by M G Vassanji
On the way to the village by bus, we pass dozens of loud honking buses racing to the city full of students shouting, “Inqalab Zindabad,” Long live the Revolution!
We stop at a town where my host teaches at a small college. It dispenses B.A.s. A somewhat bleak place, looking more like a slum apartment building—a block with dirty yellow paint, no grounds, many windows. I am taken to the principal, introduced in the most effusive terms. The office: long empty tables arranged in a U, at the head of which sits the weary-looking principal with no work in front of him. He’s tired simply being there. He’s not very old, has been recently transferred here from the city. His is a government job. At one end of the almost empty room are bundles of paper, tied with string and piled up; I understand from a similar pile at the University of Kerala, though upon a table there, that this is the filing system, a century old, perhaps even regressed since then. The only prominent items in the principal’s room: a row of five formal photographs of former principals on one wall; on another wall, Gandhi, Nehru, and Swami Vivekananda. As I sit somewhat uncomfortably at a table, there takes place a long exchange between Hussein and the principal. The outcome is that the principal signs five copies of a letter which turns out to grant three weeks’ unpaid leave to Hussein for having participated in the conference in Orissa. Hussein is very disappointed; he had been granted permission, commended for his initiative to further his qualifications; and now this bureaucratic betrayal. He had hoped my presence would convince the principal to cooperate, but that strategy has obviously failed. He has only lost face.
After lunch—the students have filled up most of the restaurants—we take another bus, to Hussein’s local town, Varkala. Here he picks up his scooter parked at a friend’s house, and we ride it to his village ten miles away. He parks outside a shop and takes me home.
The village consists of a small row of shops on one side of the road, a few side streets, and across the road some houses scattered next to the beach. To get to his house, which is on the beach side, we walk along a narrow path at the edge of an aqueduct said to be built by the British, a short stream at which some womenfolk are washing. At the end of the path we walk up onto the bank, cutting across an uneven landscape full of coconut trees and other vegetation, until we reach the house. In the old days, Hussein explains, one was considered to have a lower status if one’s house was close to the highway.
The coconuts, he says, bring in one thousand rupees a month, a considerable sum. The land belongs to his wife through her father, the adjacent land with an empty house belongs to his sister, who is in the Gulf.
The traditional occupations of the village are selling copra and coir—both coconut products—and fishing. As we look upon the Arabian Sea, the beach is empty, there are a few boats in the distance. They are from a Christian village up the road, Hussein says. Nowadays the fishermen of his village—generally men of over forty years in age—fish from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., and collect some two hundred rupees, of which they spend half on occasional household expenses, half on drink.
And yes, a truth emerges: most young men are away working in the Gulf at low-status jobs but earning high wages by local standards. Most of the wives and children remain behind. The men return once a year on leave. A lot of money comes in (the monthly wage there is two thousand dirhams, or sixteen thousand rupees; a lecturer here makes five thousand rupees) and gets squandered on useless consumer items. Any problems? You can’t buy fish, he says. You can’t buy land. But people build larger houses, “better than you would see in New York.” A mosque has almost been completed on his wife’s property, using donations from Gulf-earned money. It is an impressive, towering, gleaming white structure with domes and arches, like some alien spaceship looking upon, from the top of a hill, the ramshackle village.
Through this hill site, the local British administration had started building a tunnel. But when the workers reached a certain spot, now on the grounds of the mosque, they came upon a body in sitting posture; the land around was soaked in blood. The tunnel was quickly diverted. A shrine was later constructed where the body was buried. The mosque, almost completed, stands at the site of a landslide. But the land, according to local belief, is hallowed and free from the danger of another slide—which the unbeliever, however, has no hesitation in predicting.
I am interested in the history of the community—their conversion to Islam, their folklore regarding this event, their indigenous responses to Islam. Muslim communities in Gujarat, Sindh, Punjab, even Bengal, I am aware, have their own folklore and songs, their saints and shrines. There are long syncretistic traditions in those parts. The subject has interested me, has become a passion, and so I ask my questions brashly. Hussein is somewhat at a loss—it’s something he doesn’t quite know about. He takes me to the mullah at the new mosque.
The mullah, in white robe and cap, has a black beard and appears quite young when one begins to focus on his face, which is very fair. To answer my question, he tells us the story of the first Muslims who came to Kerala, at about the time of the Prophet (in the sixth century). As these visitors arrived on shore, the local people offered them coconuts to eat. Instead of straightaway accepting the gift, the shaikhs asked the people if the coconuts belonged to them to give away. The locals were impressed by this response. Are you from the Prophet across the sea? they asked. Yes, the visitors replied. What is the proof, then? At this, the Arabs pointed up above to the sky. When the locals looked up, they saw the crescent moon broken into two, a sign which according to Islamic legend had appeared to the Prophet himself in Arabia. And so Islam spread in Kerala.
I ask the mullah about local Muslim literature, in Malayalam. He speaks of translations from Arabic. In them, he says, nothing has been changed since the time of the Prophet. To him that obviously makes them purer, better. Arabic Islam is the purest; next comes the translated one. Indigenous responses are adulterated. I cannot help thinking that unless these Muslims have their own responses to their lives here, they will always be out of the mainstream, watching wistfully as their neighbours carry out their exuberant celebrations and festivals. Many of these festivals, like Onam, as Hussein tells me, they do still celebrate. But what do they mean to them?
Hussein is as aware of my dissatisfaction as he is flattered by my interest; and disconcerted by his ignorance. The story we heard about the arrival of the Arabs was set elsewhere on the Kerala coast, it does not say anything about his own community here. After tea, therefore, he takes me around. We scooter through town and countryside looking for someone Hussein says who knows some village history—the first conversions, the local lore, and so on. We are directed to the Rotary Club, a shack, which is closed. We drive around, and he shows me some of the newer houses outside the town, built out of Gulf money. We alight at the town centre, inquire about the party we are looking for, but nobody knows where he is. The town is quite lively in the evening, buses plying the road, dropping passengers off, men standing around, everyone known to each other. At around eight, all go home, as do we.
This search for local Muslim history and lore has turned out not only fruitless but also somewhat disquieting. Hussein promises to send me some information by mail. That very promise says a lot. I suspect the conversions in this area to be recent, class and caste reactions, a seeking out to break the bonds of ancient barriers—and what better way than to deny everything and start afresh? But what to replace the everyday culture with? What songs to sing?
We return to the village on the scooter, my heart in my mouth, a bus in front of us and another behind. The shops are closed. Hussein puts the scooter in an empty store he rents, pulling out the door panels in the same way they did in my grandmother’s shop in Dar es Salaam long ago.
Hussein’s wife is a shy woman, and bigger than him. She hardly talks, makes gestures to him from another room that he easily translates for me. Even as we eat at the table, he and I, the food appears from the kitchen area brought by the son. I sense a certain embarrassment in my host.
(To eat with the hand: one only has to do it once to feel comfortable with it again, it is quite natural, easily reacquired. But there is no point in trying to eat curd and condiments—served in their separate plates—the way they do here, in one swift motion following the helping of rice and chicken, with the quickness of an assembly-line operation, the flick of a hand or finger; and trying to roll down a boll of rice to the palm and involving the whole hand is a habit that’s been lost for more than a generation and had better stay that way.)
By this time I’m wearing a lunghi and borrowed shirt; we sit watching news; he shows me paragraphs from Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope.
To get a job in a Muslim college, Hussein tells me, he was asked to give a fifteen-thousand-rupee “donation” to the institution, which he could not afford. So he had worked in an office until he found a job at a government college. Now he’s doing a Ph.D. on the work of Michael Ondaatje. He’s desperately looking for a copy of The English Patient. Ondaatje, I tell myself, should feel honoured to be the object of study of this dedicated academic who’s just lost three weeks’ pay in pursuit of his study.
The older son is in college, studying botany—not out of interest but because he had no choice. A more popular subject would have required an unaffordable “donation.” The middle child, a girl, goes to the village school, where the language of instruction is Malayalam. The youngest, a boy, goes three miles away to an English medium school and to perhaps better prospects than his sister. All the children have Malayalam names, unlike their father and mother, who have Arabic ones; one begins to wonder.
Morning: crows crowing, rooster calling; waves pounding on the shore as the tide comes in barely a hundred yards away; coconut leaves rustling; a song on the radio welcoming dawn, another comparing dawn to the child Krishna. A young rooster makes bold to walk in through the open front door, looks left and right, walks out.
It is a beautiful, peaceful, rural scene. My host contemplates leaving it, he’s told me, wants to sell it to buy a house in urban Trivandrum. He feels embarrassed by this rural setting, the village life. He has academic aspirations. How long, I tell myself, before someone builds a tourist hotel here?
Morning ablutions: cleaning teeth with charcoal powder, the kind we bought back home for economic reasons, called Monkey Brand, made in India. A shred of coconut leaf to clean the tongue.
A frog leaps out of the bathroom.
It is not easy, after so many years, to get used to getting up from a crouch in the privy.
In the morning the wife, still extremely shy, comes to say goodbye. It’s all smiles and shakes of the head. She asks me to enquire to my mother, my wife—meaning, in local usage, convey regards to them.
While Bombay Burns: The Calcutta Intellectuals
Bombay burns, the newspapers tell us. Riots rampage through the city. My hosts there have sent a message to Trivandrum: Don’t send him. If he comes, it’s at his own risk. My hosts in Baroda, Gujarat: Under no circumstances come before the kite festival (which could be used as a pretext for violence). I go to Delhi by plane.
It is a singular piece of irony for me that my father saw Bombay only through a porthole; I see it also from a porthole, of a plane, as we fly over it. I see it desolate, the streets and highways empty, except for a few places with thin, tentative crowds.
From Delhi to Calcutta I also travel by plane, and learn that the express train on which I had originally made my booking has crashed, with a few people dead.
A local communist party official has been murdered—the body had lain outside in the street the whole night before police arrived—so traffic on the way to the airport is at a standstill. My host Pranab has had to walk part of the way to fetch me. It takes us a while to get a taxi, and a long time to get to town.
Calcutta: one has heard so much about it. But this stop is going to be short, I’m here only because I made a prior arrangement to come. Smoky, foggy, wet, grimy streets that seem weirdly Dickensian. Cabbies who have their own ideas about where they want to go, so that where you go, and if you go anywhere at all, seems to depend on their whims and convenience. Nowhere else have I seen cab drivers so reluctant.
Calcutta is the intellectual capital. Book fairs here are attended by the hundreds of thousands. This is the state of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. At Independence a large part of Bengal broke away to form East Pakistan, later Bangladesh. Pranab is a professor of literature and has translated African writers into Bengali. Middle aged and somewhat ailing, he is simple, modest, and generous, but possessed with an unsettling intransigence in his views, a readiness to condemn. He arranges a meeting for me with fellow intellectuals.
A smoke-filled room, young people sitting on the floor, the scene very reminiscent of a campus radical group of the sixties or early seventies. If the mood in the rest of the country is resigned fatalism—What is happening to the country? Times are bad, but they will go away—here it is, There is no hope. It is finished. The end is coming. We told you so!
They are the opposition. They have always been the opposition. A young professor commands the room, rake-thin and dark, smoking incessantly, hoarse-voiced—a rising star, with an attitude of, See! We know the types: fascists, Nazis, racists, the bourgeoisie—and possessing a sense about him of gloating at the troubles wracking the nation, at having been on the right side all the time. This could be a room from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. With someone like him, it’s all or nothing. You either speak his language or you don’t. If you speak it, you have to know his political facts, and moreover have the right interpretations. With him he has two chelas, students simmering with the anxiety of wanting to say the appropriate thing, quickly and sharply enough to impress, and the exhilaration of having a cause, at being on the right side of things, on the path of the good ones.
Of course there is a brilliance here, compared to the simple career-mindedness that I’ve seen elsewhere. These people here are not merely climbers, with wives or families to answer to, status to aspire to. They do not yearn for trips abroad. They are well informed, up-to-date not only on the news but also on global events and history; and they know literature. This is Calcutta. They can quote freely from Bengali writings (as well as Derrida and Foucault), and unlike Indians elsewhere lapse easily into the mother tongue in front of a nonspeaker even as they apologize for this; they relish the language, love it, so it’s easy to understand, excuse the lapse. And there is a genuine sympathy for the oppressed: after all, there exists a caste system, and the multitudes are poor beyond imagination.
But with them there are no two ways. The world is divided neatly between the oppressed and the oppressors. There is right, and there is wrong. They are on the side of the right. They see fast approaching a fascist government under the BJP, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. I remind them that a recent issue of India Today had warned of just that possibility. The media, they proclaim, were the first to embrace the BJP. There is no room for adjustments: the media belong to right-wing elements. Hinduism is an oppressive religion; it allows the caste system to flourish; its most sacred book, the Gita, justifies war; it has fascistic ideas and its proponents massacred the Buddhists in the past, and now are oppressing the Muslims and other minorities.
It occurs to me that the Muslims are merely a handy cause for these rebels of the privileged classes. They are too convenient, and I say so. And moreover, the Muslims are a diverse lot, culturally, socially, economically, historically. The Muslims do not want to be patronized by the Calcutta intellectuals.
From the perspective of this smoke-filled room, the whole country seems to be rotten. I cannot help thinking that the despair of these people is superficial, that they seem to be celebrating.
But I leave Calcutta not untouched by that mood of imminent disaster. All weekend, details of the violence in Bombay keep pouring in through the newspapers. It is worse than I thought, worse than anyone had thought. Here I quote straight from these newspaper accounts, because it seems to me nothing
more needs to be said.
Last week we saw the future in Bombay and it was a kaleidoscope brimming with blood. An inquisition launched against India’s Muslims for a series of crimes beginning with 700 years of imperial rule and ending with the usurpation of street space for Friday prayers took on a fresh range of practical dimensions: raw communal violence with almost computerised targeting, very well defined economic aggression and ethnic cleansing….
The fascist cross was marked on every Muslim door and there was escape for neither the anonymous toiler condemned to a life of darkness of 15 square feet of a chawl nor the influential senior executive of a multinational floating in 3000 square feet of the sky. Both became victims of a trapped identity.
The Daily Telegraph, January 17, 1993
The intensity with which the rioters have murdered people and destroyed property suggests that the violence was premeditated and carefully designed to look like intercommunal hysteria.
Indian Express, January 17, 1993
MERCHANTS OF DEATH CAME IN AN AMBULANCE
Surat (Gujarat) 12:30 p.m.
An ambulance van labelled “Emergency Hospital” came to a screeching halt near Vishramnagar locality on the slum-dominated Ved Road. One by one emerged from the van the merchants of death who were within hours to burn alive some 32 innocent people….
Around 6 p.m., having laid the dragnet, the group suddenly raced menacingly towards some houses in Vishramnagar. Swords, daggers, kerosene lamps, hammers and lathis in their hands. Some of them held the residents while others dragged out whatever was contained in the house and threw it in large pits….
In the presence of scores of slum-dwellers, some 32 residents of Vishramnagar were stabbed and pushed into pyres in the pits. Some were torched and pushed into a manhole.
