Holi message at Rumi’s mazaar
IT has always intrigued me how the darvesh at the tomb of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi at Konya in Turkey dance their way into a trance during Holi. This could be all the more unimaginable in these times of a clear divide between the two faiths. But visit Konya and the Mazaar-e-Maulana Rumi a fortnight prior to Holi, and you will be surprised how the mystics, and even visitors, play Holi at the mazaar of one of the greatest mystics of all time. Rumi, like all mystics, celebrated festivals of all religions, but was a tad partial to jashn-e-charaghaan (Deepavali) and jashn-e-faam (festival of colours). Rumi believed that Holi celebrated life and its myriad moods through a riot of colour. He wrote: Choon rango-abeer (abeer for gulaal is a Persian word) jashn-e-faam/ ziyadat un meez azqaam (the colours of Holi are a depiction of life’s myriad and varied moods). He believed that the colours represented the phases of life and the stages of human existence.
In these times of rabid religious discrimination, Konya’s is a heartening story. Its library has books on philosophies of all religions, and not just of Islam. Rumi’s putative master, Fariduddin Attar, spent a few years in Deccan (today’s Gulbarga and Bidar) and imbibed the spirit of Upanishadic Hinduism and the loftiness of Hindu philosophy. He celebrated Holi, and even carried a handful of gulaal to give it to his eight shaagirds. Rumi was his favourite disciple. He gave a pinch of the colour to Rumi and exhorted him to have a spirit and soul as colourful as the gulaal and as light as its particles. Rumi imbibed his master’s teachings and spread colours on the festival of Holi. He would say: Tee az rang-e-kaaynaat (colour the universe), believing that the Almighty made two types of colour spectrum — rainbow in the sky and Holi on earth (Taghzeen-e-rishafa un meezt falak/ Tanzeen-e-faam un meezt zameen). Going beyond the narrow precincts of theirs and mine; your festivals and my festivals, Rumi urged all to celebrate the faiths of one another.
When the country is boiling over issues that are flagrantly religious in nature, it is time to assimilate the teachings of the Sufis who never differentiated or discriminated.
Rumi himself said just before his demise, the lights at night like Diwali and the colours of life in Holi would save the mankind from getting degenerated into rabid fanaticism. It was symbolical as he emblematically meant ‘lights at night’ (a glimmer of sanity in the Stygian darkness of ignorance) and a riot of colour to dispel the gloominess of existential prejudices.
Shouldn’t we all understand this collectively and spread the colours of love, bonhomie, cordiality and unity in these grey times?
