In the weeks to come, a two-lane highway in eastern Uttar Pradesh is going to witness a heavy traffic of media vans.
The 90-km stretch between Varanasi and Azamgarh will see journalists zipping back and forth as they cover the campaigns of Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in Varanasi and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav in Azamgarh.
Already, the media has framed the two contests in terms of a religious binary: if Modi has come to Varanasi, the sacred city of Hindus, to enthuse Hindutva supporters, then Mulayam has entered the fray in Azamgarh to reinforce his perceived commitment to Muslims.
TV channels are falling back on stock images showing Hindu sadhus on the ghats of Benaras, and skull-cap wearing Muslims congregating in the mosques of Azamgarh.
But the identification of the two places with these specific religious communities is flawed.
According to the 2001 census, the last available data for the religious composition of the population, Muslims formed 15.1% of Azamgarh district's population. In the Varanasi district, however, they were a marginally higher presence, at 15.9%.
However, this cold statistic cannot alone capture the interwoven tapestry of life in the two places.
Azamgarh has produced a steady stream of eminent writers, both Hindu and Muslim: Ayodhya Prasad ‘Hari Oudh’, Laxmi Narain Misra, Allama Shibli Nomani, Shyam Narain Pandey, and Kaifi Azmi, among others.
Benaras, on the other hand, has nurtured the syncretic traditions of Hindustani classical music. The town was home to sitar player Pandit Ravi Shankar, thumri singer Siddheshwari Devi, flautist Ronu Mazumdar and singer Girija Devi.
Going to prove that India is too complex to be fit into neat boxes, it was Azamgarh that gave us Mahapandit and Varanasi that nurtured Bismillah. Here are their stories.
The Mahapandit of Azamgarh
In a country where translations remain an exception even today, one book written in Hindi in pre-Independence India was not only translated into all major Indian languages, there were also versions of it in Russian, Czech, Polish and English.
The book remains so popular that 70 years after publication, you can still place an online order for the Malayalam version 'Volga Muthai Ganga Vare', a translation of the Hindi work, which is titled 'Volga se Ganga'.
A collection of stories based on 8,000 years of civilisational history along the banks of the two great rivers, it was written by a boy born in Azamgarh district in 1893, who went on to travel to the remotest parts of India and Asia. Rahul Sankrityayan, as he is known, was born Kedarnath Pande and went on to earn the title Mahapandit.
Rahul Sankrityayan was born into a Bhumihar orthodox family of modest means. He grew up in Pandaha village in Azamgarh, and like other boys of his age and circumstances, he learnt both Urdu and Sanskrit at primary school. In his autobiography, he documents his childhood, etching sensitively, in the words of Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell, scholars of languages in South Asia, "the precariousness of life before the availability of modern medicine; and also of the great dynamism and complexity of tradition which underlies every aspect of a child's uprising in Indian society".
But Kedarnath’s formal education came to a crashing end, and his real learning began when he ran away from home at the age of 9. He lived with sadhus, enrolled in a monastery, mastered Sanskrit and picked up languages ranging from Tamil to Pali. While he read about all religions, Buddhism came to influence him deeply, and he changed his name to Rahul (after Buddha's son) Sankrityayan (Assimilator).
His writing career started in his twenties, but political upheavals like the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre radicalised him, and he joined the freedom struggle, and briefly even became the President of the Azamgarh District Congress.
Still, his abiding interests remained travel and scholarship. Sankrityayan travelled to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Kashmir and Ladakh, reading Buddhist texts in the original, salvaging old Sanskrit manuscripts, and producing important commentaries, translations, dictionaries and grammars. He even travelled to east Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Manchuria), Iran and Baluchistan, laying anchor briefly in Russia, where he taught at Leningrad University as Professor of Indology. He married a Mongolian scholar. He came under the sway of Marx, but his writings, now seen as progressive, were derided as provocative at the time of publication.
His most famous work ‘Volga se Ganga’ created much controversy when it was published in 1944. “Some anonymous Swamiji abused Rahul in an article in ‘Vishva-Bandhu’ as Nagnavadi Vedanidak Rahul (Rahul, an advocate of nudity and a vilifier of the Vedas),” writes Prabhakar Machwe in a monograph on Sankrityayan.
Among his many works is a voluminous comparative history of world religions. “In Hindi, there is no other book that gives such graphic and detailed description of Buddhist thought and Islamic thought in one volume,” writes Machwe.
Sankrityayan died in 1963 in Darjeeling, leaving behind more than 140 books spanning diverse genres of travel, history, philosophy, folklore, autobiography and essays.
"In his eventful life, he was a ceaseless wanderer both physically, through some of the remotest parts of India and Asia (and only occasionally Europe) and intellectually, through a largely autodidactic course charted in the choppy seas of literatures, languages, religion, philosophy and politics, as they played out in India, but also globally," writes Dr Maya Joshi, Associate Professor at the Faculty of English, Lady Sri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi.
The Mahapandit from Azamgarh, she says, was "an extraordinary figure from modern India who needs to be read more widely and deeply".
Bismillah Khan of Benares
In July 2002, Ustad Bismillah Khan, the shehnai player from Varanasi, performed in Parliament, along with his student, the singer Soma Ghosh. In the audience were the prime minister, president and several state chief ministers.
Just seven months earlier, terrorists had attacked the Parliament building, heightening tensions between India and Pakistan, where the gunmen were thought to have had their origins. As Khan walked into the hall to play, he turned to Ghosh and said, "Let us, father and daughter, show Parliament that music has no religion. Those who are in tune cannot fight."
That is how Ghosh, who was born and raised in Varanasi, recalled the event. "Baba was troubled by all the terror attacks and riots in the country," said the ghazal and thumri singer, who now lives in Mumbai. "He would always say his true religion was music, that music had no caste."
As Varanasi gets ready for a highly charged face-off between Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party's controversial prime ministerial candidate, and the Aam Aadmi Party's Arvind Kejriwal, it is worth remembering one of the holy city's most famous sons and the syncretic culture of Hindustani music that he represented.
Khan belonged to the city’s minority Muslim sect of Shias. Born in Bihar into a family of musicians, Khan moved to Varanasi when he was six. There, his uncle, Ali Baksh, was the official shehnai player at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of Hinduism's most important temples, and practised in the temple rooms of Balaji Ghat. Khan's father was also a shehnai player, in the court of a Hindu king, Maharaja Keshav Prasad Singh of Dumraon in Bihar.
Noticing that the young Khan had musical talent, Ali Baksh undertook to train him. Khan accompanied his uncle to the temple every day and mastered the instrument over the years. Khan was perhaps single-handedly responsible for bringing the shehnai into the mainstream of Indian classical music. Until then, the wind instrument was mainly associated with temple and wedding rituals.
Though Khan won several awards over his lifetime, including India’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 2001, five years before his death, he lived simply all his life and did not leave behind much for his large family.
He was a pious Muslim, but like many musicians of his faith, he also worshipped the Hindu goddess Saraswati. "This syncretism in Hindustani music is amazing," said Ritwik Sanyal, a dhrupad singer who teaches vocal music at Banaras Hindu University. "I learnt to recite Sanskrit verses from the Dagars, my gurus. And I have learnt hundreds of songs that are rooted in Islamic culture." The Dagar family of musicians are upholders of one of the main schools of dhrupad, one of two forms of Hindustani classical music. (The other is khayal.)
Varanasi has been steeped in music over the centuries, giving birth to two gharanas, or musical schools, one in tabla and the other in kathak. Because of the city's deep connection with music, this syncretic culture carries over into other parts of its life, even though it is primarily thought of as Hinduism's holiest city. "This is a city in which Kabir and Shankaracharya lived," said Sanyal. "Hindu-Muslim syncretism has always been there."
Said the Mumbai-based flautist Ronu Mazumdar, who grew up in Varanasi: "I have been often to Khan saheb's house. It was a secular home that made no distinction between Muslims and Hindus. The atmosphere there was not one of religion but of humanity."
Hindu-Muslim syncretism is not restricted to music; it can be seen in many artisanal trades, the best-known of which is perhaps weaving. The weavers who produce the beautiful silk sarees for which the city is famous belong to the Sunni community of Ansaris, but they work closely with Hindus — from the Vishwakarmas who make the Jacquard looms used for weaving to the Gujarati, Marwari and Punjabi Khatri wholesalers and merchants who commission work and buy their wares.
In the city's Khojwa-Kashmiri Ganj neigbhourhood, Sunni weavers, Shia zardosi embroiders, and Hindus involved in woodwork live side by side and interact closely on a daily basis. "There is no Hindu-Muslim difference in the arts and crafts," said Nita Kumar, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in the US who spends at least four months a year in Varanasi doing research and helping run the non-profit NIRMAN, which she co-founded in 1990. "The artisans work completely together. What is uppermost in their mind is not that they belong to one religious community or the other but that they share the same work."
"The Gujarati traders in the saree business are completely used to daily interaction with Muslim weavers," she added. "There is a high level of tolerance. But I am apprehensive that someone will come along and introduce divisions."
Today, the Muslim presence in music has dwindled because it was mostly concentrated in the shehnai-playing community, which itself has shrunk after the death of Khan's eldest son and nephew. Yet the spirit of syncretism that Khan exemplified lives on not only in Varanasi but through students like Soma Ghosh.
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The 90-km stretch between Varanasi and Azamgarh will see journalists zipping back and forth as they cover the campaigns of Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in Varanasi and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav in Azamgarh.
Already, the media has framed the two contests in terms of a religious binary: if Modi has come to Varanasi, the sacred city of Hindus, to enthuse Hindutva supporters, then Mulayam has entered the fray in Azamgarh to reinforce his perceived commitment to Muslims.
TV channels are falling back on stock images showing Hindu sadhus on the ghats of Benaras, and skull-cap wearing Muslims congregating in the mosques of Azamgarh.
But the identification of the two places with these specific religious communities is flawed.
According to the 2001 census, the last available data for the religious composition of the population, Muslims formed 15.1% of Azamgarh district's population. In the Varanasi district, however, they were a marginally higher presence, at 15.9%.
However, this cold statistic cannot alone capture the interwoven tapestry of life in the two places.
Azamgarh has produced a steady stream of eminent writers, both Hindu and Muslim: Ayodhya Prasad ‘Hari Oudh’, Laxmi Narain Misra, Allama Shibli Nomani, Shyam Narain Pandey, and Kaifi Azmi, among others.
Benaras, on the other hand, has nurtured the syncretic traditions of Hindustani classical music. The town was home to sitar player Pandit Ravi Shankar, thumri singer Siddheshwari Devi, flautist Ronu Mazumdar and singer Girija Devi.
Going to prove that India is too complex to be fit into neat boxes, it was Azamgarh that gave us Mahapandit and Varanasi that nurtured Bismillah. Here are their stories.
The Mahapandit of Azamgarh
In a country where translations remain an exception even today, one book written in Hindi in pre-Independence India was not only translated into all major Indian languages, there were also versions of it in Russian, Czech, Polish and English.
The book remains so popular that 70 years after publication, you can still place an online order for the Malayalam version 'Volga Muthai Ganga Vare', a translation of the Hindi work, which is titled 'Volga se Ganga'.
A collection of stories based on 8,000 years of civilisational history along the banks of the two great rivers, it was written by a boy born in Azamgarh district in 1893, who went on to travel to the remotest parts of India and Asia. Rahul Sankrityayan, as he is known, was born Kedarnath Pande and went on to earn the title Mahapandit.
Rahul Sankrityayan was born into a Bhumihar orthodox family of modest means. He grew up in Pandaha village in Azamgarh, and like other boys of his age and circumstances, he learnt both Urdu and Sanskrit at primary school. In his autobiography, he documents his childhood, etching sensitively, in the words of Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell, scholars of languages in South Asia, "the precariousness of life before the availability of modern medicine; and also of the great dynamism and complexity of tradition which underlies every aspect of a child's uprising in Indian society".
But Kedarnath’s formal education came to a crashing end, and his real learning began when he ran away from home at the age of 9. He lived with sadhus, enrolled in a monastery, mastered Sanskrit and picked up languages ranging from Tamil to Pali. While he read about all religions, Buddhism came to influence him deeply, and he changed his name to Rahul (after Buddha's son) Sankrityayan (Assimilator).
His writing career started in his twenties, but political upheavals like the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre radicalised him, and he joined the freedom struggle, and briefly even became the President of the Azamgarh District Congress.
Still, his abiding interests remained travel and scholarship. Sankrityayan travelled to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Kashmir and Ladakh, reading Buddhist texts in the original, salvaging old Sanskrit manuscripts, and producing important commentaries, translations, dictionaries and grammars. He even travelled to east Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Manchuria), Iran and Baluchistan, laying anchor briefly in Russia, where he taught at Leningrad University as Professor of Indology. He married a Mongolian scholar. He came under the sway of Marx, but his writings, now seen as progressive, were derided as provocative at the time of publication.
His most famous work ‘Volga se Ganga’ created much controversy when it was published in 1944. “Some anonymous Swamiji abused Rahul in an article in ‘Vishva-Bandhu’ as Nagnavadi Vedanidak Rahul (Rahul, an advocate of nudity and a vilifier of the Vedas),” writes Prabhakar Machwe in a monograph on Sankrityayan.
Among his many works is a voluminous comparative history of world religions. “In Hindi, there is no other book that gives such graphic and detailed description of Buddhist thought and Islamic thought in one volume,” writes Machwe.
Sankrityayan died in 1963 in Darjeeling, leaving behind more than 140 books spanning diverse genres of travel, history, philosophy, folklore, autobiography and essays.
"In his eventful life, he was a ceaseless wanderer both physically, through some of the remotest parts of India and Asia (and only occasionally Europe) and intellectually, through a largely autodidactic course charted in the choppy seas of literatures, languages, religion, philosophy and politics, as they played out in India, but also globally," writes Dr Maya Joshi, Associate Professor at the Faculty of English, Lady Sri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi.
The Mahapandit from Azamgarh, she says, was "an extraordinary figure from modern India who needs to be read more widely and deeply".
Bismillah Khan of Benares
In July 2002, Ustad Bismillah Khan, the shehnai player from Varanasi, performed in Parliament, along with his student, the singer Soma Ghosh. In the audience were the prime minister, president and several state chief ministers.
Just seven months earlier, terrorists had attacked the Parliament building, heightening tensions between India and Pakistan, where the gunmen were thought to have had their origins. As Khan walked into the hall to play, he turned to Ghosh and said, "Let us, father and daughter, show Parliament that music has no religion. Those who are in tune cannot fight."
That is how Ghosh, who was born and raised in Varanasi, recalled the event. "Baba was troubled by all the terror attacks and riots in the country," said the ghazal and thumri singer, who now lives in Mumbai. "He would always say his true religion was music, that music had no caste."
As Varanasi gets ready for a highly charged face-off between Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party's controversial prime ministerial candidate, and the Aam Aadmi Party's Arvind Kejriwal, it is worth remembering one of the holy city's most famous sons and the syncretic culture of Hindustani music that he represented.
Khan belonged to the city’s minority Muslim sect of Shias. Born in Bihar into a family of musicians, Khan moved to Varanasi when he was six. There, his uncle, Ali Baksh, was the official shehnai player at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of Hinduism's most important temples, and practised in the temple rooms of Balaji Ghat. Khan's father was also a shehnai player, in the court of a Hindu king, Maharaja Keshav Prasad Singh of Dumraon in Bihar.
Noticing that the young Khan had musical talent, Ali Baksh undertook to train him. Khan accompanied his uncle to the temple every day and mastered the instrument over the years. Khan was perhaps single-handedly responsible for bringing the shehnai into the mainstream of Indian classical music. Until then, the wind instrument was mainly associated with temple and wedding rituals.
Though Khan won several awards over his lifetime, including India’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 2001, five years before his death, he lived simply all his life and did not leave behind much for his large family.
He was a pious Muslim, but like many musicians of his faith, he also worshipped the Hindu goddess Saraswati. "This syncretism in Hindustani music is amazing," said Ritwik Sanyal, a dhrupad singer who teaches vocal music at Banaras Hindu University. "I learnt to recite Sanskrit verses from the Dagars, my gurus. And I have learnt hundreds of songs that are rooted in Islamic culture." The Dagar family of musicians are upholders of one of the main schools of dhrupad, one of two forms of Hindustani classical music. (The other is khayal.)
Varanasi has been steeped in music over the centuries, giving birth to two gharanas, or musical schools, one in tabla and the other in kathak. Because of the city's deep connection with music, this syncretic culture carries over into other parts of its life, even though it is primarily thought of as Hinduism's holiest city. "This is a city in which Kabir and Shankaracharya lived," said Sanyal. "Hindu-Muslim syncretism has always been there."
Said the Mumbai-based flautist Ronu Mazumdar, who grew up in Varanasi: "I have been often to Khan saheb's house. It was a secular home that made no distinction between Muslims and Hindus. The atmosphere there was not one of religion but of humanity."
Hindu-Muslim syncretism is not restricted to music; it can be seen in many artisanal trades, the best-known of which is perhaps weaving. The weavers who produce the beautiful silk sarees for which the city is famous belong to the Sunni community of Ansaris, but they work closely with Hindus — from the Vishwakarmas who make the Jacquard looms used for weaving to the Gujarati, Marwari and Punjabi Khatri wholesalers and merchants who commission work and buy their wares.
In the city's Khojwa-Kashmiri Ganj neigbhourhood, Sunni weavers, Shia zardosi embroiders, and Hindus involved in woodwork live side by side and interact closely on a daily basis. "There is no Hindu-Muslim difference in the arts and crafts," said Nita Kumar, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in the US who spends at least four months a year in Varanasi doing research and helping run the non-profit NIRMAN, which she co-founded in 1990. "The artisans work completely together. What is uppermost in their mind is not that they belong to one religious community or the other but that they share the same work."
"The Gujarati traders in the saree business are completely used to daily interaction with Muslim weavers," she added. "There is a high level of tolerance. But I am apprehensive that someone will come along and introduce divisions."
Today, the Muslim presence in music has dwindled because it was mostly concentrated in the shehnai-playing community, which itself has shrunk after the death of Khan's eldest son and nephew. Yet the spirit of syncretism that Khan exemplified lives on not only in Varanasi but through students like Soma Ghosh.
