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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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