by Eboo Patel
The idea of America was worth fighting for. An experience with an extreme form of an oppositional identity convinced Baldwin of this. He was invited to the home of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. The Nation, Baldwin observed, was not like other angry black organizations in Harlem. White cops didn’t rough people up at Nation rallies. They stood in formation at a safe distance, faces set stoically ahead while Nation preachers spoke about the blue-eyed devil, too scared of the intensity and discipline on display to attempt their typical brutality. Elijah Muhammad’s ideology was most certainly warped, but Baldwin was impressed by the allegiance it had attracted. Moreover, he was disgusted that white people refused to see the reason for this. After centuries of slavery and subjugation, white Americans were still unable to imagine the anger that seethed within black people. It existed in Baldwin also. He accepted Elijah Muhammad’s dinner invitation to determine whether their anger was the same.
The dinner was a regal affair. Nation members, dark and intense, filled the room, the women separated from the men. There was an overwhelming power in Elijah Muhammad’s presence. It was time to stop being brainwashed and come to his true self, he told Baldwin. A series of slow, penetrating commands ensued, each followed by a chorus of “Yes, that’s right” from the Nation members who surrounded them. Then came the condemnations—of white people, of Christians, of intermarriage, of restaurants where alcohol was served and blacks mingled with whites—all accompanied by the same “Yes, that’s right” chorus. Any interaction with the enemy was a denial of the true black self. And then Elijah Muhammad laid out a vision built on this ideology: finding the land to create a black society with a $20 billion economy. In other words, total separation.
The Nation was fast becoming a mass movement with a deeply devoted core of true believers. If Elijah Muhammad made a serious attempt at this goal, tens of thousands might well jump off the cliff with him.
Baldwin understood that this was Elijah Muhammad’s response to the racism he had experienced, but his plan was a disaster waiting to happen—not only because it would be impossible to separate people who were so intimately connected economically but also because the plan violated a spiritual principle: namely, human beings were meant to be diverse, and they were meant to live together. America’s sin was not just the gross inequality with which the black race had been treated but also its creation of barriers between people. Still, Baldwin felt that there was a chance that America could be redeemed and become a place where people from everywhere collectively created a home. Near the end of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote, “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
In college, I had understood identity as a box to lock myself in and a bat to bludgeon America with. I was seduced by the notion that we belonged to a tribe based on the identity of our birth, that our loyalty rested exclusively with the tribe, and that one day my tribe of dark-skinned third world people would rise over our white oppressors. I may well have been a candidate for Elijah Muhammad’s separate society. But here was James Baldwin, whose ancestors had been enslaved and who knew more about the brutality of white racism than I could ever imagine, saying that love between people of different identities was not only possible but necessary, and that we had to insist on it. Here was a black man who had been chased out of restaurants because he had the temerity to ask for a cup of coffee from the front counter, rejecting separatism in favor of the hope of pluralism, a society where people from different backgrounds worked together, protected one another, sought to achieve something more meaningful for all. Here was a man who viewed identity as a bridge to the possibility of pluralism.
Richard Rodriguez once wrote that Thomas Jefferson, that democrat, was a slaveholder. And Thomas Jefferson, that slaveholder, was a democrat. America embodied that same trauma of contradictions. In college, I had viewed it as my responsibility to expose America’s shadow side. But too much emphasis in that direction risked seeing only shadow in the American story and, worse, believing that there was nothing but darkness in its future. That’s a cop-out, Baldwin was saying. I realized that it was precisely because of America’s glaring imperfections that I should seek to participate in its progress, carve a place in its promise, and play a role in its possibility. And at its heart and at its best, America was about pluralism.
In a strange way, Baldwin’s writing on America helped me understand my relationship with India. I relieved India of the burden of being my haven, and I relieved myself of the responsibility of being the reincarnation of Gandhi. My heritage as an Indian in America gave me a special relationship with the country of my citizenship. Why couldn’t my citizenship in America provide me with a unique way of relating to the land of my heritage?
My eyes started to adjust. The street scenes that had seemed like nothing but madness two weeks earlier had come into a little more focus. It was not simply random chaos happening on Colaba Causeway, the road that runs between my grandmother’s flat and the famous Taj Hotel. It was a thousand carnivals spinning simultaneously and sometimes crashing into one another. There was the carnival of business: ear cleaners, pan wallas, single-cigarette dealers, street barbers, sidewalk book merchants. There was the carnival of food: little boys in rags carrying cha and tiffins from office building to office building, sweet meats stacked in display windows, college students lined up outside makeshift dosa stands, kohli women carrying baskets of fish on their heads and bellowing, “Machi! Machi!” There was the carnival of fashion: young men on motorcycles wearing flared jeans and loose-fitting cotton shirts, young women experimenting with bright styles that mixed India and America, stores advertising bridal outfits and others displaying matching jewelry. There were carnivals of furtive lovers, sidewalk families, street animals, and child beggars. And despite the desperation of so much of life in Bombay, most people seemed happy. They drank tea in cafés, played cards on the sidewalks, bartered playfully in markets, got high on holidays, danced to Hindi music, and dreamed of becoming film stars.
I had picked up enough of the language to have a workable patois of Hindi, English, and hand waving—enough to get me where I was going most of the time. Kevin and I had convinced the servants to teach us how to make chapattis (flat, unleavened breads), which meant they no longer saw us only as lords. It was a far cry from being equals, but it felt much more comfortable to our American minds. We were having a great time with Saleem and Zohra, my two cousins who were only slightly younger than we were. The faculty at their college had conveniently gone on strike during the stretch that Kevin and I were in Bombay, so the two of them and their friends became our social group.
We read for hours every day. We went through stacks of Indian literature: nonfiction by Naipaul, novels by Rushdie, speeches by Vivekananda, poems by Tagore, a history of India by Nehru, various biographies of Gandhi, and, because of our audience with His Holiness, everything we could get our hands on about Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhism. We split our time between the carnivals of India outside and the idea of India inside. And the more I immersed myself in Indian civilization, the more I recognized the faint outlines of myself in its vast mirror.
I found myself rejecting Naipaul’s cold, exacting pessimism of India—that it was a million mutinies and an area of darkness. Somehow, amid its poverty and filth, India danced. Naipaul seemed incapable of seeing that joy as anything but an opiate. Perhaps he had no rhythm.
I was drawn to the hopefulness expressed by other Indian writers, to their visions of what India could be, what it was meant to be. I loved their ability to weave the worlds of ancient religious texts and village life and the Mughal Empire into a garment of possibility. Here was Rushdie’s protagonist in Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, hosting conferences of the children
born at the moment of India’s liberation—Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs; the sons of beggars and the daughters of successful businessmen—each of them holding forth on what her country’s identity should be. The evil work of the antagonist of the novel, Shiva, was to destroy the dialogue.
Indeed, the common theme that ran through these hopeful visions was India as a civilization whose diverse communities were in deep dialogue with one another. The emperor Ashoka, who, more than two thousand years ago, managed both to spread Buddhism and to encourage interfaith discussions, said, “Other sects should be duly honored in every way on all occasions.” The sixteenth-century Muslim emperor Akbar invited leaders and scholars from all of India’s various religions to debate one another in his court, scenes of which are depicted in paintings that have come to be considered characteristic of Indian art. For centuries, persecuted religious communities—Parsees, Tibetan Buddhists, Jews, and Baha’is—have found India’s doors open to them. The great poet and contemporary of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote that the “idea of India” itself militates “against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others.”
The dream of India is the dream of pluralism, the idea of different communities retaining their uniqueness while relating in a way that recognizes they share universal values. It is a dream I recognized from the writings of James Baldwin. It is the American dream also. And just as America has sinned against its dream with slavery and racism, India has violated its promise with religious nationalism.
It was a sin my family knew well. In January 1993, the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena organized groups of saffron-clad thugs to terrorize the Muslim population of Bombay. My cousin Saleem saw one of these groups armed with machetes pull down the pants of a little boy. Saleem turned and ran as fast as he could, but he still heard the scream. His parents had told him about these murders. Chanting Hindu nationalist slogans, the Shiv Sena marauders surrounded young boys and pulled their pants down. If they were circumcised, it meant they were Muslim, which meant they were dead.
For Saleem’s parents, my aunt and uncle, this was the final straw. They locked themselves in their apartments, taking their nameplates, which marked them as Muslims, off their mailboxes so that the roaming mobs would not know who lived there. They lived that way for several weeks, not going to work or school, afraid for their lives, afraid of their city.
In 1998, the year I returned to India, the BJP, a Hindu nationalist political party, was elected into national office. They had whipped up a frenzy of support from certain Hindu groups by stating that, centuries earlier, a Muslim emperor had destroyed a Hindu temple, which they claimed was the birthplace of a Hindu god, and had built a mosque over the rubble. The second in command of the BJP had led a campaign to destroy the mosque, a move that many Hindus in India saw as both patriotic and faithful, the very definition of religious nationalism.
I remember one of my aunts expressing dismay and concern over the election: “This is bad for Muslims; it is bad for Hindus; it is bad for India.” I don’t think even she knew how bad. Under the BJP, India exploded a nuclear bomb, the “Hindu bomb” it was called. Pakistan followed with its own nuclear test. Tensions between the two nations, which had fought three wars in the past half century, rose dramatically. That made life more difficult for Muslims in India. Although India has just about as many Muslims, 130 million, as Pakistan, the Hindu nationalist rhetoric coming from the government constantly questioned their loyalty to the nation.
The BJP’s allies started weaving Hindu nationalism into the fabric of Indian life. They changed textbooks to teach the Hindu nationalist line. Muslims found it harder to get certain jobs. Police forces, some very much in the control of Hindu nationalist elements, became more brazen in their brutality toward Muslims. A few years later, in 2002, Hindu nationalist groups in Gujarat, a state run by a strong BJP ally, went on a murder spree that took the lives of about two thousand Muslims. In some places, the police force stood by and watched. In others, it actively aided and abetted the murder. Almost no one has been prosecuted. The governor of the state, Narendra Modi, won his reelection campaign later that year.
Gandhi, a devout Hindu, had long maintained that Hindu-Muslim unity was just as important to him as a free India. His murderer was a member of a Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS. In the fury and sadness that followed the assassination of the father of the nation, the articulator of its dream of freedom and pluralism, the Hindu nationalists went underground. But they returned with a vengeance in the 1990s, and it was not just Muslims that they were targeting, but the very idea of India itself.
One of the proudest moments in India’s recent history was its granting refuge to the Dalai Lama when he was forced to flee Chinese occupation of his native Tibet. Buddhism was founded in India but had nearly disappeared over the centuries. The Dalai Lama brought it back. He set up his government in exile in Dharamsala, a small city in the foothills of the Himalayas which attracted an eclectic mix of old Tibetan monks and young Western seekers. It was here that Kevin and I traveled for our audience with His Holiness.
What do you say to the Dalai Lama when you are with him? It is a question worthy of a Zen koan. We met with His Holiness in the visiting room of his small palace. He presented us with the traditional Tibetan white scarves and said he had heard of us from Brother Wayne. We spent a moment drinking in his presence with our eyes.
His Holiness was in a playful mood. He reached out and put his index finger on the chain that Kevin was wearing around his neck, a string of beads with a small bowl on the end, given to him by a Native American couple at the United Religions Initiative conference. “Emptiness,” the Dalai Lama said. “I like it.” And then he giggled.
“I spent many years studying the concept of emptiness in Buddhism,” Kevin explained. “Ultimately, it brought me back to a similar notion in Judaism—the idea of ayin, which means that God was once the entirety of creation, and the universe as we know it was brought about when God contracted Himself. That contraction caused a shattering of light across the world, and we human beings are carriers of that light.”
The Dalai Lama listened intently and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “this is a very spiritual concept. You are a Jew?”
“Yes,” Kevin said. He finally felt comfortable embracing that identity. He still practiced Buddhist meditation and read widely in other religions, but it was clear that his roots were in Judaism. Somehow, the things Brother Wayne had told us—that studying other religions should first and foremost have the effect of strengthening our understanding of our own—had sunk in for Kevin. More and more, I saw Kevin with his nose in a book about Judaism. He would constantly tell me about Jewish spirituality and social justice theology, comparing Jewish concepts to ideas in other religions. He always ended with a diatribe against the Hebrew school he had gone to when he was younger: “Why didn’t my rabbi teach us this stuff? All he ever talked about was rituals and Jewish chosenness, never Jewish social justice.”
The Dalai Lama seemed happy. “Judaism is a very good religion,” he said. “I have many Jewish friends. We have interfaith dialogue. I learn a lot from them. Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.” I have never seen Kevin look happier. The Dalai Lama reached over and touched the beads around his neck again and then rubbed his head and laughed.
Then he turned to me. I started getting a little nervous. I knew what was coming. The Dalai Lama was about to ask me about my religion. He had just commended Kevin for deepening his Jewish identity. Somehow I didn’t think he was going to be impressed with my story of trying to be a Buddhist. Yet try as I might, I just could not get the hang of it. I had a little secret that I hadn’t even told Kevin: I was a total failure at Buddhist meditation. Our version of it was to sit cross-legged and quietly focus on nothingness. By the time I got my legs in order and my back straight and I took my first full breath, a thought would enter my mind. I would try to shove it out.
But halfway through my next breath, another thought would penetrate. I spent the whole time I was meditating shoving thoughts out of my head and being mad at myself for being a bad Buddhist. Those thoughts were my greatest enemy. My Western materialist upbringing was preventing me from entering the original mind.
Lately, though, I had gotten tired of shoving thoughts out of my head, and I had allowed one to linger long enough to get a sense of what it was. I could not have been more shocked at the discovery: “Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad”—the prayer that my mother had taught me when I was a child, the prayer that was meant to help me fall asleep and keep me safe through the night. The realization startled me. It had been such a long time since I had said that prayer intentionally, but here it was floating in my head, still woven into my being. I decided to let it stay, even if it didn’t abide by the rules we had made up and called Buddhist meditation. I knew my intention was pure, even if I wasn’t skilled at creating and focusing on nothingness.
