[Reader-list] Fwd: Intizar Husain on Husaini Brahmins

[prabhat kumar]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ali Usman Qasmi <auqasmi at yahoo.com>
Date: 2008/12/10
Subject: Re: Hussaini/ Dutt Brahmins
To: prabhat kumar <prabhatkumar250 at gmail.com>, Shoumen <soumenm.2 at gmail.com>


Thanks for the link. Following is an article by Intizar Hussain, the best
known Urdu novelist of our times. I came to know about the Hussaini Brahmins
from his article.

COLUMN: Brahmans in Karbala
By Intizar Husain


LITERARY NOTES

The history of Husaini Brahmans, as told by Nonica Dutt, begins with ten
Brahmans going to Karbala with the determination to die fighting for Imam
Husain. Among them were Rahib Dutt and his seven sons who fought bravely and
resolutely. With the blessings of Imam Husain they met their death in a
heroic way. Rahib Dutt was the lone survivor of the battle.

WITH the arrival of Muharram this year, I was reminded of an encounter I had
with an unusual, intelligent girl in Delhi who asserted that she was a
Husaini Brahman. I recall referring to Prem Chand's play 'Karbala' in one of
my addresses, which was based on a legend. The legend was about a group of
eight Hindu brothers who had somehow reached Karbala determined to die
fighting for the cause that Imam Husain stood for. They fought bravely and
sacrificed their lives in devotion to Imam Husain. It was in this context
that I was talking about Husaini Brahmans, who seemed to have vanished from
the social scene in India.

All of a sudden, a girl from among the audience stood up and challenged my
statement. She said, 'Here I am before you. My name is Nonica Dutt. I belong
to a Husaini Brahman family.' It was clearly a pleasant surprise for me,
something like discovering a rare bird while walking through a jungle.

The girl promised me an exclusive meeting to enlighten me with interesting
information about the Husaini Brahmanian background of her family. But the
proposed meeting kept on being postponed for one reason or the other.
Finally, on the last day of my stay in Delhi, I received a call from her.

'Let us meet now,' she said

'But I have no evening to spare for you. Today is the last day of my stay in
your city,' I said.

'But I am already in the lounge and I must meet you,' she said.

So we finally had a meeting. She entered my room with two large volumes
under her arm. I proposed a detailed sitting on my next visit, which was due
after a month or so. 'But in the coming months, I will not be in Delhi. I am
moving to Germany and will spend four months at the Humboldt University.'
Nonica Dutt taught history at Jawahar Lal University and had been honoured
with a fellowship from the Humboldt University. Hence she was on her way to
Germany.

'I,' she said, 'told my mother about your comments regarding Husaini
Brahamans and how I introduced myself as one. To that she said, did you tell
him that we don't perform the rituals the Brahmans are obliged to perform.
That we don't go to the temples?'

'Should I presume from this,' I asked, 'that you have turned Muslim.'

'No, we are not Muslims,' she exclaimed.

'Then what are you?' I inquired.

'We are Husaini Brahmans,' she said with a certain sense of pride and added,
'Now, I will tell you about a sign each and every Husaini Brahman carries
with him/her. On his/her throat s/he bears a line of cutting, which is
indicative of the fact that s/he is the descendant of those Brahmans whose
throats were cut in the battle of Karbala.' Then she told me about the
ritual carried out on the birth of every child in her family. She said,
'Among Brahmans, after child birth, the ritual of Moondan is performed. In
our family this ritual is performed in the name of Imam Husain.'

She then went on to tell me the historical facts. 'I will now tell you about
the history of our martyred forefathers.' Pointing to the two books placed
on the table she said, 'our entire history is conserved within these two
books. When needed, I will quote from them.' Considering their worn out and
pale pages, the books, which were written in English, seemed to be centuries
old.

The history of Husaini Brahmans, as told by Nonica Dutt, begins with ten
Brahmans going to Karbala with the determination to die fighting for Imam
Husain. Among them were Rahib Dutt and his seven sons who fought bravely and
resolutely. With the blessings of Imam Husain they met their death in a
heroic way. Rahib Dutt was the lone survivor of the battle. From Karbala he
escaped to Kufa, where he stayed for some time. It is said that Rahib had
the privilege of meeting the members of the Imam's family after the
massacre. He introduced himself by saying, 'I am a Brahman from Hindustan.'
The reply came, 'Now you are Husaini Brahman. We will always remember you.'

Rahib went from Kufa to Afghanistan, and from there came back to India where
he stayed for a few days in Nankana. Nonica paused for a while and then
spoke, 'In the Sialkot district there is a town known as Viran Vatan. That
place is our ancestral home. We are the descendants of Rahib Dutt. He had
brought with him a hair of Imam Husain, which is ensconced in the Hazratbal
shrine in Kashmir. She then recited a few couplets from the book she had
brought along with her, in which these incidents have been recorded. 'These
couplets,' she said, 'are very popular among the Husaini Brahmans.'

Nonica shut the book and said 'Let me inform you that Sunil Dutt was also a
Husaini Brahman. And the father of Nargis too was a Husaini Brahman.'

She got up saying 'Now I must go.'

'I think,' I said, 'after you return from Germany, I should make a point to
come to Delhi so that you can introduce me to your father. I will perhaps be
able to know much more about your ancestors from him.'

She said goodbye and left hurriedly. I had been under the impression that
the story of the eight Brahmins was just a legend. But Nonica firmly
believed that it is a historical fact. And it is the belief of Nonica and
her community that really counts. For them the event is a reality.




--- On *Wed, 12/10/08, prabhat kumar <prabhatkumar250 at gmail.com>* wrote:

From: prabhat kumar <prabhatkumar250 at gmail.com>
Subject: Hussaini/ Dutt Brahmins
To: "Ali Usman Qasmi" <auqasmi at yahoo.com>, "soumen mukherjee" <
soumenm.2 at gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 4:21 PM


I found something coincidentally on Hussaini-Dutt Brahmins in reader list of
SARAI, CSDS!!

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:16:58 +0600
From: "Naeem Mohaiemen" <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] Ruchira Paul: When Hindus Mourned Muslim Martyr
To: "reader-list at sarai.net" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Message-ID:
       <e9cfea7c0812092016s4b7884ej96e1a35d78411220 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

December 08, 2008

When Hindus mourned a Muslim martyr

Ruchira Paul

http://accidentalblogger.typepad.com/accidental_blogger/2008/12/when-hindus-mourned-a-muslim-martyr.html


Today or tomorrow, depending on the sighting of the moon, is Eid
al-Adha, a day of celebration for Muslims worldwide. This year,
December is also the month of Muharram, a religious event of lament
and mourning observed by the Shia Muslim sect.

I recently finished reading The Girl From Foreign by American
documentary film maker Sadia Shepard which I had previewed here a few
months ago. Shepard's journey in search of her Indian born Jewish/
Muslim grandmother's roots crisscrosses through western India and the
Pakistani city of Karachi. It is a fascinating story which I plan to
describe at a later date. Today however, I wish to bring up a little
known fragment of Indian history that had laid buried in my memory for
decades and which an anecdote in Shepard's book helped shake loose.

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls
from practically every part of India belonging to several different
linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi
and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral
homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In
middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the
Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's
family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the
partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said.
We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales
from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story
acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in
Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in
particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the
remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not
a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin.

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more
communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They,
along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to
commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in
the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle
among early Muslims. Of the Dutts was said the following:



Wah Dutt Sultan,

Hindu ka Dharam

Musalman ka Iman,



Wah Dutt Sultan

Adha Hindu Adha Musalman



[Oh, Dutt the king,

follows the religion of the Hindu

And the faith of the Muslim.



Oh, Dutt the king,

He is half Hindu, half Muslim.]



I do not bring up my friend's story in any specially sentimental way.
Looking back on her simply told tale with the political events of
today as the backdrop, evokes more wonder than sorrow.  I was born a
few years after the bloody partition of India. The political and
psychological wounds of that cataclysmic event were raw on both sides
of the divide during my childhood. Yet amazingly enough, there
probably was more mutual understanding between the two battling
communities then than there is today. After decades of mistrust and
alienation, the line in the sand that was drawn across Hindu and
Muslim identities around 1947, has now hardened and appears set in
concrete. As one of the linked articles explains in its somewhat
flowery text:



The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim
Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. Younger generation
Hussaini Brahmins are said to be abandoning their ancestral heritage,
some seeing it as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can an
ambiguous, yet comfortable, liminality be sustained, fuzzy communal
identities giving way under the relentless pressure to conform to the
logic of neatly demarcated 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' communities. And so,
these and scores of other religious communities that once straddled
the frontier between Hinduism and Islam seem destined for perdition,
or else to folkloric curiosities that tell of a bygone age, when it
was truly possible to be both Hindu as well as Muslim at the same
time.



I am not a starry eyed optimist. I harbor no illusions that the
complicated politics of the Indian subcontinent are going to be solved
simply by harping on the feel-good history of shared culture - of
food, music, language, ethnicities and sometimes even religious
celebrations. Nonetheless, those who have turned the region into a
powder keg of hostilities and have fueled communal fires with lies and
revisionist history, need to be reminded perhaps, that if the present
mayhem is always the consequence of past injustices, there are also
many examples of peaceful co-existence that could serve as the model
for reconciliation between south Asian Muslims and Hindus.



Eid Mubarak  to our Muslim readers and to any one else who may wish to
rejoice with their Muslim friends on this day.


------------------------------
-- 
Prabhat Kumar
Ph.D. Student,
Department of History,
South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg,
Im Neuenheimer Feld 330,
69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Mobile: 00 49 17685050077
FAX: 00 49 06221 546381.





-- 
Prabhat Kumar
Ph.D. Student,
Department of History,
South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg,
Im Neuenheimer Feld 330,
69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Mobile: 00 49 17685050077
FAX: 00 49 06221 546381.