Between silence and screams - authors

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Tabish Khair

I dislike the word `exile' and the word `hybrid,' both so easily appropriated by people with fat wallets and glib tongues. People from my class and classes more privileged than mine. And yet, like many writers and artists, I speak from an in-between space. The space between the material and the symbolic, the space between people, the space between cultures, the space between the past and the future.

The greatest danger in speaking from in-between spaces is that one either lapses into silence or starts screaming. For whatever you say is liable to be overheard or misunderstood.

Let me explain with an incident from the time I was in my twenties. I was still living in my hometown, a small and backward place in India, but had started writing for the Times of India. The Delhi edition carried a long piece by me criticising Salman Rushdie's lack of understanding of Muslim sentiments but strongly defending his right to express himself, a piece written without reading The Satanic Verses (a novel I could lay my hands on only much later). Emboldened by the success of the piece, which provoked healthy debate in my circles, I collaborated with my best friend, Gyanendra Nath (who was to die later in a road accident), to write a critique of the Mahabharata TV serial. The Mahabharata, as the reader would know, is one of the two sacred epics of Hinduism. This article provoked more extreme reactions. A couple of our acquaintances--supporters of what was a small Hindu-rightist party in those days, the BJP--lost their temper at Gyanendra. To me, they only said: Gyanendra is at least a Hindu; why don't you write about your own Mullah Muslim religion?

I was stung by the challenge to write about my own "Mullah Muslim religion." Not that I considered Hinduism any less my cultural heritage than Islam, but still. I wrote an article on Islam in India. It too was published by the Times of India. The article was simple to my mind: highlighting the Islamic tradition of ijtihad (scriptural re-interpretation), I asked why Indian Muslims--or rather Islamic scholars in India--did not reform aspects of religious practice in keeping with the spirit of Islam and changing times? I mentioned things I would like to see reformed--for example, it might be a good idea, I argued, to consider replacing the annual ritual of sacrificing animals during Eid (to commemorate Abraham's `sacrifice,' the Biblical one about which Soren Kierkegaard wrote an entire book) with charity in the shape of cash. Nothing happened for a week. Then (I have been told) the article was taken up for discussion on radio and all hell broke loose in my town. Only in and around my town though. The local mullahs started preaching against me, I received anonymous phone calls by people who threatened me with death and worse, my defence of Rushdie was suddenly recalled in the vivid colours of apostasy, a mob surrounded my father's clinic demanding that I should be turned over to it to be "disciplined."

My father, a religious man and a doctor, did not want to call the police because he was afraid the matter would turn into a Hindu-Muslim riot if (Hindu) policemen were involved in it. He went out to speak to the leaders of the mob: he was alone, except for one of my uncles, the Urdu writer Kalam Haidri. The mob was on the verge of turning violent, but there was still some respect for my father. My father, who knows his Quran and Hadiths inside out and can speak the language of the crowd, argued with the leaders of the mob for three or four hours. At the end, he convinced them that I had not done anything "un-Islamic." They went away, some of them still muttering.

A few years later I moved to Denmark (a purely personal decision and not due to any kind of `exile' whatsoever) and my first novel was published in India. A (Danish) journalist, who heard of it, requested an interview with me. During the interview, I told him about the mob because my novel featured similar situations. But I also narrated the incident to highlight the local character of the threats (the result of small town conservatism and intrigues rather than global Islamism), its transitory nature (after a few months I could enter Muslim areas of the town without feeling threatened), and, above all, the complexities brought forth by the fact of the mob's discussion with my father. I insisted on the final point because, to my mind, it illustrated the possibility of dialogue in the space between people and cultures, if that dialogue was informed by knowledge and respect. Imagine my surprise when the article appeared bearing the heading, `Indisk forfatter-talent betalte dyrt for at stotte Salman Rushdie' (Budding Indian writer pays dearly for supporting Rushdie).

My natural reaction to this heading was to decide not to speak about the matter to any Western journalist in the future. If the complexities of the in-between spaces that I occupied and wished to narrate were to be reduced to the usual stereotypes, why, then, I might as well stay silent.