What does the word “friendship” evoke in me? First and foremost, it is a likeability. I am in a place, a time and in a company that I like to be in. My earliest memory of that place is in first grade (or first standard as we call it in India), under big Gulmohar trees, after school, waiting to be picked up, with an Assamese girl called S, whom everybody called Dulla (‘u” as in “pull”). We were always the last ones to be picked up, and everyday, we would spend a brief time by ourselves under those trees. I do not remember what we talked about, or what we did, but there is a faint memory of picking seeds together. That was my first friendship. Dulla had the distinct features of people from the northeast India – perfectly straight brown hair cut short to her ears, narrow brown eyes, beautifully smooth skin and cheeks that grew pink in the sun. I remember that I liked how different from everyone else she looked, and I was always amused by the surprise she evoked in people when she opened her mouth to speak flawless Malayalam.
Once when we found out that both of us owned similar black sandals, with little butterflies on the straps, we decided to wear them to school the next day. School was strict about uniforms, and only black shoes were allowed, except on rainy days. Sadly, it did not go down well with the teacher, and we got a warning. I remember the excitement, and also the regret, and how I vowed never to break rules again.
Our school was housed in the CPCRI (Central Plantation Crops Research Institute) premises where my grandfather worked, and so did Dulla’s father. This was before the new school buildings came up in the residential section of the campus, a few kilometers away. Dulla left Kasaragod, and moved to Ooty in the second grade. I think we sent each other a few letters after that. But by the time our school took us on a trip to Ooty a few years later, I had lost touch with her. On that trip, we lodged overnight in the Kendriya Vidyalaya building there (my school was also a Kendriya Vidyalaya- a central government run school, and part of a nation wide system) and I remember wondering then if she was nearby.
By then, I had also made many other friends. I was a very timid child, and in all new situations, I would take some time to step out from my shell. But my school was a small one, and there were about 25 kids in my class. Spending time with the same bunch everyday meant that even the timid ones like me made friends. And I was likeable and I liked people, even when I felt shy. If there is one thing I distinctly remember about myself, it is this- that I liked people. I liked watching people. I particularly admired those, young or adult, who could be in the world as if they owned it. I was certainly not one of them.
I have been trying to read up on friendships over the past few days to understand my own experiences with friendships, what place it occupied in my life, why, and how my expectations from it has changed over the years, and how it has shaped me. What role does friendship play in our sense of self, in how we define our identity? Does this role in identity building also translate to a similar role in the character building of a society?
I know these are broad questions. I raise them just to sort of set a vision for myself in my explorations.
I came upon a great article called “The Six Forces that Fuel Friendships” written by the Atlantic editor Julie Beck, who condensed her insights from interviewing real life friends for her series called “Friendship Files“. The six forces are accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace. (You can read a summarized version here.)
Accumulation signifies the time that is spent together. She says that it takes about 40-60 hours of time spent together in the first six weeks to become even a casual friend. Even more for more. This is the reason why most friendships happen at work, in schools, churches, and at extracurricular activities.
Attention is the awareness you bring to the people around you, and to be on the look out for signs of a potential friend, to look even in unlikely places, to notice a mutual interest, and a liking. Intention is the action that follows this attention. It requires courage, the willingness to be awkward, and be vulnerable. It might even require a kind of courtship. Ritual involves the effort that you bring to the performance of this friendship- the lunch meetings, the shared activities, the rituals of being in touch etc. Imagination helps you shape the friendship to be whatever you want it to be rather than something on the sidelines of other things. And grace allows for forgiveness, space, and expansiveness.
Looking back on our lives, we see these forces in action even when we did not recognize them as such. Friendships in early childhood just happened. Through play and trial and error, you begin your journey into the world of friendships, its various meanings and possibilities.
Years later, a friend from my later years at the same school in Kasaragod, who is one of those people who has a way of keeping in touch with practically everyone she has been friends with, told me that she could put me in contact with Dulla again. But I never took her up on that offer. Its been so many years and I know that I have changed and she has too. What do we do once we make contact again?
You can trust fascism to corrupt everything in society, from institutions to language itself. This is what happened to the word “democracy” in India, with a government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi that entertains no criticism, no opposition, and no dialogue. Yet, Modi likes to tout India not just as the largest democracy in the world, but also as the mother of democracies. This, when he hasn’t given a single press conference in 9 years. Instead, every month, he speaks over government owned media, radio as well as television, in a program called “Mann Ki Baat”, which would literally mean “Mind Speak”, thus implying that the PM is speaking to the people directly from his mind. You could portray it as a self-styled patriarch or guru advising his household on moral and social issues, inspiring them towards the common good. But for those who know Modi’s politics, this is one arm of his thriving propaganda machine, that sustains the personality cult of Modi. There is no dialogue. There is no room for listening. As the PM prepares for his 100th Mann Ki Baat, to be live telecast from the UN headquarters, the nation’s top wrestlers are protesting in the capital against the chief of the Wrestling Federation, alleging harassment from him, and they ask an unresponsive PM, “Can’t you listen to our Mann Ki Baat too?’
A democracy where people have no channels to speak to the Prime Minister? This is what I mean about the corrupting influence of fascism. India as the mother of democracies!
There is a slow, but sure acknowledgement of this corruption outside of India. This corruption is pernicious. It finds its way into other aspects of the society, even into nooks and crannies of our personal spaces. It corrupts everyday life.
Modi likes to address his listeners as “mitron” or “friends” in his speeches. It begs the question- does friendship tolerate such a wide disparity in power as between a cult leader and his followers, or between a despot and his subjects? Doesn’t his appropriation of the word in the end also corrupt what the word stands for? Has the essential idea of friendship survived unscathed after it has been used for such immoral purposes?
This is what I want to explore through anecdotes from my life. I will try to write as honestly as possible on the intersection of my highly politicized Muslim identity, and my Indian self that feels distraught, unanchored and a bit lost. Friendships have fared badly in this intersection, and it will not be easy to talk about it openly. But I think I should try. It will be worth it, I believe. One of the ways fascism thrives is in silence. And it is such a silence that is imposed on Indian social life under the guise of holding peace. I believe that silence has taken its toll. Its time for an open, public, earnest, reflective conversation.
But Roshi, wont this become your “Mann Ki Baat”? Is there a room for dialogue?
First and foremost, I am no despot. Secondly, this blog has a comment box. My friends, who feel they are being talked about, know that it is no coincidence. I can be reached. I am available. We can talk.
Lastly, this blog has been primarily for myself. To unburden the clutter that my mind collects. To sort things out. Clean up. Throw away. And keep the most valuable, to make meaning, to pass on.
I did not have to think twice before I said “Yes!” My sister invited me to tag along with her and her two daughters on their trip to visit her niece, who is a student at the National Institute of Design in Jorhat, Assam. I was in India with my husband to visit my family after having stayed away from them for an unusually long duration of 2 years due to the pandemic. Omicron had just emerged, and it was spreading quickly, and we had wavered in our decision to fly to India, but then eventually, we had stuck to our plans. We had already spent 2 busy weeks in Kerala, and my husband was winding up his stay. My plan was to stay a few more weeks in Kerala with my parents. This is the juncture at which my sister came up with her splendid idea for me. I was taken. And thus, on the day that my husband began his return journey to the US, I found myself in an Indigo flight with my sister, and my 2 lovely nieces, on our way to Jorhat via Kolkata (Calcutta).
I spent most of the 3 hour long flight in the middle seat, but I swapped seats with my niece just before landing which gave me an overview of the sprawling city that Kolkata is. Kolkata airport seemed old and busy, and crowded, without enough charging stations for our cell phones. The layover was an hour or so. The next leg was quick, about an hour to Jorhat. As we flew, I saw large swathes of barren land, interspersed with flowing river channels. Brahmaputra, I whispered to myself. It’s floodplains? We also saw what looked like a peak jutting over the clouds. Either we saw a snowy peak of the Himalayas, or our ignorance was taking us on a very fascinating ride. It was all good.
As we landed, we saw land wide and green, with trees scattered all over. As we closed in on Jorhat airport, it seemed very rural, and the buildings reminded me of modest and plain government buildings known for donning their yellows. We climbed down the stairs from the plane and walked to what was a tiny airport. “No photography allowed”, said a sign. The airport in Jorhat belongs to the defense forces in India, with just one civilian plane flying in and out every day. This must explain the very bureaucratic reception that awaited us, with 2 personnel checking for papers at the door, which we soon found out were proofs of vaccination. It was a very disorganized affair, and I found myself speaking in Hindi as seemed the norm there, and finding out to our dismay that my youngest niece (unvaccinated) would have to go through an on arrival Covid test in spite of her RT-PCR test showing negative infection from the day before. But we got it done without much difficulty at the makeshift location outside. The air was crisp and cool, and a formally arranged garden surrounded the driveway. Once we got the negative result, we walked to the exit, and taxi drivers approached us. With tourists written all over us, we knew we would have to put up with their pricing regardless of our own feelings about it.
Off to G K Palace, the hotel where my sister had made her bookings, 6 km away from the airport. We drove through dusty little roads and I thought the place had a familiar air to it, with plain concrete buildings and vegetation that included arecanut, plantain trees, and even coconut palms, but all with a dash of dust as one would see in certain towns in Tamil Nadu. What was different were the people, with their distinct facial features. And everyone seemed to be making much ado about the mildly cool weather, choosing to wear light winter jackets and shawls over their clothes.
The hotel rooms were clean, and the view outside was of a petrol station undergoing renovation, roads, railway tracks, sheet roofs on single story buildings, and a lot of vegetation in the distance. My sister’s niece, P, was soon with us, and the girls had their happy reunion, filled with chatter and laughter. We discussed our plans for the day, and then decided upon a visit to the NID campus where P is a student.
National Institute of Design at Jorhat enrolled its first batch of students in the year 2019, and P was one of those students. She is doing Industrial design there and was very eager to show us around. The campus has its main buildings connected by airy corridors with its bamboo columns and rafters. We went through the design studios, looked through projects P and her classmates were involved in, for example, a project that tries to make the lives of patients and bystanders better in a hospital, or the design of passenger amenities in a train. The cafeteria had posters of movies made by the Communications Design class. I heard from P that astrology is big in Jorhat. The students had made a movie based on a muslim astrologer and called it “Dua”. I was reminded of the huge billboard of an astrologer that I had seen earlier in the town. The walls of the cafeteria, with its colorful seats and tables, were painted by the communication design class with images that reminded me of illustrations in Dr Suess books. Walls came alive with much that was being said, all of it about food.
After visiting NID, we had a really nice dinner at Moti Mahal restaurant and then we got back to the hotel. P left for her campus, where a new year party was waiting her. The plan for the next day was to go to Majuli, a river island on the Brahmaputra, and known to be the largest river island in the world. The receptionist gave us the number of a taxi driver. My sister called him up to inquire about the fares. She also called the driver we had used at the airport. It took us a little bit of debating as to which driver we should pick, and finally, we stuck to the one the receptionist gave us. Pankaj would arrive by 8 in the morning. The ferries start operating by 8:30 am. The last ferry would leave by 3:30 pm from Majuli. To get most of the island without without being stuck there without a ferry to return, we had to leave early. The hotel had breakfast and dinner included in the room pricing, so we got ready early and left for breakfast. We were greeted by pitch darkness as we opened the door to what was supposed to be the restaurant. There was no one there! We went down to the reception and asked them what was going on. It was evident that the hotel was running low on guests as well as staff. We were asked to wait and since there was no other plan for breakfast, we waited. Half an hour or so later, pooris and a basic potato curry arrived as also some bread , butter and jam. After the tea, we were set to go. It was past 9 am by the time we got to Nimati ghat. The ticket counter wanted our names, ages as well as our phone numbers. We had heard about the accident that had happened a year back there, when a ferry overturned and 3 died. Assam government had brought many changes and taken over the ferry service after that accident. I am always concerned for safety when it comes to water journeys as I don’t swim. This was no exception. I assumed that they would need details of passengers in the event of an accident. Not a very comforting thought. The fare was just 75 rupees per person. Soon we were on the top deck of the boat. It was a misty kind of day. The water looked calm and expansive. The ferry did not have much of a crowd, and there were only a few others on the top deck. We took a lot of lovely pictures. P was still sleepy from the new year party and she would occasional snooze in a corner during the long journey. The ferry came to a halt near to a very sandy shore and stayed there for a long time. When we asked around, we found out that they were waiting for the fog to clear. It was 11 am by the time we got off the ferry at Kamalabari ghat. The taxi we arranged for was waiting and Narayan was our driver and guide for this stretch. He answered our polite questions as we set off for Auniati Satra, a Hindu monastery. I heard from Narayan that the river floods in the rainy season and the sandy road that we drove over ( about 2 kilometers long ) before we got to the tarred road would be flooded then. This explained the stilts we saw under the houses on both sides of the road, crudely made huts of concrete, bricks, and bamboo, with tin roofs. A curtain formed the entry door to all the houses. P told us that the kitchen formed the center of all the homes and often, people feel offended when students or tourists ask to be shown inside. She was reminding us in a way that it is important as a visitor to respect what is there, and in humility, to be aware of our own ignorance of their values and their sentiments. Poor as the region seemed to me, I was also enchanted by the sights of a new culture passing by me.
We arrived at the road leading up to the Auniati Satra. The street was lined on both sides with shops that carried a lot of knick knacks, including toys, jewelry, and food stuff. What stood out were the basket weave bags and all the shops had those. We removed our shoes at the gate to the Satra. As we walked on, we saw well maintained grounds, and passed by a spot where they grew the marigold flowers needed for puja. We came to the small temple or namghar as it is called there, and went inside, to see a huge prayer hall with some decorative columns and a couple of murals. There was a huge drum that my sister posed for a picture with. It was meant for the puja ceremony. I was surprised that we were allowed in the inner sanctum. I made a small donation, thinking that it was appropriate since we had not been charged an entrance fee, and we were almost intruding, for the fact that we were not devotees. The grounds around the temple had other buildings that housed the Satradhikar as well the students in training there. We met a couple of young students, one whose arm had been fractured. Birds were creating a cacophony in the canopy of the lush trees all around. We strolled around a bit and then decided to see the museum. There was a small entrance fee, and a few cultural artifacts inside a small room, nothing that aroused my curiosity. We politely looked around and then thanked the Museum keeper, and we walked back to the gate, got back into our shoes, and then began browsing through the small shops we had seen earlier. When I came to one shop, a very healthy looking, handsome young boy, who was the shopkeeper, struck a conversation with me. He asked me where we had come from, what language we spoke and then he asked me how I felt at the satra. I told him I liked the place a lot, and it was very peaceful (“bahut shanti hein idhar“). He was pleased to hear that. I asked him what his name was. Durlabh, he told me. He was a student whose family resided in a town called Dibrugarh. I bought a pair of copper bangles from him for 40 rupees.
We were very hungry as we left the Satra, and in a mood for some real Assamese food. Narayan drove us to a restaurant called Pulu. It looked like a tiny neat little restaurant as we entered. The tables had purple table covers, and the place was empty. The owner soon came up and took our order. We ordered 2 fish thalis and 3 vegetarian ones. As we waited, I used the restroom in one of their hotel rooms that they were preparing to let out. The room was a tacky little set up, with furniture taking up most of the space and very low ceiling. The bathroom was clean. We waited quite a while for the thalis to arrive. Instead of 2 fish thalis, he had brought us all fish thalis- 5 of them. We had also ordered fried fish. It was a terribly miscalculated affair, and we were to be utterly disappointed by the whole meal. The fish smelled like the pond it had come from. The fried fish was bone dry and some more. My sister and my nieces refused to eat the fish. P is one of those with a true travel spirit and told us how she ate fried critters in Nagaland. I am not that adventurous, but hated wasting a life. So, I ate the fish, but left the gravy out. All the other curries were simply bland. And the bill was exorbitant, more than three thousand rupees! I stood there doing calculations and found that he had charged us for an extra Thali. It came down a bit, but even then, it was like highway robbery. I asked him what Pulu meant. It was his son’s name. He told me how his staff were mostly gone, as it was New Year day and they had to attend the yearly fair (picnic as he called it) on the mainland. He asked us to leave a good review online. Just you wait! We joked about the whole thing as we set out to see the mask makers of Majuli. The name “pulu” should have been a red flag , we joked, since it is a slang for “a lie” in Malayalam. ” Now let’s just think we donated to little Pulu’s education fund,” I suggested. At least it keeps out the bitterness at being duped. The fishy affair is one to remember for life.
The mask makers were busy at work, applying and sculpting with cow-dung. P explained the construction of the masks to us. Bamboo strips are weaved together using very strong star knots, to form a skeletal framework for the masks, over which clay and cloth are pasted to form a solid surface. Over this, a mixture of clay and cow dung is applied that is sculpted to form the needed details on the masks. There was a big serpent like costume lying on the ground, and it began moving all of a sudden creating excitement for the people around and a kid soon emerged from the serpent. There were 2 buildings that formed the main center of their operations. They had masks and baskets on sale. The baskets were woven out of dried water hyacinth strands, and there was a good variety of them. My niece got one that looked like a cup and I got a cylindrical one with a thin stranded handle, which I thought would look lovely holding a money plant inside. Or dried flowers. We did not have a lot of time left to get to the ferry, and we hurried back to our vehicle, to head back to the ghat. The return journey saw us seated in the lower deck, with a room full of passengers. And surprise surprise, in a place where we seemed to be the only non-local visitors, we came across another muslim (I could see from the hijab) family who struck a conversation with us when when they heard us speaking Malayalam. And they were also in Jorhat because of NID, with a daughter studying there, whom, of course, P knew well. The boat was very crowded, and as we approached shore, we realized why. The new year picnic and fare that the Pulu staff had gone to was visible in full sway along the shore just before we got to the ghat. The ghat was crowded as well, and our taxi was delayed due to the traffic. The newest driver, Avinash, was very talkative, pointing out great restaurants and stores to us, and we asked him about Kaziranga National park and how much he would charge us for a trip there. His over enthusiasm made us uncomfortable, but then, it was also great that he was giving us so much information. After some light snacks at a small snack bar called Mithai junction, where we also had matka teas (tea in small earthen cups), we set off to the hotel, promising my younger niece, S, always the hungry one, that we would return later for momos (dumplings) from a vendor that P had recommended. And we did take a stroll through the town later to buy the momos. They were so burning hot and spicy that we were left in tears. We also bought some bread and cheese for making sandwiches in the morning to carry with us to Kaziranga. We planned to leave very early and we set it up with Avinash to be there at 7 am the next morning. The last jeep safaris at Kaziranga would leave by 9:30 am, and the drive to the national park would be 2 hour long.
Avinash arrived on time, but we ladies were not ready yet. The girls simply would not go by our advise to sleep early. And the hotel was simply not keeping its word on heated water. We had complained earlier at the reception, and had been assured that it would be fixed, but there still was no hot water in the bathrooms. And so, we had to heat water in the kettle to take a morning shower. Following all the hustle and bustle, we managed to get out by 7:30. We had to pick P from her campus on the way too. Finally, we were on our way. We passed through misty tea gardens, with lone trees scattered here and there, and then a lot of rural landscapes, little towns, and by 9, we were at the national park. The rest room trip was arduous, even though they were pay and use toilets. There was quite a crowd too. Somehow, we stood out in the crowd. Most people seemed like they were from the north east regions. We went to pay for the jeep safari, and we were assigned a driver from the lot who were standing there and waiting for customers. When I saw our jeep, I was disappointed because it seemed old and broken. I sat in the front and then there were two more rows behind, that the others occupied in twos. As we entered the forest, we saw how the rest of the jeeps looked much better and had better seats. I felt almost as if I was in a pit. The others asked me to move back, even though it would mean that the three girls would be tightly packed in the back row. The two rows in the back were higher and I could see everything better there. Soon we realized that the real fun was to stand up. The air was beautiful, cool, fresh, clean, and the green grasslands were quite e feast for our eyes. We passed by elephants grazing, they were the tamed elephants that takes people on early morning safari into the grasslands. We got a sight of one rhino grazing about 200 feet away. As we went deeper into the park, we drove through beautiful trees, lakes and more grasslands. It was just a delightful ride. The girls were now standing up on the seat and giggling all along. For me, who is used to traveling with boys, it was quite a change to be with three girls. I enjoyed their laughter and their delight at just being together. The safari was about 2 hours long. We did see a few animals, a large reptile (our jeep driver was not really imparting any information to us and there was a language barrier), turtles, deers, a lot of birds, wild buffaloes, and another lone rhino. But it was not much, and I really came away feeling that to see the animals, one has to take one of the earliest safaris. Elephant safari would be the best for those that have the courage to do it.
Once we came out of the park, we were dropped at a spot with many handicraft shops and tea stalls. Avinash was there, waiting for us. We had some excellent tea there. The cups are tiny in Assam. But the tea is generally very good. I bought a handbag made from handloom fabric with a very traditional print of red, black and white. I also picked a wooden rhino from the massive collection of wooden animals. Our next stop was the Orchid park, an ecological and cultural centre, with many exhibits including a green house full of a wide variety of orchids. P told us that the best season to visit is April, when a lot more orchids are in bloom. The climate in Assam and, I would think, generally the north east states in India, offer a great climate for orchids. We were there on a new year weekend, and it was unbelievably crowded there. The cultural museum was next, where we got to see various artifacts from Assamese culture. There was also a gallery of pictures of historic buildings from the region. Ahom kings are much respected in Assam, having ruled for 600 years, and we were given a brief history of their rule by a volunteer. We were told that they resisted Muslims too (the Mughals). That was the only hint of communalism I ever experienced during the whole trip. The Ahom kings originated in a region of China, but later migrated to the south east (Thailand) and from there, arrived in what is now Assam. I asked them what they were doing traveling so much. “Bas ghoomne key liye aye,” she told me, which means that they were only wandering! History is but an interpretation, I thought. The kings did rule well, I assume, since they ruled for such a long time. After this, we sat down at the venue where artists perform the various folk dances from Assam, including the Bihu dance that we have often heard about and even seen at school events in our childhood. The north east region has many tribes who have their own traditional culture and art forms. Some of these dance forms were part of their agricultural practices. Another important aspect of their culture is weaving. Every home would have a loom. It played a part in romance too, where the expression of love was through weaving a particular kind of design for your Romeo (or Juliet, but I guess women did the weaving!) and then gifting it to him. Thanks P, for that trivia.
We checked out the dining area next to see if we could eat an Assamese thali there, since the place is well known for it. But again, the crowd of people waiting to eat deterred us and we gave up. We were also very tired. As we got out, we wandered along the shops, had some snacks, bought a few more handicrafts, including two beautiful handloom shawls in the traditional Assamese colors (red and black over cream). I did not find a good set of mekhela-chador, the traditional dress worn by Assamese women, even though I really wished to buy one. Now it was time to set back. The girls and the adults could not come to an agreement on what to eat, and going by the experience of the day before, we decided it was best to eat once we got back to Jorhat. The drive was long, and my niece was showing signs of illness, sneezing and complaining of irritability in her throat. Omicron is on everyone’s mind. Avinash, the driver, advised us to make sure she looked better at the airport, so she is not sneezy and coughing there. It could set set off alarm bells, and she could be asked to take a test. Not a desirable scenario, but it was not in our hands. We got off once we got to Jorhat town and walked to Food villa, a restaurant nearby. The food was great, after which we shopped at a store selling Assam tea, from where we bought quite a lot of tea. Assam red tea is quite famous, it is also called Orthodox tea for some reason. After the shopping, it was time to retire. Except now my niece was really irritable from her cold and cough. Poor thing had a terrible night, and so did my sister and I, accommodating to her needs. Children!
Our flight to Kolkata was at 1:30 pm the next day, and we had enough time in the morning to go to the vegetable market. My niece, S wanted to buy the small potatoes about which she had heard from Avinash. The vegetables were a pure delight to see. The fish vendor had very unusual kind of fishes, some swimming around in shallow tubs of water. We chatted a bit with the fish vendors and heard from them that they had fishes called Ari, Rohu etc. As we walked further, we saw the heap of local bananas and remarked in Malayalam that it did not look great, “nallathalla“, when the vendor shouted back at us, “nalla pazham” meaning “good bananas”. We were surprised to hear our language there, even though we should not have been, when our father employs an Assamese guy to do farm work for him. Our fruit vendor told us that he used to work in Ernakulam for a while and was there during the entire length of the complete lockdown in the first wave of the pandemic. After that, he decided to return home. We bought some bananas from him, and wished him well.
We were the only women in the market, but somehow, we did not realize it then. Jorhat has been a great experience traveling as a group of women. The town seemed like a safe place, and I was told by P that the town is a very laid back place with people closing down shops by 8 pm to go home and spend time with their families. I saw girls traveling in group autos, and was surprised to see a school girl riding along with the driver in the front seat, a common practice there. P loves the town and is genuinely at home there. She recounted to us her tryst with Covid while in Jorhat, her days being treated at the hospital, all so far away from her home. I imagine that these experiences had strengthened her bonds with Jorhat rather than make her fearful of the place. She had been a wonderful guide on our short trip to Assam. After a simple breakfast at a small restaurant near G K Palace (how I wish I had noted the name!), of puris, also parathas and vegetable curries, it was time for us to go back. On the way back, we spent 5 hours in Calcutta airport and had some good food there. I love the food courts in India, offering such variety of tasty options. The momos from “Wow! Momo” were quite a treat. There was also a great handicraft store called Biswa Bengla, where we saw cotton handloom sarees worth 75,000 rupees. It was a very pricey store, but the merchandise were pure works of art. As usual, my sister fished out some beautiful sarees to gift that were not so exorbitantly priced. I bought a couple of shawls again!
We got back to my sister’s house late at night. It was a delightful time in Assam, and I wish to go back. I would plan a bit more next time. But that does not mean that lack of planning made for a bad trip. It was a “make it up as you go” kind of trip. And the fact that we were all women let us do all the girl stuff- a lot of chatter, giggles, shopping, food and a lot of strolling down the streets. I would say “yes” all over again.
I spend most of my days at home. My world is pretty small. There is cooking, gardening, some reading and Muslim Space events. I have friends that I hear from through texts, phone calls, and small social gatherings. And then there is the socializing I do with my relatives back home through Whatsapp. It is on whatsapp that I get to hear about things happening in Kerala , in India , where I am from. It is a very lively, chaotic place, with non-stop social or political controversies, and social media battles over it.
And it’s on Whatsapp that I came upon the speech by a young woman, speaking at an atheist and freethinkers conference. The Title of the Speech was “The Woman Who Left Religion”. The religion she left was Islam. We know how much we love listening to people who found islam, their conversion stories. But when someone leaves islam, we want nothing to do with their journey. Our common attitude is that something is wrong with them that they left Islam, better stay out and be safe. But I did listen to her. Her speech began by her saying that there are two scenarios- a person leaves a religion, or a religion leaves a person. When a person leaves a religion, she says, it is because the person finds religion a barrier as one tries to live according to one’s truth, one’s reason and principles. But when religion leaves a person, she said, it is often for very silly reasons. Religion started to leave her out, she says, when she felt too hot in her hijab and she took it off for a while. Religion began to leave her out the minute her appearance did not fit with the symbolic boundaries that religion set for her. This opening comment was impressive. I agreed with her. Religion left me first, she said and then I left religion.
But what followed was an argument that seemed like it came right out of an Islamophobic playbook. I was surprised that the arguments were so flawed. It was clear that the religious community she had been born into, had left her out first, and then she had looked for arguments to reject their faith, arguments readily available to her in present day conditions of festering islamophobia.
So what happened that made her feel that the religion of islam had left her out? I would say that it was just pettiness on the part of Muslims. At first, she was this little girl, a third grader, who took lessons in bharatanatyam, the classical indian dance, and then was asked by her religious teachers to choose between her religion and a hindu dance. Her parents chose for her religion, and that ended her dance lessons. What followed was a foray into drawing and painting, again to earn scoldings from her religious teachers. When she did theatre, and then got busy with practice, shows etc, her parents were again rebuked for letting her do it. What turned out to be straw that broke the camel’s back was a flash mob dance that went viral on social media, and then her community turned against her and her parents calling on them to disown her. I agree with her when she says that no one would have been bothered if she were a man. Kerala is not a place where muslims don’t engage with art at all. What outraged people was the fact that she was a woman.
Listening to her story makes me ask, should Islam be so suffocating, with such tight borders of haram and halal? And why do we make these borders even tighter for girls and women? Is individual freedom a value in Islam?
I feel a connection with her story, because I come from a similar muslim cultural background. I did not have her boldness, so i just disagreed in my mind, sometimes even raged inside, but never took the courage to break boundaries outwardly. Do I wish I had lived differently, I really don’t know. But , when I look back on my growing up years, what I see is a complete lack of understanding of Islam. Yes there were prayers. Sometimes too many of them, like those few months in 4th grade when I prayed all the fards as well as sunnas, including a prayer called dhuha in the midmorning! It really pleased my grandmother. There was a real fear of hell, its horrors. It becomes our life’s mission to stay out of it. But what I never learned as part of my religious teachings are what today I hold as the real core, its spirit, its strength, its beauty and its treasure- the message of compassion and justice that islam opens out to us. All the dos and don’ts were never given to me from the standpoint of these two essential qualities of Allah and of ourselves as his worshipers. Once we start looking at our religion from the lens of these two primary principles, it challenges us. Dos and don’ts are simply not that black and white. That should explain the volumes that have been written and rewritten on islamic law.
What we encounter often is that dos and donts are simply put forward as the bricks that make the fortress of islam- the fortress that defines who is a muslim and who is not. A muslim does this, a non muslim does not. Often the impetus is the other way round, a non muslim does this,so we as muslims dont do it. This preoccupation intensifies when we are threatened as a minority community. Even scholars are not immune to this, even great scholars from the past at that. It is understandable, but is that necessary?
To answer this, we have to look at the lifetime of the Prophet and what happened then. Allah’s revelation to the Prophet brought to the Arabs a monotheistic message that was already available in the Jewish and Christian books, but one that had lost its hold on the society. It was a message that needed to be rejuvenated through a prophet’s living example. The prophet’s guidance allowed them to look at their world in a new light, without the weight of older , tribal affiliations. But at the same time, the old way of life formed the context to which the new values were applied. There was a universal message, but it was applied to a particular context, that of 7th century Arabia. Thus, what their new faith gave them was not a totally alien culture, but a new paradigm, where every individual is seen as a blessed creation of God, endowed with the spirit and the intelligence needed to surpass egotistical and tribal views of themselves and enter into a relationship with the divine. This brought to them an awakening in the understanding of their responsibilities to one another, and helped bring social change, giving the marginalized members rights they did not have earlier, and a clear command to treat every member of the society fairly, without any exploitation.
Following the time of the prophet, Islam took a historical route that gave it certain characteristics, that we associate with islamic culture and civilization today. But once you probe into that history, you realize that the contemporary cultures and civilizations that were in contact with muslims, like the byzantine, and the persian, as well as others, influenced every aspect of islamic development including its knowledge tradition, social life, law, philosophy, art and architecture. Islam never originated in a bubble nor did it develop in a bubble. Islam influenced as well as was influenced by others.
So, today when we talk about Islam, can we draw rigid boundaries? Are we expected to draw such rigid boundaries? I would say not.
For the simple reason that rigid boundaries are oppressive. They kill the human spirit, the one that Allah endowed humans with. It is the spirit of free will, the spirit of enquiry, seeking knowledge, creativity, and the Godly attributes of love, and compassion. As we impose the boundaries, we waver from the Quranic idea that there is no compulsion in religion. Good and evil are self-evident. But what does this verse mean? Are the distinctions between good and evil like the distinction between an apple and orange? No. As individuals and communities, we need certain freedoms to be on the journey of understanding these concepts intimately, and to be convinced freely and completely.
Recently, while reading about Judaism, I found out that there is an age in their history that they refer to as the Golden age of Judaism. I was surprised to find out that this golden age is the Islamic Age in Spain. Jews were present in that region from before Roman times, and were persecuted greatly under the Visigoths, but Umayyad rule in the 8th century gave them protections that saw a flourishing in their intellectual achievements as well as their financial success. Jews from other regions emigrated to al-Andalus, as the region was called, and it became a new Jewish homeland that lasted for more than 500 years. They called it Sefarad in hebrew. The unique coexistence and cooperation between Jews, Christians and Muslims there came to be known as convivencia in spanish.
A similar inclusive and pluralistic culture also took root in Iraq under the Abbasid rule. The patronage that the caliphs gave to intellectuals, and artists, drew people from far and wide, and it was a city of Arabs, Persians, jews, christians and buddhists. Islamic world saw the development of many such centers of learning, of innovation and co-existence, like Cairo, Samarkand, Isfahan, and Delhi.
This would not have happened if Muslims had not embraced a culture that valued human creativity and intellectual pursuits. The basic tenet of theology in islam, la-ilaha illallah, is as much a declaration of the existence of God as a declaration of the non-exitence of any other entity to whom human beings owe submission. This is the Truth to which Prophet Muhammad called his followers. It is an idea that frees the human spirit, but at the same time, also guides it away from the trappings of its own desires.
I know that we tend to look at this past history and feel pride without really understanding its complexity, focusing on the good aspects while ignoring the not so pretty. Not everything about that culture seems admirable, especially not if you look at it as a woman. But let us give it credit when it is due, and the achievements of the Islamic age is one that is understood very little by Muslims. In the popular western narrative, modern civilization was created from fossilized DNA of Greek philosophy that Europeans found preserved in Arabic books! In actuality, Muslims had absorbed Greek knowledge, and it had been as much a part of the Islamic age as the Prophet’s teachings. Not just Muslims, but Jews and christians as well, grappled with the manner in which reason and revelation correlates, trying to make space in their world for both these facets of human life.
Getting back to our own times, as we live in secular contexts, in the middle of grinding Islamophobia, what do we do as Muslims? How do we preserve our identity as Muslims? How do we raise our children? Do we cripple them by making them too afraid of God, to engage with the civilization that they find around them? Do we bubble wrap them for the fear that they will stray from Islam?
I would say that rather than present a god who is made to appear like a tyrant, who is waiting to catch them at a mistake, present to them God as God truly is, their creator who is loving and nurturing, as well as forgiving, who created them to grow up discovering their own potential for kindness, for compassion, for justice, for intellectual inquiry, and for the pursuit of beauty. Present to them a path of growth, one that will require God’s help, one that will require courage, one where they will be respected by their parents as well as community, cherished for who they are, and at the same time require them to respect and cherish others.
Let us not stifle their innate yearning to explore, to seek, to discover and to learn and to love. Yes, there will be mistakes on their part just as there were on our part as we lead our life.
Let us give one another the freedom and the space to be, to become who we were meant to be.
When a dear friend moves back to her hometown, a place where her roots run three generations before her. The yearning for home takes her to Iowa. But if you have known her enough, you know that there is another kind of yearning that drives her to most everything she does. It is the longing to return to one’s truer origins. This longing engenders a sense of homelessness. The two kinds of very human longing come together in my mind in the figure of the storyteller- a recent addition to Native American art from the south-western pueblos. The storyteller doll symbolizes continuity, the transmission of values and culture from one generation to next. I wish my friend fulfillment, at home in Iowa , and at home in her restlessness!
Answer the call of your beginning, Go. Listen to the primeval chant. Imbibe. Reverberate. Go. Since you know the stories, Narrate, tell them all. Enthrall. Go. Those stories that are hardly heard. Ease them out. Tell them out loud. Those that are excessively told, Retell- to disrupt, to reimagine. Go. You know the light, and the shadows, You know the sounds and the silence, You know the seasons, You know the peaks and the troughs. And because you seek, To embrace the past, And to open to the new- Gather them around, Those that came later. Soothe them, heal them. Also chide them, and do praise them. Whisper words of endearment, Blowing kisses when words don’t suffice. Be the healer. Be the leader. A prophetess. Be the mother. Be the storyteller. Through you, let the past Meet the future. Go.
(The storyteller doll featured in the picture above was handcrafted in the Jemez pueblo by Diane Lucero.)
The year was 1999. I had just finished an extended thesis which was a requirement to complete my coursework towards a degree in Architecture. I had got married 2 years prior to that, and my software engineer husband had just moved from Singapore to Durham, North Carolina. It had been a long distance marriage that was on rocky territory, and my mind was apprehensive about the future, if happiness was even possible in the arrangement I had got into thoughtlessly and naively. In the midst of many uncertainties, anxieties, there was also a nervous excitement to meet my future on my own, away from the protective and controlling gaze of my parents, in a strange, new land that had always been a dream of mine to visit.
I visited my hometown, my birthplace, where the bulk of my relatives live, in order to bid farewell to everyone, a few days before the scheduled date of departure. My grandfather, my dad’s father was 83 then, and had undergone surgery to remove cancer from his colon a few months before. But further tests had suggested that the cancer had metastasized to his liver. Still, during that visit, he looked his usual self in his tall and lean body, thin hair on a mostly bald head. He would be seen in one of his crisp and light colored shirts, over his lungi, wrapped around his waist. He had the habit of sitting on a chair with his legs extended out and resting on the window sill, often seen in this pose while reading a magazine or a book in his room. A lot of women, including some of my father’s aunts were visiting, and they had gone up to his room to pay him their respects. I had accompanied them. After the customary greetings and the polite enquiries, the topic returned to my imminent journey. One of the aunts asked me about the flight details and how long it would take. I told them that it was a 36 hour long journey including a very long layover at Frankfurt. I had never traveled anywhere that far by myself, and was very nervous inside, even though I kept it guarded and concealed. But the aunt whose life was confined to the small town and who had not traveled much at all, was more forthright, and she said aloud, “ You have to go all that distance and time all alone?!” I could not help but nod my head. My grandfather, mostly a quiet person who talked minimally, who was still facing the window, did not turn his head towards the aunt who spoke, but replied as if talking to himself, “What is the big deal there? Don’t we journey all alone after our death?”
A spell of silence fell over the room as the rest of us processed it in light of his condition. There he was looking unperturbed and reading a book, but we realized that death was looming large in his mind. And we saw it too. My journey to America truly seemed insignificant.
I landed in United Sates one evening in August, and my grandfather passed away in December of the same year. That day in his room is my last vivid memory of my grandfather, always a man of reserve, quiet emotions, and a lot of courage. I wish I had spent more time with him and had gained from his wisdom. It’s been 21 years since his death as well as my arrival here. My marriage survived and thrived in the kindness and understanding that I found in my husband, who gave me the space and support to understand my own mind, as well as to adapt to a new place and culture. Much like my own grandmother had found in my grandfather as she battled her psychological ailments. It is easy to experience loneliness in this world, with a pace of life that makes everything look fleeting, but my grandfather’s words still bring perspective, and a reminder that here and now is but a crossroads before the final destination.
It’s a common question. A normal question for human beings whose story is about being on the move. By choice. Sometimes for no choice. Sometimes driven out from their home turf, uprooted callously by powers that be. “Where are you from?” We ask one another, curiously, innocently. Growing up in India, this is how we open up conversations on trains, buses, in places of work or education, and in reply , we get names of places, often nearby , but also from other parts of the country. India is always on the move. But when I brought this casual conversation opener to America, I was blunder-fully lead into the wounds of this question, and its politics.
The first time I asked this question to a non-Indian may have been to an Asian girl in a lime green dress and yellow boots, playing at the edge of the Barton Creek. “Where are you from?” She looked at me with the most bewildered eyes, planted her hands on her hips, and answered matter of factly, “Austin!” Looking back, yes, my question was a stupid one that instinctively came out because the little girl did not look white. And I myself had just arrived here, and I still moved around like a tourist in this country.
That was a good lesson. I think I took it to heart, and was careful after that. I never asked that question to a little kid ever again. And to adults, it was never the first question I asked. And I always placed “originally” as a cautionary qualifier in the question. “Where are you originally from?” Years later, I would ask people what their ethnic background was. Somehow, I am unable to leave my Indian curiosity out. I love stories that people carry from their journeys, and fish for them at the slightest opportunity.
Many years later, my father asked this about his friend’s daughter-in-law. My father’s friend was born and raised in the same town in Kerala as he, but then he had married a woman from Bombay and had moved to US about 40 years back, running his own small business here. His son married a Pakistani-American girl, and it was during a visit, as we watched the wedding video and saw that the bride’s mother had some very distinct features, that my father blurted this question out, “Which part of Pakistan is she from?” In the company of an old friend, who shared his cultural background, my father should be forgiven for being his normal Indian self, and an Indian self is the excessively curious self. It was not my father’s friend who responded , but it was his American son, the bridegroom in the video, who seemed slightly offended, as was evident in his reply. “We have all migrated here from various parts of the world, and when we are here, we have become Americans. There really is no reason to think beyond that!” he said. My father seemed emabarrassed by the reply, and it still seems like an overreaction on the son’s part when I think about it. But, he must have had his reasons.
A few years after that, I heard another passionate rebuke of this question, “Where are you from?” Some women had gathered to hear from converts to Islam about their experiences being part of the Muslim community. It was then that a black sister passionately pleaded for people to be spared from enquiries into their past. “Some of us here don’t have great pasts that we want to look back to and talk about! Some of us simply don’t know where their family came from!” It was part of an urgent monologue on her part to imbibe the spirit of the Quran and be a walking Quran. “Be the book for the many that may never ever open and read it!” I forget the exact flow of ideas in her speech, but what she said about people’s pasts struck me, because of the highly emotional nature of her plea. After a while, as women chatted, two women bonded over the fact that both felt connected to a certain part of a certain city, having called it home at one point in their life. “See, this why the question is not all that bad,” I remarked with a smile, looking at the black sister, who smiled back kindly.
How significant is our past? Is it the eventual goal of our live’s journeys to transcend our pasts, as I boldly imagined at the end of my post “The Changing Flavors of Eid?”
“Like the silvery dandelion, dry and frail, scatter I must. But I ask this: when the dandelion, trapped in sunlight and flailed by the wind, finally gets scattered, is it not also because it has come of age? Is it not because it has finally been released to embrace much more than the ground that grew it?”
And yet, here I am many months later realizing that we live many cycles of that dandelion’s life in our own. Rooting at the slightest chance, we flower and seed and disperse. Again and again. And that first cycle, that first rooting, soon after being born, remains the most important. Family, home, hometown. Those draw you ever closer in a tighter embrace.
Then, what about those for whom that early childhood is a bad memory? Of those people whose collective history begins from an uprooting rather than the healthy nurturing of a fertile soil and the beneficent elements surrounding it?
I was led into how this feels and affects people as I listened to Sherman Jackson teach “Islam in Black America” on Bayanonline. The first slaves arrived in the year 1619 in two ships belonging to Dutch privateers- The White Lion and the Treasurer ( two names we do not hear as much as we hear about the Mayflower). Dr Jackson, in his quintessential theatrical style, forces us to be in their shoes and the shoes of their owners, as the latter constructed whiteness to give themselves an identity at the expense of the former, and thus thrusting over them blackness and its associated denigration as their identity. But in this country, what followed that uprooting of the slaves was a rooting, in the barest and harshest of conditions. Have you ever wondered at that dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete? That is blackness. Today, blackness is a majestic tree. Proud and confident. Defiant when needed. Sherman Jackson explains why the designation of blacks as African-American is misleading, even though blacks in America have an African past that they embrace and celebrate, since the term elides a millennium of New World history, giving the impression that blacks are African in the same way as Italian Americans are Italian. Blacks do not enjoy a hyphenated identity where “the right side of the hyphen assumes the responsibility of protecting the cultural, religious and other idiosyncrasies of the left side.” Jackson prefers the term Blackamerican as this better reflects their struggles and their transformation into a new people in this continent.
An innocuous, curious question about someone’s past is thus also a launchpad for much politics. I arrived in US just before 9/11 and thus, I arrived here just as immigrant muslims who had been here much before me were being shaken into new realities as Americans. Immigrant Muslims who had found their way to the United States after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, that revoked the restrictions and quota system of the National Origins Act of 1925, were mostly from privileged backgrounds in their home countries. They found themselves legally white, aspiring for whiteness, and thus at odds with the Blackamerican Muslims whose religion was grounded in a protest sentiment to whiteness as much as it was based on Muslim characteristics. After September 11, 2001, “anti-immigrant muslim backlash made it clear that the immigrant Muslims had acquired a social non-whiteness that could not be offset by their legal whiteness” (from the book “Islam and the Blackamerican” by Dr Jackson) . I am not surprised that I myself felt lost in those new realities when I came here. If America had its shine, it seemed a bit hard to get. I was faced with an uphill task of understanding a new cultural context, with only a naive mind to my aid. Often questions of identity seemed like a burden preventing me from the adaptations that were required of me. And I wished to transcend the need for an identity. I embraced the foreign and looked out the window, at the new people and new ways, always unsure how to blend in. Islam seemed to offer an answer, a universal idea to stand on. I resisted the conflation of islam with identity, and sought an interpretation that would agree with American values of individualism, democracy and freedom of religion. It is these ideas that led me on, and I imagined prophet Muhammad to be a to be vanguard of the democratic spirit. In theory, it was all perfect. There would be no conflict between my Muslimness and my Americanness. But in practice, I was left standing by the window and looking out! Muslimness as well as Americanness happen in community. These ideas are negotiated, contested, and shaped by cooperative action. Alone, I am nothing but insignificant.
If it was not for the black lives matter movement, Muslim Space may not have embarked on the group learning of the course “Islam in Blackamerica” on Bayanonline. The course opened my eyes to contested nature of identities, especially in a racist/ casteist social system. On the one hand, there is the racist, for whom the ostracized communities are lesser human beings. On the other hand, there are the liberal humanists, who tyrannize with their false universals. “Why talk about race? Why hold on to limiting identities, when you can just be human,” they will admonish. But it takes some education to open our eyes to the fallacy of being “just human”. A human is always situated in a history, a culture, and a place. But then, as Dr Jackson says in his book “Islam and the Blackamerican”, some history is “internalized, normalized and then, forgotten as history.” This allows some to speak in absolutist, universal terms about being human, but what is really happening in such speech is a conflation of humanness with the perspectives of the dominant group. For a person outside of the dominant group, following the admonition to be “just a human being” would result in a solitary particle separated from one’s religion, family, ethnic community, much like the dandelion seed I imagined, but one without any germ within to germinate and grow.
So, now the question is, “Where have I come from?” It is certainly an interesting time for a person like me. One would think that my Indianness, the outcome of being born and raised in India, would not be a contested issue, yet it is so today. The rumbling against Muslims in India began with the demolition of Babri Masjid in the year 1992 by the hindutva mob. I was in high school then, and I overheard a classmate musing, soon after it happened, “Why don’t they just go to Pakistan?” The attack on the identity of India’s Muslims that began in all earnestness then, brought us to Modi’s India with its accompaniments of public lynchings and legal discrimination in the form of a Citizenship Amendment Act. And then one day, an Indian friend introduced me to her Pakistani friend saying, “She is also from Pakistan.” All that she must have meant to do what to convey to her friend that I am a Muslim.
So, I realize that my Indian identity is slowly being stripped off from me, even though my roots run deep in Kerala. Muslim community emerged in Kerala as a result of the trade links that thrived with Arabia. Legend has it that a local ruler traveled towards Makkah to meet the prophet, and died during his onward journey to be buried somewhere in Yemen. In Kasaragod, my hometown, rests Malik Deenar (d 748 CE), the Persian disciple of Hasan al Basri, who was one of the first Muslim scholars to arrive in Kerala. Arab merchants and travelers brought the new faith, intermarried and thus grew the mappila community that I am from. When Portuguese arrived with the intention of colonization, it is that very Muslim community that fought them under the banners of local kings. Even today, mappila community has its distinct characteristics, and a thriving community exists in America too.
But I realize that my past will mingle and merge in this new context. My children hardly speak Malayalam, though they do understand, and did speak well in the initial years of their lives, only to lose it to schooling in English. I think I held a callous disregard for preserving my past and my heritage. For one thing, my education in a curriculum designed by the Central Board of Secondary Education gave me little appreciation for my own local heritage. I never learned Malayalam in school, my whole education was based in Hindi and English, both languages that I never used for day to day conversations, except when necessary in the classrooms. I had a terrible inhibition to speak English in social contexts before I came to US. But then, Malayalam is a language that I never mastered beyond conversational levels! Talk about twisted relationships with language. So, I am not surprised that my children don’t speak Malayalam. When they are in India, I do wish I had taught them as best as I could, especially because it would have fostered a better connection with their grandparents and grand aunts and uncles.
So here I am, between many worlds and cultures. Many conflicting ideas and notions. Amidst all that, it is certainly faith that brings a perspective that keeps me grounded. There are moments of utter loneliness, but I am always drawn back to life by my roots. Engendered by my pasts and nurtured by God’s ever present love, made visible through family, friendships, and communities.
I just finished reading “Inside the Gender Jihad” by Amina Wadud. The book spans her life as a Muslim, a scholar of Islam, and an activist working towards gender inclusiveness in the Muslim world. This is a woman who brought a seismic shift in how I read the Quran. Before I read her “Quran and Woman”, I used to hear an alien, dictatorial and manly voice when I opened the Quran, that spoke mostly to men, that seemed to give them many favors, and that urged women to obey and always be under the jurisdiction of men, either a father or a husband. I read it based on my experiences as a muslim girl who experienced more restrictions on her life than her male peers. The book opened my eyes to the ethics of equality and justice in the Quran, the prominent place that women hold in the Quranic worldview, and the patriarchal conditions that it sought to change with its strategy of progressive changes to the human psyche and social life. Men are being called upon to recognize their privilege in the society and become agents for justice. (Quranic interpretive science generally looks into Quranic verses as existing in a context, except when it comes to women. Then oddly, interpretation becomes literal, and static, trying to keep it “more of the same”!)
I remember a heated discussion I had with my family members, about 15 years back, where I spoke in support of Amina Wadud’s prayer leadership in 2005. I think it was around the same time that “Quran and Woman” was published as a translation in Malayalam. I had very little knowledge about the Islamic framework that legitimized her action, but the manner in which her action was decried just irritated me. People who protested it saw it as a heresy. I did not see it that way. The reaction itself seemed very patriarchal. A very scholarly and slightly patronizing relative who tried to convince me about the wrongness of Amina Wadud’s views also confessed that he had not read her book entirely, even though he owned a copy. I think it was around that time that I made a conscious decision to start reading. I have not stopped from that time and have dwelled into many modern scholarly works on Islam in English. “Quran and Woman” itself was not an easy read, as the author herself warns in the preface. But I persisted with the book, read and reread it, and made sense of it eventually, until it completely transformed my approach to the Quran. I saw that I had developed a perspective of my own. There was in the Quran for guidance for me, in my femaleness, looking at the challenges my life brought me.
My reading and the opinions they brought forth rocked the boat a bit at a women’s Quran group led by a peer at the mosque (by no definitions was the lady a scholar). My opinions were coming from half-baked knowledge, but I thought it was important to voice my concerns with what was being taught. I spent a couple of years away from the mosque after some very unpleasant turn of events that led to the ousting of a family for belonging to a different sect. Then when I went back to the mosque, it was to leave again following the ouster of a very esteemed African-American sheikh who challenged some of the cultural norms, encouraged an appreciation of the diversity within muslim tradition, and who encouraged thinking and questioning. (When I look back to those events, I see the work of “muslim Karens” – an epithet that I came across recently! The authority they were ringing up to keep people in check were transnational- sitting at transnational Islamic councils).
But in all my reading, I have never come across an Islamic scholar who speaks so explicitly and precisely about the affliction that cripples the mosques, flaws that I have personally experienced, that I find disappointing and alienating, the way Amina Wadud does here:
“If the mosque organizations are focused on preserving the boundaries of Islam to such a level as to give more attention to constructing and preserving those boundaries, then where will Muslims, whose lives are not so narrowly defined, go to further their knowledge of Islam and to affirm their identity as Muslims? Furthermore, how will their identity as Muslims in America be integrated with their lives in close interaction with non-Muslims in America? Only protecting narrow boundaries is a deterrent to such agendas. “
She calls the extra-mosque enclaves, that grew in the aftermath of 9/11, that work outside the mosque congregational context to address Islam and Muslims “one of the best things in North America that have resulted from 9/11”. Muslim Space is certainly one of them, and I am grateful for the sense of belonging that I find there, however small the community is.
I did meet Amina Wadud on one of her visits to Austin a few years back. I remember her telling me that she sees her role as one of exposing the cracks, the fractures in Islamic thought, that needs to be fixed to uphold the the Tawhidic paradigm – where all our ideas, and systems serve the one, indivisible, uniform, transcendent, yet immanent Allah, unifying all of us in a web of interdependent and mutually benefiting relationships; where Allah is the third one in any relationship, bringing balance and harmony.
“Inside the Gender Jihad” is a deeply invigorating book, in spite of some parts that I struggled to comprehend, and understand, especially in Chapter 2, a section that relates to her life in the academic sphere as a professor of Islamic studies, and all the hurdles that she experienced as she fought to include gender as a category of thought within Islamic studies. If I remember right, this is a book that Amina Wadud considers a work of greater scope than “Quran and Woman”; it is also the book that is more personal to her, weaving her own experiences into the content of each chapter, as she puts across her intellectual arguments for new ways on thinking about gender, and gender related issues in the Muslim world.
Coming back to myself, as I spend hours reading, I realize that what unmosqued me was not that I read books, but that I read the wrong kind of books!
Freedom. A new freedom movement is going on in India. 62 years after gaining independence from the British, people in India rise against the Hindutva establishment. Hindutva runs on the premise that the grand civilization called India lost its lustre when Muslims invaded and ruled over the Hindus. And their chivalrous work is to reclaim its heritage and its glory. And with the partition of India, and the formation of Pakistan as an Islamic state, the proponents of Hindutva have been working to undermine the secular foundations of India and build a Hindu raj over the iron grip of Hindutva. But what is Hindutva and how empirical are the claims that Muslim rulers destroyed Hindu culture? How exact are the imagination of two distinct identities called Hindu and Muslim in India?
Kabir, (Arabic: “Great”) (1440 – 1518 AD), iconoclastic Indian poet-saint revered by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. His early life began as a Muslim, but he was later strongly influenced by a Hindu ascetic, Ramananda.
Today, in India’s age of identity conflicts, with 2 distinct and polarized vision of what India as a nation means, Romila Thapir’s book “The Past as Present” is a highly relevant and very informative read. For Romila Thapar, the issue of identity is as old as herself. She was 16 when India gained its independence from British rule, and her speech at the celebratory event at her school were reflections on two themes: What kind of society did Indians want to build with their freedom and what was the identity that tied Indians as a people? The British historian had left a neat periodization of India’s past into Hindu civilization, the Muslim civilization and the British period. This periodization is so ingrained in the Indian mindset, where school curriculum confirms this view of the past, loaded with its oversimplification and factual errors.
Historically speaking, there isn’t one homogenous civilization before the arrival of the Muslim rulers that can be called Hindu. In fact, the origin of the word lies in the name of a river called Sindhu, the Indo-Aryan name for the Indus River. When the Achaemenid Empire of Iran conquered the Indus region in the mid-first millennium BC, the area began to be referred to as “Hindush”, with Indo-Aryan ‘s’ changing to ‘h’ in Old Persian. Subsequently, Arabs began to refer to the region beyond river Indus as al-Hind and the people came to be known as Hindu. Thus Hindu was the term for a geographically based identity, until after 14 th century, when gradually the name began to be applied to all people in the region who were not Muslim. Thus it began to denote a religious identity, even though the religion of the geographical region is very diverse in its beliefs, the dieties worshipped, and the social norms followed. Caste and tribal identities are what the people really associate with, and they form endogamous groups based on those identities. This is true even today, in spite of all the passions surrounding the Hindu identity.
Romila Thapar writes: “The known history of the Hindu religion begins with Vedic Brahminism from the late second millennium BC and winds its way through a variety of sects, belief systems and ritual practices to the present. It is therefore not possible to date it precisely. Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, were all founded at a particular point in time, by a historical person. This makes them different from Hinduism.” The semitic religions as well as Indian religions like Buddhism and Jainism began with a structure at a basic point in time, and evolved in relation to that structure. Even though these religions also diversify into sects, there remains a particular reference point- the historical founder and the teachings generally embodied in a sacred text regarded as a canon. The discourses within these faiths are related to the tenets and doctrines set out at its founding.
Thus, Hinduism, as we understand the term today, is very different from the other world religions. In ancient historical sources, there is no reference to a religion called Hinduism. Instead, we find early historians like the Greek Megasthenes of 400 BC, the Chinese travelers, and Arab historian and traveler Al-Biruni (1017 AD) writing about the Brahmanas and Shramanas, as the two religious groups prevalent in India. Brahmanas were the highest of the 4 castes in a caste system that has origins in the vedas, and they positioned themselves as mediators between humans and the divine, and performed sacrificial rituals for the other upper castes (the shudras, the lowest in the caste hierarchy, were not bound to such religious duties). Shramanas on the other hand were the monks, or Buddhist and Jain adherents. These groups were considered heretical sects by brahmans, and they were outside the power of the brahman. Monkhood was open to all. Thus, even though Buddhist and Jain teachings could not unsettle caste hierarchies, these faiths gave equal access to the divine and salvation. In many ways, this choice of becoming a monk or a mendicant has been a way of dissent in a society held tightly under caste norms. Gandhi’s own choice to live a ascetic life had a hint of this age old phenomenon in India.
What we see in the evolution of the many sects of Hinduism in India is the exchange and amalgamation of belief systems within a framework of castes. It is the caste system itself that seems to have an age old existence in India. Early Vedic brahmanical religion was aniconic, and based on elaborate and intricately planned sacrificial rituals rather than the worship of dieties, which emerges later. It was Buddhism that introduced iconism, probably borrowed from the Greeks of the time, and gradually, it was then adapted by others, and it became a predominant feature of Puranic Hindu faith, that centered itself around “Bhakthi” or devotion to the diety. Romila Thapar writes that the Bhakthi sects were in some ways inheritors of the shramanic tradition, and to some degree, replaced it in places where it was declining. Similarly, local hero stones, memorializing the valiance of local war heroes, soon were also incorporated into the Puranic framework by giving them the status of avatars or reincarnations of Puranic gods. When religious sects gained secular power and status, they would move up the caste hierarchy by interpolating their beliefs into the predominant beliefs. So the evolution of the Hindu religions was not a linear process, but one of many adaptations depending on the social and economic changes surrounding castes and sub castes.
With the arrival of the Muslim rulers, gradually, the population that was not Muslim soon began to be referred to as Hindu. But was Muslim rule characterized by a brutal attack on Hindu religion and culture as claimed by the British historians and the Hindu nationalists? There is a lot of attention given to the temples that were demolished as part of conquests, but what is tactfully avoided is the mention of other facts surrounding those events. Temples were more than centers of religious worship. They were also centers of power and finance, which is why, even Hindu rulers are known for temple demolition, a fact carefully avoided from Hindutva narratives. Another fact that is suppressed is that the Muslim rulers, even Aurangazeb, a name that is invoked as the epitome of Muslim hatred of the Hindu, are also known for the numerous endowments made to temples. Hence, temple demolition was more political in nature than a result of religious animosity.
Initially, the muslim invaders faced intense opposition from Rajput states, but by the time Akbar was in power, the Rajput princes had been accommodated within the Mughal rule and made part of the courts, given governorships, and command of Mughal armies. Ties were also strengthened with marriages. Art and architecture flourished with the amalgamation of Indian and Mughal influences. Rajput status was frequently claimed by groups that attained secular power, and this explains the presence of Muslim Rajputs in North western and eastern Pakistan. The custom of purdah or seclusion of women is common to both Rajput and Mughal culture. The Hindu Bhakti movement was also infused with Sufi teachings that arrived with Muslim rule.
Once British took over India, both Islam and Hindu faith came under the scrutiny of the orientalist and some soul searching became inevitable. As result, there arose a number of groups such as the Brahma Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, the Divine Life Society, the Swaminarayan movement etc. The debates and dialogue between upper caste Hindus who formed the middle class, and Christian missionaries gave rise to the idea of Hinduism as a common religion of the Hindu people. What this religion and culture looked like inevitably was also drawn from the beliefs and practices of the upper caste Hindus. Soon, it also became a means of political mobilization. The founding fathers of Hindutva, Savarkar and Golwalkar claimed a continuous and unbroken Aryan identity at the centre of this new Hinduism, and also claimed supremacy of their rights over the land, even though there is no historical basis for such an indigenous Aryan identity. Today, the greatest support for Hindutva comes from the Hindu diaspora, who experience a sense of cultural insecurity as a minority community, and therefore, search for a religious identity that will strengthen them in terms of numbers and also enable them to pass down to their children a structured religion at par with Christianity.
It is these Hindutva proponents that I encountered at the CAA and NPR teach-in organized by the South Asian Institute at University of Texas, Austin. The panelists were also Hindus, academics from various departments in humanities . Their objective, logical and in depth lectures laid out historical and legal facts that portrayed the CAA and NPR exercise as merely a war on the poor. But this was unappealing to the group of impassioned RSS members (assumed) in the audience who had come with the sole intention of disrupting the event. Their disruptions were kept at bay till the very end, but the nature of their questions revealed that the entire exercise had been futile. Their minds had been stamped and baked with anti-secular, anti-Muslim narratives. Many random comments were made to discount the answers the speakers gave to their questions. When the speaker said that the anti-CAA protests had generally been peaceful, one man butted in with the statement that the protestors are shouting “Hinduon se azadi” (freedom from the Hindus). The event concluded amidst the mayhem, and as I left, I saw the man standing near the exit door. I went up to him and told him abruptly that the slogan being shouted at anti-CAA protests was not “Hinduon se azadi”, but “Hindutva se azadi”. He quickly took out his phone saying he had evidence, and I told him I did not wish to see his WhatsApp videos. I told him that as a Muslim protesting CAA, all I was saying was “Hindutva se azadi” (freedom from hindutva”), not “Hinduon se azadi”. I grew up with Hindu friends, and I want Muslims to continue to live with Hindu friends, I told him. I left quickly to avoid the crowd that was forming near him. I heard them shout about Islamic terrorism from behind me and my friend, and a Sikh man who had also confronted them about something they had said. There are no Muslim victims. Muslims are ever the rioters in their eye. But I have resolved not to conflate a Hindu for a fanatical fundamentalist that I saw in each one of them because I had also seen there that day, respectable Hindus who had spoken for justice, and had stood strong and defiant against their ignorant taunts, standing firmly on knowledge and truth, their regard for secularism and the constitution of India.
It was her eyes that met you first. Like marbles on sand, they stood out, placid and silent, as if weighed down by sorrow. You wondered what they had seen, and what was the pain that held them hostage. You did not ask. You noticed her warm brown skin and her thick long hair, braided on two sides. There was no smile that was forthcoming.
You heard it said that it was her father’s demise that had brought her to your town. In the classroom of a new school building, with its freshly painted walls, she sat quietly, absorbed in her work and unperturbed by the hustle and bustle of youthfulness around her. You saw it fit like everybody else to give her space to come to terms with everything new in her life.
After a few days, you noticed that she was slowly stepping out from the confines of her sorrow, showing signs of life and vigor. There emerged the signs of a very bright and motivated student, and a good natured self, that tended to look like gullibility at times. Often it seemed as if she was too good to be true.
It was the last year of high school and a simple friendship took root between the two of you. You yourself had just overcome the awkward period of being a new student, and it had taken you around two years to do it. You reveled in the newfound friendships with many others, and she was not too important in the overall scheme of things.
The academic year soon came to a close bringing with it many celebrations and the great fanfare associated with being an outgoing batch. An excursion was planned to a waterfall a few hours away. The trip took a fateful turn for one family. A young man who was one of the quietest in the class, and who was ill during the trip, fell down from a rock on which he was solemnly perched for the lack of energy to join his boisterous classmates frolicking in the water. His friends did not realize that he had fallen, until it was too late. They could only bring out his lifeless body from the depths of the water. It shocked everybody to their core. It devastated his close friends.
On the day of the funeral, you went with the rest of your classmates to the home of this young man, the oldest of the two children to his widowed mother.The house was a modest, traditional one, set in the countryside. You gingerly went into the house, with the rest of your classmates. You stood to a side and watched the mother lying on a mat spread on the floor, rolling to and fro in her traditional white sari, her hair in disarray, and wailing with her eyes shut. All of you were dumbstruck. There was nothing to say. You felt as if you had let her down by not safeguarding her only son.
The air around you felt tight. The warmth and odor of the bodies around you stood heavy, adding to your stupor. All of a sudden, you noticed a movement from your midst. It was her. You saw her move towards the mother slowly. She sat down beside her. She moved her right arm and rested the palm of her hand on the mother’s head. She began stroking her hair gently, comforting her, trying to calm her.
You did not take your eyes away. You could not. There in that moment of pure compassion, she took on a different light. She seemed so different from everybody else. Life seemed to have taught her something that the others were not aware of. She looked so mature, so intent, and so serious in her mission to comfort. There she sat for quite a while as the rest of you watched.
They took his body away to cremate it. It was time for the rest of you to go home. Like young and immature school children, you forgot the mother’s sorrow and your own too. You laughed and talked as you journeyed home.
Your friendship with her found a new meaning after that. You were in love with this kind soul whose good natured spirit had seemed so unnatural before. There were many days that you spent getting to know her anew. You heard about her father, and you heard about her many old friends left behind. You bonded with her mother and her sister. You spent many lazy afternoons in the warmth of her simple home, you happily joined the family at lunch time, much to chagrin of your parents who warned you against being emotionally involved with friends.
So many friends after that one. So many beautiful souls that beckoned you to something more. Something you did not possess in terms of character. So many loves.
It was her eyes that met you first. Like marbles on sand, they stood out, placid and silent, as if weighed down by sorrow. You wondered what they had seen, and what was the pain that held them hostage. You did not ask. You noticed her warm brown skin and her thick long hair, braided on two sides. There was no smile that was forthcoming.
timeless pursuits 