The Mahatma’s Progeny

PS That last post was for tvarad and the dalit hating hindu Rsidhar

Jinnah..

http://www.geocities.com/indianfas/indopak/jinnah.htm

By RAHUL SINGH

(c) Earth Times News Service

MUMBAI, India--Of the four major, towering figures involved in the birth of India and Pakistan -- Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Louis Mountbatten and Mohammad Ali Jinnah -- Jinnah, the moving spirit and founder of Pakistan, was undoubtedly the most enigmatic. Cold, cerebral, aristocratic and somewhat aloof, a great deal of misinformation has been spread about him in the sub-continent. In Pakistan, he has been made into an unreal, mythic, almost holy figure, robbing him of his personality, while in India he is seen as evil incarnate, the calculating man who came in the way of a united country.

Manohar Joshi, the chief minister of the most industrialized state in India, Maharashtra, has now added his two-bits in further maligning Jinnah, or so he would like to think. Joshi happens to be a senior leader of the Shiv Sena, the party which is in power in the state in alliance with the right-wing Hindu-chauvinistic Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If anything, the Shiv Sena is even more right-wing and chauvinist, losing no opportunity to bait Muslims, whom it often calls ``anti-national,`` and to slam Pakistan.

This time, Joshi`s chance to bash Jinnah, while showing his own ``patriotism``, came with a 12-minute documentary which his state government has produced for the 50th anniversary of Indian independence. In the documentary, the state Cultural Affairs Secretary, Govind Swaroop, while being interviewed, said that Jinnah had also contributed to the Freedom Struggle and that he was a ``freedom fighter.`` Swaroop placed Jinnah along with other nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lokmanya Tilak, Maulana Azad and Subhaschandra Bose.

Joshi, when he got to know about what Swaroop had said in the documentary, saw red. He promptly got Swaroop out of his job. A livid Joshi said at a recent press conference that it was a ``very serious lapse`` on the senior official`s part: ``I cannot accept such remarks.....it is very irresponsible....I have directed that the comments be deleted from the cassette.`` Meanwhile, Swaroop offered an ``unconditional apology``.

He needn`t have. And Joshi, clearly ignorant of the history of the sub-continent, as well as Jinnah`s role in it, had no business to transfer Swaroop for a statement which was historically quite accurate. If anybody has been ``irresponsible`` in this sorry episode, it is the Maharashtra Chief Minister.

The truth of the matter is that Jinnah, an outstanding lawyer, certainly more brilliant than either Nehru or Gandhi (who were also British-educated lawyers), was an out-and-out nationalist, who strove for a united India until the dream began to fade. He was for several years a leading member of the Congress Party, the party which eventually gained India its independence, though never its president. He only joined the All-India Muslim League seven years after its foundation. Even after he had joined the AIML, the Congress and the AIML worked together for independence.

What`s more, Jinnah was a secularist to his core, just as much as Nehru was. He was also a western-style liberal, with the same kind of democratic ideals and values as Nehru. Jinnah abhorred religious fundamentalism. He felt that religion and politics should be kept strictly apart. Nehru felt the same way. At the AIML`s session in the north Indian city of Lucknow, over which he presided, he confessed that he had always been a ``staunch Congressman`` who had ``no love for sectarian cries.``

He was strongly opposed to separate electorates for Muslims, which were part of the British Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 and an ingredient of its government`s policy of ``divide and rule.`` He disagreed with Gandhi over Gandhi`s support for the Khilafat (the British were trying to dismantle the Caliphate of Turkey and the Khilafat movement became a rallying cry for conservative Muslims).

However, in this instance as well, he behaved in an impeccably secular fashion, keeping a distance from what was essentially a religiously fundamentalist movement, whereas Gandhi tried to opportunistically fuse religion and politics.

All this comes out in the more objective and scholarly books written on the period, in particular an authoritative treatise by Ayesha Jalal titled, ``Jinnah, the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan.`` Govind Talwalkar, the distinguished former editor of the ``Maharashtra Times`` and a history buff, says quite categorically that Jinnah was most certainly a freedom fighter and somebody who had the complete trust of Tilak, another towering Hindu figure of the nationalist movement. In fact, he was trusted so much that he became Tilak`s lawyer, something which the Maharashtra chief minister was evidently ignorant about.

Even when Jinnah refused to support Gandhi`s non-cooperation movement, he had good reason. He was opposed to Gandhi`s call to students to leave their schools and colleges. And guess who supported him in his opposition to the non-cooperation movement? None other than Rabindranath Tagore, among India`s most revered figures who won the Nobel Prize for Literature! One wonders whether the Maharashtra Chief Minister would like to expunge Tagore`s known differences with Gandhi on this issue from the historical record as well.

It is true that Jinnah and Nehru did not like each other and that Jinnah distrusted Gandhi, even though Gandhi on one occasion suggested that Jinnah become prime minister and Nehru serve under him, if that was the only way of keeping the country united (Nehru dismissed the suggestion with contempt). And it is also true that both Nehru and Gandhi handled Jinnah very badly. They often belittled him by saying that he did not speak for what they called ``nationalist Muslims,`` such as Maulana Azad.

Nehru and Gandhi miscalculated badly -- the vast majority of Muslims in the sub-continent, feeling insecure, had begun rallying around Jinnah. The likes of Azad were getting isolated. The miscalculation eventually led to the Partition of the sub-continent. What`s more, Nehru and Gandhi did not reassure Jinnah sufficiently that Muslims would be safe and treated as equals in a united India. Jinnah, too, could perhaps have been more flexible.

However, till almost the very last, Jinnah used the notion of a separate nation - Pakistan - largely as a bargaining counter to get more concessions for Muslims. Until only a few weeks before independence, he did not really believe that Partition would take place. He imagined, at worse, that there might be some kind of separation or a loose federation but that the two countries would eventually come back together again later and that he would be able to return to his home in Bombay on Malabar Hill that he loved so much.

But that was not to be. The communal riots and the mass bloodshed that had already started taking place would make Partition irrevocable. An iron curtain of bitterness would descend in Punjab and Bengal, even more impenetrable than the iron curtain in the West between communism and democracy.

Who was largely responsible for Partition and the suffering that accompanied it? Many Indians like to think that it was Jinnah. Quite a few of them also imagine that he was a fanatical Muslim who hated Hindus and Sikhs. They think that way, largely because of the communal riots that took place during Partition and the strongly Islamic nature of present-day Pakistan (they forget that he married a non-Muslim and that the Pakistan that evolved after his death would have been abhorrent to him).

So, the logic among many Indians now goes that he could not possibly have been a ``nationalist``, but somebody determined early on in his political career to carve out a separate Pakistan.

Those Indians who think along such lines are quite wrong. Gandhi, Nehru and the British -- particularly Mountbatten -- share just as much responsibility for Partition, if not more. It is only communal prejudice and ignorance of history in India which makes an ogre out of Jinnah - prejudice and ignorance that the Maharashtra Chief Minister has just now displayed in ample measure.

Jinnah was a nationalist first, very much a freedom fighter desirous of a united India, driven by frustration to a goal that he really did not want.

Reply Tvarad # 921

“In the last 50 years neither he nor his father or any of the other so called Muslim leaders did diddly squat to better the miserable lot of Indian Muslims.”

Something that bears saying again, and again, and again. In fact every time Bukhari opens his mouth and speaks “for” us.

“If this guy had so much clout over Muslims to start a civil war over Gujarat (which is quite far-fetched) …”

Actually, the last time he endorsed a candidate for the Jama Masjid area of Old Delhi the guy he endorsed lost his deposit. Vah, what influence, what respect he has in the community! Vah!

“It just proves the siege mentality of the Muslim leaders that I have been talking about.”

You tell me why he is considered more representative, interviewed more often, quoted more often, consulted more often than people like Asghar Ali Engineer. The process which produces unelected “leaders” is utterly corrupt, and whose interests does it serve?

And to add to my last post to Rsidhar is extremely stupid attempt... In 1960s.. when Fatima Jinnah ran for office, why did she win complete support in East Pakistan just because she was Jinnah`s sister? Why did Awami League (formerly Jinnah Awami Muslim League) completely support Fatima Jinnah.. Why was the entire East Pakistan lined up behind her...

Posting one or two revisionist articles, most of which don`t make any sense as I have shown, is not enough to prove something as outrageous as what Rsidhar is trying to put up to be true!

Now why do we do not get to read such stuff in the Friday Times-----the secular scumrag of Pakistan.

__________________________________________________

Name: Thamizharasan

Email: VaazhgaThamizhakam

City: Thamizh Naad

Date: 09 Dec 2000

Time: 12:53:38

Comments

I was so heartbroken to know what these b/astard brahmanans did to harmless dark skinned people, we Tamils, Keralites, Telugus, Kannadigas....need to unite, and form a separate homeland for us Dravidans, we have Dravidan culture, Dravidan practices, and most important of them all.....Dravidan people, we Dravidans need to unite...and fight against these idiotic Aryans! Where do the majority of computer engineers and GENIUSES come from? South India! Look at our temples, and the calculations it took to construct them, NOT ONE north Indian temple has any equivalents to ours! That shows that we are smarter than those northern monkeys!

This is really hilarious.Most Pakistanis will find it very exotic & fascinating.ENJOY!

This is the kind of India the world wants to see preserved.It is sad that this heritage is not being preserved by the world powers.

_________________________________________________

[OJ.2.6] Though exceedingly numerous, the Indian sadhus command the respect and even the superstitious veneration of the vast multitude of their countrymen, who believe that they are often, if not always, possessed of almost unlimited supernatural power for good or evil.

[OJ.2.39] Most sadhus wear strings of beads about their necks or carry rosaries in their hands, reminding one that it was from the East, probably during the time of the Crusades, that Christendom borrowed these aids to devotion.

Sadhus at Home

[OJ.2.44] Of the men in the group [left] the one with averted face was not actuated by any feeling of modesty or self-depreciation from facing the camera. He joined the others casually while the instrument was being adjusted, and, when asked to assume a suitable attitude, pompously replied that he obeyed no man`s behests, recognising no master save Rama Chandra. It required some little persuasion on the part of his brother sadhus to induce him even to take up the ungracious and ungraceful pose in which he was photographed. He might, perhaps, have been a shady character wanted by the police, and might have acted as he did for prudential reasons, or, which is quite as probable, his rudeness may have been due merely to an objection to be photographed, on the ground that any likeness taken carries away with it some virtue from the original—possibly a portion of the living soul— this being by no means an uncommon superstition.



Lay Hindus are often subjected by the Brahmans to penances for offences such as the ill-treatment or killing of a cow, or for some other equally serious breach of the ethical or ceremonial law, And occasionally sadhus, for reasons of their own already indicated, voluntarily [OJ.2.45] undergo inconveniences, pains, and even terrible tortures. In doing so they follow the traditional path, and do not exercise any special ingenuity in the invention of methods of self-torment.

One favourite mode of mortifying the flesh is to sit under the open canopy of heaven girt about with five small fires. Sometimes only four fires are lighted, the sun overhead being regarded as the fifth one, and an intolerable fire he is, too, on a cloudless summer day in the plains of India. As a rule this arrangement is devoid of sincerity, and is indeed a mere performance or show. Yet the fires, insignificant though they be, serve the very practical object of advertising the sadhu and attracting admirers and clients. Sadhus who follow this practice are known as panchadhunis.

Bed of spikes 1

Another way of afflicting and subduing the body is to sit and sleep on a bed of spikes. I have even seen a sadhu’s wooden shoes bristling inside with a close crop of pointed nails. That the discomfort in such cases due to the constant contact of acute spikes with some portion or other of the almost naked body is real, there can be little doubt, but it need not be very injurious to health. [OJ.2.45] Referring, in connection with this practice, to Bhishma, one of the heroes of the Mahabharata, Mr. W. Crookes (The Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India, vol. i. p.92) writes: “To the Hindu nowadays he is chiefly known by the tragic circumstances of his death. He was covered all over by the innumerable arrows discharged at him by Arjuna, and when he fell from his chariot he was upheld from the ground by the arrows and lay on a couch of darts. This sara-sayya or ‘arrow-bed’ of Bhishma is probably the origin of the kantaka-sayya or ‘thorn-couch’ of some modern Bairagis, who lie and sleep on a couch studded with nails.”

To the discredit of human nature it must be admitted that deceptions and impostures even in asceticism are unfortunately inevitable. An Indian gentleman, not, however, too favourably disposed towards the ascetics, assured me that he once found out that a sadhu whose practice it was to sit in public on [OJ.2.46] spikes had cunningly taken the precaution to protect his buttocks with thin iron plates so artfully made with irregular surface as to deceive almost any onlooker into the belief that his flesh was being pitted by the cruel points.

There are sadhus — tharasri they are called [meaning khareshwari] — who will stand leaning on some kind of rest for days or weeks together, with what painful fatigue and hardship it is easy to imagine. Occasionally in this form of self-torture only one leg is used, the other being drawn up.



Urdhvamukhi 1

A prominent feature in the ascetic practices of some sadhus is hanging head downwards suspended from the bough of a tree or a suitable framework, for perhaps half an hour at a time. Such sadhus are known as urdhamukhi,..., but must be exceedingly rare, as I have come across only a single example of this class, described later on in Chap. IX. [I haven`t seen it at all.]

Severer forms of voluntary torture are also known, as when a man ties his arm to a support such as a light bamboo, so as to keep it erect overhead, till, at last, the disused limb, reduced to a shrunken and rigid condition, refuses to be lowered again to its natural position. When both arms are so dealt with, the subject becomes a helpless cripple entirely dependent for everything upon the kindness of others. Sadhus who practise this form of austerity are known as urdhabahus. A modification of the last-mentioned practice is the closing of the hand till it becomes useless and the long nails grow like curving talons from the cramped and atrophied fingers, or even find their way through the flesh between the metacarpal bones of the hand.

Samadhi

Burying alive, or performing samadh as it is called, is a very rare yet well-known practice amongst Hindu religious devotees. The period of inhumation may be from a few days to five or six weeks, and, if the buried man lives out the fixed time, he emerges from his temporary grave an undoubted saint and an object of popular veneration ever afterwards. The advantages in view are great enough to tempt the more ambitious sadhu; but samadh is attended with the gravest risks, even when undertaken by cunning and designing impostors for their own [OJ.2.47] glorification and profit. Two recent instances, both ending fatally, are described by Sir Monier Williams in his Modern India (pp. 50-53).

A well-known and well-authenticated instance of a samadh lasting forty days and ending satisfactorily is the case of the yogi Haridas in the time of Ranjit Singh of the Punjab (A.D. 1792-1839). {[footnote] Described after Dr. Honigberger in my Indian Life, Religious and Social (T. Fisher Unwin), pp. 28-30.}

Great hardship attends what is known as the ashtanga danddwat, or prostration of the body, involving the performance of a pilgrimage by a slow and most laborious mode of progression,—in fact, the application of eight parts of the body—the forehead, breast, hands, knees, and insteps —to the ground. The vower determines to traverse the distance to his destination, a shrine or some noted place of pilgrimage, by prostrating himself full length on the road, then crawling along till his heels touch the spot where his forehead last rested, then prostrating himself again, and so on, with repetitions on repetitions, till his goal is reached. The performance savours of great humility, and is not confined to short distances. I once met a youthful sadhu at Burdwan in Bengal, on the Grand Trunk Road of Northern India, moving in this leech-like fashion from Juggernaut to Benares, a distance of about six hundred miles, and I have heard of pilgrims thus measuring, as it were, their toilsome way towards the sacred source of the Ganges, amongst the eternal snows of the Himalayas, pursuing for months, and even years, with patient courage a journey almost impossible of accomplishment in such inhospitable regions under the imposed conditions.

[OJ.2.49] Not to all men is it given to submit voluntarily to the more trying austerities, and therefore, as might have been expected, we find a number of minor asceticisms indulged in for the sake of attracting attention and perhaps gaining some pecuniary advantage. For example, a sadhu whom I saw at a religious festival, a big and powerful fellow, had a strong wooden framework erected to support a huge earthenware jar provided with a perforation at the bottom, from which a stream of water could flow out. [] Under the jar the sadhu was in the habit of sitting during the night, particularly in the small hours, from about three o’clock till daybreak, with a stream of water falling on his head and flowing down over his person to the ground. It was winter time, and very cold work no doubt, but the sadhu had his reward in gratified vanity; for in the eyes of his numerous admirers he was Siva himself with the Ganges falling from heaven upon his head and flowing thence to bless and fertilise the earth. This man, on account of his peculiar ascetic practice, would be known as a jaladhara tapashi.

[OJ.2.52] Amongst the Indian ascetics of our day there are some—like the highly emotional and tearful Bengali Sanyasi Ramakrishna, subject to hysteria, trances, and catalepsy—who see visions, are believed to have been favoured with personal visits from the very gods and goddesses themselves, and are reputed to be [OJ.2.53] able to work miracles, though indisposed to do so, thinking that such performances are hindrances in the way to perfection. But apart from such neurotic saints, who always excite attention and sometimes found new sects, every Hindu knows that, though not nearly so powerful as the ancient rishis, whose fame has grown with the centuries, many sadhus do, even in our degenerate days, work wonders, and these not always of a beneficent kind.

What the magician is, or has been, in other countries, that, to some extent, is the sadhu in India. Elsewhere the necromancer and the witch have been in antagonism with, and under the ban of, the hierarchy, but in India the ecclesiastical mantle has proved elastic enough to cover even some sorcerers, though certainly not all.

The Christian Church has always admitted, on biblical authority, the existence of wizards and witches. It has abhorred their dread power, and, when the vengeance of Heaven did not directly overtake them for their deeds, persecuted them to the death, in obedience to the divine command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ex. xxii. 18; Lev. xx. 27).

Medieval history is painfully blurred with the smoke of the penal fires which attest the zeal of the Church in the suppression of witchcraft, whose successes were attributed to diabolical agency; but in India, since the earliest times, magic and sorcery, however much dreaded, have not been without a certain acknowledged respectability.

Of course there has been in India the inevitable rivalry between the hereditary priesthood and the lay professors of witchcraft, but the Brahmans, with their wonderful faculty of adaptation to circumstances, themselves adopted, at a very early date, the role of sorcerers (as the Atharva Veda amply proves), and by so doing have inevitably, [OJ.2.54] though unintentionally, dignified the calling of the lay magician; since spells for the attainment of much which is elsewhere stigmatised as base, immoral, und impious have not been excluded from the sacred canon of the Hindus.

“Even witchcraft,” says Mr. Bloomfield, “is part of the Hindu`s religion; it has penetrated and become intimately blended with the holiest Vedic rites; the broad current of popular religion and superstition has infiltrated itself through numberless channels into the higher religion that is presented by the Brahman priests, and it may be presumed that the priests were neither able to cleanse their own religious beliefs from the mass of folk-belief with which it was surrounded, nor is it at all likely that they found it in their interest to do so.”



Number of sadhus 100 & 350 years ago

[OJ.2.96] The physician François Bernier, who during the reign of the Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb travelled extensively in India, and met M. Tavernier there, does not fail to mention “the vast number and endless variety of faquirs” he encountered. Of these the jogis [Gorakhnathis] seem to have made most impression upon him, not by their religious or philosophical professions, but by their repulsive appearance. From his narrative it is evident that the practice of holding the arms perpetually above the head was a common one with the sadhus in his day—much more common, I should say, than it is at the present time, but [OJ.2.97] the only feeling which this cruel self-torture seems to have awakened in the mind of the French physician was one of disgust; for, alluding to those who adopt this unnatural attitude, he says, “No fury in the infernal regions can be conceived more horrible than the jauguis, with their naked and black skin, long hair, spindle arms, long twisted nails, and fixed in the posture I have mentioned.” {[footnote] Bernier`s Travels (A.D. 1656-68), pp. 316, 317 (Archibald Constable & Co.).}

[OJ.2.97]The testimony of this enlightened traveller, corroborating that of his contemporary Tavernier, leaves no doubt that two hundred and fifty years ago Hindu religious devotees abounded in the Mogul Emperor`s dominions; that they wandered about freely in considerable bands, and walked through large towns stark naked, — “men, women, and girls looking at them,” says Bernier, “without any more emotion than may be created when a hermit passes through our streets.”

In the course of time a Christian power from beyond the seas supplanted the Muhammadan overlords of India, yet the sadhu still held his own under the new and unsympathetic régime.

That sagacious, intelligent, and quaintly, perhaps unctuously, pious Christian, James Forbes, who spent seventeen years in Western India—from A.D. 1766 to 1783—in the Honourable East India Company`s service, [OJ.2.98] and having attained the rank of ”senior merchant” in the employment of that famous corporation, retired at the early age of thirty-three years with a disordered liver and an ample fortune, did not fail to observe, during his exile in the East, the sadhus and faquirs of his day.

From his valuable Oriental Memoirs, published in 1813, we learn that in the latter portion of the eighteenth century the wandering sadhus were in great force throughout the western country. “These gymnosophists,” he says, “often unite in large armed bodies and perform pilgrimages to the sacred rivers and celebrated temples; but they are more like an army marching through a province than an assembly of saints in procession to a temple, and often lay the country through which they pass under contribution” (vol. i. p. 68).

Our author was also aware that in their pererrations these peripatetics went “from the confines of Russia to Cape Comorin and from the borders of China to Malabar hill on the island of Bombay” (i. 286), that they had many marvels to relate of the men and places they had seen, and were especially lavish in their praise of beautiful Kashmir (ii 459). Mr. Forbes found these travelled ascetics more liberal-minded than the stay - at - home Hindus, and confesses that he “spent many a pleasant and improving hour with religious mendicants both Hindus and Mohammedans” (ii. 461).

[OJ.2.99] According to our author, it would seem that the roving propensities of the sadhus, however beneficial to themselves intellectually, were not conducive to right living, for many of them led a by no means chaste life, being veritable terrors to husbands wherever they went (ii. 2 3 4), and, though they had professedly renounced the world and its vanities, the wandering religious mendicants often contrived, to the great annoyance of the officials, Mr. Forbes included, to carry on, for their own profit, no little illicit trading in valuable objects (ii 214, 216).

We also learn from Mr. Forbes that “many yogees and similar professors” subjected themselves to cruel penances and mortifications. “Some of them,” he tells us, “enter into a solemn vow to continue for life in one unvaried posture; others undertake to carry a cumbrous load or drag a heavy chain; some crawl on their hands and knees for years around an extensive empire; and others roll their bodies on the earth from the shores of the Indus to the banks of the Ganges, and in that humiliating posture collect money to enable them either to build a temple, to dig a well, or to atone for some particular sin. Some swing during their whole life, in this torrid clime, before a slow fire; others suspend themselves, with their heads downwards, for a certain time over the fiercest flames” (vol.i.p. 69).

In his travels Mr. Forbes came across the sadhu who carries his useless arms above his head, and, reduced to utter helplessness by his voluntary asceticism, is fed by pious Hindu women even of good position. He also saw the men who swing round a lofty pole suspended from a cross-beam by means of iron hooks fixed in the muscles of the back.

A far rarer and more curious form of austerity is thus described: “I saw another of these devotees, who was one of the phallic worshippers of Seeva, and who, not content [OJ.2.100] with wearing or adorning the symbol of that deity, had made a vow to fix every year a large iron ring into the most tender part of his body, and thereto to suspend a heavy chain, many yards long, to drag on the ground. I saw this extraordinary saint in the seventh year of his penance, when he had just put in the seventh ring; the wound was then so recent and so painful that he was obliged to carry the chain upon his shoulder, until the orifice became more callous” (vol. i. p. 70).

Mr. Forbes, intelligent observer and inquirer that he was, ascertained that the Hindu devotees were recruited from all classes of the community “except [?] the caste of Chandala.” He did not fail to realise that a high standard of abnegation and self-repression was theoretically demanded of the professed ascetics, and he was prepared to admit that, though the majority of the sadhus fell far short of the requirements of the rules of their sects, there were at least some enthusiasts who in solitude and meditation passed blameless lives and were credited with the possession of miraculous powers.



[OJ.2.111] In connection with the cult and practices of the Sankarite ascetic sects, it should be borne in mind that although Siva is regarded by the Hindus as the Destroyer, yet throughout India he is worshipped under the symbol of the lingam, because in the endless round of births and deaths to which, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis, all sentient beings are subject, it is easy for the mystic to see in destruction only the precursor of renewed existence.



I.

I am the god of the sensuous fire

That moulds all nature in forms divine;

The symbols of death and of man`s desire,

The springs of change in the world are mine;

The organs of birth and the circlet of bones,

And the light loves carved on the temple stones.

II.

I am the lord of delights and pain,

Of the pest that killeth, of fruitful joys;

I rule the currents of heart and vein;

A touch gives passion, a look destroys;

In the heat and cold of my lightest breath

Is the might incarnate of Lust and Death.

. . . . . . .

V.

And the strong swift river my shrine below

It runs, like man, its unending course,

To the boundless sea from eternal snow;

Mine is the Fountain, and mine the Force

That spurs all nature to ceaseless strife;

And my image is Death at the gates of Life.

(From Sir Alfred Lyall’s “Siva.”)



Under the influence of the Hindu admiration of the ascetic life, Siva, the Great God (Maha-dev), stands forth in the later Hinduism of the Puranas as the great ascetic (Mahatapah, Mahayogi), a fact of especial significance in [OJ.2.112] connection with the subject of the present work. “In this character he appears quite naked, (digambara), with only one face like an ordinary human being, with ash-besmeared body and matted hair (whence his name Dhurjati), sitting in profound meditation under a banian tree, and often, like the contemplative Buddha, under a canopy formed by a serpent`s head. There he is supposed to remain passionless, motionless, immovable as the trunk of a tree, perhaps rooted to the same spot for millions of years.” {[footnote] Brahmanism and Hinduism, by Professor Sir Monier Williams, p. 83 (third edition).}

[OJ.2.142] Amongst the sects studied and described by Europeans are some whose tenets and practices have filled pious Westerns with supercilious wonderment or holy horror; but, if we are to be just, it must be admitted that such abnormalities may be found, if looked for, in the by-paths of every religion, not excepting the Christian. All religions in the course of their existence give rise to a multitude of heretical separatists. In the case of Christianity, heresies appeared from apostolic times, and some sects holding opinions entirely subversive of morality as we understand it came into existence very early indeed; for example, the Antinomians, who held that the moral law was not binding upon Christians. Sects possessed of little inherent vitality died of natural exhaustion, but many, both in the early centuries and in the Middle Ages, such as the Gnostics, Manicheans, Nestorians, Albigenses, Hussites, and others, were forcibly and relentlessly suppressed by Church and State authority. Since the successful revolt against the power of the Papacy in the sixteenth century, a very considerable number of dissenting Christian sects, some with ideas in regard to political and sexual morality far removed from those ordinarily accepted by the established Churches, have appeared and secured a footing for themselves.

Similarly, Hinduism in its long history has produced a great variety of peculiar sects, and, as it differs from Christianity in not having had a powerful, well-organised, and resolute central authority to guide for centuries its theological development, the heresies — often characterized by great freedom and originality of doctrine and much latitude in practice — have, in most cases, been able to run a normal course, and have sometimes grown to be almost semi-independent religions.



French sadhvi

[OJ.2.154] ... it was still quite startling to read in the Pioneer of Allahabad, early in 1899, that an elderly, educated, and well-to-do American lady of French extraction had come to India as a sanyasin under the name of Swami Abhayananda, having been admitted to the Puri sub-order by Swami Vivekananda, the Bengali sadhu who went to the Congress of Religions at Chicago as the representative of the Hindus of India. The lady, it would appear, had studied the Upanishads and had been converted to the pantheistic doctrines of the Vedanta philosophy. “Her original intention,” says the Pioneer, “was to beg her way through India. She had a basket for the purpose instead of the customary bowl. But she has been persuaded to relinquish this intention. She wears a high-necked dress of the plainest possible cut and of a yellow colour.”



[OJ.2.153] The followers of Sankara, while paying special honour to Siva, do not, as a rule, reject the other gods of the Hindu Pantheon, nor do they deny the truth of the Shastras generally. Hence the order is a rather mixed one, containing may Vaishnavas and even Tantrics. It is nevertheless a pretentious sect, claiming that its members are alone the true sadhus of India, probably because the closing and strictly ascetic period in the lives of the “twice-born” castes (as laid down in Manu’s ordinances) is known as the sanyasi stage. It is generally held that the Sanyasis are divided into ten sub-orders, the Dasnamis, named as follows: (1) Giri. (2) Puri. (3) Bharti. (4) Ban. (5) Auran (Aranya). (6) Parvat. (7) Sagar. (8) Tirath. [sic. Should be Tirtha] (9) Ashram. (10) Saraswati. But it would seem that the last three names on the list belong properly to the order of the dandis. All Hindus, even Sudras and outcasts, may join this order, though it is generally held that some of the sub-orders, such as the Ban, Auran, and Saraswati, admit Brahmans only. [Not entirely correct, nowadays anyway. E.g. Sarasvati allows lower casts; Ashram allows only Brahmins.] At the annual spring saturnalia low-caste men actually become Sanyasis temporarily during the continuance of the festival. [OJ.2.154] Such facts prove conclusively the democratic character of the order and its freedom from the caste prejudices of Hinduism.



Burial procession

[OJ.2.156] One morning at about ten o`clock I overtook a strange procession—strange even for India—wending its way slowly along the Lahore Mall between the Chief Court and the Cathedral. A loud brass band led the way, discoursing music—European music, too; for it was not difficult to make out the tune of the once-popular song—

“Just before the battle, mother,

I was thinking most of you.”

Behind the musicians came some three or four men carrying smoking censers of sweet incense. They were marching in front of a litter borne on the shoulders of a few men. It was a very unusual-looking litter, the front being in the form of a moresque arch. There was a cloth hood over it, but it was open on three sides, so that the occupant could be plainly seen except from behind. And the occupant was a dead sadhu, sitting in vacant contemplation with his legs crossed in the approved manner. He was tied to the upright back of the litter and was covered with strings of flowers, which formed a sort of floral veil over his face but could not conceal the hideousness of death, [OJ.2.157] as the unconscious head rolled helplessly from side to side, keeping time, in a sort of grotesque mockery, to the measured step of the bearers as they marched slowly along the wide road.

On one side of the litter was a hired landau with some respectably dressed natives, who may or may not have been part of the procession, and on the other a slovenly policeman in yellow trousers and blue tunic lolling in a one-horse carriage known as an ekka. A little confused crowd, in which the female element predominated, brought up the rear; while a number of urchins, stimulated by curiosity, accompanied the cortege and pointed out the dead man to one another. I ascertained that the party was on its way to a selected spot where the sadhu, a Sanyasi, would be buried in a circular grave, sitting upright and covered over with salt. This funeral procession brought to my recollection a similar one I had seen many years previously at Rajamundry, in the Madras Presidency. On that occasion the dead sadhu was placed in a sitting position in his grave, a quantity of salt was piled up about him, and earth thrown in till the body was nearly covered up. Then upon the top of the shaven head, still exposed to view, a large number of cocoanuts were broken in order to crack the skull and afford the imprisoned soul a means of exit from the now useless body. The fragments of the cocoanuts which had been used for the liberation of the dead man`s soul were, I remember, eagerly sought for by the bystanders.

It should be mentioned that the practice of burial rather than cremation, in the case of these and certain other sadhus, is due to the sentiment that the bodies of such sainted personages do not need to be purified by fire.



[OJ.2.160] This sect [the Dandis] is recruited exclusively from the Brahman caste, yet it discards the sacred thread. It derives its name from the danda, or staff, which each member is required to carry. Theoretically, dandiwallahs should not settle down in one place for a single day, and even the danda should not be allowed to rest, but should be stuck erect in the ground or be suspended from a tree. In practice, however, these rules are neglected, and large numbers of dandis are to be found at any time in Benares, where an important ghat or bathing place on the Ganges is named after them. The dandis, I have been assured, do not worship Siva, but only their own danda. If this be correct, the explanation is probably that the danda is regarded by them as the phallic emblem of the god. {[footnote] In regard to the danda, Sir Monier Williams in his Buddhism (Preface, p.xiii) says: “Finally, there is the danda or staff held in the left hand, and used by the Sanyasi as a defence against evil spirits, much as the dorje (or vajra) is used by Northern Buddhist monks. This mystical staff is a bambu with six knots, possibly symbolical of six ways (gati) or states of life through which it is believed that every being may have to migrate — a belief common to both Brahmanism and Buddhism. The staff is called sudarsana (a name for Vishnu’s cakra), and is daily worshipped for the preservation of its mysterious powers.”} [It`s not a bamboo, however.]

[OJ.2.162] A learned Indian Sanskritist explained to me that the name of this sect [Paramahamsa. But paramahamsa is not a sect-name; it`s a “rank”] is derived from the words parama, meaning much or great, and hansa, a certain (mythological) animal which can separate water from milk; whence, as my pandit said, it would seem that the Paramahansa is one who can distinguish truth from falsehood.

Sanyasis, dandis, and other ascetics who have undergone a probation of usually not less than twelve years, may be admitted to this superior order, in which both Sivites and Vishnuvites merge their religious differences in a comprehensive self-worship, based on the presumption of each Paramahansa’s identity with the Divine Spirit.

Such high pretensions have of necessity to be supported by some visible proof of superiority to physical discomfort and the weaknesses that flesh is heir to; and so it happens that some members of the sect go about naked in all weathers, some affect to live without food of any kind, others observe strict silence and do not indicate even by a sign any physical need or suffering. There may be impostors among them, but honest ascetics are certainly not wanting; and so great is the respect and admiration which the self-denial of these sadhus commands from the Hindus, that they are seldom if ever allowed to experience the full measure of the physical evils which would, in ordinary course [would he mean “Western” course ?], be attached to their voluntary asceticisms.

Amongst the Paramahansas are scholars well versed in Sanskrit learning. These are usually to be found in the monasteries.

Paramahansas bury their dead, or float their bodies away upon some running stream.



[OJ.2.163] Being strongly opposed to Brahmanism, the distinguishing badge of this sect [the Lingayats] is a lingam fastened to the neck or arm by a thread which “is called the linga sutra, as opposed to the yajna sutram or sacred thread of Brahmans.” (Bhattacharjee, p.397) The mendicant monks of this sect, known as vaders, meaning masters of lords, go about with small bells attached to their arms or carried in the hand to advertise their presence. They receive from the lay Lingaits the most extravagant veneration and even worship.

[OJ.2.164] The Jangamas, who are occasionally seen in Upper India, are stated by Dr. Bhattacharjee (Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies) to be “the priestly Sudras of the sect [lingayats].” They are married men not given to austerities, and go about well clad, as will be seen from the illustrations .... at p. 52 of this volume. [They still look the same today] In regard to the name of the sect, “it is said that, when Shiv (Siva) at his marriage desired to give alms to Brahmans, no Brahmans appeared; the god thereupon tore open his leg (janga) and produced therefrom a man whom he called Jangama, to whom he gave his alms,” and this man, no doubt, was the father of the sect. At Kedarnath in Garwal they have a temple and monastery of their own.



[OJ.2.165] Strange as it may seem, the disgustingly repulsive habits of the Aghoris are a direct and legitimate, if horrible, outcome of a desire to push the pantheistic doctrines of the Vedanta philosophy to their logical conclusions in a certain direction. “If everything in existence is only a manifestation of the Universal Soul, nothing can be unclean!” So argues the Aghorpanthi, and he proves the uncompromising sincerity of his convictions by his repellent acts. Cases, few and far between, of necrophilism, anthropophagy, and coprology are not unknown to mental pathologists in Europe; but it is, perhaps, only in India that such perverted instincts could be made the basis of a religious sect. [OJ.2.166] The present headquarters of the Aghorpanthis appear to be at Mount Abo [Abu]. [OJ.2.167] Women known as Aghorinis are often associated with these ghouls, and are as filthy as and even more shameless than their male companions.

[OJ.2.181] However edifying Swami-ji’s explanations may be, it is, to say the least, rather curious that the Yogi should derive his transcendent enlightenment from an organ in the neighbourhood of the coccygeals.



[OJ.2.189] The Ramanandis have large and wealthy monasteries in Upper India. There are four sub-sects or orders, all celibate. (1) Achari, (2) Sanyasi, (3) Khaki, (4) Bairagi. The Acharis wear silken and woollen garments, the Sanyasis salmon-coloured cotton clothes, while the Khakis usually go about naked, their bodies powdered with dust and ashes and their hair and nails unclipped. The Bairagis are probably the most numerous order of this sect; their name is commonly applied to all Vishnuvite mendicants ... [] Hindus of all castes are permitted to become Bairagis, and, as a matter of fact, the sect is recruited from all castes, including the Brahmans. Evidently, Ramanand’s sectarian movement was once opposed to, and no doubt intended to be subversive of, the established, rigid, and immemorial caste system. [] All, whether of the three “twice-born castes” or not, put on the sacred thread and wear a tuft of hair on the crown of the head — practices which would seem intended as assertions of the equality of all Hindus, effected by a process of levelling up to the higher strata in the caste system.

[OJ.2.190] The Bairagi is expected to pay at least one visit to Dwarka in order to be branded on his right arm with the Vishnu symbols — the discus, the conch, the club, and the lotus.

[OJ.2.191] In all religious systems the celibate state has, with good reason, been looked upon as one of supreme [OJ.2.192] self-sacrifice, and therefore as a holy state; but it is so entirely unnatural that, when embraced as a rule of life by sects, orders, or professions, it has never been lived up to. What steady and protracted opposition was experienced in the Christian Church before celibacy could be enforced amongst Christian ecclesiastics, and what gross immoralities and scandals compulsory celibacy led to, are well known.

[OJ.2.192] There are amongst the followers of Ghaitanya various sub-sects well known for their immoralities. For example, the Spashta Dayakas, amongst whom the monks and nuns live together in the same monasteries, with results which [OJ.2.193] may well be imagined; the Sahajas who hold that every man is Krishna and every woman Radha, and consequently approve of promiscuous intercourse; and the Bauls, who, going one step further, maintain that “sexual indulgence is the most approved form of religious exercise.” {[footnote] ` Dr. Bhattacbarjee`s Hindu, Castes and Sects, p. 485.}



[OJ.2.196] The Nirmalis (the pure). The circumstances under which this order originated are, I should say, unique. In AD 1691, or thereabouts, Govind Singh, the tenth guru of the Sikhs, ... who was only twenty-five years of age and a particularly handsome man, captivated the susceptible heart of [a] young widow, and she resolved to try her arts upon him. [He wasn’t seduced, therefore] [OJ.2.187] When Govind Singh returned home he gave the ascetic garb he had assumed for the memorable occasion to one of his followers, Bir Singh, a very holy personage, and authorised him to found a new sect of sadhus, to be called Nirmalis, or the pure, in commemoration of the event. [OJ.2.198] The Nirmalis are, on the whole, a learned order much given to Sanskrit studies, and are followers of the Vedanta philosophy. There is a tradition amongst them that five original members of the order went to study Sanskrit theology at Benares, but were denied the privilege of such studies by the Brahmans, because they happened to be Sudras by caste. However, Guru Govind Singh cheered the disappointed students by the prediction that their order would be famous for its learned men, from whom the Brahmans themselves would be glad to receive instruction. Nirmalis wear their hair long, and dress themselves in reddish-yellow garments.

[OJ.2.198] The Nihangs or Akalis. {[footnote] Nihang=humble. Akali=immortal} The circumstances which gave rise to this sect are connected with the flight of Govind Singh [17th cent.] from Cham Kor, famous in Sikh annals. [Fleeing from the Mogul soldiers, Govind disguised] ... himself in the blue dress of a Muslim faquir, known about those parts as Uch ka pir (a saint of Uch), ... [OJ.2.199] When the party reached a village inhabited by Govind’s own people, he burnt a portion of the blue clothes he had assumed by way of disguise, and the remainder he presented to one Man Singh, a favourite follower of his, to be worn by him as the distinctive garb of a new order — Nihangs or Akalis — which he was authorized to found. The Akalis, in consequence, wear blue garments, but the dress they have adopted, in which their veneration of warlike weapons finds exaggerated expression, is grotesque. [OJ.2.200] Although the armed Akali may, by an obvious association of ideas, recall to mind the famous military orders of the West — the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic knights of the Middle Ages — the resemblance is too slight and trifling for even a moment’s consideration.



Bed of spikes 2

[OJ.2.203] Near a large tank known as Ratan Chand’s talao, in the neighbourhood of a group of Hindu temples in Lahore, and under some fine old peepul trees, two or three hundred people, mostly Hindus of both sexes, were assembled one fine evening in November, most of them attentively watching a palanquin which had been placed on the high platform of a samadh or cenotaph erected to the memory of a Hindu lady by her wealthy son. The screens of the palanquin were drawn back, but I could see nothing within until I approached quite near, when I discovered the emaciated figure of an almost naked man sitting with his knees drawn up against his chin in an attitude common enough in India, but one which the European would find it rather difficult to imitate.

Down the length of the palanquin was a board, closely studded with iron nails, and it was upon a portion of this most uncomfortable bed of spikes that the Bairagi was seated, and was supposed, perhaps quite correctly, to sleep at night. Above the bony shins and exaggerated knot-like knees of this seated figure appeared a human [!] head with an immense shock of hair like a chignon hanging heavily behind it. Its [!] hollow eyes, peering over a pair of green glass-and-wire goggles, had a queer hunted look about them, and its nostrils seemed strangely misshapen, one being apparently distended with some sort of plug or other. From this repulsive figure there proceeded, from time to time, sundry guttural sounds and hollow coughs.

A faithful disciple, conveniently at hand, explained to me that his master in the palanquin was more than one hundred and thirty years of age, and had resolved to undergo certain penances until he should succeed in collecting enough money to feast one hundred thousand Brahmans and to give each of his guests the present of at least one rupee, apparently for being good enough to partake of the banquet provided for him.

As I stood near the palanquin a succession of men and women, mostly the latter, mounted the platform, approached the ascetic, and, bowing down before him so that their heads touched the floor, placed their offerings, consisting for the most part of pice or of small silver coins, before the holy man. This done, they passed on without an audible word, though some silent wish or prayer was no doubt in each one’s heart. The saint did not condescend to notice anyone, but merely looked absently, with those queer hunted eyes of his, at his admirers as they approached his presence and added their contributions towards the considerable sum necessary for the fulfilment of his vow.

[OJ.2.204] Presently a stir took place amongst the ascetic’s attendants. The usual time for him to perform his ablutions had arrived. A pair of wooden-soled sandals studded with spikes were placed beside the palanquin, and upon their prickly surface the poor fellow was helped to place his bare feet. With the assistance of his men, the emaciated Bairagi was brought forward and allowed to subside on a low wooden stool about four or five inches high. When he emerged from his palanquin the onlookers took up what, according to Indian ideas, is a most respectful attitude, all present facing the ascetic with slightly bowed heads and palms joined together before their breasts. []

When about to perform his ablutions in public, he requested the people nearest him to stand back a little, lest the water should reach and inconvenience them. [too considerate; perhaps another reason ?] A slight backward movement was the result, and, when an attendant poured some water on the Bairagi’s hands, it was seen that his wrists were united by an iron chain not more than six or seven inches long. Now came the important operation of dislodging the huge plug from his right nostril. As the sadhu removed it, not without a little effort, it was followed by a loosely twisted cord of unspun cotton about eight or nine inches long, which had apparently been hanging in the pharynx at the back of the nose. [OJ.2.205] No wonder the poor fellow coughed so frequently and so painfully. Two cotton cords, similar to the one described but somewhat longer, were handed to the Bairagi. Their ends were pointed and perhaps a little stiffened with wax. With an unpleasant, almost painful, grunt or moan, he passed them both up his nostrils, and then, opening his mouth as wide as possible, fished up with his long skinny fingers the pendent ends of the two cords. All four extremities were now in his hands, and he proceeded to draw the strings to and fro through his nose and mouth five or six times. When Maharaj, as they called him, had thus cleaned his nostrils and throat, two narrow bamboo tubes, each about eighteen inches long, were brought to him. One had a small funnel at its extremity. The Bairagi having held his head aslant, the small end of the funnel tube was applied to his left nostril, the latter being lower than the former. Water was now poured, from a vessel with a spout, into the funnel, and came off in a continuous stream at the end of the other and lower tube — a rather difficult performance this, I should fancy. It remained to plug the left nostril for the night as the other had previously been, for they were stopped turn about. This operation was accomplished by passing a long wick, or cotton cord, up the nose, and finally introducing its other and knotted end with a little force into the much distended nostril. As the stiffened end of the cord disappeared up the ascetic’s nose, a veracious disciple assured us that it had gone straight up into the brain. He repeated this statement many times, and the Bairagi, who heard it, and knew it was not true, did not contradict it.

These operations duly accomplished in the public gaze, the holy man was helped back once more into his uncomfortable lodging in the palanquin. I learnt that twice a day, morning and evening, Maharaj repeated this disgusting and unedifying performance, and that twice a day people assembled to see and admire it, although it is neither original in its conception — for other Bairagis do the like — nor, I should think, specially agreeable for anyone to behold.

[OJ.2.206] I had leisure now to study my company and surroundings. At the foot of one of the peepul trees I found three sadhus sitting round a small fire, all of them young and healthy. They had no connection with the Bairagi who was attracting so much attention, and rather affected to turn their backs upon him. Two of these men were so scantily clothed that their united garments would have hardly made a decent-sized pocket-handkerchief; the third was absolutely naked, sky-clothed (digambara) he would himself have said, under broad daylight, in a public place, and amidst a mixed crowd of both sexes. The sky-clothed one was, I have no doubt, an abandoned scamp. He looked it. A grave and well-dressed man ventured to suggest, in my hearing, the desirability of a rag in the interests of decency, to which the religious man made some flippant observation about the trouble of keeping it tied.



Urdhvamukhi 2

[OJ.2.206] Before I left the spot I learned that the sadhu of the spiky bed had yet another mode of drawing the wondering multitude to visit him and to contribute their portion towards the accomplishment of his vow. Once a day, in the afternoon, he used to have himself suspended, head downwards, from a sturdy branch of a great tree, before the admiring gaze of a large concourse of people. On the first suitable opportunity I came to see this part of his performance.

[OJ.2.207] It was a lovely day. A crowd of about five hundred [!] men and women had assembled, and, in Oriental fashion, were meekly and quietly sitting down on the ground awaiting the great man’s convenience. [] At about one o’clock an attendant came forward and set to work preparing a space about ten feet square, under a large peepul tree, by smearing it over with a mixture of clay, cow-dung and water. This done, he placed a pile of dried cow-dung cakes upon it and applied a light. A cloud of white smoke was quickly diffused all around. When the fuel happened to blaze up the attendant moderated its energy by sprinkling a little water on it, thus bringing it back to the desired smoky condition. The Bairagi now came forth, helped as before, and, after washing his hands, had his hair firmly tied up in a cloth which also covered his face. He next put his foot into a loop of thick cotton rope depending from a branch of the tree, and was hauled up, head downwards, till he hung suspended about three feet above the smouldering fire. With one hand he grasped the free foot, and with the other he manipulated a rosary concealed in a bag called a gomukhi. By a slender string passed round his body one of his disciples kept him swaying over the smoky fire, into which a Brahman was throwing grain, ghee, and other things. For seven-and-twenty [exact!] minutes by my watch the Bairagi was swung head downwards over that smouldering fire.When he had counted his beads he dropped the bag and was then immediately taken down, looking perhaps a slight degree more exhausted for his half-hour’s constant fumigation feet upwards.

[OJ.2.208] Never a word was spoken throughout the entire performance about right or wrong, not one syllable about duty or worship. There was a dumb show, and nothing more.

As the emaciated figure, resembling a skeleton rather than a man, swayed to and fro like the pendulum of some strange old-world clock — the clock of Indian ideas — I tried to read on the living dial before me what time of day it was. The circle of onlookers was a large one, composed of Orientals, whose thoughts and ideas are very inscrutable, yet it seemed to me that the face of the very complicated, but interesting, dial I was studying indicated that dawn was approaching, though the daybreak had not yet appeared.

A few generations hence the Bairagi clock I have described will be unknown, at least in the great cities of India.



Urdhvabahu

[OJ.2.214] Adjoining the famous Golden Temple at Amritsar is a grove known as Guru Bagh; and here a sadhu, conspicuous on account of having both arms rigidly uplifted above his head, took up his temporary abode attended by a few disciples. This was in the month of October, at the time of the Divali festival, which annually attracts a large multitude of people to the holy city of the Sikhs.

When I saw the sadhu, his emaciated arms were apparently quite rigid, and the clenched hands, which were about six inches apart, were particularly painful to look at —wasted and shrunken, with great curved nails growing like bird`s claws out of the thin fingers.

He had his person rubbed all over with white ashes, and he wore a small loin cloth and a neatly tied turban. His features were long, and the expression of his face agreeable. What he looked like, and his utter helplessness, the portrait [drawing] of him in the frontispiece will, I think, make quite clear.

In conversation with him I ascertained that he was a Bairagi, that he came from Ajudya [Ayodhya], and had been the chela of a famous guru formerly attached to the Hunaman Gari [Hanuman Gardhi] monastery in that city, but now deceased.

part of the frontispiece



I had visited Ajudya, and could talk about it and the sacred Surayu (Gogra) [Sarayu], which flows by that ancient town; and so the sadhu, touched by old associations, became communicative. His native place, he told me, was Bas Bareilli in Oudh, and his name Gareeb Das. [Remarkable that he as a Sita-Ram Baba is performing urdhva-bahu.]

What I wished particularly to ascertain from the Bairagi was what motive could possibly have induced him to subject himself voluntarily to such terrible, such almost inconceivable personal hardships as were plainly involved in the penance he had adopted. Not only had he deprived himself of the use of both his arms, but by the awkward unnatural position which he had forced them to assume he had made them a source of constant trouble, weariness, and [OJ.2.215] inconvenience to himself, both waking and sleeping. His replies to my inquiries were evasive and unsatisfactory, probably because he was an illiterate man. At first he said that from the Scriptures he had received his mandate to perform this penance—which cryptic statement he subsequently elucidated by saying that from several penances recommended in religious books he had selected this one, as it had been adopted by several members of his own sect and monastery. His object in thus afflicting himself was to have communication with Permashwar (God), or, as he also said, to obtain mukti (salvation).

An unsympathetic and ill-mannered bystander, on hearing the sadhu`s statement of his spiritual aspirations, contemptuously cited a Sanskrit distich which meant, “From penance comes a kingdom, and from the kingdom comes hell”—in allusion to a common belief that, by such mortifications of the flesh, sadhus really strive for raj or power and position in the next mundane life, that they gain their end, and then fall into the hell whither power and dominion inevitably lead one.

Gareeb Das the ascetic, when I saw him, had had his arms up above his head for eight long years, and desired to make no change for a further period of four years, at the end of which time he hoped to restore them to their former state, firstly by presents and feasts to the Brahmans, whose intercession would thus be secured, and secondly by the application of certain emollients with peculiar stimulating properties known to the sadhus. “If it be the will of God ,” added Gareeb Das, speaking on this subject, “then my arms will be restored to their proper use when the appointed time comes.”



[OJ.2.216] As there are European thieves who do not hesitate to rob a church, so there are, it would seem, Indian representatives of the same ancient, if disreputable, fraternity, who have no scruples about appropriating the property of even a helpless sadhu. This was illustrated when Gareeb Das was deprived by impudent thieves of all his portable property, including a book, which rumour declared was actually a bank pass-book, testifying to cash deposits mounting up to as much as a lakh of rupees. The disgusted sadhu promptly removed himself from the Guru Bagh where he had been robbed, and some of my servants met and conversed with him near the railway station, waiting for the train which was to take him away to Jeypore on his homeward journey. Such was the tale which was current in Amritsar, and which I noted down on the 26th of October. What was my surprise on the 7th of November to find my friend Gareeb Das once again established in the Guru Bagh, the story of the robbery having been in all probability a mere invention got up to stimulate public interest in sadhuji. On this occasion the ascetic had a small private enclosure of his own, made up of bamboos and cloth screens. People were crowding in and out of this enclosure in goodly numbers. When I went in I noticed great heaps, 1iterally heaps, of flour, salt, sugar, and such things—in fact, sacks and sacks full. It appeared that a few days previously the sadhu had given notice in the city that he would not eat anything until he had entertained five hundred unmarried girls at a feast. [kumari puja] He hoped to accomplish this before the end of December, but contributions had come in so quickly that the feast day had been fixed for the 9th of November. While I was learning these particulars the sadhu rose and walked a few paces with his arms above his head, and as he did so the poor fellow looked so utterly and painfully helpless that I could not but experience a feeling of the greatest compassion for him, not unmingled with a certain [OJ.2.217] admiration of his steadfastness and prolonged endurance.

Before I took my leave of the ascetic, an attendant, making a very polite speech, offered me a couple of handful of raisins and almonds. I took just two raisins and dropped a rupee on the remainder. The money was removed and the raisins and almonds given to the policeman who was in attendance upon me, in accordance with the rule which prevails at the Golden Temple. The Punjabi policeman willingly accepted the gift, carefully tying up the dried fruits and nuts in a very dirty handkerchief.

The sadhu`s feast to the unmarried girls came off in proper time, and was a complete success, for a great many Hindu ladies of good position came on the appointed day and helped to cook and distribute the food amongst the invited guests. In this way Gareeb Das, without spending a single rupee out of his own pocket, and himself a cripple, was enabled, through the liberal contributions and helpful courtesy of his admirers, to play the host munificently to five hundred youthful maidens of Amritsar.





French sadhu

[OJ.2.223] Some years ago at Simla, the summer capital of the Indian Government, I interviewed one Charles de Russette, a young man of French descent, who, although brought up as a Christian and properly educated in Bishop Cotton`s school in that town, had, while a mere boy, embraced the life of a sadhu. I understood that he had inherited some property, which he made over to his sisters, reserving nothing for himself. Why he abandoned Christianity for Hinduism I did not find out, as he was disinclined to talk about the matter; but, whatever the cause which severed him from European life and thought, it was evident that he did not regret the step he had taken, and that he was well satisfied with his condition and mode of life as a Hindu devotee— a Sanyasi, I think.

Judging from outward appearances, the man had not suffered any such physical inconveniences as would affect his health, and he was particularly well clothed, though not in any sadhu style that I have ever seen. He informed me that he lived his solitary life in the neighbourhood of Simla throughout the year, even in winter, when the snow lay deep upon the mountains. Of his fellow sadhus he spoke in terms of high praise, and assured me that he had seen Yogi adepts perform many most wonderful acts. Of virtue and vice he discoursed in the usual way, maintaining that it was not necessary to be a Christian in order to lead a virtuous life. De Russette`s intellectual capacity seemed of a very ordinary kind, but I have no doubt he commands the highest respect from the natives, and lives idly, happy and contented, without any anxiety about the morrow.

The photograph reproduced here ... is an excellent likeness of the man as I saw him at Simla in 1894.



Naked sadhu, half-naked sadhvi

[OJ.2.223] Information that an interesting group of sadhus was encamped on the maidan (open plain) near the Lahore Fort having reached me, I went there one morning to make the [OJ.2.224] acquaintance of the visitors and increase my stock of knowledge about sadhuism. [OJ.2.224] The leaders of the party were a naked Sanyasi, and an almost naked Sanyasin who let people understand that she was a widowed and childless daughter of the Rajah of B––––. Not many minutes’ conversation with the sadhu were needed to satisfy me that he was at best a shameless reprobate, but, as I thought his portrait would enrich my collection, I expressed the wish to take a photograph of him and his followers. This suggestion tickled his vanity, and he had the effrontery, though I am sure he did not wish to be impertinent, to offer to have himself taken in a most objectionable and unseemly attitude, which would demonstrate his virility to the greatest advantage. [chabi, lingasana?] His female companion was, I should say, under twenty-five years of age, and not particularly attractive. [] Both of them had ashes rubbed over their persons. Three or four sadhus, one of them a Kanphata Yogi, had joined theses worthies as travelling companions. A boy devotee of about twelve years of age also belonged to the company, and seemed devoted to the Sanyasin.

While I conversed with the sadhus under a group of trees, there was a small and ever-changing gathering of about two hundred [small?!] persons round these queer, though evidently much respected, wanderers. Most of the visitors had dropped in, as it were, to pay their respects to the sadhus after having had their morning bath in the river. The naked mendicant and his companion, the almost nude Sanyasin, were not edifying sights; yet women [!], girls [!], and children of respectable families were all gazing at them reverentially, without any sign of shame or bashfulness. They were holy privileged people these sadhus, and not to be regarded with ordinary eyes or judged by customary standards. Yet, whilst I was present, a protest was raised by some Aryas — sectarians of a new school — against the Sanyasi’s nudeness. Angry accusations and bitter retorts were exchanged, and in the course of the altercation the Sanyasi tried to turn the tables upon his censors by asking them significantly what they gained by deserting the religion of their ancestors.

Meanwhile, as a sort of practical reply to the Arya objectors, offerings were accumulating near the sadhus — wheat, flour, rice, lentils, ghee, and also copper and silver coins. It was plain that the Sanyasi and his companions were in favour and not faring badly. As we conversed, the leader of the party, followed by the woman and then by the others, indulged in the luxury of pipes of charas, exhaling wonderful volumes of dense white smoke from their lungs. Just a pull or two was quite enough for each one, for the smoke was so pungent that it had to be drawn through a wet cloth applied to the bottom of the tall chillum or pipe which is used in charas-smoking.



At this visit it was arranged that the group should be photographed by me the next morning. When, at the appointed time, I came to the camping-ground with my camera, I found to my surprise that the sadhus had all disappeared, leaving not a trace behind them. However, I was bent on having their portraits [naked female sadhus must have been rare, even then] if possible, and, after patient inquiries and no little discouragement, followed them up to a little temple of Siva near one of the city gates. They were dismayed when they saw me, for they had been artfully told that I was a police officer and wished to have their photographs in order to get them into trouble. I learned also that the principal sadhu had been forced by the Aryas to put a rag about his loins.

He and a number of Hindu men who were present at the temple — no women visitors were there — informed me that the ascetics had been very badly used by the Aryas, who had scattered and spoiled all the offerings which had been made to them, and even caused their plates and utensils to be looted. How much truth there was in these allegations I cannot say, but the Aryas knew me very well, and no doubt surmised that I was in quest of materials for a book, and possibly, it did not suit these sectarians to have the naked sadhu described for European readers, hence their opposition and interference. However, the soothing influence of two or three rupees [wasn’t that a lot in those days?] enabled me to dispel the suspicions aroused in the minds of the Sanyasi and his supporters and to secure the photograph I wanted. This I have now much pleasure in reproducing (Fig. 13), as it is, I am inclined to think, unique in its character. [And so it is!]



[OJ.2.233] A party of half a dozen or more Yogis [Gorakhnathis] came to Lahore and made themselves somewhat conspicuous by occupying favourable positions alongside some of the main thoroughfares. One of these sadhus used to sit at the meeting of three roads, and was the object of a great deal of attention, especially from the women, who paid their respects to Maharaj as they went by him on their [OJ.2.234] homeward journey after the daily matutinal bath in the river Ravi.

These good creatures were much exercised in mind at seeing the holy ascetics eating pinches of wood ashes from time to time, and some, more devout or more impulsive than the others, begged one of the Yogis to permit them to minister to his wants. He haughtily declined their assistance; but to one pious lady, more pressing than the rest in her offers of service, he condescended to explain that he had taken a vow never to lift a morsel of food (or anything but ashes) to his mouth with his own hand. “Permit me, Maharaj,” said the ministrant fair one, “to feed you with my own hands. It will be an honour to me and mine.”

The saint good-naturedly, but still reluctantly, yielded the point. Henceforth the favoured one fed his saintship daily, and so did one or two other women—amongst them a beautiful girl of about sixteen years of age. Every day, when the Yogi had partaken of as much food as he cared for, he would bless the remainder, bidding his kind friends [i.e the ladies] to partake of it themselves.

The regular meal-time of the lucky Yogi became an event of interest to the passers-by, and a certain man, who probably lived or had his place of business in the immediate neighbourhood, was in the habit of coming to watch the proceedings. Observing, perhaps with a pang of jealousy, the beautiful young girl I have alluded to feeding the almost naked Yogi with her own delicate fingers, this discontented spectator ventured to wonder in audible terms whether she was as attentive to her husband as she was to the saint. Of course the young wife, drawing her veil over her face bashfully, suggested that the rude fellow might mind his own business; but the Yogi, irritated by his impertinence, showered a volley of abuse upon him, desiring him at the same time to take himself off and not stand there staring at his betters. Uncomplimentary epithets were freely exchanged, till the ascetic, losing his temper, threw his stick at the intruder, but without effect. He next hurled a piece of lighted firewood at the man, and, more successful this time, [OJ.2.235] struck his adversary on the arm, with the result that he was slightly burnt.

In a rage—literally a burning rage now—the meddlesome fellow flew at the sadhu and beat him soundly with a stick. Bystanders in horror hastened to interfere, when a new arrival, pressing forward to see what the excitement was about, grasped the situation and laughingly exclaimed, “Oh, ––––, so you have come here, have you ?”

Noticing his familiar mode of address, several present queried with surprise, “Do you know the Maharaj ? Whence does he come?” and so on.

”Who is he ? Why ––––, the son of ––––, a choorah (sweeper) by caste, and I see that there are several of his caste-mates not far off.”

“A choorah ? Are you sure ?” came from many voices.

“I should rather think I am sure—he is one of my own beraderi. Have I not known him since he was a child ?”

This disclosure was like a bolt out of the blue !

“Toba ! toba !” said the horrified bystanders. “And these respectable ladies have been feeding choorahs with their own hands and eating their contaminated leavings.”

The pious women victimised by the Yogi veiled their faces closely and fled without a word, overwhelmed with shame and anxiety. “Toba ! toba !” passed from mouth to mouth, and the crowd was moved by mingled feelings of merriment, indignation, and disgust at the discomfiture and punishment of the low - c

THE BEST EXAMPLE OF GANDHIISM:

Rsidhar 900

re:Reply #: 893

progressive,

``I will use the paper on which this article by Velu-whoever was published to wipe my A$$ after i have emptied by bowel. That is how much this article is worth. An article by a biased Dalit! Can you not get anything better?``

Sridhar



So Rsidhar please explain ... so not only are Dalits `untouchable` maleechs but their work has no intellectual importance either right? Because they are not from a high caste like yourself I suppose? Not a Brahmin probably?

How could a dalit velu something be right? right?

Shame on Indian Gandhian Mentality...

Thank God for Jinnah who after trying hardest to bring about Hindu Muslim Unity than any Gandhi or any such naked thing finally gave up and liberated us from Hindu caste domination.

-YLH

tvarad,

``The RSS/VHP movement is also led by ``modern, educated and urbanite Hindu polity`` and they exhibit the same kind of intolerance that Jinnah and his Muslim League practised.``

No there are not and secondly instead of making idiotic generalizations prove it with some facts. The fact is Jinnah`s picture hangs in the most hallowed hall of British constitutional tradition... while your saffron brigade is the same kind of Hinduvta garbage as your Gandhi. Jinnah`s speeches, his actions, his pronouncements all speak of a modern looking polity with EQUAL rights for all.... so Your accusations are sad, untrue and indicative of your dishonest Gandhian mentality.

Gandhi with his hindu dharma, ram rajya and other such nonsense is the true intellectual father of Hinduvta.

You also say:

``It would take me but a few sentences to get personal on Jinnah or any of your other beliefs but as I have said, other than such silly statements, personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with you and pages of irrelevant verbiage you have no other argument.``

I have quoted an entire book from the father of your indian constitution... Dr.Ambedkar.. what have you done.. you little twit? Infact your statement is right back at you... other than making a few smart alec comments you have rarely proved your ill founded and stupid assertions ...

You make foolish statements like:

``Contrast this to Jinnah`s Pakistan which was built on a narrow agenda of irreconcileable belief systems.``

No that is just not true. Jinnah`s personality and his politics have been discussed by many in India.. and this is not the conclusion they have drawn.

``This ideology didn`t even outlast him by 25 years and crashed on the graves of a 1.5 million Bangladeshis.``

Like the `armenian` genocide the number of Bengalis killed increases every year by a 100 000 .. I wonder why. Your entire post smacks of arrogance and bigotry. The bottom line is that it is not Pakistan which is burning up ... like Gujurat is ... It is Gujurat India.. where Gandhi`s legacy of religious politics lives on .. where Muslims are slaughtering the Hindus and Hindus are slaughtering the Muslims... That is your forward looking Gandhian ideology.

``The real reason for the attacks on Gandhi, most of which are based on personal biases rather than on historical facts, is because these people know that it is Gandhi`s India and what better way to bring down India than to pick apart Gandhi`s ideals.``

You are the one who is denying Historical facts... one which is illuminated is that Gandhi was Hindu casteist Bigot:

QUESTIONS ABOUT TRUE GANDHIAN IDEALS:

PERHAPS the `TRUE` Gandhians will reply to my QUESTIONS Here:

DIRECT QUESTION NO 1:

`Politics divorced from Religion is like a corpse only fit to be buried` Bandopadhya `Social and Political Thought of Gandhi, Calcutta, Allied Publishers

What did Gandhi mean when he said that??

DIRECT QUESTION NO 2 (and this one is for SADNA especially) :

Gandhiji, :`Sanghtan is a really sound movement. Every community is entitled, indeed bound to organize itself as a seperate entity` (Young India January 6th 1927, Also found in collected works of Mahatma Gandhi)

If so what is your problem with Accepting Pakistan and the Muslim National Movement or is it that Only Hindus are entitled to organize themselves, and Muslims are not?

QUESTION 3:

Endorsement of the caste system,

Gandhi ji said:

`the seeds of swaraj can be found in Caste system different castes are like different sections of a military division.` (Dr BR AMBEDKAR `Gandhi or Gandhism`, Jullunder, Bheema Patrika Publications,

1970 Page 128)

Ah so CASTE SYSTEM should exist... well done? And this guy is supposed to be bright eh?

QUESTION NO 4

Then on page 152 of the above mentioned book we find the following quote :

`To the Shudra who only serves (the high caste) as a matter of religious duty and who will never own any property, who indeed as no ambition to own anything, is deserving of many obeisances .. the very God will shower down flowers on him`

QUESTION 5 :

Gandhi Ji says :

`Prohibition against intermarriage, and interdining is essential for the rapid evolution of the soul... like we perform the act of answering the call of nature in seclusion so also the act of taking the food should be done in seclusion` (BR Ambedkar`s book Gandhi or Gandhism)

WHAT DOES GANDHI Mean when he spouts this bigoted communal nonsense?

QUESTION 6:

`My own experience confirms that the Musalman as rule is a bully` (Young India May 29th 1924)

Was this aimed at winning Hindu Muslim Unity?

DIRECT QUESTION 7: GANDHI QUOTE ENDORSING VARNA CASTE SYSTEM OF THE INDIAN HINDU VARIETY:

`Varnashram is inherent in human nature and Hinduism has simply reduced it to a science. It does attach by birth. A man cannot change his Varna by choice.`



Contrast these to Jinnah`s IDEALS which unfortunately Pakistan has forgotten... and you will see who is what...

Not that all Indians are idiots like Tvarad or the casteist bigot Mr.Rsidhar ... after all the Book `Quaid e Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah` was written by a Congressite Gandhian Sailesh Kumar Bandopadhaya... and `Secular and Natioanlist Jinnah` was also written by an Indian...

CASTEIST HINDU RSIDHAR`S WONDERFUL QUOTES...

rsidhar,

Since you can`t defend your a-hole of a founder of the nation .. aka Gandhi... I see that now you have taken to post Bengali pro-fazle haq propaganda ... I wonder if you asked what the only Bangladeshi, Sigalph, on this board thinks about Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

And .. if you read closely the article makes the entire case based on personal hostility between Fazle Haq and Jinnah... while forgetting that Suhrawardy was also a Bengali who was favored by the Muslim League leadership over fazle Haq. Fazle Haq we know was a power hungry politician who switched sides whenever he got the chance to.

It Also forgets that the first Bangladeshi Nationalist Party... the Awami League started as the JINNAH AWAMI MUSLIM LEAGUE. Can you please explain if Jinnah`s policies were so bad for the Bengalis ... why did they NAME their own party after him? Can you please explain why?..

Ok so the answer:

Point 1: Doesn`t make sense. Only idiots like Rsidhar will actually quote point 1 as a legitimate point.

Point 2: ``Yet, Jinnah had preferred to promote and project the non-Bengali loyalists, rightists and collaborationists in the leadership roles at both AIML and Bengal Provincial Muslim League(BPML).``

If this means `Suhrawardy` .. I think anyone will agree Suhrawardy was a much more popular leader than Fazlul Haq. Please explain however... why did Fazlul Haq come back begging to Jinnah?

Point 3 This has NOTHING to do with `Jinnah`s evil design against Bengalis. I wonder if this Dalit-hating BIGOT aka Rsidhar actually even read the article?

Point 4 This again doesn`t take into account that FazlulHaq was an opportunist who , while being the father of Lahore resolution and Muslim separatism, went across communal lines just for power`s sake. If Jinnah`s preference of Suhrawardy over Maulvi Fazlul Haq is somehow anti-Bengali, I wonder what more can you say.

Point 5 . ``The most relevant fact is that M. A. Jinnah had decided to nurture and sponsor the conservative elements in the party.``

This is the biggest lie anyone can ever say... Please take a look at the careers of Suhrawardy (who is being considered `conservative`) and compare it with the career of `Maulvi` Fazlul Haq who somehow is being called a Liberal... Maulvi Fazlul Haq had presented a novel solution to the PAKISTAN constituent assembley once: Make Arabic the National Language. The fact that Fazlul Haq had nevertheless sided with Mohammed Ali Jinnah is another fact that this article of revisionism doesn`t take into account.

Suhrawardy named his political party after Jinnah... doesn`t that say anything to refute the allegations of this article?

Point 6 is exactly that an allegation which is not proved.

Point 7 is again an allegation and not a fact.

Point 8 How could Liaqat`s response be indicative of Jinnah` attitude? ... Again this article doesn`t make any sense.

Point 9 and 10 So Punjab is a Majority today.. Should we impose Punjabi as the National language.. I am sorry... whereas Bengalis had other reasonable demands the language demand was frankly stupid. Urdu was a language which was not the language of any ethnicity in Pakistan and hence was the perfect candidate for one national language.





Now coming to the dalit-hating bigot aka rsidhar`s smelly defaecation:

``All in all, an illuminating article about Jinnah`s manipulative and ruthless policies against Bengali muslims that seem to have set the stage for later problems.``

Explain your words .. Ruthless and manipulative. Unlike Gandhi, you won`t find any words of Jinnah declaring that one group is better than the other group. Your usage of the word `Ruthless` shows your bigoted Hindu mindset.. which no doubt you inherited from your Gandhian background.

``If this man had lived for even 10 more years, Pakistan (or what remains of it today) would have ceased to exist by now.``

Read Allan Mcgrath`s `Destruction of Pakistan`s democracy` .. or read Lawrence Zirring or read Ian Talbott... those gentlemen will vehemently disagree with you..

So would both FazlulHaq and Suhrawardy... who followed Jinnah to the hilt despite whatever their differences might have been... and we know as I have already mentioned, that Suhrawardy named his party `JINNAH AWAMI MUSLIM LEAGUE` after his great Quaid...

The bottom line is that ... Rsidhar is trying to hide the crimes of his own father of the nation aka Gandhi who was a casteist bigoted Hindu.. by attacking the pristine personality of Mohammed Ali Jinnah..

Bechara Dalit-hating hindu bigot... another pathetic try by Rsidhar!

-YLH

David Duke is only one of thousands.Many more of written about the Largest Dump of Democracy.

www.yachtpilgrim.com

.

If you want to appreciate Switzerland, visit India. It makes the Bronx look like Beverly Hills. All the guidebooks on India are correct. It is filthy and it is beautiful. It is shocking and it is awe-inspiring. Indians are capable of being helpful, gracious, beautiful, hospitable, generous, thieving, conniving, deceitful and manipulative. To tourists and visitors they are usually polite and always non-threatening yet they murder their politicians, their wives and believers in the ``other`` religion. They are paranoid about their neighboring countries and feel the West oppresses them. They know for a certainty that if it were not for the British occupation, India today would be a world super power. They are consummate bureaucrats who are unable to finish anything. The world`s largest democracy, India is proof positive that democracy may not be for everyone. India is falling apart, crumbling before your eyes: physically, politically and economically. Perhaps it has always been that way. I think the British would disagree.

In the cities and small towns of India the narrow, winding streets are clogged with hoards of people, naked children, cattle, goats, dogs, buses, trucks, hand carts, and rickshaws. Women in yellow and blue neon saris wend through the chaos with a child sitting on a hip and a basket of building materials balancing on their heads. The women seem to do most of the hauling of goods, supplies, firewood, water, sand, laundry; you name it and they schlep it. Camels are reserved for pulling carts laden with bigger, heavier more important stuff: wooden beams, metal pipes and men.

So, with all the squalor, where is the awe inspiring beauty? Well, of course it is in the eye of the beholder. Or, maybe it is as simple as beauty is where you look for it

After a very long and very hot day, Rajee invited us to his home for dinner and to meet his family. We felt touched and pleased. He dismissed our driver and the three of us piled into a tiny taxi and were off to his family`s house. The ride seemed to go on forever as we wove thru ever narrowing streets into the heart of Old Delhi. Along the way we stopped at a flower seller`s stand so Steve could buy a bouquet for our hostess. Finally, the taxi could go no further and we continued on foot through a maze of alleys, some no wider than the horns of a cow. In our western dress, and silver hair we couldn`t have stood out more if we were dressed like astronauts. The maze was a mob of cows, goats, dogs, kids and people moving in all directions on their way home from work or shopping or just standing around, watching the ebb and flow.

Rajee`s house is narrow and shallow, five stories high and constructed of brick and mortar. Like most buildings in India, there is a lot more mortar than brick and it looks vulnerable to a high wind or a little rain. Rajee and his entire family live in the building. His parents live on the second floor; his brothers and their families live on the third and fourth floors, and Rajee, the eldest son and his wife and children have the fifth floor, which includes an outdoor rooftop area. We think the first floor is Rajee`s exclusive domain, off-limits to his wife and children. Each floor was about 500 sq. feet, divided into 3 or 4 small rooms. Small is the operative word here. The kitchen is about the size of a small bathroom or large closet and one side is open to the outside. Furniture is minimalist, limited to a twin- bed-sized bench, with a twine woven seat, and a small low table. Shelves are boards nailed to the wall and the closet is a metal storage container of the type one sees in the stationary supply room at the office. A small black and white TV sat on the floor in a corner. A travel poster taped to the wall was the sole decoration.

We arrived around 7:00 and chatted with Rajee and his family till 9:00 when dinner was (finally) served. At first we were a little anxious about just what it was we were going to have to eat. Fortunately, the dinner was quite good, if simple: flavored rice, a vegetable and curd mixture and a sweet pudding for dessert.

It was a very interesting evening! In talking with Rajee, his wife, his mother and brothers and watching the ways in which they interacted, we got our first lessons in the culture of Hindu India. We also got to know a lot more about our host.

It soon became apparent to us that Rajee had more on his mind than entertaining us. We were not so much honored guests as business prospects. OK, we thought, this is a business dinner. No big deal. That`s as American as apple pie. Rajee made his pitches and we made appreciative sounds. In a way, we had to admire him. He had more deals going than a Moscow gangster. He even had an Amway pyramid scheme going, with him at the top of course. He was planning ``Motivational Seminars`` and had business cards for his soon to be started travel agency. At first we were impressed. Rajee kept referring to the gifts he had received from his clients (hint, hint). Then he overplayed his hand. He brought out a letter he claimed was sent to him by an American family who had befriended him. The letter extolled his skill and virtue and the writer`s affection for Rajee`s wife in the most florid prose imaginable. It read like 16th century love letter from a princess to her Lancelot.

Between Rajee`s self-adulation and sales presentation we asked him dozens of questions about life, death and religion (not politics) in India. It was a fair trade. We were his appreciative audience and he was our tutor.

We learned that both the caste system and arranged marriages are still very much the norm throughout India. Putting other things together, we figured out that women have very little social or economic value. Consequently, a girl`s father must pay the prospective husband for taking the girl off his hands. It is treated and talked about as a dowry but to us it sounded much more like a bribe. Rajee was given a TV, furniture and money. From what we could tell, marriage is more a job definition than a relationship. The woman does as she is told. All the interactions we saw between Rajee and his wife were limited to his telling her to fetch this, put that away and make the kids behave. She spoke only when spoken to. As we sat chatting with Rajee, his sisters-in-law came and went with covered faces. Rajee explained. After a woman marries, she must hide her face from men in her husband`s family who are older than her husband. We asked, why? Out of respect we were told. Hmmm.

Rajee has two female children. Most families are large -- usually about 6 children. His wife has had five abortions, an unfortunate form of birth control. Amniocentesis or some other form of ``prenatal care`` is used to determine the sex of the child. We heard some disturbing statistics about the number of boy children significantly exceeding the number of girl children. Between the gender ratio and epidemic AIDS, the future of the family unit in India looks bleak.

.

A few more observations concerning women in India. As mentioned at the beginning, nearly all the women we saw in both the cities and country were usually working as menial laborers. Women dig trenches, plow fields and scavenge. Young girls work along side their mothers and in the country they herd goats and sheep. We can`t recall seeing any women working in offices, shops, hotels, or restaurants. Indian Airlines flight attendants are all women, however.

Indian women are occasionally susceptible to a unique form of divorce known as ``a kitchen fire death`` caused by a sudden spilling of flaming cooking oil onto a sari. After we were told of this horror we read several newspaper accounts of wives dying in kitchen fires.

What mystifies us is how some women have managed to climb to the top of the political power structure in India despite such seemingly insurmountable hurdles. We suspect that in the end it comes down to India`s three immutable forces: the cast system; extreme wealth amidst unbelievable poverty; and rampant corruption in government. If you believe in reincarnation, pray you do not come back as a woman in India!

While women, especially lower caste women, are at the bottom of the heap, cows have it made! They also provide comic relief for western tourists. Hindu religion holds cows to be holy and so they are treated with respect. In the cities, cows freely walk about the streets, sidewalks and roads. They lie down and snooze whenever and wherever they want. People, cars and trucks maneuver around them. They stroll home in the morning and evening to be milked, but the rest of the time they wander, nibble and nap. City cows along with their sometimes colleagues the goats, dogs, and chickens are part of India`s garbage collection (recycling?) system. They are the only garbage cans we saw in all of India.

Another surprise awaiting us in India was the universal decay. Everything is falling apart. Everything! The quality of new construction is appallingly and inadequate. Every painted surface is peeling. Walls, even in first class hotels, are cracked and water stained, every pipe leaks whatever fluid flows thru, doors won`t close, windows won`t open and they are so dirty you can`t see through them, chairs are broken, telephones work intermittently and there are constant power outages. After staying the night on one moderately expensive hotel we decided the cost far exceeded the value. In the morning we told the manager we were checking out and why. He insisted upon showing us a ``better room`` We very reluctantly agreed and then only to allow him to save face. Steve dutifully followed the manager up three flights of stairs to the better room. In the bathroom, Steve reached for the shower knob to test the water (his standard practice). The knob came off in his hand. Steve turned to the manager, handed him the knob and without a word being spoken by either they left the room and walked to the lobby. Even Indians warned us away from buying anything made in India and they referred to Indian manufactured goods as ``crap``. Although we had expected dirt we were still surprised. Garbage in the streets, filthy tablecloths and dirty flatware in nice restaurants, grimy towels in hotels, clothing always a little grubby and food stained. We chatted with an Indian who had been living in NYC for the past ten years and returned to India for a short visit. Steve remarked that New York was a tough city in which to live. ``Not after living in India`` he answered with a grin. He also reported that ``things had gotten worse, much worse`` since he had left India.

We have to confess that Hinduism is particularly unappealing to our Western, Judeo-Christian vantage. It seems to us to be comprised of a pantheon of rather strange gods and goddesses who assume animal form and evolve and reincarnate. The images of the deities are sufficiently frightening to our eyes as to discourage much intellectual curiosity. Another reason to pray that one does not reincarnate as an Indian woman.

re:Reply #: 886

Prem,

Sorry, i did not read this post earlier. Yes, you may be right. That article is open to different interpretations and is ambiguous to say the least. Imagine it got published in a major Daily.

Sridhar

re:Bukhari`s threat about civil war

Guys,

Who do you think this man is kidding? Does he have so much clout among muslims in India that he can cause a civil war. No way. This guy belongs to the fringe. People on the fringe are unpopular but make popular rhetorics which are quoted by the dailies.

Sridhar

re:Reply #: 917

Prem,

Thanks for your post.

I have been writing in Chowk for a couple of years at least (perhaps more). I had conscientioulsy refrained from passing adverse comments on Jinnah or Islam. My views on religion are well known. I think all religions are great and only the interpretors of religion (VHP, Taliban etc)have been playing havoc.

I had until now not commented on Jinnah. One reason was i do not know much about him. If i have to respect Jinnah, who is held in high esteem by Pakistanis, let latter also respect India`s best known leader and father of the nation viz Gandhi. I do not think Jinnah was perfect. I also do not think Gandhi was perfect. Let us at least agree to respect our national leaders and go from there. I see people like ylh desecrating the name of Gandhi and i say to myself: this has gone on for too long. Let me dig into Jinnah`s past and see how much dirt i come up with. So, i shall continue to post some articles on Jinnah, mainly to prove that he was by no means perfect.

I agree with the feeling behind your post. I did see the movie ``jane bhi do yaro``. Not once but 3 times. It was hilarious. I thought Om Puri excelled in that role as a drunk punjabi.

regards,

Sridhar

re:Reply #: 919

aUDiO-video-RADIO,

Like i said one time before, you are neither seen nor heard but seem to speak trash. My grandfather was in Ministry of External Affairs in the 30s when British ruled India. The capital of India shifted every 6 months to Simla. The whole GOI staff would move to Simla. Perched on top of the hills of Simla, the British, with the help of Madrassis and Chaprasis, ruled over a subcontinent. There was a significantly small number of Tamilians during those times.

Punjabis invaded Delhi after partition. Delhi is a city of immigrants. It is a truely cosmopolitan city, just like New York is. There is a significant population of Tamilians in areas like Karol Bagh, R.K. Puram, Janak Puri etc.

Your outburst is ill-conceived. Have your facts straight next time around.

Sridhar

re:Reply #: 921

tvarad,

Like Shabhana Azmi said, this guy needs to be airlifted and dropped in the center of Afghanistan. The guy is a nuisance. Only people with little popular support make such statements as they know they will be quoted in newspapers.

Sridhar

dost-mittar #847 #883
Re minority/majority
Just FYI, some quotes from elsewhere:
http://www.samachar.com/features/260402-fpj.html

``...``If you seek to give special safeguards to a minority, you isolate it. Maybe you protect it, but at what cost? At the cost of isolating it and keeping it away from the main current in which the majority is going, at the cost of forgetting that inner sympathy and fellow-feeling with the majority``

Whose views are these? It may surprise many but this was said by Jawaharlal Nehru, the chief advocate of secularism in post-independence India.

Then, again: ``I have often strongly disagreed with the government policy of constantly harping upon minorities, minority status and minority rights.It comes in the way of national unity, and emphasises the differences between the majority community and the minority. Of course, it may serve well as a vote-catching device to win Muslim votes, but I do not believe in sacrificing national interests in order to get temporary party benefits...``

These are the words of the late Mohammad Ali Currim Chagla, an eminent jurist and Central minister in his day - and a Gujarati Muslim. ...`` (and Jinnah`s former right-hand man -sadna)