Coming out of the shop in south Delhi’s Yusuf Sarai, we walked towards our car. The car was in its usual place, but the driver wasn’t there. Then we saw him, a little distance away, in the parking lot nearly vacant that Sunday evening. He had spread out his mat and was knelt in prayer. But even as he prayed, he saw us and gestured a request for a little time.
I gestured back, trying to say that he should take whatever time he needed. “Let’s not disturb a praying man,” my companion said softly. We waited; the distance between us and the man felt like the threshold of a shrine. It was an unusually empty stretch on the bustling main road. Two other men stood and stared at the praying driver. They were parking attendants, waiting with a card-vending machine to collect the parking fee. They stared, a little restless. It was clear from their stare that this kind of prayer was not part of their life.
The need to pray, a communion with another plane of existence in the midst of a bustling thoroughfare in the middle of the day needs a suspension of labour. That’s what had put a pause in the evening, in the middle of our shopping trip, and on the ticket-punching work of the parking attendants. Their gaze at the praying man revealed them as unfamiliar to a culture of prayer practiced in the middle of working hours, in the heart of a public space. There might have been other things in their stare – it was hard to say from a quick glance at them. But I found no trace of hostility.
Why would I expect hostility? Anyone living in India today would recognise by now that of all the characters described above, only the praying man was a Muslim. Given the majority religion in this country, the rest were likely to be Hindus, even though I had no information about the parking attendants and couldn’t say that for sure.
Why hostility? Again, no one living in India today with their eyes and ears open, particularly in north India, needs an answer to this question. But even so, Harsh Mandar’s recent article on the incessant and pervasive barrage of onslaughts and prohibitions on Muslim prayer in India has been a reminder of the brutal intensity of this reality.
To pray is to become vulnerable, and the prayer of large groups shapes colossal vulnerable collectivities. The six-week Maha Kumbh celebrations at the confluence in Prayagraj, which rose from the erasure of its past life as Allahabad, has just been blotted by a stampede that has left at least 30 dead and more than 60 injured, with many projecting larger numbers. Mistakes happen and reason is breached easily at moments of mass devotion – as it did during the holy dip on Mauni Amavasya. To stretch our memory is to touch the deadly disaster of the 2015 stampede among Haj pilgrims in Mina in Saudi Arabia, which left over 2000 pilgrims dead. All different events, and tragedies on different scale. But what they have in common is the vulnerability of the praying mortal in a temporary suspension of relationship with the secular world – and often with it, of secular reason, bodily awareness, and safety concerns.
But the work of hate on the vulnerable bares a spectacle of a different brutality as the violence unleashed at places and rituals of Muslim prayer grows to an uglier beast that starts to define our nation. Not very much unlike, sadly, what our eastern neighbour, Bangladesh, has started to emerge as, through their now-widespread attack on places of Hindu worship, prayer, and community.
In his essay, Mandar describes the suspicious policing of a Muslim woman’s prayer for the recovery of her family member in a public hospital in the same Prayagraj, back in 2022. He mentions the 2024 video of a Delhi cop brutally kicking a praying Muslim man in Inderlok. He describes the repeated action of Hindutva groups in disrupting Muslim prayer in malls and streets with the strategically loud and boisterous chanting of Hindu hymns such as the Hanuman Chalisa. And of widespread police violence and restriction on Muslim prayer in multiple locations in Uttar Pradesh.
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What is that makes violence during prayer so terrifying? Particularly on forms of prayer that happen in a public space? Perhaps, most viciously, on rituals of prayer that can happen amidst the daily labour of the everyday? Backed by the now-entrenched culture of hate in India, the sharpest edge of this attack is a horrifying sleight-of-hand between the public and the private. The ostensible target of these attacks is the public nature of the Muslim prayer – that it dares to raise its head in open spaces. But it truly draws blood on the vulnerable flesh of the private. Its deepest cuts are on the deeply personal nature of prayer – the individual in communion with God. The individual who has, for a little while, suspended secular labour and ties with the world of quotidian reality around them, and is vulnerable in their abandonment. That is the most devastating moment for a dagger of destruction to come flying from the world of reality. That is the moment when the individual is at their most lost and naked. This is the moment when the injury is sure to be final.
Our myths, epics, and histories are full of instances when battles had to be paused for hours of prayer. When the vulnerability of the worshipper made them sacrosanct and inviolable. Indeed, the rupturing of intimate communion – not with God but with one’s own – led to the birth of The Ramayana. The curse of Valmiki on the hunter who shot to death the mating crane was to become the first verse of the epic. It’s a communion of a wholly different order than that of prayer. But it too, is a private communion that cut one off from the world, and hence exposed to it one’s soft nakedness.
There is no eruption as violent as when your nakedness infringes on mine. When your moment of private communion intersects with mine – because for the bigot, that intersection is always an act of violence, or at least, an ugly interruption. Growing up in a boarding school where our Hindu prayers mingled daily with the sound of azaan from the neighbouring Muslim village, such an intermingling has been part of my making, and my imaginative life. It was always, I remember, an unequal interaction, where the poverty of the village stood in stark contrast with the elite boarding school run by Hindu monks to inevitably stigmatise religious polarisation in that class difference.
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What are the ravages of that contrast? Do you remember that image from 2023, (published on the news portal, Scroll.in), of the demolished Sher Ali Baba Mazar in Uttarakhand’s Ramnagar tehsil, with its caretaker, Ashraf Ali, standing and praying before the empty space? The mazar had been demolished in May 2023, notwithstanding an initial confirmation that its documents were all in order. Outside the barbed wire fence surrounding the emptiness that threatened entry as illegal and punishable lay a collection of incense sticks, sweets, clay lamps and sacred cloths, invoking the ghost presence of the demolished mazar. It was clear that locals still visited and prayed at the site.
For a moment, the image had taken me back to a photo taken by Ismael Mohamad of United Press International, of Palestinians in Friday prayers near the ruins of a mosque destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. It was an image at once heart-breaking and terrifying, of people absorbed in prayer next to the shambles of the mosque. God is forever absent, but people seek to etch structures marking traces of divine presence that bring communities together. The gaping hole left by the demolition of such a structure had left a lacuna larger than the absence of God.
Still, in the nation of my childhood, that contrast was a private, or best, a localised reality, in times we could at least pretend were secular. But we’ve now entered a six-week cycle of what is possibly the greatest celebration of Hinduism in post-independence India. Spiritual communion, in this festival, has shed the austere loneliness of the private. The dazzling carnival of wealth and glamour draws from the flamboyance of domestic and international celebrities to steal the thunder of God. Cash and luxuries flow like the river water that promises to wash away sins through ritual baths.
The tragedy striking through the Kumbh Mela reminds us of the deeply mortal vulnerability that always makes up the heart of prayer. Time for us to remember that this is a nation where another kind of prayer has been vulnerable for several years now.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.