Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA :

A senior professor and his student occupy a table at Wazir Hotel, off the busy Mohammed Ali Road at crowded Bhendi Bazaar. Over endless cups of tea the professor, a sort of walking encyclopedia on people he met in the past, reminisces about Wazir Hotel’s heyday when it was a favourite haunt of poets, lyricists, musicians, singers and qawwals. Lyricists like Shakil Badayuni, Sahir Ludhianvi and Majrooh Sultanpuri chatted up the music maestro Naushad even as legendary qawwal Aziz Nazan discussed details of his delightful mehfils. And then the professor orders tea yet again but the waiter places two empty cups on the table announcing that the tea is over and the hotel is downing shutters forever. That was in 1986.

This scene from senior Urdu journalist-playwright Saeed Hameed-penned and Mujeeb Khan-directed play ‘Wazir Hotel’ after the long vanished famous eatery is part of Imambada-based Urdu Markaz’s second Bhendi Bazaar Urdu Festival (Jan 8-10). Aimed to revive that fast fading flavor of an era when shairi thrived and culture flourished, the festival celebrates a spirit which today lives in tales and memories.

Many memories will come alive when television actor Neha Sharad reads letters of Safia Akhtar (poet-lyricist Javed Akhtar’s mother) to her husband Jan Nisar Akhtar while ghazal exponent Pooja Gaitonde sings some of Jan Nisar Akhtar’s famous film songs, including the immensely romantic Main tumhi se poochhti hoon mujhe tumse pyaar kyun hai (Black Cat). “This festival dispels many myths and one of them is that Urdu belongs to Muslims alone,” explains Gaitonde.

“The idea is to tell people what Bhendi Bazaar symbolized and can still offer if earnest efforts are made,” says Zubair Azmi, director of Urdu Markaz and the festival. The festival maintains its “secular” character. So, apart from a mushaira featuring non-Muslim poets of Urdu, a discussion titled “Celebrating Urdu” will see non-Muslim intellectuals like Jnanpith Awardee novelist Bhalchandra Nemade and Sudheendra Kulkarni talk about Urdu’s contributions to our celebrated composite culture. “The festival is fast becoming a platform to showcase Bhendi Bazaar’s cultural ethos and promote communal harmony,” says local MLA Amin Patel. While admitting Patel’s “critical facilitation” to host the fest, Azmi agrees with him that the fest needs to be held on a larger scale.

It is not the old-timers alone who will get their antennae recharged through a medley of plays, soirees and singing of Sufi kalams and old Bollywood numbers, but even the young and restless can look forward to fun-filled sessions. “Workshops on drama, fiction, scriptwriting and poetry will engage college students to learning the finer points of these arts,” informs the festival’s reception committee chairman Farid Khan.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India /  News Home> City> Mumbai / by Mohammed Wajihuddin / January 03rd, 2016

Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA :

Makhdum Ali Mahimi, who is buried in the popular Mahim dargah, is the patron saint of the city police.

The Mumbai police was out in full force on Friday to mark the first day of the Urs or death anniversary of Makhdum Ali Mahimi, the man to whom the famous Mahim dargah in the central part of the city is dedicated.

Makhdum Ali Mahimi was a 14th-century Sufi scholar remarkable in many ways, but perhaps the most remarkable is that he happens to have been the patron saint of the Mumbai police since its roots as a citizen’s militia in the 17th century.

Once a year on Mahimi’s Urs, thousands from around the city, not least the Mumbai police force, come to pay their respects and seek his blessings. The Mumbai police force has the privilege of laying the first chadar, or decorative tomb covering, of the Urs in Mahimi’s respect.

The Mahim police station, about 200 metres away from the dargah, has been built on the site where Mahimi is said to have lived. A green steel cupboard in the Senior Inspector’s room is said to contains the saint’s possessions. During the ten days of the fair held each year to honour Mahimi, the office is thrown open for devotees.

“The full Mumbai police follows Makhdumi Baba,” said Basheer Baba, 55, who is among the dargah officials overseeing the festivities. “Nobody can break that bond. There should be more chances like this of Hindu-Muslim love.”

An ancient tradition

On hearing that a journalist was in the vicinity, a series of constables in festive plain clothes ushered this reporter in to a small building off the main compound where the retired senior police inspector organising festivities this year, sat with his team of ten constables.

“I was in the papers today,” the inspector said, taking a small, neatly folded rectangle of paper out of his pocket. “See, that’s my name, LB Shaikh.”

Shaikh, as the Times of India said in its three-paragraph note of the procession’s timings, happened to join the police force in 1979 on the very day of Mahimi’s urs. His first posting was at the Mahim police station. This, he said, gave him a special attachment to the holy man.

“He was not a saint – he was our guide,” Shaikh said. “He was a very scholar person, a spiritual and qualified man. Police used to take advice for unsolved cases and he would help us. This is a long tradition of 500 years.”

Scholar and judge

It is in fact slightly longer than that. Mahimi is thought to have died in 1431, 584 years ago. He was born in 1372 to a family of intellectually inclined Arab immigrants called nawaits. He lived in Mahim his entire life.

Abdus Sattar Dalvi, in a brief history of the Mahim Dargah which is dedicated to Mahimi, writes:

“The figure of Makhdum Ali Mahimi has commanded respect for his unquestioned devotion to his mother, his generosity, his liberal outlook, and his achievements as a Sufi and a scholar.”

As a spiritual and intellectual person, he became a member of an unaffiliated group of Sufis called Uwaysi. He was also renowned for his scholarship, particularly for an early incisive commentary in Arabic on the Quran. Mahimi’s legal excellence, Dalvi notes, was such that Sultan Ahmad Shah of Gujarat made him a qazi for the Muslims of Thana district.

It was perhaps this appointment that led him to be so closely linked with the Mumbai police. The East India Company formed Bombay’s first militia in 1669, soon after the Portuguese had handed over the group of seven islands to the British in dowry.

The constabulary at that time was drawn largely from conscriptions of land owners, but excluded Brahmins and Banias for a fee. Most of the early recruits were from the Bhandari community of toddy tappers, who were among the original inhabitants of Bombay.

As remained the precedent until Independence, the organising officer of the motley group was a European. It was one of these officers who was said to have worshipped the saint and sought his help for cases.

“A Portuguese sergeant at the time used to worship him and seek his advice a lot,” Shaikh said. “In that way he solved many cases. So at the time of his last illness, he said that after he died, only the police would do Makhdum Shah Baba’s seva.”

Faith runs deep

And so it is today. The Mahim police station was built in 1923 over the site of the saint’s accepted abode. Among the thousands of civilians who lined up on Friday for a chance to seek his blessings, were uniformed members of the police force – traffic police in white, the main force in khaki, and even the red of the police band.

The procession on Friday began, as usual, in the afternoon from the Mahim police station. It ended at the Mahim dargah 200 metres away only at around 11 pm.

Three vans, all blaring deafening music, marked the procession lines. One, a group called Shaikh Master Brass, had as its star singer a man from Mazgaon whose claim to fame was being one of the qawwali singers in Deewani Mastani from the film Bajirao Mastani.

A woman dressed in decidedly non-festive clothes and looking as if she were on a mission clutched a decibel meter. When asked which organisation she represented, she wordlessly pointed with an air of doom at its measured 104 decibels and set off once again into the din.

Children and adults alike clambered up to line the boundary walls of residential buildings for a better view as the regular events of an urs proceeded in the centre – devotees swirling incense towards themselves, young men whirling blades to cut their backs, children getting their ears pierced.

Sania Qureishi, 8, was a tough customer. When asked what she liked best about the fair, she pursed her lips and said, “I don’t know yet. I will have to wait and see before I can decide.”

A man for Mumbai

Other places in the city also bear Mahimi’s name, notably the colloquially named JJ Flyover that was until a few years ago the longest in Mumbai. In records, it is called the Qutb-e-Kokan Makhdoom Ali Mahimi Flyover.

Nor is he just the saint of the Mumbai police force. Aspiring actor Ramesh Kumar credits his moderate success in films to him.

“I am a Hindu, but I have faith in Baba,” Kumar said. “Hum jaat ko nahi manta, kalakar hai.”

Kumar, or Junior Johny Lever, as he prefers to be known, said that he has been seeing the procession since he was a child growing up in Mahim. Two years ago, he began to perform comedy and anchor small events at the station. He also got a role as extra in two films. This he credits to the intervention of the saint who he began worshipping six years ago.

Said head constable Chandrakant Salve, “See, the way Mount Mary [in Bandra] and Siddhivinayak temple [in Prabhadevi] are both parts of Mumbai, in the same way even Makhdumi Baba is Mumbai’s only. There is no race or religion here – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, they all believe in him. So do I.”

Behind the optics of the grand gesture, though, some problems remain. Muslims form about 1% of the Maharashtra police force, lower than the national average of 4%, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. That’s the kind of structural imbalance offering a chadar to the saint won’t be able to remedy.

source:  http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Syncretic Tales / by Mridula Chary / Photos by Mridula Chary / December 26th, 2015

I got attracted to history only after I entered the museum

“If we want communal harmony, we must have a proper history to be taught to the people, and the younger generation in particular,” says J. Raja Mohamed.

Having spent over three decades in Tamil Nadu State Department of Museums – first as the Curator of the Pudukottai Government Museum from 1968 to 2003 and retiring as Assistant Director of Museums, Chennai in 2004 – Dr. Mohamed is amply qualified to comment on how we allow our awareness of our past to shape our present.

In a way, Dr. Raja Mohamed’s home in Pudukottai’s Jeeva Nagar neighbourhood is like a museum too, a repository of books from all over the world and his own writings (he is the author of around 10 books in Tamil and English on local history and has published over 100 research papers in art, architecture and history).

Like any good historian, all his statements are backed up with meticulous research. “Many facts in history have been distorted over the years, and we do not know at which stage it was done. Similarly, so many things have not been brought to light,” says Dr. Mohamed, who has specialised in the history of Pudukottai and has also written a seminal reference work on the maritime history of Tamil Muslims (see related story on Page 2 ).

So how did this zoology graduate get so interested in history?

New passion

Born in 1946 in Udayarpalayam (in present-day Ariyalur district) to a middle class family trading in animal hides, the young Raja Mohamed was entering high school when his father suffered a heavy financial loss.

“Paying the Rs. 3 fees for school was a huge problem, and most of my siblings had to stop studying due to this,” he recalls today.

“But I was determined to continue my studies, and so I started working in my free time at bakeries, cool drinks shops and factories, to meet my expenses. Saving those three rupees was very tough because a day’s work would only pay one or two annas (16 annas made a rupee),” he says.

After 2 years of hardship, he was one of 6 students from the Composite District of Tiruchi who won a government scholarship of Rs. 12 which took care of his fees from 9th Standard till the end of school.

He stood first in his B.Sc Zoology course, which made it easier for him to apply for Government service. “I decided to work in the Pudukottai Museum because Zoology graduates didn’t really have a choice in those days,” says Dr. Mohamed. “But I got attracted to history only after I entered the museum.” As proof of that new passion, he went on to earn post-graduate degrees in History, Archaeology, Anthropology, and for good measure, a degree in Law besides a certification in Museum Studies. For his doctoral thesis, Dr. Mohamed researched the maritime history of the Muslims of the Coromandel Coast.

Extensive research

Contradictory interpretation of history has remained a concern for Dr. Mohamed.

“When we read Indian history, the biggest accusation made by big and small scholars alike is that Muslim rulers destroyed temples. Some people may simply be repeating what someone else has said. Nobody has gone into researching the merit of these statements for themselves,” says Dr. Mohamed.

With a grant from the Nehru Trust for Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (NTICVA), London in 1994-95, Dr. Mohamed set out to research Islamic buildings in Tamil Nadu.

The result of his work was published by the Department of Museums in 2004 as Islamic Architecture in Tamil Nadu , a book that contains photographs and descriptions of buildings throughout the State, some of which date back to the 8th Century.

The research showed him many new truths, he says. “As inscriptions on the sites prove, each and everyminbar (pulpit) of the old mosques that we find in the seashore areas to this day was made for mosques. Temples were never demolished or converted into mosques,” says Dr. Mohamed.

The main point, he says, is that around a thousand years ago, “The sthapathi or mason who was building the temple, was also the person to build the mosque. So when he built the mosques, he used Dravidian architecture, but avoided portraiture of figures and icons as per the tenets of Islam. Many structures look like temples, but they are mosques. And they have inscriptions from the 9th Century and 10th Century that state that they were endowed by Hindu rulers. These facts have got obscured over the years.”

Dr. Mohamed’s research also concludes that the earliest mosque in the State was built in Tiruchi.

“It is a small structure built during the Pallava era and is shaped like a temple mandapam, but with an Arabic inscription of old character, of 8th Century. We discovered that it was built in AD 734,” says Dr. Mohamed of the mosque that may be found in the city’s modern-day Fort Station area.

He also deciphered 200 temple inscriptions, and helped to unearth the ancient villages of Ollaiyur (now in Thirumayam district) and Senikulamanickapuram, which has now become a part of Pudukottai.

Some of his ongoing projects include a book on the ancient history of Pudukottai (till 6th Century) for the Central Institute of Classical Tamil. During the fieldwork for this book, he found a rock painting at Kudmiyanmalai, which takes the history of Pudukottai to 2000 BC.

A book on the village deities and folk arts of Pudukottai is also nearing completion. “People have been willing to accept new ideas in religion and live in peace, even though this has not been made obvious in our printed historical records,” says Dr. Mohamed, who received the State award for communal harmony in 2012.

A father of two sons and a daughter, Dr. Mohamed credits his wife Abida Begum for her unstinting support that helped him to spend time “at home and in the forest”, for his research. Not having his parents around to see him achieve his career milestones is a recurring regret.

“But my early struggles taught me to trust hard work, and not luck. I loved my job, and I still love it even though I retired long ago,” he smiles.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Tiruchirapalli / by Nahla Nainar / Tiruchi – November 30th, 2015