[lbo-talk] Indian secularism: Khan Saheb in Kashi

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Sun Aug 27 08:51:23 PDT 2006


At around 27/8/06 2:56 am, Sujeet Bhatt wrote:
>
> Khan Saheb in Kashi
> Shekhar Gupta
>
> Why did Khan Saheb not migrate to Pakistan with Partition? "Arre, will
> I ever leave my Benares?" he asked. "I went to Pakistan for a few
> hours," he said, "just to be able to say I've been there. I knew I
> would never last there." And what is so special about Benares, his
> glorified slum of a haveli in a grandly named Bharat Ratna Ustad
> Bismillah Khan Street that had more potholes than footholds, and more
> heaps of chicken entrails from nearby meat shops, than garbage heaps
> from homes? "My temples are here," he said, "Balaji and Mangala
> Gauri." Without them, he asked, how would he make any music? As a
> Muslim he could not go inside the temples. But, so what? "I would just
> go behind the temples and touch the wall from outside. You bring
> gangajal, you can go inside to offer it, but I can just as well touch
> the stone from outside. It's the same. I just have to put my hand to
> them."
>

Bismillah Khan as "house n-word". What a novel concept for an obituary.


> he also personified, so strikingly, the fact of how the Muslims of
> India defy the stereotypes building up in today's rapidly dividing
> world. They may be poorer than the majority, or even other, smaller
> minorities, they may still live in ghettoes of sorts, but they are a
> part of the mainstream, nationally a well as regionally and
> ethnically, more than Muslim populations are in most parts of the
> world.

That's good to know. Nothing to see here, I guess. Keep it moving!


> A Tamil Muslim, for example, is as much an ethnic Tamil as a
> Hindu or a Christian and certainly has more in common with his ethnic
> cousins than with fellow Muslims in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.

Except his Tamil "ethnic cousins" have stereotypical crap to say about him probably as much as the UP Muslim's does.


> India's
> Muslims work in mainstream businesses where their interests are meshed
> inextricably with the rest, particularly the majority Hindus, even if
> they happen to spar occasionally. That is why, unlike Bush's America
> or the western world in general, India cannot even think of the
> diabolical idea of "Islamic" fascism or terrorism.

If America is "George Bush's America", full of diabolical ideas of Islamic fascism, India is not Advani's (or the even more extreme characters of the Hindu supremacy) India, full of diabolical ideas of Muslims treason for [allegedly] cheering the Pakistani cricket team?


> No country can
> survive if it starts looking at nearly 15 per cent of its population
> as a fifth column. That is why India's view of the war against terror
> has to be entirely different from the western world's, more nuanced,
> more realistic and, most importantly, entirely indigenous.

Such as the great successes in Punjab and Kashmir, and the sophistication of POTA and TADA.


> It is a difficult argument to make in times when it is so tempting to
> tell America and Europe that, see, the people who are terrorising you
> are the same as the people who have been terrorising us. So far you
> never believed us. Now, with every other terror suspect being traced
> back to Pakistan and, more precisely, Jaish or Lashkar, accept and
> acknowledge that we have been in the forefront of the global war
> against terror for a decade before it hit you.

And the other shoe drops!


> But it is tougher
> in India where any notion of 'Them versus Us' is an impossibility
> given how closely communities live, work and do business together. It
> is one thing to say that we have learnt to live with diversity for a
> thousand years.

Oh yeah, hence the rioting in Tamil Nadu in the late 20th century against cultural and linguistic imposition from the north.

Perhaps the piece should have started "I write this not to praise Bismillah Khan, but to use him".


:-(

--ravi

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/



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