By Samira Bose
While my family sat around the television, rather aghast at the statements of the ‘anti-Romeo squad’, my mother suddenly disappeared and fished out a photograph. As she flashed it in our face, I saw her (Anuja Bose, now 48 years old) at 19 with her arms around two boys and a few others lounging around. “I wonder what they would have to say about us,” she scoffed, “especially if they learnt about our backgrounds”.
My mother, whose surname prior to marriage was Chaudhary, spent most of the 1970s and 1980s in Aligarh, in a family of 10. She attended a Muslim majority school and college (Lady Fatima and then AMU). Aligarh, one of the larger cities in Uttar Pradesh, is known predominantly for Aligarh Muslim University and its famous lock industry. The presence of a large Muslim population (who were in the majority prior to partition) weaves a kind of culturally codependent fabric for the town. The process of lock manufacturing, for example, requires active participation of members of both communities at different stages. While this works in the sphere of economics, my mother’s anecdotes about her youth and home in Aligarh show a glimpse of how this permeated into the sphere of cultural interaction.
One of the first actions taken by Yogi Adityanath as CM was the crackdown on slaughterhouses, with few qualms about the political intentions of the act. The consumption of food provides the site for moral righteousness and assertion of upper-caste Hindu identity. This reminds me of what my mother always tells me about her kitchen and the way her friends shared food with each other. My grandmother would cook satvik food (without garlic and onion) for her Hindu friends separately earlier in the day, and meat for the rest in the evening. Everyone would sit around and eat together— rotis made on the chula by the dozen. When the youngsters brought tons of kebabs to eat with their tambola game, my grandmother would wait until they had made a lot of fun of Ajay’s moral conundrum, before miraculously producing some vegetable dish. Her exemplary cooking and a group of famished and “deprived” hostellers led to her becoming the assigned iftar chef. This sweating group of hungry ruffians would swoop into the house and break roza together. The same lot would assemble quietly around my mother’s Anglo-Indian Catholic friend Greta Pedro’s dining table, and furtively look at each other as her stern father said a prayer before the meal. They always got the most delicious plum cake for dessert.
My mother’s closest friends, between late high school and college, were Subuhi Ansari (now Haque), Shubhi Upadhyay and Greta Pedro. As much as this religiously diverse trio sounds like a cliché, it appears that they formed a terrifically strong bond. Subuhi mausi (I’ve always called her aunt) recently told me about the time when my mother had chicken pox and could not give an exam, which would mean that she would have to fail that session. Subuhi mausi was a Sunni Muslim from Mirzapur and lived in the hostel. She did not want to leave her alone, and in sheer defiance skipped the exam and took care of her, and later contracted chicken pox herself. “That’s just how it was; I would do anything for Anuja.”
“It’s too cheesy, don’t put this in,” my mother instructed me when I informed her of including this. But it’s true. However, despite these cross-cultural connections through friendship, both Shubhi and Subuhi had arranged marriages within their caste/religion. It makes one wonder how specifically the women bear the burden of identity politics and filial obligations.
A rather serious aberration in this sphere came from within the Chaudhary household. My mother’s older sister Mukti made a choice to convert to Islam in 1980 when she decided to marry Sajjad Husain, a Muslim from Khurja and a student of AMU. While my aunt spent much of her life after this period in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, I keep prodding her to tell me about people’s reactions to this. She said that my grandparents were very supportive, and my nani just warned her that she would have to live with the consequences of being perhaps “neither-here-nor-there”.
“Basically in that time and space, it was not such a big deal,” my aunt emphatically told me, “these things are becoming a bigger deal because people in power want them to be”. The house, via my globe-trotting aunt, also experienced a lot of exchange students from Iraq, Iran, Sudan and Palestine, which enabled the family to learn about global politics and the way Islam was engaged with abroad. In fact, after learning about the Palestinian cause from the students, my aunt later encountered Yasser Arafat (but that’s another story).
It’s not that there were no communal assertions or restrictions during this period; hostility pervaded in different spaces in the campus. This friend group, however, found ways to evade it in a collective manner. They would trot out rowdily to the famous Aligarh numaiish (fairground) at 1 am. Ismat insisted on wearing my mother’s frilly shirts on stage while performing. “We were so innocent; we were not rebels,” she always told me, when I expressed admiration for this youthful defiance.
My mother and her friends and family are definitely privileged to never have directly encountered violence through communal conflict. Perhaps what stands out for me the most is that at the core of it there appeared to be no valorisation of religion from any of the members. In fact, there appears to be a logic that works precisely outside of religious faith. As a generation, they still upheld a lot of the ritualistic elements of their inherited faith, but the spaces they shared were in some senses beyond it. It is precisely such spaces (privileged, of course, by a certain class access), where the percolation of hate mongering by the likes of Yogi Adityanath can be negated by tolerance and communication. If the social fabric of Aligarh rests on communal corporation, the orders for animosity will come from above.
The family house in Misgil Compound is getting increasingly decrepit—my grandmother keeps to herself and the friend group has dispersed. My ties with Aligarh have grown tenuous. However, delving into the archives of my mother’s youth, I found myself negotiating with an imagination where coexisting was the norm, where the same hall and strobe lights could be used for Eid, Christmas and Diwali. Among official histories of strife, discord and conscious vilification, these oral narratives provided a kind of micro-historical rupture that came to me in anecdotes as I would eat both bedmi puri and kakori kebab with my mother’s friends.