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Papers by altaf hali
(1837-1914) in his inimitable way captures the dilemma of Muslim identity as perceived by segment... more (1837-1914) in his inimitable way captures the dilemma of Muslim identity as perceived by segments of the ashraf classes in nineteenth century northern India. Steeped in nostalgia for Islam's past glories and a wry sense of the Muslim predicament, Hali's Shikwa-e-Hind, or complaint to India, cannot be dismissed as simply the bigoted laments of a man who has accepted social closure on grounds of religious difference and antipathy towards non-Muslims. To challenge Hali's questionable reading of the history of Islam in the subcontinent or his spurious representations of Indian Muslims in undifferentiated terms as descendants of foreign immigrants is to concentrate on the obvious and miss out the richness of the poetic nuances. What is instructive about the poem is how a committed Muslim with more than a surfeit of airs was hard pressed to deny the decisive and irreversible impact of India on his co-religionists. As the metaphor of fire to ashes makes clear, this is an assertion of a cultural identity, once distinctive but now all too faded. Hali's grievance is precisely the loss of distinctiveness which he believes had given Muslims a measure of dignity and humanity. Bereft of any qualities of friendship or fellowship, Muslims had become selfish, inward looking, indolent and illiterate. None of this is the fault of India. Hali instead blames qismat which brought Islam to the subcontinent and made certain that unlike the Greeks the Muslims did not turn away from its frontiers in failure. India without Islam is an ingenious idea. It would certainly have obviated the need for endless scholarly outpourings on communalism. But however much Muslims may take Hali's lead in blaming qismat, Islam in India, united or divided, is a fact of history and an intrinsic feature of the subcontinent's future. What is less clear is whether communalism should continue to serve as a descriptive or analytical clincher in representations of the Muslim past, present and future in the South Asian subcontinent. In the 1990s it has once again taken center stage in academic and political debates, a consequence of the resort to what has been called Hindu majoritarian communalism seeking to preserve or capture centralized state power. Successive Congress regimes in the 1980s surreptitiously invoked a nebulous form of Hindu majoritarianism which has been crafted into a more potent political ideology by the forces of Hindutva. Neither the Congress nor the RSS, BJP and VHP combination would plead guilty to the charge of communalism. Not only the self-professedly secular Indian state and the Congress regimes at its helm, but also their challengers claim the appellation of nationalist. The original sin of being communalist for the most part has been reserved for the subcontinent's Muslims. Notwithstanding the compromises of secular nationalism with Hindu communalism, the burden of this negative term in the history of late colonial India has fallen on the Muslim minority. The establishment of a Muslim state at the moment of the British withdrawal added immeasurably to the weight of the burden. In the post-colonial scenario in general, and the conjuncture created by the Ayodhya controversy in particular, the Indian secularist response has been to tar both Hindu majoritarianism and Muslim minoritarianism with the brush of communalism. This asymmetry has expressed itself not only in state policy but also in secular academic discourse. Muslim minority 'communalism' has occupied a critical location in academic texts organized around the binary opposition between secular nationalism and religious communalism. If this neat but
(1837-1914) in his inimitable way captures the dilemma of Muslim identity as perceived by segment... more (1837-1914) in his inimitable way captures the dilemma of Muslim identity as perceived by segments of the ashraf classes in nineteenth century northern India. Steeped in nostalgia for Islam's past glories and a wry sense of the Muslim predicament, Hali's Shikwa-e-Hind, or complaint to India, cannot be dismissed as simply the bigoted laments of a man who has accepted social closure on grounds of religious difference and antipathy towards non-Muslims. To challenge Hali's questionable reading of the history of Islam in the subcontinent or his spurious representations of Indian Muslims in undifferentiated terms as descendants of foreign immigrants is to concentrate on the obvious and miss out the richness of the poetic nuances. What is instructive about the poem is how a committed Muslim with more than a surfeit of airs was hard pressed to deny the decisive and irreversible impact of India on his co-religionists. As the metaphor of fire to ashes makes clear, this is an assertion of a cultural identity, once distinctive but now all too faded. Hali's grievance is precisely the loss of distinctiveness which he believes had given Muslims a measure of dignity and humanity. Bereft of any qualities of friendship or fellowship, Muslims had become selfish, inward looking, indolent and illiterate. None of this is the fault of India. Hali instead blames qismat which brought Islam to the subcontinent and made certain that unlike the Greeks the Muslims did not turn away from its frontiers in failure. India without Islam is an ingenious idea. It would certainly have obviated the need for endless scholarly outpourings on communalism. But however much Muslims may take Hali's lead in blaming qismat, Islam in India, united or divided, is a fact of history and an intrinsic feature of the subcontinent's future. What is less clear is whether communalism should continue to serve as a descriptive or analytical clincher in representations of the Muslim past, present and future in the South Asian subcontinent. In the 1990s it has once again taken center stage in academic and political debates, a consequence of the resort to what has been called Hindu majoritarian communalism seeking to preserve or capture centralized state power. Successive Congress regimes in the 1980s surreptitiously invoked a nebulous form of Hindu majoritarianism which has been crafted into a more potent political ideology by the forces of Hindutva. Neither the Congress nor the RSS, BJP and VHP combination would plead guilty to the charge of communalism. Not only the self-professedly secular Indian state and the Congress regimes at its helm, but also their challengers claim the appellation of nationalist. The original sin of being communalist for the most part has been reserved for the subcontinent's Muslims. Notwithstanding the compromises of secular nationalism with Hindu communalism, the burden of this negative term in the history of late colonial India has fallen on the Muslim minority. The establishment of a Muslim state at the moment of the British withdrawal added immeasurably to the weight of the burden. In the post-colonial scenario in general, and the conjuncture created by the Ayodhya controversy in particular, the Indian secularist response has been to tar both Hindu majoritarianism and Muslim minoritarianism with the brush of communalism. This asymmetry has expressed itself not only in state policy but also in secular academic discourse. Muslim minority 'communalism' has occupied a critical location in academic texts organized around the binary opposition between secular nationalism and religious communalism. If this neat but