Abstract
An absorbing story is narrated by the child of a mixed marriage, Hindu and Muslim, in the first quarter of the twentieth century. At once creative and critical, the memoir is innovatively structured. In its ex-centricity to established forms and styles it seeks to represent substantially and formally the disjunctivity of memory, the flux of experience and everyday living, and the incertitude of meaning. Through a muddle of anecdotes, conversations and dialogues with the self, the minority subject is produced as always in process.
One afternoon when my parents were away at work, my siblings and I were playing at home. I opened a drawer in my father’s study table and came across a revolver. It became part of the game we were playing. I held it to my sister’s head menacingly and she shrieked on cue. Decades later I learnt that it was given to my father by the Pune police for his protection against threats of violence following his marriage to my mother.
My mother, Malini Panandikar, was a Saraswat Brahman. She was brought up in the home of her maternal grandfather in Pune. Her mother died early of cancer and her father’s job being subject to transfers, the children were taken in by the grandfather. Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar was a Sanskrit scholar and an orientalist of repute knighted by the British Government—those were the early years of the 20th century—for his scholarship. The Bhandarkar Oriental Library in Pune is named after him. He was a staunch believer in the power of education to achieve social reforms including the advancement of women. One of my mother’s cousins was among the first small batch of girls who graduated from the prestigious Elphinstone College in Bombay.
Of my father’s beginnings I know little and almost nothing from his own lips. He was a Muslim, born in a small village in Maharashtra, in Satara district. The family was of very limited means. They later moved to Wai in search of opportunity. The men of the family may have had some basic education, the women were uneducated. My humble father believed as staunchly in the power of education as my mother’s grandfather did. He had to struggle long and hard before he could make it to the renowned Deccan College in Pune from where he graduated. In the course of his school education he had to suffer much discrimination even having to sit outside the classroom.
His religion and his class were against him. But he harboured no bitterness against Hindus. Two of the friends he made then remained his friends through life. He was determined to ensure an education for his younger sister. She later became the headmistress of a school in Pune.
My parents met when they were studying in Pune, in the very early 1920s. Widely removed as they were by religion and class, their marriage raised a storm in Pune. My mother retained a warm feeling for the Bombay Brahmins and drew a sharp distinction between them and the Pune Brahmins in the ostracism she suffered. Neither of my parents spoke to us about the trauma they were put through. She had been too deeply wounded; he, in any case, was a man of few words. What I learnt of it was mostly through casual asides from others. Because of their unstudied silence and their forward looking courage, our childhood was not infected by bitterness or hate as it might have been. I look back upon my life to put that on record in this memoir.
But this memoir, if that’s what it is, is not going to be a pieced-up, put together account of that marriage, a footnote to history. There is nothing in it that adheres to the protocols of history. Names are few, dating is occasional, perhaps disputable, and places are insufficiently particularised. The ‘events’ are voices as they present themselves to my memory and memory is not an inert document. It is organic, shaped by the discourses in which it is seeded and grows. 1 It is not accountable to discipline but to the truths of the imagination. As such, this document must surely discourage co-option into any grand narrative of intercommunal relations. But in troubled times these voices achieve the status of events and an articulation which may stoke conflagrations. They speak. Voices must be heard. Heeded.
This document seeks to show how a mixed marriage—in my story, a Hindu–Muslim marriage—is lived out in the consciousness of offspring. It can be experienced sometimes as a miasma, sometimes turbulence, of voices from a past that have not been laid to rest. They are disembodied; the minimal fleshing out provided by memory is given in order to give the experience an in-the-world-ness, a certain historical veracity. 2 And to give to the one who heard the voices a certain subjectivity. To locate her.
This is my story. But it is not an autobiography. I have other selves which are not contained in a single subjectivity. A wanderer seeking stabilities. A wayfarer knocking on the door and yet afraid of what lies beyond. Resisting absorption, moving on. An escape marked by a sense of loss.
The Voices
What language do you speak at home?
This question has remained with me—though totally disembodied because it has been voiced so many times. It now has a life of its own which, articulated with some others, has for me a sinister force. It is part of a group of questions and usually the last of them. These are generally inspired when the speaker hears my name for the first time. Ubiquitously, by men and women, young and old. The most recent, and I shall remember her until she merges with the rest, was a Catholic nun, sitting at the same desk as I was at a Kannada-speaking short-term course in Bangalore. In our first class we students were asked to introduce ourselves by name. ‘Zakia Pathak’ I said bracing myself for the onslaught. Her head swiveled around to me as she hissed one of the questions. They comprise the following: Hindu or Muslim? Did your mother convert? What was your maiden name? Is your husband a Hindu? Are your children Hindu or Muslim? What language do you speak at home? I have to think on my feet to stem the onslaught. In this last case, hiss for hiss: ‘Shh….mustn’t disturb the class’. If I were to reply to these questions it would amount to giving them my life history and I was not about to sacrifice my privacy in order to be left alone. I had once thought of a tit-for-tat but—since privacy is never valued in this country—the fear that I might have to sit through their life stories acted as a timely deterrent.
These questions may appear to be casual, inconsequential, but they stirred an unease in me from the start. They accumulated a nasty charge to which I could not at first give a name. Today I am convinced that they are far from neutral, forget innocent. To put it bluntly they are inquisitorial, a searing inquiry, a searching out for the unorthodox. Zakia Khan—that name never aroused such salivating curiosity; Zakia Pathak did: an appetite to find the marital equation (rich food for gossip) as to which partner, read which religion, prevails. Names tell stories.
The naming of children in a mixed marriage can become a site for negotiation in a power struggle. I remember coming across an old exercise book of my schooldays in my mother’s house. The name on the flyleaf in my hand read: Vijaya Khan. I cannot think that this was a creature of my imagination. Our childhood was singularly free of perplexities of identity. The name was surely inspired. My mother had acquiesced that we children should be brought up as Muslims, because Islam as a proselytising religion is more welcoming. This was probably buttressed by the fact that my parents’ marriage had been accepted by the Muslims of Pune in sharp contrast to the Pune Brahmins. So the decision to bring us up as Muslims was a political one.
Mainstreaming in India involves being fluent in the language of the state and mastering the script. The Muslim Satyashodak Mandal started in Pune by Hameed Dalwai had as an important objective the winning over of Muslims to speaking the Marathi language at home. It has been resisted by Muslims who are wary of absorption. For my inquisitorial interlocutors, the language you speak at home nails you to a religious identity.
What’s in a name? said Shakespeare. He didn’t do his theory.
‘Do you want to be buried when you die?’
The question was shot at me by the Chairman of the Minorities Commission of the state government one morning when I was in Hyderabad. A communal riot had just erupted and I was in the city as part of a fact-finding team constituted by the Department of Social Work of Delhi University. An NGO and some activists there had drawn up a programme of visits to the affected areas of the city and organised a series of interviews with relevant bureaucrats and some leaders of the Muslim community. On the morning in question we had just concluded an interview with the Chairman of the Minorities Commission, a Muslim. As the meeting broke up, an officer of the state Social Welfare Department who was also present and had been a student of my husband at the Delhi School of Social Work came up to greet me and asked: ‘Madam, you are a Muslim are you not?’ I had barely said a word of affirmation before the chairman, who had evidently overheard the exchange, muscled in with, ‘Do you want to be buried when you die?’ I was taken aback; he looked as if he would like to do the job himself and without further ado. I collected my wits and answered truthfully: ‘I should like to be cremated at an official state crematorium’. I thought I was being conciliatory (not the burning ghats, see). ‘Then do not deceive people by calling yourself a Muslim’ he spat at me before stalking out. I found his remark personally offensive and, given the context of our meeting, professionally irresponsible. I was amazed by the venom which he made no attempt to hide. Better a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu, never mind the riots, than an apostate Muslim. The immediate response to a communal conflagration may be a hardening of postures. But those who are in the business of conciliation should not cultivate an amnesia to history.
Islam spells out certain practices which are binding. Prayer five times a day, fasting for 30 days in the month of Ramzan, burial, charity during the holy month and pilgrimage to Mecca. The articulation of these and other such practices into a defining fiat is clearly arbitrary. For instance, Islam prohibits the enjoyment of unearned income, and interest on bank savings clearly falls in this category. Does the honourable chairman keep his savings in a hole in the ground? A debate is on for the need to modernise Islam and is considering the problem of interest on savings. The sacralisation of symbols and practices can only lead us to dogma. It represses history.
After the Sikh riots in 1984, some intellectuals in Delhi University felt the need to assert their religious identity. Some of us were sharing a taxi on our way to a seminar. The last to be picked up was a Sikh professor, also in a mixed marriage, who kept us waiting. We were growing impatient but the neighbourhood taxi driver, a Sikh, relaxed and grinning, said: ‘Perhaps the professor is having trouble tying his turban.’
Postscript
I cannot escape a suspicion that the chairman’s wrath was more than a religious response. How could I be accused of deception when I publicly avowed my mixed lineage through the kumkum mark on my forehead, through my name: Zakia Pathak? It was the discursive image of the woman as naturally duplicitous that erased the language of these silent markers. The need to close ranks after a riot can become pathological.
‘Neither dharma-patni nor mankula, only a prostitute’
This was the abuse directed at me by a person introducing himself as teaching at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in a personal letter sent to me at my home address at Delhi. To quote from it: ‘Supposing a so-called and self-styled and posing herself as a Muslim woman marries a Hindu’—he had evidently worked this out from my name: Zakia Pathak—‘then she is neither dharma-patni nor mankula, therefore such a woman in Muslim society is termed as dasshta and in Hindu society as gandita. Thus, like prostitutes new sex-based professionals have come to the fore. And no doubt this is a particular problem of Indian society. How to accommodate such women in society was the real main issue of the seminar’. The seminar referred to was organised by the Women’s College of AMU. My interest in it was focused on the session in which the Shahbano case was being discussed. Shahbano, a divorced Muslim woman, was fighting a case for maintenance under the state law and found herself impaled on a confrontation escalating daily between the State and Muslim Personal Law. I was particularly interested in a paper to be read by Zoya Hasan, teaching in the Political Science Department of Jawaharlal Nehru University at Delhi. I had published a paper myself on the issue. A Hindu colleague in the department of English at Miranda House, Delhi University collaborated with me. I had participated in a number of marches and rallies but declined to give a talk on the subject which the Delhi University Teachers Union had invited me to give. I had pointed out that my credentials as a Muslim might be problematised at a public meeting given my Hindu mother and my own marriage to a Hindu. Masooma Ali, also a department colleague at Miranda House, had made it possible for me to attend the Aligarh seminar. Shortly after, I came to know of the turmoil caused through the seminar by the correspondence appearing in the newspaper The Indian Express. The director of the seminar, the head of her department at AMU, was accused by a fundamentalist lobby of promoting an attack on Muslim law and she had written to the editor denying the allegations flung at her in the mud-slinging. I thought she could do with some support and wrote a letter to the editor which was duly published. It was this that appeared to have inflamed the writer of the nasty letter to me. My initial reaction was to throw it into the garbage bin since the writer did not have the courage to address his fulminations to The Indian Express, the appropriate public forum. On second thoughts, however, I decided that a dismissive gesture was called for. I contacted Zoya, Zarina Bhatty, a Muslim woman teaching at the Political Science department of Jesus and Mary College in Delhi, and Masooma. The four of us met. The general sense was that we should not give the letter any prominence but only refer to it indirectly by taking a stand against fundamentalism. Our letter lauded the Aligarh seminar for having provided a forum for diverse views in the struggle towards a just and equitable society. And urged Muslim women not to allow themselves to be isolated in this struggle. I heard no more from my correspondent.
Our correspondent is a mixed up fundamentalist. He cannot decide between historicising his ‘prostitute’ and essentialising her. His wrath targets the Muslim woman herself, offspring of a mixed marriage who compounds the transgression by marrying a Hindu man. She is a ‘particular problem of Indian society’. How to ‘accommodate’ her? This historicising move quickly gives way to essentialising which needs a similarity of thought across times and cultures. Daashta and gandika, Muslim and Hindu nomenclature, need a third term to categorise the ‘new, sex-based professional’ who is ‘like a prostitute’. Why not call her a slut and get on with the argument? He cannot. She is his argument—essence and history. In the context of the Shahbano agitation, she is very likely the modern, educated, urban, economically self-reliant woman, active in the growing struggle for gender rights.
Postscript
I did get a letter from a gentleman who introduced himself as the father of a marriageable daughter in Aligarh requesting us to find a suitable boy for her!
‘Our men asked, “Were we dead?”’
The domestic servant network in our neighbourhood had retailed the wanted! call: ‘The Baman bai (Brahmin Lady) needs a maidservant’. The recruit on our doorstep explained her presence thus. I was distressed by the tag she gave my mother. It was polite enough; ‘bai’ is a term of respect in Maharashtra. And it was the truth; my mother had not converted. The law which had required a renunciation of faith in the case of marriage outside one’s community had been repealed a few years before hers came within its ambit. Conversion would have been less searing for her than in the case of many Hindus who perform daily puja at home. Her family were members of the Prarthana Samaj, a reformist faith which was against ritual. They had no temple, often meeting in schoolrooms, no priesthood, sermons delivered by senior members, many of them learned professionals,—university teachers, doctors, lawyers. A kind of prayer book was also devised containing thoughts of seers of all faiths. My mother’s faith in the Prarthana Samaj was unwavering. Nor do I remember any pressure exerted on her by my father and his people. Externally too she was distinguishable as a Hindu, she wore the kumkum mark on her forehead; she was always in a sari draped in the Maharashtrian kasota style, for several years before the six yard sari came into style. She wore the pearl necklace along with pearl earrings of a certain circular pattern which was the Brahman preference of her day. She was a regular subscriber to the newsletter of the Samaj.
So why did the maidservant’s description of her distress me? My mother guessed before I realised it that my resistance had to do with the foregrounding of caste identity whereby her marital status was displaced and interrogated. She asked me to remember that this was an uneducated woman who could not perhaps accept a marriage solemnised in a secular court as marriage—in fact such marriages were described in common parlance as court marriages. The maidservant perhaps unwittingly contributed to the stereotype of the Muslim male as of high sexual potency, lascivious: read dirty. I prefer to think that the men who asked if they were dead were probably asserting their own potency which they felt threatened in the implicit comparison.
Postscript
Discourse is a site of power struggle. The state may have addressed and redressed the problem of individual autonomy in the choice of marriage partner. But the discursive withholding of consent to court marriage seems to leave a trace even on the officials who have to conduct them. The need for religious ritual to legitimise a bonding as marriage seems to mark even the officials sent by the court authorities to register marriages. My marriage was a registered one; I remember the approval on the face of the registrar’s representative as we were filling up the form, when I entered the names of my parents as witnesses. It prompted him to insert the words, ‘I, Zakia, take you….’ I squirmed but accommodated his need. Never mind that the ceremony was held in our hotel room and the huge bouquet of roses sent by a close Anglo-Indian friend had to be accommodated in a bucket from the attached bathroom.
‘We keep out smugglers, muslims, criminals’
I was in the process of selling my small flat in Bombay in preparation for relocation to Bangalore after retirement. Certain documents had to be attested by a chartered accountant and since I knew no such in Bombay, a friend had suggested one. I visited him at home in the suburb where he used to do some work before leaving for his office. After the business was over, his wife brought in a tray of tea in the best traditions of hospitality. Making small talk as we sipped it, I remarked on how attractive his apartment complex was—how well maintained, quiet and so forth. He beamed and offered me the above explanation: ‘We keep out smugglers, Muslims, criminals.’
My sister had accompanied me and our first reaction was one of hilarity which of course had to be suppressed. He would not have recognised it as appropriate and to be honest we could not have explained it ourselves. Should we not have taken umbrage? Why did we not? Because we perceived it as not intended to provoke or insult? Later, on consideration, I thought that that precisely was the problem. The process of categorisation works to set up boundaries between the normal and abnormal. These come to be internalised and naturalised. The chartered accountant was not being offensive. The Muslim had been naturalised as an undesirable element in a housing project as elsewhere. Any Muslim who has tried to buy or rent a flat has been faced with that problem. My father managed to get a flat for my brother and his family because of his persistence and perceptiveness in smelling out a distress sale.
But not taking umbrage: Is it a survival strategy?
‘Muslim? and Maharashtrian?’
When I was asked in a casual conversation where I came from I would say: ‘I am a Maharashtrian.’ Then came the exchange of names. Zakia Khan. ‘But that is a Muslim name.’ Puzzlement, disbelief, suspicion. Ethnicities are formed or sharpened during struggle. In the course of the struggle for Indian Independence, the Nation became the overriding identity seeming to absorb minority and other subordinate identities such as region. But when the political ends of the struggle were achieved, the subordinated ethnicities were once again in competition with modern identities. In the 1950s, the linguistic reorganisation of states was meant to unify regional communities on the basis of a shared language but failed to achieve that objective. Regional identities surfaced: In Maharashtra Marathas, Konkanis and the people of Vidharba could prevail at the hustings across party divisions. On their part, Muslims began to perceive the political advantage of closing ranks which gave them the status of a vote bank on the road towards capturing power. 3 So Muslim and Maharashtrian come to inhabit mutually exclusive categories and the Nation has to be manufactured every time it is needed. And how seductively it is done through the media. Such stirring music, such haunting lyrics.
Postscript
Then the music subsides, the story ends. Back to normal. Muslim and Indian? One big family? Uh huh. In the gap between personal experience and official representation, the subjective perception of Indian as an ethnicity, falters and the minority subject is produced.
‘Oh, I do not mean all muslims’
I am on a railway journey back to Delhi. A brash young man is trying to educate the rest of us about India Shining (an election slogan) and so on. ‘No man need be poor. All he needs to do is hard work’. After a few minutes of this nation-building, I butt in and tell him about my maidservant who works eight hours a day and brings up a family of five in the remaining time and whose ration card puts her in the category ‘below the poverty line’. He is not impressed. Clearly, domestic labour does not count as work, not the kind that builds nations. How we get on from there to Muslim-baiting I do not remember. But once again I have to stem the tide of his rhetoric by saying bluntly: ‘I am a Muslim.’ He is conciliatory ‘Oh! I don’t mean all Muslims, only the Khans and people like that.’ ‘I was a Khan before my marriage,’ I say. Before the matter escalates I decide to go to the toilet. When I return I walk into a dead silence. Clearly, they have been discussing me. The young man springs up, bends and touches my feet in the time honoured gesture of respect. It seems he must have received a dressing down from the others. Talking back to the elderly is not done.
Postscript
In the same cabin is a newly married couple. Early in the morning I saw her close her eyes in prayer; her hand touched the locket to her eyes and she kissed it—the gesture of devotion. Her husband moves over to sit by me and whispers shyly: ‘Madam, ours is also a love marriage.’
Lockets generally contain the likenesses of gods. Hers had his photograph in it. In Hindi, the same word is used for a husband and God: Yajman. Pati-dev, husband-God. Has anything changed? Mixed marriage proclaims the right of the individual qua individual to freedom of choice of the partner. But the ontological construction of a woman overpowers the language of rights.
‘Look how the mussalman is dancing’
It is Navratri and all the residents of the apartment complex are down in the compound. The music is at the highest decibel level and the garba dancers are clicking their sticks madly in a crazed dance. A Muslim teenager from an apartment in the complex is infected by the merriment and collective gaiety and joins the dance. A Marwari matron nudges her neighbour and says snidely ‘Look how the Mussalman is dancing’. The ethnicity which has already been stigmatised is isolated and foregrounded and imposed on the subject. A natural emergence of communal harmony is thus sabotaged.
‘You are nothing’
The words erupted in an altercation I was having with my aunt, my mother’s sister. I forget what it was about except that it had to do with religious identity. I said with some force, I am a Muslim. ‘You are nothing,’ she retorted with some heat. I was shattered. Coming from her it was painful. Where did the words come from?
Sulabha Panandikar was no Hindu fanatic. This was a person whose liberal credentials were widely known and respected. She had stood by my parents in their darkest days. She was a student of Philosophy, a postgraduate from Elphinstone College, Bombay and had a Masters’ Degree from Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. She had a brilliant professional career, rising to be Director of Education of the large, composite state of Maharashtra following the linguistic re-organisation of the states in the late 1950s.
Her success sat lightly on her. Much of Gujarat was then included in the state and the officials of the education department were required to pass an elementary exam in Gujarati. Some years later she was the Chief Guest at some function. The chairman, while introducing her listed her degrees impressively but was stumped when he came to ‘G.H.S.’ Since this came at the end he naturally assumed it to be the highest degree and pronounced; ‘Not only has Miss Panandikar a degree from the prestigious Cambridge University, she also holds the G.H.S.’ My aunt refrained from telling him that the letters referred to Gujarati Higher Standard, a school leaving certificate. She used to narrate this incident with great amusement to the family.
My aunt was unconventional for her day—and for much of Indian society even today. It was not so much that she flouted conventions but that she lived unassertively outside them. She never married. But her circle of friends included many men whose company she enjoyed, some of them were her college mates from the old days. They might drop in of an evening and often the discussion would grow so animated that they stayed over to dinner. By the end of which all public transport was off the road and they had to be put up for the night. Yet I never heard a whisper of scandal about her. I recall an occasion when a friend approached a senior person in the Education Department at Pune with a recommendation from my aunt to facilitate the mid-term admission of her son. The official replied, For us, Miss Panandikar’s word is Brahma vakya—the word of God.
Spinsters are associated with gloom and doom but not she. For me she represented the spirit of fun and adventure. My father tended to place restrictions on the movements of his daughters outside the house, once we had entered our teens. She would descend on our home in Pune and, cocking a snook at my father, carry us off to a restaurant for a huge tea. My sister sometimes described him as: ‘Our father which art in Pune.’ I had many spats with him, occasionally punctuated by my mother’s supportive cry; ‘You are bringing up my daughters like hothouse flowers.’ Now I wish I had been a little more understanding of his compulsions. His overprotectiveness was probably induced by the sleazy abuses he must surely have encountered over his marriage as much as by the restrictions dictated by Muslim custom in a small town, as Pune was then.
My aunt also gave us some wonderful holidays. Twice she had us and our maternal cousins to stay when she was transferred in the course of her career to small towns, such as Belgaum which was then in Maharashtra, and Bordi, in Gujarat. Through these shared holidays she quite unintentionally achieved a rapprochement between my mother and my uncle, who had cut off relations with my mother after her marriage.
My aunt was a romantic at heart but without sentimentality. Once she and I were holidaying at a hill station and found that the room next to ours at the hotel was occupied by a middle-aged Hindu couple who evinced an interest in me which seemed over the top. My aunt was convinced that they were considering me as a matrimonial prospect for a son. Sure enough, the son arrived unexpectedly over the weekend. By that time, however, they had discovered that I was a Muslim. The son vanished. My aunt chortled. ‘He’s been sent packing’.
So where did those words come from ‘You are nothing’? They were no aberration. They were not a departure from long-held values. Emotional outbursts can serve as a sudden unmasking of discursive truths and the power of discourse to subjectify.
At any time, a number of discourses prevail in a society. They may sometimes be in conflicting relations as an element travels from one discourse to another—living together for instance—and the articulatory practice of the new discourse changes its meaning. 4 The value placed on marriage in the regulation of sexuality is an instance. In the discourse of religion marriage is the legitimising practice and can be performed only by the clergy. But in State law this is being contested. A recent judgement has held that if a man and woman have lived together as man and wife for a certain number of years and can be proved to have done so, the relationship can be considered as a marital one, and the woman can claim the rights of a wife. Case law recognises such bonding as marriage. But the enduring strength of discursive truths is not so easily weakened. They remain as deposits in the individual psyche. The state has made it possible to bypass the clutch of the clergy; birth, marriage, death are all officially registered at its institutions—the hospital, the court, the official crematoria. But even when the citizen subject takes her stand within the state law, she carries her culture with her. 5 Personal laws may be displaced from hegemonic status by state law but their persistence in the female psyche, from a maidservant to a scholar-administrator, is evident.
Postscript
I sometimes wonder if my free-spirited aunt was co-opted into a discursively negotiated deal where she paid with her celibacy for the repute she undoubtedly enjoyed in the community.
The Discourse of the Voices
I have represented my experience as a cacophony of voices because it came to me and stayed in that form, without a context, a fullness of history. As narrative strategy such cacophony could represent the disorderly nature of the experiences. There is no linearity, no order of progression. This itself is to narrativise the self as visitations of subjectivity.
Memory is known to be driven by crises of identity. Do I as the offspring of a mixed marriage occupy a dubious position? Can I speak with authority as a Muslim about Muslims, for Muslims? My own claim to speak attaches exactly to that position because it gives me more sharpened sensibilities to both religions because of loyalties to both communities. Who is a Muslim? What makes a Muslim? If belonging to an ethnie is a subjective perception of a collectivity, then I am a Muslim with the right to speak as one. But it is not a fixed identity. When I am in a group that turns to Muslim-baiting, I am a Hindu. In a group which is Hindu-baiting, I am a Muslim. This does not arise from a secular, liberal ideology; there is little of that rationale motivating my responses. It is not supporting the underdog. I am that. It is the production of the minority subject.
The attributing of meaning to discursive acts is never neutral, I read in the discourse of voices a hegemonic discourse of sexuality. The images in the voice argue for the dissimulating female, the God husband and stereotypes. The voices utter hegemonic truths. These have been internalised and naturalised with all the authority which flows from discourse, from which the constituting individuals have disappeared.
I want to revisit my childhood and adolescence not in the memoir-driven search from innocence to experience, nor in a nostalgic recreation, but to examine the discourses through which the subject is positioned.
Childhood: Sedimented Discourses
Writing about it comes so easily. Nothing in childhood prefigured the disorderly discourse of the voices. Childhood was constituted by the unmarked absorption of the religious identity. Through the language of practices, an unassertive Islam spoke. This was the patriarchal order: The religion of the father determines that of the offspring in marriage. My father was a Muslim, ergo, I am a Muslim. It was as simple as that. No intimations of loss or lack. 6
We lived in Pune, on the border of the cantonment and the city: two different worlds. The cantonment (‘the camp’) as the name indicates was where the British had their barracks and their administrative offices, and the officers’ residential quarters. In my day, the residents of the camp were considered anglicised; camp was where the minorities lived—Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Sikhs and Jews. Indicatively, the white Baghdadi Jews lived in the camp and worshipped at a beautifully built red brick synagogue, which still stands as a landmark. The Indian Jews worshipped in the city. The city was largely Hindu and Marathi-speaking. The convent and missionary schools were in the camp, the prestigious colleges in the city. In a sense, my location on the border of camp and city represents my location on the cultural axis.
My Muslim identity was unproblematically shaped. My father paid his monthly dues to the neighbourhood mosque when the bangi called to collect them. Outside his professional orbit where he wore a suit like the others down to the solar topee, my father dressed in a sherwani and a black cap. At the right age, we were placed in the charge of a maulvi for our religious education, chiefly reading the Koran through and learning the form of prayer for five times of the day. We celebrated Muslim festivals, observed some of the more important fasts. It was fun rising before dawn to eat seheri and say our prayers, beating the sunrise, and to break the fast in the evening iftar with dates and goodies. What irked my mother was that we in Pune had to depend on the Imam at Delhi to announce that the moon had been sighted and Id-ul-fitr could be celebrated. If the moon was not sighted in Delhi quantities of milk and mutton in Pune had to be preserved till the next day, no small job when the festival fell in the hot summer, for those like us who had not acquired refrigerators. On the authenticated morning, my father always stopped at the flower market on his way back from the mosque to buy flower chains for my mother and my sister and me which he would want us to dress our hair with immediately. On the day itself the women were kept busy attending to the men, friends of my father who came visiting. But the next day was for the women, who went visiting and were visited. My father’s elder sister wore a chaddar whenever she left her home and was always chaperoned by a male member of her family, never mind if it was only her six-year-old grandson. My sister and I wore shalwar kameez, when outside school; in school the uniform—a dress—was compulsory. After we entered our teens the cook was always a female and a Muslim. The servant for ‘top work’ was a man, later succeeded by a maidservant—who was generally a lower-caste Hindu. Childhood was tension free as I remember it.
Becoming a Woman: Strategising Womanliness
My mother was very reticent about matters concerning sexuality. My first encounter with my body was when I menstruated. It came as a shock. It happened during our lunch hour when my father had picked us up from school as usual and brought us home for lunch. When I visited the loo after lunch, the sight of all that blood terrified me and I called my younger brother in. Of course, he was of no help and could only hazard a guess suggesting I must have climbed a tree and hurt myself. The cook of the day, a sour faced, unpleasant woman whom we called the bulldog, heard us whispering and swung into action. She threw out my brother, improvised a sanitary pad, and told me as a matter of fact that it happened to all women and now my father was waiting to take us back to school; my mother, she added, would tell me all about it when she returned from work. She did—and worse—she informed my father who insisted that I wear the shalwar along with my uniform from the very next day. I was mortified. Fortunately, a Muslim classmate who lived two houses away also had gone through this trauma and with the more disastrous injunction that she wear the shalwar
I have chosen to record the ‘menstruation event’ at some length because it exemplifies how culture inscripts sexual difference on the body. The violence in the issuing of the blood from my body was inexplicable at the immediate moment and frightening, because my elder sister had not yet menstruated, so there was no explanation around to minimise the shock. Societal representations of the event took over. The one offered by the cook, ‘It happens to all women’ put the fear in perspective. The bleeding was natural and definitive of woman. She had introduced the idea of the seperateness of the sexes by her marching orders to my brother. That it was normal woman’s business was implied in the instruction that I should not delay my father because it was getting late and he had to go back to work. Her confidence that my mother could explain everything reinforced the marshalling of the sexes into gender roles. Later, it became clear that my mother supported the dress code. So parental wisdom and not paternal authority alone was behind the gendering. It helped in naturalising the process of becoming a woman.
All this of course was not articulated at the time of happening; it came later. My support to my Muslim classmate in subverting the dress code, for instance had been more of a prank to me. Though there was a dimly sensed oppression, wearing the shalwar and odhni were not perceived by me as a gendering of the body but more as a move to distinguish us from our classmates who were mostly Catholics. We did not approve of our minority status being paraded. The construction of Muslim and the subjectifying of woman seem to proceed differentially.
It was only when I passed out of school and entered co-educational colleges for undergraduate study, first in Pune then in Mumbai, that the process of articulation was stimulated. If the body could evoke desire, then womanliness was a strategy towards that end and what it promised.
When I was halfway through the undergraduate course, we had to relocate from Pune as our parents were transferred to Mumbai. Mumbai had always been Eldorado; its free and fast life, the staple of fantasy. Add to that the freedom entailed by living away from the parental embrace—my sister and I were put in a settlement for university women—opened up a whole new life for us. Our Pune upbringing could not be discarded like a garment. But the freedom of Bombay represented womanliness as a kind of choice and so being womanly did not seem irksome. Quite the contrary, I enjoyed putting on the garment of femininity. I was all for the sideways glance, the smouldering looks, the private innuendoes— reinforced not so much by the visuals of Bollywood movies as by the songs which allowed individual editing in the imagination. No thought of marriage ever entered my head in those years. What was always shadowing the romancing was the image of the ‘complete woman’ imparted by my mother—educated, economically independent, working, thinking and creative. Marriage did not figure prominently in this composite identity. My first salary cheque in my first job went to her.
When my first poem was published in The Illustrated Weekly of India that cheque too winged its way to her. Writing poems is often a resource for the young to express the stirring of desire as poetry can accommodate an awakening sexuality safely. With me, wooing was a gentle acknowledgement of love and never a headlong rush into passion. But that was later. At our convent, we seemed to have moved in a penumbra of orientalist discourse. I remember a novel The Sheikh where the hero was an Arab male tempestuously wooing the virginal English woman. He turned out at the end to be a white English army officer! It did nothing to its circulation which continued to soar. The last two lines of a poem which I wrote when I was 25 years old express the dance of advance and retreat.
And if I stand poised on the fringes of you
Dear, be impassive, I flee if you woo.
The Irish editor of the weekly must have liked it, he asked for more.
Somewhere along the way I learned to adopt two modes of behaviour—strategically—one for Pune, the good Muslim girl, the other for Mumbai, freed but anonymous. It was not always possible to keep them apart as I discovered with dismay. One of my classmates in Bombay was a Muslim boy from Pune and our families were known to each other. One day during the vacation when we were both at our homes in Pune, he dropped in and asked to see me. I was petrified, I could hear my father pacing up and down in his room. When the boy left, my father asked me to join him on his evening walk and I knew what was coming. Obviously, he was under an injunction from my mother not to provoke my hot headness because after a sharp and staccato exchange, the matter was dropped and we walked home in silence. Later that day my mother spoke to me and I felt I had put all of us in a false position. She told me that the boy’s family had earlier sent a proposal of marriage for me and they had turned it down. The boy could not have imagined that I knew nothing of it; how was he to know the reticence in our home about sexual matters, and perhaps he put the worst construction on my behaviour in Mumbai. I had never been ‘interested’ in him and his visit put me off completely. It may have been the same with him.
Complicit with my parents were the nuns in the convent where we were studying. We had to buy our textbooks from the ‘school bookstore’. When the Physiology and Hygiene textbook came to us, the pages of the offending portion were stitched together. Is it any wonder that when questions pertaining to sex began to burgeon in the mind I had to sleuth around for answers? That I had to ask a hostelmate: ‘Can you conceive with your clothes on?’ ‘Ha, ha’ she said, ‘which man would tolerate it’. ‘Ha ha’ I joined in, while cursing her inwardly for her ill-timed jocularity which left me without an answer.
The Minority Subject
Once the ‘voices’ began to make themselves heard—the ‘big questions’ emerged invasively. Who is a Muslim? One who professes a belief in Islam? Or is it enough to observe practices without bothering too much about the meaning behind them? Must one be perceived by other Muslims as a Muslim to be a Muslim? What does it mean to be a Muslim woman?
What marks the minority subject? A hermeneutics of suspicion. A proclivity to discern subtexts. A text can be a word, a sentence, a request for information, a statement or a joke. A moment suddenly occurs when the subject is alerted to the perceived subtext which undermines the neutrality of meaning and problematises the intention of the speaker. When there is signification, a subject comes into place.
Voices become events in the discourse which orders them. Suspicion is not paranoia, it is an interpretive mode. The ‘trivialities’ of everyday life are now experienced as salient features of a discourse. Everyday life—telling your name, hiring a maidservant, renting a flat, taking a railway journey—now produces that unquiet surrender to antipathy and distrust. Stereotypes congeal into standard bearers of truth. ‘Harmless’ jokes drip poison. ‘Friday? That’s when Muslims take their weekly bath isn’t it?’ ‘Lucky devils, they can take four wives’. The subtext glimmers: Dirty Muslims, inside and out. The minority subject is produced. Again and again. This is not incremental knowledge.
How does this subject react to the semiotic moment? She may decide to ignore the subtext in the interests of maintaining an already fragile harmony so as not to rock the boat. Should she publicise the ethnie and force the real meaning out of its hiding? Or crucially she might minimise the experience, refuse to engage with it. This may later return to haunt one, setting into motion a sense of betrayal of the ethnie, a loss of self-respect and a need to compensate. It is this need that produces behaviour which is ‘inexplicable’. When a hate crime happens and investigation begins, neighbours of the suspected offender often report their amazement that he could have done it. ‘He seemed such a quiet man.’
I decided to send this piece to a friend for her comments, my first flesh and blood reader. She is close enough to know what I was talking about and scholarly enough to speak her mind, without mincing words. One of her questions shook me. ‘What happened to your mother? She disappears from your memoir so early. This is about gender, isn’t it?’ I was dumbfounded. ‘But she’s everywhere,’ I expostulated. ‘Not to this reader. It is your aunt who comes alive.’ I considered this long and deeply. How did this happen? What does it say about me? I am persuaded that the narrative mode had something to do with it. My aunt fitted easily into the classic realist mode of the Victorian novel with its chronological development of character from innocence through the experience to maturity and esteem. Yet ‘You are Nothing’ had left the hegemonic discourse of sexuality intact. I had never thought of my mother in terms of a character, it would have totalised her. She was just a woman who was different. I had wanted this memoir to be a celebration of that difference.
Making a difference called for negotiation and strategies. Sometimes the effort became too much for her. I cannot narrate those moments because I am not in command of myself when I recall them. I must remember only her gift to me. The gift of a peaceful childhood which could not be threatened even when I came across that revolver in the course of play. Only once did I have a fleeting glimpse of what it must have done to her, the trauma and tension of the weeks before the marriage and the ostracism after. We had had an altercation over something I do not remember and in a fit of pique I stopped talking to her. It took her barely a couple of hours to come to me and in a voice thick with unshed tears say: ‘Whatever happens, child, do not stop talking to me.’
Mummy, I’m talking to you now.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Joan Scott at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, for unfailing encouragement from the inception of this essay through critique of the first draft and for a thumbs up for the final avatar. I am truly grateful. To Sharada Nair, Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, thanks for being always available at the end of the telephone line for impromptu discussions on the theoretical underpinnings of the essay. And for her help with some googling where needed. Uma Chakravarti’s sensitive response on reading the manuscript to the matter and form of the essay actively pushed it to finding its home. To Mary John, my gratitude for her generous and stimulating welcome to this article when I was beginning to despair of finding an Indian publisher. Thanks to Uma Mahadevan for typing, retyping and then again typing messy drafts. Last but far from the least, thanks to Manju, in charge of the neighbourhood cyber centre, always willing to walk the extra mile to help out the technologically challenged old girl.