Chai and Islam

On a cold Thursday evening in January 2023, I accompanied a friend to the Shah Farid graveyard in the Sabzazar Housing Scheme. Located on the western edge of Lahore, right off Multan Road, which is the main traffic artery in this part of the city, Sabzazar is a dense mix of planned middle-class housing, expanding commercial markets, and pockets of working-class neighborhoods. The Shah Farid graveyard takes its name from the eponymous saint entombed here, whose glittering shrine hovers over the area. However, we were not here to visit this shrine but were looking for Sakina Bibi, an acquaintance of my friend, who had invited us to spend the evening with her sangat. Even before we had alighted from our car, we spotted her waving and gesturing toward us. After exchanging warm greetings, Sakina beckoned us to follow her to the baithak of her saint, Syed Shabbir Shah. This was a narrow clearing between graves in a section of this graveyard where a group of men were seated close to a fire. Sakina proudly informed us that this was the place where her Qalandari sarkar, Shabbir Shah, spent many years when he was alive. While his actual grave and tomb are in another part of the city, his local followers had carved out a small space around a replica grave, which they claimed to be imbued with his sacred presence.

A few minutes after I had paid my respects to the saint by bowing and touching this “grave,” I found myself comfortably seated next to the fire, using a grave as a backrest. Sakina proudly introduced the four men present here as members of her Qalandari sangat and fellow devotees of Syed Shabbir Shah. I also noticed another small group of men a few feet away, who all seemed younger and were seated in a row in a narrow crevice between another set of graves. Initially I was under the impression that Pannu, who was seated right across from me, was the leader of this gathering as the others were showing him some deference.

Introduction

In 1953, the Arabic litterateur Wadiʿ al-Bustani received the Golden Medal of Merit for his Arabic versification of the Indian Mahabharata in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) building in central Beirut. Camille Chamoun, then president of Lebanon, awarded the honour to this member of the famous literary and scholarly al-Bustani family. Wadiʿ's life encapsulates the high degree of global mobility of intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. His hometown, Dibbieh, now lay in the newly independent state of Lebanon. He was born in 1888 in what was then still the Ottoman Empire, studied at the prestigious Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), worked as an interpreter at the British Consulate of Hodeida in Yemen in 1909, translated Umar al-Khayyam's Persian poems into Arabic in London in 1911, and set sail to India in 1912 to dedicate himself to Indian literary works. While in India, he met Rabindranath Tagore. The following years brought him to Johannesburg in South Africa and through political appointments to Cairo and the British mandate in Palestine. He became a vocal critic of Zionist politics and a founding member of several Muslim–Christian societies, taking part in the countrywide general strike of 1936. Later in life, he turned away from politics and dedicated most of his time to versifying Arabic translations of Indian literary works. In 1953, he finally returned to Lebanon, where he died in 1954.

While scholarship has shed light on translation movements from Sanskrit into Arabic during the early Abbasid period (eighth–tenth centuries), such as the Arabic ‘telling’ of Kalila wa-Dimna, there is a huge gap in academic research in terms of studying such translation itineraries between the Arabic and the Indian literary-intellectual spheres, when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, there are several recent advances which aim to remedy this by approaching those intellectual exchanges and itineraries from an Indian Ocean perspective. Esmat Elhalaby studied Wadiʿ al-Bustani's life and work through the notion of an ‘Arabic rediscovery of India in the 20th century’. Elhalaby writes an intellectual history across the modern Indian Ocean region and thereby globalizes the Nahda, often framed as the ‘cultural and literary reawakening’, beyond the Middle East.5 He places Wadiʿ within the conceptual framework of ‘a history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame’.

As months passed at the bazaar my claims of conducting research without seeming to do much were for many of the jhupri labourers really a distraction from a more obvious reality: I was unemployed. The group were then impressed by my swift change in status in subsequent years evidenced by a business card, jumping from a hanger on who drank too much tea to a ‘professor’, as they generously framed various post-doctoral positions. This admiration was accompanied by requests to detail my income and expenditure in minutia, starting of course with salary, tax and housing costs and later, at my own insistence, the much-dreaded nursery fees. Jobs are hard to come by in Dhaka and anything vaguely formal a distant dream for the jhupri labourers. Government positions in particular are rare and much coveted, often requiring extortionate bribes to acquire, similar to how jobbers once mediated work in industry. Many municipal sweepers in Dhaka, for example, are known to have paid up to 10 lakh taka to gain a job, bringing debts but conferring stability of income and other opportunities. A younger labourer in the jhupri group, clearly exaggerating, once claimed to me while looking at the road being cleaned that ‘even the sweepers on this lane are government people, but only us labourers don't have papers.’

The jhupri group have few avenues for getting salaried jobs. Being the sons of labourers, fishermen, small-scale farmers or faded one-time santrashis and having spent years apart from them, means family is rarely a source of strength. Few here can rely on family capital, security, contacts or opportunities. Whatever the jhupri labourers have, they have it despite this background. As children they learned to fend for themselves. The friendships formed here were not only their fictive bhais and schoolmates to play and joke with, but something even closer, brothers to survive with. Viewed from the side of the jhupri lane, their world then is much smaller, framed by the corners of the bazaar. It is here that they can earn, and here that they seek opportunities.