Promising debut

Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands by Aatish Taseer; Picador; Price: Rs.495; 323 pp

Post 9/11 amidst the rise of global Islamic terrorism, interpreting and explaining radical Islam and its fanatical followers has emerged as a major industry which has kept printing presses humming. Yet most of the rash of analyses of militant Islam have been academic publications explaining the political, historical and cultural contexts from which Muslim extremism has sprung.

Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History is a refreshing departure from this tradition. Part memoir, part travelogue, this debut book by 28-year-old Taseer, a former reporter of Time magazine, is a first-person account of a journey he undertakes through the Middle East and Pakistan spurred by a mission to understand Islam — his father’s religion — and the “new energised Islamic identity working on young Muslims”.

The outcome of a short, intense cross-border affair between India’s celebrated woman journalist Tavleen Singh, and Salmaan Taseer, a high-profile Lahore-based businessman and politician recently appointed governor of Punjab (in Pakistan), Aatish was born in London and lived there until the age of two, when he and his mother were abandoned in 1983 by Taseer.

Forced to return to India, he was raised by supportive grandparents in Delhi even as Tavleen established a reputation as one of post-Emergency India’s most articulate woman journalists (India Today, Sunday, Indian Express,etc). As the author hurriedly tells it, while growing up in secular India and mixing with his upper class (and wealthy) Sikh cousins, he had only a vague sense of his different Muslim identity mainly because before he scarpered, his father had ensured that Taseer was circumcised as per Islamic orthodoxy.

Curiously, in an otherwise engaging narrative, the author dismisses his obviously superior private school education in India (“Christian boarding school”) and higher education in the US (“an American university”) in two paragraphs. Equally curiously, even though he insists on the circumcision of his offspring, the father never acknowledged his son, or ever spoke to him until the latter journeyed to Pakistan to meet him as a 21-year-old. Typical schizo behaviour of the feudal landed gentry in socially backward Pakistan, as recounted by several women writers of our neighbour nation, particularly Tehmina Durrani (My Feudal Lord, 1996).

Next thing you know Aatish has landed a job as a journalist in London with effortless ease. The train-bus bomb blasts in London in the summer of 2005, allegedly triggered by Muslim militants which killed 52 and injured 150 people, prompted him to write an investigative story about Islamic militancy for a British magazine. In his debut cover story he ascribes the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in Britain to the “particular estrangement, the failure of identity on so many fronts” that second-generation Pakistani youth experience in their adopted country. Far from pleasing his father, this achievement prompts him to write his first-ever letter to his abandoned son, reprimanding him for lacking “even superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos, blackening his name… and spreading invidious anti-Muslim propaganda”.

Confused and disturbed by the ferocity of the letter and his own shallow knowledge of Islam and Islamic society, in 2006 the author sets off on a quest into the heart of Islam, for the physical journey is also metaphorical, a way of coming to terms with his Islamic heritage from which he feels alienated. On his route lie an arc of Muslim countries — Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan.

Taseer Jr. begins his Islamic odyssey in Istanbul, the once great capital of Islam, where religion was banished from public life by its globally renowned reformer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). In this fiercely secular country, his investigations indicate that state-imposed rejection of Islam and its once glorious past has alienated a large and growing number of youth, pushing them to find refuge in the faith.

In Damascus, the capital of Arabist Syria, he comes face to face with the rage of the faithful against the West and its freedoms and excesses. But in Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the excesses of a regressive theocracy are on full display. Here the complete assimilation of state and church has shaped a generation of angry youth, notes the author, adding that the Iranian Revolution has turned against its own people, “brutalising its children”. Iran’s youth have reacted to the tyranny of religious imposition with defiance and rejection.

Aatish’s Islamic voyage ends in Pakistan or ‘land of the pure’ — a country carved out of Hindu India in 1947 for the faithful. But it’s far from a warm homecoming. The thorny India-Pakistan relationship which soured his parents’ affair casts a long shadow over his relationship with his father, making their interactions tense and embarrassing. And the father-son relationship, which revived and then fell apart in the seven years since he first met his father as a 21-year-old, ends on a quiet and sombre note.

On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto — Taseer Sr. is a life-long supporter of the Bhuttos — was assassinated, casting a pall of gloom over the reconciliation. Yet despite years of neglect and rejection, the author describes his moment of filial tenderness for his father, a man committed to great causes. “I felt a great sympathy as I watched the man I had judged so harshly, for not facing his past when it came to me, muse on the pain of history in his country,” he writes.

An amalgam of autobiography and travelogue, Stranger to History is the promising launch of a talented writer who skillfully interweaves his own alienation with the frustration confused youth in the Muslim world experience, their dreams and freedoms crushed by autocratic gerontocracies deriving legitimacy from Islamic dogma. The paternal relationship infuses the book with poignancy, while the author’s encou-nters with students and youth as he journeys through the arc of Muslim countries, give readers a wider understanding of the Islamic world, its history, politics and people.

Muslim understanding of Islam as a civilization of faith transcending national borders, their rage against the West, their fear of modernity and paranoia about the threat to Islam, are ideas which Aatish explores, debates and interprets with facility, honesty and intelligence.

Summiya Yasmeen

Sacred Kerala — A Spiritual Journey by Dominique-Sila Khan; Penguin; Price: Rs.275; 233 pp

The southern littoral state of Kerala (pop. 31.8 million) has a unique population mix. A little less than half of its inhabitants are Hindus, of various castes. The rest are Muslims and Christians, in roughly equal number, sprinkled with a minuscule population of Jews.

In contrast with most of north India, inter-community relations in Kerala have always been harmonious, although the situation is beginning to change today. At the popular level, economic and social ties and the interdependence of Kerala’s diverse religious communities have given birth to a strong sense of Malayali identity which transcends communal boundaries. This has been facilitated and strengthened by the use of the Malayalam language by all communities, as well as a long-standing tradition of religious overlapping or shared identities, which is what this fascinating book is all about.

The author, a Romanian Jew born and raised in France, married to a Rajasthani Muslim and deeply interested in India’s ‘folk religious’ traditions, herself exemplifies the notion of shared religious traditions that defy neat categorisation. Her location in India, she says, led her to undertake a series of journeys to Kerala to explore the state’s live legacy of popular religiosity that binds people of God’s own country which, to compound its religious multiplicity, also hosts a strong communist movement.

The central argument of the book is that as demonstrated by Kerala, the belief that communal identities are neatly bound, homogeneous and clearly set apart from, or even in contradistinction to other religious particularisms, is erroneous. Textbook definitions of Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, which describe them as wholly independent creeds whose followers are distinct from each other, conceal a vibrant historical tradition of overlapping religious customs and identities, or what for want of a better term, can be called ‘syncretism’ or ‘liminality’. Shared religious traditions and religious spaces, contends the author, contain the seeds of universal spiritualism.

As an ethnographic account of religious syncretism in Kerala, this book excels. Khan describes several common ceremonies and practices that bind rural Hindus, Muslims and Christians throughout the state. She narrates stories of generous land grants made by Hindu rajahs to Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities to build their mosques, synagogues and shrines. Cults that have emerged from such shrines continue to survive, bringing together people of different creeds in common worship and celebration. At the annual Chandankulam festival in a remote Kerala village, devotees of all faiths gather in a Catholic church, proceed to a Bhagvati temple and finally congregate in a mosque. Similarly Hindus undertaking the arduous pilgrimage to the shrine of Ayyappa at Sabarimala, first visit a mosque, and, after their devotions, often pray at the shrine of a Christian saint. Ayyappa, one of the major Hindu folk deities of Kerala, is believed to have been a close friend of a Muslim named Vavar, as also of a Christian priest. Consequently Hindu festivals often involve prayers and contributions at Christian and Muslim shrines.

Sila Khan travels the length and breath of Kerala to uncover dozens of such shrine-based religious traditions that, taken together, present a vastly different picture of inter-communal relations from the conventional image of religious exclusivism in terms of belief and practice.

Nevertheless while lauding the syncretic traditions of Kerala, the author doesn’t sweep the reality that in recent years India’s most literate state has witnessed the emergence of a number of right-wing communal and religious fundamentalist movements — Hindu, Muslim and Christian. These movements have had a major impact on Kerala society, and have succeeded in reviving communal particularism. Nevertheless they are a fundamental departure from Malayali tradition, says Sila Khan, who argues that the essential trait of the people of the Malabar region is that they are open and inclusive, although she is also cognizant of deep-rooted caste discrimination in Kerala.

Yet the worth of this work of deep research and valuable insights is that it tells a fascinating story of alternate, more tolerant and accomodational interpretations of religious, spiritual and communal identities. It recounts the spiritual history of vast numbers of ordinary people, whose voices are unheard but who keep alive and practice harmonious spiritualism, which is a negation of the politics of religious exclusivism that threatens the unity of the Indian state.

Yoginder Sikand