Or so I argued, and I was surprised by the reactions I received. I discounted the purely cricketing responses — including those from some who churlishly felt that the teenager's contribution to India's cricketing triumphs in Pakistan was not as great as my praise implied — on the grounds that they have somewhat missed the point. In bringing his vigor and his talent to the national cause, Irfan Pathan, a Gujarati Muslim of (to put it territorially) “Pakistani” ethnic origin, had repudiated those who had allowed themselves to forget (or who had consciously denied) an indestructible Indian idea.
A number of readers liked the piece — but of the many who disagreed with it, two, in my view, made strikingly interesting arguments that deserved attention on larger political grounds. One was passed on to me from an Internet discussion group that had reacted to my piece; the other was sent to me directly by an eminent Indian academician. One I disagreed with, the other I accepted.
The first, by a chat-room discussant called Saurabh, also objected to my “attempts to build up Pathan as the star of the Indian victory.” He felt I was echoing Imran Khan's statements “downplaying India's team effort” and felt the problem lay in the Pakistanis’ “inability to believe they can be beaten fair and square by India (unless of course it is Muslims who are responsible for their defeat).” Obviously, I did not share this piece of social psychology. But Saurabh then went on to hail Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's comments reacting to what he called “Zaheer Khan's nice putdown of his Pakistani interviewer.” (Zaheer had, I understand, retorted to a question about how he felt as a Muslim playing for India by pointing out that it was his country, he had grown up there, and it had made him who he was.) Thackeray, Saurabh explained, “immediately endorsed him as a ‘true Indian Muslim.’ That runs contrary to Tharoor's script of the Hindu Right as being unprepared to accept an Indian Muslim as Indian.”
Now this took me a bit aback. I had thought Thackeray's comment nauseatingly patronizing, the equivalent of an anti-Semite bestowing the label of “good Jew.” Are we now, in the enlightened first decade of the twenty-first century, to accept the notion that the leader of a Hindu-chauvinist political party is entitled to certify who is, or is not, a “true Indian Muslim”? The notion is as offensive as it is unsustainable. I admire Zaheer's forthright defense of his birthright no less than Thackeray does. But my point is precisely that an Indian Muslim should be free to define his Muslimness as he sees fit (in Irfan's case, with overt expressions of his piety, hardly surprising in a muezzin's son) without in any way diminishing his claim to Indianness. An Indian Muslim is simply that: an Indian and a Muslim. It is not for Mr. Thackeray and his ilk to determine what makes him a “true Indian Muslim.”
The second notable critique came from Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain, vice chancellor of the University of Calicut in Kerala. “As an educated Uttar Pradesh Muslim,” Professor Hasnain wrote, “I felt humiliated that when some player or film actor performs for India, then the majority community feels that Muslims are patriotic Indians.” I was again taken aback, since the last thing I had intended was to humiliate any Indian Muslim by my celebration of Irfan, but the good professor went on to explain: “There are hundreds and thousands of Muslims who are performing for India in various fields and nobody wants to acknowledge their contribution.” In Kerala alone, Professor Hasnain argued, there are over 150 Muslim-funded institutions in the Malabar region providing medical education, and training nurses, paramedics, engineers, and teachers in fields as varied as arts and sciences, hospitality management, and costume and fashion design. These are “high-quality institutions,” he explained, reflecting an estimated total investment of around 1,000 crore Indian rupees, entirely provided by individuals belonging to the Muslim community. And here's the rub: the students who attend these colleges, according to the professor, “are 90 percent non-Muslim boys and girls.” There are, he adds, similar institutions in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. “In my view,” Professor Hasnain concludes, “Irfan is not the standing, leaping, glorious repudiation of the killers of Muslims in Gujarat, but certainly the Muslim institution-builders of South India in general and Kerala in particular are the shining examples.”
I accept the good professor's rebuke, but with one mild expression of self-defense. To celebrate one individual as representing a larger idea is not to deny that there are other examples that affirm the same idea. Irfan and cricket had captured the national imagination at the time; it was not unreasonable for a columnist to seize on them to make his point. No doubt there are worthier examples of Indian Muslims repudiating the assumptions of the murderous chauvinists of Gujarat and elsewhere.
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This was not the first time, though, that I had unwittingly offended Indian Muslim readers in expatiating on the vexed subject of Indianness. “There is a certain kind of secularism which sometimes scares me even more than the militant fundamentalism of the mosque-bashers,” began an e-mail I received in response to a series of columns on Hinduism and Indianness. “It wears a smiling face and speaks in a tender voice, asking Muslims to participate in Hindu ‘culture’ rather than ‘religion.’ ‘Celebrate Deepavali with us,’ these secularists say, and they perceive no irony in the way Deepavali takes over civil life in India the way Eid or Muharram can never aspire to. They are proud of the fact that rural Islam is almost indistinguishable from Hinduism, but they do not stop to wonder why it is not the other way around.”
I sat up and took notice. I am used to criticism from all sides in our wretched national agonizing about secularism, but rarely in such terms from an Indian Muslim. The author of these words, Shahnaz Habib, went on:
You write about the Amritraj family, “To give their children Hindu names must have seemed more ‘nationalist.’” You have just equated Hindu with nationalist, a religion with the country, the part with the whole. You go on to add that Muslim Indians still “feel obliged to adopt Arab names in deference to the roots of their faith.” I wish I knew how you defined “obliged to.” Is it merely a compulsion of faith as you seem to see it or is it a joyous affirmation of being able to participate not only in a local heritage but also in a culture that goes beyond national boundaries? Or could it be a political act? Could it be the insecurity of living in a country where you walk into a nationalized bank to be faced by a huge oil painting of goddess Lakshmi? Why are there so few Muslim or Christian symbols in our public spaces if cultural assimilation has been so successful?
And there was a particular poignancy to Ms. Habib's concluding paragraph: “I wish for you the knowledge of what it feels like to be a minority. What it feels like to be on the wrong side of an accident of numbers. On one hand, the adventure of having more than one culture to call mine. The magic of constantly challenging my preconceptions. And [on the other,] the pain of wishing that my Hindu friends knew as much about my Muslim festivals and customs as I know about theirs, of wishing that I didn't have to explain my actions in my own country. And worse, feeling guilty for feeling this pain.”