CS: Muslims wear skull caps Hindus vermillion

Hindu-Muslim identities in South Asia ought to be seen through the clichéd prism of social faultlines that exist in both communities Jawed Naqvi Delhi 

In conventional wisdom promoted by Hindi movies — most are actually in Urdu — the rapist is usually a Hindu, the pimp is likely to be a Christian and the whore often enough a paan-chewing Muslim. In movies depicting war with Pakistan, there is inevitably the loyal lower-ranking Muslim officer, a sidekick to the Hindu hero who together hunt a villain or a traitor who could be a Hindu or a Muslim officer. At this point, religion doesn't matter since all secular precautions have been taken most notably by describing the Muslim officer's patriotism.

But have you ever seen a Muslim woman rickshaw-puller in real life? There are several in the Nizamuddin area of Delhi. They cart piles of rubbish in the baking heat. Just one look and a complete worldview based on popular stereotypes would collapse. Far from wearing a burqa, this woman can barely afford a set of clean clothes. She paddles the rickshaw under the full gaze of the mullahs of Nizamuddin West. They don't care about her difficult life. But they would be furious if she took a boyfriend or husband outside her faith or worse if she tried to divorce him. That's when the mullahs go for the kill.

The Congress and the BJP, India's main parliamentary groups, nurse the mullahs for a reason. They have given them a potent platform in the Muslim Personal Law Board to promote stereotypes so that they can make temples and mosques the real agenda, the Big Fight as it were of nationalism. One of the advantages is that the entire damned country would be discussing them and not the annual neo-con budget.

Now do an experiment. Try to draw a woman like the one described above and try to draw a mullah. We know roughly how a mullah would look. But how does one draw a Muslim woman who doesn't wear a burqa and who pedals rickshaws for a living? This is where the problem of stereotypes meets its most understated challenge.

Shankar, the cartoonist, was once having great difficulty drawing Nehru until one day he saw him without the Gandhi cap and the bald pate did the trick. How does one draw an Indian Muslim man? For that matter, how does one draw his Hindu counterpart? The government seems to have found a way.

Often enough in official posters on family planning depicting the happy Indian bouquet, a Muslim man would be shown sporting a trimmed beard and wearing a fez cap, if not a skull cap. The Hindu man's forehead would be smudged with vermillion, though in extreme cases a clean-shaven head crowned by a sacramental tail would also define him.

Saadat Hasan Manto used the difficulty in identifying a Muslim from a Hindu male in one of his more poignant tales from the Partition, when a crowd of killers is horrified after looking at the dead man's genitals — they had lynched one of their own. Of course, even circumcision is not an exclusively Muslim requirement. Jews and some Christians also follow the painful custom.

There is a famous baul song by Lalan Fakir in which he blasts not just the ritual of circumcision but also the thread worn by upper caste Hindu men as essentially a reflection of the domineering male ego. "Even if you could tell a Muslim from a Hindu by circumcision or the Brahminical thread, how would you tell the difference between their women?" the minstrel wonders aloud.

Had we understood Lalan Fakir, there would be no Partition in 1947. In a sense what happened then was a vertical division of India into three arbitrary time zones. Millions were required to adjust their lives to the new meridian of longitude they were forced to accept as their own. In the tragic melee that followed, many remained glued to the old wall clock that often had no hands to indicate the real time, like a scene from Ingmar Bergman's surreal Wild Strawberries.

Most of our discourse on Partition is filtered through the so-called Hindu-Muslim prism. This conveniently imbues the two groups with identities that are used to describe their jostling for equal space in post-colonial India. But a less popular and more accurate way of analysing the same reality could be to sift the vertical separation from the horizontal reality, the social faultlines that existed then and fester today in India and Pakistan. This approach will help expose the myth of Muslim and Hindu identities, the truth of which can be felt palpably in the present mess confronting the two countries. Since we regard the uprising of 1857 as the first conscious step towards our collective quest for freedom, in which Hindus and Muslims were explained as equal partners, it would be fair to begin the scrutiny of this methodology at the very beginning, in1857.

 In some ways, Begum Hazrat Mahal of Oudh was one of the leading women rebels in British India, but thanks to wonderful work being done by historians in Aligarh, there are less flattering accounts to give a new perspective on her approach towards her subjects. Without meaning to diminish Hazrat Mahal's heroic battle against colonialism, let us quote from an original document, a proclamation by her son, Birjis Qadar, that carries the full authority of the Begum.

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has come out with a collection of proclamations issued by the rebel leaders. Documented by Dr Iqbal Hussain of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), it is a must read for students of social history on both sides of the border. Birjis Qadar (Wali of Oudh-Awadh) urges his subjects in a proclamation (June 25, 1858) that his government respected the right of religion, honour, life and property, in that order, something the British ostensibly didn't. Then he explains his claim. "Everyone follows his own religion (in my domain). And enjoys respect according to their worth and status. Men of high extraction, be they Syed, Sheikh, Mughal or Pathan, among the Mohammedans, or Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaish or Kayasth, among the Hindoos, all these retain the respectability according to their respective ranks. And all persons of a lower order such as a Sweeper, Chamar, Dhanook or Pasi cannot claim equality with them."

Prince Birjis Qadar twists the knife deeper: "The honour and respectability of every person of high extraction are considered by (the British) equal to the honour and respectability of the lower orders. Nay, compared with the latter, they treat the former with contempt and disrespect. Wherever they go they hang respectable persons to death, and at the instance of the Chamar, force the attendance of a nawab or a rajah, and subject him to indignity." This is the reality the Partition discourse tends to overlook. How much was the support of the Ajlaaf Muslims and the Ashraaf Muslims — the lower and upper crusts — to the Muslim League and the Congress?

So this is the state of play about Muslims in India. They are different from one another -- from Tamil Nadu to Bihar, from West Bengal to Gujarat, not to forget Kashmir. They are as inexorably divided like the Hindu caste order into exclusive, hidebound units. However, if one accepts this basis to describe reality, one would have to give them reservations such as Dalit Muslims. And this, neither the Congress nor the BJP, or even their protegés in the Muslim Personal Law Board, would be prepared to accept.

They have kept a whole lot of Indian Muslims from receiving the benefits of affirmative action because the only Dalit they want to accept is what they call a Hindu Dalit. Surely, they use religious categories to exclude Muslims and Christians from the grudging benefits that accrue, thanks to our collective shame.

 The writer is India correspondent of Pakistani daily Dawn