Mocking the Frontier: The Baba’s Dargah and Chamaliyal

The rickety bus from Jammu to Ramgarh, a distance of some forty kilometres, took more than two hours to reach its destination, stopping after every twenty minutes to pick up large crowds of people heading for the Sufi shrine of the Baba at Chamaliyal. It was Thursday, a day particularly important for the Sufis, and the usual Thursday festivities were being held at the shrine, located right on the Line of Actual Control that separates Pakistani- and

Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Lunch at Ramgarh was simple fare-- hot daal , sarso ka saag swimming in oil and thick, crispy rotis, washed down with a glass of sweet, frothy lassi. There had been news of heavy firing the night before between the Indian Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers in the Samba sector, where Chamaliyal lies. Luckily, Chamaliyal had been spared the fury of the gun-shots, though it was said that some neighbouring villages on both sides of the Line of Actual Control had been hit. That was, a burly, mustachioed, Muslim Gujjar herdsman who was sitting next opposite me, told me, a routine affair. It was actually news when the guns fell silent for a day or more, he said, giving his recalcitrant goat kid a spank every time it bleated.

No vans or buses were plying to the border villages for fear of coming within the range of the continuing shelling. My hopes of visiting the Baba's dargah, about which I had heard so much, seemed dim, when an amiable Sikh drew up to me, leading his horse-drawn tonga. He offered to take me to the dargah for a hundred rupees. I readily agreed, and hopping into the tonga, we set off for Chamaliyal, some five kilometres away.

As the tonga wobbled along the pot-holed road, we passed by lush green wheat fields, the monotony broken by stretches of bright yellow mustard flowers like a patch-work quilt. Robust Sikh women were busy harvesting their crops, while herds of buffaloes lazed around in little muddy pools, soaking in the winter sun. A family of Gujjars moved ahead of us, their animals sending up large clouds of dust in the air. All along, the tonga-driver pointed to me the local sights of importance. 'Here', he said, indicating a field of carrots and onions, 'was where more than a thousand Muslim villagers were slaughtered overnight in the violence of 1947'. He had not witnessed the event himself, and hardly any of those who had lived through those tumultuous times today remain. He then went on to relate a horrific tale of the bloody massacres of that eventful year, in which he and his family, along with several thousand Sikhs and Hindus, had fled across to Jammu from Sialkot, now in Pakistan, and how an equally large number of Muslims in Jammu had been forcibly pushed across into the newly-formed state of Pakistan, much against their will. Several thousands had been slaughtered in the violence in the area, and villages that were home to Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Dalits were subjected to one of the most brutal experiments in ethnic cleansing that the world has ever seen.

Almost an hour later, we passed by the village of Dagh, the last settlement on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control. We crossed a little stream and then headed up a narrow mud path. When we came out into a clearing the tonga-driver pointed out to a clump of eucalyptus trees hardly a stone's -throw distance away. 'That's Pakistan', he said in a matter of fact way, with a wave of his hand. A sudden wave of excitement filled me and ran down my spine. Pakistan! So close, and yet so far!

The tonga trudged down the path in the direction of the trees, streams of sweat trickling down the horse's hairy black coat. Gradually, the large bulbous dome of the Baba's dargah drew into view. We had reached Chamaliyal. At the entrance of the shrine, we were stopped by a smart uniformed Border Security Force guard. He wanted to know what I was doing in the area. 'Just a casual visitor', I said to him. That did not seem to fully satisfy him, for no causal visitors, I was told, have come to the village before, but he let me in, nevertheless.

The Baba's dargah is built in traditional Muslim style, with a large green dome shaped like an onion over his grave. In the small courtyard outside the grave complex, in the shade of a large, gnarled peepul tree, are the graves of two of his closest disciples, again buried in what appears to be Muslim fashion. Yet, almost all pilgrims to the dargah are Hindus. No one seems quite clear as to who the Baba actually was. For most visitors to the shrine, he was a Hindu saint, but some village elders insist that he was a Muslim Sufi with a large following among people of all communities and castes, this being hardly unusual in an area where various Sufi orders have, for centuries, had a strong influence.

According to one version, and this seems to be more convincing, the Baba was a wandering Muslim faqir. He is said to have been particularly popular among the peasant castes, because he dared to oppose to writ of the local landlords. Because of his outspokenness, he and his followers were attacked by the landlords, but although they were heavily outnumbered, they bravely resisted. The Baba is said to have lost his life in a skirmish with a local chieftain, but even after his head had been severed from his body, so the story goes, he kept up the fight, holding his head, dripping with blood, in his hand, finally falling on the spot where his grave is now located. Of his two closest disciples, one was martyred along with him, while the other fled the battle-field. That night the Baba appeared to the latter in a dream, and angry with him for his disloyalty, cursed him with leprosy. The next morning the man awoke to discover his body covered with festering sores and his limbs rotting away. He ran to the Baba's grave and begged him for forgiveness. The Baba then came once again to him in a dream and told him to rub his body with the mud from a pit near his grave and the water of a well close by and he would be cured. He did as he was told and, it is said, the next morning found himself recovered completely. Soon, the fame of the curative powers of the Baba's shrine spread far and wide, and people from all castes and communities started flocking here in the hope of curing various skin ailments. And so it remains till this very day. People with all sorts of skin problems come here, from as far as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, some spending several months at a stretch in the hope of a miraculous cure for various skin ailments. Rubbing themselves with a mixture of the mud of the pit, which they call shakkar or sugar, and the water of the well, which is considered to be sharbat or nectar, they stand in the sun for days on end. Scores of men and women may be seen in this condition on any day

throughout the year, looking like eerie ghouls .

For many Hindus who come to the dargah, the Baba is now remembered as Baba Dilip Singh Minhas, a Rajput Hindu holy man with miraculous powers. The marked Hinduisation of the legend of the Baba, and of his shrine as well, clearly seem to be a post-1947 phenomenon. With the mass exodus of Muslims from the area in the wake of the Partition violence, the shrine was abandoned by its Muslim custodians, but since the local Hindus held the Baba in great regard, they took over its management. As a result, the tradition centred round the Baba seems to have undergone a gradual process of Hinduisation in the years that followed, with the Baba's probable Muslim origins being slowly erased from public memory. In this, the Chamaliyal dargah is not alone, for numerous other Sufi shrines in various parts of India have undergone this sort of transformation in recent years.

In the past, liminality, the refusal of some traditions to be neatly boxed in as unambiguously Hindu or Muslim or other, seems to have been a predicament with which many communities in India were perfectly comfortable. Competitive communal politics based on enumerated communities have, however, played havoc with such traditions, forcing them to define themselves clearly as belonging to one religious community or the other, drawing lines of demarcation that either previously did not exist, or if even they did were so faint as to be of little practical concern. The tradition associated with the Baba seems clearly to have been made a victim of the hegemony of this perverse logic. The most visible indication of this is the effort to give the shrine complex an unambiguously Hindu look. A large, gaudy welcome arch installed by the Border Security Force with a brightly-painted Om symbol in the centre greets the visitor at the entrance of the dargah, and inside posters of various Hindu deities and figures have been stuck on the walls. The actual grave itself has, mercifully, been spared the face-lift, and the mandatory green silk chaddar that is used in most Sufi shrines is still placed over it by visiting pilgrims.

Until 1947 the dargah was looked after by a Muslim family, probably descended from the Baba or one of his near disciples. In the wake of the Partition violence, all the Muslims living in the village and around either fled across the border to Pakistan or else were massacred. No one seems to know where the family now is, but a board put up at the shrine mentions that they now live somewhere in Pakistan. Today, the shrine is looked after by the Border Security Force, which has a large camp close by. The Border Security Force runs a small free community kitchen for visiting pilgrims, and a dormitory for those who stay overnight.

The Baba is said to be equally, if not more, popular among the villagers living on the Pakistani side of the Line of Actual Control. Till the late 1980s Pakistani pilgrims were allowed to visit the shrine during the annual urs or fair, which is held every June. They would participate in the festivities along with Indian pilgrims, and would go back carrying with them buckets full of sharbat and shakkar to distribute as magical cures to their friends and relatives. The outbreak of violence in Kashmir, and the worsening relations between India and Pakistan, have however, caused the Indian authorities to put an end to the practice. No Pakistanis are now allowed to cross the border to visit the shrine. Instead, the Border Security Force makes arrangements for the mud and water from the dargah to be transported in trucks to the border, from where the Pakistan Rangers distribute it to the devotees on the other side.

I spent an entire day at the dargah, and after a hearty evening meal with a local Sikh peasant family, I strolled over to the Border Security Force bunker just behind the shrine and looked beyond. Hardly a hundred metres away were the thatched huts of the Pakistani village of Sayyedan Wali, and a tall border watch-tower, its green and white Pakistani flag fluttering merrily in the breeze. A group of Pakistani farmers were working in their fields and a little country bus was gently rolling down a road. It was getting dark now, and the last remaining pilgrims had already left. 'It is not allowed to look into Pakistan for more than five minutes', a Border Security Force guard gruffly told me, curious to know what I was up to, ordering to leave at once. What would the Baba have to say, I wondered, as I scrambled into the waiting tonga and headed back to Ramgarh.