Reclaiming Not "Converting To"
The Sufi Way
By Jayshree Kewalramani04 October, 2006
Countercurrents.orgAs a young girl growing up in Kuwait among a diasporic Indian community I was scarcely aware of my religious, let alone ethnic origins. No one had ever asked me where I was from and I hadn't felt the need to ponder over or interrogate my parents about our ancestry. I knew I was Indian, but my home was very much in Kuwait. There was no contradiction in that.
Fortunately my family and I escaped the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, as we happened to be on vacation in India where we remained once it was clear that the occupation was not likely to end anytime soon. Within the first few weeks of my attendance at school in Bombay, my hitherto uncontested and uninterrogated identity became a source of great anxiety. Some girls would ask me if I was Indian or Kuwaiti. As far as I could tell, we looked the same – I wasn't a shade too dark or a shade too fair - and there should have been no reason for anyone to quibble. Often during our Marathi classes we were asked to write brief biographies of ourselves, describing not our interests or creativity but dull details like our names, our age and significantly the place of birth and native village. Having never been to a village before, I was clueless as to the answer and nervously looked at the answers given by my peers. Surely my village had to be equally obscure but did I even have one? Delhi, where my father grew up, was certainly not a village! But I felt at a great disadvantage as I couldn't lay a claim to a village of my own and hence left a blank on that page of my Marathi notebook.
A few years later, I must have been about 12 years old or so, I was giving a friend a lift to school. We had known each other a while but religion had never cropped up as a topic of conversation. I knew she was Catholic and attended the Religious Study class while I, like other non-Christian students of our school who were clubbed together, was made to sit through what was then called Moral Science (later Value education) class. As a non-catholic in a convent school I always felt there was something I was missing out on. We never really discussed with the other girls what they did at their Religious Study classes but I knew I felt a bit left out. Strangely though when I talked to my friend, she told me that as a child she had earlier attended the Moral Science classes and enjoyed them too. She didn't realize that she was meant to be in the other class, among other students. Moreover, she told me that as her father was Muslim and her mother was Catholic, she always had access to another religious option; it wasn't a firm decision that she was a Catholic exclusively, but a contingent one.
I remembered that conversation recently while I was reading about the Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill 2006. Among other things, it subsumes Jainism and Buddhism under the category of Hinduism which itself operates as a dangerously ill-defined term. Yet the identification of these different faiths as being inherently one or part of a single tradition is nothing new. I have heard it repeated in my conversations with my Hindu friends and it strikes me as being no different from my university experience in Leeds last year when a Pakistani Muslim gentleman greeted my Indonesian neighbour with delight – he was disappointed upon being told that Dwan was Christian, not Muslim, and deservedly chided for his presumption. Faith is an extremely personal matter, yet one's declaration of one's faith - in the above case, mere mention of one's nationality - brings one in confrontation or maybe even unsolicited affiliation with strangers. However, ultimately every individual possesses the unique agency to define themselves in their own terms that might undermine or bypass received notions and categories. In a liberal state, the government and the constitution have little role to play in defining or determining matters of personal belief. If certain individuals or groups have a reduced capacity to voice their own interests then the law needs to safeguard their interests but the right to self-definition, much like the right to self-determination involves the exercise of autonomy. It is the individual himself/herself who can eventually negotiate - define or disavow - aspects of their identity.
The Gujarat Religious Freedom (Amendment) Bill 2006 not only encroaches upon individual space, it further seeks to perpetuate Hindus (subsuming Jains & Buddhists), Muslims and Christians as mutually exclusive and, what are worse, hostile categories. It is not business of the state to determine or monitor the parameters of individual preference, especially those pertaining to matters of personal faith. I might be a closet Mithun Chakravorty fan with a penchant for cheesy 80s disco music but that is hardly something that I need to inform my district magistrate of. "Conversion" (I use quotation marks to denote the inadequacy of the term in facilitating the understanding of the phenomenon involving the acceptance of another religion as well as to allude to its political instrumentalisation as dirty word), as a personal choice, is linked to one's right to exercise one's will. In the Indian context it is frequently linked to emancipation from oppressive and hegemonic structures. It is thus a decision, a process and one that is most fundamentally linked to one's desire and capacity to define one's personal beliefs and/or also reconstruct one's social identity.
I might not have known the name of my native village as a child. Having discovered since that it is in present day Pakistan, in Sindh, evokes no phantom wish to relocate there on any terms. My link with Sindh, much like my relationship with Hinduism, is complex and not reducible to simple categories of being. Having lived a significant portion of my life as a diasporic Indian, I am happy continually renegotiating my beliefs and identity without worrying about things like "origins" and "native" and misclassifying my beliefs as Hindu (as opposed to Islam, Christian). The single most valuable thing that I have re-inherited as it were from my musings over Sindh is its non-sectarian Sufi culture. One romantically wishes to return religion to the spiritual domain, removed from politics of hate; yet the present urgency compels one to wonder whether perhaps the former can be mobilized to combat the latter. To do so it becomes necessary to reclaim shared socio-cultural spaces and traditions without glossing over seeming contradictions, subsuming distinct identities or homogenizing/erasing differences.
In a rejoinder to the blank that I left on that dreaded page of my Marathi note-book, I would like to revisit it with the absence that Sindh marks in the mental topography of Sindhis in India and elsewhere. However, I would choose to fill that blank/absence not with the wounded memory or postmemory of partition, which has aided Hindutva sympathies, rather I would like to reclaim an important heritage that has been threatened since. While the controversial Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill 2006 recognizes Sunni and Shia as Islamic sects and by an invented corollary defines Jainism and Buddhism as sects of Hinduism, I would like to lay claim to, or rather reclaim, an alternative belief and practice. Unlike present monolithic categories, Sufism - especially Sufi shrines - enabled the sustenance of shared spaces where members of different religious leanings offered prayers together without confronting, denying or erasing each other's differences. My challenge to unsolicited categories and definitions prescribed by the state is a non-sectarian one, which not only undermines exclusivist definitions but also religious orthodoxy.
By reclaiming Sindh's sufi heritage, in one stroke, I reclaim my Sindhi identity without erasing my Indian nationality or diluting my liberal humanistic values. And that is what faith and identity (as well as education) must primarily be about - liberation, spiritual growth and empowerment not dogma and social division.
Comment On This Article
Get CC HeadlinesOn your Desk Top