For Muslims, faith has died

MY earliest recollection of Independence Day is a collage of events that may have taken place in Mustafabad or Rae Bareli. Mustafabad was our ancestral home, a culturally exquisite Muslim settlement, or a qasbah, distinct from the village. In tastes and manners it was as urbane as any civilised part of old Lucknow with one added advantage: it was in a rural setting, exposing us to the folksy spectacle of village life, steeped in Avadhi and Brajbhasha. This rural-urban cross fertilisation resulted in a language of unbelievable beauty: the ladies of the house conversed in dehati, a mixture of Avadhi carrying touches of Brajbhasha, their conversations laced with Malik Mohammad Jaisi, Tulsidas, Surdas, Kabir.

Heaven knows how contemporary feminists would explain why the women of my grandmother’s generation spoke in their folksy dehati among themselves and switched to a more formal, Persianised diction in the presence of men. The men did likewise, though in a less pronounced way. I suspect the man-woman equation was so formal in those days that the slight linguistic switch, from urbane to the folksy and the other way around, came in as a natural harmoniser in their otherwise segregated lives.

What does this preamble have to do with my memories of that first Independence Day? The purpose is to give you an idea of the men and women (about 50 relatives) who sat around that small radio set, as around an altar, to catch what Panditji (Nehru) was saying from the Red Fort. A most comforting image Panditji was to most of us, representing fragments of a feudal system in total decline. Our lives had been shattered, first by Partition and second by zamindari abolition.

True, the carnage in Punjab and Bengal that accompanied the build-up to Partition and its aftermath was on such an unprecedented scale that world attention was frozen on those unspeakable brutalities. Murder and mayhem, trains filled with dead bodies, grabbed the headlines. Our tragedies were played out in slower motion. In our part of the world, Partition was not a conclusive event. It was a temporary political settlement. How could Mahatma Gandhi, Panditji and Maulana Azad have accepted the country’s Partition? It was just not possible.

An uncle, a captain in the army posted in Mumbai, produced a map and a measuring tape. The distance from Mumbai to Mustafabad was not very different from that between Karachi and Mustafabad. Since a brigadier, a relative, had been assigned to the Pakistan army, my uncle argued his career would be more secure in the brigadier’s proximity. Several relatives crossed over to Karachi, not because of some overriding commitment to Pakistan, but in anticipation of better fortune.

There were such strong Congress affiliations for most of the family (the more educated were Communists) that the very idea of Pakistan was abhorrent. But they faced another dilemma later. A compulsive hatred for Pakistan as a function of patriotism did not come naturally to them. However for us, there was Panditji, in an elegant achkan, a rose in the buttonhole, speaking the language we understood — Hindustani more tilted towards Urdu.

It was this faith in Panditji as ‘‘one of us’’ that lulled Muslims into an unshakeable faith in the Congress party. It was this unthinking faith which Indira Gandhi transformed into a vote bank, aggravating political currents against the Nehru legacy. The achkan, the rose and Urdu exposed Nehru to criticism from the more homespun leadership the new Indian sociological upheavals were throwing up.

The Discovery of India is a great book, but Nehru discovered India from the outside, ‘‘Bhai was very cross with father (Motilal Nehru),’’ Vijayalaxmi Pandit once told me, ‘‘when he found upon his return from England that father had appointed an English governess for me.’’ She paused. ‘‘You see, British aristocracy in those days preferred French governesses.’’

The Nehru image was sustainable so long as democracy, social justice, upward mobility had not begun to shake the centuries-old twin hierarchies of feudalism and caste. The spell Nehru cast on Muslims began to weaken with Indira Gandhi and ended with P. V. Narasimha Rao on December 6, 1992, after Babri Masjid’s demolition. The Muslim felt cheated with retrospective effect. Partition had been a trick played on him by the Congress. Time, of course, is a healer of sorts. Today the Muslim is making political adjustments, like everybody else, at the regional level. But what will his stance be in the Hindi belt? Disenchanted with the Congress, distrustful of the BJP, uncomfortable with casteist formations — which way will he lurch?

When I listened to Vajpayee on August 15, the thought crossed my mind: the Muslim, like an overwhelming majority of Indians, wants the communal temperature in the country to drop. Normalisation with Pakistan is almost a precondition for this to happen. Vajpayee, I like to imagine, went to Agra with this in mind. How this scenario unfolds until December will reflect on the muscle and will he has left in him.

Earlier Columns