From Tablet Magazine
Muhammad Abdul Yassin has worked in Mumbai’s Jewish cemetery for more than 40 years. Now he’s passing the chisel to his sons.
Even though the Jewish population in Mumbai has declined dramatically over the past several decades—from a peak of 30,000 in the late 1940s to some 3,500today, due in large part to mass aliyah—it is still the largest Jewish community in India. But for decades there was only one person in Mumbai, and the entire state of Maharashtra of which Mumbai is a part, who engraved Jewish tombstones: a devout Muslim named Muhammad Abdul Yassin.
On a recent visit, I found Yassin sitting in his cement hut on the southern end of Mumbai’s Jewish cemetery, surrounded by smooth marble and granite slabs—soon to be used for headstones—and the tools of his trade, hammers and chisels of various sizes. He stared out into the crammed cemetery, whose sidewalks have been narrowed to create more grave space over the last decade. The discernible dates on the headstones date back to the 1800s, though some of the graves, Yassin told me, date back earlier than that.
He has come here every day except Friday, the Muslim special day of prayer, for more than 40 years, rain or shine. But Yassin, now 75, is now passing the baton—or chisel—to his sons.
Raised in a poverty-stricken area of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, Yassin decided he would move away and change his fate as soon as he was old enough. “Everyone was poor in my neighborhood,” he told me. “I did not want to live that way.” In 1968, when he was 27, Yassin left Uttar Pradesh in search of work, any work, that would enable him to live comfortably. He began traveling south, and a few months after he left home, he received word from a friend of his uncle’s that the Jewish tombstone engraver in Mumbai was looking for an apprentice. Yassin never imagined working for Jews, let alone being a tombstone engraver. But it was a job.
Within a week, he arrived at the cemetery and was met by a man named Aaron Menasse Navgavikar, a Bnei Israeli Jew who made tombstones for the community. (The Benei Israel, India’s oldest Jewish sect, claim to be part of the biblical tribe of Zebulon who were shipwrecked in India at some point between the First and Second Temple periods.) Navgavikar took him on as an apprentice and taught him much more than the tools of the trade. When Yassin began his apprenticeship, he spoke Gujarati fluently but was completely illiterate. After three years under Navgavikar’s apprenticeship, he could read and write fluently in six languages: English, Hebrew, Marati, Hindi, Gujarati, and Urdu.
