Walnuts and wells

Shivaratri or Herath as Kashmiris call it, brought me a beautiful notion from the Valley. It came from a young, modern pirzada. He told me that the pirs of Kashmir used religion to preserve water bodies and ensure a hygienic supply of drinking water in the Valley. For instance, no fish are caught and eaten from wells. It has been made taboo through the diktat of the pirs. The reason is, that fish eat the algae in wells which keeps the water potable for human beings. Further, his contention is that “None of the militants are from madrassas, they are from secular mainstream schools.” Instead, madrassas can be used as a positive force for social transformation. He cites the example of Qari Mohammed Hussain Danish, the preacher and imam of the Jamia Masjid, Kupwara, who runs a madrassa with about 200 students. The locals began to steal electricity for their studies and gatherings. But the imam reproached them: “Do you think your Koranic prayers will reach Allah when you read them by stolen light?” This so abashed them that they stopped and began to pay for their electricity.

The pirzada is dead keen that religion, the only force capable of actually shaming people into good behaviour, should be innovatively used by priests and preachers. I was happy to recall the fine example at Anandpur Sahib during the Khalsa Tercentenary, when they gave away saplings of neem, shisham and so on, as prasad.

The next day I was summoned to Shiv Puja at a Kashmiri Pandit’s home, something I’ve been promising to attend for the last eight years but never could. I was fascinated to see two large earthern pots and one little one ‘installed’ in the worship area. They represented Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh! Soaking inside them were walnuts, which, in a fertility ritual, would be handed round as prasad after a few days.

Meanwhile, another friend, a Dogri lady who spent her childhood in Kashmir told me how her neighbours steal her flowers and when she protests, turn around and say righteously, “It’s for puja”. But who, like the Imam of Kupwara, will tell them that God may not appreciate such tainted offerings? Now suppose the Acharya Sabha (the equivalent of the Jamaat-e-Ulema) were to pass a resolution that during the right season, temples across India will hand out flowering creepers and puja plants in little earthern pots as prasad for devotees instead of laddoos, especially to poor people in slums. Just imagine madhumalati, jabakusum, champaka, malli, roja, chameli, juhi, raktakarabi, tulasi, spreading across our dirty little towns. Suppose there was an all-India inter-faith move on this, since everybody offers flowers to God? Before we tackle ideological issues, why don’t we first spread a green carpet together to sit on?