Bhajan singer Munna Master — Muslim by faith, Hindu by art
The lanes are narrow, winding , and flanked on both sides by old, crumbling houses that seem to want to careen into the road. There are hole-in-the wall shops and vagrant dogs that sniff hopefully at you. It’s a shabby place — one of India’s many overcrowded, down-at-the-heel urban localities that could do with some sprucing up. The yellow winter sun doesn’t quite reach the dank gullies here. Yet there’s a riot of sunny yellow shimmying around Delhi’s Nizamuddin Basti today. It is Basant Panchami, the day that marks the arrival of spring. And decked out in bright yellow, the vibrant colour of spring and the renewal of life, people are making their way to the dargah of 13th century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, where Basant Panchami has been celebrated for over 700 hundred years.
Legend has it that when Hazrat Nizamuddin’s beloved nephew Taqiuddin Nuh died, the saint sank into a state of prolonged grief. The poet Amir Khusrau, who was Nizamuddin’s follower, desperately wanted to cheer him up. One day, Khusrau saw a group of women dressed in yellow and carrying yellow mustard flowers, singing as they went by. They told him that they were going to the temple to celebrate the festival of spring. Khusrau then decided to dress up similarly in a yellow saree and went to the Hazrat and began to sing. Amused by his costume and his antics, the saint is said to have finally broken into a smile. And since then, the celebration of Basant Panchami, which is essentially a Hindu rite, became a tradition in the order of Hazrat Nizamuddin.
To come to the Nizamuddin dargah on this day is to witness a soul-stirring sight. The place is aglow with boys and men dressed in yellow scarves, kurtas and bandanas, women in yellow odhnis, little boys holding sprigs of mustard blooms, baskets with masses of marigold and sunflower petals being carried into the shrine…then the qawwals break into joyous vernal songs to the beat of dholaks and fistfuls of golden flower petals are thrown up in the air.
Standing in the crowded courtyard before the shrine, and feeling the flower petals fall like benediction on your head, you marvel at this remarkable spectacle of India’s multicultural ethos, the so-called Ganga-jamuni tehzeeb that melds Hindu and Muslim traditions into one syncretic whole. Standing here is to understand that the old school-textbook maxim of India’s “unity in diversity” is not an empty phrase; it is to understand that our shared cultural identity is open and porous and is as vibrant as our individual religious identities; and it is to understand that the essential inclusiveness of our culture continues to manifest itself in heartening ways.
The history of India is alight with this cultural give and take — the motifs of bell and chain and elephant heads sculpted by Hindu artisans into Islamic architecture, Hindu craftsmen creating Muharram tazias and Muslim carpet makers threading the forms of Hindu gods and goddesses into their weaves… Indeed, from the clothes we wear to the foods we eat to the language we speak, everything bears the stamp of our interlinked traditions.
This is what makes the divisiveness of our times so monstrous and tragic. The othering of communities is not unprecedented in this country. But in earlier, unenlightened times, there were men like Sant Kabir to shine the light. A major figure of the Bhakti movement, Kabir said, “Koi jape Rahim, Rahim/koi jape Ram/das Kabir hai prem pujari/dono ko parnam (Some worship Rahim/some worship Ram/kabir worships love/and respects them both).” In another age, a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was martyred because he would not favour one over the other.
Sadly, there is no messiah of tolerance today who speaks the language of universal love. No compelling voice has emerged to lead us out of the recreated narrative of hate. At the Nizamuddin dargah one hears murmurs that the Basant Panchami celebrations have become much less exuberant in the last few years since religious polarisation has alienated many. What a pity it will be if long-held traditions of inter-faith harmony wither away because brute majoritarianism seems to have become the order of the day.