The Island Shrine: An Introduction to India
“You’ll have converted me to Islam by the end of this trip,” I quipped to Hamza from across the wooden row boat. We were on our way to a little island in Bhopal’s Upper Lake to visit a dargah, the name for Sufi Muslim shrines. This dargah was for the Sufi saint named Shah Ali Shah.
“No no you have it all wrong,” he corrected me through laughter. The man we paid 300 rupees to ferry us to the island didn’t speak English and paid no attention. “I am not converting you, I am reverting you. You were born a Muslim in the eyes of Allah but then strayed from the faith when you became an atheist. I’m just guiding you back to the one true path.” This became our running joke as he chaperoned me through India: Hamza was reverting me, civilizing the savage, bearing the Brown Man’s Burden with enough humor and pride to make Kipling roll in his grave like a birling log.
Bhopal is a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, which literally means Central Province. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge of India that’s the envy of travel writers and guidebooks alike, Hamza is from the western state of Gujarat and couldn’t tell me who or what Ali Shah was a saint for. However, he did tell me that the very question came from a misunderstanding. “Saint” is an imprecise translation of the Arabic word “wali,” which refers to revered holy persons. The English word saint carries Christian connotations of institutional recognition, like when the Vatican canonizes somebody into sainthood. Sufi Muslim saints are not attached to institutions and are often revered locally. During our visit to his dargah Ali Shah was therefore the saint of nothing and anything. It turns out he’s actually the patron saint for local fishermen, but we discovered that later.
Ali Shah’s island is small and circular. The surrounding edge is marsh and most of its solid center, including the shrine, is hidden from the lake by a perimeter of thin trees. As we disembarked at the narrow dock we realized I might not be allowed in. I was wearing shorts, and men must cover their legs in Muslim holy spaces. It was a stupid mistake, but we were in central India during a historically violent heat wave, and I foolishly decided to dress like it. Hamza had me wait on the dock and went ahead to inveigle the Imam.
As Hamza’s guest, visiting to learn about South Asian Muslim culture, I was welcomed into every mosque before this. Colorism on the subcontinent also means lighter-skinned people, especially white foreigners, are treated with unearned preference. We planned for this and uncomfortably used it to our advantage when navigating conflict, but it mostly just made people eager to talk with me.
White faces are already uncommon in Bhopal, especially in Muslim spaces like the Jama Masjid. (Jama Masjid is the general name for the main mosque of a city. The Jama Masjid of Delhi is grand, but the Jama Masjid of Bhopal, styled in its image and formally named the Taj-Ul Masaajid, is the largest masjid in Asia.) There I simply met the curious stares with a smiling “Asalaam alaykum,” alighting their faces with happy surprise that I knew their greeting.
Muslim hospitality culture is famous for good reason. The reception by Hamza’s relatives was utterly novel. People constantly inquired about whether I was enjoying myself, what I thought about India, and if there was anything I needed. Around the Old City, we were welcomed into the back of market stalls for chai and even dropped in on a wedding at the Taj-ul Masjid that we weren’t invited to. Hamza, tirelessly talking himself into everybody’s good graces, was personally invited to at least three weddings. Against this background, we hoped the Imam of Ali Shah’s shrine wouldn’t be an exception. And if anyone was going to talk our way in, it was Hamza.
I looked up when Hamza called my name. The Imam, dressed in white from his skull cap to his beard and kurta, was beside him eagerly waving me forward. He said he was very excited to have us there. And my shorts? No problem at all. In fact, he beseeched us to take as much time as we wanted inside the shrine. No rush. If we needed anything we only had to ask. I didn’t know what Hamza told the imam, but I was now convinced he could sell steak to a steer.
The shrine was extravagantly modest: a square, single-roomed building covered in colored tiles and shaded by an overhanging; wrap-around roof supported by a pillar in each corner. The entire structure is crowned with a green and white Mughal dome and inside is the tomb of Shah Ali Shah. Standing together beside the tomb Hamza told me he’d pray in silence, and I could meditate on whatever felt appropriate.
White atheists from rural Pennsylvania aren’t usually the target demographic for Muslim shrines in central India, and yet there I was. That seems appropriate, I thought, and recalled that first step on my long and somewhat accidental journey to the Indian subcontinent.
In 2017 I made a Kashmiri-Pakistani pen pal named Afaf who introduced me to the obsidian-tipped writing of Arundhati Roy. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that was the start of a years-long study of the rise of Hindu nationalism, a movement inspired by European Fascism. So, when I met a handful of Indians — Hamza among them — at an international collegiate conference in 2019, a friendship grew around our common alarm. Particularly later that year, when the Hindu Nationalist government of India stripped Kashmir of its constitutional protections for autonomy, opening it to more direct forms of colonization.
Then in 2022, the opportunity came for me to experience firsthand the state of Muslim life in India. I was invited as a guest to the wedding of Hamza’s cousin in Bhopal, a sweltering textbook of a city in Madhya Pradesh that was the seat of its eponymous Muslim princely state before Partition. Bhopal now has a Hindu majority which provides scant funding to maintain the various decomposing, historic forts and mosques of the Old City. They’ve even begun erasing the Muslim names of villages and public sites to Hindu ones, as the BJP and their allies have been doing across the country and Kashmir.
Our first instance of casual hostility with Hindus happened while checking into our hotel in Bhopal. The expressions of the men at the front desk turned sour when they asked for Hamza’s full name and were given a Muslim one. But he was with me, and they wouldn’t risk giving a rare American guest a bad experience, particularly on his first time in their country. Hamza made sure to remind them of this whenever it was necessary.
Hamza could pass as an upper caste Hindu as long as he didn’t reveal his name. He used this ability once before, on a train, to intervene when a group of young Hindu men were berating an elderly Muslim woman. He did something vaguely similar in Bhopal but conscripted me along with him.
Inside a kurta shop, we noticed pictures the shopkeeper hung behind the register, photos of the Lord Ram and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi is the head of India’s ruling party, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which seeks to collapse country of India into a nation of and for Hindus. He was also the chief minister (the equivalent of governor) of Hamza’s home state of Gujarat in 2002. As chief minister that year Modi oversaw a pogrom — more accurately, a practice in genocide — in which over 1,000 Muslims were tortured and murdered in the streets with the help of the police. Because of the pogroms, Modi’s domestic popularity grew, and the U.S. government banned him from traveling to America. The ban was lifted, however, when he was elected Prime minister in 2014. Ram is an avatar of another God, Vishnu, and has become the patron God for Hindu nationalists who, when lynching Muslims, force them to chant “Jai Shri Ram.” This means “victory to Lord Rama,” or “hail Lord Ram.”
Hamza didn’t tell the shopkeeper his name, but he told him something else. I was trying on a blue kurta in the back of the shop when Hamza told me he’d secured a discount. “I told him you are a devotee of Lord Ram,” he said, “and that we just came from the Ram temple, the one we saw a block away.” The man was so pleased to hear this that he cut our price in half. But we had to sell it. “Remember to shake his hand and say, ‘Jai Shri Ram’ when we leave,” Hamza said. He would too.
It wasn’t that the shopkeeper was a Hindu, but that he was a supporter of the BJP. Hinduism is not the source of Hindu Nationalism. The origin of the persecution of Indian Muslims, like Israeli colonization of Palestinians, is not so-called ancient hatreds. These political conflicts co-opt religious identity to define membership in the nation state, but the conflict itself is not religious in origin. And it’s very modern.
There are many Hindus who aren’t Hindu Nationalists, but there are many more who either are or aren’t moved by the suffering it intends toward communities outside their own. As a result, Hindu Supremacists control the national and many state governments in India.
The BJP is only the political wing of a paramilitary organization called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. One of many Hindu supremacist groups, the RSS is the largest. This violent group — connected to massacres, demolitions of mosques and churches, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and officially inspired by Adolf Hitler — is actually the largest volunteer organization in the world, boasting over five million official members, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The RSS has a United States branch too. Its called the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), and one of its directors was appointed as an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security. Hindu Nationalists have an extensive reach in the United States, but I won’t digress on those details here. This is about the state of crisis in India itself. Here’s an example of the general climate.
In December 2019 the BJP began legally defining Indian citizenship along religious lines, excluding only Muslims from the list of immigrants eligible for naturalization through the Citizenship Amendment Act. In February 2022 the BJP’s official Instagram account shared cartoons cheerfully depicting Muslims being hung to death. Confident Hindu nationalist leaders have even been openly campaigning for a genocide of Indian Muslims. Then in November of 2022 Modi’s right hand man and Home Minister Amit Shah described the 2002 Gujarat massacres as Modi “[teaching] a lesson to anti-social elements.”
The threat of violence is growing and hope is diminishing so much that some younger Muslims who can afford to leave the country are doing so. This is what the Bhopali shopkeeper was supporting and celebrating.
I left Bhopal a couple days later with the same longing to stay that I carry out of most cities. But Hamza and I only had five days to spend elsewhere before going to his hometown in Gujarat and there was just one place we both needed to see. Where I wouldn’t have gone alone and he wouldn’t go without me: Srinagar, Kashmir.
Kashmir is a Muslim region below the Himalayas known for its exquisite beauty and territorial division between Pakistan and India. The portion controlled by India is that country’s only state with a Muslim majority. To subdue their decades-long struggle for independence Kashmiris remain subjugated under one of the densest military occupations in the entire world, which includes a network of torture facilities, civilian disappearances, and mass blindings. Reduced to terrorists — a term reserved for Muslims but never the governments that rape, torture, and murder them– Kashmiris are caricatured by Hindu Nationalists as inherently violent and malicious to justify this subjugation.
Kashmir was where we needed to go and where we needed good luck to avoid any problems. Mostly from the occupation forces, but also to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time if those forces were attacked. In February 2022 civilians were killed in a Srinagar market when a grenade was thrown at soldiers stationed in the area. Militants here explicitly avoid tourist areas, but in Srinagar we weren’t staying in a tourist area. Because of these attacks and the Indian military’s violent repression of frequent civilian protests, the U.S. State Department has maintained an explicit “Do Not Travel” warning for Americans considering a trip to Kashmir.
This is why we only went with each other. Hamza speaks Urdu (though many Kashmiris also speak English) and is a Muslim. This provided cultural access. However, he is a Muslim, and an Indian citizen, which put him at risk from India’s occupation forces. To this end my whiteness and American passport which would ease any interactions we had with them.
Next to Ali Shah’s tomb I considered all of this, where we had been and where we were going. In his shrine the full length of my journey to India became apparent, so with him it became associated. The saint of nothing and anything became my personal Saint of Safe Travel as I asked him to extend our good fortune going forward. I don’t believe in God, but I needed all the help I could get. We wanted no trouble in Kashmir.
We had taken our time in the shrine. Our ferryman stood on the dock frowning in agitation. We thanked the Imam for his hospitality, he gave us a blessing, and we said Allah Hafiz before walking back to the dinghy. With some distance between us and the Island, the setting sun, and the curved silhouettes of birds and bats framing it like a photograph, Hamza asked me a question.
“Hey, do you know why the Imam was so eager for you to come up? Do you know what I told him?” I suspected that the answer was not ‘the truth,’ and prepared for a punchline. “I told him you are a new convert, at the beginning of your journey to Islam!” We both laughed a little too loudly. I’ve never been conscripted into two religions in the same week. Then he leaned forward and in a voice like a pat on the knee he said to me, “Welcome back to the one true path.”
