Sacred Fire In Baku

WHEN WILL DURANT wrote “most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years,” he was restating a truth about the importance of keeping history afresh in memory.

This 6,000-year time travel takes us back to an India which had evolved a flourishing maritime culture and had left its im­print overseas. David Frawley in his Gods, Sages and Kings, and Michel Danino in his The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati show that the ancient Vedic civilisation was a maritime civilisa­tion. Likewise, pioneering historian S Srikanta Sastri (1904-74) marshalled a wealth of evidence that testified to the seafaring element in the Vedic zeitgeist.

This maritime contact of India with the rest of the world was a continuous and positive force for transnational economic and cultural exchange. It remained unabated till the waves of Islamic invasions disrupted it. It is also, sadly, an understudied area of Indian history, which had been spearheaded in the late 19th cen­tury and continued till about 1950. No­table works in the field include Radha Kumud Mukherjee’s Indian Shipping: A History of Seaborne Trade and Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times, RC Majumdar’s Classical Accounts of India, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, India and South-East Asia and Moti Chandra’s Trade and Trade Routes in An­cient India. These apart, V Raghavan and Vasudeva Sharan Agarwala’s scholarly anthologies explore the influence of India’s artistic, musical and theatrical traditions in foreign lands.

Three random examples can illus­trate this.

Pliny the Elder (24 CE-79 CE) was mortified at how copiously the Mala­bar black pepper was draining the Roman exchequer; he branded India as the “sink of precious metals” that Rome supplied as ex­change to buy pepper.

In the second century CE, a Greek artist had engraved an image of Bharat Mata on a silver dish discovered at Lampsacus (now Lapseki in Turkey) during an archaeological dig in 1847.

The Balinese dramatic art form known as Wayang Beber, performed by the artist known as Dalang, is a song narrative in which he unfolds sheets cloth embossed with miniatures of scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and narrates each story depicted therein.

Among all foreign lands, Brihad Bharata—known as Southeast Asia—shows the densest imprint of Hindu culture and traditions. In RC Majumdar’s words: “The Indian colonies in the Far East must ever remain as the high-water mark of maritime and colonial en­terprise of the ancient Indians… political conquest… was rapidly followed by a complete cultural conquest. The local people readily assimilated the new civilisation and adopted the religion, art, social manners and customs, literature, laws… of the conquerors… a new India was established in that far-off region… we find new towns and countries called Ayodhya, Kaushambi, Srikshetra, Dvaravati, Mathura… So long as the Hindu dynasties were in power the civilisa­tion flourished… the descendants of men who founded that empire abandoned sea-voyage as something unholy and thus an impass­able barrier was created between the Hindus and their brethren of the Far East.”

Moti Chandra’s Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India is perhaps the most thorough treatise on the prow­ess of Hindu maritime and cultural proselytisation that carried the best of Hindu culture to Southeast Asia, Rus­sia, Turkey, Greece and Rome. In his foreword to this work, VS Agarwala opens an evocative world before us: “In the travellers besides the merchant community were included monks, pil­grims, pedlars, horse traders, acrobats and actors, students and tourists… In­dian travellers by land and sea routes, were also the carriers of Indian story lit­erature. Seamen often related miracu­lous stories of Yakshas, Nagas, demons and spirits and aquatic animals connected with the seas. These stories diverted the people during their travels; such stories were adopted by literature as motifs as well…”

Indeed, every great Hindu empire in the classical and post-classical period was also a formidable naval power—from the Maurya to the Gupta and the Rashtrakuta, the Chola and the Vijayanagara empires.

With the establishment of Muslim power in India, this spread of Hindu culture abroad received an almost irrecoverable blow. However, the entrepreneurial spirit of Hindus refused to remain caged. While Sultans wielded despotic and bigoted political pow­er, they depended on Hindu business classes to keep their finances well-oiled. In turn, these classes found creative ways to preserve their Dharma and traditions both in India and abroad.

In the 16th century, groups of Sindhi Bhatiyas migrated to the Persian Gulf and settled in Muscat; they were later followed by Kutchi Banias. For the next two centuries, they acquired unchal­lengeable financial clout and became confidants of the successive sultans of Oman. They even had a decisive say in deposing one sultan and installing another. They built temples, celebrated all major Hindu festivals and sent Prasad to the sultan himself. It was not a coincidence that Narendra Modi visited the Motisvar Temple in Muscat in 2018. It had been built by a Sindhi Bhatia sometime in the 19th century.

A similar but lesser-known cultural stamp left by migrant Hindu businessmen is found in Baku, Azerbaijan. This is the Jvalaji temple built in 1745. Today, it is simply known as the Ateshgah of Baku.

Brisk trade had existed between India and the region for at least three centuries prior to the Russo-Persian war of 1722. A sizeable community of Hindu and Sikh businessmen—mer­chants, traders and bankers—had settled in Bokhara, Samarkand and Azerbaijan. However, the Russian invasion didn’t hamper commerce in a significant way.

After the Jvalaji temple was built, it quickly became a vener­ated site of pilgrimage. Hindus and Sikhs from various parts of India undertook tirtha yatra at great risk. European travellers of the era testify as to how “…these poor devotees… come on a pil­grimage from their own country... they mark their foreheads with saffron, and have a great veneration for a red cow… [I] met two Hindoo Fakirs who announced themselves as on a pilgrimage to this Baku Jawala Ji… where a Hindoo is found so deeply tinc­tured with the enthusiasm of religion, that though his nerves be constitutionally of a tender texture and his frame relaxed by age, he will journey through hostile regions from the Ganges to the Volga, to offer up prayer at the shrine of his God…”

As its name clarifies, the Jvalaji temple is a shrine dedicated to Agni. Seven “Sacred Fires” used to burn from seven holes within the enclosure of the temple. This was the original garbhagriha. In the Vedic pantheon, Agni is conceived as having seven “tongues” (Sapta Jihva) or flames.

The temple complex houses 17 inscriptions of which 14 are in Sanskrit (both Nagari and Devanagari), two in Gurumukhi and one in Farsi. The very first inscription contains an invocation of Ganesha, beginning with “Sri Ganesaya Namah.” Then it de­scribes the glory of the Jvalaji deity, narrating its miraculous pow­ers. Another inscription is an elaborate stuti, or praise of Shiva.

In his History of Dharmasastra, PV Kane cites a sloka found in another inscription and gives an informed exposition on the Hindu rituals performed there. This is the gist of the sloka: “In Yajnas, vows, pilgrimages, the feeding of Brahmanas at sacred places, giving sacred offerings to ancestors, in the hands of a men­dicant, wealth finds its righteousness.”

Such verses are abundantly found in thousands of inscriptions within India. But the fact that they were also discovered in Baku reaffirms the truth that Hindus create a new India wherever they go.

THESE VERSES ALSO give us a hint as to why Hindus from India journeyed all the way to visit the Jvalaji temple. It was believed to have a deep connection with the Jwal­amukhi temple in Kangra, a Shakti Peetha in Himachal Pradesh. Devotees regarded the Kangra deity as the chhota (smaller) Jva­laji and the one in Baku, as the bada (greater) Jvalaji. In A Second Journey through Persia, the British secretary to the embassy in Persia, James Morier, records his 1818 encounter with a sadhu in Karadagh, in East Azerbaijan: “…we met an Indian entirely alone, on foot, with no other weapon than a stick, who was on his road to Benares returning from his pilgrimage to Baku. He was walking with surprising alacrity, and saluted us with great good-humour, like one satisfied with himself for having done a good action. I believe that these religious feats are quite peculiar to the Indian character; or there is a great difference between the mind of one who undertakes a voyage to Mecca with a caravan, in the company of others, and of him who undismayed by solitude and distance, and unencouraged by example, perseveres in his object to the last.”

By the end of the 19th century, Arabia and Central Asia had become bloody theatres of war. As a result, most of the Hindu population in Baku fled. Its place was taken by Zoroastrians who mistook the Jvalaji temple as a shrine of their venerated Fire God and renamed it as Ateshgah. The term is a Persian compound word, a corruption of the Sanskrit words, atharvan (atesh: fire) and gruha (gah: house).

In 1925, the Zoroastrian priest Jivanji Jamshedji Modi travelled extensively in Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia and recorded his expe­riences in My Travels Outside Bombay: Iran, Azerbaijan, Baku. This is what he writes about the Jvalaji temple: “…any Parsee… after examining this [temple] with its inscriptions, architecture, etc., would conclude that this is not a Parsee Atash Kadeh but is a Hindu Temple whose Brahmins… used to worship fire (Sanskrit: Agni)”.

When Jamshedji Modi visited Baku, it had long ceased to be a living temple or a Zoroastrian shrine. In 2007, the Azerbaijani president by decree designated the temple complex as a pro­tected reserve named as the Ateshgah Temple State Historical Architectural Reserve.