War and peace

Live like Ali, die like Hussain!8221; This exhortation on a rattle-trap three wheeler in Delhi emerges now and then in my memory like a shi...

Live like Ali, die like Hussain!8221; This exhortation on a rattle-trap three wheeler in Delhi emerges now and then in my memory like a shining beam that stands out on a dark night. Revered all over the world, Hazrat Ali is considered the fount of the mystic tradition in Islam.

Imam Hussain, his son, is particularly remembered during the first ten days of Muharram when the cruel death he and his family suffered is commemorated with matam and re-enactments of the event in lamentation, prayer and passion plays.

This year I found myself perched on a rickety terrace watching a re-enactment of these events by the Iranian Muslims of Mumbai. My mind wandered to that exhortation 8220;Die like Hussain8221;. Was I going to witness something that would help me understand what this could mean?

The drummers started a reverberating beat. Yazid8217;s men dashed in, dressed in brilliant red, faces covered, brandishing sticks with which they hit out at the assembled crowd. Suddenly there was no audience.

All were participants in the drama. The crowd fought back, some were stricken and they fell to the ground. Somewhere at the back a woman got into a fury that the beating had become a little too realistic, and caught hold of the sticks and hit back at Yazid8217;s army until the actor stopped, and soothed her down and took the sticks from her hand to continue his action elsewhere.

The sound of the drums was now accompanied by the sound of cymbals clashing swords, noted my observant anthropologist self. The crowd pulsated. But the banners were aloft and the flowers stood high above the mayhem being enacted below.

What makes the memory of a war in which evil gained the upper hand, turn from the red of blood to the red of roses? How does this magnificent transformation take place? The lamentations for Hussain never speak the language of revenge.

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The real blood that is shed every Muharram is not the blood of the hated other. It is not the blood of Yazid that is shed, Yazid who is remembered with contempt, whose blackened face and demeanor show that he who thought he was victorious has been remembered with loathing and scorn for more than a thousand years. Yazid used politics to legitimise his action.

The judge of his province ruled that anyone who opposed the ruler was guilty of treason, and in that decision gave Yazid the excuse he needed to destroy the person who challenged his rule. In that moment he stamped forever the future of his own memory.

History and myth, blood and roses, blood turned into flowers. War and peace. Past and present. The enactment of a pulsating war, in which the soothing calm of flowers is held higher than everything else. A reminder that while war is a reality, it is truth that will ultimately triumph.