Some excerpts;
“ON A DELHI PLAYGROUND in the late 2000s, five-year-old Azania was about to kick a football with her white canvas shoes, when a boy from the rival team screamed, “Get away from the ball, you Paki.” When the author Nazia Erum heard about this—one of several instances of Islamophobia in elite schools in the National Capital Region, she writes—she wondered whether she should give her own daughter a Muslim name. When did schools become like this? She remembered that her elder brother was called “Hamas” in the 1990s, but that had felt somewhat light-hearted by comparison.
A few years before the playground incident, another child in a different part of the city found that there was an unexpected problem with her new home. After moving near her workplace in a Muslim-dominated locality near Jamia Millia Islamia, the author Rakhshanda Jalil sent handmade cards to her daughter’s classmates to invite them home for her birthday. Most of her daughter’s friends declined the invitation. Over the phone, their mothers explained to Jalil what had changed. It was different when Jalil lived in Gulmohar Park, an elite outpost where Muslims are not conspicuous, they said, but “we have no idea about the Jamia side.”
In 2008, after night-time discounts for phone calls kicked in, the writer Neyaz Farooquee and his friends used to spend hours gossiping and mocking each other. They spoke about the women they were interested in, college life, and their friend Kafil’s obsession with trivia regarding guns and weapons. Days after the Batla House encounter in September that year, Farooquee deleted the numbers of his closest friends from his phone.”
“A good deal of Muslim autobiographical writing in India seems to hinge on two points: a remembered past, and a present that is worse and more difficult in myriad ways. The sense of an escalating decline is ubiquitous, but the patterns signifying that something has been lost are less linear than they may initially seem. All Muslims did not inhabit the same havens to begin with.
There is a certain way in which ‘Muslim memoirs’ are written and reviewed. The years of a writer’s life are often charted against depleting levels of secularism in the country. A few themes make frequent appearances: the pain surrounding Partition and a sense of disbelief that the Congress let it happen; the ostensible glory of the Nehruvian era—the 1960s and 1970s—when Muslims could do their jobs without being made aware of their religion, and how this started changing; the ulemas of the 1980s, who stymied attempts to reform the community and change antiquated personal laws; and the gradual institutional collapse of secularism after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But is there more to Muslim lives in India that this arc obfuscates?
A wave of recent non-fiction books use the autobiographical form to tell the story of Muslims in India. Published in the last few years, faced with an escalating assault on Muslims under the Narendra Modi government, these writings provide an insight into Muslims’ minds as they witness these times. The writers contextualise their experiences against the broader history of independent India. In her book Mothering a Muslim, Nazia Erum, faced with bringing up her daughter in an Islamophobic world, describes her conversations with other Muslim parents. Neyaz Farooquee, in An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism, takes us into the petrified mind of a young Muslim man who fears being labelled as a ‘terrorist’ by a biased state and an unquestioning media. Rakshanda Jalil, in her collection of essays titled But You Don’t Look Like A Muslim, responds to the stereotypes she faces. Seema Mustafa’s Azadi’s Daughter: Being a Secular Muslim in India and Saeed Naqvi’s Being the Other: The Muslim in India compare the authors’ experiences of growing up in a secular, pluralist India to what they later witnessed as journalists reporting on events that reveal the erosion of the India they once knew.
The narrative of the steady disenfranchisement and marginalisation of Indian Muslims is important and urgent, and deserves to be told again and again. But there is another story that gets neglected in this telling. Indian Muslims are constantly talked about, yet the role of caste in the Muslim community remains almost entirely secret. Islamophobes, liberals and prominent Muslims in both religious and intellectual spheres have consistently overlooked the issue. The dominant discourse on Muslims—focussed on discrimination, backwardness, marginalisation of women, terrorism and communal violence—sees them solely within the confines of religious politics. The questions it asks of Muslim lives are limited to ones of secularism, communalism or fanaticism. One of the primary reasons for this is the caste identity of the writers, scholars and critics who have so far formed the Muslim intelligentsia. As the scholar Arshad Alam noted, most Muslims of India are lower-caste, whereas the people who represent them are upper-caste.”
posted by f.sheikh