Thought provoking, the book Being the Other The Muslim In India, which is a work of Saeed Naqvi and comes from the house of Aleph Book Company, is essential reading for all those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped contemporary India. The clouds are moving ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with dense clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj. The above lines were composed by Mohsin Kakorvi, a Muslim poet, to celebrate not Lord Krishna's birthday but that of the Prophet Muhammad. Awadh, the author's birthplace, was steeped in this sort of syncretism in which Islam and Hinduism complemented and celebrated each other and Urdu culture merged with Awadhi and Brajbhasha. Sadly, this glorious culture has been systematically destroyed over the past century. In many ways, Awadh stood for everything that independent India could have become, a land in which people of different faiths coexisted peacefully and created a culture that drew upon the best that each community had to offer. Instead, what we have today is a pale shadow of the harmony that once existed. Everywhere there are incidents of sectarian murder, communal propaganda and divisive politics. And there seems to be no stopping the forces that are destroying the country. In this remarkable book, which is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various deliberate and inadvertent acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million Muslims in India, Saeed Naqvi takes us to the time before Independence when the divisions between Muslims and Hindus, would deepen and metastasize over the next several decades, were first fomented by the British. In the run up to Independence, and its immediate aftermath, some of India's greatest leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and others only served to drive the communities further apart. Successive governments, whether formed by the Congress or BJP, compounded the problem by failing to prevent tragic events like communal riots in Gujarat in 1969 and 2002, Bombay in 1992 and 1993, Muzaffarnagar in 2013, the demolish of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and so on. As a reporter, and editor, Naqvi covered all these events only with the exception of Partition, and in the book he shows us with acuity and insight, how each of these resulted in the shaping of the discontent of the Muslim in India.
Loading...
