#
The philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote an essay called, What is it like to be a bat?
#
The essay deals with the nature of consciousness, its deep and nuanced and influential and controversial,
#
and my takeaway from it when I first read it as a kid was that no matter how much knowledge
#
we gather, we cannot really know what it is like to be a bat.
#
Let's navigate the world through something called echolocation, in other words they use
#
Now we can understand this at an intellectual level using the laws of physics and so on,
#
but we can't actually get inside the head of a bat.
#
And why only look at other species?
#
I would argue that despite being wired for empathy, it is hard for any one human to know
#
what it is to be someone else.
#
For example, I am a man and no matter how much knowledge or empathy I have, I can't
#
truly know what it is like to be a woman, to carry that extra layer of awareness every
#
time I enter a lift, or walk on the street at night, or just sense someone's intrusive
#
Those extra layers would shape everything else about me till I wouldn't be me.
#
And that's the whole point.
#
And this is not just across gender.
#
One of my favorite novelists, George Seminox, once said that the biggest tragedy in the
#
world was that complete communication is impossible between any two people in this world.
#
Maybe we can never truly know other people who remain characters in the grand play in
#
Maybe we can never even know ourselves because we are wired to be self-delusional.
#
But before I go too far down that road, let me come to the question that sparked my desire
#
to record this episode.
#
For someone born a Hindu in India, is it possible to truly know what it is like to be born a
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Ghazala Wahab, author of the book, Born a Muslim, Some Truths about
#
I love this book, learned a lot from it, and I recommend all of you read it as well.
#
This book contains multitudes.
#
It is both personal memoir as well as a scholarly history of Islam in India through the centuries.
#
It covers the different routes Islam took through India from trade and travel to conquest.
#
It covers the different influences within Islam, from the Arabic to the Persian.
#
It looks at the harmonizing influence of the Sufis as well as a polarizing effect of the
#
radical sects that later emerged, inspired by Wahhabism.
#
It shows us how a series of events drove Muslims in India away from the mainstream, and how
#
their politics was often so disconnected from their social reality.
#
Most of all, it shows us the insecurity that Muslims feel in India today, and the vicious
#
circle of mistrust and animosity that we seem to be trapped within.
#
But there is also much in this book to take hope from.
#
This conversation covers a lot of ground, and the first 90 minutes or so, until the
#
break, are about Ghazala's personal journey, in a sense mimicking the structure of the
#
I always begin my episodes by chatting about my guest's life so far, and I find it as
#
fascinating as whatever subject we may be discussing.
#
I may never know what it is like to be a bat, but it's a lovely feeling to get a sense of
#
how someone else has been shaped.
#
If I could say to everyone I met, let me walk for a moment in your shoes, and if they let
#
me do that, I would be so lucky.
#
So I always love this first portion, but if you want to get to the part of the show where
#
we talk about the history of Islam, well then that begins after the first break, at around
#
But hey, just listen to the full thing.
#
Before that though, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
One of the great tragedies of my life is that I had such bad math teachers in school.
#
For that reason, I never got turned on to math till I was an adult, and fell in love
#
with it while writing about economics and playing poker for a living.
#
But oh my god, math is so much fun.
#
That's why I have an online course to recommend to you.
#
Head on over to the sponsors of this episode, The Great Courses Plus, at thegreatcoursesplus.com,
#
and check out a course called The Joy of Mathematics by Arthur T. Benjamin.
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Over 24 lectures, this course will show you how to have fun with maths.
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In fact, I shouldn't call them lectures, but play sessions.
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The chapter titles include The Joy of Primes, The Joy of Algebra, The Joy of the Imaginary
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Number, The Joy of Infinity, Joy, Joy, Joy, you get the picture.
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And that's just one of the many great courses on this aptly named site.
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The Great Courses Plus has a fantastic library of online courses, from subjects ranging from
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music, math, cooking, history, political theory, and much else.
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They also have an app where you can listen to the audio of these courses the same way
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you are listening to this podcast now.
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And it will cost you nothing.
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You get one month of unlimited free access if you use the following URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com
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That's right, Unseen, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Unseen for one month of unlimited free
#
Ghazala, hi, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
Such a pleasure being here.
#
I love reading your book, Born a Muslim, and one of the sort of things I really liked about
#
it is how it's such an organic mix of the personal and the socio-political that through
#
the story of your own life, in a sense, and your experiences, you are also tracing the
#
history of Islam in India, how it's evolved through the decades, and what it's like to
#
be Muslim in India today, all of which taught me a lot.
#
But let's begin this as you begin your book.
#
You begin your book with this wonderful introduction, which to me was worth the price of the book
#
alone, which is like this long personal essay which talks about your growing up years and
#
But, you know, even before that, tell me a little bit about the young Ghazala as a kid,
#
you know, where did you grow up?
#
What kind of person were you and what were your early influences?
#
Fill me into some of that.
#
I grew up in a small Muslim-dominated Mahalla of Agra.
#
We were a large family living in a very small house, so there were always too many people
#
and too few rooms, and we had to share rooms, so it was understood that girls would be sharing
#
the rooms with their aunts and boys would be sharing with their uncles, and there was
#
never enough space for the kids to play, and it was a joint family.
#
My grandfather had 11 kids, six sons and actually seven sons and four daughters.
#
One of his sons died early, and I grew up with a lot of cousins at home, and we were
#
not allowed to step out of the house because both my grandfather and my father and his
#
younger siblings felt that they wanted to give us a different kind of life as opposed
#
Our neighborhood was largely low middle class, and most of the people were employed in some
#
sort of a family low-level business, so a lot of people were underemployed because all
#
of them were doing the same thing, so the kids also didn't go to the best of schools.
#
A lot of kids didn't go to school, so my family, an extended family, they wanted something
#
different for their children.
#
We all went to English medium school.
#
I went to a convent school.
#
So to prevent us from stepping out of the house unescorted or to mingle with the other
#
kids, we used to be told very fanciful stories about if we go out, somebody would be sitting
#
there and we'll be kidnapped or somebody would do some sort of a black magic and we'll turn
#
So that lane outside the house was always full of dangerous possibilities, and I was
#
not a very brave child, so I was happy staying inside.
#
So for us, our play area used to be the rooftop where we would spend most of our time.
#
But because I was not a very athletic child, I was prone to falling very often and hurting
#
myself, especially my ankles.
#
So I was not heavily into a lot of physical games that my other cousins would play, and
#
I got more interested because we didn't have any technology, no television at home.
#
So I drifted into reading, and I had this huge desire to just read because it was so
#
entertaining that I used to read anything I could lay my hands on.
#
I would read the newspaper, whatever I could make of it.
#
I would read textbooks of my younger aunts and my uncles.
#
I would read that salacious magazines that my uncle was subscribing to, a Hindi magazine
#
called Manohar Kahania.
#
So whatever I could figure out or make of it, I used to hide in some corner of the house.
#
Most of the time, it used to be below the staircase because nobody would be able to
#
So I would just sit there, read, or maybe go to the rooftop with everybody else.
#
And while the other kids would be playing, I would sit with one of the books in the corner.
#
Came to such a pass that my mother was very worried about me, about what kind of stuff
#
So if I was found with something in my hand, she would immediately confiscate and check
#
what I was doing because I would just pick up anything randomly and start reading.
#
And along with that, I also developed sort of a desire that I also want to write what
#
I should be able to produce something like this.
#
So writing happened concurrently.
#
It was earlier, I couldn't write prose or something.
#
So I would dabble into some stupid poetry and all this was going on.
#
Finally, I started writing or thinking about writing a little more seriously when my father
#
once asked me to write something.
#
He used to come to Delhi very frequently because my father was an exporter and a lot of business
#
And he used to export through the state trading corporation.
#
So their office was in Delhi.
#
So he had to come to Delhi quite often to meet the bureaucrats, the government officials
#
So often we used to come with him because it was not a long journey, it would just take
#
about four to five hours in an ambassador car.
#
So we used to come here and that's when sometimes he would go to Palika Bazaar and pick up something.
#
And from Hindi, I switched a little to English, you know, kids magazines like Tinkle or very
#
So one of on our journey back to Agra after one such trip, there was a huge procession
#
and we had to take a detour from the main road and we went through the old city to come
#
to our house in the Mahalla.
#
And I saw a huge procession there moving with a statue and I asked my father what it was.
#
So he explained to me that was Dr. Ambedkar's statue and the procession was being led by
#
his followers and they're taking it for putting it there outside the Agra fort.
#
They were setting it up there.
#
They had built a small park there where the statue was to be set up.
#
And then obviously I was curious who Dr. Ambedkar was.
#
So he told me the entire story of his life, how he was a low caste, he had to sit outside
#
the classroom and how despite all that because he was so diligent, he worked so hard, he
#
became such a huge personality that he actually wrote the constitution.
#
I mean, he told me he wrote the constitution much later that you realize what he did.
#
So once we reached home, he asked me to write it down for him to see if I have understood
#
And over the next two, three days, I wrote whatever I remembered in our very haphazard
#
sort of English because English was neither of our first language.
#
And we also didn't speak English at home.
#
So whatever language I knew, I knew it from the school.
#
So I wrote it down a few 10, 15 sentences and showed it to my father.
#
That encouraged me a lot.
#
I thought I have some potential as a writer.
#
A few days later, there was this incident of two gangsters, Ranga and Billa, kidnapping
#
these siblings, Sanjay and Geeta.
#
And this was all over the newspapers.
#
We used to get Amarijala at home and I read the headlines.
#
I read a little bit of the news and I asked again my father what this incident was about.
#
So he explained it to me and again he asked me, why don't you write it down?
#
So then I wrote it down and I tried to copy the newspaper style of writing it, like intro
#
or just summarizing what happened and then giving a little detail.
#
So that's how I was writing concurrently as I was reading.
#
But my reading was not really literature.
#
It was reading of the papers which were coming home, reading of some magazines and just whatever
#
I could lay my hands on.
#
That was also the time our family was, you know, we were moving up the ladder of economic
#
So things were gradually changing at home.
#
And I, so my access to a lot of things were also improving gradually.
#
Subsequently we moved from this house to another house that my father was building and this
#
was, we were a nuclear family now except that my younger uncle had come to stay with us.
#
And here everybody, all of us had our own rooms, they were attached bathrooms which
#
He had never imagined something like this, only seen it in hotels.
#
And my father had gone and set up a place, bathrooms in each bathroom.
#
So it was again a huge luxury and very ambitiously he had built a study in this house.
#
I'll just take you back a little bit.
#
And my father himself was not a school educated person.
#
His learning of the languages was also self-tutored and my mother also just did class 11th and
#
So basically my family was not a very educated family.
#
We came from a working class background despite the fact that in the caste, Muslim caste hierarchy
#
or class hierarchy we were number two from the top.
#
But in terms of education, because my grandfather, his family, they were quite poor and most
#
So it was more important for them to know a trade.
#
So my grandfather knew the trade of footwear, the upper of the shoe.
#
So he used to do that stitching of the uppers.
#
So that is what he had learned.
#
And my father also started like that.
#
He started working in a factory as a person who would cut the upper and then subsequently
#
he became a supervisor and eventually he started his own factory.
#
But his desire to learn and he was very fascinated by English language.
#
So he had approached the munci in the factory who used to do the accounting of, you know,
#
used to distribute the weekly wages.
#
So he advised my father that one of the easy ways of learning the language is that my father
#
So he said, you subscribe to a Urdu newspaper and you subscribe to an English newspaper.
#
And if they are from the same organizations, the news would be identical.
#
So you could read it in Urdu and then you could try and read in English.
#
So he helped my father with alphabets and my father then started reading Komi Avaz and
#
Both of them came from the National Herald group of papers.
#
So he has own learning was, it was self-tutored.
#
So when we moved to the new house and my father built his study, he had no exposure to literature
#
And he had no references as to what he should buy and what he should put in his study.
#
So he used to come to Delhi and he used to make a special trip during the Delhi Book
#
Fair and just pick up books which looked good or books which had some nice blurb or if somebody
#
So it was a very eclectic kind of collection and very little fiction there because he obviously
#
thought if he's spending so much money on books, the books should give him something
#
I mean, he should be able to learn something.
#
So there was a lot of history, a lot of modern Indian history, authors like Dominic Leper,
#
Larry Collins, because he thought the language was very beautiful, very evocative.
#
Then he used to buy books in bulk.
#
So we had the full collection of Patel's biography by, I'm forgetting the name of the author
#
now, then the entire collection of Nehru, collection of Gandhi.
#
So that is what the study was.
#
So when I started reading books, my introduction was through nonfiction.
#
So I was reading a lot of historical books, I was reading a lot of biographies.
#
I drifted to fiction much, much later in life and I was already 13 or 14 years old when
#
I started reading novels.
#
And by this time, girls my age had already gone past Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew.
#
So I never really grew up reading them.
#
I probably read one or two books of this and that.
#
But I then moved to other authors and so and alongside this, I started fancying myself
#
as a poet, because I thought that I was introduced to Urdu poetry through my parents.
#
They were heavily into poetry.
#
So I couldn't read Urdu, but I used to ask my mother if she could read out verses to
#
me in Urdu or I would nag my father to read out passages from Maulana Azad's Khubare Khater
#
where he's talking about his experience in the jail.
#
So all this drew me to Urdu and I somehow was very attracted to the style of ghazals.
#
And even though I didn't understand a lot of it, I just loved the sound of it.
#
And I used to memorize verses and recite them to myself.
#
So my parents thought that maybe I can be a poet.
#
So Urdu teacher was appointed and he was also a poet.
#
So he started teaching me Urdu poetry.
#
And I started writing a few verses in Urdu, which I thought were very bad.
#
And finally, I realized that I am terrible as a poet.
#
And I was embarrassed of my own verses, which I wrote.
#
And around that time, I think I came back to English writing and I started writing some
#
sort of a long form of writing, just putting together nonsense ideas which would come to
#
me or sitting in my study, looking out of the window.
#
So I would just write a descriptive essay, sort of a thing, a short piece, just describing
#
Maybe what helped in this was I was a huge daydreamer.
#
I had never been bored of my own company.
#
I never ever said this to anybody that I'm getting bored.
#
If I had nothing to do, I would just sit idle and daydream and just imagine things happening
#
to me, imagine things happening around me.
#
And I could spend hours doing just that and not be bothered at all.
#
So when I started writing, a lot of my writing, my trial and error sort of writing used to
#
be just describing a particular scene that I was either imagining or witnessing.
#
So that is how I was when I was growing up.
#
And I didn't have too many friends.
#
I didn't make too many friends.
#
So I don't want to say that I was lonely or I preferred being on my own.
#
But I did like to be on my own a lot of times.
#
And even if I was with friends, if I was as I was growing older, I often wanted to just
#
come back and sit in my room and just be on my own.
#
And probably that was one of the reasons because I had my own attached bathroom.
#
I used to spend a lot of time in my bathroom because nobody would disturb me there.
#
So I would just lock myself in there and sit there for a long time.
#
So that is what it was growing up.
#
Yeah, there is so much to unpack there.
#
Just from sort of what you said right now, there's so much that I want to talk about.
#
Let's kind of, you know, before we get to the personal narrative of how events unfolded
#
around you and your family and all of that, I'd like to stay with reading a bit.
#
Like, first of all, all this makes me very sort of nostalgic because, you know, younger
#
people today don't realize what a joy it was to read anything that you could get your hand
#
on back in those days when you didn't have the Internet and the world of information
#
In fact, I think, you know, a defining image for all Indian kids growing up in the 80s
#
would be the one that you described of yourself sitting under the stairs reading Manohar Kahania,
#
which is to me, you know, the story of so many people just sort of in one image.
#
What also kind of strikes me is the multilingual nature of how you were coming up.
#
Like, one thing that I've realized is that, you know, being from a fairly like I was from
#
a fairly privileged background.
#
And though in one sense, it was a restriction in the sense that everything I read was essentially
#
I read a little bit of Hindi here and there I did well in school and all that in Hindi.
#
And all my reading was English.
#
Many of the people I later encountered in working life were also people who grew up
#
reading English newspapers, English books, got everything from English and in a certain
#
sense that limited their worldview.
#
This is a theme I've explored with earlier guests in episodes.
#
I think it came up when I was chatting with Akshay Mukul, Rahul Verma, both of whom also
#
read in Hindi while growing up.
#
And number one, did you feel that being multilingual like this, reading these multiple languages,
#
Hindi, Urdu, English, that it kind of that your vision was broader than, say, maybe the
#
people you would subsequently work with in journalism or whatever that you had seen things
#
that they would not have known or expected because many of us English speaking elites
#
are kind of, you know, in our little bubbles and we don't really see the world outside.
#
But you had, of course, through growing up, you had gotten a glimpse of that, but also
#
And I'll wait for you to answer this because there's a related question which also fascinates
#
me, which has to do with language.
#
But you know, what's your take on this?
#
You know, this exposure to different languages, it was not just a question of language.
#
It was a question of different world altogether.
#
Hindi as I used to go through the textbooks of my aunt, I became familiar with writings
#
of Premchand at a very young age, probably even at a time when I was not intelligent
#
enough to grasp the depth of what he was writing.
#
But I could read and I could see a completely different world or writers like, you know,
#
Hindi transversions of Mantop.
#
Now, it was hugely shocking, his work for a child to be reading that it was really a
#
completely different sort of idiom, a completely different sort of imagery that would conjure
#
So I felt that I was exposed to a variety of things, which when I came to Delhi and
#
I was exposed to entirely the English speaking group of friends in my college and subsequently
#
when I started working, they were not exposed to this.
#
So when I would talk to them, they would be talking about Chekhov and I had read Chekhov
#
But my understanding, I mean, I could relate to the poverty part of it because I had seen
#
I was privileged in the sense that by the time I was growing up, my family had resources.
#
But having read this, I could understand, I could make the connection.
#
Probably another thing I would want to add here is it's not just the languages in the
#
novels or in the books, it's also the languages of the newspapers.
#
And I would come back to the newspaper for the simple reason, as a journalist, my exposure
#
to newspaper writing in India has been greater.
#
And I have seen how newspapers have evolved in India since the mid 80s onwards.
#
Mid 80s was the time when I was in my teens and I was reading the newspapers on a very
#
I'll give you a small example.
#
In the 80s, probably there was a government directive that if there was a communal riot
#
or a violence somewhere, the communities would not be identified.
#
So it was all, the newspaper reports would say one community has rioted and the second
#
Then the police opened fire and four members of one community have.
#
So they would be like that, very vague.
#
I always was curious who are these communities, who was the instigator, who started the riot,
#
who were the people killed, but the English newspapers would not put this out, maybe out
#
of the government order or out of deference for sentiments or whatever.
#
But the Hindi newspaper were very clever.
#
They, papers like Amarjala Adhenik Chakran, they would say Bahu Sankhya, which is majority
#
and they would say Alp Sankhya.
#
So you would know which community has done what.
#
So they were cutting across the government directive in a very clever way.
#
The Urdu newspapers would identify.
#
They would identify the victims by, not by the community, but by names.
#
So you knew that in the police firing, Javed and Sajed and so and so have died.
#
So they were actually short-circuiting the government.
#
So I realized that the English journalism for the sake of being fair and not instigating
#
more violence or whatever the principles was only conveying half a story.
#
So as a reference to a particular event, you would not get the correct picture.
#
Whereas the vernacular would give you in some way, it would manage to convey the actual
#
The other thing was that in English journalism, it was said that, you know, the reporter should
#
You know, you should not show yourself because that invisibility ensures, or it was meant
#
to ensure some kind of impartiality.
#
But in the vernacular writing, the reporter would be invisible, but reporters bias would
#
So it was when I was growing up, even then in Agra, I was conscious of the fact that
#
this particular reporter, if he's saying this, there is a lot of exaggeration in a certain
#
So you don't have to show yourself up, but your bias shows.
#
So when I come to Delhi and I was studying in college and I used to interact with my
#
classmates, I realized that our sensibilities and sensitivity towards our environment were
#
For example, another example, this mandal agitation was at its peak when I joined college.
#
And I found that most of my classmates were actually just repeating what probably they
#
had heard at home and their anger, their rage against the recommendations was not really
#
reflective of what the truth or the history of India has been.
#
So I was amazed that this sort of a privileged overhang over these people, how much it enables
#
prejudice, how much it is a factor in encouraging a biased view of your own society.
#
So there's another thing, because of this exposure to multilingual writing, both in
#
books and newspapers, I also felt that now when everybody talks about Ganga Jammini and
#
people talk about Ganga Jammini culture of North India, especially the UP, Bihar and
#
parts of Northern Madhya Pradesh, people who have not seen this through literature, through
#
writings of a certain period, they assume what the culture would be.
#
See, if you read short stories by Prem Chal, you would realize that it was not just celebrating
#
each other's festivals.
#
It was not just going to somebody's house on Eid or Diwali.
#
It was, there was so much of economic interdependence.
#
The characters were organic, but irrespective of religion, characters used to be organic
#
to the stories because that is how a small town or rural India lived.
#
There was so much of social and economic engagement with each other.
#
So now a lot of people, when they talk about, oh, but we always greeted our Muslim friends
#
on Eid or our Hindu friends, we played Holi with them.
#
That's just one and probably a superficial part of it.
#
It doesn't really convey the kind of dependence you had on each other, the kind of trust you
#
I'm sorry if I'm giving too many examples.
#
Can I give one more example?
#
There's no such thing as too many examples.
#
I had met one gentleman in Delhi while I was working on my book, but he was from Farooqabad.
#
So he was narrating the incident of when he was growing up there.
#
His family lived in a village where the majority in the village were not Muslims and his family
#
was among the two or three Muslim families in that village.
#
But whenever anybody went out of the village to visit somewhere or go on a holiday, irrespective
#
of religion, such was the stature of this person's father that he used to, everybody,
#
whoever was going would leave the house keys, leave the cattle, everything with this family
#
that you please take care of our cattle, you take care of our house while you're away.
#
So that was the level of trust and that was the lived heritage of those people, that community
#
irrespective of religion.
#
So this is something which you know if you are either from this area or you have the
#
sensibility to see it, even if it's not very obvious.
#
Again, there's a lot to unpack here, you know, all of these answers of yours are like little
#
Chinese boxes, you open one layer and there's another layer below that.
#
You know, so before we get to kind of the subject at hand and what you've written about
#
in your book, you know, I'll just take one more digression with due apology to my listeners
#
because it's a subject that fascinates me and it again has to do with language.
#
So now I teach this online writing course and a few months back, you know, one of the
#
girls who was doing that, who had this very sharp way of observing things, but the language
#
was a little not quite formed yet.
#
And she kind of came to me with a problem and she said, you know, the thing is English
#
is not my first language.
#
So I'm having trouble kind of expressing it and what can I do?
#
And at that point, I remembered the author I had discovered called Agata Kristof, like
#
I'd watched an interview of Jhumpa Lahiri by Tyler Coven and I'll link all of these
#
And what Lahiri had done was her languages are English and Bengali, but she learned Italian
#
from scratch and then she wrote a book in Italian.
#
So as an adult, you're learning a whole new language and you're writing a book in that.
#
So when Tyler asked her about that, she pointed to the example of Agata Kristof, who essentially,
#
I think during the war shifted as an adult to France from somewhere, maybe Hungary or
#
wherever, I don't remember, but shifted to France, learned French at the age of 2021
#
and then wrote a series of incredible books in French, a completely new language to her.
#
So I recommended to this, the participant in my course that why don't you try reading
#
Agata Kristof and because her language is very sparse, very powerful and all of that.
#
And she recently told me a few months after I gave her the record that she, one, she loved
#
And two, what she started doing was that she started, you know, copying from the book in
#
the sense, writing each sentence again by hand to get a closer sense of what the language
#
And that struck me as something beautiful and inspiring because what it means is that
#
you're looking at the language with, you know, so to say, which you otherwise don't because
#
we people, like I take English for granted.
#
I have to remind myself to be mindful and, you know, go word by word, notice all the
#
little intricacies of it, but because she was kind of new to it, she was doing this
#
and it struck me as such a beautiful thing to do.
#
And therefore I want to ask that, you know, you mentioned that you, at one point you were
#
drawn to poetry and it again struck me that, you know, anyone who is, for example, exposed
#
to Urdu would turn to poetry because Urdu is such a beautiful lyrical language.
#
You know, English almost seems like a functional kind of dry language compared to that.
#
So your experience in these different languages, do you think in some ways it shaped the book
#
Like, you know, everything that you've written is obviously very accomplished.
#
No one can tell that English is sort of not your mother tongue in that sense.
#
So did you ever during the course of your time pay that kind of attention to language
#
Maybe, you know, like everybody, of course, as they get into journalism and writing will
#
pay attention to craft, they learn to edit, they learn to do all of that.
#
But did you feel that there was some, you know, element of looking deeper at the language
#
while you were writing in it?
#
Actually, no, I think language or writing in English came very naturally to me.
#
I have no idea how, even when I was writing grammatically incorrect English, my tenses
#
would be a bit heavier, I was always able to put the imagery that I was thinking what
#
I was looking at on paper.
#
When I was in first year college, some like, I think the general elections announced and
#
I had gone to Agra and I saw this, I'm forgetting the name of the candidate, Nihal Singh or
#
I saw a entourage of this guy during the campaign.
#
I was driving on the highway and just short of Agra, there was a dhaba and these guys
#
So I saw that entourage and I just liked that image, the visual image, it conjured up of
#
people in white kurdas and topis and all those chapais just outside the dhaba and, you know,
#
there were guys coming, people coming touching the feet of this candidate and so we had stopped
#
at the dhaba for tea and I was watching these things happening there and it was so fascinating
#
for me that I wrote that scene and when I came back to college, we were sitting with
#
some friends and I showed it to one of them and then somehow it went to my class teacher's
#
hands, I don't know how that went there and he was so fascinated, he asked me to come
#
So I was made to read it out to the class and I was embarrassed because while I was
#
reading, I realized that there were a lot of mistakes in it.
#
The articles were missing in some places because I had just written it because it was fascinating.
#
So he told me that, you know, you have a very descriptive way of writing in this thing,
#
maybe you should pursue this a little more seriously and I realized that even though
#
I was probably not as proficient with the grammar of the language, I was able to express
#
myself and maybe use it in a way to describe things and maybe describe them in a manner
#
which gives you a sense of what I had seen.
#
So probably Urdu poetry played a role in this because there is a form in Urdu poetry which
#
is a descriptive form, you know, beyond Urdu poetry has a lot of forms, I mean, the most
#
popular are Ghazals and Rubais, Nazams to some extent, but then there are other forms
#
also, there are forms where you are describing scenes, there are forms where you're exaggerating
#
So it has a variety of forms, so when I was learning the poetry from my teacher, he acquainted
#
me with these forms and I was fascinated that actually poetry is not enough, within the
#
poetry also you have distinguished one form from another and probably that had some sort
#
of an impact on me just describing a situation as it was, why I'm going on about describing
#
per part is that maybe when I became a journalist, when I joined my first job, it was, I mean,
#
my seniors decided that I should get into feature writing because I was more suited
#
for feature writing as opposed to daily news reporting because news reporting doesn't give
#
you the option of or the luxury of just going off tangent and spending so much of space
#
on building up the situation or building up the story.
#
So I don't think I had a struggle as far as writing was concerned.
#
The struggle part was always trying to cut short my flight of fancy and come to the point.
#
It's really fascinating and you know, someday we should do an episode on the different forms
#
of writing in Urdu and all of that, but I suspect if I, although this is one of my sort
#
of pet themes, if I continue talking more with you about this, my listeners will be
#
that, hey, that's not the subject of the book, kindly get on with it.
#
So you know, and it's interesting, you just spoke about how when you were in college in
#
the late 80s when Mundell Commission happened and your classmates approach and all, and
#
in the book you also said something very interesting there, which is that none of them asked you
#
anything about yourself, that even if they had their anti-Muslim prejudices and all of
#
that as evident in their politics, you know, you almost wish that they would ask you what
#
are Muslims like, what is it like to be a Muslim and they never asked you, which was
#
in contrast to something which, you know, you describe from your school days when you
#
write a quote, their questions covered the entire gamut from genuine curiosity to inherited
#
prejudice. Why do you fast during Ramzan? Do you put meat in all your food? Some questions
#
stemmed from stereotyping. Why don't Muslims bathe every day? And some were downright ridiculous.
#
How many mothers do you have? Stop quote. And so my question to you is that, you know,
#
on the one hand you are growing up in a Muslim family in a Muslim Mahalla, at the same time
#
your family is kind of insulated itself from the street around it, like you describe how,
#
you know, all the rooms would have a window open to the inner courtyard, but none to the
#
outside because, you know, like you mentioned earlier, you weren't supposed to venture out,
#
it wasn't safe, it wasn't great. So what was your personal view of Islam as a kid growing
#
up? How big a role did it play in your life? And how did you imbibe it? What did it mean
#
to you? And what did it mean to the other kids around you, like your cousins and so on?
#
You know, when we were growing up, we were initiated into religion in a very simplistic
#
manner. As kids, we were taught the first kalma, which is just two lines. And that was
#
enough. Beyond that, there was no formal initiation in terms of learning how to say the namaz or
#
learning to read the Quran, which is what happens in most Muslim households. You start
#
learning the alphabets from a very young age. And in a conservative Muslim family, a child
#
is expected to finish the entire reading of the Quran by the time she is seven years old.
#
But in my family, that never happened. Not just my immediate siblings, but my cousins
#
also, we never did that. Though we had a mosque right next to our house, and I grew up listening
#
to the Muslims call from childhood, so much so because I still hear it five times a day.
#
And sometimes more than that, because on special occasions, they used to be late night prayers
#
as well. And because of which I knew it by heart. And sometimes, as part of our playing,
#
we used to do a little bit of play acting. So one of my cousins would pretend to be the
#
hafiz who would give the call to prayer. So he would recite the prayer and we would join
#
in or so it was all in good fun. Why we were not initiated into religion, probably because
#
my grandfather himself had a very laid back attitude to Islam, though he was very diligent
#
with his prayers and used to go to the mosque whenever he could. He never forced any of
#
his children to do that. So his children didn't force their kids to do anything. It was left
#
in a very laid back, easy manner that you decide the kalma whenever you're worried or you're
#
scared or before going to bed, just recite the kalma and go to bed. That is a habit I
#
have even today. I recite the kalma before I go to bed. But that is how we were introduced
#
to religion. It was only years later when we had moved to a new house and we were moving
#
in a different direction from my cousins, that my uncles who were in the Mahalla, maybe
#
because there was no adult supervision, I mean, they themselves were adults with kids,
#
but maybe because there was no umbrella of moderation, which my grandfather had provided
#
to the family and then my father, they kind of drifted first into the neighborhood. They
#
made friends in the neighborhood. Then the children, their kids, my younger cousins,
#
they started playing with the neighborhood kids. And then the religious teacher Hafiz
#
was asked to teach my cousins. The reason he was asked was also because Hafiz had started
#
to come to our house because my grandfather's illness and it was thought that his presence
#
would calm my grandfather and would make his day a little less boring. But despite the
#
presence of a religious teacher in our house, my parents did not encourage us to learn anything
#
from him, but my cousins started doing that. So that difference in this approach to religion,
#
I think also had a little to do with the time that we were living in. By the late eighties,
#
a lot of social situations had started to become a little vitiated. There was a little
#
consciousness about who you were. The Ram Mandir campaign had started, 84 onwards there was
#
this Babri issue had suddenly become a big issue in UP. The newspapers used to be full
#
of that. Hindi newspapers would be full of stuff like appeasement of minorities, as they
#
would say. So people were becoming a little conscious of their identities. And maybe this
#
initiation into religion was also a kind of a defiance that this is who we are. So I think
#
that is why my... Okay, there's another thing which I feel, because like my father, my uncles
#
were also semi literate. Though my father worked on himself and he studied the languages
#
and his aspirations were different from his brothers. My uncles didn't do that. So they
#
remained in their semi literate Hindi dominated world, Indian Urdu dominated world. And as
#
I mentioned earlier, the exposure to our world at that time was through the Hindi newspapers
#
and the Urdu newspapers. And they both had nuance towards identity. So while the Hindi
#
newspapers were conscious of its readership, which is a Hindi readership, and they imagined
#
that this readership would probably like a story or a bent, which favored the Hindu communal
#
sentiment. The Urdu newspapers were at the same time working on the Muslim sentiments.
#
So their exposure was getting increasingly sharpened through this sort of writing. Probably
#
that was another reason why they and then subsequently my younger cousins were drifting
#
more and more into a Muslim milieu. The friends they chose also were traditionally Muslims.
#
Though they went to the same schools as I went, I never had a Muslim friend in school.
#
I mean, one of the reasons was there was hardly any other Muslim child in my class. At least
#
as long as I was in the convent, I was always the only Muslim girl in my class. Subsequently
#
I moved to a co-educational institution, again a church run institution. There was another
#
Muslim in my class, but somehow I never got along with a Muslim. And there was no desire
#
that I should befriend a Muslim person. Similarly, that person also never felt that she should
#
have a Muslim friend. So I had a different group of friends. But my younger cousins,
#
I realized gradually that they used to veer towards Muslims more than any other community
#
for the simple reason they felt comfortable with probably voicing their political positions.
#
They felt secure in a Muslim environment. That was also one of the reasons that for
#
a very long time, my uncles didn't shift out of the Mahalla, though they had means to shift
#
out. It's not that they were not doing well in their businesses, but they had grown comfortable
#
in that. When I was growing up, we were not comfortable in that, which is why we had kept
#
our house isolated. It was almost like an island in that Mahalla, but they had become
#
comfortable. They had become comfortable going and visiting their neighbors houses and they
#
were happy that neighbors were coming to their houses. So that was a difference.
#
So before I go on to my next question, a quick aside, you know, my favorite sentence in your
#
book is actually, you know, a great example of sure don't tell. And it's a lovely sentence
#
about your grandfather, where you wrote quote, during winter, he used to shell pine nuts
#
during the day so he could reward us with fistfuls of shell nuts in the evening. Stop
#
quote. And it's such a lovely sentence because it tells you so much about the person and
#
his love for his grandkids and all of that. And I love that. Now, you know, it's interesting
#
that when I was sort of reading about the arc of your family, almost through the generations,
#
you talk about how initially, you know, your ancestors were, you know, in a settlement
#
outside Agra. And then your grandfather married a Syed, as you said, and, you know, wanted
#
to be upwardly mobile, moved to Agra for that reason. But even moving to Agra wasn't the
#
mobility alone, the mobility had to continue. So even though they had to move into a Mahalla,
#
they've kind of kept themselves apart from everything outside. In fact, you know, you
#
describe how that lane outside was described to you as quote, riddled with poverty, illiteracy,
#
backwardness, and unthinkable danger. Stop quote, which strikes me how many Hindus would
#
describe Muslim areas even today. And then that further mobility happens where your nuclear
#
family and a younger uncle, you move to a separate place. And here, what is sort of
#
interesting to me is that you've gotten away from this sort of milieu. You've become mobile,
#
your dad has become very successful and rich, and you've moved, you know, almost out of
#
the ghetto, as it were. And, you know, you're living your individual lives. And at the same
#
time, you described how your other uncles with their families remain back and they kind
#
of got drawn more and more into fundamentalism. In a sense, you open the doors and the windows
#
and let the lane inside in a metaphorical sense, I suppose, and that sort of journey
#
is happening. And they also then become more into the religion in terms of those other
#
sort of aspects of it. Like you describe how for you, what Islam meant, as you've said,
#
you mentioned how it came to you by driblets, which I found a wonderful phrase in this regard.
#
And you've mentioned how those sort of values you imbibe were the values of charity that,
#
you know, during the holy month, you do charity, you feed the poor, all of those things. But
#
your cousins are taking in a sort of more fundamental version. And what is sort of starkest
#
about this distinction was that when you are 16, your father is giving you prospectuses
#
of universities abroad because he wants you to go outside. And you describe how when you
#
are writing an admission essay for one of them, one of your cousins in the Mahalla is
#
being felicitated for memorizing the entire Quran. And the reason all of this seemed fascinating
#
to me is that the denouement that this comes to is an incident where your father realizes
#
that all this still doesn't insulate him from being a Muslim. That in India, there are still
#
things which can sort of go wrong and all the riches in the world can't save you. You
#
know, and this, of course, you've described so eloquently in your book about how your
#
house was attacked during a riot and you dialed all the numbers and, you know, your father
#
told you, gave you all the numbers, said, dial all these numbers. People were outside
#
with stones and all of your father's, you know, friends did not pick up the phone at
#
that time, did not help. Tell me a little bit about that and sort of the realization
#
that comes out of that, because this is like a deeply poignant story. This is about, you
#
know, different arcs. You know, you have the people who stayed back in the Mahalla. You
#
have the person who's escaped and who thinks that, okay, he's beyond all of this. And yet
#
all of you are, in a sense, equally in danger in this India that we are in. So tell me a
#
little bit, which year was this, what was happening and all of that.
#
You know, I never thought of myself as a Muslim while I was growing up. Even when we lived
#
in the Mahalla. So when I described the lanes or when I have described the Mahalla, it was
#
not something that I was condemning my own. Even at that time, when we were growing up,
#
my family always thought that why do they live like this? What is wrong with them? Why
#
are the lanes kept so dirty? So they wanted to insulate us from what they viewed as people
#
of a certain kind, not necessarily Muslims, though they were Muslims all right. But we
#
did not see ourselves as Muslims and we did not see them as Muslims. We just always thought
#
that these people are less civil than we are and they have less ambitions and less desire
#
to go beyond what they have inherited from their forefathers.
#
So when we moved to this new area, which in India areas like this are called colonies.
#
So we moved to this Hindu colony. We did not think at that point that we were the only
#
Muslim in a Hindu colony. We were not conscious of our Muslimness and to our neighbors credit,
#
they also never made us conscious of our Muslimness. We got along fabulously with them and by
#
parents were socializing with them. They were used to come to our house and there was a
#
lot of intermingling. In addition to special occasions, it's not that we met each other
#
only on special occasions. There was a daily sort of a thing. My brother used to go out
#
to play because now it was not a Mahalla. So we were allowed to go out and play and all
#
the playmates were the neighborhood boys. So we were never conscious of the fact that
#
we were different from the rest of them. A small example, so much so that a lot of neighborhood
#
youngsters were older, much older than me, but roughly my younger uncle's age. They used
#
to socialize with him also because my uncle had a car, so they could hitch a ride and
#
go out for a night out. So that was, it was never considered that we were not part of
#
this new society that we had embraced. When the 80s progressed and this atmospheric had
#
changed so drastically, it was the first time that I actually became conscious that people
#
were talking of Hindu and Muslim and in such harsh terms. My mother was into a lot of social
#
work. My father was a big philanthropist. So she used to go to a lot of public functions
#
and events. I remember sometimes in 88 or 89 probably, I don't know the year exactly,
#
there was a big police function in Agra. My mother was invited to that function as one
#
of the delegates or some attendee. My mother used to work with the Agra district jail people
#
and she was doing some work in adult literacy with the families of the jail inmates because
#
at district jail people, most people who were prisoners, they were there serving life sentences.
#
So the jail had built a small enclosure there for the families and kids to live. So my mother
#
used to, with a group of people, she was working in that area. So she was invited to this event,
#
police, Agra police event, and I tagged along with her because I had nothing better to do.
#
And B.P. Singhal, who was the brother of Ashok Singhal, he retired as a DG police UP. He
#
was one of the speakers at the function. And the kind of language he used at that event
#
and the way he spoke, it was beyond shocking. I could not believe that in a public event
#
where all kinds of people are present, somebody could speak like this and not feel embarrassed,
#
not feel concerned that some people may get hurt or they may feel bad the way you're talking
#
about them. And the fact that we are sitting there, it didn't occur to him that he should
#
not be talking like this. And then there was stray slogan shouting. So every time somebody
#
would shout a slogan or say something, I would turn back and see who's saying this. But obviously
#
you can't see it. It's a huge crowd. So that was very disturbing. I had not imagined something
#
like this could happen in a public space. I thought probably if even people feel like
#
that, they would talk about this inside their homes and be mindful that nobody else hears
#
this. Even in my own family, extended family, I used to hear things like, you know, there
#
is all of us are prejudiced. We kind of inherit our prejudices. So we would talk. I mean,
#
my family members would often talk about Hindus or Christians or Sikhs in a particular manner,
#
but it would always be inside the house. And it was always among the close family members.
#
It was not meant for public consumption. But here this was being said loud and clear in
#
a event where all kinds of people were present. So I realized that things were really not
#
right. Things were going bad. And then these audio cassettes came of Advani, Sadhvi, Ritambara,
#
and other speeches. They were being distributed. One of my father's closest friends, all my
#
father's friends were also Hindus. So he started distributing the cassettes. And then he would
#
have discussions with my father, which again is a measure of how comfortable he was with
#
my father and how comfortable my father was with him. And he would discuss the content
#
of the speeches. He would talk about Babur. He would talk about destruction of temples.
#
And my father would say, no, no, it's all nonsense. And they both would have these arguments,
#
but they would have these arguments that Somnath was destroyed so many times. And so my father
#
would reason out that look, it was political and maybe how would he know every time that
#
a temple was flushed with funds, if he was coming at the time when the temple was flushed
#
and somebody was informing him, that is how he was coming all the way from Afghanistan.
#
But the good part was that though their paths were diverging a little, you know, the politically
#
they were getting distant, they still had this history of friendship between them. So
#
they could talk. But when I had, when I came to Delhi, nobody spoke to me about this. Nobody
#
asked me any question, which is what disturbed me the most that if you have any questions
#
about Muslims, if you think that Muslims are a particular Muslims as people are different
#
in a particular way, because this is what they've done wrong, then if you ask me, maybe
#
I can find out the answer for you if I don't know, but that did not happen. So going back
#
to the attack, the 1990, I was already in college and I had already seen what was happening
#
in Delhi and my classmates. And this, all of them are voting BJP. All of us were first
#
time voters and they said, no, no, how can we vote for anybody else? We would vote for
#
the BJP. And whatever people may say or justify, the truth is the history of the BJP or Jansung
#
is it stems from otherization of certain group of people in India. They've always done politics
#
which pits community against community. So nobody can whitewash this part about the BJP.
#
So despite this, if some people are convinced that they only want to vote for that party,
#
it means that you at some level agree with them or you at some level believe that what
#
they're saying is correct. So it was this sort of a background that I was called back
#
home and our neighbors were coming and warning my parents that something is going to happen.
#
You go back to your house in the Mahalla. Violence had broken out in Agra in certain
#
areas. One of my uncle's friends, his shop, he had a shoe shop that was burned. So we
#
all were quite anxious. Finally, my father said, okay, well, we didn't want to go back
#
to the Mahalla. Because once you leave, in any case, it was a small house. And once we
#
left the rooms that we had was not occupied by my cousins and my other uncle's family.
#
So then my father booked us in Mughal Sheraton and my mother drove us to the hotel. Then
#
sometime in the late afternoon, she got very anxious. And this was the day when our neighbors
#
had persistently pushed my father that, you know, we have information and there's nothing
#
we can do. And my father saw their point. It's, you know, you can't argue with a mob
#
and you don't know what the mob would do or what size of what the size of the mob would
#
be. And it doesn't really make sense that you expect your neighbors to stick their
#
legs out. They could probably, but why take a chance? So my father sent us off. But we
#
came back in the afternoon because my mother was very, very anxious. And sure enough, in
#
the evening, there was a lot of slogan shopping happening. So my father gave me this telephone
#
book and he said, just call up these people, keep calling them up and tell them that our
#
house is likely to be under attack. And these are the people my father had been socializing
#
with for many years. You know, in a small town, whenever there is a new DM or a new
#
DIG, it's customary. I mean, they also come and they ask their office staff that who are
#
the people that we should know. And the business families, they also feel that it's a matter
#
of prestige that you're friends with the district authorities. So apart from the prestige part,
#
it's also some sort of insurance cover that if you need, you can ask these guys to help
#
you. So we knew most of the district authorities very, very well. But that evening, nobody
#
answered any calls, even though I called up the residences also, but nobody answered any
#
calls. And around dusk, when it had just about to get a bit dark, a mob started walking towards
#
our house. And our house is, we have a very narrow, a short porch, and then there's a
#
gate. And the inside door has a glass panel on one side. So from the glass panel, you
#
can see the porch and the gate and the road beyond. So my brother, younger brother and
#
I, we ran to the glass panel and we started looking out and we saw this big group of people
#
carrying fire torches walking towards our house. And my mother was screaming, she said,
#
come back in, come back in, because she thought we may get hurt. And they came and stopped
#
in front of the gate and they were shouting slogans. And then we identified this neighborhood
#
boy and we came back, we ran inside and said, oh, this boy is there. So my father was very
#
sanguine. He said, oh, so obviously they won't do anything because this boy, he knows us
#
so well. But then they started throwing stones. And that is when everybody panicked, because
#
the distance between the gate and the house is not much. And my father had a licensed
#
revolver. So my uncle knew where it was kept. He went in my father's room, he took it out
#
and he tried to go to the rooftop and he said, I'll just fire a few shots in the air. And
#
my father had bitter sense, he shouted and screamed after him. And my mother also kind
#
of ran after him to pull him back physically. That, I mean, father said that if you fire
#
one shot, they'll burn the house down. Finally, Vanthal calmed down and he came back. And
#
after a bit of stone pelting and they destroyed the car, which was parked outside the windscreen,
#
everything was shattered. Our glass windows were, even the first floor windows, the study
#
which used to face the main road and which used to be my favorite place to sit and look
#
at the road and the traffic. It was very badly damaged. The windows were cracked, the stones
#
had landed inside the study, the sitting area, we had huge glass windows. So they had kind
#
of broken everything. So finally, after a bit of stone throwing, I think it must have
#
lasted about 10, 15 minutes, the crowd dispersed. And then at that point, my call got through
#
and somebody answered from the SSP's house. And they said, okay, the SSP didn't come on
#
the line. Probably he was busy because there was riots going on all over the city. So somebody
#
answered the call and they said, we'll send a patrol party to your house, which came very
#
late in the night, well past 10, 30 or so. So my uncle and my father went to speak with
#
the policeman and they said, I don't know, we'll include your house in our nightly rounds.
#
So nothing will happen. Don't worry, go to sleep. Obviously, we couldn't have slept with
#
so much of fear all around. And then next morning, there was a police cordon and search
#
operation was carried out in that Mahalla where my uncles were. And all men, and they didn't
#
distinguish between men and boys, they were rounded up and taken away. So my cousin who's
#
six years younger than me, he was also picked up. He must have been 13 or something. And
#
fortunately that there was an elderly constable who took pity on him or he probably recognized
#
him from belonging to this family. So he allowed him to jump from the Jeep when it was turning
#
on the main road. And from there, he walked to our house and informed us that this is
#
what has happened. So my uncle and my mother and I, because by this time I was studying
#
to be a journalist and I had assumed the role of a reporter already. So I tagged along and
#
we went to the house and it was absolutely quiet. There was no noise at all. And this
#
was a house which was always so noisy. People were screaming on top of their voices. There
#
was no privacy for anything. And it was absolutely eerie. There was no noise, no sound. So we
#
opened the door, pushed, my mother pushed the door and it opened into that central courtyard.
#
And there were things strewn all over. There was a television set, there were cricket bat,
#
there were a lot of things lying there. And my mother, obviously in total panic, she screamed
#
my uncle's name. And they were all huddling in one of the storerooms, in the ground floor
#
room. So they came running out and everybody was crying. And then they narrated how the
#
police had come early in the morning and taken everybody away. My father and my uncle, they
#
went around to various places. My father went to the DIG's office, but my uncle went to
#
another, the local police station and they kept denying that anything like this had happened.
#
But finally my father managed to speak with the DIG and he said, nothing will happen.
#
I assure you that your brothers will come back. They came back late in the afternoon
#
and they were quite badly bruised. The neighborhood, all the men from the neighborhood, they came
#
back in the course of the night and the next morning, they were even badly hurt. A few
#
were hobbling and there were probably some had broken bones. Fortunately, my uncles didn't
#
have any broken bones, but they were bruised. They were hit on their calves and on their
#
backs by batons or something. So they had all those blue and black quills on their backs.
#
And my younger uncle had a cut on his forehead, very close to the eyelid. So that was a very
#
harrowing thing because all of us kind of got together and was wondering that you think
#
that if you're living in a mixed community, you would be secure because it's a upper middle
#
class society or a colony where people of a certain class live. So it will be insulated
#
from petty roadside violence, but that doesn't happen.
#
And then you think that in a Muslim Mahalla, everybody is a Muslim, so you have security
#
in numbers. But then if the police gets after you, then even that is no longer secure. Probably
#
a Mahalla is secure from a riot because a Hindu mob will not enter a Mahalla thing because
#
of preponderance of Muslim population. But what do you do if the police enters? So basically
#
if you have to be targeted, if there is a political directive that a particular lesson
#
has to be taught or a few hours notice, it's a window of a few hours that you give, okay,
#
just do whatever you want and then the law enforcement will take its course. So if that
#
kind of a thing happens in a situation, then it doesn't matter what distance you have traveled,
#
your education, your financial situation, your thinking, your worldview, even your modernity
#
or progressiveness, none of that matters at all.
#
Yeah, I mean, I was struck by this trade off which should not exist in the first place.
#
It should not be a trade off, but it's a trade off that comes up when your dad is thinking
#
of shifting your family from the Mahalla and you write at that point, quote, we didn't
#
know where we would be more secure, in an upscale Hindu majority neighborhood where
#
the privilege of the residents would throw a security blanket around us or in a Muslim
#
majority lower middle class Mahalla where the numbers would insulate us. Stop quote, which
#
sort of reminds me of something that, you know, when I was chatting with Annie Zaidi
#
in my last episode, you know, there's this poignant quote from her book about home is
#
not just a place where you are safe, it is a place where you can be visible. And that
#
sort of, you know, strikes me in this context. And later on, after, you know, the riot happened
#
and all of this happened, you wrote a quote, in the family comprising six brothers and
#
four sisters, these two men had most visibly shed their ghettoized Muslim identities. They
#
were at home in the social, cultural and economic life of Agra, hobnobbing with the who's who
#
of the city. And yet, when it came to communal division, they were nothing but Muslims, forever
#
aspects, forever scapegoats. Stop quote. And then you talk about how as this period
#
progresses and obviously Hindu nationalism is on the rise, Hindutva nationalism rather,
#
and you talk about, you write quote, demonstrative religion was all around us. As a benign Ram
#
Ram was replaced by the militant Jaishree Ram, people started huddling with their own
#
kind. A lot of business class Muslims who had stepped out of the Mohallas and built
#
swanky houses in mixed localities returned to the smothering comforts of narrow lanes
#
and close minds. Stop quote, which is of course not just literal, but metaphorical. Tell me
#
about this kind of shift that now happens because it strikes me that this is going to
#
be the natural tendency that if I am attacked, if I am seen as another, I will obviously
#
look for comfort from, you know, those of my own kind. So it almost makes this ghettoization
#
completely natural. And obviously, you know, my sort of reading of, you know, the history
#
of the last couple of hundred years, and we'll discuss that in much more detail because you've
#
written about that in your book as well. But my reading is that these fissures have always
#
kind of existed, but it's only now that in a sense politics has caught up with culture.
#
So is that what is happening? Is it a vicious circle? Is there this increase, ghettoization,
#
you know, what was your own response to this? And what was the response of others around
#
you? You know, there is, I would like to make a distinction between a Muslim majority area
#
and a ghetto. Now a lot of Indian towns, they have community specific areas, which have
#
grown organically, which have developed organically in a city. Like in Delhi, you have the Dajama
#
Basid area, or you have Nizamuddin West area, which were always part of the city. Or in
#
Bombay, you have Muhammad Ali Road, or you have Bindi Bazaar. So Muslims have traditionally
#
lived here. They did not go there because they were scared of living anywhere else.
#
They have lived there for generations, and even rich, prosperous Muslims lived there.
#
The facilities which other areas in the neighborhood have are probably available to these areas
#
also. As an example, a ghetto would be a place like Mumbra, outside Bombay, which emerges
#
after an incident of communal violence, because people move there for security reasons. A
#
Muslim majority area, people live there not so much for security reasons, but because
#
they have lived there, they're comfortable there, the kind of people they've grown up
#
there are all around them. They identify themselves more as Muslims, so they're comfortable with
#
Muslims around. Their eating habits are similar, their mosque is there, so they can go there.
#
Their mothers are there for their children. So it's a comfort factor. So most small towns
#
in India have these Muslim areas. So the Mahalla which I grew up was dirty and all of that,
#
but it was not a ghetto in the real sense of a ghetto as you find in Delhi now in the
#
Okhla region. Because Okhla area is a ghetto, you find this huge presence of police there,
#
and a policeman in plain clothes. They are basically spies. They are basically from the
#
intelligence agencies. They're trying to keep tabs. This is the area where if you have an
#
address of Okhla or Batla house in Delhi, you are less likely to get a bank loan. You're
#
not 100% not going to get a credit card. The delivery services, even a pizza delivery is
#
not possible. The pizza delivery boy would say, okay, you come at some point and I'll
#
leave the pizza there. So these are the places which are not organic to a city. These are
#
the places that have developed because the law enforcement agencies have not acted on
#
time and the government has not done anything to prevent this sort of pervasive fear from
#
taking grip over the people. What happened in Agra after this incident of 1990, that
#
was the only Hindu Muslim communal riot in Agra. Agra has no history of communal violence.
#
Even during partition, there was no communal violence in Agra. So it has always been very
#
insulated from communal prejudice. I mean, people may have been prejudiced, but it was
#
never vocalized. But all this happened in the late 80s when it was being vocalized,
#
early 90s, where people started talking in this very communally charged and harsh, impolite
#
uncivil language. So even today, Agra has a lot of places where Muslims live predominantly.
#
And after the 1990 violence, a lot of Muslims who had moved to fancy, swanky places like
#
our family, they went back. A few of them I have heard from my brothers that have returned
#
to their houses because they didn't sell their houses. They just went back to the family
#
homes. By the mid 2000, 2004, 2005, when they thought that things are getting a little better,
#
they came back. And probably there is a political point here, because you see the government
#
which were in power in this period, both in the UP and at the center. So maybe that gave
#
them some sort of a confidence that we will not be subjected to violence. But all that
#
changed again, 2014 onwards, when the fear of the 90s has been not just reinforced, it
#
has multiplied manifold. Because even in the 90s, when there was violence, you feared for
#
your life and you feared for your property, for the duration of the violence. It was a
#
riot which went on for two days or three days. You feared for that duration and then you
#
rebuilt your life, whichever way it was, and you moved on. What is happening now is that
#
the fear is not limited to the duration of a riot, because now there is no riot. Now
#
it is something which you are subjected to on a daily basis. So you hear people saying
#
that in public transport we don't greet each other with salaam alaikum, because we don't
#
want to draw attention to ourselves. Or people not carrying food from home. A very senior
#
surgeon told me in the book that he is scared of bringing Eid food from his hometown when
#
he comes to Delhi after Eid celebrations, because he worries for his family. So this
#
fear that even privilege is no insurance, was not there earlier. One of the reasons
#
that my family, my father thought that we will be safe, because he felt confident that
#
we are too privileged. I mean, if we can afford to go in a five-star hotel to stay, then you
#
can imagine in our mind, we believe that it's poor are affected. It's not, people like us
#
will not be affected. But that doesn't happen any longer. This divisive violence is now
#
indiscriminate. So when we talk about Muslims being caught between this lack of choice about
#
where to live, it's partly because of this normalization of prejudice. We are not embarrassed
#
by our prejudice anymore. We believe that what our prejudice tells us is actually the
#
fact. We don't even pause to consider that maybe it's nonsense, maybe it's just something
#
which we've heard or it's hearsay. Because of this, you hear instances of Muslims not
#
finding accommodation. But again, it's a big city phenomena. I don't think in a small city
#
like Agra, Muslims live everywhere. It's unthinkable. I've never come across anybody telling me
#
that they were not able to find accommodation in a place which was predominantly non-Muslim.
#
So this is a big city place where probably the size of the city, the insecurity which
#
a big city instills in you, the economic challenges which it imposes on you, maybe it is all driven
#
by that for want of anything else, you channel or you channelize your dislike for a certain
#
group of people. So you deny them equal opportunities, you deny them accommodation, you deny them
#
civility. So what is the choice then? Then they have to purpose go and look for a place
#
in a ghetto which even if they don't get along with that sort of Muslim population, even
#
if they are forward-looking, educated people. I'll give you an example. When I first came
#
to Delhi as a student, I lived as a paying guest with a Muslim family for a year and
#
then I moved into my own flat. My father rented a flat in South Extension. Now South Extension
#
was in Delhi, is a South Delhi area. I don't know how familiar you are with the Delhi social
#
hierarchy of places. So it's a reasonably fancy place and with hardly any Muslims there.
#
I had no problem finding accommodation there and then I moved to another place. I lived
#
in rented accommodation for nearly 11 years before we bought an apartment here. I never
#
had any problem finding a rented accommodation and all my landlords were non-Muslims and
#
nobody ever asked me to vacate the flat. I moved because of my jobs, I moved from one
#
place to another and I changed three apartments and in each I lived for nearly three to four
#
years and I had never had any problems. Nobody told me don't cook non-vegetarian food. Nobody
#
said anything. But when my cousins came in 2007 and they came from an even smaller town
#
than Agra, they came from Menpuri and they couldn't find accommodation. Every time they
#
would approach a broker, they were told go to Watla house, go to Okla. They did manage
#
to live in East Delhi but with great difficulty. Finding accommodation for them was always
#
a huge struggle and even if they did find accommodation, within a year or so the landlord
#
or the landlady used to pester them to vacate the place because things had changed so much.
#
It's a very subtle distinction that you drew between a ghetto and a Muslim majority area.
#
I was just using it in a general kind of sense but I find that distinction that you made
#
is important because it also tells you a little bit about why it has kind of formed. For what
#
I have seen happening in India over the last couple of decades and what you alluded to
#
where people are more open with their prejudices, where they are expressing their prejudices
#
while earlier they would hide it. The sociologist Timur Kurhan wrote a book in 1999 called I
#
think Public Lies and Private Truths where he coined this phrase called preference falsification
#
and one of the illustrations he gave was Soviet Union where what happened was that everybody
#
hated the state but nobody could say it because a neighbour could tell on them so they would
#
keep it to themselves and that was preference falsification and then one day suddenly the
#
floodgates opened and everybody found that everybody thinks like me and what took place
#
was what Kurhan calls a preference cascade where suddenly everybody was free to express
#
what they felt about the state and almost overnight the Soviet Union kind of collapsed
#
and there seems to be like one of the reasons I think you know Modi came to power so strongly
#
and took such a stronghold is that there has been a preference cascade now is that many
#
people were what I call closet bigots that many people had these prejudices they would
#
not express it in polite society because hey you know you thought that it won't go down
#
well and all of that but then you reach this turning point where you realize that you know
#
the majority thinks like you it's okay in fact not only can you say these horrible things
#
but they will win you brownie points like you described listening to that speech of
#
BP Singhal that that's probably an early manifestation of that but today you know if you look at
#
our politics you don't need dog whistles anymore you know people will openly say things which
#
they could only have alluded to in the past and as for what is happening in our cities
#
and of course in Mumbai this is well documented various journalists over the years have done
#
stories on how it's hard for Muslims or single people or women or whatever to rent kind of
#
flats in Mumbai so I have a sort of larger question that I've thought about in the past
#
I don't know even know if it's a question or a lament and it's really for all my listeners
#
to comment on as much as for you is that you know if you look at the level of an individual
#
flat owner right she has a right to give her flat to whoever she wants so she can say that
#
I want people of my community only or I want people who won't cook non-veg because hey
#
it's my flat I don't like it and so on and so forth and at an individual level these
#
individual decisions get made but when we are a society with such prejudices then the
#
overall outcome can be really bad the overall outcome can be this sort of clustering of
#
different communities in different areas which actually exacerbates these prejudices because
#
then if you're a you know a good vegetarian Hindu growing up in a middle-class household
#
you're never encountering another Muslim because they don't live anywhere around you and the
#
prejudices deepen and they become worse now you know this is not possible to police for
#
and I don't think you know the state should use coercion to sort of decide what people
#
do with their individual flat so it's a bunch of individuals making rational decisions which
#
leads to an absolutely horrible social outcome and the only way out therefore to me it would
#
seem is that you have to change it at the level of society where people feel differently
#
about this but right now we are stuck in this very bad equilibrium where there is where
#
we are in a vicious circle there is distrust and hate on all sides so I don't know the
#
way out so it's not a question it's probably a lament do you have any thoughts on this
#
you know I had heard Kefi Asbi at one of the Mushairas this was in the mid 90s and he said
#
that if every Muslim has four or five Hindu friends and every Hindu has at least one or
#
two Muslim friends this whole communal problem will end because then you get to see one another
#
you get to grow up with one another and understand each other this is why I earlier when I was
#
referring to my exposure to Hindi literature and Urdu literature because I realized that
#
this Ganga Jamdi that now has become a very bad word for a certain group of people this
#
was a living reality it was not just limited to going to a festival to somebody's house
#
it was something which was very organic to you you did not look at people by their religion
#
you saw them by as your neighbor or you saw them as your business colleague or as a partner
#
business partner or a shop where you trust the shop owner and you always buy your groceries
#
from him or a vegetable vendor so it was very natural kind of intermingling of communities
#
without any thought about a person's religion religion was in a private space even the namaz
#
the azan which now has started bothering people nobody ever thought it was bothering them
#
this five times a day call through a loudspeaker it was very organic to a city nobody minded
#
it and nobody ever thought that it was impinging in their private or personal space or the
#
jagrins nobody thought anything about it but now all of these have become irritant and
#
all of them have become irritants to a degree that people relate their old grievances linked
#
to this that oh we've been suffering this for years but you did not they did not suffer
#
this they they did not even notice it it was so much part of your life so this is what
#
is happening now what you just said that if you don't give your house you don't get to
#
see another muslim this is also true of muslims see if you are forcing muslims to live in
#
a ghetto then these muslims they do not see people from another community so you are driven
#
by your own prejudice but you are in turn also helping another community develop their
#
own prejudices there are people in the okhla area or batla house area the jamia area who
#
never encountered a non-muslim at all in their lives they they are born in that area and
#
they go to the local hospital there where the childbirth happens they go to the local
#
school there then they go to the college or institute or whatever there if they don't
#
if they can afford to go to the university they go to the jamia university or if they
#
can't afford that then they just get into the workforce in that area so their exposure
#
to anybody outside the community is minimal so while you are trying to insulate yourself
#
from the outsiders you think they are dirty or they are oppressors or we have suffered
#
for thousands of years because of them but you are actually imperiling yourself even
#
further because instead of you trying to understand them and them trying to understand you you
#
are actually furthering this distance even more so your prejudice is getting reinforced
#
but the other person's prejudice is also getting reinforced and add to that other person's
#
prejudice is also genuine grievance for not getting a fair chance a genuine complaint
#
that the law enforcement agencies are biased towards them so these are or these should
#
be a matter of concern for any country that you are dispossessing a huge chunk of your
#
population how can you even imagine that despite this dispossession you can still develop you
#
can still grow your GDP will grow when such a huge chunk of your population is disaffected
#
it is not part of your mainstream it is not contributing to your mainstream this human
#
resource is being is underemployed it is not being harnessed for nation building how do
#
you even imagine that you can still manage to do well with this.
#
In fact if you are talking of human resources not just a minority community it is all women
#
basically the way women are like second class citizens in India and can't you know reach
#
their true potential and you know I had done an episode with Aanchal Malhotra a very moving
#
episode on partition and you know one of the thoughts that came to us while we were in
#
conversation there was this difference between the abstract and the concrete that when we
#
speak of all this hatred that is there within people all this animosity towards the other
#
as it were all of it is in an abstract realm in the concrete realm they can be perfectly
#
good people they can be friendly they can be assimilative and all of that but in an
#
abstract realm that's where all these concepts like nationalism and you know Hindu purity
#
and that sense of historical victimhood though they have never been victims themselves all
#
of that comes into play and therefore it strikes me that what you need really to bring people
#
together is more of the concrete and less of the abstract and like you pointed out that
#
if you are not exposed to the other at all if a Hindu will have no Muslim friends or
#
a Muslim will have no Hindu friends then there is none of that concrete where you know you
#
can just look across the table and you see someone just like you and therefore the abstract
#
concept doesn't matter so much and that's kind of a little tragic and if anything it's
#
you know outside our elite bubbles I think it's only increased you know over the years
#
see there's another thing here sometimes we are so happy and we know that our abstract
#
is actually a bubble it's so vulnerable to our hard gaze that we do not even question
#
what we have inherited the prejudice that we are living with because we know if we look
#
at it or if we question it it will all come crashing down because there's no basis to
#
it it's just probably an insecurity that has been a fan for so long that it has become
#
some sort of a concretized stone on your heart or in your mind or it's it's probably just
#
economic vulnerability you just feel so insecure in your own self that you feel that if I share
#
this space with somebody else probably this opportunity will be taken away from me so
#
that could be one of the reasons yeah that's a fascinating point I mean in a poor country
#
you know people tend to think more in zero-sum ways because there is scarcity you know otherwise
#
of course all human interaction is positive some you know I buy something from you both
#
of us benefit that's why we are having that transaction but where there is scarcity where
#
there are limited opportunities and resources there people tend to think of it as a zero-sum
#
game if somebody else wins something that means you have lost which you know goes into
#
many other contexts apart from just money and I guess that is again one factor that
#
could have be fueling this in a country like India we'll take a quick commercial break
#
now and and when we come back you know we've spoken so far about sort of your personal
#
impressions and your life and all of that over this period of time but your book is
#
also a fabulous book of scholarship you know there's so much I learned about the history
#
of Islam in India though I'm fairly well read in history but there were a lot of things
#
which I hadn't known earlier which I'd really love to get into but let's take a quick commercial
#
break and after that we shall continue this conversation long before I was a podcaster
#
I was a writer in fact chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog
#
India uncut which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the
#
time I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways I exercise
#
my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things because
#
I wrote about many different things well that phase in my life ended for various reasons
#
and now it is time to revive it only now I'm doing it through a newsletter I have started
#
the India uncut newsletter at India uncut dot subtract dot com where I will write regularly
#
about whatever catches my fancy I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast
#
and about much else so please do head on over to India uncut dot subtract dot com and subscribe
#
it is free once you sign up each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox
#
you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the India uncut newsletter at
#
India uncut dot subtract dot com thank you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with Gazala Vahab about a wonderful
#
and at least for me eye-opening book born a Muslim which has so much of both personal
#
experience and history and sociology about you know Islam in India and does so much to
#
explain where we are today and why and now I want to kind of talk a little bit about
#
history because you know a lot of I mean history these days is learnt a lot on whatsapp
#
a lot of people have this view of history that oh you know they think of how Islam
#
came to India and they only think ki chalo conquest hua temple tora all of that nonsense
#
but it's actually a very multi-layered and heartening story almost of how Islam actually
#
did come to India it wasn't all conquest and destroying temple so tell me a little bit
#
about you know the origins of Islam I mean some versions hold that you know Islam was
#
in India at the time during the prophets lifetime itself so tell me a bit about that
#
there was a communication see communication between the Arabs and South Indian the Malayali
#
area the Kerala region of India so even before Arabia became Muslims these people were coming
#
and the trade was really a very prosperous trade when Islam came during the prophets
#
lifetime also the traders were coming but the religion didn't come in real earnest at
#
that time because it had not started to expand beyond its territory during the prophets lifetime
#
that happened after his death and with the first Khalifa which was Abu Akr so that is
#
when the Muslim armies or soldiers were moving out but in India because the trade route was
#
already there and these traders were now Muslims so when you're coming by sea you're actually
#
out of your home for months and sometimes years and sometimes you don't even know if
#
you're coming back so they obviously would be accompanied by some religious people who
#
could give them support or someone who could lead the prayer because in Islam prayer for
#
men is led by a prayer leader I mean women can pray on their own but for men which is
#
by the concept of going to a mosque and praying together which is why mosques have to be huge
#
spaces even if they're not constructed spaces they have to be huge spaces because men are
#
required to pray together in a congregation led by a prayer leader so the religious preachers
#
started accompanying these trading caravans a lot of people settled down there and the
#
preachers was preaching to the local people some converted some didn't convert but even
#
if you didn't convert if you just felt some sort of peace some sort of happiness talking
#
to a person you automatically start veering towards that person so the early Islam which
#
came to India it came through these mendicants who would set up a small cottage or a place
#
outside the city zones or village or on the outskirts and people would start coming to
#
them because they found peace there or some sort of comfort gradually the population in
#
a very organic manner started growing in this entire coastal belt the Malabar belt but it
#
was along the coastline because probably they were also worried of going too much in the
#
hinterland that happened over the next few centuries I think by the ninth century they
#
had moved much further inside because there was a lot of intermarrying was happening then
#
the king there were the Perumal kings there they converted to Islam and once the ruler
#
converted to Islam then obviously there was this huge umbrella of royal patronage which
#
was given to the Muslim preachers so they've moved further inland and that is when this
#
was the first cycle of Islam coming into India at the same time there was another route sea
#
route which was coming to Kutch and this was also traders businessmen who were coming there
#
working there some settled down there some married local women the first invader was
#
Muhammad bin Qasim who came but if you read Tarachan's history of India he says that he
#
came because there was and by this time Islam had spread to Sri Lanka also so there was
#
some Muslim who were there in Sri Lanka the parents had died and they were like a group
#
of orphans and so they wanted to go back to Arabia so this ship was hijacked by the Gujarat
#
based pirates and these kids were taken away so the caliphate then the governor of Basra
#
then he sent a Dimash to the king of this region and he said you return the kids and
#
so there was a face-off and then Muhammad bin Qasim was tasked to go and rescue the
#
kids so that's how he came leading an army and that was the first invasion but he came
#
here he defeated the local king Dahir he plundered it whatever and plundering was a very natural
#
part if you're going somewhere you have to pay for your journey to and back I mean if
#
it doesn't make economic sense to you why would you go there so they he did some plundering
#
and he returned to Arabia so that was the first invasion that happened but that invasion
#
didn't create a empire or a dynasty or any such thing he came he went away and this trade
#
continued the in our perception of Muslim invaders we actually do not look at all this
#
with so much of emphasis we look at the invaders from Afghanistan we look at Wari and Ghazni
#
Mahmud Ghazni because these are the people who left lasting impact on the Indian population
#
the Indian society but the lasting impact or even greater impact was led left by the
#
business community the traders but because that doesn't give us much room for vilification
#
so that part or the coming of Sufis and the how the how Islam spread through Sufis that
#
part we kind of whitewash we only focus on the invaders but invaders was only one part
#
of coming of Islam to India and actually invaders were individuals who were pursuing their political
#
ambitions they were not really ambassadors of Islam they were not coming here to spread
#
Islam so subsequently even Gauri was trying to become a Muslim you know Mujahid and he
#
made the petition to the Basit Caliphate and said I'm spreading Islam but he was far too
#
debauched for the Caliphate to consider him as actually a Mujahid I mean he was not really
#
an Islamic warrior so a lot of warriors also or a lot of invaders subsequently you know belatedly realized the importance
#
of claiming the title of being crusaders for Islam or Mujahids people who are waging jihad
#
because they felt that it would accrue them some religious benefits though they were amassing
#
wealth and they were completely against the principles or the key founding principles
#
of Islam but they thought it would accrue them some benefits but they can carry some
#
favors with the Caliphate so that is how Islam came to India the first empire which was set
#
up here was that slave dynasty which had two prongs one was in Bengal which was the Bengal
#
Sultanate and the other was established in Delhi and North India which was the Delhi
#
Sultanate so while the Bengal Sultanate went further east went up to Assam and other parts
#
of the northeastern states in addition to the whole of Bengal the Delhi Sultanate apart
#
from North India they and during the reign of Alauddin Khilji they started moving further
#
south so the first campaigns in the Deccan were carried out by Alauddin Khilji's commander
#
in chief that I'm forgetting the name Kafur whatever his name is Malik Kafur so interestingly
#
these were the Afghan people of Afghan origin but with a lot of Persian influences so these
#
were not Arabs the Islam which people in Kerala and parts of Karnataka Tamil Nadu even the
#
slight the northern Konkan belt the kind of Islam that they were familiar with or they
#
were practicing was the Arabized Islam which came through the Arab traders but when Malik
#
Kafur's campaign succeeded and he conquered these territories so there was this amalgamation
#
of Persianized Afghan Central Asian sort of culture language food and there was this Arabized
#
sort of a thing so if you see this belt there was a confluence of both these influences
#
which is why the Islam practiced in the southern part of India is very distinct from what we
#
do in North India there's a very clear I mean not only language and culture but even to
#
some extent in what they believe to be religious practices so there's a difference because
#
they came from so many different ways all very fascinating and your book has a really
#
good account of the multiple ways in which you know Islam came into India like you pointed
#
out that trade was the predominant way to begin with that you know the Muslims who came
#
to Malabar, Gujarat were really the Arabs and whatever happened in the north later the
#
north was perhaps trade plus some conquest even the conquest there was not so for the
#
purposes of religious domination it was a lot of it was political you just want to plunder
#
and in fact the reason that so many temples were destroyed was not because they are Hindu
#
temples or whatever but because they are a symbol of whichever the local ruler is his
#
dear dignity or prestige and you want to wipe that out and one of the sort of interesting
#
points you you quote the historian Tarachand from his book influence of Islam on Indian
#
culture so I'll just quote you quoting him where he writes quote henceforth Muslim influence
#
grew rapidly they were welcomed as traders and apparently facilities were given to them
#
to settle and acquire lands and openly practice their religion they must have entered upon
#
missionary effort soon after settling down for Islam is essentially a missionary religion
#
and every Muslim is a missionary of his faith many were undoubtedly held in respectful esteem
#
before the ninth century was far advanced they had spread over the whole of the western
#
coast of India and had created a stir among the Hindu populace as much by their peculiar
#
beliefs and worship as by the zeal with which they professed and advocated them stop quote
#
and a little later you write something which leads me to my next question where you write
#
quote their pace of growth was more rapid in the south as compared to the western central
#
regions primarily because there was great religious social and political turmoil in
#
southern India during the eighth and ninth centuries there was a tussle for supremacy
#
between Hinduism Buddhism and Jainism in addition the old kingdoms were in disarray in the face
#
of new claimants to power into this situation Islam appeared upon the scene with a simple
#
formula of faith well-defined dogmas and rights and democratic theories of social reorganization
#
it produced a tremendous effect stop quote and my question here is this that you know
#
when I read this I was sort of thinking about the power of narratives in cultural dominance
#
and one of the things that struck me here is that people are drawn to simple narratives
#
complex narratives are too complex as it were they want simple explanations of the
#
world and it strikes me that Islam what it would have provided with its certainties with
#
this linear strand of what happens where and you don't have a hundred gods and you don't
#
have all of that would have provided a simple narrative which you can immediately understand
#
and internalize as opposed to its competitors and I say its competitors because you know
#
there is a school of thought that Hinduism is not some monolithic thing as we know it
#
today that was partly a construct of you know when the British came their early interlocutors
#
were the upper caste Brahmins and the upper caste Brahmins sold them this version of Hinduism
#
as you know the Varna system and the Manusmriti Hinduism basically and they extrapolated that
#
to the whole subcontinent but actually there were many many many different traditions within
#
Hinduism and they would all have been very complicated and all of that and Islam comes
#
along and one you are supposed to be zealous about spreading the faith and two you've got
#
a really simple narrative like one of my and I'm not making a value judgment on simple
#
narratives one way or the other that they are necessary sometimes they are good sometimes
#
they are misleading like I once speculated that one of the reasons Trump won in 2016
#
was he had a simple narrative it was wrong but it was simple and sometimes that's an
#
important thing and perhaps you could argue the dispensation and power in India has a
#
simple narrative as well it's wrong but simple you know it doesn't embrace the complexities
#
do you think there's something to that?
#
I agree Islam had a very simple narrative added to that simple narrative was a very
#
laid down structured form of practicing of religion so there were five pillars very easy
#
to remember one was the Kalma which every which has two lines that you memorize it and
#
the Kalma itself is proclamation of your religion that okay I am Muslim now so even today if
#
a person has to convert to Islam all he has to do is recite the Kalma and you are converted
#
there is no ritual happening there is no process of becoming a Muslim it's as simple as reciting
#
of a Kalma then you have prayers five times a day again very simple and the prayer times
#
are fixed what the first prayer is that before dawn then there's just before the noon hour
#
that is Zawal period then you have pre-dusk then you have dusk and you have night prayer
#
very simple laid down prayer time then similarly Ramzan you have a month in a year where you
#
fast from dawn to dusk very simple no complication and Hajj if you are able-bodied if you're
#
financially solvent you can do it you go for Hajj and the most important is Zakat now again
#
Zakat is such a noble thing to do that anybody would be would really believe and rightly
#
so that a good part of your faith is helping others so now there's an integral to faith
#
that you have to help others it's not a choice you know it's not left to an individual's
#
judgment so these were the five pillars now over the years what has happened you have
#
Islamic jurisprudence you have this law that law all that has later addition but when you
#
appealing to a non-muslim this is these are the five pillars very simple systematic way
#
of becoming a Muslim and if you see this it's not even very complicated to practice I mean
#
now hardline Muslim ulemas would insist that you do prayer in a particular way you have
#
to bend in a particular way but traditionally nobody interrupted in the way you practice
#
your religion the biggest factor in favor of Islam at that point which would have appeared
#
to people who were converting then was lack of clergy absence of clergy there was no religious
#
leader that you had to go to there was nobody who would tell you with authority or impose
#
upon you his or her treat that this is how you have to do it Islam Sunni Islam said it
#
is between you and your Allah so you do whatever you want to do as long as your conscience
#
is clear nobody has any business to interrupt or tell you that you're doing something wrong
#
so in a society where you had such rigid clergy it's not just India I mean even in the entire
#
Christian world where you had such rigid clergy and when people were expected to be reverential
#
towards the clergy defer to their whims and their orders spend so much money in keeping
#
the clergy happy so this looked like a very simple and humane sort of a religion where
#
you're also factoring in looking after a fellow Muslim you know there's an Islamic saying
#
which is not part of the Quran but it is part of the Islamic saying that every Muslim is
#
responsible for 40 households in his neighborhood so 10 in each direction so if even one person
#
in this neighborhood of 40 households that every person is responsible to dies of starvation
#
that sin is upon you how was it that you didn't come to know that somebody was hungry so if
#
each is responsible for 40 so it's a cycle it's a circle which kind of grows so with
#
this sort of approach and then the Sufis very selfless poor people who want nothing for
#
themselves they live in poor circumstances they hold these open kitchens for people to
#
feed people every day all this is very appealing you know as a person you would just get drawn
#
to something which appears so selfless so the politics of the religion uh it surfaced
#
much later i mean there was a lot of politics of religion even in arabia at that time but
#
when you're reaching out to people this politics doesn't show itself you show yourself uh with
#
your best foot forward and this is what it how it appears to people yeah and and you
#
know in the popular imagination these days people will look upon uh those sort of years
#
of you know slave dynasty followed by the mughal dynasty and all of that as muggles
#
are coming and they've subjugated the local people but that was far from the case uh whoever
#
might politically have been in charge uh the you know muslims and hindus worked together
#
at all times like shivaji had muslims who worked for him and the muggles had uh hindus
#
and rajputs and all of that uh and all the you know armies were mixed i had a very memorable
#
episode with manu pille on this which i'll link from the show notes and uh you know you
#
sort of uh talk about how this mingling of uh islam and hinduism which led to what you
#
call quote a distinctively regional syncreticism stop quote was almost inevitable and and i'll
#
again quote from your book uh quote muslim authority had also to impose itself impose
#
upon itself other restraints the employment of the hindus was a necessity of their rule
#
mehmood of ghazni had a numerous body of hindu troops who fought for him in central asia
#
and his hindu commander tilak suppressed the rebellion of his muslim general uh niyati
#
jinn when kutubuddin abak decided to stay in hindustan he had no other choice but to
#
retain the hindu staff which was familiar with the civil administration for without
#
it all government including the collection of revenue would have fallen into utter chaos
#
the muslims who came into india made it their home they lived surrounded by the hindu people
#
and a state of perennial hostility with them was impossible mutual intercourse led to mutual
#
uh understanding uh stop quote and and and obviously you know i've had episodes on akbar
#
as well and the mughals in general and and you see the syncretism every day in our culture
#
in our food where we have influences from everywhere in the clothes that we wear i mean
#
uh prime minister modi's elegant churidar kurtas are of course you know without the
#
mughals they wouldn't have been there so all of this is very fascinating and at this time
#
there's another strand that is emerging that is particularly appealing to even non-religious
#
atheists like me which is sufism which is so fascinating and and also becomes extremely
#
popular in the subcontinent almost uh sort of a default way of many people to think about
#
the religion so tell me a little bit about that strand and how it came up
#
see uh sufi uh the emergence of this uh strand of sufis or this uh group of sufis was as
#
old as the religion itself a lot of people tend to think of sufism as a sect or as islamic
#
sect but actually it was not sufis were just a group of people who believed in uh following
#
the religion in a particular manner i have drawn a comparison between the sufi and ulema
#
uh ulema was a more dogmatic sort of a person which emerged uh much later with the rise
#
of the caliphate and uh the earliest caliphate but uh sufis were there during the prophet's
#
lifetime itself and they used to be the people who would be constantly lost in prayer and
#
uh meditation and uh with no desire of worldly pleasures so this has evolved concurrent to
#
islam uh in fact in early years there was no distinction between a regular muslim ulema
#
or a sufi or a maulvi or a sufi because everybody was finding the religion for themselves and
#
everything was acceptable the early muslim scholars have actually said that you cannot
#
judge who is following the correct path to islam as long as your principle of your basics
#
are in order as long as you are devoted uh to uh the first kalima which is there is no
#
god but allah and uh muhammad is his prophet so if you are if you adhere to this basic
#
principle you can find various ways of reaching the almighty so sufiism basically is part
#
of this uh tradition when uh this in uh south arabia after uh there was this preponderance
#
of uh sufis and they had established their khankhas and they were challenging uh the
#
ulemas these hard core so-called uh islamic elite of learned people who were who had memorized
#
the quran by heart who were working on islamic laws were codifying islamic laws uh that was
#
the time when they realized that more and more people were drifting to the sufis because
#
they found the sufis more approachable as opposed to the ulema ulema would be this learned
#
person and obviously if you think you are learned and you know better a certain degree of arrogance
#
comes and then this expectation of subservience comes into you so as opposed to these uh the
#
sufis were very simple people so a lot of people uh put still veered towards the sufis instead of
#
coming to the ulema for their problems so that was the time when they started the uh vilifying
#
the sufi started telling calling them names saying that unislamic they are actually outside the pale
#
of slum and the vilification started happening so once they were pushed out of uh saudi arabia
#
not saudi i keep saying saudi arabia arabia there was no saudi then
#
once they were pushed out so then they moved into territories like persia they moved into turkey
#
and central asia and india that is how it came in india and at one point i am forgetting i have
#
mentioned it in the book uh there was something like 10 to 12 various sufi orders uh in various
#
parts of the country in fact one very interesting sufi order was in kashmir which was uh uh you know
#
a mix of uh the shevites and the muslims so uh and they worked with both and both uh the hindus and
#
the muslims were devoted to this sufi order uh but the most popular sufi order in india has
#
been the chistia order uh which was started by uh muhenuddin chisti in ajmer and despite the fact
#
that uh muslims a lot of muslims uh hardliners uh the conservative ulema vilified them they
#
called them names and said they are not islamic at all and the whole practice of sufism is against
#
islam because it encourages idol worship because when you're going to a sufi's mazar you're like
#
it is considered that you are worshipping the mazar which is not correct it's it's a it's a wrong
#
interpretation of what people do there despite that their popularity has not waned even today
#
despite the growth of hardliners within islam despite this whole uh wahhabism
#
the influence of the sufis has not diminished not just in india but you see even in a country like
#
pakistan where there has been a really concerted violence against sufis now their um dargahs are
#
still so popular which is why there are places of targeted violence because people still come
#
to grade their uh during course and they still believe that this is where they'll find peace
#
this is where they'll uh their problems will be mitigated so sufi and one of the biggest factors
#
of spread of islam in india has been the sufis even today if you visit a dargah though now uh
#
it's uh there are very few dargahs where you actually get a sense of peace and calm because
#
there's so much of chaos and so many people there and uh a lot of uh non-religious activities happen
#
there in terms of forcing you to uh contribute money to this cause that cause uh to the extent
#
of being extortionist but uh despite that uh a lot of non-muslims still visit the sufis and a lot of
#
non-muslims have such faith in the resident uh sufis at various dargahs or people who profess
#
sufism that uh they treat them like a family advisor they consult them for uh family matters
#
so it's not just muslims so i think uh sufism has been the biggest driver of islam in this region
#
south asian region so there's uh you know one of my favorite bits in this book is this legend which
#
you uh cite and i'll i'll quote that entire paragraph and come to a question that i have
#
associated with it where you write quote there is a famous legend associated with the greatest
#
woman sufi ever hasrat rabia of basra who died in 801 ce once she was found running in the desert
#
with a torch in one hand and a pitcher of water in another when somebody stopped her to ask what
#
she was doing she replied that she intended to burn paradise with a torch and douse the flames
#
of hell with water so that people would love god for the sake of god and not for want of paradise
#
or fear of hell stop quote and this is so beautiful and what it also sort of seems to be
#
um almost a sub tweet against as it were by current uh terminology or what it seems to also uh
#
um argue against is the transactional nature of religion how conditional the love of god can be
#
for uh people you know like at the basic level is of course do this otherwise you'll go to heaven
#
or otherwise you'll go to hell and do this and you'll go to heaven and blah blah blah but you
#
know christopher hitchinson one of his uh screeds against organized religion i think this was in the
#
context of christianity but can hold true for so many others uh wrote about how you know it's
#
basically bribery you you have a god who's threatening you that if you don't do all of
#
this shit if you don't believe in me and me only you're in deep trouble and uh sufism seems to
#
strike away from this and and you know like i did an episode on a nanak panthi with amardeep sing
#
last year at some point in time and it strikes me that guru nanak was also in his original sayings
#
and the following he built around him like a sufi in a sense it's the same kind of thing where
#
you don't need to give it a name but it's like you love god and therefore humanity for the sake of
#
it but there is there are no rituals involved there's no bribery there's nothing transactional
#
and the thought that strikes me here is that i see the appeal of something like this like even to
#
someone who doesn't believe in god like me there's a lot of appeal of sufism and nanak panthi and you
#
know strands like this a bhakti movement strands like this which are not dogmatic and which don't
#
have rituals and all that associated with it but yet at the same time we see that there is uh you
#
know growing extremism in all the religions where more and more people seem to be drawn towards
#
those extreme ends towards all these rules don't do this don't do that and all of that and uh that
#
in fact you know seems dominant today though that could just be the availability heuristic and maybe
#
it's just this period in time and uh we'll be living in a sufi world 100 years from now
#
but right now that's what it seems to me that people get drawn to these harsh dogmatic othering
#
aspects of religion uh rather than to those sort of impulses that sufism seems to attract uh what
#
are what are your thoughts on this see there are two ways of approaching the religion any religion
#
one is fear and another is love so what the sufis were doing they said uh you your religion
#
should be premised on your love for god what the ulemas or what the uh dogmatics were doing that
#
it should be based or it should be premised on fear which is why uh you hear even among muslims
#
the reason why uh it appears to us in that sufism kind of lost out to this uh more extremist form of
#
islam was basically uh fear is always greater than love i mean uh love is such a simple and uh
#
harmless uh emotion that uh uh it it can never stand up to fear if the fear of uh extreme
#
consequences is so huge that you cannot reason out now what has happened in uh
#
amongst the muslims apart from this fear of god once uh the codification of islamic laws was
#
happening once the uh the sayings or habits of the prophet were being written down as hadiths or
#
treaties the documents of his life was being written down in black and white people started
#
to treat all of this as far uh at par with uh religion itself that these are the things which
#
are ordained by god and we have to believe into this because eventually as i said uh politics
#
also gets into religion basically religion in my opinion is a amalgamation of a number of things
#
it's faith it's culture it's history it's your family traditions it's your fear it's your
#
superstition and it's politics so uh faith alone cannot make a religion so islam was probably
#
faith or what uh prophet muhammad was saying was a very simple uh simplistic faith which i had
#
mentioned earlier uh and which is what appeals to a lot of people but when the religion of islam was
#
being formed then they took into account all these things and then political power or political
#
control over people was very very essential which is why you see the rules the regulations like uh
#
blasphemy came about uh now islam or quran has absolutely nothing to say about blasphemy i mean
#
you can say whatever you want ideally you should not i mean it's bad behavior that you are uh
#
calling somebody names but uh it was not punishable there was it there was no offense in this
#
but when the uh the politics became part of religion because when the muslim empire was
#
being built uh the first was uh uh the the first uh caliphate i'm forgetting the name now
#
and the second basit so when these uh caliphates came and they realized that they are now an empire
#
they have their armies marching all over the world i mean they're right there at the doorstep of spain
#
on one side and they're here in central asia on the other so the political power had to come
#
from only fear i mean you uh have to control the people through fear that then love cannot work
#
you cannot ask a huge mass of people to follow you because they should love you so that is how
#
the ulemas the dogmatic ulemas were cultivated encouraged because they help the political power
#
they help the rulers to uh enforce their writ and the more rigid you become the more power you feel
#
because then you're you're restricting a individual's agency over his or her life you keep telling
#
him that this is wrong and you'll rot in hell this is wrong you'll be burnt in hell so when you are
#
playing on a person's insecurities to this extent you tend to then look for ways which will guarantee
#
you at least some place in some corner of paradise so this whole idea of your own agency your whole
#
own individual approach to religion uh was unacceptable because even one person saying
#
that i do not agree with you and i will do what i wish to do is disruptive it just disrupts your
#
whole setup that you have built of power of religious power political power all enmeshed
#
together so this is something which uh was absolutely unacceptable and progressively
#
as more and more muslim uh rulers came they took away the agency of individuals further from them
#
which is why there was a time when even secular education was uh frowned upon because they realized
#
that if you are exposed to education if you are exposed to different ideas uh you may start
#
thinking for your own and which is why then the salubh dynasty came and they said no no we've
#
established this group of madrassas the whole idea was that religious education is enough
#
when the quran says that education learning is important it means that only islamic learning
#
religious learning is important you need not learn anything else so the cascading effect of this has
#
been that a lot of muslims felt that for them learning about slum is enough to see through this
#
life and they need not learn anything else if you are not exposing your mind to new ideas if
#
you're not challenging yourself then obviously it leads to some slight sort of a intellectual
#
atrophy your capacity to think generation on generation reduces because you're not using your
#
brain you're not using your uh intellect and this is once you have these pygmy people uh
#
intellectual pygmies then it is easier to hurt them you know like a flock of cattle you can just
#
tell them go here go there do this and that is where your whole idea of islamic exclusivism
#
islamic extremism i'm not talking about violence i'm just talking about extremism in the sense that
#
you feel that you're superior you're different from others you feel that you have to be even
#
more dogmatic i mean it is not enough you're praying five times a day now you also need to
#
do extra prayers you also need to do penance prayer it is not enough that you're doing uh
#
your fast in 30 days in a month uh you have to do additional fasting and a lot of muslims actually
#
uh fast through the year uh every week or every fortnight there's some fast or the other because
#
the five basic principles are no longer enough they need more and more rigidity in their faith
#
to feel that they are better and closer to heaven than others yeah all very fascinating and and you've
#
described this beautifully in your book where you first talk about islam becoming more and more
#
extreme in kind of a global sense and then how that comes to india like you've written about
#
you know the pushback to this coming from ibn taimiya and then from muhammad ibn abdul wahab
#
the whole wahabi movement and you quoted from this book called the two faces of islam by stephen
#
schwarz and you write quote uh abdul wahab said schwarz made no secret of his opinion that all
#
muslims had fallen into unbelief and that if they did not follow him they should all be killed their
#
wives and daughters violated and their possessions confiscated shias sufis and other muslims he
#
judged unorthodox were to be exterminated above all uh wahab and his followers despise music
#
which they viewed as an incitement to forgetfulness of god and to sin many sufis by contrast used
#
music as a means to heighten consciousness of god uh stop quote and later you know you have
#
this section on indian muslim sects like deobandis barilvis uh ali hadith and so on and you talk about
#
how they all quote owe their theological development to the vast repertoire of shah wali
#
ullah and wahab uh stop quote and it seems to me to be like two sort of parallel strands which
#
are happening here one is that all of these sects which you describe of course come from
#
wahabism and they have this exclusionary view and uh therefore uh you know you will have the mullahs
#
around having these uh extreme views which kind of feeds into the vicious circle
#
at the other side it strikes me like the question is often asked that why are indian muslims
#
not as extreme as muslims in certain other parts of the world who are who are more radicalized
#
though i would you know continue to stress that muslims are the biggest victims of terrorism
#
worldwide including what is called islamic terrorism so we should kind of keep that in
#
mind and not paint with uh too much of a broad brush but yet indian muslims haven't uh been
#
radicalized to that extreme and it seems to me that one reason for that would be that a lot of
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indian islams has sort of you know imbibed the those sufi kind of traditions and not uh you know
#
the radical kind of islam that comes from these sects that you describe so tell me a little bit
#
about this uh how through the centuries this tension has played out between the lived islam
#
of many people which takes more from sufism and is like chilled out and musical and all of that
#
and with the more radical kind the more political kind see the as i mentioned the radical islam
#
basically was a pushback against this uh growth of uh sufis and the influence that sufis were
#
wielding over the muslim mind okay i'll go a little back in the history when uh after the death of
#
prophet muhammad the first khalifa was appointed he came from a very powerful qurash tribe now this
#
qurash tribe was opposed to the prophet uh when he was propagating islam and these early battles
#
of islam were between the qurash and prophet muhammad and his followers but when the qurash
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embraced islam then they feel they retained their political power which they in any case had
#
earlier also so the first three khalifas were from the qurash and this only reinforced their
#
power and this is when the codification of laws started the fourth was uh hasrat ali who was
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prophet's nephew and son-in-law so uh he was from his tribe which was not qurash so this political
#
power when it was vested in this qurash tribe and they were trying to uh and after ali's assassination
#
it went back to the qurash because uh muhabiyah who assumed uh caliphate after ali's assassination
#
was also from the same tribe uh so this they were conscious of the fact that they're not regarded
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as noble as the earlier caliphs were or ali's had ali had a huge reputation i mean even today
#
all the dargahs and everywhere you go uh it's ali's uh name which is invoked you know ya ali
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madad or ali maula you hear sufi music it's uh his name is invoked because he had such a he had
#
captured the muslim mind in such a huge way that uh the subsequent uh khalifas they are caliphs they
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realize that they do not have that spiritual legitimacy so the office of uh caliph was then
#
bifurcated the political power vested in the person who assumed the caliphate and it became
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hereditary and the uh spiritual power was vested in the ulema this is something which happened when
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saudi arabia came about when ibn wahab met with the ibn south and they said okay let's divide
#
this country i'll control the religious part of this i'll control the islamic part of it
#
you control the political part so it was like a compact uh so the early uh evidence of this compact
#
was during the reign of the hereditary uh caliphs now caliphs originally were supposed to be elected
#
by the people but once it became a non-elective it became a hereditary and it became an empire
#
then they felt that there was a need to have a religious a powerful religious person who could
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kind of ensure that the people remain devoted to the uh the ruler the and religion is i mean as we
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see in india today also religion is a huge motivator you mean nothing binds people together
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uh more strongly than a religious directive from some kind of a religious head so that
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is how these ulemas were being cultivated they became a conduit between the people and the ruler
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and because they were now on the payroll of the ruler so they were not representing the
#
people to the ruler they were representing the ruler to the people so their job was to
#
tell the people that what this guy is doing what the ruler or the caliph is doing is correct this
#
is islamic and this is an islamic uh sanction for this various fatwas were being issued
#
and the moderates of people who were deemed as somebody who could question them were increasingly
#
put outside the veil of islam this harassment this uh targeted uh pushing them out of the society or
#
ostracizing them all this started happening around this time so all through uh and this started
#
within two centuries of prophet's death i mean it was not so bad as it became in the 15th century
#
on after ibn Taymiyyah onwards but this division had started to come then this was also the time
#
that uh now quran is a book of reference it has verses it has some prayers it has a lot of things
#
it has some some guidance or some direction to how a person should be leading a honorable life
#
but it doesn't have law so what we call islamic law it's actually not part of the quranic law
#
quran just gives you direction the only issues which it really addresses with a lot of force is
#
uh divorce marriage and divorce and uh usury and all that so there are few things which it addresses
#
very forcefully the other things uh crime punishment uh all this are suggestions
#
so this was left to uh i mean the quran didn't say that rules should be made but when the rulers
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came when the empires were being built they felt that they needed a uniform islamic community like
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a umma so the laws were being codified based on what they understood of the quran so these
#
ulemas who were sitting down and writing islamic laws they started interpreting the verses and they
#
started laying down the law writing down the law in great details so this is actually because
#
these were from arabia these are arabs so a lot of their interpretation stemmed from their own
#
historical uh background what they have their own lived and experienced their own tribal culture
#
their practices so that kind of crept in uh the laws so what we see uh in islam they say that
#
if a somebody if a person steals you cut off his hand or uh you stone a person so this is not there
#
uh uh this is not really a divine law this is a law which has been codified subsequently because
#
this is with the tribal practices so this these practices obviously have to evolve with times but
#
unfortunately most countries have their own laws but i'm just using this as an illustration to say
#
so when you were trying to dominate or rule or govern a huge mass of population
#
you needed very rigid laws so that the fear of law and fear of god could be
#
instilled in the people so for that sufis were a liability because they were saying that
#
there's nothing to fear if you've done no harm no harm will come to you
#
so that is how this whole tradition with you know of sufism veering away from the classical
#
or dogmatic Islam started happening this cleavage kind of widened and widened why this did not happen
#
so much in India until recently until the late 80s not 80s until recently actually late 80s
#
the process started uh was because uh unlike the popular narrative Islam did not come to india
#
through uh the clergy or through the uh rulers it came through largely traders whose interest
#
was very uh small-time business you know just wanted to live their life and earn a living and
#
be happy or sufis so our uh slum that we imbibed here and sufis also ensured that a lot of local
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traditions were married into the Islamic practices which is why in India you find a very not just
#
India if you go to Indonesia also it's a very rooted geographically rooted kind of a religion
#
you you have not completely alienated yourself from your geography from uh the customs traditions
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of your ancestors so it's a very nice balanced amalgamation of history faith culture and uh
#
what you think today is pragmatism so that is probably one of the reasons why
#
uh Indian Muslims had no reason to get radicalized to the extent as you see in certain parts of the
#
middle east and uh north africa unfortunately in the 80s when uh a lot of Muslims started going to
#
the gulf for job and see this is again i'm coming back to the thing my earlier point that if you are
#
pushing a group of people a large mass of people out of the mainstream because of your own prejudice
#
then they have to find some ways of surviving so because of this prejudice was okay not so vocal
#
then but discrimination was still there so a lot of Muslims who are not getting jobs in the mainstream
#
who were not finding employment uh at par with their educational levels uh they started looking
#
for opportunities abroad and the big opportunities opened with the discovery of oil with the
#
in the middle east and a lot of Muslims started going there so these people when they were exposed
#
to that sort of uh religious practices and in a sharp contrast to their very laid back uh amorphous
#
sort of a belief that you do whatever you do they realized that very clear-cut principles of Islam
#
very clear-cut formula that you must do this you must do that and anything which is made harder it
#
looks more real i mean unless uh religion is hard to follow what is the point of following it
#
so these people when they came back they brought that sort of uh rigidity with them so that is how
#
you find a lot of uh Muslims now not being content with the Islam they have been following and they
#
want to follow a more arabized form of Islam and uh but thankfully even this has not led to
#
radicalization for the simple reason their roots of the local elements are too strong for them to
#
really veer off track completely. So let's again now go back to uh history before we come to the
#
current day uh the one sort of the the TIL the thing i had absolutely no idea of the one thing
#
i learned from your book was the importance of 1857 like of course we know the importance of the
#
1857 rebellion in terms of what it did for the freedom movement and colonialism in India and
#
all of that but it was also a big factor sort of the later Hindu-Muslim divides that happened the
#
British played a role in that 1857 had so much of a wider resonance that i had not known anything
#
about that so tell me about that why was 1857 so uh important even in uh sort of this uh particular
#
context? See 1857 though a lot of people had risen against the British uh power they did it under the
#
Mughal emperor now the Muslims felt that this will restore the Muslim power back in India
#
if you uh recall this is it was a period where Muslim power or the Mughal empire was actually
#
only notional i mean Badusha Zafar had no writ outside his own uh fort the Marathas were controlling
#
large tracts i mean even before the British it was already uh empire on its last leg so a lot of
#
Muslims thought that this would restore the Muslim power now power is associated with uh glory it's
#
associated with the influence and a lot of things so they they were fighting the British
#
for that they were fighting the British to reclaim their lost power lost glory the non-Muslims the
#
Hindus were fighting to throw the British out or their own grievances against them because of
#
various policies of usurping territories like Jhansi and other places so they had different
#
motives but once this uh war was given a color of jihad and which is uh understandable because uh
#
jihad religion as i said is a huge motivator so a clarion call for war uh usually if you have a
#
religious call then more people uh get uh motivated to go do and die type so when this happened a lot
#
of Hindus especially the business community of Delhi the rich moneylender community uh the traders
#
of Delhi which were all Hindus uh they were charry of what was happening and a lot of them
#
had started thinking okay that is let this bloodletting happen between the Muslims and the
#
British and we'll see which side wins and then we'll take our sides i mean reveal our cards then
#
so once this was happening uh and there was mass killing of Muslims reports came out people
#
i mean it's not difficult to hide that who was telling on them who was the
#
informer who was talking behind their backs or who was supplying equipment or money to the British
#
so this deepened the fissure now uh the other thing was the British themselves were because of
#
the history of uh rebellion in various of colonies from north africa to other parts
#
uh and the long history of crusades which have been like really really uh harrowing uh
#
bloodletting between the Muslims and the Christians so they in any case had a very deep prejudice
#
against Islam uh if you recall even today much much before the vilification of Islam started in
#
India it used to happen in the west and even today this whole characterization of Islam as a
#
primitive religion caricaturing of uh the prophet it happens in the west more uh than it happens in
#
India because probably there is some sort of rebellion now that defines that why should we
#
listen to them if they're offended let them be offended but it also stems from the fact of
#
their history so a lot of this desire to offend is also a desire to humiliate it comes from that so
#
so in uh that was the time when they started uh cultivating this notion of Muslims as uh
#
uncivilized barbaric people this whole idea or this whole narrative of victimhood uh was cultivated
#
by them and imbibed by the Hindus who suddenly thought who found themselves uh that Muslims are
#
no longer the rulers so the British they kind of became allies with them against the Muslims and
#
they felt that with this we can regain our power in any case they were better educated because
#
Muslims traditionally did not uh imbibe secular education so their influence on the society was
#
largely through uh music poetry art culture it was not through education so when the British
#
came and the modern society was being uh shaped so Muslims were outside the pale it uh and Hindus
#
were employed uh in high positions across the board so uh that further created the fissures
#
and facilitated this narrative a Hindu narrative of victimhood of centuries of victimhood to grow
#
and develop and there was no counter to this narrative because uh the intellectual capacity
#
of the Muslims was so weak uh despite the fact that the Mughal courts had historians they had
#
writers but all that was in the past by the middle by the early 19th century uh they were actually
#
very badly off intellectually or financially uh the only thing they had was culture but how
#
far could culture go yeah no it's like just to kind of sum it up and you can tell me if i'm
#
processing it uh correctly the 1857 revolt was interesting because number one radical Muslims
#
saw it as a chance to appropriate the struggle and uh sort of go at the forefront you know it
#
was fought under the banner of the Mughal emperor so to say so uh you know Muslims came along and
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and the British sees this you know this was a great opportunity to divide and rule you've spoken
#
about how they fanned the narrative of Hindu victimhood which again has a colonial beginning
#
in a sense as far as narratives go or at least a colonial propulsion at this point and are you
#
right as far as the ordinary Muslims are concerned you're right quote the Muslims felt let down by
#
their leaders cheated by the Hindu neighbors and disillusioned by their faith they had believed
#
the ulema who told them that as in the historic battle of badr Allah would intervene to ensure
#
their victory and so as a defeated people tend to do they became dependent and inward looking
#
and then you write about how quote the ulema were quick to turn this to their advantage they claimed
#
that while the Muslims cause was just their faith was weak hence the faith needed to be strengthened
#
stop quote and you write about how all these sort of uh sects inspired these Sunni Muslim
#
sects inspired by Wahhabism like the Deobandis and Barelvis were a consequence of you know grew
#
in power at this point and you write as a result ordinary Muslims started shrinking away from the
#
national mainstream increasingly identifying with the idea of the global umma besides his development
#
one of the effects of the 1857 revolt was an erosion of the economic and educational foundations
#
of the Muslims stop quote and this of course has a cascading effect you know one of the prominent
#
Muslim leaders we remember in our history from that period is of course Sayyid Ahmad Khan who
#
started the Aligarh Muslim University later and all of that but you point out that how he was
#
almost a minority figure within his community in the sense that you know people just turned away
#
from that kind of secular education they turned away from modernity and that is a sort of a trend
#
that has continued ever since in India tell me a little bit more about that and also my other sort
#
of related question is that what then seems to happen at this point or what at least comes into
#
the stark relief at this point is the dual notion of the umma on one hand and the nation on the one
#
hand where you can ask you know where does a Muslim belong if I am a Muslim am I an Indian
#
or do I belong to the larger Muslim umma and am I looking to sort of the caliphate for my
#
source of identity so this is also a tension that sort of playing out in all of these years
#
and has a consequence on our politics as well so tell me a little bit about these different kinds
#
of tensions one Muslims turning away from the mainstream almost sort of in an intellectual
#
sense ghettoizing themselves as it were and and then these growing conflicts between umma and nation
#
I'll answer the second one first see this is a mis-concept and again a part of
#
the vilification which started with the pradesh in and around the 1857 revolt
#
and that Muslims there is a umma they are not subservient to the regime they are not
#
they don't consider themselves citizens of a particular nation where they live there
#
their loyalty always lies with the the central figurehead of the caliph now the thing is that
#
if you see in India even through the various Muslim dynasties starting with the
#
Delhi Sultanate there was no connection with the caliph so much so that during the reign of Akbar
#
he actually challenged the caliph in the sense that he said he was deserving of being a caliph
#
so and India was never a Islamic country despite this long history of a Muslim ruler preceding the
#
Mughals also it was never declared a Islamic country that was one of the factors that it was
#
always out of the pale of the larger Muslim umma because they it was considered a country
#
where majority is still not Muslim so it did not qualify as an Islamic country so the Muslims in
#
India have always been rooted in in this country which is another reason that though Muslims go
#
out for employment you do not see Muslims settling down in a lot of foreign countries
#
the majority of guys who go to the middle east for employment they work there they earn their
#
living there send remittances back home and once the job is over they come back here you don't see
#
that Muslims are going in containers and somehow getting into Canada or getting into some place
#
because they feel that they can have a better life there even when partition happened and they
#
were promised a Muslim country Islamic country majority did not go the rich went primarily
#
because they thought they will more power there as opposed to India or as opposed to Hindu India
#
but the middle the lower middle class the poor they did not go because they have been so rooted
#
to the land I'll give you the example of my own family we have been the most immobile family
#
in my family nobody has moved anywhere in life physically uh we uh I grew up in Agra the maximum
#
I went out was uh come to Delhi and live in this area my entire family we are all in and around
#
Agra for generations we have lived here so our this fondness of staying in a place and identifying
#
that with that place uh identifying with that uh uh the culture of that place the food of that
#
place I mean I still hanker for street food in Agra people say the best street food is in
#
Banaras or Lucknow but I keep saying no no Agra is the best and I know which hawker sells the best
#
stuff so uh this rootedness uh as in in India has ensured that there is no concept of a umma
#
no Muslim looks up to anybody in any case there is no global Muslim leadership anywhere so what is
#
that Muslim looking at or looking for you don't find any Indian Muslim forget going to Palestine
#
or forget going to Afghanistan to fight uh nobody even raises a voice for Kashmiris I mean Kashmir
#
is a part of India and Kashmir has been suffering this roiling insurgency since uh 1989 and so many
#
atrocities so much of violence has happened against the Muslims in Kashmir but uh you don't find
#
mainstream Muslim in any other part of India uh emphasizing with them or raising their voice
#
in their favor so this Muslim brotherhood is actually
#
a concept which has been found by uh vested interests from time to time to just uh question
#
their loyalty to the country of uh residents of the country uh their nation because it also helps
#
you build a narrative of that they cannot be trusted that their fifth columnist their loyalty
#
doesn't lie here as Goldbarker had said that ghar ke bahar wali so it it felt like a
#
Muslim so it it fans that it fuels this narrative which is by everybody from time to time talks of
#
the Muslim umma there is no Muslim umma I mean each Muslim from different countries are very
#
distinct from another uh Muslim uh uh Japanese not Japanese extreme example but a European Muslim
#
who's uh not a migrant who's not gone from North Africa who's a European because he uh was converted
#
while being uh in Europe is very different from a Sri Lankan Muslim or a Bengali Muslim similarly
#
a Bengali is very very different from a Tamil Muslim so they wherever they are uh they are
#
extremely rooted in uh their geography in their history and in the traditions of that particular
#
place even in terms of costume uh Muslims from Bengal would be wearing a sari in a particular
#
fashion and Muslims in Tamil Nadu would be wearing in a particular fashion but a Punjabi Muslim will
#
not be wearing a sari like a Punjabi Hindu wouldn't wear a sari so this is a second part I'll come to
#
the I'll respond to this quickly where I completely agree with you as far as you know about uh
#
Muslims here or in fact anywhere else for that matter being rooted in their local circumstances
#
and all that I completely buy that which is why it uh you know Savarkar was playing such a devious
#
game in his toxic book Hindutva where he spoke about how the only Indians are those whose mother
#
land whose place of origin and place of worship is India and he said Muslims aren't because they owe
#
their allegiance to Mecca which was not true at all at a social level but nevertheless there was
#
a political strand and I'm you know specifying political as opposed to social or cultural there
#
was a political strand which did look to the caliphate for example uh and it's very consequential
#
to how our history turned out and I'm referring of course to the Khilafat movement of the Ali
#
brothers where after World War I was over they demanded you know the Khilafat movement demanded
#
a sort of reinstatement of the caliphate as it were and that became consequential for us because
#
Mahatma Gandhi who at that time hadn't really become the leader of the congress so to say
#
tied up with them as you know as a tactical means and became the leader of the congress which caused
#
Jinnah who until that point was a great moderate leader in the congress to walk out in disgust
#
and say what the hell is this because it was of course incoherent because Gandhi is talking
#
about the nation and the Ali brothers are talking about the umma and and eventually of course that
#
alliance fell apart but proved to be really consequential and I totally agree with you
#
from my limited experience and readings of course that you know most Muslims are just rooted in their
#
circumstances but nevertheless what is happening in modern times and this is something that you
#
describe later is that you have these Saudi petrodollars coming into India where you know
#
they are setting up these organizations all over the place and they are doing what like at one
#
point in the context of Assam you write a quote today the traditional mekla chador of Assam is
#
being replaced by so-called Islamic dresses like salwar suits or shararas complete with the hijab
#
stop quote so at a political level there is an effort to sort of go beyond the local specific
#
sort of you know leave the mekla chador aside and put on the hijab so you know does this worry you
#
is this increasing is it part of the vicious circle of extremism that's kind of going on
#
there are two things here actually you have asked two questions the first is the khilafat now see
#
this whole khilafat movement this is exactly why I have written that Muslim politician is absolutely
#
irrelevant because he doesn't represent his own people so at the during the freedom struggle when
#
everybody was fearing towards fighting the british there was a group of people which ali brother
#
johar muhammad ali johar and his brother their priority was amorphous concept I mean even the
#
turks didn't want the caliphate to survive I mean they were tired of it but because these ulemas
#
I mean not ulema they were not ulemas but they came from a strand of religion which was driven
#
by ulemas I don't know if you've read maulana azad's india wins freedom he describes this
#
meeting with gandhi and where this maulana basri and all these people are there and ali brothers
#
are there and they said our priority is that the caliphate should be restored and people like him
#
and azad and maulana azad and rafi emed kids by and they were populist they said but that is not
#
our agenda our agenda is something else so even at that point these people these group of people
#
they their worldview or their concept of what muslims should stand for or what muslim politics
#
should stand for was very different from what people wanted which is why in the early years
#
muslim league had no support they had no ground support it was only a party of leaders and party
#
of petitioners they didn't have ground workers the ground workers came only when jamaat islami
#
aligned itself with muslim league that is when they got that street power and they could carry
#
out their violence and other things but as long as it was strong of jamaat islami they had nothing
#
they had nothing to stand on which is why even jinnah when he came and he drifted into muslim league
#
muslim league had no base in india that base was built only once jamaat islami carder came and
#
jamaat islami carder was in any case hugely uh dogmatic because of madhudi's uh philosophies in
#
fact madhudi's influence went well beyond india even muslim brotherhood they uh drew inspiration
#
from madhudi's writing he's supposedly the first person who has given some kind of a concrete
#
shape to the concept of political islam so all this happened later uh now coming to the second
#
part of your question which is that uh in assam what is happening the petrodollars this is what
#
i refer to as arabization of indian islam this is again it's not radicalization it is actually
#
in real since arabization because the earliest islamists also they felt that because
#
slum came to arabia so arabs were the chosen people though prophet in his last sermon has
#
said that arab is not superior to anybody else and all people are equal but arabs have always
#
maintained their superiority even in the present day politics their biggest rivalry has been with
#
iran only not because there's shia sunni shia sunni is one part of it the other part is this
#
traditional uh rivalry that historical cultural rivalry because persia was a very evolved
#
nation well even before islam came well before islam came whereas arabia was a primitive group
#
of tribes so they really did not have a society as sophisticated as learned as persia had iran had
#
so this rivalry is comes from there so when they realized that in the indian subcontinent or a lot
#
of the central asia the persian version of islam despite being sunnis their mannerism their language
#
their literature this is becoming popular in fact that persian language was part of our indian
#
language the court language well after freedom also independence also so when they this obviously
#
was a huge inferiority for the arab society or arab politicians because they were feeling
#
themselves thinking we are the chosen ones we should be predominant but because they had nothing
#
to speak of no economy until the oil was found they couldn't do much about it so once they had
#
the resources they started this export of their version of islam in great earnest and it spread
#
rapidly but see in india despite this it did not come in a very violent fashion as it happened
#
in parts of pakistan and afghanistan fortunately because again there is no umma it's just a very
#
rooted geographically limited or located religion that people are imbibing arab practices they are
#
trying to find a arabized version of their practice of islam whether it's in language
#
in dress and saying allah hafiz or in saying ramadan and salat instead of rosa and namaz and
#
so they're doing all this but it is limited as of now it is limited to only that it is not
#
really translating into extremism or radicalism and i'm just leading you on that is also the reason
#
that despite this whole idea of terrorism islamic terrorism in india and our government
#
keeps saying that terrorism is the biggest threat to humanity i do not believe that we have
#
terrorism is a problem in india i do not believe that our threat is terrorism i think it's
#
complete propaganda yeah i mean i agree with you it's just a no-brainer that you know we
#
don't have that kind of terrorism here if it's if anything it is it comes in from outside and let me
#
take you back to the other question though which you know in on this show there are a lot of
#
digressions because we discuss so many things that we just jump from one to the other but the
#
other you know i'd ask two questions and the other one was this then tendency to look inward
#
to become you know after 1857 the ulemas get more extreme and they get more of a hold and you speak
#
you speak about how muslim society then turn inwards it is distrustful of secular education
#
it buys a rhetoric that all you need to know to you know prosper in the afterlife or whatever is
#
knowledge of islam and the quran and all of that and that becomes an in a sense a modern sort of
#
illustration of that is that incident you describe from your own life where at the age of 16 while
#
you are writing essays to get into universities abroad one of your cousins is being felicitated
#
for memorizing the quran so tell me a little bit about this sort of drift and how it kind of harmed
#
the muslim community here and i suppose it is possibly related in some way and maybe you can
#
expand on that but what you said earlier also about muslim political leaders not really
#
representing the people at large per se so tell me a little bit about you know these two strands
#
and the kind of marginalization that is resulted in see uh the ulemas in uh india have always been
#
uh very conservative very dogmatic so it's not that they suddenly became extreme because uh the
#
source of their uh islamic learning came from largely from shah waliullah who was exposed to
#
this sort of islam when he went for hajj to arabia and he was though there's no evidence that he
#
met up with abdul wahab but uh he was familiar with his works his writing so when he came to india
#
he thought he sought to reform indian islam which he thought was had fallen on bad days because
#
people were uh had adopted so many customs and cultures of the local people so uh when the
#
indian ulema class developed it grew out of he he ran the very successful and very prestigious
#
madrassa in delhi that madrassa rahimia so when this uh uh learned class of indian ulema came
#
mostly emerged from madrassa rahimia so they were always like that what happened after 1857 when
#
your financial power was taken away when you were economically degraded uh with so much of loss of
#
life and hope of future was looked very bleak so like all disillusioned all weak all disheartened
#
people they try and turn to religion and they try to turn more and more to dogmatic and religion
#
because it's not only comforting it's it kind of takes away your your attention away from your
#
present misery because it just promises you great things which will happen to you in the future so
#
this is uh what was happening to the muslims because there was so much in uh this area i mean
#
the widespread bloodshed that happened after 1857 i mean if you read the old accounts it's in the
#
north india there were villages which were wiped out so people at that point they had no uh way of
#
uh you know finding some kind of support who could they turn to the emperor was no longer there
#
they were uh rudderless they were leaderless so at that point the ulema smoothly moved into this
#
space and muslims in any case had a historic tradition of looking up to a religious figurehead
#
as uh as a ruler because you have a history of caliphate where uh the early three uh four
#
caliphs were also they were both spiritual as well as temporal leaders so for them to
#
accord the leadership status to a ulema or to a group of ulemas was not very difficult they
#
just thought maybe uh this is how we'll uh reclaim our lost uh glory power or whatever
#
so that that is when the ulema started wielding a disproportionate influence over the uh population
#
sayyid ahmed khan uh was part of this delhi elite and his family had witnessed the wholesale massacre
#
but because his family was aligned with the british they were in the service of the british
#
so they didn't suffer the repercussions and he used his association his family's association
#
to get concessions from them to try start up a school for muslims that is how anglo-american
#
uh anglo-arabic uh school then metamorphosed into uh the university uh illegal muslim university
#
uh british also facilitated his visit uh to oxford and cambridge so he could see uh what
#
how a modern university uh is designed and how it operates but uh because a large number of muslims
#
were now closely aligned with the ulema uh because first mover advantage ulemas had moved first so
#
they managed to get a bigger support they did not want to join the university because there was a
#
constant tussle between the ulema and sir sayyid there were a lot of fatwas which are issued against
#
sir sayyid uh saying that he's promoting uh unislamic practices he's promoting kufr
#
uh or sin amongst the muslims so he he was trying to convince uh rich landed muslim gentry the
#
landlords uh the talukdars that you send your kids to the sons no daughters uh to my institution
#
he was trying to convince the ulema that look i will ensure that they get islamic education
#
which is why the whole curriculum of aligarh university was uh modern but islamic at core so
#
their prayer they did ensure that there were prayers happening they did ensure that some
#
sort of islamic dress became a uniform there that sherwani aligari pajama and all of that
#
so he maintained he ensured that the cultural ethos of uh north indian upper uh caste and class
#
muslim is in place and a modern education is also there which is why this very modern elite muslim
#
elite emerged from the early years of aligarh university which eventually moved to pakistan
#
so that was uh his contribution but then one aligarh university is not enough i mean
#
even today they cater to some uh 4000 students i mean it's it's a drop in the ocean and at that
#
time it was much smaller but uh it was not only that even syed emad khan's focus in those days
#
was on educating the elite he was not in the favor of expanding this doors of learning or opening
#
these doors of learning to lower class or lower caste or poor muslims as well as women he felt
#
that women cannot be better or more educated than men because it will disrupt the family harmony
#
so uh as long as they are quran literate and they are good enough to teach the kids the quran
#
so it's fine so this conflict between so-called modernity and uh conservatism uh continued
#
till uh for many years till uh leading up to the partition because if you see those early muslim
#
leaders were all from this aligarh stock which is why muslim league earlier was called the aligarh
#
party because uh it produced these early class of sophisticated muslims articulate learned people
#
with fancy libraries and studies at home who would be you know who'd be so rich that they
#
didn't work they would just dwell on poetry and literature and classical music
#
so there was another reason why uh the influence of ulemas did not wane even after uh independence
#
because when the pushback from the lower classes and the lower castes of the muslims they it started
#
i mean just upward mobility started after the partition uh these were the people who again the
#
ulema's target and these are the people because of poverty are the first ones to go to a madrassa
#
because at least that ensures some amount of education to the child so the the influence
#
of the ulema has remained strong over uh the community until and unless people who have really
#
been disruptors who have moved away uh forge their own paths and their own education whether in a
#
muslim institution or a non-muslim institution and they have been bold enough to question the
#
ulemas and there has been a substantive number of muslims who have done this uh since the
#
independence movement maulana azad was one of them he he was completely removed from this
#
traditional ulema led or aligarh led community of muslims so there have been people like that and
#
and probably even today there's a kind of a balance there equal number on both sides unfortunately
#
the the moderate is usually uh silent because uh for various fears i mean he is viewed as a
#
renegade muslim by the conservative ones you know like an apologist and he viewed only as a muslim
#
even by a non-muslim one by a non-muslim they don't really see that okay so this person or
#
this uh muslim is not a conservative fundamentalist dogmatic muslim they don't see
#
they when when they are targeting you or when they want to vilify you you're only a muslim
#
so this this class uh by and large remains invisible and silent because they don't want
#
to draw attention to themselves which is why when we are talking of a muslim society you keep thinking
#
about um uh very rigid conservative people who are driven in largely by the ulema which is true
#
a group a substantive part of the society is like that but there's also the other group which is not
#
like that which is individualistic which has uh which has uh aspirations or dreams or
#
desires like anybody else do not really identify themselves with the community per se but with
#
their own socioeconomic milieu when a middle-class muslim they see themselves as a middle class and
#
like any other middle class they're they're struggling to go on an annual holiday they're
#
struggling for a next promotion and job they're trying to get a scholarship so this class is also
#
there and they they are convinced and more and more in the last few years since probably the last
#
decade they're getting it more and more convinced that the more they hide themselves better they
#
will be able to go ahead in life i mean it's not just a question of survival it's also a question
#
of leading a decent existence no that's that's really tragic and resonant and you mentioned
#
that it's become worse during the last 10 years and and there are multiple reasons for that one
#
of course is the rise of the bjp which we'll talk about and you know how virulent everything
#
has become but as far as moderation is concerned like when you were telling me about the moderate
#
muslim yeah of course the radicals will think he is not muslim enough but then for the others
#
there is you know a moderate muslim can never do enough to convince him that he is not like
#
the radicals and that is in fact a tendency that i see in other domains also it's not just about
#
islam it's say in the domains of politics where for example the word centrist has become a pejorative
#
on twitter where people will call sheikhar gupta centrist as if you know it is a pejorative and
#
uh something really bad because what you have is uh you have these echo ideological echo chambers
#
on social media and they have their purity tests and it's a race to extremism as you know within
#
those echo chambers people will keep signaling their virtue to get higher and higher and one way
#
of doing that is by castigating those who are not pure enough so if you don't belong to those echo
#
chambers like i i suspect the vast silent majority then you might as well stay silent you know why
#
invite that mob mob upon yourself and i guess that's true in the context of anything that you
#
know i think social media also has exacerbated this drift towards the extremes now one of the
#
sort of parts of your book which i was struck by and also saddened by is when you talk about this
#
you know person who does odd jobs and his name is jiarun and which is an odd name but one day you
#
discover that his actual name is muhammad ziar ul haq which he tells you and you know two other
#
people are sonu and bablu and one of them one day tells you you know in confidence that hum bhi
#
musliman hai and this is really sad because it's almost as if they have to hide their identity
#
from the others around them so that there are no consequences just as a matter of precaution again
#
going back to annie's quote about you know home is not just where you are safe but where you are
#
visible and these are not people who feel comfortable enough to be uh visible and they go to the extent
#
of you know hiding their names and calling themselves sonu and bablu now you've uh referred
#
to sort of five historical reasons why there is this sort of distrust still has grown between
#
uh hindus and muslims and why uh you know they are in the state i'll i'll quickly skip through
#
them and then ask you to elaborate yeah one there is partition where uh nearly eight million muslims
#
cross over to pakistan and a sizable proportion of these are the elites it's almost as if all the
#
elites who can afford to go just go and what you have left behind is the slightly uh lower classes
#
and so that there it has a devastating impact then the bloodletting that happened during partition
#
leads to distrust so uh you know starting with siddharth patel who doesn't want any muslims in
#
the uh you know in the levers of government so muslims are filtered out of the army and uh the
#
bureaucracies and you quote najeeb jung at one point uh saying even about the modern times that
#
quote muslims on a selection panel may be hesitant to push for a muslim candidate for fear of
#
appearing parochial or communal stop quote and and then this leads to the other factor that a
#
lot of muslims feel hey we won't even get a fair deal so you call it the reluctance to even try
#
and they don't even sort of make the effort you again quote wajahut habibullah saying quote there
#
are two issues here actual exclusion of the muslims and the feeling of exclusion from the
#
national uh mainstream stop quote and and of course they haven't then got uh you know because
#
of disdain secular education they're not even educated enough they uh you know and and so they
#
have uh less opportunities of getting ahead of course some of them go to the gulf and all that
#
but you speak about the consequences of that the exposure to wahhabi islam uh you know the remittances
#
which disturb the social balance as you put it and finally you talk about how we are now in an
#
equilibrium where there is tremendous insecurity among muslims in india so uh and of course there's
#
also the sort of the political influence of what happened when the bjp kind of came to power and
#
all of that which you know pushed the muslims to further extremes so tell me a little bit about
#
all of this that you know the way these factors kind of pile up it almost seems like you know
#
uh it was always going to be this way i mean um which is very kind of so what's what's your sense
#
of where uh muslims are today like where is this going is there a is there a direction in which
#
this is going that makes you despair i hear affluent people of all religions actually but
#
also muslims saying that we want to leave the country i know people who already left because
#
of the way uh things are going so what is your sense of where things stand today like we are
#
in 2021 for god's sake you would have thought we've you know we've been globalizing through
#
this period uh we've been exposed to the whole world all of that are we going backwards what's
#
going on i think uh let's look at it from a different way today uh i have quoted the figures
#
in uh another chapter i think marginalization of uh indian muslims the rss outreach uh through
#
educational institutions and professional uh coaching institutions is phenomenal they are
#
uh churning out 20 black nearly 20 lakh students uh from their various their bharti schools
#
all over the country every year now if this has been going on since the 50s uh these schools
#
you can imagine the mass that they have uh created the then see the other side yeah in the same way
#
they have uh our bureaucracy our civil services the kind of people who are uh joining the bureaucracy
#
are mostly from small towns mostly from uh quasi villages or you know villages on the verge of
#
being towns a lot of these uh people uh they have schooled at some point of their life in a rss
#
run school or when they do this uh pre is coaching or pre army uh the ssc coaching when they try and
#
do that uh they do it in our rss uh run school which institution a coaching center so this
#
outreach is so huge and this kind of uh deliberately misleading version of your history
#
which is being taught to them uh it becomes truth i mean why will you question it why will you think
#
that you have been taught something which is completely false or which is not correct or
#
which is exaggerated uh because if you've learned this uh it's part of your uh mental makeup now
#
a lot of people think that history is nonsense history is it's of no use i mean you do sciences
#
you do math you do computer sciences but the truth is at some point in your life you have studied
#
a faulty history and that never leaves you that impression never leaves you take for instance
#
partition we hear stories about atrocities that hindus and Sikhs have suffered in
#
partition we we have this uh this collection of stories from people people who have suffered they
#
have and they have passed it on to the next generation to the children to the grandchildren
#
they talk about it but the similar stories are also being collected in Pakistan i mean it's not
#
that there there was no massacre of muslims i mean there was massacre of muslims also but when we
#
recall partition or when we talk of partition and how how badly we have suffered we do not take
#
into account that they have suffered equally so it's a collective suffering on both sides
#
but in our narration it's one-sided then this narration goes further on then you talk about uh
#
you bring in the umma you bring in the islamic terrorism you bring in uh appeasement of muslim
#
you bring in so many various factors to create an image of a community which has wronged
#
us wronged the hindus it they have the loyalty to india has always been suspect they have been
#
fifth columnist they are the ones who get the best of the government policies i mean you you see even
#
today uh people actually genuinely believe that muslims get the best of government policies the
#
the policies favor the muslims which is not correct so when you have these kind of narratives coming
#
from so many different sources why won't you believe that these are correct it's very difficult
#
to sift through them and to tell people that look this is not true this is the other side you listen
#
to the other side so when we talk of muslims becoming uh you know getting pushed out the muslims
#
not trying enough in india muslims getting disillusioned or muslims being marginalized
#
or muslims uh getting you know towards some kind of radical islam all all of this is a consequence
#
of uh the realization this is academic uh uh information for a lot of people but for muslims
#
this is something which they have grown up with uh in small towns maybe it was much less when i
#
was growing up i didn't see this in my face but uh in delhi when i came a big city which is supposed
#
to be more modern which is supposed to be more liberal than agra which is like back of beyond
#
i mean not really but in a manner of manner of speaking so when in a big town where people with
#
uh greater exposure have this sort of a perception of muslims where there's no curiosity of finding
#
out about them uh it would automatically put you in a kind some kind of a reductive shell you you
#
feel that maybe i'm not welcome or if i'm welcome then i'm being suspected all the time or you start
#
doubting your own relationships with these people uh that uh whether they really are my friends or
#
they're not or whether they're talking about me behind my back uh whether they gossip about me or
#
whether they make fun of me the way i behave the way i dress or whatever or my my educational
#
background so there are so many things which now then become part of this mindset which we are
#
which we have kind of seen happening not just in the last 10 years but for many many years
#
but now it is in our face because it has been growing so when we talk about what is the future
#
i feel that it is so difficult to actually penetrate this uh disinformation uh it's not even a campaign
#
now it's like a wall of disinformation which has um uh which has been built all around us so it is
#
so difficult to penetrate that but unless you penetrate this how do you tell them to see the
#
right from wrong so the fate of muslims is not their fate alone i mean their fate is so intrinsically
#
linked to the fate of how we go forward how as a nation we go forward are we going to
#
be a modern progressive forward-looking country or are we going to be a country which is always
#
thinking of historic wrongs which need to be righted now so which is why even when i was
#
writing this book i was not thinking in terms of addressing only muslims my idea was that
#
i need to make some kind of an effort that i'm reaching out to people and telling them
#
that if you just have an open mind and give me a little time to read through a few things
#
check for yourself check i mean there are historical evidences available everywhere so
#
you just check for yourself whether what i'm saying what i'm writing is correct or not correct
#
then real thing i mean if you just see around you don't even have to make an effort if you
#
just try and look around and with an open mind you'll see what kind of people are
#
all around you what kind of muslim people are around you you look at the muslims who are
#
working in your offices do they do they fit in the version you have of them in your mind you see the
#
muslim in your college is that the person you think a muslim is supposed to be then you'll
#
realize that actually it is not difficult to break through your perceptions break through your
#
prejudice which you have inherited from your probably your parents or your leaders or yours
#
or you learned in some school you went to and that is the only way we can actually collectively
#
move forward muslims cannot move forward on their own they have to move forward with everybody else
#
no man is an island i'd urge my listeners to read your book because this is really only a
#
small sampling of it everything that we've discussed today and to really discuss your
#
book properly would take 30 hours and not three and i don't want to inflict that on you so i'll
#
move away from the book for a moment and end with some larger questions your thoughts on some larger
#
issues and one is something that i don't have an answer to which is how liberal are we as a society
#
for example at one point i did an episode with jp narayan the politician and i mentioned to him
#
that india is a deeply illiberal society and i hardly need to elaborate on that the way women
#
are treated the way minorities are treated the caste system blah blah blah and he said that if
#
you look at it another way we are a deeply liberal society in terms of our lived life the way that
#
there is a live tolerance there we assimilate so much from so many cultures and all of that
#
and i get it that there is a stand of that also now when i look back on indian history in the last
#
sort of hundred years what what kind of strikes me is that what is happening today while it has come
#
to our politics this sort of othering of muslims and this very toxic polarizing politics while it's
#
come to our politics today while it's gained dominance in our politics today rather it's
#
always been in our culture something that i got a slightly deeper realization of when i did an
#
episode with akshay mukul who's written a brilliant book on the gita press and one sees that you know
#
when you look at the you know their version of the bhagavad gita selling 70 million copies and the
#
kind of things that they sell not just the bhagavad gita which anyway everyone should read it's a great
#
book regardless or whatever but the other kind of stuff that they sell including uh you know much of
#
like you know what i learned from reading his book was how old these campaigns like love jihad and
#
the campaign against cow slaughter and all of those actually are it's not something new it's
#
they've gained dominance in politics recently but they've been around in culture for a long time
#
and my sort of sense and the sense that kind of gives me some hope is that we all contain
#
multitudes so therefore somebody who might on the one hand be drawn by abstract notions of
#
nationalism or india is for the hindus or whatever might also have other aspects to her personality
#
which are much more tolerant and assimilative and therefore uh you know one hopeful hypothesis is
#
that what currently uh the people in power have managed to appeal to and what has currently
#
become the dominant narrative strand is this particular strand but there are other strands
#
which are possible because there are you know we do contain multitudes we are illiberal but at the
#
same time we are liberal what is your take on that you know is there uh you know like someone
#
once said whatever you say of india the opposite is also true so is that something that you'd agree
#
with is that something that you know i i know that we can look all around us and there is a lot to
#
give us the spare are there also things that give you hope and feel that at a cultural level because
#
it has to change at a cultural level first before anything else changes at a cultural level is there
#
hope that say the better angels of our nature so to say can express themselves what is your sense
#
of this uh i i completely agree we are actually there's a huge dichotomy between in our country
#
we have always been very tolerant of outsiders at one level but we have also been xenophobic
#
i mean we have been very liberal in our approach to a lot of issues acceptance of others being one of
#
them tolerance of everybody uh whether it's uh you know even gay i mean now there has been a bit of
#
homophobia i mean there has been a strand of homophobia but there has been acceptance and
#
it's part been part of our culture uh we have been very very reverential about women in certain
#
matters and i'm not talking about worship but uh we have been accepting of women leadership also
#
and not just in politics but in other parts of our lives also whether it's businesses business
#
houses or within the family uh and then we have cases of complete horrific violence against women
#
so we kind of inhabit both worlds but uh coming to your question specific question about what gives
#
you hope i think the recent example of this uh ca nrc protest which uh broke out or if it started
#
in uh Shaheen Bagh and it kind of sprouted in all parts of india and it was uh essentially driven by
#
a muslim's insecurity about uh their place in india whether they'll be declared as
#
non-indians and uh shoved into some uh camp but uh the kind of support that it garnered from
#
all sorts of people even people who were no not known to be activists they came out on the streets
#
to uh support this assault on what they called constitution but assault on constitution again
#
is a abstract vague concept essentially on the ground what was happening was assault on a community
#
based on their religion and you see people who had no familiarity with urdu poetry were singing
#
faiz emad faiz and there were people who had memorized it uh and actually it's not an easy
#
nazm to learn and it's not easy to uh understand also it has a very strong islamic imagery i mean
#
though it's not a religious poem um but it has a strong islamic imagery which goes back to the
#
time of the prophet so uh despite that people were saying that so i think all this shows that
#
there is a sustained pushback in whatever way you know if you're faced with police and police is
#
completely compromised and they're hitting out at you it's very difficult and it's not fair also
#
to expect that people will will continuously be standing against uh this sort of violence
#
but this pushback this uh even emotional agitation which uh happened among a lot of
#
people and non-muslims it's very it's i encouraging is a very condescending word
#
it is something which tells you that uh this rss outreach it's not been a completely successful
#
project that despite uh they're trying to kind of build a narrative in their own way
#
it has not percolated down to the last citizen of the country there are people who are still
#
thinking and resisting because they feel that this is not what uh india is or this is not what india
#
stands for i think this is this has been a huge moment i i'm also not a activist by temperament
#
i'm a very uh quite a sort of a person i like to be on my own i like uh being on my own quietly
#
sitting in one corner and just thinking about things and daydreaming or i'm not a very social
#
person but when all this was happening and i was reading up stuff and i was watching videos it was
#
something which was filling me up with this huge desire to go out there and maybe i should also
#
stand with them and do something maybe uh i'm wasting my life just sitting in my study and
#
doing nothing uh so that sort of momentum which it created i think it has been unparalleled in
#
recent times and this is what is happening now with the farmers protest also so probably things
#
will not change in a hurry but as long as this resistance is there as long as there are people
#
who believe that they need to stand up and be counted whatever the consequences
#
we shouldn't despair no very wise words and and as an aside you mentioned daydreaming now and
#
earlier and it struck me when you mentioned it earlier that i'm also a huge daydreamer to the
#
point that you know when i first read james serbers famous short story the secret life of
#
walter mitty i thought that what is a big deal about this aren't we all like this you know am
#
i the only unusual person who's exactly like this and uh again i've done episodes on the caa and
#
also radically networked societies i'll link those from the show notes which that was a great example
#
of society and the state that also gave me a lot of hope so many young people not just singing
#
fairs but uh you know uh waving the preamble of the constitution on the streets like who would
#
a thunk of something like that a generation back though i wish they had waived the ambedkar version
#
and not the indira gandhi version with the word socialism in it but regardless some preamble is
#
better than no preamble my other question is about politics now at at one point in your book and i'll
#
go back to your book just to sort of get into the subject where you write about indira gandhi's
#
role in this and you say quote the deterioration was due to a large degree to indira gandhi's
#
change style of politics the minorities had begun to move away from the congress i indira gandhi
#
made a bid for the hindu vote to the bjp's disconfiter uh stop quote and i i did an episode
#
with vinesh sitapati recently on uh you know the bjp before uh modi and sha so to say and one of
#
the things that emerges there is that the congress turned to the hindu vote in a big way in the early
#
80s and the bjp had then uh you know when they were formed vajpayee was saying all these flowery
#
things about the gandhi and socialism and all that but they had to respond because the hindu
#
vote was going away and therefore they responded by getting more and more radical and uh you know
#
and it became a race to the bottom and of course the bjp won because uh you know the bottom was
#
not a new place for them uh so uh and and when i look at current times one of the things that
#
disheartens me is that uh that soft hindutva of the congress remains in a lot of what they do they
#
did make kamal nath cm of uh madhya pradesh despite all their posturing on uh twitter they'll do that
#
soft hindutva thing they'll chase that vote you know when the temple judgment came they actually
#
said that uh you know uh it was rajiv gandhi who first opened the gates and all of that you see the
#
amadmi party uh chasing that also with the you know the chanting of the hanuman chalisa after
#
the last election and all of that and i think one realization or at least one perception because it
#
may not be true so i won't call it realization but one perception which all these parties seem
#
to have come to is that you cannot mess with the hindu vote so uh does that put a limit on
#
the politics that can happen on behalf of the marginalized people uh in this country the fact
#
that you know that there is a realization among the parties or there is an perception among the
#
parties because i don't believe it's entirely true but there is a perception among the parties that
#
you cannot piss off the hindu vote which is why even when caa was happening right there in delhi
#
you did not see kejriwal besides making a few token noises really going out there and
#
doing something about it so now obviously it is true as i keep saying on the show that politics
#
is round stream of culture the culture has to change first then the politics will respond
#
but uh you know the culture is complicated it's got multitudes all of that but in a political sense
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is there something that gives you hope someone who will actually fight against this because you know
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despite the random twitter posturing rahul gandhi may do on the ground the congress doesn't give a
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shit they're playing the soft hindutva game so what is your perception of our politics the way
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it is and what it means for muslims see i think uh under the circumstances uh the soft hindutva
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would be acceptable to a large number of people because at least uh uh this doesn't result in
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everyday violence i mean congress has been done doing soft hindutva for decades but it didn't
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result in uh lynching of people and at least there was some token lip service uh after every riot and
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the government or the law enforcement agencies didn't really go after the victims in the way
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they do now i mean they actually frame the victims if a person is getting lynched his
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chashid is filed against his family also so at least this sort of everyday terrorism of civilians
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was not uh there so probably we'll return to this happy coexistence of uh uh increasing uh
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hinduization of indian society which i think it very difficult to resist for the simple reason
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the majority is hindu and uh there is increased religiosity of our public spaces it's not just
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hindu uh religiosity but even muslims are becoming overtly i mean in their wherever
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in numerical strengths they are becoming overtly demonstrative about their identity or any other
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religion so that is something which is uh happening in our society probably some kind of churning is
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required and at some level we'll some point in time we'll realize that it is all stupidity and
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we'll go back to being normal human beings but uh if this fear of if this fear of the street goes
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away then probably more muslims can come out and claim part of this street right now one of the
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reasons why they are comfortable in moving to a ghetto uh though they don't get accommodation
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in a lot of places but even when the accommodation option is available a lot of them prefer to go to
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a ghetto is because they think it's safe for them and their children so once your streets are safer
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your public transportation is safer you'll see more people accessing it more people trying making
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an effort here more people asserting their rights here so that can probably over a period of time
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have a cascading effect on our society and our uh you know the culture as we know it uh and going
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back to what keffi has me had said that if every hindu has one or two muslim friends then if there
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are more muslims in public spaces then probably more hindus can find muslim friends and they'll
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learn to distinguish between what they perceived and what they find
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yeah very wise words i've taken up a lot of your time so i'll end with a final question which has
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nothing to do either with the book or the subject at hand but instead about you i'm always sort of
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odd when an author writes a book like this because i think about just that process how it must have
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changed that person because i think writing a serious book is always also a process of self
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discovery about learning things about yourself and all of that how did this book change you like what
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are the big things you know now that you did not know before the book perhaps or uh you know i mean
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what gave you the impetus to do a book like this and having done a book like this uh you know what
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was the process like was it difficult was it hard at one point you wrote about you know how your
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dad wasn't so comfortable about the personal bits of you know your childhood and all of that but i
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think yesterday on twitter you wrote that he said to you that he's very proud of the way that you've
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written about the whole subject and indeed he should be because what a wonderful book so tell
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me a little bit about this process and what it's meant to you actually i think i was veering towards
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writing this book since i started this magazine called force in 2003 though it was a magazine on
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national security and defense and our focus was on the indian military and external defense at that
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time but that was also the time when this global war on terrorism was underway and we used to meet
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i mean when i used to go and meet people especially from the armed forces i used to hear constantly
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that about terrorism i used to travel a lot to kashmir my early reporting was always from
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kashmir and and i as i became more and more familiar with the insurgency and the antecedents
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of insurgency the problems that the people are facing there there again the vilification which
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we see now in the mainstream the mainland india i started with kashmir i mean that is the people
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have been living with that for years so i i used to write when i used to come back and write my
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article in the magazine i used to bring in these elements about how rumors are spread how
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uh perceptions are deliberately built to actually dehumanize some people i mean uh my early
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earliest experience in kashmir was so traumatizing for me i mean though i was not at the receiving
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end but i was being driven to uh to a separatist leader's house by a local boy who wanted to become
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a journalist i had gone to the press colony to meet some people and one of the journalists said
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that my younger brother also wants to be a journalist and he wants to go to delhi and
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study journalism very young nice enthusiastic boy and he offered to drive me uh to uh this leader's
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house and while uh we were going there uh the car was uh stopped by a crpf guy who uh used his uh
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bait into very violently uh bound the the engine uh the drum and he stopped the car and he spoke to
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this boy very harshly and this boy immediately minutes before was you know very enthusiastically
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telling me his plans and how he was going to finish school now and if i could help him and uh
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uh he was stopped violently and this guy he was scouring in fear and he was shaken up so badly he
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got out of the car and this constable was so insulting i also got out and i said why are you
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talking to him like this and he said madam up to pray here so i felt this everyday humiliation and
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this boy from that point till the rest of my journey he kept quiet he didn't say anything
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because obviously he felt so humiliated in front of somebody he was bragging about he was talking
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about how great he is and how well he's doing in school and so that was my first experience and
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then subsequently i used to see we are traveling someplace and i'm one fancy journalist from delhi
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so nobody would trouble me but uh the driver of the car would be harassed the taxi would be
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harassed at every checkpoint and every hundred meters there would be a checkpoint so that i
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became more uh engaged with their everyday struggle instead of the big picture of uh
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pakistan instigating violence or terrorism into india and while i was engaging with them more and
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more i came across a islamic sect la hadith my first encounter with the islamic sect was in
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kashmir because in delhi i have not been so exposed to the muslims uh or various strands of islam
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because i was not exposed to them when i was growing up in my work my career did not expose
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me to this kind of religious conservatism but it was in kashmir so that is how i got drawn into
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writing you know kind of a clarification about the religion and trying to address both the muslims
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as well as the non-muslims that uh you know this is nonsense what are you talking about
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so jihad was one of the early subjects that i started writing about that you know it's nonsense
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so as in uh gradually i became more and more involved in uh writing on terrorism i realized
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that even my understanding was so limited so i had to do a lot of reading to actually make sense of
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my argument so with this background when i started to write the book when i started to conceptualize
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i my first audience i thought was going to be the muslims and i was going to tell them that
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you're stupid people by uh doing these things to yourself i mean this is not what the religion
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tells you but in the course of researching for it i uh came across uh these examples which i have
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just narrated from kashmir and i realized that this sort of marginalization every day marginalization
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in your your cities in your workplaces uh is actually a reality which i have been blind to
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because maybe my privileged background and the fact that uh in media in any case there is a
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preponderance of muslims so that kind of insulates you from the larger side because you only see
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uh what you see around you i mean you don't really see beyond what is evident to you it's only when
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you sit down and sometimes reflect and then you realize that probably there is another side to
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the story or there is a truth behind uh what is visible to you at that point so that is how the
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process started and my biggest learning and actually it has been a massive learning is about
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my own religion because i did not have uh this great background in uh religious history or
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practices because it was never inculcated in me when i was growing up uh this has been a
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revolution i had never regarded islam as a reasonable and uh you know a balanced sort of uh
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faith uh i was not aware that even today it's like uh the this peaceful conversion to islam as a
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worldwide phenomena i mean when i was looking at these statistics i realized there must be
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something about it which people still find gives them hope so they want to embrace it so uh this
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has been uh learning for me and i feel if i can learn this if i can find this out without making
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without making so much of an effort i mean it just takes a little bit of reading and little bit of
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observation why can't others do that you know i think you're understating it when you say
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little bit of reading and a little bit of observation because you've clearly done a lot
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of both and and you know what i'm also impressed by is that all we spoke about here is really your
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book in this subject you are actually a deep expert in another subject uh you know you found
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it force you've written this wonderful book dragon on our doorstep with uh praveen uh sony completely
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again different subject that's about managing china and india's defense and all of that
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and so you know like your book you contain multitudes as well uh and perhaps uh you know
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one day uh you can show up again on this show and we can discuss some uh other things but meanwhile
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you know i have to thank you first for writing your wonderful book which i think everyone who
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is listening to this should read and secondly for being so incredibly patient with me and
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you know sharing your time and your thoughts with me thank you gazala thank you so much it was
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absolute delight being here thank you
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode hop on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
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and buy gazala wahab's wonderful book born a muslim some truths about islam in india you
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can follow gazala on twitter at gazala wahab you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a
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you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for
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did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support the
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