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The Rediff Special/Vijay Tendulkar

'We were born as Muslims and that puts a stamp on our forehead in this country: TRAITOR! Why?'

I began singing those songs, imitating his style. I would stand like him, upright, chest thrown out and then sing imagining myself to be him. (My fair complexion could not match his tan black. And he was too manly in looks compared to my vegetarian, adolescent appearance which gave me a terrible complex.) I was in my late teens now: still biased against Muslims in general but at the same time an ardent fan of a Muslim: Shaheer Amar Sheikh.

Many years later, we became friends; the relationship lasted till his death in an accident.

Incidentally, I came to know about his mother after he died. Munerbi, Amar Sheikh's mother, was an illiterate Muslim woman married to a small farmer and a poetess of unusual strength. The poems she composed had a natural mix, a captivating intermingling of both the Muslim and the Hindu cult. The imagery came straight from the Bhakti poets and the poems flowed from Urdu into Marathi and back to Urdu like a child frolicking between two sections of a house divided by a recently erected wall.

At times the meter is traditional Marathi, used by the Bhakti saints while the language is Urdu as spoken by Muslims in rural Maharashtra. In one of her poems she sees Krishna, the Hindu god, in her Muslim son.

In 1967, her Muslim son, the bard Amar Sheikh, poses a question to his readers in an article: How am I a traitor ?

He narrates a happening: 'I cannot forget that day. I had returned from an election meeting in which I had performed as usual and was taking a nap when I was awakened by some commotion. Then a kick on the door of my apartment in the chawl. Then another kick. The door gave way with it. It opened wide. Someone rushed in. Lunged at me. I sprang to my feet and grabbed him. A battle royal ensued. My attacker was in his early thirties. I had completed fifty. I did not spare him. Nor did he while letting himself go at me. It is not the beating I had to take that hurts but the words which he shouted at me, the mindset behind those words. 'Amar Sheikh is a Muslim' he yelled. 'He deserves to be lynched. He has married a Hindu woman. Haul me before a court and put me in a jail but I shall come out and lynch this man. I shall become a martyr for killing a Muslim.'

Amar Sheikh writes further in this article: 'I have been living in this locality for the last seven years. My attacker grew up watching me. My daughter grew up with him. And today he barges into my house after beating up three Muslims on his way. Why? Because I am a Muslim. And a Muslim is a traitor; an arch-enemy of this country. I with my record of service to this country and to my people am called a traitor and he who has never shown any concern for this country is a patriot because he is born a Hindu! We were born as Muslims and that puts a stamp on our forehead in this country: TRAITOR! Why?'

This excerpt says everything.

I came across Munerbi's poetry and this article of her son in a book which was given to me during the post-Babri Masjid days, when communal passions were running high once more in the country and a spate of communal riots was already on. The climate around me was once again rife with Muslim-hating and the word I had first heard used against Muslims at the time of Partition of the country was once again common currency: Laandya: The human dog with a cut tail.

The answer to Amar Sheikhs's question immediately came to my mind:

Because we were brought up that way. We, Hindu children; with casual remarks like Manoos Ahes Ka Musalman?

Because of our upbringing which taught and prohibited us to shun any contact with Muslims.

Because of the biases knowingly and unknowingly sown in our minds at an early age by presenting and teaching us our history (in my case the Mughal and Maratha period of it) in a wrong light.

Because of the experience of the Partition of the country through its portrayal by the mass media and of the preceding years of Hindu-Muslim relations as they percolated to us through the attitudes of our elders.

And, most of all, because of the total lack of contact, the wide chasm between us and the Muslims among us, as people.

Yes, I am aware of the games politicians have played among both the communities from time to time and the communal passions whipped up by them to suit their politics of self-interest based on hatred. But those games would not have succeeded to the extent they did if we Hindus and the Muslims had known each other better; if we had grown together from our childhood as one community rather than two separate worlds within one nation, within one city.

After Amar Sheikh, I had the good fortune of having Hameed Dalwai, the Muslim reformer of the '60s in my life. We became friends much before he plunged into the Muslim reform movement. He was a creative writer. He wrote short stories. I was the editor of the monthly magazine in which they were published. I published his short stories. I was one of the first readers of his writing. He wrote about his community. His childhood. He wrote with anguish about his mother who was the third wife of his father. About communal riots. He wrote with a searing insight about his community, the Muslims.

My days with Hameed taught me the real lessons in understanding Muslims in my society. The working of the minds of the Muslims, their upbringing, what they were taught about us, Hindus, in their early formative years and the biases they were injected with at an early age. All this realisation came through Hameed. Through our long evenings and nights of intimate conversations.

Hameed had come to learn about my Hindu world more or less in the same way as I came to learn about his: through whatever little contact we could make with the 'other' world, the other side of the communal divide, by going out of our way in our adolescent years to know things by ourselves. His father was a Muslim Leaguer. A local leader of the League and a Hindu-hater. Hameed had grown up as a boy in this political climate. He grew out of it later, at a fairly young age.

When he worked for a better understanding between the two communities and propagated progressive social reforms in his own community particularly concerning the state of Muslim women, he was branded a traitor and a heretic by the majority of his people -- especially the diehard, conservative men of his community. He was simultaneously seen as an exception and a freak within his Muslim community by the Hindu intelligentsia.

I still remember. One of our senior writers who proudly proclaimed himself as a Hindu revivalist once advised Hameed with genuine concern: "You will always be an outsider among the Muslims. Why don't you become a Hindu? After all your forefathers were Hindu. You have Hindu blood in your veins. Come, I shall arrange for your conversion to Hinduism."

Hameed laughed heartily every time he heard this.

But he did say to me once in his introspective mood: "We Indian Muslims are a peculiar lot. Our forefathers did not come from across the borders of the country. They were not invaders but the invaded like the Hindus. They were Hindus. They were converted to Islam mostly under pressure; even by force. If this is true, then we belong here. We have Hindu genes in our system and a Muslim upbringing, a Muslim bias. We are a product of a mixed or hybrid culture which makes us an isolated lot; removed from the general reality, the general ethos. We belong nowhere. Not to the Muslim world outside nor to the predominantly Hindu world of this country. We have no roots to claim. And our loyalties will always remain questionable in this country. Not necessarily because of what we do but because of what we are expected to do -- as an alien race whose interests lie outside of this country. It will be presumed that we do it, that we have done it though we may have not. And we must not. Whatever happens to this country happens to us. Our fate is tied up to the fate of this society which may never accept us as its natural, integral part."

My friend Hameed died prematurely of kidney failure.

After him I have had many Muslim friends. Some of them mean much more than friends to me. But when I look back at our friendship, I find a subtle difference between them and my other -- I mean Hindu -- friends. When I meet a Hindu friend I am never conscious of his religion. He is just a friend. But when I meet a Muslim friend I never forget, never can forget, that he is a Muslim. Even if I forget this for a brief while, my upbringing reminds me that he is a Muslim. I feel proud of my friendship with him. I love him more for being a Muslim.

Ideally, it should be no less, no more.

A friendship is beyond all considerations, is it not ?

By arrangement with Communalism Combat

The Rediff Special

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