Cross-Border Spiritualism
In a Pakistani writer’s spiritual search, the sacred helps transcend hate
Annie Ali Khan offers us a most strange and wondrous book wherein she travels to various shrines in and around Karachi, both Muslim and Hindu. She draws our attention, for example, to the strongly rooted worship of Durga in Hinglaj, Balochistan. The temple there is one of several shakti peeths that dot the subcontinent, marking the spots where parts of Sati’s dismembered body fell to earth. Other landscapes in this country of determined Muslims are made sacred by their connection with the Ramayana—here is where Janaka found Sita nestled in the earth and there, the ground opened for her to return to the protective arms of her mother after her trials in the world of men. Simply because of Pakistan’s demography, it goes without saying that there are more Muslim worshippers at these shrines than there are Hindus, giving credence (as if we needed it) to the idea that holy places in both India and Pakistan say more about shared religious practices than they do about separation increasingly enforced by orthodoxy. How reassuring it is in our times to know that sacred geography still transcends the borders of nations and the boundaries of hate.
Ali Khan is in search of the ‘seven satis’ looming large in her imagination as seekers of truth. This takes her to sites of women’s participation in public religion, showing us that at the intensely local level in so-called ‘folk’ practice of South Asian Islam, women are highly visible and fiercely active. They are honoured as channels and vessels of the divine by the community around them. Ali Khan is equally quick, however, to introduce us to the real lives of these women, filled with the persistent and systemic violence of misogyny that punctuates all of South Asia. In the stories that she tells, Ali Khan does not shy away from calling out the divisive effects of colonial history, nor is she coy about the steady erasure of ‘Hindu-ness’ from a country Islamicised by the predilections and fanaticism of one man, the imprint of whose jackboots still scar the land.
Ali Khan is driven by her own passions and quests and so, despite being conscientiously researched, the book does not proffer a studied anthropology of religious practice and practitioners. Rather, it is scattered, fragmented, lyrical and, somewhat unexpectedly, tinged with personal pain. Most often, it has the feel of a diary or a journal rather than a work ready for publication. But Ali Khan’s unguarded voice, her willingness to be both physically and emotionally vulnerable as she travels and writes, adds to the compulsive and compelling accounts of people and places she has experienced so fully, rendering them fresh and intimate. Ali Khan, in her book, becomes one of the ‘satis’ that she seeks and so, Sita Under the Crescent Moon is a deeply moving portrait of a contemporary woman from South Asia who wants more than life has assigned to her. ■