மஹ்திதாசன்

Saw this thread (linked here ) about Bipin Chandra Pal yesterday on Twitter. To summarize it shortly: young Bipin used to drink lemonade from a Muslim vendor, which angered his Pundit father until Bipin was ill and lemonade was the only cure, thus forcing the Pundit to go buy some from Muslim sellers. Somehow, this here is construed as an inspiring tale of communal harmony. But we do not truly know if that yielding to Muslim-made lemonade ever became something more than a one-off act of desperation, whether or not it cured Bipin's father of UC Hindu supremacist notions—and we certainly know that it did absolutely nothing to veer Indian Hindu society away from its course of virulent Islamophobia today.  There is a similar story I heard recently attributed to Peer Muhammad Appa R.A., the Tamil Muslim mystic of Thuckalay. As a child, Peerappa used to play with his friend, the son of a Brahmin priest. One day, he and his friend happened to go for a swim in the same sacred pond the town...

This section about Nathar Vali R.A. and the serpent (who is very directly a reference to the Sesha-Ananda mount of Trichy's Ranganatha) from "Saints, Goddesses, and Kings" by Susan Bayly always had me wondering if any Sufi pīrs have interacted with Vishnu's moving mount, Garuda...until I remembered this devotional painting of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar R.A. riding Garuda.  It's interesting to note that the piece not only syncretizes Sufi imagery with Vaishnavite iconography but also lifts from a painting of Jesus for the saint's pose. When a pīr attracts devotion from all corners of society, his cult also absorbs their emblems and further roots itself into local traditions.  Tangentially, this makes me think about the hundreds upon hundreds of snake-stones in Kanchipuram—they originate as emblems of local Naga-centered animism, but depending on the section of the town, they are modified with lingams and dancing Krishnas to either appear explicitly Shaivite or Vaishn...