Mukul Sharma

Each year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims bound for the hill shrine of Sabarimala in Kerala pause, on their final approach, at a small mosque in the forest town of Erumeli. They arrive dressed as Ayyappa devotees, in black or blue, carrying the irumudikettu bundle on their heads - and yet the sanctioned route requires them first to offer prayer at the Vavar Juma Masjid, a mosque dedicated to Vavar, the Muslim warrior whom local tradition holds to have become the deity Ayyappa’s companion and the guardian of the forest crossing beyond. Muslim custodians tend the mosque; Hindu pilgrims, by long convention, are welcomed inside it before they continue toward the hills. Nobody at Erumeli is much troubled by the question of whether this is a Hindu practice that has absorbed a Muslim figure, or a Muslim shrine folded into a Hindu itinerary. The forest path does not observe that distinction, and neither, for the most part, do the people who walk it.