CFP: Inviting proposals for book chapters

Proposed Book: ‘Muslim Life in West Bengal’

The recent ASGG Report (2014) on the conditions of Muslims in West Bengal reiterates the concerns expressed in such previous reports as the ones headed by Justice Sachar and Misra.   Muslims in West Bengal are grossly underrepresented in the political and economic life.  Their socio-cultural situation fares no better than the dalits. The migration of most of the elite Muslims from Bengal during the Partition of India (1947) has left behind a disenfranchised community. The subsequent indifference of the ‘secular democratic’ state toward the bleak condition of Muslims has further exacerbated the problem.

Since there has not been any significant comprehensive study undertaken about Muslims in West Bengal, we intend to put together a book that would focus on the question of Muslim life in West Bengal, their political participation, their educational attainments, their intellectual contribution, their contribution to Bengali cinema, literature, and music, the Bengali Muslim Women’s Question, the emergent Dalit identity among Muslims in West Bengal, and their present-day plight.

We invite book chapters, from academics with an interest in and research background in Muslim life in West Bengal. The contributors are requested to address some of the following questions in their submissions (but not limited to these questions alone):

How did the Bengali Muslim identity emerge historically? Does the post-Partition Muslim identity in West Bengal differ from the pre-Partition days? Did the Muslim identity in West Bengal evolve differently from that of present-day Bangladesh? What form has the present-day Muslim politics taken in West Bengal? Does a separate Muslim party have a future in the politics of West Bengal? What role do the madrasas play in the education of Muslims in West Bengal? Is there a division between religious and secular forms of education among Muslims? What has been the contribution of Muslims in West Bengal toward literature, film, music, art, architecture, and television? How have Muslims been represented in the cultural domain and media? Where are the organic Muslim intellectuals in Bengal? Since the time of late 19^th century, how has the Muslim Women’s Question evolved among Bengali Muslims? How have Muslim women fared in West Bengal compared to their Hindu counterparts? How does the emergent dalit identity among Bengali Muslims recalibrate questions of politics, economics and culture? Since the state has failed to perform its duties towards more than a quarter of its population, how could the Muslim civil society pressurise the government to attend to the needs of the community? At a time of neo-liberal reforms when jobs are mostly privatised and when there is a growing popularity of rightist ideologies, is the demand for reservation among Muslims in West Bengal counterproductive?

Contributors are requested to prepare 5000-6000 word essays. Please follow the MLA style guide while preparing your chapters. Last date for submission of chapters: 30 May, 2018. Email your submissions to both: mosarraphossainkhan@gmail.com & mursedalam@gmail.com

Probable publishers:

We intend to send the manuscript to a reputed US academic publisher. Our second option is an Indian academic publisher. It will all depend on the quality of the final essays.

Editors:

Mosarrap H Khan has recently defended his doctoral dissertation at the Department of English, New York University. His research interests include South Asian literature and culture, religion and secularism, theories of everyday life, and Muslim life in West Bengal.

Mursed Alam teaches in the Department of English, Gour College, Malda, West Bengal. His research areas include subaltern life and politics, Islamic traditions in South Asia, minor discourses, etc. He has published in journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Rethinking Marxism, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Contemporary South Asia, South Asia Research, Kairos, and the Journal of Critical Symposium.

Debate: Saraswati Pujas should continue to be organized in schools across Bengal

For the Motion: Mosarrap H Khan

First, the call for a stop to Saraswati Puja celebrations in schools (especially the public-funded ones) comes from a new-found religious assertion among Muslims, which was dormant during the thirty-four years of the Left regime but is now in ascendance with Mamata Banerjee’s rule. I am alarmed with the new assertion because it delinks religion from culture. I see Saraswati Puja as part of larger Bengali cultural identity (albeit, no doubt, undergirded by the Hindu majority identity). As Olivier Roy argues in the case of France, the new forms of fundamentalism and extremism among Muslims (and also among born-again Christians) are a result of de-culturalizing religion, which makes religion a transnational, ahistorical phenomenon. In India, too, such occurrences are common with the emergence of a new breed of Muslim tele-evangelists and internet preachers, who have been consistently trying to delink Islam from particular cultural moorings, for example, Islam in Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, each one of which bears distinct cultural marks. In Bengal, Saraswati Puja is part of that cultural mooring for me, even if one doesn’t offer pushpanjali (actual worshipping of the goddess).

Second, I’m aware that culture can operate as hegemony and build barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Mathew Arnold does it in Culture and Anarchy: culture is something that comprises of the best knowledge and thought. Anything that falls outside this is philistine and must be brought under the purview of culture. However, when I say Saraswati Puja is part of Bengali culture, I want to take a view of culture which Edward Said posits: that is affiliative, instead of filiative. We are born into families, tribes, extended network of caste, etc. That’s a filiative bond, something related to filial feelings. An affiliative bond can occur between people who are not necessarily bound by filial bond, for example, people of different castes, languages, etc. Similarly, my idea of Bengali culture is affiliative, across divisions of religion (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc). If we can identify ourselves affiliatively as Bengalis, then I don’t see why we can’t take part in Saraswati Puja as Bengalis (the way we do in the case of Durga Puja) or Pujas to be organized in schools. An affiliative identification is an attempt to make our horizons of belonging larger, more expansive.

Third, I want to take a more pragmatic look at this debate about Saraswati Puja celebrations in schools. In the last decade and a half, Bengali Muslims in West Bengal have made remarkable progress in the field of education. There is an emerging middle-class of professionals, intellectuals, despite the overall poor indicators of Muslim progress in the state. I don’t want us to fritter away this development over issues of Saraswati Puja celebrations. This will be a wrong battle to pick for Muslims in Bengal at this time. This is the time to consolidate our strength, to forge ahead, to harness our talents. Saraswati Puja celebrations can continue in schools.

Fourth, this one is a personal reason. I have grown up attending Saraswati Puja in my local school and later in my Hindu missionary school. I even used to offer pushpanjali, which my sisters too did when they attended school. The other day, I asked my mother, what she thought about it. She said, she didn’t see any problem in that. She is a practicing Muslim. The point I’m making is Muslims are diverse in their life-experiences and sensibilities. We shouldn’t turn Saraswati Puja into another essentialist battle of religions.

[Anyone wishing to write against the motion, do send an email to infocafedissensus@gmail.com. A 500-600 word write-up would suffice.]

Yakub Memon, A MUSLIM, Was Hanged

As the tamasha of late night court proceedings unfolded, I had a sense of déjà vu. A blood-thirsty nation would have to be satisfied.

Yakub Memon must be hanged.

He was a conspirator during the Bombay Blasts. He had taken lives. We must have his life. Once the date of hanging was decided in advance, there was very little chance left.

Yakub ran a successful chartered accountancy firm with a Hindu, a Mehta. What could have drawn him into this plot for revenge? Did Yakub Memon feel angry when he saw hundreds of people killed, displaced, terrorized, and traumatized by the goons of Shiv Sena and other right wing groups?

Let’s hang on for a moment to the supposition that Yakub was directly involved in plotting the blasts. But since he had managed to escape to Karachi, along with his family, why did he return?

Read the whole piece on Cafe Dissensus Everyday

Do we have the LANGUAGE to talk about Housing Discrimination against Muslims?

You read about a Muslim woman being denied an apartment in Mumbai.

Hashtags such as #MisbahQadri, #ApartheidTruth lasted for about 72 hours on social media.

Raging, raging, gone…

You know you have been there; you have heard that; you have been asked to f*** off. Because you are a Muslim.

You also know social media outrage is incapable of devising a language of pain. Yes PAIN, which lies at the heart of such experiences.

Are our personal narratives just one way to grapple with that language of pain, you wonder.

                                                                        ***

You are at the University of Hyderabad. You have just completed a master’s and are brimming with idealism. The highs of university life have made you confident. You think you can take on the world. At least, that’s what the university community made you feel.

You have left the memories of 1992 behind. Somewhat.

You want to spend an additional year in Hyderabad. Because your girlfriend is still completing her master’s. You drive a hard bargain with your dad, who isn’t very keen on funding your stay in the city for an additional year. Hyderabad is not yet a booming tech city, where you could at least land a language trainer’s job at a call center. But you somehow manage to convince your dad. You tell him you are preparing for Ph.D. admissions. And, of course, the Ph.D. would have to be funded through a scholarship. Goes without saying.

Since you have completed the degree, you can’t live in the university hostel any longer. You go house-hunting in the city. Mostly you look for modest places. “We don’t rent our house to Muslims,” they say. You are young. You are full of hope. You are never bitter. You have made good friends at the university. They never considered your religion important. And, of course, you are dating a non-Muslim woman.

Read the whole piece on Cafe Dissensus Everyday.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)

After a brief visit of about ten days, I returned from Dhaka at the end of 2011, which happened to be the fortieth birth anniversary of Bangladesh. During my stay, I interacted with academics, scholars, and lay people about the legacy of Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), which severed Pakistan into two distinct countries. While in the genteel and more cultivated circles, the schizophrenic nature of Bangladeshi nationalism embodied itself as an entrenched ideological battle between the secularists and the Islamists (some of these Islamists have since been hanged following a controversial tribunal), this divide took on a more visceral turn on the streets of Dhaka, as bombs exploded and cars were set on fire. The recent killings of ‘secular bloggers’ have further intensified this divide. As I boarded the Friendship Bus (Souhardya) plying between Dhaka and Kolkata, I remembered Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s prophetic words in his poem, “Hum Ke Thehre Ajnabee”:

“Kab nazar men aayegi baidaagh sabzey ki bahar
Khoon ke dhabbey dhulain gain kinti barsaatoon ke baad”

(When will we see the unsullied green of spring?
After how many monsoons will the stains of blood be washed?)

Faiz – a humanist, a committed Marxist, and a poet of the oppressed – wrote this after his return from Dhaka in 1974. After forty years, Bangladeshi nationalism, like many of its Third World counterparts, still periodically reenacted its founding violence of 1971.

As an admirer of Faiz and his vision of justice, I have been asking myself: What was Faiz’s particular position on the Pakistani Army repression in East Pakistan which began on 25 March, 1971? What was his view on the East Pakistani resistance that culminated in the death of millions (this number has been contested often and no consensus exists) and rape of thousands of women? Faiz had already been a well-known poet in East Pakistan and many of his poems had been translated into Bangla. He was introduced in East Pakistan by Munir Chowdhury, a well-known professor in Dhaka and Faiz’s friend. During that official trip of 1974, where he accompanied the Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, many of Faiz’s friends didn’t show up, either because they had disappeared during the Pakistani Army excesses or had decided to stay away because of what they had felt Faiz’s deliberate silence about army repression. As Bangladeshi journalist, Afsan Chowdhury, writes, “During those days, those who knew would ask, ‘What did Faiz say? Did he protest? Did he give a statement saying it was wrong?’ In fact, we do not know what Faiz did.”

Read the whole piece on Cafe Dissensus.

How to Eat Beef in Bengal?

We are a family of gastronomic dissidence, almost bordering on anarchy. My mother eats beef but no mutton. My father loves mutton but eats no beef. One of my sisters doesn’t eat any meat, not even fish. Another sister was gastronomically more adventurous until recently when she gave up eating beef. I haven’t eaten red meat since my childhood, owing to what I felt a strong smell (which made me nauseate) and thick fibers.

As in the case of political parties, someone sets the agenda in every family. In our home, it’s my mother. Since she never ate mutton, she made sure no mutton would ever be cooked at home. We siblings, therefore, never grew up developing a taste for mutton. My poor father, who really loved mutton, gorged on it mostly in weddings, until he gave up eating meat altogether. The health freak that he is we were not surprised.

But my mother loves eating beef. There is not a single part of the cow that she didn’t relish eating – from the meaty parts to entrails to legs. She grew up in a village where beef formed an important part of the diet. While extremely eclectic in her sartorial preference, honed by the limited choices in a small town where she went to school, she remained truly rooted in her village in gastronomic matters.

After marriage, she came away to live in a small town (more like a hamlet), where my father had already set up his business. The town, a Community Development Block, was more like an extended village with a state highway passing through the settlement. Houses began cropping up haphazardly, many of which were built by families that moved from villages, either to work in a few existent government offices or to start a business. Some other families moved to give their children a better education, albeit there was just one high school for the boys and one for the girls.

Read the whole piece on Antiserious.

What does AAP’s Victory in Delhi Assembly Election say about Muslims?

I must begin with a caveat: I am neither a political analyst nor a psephologist. Like many in India, I am an avid follower of politics and try to make sense of the happenings with common sense. This piece is an attempt to make sense of AAP’s victory in Delhi and situate this victory within the larger popular discourse about Indian Muslims, particularly their supposed victimhood, lack of leadership, and ghettoization.

What’s up with Indian Muslims?

Here I sump up very briefly the arguments from three newspaper articles about Indian Muslims, which give us a glimpse into the popular discourse about Indian Muslims.

In a well-intentioned piece, coincidentally published on the morning of 7 January, 2015, the day the Charlie Hebdo massacre took place, Sagarika Ghose recommends that Indian Muslims shouldn’t allow themselves to be pushed into perpetual victimhood over issues of ‘love jihad’ (inter-faith love/marriage between Hindus and Muslims)  and ‘ghar wapsi’ (religious conversion of minorities to Hinduism). She recounts the achievements of Indian Muslim icons and frames them problematically with Indian nationalism, “India’s exceptional Muslim citizens are icons whose achievements are proudly, subliminally claimed by Indian nationalism even if the ‘Muslim’ is apparently antithetical to it.” Ghose’s concern is borne out of the fact that Asaduddin Owaisi gained prominence as the ‘sole spokesperson’ of the Muslim community in India, after his impressive electoral debut in Maharashtra, outside his home-turf, Hyderabad. Further, Ghose answers why Indian Muslims might be opting for Owaisi’s supposedly communal brand of politics, “A leaderless community is now seeking refuge in their own demagogues, in the belief that they alone can offer an effective counterpoint to both majoritarian and flawed secular politics.” While she makes an ardent appeal for a modern, moderate Muslim leadership that can steer Muslims to national mainstream, her final message is one of self-congratulation: “Beyond the yelling bigots, there’s a silent more welcoming truth: Indian Muslims would not be the second largest community in the world, if the true Hindu was anti-Muslim.”

Read the whole piece on Cafe Dissensus Everyday.

Short Story: Mehru’s Dream

The dark clouds had been gathering for a while. The nor’wester would strike soon, bringing momentary relief from the heat and humidity. Mehru wiped the sweat off her face with the corner of her sari. The boy on the lap was tugging at her breast. He must be hungry. She lifted her blouse and held his mouth to her breast. The boy kept quiet and started suckling her.

Mehru was thinking of the cow she had tethered on the green patch a little distance from the house. The summer heat had parched most of the grass, forcing her to take the cow far. The calf had followed the mother eagerly. Should she go and fetch her? Worried, she walked out of the house, hoping she would chance on someone.

“Boudi, are you looking for something?” Topu asked. He lived in the mohalla across the pond.

“I am worried about the cow. I tied her next to the banyan tree.”

“I am going that way. Should I untie it? Where is Ali?”

“Please do. He has gone to the market to buy manure for the sowing.”

“Don’t worry. You get in. I will unfasten it on my way,” Topu walked away with long strides.

Mehru sauntered in and put the boy to sleep on the cot in the verandah.

She picked the dry clothes off the line tied to two bamboo poles in the courtyard. She dumped them on the cot.

Read the whole story on Cafe Dissensus Everyday.

What Ferguson means to an international student in the US

You approach the immigration counter at the JFK airport. The black immigration officer looks at your passports and starts talking about smelly Koreans, Indians, and Mexicans. He seems repulsed with the fish that the Koreans supposedly carry when they try to clear immigration formalities. You and your partner look puzzled and try to smile as politely as possible. After all, you don’t want to bungle up this last hurdle before entering “the land of milk and honey,” as the immigration officer alludes to your aspirations.

*

You start tentatively and look to make friends among your cohorts, who attend one common course in the first year. This is to build ‘collegiality’ among members of the cohort. You get close to a few male and female cohort members. One day before the class starts, you speak to XXX, a white American female student from the Midwest. She tells you that as many as five Indian men proposed marriage to her because they wanted a Green Card. You are stunned and wonder if you should have mentioned you are already married.

*

You take a consortium class at Columbia. One day you feel like grabbing a coffee before entering the class. The Starbucks right opposite is packed, as always. You wait in line for your turn. A middle-aged white man pulls close and tells you, “Go back to the fu**ing place you came from.” He leaves abruptly before you can regain your composure. The white elderly woman standing behind you asks gently, “Are you alright?” You wonder if she would have asked you the same if you had decided to punch the man on his face…

Read the whole piece on Cafe Dissensus Everyday

Everyday Objects: Natasha Raheja’s ‘Cast in India’ (2014)

[First published in Cafe Dissensus Everyday]

Perhaps, it’s not proper to introduce a film – Natasha Raheja’s Cast in India – with an extended quote. Perhaps, it’s not completely out of place if a particular moment in one continent resonates strongly with another moment in another continent.

In Fernando Pessoa’s quasi-autobiographical The Book of Disquiet (1998), the insomniac bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares writes a diary entry about his journey across Lisbon in the early 1930s:

I’m in a trolley, and, as is my habit, I’m slowly taking notice of the people sitting around me. For me details are things, words, sentences. I take apart the dress worn by the girl in front of me: I turn it into the fabric that makes it up, the work that went into making it… And immediately, as in a primer on political economy, the factories and the labor unfold before me – the factory where the cloth was made…I see the components of the factories, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses, my eyes turned inward penetrate into the offices, I see the managers trying to be calm, I follow, in the books, the accounts involved in it all; but it isn’t only that: I see, beyond that, the domestic lives of those who live their social lives in those factories and those offices…All of them pass before my eyes merely because I have before me, below a dark neck, which on its other side has I don’t know what sort of face, a common, irregular green edge on a light green dress.

The entire life of society lies before my eyes.

Beyond all that I sense the loves, the secret life, the souls of all those who worked so that this woman seated in front of me in the trolley can wear around her neck the sinuous banality of a band of dark green silk on less dark green cloth.

I become stupefied. The seats on the trolley, made of a tightly woven strong straw, carry me to distant regions and into multiple industries, workers, workers’ houses, lives, realities, all.

I leave the trolley exhausted and sleepwalking. I just lived an entire life.

In a rare close-up, Natasha Raheja’s short film, Cast in India, opens with the camera zooming in on a zebra-crossing at a busy intersection in New York City. Amidst the crowd of legs, we catch a glimpse of a Macy’s shopping bag for the fraction of a second; the red star, though rarely visible, makes the scene almost an extension of Soares’ reverie on seeing the green dress of the girl sitting in front of him. For a moment, I wonder if, like Soares’ diary entry, Natasha wants us to think what the bag contains, where these commodities come from, who produce these commodities, and how they arrive in this city. Unlike 1930s Lisbon, the labor infrastructure that produces clothes and other commodities for western consumers has expanded. Once we look up the tag on a shirt, a top, or a pair of jeans, we are certain to encounter ‘Made in Bangladesh’, ‘Made in Nigeria’ or ‘Made in Vietnam’ embossed on them. A growing awareness about exploitative labor conditions across garment factories in third-world countries reveals to us the social life hidden behind these objects. Something that Soares’ diary entry tried to imagine.

When the same sets of people at the zebra-crossing step on a grey manhole cover, where ‘Made in India’ is prominently emblazoned, no one seems to notice. They step on it or step across it. And that’s that. So do we, who live in this city. However, Natasha’s deft camera cuts to the grimy and soot-filled interiors of a factory in Howrah in the Indian state of West Bengal, in her quest to track down the labor networks that lie hidden behind these everyday objects.

Cast in India makes a crucial intervention in the discourse of labor and globalization – Soares couldn’t have conceived of this in 1930s Lisbon – as labor-intensive work gets outsourced to the poorer countries. The camera pans around the vast expanse of the foundry and then zooms in on the details of each of the fragments that constitute the production of these sanitary castings. The working conditions are primitive, where molten iron is carried in tin containers and the workers use their bare feet to shove parts of the castings. There is a striking rawness in this portrayal that affects the audience viscerally as the camera focuses on the bare bodies and spindly sinews of workers who are seen milling around to have a cup of tea or change their dress before exiting the factory. Like Bernardo Soares imagining the people who produced the green dress in factories, I am left exhausted at the end of the screening.

Natasha’s film works on two different registers: first, it reveals to us the extensive labor infrastructure and social life behind the everyday objects that we encounter in the built environment of the city, thereby highlighting our own alienation in modern life; second, it exposes the hazardous working conditions that are masked by the shiny surfaces of our great metropolises.

Here is a courageous and talented filmmaker, who makes an unusual move of entering the grubby interiors of a factory; something not many young filmmakers do these days. The film has been nominated for the30^th Annual IDA Documentary Awards.

Catch the next screening of Natasha’s film. Details here.

Trailer of Cast in India

Here is a brief conversation with Natasha, who is pursuing a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology at New York University:

Mosarrap H. Khan (MHK): Congratulations on an excellent film! Please tell us something about your background as a filmmaker. Was Cast in India your first film?

Natasha Raheja (NR): I started learning filmmaking at New York University. I am in NYU’s Culture and Media program which offers integrated training in anthropology and video production. Cast in India is my second film. It’s my first on the film festival circuit.

MHK: What prompted you to make a film on ‘manhole covers’ in New York City?

NR: I was walking the city streets one day shortly after moving here from Texas, when my gaze fell to a manhole cover below my feet with the boldly emblazoned byline ‘Made in India’. Iconic and ubiquitous as manhole covers are in New York City, I wanted to learn more about this curious circuit of exchange.

MHK: The New York Times mentioned your film is about the “hellish condition” of Indian laborers. Is Cast in India only about making us aware of the “hellish condition” or is it about overcoming our own alienation from the social relations that lie hidden underneath the everyday objects in the built environment of this great city?

NR: Viewers have a range of responses to the film and take different things away with them. For me the film enlivens everyday objects and commodities, while raising questions around the concealment of labor infrastructure.

MHK: To your credit, without recourse to typical documentary techniques of voiceover, interviews, interpretations etc., the film succinctly captures the process of production of ‘manhole covers’ in factories in Howrah. Could you please tell us more about this particular style of filmmaking where the camera itself, as if, does the talking?

NR: I employ a sensory ethnography style that foregrounds feeling over interpretation and presence over explanation. I strive to make patient and committed shots. I strive to maintain a proximity to my subjects that is palpably intimate, and thus, for example, I minimally use the zoom feature on my camera.

MHK: What was the experience like in Howrah? Did you face any obstacles while shooting for the film?

NR: Shooting on location in Howrah was very smooth and I faced no significant obstacles. Except for being cloaked in soot!

MHK: At the end of the film, you insert a clip where some of the workers watch the film on your laptop. What was the idea behind it? Could this help the workers themselves overcome their alienation from the fragmentary nature of work in the factory?

NR: I wanted to share my representation with the foundry workers. Many of the workers’ family members had not seen the foundry before and were curious about the technical process of iron casting.

MHK: What other future projects are you thinking of at the moment?

NR: I want to share the film with a range of audiences so I am diligently applying to film festivals. I also hope for the film to have an educational circulation for which I’m exploring ways to build a lesson plan around the film for high schools and colleges.

MHK: Thank you, Natasha!