(This is a simple cathartic letter. All incidents and names in this article are true and have been personally experienced in real life).
Dear Maulanas of AMU:
Peace be with you etc. though you’ve snatched my peace years ago.
So, I finally remebered and wrote this long overdue letter to you guys/the mullahs..
of Aligarh.
Its taken me almost 19 years to do that..long as its been.
Maybe it was the trigger of the women locked up by the Taliban or the girls in Francesa Marciano's book 'The End of amnners'. or maybe some other random image of the Talibs/ students on CNN which brought the whole experience tumbling out of me..
Do you know what it feels like to be called a prostitute?
Not just in abuse. but to have an article written about you being a ‘call girl'..( then later an apology at the bottom of the same page, which most people probably wouldnt read).
This was my punishement for daring to take on the mullahs of AMU (also known as Aligarh Muslim University, India’s elite univesrity, founded in the heyday of the anti-British-imperialist movement) as a callow 18 year old with the 'Topper' trophy in Biology (in the much coveted All india CBSe ex-m), when I left for Aligarh.
and spent 3 cruel months, like roasting on the coals of hell.
From the day I landed, an un-headscarved, jeans-wearing outsider (don’t ask me why I should Have gone to Aligarh with a 92% in Sciences from India's Top board exam anyways, when I could have walked into any top program in Delhi University. That is a family history that is another story).
I was a shocker. Girls from far and wide in the entombed Women’s College campus of AMU came to see me..me not wearing shalwar kameez, not doing 'salamaliekums' to random strangers and not! Asftegfirullah (god forbid), covering and oiling my head, asa the 'tradition; dictated for the first six months.
I who was my father, another son of Aligarh 'Simone de Beauvoir' meets Annie Aapa.. rolled into one.
My father, as a raw intellectual and handsome young 16 years 'Nawab sahab', had been molded into his leftist progressive sensibility by AMU, 30 years before. Met and married by rebel academic Mom, who was also faculty at AMU ( However, she was unceremoniously thrown out from her faculty position, the day she announced her inter-faith/"Hindu Muslim" marriage to my Dad. Her boss's words to her were, 'Either you can chose Azhar Abbas (my dad) or your job'. My Mom chose us :). So the seeds of fundamentalism were there.. loong back then. That she was also 'disowned' by her own Hindu fundamentalist family, is also another story. What this with my culture and throwing people out and 'disowning' them at the drop of a 'identity'?
Its my father's intractable elegance, that despite such a fascist indifferent society, he brought us to be a French thinkers meets Picasso meets Che Guevara, reading Marx and philosophy before we could walk, being told we could do anything e wanted in life.. reach the stars, as long as we didn’t get wasted..with our life, living in illiteracy to some random guy and having his 3 kids. After all Aligarh was the center of progressive writers movement hand the home of some of India’s most famous Muslim feminists..Ismat Chughtai, Q. Hyder (the octogenarian legend, who never married and wrote 'River of Fire', India's 'One hundred years of solitude') and the Gauloise-smoking, bicycle-riding 'Zaidi sisters'..my Mom and Dad's mentors and inspirations). I didn’t just follow these tenets due to my Dad. it was fundamental to me.. which is why I have always got on with him.
So, I also refused to divulge my religion, smoked Gold Flakes/cigarettes openly (In India, its extremely 'shocking' for a woman to smoke publiclly, unlike countries in the West and even the Middle east) and said 'god is nobody’s business but mine'. I got mad at the "aapas' (elder sisters), the so-called seniors who barged into dorm rooms at night and forced girls to cover their head and ask them if they had read their namaz..prayers. I talked back to them asking them why they were harassing the half literate girl from the Bihar villages, who had spent their entire life's savings to send them to this reputed university.
I found this medieval madness hard to swallow and so I was "boycotted".
An official notice was printed out by the senior "aapas' (who were like the Senior 'Talibs' walking around checking who was covering their heads right and reading their namaz on time). WTH.
The only girls who were loved and respected 9 despite speaking English and being 'asgtf. Delhites were the bimbettes who duly got married even before their final exams were over and moved to Dubai, lock stock and barrel like good Muslim wives are supposed to. Brilliant intelligent girls, discussing the Beatles and Rumi with me at night, married off in 2 weeks.. to strangers or men they didn’t love. and cried to me about. The ones who flaunted it, were even more cherished. two of them lived in my neighborhood in Delhi and their weddings were the talk of the town. Never mind, they were college drop-outs who completed their exams, half pregnant. But you must be pregnant by the time you are 21).
Any girl who spoke to me would be boycotted too. and for two weeks I spent my days eating alone in the hostel cafeterias..But I refused to budge. I felt like one of those heretics during the inquisition or in the Middle Ages in Europe. Like Galileo refusing to say' the sun goes round the earth'. you get the picture.
I was gonna show these mullahs what I was made of, with all my passionate 17 years strength. These b..r couldn’t mess with me. I had Voltaire and Rousseau and Che to live up to.
So I thought.
Some of my friends met me secretly behind the girls 'loos' and said how sorry they were they couldn’t talk to me in public.
I also committed adultery by talking to the boys in the labs.. Sinful harmful things like asking them to pass me test-tubes and what biochemistry books they had read. All this was being duly noted and passed to the Aapas. I would hear the name of the guys I had talked to in the lab, when I got home, even before I knew what he was called :)
After all I was from Delhi’s top co-ed school.. and had to show off my arrogance.
A few weeks later, one of the innumerable Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Aligarh and the university shut down..for a few weeks.
There was curfew et al and I was dancing all the way.
I knew it was my passport out of the mullah-land. All my dreams of Aligarh being a leftists paradise, from the days when my parents had met and fallen in love on its campus, were shattered anyways. The home of Naserruddin Shah and Muzaffar Ali and India's top progressive writers.. was now a mullah land.. infested with Wahabi Salafi funded thugs, who forced women to wear headscarves, attend compulsory prayers and generally randomly harass anyone who dared to break the 'traditions'. (No wonder I sympathies with those kids in Iran. Been dere done dat et al)
I did try to inform them of the 'tradition' of Gauloise smoking writers and feminists like Ismat Chughtai and Qurrtul ain Hyder and the famous 'Zaidi' sisters, which Aligarh had been proud of in its heyday, as North India’s elite paradise, especially for its "Muslim' elite. But nobody wanted to listen. The call to prayer/'azaan' drowned out all other voices.
Then the bombshell happened. The Aapas had promised me they would let me get away with it.. me the half-kafir infidel. who refused to bow down.
(I had quoted the fundamental premise of Islam to them when they asked me to bow and do Salaam. I said, "Islam forbids bowing your head before anyone for the One god'. They had been suitably miffed).
The cheesy article, in the local newspaper talked about how 'call-girls' had infested the women’s college and these girls entertained men at night in cheap guest houses, form Dubai.
They said the name 'Lehar Pepsi' was a code word used by them.
Of course later the paper apologized and said 'we did not know there was actually a student named Leher at the college 'at the time. blah blah).
But the damage was done.
But I did go bk to Aligarh.. to face them down once more and made sure the paper published the apology.
But I left with fear. Fear of a kind which is hard to break free.. and a price I am paying everyday. in terms of thought..
Writing this has been catahrtic..and releasing.
I hope all those girls forced into burqas for fear of being called 'prostitutes' willl one day show their faces.. learn to breathe.
and I will never call a woman a 'prostiture' again..
And with this pregnancy obsession of my countrymen, regardless of religion. I am really getting it out of my system. We are already blowing up the earth with our obssession with reproduction.
