by VIJAY TENDULKAR
ILLUSTRATION/Amili Setalvad
(Noted playwright, VIJAY TENDULKAR, recounts the story of his own life to illustrate how anti-Muslim prejudice makes deep inroads into the psyche of a middle-class Maharashtrian Hindu at an early age: through an upbringing which “prohibits any contact with Muslims”, the teaching of distorted history, Partition, and, “most of all, because of the total lack of contact between us and the Muslims among us, as people”)
I was born in 1928 in Mumbai in a Maharashtrian middle class family. Except for the Marathi-speaking families of Maharashtra, Mumbai was known and spoken of as Bombay.
Even those Marathi speaking gentlemen who had higher education – which had its accent on English – and wished to show their proficiency in the language of the rulers, would fondly call the city Bombay.
Bombay was fashionable with us, Mumbai was natural and, of course, the original. It was turned into Bombay by the white sahibs first and then by the brown sahibs as was the normal practice.
Mumbai of my childhood was not as sprawling and overcrowded as it is today. The city was limited to its core area which was sparsely populated. You could walk on the roads at any time of the day without fear of being bumped off by a speeding vehicle or colliding with another pedestrian rushing to reach somewhere. Even with clocks and watches around, life was long enough to be enjoyed with its simple comforts and to be lived without the persistent feeling of anxiety.
We still had to learn and recite, by heart, a poem eulogising George the Fifth, the then emperor of the British empire on which the Sun never set. The poem was a part of our school curriculum.
At the same time the air outside was charged with Mahatma Gandhi’s movements of non-violence and memories of Lokamanya Tilak and Shaheed Bhagat Singh which were still very fresh in the minds of the elders.
My mother, who was a housewife and, like most women of the time, barely educated, talked fondly of the meetings she had attended of Tilak and his powerful oratory and the terrible night on which Bhagat Singh was hanged. ‘Bhagat Singh! Hai! Hai!’ She would tell us how these muffled slogans of the mourners echoed on the roads of Mumbai throughout that night. My college-going elder brother was already in the freedom movement and had pledged himself to swadeshi and chakra, the spinning wheel that Gandhi had turned into a household item.
Once in a while the atmosphere would suddenly get tense. I remember one such occasion. I was hurriedly brought home from my school nearby, and my elder brother who had grown a beard was pressurized by the family to shave it off for the time being. These were sure signals that a communal riot had started in the city.
On such occasions, Hindus would shed any resemblance to a Muslim, take extra care to look thoroughly Hindu and make it a point to avoid Muslim localities till things got normal again. In their routine existence, most Hindus had very little to do in Muslim localities anyway, except passing through them in a tram or a bus. For them, it was an alien part of the city, segregated in their psyche like the prostitutes area.
During riots, one strictly avoided even passing through the Muslim area for safety’s sake till the end of the tensions between the two communities were officially over. Withdrawal of curfew was a sure sign of the situation returning to normal.
The media strictly avoided any mention of the community background of the aggressors or the victims so there was no way of knowing what happened to the Muslims in the city during the riot situation. But even as a child I would hear of incidents in which a Muslim hawker or a beggar who strayed into the Hindu locality was promptly stabbed. As a rule, any recounting of such an incident would necessarily involve recounting a similar incident of a Hindu being stabbed in a Muslim locality. It was perhaps necessary both for the Hindu listeners and narrators to convince themselves that violence against a Muslim was simply a case of squaring of the account, a tit for tat and therefore perfectly justified.
I clearly remember the hush that would precede or follow any conversation about communal violence. This hush was not out of any doubt about the wisdom of such a justification but probably because the white collared clerics and their families felt uncomfortable even talking of violence. They had got so used to the smooth working of the law and order machinery of the British Raj and the peaceful existence of the politically uninvolved middle class under it.
Sabrang for more
(Thanks to Mukul Dube)