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Page 4 of 6
Muslims as ‘Mughals’?
In the introduction to his book of essays, Imaginary
Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91, Rushdie talks of a seminar
in London in which eminent writers and historians from India were invited to speak
at the festival of India in 1982. He writes: “…an eminent Indian academic
delivered a paper on Indian culture that utterly ignored all minority
communities. When questioned about this from the floor, the professor smiled
benignly and allowed that of course India contained many diverse traditions—including
Buddhists, Christians and ‘Mughals’. This characterization of Muslim culture was
more than merely peculiar. It was a technique of alienation. For if Muslims
were ‘Mughals’, then they were foreign invaders, and Indian Muslim culture was
both imperialist and inauthentic. At the time, we made light of the gibe, but
it stayed with me, pricking at me like a thorn.”
In the light of this experience, it would not seem impossible if Muslims
took the airbrushing of the Mughlai food items from the Indian menu as an act
of alienation.
Ghazal becomes Gajal
The same way the chandrabindu (the
dot below a devnagri letter to signify pronunciation) seems to have been
airbrushed from common devnagri lipi.
It was meant to be a meeting ground of Urdu and Hindi, if you will—the two
sister languages that also fell victim to communalization in India. The
result is disastrous. The chef on TV has no compunction in pronouncing zeera
(cumin seeds) as jeera. And the literature student has no problem asking: Yeh kya Galib (Ghalib) ki gajal (ghazal) hai. It grates my
ears through. The interesting thing is that even no-Urdu knowing Muslims today
pronounce words in this fashion.
Et tu, Bollywood?
And finally, the technique of alienation seems to have invaded the most
secular of India’s
cultural spaces—television and Bollywood. These are not just virtual cultural
spaces but powerful engines of culture-generation. After the 1990s, as
Bollywood moved from producing the cinema for the front benchers to the cinema
for the yuppie, multiplex-going crowd, its stars and filmmakers began to define
and set the cultural agenda of the country. Their impact on Hindus and Muslims,
both off screen and on screen, are alike. As noted American political
philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, it’s also interesting that
Bollywood is the one place where Hindus and Muslims intermingle and intermarry
and there is not any great sense of the gulf between them.
After the death of the Muslim socials in Bollywood (a natural corollary
of the death of the Muslim elite), its filmmakers turned their back on Muslim
characters. How many principal Muslim characters have you seen in Bollywood
movies in the post Manmohan Desia era? Don’t even try to count on your fingers.
The situation is worse in TV’s case, especially the popular daily soaps
on satellite TV channels. With the exception of the low-budget fantasies like Alif-Laila, in the world of Saas bhi
kabhi bahu thi (which is supposed to be popular even in far and away
Afghanistan)
and Kahani ghar ghar ki, there are hardly
any mainstream Muslim characters. It seems they are not part of the glamorous
and prosperous social fabric of India
which is more or less true.
These are big-ticket questions for the entertainment world. But I am
asking a minor question. Like the national integration slogans, Mughlai food
and the chandrabindu, one more thing has disappeared from Hindi movie, well almost:
the Urdu language titles, along with Hindi and English, in the opening credits.
In the last 10-15 years, I think I have seen most movies have done away with
it.
I was glad to see that not all filmmakers have forgotten this
tradition. Shyam Benegal prominently displayed the Urdu titles in his latest
film, Welcome to Sajjanpur, in the feature’s opening
credits.
I agree that these are not big issues—where do they stand in front of typically
cited larger issues such as fundamentalism and terrorism?
My “regular Indian Hindu” friend might ask me how do these minor,
inconsequential things matter to the Indian Muslim mind? My answer is: a lot.
These are minor issues but they act as psychological symbols—symbols of our
existence, participation and inclusion with the nation at large.
How these symbolic things, tokenisms, if you will, have tiptoed their
way out of the public consciousness remains a mystery to me. But I would rather
not have had them disappear from our public lives.
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