October  2003 
Year 10    No.92

Breaking Barriers


Ration card from Sialkot

The denial of memory is an affront to human dignity; victims of conflict must be allowed to commemorate their loss

BY ZARINE HABEEB

Qutubuddin Ansari, the Gujarati tailor was back in the news recently. In the first instance of “fame”, the photograph of Ansari begging Hindu chauvinist rioters for his life was splashed across newspapers and magazines during the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat last year. It was reported recently that Ansari and his family have decided to leave Gujarat and settle down in distant West Bengal. He said, “It (Gujarat) is my desh, I was born there, and God willing, I will be able to go back there to celebrate Id with my family and friends later this year.”

Let us hope that God grants Ansari’s wish to go back to Gujarat to celebrate Id. Let us also think of hundreds of thousands of people belonging to different faiths and ethnicities who have been forced to leave their homes and resettle in strange places, involuntarily because they happened to belong to the “wrong” community. As I write this, several Sindhis, Kashmiris, Punjabis, Bengalis and other communities come to my mind.

Ritu Menon, the feminist and progressive author, publisher and activist of repute, writes poignantly about the older generation in her Punjabi family in the preface of the book, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (which she co-authored with Kamla Bhasin, a very respected feminist and progressive Indian activist). It is something that deserves to be quoted at length.

“For a long time, and certainly all the time that we were children, it was a word we heard every now and again uttered by some adult in conversation, sometimes in anger, sometimes bitterly, but mostly with sorrow, voice trailing off, a resigned shake of the head, a despairing flutter of the hands. All recollections were punctuated with “before partition” or “after partition”, marking the chronology of our family history.

“We learnt to recognize this in many ways, but always with a curious sense of detachment on our part. The determined set of my grandmother’s mouth as she remembered walking out of our house in Lahore, without so much as a backward glance; her unwavering bias against ‘Mussalmans’ and her extreme and vocal disapproval of my Muslim friends in college; the sweet nostalgia in my uncle’s voice as he recalled Faiz and Firaq and Government College, and recoiled at the soulless Hindi that had displaced the supple and mellifluous Urdu of his romantic youth; the endless recreation by my mother and aunts of Anarkali and the Mall and Kinnaird and Lawrence Gardens and…”

These are stories of belonging (as a Delhi-based interviewee in the same book said “My real home? ... the one at Sutar Mandi, Phullan wali Gali, Lahore…”) and loss not only of tangibles like property or jewellery but also of the sense of rootedness. Unfortunately, at least in India, we have done little to address this sorrow. People may wonder why it is necessary at all. There are two reasons, the first one looks towards the past and the second towards the present and the future.

For the first reason, let us ask ourselves why memory and nostalgia are important parts of human selves. To be able to remember with a sense of bittersweet feeling is, I believe, one of the God-given gifts to humankind. We own our memories and in a sense, the spaces these memories inhabit.

Speaking for myself, I remember the campus of Government Engineering College, Trichur, Kerala where my grand-uncle (whom I call Kochatha), Dr. MS Abdul Kadir taught, with that sense of sweet happiness, listening to Kochatha’s stories and playing with him, wolfing down the absolutely delicious biriyani that Pathumma chinnamma made, being doted upon by Kaniyappan mama and Regina chinnamma, and of Jawad mama playing pranks on me. If I ever go back to that wooded and leafy campus of my childhood, I can claim the house they lived in, with its jasmine creepers, the wide expanse of the campus with several flowering trees, its badminton courts, as mine, even though technically or legally it is not mine.

I can go there. I can and do claim the campus as mine. But for many, many Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits, Lahore, Delhi, Meerut, Srinagar, Kanpur, Bhagalpur, Vadodara, Surat, Karachi, Sialkot, Quetta and many other cities, towns and villages where they were born and grew up are completely out of bounds, in more ways than one. I am told that the government of Pakistan does not allow Indians permission to visit more than three cities at a time. Gujarati Muslims who have moved from Gujarat after the massacre in 2002, I am given to understand, would face humiliation if they went back to Gujarat today. The continuing militancy in Kashmir makes even a pilgrimage to Amarnath an adventure.

Worse, the atrocities during Partition, communal riots and militancy when people were killed, women were raped, men and women were forcibly converted and property was looted have permanently scarred many of these people, rendering it very difficult for many of them, I would think, to even claim their bastis and mohallas and kothis in present Pakistan, Kashmir, Gujarat, Bhagalpur, Delhi, Meerut, Kanpur as their own, even in a figurative sense.

This denial of your sense of memory is an affront to human dignity. Memory provides you a sense of belonging and rootedness, and completes a human being. The personal narratives, memories and longing of these people stand on a different footing from, say, my childhood memories, because of the tragedy associated with it, the tragedy of knowing that what was yours exists in tangible form (for instance, Anarkali market in Lahore still exists, unlike death) but will never, never again be yours. So, I argue that we in India should develop and exhibit a respect for the memories of these people and find imaginative means to address the pain of the loss.

That was the reason for a (for want of a better word) “respecting memory project” that looks towards the past. Now I want to examine the reason that looks towards the future, the future of a secular, democratic, multicultural India where all kinds of minorities stand shoulder to shoulder with all kinds of majorities.

Reading Menon’s preface, I am not surprised that her grandmother harboured prejudice against Muslims. When I say this, I am not discounting, even for a moment, that there are people who were fortunate to come out of the trauma of these events unscathed by prejudice. Kuldip Nayar and the late Bhishm Sahni come to mind, but not many people were as fortunate.

For many Hindus and Sikhs who had to leave Faisalabad, Karachi, Quetta, Lahore and in recent times Srinagar and other places in Kashmir to settle down in strange and unfamiliar places in India, Partition and the violence in Kashmir (or rather the Jihad, if we were to borrow the phraseology of the Muslim militants there) epitomises Muslim betrayal and Muslim communalism.

For Muslims who had to leave Gujarat, Mumbai, Bhagalpur, Meerut and settle down elsewhere in India or even migrate to other countries, communal riots and ethnic cleansing of the kind that took place in Gujarat force them to ghettoise and live in Muslim-only enclaves and concoct theories about a world-wide anti-Muslim conspiracy. The perfect recipe for even greater communal polarisation.

These stories of loss, of supposed Muslim intransigence, of Muslim violence, become part of family folklore. Coupled with bigger events such as the controversy in Ayodhya or the Shah Bano case and the Uniform Civil Code debate and events like September 11 and suicide bombings that claim innocent Israeli lives, they entrench even greater distrust and bias against Muslims.

On the other hand, many Muslims react to Hindu chauvinism in India and larger world events such as the widespread civil rights violations of Muslims in the United States after September 11, the hate crimes against Muslims in several western countries, the aggression of the Israeli defence forces against the Palestinians in occupied Palestine, by taking on impoverished and parochial views about Islam, developing prejudice and animosity against Hindus, Jews and Christians and assuming that every Hindu, Jew or Christian is implicated in the tragedy that has befallen several Muslims and worse, at times even condone Muslim violence.

This is of course a very complex problem and we need many, many solutions. I firmly believe that addressing pain and sorrow is one such solution. When I talk of addressing this sorrow and sense of alienation, let us first of all exclude the government of India. For far too long, the government, (and I am not talking of the Hindu chauvinist BJP alone, but also successive Congress governments) have held people’s memories and aspirations to ransom. Moreover, experience has shown that government initiated projects get tied up in red tape and the vagaries of the bureaucracy.

Let us look at alternative, people-based initiatives that are completely autonomous of the government. The magazine Outlook took a small step in this direction and produced an issue (on the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence) that was full of stories about Partition. Today, when Hindu-Muslim relations are at their lowest ebb in many parts of our country and the memory of these people is not worth a lot in material terms, let us document both positive and negative stories, let us save any scrap (the American author Stephen Alter, talks in his book, From Amritsar to Lahore, of the ration card from Sialkot that an elderly Mr. Randhir Mehta showed him with the comment, “…Don’t ask me why I’ve kept it”, when he was questioned about Partition) from those days, let us have a commemorative day and let us be on the look out for other imaginative ways to address this tragedy and alienation.

Finally, I make an appeal to the leaders of the Indian Muslim community. I appeal to them to lead the effort in applying the healing touch, of initiating this project. Let the leaders of the Indian Muslim community of all persuasions, from the conservative Syed Shahabuddin, the more centrist Salman Khurshid to the liberal Shabana Azmi reach out to these people, especially non-Muslims who have been rendered homeless, destitute and whose loved ones have been killed during communal riots, Partition and the militancy in Kashmir.

No, this is not an exercise in petty vote bank politics; rather it is an exercise in humanism. We, human beings should reach out to the opposite camp, to the camp of the potential enemy. I end with a profoundly inspiring quotation from the Mahatma.

‘You may be astonished to learn that I continue to receive letters charging me that I have compromised the interests of Hindus by acting as a friend of Muslims. How can I convince the people by mere words, if the last 60 years of my public life have failed to demonstrate that by trying to befriend the Muslims, I have only proved myself a true Hindu, and have rightly served the Hindus and Hinduism. The essence of true religious teaching is that one should serve and befriend all. This I learnt in my mother’s lap. You may refuse to call me a Hindu. I know no defence except to quote a line from Iqbal’s song, ‘mazhab nahin sikhatha aapas mein beir rakhna’, meaning religion does not teach us to bear ill will towards one another. It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”

(Zarine Habeeb, a native of Ernakulam, India is a Human Rights lawyer. She lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. She can be contacted at [email protected]).

 


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