The wise people have said that all of us are same at the deeper, spiritual level while seeming to be starkly different outwardly. May be there is something to this argument although one finds it difficult to imagine it. How are we one? How can we be one? I am quite convinced that it is possible to be one if we forget our differences, or if we don’t allow the differences to prevail. Contradictory, right? But we do live our contradictions daily. For instance, we don’t agree with every opinion, behaviour or action of our loved ones like husband, children, parents and siblings. But we do live together as we don’t allow the differences to prevail.
Even when they do, the disagreements are temporary. Ultimately, we allow our love and our commonalities to prevail. This state of affairs is a daily experience. Acceptance-rejection, love-dislike, agreement-disagreement are inevitable with not just our loved ones, relatives, colleagues and neighbours but even with ourselves. The pulls and pressures of anger, greed and grievances are constant but mostly they are overcome by love, need for peace and the instinct for survival. The exceptions are precisely that, simply exceptions. The general rule is that we carry on merrily. Just as we have done for hundreds of years as Hindus and Muslims and Christians, as upper castes and lower castes, as vegetarians and non-vegetarians, as Dravidians and Aryans, as blacks and not-so-blacks.
This should be the context in which Shabana Azmi’s statement on being a Muslim and not finding a house in Mumbai should be looked at. Her confession of her travails prompted other films stars like Saif Ali Khan, Arshad Warsi to voice similar experiences. Actors like Farhan Akhtar however have disagreed.
Shabana has received much criticism both from moderates and extremists, for her statement. From the former because they don’t want to disturb the sleeping dogs and from the latter because they think minorities in their part of the world should be grateful for being allowed to exist. In subsequent interviews, Shabana explained that such issues were marginal but they came in handy for the extremists to rake up issues.
Often, we stereotype people and allow our prejudices to define them. One meets with prejudice all the time. Ask a woman, ask a Dalit, ask a minority, ask a single mother, ask a transgender. Often, we assert our power, as a senior, superior, elder, belonging to the majority religion, speaking the majority language, as a male, employer, and as house-owner. We find a security in commonalities because it is an emotional need and these commonalities differ in different contexts. For instance, I am an Indian first and foremost when I live abroad. Similarly, I am a South Indian in Delhi Bangalore
On my own house-hunting sprees some years ago in Hyderabad, I was blatantly asked by prospective sellers about my religion as then I did not wear any overt religious symbols on my self; a Muslim builder helpfully suggested I look at another apartment since the one he was building was meant only for Muslims; a Muslim doctor-couple from Mysore, comforted by my connections to Karnataka, confessed in indignation that not just Hindu buyers but even Hindu tenants are not allowed in their apartment building. Once, an autorickshaw driver was hesitant to take me to a specific locality in the Old City
During my stay in Washington DC some years ago, I was invited by a Muslim single woman to spend an evening with her friends, all of them being Muslim (interestingly, there used to be minimum, if at all any, socialization between Indian Muslims and Hindus in the USA.) Some of the invitees were Pakistanis. Later I found out that my friend had to take the permission of the local Mulla to invite a Hindu to her home since Hindus are rarely allowed into their social get-togethers!
Then, there are travails of the non-vegetarians in cities like Ahmedabad. A friend recalled how he had to lie to rent a house from a vegetarian. Since cooking meat at home was out of question, the family would go to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact whenever they bought cooked meat dishes from a hotel. They would eat in secrecy, not daring to even heat up the dish for fear of the smell giving them away, then light plenty of agarbathis to ‘cleanse’ the home, collect the bones in a plastic bag and dispose it off in a dustbin far away from their neighbourhood to avoid being detected!
The travails of the upwardly mobile Dalits are no less. They do not get homes on rent, they even face two-glass system in their workplace, they are transferred to posts nobody wants, and are overlooked in promotions. A Dalit minister in AP publicly rued the fact that she had a servant problem since nobody wanted to clean the dishes and wash the clothes of a Dalit however important a public figure she was!
While all these instances are real, faced daily and most of us are traumatized for being who we are, this is not the entire picture. The other side is we gloat over our secular and inclusive traditions, revel in the poetry of Kabir and qawwalis of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, admire B R Ambedkar for his amazing intellect and his gift of freedom through the Constitution to all of us, get inspired by Abdul Kalam and thrown into depths of despair by Shah Rukh Khan’s Devdas, stirred by Amir Khan’s Lagaan, rocked by the romantic Saif Ali. And where does A R Rehman fit in all this? In the depths of our soul, of course, where else? This is India meri jaan. Thoda khatta, thoda meetha, thoda namkin. An unbeatable mix. That is why we have survived for ages.
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