12-19-2008, 09:56 AM
The struggle for India's soul
World Policy Journal, Fall, 2002 by Mira Kamdar
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My immigrant Gujarati father is both a liberal Democrat and a supporter of Hindu fascism. This is not as unusual as one might think. According to one of the central tenets of the Hindu far-right ideology known as Hindutva, India is not only the fatherland, pitribhumi, of Hindus, Jains and-more problematically--Sikhs, it is also their punyabhumi, their holy land. (2) Because the birthplaces of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism are outside India, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Jews--no matter how many hundreds or thousands of years they may have lived in the country--are seen by Hindu extremists as aliens. My father, a Jain, identifies completely with this view.
I grew up in a home where Martin Luther King was venerated, the civil rights movement championed, the Kennedys (Jack and Bobby) worshiped, and a "McGovern for President" sign picked up from where it had been knocked down the previous night and reimplanted on our front lawn every October morning in 1972. We children learned early on to view racism as a disease that could be eliminated, if only the same zeal were applied to it as had been applied to the eradication of smallpox. Even our parents' "mixed marriage"--my mother is Danish American--was to be understood not so much as a love affair as a salvo in the war on racism. The personal was consciously political in my childhood home.
My father never hesitated to express his outrage at racial injustice, whether in the exalted form of British imperialism or in the more everyday, American redneck, good ol' boy tradition. Whenever anyone challenged him about something he wanted to do, he was fond of retorting, "Why not? I'm free, white, and over 21 aren't I?" daring you to question his whiteness. More boldly, and more rarely, he would allude to the Nazis' linkage of Indians with Germans in one vast Aryan family. I always took these remarks to be tongue-in-cheek observations that no one, least of all my father, really believed, remarks designed more to provoke than to express his true views.
So it has been a great and sad shock to me to realize that my father, who loved Martin Luther King, hates Muslims. He hates them blindly, viscerally, categorically. In most other respects, my father is a rational man: gifted in mathematics, and a highly trained aeronautical engineer who worked, among other things, on the Apollo missions. Yet, in any discussion where Muslims, the Middle East, Bosnia (not to mention Pakistan) comes up, he is wont to fly into an apoplectic rage, turn red in the face, shout until spit begins to pool at the sides of his mouth, shake his fists. The culmination of these fits is always the same. He bends over, seizes the cuff of the right leg of his pants, and pulls it up to show off a series of diagonal dents marching up his shin, scars from a back-alley encounter decades ago with a gang of bicycle-chain-wielding Muslim youths. "This is what Muslims did to me! This is what Muslims do!" My father is a heart patient who recently underwent a quadruple bypass operation. "Dad! Dad! Calm down," we soothe, and move the conversation into safer waters.
Until quite recently, I believed my father's hatred of Muslims to be a particular affliction, the result of an attack whose emotional scars go far deeper than the physical ones. I realized in 1992-93, when Hindu-Muslim riots raged throughout India in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya by Hindu militants, that my father's views were, if not a universal plague, at least a widespread distemper.
World Policy Journal, Fall, 2002 by Mira Kamdar
--
My immigrant Gujarati father is both a liberal Democrat and a supporter of Hindu fascism. This is not as unusual as one might think. According to one of the central tenets of the Hindu far-right ideology known as Hindutva, India is not only the fatherland, pitribhumi, of Hindus, Jains and-more problematically--Sikhs, it is also their punyabhumi, their holy land. (2) Because the birthplaces of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism are outside India, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Jews--no matter how many hundreds or thousands of years they may have lived in the country--are seen by Hindu extremists as aliens. My father, a Jain, identifies completely with this view.
I grew up in a home where Martin Luther King was venerated, the civil rights movement championed, the Kennedys (Jack and Bobby) worshiped, and a "McGovern for President" sign picked up from where it had been knocked down the previous night and reimplanted on our front lawn every October morning in 1972. We children learned early on to view racism as a disease that could be eliminated, if only the same zeal were applied to it as had been applied to the eradication of smallpox. Even our parents' "mixed marriage"--my mother is Danish American--was to be understood not so much as a love affair as a salvo in the war on racism. The personal was consciously political in my childhood home.
My father never hesitated to express his outrage at racial injustice, whether in the exalted form of British imperialism or in the more everyday, American redneck, good ol' boy tradition. Whenever anyone challenged him about something he wanted to do, he was fond of retorting, "Why not? I'm free, white, and over 21 aren't I?" daring you to question his whiteness. More boldly, and more rarely, he would allude to the Nazis' linkage of Indians with Germans in one vast Aryan family. I always took these remarks to be tongue-in-cheek observations that no one, least of all my father, really believed, remarks designed more to provoke than to express his true views.
So it has been a great and sad shock to me to realize that my father, who loved Martin Luther King, hates Muslims. He hates them blindly, viscerally, categorically. In most other respects, my father is a rational man: gifted in mathematics, and a highly trained aeronautical engineer who worked, among other things, on the Apollo missions. Yet, in any discussion where Muslims, the Middle East, Bosnia (not to mention Pakistan) comes up, he is wont to fly into an apoplectic rage, turn red in the face, shout until spit begins to pool at the sides of his mouth, shake his fists. The culmination of these fits is always the same. He bends over, seizes the cuff of the right leg of his pants, and pulls it up to show off a series of diagonal dents marching up his shin, scars from a back-alley encounter decades ago with a gang of bicycle-chain-wielding Muslim youths. "This is what Muslims did to me! This is what Muslims do!" My father is a heart patient who recently underwent a quadruple bypass operation. "Dad! Dad! Calm down," we soothe, and move the conversation into safer waters.
Until quite recently, I believed my father's hatred of Muslims to be a particular affliction, the result of an attack whose emotional scars go far deeper than the physical ones. I realized in 1992-93, when Hindu-Muslim riots raged throughout India in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in Ayodhya by Hindu militants, that my father's views were, if not a universal plague, at least a widespread distemper.