The Shoaib effect and Indian Muslims

Indian Muslims leap up and talk about what a twit Shoaib was to have said that. There was a flurry of articles from eminent Muslims stating, yet again, presumably on behalf of all Indian Muslims, how out of line Shoaib was with Indian realities and the Indian Muslim psyche.

True, Shoaib’s statement was a gaffe. But should it have led to such comments? In fact, more than a gaffe, Shoaib’s statement was a reflection of the stance of a Pakistani state, which defines its nationalism by religious identity alone. But the anxiety of Indian Muslims to ‘distance’ themselves from a cricketer’s remark indicated that 15 per cent of India’s population felt the need to re-pledge themselves publicly to ‘Indianness’.

The fact is that the identity of the young Indian Muslim has evolved greatly from the stereotype of the Good Samaritan ‘chacha’ of sixties Bollywood, and from the innumerable underworld thugs portrayed crudely in modern Hindi cinema. Young Muslims seek their place in the modern Indian project and are anxious to get on like any other community. Consider this: a popular website offering information on Indian Muslims, greets you with a huge sketch of Mahatma Gandhi. It is Gandhi that defines the website’s philosophy, not any ‘predictable’ Muslim image. Pakistani relatives of some Indian Muslim families I know, also laugh at the ‘interesting’ (read non-scriptural) names Indian Muslims choose for their children today — words with an Urdu or Farsi resonance but which are not predictable: like Sahir, Danish, Zara, Sahil or even Tarana.

Post-partition,...