Kafila, Jinniology and Secular Modernity's Tiger of Wrath

Edit- So as to take revenge for my showering uncouth abuse upon her in the course of this blog post, Aarti Sethi has written very sweetly to me to say she thinks I might be 'erudite' not in Angrezi as wot she is spoke by Queenji also, but in 'Sanskrit and Tamil and Persian' and such like. 
OMG! She thinks I'm some dehati Uncleji type! The shame! The humiliation! 
I have written back to her saying 'Beti, kindly do Love Jihad against Muslim Professors- especially if they come from Kashmir- and rape them and force them to marry you to bachao their izzat same as what Ananya Vajpayi did to that nice Basharat Peer. Remember, true Heroines of Hindutva like Ananya are allowed to marry up 5 husbands at one time. Jai Hindutva! NaMo Shivaya!'

A Tiger of Wrath.
A mentally ill young man somehow got into the Tiger enclosure in Delhi zoo. The Zoo staff should have tranquilized the Tiger, but their dart gun was locked up somewhere and Red Tape is Red Tape.

The crowd threw stones at the tiger, which was watching the young man intently. Perhaps, this was the wrong thing to do. Maybe it caused the tiger to pounce on the poor fellow and drag him away. 

Kafila, the leading Careerist, Credentialist, faux Left-Liberal website published an extraordinarily foolish post on the death of that young man from which I excerpt the following-

'Maqsood Pardesi was the bearer of a message: Maqsood comes from the Arabic root “qasad”: intention. From which come both “qasida” a petition; a prayer; a praise, and “qasid” the messenger. In Persian the Arabic transforms to “maqsad”: meaning, and maqsood: intention; desire. What is the maqsad of Maqsood’s life? How will he be remembered?

As a “mentally ill” drunk whose “obsession” was responsible for his ludicrous death? As a sad case whose strange manner of dying testified to the destitution of his brief life? Or, as a man who wagered, and lost, his life on the impulsion of an encounter? Mourning Maqsood’s death does not preclude taking seriously the extraordinary vitality of his life. To posthumously pathologise Maqsood by calling him “mentally ill” is to impoverish his memory, and denude our capacity to receive that which is given, and appears, only very rarely.

Maqsood Pardesi walked into the enclosure of a tiger! What is lamentable about a death like this? Why must it mark a “failure”: his, society’s, the zoo authorities’? Is this not perhaps how, when the world was a richer more awake place, people went to meet the spirits and the gods?

Tigers are beautiful. Unfortunately, humans are tasty. Simone Weil said 'perhaps the primordial sin is to try to eat what one should only look at.' She didn't say it to a Tiger though. It mightn't have agreed and anyway Simone was off her head and soon died of inanition.
But what has all this to do with 'Kafila'- the caravan of the Careerist Left winding its way through the vast Sahara of Indian Secular discourse?
Surely this is not a case where 'tigers of wrath' turn out to be more worthwhile than 'the horses of instruction?'

After all, Maqsood had paid for admission to the Delhi Zoo. That institution had a duty of care towards him. Whether he jumped or fell into the Tiger enclosure is irrelevant. The Zoo has a legal obligation to protect even crazy people who endanger themselves. In this case, proper procedure required the tranquilizing of the Tiger. But the dart gun was locked away. This is criminal negligence plain and simple. 

The reason rational people should lament a death like this is because, as members of the Public, we need to take responsibility for the actions of Public Bodies which act on our behalf. The Delhi Zoo is a Public Body. It had a duty of care. It failed to discharge this duty and is guilty of criminal negligence. This certainly is cause for lamentation, for breast beating, for righteous indignation and a calling of public officials to account. What it isn't cause for, at least for rational members of Civil Society, is some belles lettrist vapouring about how mebbe the world was a richer more awake place when people went to meet the spirits and the gods and ended up being mauled and eaten.

The writer of the post from which I have quoted is a lady with a Hindu name. She explicitly mentions the young man's religious and cultural background- viz Muslim and 'foreign' (the literal meaning of his surname). The tiger, incidentally, had a Hindu name- 'Vijay'- 'victory'.

A person with a male Muslim name- Imtiaz Ali- left several increasingly irate comments on the lady's post. He appeared to believe, that the duty of Hindu intellectuals is to condemn Hindutva, not parade their knowledge of Urdu and engage in Akeel Bilgrami type waffle about 'Enchantment'.
 Clearly, Hindu intellectuals need to establish that Maqsood was killed by Modi's minions- something they can easily do if they stop pretending to know Persian and Arabic and concentrate simply on doing 'a proper anthropology of Hinduism' so as to disclose 'the ontology of Hindutva'. This, surely, is the 'need of the hour'.

The lady, in reply, pointed out that Hindutva is as boring as shite and saying Hindusim is crap requires some pretence of knowing about Hinduism so fuck that and anyway all the big league Professors have already vomited all over the subject so gimme a break, hon.
The Muslim gentleman replies that it is the responsibility of people with Hindu names to vomit all over Hinduism because when people with non-Hindu names do it they just come across as ignorant or ISIL.  I mean a Muslim dude can scarcely write stuff like ' Hinduism is an evil religion which creates Hindutva which is an evil ideology responsible for thousands of people risking their own lives to kill non-Hindus.' without looking a complete wally. Thus ladies with Hindu names should take on the job coz they can always pretend they just been raped by Hindutva guys who tore open their belly, dragged a fetus out of it, raped the fetus and then ripped open its belly to drag a fetus out of it which they raped and like ever since Modi became PM it's like totally going down 24/7 in every Hindu household and nobody notices coz they aint Hindu ladies and like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum gonna write a book about it soon which I will co-author so just take my word for it already.'
Clearly the Muslim dude is making a valid point. Hindu ladies have a duty to tell vicious lies about Hinduism coz non-Hindus don't wanna look stupid by publishing those same lies, as original research, under their own names.

 How does the Hindu lady get out of the stern task the Muslim gentleman has set for her?

To find out,  why not read the whole thing for yourself?

Imtiaz ali permalink

September 27, 2014 3:48 PM

The tragedy of secular moderns of India is their fascination with Islam. Having said that I think all attempts to understand any object of knowledge are welcome!
Aarti do you not feel that the need of the hour, the need of several decades now is to understand Hinduism in India. Bhrigu does focus on Hinduism but then again the forms which he investigates are devoid of any political agency.
Does not India desperately need an anthropology of Hinduism, particularly of Hindutva. What do we know about the maqsad of Hindutva. What is it about Hindutiva that people ready to sacrifice their life for this ideology.
Where is the definitive account anthropology of contempt that Hindutva sows.
How does Hindutva operate within a Hindu canon. What has transformed in the motivation of people who joined Hindutva organisations a 100 years back and now. What is the ontology of Hindutva.
Yes there are several hundred articles written on Hindutva, on Hindusim. Yes there are tens of book on this topic as well. But somehow on an everyday commonsensical level knowledge about Hindutva and Hinduism does not seem to be have crossed a discursive threshold.
No secular modern non-Hindu can attempt to ask questions on Hindutva in India as an object of inquiry. Even if she wants to study Hinduvta, has familiarized herself with the cannon and so on she probably will not do it. No secular modern non-Hindu can do an anthropology of the Sangh. And it appears secular modern Hindus are too busy analyzing jinns of Delhi, which is really sad!
Why is it that I can’t think of any Bollywood film or any novel for that matter any anthropological account which depicts radicalisation of Hindus in India. Maybe boys in the branches is an exception but that it is so old now. I wonder how many people know about it. At the same time films like Fiza, Shahid readily comes to my mind when I turn the angle.

Reply

• Aarti Sethi permalink*

  September 28, 2014 7:35 PM

  @Imtiaz,
  Thank you very much for your comment. You raise some very serious questions. Let me try and respond
  So first, I disagree with you :) In my opinion “Hindutva” is precisely that of which we do not need any anthropologies. Of course if someone wishes to write one they should do so, but I personally would have zero interest in such an undertaking. Why? Because I do not think such an exercise will yield anything particularly productive. When it comes to phenomenon such as Hindutva there could be, broadly, two reasons for why one might be interested in studying them. The first, which we can call an “instrumentalist” reason, is because it is good to know one’s enemy in order to fight. So we need to study Hindutva so we can sharpen our weapons against it. If this is our purpose then the hundreds of studies, as you yourself mention, on the history, emergence, demographic composition, political vocabulary, and everyday practices of Hindutva produced by a legion of political scientists and historians already give us a detailed understanding. And more, there are classic works on fascism as well that address not the specificity of Hindutva, but tell us how and why and through what means ideaologies such as Hindutva find resonance amongst particular groups at particular moments in history.
  But there may be another reason to study Hindutva: because in itself there is something exciting vivifying about Hindutva for the.researcher, and on this count for me Hindutva falls flat. This is I think the source of disagreement between us: i.e. on what constitutes a “resource”.
  You mention Bhrigu’s work and say that the sorts of popular Hinduisms he studies have no “political agency”. You are right, and I think that is precisely what is exciting about his work and the practices he looks at. Again for you the study of Djinns is a cause for lament while for me Anand’s work opens an entire terrain of . The question is, at what level must “resources” be produced and towards what purpose. The kinds of practices that Bhrigu and Anand study do not operate at the level of what you term “politics”, and therefore cannot be marshaled for “political agency”. This is precisely why they continue to produce pathways along which people find routes of escape. Because these practices have somehow (thus far though I wonder for how much longer) managed to elude capture by the state form and the dead-end exhausted trap of representational politics.
  So what sort of study of Hindutva would you wish for that has not been undertaken already? Towards what purpose?
  

  Reply
  • Aarti Sethi permalink*

    September 28, 2014 7:48 PM

    @Imtiaz,
    One last connected thought: If you ask me, the need of the hour is to turn our back on all thought that takes the current form of the state as its starting point and its destination. Everyone has their own functions to perform, and if academics have been given the extraordinary privilege and liberty to be the priests of a secular world and get paid for thinking, then at the least they can do is produce (and/or recover/discover) images of worlds which we may wish to inhabit. If this is the case, then these images, to my mind, will not come from an exploration of the wastelands (imaginative and actual) that the state has produced. They will have to come from elsewhere, precisely from sites such as Anand and Bhrigu point to.
    Does this mean that we should give up on even analyzing what the state, and things allied with it, does? No of course not. We are condemned to live under one, so we are condemned to not ignore our master. However these must be seen as reports on the doings of power. Not as sites from which alternative visions of life can flow. Therefore I think there is no need for anthropologies of Hindutva. What we have, and thankfully we have a lot, will do :)
    

    Reply
    • Imtiaz ali permalink

      October 5, 2014 4:50 AM

      Aarti,
      I am sorry but did I make an argument about knowledge? Whether the knowledge appeals to instrumentalist reason or whether it is vivifying is not the point I was trying to make. The point I wanted to raise and still want to raise pertains to the responsibility of intellectuals.
      For in a society where knowledge is such a scare resource is it not the responsibility of intellectuals who are in a privileged position to expose the lies of power, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions? And explain to the general public through the help of their training what is power up to.
      Tell me what do I do with the knowledge of emerging liberal ideologues working for the empire writing enchanting texts about chattan baba or the jinns? Their work is slowly appearing to be as crucial and critical as that of a German anthropologist working diligently in the 1930’s writing about peripatetic priests of Calvinism or the jewish mysticism in Munich.
      Should I not look upon intellectuals to explain what called the mobs to murder a techie in Pune? What message did Dhananjay Desai bear? How would you, as a trained anthropologist, look at what’s coming from Mangalwari Mahal in Nagpur? How would you look at the PMO? Can you even do an anthropology of PMO with as much of command over ideas as you wrote about Mr. Pardesi? My guess is perhaps you can but you’d rather not. Because you suggest, do you not, Hindutva as an idea, as a practice, as a system of thought does not matter now because too much has been already written on that subject, isn’t it?
      No one can tell anyone what to write and what to research. It is as much a researcher’s imperative to write as it is of a reader’s to read and comment. You wrote an extremely moving piece about Mr. Pardesi. I know now because Mr. Pardesi bore a message therefore he went to meet Mr. Tiger. Mr. Tiger did not kill Mr. Pardesi. Mr. Pardesi died a tragic death while meeting Mr. Tiger. The logic of your interpretation is resolute. Your interpretation is deeply nuanced and could I dare say absolutely brilliant! I thank you for your keen observations and look forward to read more of your wonderful writings.
      

      Reply
• Aarti Sethi permalink*

  October 5, 2014 2:21 PM

  @ Imtiaz,
  Thanks again for coming in. I think we disagree on some very fundamental questions to do with how one lives in the world and what might constitute a responsibility towards it. It remains to be seen if these disagreements are productive or not, and what their political stakes are.
  So, you say:
  

  “Whether the knowledge appeals to instrumentalist reason or whether it is vivifying is not the point I was trying to make. The point I wanted to raise and still want to raise pertains to the responsibility of intellectuals.”

  What we think of as the ends of knowledge is intimately connected to what you call the “responsibility of intellectuals”.
  

  “Should I not look upon intellectuals to explain what called the mobs to murder a techie in Pune? What message did Dhananjay Desai bear? How would you, as a trained anthropologist, look at what’s coming from Mangalwari Mahal in Nagpur? How would you look at the PMO? Can you even do an anthropology of PMO with as much of command over ideas as you wrote about Mr. Pardesi? My guess is perhaps you can but you’d rather not.”

  The responsibility of academics and intellectuals towards the world they live in is contiguous with the responsibilities of others who live in the world also. (Is this true? Can we imagine a doxastic logic based on the notion of contiguity? Sure. Why not? Cogs in a machine, or operations along a critical path, could be thought of as having 'contiguous' responsibilities. Why? Because they don't need to have an internal picture of how the whole coheres. They face no concurrency, race hazard or co-ordination problems. In other words, 'contiguous responsibilities' are precisely the sort which can be discharged without the use of the intellect or the carrying forward a Research Program.  Thus, Intellectual or Academic responsibility must always be overlapping or pre-emptive, never contiguous- otherwise, for starters, Maths would be exhaustible and thus the demarcation problem would have a canonical solution and stuff like 'angelology' be wholly Scientific and Popperian) Therefore an academic must do what they can to protect lives and limit harm, (excluding harm to people who lose their life due to the criminal negligence of Public officials at Delhi Zoo) and oppose power (Zoo officials have the power to make the tiger enclosure safe- but you aint opposing their failure to do so are you? Instead you write illiterate shite) and help, (what fucking help have you ever given anyone you stupid jhollawallah careerist? You have a responsibility to use your brain and think logically.) in whatever way they can, those who find themselves in powers’ crosshairs. And this academics do all the time. But there is something more at stake here for you I think. Which has to do with what you see as the “professional” function of academics (and by extension I presume intellection in general). So let me try and address some of this.
  If it is illumination you are seeking, then there are already several works that academics have produced that try and grapple with the murder of a techie in Pune. (Either those 'several works' are shite or the don't exist or you haven't read them or you are too fucking mean spirited to tell this poor semi-literate Muslim nutjob what great discovery they have made)  And Dhananjay Desai bore the same message that fascist thugs everywhere bear. (Fuck off! Fascism comes in a lorra different flavours. Their message aint univocal. It is an elementary rule of survival that has us look for wedge issues to divide our assailants- e.g. back in the Seventies I always called skinheads 'proddy bastards'- which meant the Catholic Irish amongst them gave me a pass. My calculation was based on the knowledge that, had the skinhand band I encountered been wholly Protestant, I'd have been kicked to death anyway. )This is why beyond stating this, there is nothing that a further excavation of his experience can yield. (Absolute shite. Look at the work of Vibhuti Narain Rai. His meticulous research and accessible writing genuinely changed the Hindu mind-set in a wholly salutary way.) What would such an exploration open? (An exploration of Dhanjay Desai would open the fact that he is a Frankenstein monster created and propped up by  the 'Secular' Congress-NCP alliance) How would it extend our expand or further the ways in which we might inhabit our worlds? (Are you fucking kidding me? By finding out about who is actually backing this worthless cunt who got an innocent 24 year old techie killed we stop living in your fucking cartoon world of 'Fascist thugs' and Foucaldian parrhesia as Arundhati Roy ranting and shite.  We wanna see that fucking double D getting titty fucked in Tihar Jail. Then we want him hanged along with his better educated, orAfsal, Gurus.) This is the rub, this is where our differences lie: on what we see as the ends of thought and its connection to responsibility....
   ...But seriously, I think you should interrogate what makes you think that an engagement with mysticism and human experiences of this sort is somehow a less valuable, or less critical, engagement with the crises of the present, than an anthropology of the PMO. BTW, I'd read a  properly researched Bourdieusian social anthropology of the PMO. So would any BRIC hedge fund manager. So would any Mechanism Design guy. So would any sensible person. Why? There are no fucking Gods and magic Tigers involved. Is it because things like mystical experience strike you as frivolous, or “not located in the real world” (a favourite barb thrown at academics such as myself)? As if somehow we are writing or thinking about experiences that inhabit some other, and indeed a lesser world? I am telling you now that if you are searching for redemption to the crises of this current moment, it will not come from undertaking an anthropology of the PMO.
  A fair question at this stage would be to ask, so to what “crises” are these engagements responding? At what level is this”crises” located? I’m afraid the answer to that is far too long to undertake here. You don't fucking know do you? You seriously haven't a clue. Deracinated poseur- you can always emigrate to La-La land. Fuck you, fuck Kafila- youse guys r shite.
  
  

  
  

So, kids, what have we learnt today?
A Public Body, the Delhi Zoo, is guilty of criminal negligence. A young life is snuffed out. Public intellectuals need to identify the cause of the tragedy and to show how the same sorts of mechanism design error in other Public Bodies is leading to massive avoidable loss of Life and Life Chances.
This is a widespread problem. Plenty of the people who read Kafila, even some vernacular contributors to Kafila,  are engaged in fighting bureaucratic inertia and stupidity of the sort exhibited by Delhi Zoo when it locked away the dart gun that was mandated to be used in an emergency of the sort under discussion.
However, sensible conversing about Mechanism Design is not what Kafila's Public Intellectuals do. Why? Because they are frivolous dilletantes, poetes maudits manque (okay me dunno French bon)  masquerading as the sort of sober, scrupulous, Careerist, Credentialized, gobshites we have come to revere.
A tiger with a 'Hindu' name kills a lunatic with a Muslim name and Kafila's best and brightest immediately play up the young man's Religion, even though it is entirely irrelevant, simply to start babbling on about Spirits and Gods and Fairies and their own worthless researches into the same.
Nobody in the comment section says 'this is a stupid post.' Instead we have a Muslim dude say 'Your duty is to tell vicious lies about Hinduism and Hindutva because a Muslim or Christian or Jew would look stupid telling the same lies because everybody can see the biggest slaughters of Muslims are
1) Fellow Muslims
2) Christian America and its drones (the boy Cameron was born to be a Drone)
3) Jews
4) Buddhists.
Hindus just don't make the cut.
This is why it is vital that women with Hindu names write pseudo-intellectual shite about 'hidden violence' and everybody getting raped and Suttee and Thuggee and so on.

Nor has this topic wholly died out and been forgotten in Kafila's caravanserai of ultracrepidarian crapping on everything. A young guy with a Hindu name who is an Assistant Prof in the U.S has written a longish post, taking on the Muslim dude previously referred to and defending his own faux Foucauldian 'jinneology'. I'm not kidding. Take a gander at this-

Jinnealogy: Everyday life and Islamic theology in post-Partition Delhi

Anand Vivek Taneja

Abstract

#In this article I explore what I call jinnealogy, a theological orientation that emerges when the genealogies of human memory are confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape. In stories told in contemporary Delhi, long-lived jinn act as transmitters connecting human beings centuries apart in time. In petitions deposited to jinn-saints in a ruined medieval palace, medieval ideas of justice come together with modern bureaucratic techniques. Both stories and rituals attest to a theological newness intricately entwined with the transformations of the postcolonial city’s spiritual and physical landscapes. Jinn are present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary, and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state coincide to attempt vast erasures of the city’s Muslim landscapes. Jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by bringing up other temporalities, political theologies, and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of a bureaucratically constituted present.'
Is this guy saying that Muslims in Delhi worship djinns in a manner different from Muslims in Karachi or Lahore or Mombasa? Nope. Djinn worship was worse before 1857. Guys born after that date stop giving credence to djinns in their autobiographies. Yet 'erasures' and 'magical amnesias' and 'bureaucratically constituted present' were a bigger feature of 1857 than 1947. In any case, it is Pakistan, not India, where 'jinneology' really flourishes- a senior Nuclear Scientist wants to harness the powers of jinns- and where the Salafis really have their work cut out. Sure, shite like that goes down amongst the very old and the very poor and the just plain stupid in India but so what? They have no institutional power. India aint a theocracy. You can appeal straight to God coz the State aint claiming to monopolize channels to Him.  You don't have to bribe a djinn or conjure up a demon or a ghost or some such shite to get your work done in despite of the Priestly Bureaucrat.  

Still, Vivek's article is not more egregiously shite than its ilk and, being penned by a guy with a Hindu name, not punishable by fatwa for heresy re. Barzakh. It is merely a silly infidel posing as an initiate but grinning so inanely and cutting such antic capers that no scandal is afforded the rightly guided.
This then is the proper terms of trade between Secular Hinduism and Progressive Islam. The Hindu's job is to make a fool of himself by fastening onto only the superstitious practices condemned by the Salafis while telling vicious lies about Hindutva so as to establish his 'Secular' credentials as an apologist for that uncreated Truth which the Secular order must serve.
Thus the author's 'jinneology' allows him to pretend that the Delhi Waqf board doesn't contain anti-social elements (they kill each other) and anti-national elements (with proper genealogies, not jinneologies, going back to the Muslim League and the demand for a chain of Muslim states linking the 'East & West' wing. No doubt, there are double agents and 'channels of communication' and so on. Still our jinneologist is being disingenuous when he pretends not to know that documents relating to property claims (not deeds, these are claims merely) are precisely what anti-social elements fasten on to back up encroachment on Public and Commonly owned land and buildings- not to mention privately owned buildings. More often than not, disputes of this sort are intra Barelvi or Barelvi Deobandi or Shiah Sunni and it is indeed anti-national to allow communities to get divided and to shed blood over such issues.
Our jinnealogist, no doubt, wants us to imagine that the State is doing something very sinister by not handing out photocopies of contradictory 'sanads'. However, the plain fact is that these documents have no force in law and can also serve to stir up trouble to no good purpose.
The rest of his post is as shite as his paper.

I have left the following helpful comment for our jinniologist who only printed it to call me a homophobe but then censored my answer. Here it is-

'Aamir Mufti’s Karachi Grammar School background and long years as a desi stowaway on American Scholarships warps his views and renders him meaningless in the context Imtiaz is framing.
The truth is that both ‘Hindutva’ & Jamaati identity politics is intended to benefit the provincial bazaari middle class by freeing them of the necessity to conform to purely local and subaltern shibboleths- i.e. the sweeper putting ‘nazar’ on you and granny saying you have to skip your shaka or Rotary club meeting to go perform some humiliating ceremony in a stinking ruin. This has nothing to do with ecology or preserving some mythical apocatastatic folk memory of organic unity such that as Savarkar pointed out prior to the creation of the I.N.C, Hindus and Muslims spent so much time hugging and kissing and cuddling each other on the street that they neglected to purchase the dhania their wives had sent them out to purchase which is why all the womenfolk (with the honorable exception of Rani of Jhansi) got very angry and complained to Queen Victoria Ji who was immediately constituting ‘Divide and Rule’ policy which involved rape of mother earth due to otherwise how to pry apart them continually cuddling Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and what have you?
Queer theory explains how like Colonialism and neo-Liberalism and stuff are like a total cock blocker dude and like how can that not be women’s fault? Which man would rape Environment if the conga line of Hindu-Muslim anal intercourse continued to wind its way down our immemorial streets? Sarmad and Abhay Chand, Bedil and that Khattri boy he cursed, along with numerous djinns and Pirs and Vir Savarkars & Naokhali’s Husseini Pir would at last achieve not the Miri of mere dominance but Hegemony also.
In Vikram Seth’s ‘suitable boy’ the son of a Secular ‘Rafian’ Congress Minister has butt sex with the son of a Muslim Nawab. Later, he stabs him? Why? Was it due to Hindutva or Jamaati politics? Was it because he’d learnt nastaliq? No. It was because of cherchez la femme. The Hindu thought the Muslim was trying to get it on with his mistress whereas in fact, as is right and proper and in accordance with Ruswa, the Muslim nawabzada was in fact trysting with the Pakeezah who, obviously, was his own half-sister and the daughter of the Hindu’s mistress who had been raped by his friend’s father while still little more than a child.
As the Mahatma was wont to say- there is a lesson here all who run can read.
What is the way forward? It is time for action not words. Only Hindu Muslim Conga lines of continual buggery can resist the Indian National Congress- which is the only truly Fascist party that has successfully taken root (due to cock blocking widows like Indira, Sonia etc) on our soil- and of which Modi sarkar is a merely meretricious and vernacular simulacrum.
So far, I have only spoken of the responsibilities of genuine intellectuals and engaged academics like you and Mufti Sahib.
What of ordinary people like me? In the late Nineties and early Noughties, it was our salutary practice to drunk dial Indian Heads of Mission claiming to be Rahul Baba and saying ‘Tell mummy I won’t come home and become PM unless she legalizes it pronto! Ciao, ciao.’
Now what are we to do? Muril Manohar Joshi, we used to say, murli him but good. But this is not a panacea. Modi has done that dirty deed in Varanasi, but what good will it do? Some say the ‘Swacch Bharat’ toilet building program will be the salvation of India. Yes, if toilets are only used for cottaging. But how to prevent women from banging on the door and passing coarse and hurtful remarks about what you are getting up to?
Maqsood and Vijay may have found one way out. But it isn’t for everybody, though I do hope you and Aamir will give it a try. Read a bit of Walter Benjamin together. That will put you in the mood.'