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 On the evening we brought my father's ashes from the cremation ground to be taken to Haridwar I started crying to see my father, a champion wrestler, reduced to a little parcel hung on the rain tree in the garden of his house in Madras. He wrestled at Damdhami Akhara where Lord Shiva's Mace (Chari Sherief) is kept in protection. The Shiva's Mace is taken, once in a year to the holy cave of Shri Amarnath in a procession led by the saints and spiritual Gurus of India, on foot, to herald the beginning of a 'Pilgrimage' to Amarnath. The pilgrimage (Yatra) begins on the day of Shravan Poornima (the full moon day in the Hindu month of Shravan) coinciding with the festival of Raksha Bandhan and the devotees have the darshan of Shiva in the form of a naturally formed 'Ice Linga'. My father had made many a trip, while accompanying the mace of Shiva, to the cave of Amarnath which is the very abode of Lord Shiva and Parvati Devi. Shiva and Parvati are supposed to live in the cave in the form of a pair of doves. Rarely, a lucky pilgrim is able to spot the doves. My father did more than once.
In Damdhami Akhara, he wrestled and taught others
to wrestle, drank six litres of milk and one litre of Ghee in the
morning and evening and got his body massaged with half a litre of
mustard oil everyday. He was the big Dada of Maharaj Ganj and men and
women adored him and came to him for all kinds of problems. He was a
'brave heart' with a strong body and mind and an unbreakable soul. In
the year 1926, Jawaharlal Nehru gave a call to the youth of India to
assemble at the banks of the Ravi river to take an oath to free India
from foreign rule. My father ran away from his home, at the tender
age of fourteen, and took the oath personally administered by Nehru
himself along with the thousands of other youth of the country. He
was also introduced to Gandhi and came under his influence. He
remained an ardent supporter of both Nehru and Gandhi till his very
end. He participated in all the major agitations for freedom like,
Salt Saytagraha, Swadeshi Movement and the Quit India agitation.
He courted arrest three times, during the Lahore
session of Congress, during the Shimla session of the Congress and
during the Quit India movement. But even before that, he along with
his friends, had become part of the social reform movement which was
then sweeping the country. He worked on his spinning wheel daily and
sang 'Ganga kinare kato ye kanwa kheto main kam karo sare sare dinva.
Pano chavani chandi ki, Jai bolo Mahatma Gandhi ki' (Sitting by the
Ganges, spin at this wheel and work in your fields all day long. Earn
a four anna silver coin and say victory to Gandhi). He was actively
involved with a group which subscribed to the social agenda given by
Gandhiji and other leaders. One of the important items on their
agenda was freeing Kashmiri Pandit women from the clutches of
Orthodoxy and making them come out of their home to participate in
the freedom struggle. The first thing was to change the way they
dressed in a long heavy and cumbersome woolen caftan with long
sleeves which made their movement very slow. They also wore elaborate
and unwieldy head gears called 'Taranga' comprising a Zari cap (kalpush)
the front of which was meticulously covered by three white cotton
bands, so that the Zari could not show in the front. At the back it
was covered by a long tail like covering to hide the braids of a
woman, over which a thin gauze scarf was worn, which was finally
topped by a white cotton starched scarf which covered them from head
to chest. The whole dress was so designed that no one should be able
to see even a single hair on a woman's forehead nor be able to see
the braids at her back, her hands or her feet.
The Hindu women belonging to the elitist class
including my maternal grandmother wore the burka, the type of veil
worn by the upper class Muslim women in North India and never stepped
out of their houses except in a palinquin. On the other hand a
Kashmiri Muslim woman's dress was more practical. In these
circumstances Gandhiji felt that a Kashmiri Hindu woman had to change
the way she dressed and the way she thought. He wanted them to wear
sarees. Courtsey Gandhiji, the first consignment of Khadi Sarees
arrived in Kashmir sometime in the thirties. My father and other
volunteers distributed them free, two sarees to a woman in the first
phase. A khadi bhandar (hand made cloth shop) was also opened and
subsequently they were supposed to buy on their own.
However, habits die hard. Many women refused to
change. When they walked along the river bank, to go to a temple or
to take a boat, volunteers including my father, standing on the
bridges with the fishing hooks pulled away their head gears. It was a
nasty thing to do to expose the hair of highly respectable women folk
who sometimes were their own mothers and grandmothers. In turn the
women showered a volley of abuse on them, but they were undeterred in
their efforts till the saree finally became acceptable to Kashmiri
women. Shri Bakshi Gulam Muhammad, long standing Chief Minister of
Kashmir, was one of those who stood on the bridge and pulled women's
head gears. Another important item on their agenda was widow
remarriage. The volunteers, about thirty of them, were greatly
inspired by Keshav Chandra Das (he was known as Kasab Bandu in
Kashmir). Not only did they take a vow to work for the widow
remarriage, but also to marry young widows themselves. My father and
all his friends got married to young widows. Most of them were smart,
handsome, educated, young eligible bachelors. However, my father was
a widower. He had lost his first wife at a young age to Tuberculosis,
which was a great killer of women confined within the four walls of
their homes.
The first mass widow remarriage programme was
first arranged at the temple of Ksheer Bhawani where 108 widows got
married to eligible young men from very good families who had
voluntarily come forward. The whole thing was arranged in great
secrecy fearing the retaliation and disturbance from the Orthodoxy.
The process, once begun, could not be stopped. Shere Kashmir Dr.
Shiekh Abdullah was greatly supportive of the widow remarriage
movement. He was secretly funding the cost of these weddings. He also
made gifts to the brides and the bridegrooms. The marriage between my
father and mother took place in 1947 just before Independence. Soon
my mother conceived me. It seems Gandhiji blessed my mother and the
child she was carrying. I was born on the 19th of May 1948 in
Srinagar, Kashmir soon after Gandhiji's assassination, in the house
of my maternal grandmother, at Narpristan Ghat, which overlooked
Vitasta (Jhehlum) river.
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