But You Don't Look Like a Muslim

By Rakhshanda Jalil

What does it mean to be Muslim in India?What does it mean to look like one's religion?Does one's faith determine how one is perceived?Is there a secular ideal one is supposed to live up to?Can people of different faiths have a shared culture, a shared identity?India has, since time immemorial, been plural, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, where various streams have fed into and strengthened each other, and where dissimilarities have always been a cause for rejoicing rather than strife. These writings, on and about being Muslim in India, by Rakhshanda Jalil - one of the country's foremost literary historians and cultural commentators - excavate memories, interrogate dilemmas, and rediscover and celebrate a nation and its syncretic culture. But You Don't Look Like a Muslim is a book that every thinking Indian must read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: May 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353029319

Rakhshanda Jalil

Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, critic and literary historian. She has published over twenty books and written over fifty academic papers and essays. Her book on the lesser-known monuments of Delhi, Invisible City, continues to be a bestseller. Her most recent works include translations of The Sea Lies Ahead, Intizar Husain's seminal novel on Karachi and Krishan Chander's partition novel Traitor; an edited volume of critical writings on Ismat Chughtai called An Uncivil Woman; a literary biography of the Urdu poet Shahryar; The Great War: Indian Writings on the First World War; Preeto and Other Stories: The Male Gaze in Urdu and, most recently, Kaifiyat, a translation of Kaifi Azmi's poems. She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi–Urdu literature and culture. In 2016, she was awarded the Kaifi Azmi Award for her contribution to Urdu.

Book preview

BUT YOU DON’T LOOK

LIKE A MUSLIM

Essays on Identity and Culture

RAKHSHANDA JALIL

To Abbu, my father Dr Abdul Jalil, who was a proud Indian and a practising Muslim and never saw any duality in being both:

Chaman mein ikhtilat-e-rang-o-bu se baat banti hai

Hum hi hum hain to kya hum hain tum hi tum ho to kya tum ho

It is the inter-mingling of colours and fragrances that make a garden

If there is only us there can be no us and there can be no you if there’s

only you

– Sarshar Sailani

Contents

Oh, But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim!

PART I: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

1    My Father Did Not Take the Train to Pakistan

2    Living in Jamia, Coping with Ghettoization

3    Separate but Equal: The Struggle for a ‘Normal’ School for Girls

4    Burqa: Moving Tombs for Muslim Women

5    No Imam but the ‘Shahi’ Imam

6    Charlie Hebdo and the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle

7    Kabul Fiza

8    On Returning From Dhaka

9    The Haj as Travel

10  Busting the Myth of the Monotonous Monochromatic Musalman

PART II: THE MATRIX OF CULTURE

1    Memories of Summers Past

2    Gharelu Dawat: Celebrating an Oxymoron

3    Cooking in the Age of Homogenization

4    Fasting, Feasting: Foods for the Faithful

5    The Bad, Mad World of Jasoosi Duniya

6    From Amma’s Razais to Jaipuri Quilts

7    Telling the Story of Ram-e-Hind

8    The Begum Who Sang of Love and Longing

9    Of Kings, Queens and Invaders

10  Whatever Happened to ‘Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!’

PART III: THE MOSAIC OF LITERATURE

1    Urdu: ‘Rest in Peace’ or ‘Work in Progress’?

2    Songs for All Seasons: The Oral Tradition in Urdu Literature

3    Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan: The People’s Poet

4    Nazir Akbarabadi: Voice of the People, Poet of Protest

5    Ale Ahmad Suroor: The Grand Old Man of Urdu Tehzeeb

6    Shakeel Badayuni: The Resolute Romantic

7    The Absent Presence: The Partition in Modern Urdu Poetry

8    Those Days of ‘Jai Siya Ram’

9    Chhabbees Janwary: Bring Back the Angered Spring

10  Batwara vs Azadi: Two Versions of a Cataclysm

PART IV: THE RUBRIC OF RELIGION

1    On Sighting the Eid Moon

2    When Piety Meets Poetry

3    Live Like Ali, Die Like Husain!

4    By the Night When It Draws a Veil

5    When Hasrat Pined for Krishan Ji Bhagwan

6    Bada Din: Rejoicing the Birth of Ibn-e-Maryam

7    Holi: Celebrating Gulabi Eid

8    Diwali: The Night that Dispels Darkness

9    On Nanak, the Mard-e-Kamil

10  Dil ki Kitaab: The Gita in Urdu

Footnote

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

Copyright

OH, BUT YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE A MUSLIM!

I HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED HOW one is supposed to look like one’s religion. Save for outward tokens such as a turban or a topi, a beard or a burqa, how can one give instant proof of one’s religious beliefs? Yet, growing up in Delhi, all through my school, college and university, while negotiating an assortment of jobs and offices, not to say myriad social occasions, I have heard this comment delivered in tones ranging from surprise to approval. With time I have understood that the speaker is trying to give me a back-handed compliment. Since I don’t look like a Muslim, I am ‘okay’, I am not quite one of ‘them’ - the bomb-throwing, beef-smuggling, jihad-spouting Muslim of popular imagination. By extension, I might even - at a stretch - be considered one of ‘us’.

So, I don’t look like the Muslim of general perception. For one, I don’t have a beard, nor do I wear surma in my eyes or a skullcap on my head. I may be forgiven for that since I am not a man. But I also don’t conform to most people’s idea of a Muslim woman. I sound like anyone raised in Delhi, snobbish as we are - in South Delhi to be precise. I dress no better and no worse than any woman of my social class, not to mention age. I wear my hair short, un-camouflaged by the hijab. In short, I look like any average Delhi person.

Yet I have this other layer to my being, another skin you might call it; that is my Muslimness. This other skin gets revealed every now and then when I break into chaste Urdu or am outraged when Muslim youth are pulled out of buses and trains, beaten and killed; or express horror at our apathy towards the Rohingya crisis or puzzlement at those who equate vegetarianism with non-violence and vice versa. In my mind, there is no duality. I am a Muslim and an Indian in no particular order. I am both. What is more, I see no reason to be either embarrassed or defensive if some random Muslim youth decides to join the ISIS (whose numbers, incidentally, are minuscule) or, for that matter, cheer for Pakistan when it wins a cricket match (though given its present team such instances are increasingly rare, but in my childhood Pakistan won more matches than it lost). Then, of course, there is my second name which is a dead giveaway of my being ‘Muhammadan’!

Far from camouflaging my identity, I want to celebrate being an Indian and being a Muslim. And I wish to do so in the only way I know – through my writings. What is more, and this I want to say as clearly and as loudly as I can, I am not a minority within a minority. I am the voice of the Muslim middle class, a fairly new entity but a sizeable one in the seven decades it has taken to grow since its numbers were completely decimated in the Partition of 1947. And it is this large entity that the world, and India in particular, must acknowledge and learn to deal with. What is more, the Indian Muslims are not all cut from the same cloth; they are marked by regional and ethnic differences, not to mention the very obvious ones of social class, financial standing and education. A great many among this vast heterogeneous mass are practicing Muslims or even devoutly religious, yes, but even they are far, far removed from the wild-eyed Islamists dreaming of a pan-Islamic umma. Given that the Muslim population is roughly 172 million, save for the stray IS sympathizers, in my considered opinion, the overwhelming majority does not show any propensity towards terrorism. Also, the idea of converting India from a Dar-ul Harb (land of unbelievers) to a Dar-ul Islam (land of Islam) through whatever means available to them lies more in the minds of right-wing Hindu extremists than Muslims.

Be it films or popular culture, the demonization of the Muslims has only increased their sense of isolation and victimhood. In pre-globalization India, the film industry routinely depicted Muslims as smugglers or as paan-chewing, surma-wearing hoodlums dressed in pathan suits or as qawwali-singing debauched men who divorced their wives for the most frivolous of reasons. Post-liberalization, these caricatures were replaced by sinister dons sitting in West Asian havens planning the destruction of Indian cities and, more recently, as tech-savvy but devout Muslims who have been radicalized and turned into cold-blooded jihadists. Subtly but surely, several motifs have crept into the public discourse such as: the strategic entrapment of Hindu girls by Muslim boys as part of a larger game-plan dubbed ‘love jihad’; the blithe disregard for Hindu sentiments in killing and consuming cows for meat; the sheer nuisance of causing a law-and-order situation every Friday when Muslims congregate in large numbers and listen to khutbas about all sorts of regressive things such as ‘don’t take your kids for polio shots’ or ‘don’t put your money in banks as interest is haraam’; their refusal to sing ‘Vande Mataram’ in a blatant display of their innate anti-nationalism; and so on and so forth.

While the entire Muslim community has suffered because of this steady infiltration of misconceptions and piling up of images and ideas - each more offensive and alienating than the other - a culture and way of life too has suffered due to this stereotyping. Urdu, which has no mooring in Islam, is identified with all Muslims - completely ignoring the fact that Muslims in Kerala speak Malayalam, those from Assam speak Assamese and so on. Popular culture has long depicted Urdu poets and nawabs as sorry creatures steeped in nostalgia and pathos or, worse still, romanticized sherwani-clad heroes and heroines in ghararas in what were once euphemistically called ‘Muslim socials’. When not banal or limiting, some depictions are outright offensive, such as the recurring representation of Muslims as pillaging invaders who looted and burnt temples or lascivious medieval sultans lusting after chaste Rajput queens when not tearing off chunks of raw meat with their bare teeth like savages. Is this forsaking of reality for an erroneous perception not tantamount to aggravated assault? Is this deliberate othering not a form of violence: a violence to the mind and spirit? And what of the actual spike in communal violence and the increase in the number of hate crimes? And the vigilantism that has spiralled out of control from a carefully-orchestrated anti-beef hysteria?

So, how are the Muslims themselves responding to this violence around them, one that is very systematically directed against them? What answer can they give when Union Ministers claim that profits from (Muslim-owned and allegedly illegal) slaughterhouses are directed to fund terrorist activities? Or when the Taj Mahal is written off by a duly elected MLA for being ‘a blot on the nation’ built as it is by ‘traitors’? And so it goes on. The Indian Muslim is scared and silent, cowed down by the scale and strength of the violence all around him. He is waiting for his Hindu brethren to speak up. He might go for the occasional protest march but there too he is fearful to be seen holding up a placard that says ‘Not in My Name’ or ‘Break the Silence’.

‘Barq girti hai to bechare Musalmanon par’ (lightning strikes only on the Muslims) wrote Allama Iqbal in his long poem addressed to God entitled ‘Shikwa’ (Complaint). And indeed for a century and a half, to be precise since the brutal aftermath of the First War of Independence of 1857, Indian Muslims have been labouring under a sense of siege, of being persecuted and punished for the sins of their fathers, of being wrongly accused of sins of omission and of being at the receiving end of all sorts of indignities, humiliations and violations. In the years after the Partition, accused of being traitors whose rightful place was on the other side of the border, a border that their forefathers had helped create, they were reduced to pawns in a game of electoral politics. The elections of 2014 held up a mirror to the Indian Muslims; the results proved more effectively than any rhetoric how marginalized they have become and how ineffectual in the larger scheme. When it comes to a game of numbers, the Muslim vote amounts to nothing. Their effacement from the body politic seems total.

Clearly, there is much the Indian Muslims need to do to better their lot, to be more integrated and more upwardly mobile in a purely socio-economic sense. The indices on which they falter, which were so ably pointed out by the Sachar Commission report, are too obvious to be quibbled over. What is equally important is for the rest of the country, and especially the Hindu majority, to adjust the lens through which they view Muslims. There is an urge, as widespread as it is unarticulated among the Muslims of India, to be seen for who or what they are - no better or worse than their neighbours and peers, with no especial propensity towards violence nor any inherent violent tendencies brought on or encouraged by their faith. The binary of bharatiya and videshi, sanskari and ku-sanskari constantly thrust in their faces is not only hurtful and untrue but reinforces stereotypes and pushes Muslims further into the margins. Far from being perpetrators of violence they see themselves as victims of violence. For India to retain its health and vigour as a plural society, this imbalance must be recognized and addressed.

I

THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

1

MY FATHER DID NOT TAKE

THE TRAIN TO PAKISTAN

I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD in 1971. I remember the brown paper pasted on our windowpanes, the trenches dug in the park facing our house in a South Delhi neighbourhood and the near-palpable fear of air strikes that held us in thrall. I also remember being called a ‘Paki’ by other kids in school as India and Pakistan prepared to go to war against each other yet again, or at least the only time in living memory for my generation. Being the only Muslim child in class, many of my peers, a Kashmiri Pandit boy in particular, took great delight in grilling me on my Pak connections. I tried, in vain, to explain that I had none. But no one would believe my stoic denials; I was a Muslim after all, I must have relatives in Pakistan. My sympathies must necessarily lie with ‘them’. And this tacit sympathy – taken for granted by my young tormenters - made me as much an enemy as ‘them’.

I remember coming home in tears one afternoon. I remember my father, a man of great good sense, sitting me down and giving me a little spiel. That afternoon chat was to give form and shape to my sense of nationhood in more ways than I could fathom then. It was also to place me squarely on a trajectory that has allowed me to chart my destiny in twenty-first-century India precisely as I wish – not out of defiance or head-on collision but with self-assurance and poise. My father started by telling me how he had to leave his home in Pilibhit, a small town in the Terai region bordering the foothills of the Himalayas, and find shelter in a mosque, how many homes in his neighbourhood were gutted, others were vacated almost overnight by families leaving for Pakistan, and his goggle-eyed surprise at first sight of the Sikh refugees who moved into the houses abandoned by fleeing Muslims. While the option of going to Pakistan was there for him too, a newly qualified doctor from a prestigious colonial-era medical college in Lucknow, he chose not go. In choosing to stay back and raise a family here on this land where his forefathers had lived and died, he was putting down more roots, stronger and deeper into the soil that had sustained generations before him. Wear your identity, if you must, as a badge of courage not shame, he said.

He also gave the example of my mother’s father, Ale Ahmad Suroor, a well-known name in the world of Urdu letters, and his decision too to stay put despite the many inducements that were offered to qualified Muslim men from sharif families. The Land of the Pure held out many promises: a lecturer could become a professor, a professor could become a Vice-Chancellor, sons would get good jobs, daughters would find better grooms and there would be peace and prosperity among one’s own sort. And yet, my mother’s family, like my father’s, chose not to go. To be honest, I was later told my grandmother – a formidably headstrong lady - wanted to go, especially since many in her family had moved to Karachi. But my grandfather, then a lecturer at Lucknow University, was adamant: his future and his children’s lay here in Hindustan. And so, they stayed. In the face of plain good sense, some might say. Why? What made them stay when so many were going?

Over the years, I have had many occasions to dwell upon this - both on the possible reasons and the implications of their decision. As I have grappled with my twin identities (am I an Indian Muslim or a Muslim Indian?), or tried not to sound defensive about my so-called liberalism, or struggled to accept the patronizing compliment of being a secular Muslim without cringing, I have wondered why families like mine, in the end, chose Jawaharlal Nehru over Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Like many Muslims in India I have often wondered if the cleavage of hearts and land was truly inevitable, or could it have been averted? What would have been the state of the Indian subcontinent today had a pact been reached between the Muslim League and the Congress? What happened to the heady days of 1919 when Hindus and Muslims had come together to fight the common enemy, the British, chanting ‘Hindu–Musalman ki Jai’? What went so wrong between the two major communities of the subcontinent? What caused the disenchantment with the Congress? What made some staunch Congressmen rally around the once-derided Muslim League? What cooled the Muslims’ ardour to join nationalistic mainstream politics? For that matter, why was the Muslim suddenly regarded as a toady and a coward content to let the Hindus fight for freedom from the imperial yoke? Why was he suddenly beyond the pale? How did he become the ‘other’? And what of the dream of the Muslim Renaissance spelt out in such soul-stirring verse by the visionary poet Iqbal? In turn, why did the Congress baulk at the issue of separate electorates, calling it absurd and retrograde? Why did it do nothing to allay the Muslim fear that the freedom promised by the Congress meant freedom for Hindus alone, not freedom for all? Seen from the Muslim point of view, the Congress appeared guilty of many sins of omission and some of commission. ‘Nationalism’ increasingly began to mean thinking and living in the Congress way and none other. Those who lived or thought another way came to be regarded as anti-national, especially in the years after Independence.

However, to come back to the Muslim League and the extreme reactions it has always evoked among Indian Muslims, it is interesting to explore why the League logic enamoured some so completely and left others