The Maramon convention in central-Kerala was considered the mother of all conventions. Those days there was only one larger convention which was held somewhere in the Bible Belt in the USA. The week-long event held on the banks of the meandering Pampa in the month of February attracts people of all faiths. An aristocratic Hindu family at Kozhencherry, which everybody referred to as Annachi, provided buttermilk free of cost to all those who wanted it. The convention has completed 127 years. 

I have fond memories of accompanying my grandmother to attend the convention. What attracted me so much were not the theological expositions like the ones given by the American missionary who started the ashram movement, E Stanely Jones, but the rows of stalls put up on both sides of the roads leading to the convention pandal. While returning home, my grandma would buy for all of us roasted gram and one or two pounds of dates.

The stalls were put up mostly by traders from Tamil Nadu and other parts of Kerala. Not only dry fruits, they also sold household items, kitchen knives, locks, gardening tools and anything that you can name. As the saying went, “you can buy anything at Maramon except your mother”. 

Maramon also attracted a large number of beggars, many of them leprosy patients. Christians have a special affinity with them as leprosy is mentioned in several books of the Bible. I do not know whether anyone checked whether the traders and beggars were Christians. 

I used to live at a village in Pathanamthitta called Valanchuzhy. There was a Devi temple in the riverine island there.  Every year, there would be a temple festival for two or three days. Night-long cultural programmes were the highlights of the celebration. It was there that I heard Sambasivan’s Kathaprasangam based on a Russian novel. 

I used to attend such programmes, till I could no longer resist sleep. The festival attracted traders, who did brisk business. They, of course, had to pay a fee to the temple to put up their stalls. No questions about their religion were ever asked.

My friend Jessy Kurian, who is a nun and lawyer, has written about her encounter with a South Indian beggar at the Vatican. When I visited the Vatican with Capuchin priest Bijoy Kapuziner, I also saw a large number of beggars seeking alms there. The authorities of the Vatican do not consider them an eyesore. They do not ask whether they are baptised Catholics to let them beg in front of the highest ecclesiastical authority in the world.

Recently, I read a beautiful story, touted as real, about an American priest who was begging at the Vatican gate. He had all the looks of a beggar, dishevelled hair and in rags. A visiting American priest recognised him as his batchmate of yesteryears.

The next day the priest had an audience with the Pope, John Paul II, when he told him about the beggar who was actually an ordained Catholic priest. The Pope invited them to a private dinner the next day where the beggar, now clean-shaven and in new clothes, was taken inside a closed room.

He confessed to the Pope about how he went astray and eventually became a beggar and the Pope, in turn, confessed to him. Thereafter, he was taken back into the church as a priest for the Pope had the authority to do so. Apocryphal or real, it was really a heart-touching story.

I was reminded of all this when a Hindu fundamentalist organisation in Karnataka gave a call to prevent Muslim traders from setting up stalls on temple festival grounds. It was the same state where a fringe body professing allegiance to Hindutva, raked up the issue of the hijab.

Surprisingly, the Karnataka government has not taken a stand on the festival issue. Nonetheless, two BJP legislators have questioned the move on the ground that it was violative of the principles of equality enshrined in the Constitution. They have asked a pertinent question, how will India react if an Islamic nation like Saudi Arabia or the UAE decides not to allow any non-Muslim to do business there? 

Of course, the Arabs are not fools like these Hindutva fundamentalists. They will never take such a decision for it would be tantamount to cutting the branch on which they sit. Business is to the Arabs what profiteering is to those from a place called Marwar in Rajasthan.

Ask anyone who has done business in Dubai and he will tell you that no country is so good for business as the UAE. The Sangh Parivar might not know that the Arabs have been coming to India for business since time immemorial.

Kodungallur in Kerala was their main port of call. They came mostly in search of spices. This had been happening even before the Prophet was born at Mecca in 570 CE.  It may be news to the Parivar that the first mosque in the Indian subcontinent came up at Kodungallur, courtesy the local Hindu ruler.

Students of history know that until the advent of the Europeans on India’s sea coast, the Arabs were the main traders who took Indian spices to the far corners of the world. At that time, Bepur in Kozhikode was known for ship-making. Today Bepur is remembered for a great writer who lived there — Vaikom Mohammed Basheer.

Those who visit the National Museum in Delhi can see some paintings related to Bepur and they are a pointer to the rich maritime history of Kerala. Unfortunately, the ban the Brahmanical forces imposed on crossing the seas put the curtain down on India’s maritime growth.

Mahatma Gandhi had to fight the Hindu obscurantists before he could cross the sea to study law and become a barrister. It was a Muslim who gave him his first job as a legal clerk in South Africa. Today, Hindus themselves would laugh at the idea that there existed such a religious ban on crossing the seas. One of the Dalit writers has come up with an explanation for the ban.

The Brahmins were elated over their success in banishing Buddhism from India. However, they knew in their heart of hearts that Buddhism was an egalitarian religion and it was growing in countries like Sri Lanka, Japan, Mongolia, Malaysia, Myanmar etc. They did not want the people to know that a religion, which was banished, under the leadership of Adi Shankaracharya, was thriving elsewhere in the world. So they stopped people from crossing the seas claiming that it was a sin to do so.

Whether the theory is right or wrong the fact is that we lost our seafaring ability. Come to think of it, exclusion is dangerous for it extracts a heavy price. All over the world, people are welcomed to religious shrines, irrespective of their religious beliefs. India is an exception. I can’t enter the Guruvayoor temple in Kerala but I was dragged into the sanctum sanctorum of the Guruvaoorappan temple at Mayur Vihar in Delhi by the then temple president and my friend the late K Madhavan Nair.  

Take the case of what happened to Bharatanatyam dancer VP Mansiya. It is a sad commentary on the growing hatred for the other. She was not allowed to perform at the Koodalmanikyam temple at Iranjalikuda in Kerala’s Thrisoor district because she was not a “Hindu”. 

She was born a Muslim but married a Hindu. In due course, she renounced Islam. Today, she does not have a religion which she can call her own. Hinduism is supposed to be a syncretic religion in which even an atheist can find a place of her own. It was Maharshi Charak who first propounded the theory of atheism. 

Mansiya had a similar experience at the Sri Krishna temple at Guruvayoor. What is strange is that all this happens in a state which is considered to be the most liberal and educated in the country. Interestingly, the temple in question is run by the Devaswom (temple) board led by the Marxists. 

Earlier, the dancer was boycotted by the Muslim clerics because she chose to study Bharatanatyam, essentially a Hindu dance form. In other words, she has been at the receiving end of both religions, because she chose to be a dancer and marry a person of her liking. 

Even when there are no scriptural sanctions against her conduct, she is prevented from performing in a temple compound. The temple authorities have justified the decision on the ground that it was part of the temple tradition not to allow non-Hindus to take part in temple programmes. They should have known that there was a time when Dalits were not allowed to enter temples. Manu S. Pillai’s book Ivory Throne explains why the Maharaja was compelled to issue the famous temple entry proclamation.

Today, if a Dalit is prevented from entering a temple, the authorities will have to face penal action. What happened to the tradition? For the Devaswom Board in Kerala, the most important temple is the one at Sabarimala. It attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the country.

In the early twentieth century, the temple was destroyed in an all-enveloping fire. The Maharaja of Travancore wanted to rebuild the temple. Tenders were floated. No one came forward to build it, because accessing Sabarimala through dense forests was not easy. Rather, it was dangerous. 

A contractor from the Polachirakkal family at Mavelikkara, who had completed several construction projects for the Maharaja, was persuaded to take up the job. The temple, made of wood, was built at Kollam. After the Maharaja was satisfied with the work, the temple was disassembled and was taken to Sabarimala in hundreds of pieces.

While the work was still going on, the contractor died. It was his son-in-law who was an Orthodox priest, who completed the work. The temple did not lose its sanctity because it was built by a Christian, whom painter Raja Ravi Varma used as a model to paint a character in the Mahabharata.

Bengaluru, the Capital of Karnataka, was once considered the most cosmopolitan city in the country. It became India’s information technology capital. Visiting heads of state were taken to the campus of the IT giant Infosys. Once, I saw a direct Bengaluru flight taking off from Frankfurt. It was full of passengers.

Today, Karnataka is ruled by a party which came to power not because it won the people’s mandate but because it bought enough MLAs to create an artificial majority in the House. And it has ministers, one of whom openly says that the tricolour would soon cease to be the national flag.

As I write this, a court has ordered the police to file a criminal complaint against minister K.S. Eshwarappa for trying to foment animosity between Hindus and Muslims on the basis of an unsolved murder. He is the one who wants to see only saffron flags all over the state.

At the rate at which fundamentalism is promoted, Karnataka will lose its appeal as the favourite destination for IT professionals and others who plan start-ups. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who heads Biocon Limited, has urged Chief Minister Basavaraj to end the growing religious divide. She said the country’s “global leadership” in tech and biotech was at stake.

In a democracy, the people should have the right not only to select their rulers but also to choose the shops from which they should buy. Nobody has the right to restrict the choice of shops or merchandise to only one set. Diversity is of the essence in a democracy and any step that strikes at the root of this principle is condemnable.

During the second wave of Covid-19 when people in thousands were dying for want of oxygen or ICU care and the people were not willing to touch the bodies of their own relatives for fear of contracting the dreaded disease, there was an undertaker, Abdul Rehman Malbari, in Gujarat who did the last rites of the deceased, depending upon his/her religion. 

The bodies were either cremated or buried with dignity. Nobody asked him how a Muslim could perform the last rites of a Hindu. Similarly, Sher Singh made the increased burials at Jadeed Qabristan, near ITO, in Delhi a possibility. Nobody was willing to operate the JCB to widen Qabristan until he volunteered to do the job. 

Between the two, they did a splendid job. That was also the time when the gurdwaras provided langars of oxygen while even prestigious hospitals tried to shoo away patients. Nobody at the Bangla Sahib Gurdwara asked the patients whether they were Sikhs or Hindus or Muslims or Christians before they were given oxygen.

If death can bring Hindus and Muslims together, why can’t life? Why is the ever-talkative Narendra Modi remaining silent when his followers in power like Eashwarappa in Karnataka are talking out of their hat? Or, is he in collusion with them?

ajphilip@gmail.com