[Reader-list] Ruchira Paul: When Hindus Mourned Muslim Martyr

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

December 08, 2008

When Hindus mourned a Muslim martyr

Ruchira Paul

http://accidentalblogger.typepad.com/accidental_blogger/2008/12/when-hindus-mourned-a-muslim-martyr.html


Today or tomorrow, depending on the sighting of the moon, is Eid
al-Adha, a day of celebration for Muslims worldwide. This year,
December is also the month of Muharram, a religious event of lament
and mourning observed by the Shia Muslim sect.

I recently finished reading The Girl From Foreign by American
documentary film maker Sadia Shepard which I had previewed here a few
months ago. Shepard's journey in search of her Indian born Jewish/
Muslim grandmother's roots crisscrosses through western India and the
Pakistani city of Karachi. It is a fascinating story which I plan to
describe at a later date. Today however, I wish to bring up a little
known fragment of Indian history that had laid buried in my memory for
decades and which an anecdote in Shepard's book helped shake loose.

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls
from practically every part of India belonging to several different
linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi
and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral
homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In
middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the
Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's
family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the
partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said.
We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales
from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story
acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in
Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in
particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the
remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not
a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin.

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more
communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They,
along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to
commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in
the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle
among early Muslims. Of the Dutts was said the following:



Wah Dutt Sultan,

Hindu ka Dharam

Musalman ka Iman,



Wah Dutt Sultan

Adha Hindu Adha Musalman



[Oh, Dutt the king,

follows the religion of the Hindu

And the faith of the Muslim.



Oh, Dutt the king,

He is half Hindu, half Muslim.]



I do not bring up my friend's story in any specially sentimental way.
Looking back on her simply told tale with the political events of
today as the backdrop, evokes more wonder than sorrow.  I was born a
few years after the bloody partition of India. The political and
psychological wounds of that cataclysmic event were raw on both sides
of the divide during my childhood. Yet amazingly enough, there
probably was more mutual understanding between the two battling
communities then than there is today. After decades of mistrust and
alienation, the line in the sand that was drawn across Hindu and
Muslim identities around 1947, has now hardened and appears set in
concrete. As one of the linked articles explains in its somewhat
flowery text:



The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim
Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. Younger generation
Hussaini Brahmins are said to be abandoning their ancestral heritage,
some seeing it as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can an
ambiguous, yet comfortable, liminality be sustained, fuzzy communal
identities giving way under the relentless pressure to conform to the
logic of neatly demarcated 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' communities. And so,
these and scores of other religious communities that once straddled
the frontier between Hinduism and Islam seem destined for perdition,
or else to folkloric curiosities that tell of a bygone age, when it
was truly possible to be both Hindu as well as Muslim at the same
time.



I am not a starry eyed optimist. I harbor no illusions that the
complicated politics of the Indian subcontinent are going to be solved
simply by harping on the feel-good history of shared culture - of
food, music, language, ethnicities and sometimes even religious
celebrations. Nonetheless, those who have turned the region into a
powder keg of hostilities and have fueled communal fires with lies and
revisionist history, need to be reminded perhaps, that if the present
mayhem is always the consequence of past injustices, there are also
many examples of peaceful co-existence that could serve as the model
for reconciliation between south Asian Muslims and Hindus.



Eid Mubarak  to our Muslim readers and to any one else who may wish to
rejoice with their Muslim friends on this day.