Of Curiosity, Optimism and Hope

Let me begin by making a confession. I do not like cricket and have never bothered to learn the game. In fact, in a house where a father and a brother are avid cricket aficionados, I learnt to hate the game with a passion, since I missed out on so many episodes of my favourite soaps! So, whenever Indo-Pakistani matches would be played, it was incredibly curious that I, the cricket-hater was assumed to support the Pakistani team by several of my friends in Government Law College, Ernakulam, India.

Scene A: After my law degree, I was trying to figure out which lawyer in Ernakulam would take me as an apprentice and went to check out the offices of a well-established lawyer. One of the lawyers there, a friend of mine, casually mentioned “oh that is the Pakistan of our office”, he was referring to a cabin which three Muslim lawyers occupied. Something in me rankled, but I dismissed it.

Scene B: I was very fortunate to be awarded a scholarship at Oxford and went there to pursue the BCL, the graduate degree in law. I met a beautiful, smart, very devout Pakistani female student whose first question to me was “How did you (a Muslim from India) get a scholarship to study here?” Of course, she was not referring to my academic ability but the perceived rampant discrimination against Muslims in India. I was extremely irritated and launched into a little “mera bharat mahan” story to the trepidation of others present there.

Yes, I have wondered why I did not react angrily to my Indian friends who consciously or unconsciously aligned Indian Muslims with Pakistan. I do not think I would put up with such comments today. But today, more than ever before, I am also extremely curious about Pakistan, its people, its food, its history, its music (I am a big fan of Abida Parveen and Junoon! ), the post-1971 generation, anything about Pakistan except, yes, you guessed right, Rashid Latif and gang! But I wonder to myself, why?.

If I were to look for the reason within my family background, there is nothing to suggest why I should be interested in Pakistan. Unlike some very distinguished Indian writers and activists who have personally or have family who lived in pre-partition Sindh, Punjab or Balochistan, I am a south Indian Muslim from Kerala whose native language is Malayalam. I speak pidgin Hindi/Urdu (For instance, I still cannot get the gender of objects right, even after living for close to a year in Delhi!).

Does it stem from the fact that I am a Muslim? In the madrasaa I studied as a kid, Pakistan was hardly ever mentioned, much less discussed. At home, whenever he heard of the sectarian strife in Pakistan, my father would utter “asthagufarullah” and hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. At home, we loved to say that Pakistan is more an elitist than a Muslim society. We would rhetorically ask each other, sitting around our dining table, “if a few families owned majority of the land, and if shias were killed, was this the Muslim society, the Prophet ( peace be upon him) envisioned.?” Of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the less said the better.

Probing my curiosity, I think, I became curious about Pakistan in a very convoluted way. I was thrust with a Pakistani identity that I did not seek,(one of the favourite slogans of the Hindu right in India is “Babur ke aulaad Pakistan Jao”, a historically inaccurate statement that equates the Muslim presence in India with the invasions from central Asia) by all those people who associated Indian Muslims with Pakistan. I tried to dismiss this forced identity, but it did not go away. I decided to confront it and in the process became very curious about Pakistan.

I would like it, if this were not equated with the post-9/11 frenzy about Pakistan in the Western media, a passing fad, in my opinion.
Some readers, (the Pakistani ones more than others, I presume), may wonder whether this curiosity is a manifestation of voyeurism, an olinjunottam (in Malayalam) of the unknown, and in some ways the sensational, reminiscent of the white man’s gaze. I believe this is a fair concern. I like to think that my curiosity is not of the kind that either demonises or romanticizes the “other”. Needless to say, the Pakistani is the quintessential “other” for much of the mainstream public discourse in India. At the expense of sounding trite, I say that I want to look at Pakistanis as human beings struggling with the roti, kapada makan issues, enjoying the poetry of Faiz, the music of Nusrat and trying to make sense of this complex world of ours.

Is curiosity enough? Is being able to say “oh I know that some gutsy Pakistani women staged the Vagina Monologues in Islamabad recently” or that “Lahore has the biggest Mcdonalds in the world” enough? In other words, is factual awareness of Pakistan an end? Knowledge of little known facts about Pakistan is a means to an end. Also, it is quite possible to be a chauvinistic Indian who knows little details of Pakistan and dreams of the day when the tricolour would fly over Lahore. What I am seeking is something fundamentally different. To me, the objective of my curiosity is an enlightened understanding of Pakistan, an enlightened understanding that will help forge better relations between my country and Pakistan.

Some of my readers may think that it is more than a little curious that a Muslim from India should be arguing for better relations with Pakistan and yet others may question my patriotism. Does patriotism have to be based on negative emotions like enmity? Yes, we have fought wars with Pakistan and several hundreds of our jawaans have lost their lives defending India and by extension the idea of a pluralistic, secular, democratic India. But, paying homage to their sacrifice does not mean that Indians be a hate-filled, revenge seeking people who want to destroy another country. Also, the commitment of Indian Muslims to India, should not be measured on the touchstone of their hate towards Pakistan.

Like John F. Kennedy, I like to think that I am an idealist without illusions. There is a big wellspring of goodwill towards ordinary Pakistanis in India as baby Noor fathima’s parents, Tayyiba Sajjad and Nadeem Sajjad have discovered. I am sure the reverse is true. As the maverick Bollywood film director Mahesh Bhatt, said with respect to his forthcoming movie, which he characterizes as the South Asian Schindler’s list, “we, Indians and Pakistanis have to be audacious.” Yes, the audacity that Bhatt argues for is hampered by the absent visa stamp and the periodic shutting down of each other’s television channels and websites.

But, like the Harvard Law Professor, Lani Guinier, Harvard law School’s first African American woman Professor, who says “don’t wonder whether the glass is half full or half empty, let us work together to fill the glass”, I am an eternal optimist and I believe that Indians and Pakistanis must work towards that enlightened understanding of each other and never, never give up hope that things will get better in South Asia.