Lalit Mohan
There’s a sick kind of poetry in watching plastic bottles roll across sacred ground. The kind that makes you wonder if Baba Jitto chose the wrong century to make his stand. Here in Aghar, where the blood of protest once soaked into fertile soil, we’re watching a different kind of death – the slow suffocation of holy ground under the weight of what we call progress. The new temple complex stands like a concrete tombstone near the highway, complete with parking lot and souvenir stands. The soil here doesn’t remember anything anymore. It can’t. We’ve paved over its memory with good intentions and better accessibility. But up there, up that forgotten road where the old temple stands, the earth still has stories to tell.
A young shopkeeper named Sonu Sharma, whose blood carries echoes of Baba Jitto’s defiance, sits in his tiny store watching it all unfold. His ancestor died on a heap of grain rather than submit to injustice. Now we’re watching the land itself submit to a different kind of tyranny – the tyranny of convenience. The old Karaks still echo through these hills, if you can hear them over the tour buses. Gulam Mohammed’s voice rises from the past: “Jede log daiyi jaande ithe kurbaaniyan, duniya che rehndiyan ni undi nishaniyan.” The marks of sacrifice remain eternal in this world, he sang. But what marks are we leaving now? Empty chip packets? Discarded water bottles? The scars of widened roads?
Here’s the real horror of our time: We’re losing sacred soil not to feudal lords demanding three-quarters of the harvest, but to our own desperate need to make everything accessible, packaged, sanitized. The old temple sits nearly empty, save for a few cows and a philosophical black dog who might be the only one truly understanding the cosmic joke of it all. The land around the original temple still breathes. You can feel it under your feet – soil that remembers what it means to witness sacrifice. But for how long? Every year, the Jhiri Mela brings thousands, and with them comes the slow creep of what we all development. The parking lots grow, the vendors multiply, and the ancient soil disappears under layers of progress. Conservation isn’t just about saving tigers or protecting forests. Sometimes it’s about preserving the places where history bled into the earth. The spots where sacrifice made the ground sacred. But try explaining that to the Tourism Department or the development authorities. Try telling them that some places need to stay hard to reach, that some temples don’t need gift shops, that some soil needs to remain just soil.
Down at the new temple, they’re selling bottled water with Baba’s name abbreviated on the label – a perfect metaphor for how we’re condensing sacred history into tourist-friendly soundbites. Meanwhile, the real temple, the one that holds the actual breath of history, sits in dignified isolation, protected by nothing but distance and inconvenience.
Maybe that’s the bitter medicine we need to swallow: Not every sacred space should be accessible by four-lane highway. Not every historical site needs a parking lot. Some places should remain hard to reach, protected by the very inconvenience that keeps the masses at bay. The black dog at the old temple watches visitors come and go, his eyes holding centuries of wisdom. He knows what we’re doing to this place, to all places like it. Every paved road, every new construction, every “development” project chips away at something intangible but essential. Baba Jitto died protecting his right to the fruits of his labor. Now it’s our turn to protect what he left behind – not just the temples and the traditions, but the very soil that drank his blood. Conservation isn’t just about saving what’s endangered; it’s about preserving what makes places sacred in the first place.
Buy the ticket, take the ride – but for the love of whatever gods you believe in, leave the land alone. Some earth needs to remain untouched, some paths unpaved, some temples hard to reach. That’s not inconvenience; that’s conservation of the highest order.
The dog watches. The soil remembers. And somewhere, in whatever cosmic plane dead martyrs watch us from, Baba Jitto waits to see if we’ll finally understand that some sacrifices need space to breathe.
Fear and Loathing in Aghar: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Dogra Dream There I was, somewhere near Katra, on the edge of pilgrim territory, when the madness began to take hold. A tiny weathered sign, barely visible through the haze of diesel fumes and tourist dust, pointed up a desolate road. “BIRTHPLACE,” it screamed in silent desperation. Not the birthplace of reason or common sense, mind you, but of Baba Jitto – a man who had the raw nerve to die for a principle in a world that had none.
The temple complex below, the new one, was a grotesque carnival of modern devotion. Plastic cups and empty chip packets performed their own twisted dance in the wind – offerings to the new gods of convenience. But up there, up that forgotten road, something else waited. Something real. The shop owner, Sonu Sharma – a young descendant of the man himself – sat there like a keeper of ancient secrets in this wasteland of progress. His eyes lit up with that dangerous gleam you only see in people who are about to tell you something that will make the world stop making sense. “Let me tell you about my ancestor,” he said, and suddenly the air got thick with the weight of history.
The story spilled out like a fever dream: A man given away as a child, raised by an aunt with too many mouths to feed, jealousy brewing like bad moonshine. Then the escape, the land, the promise. But promises are funny things in this country – they have a way of turning sideways when power and greed enter the equation. The feudal lord wanted more, always more. Three-quarters of a crop instead of one-quarter. The mathematics of oppression never changes, just the numbers. And Jitto, poor doomed bastard, decided to do the one thing guaranteed to make the power structure nervous – he said no.
Not with guns or bombs or armies, but with the most terrifying weapon of all: his own life. He died on his own grain heap, his daughter and adopted child following him into that dark night of protest. Their blood soaked into the seeds of resistance, and now, centuries later, we’re still trying to understand what it all means while drinking bottled water in air-conditioned temples. The real temple, the old one, sits empty save for a few cows and a black dog that might be the reincarnated spirit of truth itself, watching us all with knowing eyes. No tourists here, no selfie sticks, no plastic waste. Just the heavy silence of authenticity in a world gone mad with facades.
Here’s the real horror of it all: We’ve turned a man’s ultimate protest against injustice into a three-day carnival called Jhiri Mela. Somewhere, in whatever cosmic plane dead martyrs watch us from, Baba Jitto must be laughing – or crying – or both. His sacrifice has become a tourist attraction, his principles reduced to pamphlets, his memory preserved in plastic. But maybe that’s not the end of the story. Maybe, just maybe, the old temple up that forgotten road, with its lonely dog and silent keeper, holds something we desperately need – a truth that doesn’t come with a price tag or a souvenir shop. A reminder that in this age of fake everything, real sacrifice leaves marks that even time can’t wash away.
Buy the ticket, take the ride – but make sure you take the road less traveled. The real story’s always up there, away from the highway, waiting for someone crazy enough to look for it.
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