A Question Of Survival

When we speak of Muslims, quite often it is the aspect of faith that consumes and overshadows the livelihood dimension. The social and economic conditions of Muslims across the globe, and especially in the sub-continent, does not often generate a passionate debate as the one that we are currently witnessing with regard to the 13-storey 'Islamic Centre' or 'mosque' planned two blocks away from the 9/11 ground zero. (An interesting aside: There is a nomenclature politics here. If you are in favour you call it an 'Islamic Centre,' something that has a benign modern twang, or else you condemn it as a 'mosque').

But what recently struck me as an exception and a huge corrective to this overwhelming prejudice, if not a conspiracy, is the Kolkata project of the renowned British author and journalist Jeremy Seabrook. [In the interests of full disclosure I should state here that I have known Jeremy ever since my student days in London. He was officially my mentor when I was a Chevening scholar. Most recently, he wrote a foreword for my book - Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue - The Anxieties of a Local Culture' (Navakarnataka, 2008)]

Jeremy spent many months in Kolkata in the last couple of years and has produced an intense narrative, in his uniquely polemical style, on how the urban Muslims 'live, work, love and die' in the slums of Topsia, Tangra, Tiljala and Beniapukur among others. The narrative eloquently resonates the condition of ordinary Muslims across underdeveloped economies. I, who had the privilege of reading it as it was getting ready for publication in London, found it so dark and disturbing that I couldn't gather words for a reaction. As the reading experience slowly sunk in, it occurred that this narrative doubly illustrates the dry statistics of the 2006 Sachar panel report and in fact, goes beyond to portray the starkness of the situation, which unfortunately never finds a place in mainstream discourse. It made me wonder if only an outside view could be so illuminating of something that we tend to treat so casually.

Many westerners have tried to recreate the spectacle of poverty in Kolkata through various mediums, but let me assure you that Jeremy's empathy is distinct from Lapierre or anybody else's charity, mockery or patronage. The nuances and examples that Jeremy tries to build and interweave into his narrative can sometimes be exasperating, but then there is an evident anxiety in his prose to capture the whole complexity and the whole truth. Even as emotion is palpable in the narrative, refined theoretical extrapolations don't fall behind. To achieve a unique blend of the acutely personal and the spaciously universal and wrap it all up in uncommon sincerity has anyway been the hallmark of Jeremy's writings. On any social issue, including this one on the Muslim question, his words carry a breathless pace that wake you up into a new consciousness.

In his introduction Jeremy describes the premise of the book thus:

"Muslims have been defined solely by their faith, as if this penetrated their every action and thought. This shallow, ostensibly 'spiritual' concern has had some unfortunate consequences... as though there were a specifically Islamic inflection in every daily action, which sets them apart, so that there is a distinctive way of laughing and sleeping, a Muslim sensibility in work, in affections, in pleasure, a peculiarly Muslim form of speaking, walking or weeping." On the contrary, he says, for these poor, like in the case of the other poor, it is survival that has been the biggest challenge and in their desperate search for livelihood "however pious they may have been, little time remained to them for the contemplation of eternity."

Further:

"Little attention has been paid to the fabric of daily life in poor Muslim communities - the pursuit of gainful occupation, affective and social affinities, networks of kinship and neighbourhood. Small notice has been taken of those aspects of life which unite all human societies; omissions which suggest the wilful creation of a fictive enemy, rather than the extensive hostility which Muslims in general are supposed to harbour against people of other faiths."

Having established the raison d'être for the book, Jeremy offers general insights about the Muslims in Kolkata before picking up specific cases for discussion. He makes the most important point when he says that there are Urdu speakers among these Muslims some of whom migrated from Bihar, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh in the 'twilight' of the British empire and some in the 'dawn' of Independence. In the early years they either worked as coolies in ports and docks or put their artisinal skills to use in factories and industrial enterprises, but now, with much of their skills having put to disuse by the technological and economic advancement, they pull rickshaws, work as maid servants or as workers in plastic and rubber factories, in transport and in construction and in the vast labour of recycling every conceivable used-up commodity.  "All the detritus of the city passes through their hands, in an epic work, which wastes nothing but the perishable flesh and blood of the people." In what is a brilliant observation he says: "The fact that they retain the language and the customs of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh is the most eloquent comment on their sense of separation, not fully integrated into the life, either of the city or of the state of West Bengal."

Then comes the indictment. Jeremy says if poverty were the major generator of terror as many leaders across the globe make it out to be, then Kolkata should have been the principal breeding-ground. And since that is not the case, he concludes, poverty does not create extremism, at least not among the poor themselves: "The vast majority of the people show tireless energy only in their attempts to make a living that will support them and those they love. It is not that what are euphemistically called 'anti-social elements' are absent... but these are greatly outnumbered by their peers, the young men who sit for twelve-hour days in chappal-making units performing tasks of unimaginable tedium, in over-whelming heat, and in the mild euphoria-inducing smell of adhesive, cutting, shaping, glueing and trimming shoes sufficient for the feet of a whole world."

Jeremy is also prescient about how this expose of Kolkata and the Muslim poor may not go down well with people who are drunk with the idea of India as an emerging superpower. The almost destitute condition of a majority of our largest minority is sure to drill a hole in the silken pride that India has spun around in the recent past and it may even get dismissed as 'poverty porn'. He also understands that it is going to be far more bitter if it comes from a foreign national like him. Yet, he says with absolute conviction, that this is a story that deserves to be told. In what can be read as a tongue-in-cheek comment, he says, in present day India the skinny hands of the poor has been replaced by the "fleshy well-being of Bollywood and the unstable flicker of the IT screen."

If these are general thoughts, the specifics are far grimmer and the legwork he has been able to do at the age of seventy would put any young writer or journalist to shame. Let me pick a tiny sample of lives he interacts and records in Topsia, an elongated island between two canals of waste water:

A small group of young men inhaling fumes of heroin; Sheik Siddiqui whose spine was crushed after a metal pole fell on him while he was driving his rickshaw and his wife Salima Khatoon, who buys half-burned coal from restaurants, cleans it and sells it as fuel; Nurjehan who changed her name to Bina to be able to work in prosperous Hindu apartments; a group of young men watching 'unerotic sex' on their mobile phones ("blue movies with western actors, at which they laughed and simulated uneasy arousal, perhaps to conceal the frustrations of repressed desire: none of this alien iconography is calculated to inspire in them respect for women, a failing with which non-Muslims frequently taunt them"); Mohammad Shamim, who admits to pick-pocketing in the bus or the Metro to fund his drug habit; Hamida who sustains herself by cutting the uppers of chappals and earns between Rs 30 and Rs 40 a day; Munni Bibi who was born in Topsia but gave up speaking Bengali to cultivate Urdu and thereby reduced her life-chances; Naushad, a child waste-collector, who now gets a fixed and regular wage for segregating waste; Hazara Bibi who sorts out glass and aluminum from light bulbs; Imran who fixes chappals with their straps with such speed that hundred dozen pairs pass through his deft hands everyday; Gulabshah who wants to be an air hostess; Jabeen who learnt the meaning of compassion from people whom she was working against - the drug dealers, when they helped her while in hospital after a surgery; Syeda, who is worried if she can at least cover her head when she attends the teachers' training course and then Mohammad Yasim Khan who works in a graveyard of dolls.

Mind you, these are only a tiny sample of people from just one locality. The book scans many such Muslim areas across Kolkata and documents hundreds of such struggling, destitute and famished lives with enormous empathy. This book, when published, would be a must read for anybody who is keen to understand the Indian Muslim. If Mamata Banerjee were to read it perhaps her argument against the three-decade-old Left government would get far more strident and cogent.

What enables Jeremy to speak with such sensitivity, insight and empathy on India is the fact that he has tracked social change, politics and development here for close to four decades. His India narratives do not reek of the usual arrogance and authority of Western commentators. He perhaps is the modern day Charlie Andrews, the Mahatma's best friend, who was rechristened as 'Deenabandhu' (friend of the poor).

Besides the innumerable columns that Jeremy has written in various Indian publications (he wrote a weekly column in the Kolkata 'Statesman' for seven years) and in prestigious Western publications on India, the one book that stands testimony to his relentless pursuit of the alternate, unseen and unrecorded is 'Notes from Another India,' published by Pluto Press in London, in 1995. It was a book written to extricate India from the clichés of the Western media where it was principally being portrayed as a 'pathology.' "This book is not about the fatalism of India but about some people's dynamic and tenacious efforts to change the current balance of forces in India... its principal purpose is to show visitors to India another way of looking at the country; and if it serves to bring to the notice of people in the West something of the courage and moral strength, the endurance and steadfastness of millions of ordinary people...," Jeremy had written in his introduction to the book. He had travelled from Uttarakhand to Uttara Kannada, recording various social movements and people who aspired a different future for India that had just then begun to align itself with the global economy. He had restored the balance then, offered a corrective and now, yet again, with this book he has performed the very same act.