Broad brushstrokes of blood
Ahmedabad was home to me not so long ago. In my short stay there I grew up and found my feet. I moved there from Bombay (as it was then called) in 1992 to study at the School of Architecture, watched the city wound and then resurrect itself time and time again through the years I was resident there. I left two years ago, following my feet, and with tears in my eyes I closed the door of that hostel room one last time, telling it what it had taught me, "aavjo"… come again. There isn’t a word like goodbye in Gujarati, my native tongue, only the hint of another time… and yet in the two years I’ve been away, so much has changed that I do not ever want to return. An earthquake, a lost teacher, a river of blood and fire, and with these riots, the innocence of my youth, that was taken for granted, has died.
I’m not going to talk about the merits or demerits of the arguments and the horrifying language and images flying around the net. The evidence is clear and more than enough for me to know who killed whom, and the excuses, religious or otherwise, hold no water. Two thousand people attacked that train; it wasn’t chance, it was deliberate. Mobs herded women and children into homes and set them on fire. It wasn’t by mistake; it was revenge. People were burnt alive in that train, people were burnt alive in their homes, innocents are being killed across the nation, and no explanation in the world in the name of any faith or subscription can justify this. There is a majority and there is a minority in the numbers game, there will always be, and history has ensured that they do not see eye to eye, but murder is murder, whoever did it and for whatever reason and the guilty are guilty. Justice is supposed to be blind; lets make sure that every death is not avenged through another but by justice.
A friend sent me Vir Sanghvi’s piece ‘One Way Ticket’, published in the Hindustan Times and my brother ICQed me a link to George Fernandes’ words in ‘There Are No Tall Men Around’ in the TOI. The latter had a comfortingly calm tone that I hope will prevail in a nation that seems to be on the edge of turmoil. It is the former by Sanghvi that is the reason I broke my promise to myself of a badly needed sabbatical (from writing), and that I find me here tonight hacking away at a keyboard; angry and sad, alone and miles away.
In his piece, Sanghvi ONLY uses the words ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ to describe what he sees as two sides in a conflict. I remember an incident a few years ago when a tire was stolen off our car and my neighbour saw the thief. He accompanied my mother to the police station to report the theft and the policeman asked him whether the man looked like a ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’. I can’t fault them can I? Throughout my schooling I’d learnt about the great, multi-ethnic composition of my country through percentage charts on Hindus, Muslims, Christians etc… Never once did I stop to think about how a nation of a billion people of such incredible difference could be painted, in one swift brush stroke into such simple colours with comfortable labels like ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ to accompany the pie chart. I remember a well-written feature in India Today a decade ago, months before the events at Ayodhya, about how Hindus (I’m committing the same mistake) across India were uncomfortable with the Ayodhya movement because it moved Ram to the centre-stage and unsettled their own, very personal sub-strains of Hinduism, complete with their own hierarchies of Gods that went back centuries. They too feared the Ram-Janmabhoomi movement, not because of the merits of a temple or mosque, but because the new-found momentum of the VHP and Bajrang Dal threatened to replace their own ‘brands’ of faith with a homogenous, trans-Indian variety they did not know or love or believe in, and were being forced to.
Similarly, when we say ‘Muslims’, we erase the differentiating lines that distinguish one of the richest and cross-culturally mixed conglomeras of Islam, many of them still sharing and participating in Hindu traditions and rituals that are an integral part of their histories, instead fusing them ignorantly into one homogenous mass of religion that is supposed to represent 120 million people on our little corner of the continent. Yes there are fundamental differences between the two, but quoting from dogma and bringing back a history that has long since become myth as a basis for retribution is senseless.
India is a young nation, and what we naively see, as a single identity is a recent invention, younger in fact than most of the people in it. I believe in India, but I have travelled enough within it to know that it isn’t as homogeneously boring as we read it to be in our text books and laws and in the media (to name a few), and thankfully so. The ‘Muslims’ in Kerala are very different from the ones in Mumbai or Delhi or Lucknow or Gujarat and every time some rabid writer orders them to leave for Pakistan, she or he should consider that they chose to stay and be part of this country. The same applies to Hindus- travelling from South to North, you see the change in the temple styles, the objects of worship, the language, the dress, the ritual… who dares to say they’re the same? Christians in Orissa are a world apart from those in Manipur or Maharashtra. Your neighbour might go to the same temple or mosque but shares nothing else with you, yet you’re pushed into the same can as he or she is because of your ‘religion’.
The same differences are apparent and more visible in our different states. Andhra isn’t the same as Tamil Nadu, as much as we in the North would like to think so when we say ‘South’. MP and UP share very little besides a border. Kashmir is different just as Goa or Karnataka is. The Muslims in Kashmir (or in the entire world if the utterances of the VHP are to be believed) didn’t cheer when that train burnt, as our simplistic minds that only know of two stubborn sides in any arguments might like to assume. Hindu’s didn’t cheer in Bihar when the mobs went out to seek jungle justice. The fact that the nationwide ‘bandh’ that was called met with resistance and voices of dissent from various urban and rural corners of the country meant that there were differences, and as NDTV put it: "this nation wants peace".
We never did let go of our colonial garbage, carrying it on instead passionately in the guise of a supposedly enlightened system that only speaks of divisions. In our zeal to hold together a nation, and with the weakness that comes with having no confidence in ourselves, we washed over the many million shades of grey that make up India, using the jingoist, patriotic paint of nationalism that only knows black and white. We’ve crushed our natural differences in the fear that their individual richness would undermine the semblance of nationhood we had cobbled together… we never had faith in ourselves.
Identities are scary things, they come loaded with meanings we don’t really understand but are forced to believe in. When we say Hindu or Muslim or Christian, we are describing who we are, but we are not just that. We are all Indian first, but we aren’t just that, we’re far more. By using those terms we fortify the ignorance that is the root cause of our vote-bank politics and reinforce the status quo of a wretchedly selfish class and caste system that cuts through almost every religion and community within this nation. We’re all minorities in some sense wherever we are. If not on the lines of religion then colour or beliefs or our choice of TV shows. We have to accept these differences, they are the foundations of our culture and the individuality, and using words like Hindu and Muslim to describe PEOPLE with names and faces and lives and emotions can only do harm.
And if we do believe in faith, if we know even an iota of what religion is about, if we’ve gone to a temple or a mosque or a church even once with a clean heart and not one laden with guilt, we’d know ‘right’ from ‘wrong’… we’d know good from bad, we’d know that the screams of a child being stoned, lynched and burnt alive will never leave our ears, and we know that in some way or the other, whether you believe in heaven or hell or truth or justice, it will be ‘paid’ for… even as we all continue, in our language and our thinking, to paint this nation in the broad brushstrokes of blood.
Tanzeel Merchant
tanzeel@indiainfoline.com "The views contained herein are those of the author. India Infoline may not subscribe to the same."
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