A major event occurred in 1939 when, at the conclusion of a long court case, (Civil suit no. 168 filed in the court of the F. C. sub judge at Ahmedabad on 13 Feb. 1931) a Trust was created to resolve various disputes about the management of the dargah and the use of land and funds pertaining to the shrine. ln this suit a number of Patels had lodged a complaint against the Hindu guru of the sect, Kaka Ramji Laxman, then supported by a few Muslim Sayyids.44 The resultant Imam Shah Bawa Rauza Sansthan Committee consists of ten members, three Sayyids from different constituencies and seven Kacchi Patels -this ratio being calculated according to the proportion of Satpanthi followers (at present it is claimed about nine hundred thousand of which perhaps 85 per cent register themselves as Hindus and 15 per cent as Muslims). Later on the Trust was registered by the charity commissioner according to the Bombay Public Trust Act of 1950, under category E which is defined as “cosmopolitan”.45 The composition of the Trust was to ensure a fair management of the shrine, while the cosmopolitan nature of the sect was to be guaranteed by its registration under category E.46

However, in contemporary India the existence of a majority of Hindu members within a sect recognising a Muslim Pir as its founder could not but pose a serious challenge to all those who were eager to reevaluate caste and religious identities. On the other hand the sanctity of tradition, coupled with the legal protective framework, does not usually allow a total freedom to the followers who wish to introduce certain changes. It is interesting to study the different responses which have been made to this challenge by various Indian communities, organisations or sects avec time.47 Reconstructing one's own history according to the new ideology seems to be a universal strategy which has been widely resorted to through the centuries.

Let us now return to Pirana. Our first impression, undoubtedly a superficial one, when we first visited the shrine in January 1999, was that we were confronted with a Hindu versus Muslim conflict: the space, we felt at that time, was divided rather than shared. The large open court yard, with its various sacred structures and pattern of square stones, conjured up the image of a huge chessboard at both ends of which the rival players, while seemingly ignoring each other, were engaged in a silent game. ln front of the main tomb sat the white clad Patels who had told us the “true version of the story” i.e. the Hindu identity of the shrine, the best evidence of which was that the perpetual light (akhand jyot) burning in the samadhi was made of ghï (clarified butter) and not of oil which would have been the case if the shrine were a “real” Muslim dargiih. Just opposite the dark clothed Sayyids, descendants of Imam Shah Bawa, sitting in front of the saint”s gaddï (throne), a more modest structure, claimed that their tradition has been shamefully distorted: to prove this they had proudly stood up at the end of our conversation to recite the whole sacred genealogy in which, nobody could question it, only Muslim names appeared. When we had started our visit, even before reaching the main place of worship, our attention had been attracted by a model standing on a low platform, inside the enclosed court yard. It represented various buildings, including what was visibly a temple topped by the classical shikhara superstructure. The Patels told us that it was the model of a new complex under construction not far from the village: it would include a gurukul school and a majestic temple referred to as jyoti mandir or Niskalankï Narayan ka Mandir. Nishkalanki, it was specified was their main deity (aradya dev), the tenth incarnation of Vishnu who se cult was a essential part of the Satpanth. A similar place of worship already existed, opening on the same court yard: it had been arranged inside the former resting place of Imam Shah (dholia) and was used for the daily aratï (Hindu offering cult) as weIl as for the specifically Satpanthi ritual of holy water or ghat-pat. It was really breathtaking to see, so close to the Muslim dargah (even it has been renamed samadhi by the Patel worshippers) what strikingly looked like a Hindu mandir: if the walls depicted the miracles of Imam Shah and his life, the ceiling was entirely covered by colourful representations of the ten avatars of Vishnu and of other gods and goddesses. ln the recess, which could have corresponded to the inner sanctum (garbhgrha) of a temple (but which was oriented towards the West as the mihrab in a masque or a tomb) we could see a mural depicting the Hindu trinity, Vishnu, Mahesh (Shiva) and Brahma. On the gate one could read the words püja khand (prayer hall). The Patels added:

We promised to buy aIl the books and the shrine being closed for some time, went to partake of the common meal served in the community's langar, in the company of numerous Patels and, to our surprise, a family of Agakhani Ismaili Khojas. But when the shrine reopened, instead of going immediately to see the supreme Guru, we reentered the open courtyard with the intention of drawing a map of the various sacred structures. And there, unexpectedly, we were captured by the “enemy”. Under the shelter of the chajja covered by a white cloth upon which shone words of protestation in bright red paint, sat a few young and middle-aged men, most of them wearing clothes of dark colour, some of them ostentatiously displaying their Muslim identity by wearing the usual laced cap, whereas, curiously enough, all the custodians of the various tombs (mujavars), whether Hindus or Muslims, were wearing exactly the same white cloths and “Nehru” cap. When we reached the spot the Sayyid players had been sitting regularly on this side of the chess-board for about two hundred and eighty days in dharna. ln order to protest they had created the Imamshahi Sadat Committee headed by M. M. Sayyid and Nuruddin Sayyid.

“Our heritage (indeed they are descendants of the large Imam Shah family) has been highjacked”, they explained, giving us a tract which we carefully read. It begins with the following words: “this shrine is a symbol of secularism and national integration ...now this shrine has become a place of communalism and fascism”. And then we had to listen to another version of the Pirana tradition: Imam Shah, as we are told, was the son of the Sufi Pir Hasan Kabiruddin who came to Gujarat from Multan. He traced his descent back to Imam Jaffar al-Sadiq and his son Ismail, and that is why he himself and all his descendants, including the present Sayyids, are known as “Jaffri Ismailis”. At first we silently triumphed, tempted to conclude that our informant admitted, directly or indirectly, the Shia Ismaili origin of the sect. But we were soon disillusioned: Ismaili? Did it mean that that Imam Shah was a Shia? The reply came immediately: he was a Sufi, neither a Sunni nor a Shia, a detail which overthrew all our former convictions.48 And, as if the blow were not mighty enough to shatter the rest of our illusions, one of the men added: “we are Sunnis”. And he pointed to the mosque where he and his brothers offered regular prayers (namaz) five times a day. After this interruption he went on with the story of Imam Shah.

According to him, the saint converted many Hindus, and entrusted to one of them the custody of the dargah: these people, who are celibate, are referred to as Kakas which means “servant” in Persian. Why should a mere servant entitle himself “Guru”, “Acharya” and” Maharaj”? Karsan Das, we were told, had undertaken a series of changes which were not in conformity with the Satpanth: painting the Om sign everywhere, publishing a revised version of the traditional literature, transforming the dholia into a temple with idols, while image worship is strictly prohibited in this religion, changing the name of the place into “Pirana Prerna Pith” and, still worse, the founder of the movement into a Hindu Pir .49 If these Patels were converted by Imam Shah, we enquired, why do they do that? The answer came unhesitatingly: these people are Guptis ...they look outwardly as Hindus, in reality they still follow (yes, even now) a number of Muslim customs which are a part of the Satpanth.

This declaration comes as a most exciting revelation, although it sounds strangely familiar to us: the Gupti phenomenon is well-known in the history of the Nizaris of the subcontinent and till recently many Khojas concealed themselves under the guise of Hindus. Thus, according to the Sayyids the present identity of the Patels was essentially a form of taqiyya. Conversion to Islam “really” took place. Now what happens is that, under the influence of fundamentalist Hindu bodies, they want to revert to a full-fledged form of Hinduism, a fact which, we must acknowledge, had already been noted by Ivanow. According to Sayyid:

These words had led us to formulate an interesting hypothesis: if the Hindu members of the Panth were in reality crypto-Muslims (the Patels), was not the Sayyids' Sunnism originally also a form of taqiyya? Imam Shah himself had married the daughter of a (Sunni Sufi) Suhrawardi saint, and one of the wives of his son, Muhammad Shah, was the daughter of the equally Sunni Sultan of Ahmedabad. Would these marital links have been possible at that period if both Pirs had openly acknowledged their Shia Ismaili identity?

One can surmise that in the course of time, what was now happening to the Patels had earlier taken place with these Sayyids: from a kind of Gupti Sunnism they had passed into a state of more overt Sunnism. Later, looking across the chessboard at the white Patels who stared blankly at us, we were reminded of our promise and took leave of our informants. And ultimately we went upstairs to the Kaka"s “retreat”. There we bowed in front of an imposing character wearing a flowing white beard, a ochre-coloured turban and displaying proudly on bis forehead a red tilak. The Maharaj was quietly sitting on a bed near a window, in a modern room equipped with a cooler and a telephone. He greeted us with a smile which made it difficult to believe that he was a “Hindu hardliner”.

If we had not studied the historical background of the Imamshahi sect and had no knowledge of the Ismaili tradition, we would have been in the same position as our imaginary visitor or pilgrim: that is to say in a state of total confusion. But the main elements of the Satpanth were already familiar to us, owing to the fact that they were basically the same as in the Nizari Khoja tradition: Niskalank, Atharva Veda, ginans and many other names and concepts reminded us of one essential factor: the acculturation of the Ismaili idiom in South Asia. It was clear that, if one chose to stress these “Hinduised” patterns and to play down or leave out the Islamic themes, the sect had a decidedly “orthodox” Hindu appearance.

Imam Shah, according to Karsan Das, was “a Sufi saint” (a definition which also occurs occasionally in the official literature of the Patels). When we asked “what do you mean by Sufi”?, and with the dim hope that he would after all acknowledge some sort of Islamic connection, the Acharya rejoined: “a Sufi like Kabir, Nanak, the nine Nath yogis ...” However original this definition of Sufism sounded to us (who had always naively believed that Sufism was the “mystical dimension” of Sunni, and to a lesser extent, of Shia Islam) we had to accept it as one of the major moves of the invisible chess game, one which enabled the Hindu side to reconstruct history. The Kaka then continued: “Sufism means brotherhood, absence of any discrimination, call these Sufic ideas or Vedic ideas, this is all the same ...” However, to our great relief, he spontaneously admitted that Imam Shah”s father was Hasan Kabiruddin from Multan (another Muslim name) and that he had married Fatima, the daughter of a Sufi saint but added, as if he wished to underplay these well known historical facts, that the saint was to be viewed as an avatar of the god Brahma, an idea which -we knew -perfectly coincided with the Nizari Ismaili “patterns of transformation” 50 equating the Imam with Vishnu and his representatives the Pirs with Brahma. The Acharya”s discourse was, after all, reassuring: Imam Shah had had, among his disciples, not only Hindus, such as Bhabha Ram, Kiki Bai, Naya Kaka, but also the Persian Hazar Beg; the shrine was referred to by Hindus as samadhi or mandir, by Muslims as rauza or dargah, the Guru could be equally called Pir or Bawa ... The main mantra of the sect was “Om Niskalanki Naranaya namaha” but, concluded Karsan Das, it was also possible to use the words “Pir Shah”(as, we both silently remembered, in the Nizari tradition), and even to recite the Kalma. Gratified by these revelations we started to think that, after all, the chief accusations levied by the Sayyids from across the Pirana chessboard were a little too far-fetched: the Kaka was not at all appearing as a fundamentalist, a fierce exponent of Hindutva.

During the following days, however, we started to read the “official” Satpanthi literature sold at Pirana. It was amazingly different from what the Kaka had told us: except the name of Imam Shah himself and the adjective “Sufi” (but again in the sense used by the Acharya) Islamic characters and elements were totally absent: Imam Shah had become “Satguru Sri Imam Shah Maharaj” portrayed in the pictures available at the bookshop as a saint with a long black beard, holding a rosary in bis right band and displaying the same red tilak which decorated the forehead of Karsan Das (also Maharaj). His ancestors, and even his father, were mentioned nowhere, as if he had directly fallen from Heaven. There was not even the slightest allusion to the existence of Sayyids, or other Muslim disciples.

We had been told by the Patels to ignore all the other books which were not sold here. Thanks to this precious advice we had learned of the existence of rival publications. As we soon came to know, the Sayyids had their own books telling the same stories in their own way, and to make matters worse, we learned of the existence of a secret locked chamber at Pirana sheltering heaps of dusty books and manuscripts containing a third version of the same story, the oldest one. The key to this “archive” was carefully kept by a third party who presided, invisible, over this silent game of chess: the man who claimed to be the legitimate sajjada-nishïn, the physical and spiritual heir of Imam Shah, although he was not recognised as such by all Satpanthi followers, whether Hindus or Sayyids. However, we had to meet him to try to harmonise the disturbing cacophony of all these conflicting voices.