cup. The wise Parsi adds sugar to the milk, and says, his people would only sweeten his kingdom, and wins the immigration case for his clan. And consecrates the holy fire, smuggled away from Iran and its persecution, in a cave near Udwada.

The story of the arrival of Saint Thomas too has a fabulist ring. A Jewish girl playing the flute is his one girl reception committee at Kodungallur. The pastoral, idyll like stories about these major immigrations are a throwback to that imagined innocence of men. It is also a rather romantic nostalgia under the circumstances when new battles constantly rose to the surface, where pasts were seen in severely, and lethally, divergent lights.

While these are stories of entry of religion, or a persecuted sect seeking and getting asylum, the west coast was also home to some of the busiest ports through ancient and medieval times. And Arabs in their dhows have had perhaps the longest civilisational connection with these ports.

The Navayats, Bhatkal’s quaint and prosperous community, are one of the legatees of Indo-Arab confluence. Throughout coastal India there are many pockets where this benign and peaceful confluence left communities that were both distinct and at the same time thoroughly part and parcel of the local people and landscape.

Prominent among these communities are the Konkani Muslims on the Maharashtra coast, the Moplahs of Kerala and the Labbais of Tamil Nadu and the Navayaths of Bhatkal. What, however, distinguishes the Navayath community is the strong evidence of them being of Jain and Muslim origin.

When I passed Bhatkal with Rohan on our motorcycle I did not have the time, so I went back to explore Bhatkal’s ancient connection with the Arabs. And I found a learned man in Kazia Muzzammil, a former district session judge. Muzzamil was a man in his early fifties, and a man of illustrious descent even within the Navayath community.

Muzzamil’s great grandfather studied in Baghdad. On his return he became the Kazi of Goa region and then was Kazi to the Adil Shahi Sultans. His grandfather was later granted a Jagir. He himself graduated from Bhatkal’s first college, incidentally set up by the Navayaths. It is interesting that the community seemed to have grasped the importance of education very early. Most of the town’s educational instituitions are under the aegis of the Anjuman Hami-e-Muslimeen, a body that was started as early as 1919, the year of the Jallianwala massacre.

From all accounts the community had progressed and was thriving. I asked Muzammil to tell me about his community’s history as he knew it. This was his story.

"We are descendents of Arab men and Jain women. Many aspects of our community’s life are still governed by Jain practices. The custom was that Arab traders would marry daughters of Jain traders who operated in the region. My Arab forefathers would marry here, and then leave for long journeys on the high seas. Their wives usually stayed on at their parents’ homes, and the children too were brought up there. The children were most influenced by their mothers rather than their fathers. That is why, unmistakably Jain practices still play a seminal part of our community customs."

The Navayaths, for example, never ate after sunset. Their utensils, the jewellery and apparel of their women, the preponderance of vegetarian food, all suggest Jain influence. The Navayath homes prepare the usual South Kanara specialities of idli, dosas, and steamed vegetarian food, and the women who always wear sarees, wore bangles and lucchas reminiscent of Hindu-Jain traditional jewellery.

Some of the older homes of the community still carried names that would confound anybody not conversant with the community’s unique heritage. Chetna House, Shetty Bhau House, Vania House, Kale Bhau House, Shivaji House, Tamboori House, Azbe House, Goodiye House. "All the houses between the Saraabi river and Chowk junction in Bhatkal were once Jain houses." said Muzzamil. That was the arterial passage in town.

The older Navayath houses stand silent sentinels of the community’s intimations with Jain mortality. Jains ruled Karnataka through the 10th to 12th century A.D. The rise of reformist movements of Varas’aiva and Vaishnava reformers of mainstream Hinduism in the 12th and the 13th centuries A. D. relegated the Jains to this coastal strip. Under Jain rulers Jainism flourished here during the till the fifteenth century, but there were only smudgings of a live Jain past, now.

Their intermingling with Arab traders, however, left lasting marks on the customs of the Navayaths. Among other things, the Navayath youth who marries moves into his wife’s parental home. He can stay there till he is able to earn enough to set up an independent house for his family. And this can take anything from five to 15 years.

Their idea of marriage has the reparations to such an arrangement built into it. The groom, or his family, bear all the expenses of the marriage. This primacy of the groom’s responsibility in a marriage is particularly stressed in a unique custom of the community. When a child is born to a woman in her parental home, it is imperative that the husband’s mother reach the house before the umbilical cord is cut. The custom is to make sure that all expenses, including the services of the mid-wife and her assistants, and other medical expenses are borne by the woman’s in-laws only.

In the marriage, the bride wears a ceremonial red and then later a white saree. During the nikaah ceremony she wears flowers on her head. And all the presents for the couple, whether hers or his, are hers. The first night is also at the bride’s house. All marriage dinners are between 4 and 6 pm. This itself has been affected by modernity. In the last 20 years these wedding dinners are usually held in the afternoons, preferring to "prepone" it the Indian way, rather than post-pone it the English way.

Muzzamil enmeshed the story of the community with the history of the state. "Tipu Sultan’s mother, as well as his first wife, were Navayathi women."

I asked him how it was that the community had remained unharmed throughout the bloody history of medieval South India. The entire period of the community’s early beginnings crisscrossed the battles for supremacy between the British and the Portuguese, not to speak of the constant battles of the deccani kings.

"We are essentially descendents of the Shaafi sect of Arabs. Unlike the Muslim invaders of the North of India, who were Hanaafis. The Hanaafis were traditionally a warrior sect. The Khans, Baigs and Sheikhs. They believed in conquests, annexations and reigning over kingdoms. The Shaafi, on the other hand, are a trading sect. Generally they are peace-loving, diplomatic and friendly. We traded in spices, horses and weapons. And, during the battles between various rulers, we tradesmen continued to ply our trade with all of them, without taking sides."

There are four principle schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam. These are named after the four scholars who founded it namely, Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam Shafi and Imam Ahmed Ibn Hanbal. The followers of these schools are known as Hanaafi, Maliki, Shaafi and Hanbali respectively.

Incidentally, Shaafi is the school followed by an estimated 15 per cent of Muslims worldwide, and is prevalent most widely in Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore. It is the official school of Islamic jurisprudence in Brunei and Malaysia.

The mercantile qualities of the Navayaths were evident in the spread of the community’s enterprise. Even now the community is spread across the peninsula. There are Navayaths in Hyderabad, Arcot, Bangalore, besides the Karnataka coast itself. "The textile business of the Malabar was in the hands of Bhatkali Navayaths. The place known as the Big Bazaar in Kozhikode, or Calicut, was once called Bhatkali Bazaar."

If intermingling like sugar with the coastal population for centuries was one feature of the community’s strength, it also maintained its cultural distinct identity. The community has a language which is unique to it called Navayathi. It is a mixture of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Marathi and Konkani. And though Konkani is the most preponderant strand in the community’s language, which has its own set of songs for their marriages and other ceremonies, the script is Urdu.

When education was first brought to the community, Urdu was the medium. In fact Muzammil, who graduated in the first batch of the Anjuman school in 1968, said, " I myself studied Urdu at school. It was a new language for us. I knew more Arabic and Persian, at the time of my schooling, and spoke Navayathi language at home."

In a way, the Arabic and Persian ancestry was kept alive through the language of their forefathers for centuries. It occurred to me that in faraway Sambhalpur in Orissa, Taraz and Sima were the first generation of another family of Persian descent in the throes of something that the early Navayaths must have faced. The similarity, however, ended there. Taraz was not a seafarer who settled there, he was literally a Kal-el who was rocketed out of his country by his parents to make sure that their children would not have to live with state persecution of the Bahais.

In democratic India he did not have to be a wise Parsi to win his case for immigration through Aesopian wisdom. His Persian was not under any kind of threat of being engulfed by the currents of the languages around his current home; Oriya, Hindi or the English that he and his wife taught to the children in their school. And yet, the hothouse Persian that his children learnt from their parents inside their home will be a bloodless and pale language. And eventually, when his children find the language more and more useless in their surroundings, both passion and industry for the language will diminish. Unless, it becomes a professional choice, as in one of their two children, Mona or Sina, chose to be a Persian scholar.

But the Navayathi language was something that followed the easy evolution of the mixed community itself. It took the path of easy welcome, and flourished as a robust hybrid rather than in pale purity. Unlike Taraz, the Nav Ayats, the new comers or the nine arrivals, arrived in a group. More scholarly interpretations suggest the name of the community as being derived from the base of the Persian word for seafarers, ‘Nakhuda’. To me, it seemed that the trajectory for survival that conjoined Persian with so many other languages in Bhatkal to finally arrive at Navayathi, and the trajectory that the Persian of Taraz’s Sambhalpur home that had doom written into it, illustrated the experience of the exodus and the exile. The exile’s remains a heroic and therefore tragic tale, worth a biography at best; the exodus can bludgeon a page or two of history for its tale of gritty survival through trials, tribulations, and trasnsmogrifications.

Incidentally, it was through another local historian, Aftab Kola, that I got to know more details about the mixed ancestory of the Navayaths. Aftab writes “Various authors hold divergent opinions about their actual place of origin and the reason for their exodus from the Gulf. Colonel Wilkes in History of Mysore, vol 1, 1934, states that the Navayaths belong to the House of Hashem. Incidentally, the Prophet also belonged to the house of Hashem. In the In the early part of 8th century A D during the fearful reign of Hajaj bin Yusuf, the Governor of Iraq under the Caliph Abdul Malik Marwan, many respectable and opulent persons bade farewell to Iraq and fled their homeland fearing persecution. It is believed that they followed the route their fellow Arabs took for trade, anchoring on the west coast at several points. “

However Kola says that eminent historian and sociologist, Victor D’Souza, does not buy the theory in its entirety. "While there may be some among the Navayaths whose ancestry can be traced to those who fled Iraq during Hajaj bin Yusuf’s time, not all ancestors are of that type," writes D’ Souza in his book "Navayaths of Kanara” (1955).

S K Lal writes in the Legacy of Arab Dynasty in India "that although Hajaj bin Yusuf was only the Governor of Iraq his influence and rule extended even to Persian speaking regions. Thus the Arabs and Persian traders carried on their commerce together, resulting in Persian influence in the coastal Indo-Muslim colonies.

Another writer says, ’The influence of Persian language on the language spoken by the Navayaths is vividly evident and the existence of Persian elements in Navayath culture strongly propound that a certain percentage of Navayaths hail from Iran.’

Besides these studied versions about the Navayaths, there are others within the community of the firm opinion that they came from Hadhramaut region in South Yemen in the early 8th Century A D. Although no notable author or historian, barring one, endorses this theory, there are tangible indications to support the Navayaths’ claim. Appearance, diction, sartorial preference, many cultural traits, family names, etc seem quite similar among the Yemenis and the Navayaths. Incidentally, Hadhramaut is also home to one of the most infamous Muslims names in the world : Osama Bin Laden. The Bin Laden family too trace their roots to this region before they migrated to Saudi Arabia.

What makes the Navayaths fascinating is their connections, tenuous mostly, (if one attempts the more stringent tests to determine historic veracity), with some of the most spectacularly divergent, the most non-collinear elements of the current turbulence about Islam. The Navayaths’ ancestery has a strand that connects them to the house of Hashem, the tribe to which the Prophet belonged. Some of the original Nav Ayaths traced their roots to Osama Bin Laden’s ancestral home in South of Yemen. They themselves moved to the southern coast of India because of persecution of a Persian governor under a Caliph Abdul Malik Marwan. That they should flourish through social and marital engagement with the Jains, a conservative mercantile community already divested of political patronage, after the resurgent Hindu reformist movements, is a lasting enigma of civilisational assimilation of the Hindu-Muslim worlds.

However, there too D’Souza strikes a different note. He says that while many of the traits among the Navayath community suggest Jain influence, it is not an entirely plausible explanation. He says that the language of the community is predominantly Konkani, the language of the coastal belt of the Hindus. Besides, the names of the Jain houses and parts of Jain architecture in the older houses do not suggest anything other than that their houses were built over, or where Jain houses stood earlier. It is more likely that the remains of older houses were used as building material for the new ones.

More than these, however, D’Souza’s primary argument is that the Navayaths co-mingled with Konkani women of the coast more than with Jain women. The reason he offers is that the language of the Jain rulers was Kannada. They did not speak Konkani, which seems to be the marked legacy of the Arab-Indian community of Bhatkal.

Whatever be the case, D’sousa does concede that Jain women too must have been part of the Navayath community’s forebears, though his take is that the majority were more likely to be Konkani women.

So far Bhatkal’s Navayaths may seem the lost Atlantis of Arabia untouched by contemporary India’s own version of brutality. Not so. In fact, as D H Shabbar, , a senior Congress party functionary of the town remembers it, there was a particularly significant tryst with political brutality that is marked in his memory by the exact time. “6.00 to 6:30 pm on Ram Navami day in 1993,” during the Rath Yatra.

“Some people threw some projectiles, at the Ram Navami procession and then the situation was more of less contained by the administration. But that same evening, after the night show there were a couple of stabbings. That let loose a chain of events that lasted nearly eight to nine months. About 18 to 19 people were killed.”

The laconic sentences, embedded with precise numerals, and no comments, were impressive. However, it made me feel that he was being rather restrained on the issue. In 1994, BJP won for the first time from the place in the state assembly elections.

Then, in 1996 the BJP’s sitting Member of Parliament from Bhatkal Dr Chittaranjan was murdered at “about 8 pm while he was canvassing for the election.” Two Navayath men were murdered, though Shabbar did not say it, I felt he meant that the murders were retaliatory in some ways. “One of them was a fisherman,” added Shabbar as if to underline the wrongness of the retaliation, if indeed it was that. The BJP won the by election too. The next time around, the Congress wrested the seat back.

Shabbar’s rather constrained and perhaps uncomfortable narration made me switch the topic. “Among the Jews in Bombay I heard that the girls were finding it difficult to get good matches within the community because there was a dearth of educated boys in the community. The Navayaths too, like the Jews, marry within the community. Do you too face such social problems?” I asked.

He was more forthcoming now. “Yes, it has become a problem. Our boys are going haywire. They are more interested in money and business, and do not have the love of education that our community so prized. Now, in fact, our women are more highly educated and the men are under qualified."

“Till 1969, our women only studied till the seventh standard. But now more of them are getting better education, and going into professional education. Our men travel often on business, (just as their forefathers traveled the seas leaving their women and children on the shore in Bhatkal). Therefore, the sons in the family are uncontrolled. They do not care to attend to their education.”

Shabbar seemed to be finally talking like an elder stakeholder of the community now. He was admitting, in a round about way, that the young males in the family are getting more wayward than his own generation, perhaps. He suddenly looked a little weary, a tad sad. “So how is the community tackling the problem?” I interjected.

“Well, now the women are taking charge. They are enforcing education on their sons, making sure that they do not neglect education for business.”

Trying to get a more precise and clear picture about the rather vague but paradoxically numeric picture that Shabbar had given me about the riots and the arrival of communal politics in Bhatkal, I discovered some rather disturbing facts about the riots in Bhatkal.

During the violence which rocked the town in 1993, besides the murder of 17 persons, 90 others were injured, 226 houses were burnt, 143 shops looted, causing a total loss of Rs 2 crore. There were minor discrepancies in the numbers but mostly correct.

The Karnataka government set up an inquiry commission under a retired Supreme Court Justice Kedambadi Jagannatha Shetty. The Commission’s findings in a nutshell; Pakistan’s ISI played a prominent role in the communal riots in Bhatkal, a report in the The Pioneer said, "It is established from the evidence given before the commission that the ISI was secretly operating through its agents in Bhatkal." Dawood Ibrahim and his agents were also blamed. And above all the commission recommended that Bhatkal be declared a "trouble-prone, communally hyper-sensitive area." And yes, the police did unearth arms and ammunitions from the homes of some of the disaffected Muslim families in town.

Suddenly, the reason for an informer from Bhatkal arriving in Bombay at my Indian Express office to claim reward money, his peculiar shiftiness, his story of the small girl playing with bombs, all fit in. Bhatkal, for all its serene looks, its historically long period of peace, had had its dark underbelly.

The BJP’s communal politics neatly cleaved a distinct vote bank that brought the party to political power from the region for the first time after the Babri demolition in 1994. However, Bhatkal and its Navayath community also did not let the community’s historic tryst with education and its prosperity interfere with its atavistic approach to communal machinations. Of course, one is not talking about the entire community acting in concert, but it had a large enough disaffected lot to feed a communal flare up.

This is best put by Maqbool Ahmed Siraz, the executive editor of a moderate Islamic publication from Bangalore, in an editorial in January 2000. And I quote in entirety:

” The recent incidents in the coastal town of Bhatkal in Karnataka serve an important lesson i.e., it is not enough to be rich to protect a community’s interests. A community should be resourceful in diverse ways to shield itself from the onslaughts from multiple quarters. The Navayaths of Bhatkal need to take stock of their situation afresh and do the course correction.

”It appears the community has been groping in the dark due to lack of enlightened and visionary leadership. The residual masses, in the wake of the exodus of the leadership material to the greener pastures in the Gulf, are led by the inept religious leadership which tends to be reactionary rather than pro-active.

”The recent protest on the highly condemnable characterisation of Prophet Muhammad in a Kannada play at the Christian school of Anand Ashram Convent saw nearly 20,000 of the town’s residents marching on the street on December 17. Though peaceful in nature, the demonstration was aimless in that it rejected the apology tendered by the Christian convent. The sponsors of the protest march could have perhaps better utilised the opportunity by accepting the apology and extracting a promise from the school against any recurrence of such an act; asking the school management to introduce Deeniyath in the curriculum for the Muslim students; and even better by explaining the Muslim position on the graphic display of holy personalities of the religion, Jesus (Pbuh) included. Details of the incident show that the play was inspired by ignorance of Islamic tenets rather than any desire to cast a slur on the holy Prophet, though this is not always the case. In a further knee-jerk reaction, the Navayath Muslims withdrew nearly 700 students from the Anand Ashram Convent. This must have acted as a shock therapy but does not seem to be inspired by a long term view of the problem.

”Bhatkal’s plight results from the steady depletion of the small town’s intellectual content due to a mass exodus of its educated youth to the Gulf and the West. For the last two decades, the youth have been chasing the Eldorado in Dubai and other destinations in the Gulf, tempted by the glitter and glamour of the life there. Little did they realise the social impact of this on the life of the townsfolk. No attempts were made to develop stakes in the vital sectors such as legal profession, media, education, administration or in building bridges with the authorities. This is a unique case of affluence causing alienation among the people in as much as the communal forces targeted the community for its riches rather than for being weak.

”Fascination for an English medium education grew with migrations, and pursuit of professional education. Consequently the hitherto cloistered community lost its sense of cultural discernment. The presence of nearly 1000 Muslim students in the missionary run schools is an index to the changing mores. It is indeed disturbing that town folk like those of Bhatkal have opted for such schools despite their deep attachment to Islamic traditions.

”But looked at from another angle, it speaks of the community’s sense of frustration at not being in command of the situation; riots erupting in the erstwhile peaceful town with disturbing regularity, the Jagannath Shetty Commission lending credence to baseless allegations, their plea for justice remaining unheard, and finally the missionary institutions poaching their faith and traditions.

”Navayaths today stand at the cross roads, affluent but totally powerless to mend their situations, considerably well-educated,but none willing to take up the cause of education, enough material resources, yet few interested in setting up local enterprise, a good number of professionals but all desirous of taking wings, and to sum up, a marooned island of affluence.

”This is where the Navayaths suffer from a unique dilemma. Perhaps deep in their psyche is embedded the love for the soil of Bhatkal, their traditional abode. The attachment to the town (or soil) is as much part of their identity as the Shafii maslak and the sweet Navayathi language. Yet their lust for seeking greener pastures abroad reduces their capacity to be of any worthwhile use to their land of origin. They, thus, live in a dichotomous world, sandwiched between their love for the land on one hand and the luster, lure and the lucre of the exotic locations overseas on the other.

”Perhaps some introspection would be necessary at this hour. The community would need to refix its goals. This is essential, as well as possible, for a small and closely knit community. The Navayaths need to correct the heavy tilt towards its new found love for the economic pursuits abroad. They need to build bridges with local communities, local administration, create local employment opportunities. This will pay them in long term. For this they need not look far. Manipal is an illuminating next door example. The Pias of that tiny town have in the last five decades turned that town into the Mecca of fortune hunters. Had they too looked across the Arabian Seas, perhaps Bhatkal would have none to follow.”

When Rohan and I flitted past Bhatkal, so much was hidden. And like so many other places across India, what was hidden was both old beauty and new beastliness. Bhatkal was a microcosm that started as Marquez’s Mocondo, a chronicle of death foretold on entirely how it negotiated modernity. Both technology and politics. And like Orissa’s pattachitra artists, Bhatkal’s Navayath community too negotiated modernity’s onslaughts simply, guilelessly, on gut feel. Therefore erroneously. However, the story is no where near an end, and more importantly, there is enough to look forward to a brighter future.