BEING THE OTHER – THE MUSLIM IN INDIA

“The clouds are moving
ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with dense
clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj. These lines were composed by
Mohsin Kakorvi, a Muslim poet, to celebrate not Lord Krishna?s birthday but
that of the Prophet Muhammad. Awadh, the author?s birthplace, was steeped in
this sort of syncretism in which Islam and Hinduism complemented and
celebrated each other and Urdu culture merged with Awadhi and Brajbhasha.
Sadly, this glorious culture has been systematically destroyed over the past
century. In many ways, Awadh stood for everything that independent India
could have become, a land in which people of different faiths co-existed
peacefully and created a culture that drew upon the best that each community
had to offer. Instead, what we have today is a pale shadow of the harmony
that once existed. Everywhere there are incidents of sectarian murder,
communal propaganda and divisive politics. And there seems to be no stopping
the forces that are destroying the country. In this remarkable book, which is
partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various deliberate and
inadvertent acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million
Muslims in India, Saeed Naqvi looks at how the divisions between Muslims and
Hindus began in the modern era. The British were the first to exploit these
divisions between the communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the run-up to Independence, and its immediate aftermath, some of India?s
greatest leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai
Patel, and others only served to drive the communities further apart.
Successive governments…