Occidentally Yours
A secularism that survived Partition is worth preserving
By Somnath Batabyal
Our home was here and if you followed the road, you would reach Dolaigonjo station. We took the train there and then an overnight steamer ride before we reached Kolkata. I was six.” My father was drawing quietly on a piece of paper, trying to etch from memory, his house in Gandaria, Dhaka. It took him a while to warm up, his mind clouded over now by post-operation trauma and a crippling clinical depression.
“I really don’t remember,” he kept saying through the afternoon, but I had insisted. His words are to become fodder for my next research. Once he started though, it seemed like a dam had burst forth.
“We had a shop, General Stores, stationary stuff, you know and groceries. Nibaron babu was the assistant and he had a son whom I played with. There was Manjulika, who stayed next door and told us fantastical stories about Netaji who would jump out of planes. We had a long winding corridor where I rode my tricycle wearing air raid clothes. We played football at dhop kholar maath. One day a musalmaan boy came and took our ball away.”
I was startled. Never had the word been previously used in our household and definitely never, never derogatorily. “My mother was always terrified,” baba continued. “There was a continuous drone of mosquitoes and in the evening, when it intensified, she would think that the mobs were coming screaming ‘Allah hu Akbar’.”
I came back home wanting to be a fundamentalist and told my father straight away that we must claim what is rightfully ours. Rarely have I seen the man more furious. When the anger ebbed, he explained how hard won our Constitutional rights have been, that it does not allow for a mindset like mine, which he termed “Neanderthal”. Needless to say, my history lessons were halted.
Listening to him now, I was made to realise how carefully our parents had shielded us from the brutal traumas of Partition. “My uncles and my father, they would make spears in the evening, my grandmother and mother would ground spices to be used if attacked. I was a child but I understood the terror behind words like riot and mob, and the slow rumblings of the fact that we would have to leave, that our home would soon be abandoned. Our neighbour’s boy, Aashu, would tell me that once we were gone, he would eat all the mangoes from our garden.”
The Indian secular experience is very different from the European experiment where it is meant to convey a post-religious state. Secularism in India is firmly grounded in religion, with the state guaranteeing the safety and the rights of each.
It is easy to denounce, renounce and rejoice in this unique secular experiment in classrooms and discussion halls, at political rallies, and these days, particularly on television. But this needs to be remembered: that it is my father and yours, who have lived through Partition, survived its horrors and are its remarkable foot soldiers. It is they who have shielded us from the worst in us, the atrocities we have been capable of in our very recent histories. A million people were displaced during Partition, by far the largest migration in recorded human history and yet, and this is perhaps the greatest triumph of India as a nation, we have remained secular.
“Were you never bitter towards the Muslims?” I asked baba at the end of the evening. For one brief moment the clouded eyes assumed its youthful fire. “Wrong question. Ask any Muslim man my age in Dhaka, they will tell you the same story about the Hindus. Forget the politics of us and them, it was the times.”
As the old man’s mind wandered to his favourite Dicken’s quote, I was certain that in a nation with some unforgivable negatives, this secularism is worth fighting for.
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Somnath Batabyal is Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. A former journalist, he is interested in news production practices in Indian media. His book, Making News: Behind the Scenes at Star News and Star Ananda, published by Routledge is scheduled for publication later this year. When not following such lofty pursuits, he dabbles in fiction and is experimenting with graphic novels.
This column appears in Sunday Guardian as Nomad Notes and can be read here