Sheikh Othman (Hanuman)
in Yemen
Many years ago, one Sir Syed Ahmad Taqvi bin Syed Muhammad
Muttaqi KCSI, commonly known as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, an Islamic pragmatist, reformist
and philosopher of nineteenth century British India wrote thus at Aden, circa
1870, in his ‘A voyage to Modernism (Safarnama-i-musafiran-i- Landan)’. While
out of the mosque we were sitting in, we met a Hindu and sat with him. He was a
Marwari. He had come to Bombay and ran a money lending business. He had lived
here a long time and traveled by ship. He informed us that there were three
Hindu temples in Aden - Mahadev, Hanuman and one more I don’t now recall, they
were built by donations from the Hindu travelers to Aden. I was delighted to
know that Hindus traveled across the ocean in steamers as far as Aden without
polluting their caste and religion. May god bless the Hindus of our part of the
country also with similar wisdom!
You may wonder why I mentioned this in starting. Well, one
the Hanuman temple and its relevance in distant Aden and secondly the fact that
Hanuman according to legend, reached Aden through a tunnel under the sea.
Surprised? Well, there was such a myth, and recorded so among others, by the 13th
century traveler Ibn al-Mujawir.
And with that, I will introduce you to a certain Arab
version of our epic Ramayana.
Ibn al-Mujawir’s Tarikh is a wide-ranging work, framed in
large part as a typical rihla or travel account of his journey through the
Hijaz and Southern Arabia. In it he narrates - The Indians have reported as follows – Aden was the prison of Dassir, the
name of a djinn with ten heads, one of them
al-Ghazl Dasir. He used to live in the Jabal al-Manzar and take a walk on the
sands of Huqqat. After his death Hanuman lived in Huqqat. It was Solomon, son
of David- PBUH- who drove them out when he arrived in the land of the Yemen for
Bilqis, since the people mentioned above are spirits….Aden was called Samran by
the Hinds…
Jabal irah is a lofty
mountain in the sea opposite Aden and Jabel Al Manzar… In the mountain is a
well called Anbar and called by the Indian sages Fu Bar, was turned upside down
and continuously puts out smoke… No one can look into it because it is too hot,
of difficult access and dark. There are broken stones around the well, also
sleeping vipers and snakes are rearing up. The Indians said that Hanuman, i.e.
the spirit mentioned above dug this well. It is not really a well, but an
underground passage leading under the sea to the town of Ujjaini Vikramaditya, the
seat of King Malwa in India.
I was informed by Mubarak
al Sharabi, the client of my father Muhammad B Masaud, as follows – The reason
of the digging of the well to Fu Bar was that a spirit Hadathar stole Sita from
the regions of Ayodhya, took her off and settled with her on the summit of Jabal
Sirah. He said he wanted to change her shape to that of a Djinni. While they
were engage in argument, Hanuman heard of what was going on, he being another
spirit in the shape of a monkey. So he dug this underground passage from the middle
of the town of Ujjaini Vikramaditya beneath the sea. The ends of the excavation
reached the middle of Jabal Siran and he did all this in one night. He left the
hole and found her asleep on the summit of the mountain under a thorn tree. HE
picked her up on his back and took her down the underground passage, journeying
by night until he reached Ujjaini. As dawn shone brightly, he handed her over
to her husband Ramachandra. She bore him two male children one called Lava and the
other Kusa. There is a long story full of incident attached to her, the telling
of which would take too long, but the underground passage has remained till
now.
Now he continues to mention that this is not the only tunnel
to India – A certain Indian dug an
underground passage in Devalvara in the regions of Al Sumanat the end of which
led to….. in the regions of Devagiri the first part of the borders of which are
Malwa. It also ran under the sea and sand and is said to be the work of a
djinn, there can be no doubt about that! And then he talks about another Indian
tunneler who dug a complex tunnel for a noble man so he could secretly tryst up
with the daughter of the king. Ibn al-Mujawir, also notes that Aden was often
referred to as Habs al-Fir’awn—Prison of the Pharaohs—and Muqam al-jinn—Abode
of the jinn. Ibn al-Mujawir apparently cited his anecdotes from a local Yemeni
chronicle, Kitab al-Mufi d fi Akhbar al- Zabid. In the book, Ramachandra is Ram
Hyder, and Hanuman is Hanumat (hanuman) an ifrit - a clever and powerful form
of the djinn.
Just to see how different people view the same story, take a look at this Mughal painting depicting a scene showing Sita shying away from a differently dressed Hanuman, thinking it is Ravana in disguise.
As we can see, this version is quite different from the
Lanaka Ramayana which we are all familiar with where Rama, Lakshmana and
Hanuman are involved in the rescue of Sita from Ravana living in Lanka. In this version, Ravana is replaced by Hadathar
in Aden.
The temples in Yemen which Muttaqui mentioned are actually the
Tarichmerga Temple which was built in 1862, the Ram Temple built in 1875 and
the ‘Sheikh Othman’ Hanumanji Temple was built in 1882. This was spread over an
area of five acres in the Sheik Othman district. It reportedly used to have a
garden with a pool which was used by the devotees for bathing. It also had two
lodgings for the Indian community. The temple no longer exists now. Another temple
named Shankar Hanuman Temple used to exist: It was built in the nineteenth
century and was located inside a large cave in the Dashmi Bazar, Khusaf Valley
in the Crater area.
But Hanuman as some readers already know was indeed involved
in tunnel travel in Indian versions of the Ramayana and perhaps multiple events
and stories got mixed and corrupted by the time it reached the Arab traveler.
Let’s see one of the many versions to see a possibility.
The war with Ravana is raging. Ravana sends for Ahiravana
for help. Ahiravana arriving disguised as Vibhishana, abducts the two sleeping
brothers, Rama and Lakshmana at night and carries them off to Patala, the netherworld.
Hanuman who was responsible for the security despairs and takes it upon himself
to rescue the brothers before they are sacrificed to Mahakali by Ahiravana. He enters
Patala through a crack in the sea floor and goes through a tunnel to the netherworld.
As Hanuman trudges along to the palace, he is stopped by a monkey guard looking
just like him, only to understand that this is his son Makaradhawja, conceived
from his sweat (Hanuman was celibate) through a fish Makara which swallowed the
sweat drop! But his son would not let him in, so Hanuman has no choice but to
wrestle and subdue him. Hanuman soon assumes the form of the goddess and starts
to consume every offering that is served, and awaits the offering of Ram and Lakshmana
by Ahiravana. As Ahiravana is about to slay Rama for the goddess, Hanuman
pounces on Ahiravana and lops off his head. On the way out, Rama asks Hanuman
to untie his son and makes him the new lord of Patala.
In other versions, we have Ahiravana digging upwards to the
location where Rama and Lakshmana are sleeping and eventually manages to kidnap
them. Hanuman tracks them later going through the tunnel and rescues them. I guess
that is how tunnels and the connection to the Djinn in Aden came about. Was Hadathar
the Ahiravana or the Ravana with ten heads? Difficult to surmise.
You may wonder how Ujjain came into contention in this
story. Even though the world map depicts a relatively straight line from Aden to
Ujjain, I can see no practical reason for the connection since dhows shuttled
between various western sea ports in Malabar and Gujarat to Aden in the past.
Ujjain was of course very important to the Hindus and was part of anything mathematical,
navigational and astrological, because that is where India’s ancient Prime
Meridian zero longitude and the Tropic of Cancer once crossed. Lord Mahakaal,
the presiding deity of Ujjain is considered to be the God of Time. Even today, wherever
a horoscope is made according to the Hindu almanac, Ujjain time (roughly 29
minutes behind IST) is usually its basis!
Why was such a fable created? Intermingling of cultures,
traders and tales over cups of coffee, the elixir of Yemen? Who knows? Then
again where and what was Patala and who was a Rakshasa? Some knowledgeable
people have connected the area south of the Deccan to Patala and the darker
skinned matrilineal Dravidians to rakshasas. We will discuss all that another opportune
day and later, we can also take a look at the Chinese versions of the Ramayana.
Reference
A Traveler in Thirteenth-Century Arabia / Ibn al-Mujawir's
Tarikh al-Mustabsir edited by G. Rex Smith
An Account of the British
Settlement of Aden in Arabia - By Frederick Mercer Hunter
Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and authority in the
Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 by Scott S. Reese - Hanuman’s Tunnel: Collapsing the
Space between Hind and Arabia in the Arab Imaginary
The rich Hindu temple heritage in Aden – Embassy of India
Yemen
4 comments:
First time iam hearing of this link !
Thanks for your efforts to bring out a new version of Srimath Ramayana. This ancient epic has spread over many versions in many Countries.
Brahmanyan,
Bangalore.
Thanks hari..
yeah there are so many versions, as i mentioned, i will do a study on the Chinese version soon
Thanks Brahmanyan
Yes, you are right, it has spread far and wide..and the various interpretations are quite interesting!
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