Let us relearn each other

My mother was unwilling to accept what she saw at the shilanyas as the only way India must proceed

I HAD set out from Lucknow for an election tour of UP but ended up on a nostalgic trip to my village, Mustafabad, beyond Rae Bareli. All of this deviation must be attributed to my mother’s machinations. At 86, she has lost none of her faith in the proposition that Mustafabad is probably the centre of the universe. The election got sidetracked. Instead, we found ourselves contemplating the blueprint of a residential college for Muslim women to study all that was great in the Sanskritic past.

Our house is at the end of the village (or Qasbah), beyond which are fields, lush with wheat and golden with mustard. Even on the drive from Lucknow I have seldom seen fields so rich with promise, almost in inverse proportion to the political picture.

The house is divided into three rectangles, adjacent to each other. The entrance through a huge, teak gate, its disrepair disguised in a thick coat of black paint, opens onto the first rectangle, a large unkempt lawn, the size of a hockey field, past a dusty reception area.
The first building to catch the eye is a mosque — not an elaborate mosque with onion domes but four rather modest size minarets brooding over a small enclosed and an open prayer area — more of a family chapel than a mosque.

Standing outside the mosque on the left-hand side is a long verandah with seven arches, leading to a room, long and narrow like a ribbon. This opens onto what was once a mango grove. In my childhood, the grove commanded a view of the lake stretching up to the railway line in the distance.

Opposite the mosque, across the lawn, adjacent to the entrance gate is another gate, opening onto a meandering passage leading to the second rectangle. This was the ladies chamber. Beyond this is the third rectangle, the Deewankha, a double verandah on an elegant scale, with galleries all around. This is somewhat better preserved because a Trust maintains it for Moharram congregations.

If all of this communicates any sense of grandeur it must instantly be attributed to my inadequate talent for description. Basically these vast, vacant spaces, in certain shades of light, look eerie where an Edgar Alan Poe theme can be played out. Or the black and white starkness offers a procession of surrealistic frames from which a young Ingmar Bergman would have coaxed so much mystery.

Even though it was my mother’s persistence which caused us to alter our itinerary, I was still bewildered that we should be so wrapped in nostalgia in a house in which we no longer live but with which are tied some of our fondest memories.

Then my mother’s incorrigible optimism surfaced. She reminded me of our visit to Ayodhya on the day of the shilanyas or the temple brick laying ceremony supervised by the Congress of which Rajiv Gandhi was the leader.

Her very angry and impulsive reaction then was that neither the Congress nor the BJP was good for the country. “What is the strength of the Communist parties in UP?” She asked. Mind you, this was before the P. V. Narasimha Rao phase when the Babari Masjid was demolished.

Muslims defected en masse from the Congress. The caste formations that had gained considerably from the Mandal commission report, attracted them not because they had turned casteist but because they were eager to scoot from the BJP and the Congress.

That was 10 years ago. The churning process since then has left all social groups confused and exhausted. Nobody, not even the wily old men of Mustafabad have any clue as to which formation will settle down in the Lucknow gaddi. Will Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi party pip the NDA to the post? Give whatever credence you like to that query because it is made repeatedly.

But none of it matters as far as my mother is concerned. She walks nimbly across the fields at the rear to the new school, for the very poor in the village that she has built on family property. “Let my village be educated first,” she says.

Then comes the other major issue in her framework: how to bring an end to separate development of the main communities, one evolving without any knowledge of the other — uninstitutionalised apartheid.

In recent months the family has been discussing a revolutionary idea: that the house in Mustafabad be converted into a residential college for Muslim women. What is so revolutionary about this idea? Well, the curriculum would consist of ancient Indian philosophies, Vedas, Upanishads, the great Sanskrit texts, indeed, all that is great about the country and all that Muslims have, by and large, been insulated from.

“Maybe someone will then be inspired to set up a corresponding institute to relearn something about us” says this determined old lady, unwilling to accept what she saw at the shilanyas in Ayodhya as the only way the country must proceed in the future.

Would you consider all this naive and romantic or does she deserve help before she steps out into the sunset some day not in the distant future?

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