an exile between karbala and ayodhya

A couple of weeks ago, Uma of indianwriting sparked off an interesting discussion on secularism, communalism, and violence in South Asia with her Rethinking Secularism essay "Jumping into Wells." There's a long and mostly fruitful comments section there (with thoughtful contributions by Buchu & Dilip D'Souza, among others) and Amardeep Singh and thariel of contrapuntal wrote responses on their own blogs. The latter, mentioning

the matter-of-fact, implicit, unacknowledged secularism of places like Cochin with its Jewtown and Dutch fort and Christian churches, of Hyderabad with its Urdu-inflected Telugu, of Punjab in the time when one son in every Hindu family converted to Sikhism....Secularism isn't even the right word for this. I'm talking here about cultural eclecticism, miscegenation, the blurring of boundaries in daily life.

brought to mind Amitava Kumar's latest book--Husband of a Fanatic--which I wrote about in the Oxonian Review of Books last spring. The relevant issue is now (finally) available online, so if you want to see what I had to say about Kumar's book, which uses his marriage to a Pakistani Muslim as a jumping-off point to explore secularism, identity, conversion, and boundary-crossing in the subcontinent, you can go read the review: "Intimate Borders." (Full disclosure: thariel was the one who asked me to contribute the it. Also, I am not responsible for the formatting glitches, including a particularly angst-inducing misplaced comma!) I come to this discussion as an outsider, but my own recent academic work deals with similar issues in the context of Middle Eastern history--tracing the impact of colonialism and nationalism on a small, highly diverse society (the Sanjak of Alexandretta, now the Turkish province of Hatay) in which politics started to fracture along communal lines. (As I start rewriting my MPhil thesis for journal articles and an upcoming conference paper, I might write about this some more- we'll see).

Incidentally, a nice chunk of one of the relevant chapters from Kumar's book is available online here. The following passage sums up the core themes of the book:

Against Naipaul's idea of purity and fixity in religion, it is necessary to see how communities have grown historically in dialogue with each other. Their influences are mixed and shared. They have long-standing histories in the places where they have flourished. If you go far back in time, surely all of us are converts.[...]The Sangh Parivar, in their assaults on minorities in India, are very far from the writer Intizar Husain, who has said: "I am a Muslim, but I always feel that there is a Hindu sitting inside me...I still feel that I am an exile who wanders between Karbala and Ayodhya."

Husain was born in India and migrated to Pakistan after Partition. I was struck by the beauty of his words, and his sense of sublime rootlessness. In his worldview, the sense of belonging to different places, also distant places, was not a sign of neurosis but humanity. Unlike Naipaul, born in the diaspora, and repulsed by what he had once considered home, Husain celebrates his ties to the places that are a part of his past. Even his exile is a pleasant longing for the places to which he belongs.

After my return from Karachi, I visited the poet and film-director Gulzar in Mumbai. Over dinner, Gulzar, who is a Hindu, told me that he had fasted during Ramzan for several years. A Muslim friend of his had been advised by his doctor to avoid the strain, and so Gulzar offered to keep the fast instead. I wanted to tell Gulzar, "You should stop keeping the fast. It is my turn now."