Delhi, 1947, Gujarat 2002 : A disturbing book on Indian Muslims by Anis Kidwai

As you read one chilling account after another of perfidy and deceit, of official connivance with the killers, of doctors’ refusal to treat Muslim patients, of government offices telling their Muslim employees, even those who had chosen to stay, to leave and go to Pakistan, of pre-teen girls speared through their vaginas, of infants being chopped to pieces, of pregnant woman being stabbed through their wombs, of women, in their tens of thousands, on both sides of the blood-soaked border, kidnapped, raped and sold off, again and again and again, rioters, policemen, army men all joining in this macabre act of desecration of womanhood, your blood begins to run cold.

And all this in the capital of a nation that had announced to the world that she was home as much to the Muslim as it was to the Hindu, the Sikh, the Parsi and the Christian. Those upon whose shoulders had fallen the responsibility of steering its fate, were people who were either not capable or did not care and some, many of them were almost at the top, were complicit in the violence.

As you read all this, your mind begins to be flooded with images and reports of the recent past, events, pogroms, genocides – Nellie, Bombay, Gujarat begin to flood your mind. The same barbarities, the same callousness, collusion, protectors turning perpetrators, doctors refusing to treat patients, suckling infants being beheaded, neighbours killing neighbours and all this amidst claims of a faith that was inherently tolerant, open, welcoming.

You also think of this frail woman, a woman who has lost her husband to these killers and who still went out every day, trying to save one more life, unite one more family, buy sweets for a girl with half her skull stitched up, supervising rations for the refuge seekers, begging for blankets, setting up schools for children, organizing joint processions of Hindu and Muslim children, getting their parents together, getting into communally charged localities and asking people to stop the dance of death, if not for anything, then at least for the life of the fasting Mahatma, who had vowed not to eat as long as peace did not return to Delhi.

As you read you see this unsure, scared, confused, hurt, lonely woman, grow up in stature and with her rises your hope and your faith in the victory of the Human spirit.

Read this book if you want to understand where we went wrong and to see the fault lines, to see how we need a secular state and not sarv dharm sambhav. Read this book also if you want to understand the falsity of the self image that we have created of ourselves and of our nation, but read it most importantly to understand the fragility of the premise upon which is built the idea of India and the need to protect and nurture this premise and to make it real. Because this premise is India and it is people like Anis Kidwai that made it possible.

Sohail Hashmi in Kafila. Here 

The culprits of the Bombay riots had never been prosecuted : Aravind Adiga

That evening, sitting at an outdoor table in Vihar, a restaurant on the eastern side of the Santacruz station, I began thinking, whom will I talk to in this city, how will I live here, when a tall fair man with a moustache came up to me.

"You're from Udupi," he said.

"My mother was," I replied. "I grew up in Mangalore." 

"You have a South Canara face." 

He was the manager; he told me that everyone in the restaurant was from around Mangalore. I watched them, chatting in Kannada or Tulu, wiping tables and buzzing about that humid kitchen. A tough life, but they seemed full of energy and hope for the future. It occurred to me that if I worked on my novel as they were working on the tables, I too would be taken care of. 

We had water only twice a day in my building, so I had to plan things in such a way that I was free from seven to nine in the mornings, and six to eight in the evenings. The rest of the time I wrote. The broker who had found me the place called one day: "The neighbours complain that you make no noise at all." To frighten my neighbours less, and to give myself a routine, I took the train every morning to the British Council Library in Nariman Point; for a change I would visit the Prithvi Theatre's outdoor café, where, if the writing had gone well, I would buy a ticket for a play in the evening. 

I made a happy discovery: my grand-uncle Suresh was still in Mumbai. In the 1990s, he had been a judge in the Bombay high court, where he had earned his reputation as an opponent of the Shiv Sena ("Who is this man Suresh, with only one name? He must be a Christian!" its newspaper Saamna had railed.) He was now retired and lived on the Juhu-Versova link road. 

Grand-uncle Suresh is a talking man. He told me stories late into the night about the Bombay riots, of things that had been done in daylight and men who had never been prosecuted for doing them; I took the auto-rickshaw home, and returned to my novel.

Aravind Adiga in The Independent. Here

Urdu, Hindi, Hindustani and Bombay

Bombay was the perfect setting for Hindi cinema because no one in Bombay was invested in Hindi high culture, or shudh Hindi or indeed in Hindi at all. The Bombay film industry used its approximations of Hindustani because they worked at the box office. It used an idiom closer to Urdu than Hindi for several reasons: Urdu’s metaphorical extravagance suited the purposes of stylized melodrama, Urdu’s history as a language of administration and official discourse gave it a plausible and credible idiom in which to render public context: the court-room scene is a case in point.

The producers of Bombay’s Hindi cinema were free to use Hindustani in whichever way they wanted because the Hindi cinema needed neither subsidy nor government patronage and also because Bombay’s distance from Hindi’s heartland protected them from the zealots who took charge of Hindi with the founding of the republic, cultural commissars who would have had dialogue writers replace dil with hriday and khoon with rakt. A Hindi film industry located in the heartland would have produced either popular dialect films (like the Bhojpuri film industry today) or solemn new-wave type films with Sanskritized titles like Aadharshila and Aakrosh and Ardh Satya. These might have gone on to win critical acclaim but they would not have created a pan-Indian audience, nor spun pan-Indian dreams.

From Mukul Kesavan's article in The Telegraph. More here