Which leads some of my fellow Muslims into a sort of self-inflicted second-class citizenship, a result of our guilt by association with the original sin of Partition. “If you don’t like it here in India,” say the crassest of the Hindu bigots, “why don’t you go to Pakistan?” How can you reply, “Because this is my home, I am as entitled to it as you are,” when Jinnah and his followers have given the Hindu bigots their best excuse? When they acted, in the name of all Indian Muslims, to surrender a portion of our entitlement by saying that the homeland of an Indian Muslim is really a foreign country called Pakistan?
These are the feelings that are played upon by the Hindu chauvinists. They build their case on our own concession of failure. And I’m not talking about the extremist crackpots who claim the Taj Mahal was really a Hindu palace, but the seemingly reasonable ones who call on Muslims to “assimilate” properly, to “acknowledge” our Hindu origins and subordinate ourselves to their notion of the Indian ethos. There are always some Muslims who’ll submit to this nonsense, who’ll accept a notion of the Indian ethos that doesn’t include them. But for every Indian Muslim who’s vulnerable to such feelings of guilt, there are two who have outgrown it — who assert, like the Maulana, that India is not complete without us, that we are no less Indian than the most chauvinist Hindu.
But who owns India’s history? Are there my history and his, and his history about my history? This is, in many ways, what this whole Ram Janmabhoomi agitation is about — about the reclaiming of history by those who feel that they were, at one point, written out of the script. But can they write a new history without doing violence to the inheritors of the old?
Once, when I was in college, a fellow got into an argument with me and lost his temper. “You partitioned the country!” he yelled. I interrupted him. “If I’d partitioned the country, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in Pakistan,” I said. “If you mean I’m a Muslim, I plead guilty to the charge of being Muslim. But to no other charge. Muslims didn’t partition the country — the British did, the Muslim League did, the Congress Party did. There are more Muslims in India today than in Pakistan. This is where we belong.” I said it quietly, but the fight died in him then. He spluttered and walked away. I stood my ground. All Indian Muslims must, or they will soon have no ground to stand on.
Pakistanis will never understand the depth of the disservice Jinnah did us, Indian Muslims as a whole, when he made some of us into non-Indians. There are still so many Indians who — out of ignorance as well as prejudice — think of us as somehow different from them, somehow foreign, “not like us.” I was on a train once, with my wife and children, dressed as you see me, in a shirt and trousers, smoking a Wills and reading the Statesman, when my neighbor struck up a conversation about something in the paper — I can’t remember what it was, but it had nothing to do with the communal question. Anyway, towards the end of the conversation, which we had both enjoyed, he introduced himself and asked me my name. “Mohammed Sarwar?” he repeated incredulously. “A Muslim?” As if Mohammed Sarwar could be anything but a Muslim! “Yes,” I replied, tightly, defensively. He waved a sheepish hand, the gesture taking in my garb, my wife in a floral-patterned salwar-kameez, my little boys in shorts and tee-shirts reading Amar Chitra Katha comics. “But you’re not like them at all!”
Not like them at all. I began to say something, but was suddenly overcome by the sheer futility of the attempt. It was bad enough that he had labeled me, consigned his erstwhile conversational partner to the social ghetto of minority status. But I had surprised him, perhaps even disappointed him, by failing to conform to his stereotype of my minority- hood. As a Muslim, I had to look different; perhaps my forehead should bear the indentation of banging it on the floor five times a day in namaz; my wife should no doubt be in a burqa, shielded from infidel eyes; my boys should wear the marks of their circumcisions like a badge. Instead there we were, indistinguishable from any other middle-class Indian family on the train. I looked him directly in the eye till he became uncomfortable enough to avert his gaze. I am a Muslim, I wanted to say to him, but I will never allow your kind to define what kind of Muslim I am.
Yes, there’s prejudice in this country. I know I’ve had a privileged upbringing, an elite education, and I’m now in a position of intellectual authority. I’ve been conscious of how important it is for me never to forget that isn’t that way for millions of my fellow Muslims. Indian Muslims suffer disadvantages, even discrimination, in a hundred different ways that I may never personally experience. If I’m ever in danger of forgetting that, there’ll be someone like that man on the train to remind me.
And yet, Mr. Diggs, I love this country. I love it not just because I was born here, as my father and mother were, as their parents before them were, not just because their graves have mingled their bones into the soil of this land. I love it because I know it, I have studied its history, I have traveled its geography, I have breathed its polluted air, I have written words to its music. India shaped me, my mind, my tastes, my friendships, my passions. The fact that I bow my head towards the Kaaba five times a day — after years in college when I did not pray even three times a year — does not mean I am turning away from my roots. I can eat a masala dosa at the Coffee House, chew a paan afterwards and listen to Ravi Shankar playing raag durbari, and I celebrate the Indian-ness in myself with each note. I hear the Muslim Dagar brothers sing Hindu devotional songs, and then I attend a qawwali performance by one of our country’s greatest exponents of this Urdu musical form, who happens to be a Hindu, Shankar Shambhu, and I am transported as he chants the long list of Muslim pirs to whom he pays devotional tribute before his rendition. This is India, Mr. Diggs!
I was a student in 1971 when the Pakistani generals proclaimed a jihad, a holy Islamic war, against India. This was in the war that would create Bangladesh, another Muslim state in what had been East Pakistan. A jihad, they said, but my chest swelled with pride that the Indian Air Force commander in the northern sector was my classmate’s father, Air Marshal Latif, later Air Chief Marshal. What sort of jihad would the Pakistanis conduct against this distinguished Muslim?
I take my children to the latest Bollywood blockbuster and laugh as the Muslim hero chases the Hindu heroine around the tinsel tree. I avidly follow Test cricket and cheer for my hero, perhaps the best batsman in the world, Mohammed Azharuddin, and I cheer for him because he is on my team, the Indian team, not because he is Muslim — or at least, not only because he is Muslim. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me when he scored a century for India against Pakistan, in Pakistan. One day he will captain India, Mr. Diggs, and he will make every Indian proud because no one will notice, despite his name, that he is a Muslim.