![]() Why were only the phallic offerings being removed? Did the young boys know what these offerings represented? Of course they did, which is why they took away only those, leaving toys, bangles and other items alone. I was trying to comprehend the “sanitisation” of the shrine. They would bite those who “disrespected the purity” of the place.ĭriving away from the shrine, I did not give another thought to the story of the lion and the snakes. Then there were “holy snakes” in the graveyard which helped preserve the shrine’s sacredness, the women added. The women told us that the saint could read the intentions of the devotees and if one were frivolous or engaged in “immoral activity” at the shrine, he would take the form of a lion and chase them away. So she began collecting them to “preserve their sanctity”. She explained that young boys who did not understand the significance of the offerings would take them away. ![]() Hanifa had been collecting the phallic offerings for some time and storing them in the house. It was a wooden phallus, 6-7 inches long. “Hanifa, go and bring one from the black bag,” Hajra instructed her when I broached the subject of the phallic offerings. Hanifa, it seemed, was her domestic help. After her husband’s death, Hajira had moved into this house. “He is a saeen,” she said, using a word that implies he suffered from some sort of a mental illness. Sitting next to Hajira on a cot was her teenaged son. Hanifa invited us in and introduced us to another old woman, Hajra. We were moving out when an old woman standing by a house at the edge of the graveyard waved us down. Offerings of bangles, toys, turbans and suchlike, however, were left strewn around the tomb. The village elders had apparently decided that the “vulgar display” had no place at the shrine as it once did. The phallic offerings – made made from wood, mud or marble – which women devotees brought for the saint so that he would bless them with children were locked away. (There is another shrine of Aban Shah on the outskirts of Kamalia town, around 30 km from the archaeological site of Harappa, which receives similar offerings.) The lonely shrine, standing in a graveyard outside a small village in Arifwala tehsil of Pakistan’s Pakpattan district, had been “sanitised”. We were returning from the shrine of Aban Shah, partly disappointed, for, unlike we had been told, there were no phallic offerings hanging from trees or lying next to the tomb. It was a hot summer’s day, the kind when even your car’s air-conditioning refuses to work. Three months on, India’s ban on single-use plastic has flopped.Watch: That moment when a snake tried to enter a moving car with a family inside.Delhi minister Rajendra Pal Gautam resigns after row over him attending religious conversion event.Mangaluru activist arrested for Facebook post mocking cheetah project.How the English department of Aligarh Muslim University nurtured contemporary Urdu literature.‘Maja Ma’ review: Too tepid to be subversive. ![]() ![]() How would famous musicians react to Neha Kakkar’s controversial version of ‘Payal hai Chankaayi’?.Was the British empire a benign, progressive force? My family story proves otherwise.Ramachandra Guha: How political meddling is hurting academic freedom in Indian universities.The legend of Indian khansama has become a hodgepodge of fact and fiction. ![]() Why the Middle Ages have such a bad reputation.‘Ponniyin Selvan I’ and beyond: When jewellery plays a starring role in the movies. ![]()
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