The Last Glue

This is my first posting to this list after Lopa put me on it. It's wonderful to read the posts though I have not had time to write anything myself. As a first offering I am taking the liberty of adding a piece I wrote some time last year which was then published in The Asian Age (an Indian newspaper), I hope it will serve as an introduction also to myself. Best regards Ananya (piece follows) ------------

The Last Glue

I received the news in a roundabout fashion: my parents phoned me from Kolkata to tell me that my great-uncle had died in Dhaka last week. I was surprised: we are all connected by email now: why had this news not circulated on the family bush telegraph? I suspect it was because we were in collective shock-my great-uncle, aged 87, represented in many ways 'the last of the Mohicans': the last pre-Partition generation of my family. To a scattered group, spread out across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and almost all the habitable continents, he was the last glue. And now he was gone.

He died the week I was labouring over a lecture that clinically dissected novels of the Partition. As I was briskly typing out sentences such as 'Those who celebrated Independence, in both India and Pakistan, were often the very same who had been complicit in, witnessed, or experienced the disintegration of sacred geographies and the destruction of cultural ecosystems', a man lay dying in a Dhaka hospital who had lived through India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A man whose death signalled the end point of lived memory, marked the threshold between living through, and merely remembering. Was not this death the true beginning of what scholars on my 'Trauma' reading list termed 'postmemory'?

To my adult eyes, Akber Kabir seemed a remarkable figure, embodying all the stories of how strands of our family came to Bengal supposedly from Central Asia-his features certainly suggested so-and, less fancifully, all the events of the twentieth century that have traumatised Bengal. Perhaps he was no more or less remarkable than any of his brothers and sisters, including my own grandfather, Jehangir Kabir, but they were all gone before I had the consciousness to realise what they collectively represented. Possibly my grandfather, who fled for 'secular sanctuary' to Indian Bengal on the eve of Partition, was more remarkable than those of his brothers who remained in East Pakistan. But by the time I could enquire about these things, only Akber Kabir was left to answer my questions. On the few occasions I had the opportunity to do so, there were no answers.

The last time I saw him was on his 84th birthday in Dhaka. It was a festive time, combining the end of Ramzan, my husband's first visit to 'the other side', and this birthday. All of Dhaka-normally not the brightest of cities-was lit up. I felt a faint wistfulness for the Eids that might have been in Kolkata had history taken other turns. These yearnings pressed out of me the question normally impossible to articulate: 'Why did you not come to India with your brothers? Why, when you were so like them, did you choose Pakistan?'

We were walking in the park dedicated to the martyrs of the Bangladesh Liberation War. No sounds except for the plish-plosh of his walking shoes as he agilely navigated the brick-worked channels for dispersing the fountain-waters. At last he spoke. 'It was a difficult time. I wanted to be where my parents were. Where the land was. Where Faridpur would go, so would I.' Between us the atmosphere was heavy with winter smog and unspoken things. This was no answer. Why did you desert us, I wanted to say. After 1947 you were not in your beloved Faridpur. You were in Karachi as befitted a successful Civil Servant in the new Pakistan. Granted you could not have been the same in the new India. But don't forget that your return to Faridpur was only made possible by the humiliation you suffered as a Bengali in Pakistan.

I had been to Faridpur once, in his company. I was eighteen and did not quite know why I wanted to make this pilgrimage. My aunts jokingly taught me to say the appropriate words, 'baper bhita.' I crossed the Padma river, albeit not at the mythical Goalandor of the equally mythic mangsher jhol. We drove in a Pajero to the town house, which now belongs to nobody. In the late 1960's, Kabir Bhaban was given away to the Pakistani Government.

I photographed the plaque that announced the house's new status as a Women's College named after my great-grandmother Sajeda Begum. I photographed the graves of my ancestors bordering the tranquil pukur fringed by palm trees. I photographed the house with its fluttering Indo-Saracenic arches, its Corinthian columns, and its Sanskrit swastika still picked out in blue-all details testifying to my great-grandfather's belief in what is today called 'syncretism,' and derided as an elite fantasy in scholarly circles.

I walk over and look at that photograph sitting on my Cambridge bookshelf, shrine to lost Bengal. I look at the balcony, where, I was told, Nazrul Islam once sang. I walk to the other side of the room and put on a CD. Firoza Begum's voice floats out of a silver box. Musafir, mocch re aankhi jol/ phirey chol aaponarey niya… Traveller, wipe your tears; return, with your self intact.

Alvida, memory: postmemory, swagatam.

The Necessity of Anti-Sentimentalism

It is now widely accepted, in the academic domain, at least, that the Partition of India in 1947 was a traumatic event with continuing emotional and political repercussions on personal as well as collective levels of identity formation. Perhaps it is not too optimistic to observe scholarly responses to the Partition moving from a nostalgic, overwhelmingly sentimental phase towards more searching, self-reflexive acts of remembrance, recuperation and mourning. From 'merely remembering', the emphasis seems to have shifted to examining 'how we remember/ forget'.

Yet this awakening of interest in the memorial dimension of the Partition and its attendant complexities has been tied almost exclusively to the partition of Punjab and its impact on the North and Northwest of the Indian subcontinent. There are a number of reasons for this emphasis.

Most obviously, the magnitude of the violence in Punjab and the almost complete transfer of population along religious lines meant that, from the immediate aftermath of 1947 onwards, the horrors of the Punjab partition have become metonymic for Partition itself. Secondly, the violence against the Sikhs in 1984 catalysed a new urgency among (largely) Punjabi intellectual-activists to return to 1947 and reassess the present in the light of that past. Many of these efforts coalesced around the fiftieth anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence to produce a critical mass of writing that memorialised the impact of Partition as the impact on Punjabi culture and identity.

One wonders what are the corresponding reasons for the relative absence of Bengal within this emerging discourse on Partition. Locating and historicising these reasons themselves should be the starting-point of a critical and collective discussion of the Bengal partition- a discussion that should not be derivative of but at the very least parallel the discussion centring on the Punjab. After all, the history and politics of 'thrice-partitioned' Bengal present a picture dramatically divergent from post-Partition Punjab. Firstly, the very different patterns of migration and attendant violence meant that substantial minorities remain in both Bengals. Secondly, the successful post-Partition integration of Punjab on both sides of the border can be contrasted with Bengal's decline in South Asia, with West Bengal and East Pakistan having been marginalized vis-à-vis their respective political centres-that, in the case of West Bengal, can be seen as part of the North-East's decline. Thirdly, the experience and memory of the Bengal partition has been vastly complicated, in ways totally different from the Punjab experience, by the creation of Bangladesh, a development with immense geopolitical impact. Finally, we must note the freighted cultural investment in Bengali language, literature and music, including the role it played in Bangladesh's independence movement.

Scholarship from different fields needs to come together to explain how and why the Bengal partition was experienced in such a unique way, and to factor these findings into explorations of trauma, memory and mourning with specific respect to Bengal, alongside radically imaginative work around the same issues. The first task in this regard, for both scholarship and art, is to move away from sentimentalism and melodrama.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrated in his discussion of 'Remembered Villages', Bengali Hindu memory of pre-Partition Bengal has tended too easily to slip into nostalgic evocations of rural innocence, the 'golden age' before rupture and reality. The recent, much-acclaimed documentary Abar Ashibo Firey by Supriyo Sen, demonstrates how this purely sentimental recreation evokes unmediated emotion and what I would term unhelpful nostalgia.

How can a film-maker, an artist, or a novelist for that matter, evoke 'helpful' nostalgia, or avoid sentimentalism while paying homage to memory? This balancing act can be accomplished by paying attention to the constructed nature of memory itself, as well as the impossibility of every journeying back. For instance, Ararat, by the Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, responds to the Turkish forced expulsion of the Armenians of Anatolia in 1915 through frantic sequences of a film crew seeking to recreate an authentic narrative of the event. Through this film within the film, Egoyan points out the impossibility of narrativising trauma, with the desired whole always contaminated by actual holes- gaps and omissions that signify the fundamental difficulty of integrating traumatic into narrative memory.

Today, when all of us in South Asia, not merely the two Bengals, grapple with the ugly side of naturalised omissions and selections within collective memory projects, it becomes all the more necessary to complicate the process of remembering in order to reach a more searing level of honesty within ourselves as compromised subjects of a still-traumatic rupture.

Using artwork and analysis not merely to continue valorising some sites of memory- such as the [east] Bengali village- but to unravel how those process shape the present, even by marginalizing other modes of remembering: this should be the collective endeavour of all those revisiting Bengal's traumas to learn constructively from the past.

A Story of Saffron

During my recent research visit to Srinagar, I had little time for shopping. The only item of purchase was high quality saffron for my parents in Calcutta. Yet that was also a story. The man from Pampore who came to my houseboat tried to fob me off with some middle-grade saffron. The muted scent and ludicrously low price of twelve grams of the 'best stuff' alerted me to the situation. The houseboat owner leapt into the fray: declaring that I was no 'tourist', he ordered the saffron man to return with his real 'best stuff'. Half an hour later, amidst red-faced protestations, some wonderfully fragrant saffron and a commensurate price changed hands. His embarrassment visibly increased when I mentioned the necessity of good saffron for my family's Eid celebrations- revealing myself, in one stroke, as both connoisseur and co-religionist.

Saffron has been an enduring symbol of Kashmiri culture: fragile, exquisite, and esoteric: the best obtainable only at a price and to the most knowing. The nearly failed exchange between the saffron seller and myself also symbolises, for me, the present relationship between Kashmir and India's many million Muslims. My focus on this issue may seem misplaced, given my family history of avowed secularism, and my commitment to a secular India. Yet it is this history and commitment, in combination with today's political context in both Kashmir and India, which underpins my assessment of what Kashmir can do for India's Muslims. This reversal of expected viewpoint is not meant to erase Kashmiri suffering and trauma during the past fourteen years but to propose a subject position for Kashmiri Muslims that can offer a way out of perpetual victimhood and denied agency. I should also clarify that by 'Muslim' I signal here a political, cultural, public identity rather than a spiritual, personal, belief-oriented one (though these can of course overlap).

'Secularism' is today an exhausted word in Indian politics. It may be more accurate to declare a period of 'post-secularism'. This usually means the lambasting of 'pseudo-secularists', but for me it signals a more searching return to the use of the concept by a group of nation-builders in independent India, including Dr Ambedkar, Maulana Azad, Humayun Kabir and even a rather naïve Nehru. This secularism included the endorsement, within the Indian constution, of minority rights (linguistic and religious) within a pluralist culture. The linguistic issue was largely resolved by mapping ethno-linguistic groups on to the federal structure of India. The centre-state framework has ensured a mostly healthy if volatile relationship between the heartland and its various 'others'. The most vibrant states are those who have exercised successful collective bargaining with the centre. Through voting power, their languages, literatures, and other creative expressions have entered the national master-narrative. The current influence enjoyed by regional political parties and the success of Tamil artistes such as Mani Ratnam and A. R. Rehman are two sides of the same coin.

The fate of India's religious minorities, spread across its linguistic map, is another matter. Hindutva's onward march makes it urgent for a secular position to rethink the political and cultural preservation of religious minority identities. As a Bengali I may not feel marginalized within India; but as a Muslim I certainly do, and inevitably I ponder what my 'Muslimness' means historically, politically, and culturally. Not only should I be able to live with dignity within the nation irrespective of my religious affiliation (I would say that this downplaying of religious identities was the mistake of the 'original secularism'). In fact I should be able to bring this affiliation to the public sphere with pride. Moreover others should appreciate my pride and the insecurities that history has bestowed on me rather than make a fetish of my difference. We cannot deny that these possibilities have diminished for the Indian Muslim today. The dissolution of Muslim high culture, systematic ever since the 'Mutiny' of 1857, became an official process in 1947. Lamentation for the loss of cultural status is now embedded in our psyche. Neither can we regain status (as Muslims) easily through the democratic process: the old Congress is defunct, and our linguistic diversity cancels out the possibility of putting all our weight behind any one regional party. In this bleak scenario it is understandable that Kashmiri Muslims, contemplating political options before them, will be reluctant to 'return' to the Indian nation. I would ask them to pause and reconsider. Kashmiri Muslims are, under the present arrangement, uniquely positioned within India's only Muslim majority state. Let us rethink the significance of this oft-repeated fact. The coincidence of demography and federal structure has been the root of India's paranoia towards Kashmir's political behaviour. The same fear of 'vote bank politics' also marks attitudes towards Indian Muslim political behaviour. Our dispersal across India has ironically saved us thus far though Hindutva will take few chances. It is both numbers and membership of the 'creamy layer' that calls attention to us. Thus in Gujarat where Muslims were flourishing in business they were decimated; in rural West Bengal, where Muslims comprise sometimes more than 25% of the population, the RSS is psychologically mining the 'porous border' with Bangladesh. But look at Kerala, where the prosperity and demographic weight of Muslims has created a very different political and cultural landscape (though here too the RSS is trying hard by wooing the Christians).

I suggest that Kashmiri Muslims reconsider their position within an India that is politically different from that India that caused them finally to rise up in rage some thirteen years ago. Shifting attention away from Hindutva let us make the rise of regionalism in national politics the basis of this reconsideration as well as possible reconciliation. The new state government in the Valley may be the starting point for this process. Is it too hopeful, if not offensive, to imagine a future where the state of Jammu and Kashmir can participate in a meaningful political power sharing arrangement with a coalition government at the Centre? For this Kashmiris will have to bargain clearly, which can be only done through a strong, rebuilt collective identity. To do so out of a position of collective trauma may sound wishful thinking. But rebuilding has to start from within. Partly this can happen through demanding fresh investment in the Kashmiri language (an issue which needs separate discussion); partly when Kashmiris realise that their potential strength within a federal Indian framework can offer models of political and cultural behaviour for India's other Muslims. Kashmiri Muslims who have perhaps escaped the scars that Partition left on Indian Muslims (or were affected differently) can remind us of what it is to have a Muslim public culture within our nation; the sound of the azaan echoing in common public space can call us to another kind of gathering.

This proposal is NOT the same as a common Indian 'secular' attitude (which I shall indeed call 'pseudo-secular'): 'we cannot let go of Kashmir because we have to think of the Indian Muslims who will be butchered as a result.' To this statement, often made to my face, I can only say, please do not hold me hostage to the aspirations of others. Rather, let us, you and I, reclaim and turn to our advantage this relationship that has been hijacked by others to hide their own guilt. Let me reread in this light my opening story. Years of feeling abused and under-appreciated made the saffron seller withhold his best saffron from me, an Indian. That was his momentary source of power. Yet he almost inadvertently ruined my family's Eid… until I was revealed as 'sympathetic' and Muslim. His real power will emerge when he, a Kashmiri, feels confident enough to show his best saffron to any Indian, not only a Muslim, and demand for it the best price. In ensuring that he gets his due, my role can be only that of an intermediary-but one who is herself helped in the process.

[The article was published in The Kashmir Monitor. http://www.kashmirmonitor.net/op1.html ]

Kashmir: rebuilding an identity

In Kashmir, the `hibernation', which an Urdu poet once described, is now ending. There is a scent of change in the air, as a devastated people eagerly interpret the smallest of signs as portents of a new beginning. ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR on the seeds of a possible blossoming, especially cast by the State's young people.

THE Government College for Women in Srinagar is back in business — though one should note that it never really ground to a halt. Even during the worst years following 1989, the college never closed its doors. Today, enrolment is over 5,000. The principal, Dr. Nusrat Andrabi, proudly showed me photographs of a talent show in June where students performed dances from different parts of India, sang ghazals, and modelled their own designs. In her imposing office, laminated photographs commemorating a recent visit by President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam have joined displayed photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru's much earlier visit.

I could not help but comment: "I did not expect Kashmir to be so normal."

Yet this hyperactive normalcy itself signals a traumatised society. The meticulous maintenance of order in one's immediate surroundings embodies the battle against violence and disorder unleashed by outside forces. Tripping over a loose flagstone en route to the library — well stocked, splendidly kept, putting many a venerable Kolkata institution to shame — Dr. Andrabi immediately ordered its fixing with cement. One imagines that this steely lady would like to fix wider problems with equal immediacy. Her colleague requests me, "please tell people that Kashmiris are not simply terrorists." The awareness of being represented through stereotypes while unable to control that representation is one of the many ways in which Kashmiris today perceive themselves as lacking agency.

This predicament reveals itself in how Kashmiris from diverse educational backgrounds refer to the insurgency — the English words "turmoil" (the most popular designation) and "situation", the Urdu phrases "these thirteen years", or, simply, "that which has gone on" — terminology suggestive of happenings beyond one's control and instigation. In his Kashmiri short story, Why Bhushanlal Froze, factory worker and writer Ghulam Nabi Shahid uses a Pandit's immobility in the face of security forces to signify a society frozen in the glare of endemic violence, trapped in the pincer-grip of diverse interest groups. The vocabulary of arrested movement, silence, suffocation, and amputation is everywhere — especially while reviewing political decision-making and individual response during the "turmoil".

Shuja Sultan, artist and Urdu poet, describes his silence during the early years: "if I told the truth, I would be killed. If I lied, I would betray my future generations. So I hibernated." This hibernation is now ending: copious amounts of poetry, art and sculpture have emerged out of the "turmoil", returning incessantly, however, to the vocabulary of immobility and indecision. Poet Naseem Shifai writes in Kashmiri, "Were someone to seize my neck, I would bow my head/ were someone to question me/ I would be unable to answer/ if any decision emerged in my mind/ I would hide it." Yet, art is only seemingly impotent. The writer takes on society's pain and transforms poison into nectar: "In their jars are contained/ wondrous water/ come, you too drink this/ it is amrit/ let no-one say to me/ your throat is blue."

Shifai's allusion to Shiva Neelakantha is an unobstrusive act of mourning, recreating the cultural input of the departed Pandits. In Srinagar, they speak of this exodus as loss of limb. "Children born during these years do not know what a Hindu is," says one; "we lost them, they lost us, who knows how, but we lost each other," says another. I am reminded of Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali's immortal opening line in the poem "Farewell": "At a certain point, I lost track of you." It all sounds frighteningly like Partition, but the absence (still) of national borders encourages tangible attempts towards reconciliation. Young activists from Srinagar are visiting camps in Jammu. But ultimately, it is art that transforms and transcends bitterness and suffering. In Jammu, sculptor Rajendar Tiku shows me his miniaturised pieces in marble and wood: "snowflowers". To me, they look deathly pale; for him, they mean renewal and forgiveness.

In the valley, there is a scent of change in the air. The new government is cautiously pronounced capable; the return of tourists this summer has suggested this lull may be less impermanent than others. The owner of the Holiday Inn houseboat commented on my choice of breakfast, "today at last there was happiness in our home. After 13 years someone asked for a single-fried egg." This is not the theatre of the absurd, but a devastated people eagerly interpreting the smallest of signs as portents of a different future. That future depends not so much on ready-packaged "democracy", as on searching introspection on individual and collective levels. An impressive example of this process is SPACE, a literal space for student activity and self-therapy founded by activist Gowhar Fazili, co-author of an important report on the impact of protracted violence on Kashmiri youth.

"One day a boy fired a pistol in the air, and we realised all our youth was armed. Whoever gave them arms, obviously demanded something in return. That something was our identity that we mortgaged." This level-headed assessment of past misjudgments came from none other than a militant-turned-poet. India and Pakistan are compared to the proverbial frying pan and fire, and militancy is seen as an option that failed to deliver. The overwhelming focus in the valley today is on rebuilding Kashmiri identity and Kashmiri language within the most congenial political parameters available. One feels that in this introspective, language-oriented turn lie the seeds of a possible blossoming; but it is incumbent on the rest of India to respond with empathy and openness.

On Abortion

It was expressed in today's digest that:

'In the case of the Rape or Incest I think the unborn child has the right to be born but if it jeopardize the mother's physical health than she should have an abortion.

In the case of young married/unmarried mother I do not support abortion because it is both the adults' fault that she got pregnant. A person should be responsible for his/her actions. Why should an unborn helpless child pay for your pleasure????????'

Both views are in my opinion, highly contestable and from a woman's point of view also objectionable. In the case of rape and/or incest surely it is madness to expect a woman to bear a child who will remain living proof of her violation and humiliation all her life! why should this responsibility be hers-- what about the role the male perpetrator has to play. And what about society's responsibility?

Here my objections also are addressed to the second point ie pregnancy of single mothers. Well, in this case maybe there is more room to think about 'pleasure'. But very often it is difficult for young women especially to say 'no' because of the power pressures involved in the one-to-one relationship between man and woman. The novel by Manju Kapur, Difficult Daughters sensitively describes this difficult process of a young woman saying no in the face of pressure by someone who claims to 'love' her.

Secondly, the hypocrisy of our societies and complete lack of proper sex education is responsible for such situations more than any desire for 'pleasure'. In a society where promoting awareness of condoms even to prevent HIV is seen to be as great a sin as sex itself, and where mothers certainly don't as a rule speak about these things to young girls, where will they learn how to protect themselves if and when they get into such situations? After all, it may reasonably be assumed by the law of averages that in at least 50 % of the cases sex is initiated by the man in the relationship.

Thirdly, and this point applies to children born out of both scenarios outlined above: let us hypothesise that abortion is banned for conception through rape and incest. Have we any thoughts for the trauma of the child born out of such a union, and his/her relationship with the mother and with the sort of society that exists as of today in our countries? It is this societal situation that also makes it difficult for a single woman to bring up her child if she so wishes therefore inverting the question of choice. (if tomorrow a woman from a typical middle class bengali family on either side of the border got pregnant and DECIDED out of her own choice to keep the child, then can one imagine the reactions of parents and neighbours towards both mother and child!!!).

Under the circumstances, therefore, I agree with Indira di that the ultimate right to make a decision that cannot be a psychological cakewalk for the woman concerned, must lie with her and only with her.

Regards to all
Ananya

On Kashmir

Dear Friends

A very happy new year to you all. It's good to be back on Uttorshuri! My recent piece in The Asian Age (1st January 2004) may interest you, Best wishes.

Ananya Kabir --------------

In Srinagar for the second time in six months, I continued to learn things about myself as much as about my Kashmiri friends. Consider, for instance, this lesson taught through the word ‘janaza’. A friend’s parents lamented that on the demise of his grandmother, he remained so unmoved that he did not even accompany her janaza to the burial ground. My shocked response to this information foregrounded our shared language: Islam’s observations of the milestones of birth, death and purification. But my shock actually arose from the realisation that, between my relationship with the word janaza, and my friend’s rejection of its ‘real-life’ counterpart, lay a vast gulf of words misunderstood.

The Bengali I speak at home is marked by ‘Muslim’ words for ablutions, meat preparation, water, and prayer. ‘Janaza’, pertaining as it does to the end point of life, is unsurprisingly absent from this lexicon of the everyday. I do not recall overhearing the word during my grandfather’s funeral in 1981, the only family death I have witnessed at close quarters. Belonging to a family that has for three generations overtly disengaged with religious dispensation, I was never taught what janaza means. How then had I learnt the word? Obviously through cultural osmosis, just like somehow I had sensed that the Bengali I deployed in the West Bengali public sphere had to be ‘cleansed’ of certain words.

The first time ‘janaza’ was voiced within my family signalled our changing attitudes towards Islam. Some years ago, a cousin, whose paternal family is Shia, had decided of his own accord to participate in Muharram rituals. On my visit home that year, my family narrated his ensuing experiences with staged self-deprecation and irony. After near-disasters involving overenthusiastic zanjeer maatams and other assorted misadventures, the said young man had found himself getting ready for the big taziya on the final day of Muharram. Dressed nattily for the occasion, he had launched himself into what he thought was a tributary procession, and, oblivious to some puzzled stares among his newfound companions, had mimed all proceedings with gusto. Only when the procession had reached the gates of the very graveyard where our grandparents are buried had he realised, belatedly, that he what he had made himself part of was a ‘janaza’ rather than a taziya.

This little tale symbolises to my mind the confusions rife in my family’s post-Babri Masjid generation of ‘Nehruvian Muslims’. Our blundering attempts to participate in some form of Islamic community life and our lack of coherent knowledge of how to do so crystallised in the word ‘janaza’, stumbled upon in its praxis even though instinctively understood at the moment of articulation. Its phonetics ruptures our Bengali, transforming it even as it is itself subtly transformed by Bengali’s elongated vowels. This word opens up a world estranged and sought to be reclaimed without any clear understanding of why and how. Fetishized through the analysis of affect, it emerges endowed by an elegant and tragic symmetry: pointing to the inevitability of death, connoting a struggling and, under different circumstances, possibly unnecessary birth.

My next encounter with ‘janaza’ was in a Farsi qawwali by Amir Khusrau, sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Straining to unravel the language through its double remove of Punjabi-inflected Indianised Farsi, one of the few lines that leapt out to me unaided was the complaint, ‘ba janaza gar na aayi ba mazaar khuahi aamad’ (if you don’t arrive at my janaza, then at least come to see my grave’). A sentence leapt across the centuries to sheen my idiosyncratic touchstone with further meaningfulness. ‘Janaza’ now offered what Seamus Heaney, in the context of Northern Irish English, calls a ‘linguistic loophole’: a tangible link between the struggle to relocate my Muslimness within a changing India and the world of Khusrau, from which so many of us caught in similar dilemmas continue to draw sustenance and comfort.

It was somewhat of a blow, therefore, to realise that in other places-- such as Srinagar-- this word and its associated praxis need not bear any such romanticised notions of community, loss and recuperation. Rather, the very opposite: the janaza becomes a shibboleth in the urgency to reclaim that perceived to be stifled by the prescriptiveness of religion— for instance, modernity, pluralism, the freedom of individual expression. These issues facing young Kashmiris today are complexities not easily visible from a position outside the Valley, whether this position be an unreconstructed proto-Right perspective or a relatively radical Leftist one.

The secular Indian Muslim is struggling on several fronts today—intellectual, political and, most poignantly of all, that of daily life and mere existence with dignity. Our attempts to reconfigure what Islam means to us seem very far from those negotiations that are conducted on a local level in a Muslim-majority society caught in the grip of endemic violence and war-weariness. Yet two things remain in common: the need to resist forces that deny agency and the freedom to choose, and the complex intertwining of religion, demography and politics all across South Asia that makes one group’s cold another’s epidemic. Under current circumstances (and as I have reiterated elsewhere) the Muslims of Kashmir, and those of other regions in India have a lot to learn from, and teach, one another—including our separate historical and regional engagements with Islam, tradition and modernity. We should take advantage of the present political arrangements to do so, before it might be too late all round.

On Madrasa of Kolkata

Dear friends

After a long time, writing on Uttorshuri. And from Calcutta no less! Well two years ago I took some time off to interview around 40 girls who live in a Wakf-run hostel for female students in Park Circus, Calcutta. I had a very interesting couple of days when I discovered their motivations, interests, fears etc. More on all that another time. But what was pertinent to this context was the fact that a great number of girls came from a madrassa background and that too from the poorest and remotest districts of WB. For these girls madrassas had been the only educational option affordable and within easy reach. Many of these girls were the first generation in their families to go to any school. All of them praised their fathers for supporting them and encouraging them and also named some favourite teacher 'so and so bhai/ chacha' at the madrassa who had inspired them. They also mentioned their several non-Muslim classmates. They had studied arabic of course at the madrassas but were now in different colleges of Calcutta and even at postgraduate courses in the University doing honours/ masters in diverse subjects including BEngali, History, Law, Arabic and even Mathematics. Mostly their ambitions were geared towards doing 'service' (except for the lawyers). All the girls had strong opinions on the place of Islam in their lives and the struggle to be 'normal Muslims' when caught between patriarchal and Hindu nationalist forces. For all of them, their place in the nation and the city was strongly marked by a demographic sense of being from 'the minority community.' Only one was in 'hijab proper' but the rest were very insistent on the 'modest placement of the dupatta'. Interestingly while most were Bengali speaking muslims (as would be if they came from the villages and mofussils) all the girls wore salwar kameez rather than sari. None of the girls considered modernity and Islam in any way incompatible. Many wanted their brand of BEngali identity-- mostly defined by subtle differences of vocabulary-- to be recognised and respected in the public space of the city.

On another note I have also just returned from a few very interesting days in Dhaka. I will write about those experiences soon on Uttorshuri.

Regards
Ananya