For the British, who were ruling Sindh at the time, the Zindapir dispute was of limited local importance, and direct notification of the community’s religious divorce was apparently never sent to London. The affair only surfaces twice in British records. The first is in a Public Works Department Resolution of 1894, determining that the land which the Hindus have squatted across the river from the island is of no use to the Government, and can be sold to them, the “Jind Pir fakirs,” for INR 1,000. The second is in the 1919 Gazetteer of Sindh where it is noted that “about twenty years ago… the Hindus abandoned their claim and set up a shrine of their own to Jinda Pir on the Sukkur bank of the river.” In addition, amidst the papers that form the notes and manuscript of Richard Carnac Temple’s book on Zindapir, I came across a typed transcription of this passage from the Gazetteer, onto which Temple had pencilled a date ‘1886′. This tallies with the Sajjada’s memory of the judgement. But neither Temple nor the Gazetteer revealed the original causes of this dispute.
One of the contributing causes of the Zindapir rift seems to have been Hindu reactionary piety. In 1823, when the Nepali missionary Swami Bankhandi arrived in Sukkur, he found that the Hindus had forgotten their ancient lore, and he made it his express mission to ‘awaken’ them to the sacredness of the river. He also wished to wean them away from their attachment to Sufi shrines. To that end, he colonized Sadhubela island in the middle of the river, the perfect location for such an isolationist enterprise. (It was also a direct challenge to Zindapir’s shrine, a mile upstream.)
At the time, Hindu reform movements elsewhere in Sindh and India were encouraging widow remarriage and other modernising trends but in Sukkur the management of the Sadhubela temple believed such projects would ‘undermine the entire Hindu social organisation.’ Sadhubela’s focus was on the entrenchment of ancient Hindu values. (The priests even tried to resurrect the famous Kumbh Mela at Sadhubela, claiming that ‘in ancient times’ this gigantic Hindu gathering was held here, not on the Ganges, that the Buddhists had eradicated the practice two millennia ago, and that Muslims had stifled its revival.)
Sixty years after Swami Bankhandi’s missionary project began, Hindus forsook Zindapir’s shrine altogether. Over the next century, the Sadhubela temple management undertook a series of ambitious building projects on the island, funded by Hindu ‘chiefs, grandees and rich merchants’, with the aim of articulating in expensive white marble their community’s division from the Muslim majority. (Where boats dock at the temple, two white marble tableaux still illustrate to worshippers the options before them one shows a river of naked, drowning sinners – some being skewered and roasted, at least one a Muslim saying namaz adjacent to it is a scene of the righteous fully-clothed, queuing meekly to get into heaven). The white marble was complimented, in the early 20th century, by a flurry of devout publications about ‘Uderolal’—as Zindapir was now known to Hindus. In 1924, a book was published in English on the history of the Sadhubela temple, and another in Sindhi, Gurumukhi and Sanskrit on the holiness of the Indus. All efforts—architectural, literary, financial—emphasised disparity.
Sitting a little mournfully upstream on the near-deserted island-shrine of Khwaja Khizr, the Muslim Sajjada is quick to admit that it is the Muslims who lost out most from the Zindapir dispute “Now very few people come to the island,” he says. “The Hindus were the richest and they made a separate shrine and the Muslims are poor and then in the flood of 1956 everything was swept away.” He has brought with him a copy of his family tree, to illustrate to me how “my Arabic family merged over time with the local culture.” The family tree begins, of course, with Adam and descends via the first Caliph. But during the eighteenth century the Sajjada’s ancestors shed their religious titles and took quintessentially Sindhi names such as “Nimbundo.” They became, he says, “true Sindhis.”
As the Muslims had nothing to gain from the Hindus leaving, and the Hindus wished to reclaim their original lost purity, it seems likely that the Zindapir dispute was prompted by an internal Hindu reform movement. Yet the more I search through Sukkur’s monuments, records, and memories, the more I wonder why it was that the colonial court allowed a community that had worshipped together for eight hundred years to be divided why it conspired in rendering legalistically unequivocal that which had been harmoniously amphibious. It was with incidents such as these that the Pakistan Movement was nurtured, and with hindsight, the dispute over Zindapir does seem to be a precursor of Partition. Perhaps what the colonial court fostered here in the 1880s, was a classic case of divide and rule. As I sit under a palm tree on the island, watching the wooden boats with their voluminous white sails floating past, and observing the already-stoned faqirs mixing themselves another drink of bhang, it seems lamentable that short-term separatist sentiments were allowed to prevail over hundreds of years of shared culture.
Mohanas still live on the river, near both Khwaja Khizr’s shrine and the island-temple of Sadhubela. The unmechanized wooden boats they navigate along the Indus – propelled by sails, rudders and poles – are identical in outline to boats etched onto the five-thousand-year-old seals of the Mohenjodaro city civilization. The Mohanas are a direct connection to the prehistoric Indus river cult, and if anybody has the answer to the mystery of its origins it is they. In 1940, the magazine Sindhian World reported that “the special duty of Zinda Pir is to help the Indus boatmen in the flood season”. Even today, faqirs on the island, and the Mohanas who live here, all say that Zindapir is the “pani ka badshah” (Water King). He lives under the water and the river flows unke hukum se (according to his rule and pleasure.)
In the last 60 years, the Mohanas’ lives have changed significantly. Dams have curtailed the distance they can travel by river, and road-building has created competition in the form of the multi-coloured trucks which now transport most goods around the country. Mohana spokesmen also blame General Zia’s Mujahideen days in Afghanistan for exacerbating Sindh’s heroin and Kalashnikov culture and rendering the river unsafe. All these changes have taken them further away from the water. Even now, the wild, wooded kaccha lands along the riverbank are the domain of powerful landlords and their bandit henchmen, and most Mohanas are afraid to travel far up or downstream from Sukkur. Recently, though, a few Mohanas have begun making the eight-day journey north to collect timber from the kaccha lands again. On the riverbank opposite Sadhubela, enormous wooden sailing boats with crescent-shaped prows are once again being built to do this work. Every day for a week I come to the riverside to watch the boat-building and then, when the boat is ready, arrive to find the Mohanas throwing a party sailing the boat out into the water and diving into the river from the prow.
The Indus boat-people have four family names Mohana, Mallah, Mirbah and Mirani. “When fishermen wear white cotton and carry currency notes, then they are Mirani,” a Mohana who lives near Khwaja Khizr’s island tells me. Miranis are rich they no longer live on boats. Today, most Mohanas aspire to be Miranis to send their children to school, to move off the river and into a pukka home. The further Mohanas live from the river, the more orthodox is their Islam—and the faster their belief in the power of the river, and in Zindapir, dissolves.
But there are still Pakistanis for whom the power of the Indus, and the power of Islam, coexist. Early one morning, I am sitting on the riverbank opposite Khwaja Khizr’s shrine, drinking tea with a family of Mohanas, when I see a woman standing in the river. She has just had a bath in the quiet channel between Bukkur and Khwaja Khizr’s island, and her clothes and long dark hair are wet and tangled. She wrings her hair out, pulls on dry clothes, and then she calls on one of the Mohanas to row her out into the middle of the river. Pervez, a young Mohana whose job it is to ferry pilgrims from Bukkur the short distance to Zindapir’s island, offers to take her, and I watch as she climbs into the boat and sits in the stern. Pervez stands at the prow, pushing off the bank with a long wooden pole, and the boat moves slowly out past the edge of the island. As they reach the main channel of the river, the woman stands up suddenly in the boat, and throws a bundle of cloth into the river. It twists on the surface in a blur of red and gold, before sinking into the river. Then the woman kneels on the edge of the boat, collecting water in a bottle.
“What were you doing?” I ask her when they return. Pervez speaks for her in Urdu “Her child is sick we went to the middle of the river where the water is purest.” He adds what he has told me before “Our Indus water is worth four of your namkeen sarkaari [salty bottled government] water.” He is laughing at the perplexed expression on my face when the woman interrupts.
“Darya main phenkne se sawab milta hai,” she says. You throw it in the river in order to get a blessing.
“Throw what?” I ask.
“The Qur’an,” says Pervez.
“The Qur’an? In the river?” I am shocked. Even now, after coming across such a plurality of practices that fuse Islam and ancient river worship, the idea of flinging the holy book into the belly of the river seems incredible. I begin to ask another question, when the woman looks up at me scornfully from the boat.
“Aap parne, likhne walli hain,” she says, “aur nahi samjhi hain.” You can read and write—and still you do not understand.
Excerpted with permission from John Murray/Hachette India. “Empires of the Indus” by Alice Albinia (Hachette India, INR 550) released in India on September 3, 2008.
This story was first published on September 30, 2014; and it has since been updated.
