The muezzin’s last call at Babri Masjid: Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K Jha
This guest post by KRISHNA JHA and DHIRENDRA K JHA is an excerpt from their book, Ayodhya: The Dark Night, about the original Ayodhya conspiracy of 22 December 1949
Published December 2011 by HarperCollins India; Rs 499; Pages 232
The sound of a thud reverberated through
the medieval precincts of the Babri Masjid like that of a powerful drum
and jolted Muhammad Ismael, the muezzin, out of his deep slumber. He sat
up, confused and scared, since the course of events outside the mosque
for the last couple of weeks had not been very reassuring. For a few
moments, the muezzin waited, standing still in a dark corner of the
mosque, studying the shadows the way a child stares at the box-front
illustration of a jigsaw puzzle before trying to join the pieces
together.
Never before had he seen such a dark
cloud hovering over the mosque. He had not felt as frightened even in
1934, when the masjid was attacked and its domes damaged severely, one
of them even developing a large hole. The mosque had then been rebuilt
and renovated by the government. That time, it had been a mad crowd,
enraged by rumours of the slaughter of a cow in the village of
Shahjahanpur near Ayodhya on the occasion of Bakr-Id. This time, though
the intruders were not as large in number, they looked much more ominous
than the crowd fifteen years ago.
As the trespassers walked towards the
mosque, the muezzin – short, stout and dark-complexioned, wearing his
usual long kurta and a lungi – jumped out of the darkness. Before the
adversaries could discover his presence, he dashed straight towards
Abhiram Das, the vairagi who was holding the idol in his hands and
leading the group of intruders. He grabbed Abhiram Das from behind and
almost snatched the idol from him. But the sadhu quickly freed himself
and, together with his friends, retaliated fiercely. Heavy blows began
raining from all directions. Soon, the muezzin realized that he was no
match for the men and that he alone would not be able to stop them.
Muhammad Ismael then faded back into the
darkness as unobtrusively as he had entered. Quietly, he managed to
reach the outer courtyard and began running. He ran out of the mosque
and kept running without thinking where he was going. Though he stumbled
and hurt himself even more, the muezzin was unable to feel the pain
that was seeping in through the bruises. Soon, he was soaked in blood
that dripped at every move he made. He was too stunned to think of
anything but the past, and simply did not know what to do, how to save
the masjid, where to run. There was a time when he used to think that
the vairagis who had tried to capture the graveyard and who had
participated in the navah paath and kirtan thereafter had based their
vision on a tragic misreading of history, and that good sense would
prevail once the distrust between Hindus and Muslims – which had been
heightened during Partition – got healed. That was what he thought
during the entire build-up outside the Babri Masjid ever since the
beginning of the navah paath on 22 November, and that was why he never
really believed the rumour that the real purpose of the entire show in
and around the Ramachabutara was to capture the mosque.
Muhammad Ismael had always had cordial
relations with the priests of the Ramachabutara. The animosity that
history had bequeathed them had never come in the way of their
day-to-day interactions and the mutual help they extended to each other.
Bhaskar Das – who was a junior priest of the small temple at the
Ramachabutara in those days and who later became the mahant of the
Nirmohi Akhara – also confirmed this.
Before 22 December 1949, my guru Mahant Baldev Das had assigned my duty at the chabutara. I used to keep my essential clothes and utensils with me there. In the night and during afternoon, I used to sleep inside the Babri Masjid. The muezzin had asked me to remove my belongings during the time of namaz, and the rest of the time the mosque used to be our home.
While the chabutara used to get
offerings, enough for the sustenance of the priest there, the muezzin
usually always faced a crisis as the contribution from his community for
his upkeep was highly irregular. Often, vairagis, particularly the
priest at the chabutara, would feed the muezzin. It was like a single
community living inside a religious complex. Communalists on both sides
differentiated between the two, but, for the muezzin they were all one.
But it was not so once the vairagis
entered the mosque that night. The trust that he had placed in them, he
now tended to think, had never been anything but his foolish assumption.
It had never been there at all. In a moment, the smokescreen of the
benevolence of the vairagis had vanished. The muezzin seemed to have
experienced an awakening in the middle of that cold night. His new,
revised way of thinking told him that the men who had entered the Babri
Masjid in the cover of darkness holding the idol of Rama Lalla had no
mistaken vision of history. Indeed, these men had no vision of any kind;
what they had done was a crime of the first order, and what they were
trying to accomplish was simply disastrous.
Despite his waning strength, Muhammad
Ismael trudged along for over two hours and stopped only at Paharganj
Ghosiana, a village of Ghosi Muslims – a Muslim sub-caste of traditional
cattle-rearers – in the outskirts of Faizabad. The residents of this
village, in fact, were the first to awaken to the fact that the Babri
Masjid had been breached when a frantic ‘Ismael Saheb’ came knocking on
their doors at around 2 a.m. on 23 December 1949. Abdur Rahim, a regular
at the mosque before it was defiled, had this to say:
They might have killed Ismael saheb. But he somehow managed to flee from the Babri Masjid. He reached our village around 2 a.m. He was badly injured and completely shaken by the developments. Some villagers got up, gave him food and warm clothes. Later, he began working as a muezzin in the village mosque, and sincerely performed his role of cleaning the mosque and sounding azan for prayer five times a day until his death in the early 1980s.
In Paharganj Ghosiana, Muhammad Ismael
lived like a hermit. He could neither forget the horror of that night,
nor overcome the shock that broke his heart. He was among the few
witnesses to one of the most crucial moments in independent India’s
history, and the first victim to resist the act. Spending the rest of
his life in anonymity, he appeared immersed deep in his own thoughts,
mumbling, though rarely, mostly about ‘those days’. Life for the
trusting muezzin could never be the same.
(Krishna Jha is a Delhi-based
freelance journalist and biographer of SA Dange, one of the founding
fathers of the Indian communist movement. Dhirendra K Jha is a political
journalist with Open magazine in Delhi.)
courtesy: http://kafila.org/2013/01/07/the-muezzins-last-call-at-babri-masjid-krishna-jha-and-dhirendra-k-jha/
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