Riot (14 page)

I haven't read much Freud, but it doesn't take a shrink to interpret this kind of dream. And it gets worse. Once I awake from another dream of falling, except this time I have splashed into a great briny foaming brown sea, and as I rise to the surface, choking and spluttering, I feel the unmistakable taste of Coca-Cola in my nose and mouth. I plunge again, flailing, and choke on the liquid. I am drowning in a sea of Coke! When I surface again I see, just out of my reach, my daughter on a raft, absurdly shaped like an Ambassador car. She is dressed in white, the color of mourning, and her limpid eyes are sadly downcast, seemingly unaware of me drowning just beyond her reach. In my dream I call out to her but find myself sinking again, knowing this plunge is the third and final descent into the depths, that as I go under my lungs will be full of that brown-black liquid and my voice will be stilled. I swear I awake with the taste of Coca-Cola on my tongue.

And Priscilla, I wonder what she dreams. She always says she can never remember a single dream; she awakes refreshed from her slumber, her mind blissfully cleansed of the night's wanderings. I envy her unencumbered sleep, the happy transience of her memory.

I have acquired her memories now, and they torment me. I think of her previous lovers, the basketball jock first, and imagine his dark hand on her pale thigh, much like mine, and something dies a little in me. I ask her, with studied casualness, about her old boyfriends, and she replies quite unselfconsciously, in as much detail as I want. And I always want more than is good for me. Sometimes I stop myself in time, preventing my mind from acquiring a detail that I know will come back to haunt me, to diminish my sense of my own worth as her lover. But then the most innocuous details have that power. She itemizes her menagerie at my request, and they tumble out in her recounting like an amatory United Nations — an Argentine, a Finn, a Chinese. Am I, I find myself wondering, merely the latest in a long line of exotics who have shared Priscilla's bed, the beneficiaries of some missionary urge to bring succor to the underprivileged? But then I remember she has been in WASP arms too, and consider her progression from Boston Brahmin to Tamil Brahmin. Perhaps her predilection is for minorities.

Of course I know these are unworthy thoughts, and the hot flashes of jealousy always pass, sooner or later, cooled by the refreshing candor of her love for me. I sometimes defuse my discomfort by recalling Wilde: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” So Oscar would have liked us, on both counts. At other times the words of the old song, learned as a callow teenager, come back to me: “Yesterday belongs to someone else, today belongs to me.”

And what about tomorrow? Sometimes we speak of the future as if we have one. As if we have one together. I speculate idly about resigning from the service — are you mad, my mother would certainly ask, to give up the IAS career tens of thousands can only dream about? — to accompany her to her American campus, perhaps to do a doctorate myself, perhaps to write. My mother would disapprove thoroughly of her; my father, were he alive, would disown me. She is innocent of such considerations: she speaks of staying on in India, establishing HELP-US projects wherever I should happen to be posted. I forbear from telling her that the service regulations would almost certainly prohibit an official's spouse from undertaking any such activity. The conflict of interest… But something always stops me from entering into the practical details. Priscilla is an escape from reality; her magic cannot survive too much realism.

And so I go along as she spins these glorious schemes in the gossamer of her illusions….

 

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview
with Professor Mohammed Sarwar

October 12, 1989

You should know what Maulana Azad said when he became president of the Indian National Congress at Ramgarh in 1940. I'd give you a copy of the speech, Mr. Diggs, but I don't have access to a photocopier in Zalilgarh. It doesn't matter; I know the words by heart. There is no greater testament of the faith of a religious Muslim in a united India.

The Maulana was a religious scholar, born in Mecca, educated in the Koran and the Hadith, fluent in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, an exemplar of Muslim learning and culture in India. Yet he confessed that “every fiber of my being revolted” against the thought of dividing India on communal lines. “I could not conceive it possible for a Musulman to tolerate this,” he declared, “unless he has rooted out the spirit of Islam from every corner of his being.” Remember that his principal rival for the allegiance of India's Muslims was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, an Oxbridge-educated Lincoln's Inn lawyer who wore Savile Row suits, enjoyed his Scotch and cigars, ate pork, barely spoke Urdu, and married a non-Muslim. There was no question in the Maulana's mind as to who was the better Muslim; yet Jinnah claimed to speak for India's Muslims and to assert their claims to being a separate nation, while the Maulana worked in the secular (Jinnah said Hindu-dominated) Indian National Congress to remind his fellow Muslims where their homeland really was.

“I am a Musulman and proud of the fact,” he said in that great speech. Shall I go on? Is your tape recorder working? “Islam's splendid traditions of thirteen hundred years are my inheritance. I am unwilling to lose even the smallest part of this inheritance. In addition, I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity that is Indian nationality.” And then he added — this is the key part — “I am indispensable to this noble edifice. Without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete. I am an essential element which has gone to build India. I can never surrender this claim. It was India's historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, and that many a caravan should rest here… . One of the last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam. They came here and settled for good. We brought our treasures with us, and India too was full of the riches of her own precious heritage. We gave her what she needed most, the most precious of gifts from Islam's treasury, the message of human equality. Full eleven centuries have passed by since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.”

It took courage to say this. The Maulana was dismissed by Jinnah as a “Muslim showboy,” a token elected by the Congress to advertise its secular credentials. But the Maulana was not immersing his Islam in any woolly notion of Indian secularism, still less was he uncritically swallowing Hindu professions of tolerance and inclusiveness. He was, instead, asserting his pride in his religious identity, in the majesty and richness of Islam, while laying claim to India for India's Muslims. He dismissed talk of partition by arguing that he was entitled — just as any Hindu was — to a stake in all of India, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from the Khyber Pass to Khulna; why should he accept the Pakistani idea of a narrower notion of Muslim nationhood that confined Indian Muslims to a truncated share of the heritage of their entire land? He was a far more authentic representative of Indian Islam than Jinnah, and it is part of the great tragedy of this country's Muslims that it was Jinnah who triumphed and not Azad.

Triumph? Partition was less a triumph for Indian Muslims than an abdication. In fact, most of the country's Islamic leaders, and especially those whom you might think of today as “fundamentalists” (people like Maulana Maudoodi, who was to spend years in Pakistani jails), were bitterly opposed to the movement for Pakistan. They felt that Islam should prevail over the world at large and certainly over India as a whole, and they thought it treasonous — both to India and to Islam itself — to advocate that the religion be territorially circumscribed as Jinnah and the Muslim Leaguers did. Pakistan was created by “bad” Muslims, secular Muslims, not by the “good” Muslims in whose name Pakistan now claims to speak.

You can understand why some Indian Muslims are more viscerally anti-Pakistan than many Hindus, especially North Indian Hindus with their romanticized nostalgia for the good old days before Partition. Indian Muslims know what they have lost, what burdens they have to bear as the result of the Jinnah defection, the conversion of brothers into foreigners. Mohammed Currim Chagla, who was India's foreign minister during the 1965 war with Pakistan, made a speech in Parliament during the Bangladesh war of 1971 in which he said that “Pakistan was conceived in sin and is dying in violence.” Do you know M. J. Akbar, the editor of the
Telegraph?
India's brightest young journalist, a real media star, and a Muslim. Well, he famously denounced Jinnah as having “sold the birthright of the Indian Muslims for a bowl of soup.” Some of us feel that our birthright cannot be so easily sold, but it is precisely that sense of loss that drives so many of us to rage and sorrow — the feeling that, since the country was divided in our name, we are somehow less entitled to our due in what remains of it. That a part of our birthright has indeed been given away.

Which leads some of my fellow Muslims into a sort of self-inflicted second-class citizenship, a result of our guilt by association with the original sin of Partition. “If you don't like it here in India,” say the crassest of the Hindu bigots, “why don't you go to Pakistan?” How can you reply, “Because this is my home, I am as entitled to it as you are,” when Jinnah and his followers have given the Hindu bigots their best excuse? When they acted, in the name of all Indian Muslims, to surrender a portion of our entitlement by saying that the homeland of an Indian Muslim is really a foreign country called Pakistan?

These are the feelings that are played upon by the Hindu chauvinists. They build their case on our own concession of failure. And I'm not talking about the extremist crackpots who claim the Taj Mahal was really a Hindu palace, but the seemingly reasonable ones who call on Muslims to “assimilate” properly, to “acknowledge” our Hindu origins and subordinate ourselves to their notion of the Indian ethos. There are always some Muslims who'll submit to this nonsense, who'll accept a notion of the Indian ethos that doesn't include them. But for every Indian Muslim who's vulnerable to such feelings of guilt, there are two who have outgrown it – who assert, like the Maulana, that India is not complete without us, that we are no less Indian than the most chauvinist Hindu.

But who owns India's history? Are there my history and his, and his history about my history? This is, in many ways, what this whole Ram Janmabhoomi agitation is about — about the reclaiming of history by those who feel that they were, at one point, written out of the script. But can they write a new history without doing violence to the inheritors of the old?

Once, when I was in college, a fellow got into an argument with me and lost his temper. “You partitioned the country!” he yelled. I interrupted him. “If I'd partitioned the country, I wouldn't be here. I'd be in Pakistan,” I said. “If you mean I'm a Muslim, I plead guilty to the charge of being Muslim. But to no other charge. Muslims didn't partition the country — the British did, the Muslim League did, the Congress Party did. There are more Muslims in India today than in Pakistan. This is where we belong.” I said it quietly, but the fight died in him then. He spluttered and walked away. I stood my ground. All Indian Muslims must, or they will soon have no ground to stand on.

Pakistanis will never understand the depth of the disservice Jinnah did us, Indian Muslims as a whole, when he made some of us into non-Indians. There are still so many Indians who — out of ignorance as well as prejudice — think of us as somehow different from them, somehow foreign, “not like us.” I was on a train once, with my wife and children, dressed as you see me, in a shirt and trousers, smoking a Wills and reading the
Statesman
, when my neighbor struck up a conversation about something in the paper — I can't remember what it was, but it had nothing to do with the communal question. Anyway, towards the end of the conversation, which we had both enjoyed, he introduced himself and asked me my name. “Mohammed Sarwar?” he repeated incredulously. “A Muslim?” As if Mohammed Sarwar could be anything but a Muslim! “Yes,” I replied, tightly, defensively. He waved a sheepish hand, the gesture taking in my garb, my wife in a floral-patterned salwar-kameez, my little boys in shorts and tee-shirts reading Amar Chitra Katha comics. “But you're not like
them
at all!”

Not like them at all. I began to say something, but was suddenly overcome by the sheer futility of the attempt. It was bad enough that he had labeled me, consigned his erstwhile conversational partner to the social ghetto of minority status. But I had surprised him, perhaps even disappointed him, by failing to conform to his stereotype of my minority- hood. As a Muslim, I had to look different; perhaps my forehead should bear the indentation of banging it on the floor five times a day in namaz; my wife should no doubt be in a burqa, shielded from infidel eyes; my boys should wear the marks of their circumcisions like a badge. Instead there we were, indistinguishable from any other middle-class Indian family on the train. I looked him directly in the eye till he became uncomfortable enough to avert his gaze. I am a Muslim, I wanted to say to him, but I will never allow your kind to define what kind of Muslim I am.

Yes, there's prejudice in this country. I know I've had a privileged upbringing, an elite education, and I'm now in a position of intellectual authority. I've been conscious of how important it is for me never to forget that isn't that way for millions of my fellow Muslims. Indian Muslims suffer disadvantages, even discrimination, in a hundred different ways that I may never personally experience. If I'm ever in danger of forgetting that, there'll be someone like that man on the train to remind me.

And yet, Mr. Diggs, I love this country. I love it not just because I was born here, as my father and mother were, as their parents before them were, not just because their graves have mingled their bones into the soil of this land. I love it because I know it, I have studied its history, I have traveled its geography, I have breathed its polluted air, I have written words to its music. India shaped me, my mind, my tastes, my friendships, my passions. The fact that I bow my head towards the Kaaba five times a day —after years in college when I did not pray even three times a year — does not mean I am turning away from my roots. I can eat a masala dosa at the Coffee House, chew a paan afterwards and listen to Ravi Shankar playing raag durbari, and I celebrate the Indian-ness in myself with each note. I hear the Muslim Dagar brothers sing Hindu devotional songs, and then I attend a qawwali performance by one of our country's greatest exponents of this Urdu musical form, who happens to be a Hindu, Shankar Shambhu, and I am transported as he chants the long list of Muslim pirs to whom he pays devotional tribute before his rendition. This is India, Mr. Diggs!