Keeping a solemn oath solemn

A STORY one heard from an associate of Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri possibly frames the debate nicely about India’s chief justice, D.Y. Chandrachud, who has been facing adverse comments over a TV clip that showed him with Prime Minister Narendra Modi participating in a private puja last week. The CJI holds the ritual annually at his home to celebrate Lord Ganesh. The problem, it seems, is that this time Modi was his guest, and in full public view.
There’s nothing seriously wrong with two men performing prayers together. The point is who are we talking about.
The story goes that a friend asked Firaq to evaluate Harvansh Rai Bachchan’s popular Hindi poem Madhushala, or ‘The Tavern’.
Bachchan’s poem is often likened to 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam’s famous tribute to wine. The theme of the goblet and the flask and the saqi permeates Urdu poetry too, both as a metaphor of resistance against the ubiquitous religious vigilante and as a magic potion that few Western poets (other than possibly Coleridge) have cared to indulge.
Firaq’s response to Bachchan’s long poem was scalding. “When Khayyam and his ilk write about wine, they celebrate the implicit romance of mocking the naysayer. In our [Hindu] culture, there’s no limit to the amount we can drink. Therefore, Ghalib doesn’t sound like a drunkard applauding the tavern, which cannot be said about the author of Madhushala.”
In other words, Neruda or Elliot or Nirala would not be able to carry the theme of the goblet with the ready ease that Faiz or Majaaz could. It’s not always easy to appreciate what is being said without knowing who is saying it.
The prime minister and the chief justice — both Hindu men and both representing the secular Indian state at the highest levels — can perhaps try to see the reasons for the worry their being together at a religious prayer has caused. The problem, therefore, is not so much about what is in the TV frame as it is about who is in it.
The issue would perhaps not have arisen had Jawaharlal Nehru shown up — though he wouldn’t, for reasons of state and political propriety — at the chief justice’s residence to celebrate Ganpati. Nehru may have never attended an iftaar party with Muslims or sang hymns at Christmas either, but he was without a shadow of doubt accepted as a symbol of India’s multicultural and multi-religious identity.
Nehru was in all probability an agnostic, not unlike the nastikas of ancient India, the intellectual dissenters who challenged the Brahmanical order with the social tyranny it spawned. And for this, Nehru, like the nastikas, faced vengeful retribution.
The problem in the TV clip was that it was Modi in the frame with Justice Chandrachud. The prime minister has never hesitated to fling communal vitriol at people of a religion different from his. As for Justice Chandrachud’s public appearance with the prime minister at what should have been a private event, it broke the convention of judges preferring to be sequestered from public view.
Also worrying is the timing of the event. Justice Chandrachud is demitting office in November. Such moments are increasingly seen as vulnerable for retiring judges. The bonhomie in the picture is troublesome given the bevy of judges who joined the ruling party or benefited from official munificence with jobs and coveted postings.
But, let’s also listen to Rishi Sunak reading from the Bible at King Charles’s coronation. It was a hugely needed, reassuring gesture for several reasons. Above all, it showed the practising Hindu the former British PM is, displaying an eclectic Hindu creed with the reading. Closer home, had the CJI observed Gandhiji’s profile, he would have found the practising Hindu in him having not only respect but taking care to display it for other religions of India.
India is so rich at its syncretic core. When Kunwar Mohinder Singh Bedi, donning his Sikh turban, recited poems in praise of Hazrat Ali, he gave a healing touch without being contrived about it to Sikhs and Muslims, the mutually hostile communities who inflicted horrors on each other in 1947. In so doing, the Sikh poet acquired the demeanour of a truer admirer of Muslim faith than perhaps the maulvis who ply their religion as a professional venture.
Allama Iqbal sang paeans to Lord Ram, calling him ‘Imam-i-Hind’, and exuded spiritual grace unlike the mobs that built a temple to Ram at the site of a mediaeval mosque they tore down. Maulana Hasrat lent more beauty to Mathura than many Krishna-worshipping Hindus by insisting on visiting the land of his mythical hero after every Haj pilgrimage he made.
Maharashtrian Hindus stage the annual puja to Lord Ganesh with bhajjans composed in alluring Hindustani ragas, whereby the deity who grants boon of wisdom and intellect is worshipped with fervour. Ganesh is also worshipped as ‘vighna haran’, a remover of obstacles.
A private affair common to Brahmin households, Bal Gangadhar Tilak turned the Ganpati celebration in 1892 into a popular street festival and imbued it with nationalist fervour. He attained two objectives here. It enabled him to dodge the British dragnet targeting anti-colonial public gatherings. And it sought to win back non-Muslims who often followed Muslim religious processions with eclectic devotion.
Mixing religion with politics had also picked up steam in colonial Bengal. Maulana Azad, a close associate of Gandhiji, learnt the use of the potent mix from Hindu Bengalis. Thus, he advocated the Khilafat Movement with Gandhiji, which annoyed Jinnah. The Hindu motifs alienated swathes of Indians who couldn’t subscribe to the religious brew. The worrying debate today is clearly rooted in India’s troubled past but also in the waning of the syncretic oath its founders prescribed for the ruling elite.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
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Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2024