Temple Traders

As the ongoing Express series on heritage destruction proves, Incredible India is not all that it8217;s cracked up to be, especially our li...

As the ongoing Express series on heritage destruction proves, Incredible India is not all that it8217;s cracked up to be, especially our living temples. However, it is one thing to sell Chinese fairings and another to have pilgrim takeways like the sanjhi stencils of Mathura and pichhwais of Nathdwara, which are art genres of their own. It8217;s nice to buy chadhava of deep crimson attar roses, whose sweetness makes you dizzy with pleasure, outside Gharib Nawaz8217;s ziarat at Ajmer Sharif. Or a fat, pink lotus in a leaf basket to offer Shiva at the base of his temple at Babulnath in Bombay; a dark red sindhora wooden Benarasi sindhoor box in the little lanes approaching Mumba Devi; a St Thomas medallion at Santhome in Madras; a Shivling made of a smooth oval Narmada pebble at the ghat in Maheshwar.

I love the 15-kilo, four-volume set of the Guru Granth Sahib, with Gurmukhi, English transliteration and translation all on one page, that I bought in a very nice bookshop outside Sri Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar and lugged with some effort all the way to Delhi I was on high alert through the journey in case it was inadvertently kept on the ground or in a lowly position even for a second. And the tasbih from Mecca, given me by the Imam Khatib of Tashkent, hangs protectively in my room with the rudraksha malas one from Kashi, one from Rishikesh.

So what am I, a one-woman souvenir museum? Not a bit. If I peep into your home unless you8217;re stuck in 1982 with relentless IKEA minimalism, I8217;ll see all the stuff you8217;ve parked there, right from the Khiva prayer mat and gold-calligraphed Ayat-ul-Kursi from Medina over your door to the rosary and cross from Jerusalem, Velankanni, Lourdes, Fatima or St Peters8217;s, to the gazillion bits of brass, copper, mother-of-pearl and wooden bric-a-brac from temples everywhere. Or, so fragilely powerful, the framed skeleton of a pipal leaf picked up from the Bo-Tree in Gaya.

It8217;s okay, don8217;t you think, to have neat, well-regulated pilgrim souvenir shops outside a religious place? But inside? Not just the law, even the prayer book is against it. No less than Jesus thought it completely wrong to clutter up temples with shops. Check out the New Testament, John, 2:14-16, where Jesus goes to Jerusalem before Passover, 8220;And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting; And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple8230;and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father8217;s house an house of merchandise.8221;

So what are you waiting for, authorities? Hafta?