Skip to main content

Reconnecting history in Malala’s land



When the voice of truth rises from the minarets,
The Buddha smiles,
And the broken chain of history reconnects.

The lines are from the poem, The Relics of Butkara, written by Malala’s father and quoted by her in her autobiography, I am Malala.  I’m still reading the book and found this passage about Butkara, her birthplace, interesting.

“Our Butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide and seek,” she writes.  They were relics from the days when Buddhism was practised by the people of the place.  In other words, Malala’s forefathers must have been Buddhists.  The people who are now Muslims have a Buddhist ancestry.  It is that reconnection that Malala’s father speaks about in his poem. 

“Islam came to our valley (Swat) in the eleventh century when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded from Afghanistan and became our ruler, but in ancient times Swat was a Buddhist kingdom,” writes Malala.  “The Buddhists had arrived here in the second century and their kings ruled the valley for more than 500 years.  Chinese explorers wrote stories of how there were 1,400 Buddhist monasteries along the banks of the River Swat, and the magical sound of temple bells would ring out across the valley.  The temples are long gone, but almost anywhere you go in Swat, amid all the primroses and other wild flowers, you find their remains.  We would often picnic among rock carvings of a smiling fat Buddha sitting cross-legged on a lotus flower.  There were many stories that Lord Buddha himself came here because it is a place of such peace, and some of his ashes are said to be buried in the valley in a giant stupa.”

The land of that smiling Buddha who advocated peace and simplicity of heart today resounds with booms of guns wielded mercilessly by religious terrorists.  If only the terrorists realised that their forefathers belonged to a different religion altogether.  If only they realised that their religion was imposed on them by a conqueror from beyond the borders.  Would they then still want to kill for that religion?

If only we all understand that religion is a mere ‘accident’, a chance event, that happened to us some time in history due to certain necessities or fortuitous occurrences.  There may be no violence in the name of religion at least.  And much violence in the world occurs in the name of religion, directly or indirectly.

If only we could reconnect some broken chains of history.  The world would be a much happier place.


Wish you all a Happy Diwali filled with the light of awareness, enlightenment. 

Comments

  1. Very few of us realize that many things about us are accidents. As you say, religion is an accident. A person is educated because (s)he happened to be born to parents who could provide education, while another person is uneducated because (s)he happened to be born to parents who could not provide education. One can go on and on.
    Yet, we fight in the name of religion, educated people tend to look down on uneducated people, ...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Agree with you that most of the fortunes as well as misfortunes are inherited. However, as I go on reading Malala's book I'm more and more disgusted with religion-generated violence because that very concept is an oxymoron. But then, I ask myself again: "Is it?" Just like politics has been the last refuge of the scoundrel, hasn't religion too been the last refuge of perverts? Well...

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Loneliest Place

Point Nemo is the loneliest place on earth. It is a point in the Pacific Ocean, about 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land. If you can get a foothold in Point Nemo, what you see all around you will be water and nothing but water, leaving aside the sky above. Water, sky and you. What greater solitude can you ask for? Maybe Henry Miller would be happy there as he could ponder his ‘shame and his despair’ in seclusion. He wanted to do that, according to his Tropic of Cancer , in the vacant sunshine, without companions, without conversation, face to face with himself, with only the music of his heart for company. Maybe Virginia Wolf could be her own real self, sitting by herself “like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake.” Lord Byron can find his bliss there. Though it is not the “pathless woods” that he longed for. But the rapture he wanted so much on “the lonely shore” might come by. “There is society, where none intrudes, / By the deep sea, and music in its r

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

Travancore Before Independence

Book Review Title: The Ivory Throne Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 Pages: 694 History can be more fascinating and gripping than literary fiction. It depends on who writes it. The most boring discourses I have read are in history books written by academic historians. So when I come across good history books, I am excited. Manu S Pillai’s history of Travancore in the first half of the 20 th century is an exquisite work of literature insofar as it blends history with incisive portrayal of certain characters that matter. Queen Sethu Lakshmi Bayi who reigned from 1924 to 1931 is the heroine of this book, so to say. She towers above everybody else though her period of reign was brief and she was only a Regent Queen. The king who succeeded her was not her son. Maharaja Chithira Tirunal (r. 1931-1949) was her cousin’s son. Her cousin, Sethu Parvathi Bayi, was quite a character, a stark contrast to the Queen. The two ladies come alive in this history b