But You Don't Look Like a Muslim

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  Upon their return, the pilgrim-narrators – be it of written accounts or orally-transcribed ones - were held in high esteem. Invariably, they added the prefix Haji to their name, regaled their friends and neighbours with ‘stories’ of their travels. Having seen a bit of the world and its ways, they were often called in to arbitrate upon matters both secular and religious.

  The Haj is one of the five pillars or arakan of Islam; the others being namaz, roza, zakat and monotheism. It is obligatory for every Muslim – man and woman – to perform the Haj at least once in their lifetime provided of course they are healthy and can afford it. In this context, the whole business of Haj subsidy for Indian Muslims acquires a peculiar significance. The Muslims of India go for the Haj through the Haj Committee which operates under the Ministry of External Affairs. Like several other bureaucratic institutions, it too is a relic of the Raj. In colonial times, the pilgrims went to Haj on ships that were owned by British companies, the fares – which were quite steep—went to a British cartel. After Independence, Indians either went by ship or, increasingly, by air. Those who went by air, until 2010 – that is, for the past sixty-odd years – only travelled by Air India, as the national carrier was the only one allowed to fly the Indian Hajis to Jeddah. The Haj subsidy provided by the Government of India was substantial and, to my mind, most unnecessary. Islam is very clear that only those Muslims who can afford to go on the Haj should do so. While the right-wingers talk about Muslim appeasement, many voices from within the Muslim community too spoke about removing the subsidy as it went to Air India rather than directly to pilgrims. With an eye on its political implications, the government has been wary of doing away with it altogether, though from 2010 Saudi Airlines won a bid to also carry pilgrims. The total number of Indian pilgrims, however, is decided by the Saudi Arabian authorities. Once in Arabia, all pilgrims have to go through a guide or muallim, a Saudi national who takes a fee that is non-negotiable. A double bench of the Supreme Court of India ordered the government to progressively reduce the subsidy from 2012 onwards and eventually do away with it by 2022. Like many other shibboleths, if only the Muslim community had themselves come forward and declared that they don’t want the Haj subsidy instead of the apex court having to step in!

  10

  BUSTING THE MYTH OF

  THE MONOTONOUS MONOCHROMATIC MUSALMAN

  ONCE, NOT VERY LONG AGO, I had the opportunity to travel to three Muslim countries in the span of a few months – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. This, I must confess, proved to be a mixed blessing. While travel for the sake of leisure or a journey into the unknown is a uniquely uplifting experience, travelling for work with colleagues or as part of a delegation can be a burden sometimes. To top it all, as an Indian Muslim travelling to Muslim countries one carries the weight of an additional cross: that of religious versus national identity. What is one to do in such situations?

  Does one wear one’s identity – as Muslim Indian or Indian Muslim – on one’s sleeve? Does one drop, or at the very least camouflage, one’s religious identity in favour of a national identity, especially when the delegation is an official one – as in the case of the trip to Saudi Arabia? Even if one were to leave aside religion for a minute what about culture – that sorcerer’s bag of mixed tricks? What does one do with the cultural affinities one spots at every turn, links in a centuries-old chain that can make one cringe with embarrassment or feel fit to burst with pride – often within the space of a few minutes? Let’s say you leave aside religion and culture for a bit, there is still the vexing issue of history and a shared past. What is one to do with so many conflicting, clamorous calls? Too many questions, and very few answers, or at least none that leave me feeling entirely sanguine at the end of my travels.

  What does emerge, however, from these three trips is a valuable personal discovery. In fact, several equally valuable, discoveries. The foremost being that while we in India have our troubles and vexations, others in our immediate neighbourhood are no better off. If there is consolation in comparing notes, clearly in India we have not done too badly for ourselves by placing our national trajectory on a firm footing. By holding on to the staff of secularism, even if sometimes it means doing no more than paying lip service, we have managed to keep many of those demons at bay that today plague those among our neighbours who made religion the cornerstone of their national identity. Also, our Constitution, with its rock-solid checks and balances, is perhaps the finest gift, bequeathed to us by our founding fathers. A well-crafted, meticulous Constitution, particularly one that safeguards the rights of the minorities, is clearly no less precious than the Gifts of the Magi, gifts that these three countries under consideration are bereft of, not to mention a fully functioning democracy.

  Then there is Islam, the common thread in these countries, and common to us in India too. The common perception of Islam as a monolith, unmarked by internal differences and unrelieved by regional or local variations is as untrue here as it is in India. I was struck afresh each time by the regional, ethnic, linguistic differences and the pride people take in their distinctness - be it of food, dress, language, idiom, custom, in each country. I met people of various inclinations and denominations - Shia, Sunni, liberal, fanatic, tolerant, intolerant, Wahabi, Hanafi … the Monotonous Monochromatic Musalman is, quite clearly, a myth. In Pakistan, for instance, people have stopped talking about muhajirs and locals. Time has a great way of introducing new inflections in old questions. When asked, ‘Where are you from?’ the question is understood to mean ‘Which part of Pakistan are you from?’

  Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan – an Islamic state torn between dictatorship and democracy, a kingdom of warring tribes cobbled together and united under the banner of Unitarian Islam, and a Muslim Republic recovering from the ravages of four decades of internecine warfare, respectively – each carry an additional ‘M’ to their Muslim identities. Interestingly enough, this additional M, unlike the M for Muslim tag, evokes a spectrum of reactions, ranging from mirth, ridicule, fear, dismay, even shame. In the case of Pakistan, it is M for Military; it is everywhere and its presence is pernicious and all pervasive. In Saudia, the M is for Moral Police or the Organization for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. These self-appointed custodians of moral propriety can accost and question unaccompanied women and haul people into mosques at prayer times. During my visit they had arrested a Filipino nurse on charges of ‘immorality’ as she was ‘caught’ dining with a male colleague. (Saudi law does not permit mixing of sexes in public places. Unrelated men and women caught at a restaurant can be punished with four months in jail and one hundred lashes, the same punishment applies to a man and woman found in a state of khulwa or seclusion.) In Afghanistan, the M is for the Mullah who, while no longer as powerful as he was during the heyday of the Taliban, continues to wield authority and exercise great charismatic powers at least upon illiterate, impoverished, unemployed youth.

  Feared and hated in equal measure, these three Ms have spawned a sub-culture of jokes. Everywhere I went, I sought out people who have their own favourite M jokes to tell. The one I heard in Pakistan about the military is not just hugely funny but illustrative of a people’s ability to laugh at those who seek to subvert their civil rights: A group of high-ranking military officials is sent to a certain European country on a weapon-buying spree. They sleep through a presentation on the latest missile technology and when the floor is opened for Q&A, one General wakes up, rubs his eyes and asks groggily: ‘M-16? Whazzat? I want it … if it is a corner plot.’

  At the end of my travels, as I return home I am reminded of this couplet by the noted Urdu poet Shahryar:

  Iss natije pe pahunchte hain sab hii aakhir mein

  Haasil-e-sair-e-jahaan kuchch nahin, hairani hai.

  In the end everyone comes to the conclusion

  A voyage of the world reveals nothing but surprise.

  Mingled with my surprise at the sights and sounds is something altogether unexpected; t
here is the heartening discovery that history is a better glue than religion. The ties that bind are ties of a shared past and the persistent feeling of déjà vu and empathy I felt all through the travels through these countries had more to do with a common past than a common religion.

  II

  THE MATRIX OF CULTURE

  1

  MEMORIES OF SUMMERS PAST

  ‘APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH,’ wrote T.S. Eliot. It mixes memory with desire. For those of us living in upper India, it is an especially cruel month for it marks the onset of a harsh summer. As we cower in our air-conditioned rooms and quail at the prospect of walking the short distance from our homes and offices to shops, cars or malls (all, obviously, air-conditioned), the lutf or maza of summer seems to have leached out of our lives. While no doubt the bogey of global warming is to be blamed for playing havoc with climatic changes worldwide, to be fair it isn’t as though summers were not harsh, or winters not biting, once upon a time in our part of the world. Indeed, they were. But they were made tolerable – even enjoyable - because people had better coping mechanisms, and food, no doubt, played a big role in helping people cope with the vagaries of nature. Possibly because food and lifestyles were far more inextricably linked then than now.

  Marcel Proust wrote an epic novel in seven parts called À la recherche du temps perdu (translated as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past) where he dwelt on the notion of involuntary memory and how food is connected to one’s past, especially one’s childhood. In a passage that has made the Madeleine cakes immortal, he describes the petite cakes he remembers tasting as a child when he would visit his Aunt Leonie in the small town of Combray. One day when his mother offers him the same cake, he is transported to his childhood; this is how he records his gustatory journey into the past:

  She … sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’ … I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body … An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses … I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

  The purpose of this extended introduction is to recapture my own half-buried, half-forgotten memories of summer days of long ago triggered recently by a sip of aam-ras made by my mother. One spoonful of that warm gruel of semolina, sugar and chunks of unripe mango spiked with cloves was enough to transpose me to my grandparents’ home - 1 Shibli Road, Aligarh – where my siblings and I used to spend the better part of the two months of our annual school holidays. The days seem a blur of blistering loo winds, mangoes kept in tubs of cold water and devoured by the dozen and afternoons spent gossiping with a gaggle of female relatives who lolled about on white chandni-covered takhts in rooms redolent with the smell of wet earth wafting from water-drenched khus ki tatti. Forbidden to go out, we consumed vast amounts of kharbooze ke beej, kakdi and leechis in between raucous games of Ludo and Carrom. The ladies would bestir themselves only at the time of the asr namaz in the early evening to bathe, pray and return resplendent in their crinkled cotton dupattas trailing mini clouds of the attar of rose or sandal. In their absence, the minions would have gotten to work: spraying the courtyard with water to ‘settle’ the dust, setting up a huge rattling ‘pedestal fan’ that provided a constant monotonous backdrop to the evening’s proceedings (whose drone is as intertwined with my memory as the scent of damp earth emanating from the brick-lined courtyard), plucking handfuls of the fragrant mogra, bela and motiya flowers that grew all along the courtyard and piling them on the chowkis. Someone would fill water from the hand-pump into the clay matkas, putting gleaming upturned katoras to cover the mouths from dust and flies. There being no RO water filters back then, I can’t remember being any the worse for drinking groundwater stored in earthenware pitchers!

  By five or so, the family would gather in the verandah (or the poetic-sounding baramda as it was called). Amma, my grandmother, would hold court in her chintz gharara and white chikan kameez with a chuna-hua dupatta looped around her neck as the rest of us gathered to pay obeisance and enjoy the fruits of plenty she knew how to gather with great gustatory intuition. Looking back, I marvel at the native wisdom of the women of her generation who knew, instinctively, how best to use fresh, seasonal produce. Every morning, shortly after breakfast, she would open her ledger to write down the hisaab, proceed to the pantry to portion out the provisions, then send someone to the local market to fetch whatever fruits and vegetables that were in season. This would be supplemented by what grew in her own garden – guavas would be turned into marmalade, lime into copious amounts of squash, unripe mangoes into chutney and murabba, and the gummy lasaunda (aka labheda) into a deliciously vinegary pickle. Early lessons in gastronomic improvisations were given when we, as children, played a rustic version of ‘house-house’ called hundculiya. Boys and girls were encouraged to cook rice, dal or vegetables in tiny earthen pots and shown how two bricks and a fistful of dry twigs could turn into a cooking stove, and chipped enamel plates and a bunch of mismatched spoons could be perfectly acceptable kitchenware.

  However, looking back, those summer evenings of extended bingeing must have required long hours of preparation. In an age innocent of the Tetra Pak when everything was cut, chopped, pounded, prepared fresh, when ice was bought in large slabs from the bazaar and stored on a bed of sawdust, when fruits where not peeled but washed in ‘pinky’ (a solution of potassium permanganate), when the ladies of the house chose ingredients known for their thandi taseer or cooling properties, when ice creams were hand-churned in a labour-intensive bucket-with-a-handle contraption that clanked and groaned with every crank, I marvel at the industry and ingenuity of our culinary traditions.

  Coming back to the evening repast, first, a sherbet would be brought in. Usually made of phalsa, a tart-sweetish purple berry that seems to have disappeared from urban India, it came spiked with rock salt and crushed ice. Some days there would be the glutinous bel ka sherbet but that was a strictly acquired taste for city dwellers like us - as was sattu, a homemade concoction of coarsely ground pulses and cereals that for all its high-fibre goodness tended to be thick and gruelly and instead of sliding smoothly down one’s throat needed a fair bit of gulping and gagging. The sherbet would be followed by an array of goodies: kharbooze ka falooda (melon halves with the insides scooped out and the fleshy part mixed with crushed ice and a dash of ground cinnamon and sugar); chane ki dal ki kabooli (soaked and parboiled dal mixed with finely chopped onion, tomato, green chilli, coriander, salt and ground, roasted cumin); dahi ki phulkiyan (small chickpea dumplings dunked in whipped curd, seasoned with crushed garlic, roasted cumin, red chilli powder and salt); and tiny aloo ke samose eaten with chutney made from mint leaves and raw mango. Of course, there would be tea to follow but who cared for that in the heat?

  As the younger children played energetic games of hide-and-seek and I Spy (always called ‘Ice-pice’), the older ones would be put to task: either cleaning out the paan-daan, rinsing out the muslin cloth for keeping the paan damp, occasionally even cutting the betel nut with the sarota at great risk of having a finger or two chopped off. The more industrious ones strung the bela, champa, mogra flowers into tiny garlands which would then be wound around the matkas. My memory of those summer evenings is redolent with the tremulous smell of these summer flowers. And of drinking water in silver katoras, water that smelt faintly of bela flowers, the same bela flowers that my mother wore braided in her hair and studded in her earlobes like ornaments.

  How distant that world seems now, yet how real, still, in my memories!

  2

  GHARELU DAWAT: CELEBRATING AN OXYMORON

  RECENTLY, TO CELEBRATE MY DAUGHTER getting full marks in a half-term exam, we went out fo
r a meal to her favourite restaurant. Eating over-priced under-cooked pasta, I was struck by the fact that family celebrations used to be markedly different during my growing up years. On a similar occasion (though I must confess I have never got full marks in a math test in my entire life!) or any other special occasion such as winning a prize or one or the other of the siblings doing something out of the ordinary at school, or even to celebrate a birthday or an anniversary, we would have what my mother called a gharelu dawat (family feast). No one knew the lineage of this oxymoron nor who had first coined it; the expression had been in use in the family ever since I can recall. What is more, no one cared about etymological niceties since a gharelu dawat was always an occasion for good cheer.

  A gharelu dawat was an altogether different kettle of fish from a real dawat. For a real dawat, a professional chef would be hired to cook banquet foods such as biryanis, qormas, shahi tukde and zarda pulao, a kababi would be engaged to set up his angeethi to make kababs, and a nanbai would be on hand to churn out rumali roti, naan, sheermal and other kinds of breads on the spot. Only a special occasion merited these elaborate preparations, such as a wedding, a mehndi, a milad, a roza-kushai, a ghusl-e-sehat or something that involved large numbers of guests. A gharelu dawat, on the other hand, was meant either for the immediate family or at best a guest or two who did not expect elaborate arrangements. A singular quality about gharelu dawat was that it did not require the taking out of ‘good’ crockery or cutlery, the sort kept aside for ‘aane jaane wale log’ (outsiders), nor did it entail heavy-duty cleaning up of the house or its inhabitants. Though occasionally, my mother who has a great sense of fun, would dress up for one of her gharelu dawats and get the rest of us to follow suit; it felt odd but good to be dressed up to the nines when there was no else around except family to see our finery, and it added zest to the entire proceedings, too!