indian journal of gender studies 2014 pathak 461 83

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Personal Narrative

Mixed Marriage:

Anxieties of Identity

Zakia Pathak

Abstract

An absorbing story is narrated by the child of a mixed marriage, Hinduand Muslim, in the first quarter of the twentieth century. At oncecreative and critical, the memoir is innovatively structured. In its ex-centricity to established forms and styles it seeks to represent substan-tially and formally the disjunctivity of memory, the flux of experienceand everyday living, and the incertitude of meaning. Through a muddleof anecdotes, conversations and dialogues with the self, the minority

subject is produced as always in process.

Keywords

Memoir, identity, mixed marriage, minority subject

Indian Journal of Gender Studies21(3) 461–483

© 2014 CWDSSAGE PublicationsLos Angeles, London,

New Delhi, Singapore,Washington DC

DOI: 10.1177/0971521514540712http://ijg.sagepub.com

Zakia Pathak retired from the Department of English, Miranda House,

Delhi University. She has published in India and abroad. Address: 213, 16th

Cross, M.C. Layout, Vijaya Nagar, Bangalore – 560040, India.

One afternoon when my parents were away at work, my siblings and

I were playing at home. I opened a drawer in my father’s study table andcame across a revolver. It became part of the game we were playing.

I held it to my sister’s head menacingly and she shrieked on cue. Decades

later I learnt that it was given to my father by the Pune police for his

protection against threats of violence following his marriage to my mother.

My mother, Malini Panandikar, was a Saraswat Brahman. She was

brought up in the home of her maternal grandfather in Pune. Her motherdied early of cancer and her father’s job being subject to transfers, the

children were taken in by the grandfather. Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar

was a Sanskrit scholar and an orientalist of repute knighted by the British

Government—those were the early years of the 20th century—for his

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462 Zakia Pathak

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21, 3 (2014): 461–483

scholarship. The Bhandarkar Oriental Library in Pune is named after him.

He was a staunch believer in the power of education to achieve social

reforms including the advancement of women. One of my mother’s cous-ins was among the first small batch of girls who graduated from the

prestigious Elphinstone College in Bombay.

Of my father’s beginnings I know little and almost nothing from his

own lips. He was a Muslim, born in a small village in Maharashtra, in

Satara district. The family was of very limited means. They later moved

to Wai in search of opportunity. The men of the family may have had

some basic education, the women were uneducated. My humble father believed as staunchly in the power of education as my mother’s grandfa-

ther did. He had to struggle long and hard before he could make it to the

renowned Deccan College in Pune from where he graduated. In the

course of his school education he had to suffer much discrimination even

having to sit outside the classroom.

His religion and his class were against him. But he harboured no

bitterness against Hindus. Two of the friends he made then remained his

friends through life. He was determined to ensure an education for hisyounger sister. She later became the headmistress of a school in Pune.

My parents met when they were studying in Pune, in the very early

1920s. Widely removed as they were by religion and class, their mar-

riage raised a storm in Pune. My mother retained a warm feeling for the

Bombay Brahmins and drew a sharp distinction between them and the

Pune Brahmins in the ostracism she suffered. Neither of my parents

spoke to us about the trauma they were put through. She had been too

deeply wounded; he, in any case, was a man of few words. What I learnt

of it was mostly through casual asides from others. Because of their

unstudied silence and their forward looking courage, our childhood was

not infected by bitterness or hate as it might have been. I look back upon

my life to put that on record in this memoir.

But this memoir, if that’s what it is, is not going to be a pieced-up, put

together account of that marriage, a footnote to history. There is nothing

in it that adheres to the protocols of history. Names are few, dating isoccasional, perhaps disputable, and places are insufficiently particular-

ised. The ‘events’ are voices as they present themselves to my memory

and memory is not an inert document. It is organic, shaped by the

discourses in which it is seeded and grows.1 It is not accountable to

discipline but to the truths of the imagination. As such, this document




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Mixed Marriage: Anxieties of Identity 463


must surely discourage co-option into any grand narrative of inter-

communal relations. But in troubled times these voices achieve the status

of events and an articulation which may stoke conflagrations. Theyspeak. Voices must be heard. Heeded.

This document seeks to show how a mixed marriage—in my story, a

Hindu–Muslim marriage—is lived out in the consciousness of offspring.

It can be experienced sometimes as a miasma, sometimes turbulence,

of voices from a past that have not been laid to rest. They are disembod-

ied; the minimal fleshing out provided by memory is given in order to

give the experience an in-the-world-ness, a certain historical veracity.

2

And to give to the one who heard the voices a certain subjectivity. To

locate her.

This is my story. But it is not an autobiography. I have other selves

which are not contained in a single subjectivity. A wanderer seeking sta-

bilities. A wayfarer knocking on the door and yet afraid of what lies

beyond. Resisting absorption, moving on. An escape marked by a sense

of loss.

The Voices

What language do you speak at home?

This question has remained with me—though totally disembodied

because it has been voiced so many times. It now has a life of its own

which, articulated with some others, has for me a sinister force. It is part

of a group of questions and usually the last of them. These are generally

inspired when the speaker hears my name for the first time. Ubiquitously,

by men and women, young and old. The most recent, and I shall remem-

ber her until she merges with the rest, was a Catholic nun, sitting at the

same desk as I was at a Kannada-speaking short-term course in Bangalore.

In our first class we students were asked to introduce ourselves by name.

‘Zakia Pathak’ I said bracing myself for the onslaught. Her head swiveledaround to me as she hissed one of the questions. They comprise the

following: Hindu or Muslim? Did your mother convert? What was your

maiden name? Is your husband a Hindu? Are your children Hindu or

Muslim? What language do you speak at home? I have to think on my

feet to stem the onslaught. In this last case, hiss for hiss: ‘Shh….mustn’t




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464 Zakia Pathak


disturb the class’. If I were to reply to these questions it would amount to

giving them my life history and I was not about to sacrifice my privacy

in order to be left alone. I had once thought of a tit-for-tat but—since privacy is never valued in this country—the fear that I might have to sit

through their life stories acted as a timely deterrent.

These questions may appear to be casual, inconsequential, but they

stirred an unease in me from the start. They accumulated a nasty charge

to which I could not at first give a name. Today I am convinced that they

are far from neutral, forget innocent. To put it bluntly they are inquisito-

rial, a searing inquiry, a searching out for the unorthodox. Zakia Khan— that name never aroused such salivating curiosity; Zakia Pathak did: an

appetite to find the marital equation (rich food for gossip) as to which

partner, read which religion, prevails. Names tell stories.

The naming of children in a mixed marriage can become a site for

negotiation in a power struggle. I remember coming across an old exer-

cise book of my schooldays in my mother’s house. The name on the

flyleaf in my hand read: Vijaya Khan. I cannot think that this was a

creature of my imagination. Our childhood was singularly free of per- plexities of identity. The name was surely inspired. My mother had

acquiesced that we children should be brought up as Muslims, because

Islam as a proselytising religion is more welcoming. This was probably

buttressed by the fact that my parents’ marriage had been accepted by the

Muslims of Pune in sharp contrast to the Pune Brahmins. So the decision

to bring us up as Muslims was a political one.

Mainstreaming in India involves being fluent in the language of the

state and mastering the script. The Muslim Satyashodak Mandal started

in Pune by Hameed Dalwai had as an important objective the winning

over of Muslims to speaking the Marathi language at home. It has been

resisted by Muslims who are wary of absorption. For my inquisitorial

interlocutors, the language you speak at home nails you to a religious

identity.

What’s in a name? said Shakespeare. He didn’t do his theory.

‘Do you want to be buried when you die?’

The question was shot at me by the Chairman of the Minorities

Commission of the state government one morning when I was in




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Hyderabad. A communal riot had just erupted and I was in the city as part

of a fact-finding team constituted by the Department of Social Work of

Delhi University. An NGO and some activists there had drawn up a pro-gramme of visits to the affected areas of the city and organised a series

of interviews with relevant bureaucrats and some leaders of the Muslim

community. On the morning in question we had just concluded an inter-

view with the Chairman of the Minorities Commission, a Muslim. As the

meeting broke up, an officer of the state Social Welfare Department who

was also present and had been a student of my husband at the Delhi

School of Social Work came up to greet me and asked: ‘Madam, you area Muslim are you not?’ I had barely said a word of affirmation before the

chairman, who had evidently overheard the exchange, muscled in with,

‘Do you want to be buried when you die?’ I was taken aback; he looked

as if he would like to do the job himself and without further ado. I col-

lected my wits and answered truthfully: ‘I should like to be cremated at

an official state crematorium’. I thought I was being conciliatory (not the

burning ghats, see). ‘Then do not deceive people by calling yourself a

Muslim’ he spat at me before stalking out. I found his remark personallyoffensive and, given the context of our meeting, professionally irrespon-

sible. I was amazed by the venom which he made no attempt to hide.

Better a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu, never mind the riots, than an apostate

Muslim. The immediate response to a communal conflagration may be a

hardening of postures. But those who are in the business of conciliation

should not cultivate an amnesia to history.

Islam spells out certain practices which are binding. Prayer five times

a day, fasting for 30 days in the month of Ramzan, burial, charity during

the holy month and pilgrimage to Mecca. The articulation of these and

other such practices into a defining fiat is clearly arbitrary. For instance,

Islam prohibits the enjoyment of unearned income, and interest on bank

savings clearly falls in this category. Does the honourable chairman keep

his savings in a hole in the ground? A debate is on for the need to mod-

ernise Islam and is considering the problem of interest on savings. The

sacralisation of symbols and practices can only lead us to dogma.It represses history.

After the Sikh riots in 1984, some intellectuals in Delhi University

felt the need to assert their religious identity. Some of us were sharing

a taxi on our way to a seminar. The last to be picked up was a Sikh

professor, also in a mixed marriage, who kept us waiting. We were




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466 Zakia Pathak


growing impatient but the neighbourhood taxi driver, a Sikh, relaxed

and grinning, said: ‘Perhaps the professor is having trouble tying

his turban.’

Postscript

I cannot escape a suspicion that the chairman’s wrath was more than a

religious response. How could I be accused of deception when I publicly

avowed my mixed lineage through the kumkum mark on my forehead,

through my name: Zakia Pathak? It was the discursive image of the

woman as naturally duplicitous that erased the language of these silent

markers. The need to close ranks after a riot can become pathological.

‘Neither dharma-patni nor mankula, only a prostitute’

This was the abuse directed at me by a person introducing himself as

teaching at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in a personal letter

sent to me at my home address at Delhi. To quote from it: ‘Supposing aso-called and self-styled and posing herself as a Muslim woman marries

a Hindu’—he had evidently worked this out from my name: Zakia

Pathak—‘then she is neither dharma-patni nor mankula, therefore such

a woman in Muslim society is termed as dasshta and in Hindu society as

gandita. Thus, like prostitutes new sex-based professionals have come to

the fore. And no doubt this is a particular problem of Indian society. How

to accommodate such women in society was the real main issue of the

seminar’. The seminar referred to was organised by the Women’s College

of AMU. My interest in it was focused on the session in which the

Shahbano case was being discussed. Shahbano, a divorced Muslim

woman, was fighting a case for maintenance under the state law and

found herself impaled on a confrontation escalating daily between the

State and Muslim Personal Law. I was particularly interested in a paper

to be read by Zoya Hasan, teaching in the Political Science Department

of Jawaharlal Nehru University at Delhi. I had published a paper myselfon the issue. A Hindu colleague in the department of English at Miranda

House, Delhi University collaborated with me. I had participated in a

number of marches and rallies but declined to give a talk on the subject

which the Delhi University Teachers Union had invited me to give. I had




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pointed out that my credentials as a Muslim might be problematised at

a public meeting given my Hindu mother and my own marriage to

a Hindu. Masooma Ali, also a department colleague at Miranda House,had made it possible for me to attend the Aligarh seminar. Shortly after,

I came to know of the turmoil caused through the seminar by the corre-

spondence appearing in the newspaper The Indian Express. The director

of the seminar, the head of her department at AMU, was accused by

a fundamentalist lobby of promoting an attack on Muslim law and she

had written to the editor denying the allegations flung at her in the mud-

slinging. I thought she could do with some support and wrote a letter tothe editor which was duly published. It was this that appeared to have

inflamed the writer of the nasty letter to me. My initial reaction was to

throw it into the garbage bin since the writer did not have the courage to

address his fulminations to The Indian Express, the appropriate public

forum. On second thoughts, however, I decided that a dismissive gesture

was called for. I contacted Zoya, Zarina Bhatty, a Muslim woman teach-

ing at the Political Science department of Jesus and Mary College in

Delhi, and Masooma. The four of us met. The general sense was that weshould not give the letter any prominence but only refer to it indirectly

by taking a stand against fundamentalism. Our letter lauded the Aligarh

seminar for having provided a forum for diverse views in the struggle

towards a just and equitable society. And urged Muslim women not to

allow themselves to be isolated in this struggle. I heard no more from my

correspondent.

Our correspondent is a mixed up fundamentalist. He cannot decide

between historicising his ‘prostitute’ and essentialising her. His wrath

targets the Muslim woman herself, offspring of a mixed marriage

who compounds the transgression by marrying a Hindu man. She is a

‘particular problem of Indian society’. How to ‘accommodate’ her?

This historicising move quickly gives way to essentialising which needs

a similarity of thought across times and cultures. Daashta and gandika,

Muslim and Hindu nomenclature, need a third term to categorise the

‘new, sex-based professional’ who is ‘like a prostitute’. Why not call hera slut and get on with the argument? He cannot. She is his argument—

essence and history. In the context of the Shahbano agitation, she is very

likely the modern, educated, urban, economically self-reliant woman,

active in the growing struggle for gender rights.


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468 Zakia Pathak


Postscript

I did get a letter from a gentleman who introduced himself as the fatherof a marriageable daughter in Aligarh requesting us to find a suitable

boy for her!

‘Our men asked, “Were we dead?”’

The domestic servant network in our neighbourhood had retailed the

wanted! call: ‘The Baman bai (Brahmin Lady) needs a maidservant’.The recruit on our doorstep explained her presence thus. I was distressed

by the tag she gave my mother. It was polite enough; ‘bai’ is a term of

respect in Maharashtra. And it was the truth; my mother had not con-

verted. The law which had required a renunciation of faith in the case of

marriage outside one’s community had been repealed a few years before

hers came within its ambit. Conversion would have been less searing for

her than in the case of many Hindus who perform daily puja at home.Her family were members of the Prarthana Samaj, a reformist faith

which was against ritual. They had no temple, often meeting in school-

rooms, no priesthood, sermons delivered by senior members, many of

them learned professionals,—university teachers, doctors, lawyers.

A kind of prayer book was also devised containing thoughts of seers of

all faiths. My mother’s faith in the Prarthana Samaj was unwavering.

Nor do I remember any pressure exerted on her by my father and his

people. Externally too she was distinguishable as a Hindu, she wore thekumkum mark on her forehead; she was always in a sari draped in the

Maharashtrian kasota style, for several years before the six yard sari

came into style. She wore the pearl necklace along with pearl earrings of

a certain circular pattern which was the Brahman preference of her day.

She was a regular subscriber to the newsletter of the Samaj.

So why did the maidservant’s description of her distress me? My

mother guessed before I realised it that my resistance had to do with the

foregrounding of caste identity whereby her marital status was displaced

and interrogated. She asked me to remember that this was an uneducated

woman who could not perhaps accept a marriage solemnised in a secular

court as marriage—in fact such marriages were described in common

parlance as court marriages. The maidservant perhaps unwittingly




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contributed to the stereotype of the Muslim male as of high sexual

potency, lascivious: read dirty. I prefer to think that the men who asked

if they were dead were probably asserting their own potency which theyfelt threatened in the implicit comparison.

Postscript

Discourse is a site of power struggle. The state may have addressed and

redressed the problem of individual autonomy in the choice of marriage

partner. But the discursive withholding of consent to court marriage

seems to leave a trace even on the officials who have to conduct them.

The need for religious ritual to legitimise a bonding as marriage seems to

mark even the officials sent by the court authorities to register marriages.

My marriage was a registered one; I remember the approval on the face

of the registrar’s representative as we were filling up the form, when

I entered the names of my parents as witnesses. It prompted him to insert

the words, ‘I, Zakia, take you….’ I squirmed but accommodated his

need. Never mind that the ceremony was held in our hotel room and the

huge bouquet of roses sent by a close Anglo-Indian friend had to beaccommodated in a bucket from the attached bathroom.

‘We keep out smugglers, muslims, criminals’

I was in the process of selling my small flat in Bombay in preparation for

relocation to Bangalore after retirement. Certain documents had to be

attested by a chartered accountant and since I knew no such in Bombay,a friend had suggested one. I visited him at home in the suburb where he

used to do some work before leaving for his office. After the business

was over, his wife brought in a tray of tea in the best traditions of hospi-

tality. Making small talk as we sipped it, I remarked on how attractive his

apartment complex was—how well maintained, quiet and so forth. He

beamed and offered me the above explanation: ‘We keep out smugglers,

Muslims, criminals.’

My sister had accompanied me and our first reaction was one of

hilarity which of course had to be suppressed. He would not have recog-

nised it as appropriate and to be honest we could not have explained

it ourselves. Should we not have taken umbrage? Why did we not?

Because we perceived it as not intended to provoke or insult? Later,




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470 Zakia Pathak


on consideration, I thought that that precisely was the problem. The pro-

cess of categorisation works to set up boundaries between the normal and

abnormal. These come to be internalised and naturalised. The charteredaccountant was not being offensive. The Muslim had been naturalised as

an undesirable element in a housing project as elsewhere. Any Muslim

who has tried to buy or rent a flat has been faced with that problem.

My father managed to get a flat for my brother and his family because of

his persistence and perceptiveness in smelling out a distress sale.

But not taking umbrage: Is it a survival strategy?

‘Muslim? and Maharashtrian?’

When I was asked in a casual conversation where I came from I would

say: ‘I am a Maharashtrian.’ Then came the exchange of names. Zakia

Khan. ‘But that is a Muslim name.’ Puzzlement, disbelief, suspicion.

Ethnicities are formed or sharpened during struggle. In the course of the

struggle for Indian Independence, the Nation became the overridingidentity seeming to absorb minority and other subordinate identities

such as region. But when the political ends of the struggle were achieved,

the subordinated ethnicities were once again in competition with

modern identities. In the 1950s, the linguistic reorganisation of states

was meant to unify regional communities on the basis of a shared lan-

guage but failed to achieve that objective. Regional identities surfaced:

In Maharashtra Marathas, Konkanis and the people of Vidharba could

prevail at the hustings across party divisions. On their part, Muslims

began to perceive the political advantage of closing ranks which gave

them the status of a vote bank on the road towards capturing power. 3

So Muslim and Maharashtrian come to inhabit mutually exclusive cate-

gories and the Nation has to be manufactured every time it is needed.

And how seductively it is done through the media. Such stirring music,

such haunting lyrics.

Postscript

Then the music subsides, the story ends. Back to normal. Muslim and

Indian? One big family? Uh huh. In the gap between personal experience

and official representation, the subjective perception of Indian as an

ethnicity, falters and the minority subject is produced.




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‘Oh, I do not mean all muslims’

I am on a railway journey back to Delhi. A brash young man is trying toeducate the rest of us about India Shining (an election slogan) and so on.

‘No man need be poor. All he needs to do is hard work’. After a few

minutes of this nation-building, I butt in and tell him about my maidser-

vant who works eight hours a day and brings up a family of five in the

remaining time and whose ration card puts her in the category ‘below the

poverty line’. He is not impressed. Clearly, domestic labour does not

count as work, not the kind that builds nations. How we get on from there

to Muslim-baiting I do not remember. But once again I have to stem the

tide of his rhetoric by saying bluntly: ‘I am a Muslim.’ He is conciliatory

‘Oh! I don’t mean all Muslims, only the Khans and people like that.’

‘I was a Khan before my marriage,’ I say. Before the matter escalates

I decide to go to the toilet. When I return I walk into a dead silence.

Clearly, they have been discussing me. The young man springs up, bends

and touches my feet in the time honoured gesture of respect. It seems he

must have received a dressing down from the others. Talking back to theelderly is not done.

Postscript

In the same cabin is a newly married couple. Early in the morning I saw

her close her eyes in prayer; her hand touched the locket to her eyes and

she kissed it—the gesture of devotion. Her husband moves over to sit by

me and whispers shyly: ‘Madam, ours is also a love marriage.’

Lockets generally contain the likenesses of gods. Hers had his photograph in it. In Hindi, the same word is used for a husband and

God: Yajman. Pati-dev, husband-God. Has anything changed? Mixed

marriage proclaims the right of the individual qua individual to freedom

of choice of the partner. But the ontological construction of a woman

overpowers the language of rights.

‘Look how the mussalman is dancing’

It is Navratri and all the residents of the apartment complex are down in

the compound. The music is at the highest decibel level and the garba

dancers are clicking their sticks madly in a crazed dance. A Muslim




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472 Zakia Pathak


teenager from an apartment in the complex is infected by the merriment

and collective gaiety and joins the dance. A Marwari matron nudges

her neighbour and says snidely ‘Look how the Mussalman is dancing’.The ethnicity which has already been stigmatised is isolated and fore-

grounded and imposed on the subject. A natural emergence of communal

harmony is thus sabotaged.

‘You are nothing’

The words erupted in an altercation I was having with my aunt, my

mother’s sister. I forget what it was about except that it had to do with

religious identity. I said with some force, I am a Muslim. ‘You are

nothing,’ she retorted with some heat. I was shattered. Coming from

her it was painful. Where did the words come from?

Sulabha Panandikar was no Hindu fanatic. This was a person whose

liberal credentials were widely known and respected. She had stood by

my parents in their darkest days. She was a student of Philosophy, a postgraduate from Elphinstone College, Bombay and had a Masters’

Degree from Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. She had a brilliant

professional career, rising to be Director of Education of the large, com-

posite state of Maharashtra following the linguistic re-organisation of the

states in the late 1950s.

Her success sat lightly on her. Much of Gujarat was then included in

the state and the officials of the education department were required to

pass an elementary exam in Gujarati. Some years later she was the Chief

Guest at some function. The chairman, while introducing her listed her

degrees impressively but was stumped when he came to ‘G.H.S.’ Since

this came at the end he naturally assumed it to be the highest degree and

pronounced; ‘Not only has Miss Panandikar a degree from the prestig-

ious Cambridge University, she also holds the G.H.S.’ My aunt refrained

from telling him that the letters referred to Gujarati Higher Standard, a

school leaving certificate. She used to narrate this incident with greatamusement to the family.

My aunt was unconventional for her day—and for much of Indian

society even today. It was not so much that she flouted conventions but

that she lived unassertively outside them. She never married. But her

circle of friends included many men whose company she enjoyed, some




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of them were her college mates from the old days. They might drop in of

an evening and often the discussion would grow so animated that they

stayed over to dinner. By the end of which all public transport was off theroad and they had to be put up for the night. Yet I never heard a whisper

of scandal about her. I recall an occasion when a friend approached a

senior person in the Education Department at Pune with a recommenda-

tion from my aunt to facilitate the mid-term admission of her son. The

official replied, For us, Miss Panandikar’s word is Brahma vakya —the

word of God.

Spinsters are associated with gloom and doom but not she. For me sherepresented the spirit of fun and adventure. My father tended to place

restrictions on the movements of his daughters outside the house, once

we had entered our teens. She would descend on our home in Pune and,

cocking a snook at my father, carry us off to a restaurant for a huge tea.

My sister sometimes described him as: ‘Our father which art in Pune.’

I had many spats with him, occasionally punctuated by my mother’s

supportive cry; ‘You are bringing up my daughters like hothouse

flowers.’ Now I wish I had been a little more understanding of his com- pulsions. His overprotectiveness was probably induced by the sleazy

abuses he must surely have encountered over his marriage as much as

by the restrictions dictated by Muslim custom in a small town, as Pune

was then.

My aunt also gave us some wonderful holidays. Twice she had us and

our maternal cousins to stay when she was transferred in the course of

her career to small towns, such as Belgaum which was then in

Maharashtra, and Bordi, in Gujarat. Through these shared holidays she

quite unintentionally achieved a rapprochement between my mother and

my uncle, who had cut off relations with my mother after her marriage.

My aunt was a romantic at heart but without sentimentality. Once she

and I were holidaying at a hill station and found that the room next to

ours at the hotel was occupied by a middle-aged Hindu couple who

evinced an interest in me which seemed over the top. My aunt was con-

vinced that they were considering me as a matrimonial prospect for ason. Sure enough, the son arrived unexpectedly over the weekend. By

that time, however, they had discovered that I was a Muslim. The son

vanished. My aunt chortled. ‘He’s been sent packing’.

So where did those words come from ‘You are nothing’? They

were no aberration. They were not a departure from long-held values.




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474 Zakia Pathak


Emotional outbursts can serve as a sudden unmasking of discursive

truths and the power of discourse to subjectify.

At any time, a number of discourses prevail in a society. They maysometimes be in conflicting relations as an element travels from one dis-

course to another—living together for instance—and the articulatory

practice of the new discourse changes its meaning.4 The value placed on

marriage in the regulation of sexuality is an instance. In the discourse of

religion marriage is the legitimising practice and can be performed only

by the clergy. But in State law this is being contested. A recent judgement

has held that if a man and woman have lived together as man and wifefor a certain number of years and can be proved to have done so, the

relationship can be considered as a marital one, and the woman can

claim the rights of a wife. Case law recognises such bonding as marriage.

But the enduring strength of discursive truths is not so easily weakened.

They remain as deposits in the individual psyche. The state has made

it possible to bypass the clutch of the clergy; birth, marriage, death are all

officially registered at its institutions—the hospital, the court, the official

crematoria. But even when the citizen subject takes her stand withinthe state law, she carries her culture with her.5 Personal laws may be

displaced from hegemonic status by state law but their persistence in

the female psyche, from a maidservant to a scholar-administrator,

is evident.

Postscript

I sometimes wonder if my free-spirited aunt was co-opted into a discur-

sively negotiated deal where she paid with her celibacy for the repute she

undoubtedly enjoyed in the community.

The Discourse of the Voices

I have represented my experience as a cacophony of voices because

it came to me and stayed in that form, without a context, a fullness of

history. As narrative strategy such cacophony could represent the

disorderly nature of the experiences. There is no linearity, no order

of progression. This itself is to narrativise the self as visitations of

subjectivity.




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Memory is known to be driven by crises of identity. Do I as the

offspring of a mixed marriage occupy a dubious position? Can I speak

with authority as a Muslim about Muslims, for Muslims? My own claimto speak attaches exactly to that position because it gives me more sharp-

ened sensibilities to both religions because of loyalties to both communi-

ties. Who is a Muslim? What makes a Muslim? If belonging to an ethnie

is a subjective perception of a collectivity, then I am a Muslim with

the right to speak as one. But it is not a fixed identity. When I am in a

group that turns to Muslim-baiting, I am a Hindu. In a group which is

Hindu-baiting, I am a Muslim. This does not arise from a secular, liberalideology; there is little of that rationale motivating my responses. It

is not supporting the underdog. I am that. It is the production of the

minority subject.

The attributing of meaning to discursive acts is never neutral, I read

in the discourse of voices a hegemonic discourse of sexuality. The images

in the voice argue for the dissimulating female, the God husband and

stereotypes. The voices utter hegemonic truths. These have been inter-

nalised and naturalised with all the authority which flows from discourse,from which the constituting individuals have disappeared.

I want to revisit my childhood and adolescence not in the memoir-

driven search from innocence to experience, nor in a nostalgic recreation,

but to examine the discourses through which the subject is positioned.

Childhood: Sedimented Discourses

Writing about it comes so easily. Nothing in childhood prefigured the

disorderly discourse of the voices. Childhood was constituted by the

unmarked absorption of the religious identity. Through the language of

practices, an unassertive Islam spoke. This was the patriarchal order: The

religion of the father determines that of the offspring in marriage. My

father was a Muslim, ergo, I am a Muslim. It was as simple as that. No

intimations of loss or lack.6

We lived in Pune, on the border of the cantonment and the city: two

different worlds. The cantonment (‘the camp’) as the name indicates was

where the British had their barracks and their administrative offices, and

the officers’ residential quarters. In my day, the residents of the camp




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476 Zakia Pathak


were considered anglicised; camp was where the minorities lived—

Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Sikhs and Jews. Indicatively, the white

Baghdadi Jews lived in the camp and worshipped at a beautifully builtred brick synagogue, which still stands as a landmark. The Indian Jews

worshipped in the city. The city was largely Hindu and Marathi-speaking.

The convent and missionary schools were in the camp, the prestigious

colleges in the city. In a sense, my location on the border of camp and

city represents my location on the cultural axis.

My Muslim identity was unproblematically shaped. My father paid

his monthly dues to the neighbourhood mosque when the bangi called tocollect them. Outside his professional orbit where he wore a suit like the

others down to the solar topee, my father dressed in a sherwani and a

black cap. At the right age, we were placed in the charge of a maulvi for

our religious education, chiefly reading the Koran through and learning

the form of prayer for five times of the day. We celebrated Muslim festi-

vals, observed some of the more important fasts. It was fun rising before

dawn to eat seheri and say our prayers, beating the sunrise, and to break

the fast in the evening iftar with dates and goodies. What irked my

mother was that we in Pune had to depend on the Imam at Delhi to

announce that the moon had been sighted and Id-ul-fitr could be cele-

brated. If the moon was not sighted in Delhi quantities of milk and mut-

ton in Pune had to be preserved till the next day, no small job when the

festival fell in the hot summer, for those like us who had not acquired

refrigerators. On the authenticated morning, my father always stopped at

the flower market on his way back from the mosque to buy flower chainsfor my mother and my sister and me which he would want us to dress our

hair with immediately. On the day itself the women were kept busy

attending to the men, friends of my father who came visiting. But the

next day was for the women, who went visiting and were visited. My

father’s elder sister wore a chaddar whenever she left her home and was

always chaperoned by a male member of her family, never mind if it was

only her six-year-old grandson. My sister and I wore shalwar kameez ,

when outside school; in school the uniform—a dress—was compulsory.

After we entered our teens the cook was always a female and a Muslim.

The servant for ‘top work’ was a man, later succeeded by a maidser-

vant—who was generally a lower-caste Hindu. Childhood was tension

free as I remember it.




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Becoming a Woman: Strategising Womanliness

My mother was very reticent about matters concerning sexuality. Myfirst encounter with my body was when I menstruated. It came as a

shock. It happened during our lunch hour when my father had picked us

up from school as usual and brought us home for lunch. When I visited

the loo after lunch, the sight of all that blood terrified me and I called my

younger brother in. Of course, he was of no help and could only hazard

a guess suggesting I must have climbed a tree and hurt myself. The cook

of the day, a sour faced, unpleasant woman whom we called the bulldog,heard us whispering and swung into action. She threw out my brother,

improvised a sanitary pad, and told me as a matter of fact that it hap-

pened to all women and now my father was waiting to take us back to

school; my mother, she added, would tell me all about it when she

returned from work. She did—and worse—she informed my father who

insisted that I wear the shalwar along with my uniform from the very

next day. I was mortified. Fortunately, a Muslim classmate who lived

two houses away also had gone through this trauma and with the moredisastrous injunction that she wear the shalwar and the odhni with the

uniform. She used to press me into service. We had to pass through a

narrow lane on our way to and from school. I had to keep a look out for

any approaching male so as to warn her; meanwhile, she would whip off

her odhni and bundle it into her satchel. On our way back we reversed

the process; she would retrieve the veil and cover herself with it and

arrive home like a demure, well-brought-up Muslim girl.I have chosen to record the ‘menstruation event’ at some length

because it exemplifies how culture inscripts sexual difference on the

body. The violence in the issuing of the blood from my body was inex-

plicable at the immediate moment and frightening, because my elder

sister had not yet menstruated, so there was no explanation around to

minimise the shock. Societal representations of the event took over.

The one offered by the cook, ‘It happens to all women’ put the fear in

perspective. The bleeding was natural and definitive of woman. She hadintroduced the idea of the seperateness of the sexes by her marching

orders to my brother. That it was normal woman’s business was implied

in the instruction that I should not delay my father because it was getting

late and he had to go back to work. Her confidence that my mother could




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478 Zakia Pathak


explain everything reinforced the marshalling of the sexes into gender

roles. Later, it became clear that my mother supported the dress code. So

parental wisdom and not paternal authority alone was behind the gender-ing. It helped in naturalising the process of becoming a woman.

All this of course was not articulated at the time of happening; it came

later. My support to my Muslim classmate in subverting the dress code,

for instance had been more of a prank to me. Though there was a dimly

sensed oppression, wearing the shalwar and odhni were not perceived by

me as a gendering of the body but more as a move to distinguish us from

our classmates who were mostly Catholics. We did not approve of ourminority status being paraded. The construction of Muslim and the sub-

jectifying of woman seem to proceed differentially.

It was only when I passed out of school and entered co-educational

colleges for undergraduate study, first in Pune then in Mumbai, that

the process of articulation was stimulated. If the body could evoke

desire, then womanliness was a strategy towards that end and what it

promised.

When I was halfway through the undergraduate course, we had torelocate from Pune as our parents were transferred to Mumbai. Mumbai

had always been Eldorado; its free and fast life, the staple of fantasy. Add

to that the freedom entailed by living away from the parental embrace—

my sister and I were put in a settlement for university women—opened

up a whole new life for us. Our Pune upbringing could not be discarded

like a garment. But the freedom of Bombay represented womanliness as

a kind of choice and so being womanly did not seem irksome. Quite the

contrary, I enjoyed putting on the garment of femininity. I was all for

the sideways glance, the smouldering looks, the private innuendoes—

reinforced not so much by the visuals of Bollywood movies as by the

songs which allowed individual editing in the imagination. No thought

of marriage ever entered my head in those years. What was always shad-

owing the romancing was the image of the ‘complete woman’ imparted

by my mother—educated, economically independent, working, thinking

and creative. Marriage did not figure prominently in this composite iden-tity. My first salary cheque in my first job went to her.

When my first poem was published in The Illustrated Weekly of India

that cheque too winged its way to her. Writing poems is often a resource

for the young to express the stirring of desire as poetry can accommo-

date an awakening sexuality safely. With me, wooing was a gentle




19/23



acknowledgement of love and never a headlong rush into passion. But that

was later. At our convent, we seemed to have moved in a penumbra of

orientalist discourse. I remember a novel The Sheikh where the hero wasan Arab male tempestuously wooing the virginal English woman. He

turned out at the end to be a white English army officer! It did nothing to

its circulation which continued to soar. The last two lines of a poem which

I wrote when I was 25 years old express the dance of advance and retreat.

And if I stand poised on the fringes of you

Dear, be impassive, I ee if you woo.

The Irish editor of the weekly must have liked it, he asked for more.

Somewhere along the way I learned to adopt two modes of

behaviour—strategically—one for Pune, the good Muslim girl, the other

for Mumbai, freed but anonymous. It was not always possible to keep

them apart as I discovered with dismay. One of my classmates in Bombay

was a Muslim boy from Pune and our families were known to each other.

One day during the vacation when we were both at our homes in Pune,he dropped in and asked to see me. I was petrified, I could hear my father

pacing up and down in his room. When the boy left, my father asked me

to join him on his evening walk and I knew what was coming. Obviously,

he was under an injunction from my mother not to provoke my hot head-

ness because after a sharp and staccato exchange, the matter was dropped

and we walked home in silence. Later that day my mother spoke to me

and I felt I had put all of us in a false position. She told me that the boy’s

family had earlier sent a proposal of marriage for me and they had turned

it down. The boy could not have imagined that I knew nothing of it; how

was he to know the reticence in our home about sexual matters, and per-

haps he put the worst construction on my behaviour in Mumbai. I had

never been ‘interested’ in him and his visit put me off completely. It may

have been the same with him.

Complicit with my parents were the nuns in the convent where we

were studying. We had to buy our textbooks from the ‘school bookstore’.When the Physiology and Hygiene textbook came to us, the pages of the

offending portion were stitched together. Is it any wonder that when

questions pertaining to sex began to burgeon in the mind I had to sleuth

around for answers? That I had to ask a hostelmate: ‘Can you conceive

with your clothes on?’ ‘Ha, ha’ she said, ‘which man would tolerate it’.




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480 Zakia Pathak


‘Ha ha’ I joined in, while cursing her inwardly for her ill-timed jocularity

which left me without an answer.

The Minority Subject

Once the ‘voices’ began to make themselves heard—the ‘big questions’

emerged invasively. Who is a Muslim? One who professes a belief in

Islam? Or is it enough to observe practices without bothering too much

about the meaning behind them? Must one be perceived by other

Muslims as a Muslim to be a Muslim? What does it mean to be a Muslim

woman?

What marks the minority subject? A hermeneutics of suspicion.

A proclivity to discern subtexts. A text can be a word, a sentence,

a request for information, a statement or a joke. A moment suddenly

occurs when the subject is alerted to the perceived subtext which under-

mines the neutrality of meaning and problematises the intention of the

speaker. When there is signification, a subject comes into place.Voices become events in the discourse which orders them. Suspicion

is not paranoia, it is an interpretive mode. The ‘trivialities’ of everyday

life are now experienced as salient features of a discourse. Everyday

life—telling your name, hiring a maidservant, renting a flat, taking a

railway journey—now produces that unquiet surrender to antipathy and

distrust. Stereotypes congeal into standard bearers of truth. ‘Harmless’

jokes drip poison. ‘Friday? That’s when Muslims take their weekly bath

isn’t it?’ ‘Lucky devils, they can take four wives’. The subtext glimmers:

Dirty Muslims, inside and out. The minority subject is produced. Again

and again. This is not incremental knowledge.

How does this subject react to the semiotic moment? She may decide

to ignore the subtext in the interests of maintaining an already fragile

harmony so as not to rock the boat. Should she publicise the ethnie and

force the real meaning out of its hiding? Or crucially she might minimise

the experience, refuse to engage with it. This may later return to hauntone, setting into motion a sense of betrayal of the ethnie, a loss of self-

respect and a need to compensate. It is this need that produces behaviour

which is ‘inexplicable’. When a hate crime happens and investigation

begins, neighbours of the suspected offender often report their amaze-

ment that he could have done it. ‘He seemed such a quiet man.’




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I decided to send this piece to a friend for her comments, my first

flesh and blood reader. She is close enough to know what I was talking

about and scholarly enough to speak her mind, without mincing words.One of her questions shook me. ‘What happened to your mother? She

disappears from your memoir so early. This is about gender, isn’t it?’

I was dumbfounded. ‘But she’s everywhere,’ I expostulated. ‘Not to this

reader. It is your aunt who comes alive.’ I considered this long and

deeply. How did this happen? What does it say about me? I am per-

suaded that the narrative mode had something to do with it. My aunt

fitted easily into the classic realist mode of the Victorian novel with itschronological development of character from innocence through the

experience to maturity and esteem. Yet ‘You are Nothing’ had left the

hegemonic discourse of sexuality intact. I had never thought of my

mother in terms of a character, it would have totalised her. She was just

a woman who was different. I had wanted this memoir to be a celebration

of that difference.

Making a difference called for negotiation and strategies. Sometimes

the effort became too much for her. I cannot narrate those moments because I am not in command of myself when I recall them. I must

remember only her gift to me. The gift of a peaceful childhood which

could not be threatened even when I came across that revolver in the

course of play. Only once did I have a fleeting glimpse of what it must

have done to her, the trauma and tension of the weeks before the mar-

riage and the ostracism after. We had had an altercation over something

I do not remember and in a fit of pique I stopped talking to her. It took

her barely a couple of hours to come to me and in a voice thick with

unshed tears say: ‘Whatever happens, child, do not stop talking to me.’

Mummy, I’m talking to you now.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Joan Scott at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, for unfailing

encouragement from the inception of this essay through critique of the first draft

and for a thumbs up for the final avatar. I am truly grateful. To Sharada Nair,Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, thanks for being always available

at the end of the telephone line for impromptu discussions on the theoretical

underpinnings of the essay. And for her help with some googling where

needed. Uma Chakravarti’s sensitive response on reading the manuscript to the

matter and form of the essay actively pushed it to finding its home. To Mary




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482 Zakia Pathak


John, my gratitude for her generous and stimulating welcome to this article when

I was beginning to despair of finding an Indian publisher. Thanks to Uma

Mahadevan for typing, retyping and then again typing messy drafts. Last but farfrom the least, thanks to Manju, in charge of the neighbourhood cyber centre,

always willing to walk the extra mile to help out the technologically challenged

old girl.

Glossary

bangi —a minor official in the mosque who gives the call to prayer, collects the

monthly membership fee and so on.

chaddar —a sheet that is wrapped around the head and upper body leaving only

the face exposed.

dasshta —prostitute.

dharam-patni— signifying the religious union of the marriage bond.

gandita —prostitute.

garba —a traditional Gujarati folk dance and song, originally performed as a

fertility ritual. It is danced at Navratri a nine-day Hindu festival.iftar —the meal eaten by Muslims after sunset during Ramadan/Ramzan.

kasota— the Maharashtrian 9-yard sari worn in the characteristic style.

kumkum —a vermillion powder, traditionally used by married Hindu women to

make a round mark on the forehead, and in north and eastern India, also

applied to the parting in the hair.

odhni —scarf, in the north is called chunni

seheri— the predawn morning breakfast after which the fasting starts and no food

or drink is allowed till the fast ends at sunset. shalwar— baggy, trouser-like lower garment

shalwar kameez —a long tunic worn over the shalwar usually worn by women in

north India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

sherwani —a knee-length coat buttoning to the neck, worn by South Asian men.

Notes

1. The problematising of truth by postmodern theory has unshackeled the mem-

oir from factual accuracy—of names, dates, places—to which it had beentied, though it still continues to haunt some writers and critics. New History

claims that historians reconstruct the past rather than record it.

2. Genres of fiction and history intersect to create a historical veracity in which

characters move. The novelist Ian McEwan calls his novel Atonement a

forensic memoir—a minimal fleshing out of history provided by memory




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to present the reader with a range of truths. Thus, fiction does what history

cannot.

3. A few years ago, Amrita Chhachhi (quoted in Nidha Kirmani) wrote of theforced identity that is imposed on Muslims, irrespective of whether they

are practicing Muslims or not. This often becomes a strategy ahead of elec-

tions aimed at creating a vote bank. Such an identification alienates secular

Muslims ‘who celebrate the right to choose’.

4. See Louise Phillips and Marianne Jorgenson’s discussion of Ernesto Laclau

and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory.

5. In his Rethinking Multiculturalism, Bhiku Parekh presents a compelling

account of the pressures and pulls in different directions of the homogenis-ing ideal of the modern state and cultural diversity, the autonomy of beliefs,

which mediate and seek to restrain its assimilationist impulse.

6. The terms loss or lack are associated with Lacanian theory to signify the

pre-language state where the infant enjoys a sense of completeness with

his mother. I appropriate them for this essay with the metaphorical intent to

describe the state where the Voices are not heard, or heeded, certainly not

articulated. The fragmentation of religious identity will come later.

References

Kirmani, Nidha. (2011). Beyond the impasse: Muslim feminisms and the Indian

women’s movement. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 45(1), 1–26.

Parekh, Bhiku. (2000). Rethinking multiculturalism. New York: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Phillips, Louise, & Jorgenson, Marianne. (2002). Discourse analysis: Theory

and method. London: SAGE.

indian journal of gender studies 2014 pathak 461 83

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