Very small boys sat cross-legged on the floor of their narrow stalls, at the front, above the gutters, and filed away at the needles which were used in the bigger establishments for doing brocade work. These needles looked like the plastic ink-refills of ballpoint pens; they were of that size, and they had a similar kind of point. They were sold for a rupee each: a boy had to prepare a lot of needles before he made anything like money.
There were many mosques, and some of them might have been built on the rubble of old stalls and houses: the mosque here was like a kind of folk art, over-ornamented, weak in design, painted with love. While Rashid and I walked there came, above the bazaar noise, the amplified, breaking voice of a mullah. There was such passion in that trained voice: he might have been reciting something from the Koran. In fact, Rashid said, the man with the loudspeaker was only saying: ‘Give money for the mosque, and have a palace of gold in heaven.’
The simplest kind of faith: though the outer bazaar was mixed, not purely Muslim, the bazaar life was like an expression of the faith of the book and the mosque, and it was possible to feel that everything here served the faith. The most glittering and spangled stalls were the Koran stalls. They were hung with feathery paper tassels of gold and silver. In the general drabness of bazaar goods, those tassels, which were for braiding girls’ or women’s hair, caught the eye. These Koran stalls not only sold the book; they also sold boxes to keep the book in; bookstands to place the book on while it was being read; incense sticks to go with the reading; and caps to wear while you read the book, since it was forbidden to read the book with your head uncovered. The reading caps were in bright orange, red, or green; there were also crocheted skullcaps.
The shops didn’t open before n, Rashid said. The reason was that, though they didn’t live far from their work, the shopkeepers didn’t go home for lunch. Once they went to their shops and sat on the floor, on sheets or sacking or carpets or durries, they were there for the whole working day. They were as much prisoners of the bazaar as the artisans who worked for them. The entrances to the shopkeeper’s houses were in the narrow passageways off the main bazaar lane; the living conditions in those hidden spaces were not too different from what could be seen of working conditions in the lane.
There was a point in the bazaar when you crossed over from the mixed Hindu-Muslim area to the area that was purely Muslim. The cross-over point was clear enough to Rashid; it wasn’t so clear to me. The crowds beyond that point were denser, Rashid said, and the people were smaller; they were undernourished and stunted. And I did see, when I had got my eye in (or thought I had), that many of the children in this part of the bazaar were thin and wizened, with staring eyes, and often had some kind of skin infection.
There were small private schools here and there, but generally the Muslim children of the bazaar were not educated in the modern way. Their parents didn’t see how that kind of education could lead to anything for their children. They also felt, in a profound way, that that kind of education was for other people. Education and learning were, of course, good things; but for them as Muslims that good learning, pure and untainted, was to be had only in the Koranic school or the seminary. Nothing outside the faith was for the people of the faith, the people in these squashed passageways and shops. The smallness of the spaces added to the feeling of comfort and protection within, added to the sense of the corruptions without.
Many children – boys – went to the seminary (a big, new building) or the Koranic schools in the bazaar. But most were apprenticed by their parents to various simple bazaar trades when they were eight or seven or six or even five. And if some of the children serving in the stalls or working in the shops looked frightened, it was because, Rashid said, they knew they were going to be ‘bashed up’ by the shopkeeper to whom their parents had apprenticed them, or the overseers of their employers.
Rashid said, ‘It’s an unfed world. And what can be more cruel than an unfed stomach?’
And yet, in the purely Muslim area, where Rashid was teaching me to see only gloom, I thought there was a greater feeling of festival and shopping joy than in the drab, workaday stalls of the mixed outer bazaar. Watches were repaired here; kites were sold (kite-selling common to both Hindu and Muslim shops); photographs were framed; people sold kebabs; there were other cook shops; there were even firework stalls.
And always, licensed and provocative, hanging around the stalls, like a decayed reminder of Lucknow’s past, were the transvestites and eunuchs of the ghetto, in women’s clothes and with cheap jewelry, making lewd jokes and begging: the darkness of the sexual urge finding this ritual, semi-grotesque, safe public expression – in this lane where few women were to be seen, and those who were seen, thin, tiny figures, were clad in black from head to toe. These eunuchs and transvestites sold their bodies; they had a market.
‘They are sexual objects,’ Rashid said. ‘Can you imagine?’
They sat on their haunches at the side of the lane, near the gutters, below the floors of the shops, these sacrificial women-men of Lucknow. Their faces, half male, half female, were worn and lined and crudely rouged; but they had men’s teeth, big and blackened and spaced out.
Hammer sounds, muffled and competitive, came from stalls where boys or young men, four or five or six to a stall, sat or squatted and hammered thin ribbons of silver into very fine sheets of silver foil. This foil was placed on sweets or other delicacies, to suggest luxury; it had no other purpose. The silver ribbon was placed between goatskins and beaten with a mallet. About a dozen pieces of ribbon were beaten at the same time, the silver ribbon interleaved, one piece at a time, between the goatskins – I read later that intestines, being more pliable, were most suitable for this kind of work. It took two to three hours to hammer out a piece of ribbon into foil. A sheet of foil was sold for half a rupee or a rupee, according to its size. A young man’s working day, therefore, might produce silver foil that could fetch from 18 to 36 rupees. Take away the cost of the silver, and the cost of the stall, and there wasn’t much that a young man could earn in a day, from that incessant banging, companionable or competitive, in a small space. The silver foil hammered out in this way was fragile, shredding at the touch of a finger. Almost without purpose as a commodity, it was stored between the leaves of discarded books.
Rashid said, ‘All the jobs here have this soul-destroying quality. They are doing it only because their fathers did it before them. They’ve probably never stepped out of the area. They listen to cassettes of film songs and religious songs, turned up loud, to distract themselves from the deadening labour, whether it’s beating out silver foil or doing embroidery or brocade work. They drink a lot of tea in glasses. There is a reason for the tea-drinking. It kills the appetite. When they want to pee, they just go down and pee in the streets.
‘It’s so basic. The level of education is so low, and so are the needs and the skills. Apart from the transistor and the occasional electric fan, they could be living in another age. Their leisure life is like this. They hire a television set and three video cassettes for 100 rupees. A number of them club together to pay the 100 rupees. And they sit through the night, 40 or 50 of them, watching those three films. There are about 60 firms hiring out TVs and VCRs in this area, and they’re all doing good business. There is a little exploitation here, too. Someone with spare cash books a TV for a certain slab of time in the evening – the man doing that will do it every day – and then he sells that time (and the TV) for a premium of 20 rupees or so.
‘At the most the only education the children get is the Koran. The women are not educated. They inbreed a lot. First cousins get married. That explains some of the physical degeneracy. The boys marry young, at fifteen or sixteen or seventeen. At forty a man is a grandfather, and burnt out. They eat badly. Meat and bread and no vegetables. They have poor sanitation. Most of them never meet a Hindu or non-Muslim in their lives. The people who go to the Gulf and make money stay in the ghetto when they come back. They build big houses there, to enjo
y the regard of their fellows.
‘Most of them are Shias. The highlight of their year is the Mohurram.’ The period of mourning for Hussain, the son of Ali, the Shia hero. ‘Elsewhere Mohurram runs for 12 days, or 40 days. Here in Lucknow it runs for two months and eight days. One of the Begums of Oude made a pledge once that if a certain wish of hers was fulfilled, Mohurram in the kingdom of Oude would last for two months and eight days. This Mohurram has given the Shias here a shared identity. For those days you cry, you beat your breast, you knife yourself, you moan. It helps them to bear their misery, and it gets them out of the house. This Mohurram has led to tensions with the Sunni majority. With this result: Lucknow has never had a Hindu-Muslim clash, only a Sunni-Shia clash.
‘There are any number of mosques in the area, and the call to prayer on microphones and amplifiers comes regularly from all quarters. The words for the Sunni and the Shia are the same, but there is a slight difference in the timing. So you hear 10 calls a day instead of five.
‘And then there is Ramadan for a month, when you fast during the day. In that month restaurants close during the day and stay open at night. That gives a real casbah effect.’
In a purely Muslim country people might have been less tense about the faith, and nerves might have been less raw. But here it was known that what lay outside the lanes and passageways of the chowk was outside the faith, and from this world outside there came threats and provocations.
Near the end of my time in Lucknow Rashid told me what the most worrying recent threats had been. There was the man from Bangalore who had petitioned the court to ban the Koran in all its languages and editions in India, on the ground that the Koran preached sedition. The petition was a form of provocation, and should not have been taken seriously. Instead, Rashid said, the judge, a woman, rather too legalistically agreed to consider the petition. This caused rioting. The petition was thrown out later by another judge, who ruled that the Koran, like the Bible, was ‘a basic document’, and couldn’t be the subject of that kind of legal petition.
Then there was the affair of a mosque in the town of Ayodhya, 300 miles away, which the Hindus had turned into a temple. Ayodhya was important, even sacred, to Hindus. It was the birthplace of Lord Rama, the hero of the Ramayana; and there were Hindus who said that after their invasion the Muslims had built a mosque on the site of Rama’s birthplace. With independence, Hindus wished to claim the site again. In 1949, Rashid said, the mosque was closed down, because of the danger of rioting. Then, four years or so ago, there had been a development. A Hindu petitioned the district judge for permission to pray there. The petition was allowed; the locks of the place were opened; Hindus took possession, and were still in possession. There had been riots; people had been killed; the bitter squabble was still going on.
The third threat had to do with Muslim personal law. A wealthy Muslim lawyer divorced his first wife and married again. He gave the first wife the lump sum stipulated in their Muslim marriage contract. The divorced wife then went to the Indian courts and asked for a monthly maintenance allowance as well from her husband (this was how Rashid told the story). After 20 years the case reached the Indian Supreme Court. The judge spoke of the deficiency in Muslim personal law, and granted maintenance to the divorced wife. There was an outcry from Muslims at this interference with their personal law, which was part of their faith; and the Indian government, responding to the protests, passed legislation that overturned the decision of the Supreme Court.
Parveen lived in an old-fashioned, spacious, enclosed Muslim house in the old quarter of Lucknow. The front room was the sitting room; the private rooms were at the back. Two years before, Parveen had decided to go into politics. There had been jealousy from other women, Muslim and non-Muslim; but Parveen had begun to make her mark politically, and a little time before she had led a delegation of Muslim women to the prime minister. There were photographs of this occasion on the ochre-coloured walls of Parveen’s sitting room.
Parveen was a handsome woman of upright carriage. There were lawyers and landowners and high government officials in her background, and she had the confidence of her class, which had once been the ruling class here. She was a world away from the Muslims in the chowk or bazaar, and the small black-veiled figures who occasionally flitted about the lanes there. She wore no veil; she spoke forcefully and well; and yet there were in her unexpected moments of feminine reserve which reminded you that she came from a special culture, that this Muslim house with its areas of feminine seclusion represented an important part of her nature.
She wanted to go into ‘secular’ politics; and she meant that she wanted to go, as a Muslim woman, into the politics of the state. This ambition in no way diluted her religious faith. Certain aspects of the Muslim faith were ‘the law’, she said: they couldn’t be discussed. Such an aspect was the aspect of women’s rights.
Women enjoyed many rights under Islam. They didn’t need to have their rights – which were in any case ‘the law’ – amended by the state. They enjoyed the right, for instance, of inheriting property from their parents; Hindu women had no such right. Whatever was given to a Muslim wife during marriage was hers to keep; that wasn’t so with western women. When a marriage was arranged a man undertook to pay a woman a certain sum if he divorced her. That was enough; the idea of maintenance was repugnant to a Muslim woman. When a woman became a wife, it didn’t mean that she had become a servant. After a divorce a husband became a stranger, and there was no question of a woman taking money from him afterwards. Other countries or communities could think of modifying the rights of people according to the needs of the time. But the Koran had laid down the law for Muslims for all time.
The words were strong, but Parveen spoke them easily, when – with Rashid to help with her English – she came to the hotel to talk of her political work. She was a defender of the faith. But the faith – complete, fully formulated – sat lightly on her. At her social level it was even part of her certainty and strength, and seemed to equip her for the public life she wanted to enter.
She had a talent for organizing. She was off that day to meet – informally – a young woman who had been suggested as a prospective bride for her brother. She would go to this far-off town; she would call on a friend. In the friend’s house – and apparently quite by chance – there would be the young woman her brother wanted her to meet.
Life was going on for Parveen. She didn’t have Rashid’s dark vision. Rashid was a bachelor. He was a reader, a solitary. He brooded; his mood changed easily. He loved his apartment; he loved retreating to it.
As for the Muslims of the chowk or bazaar – of course, Parveen said, they were trapped in their ignorance, and it was hard to get through to them. But though people spoke of this ignorance and constriction as a specifically Muslim problem, many other groups in India were in a similar position – people in the rural areas, the scheduled castes.
Perhaps it was that comparison that depressed Rashid. Muslims had once ruled here, set the tone. Now they had been depleted by the middle-class migration to Pakistan; and, in spite of the esteem in which individuals were held, as a group they ranked low.
Rashid was of an old Shia Muslim family. An ancestor in the mid-18th century had been a trader, with seven ships plying out of Bombay. Perhaps they hadn’t really been ships, Rashid said; perhaps they had been only dhows. But that ancestor had done well. He had even built an imambara, a replica of one of the Shia mausoleums erected in Iran and Iraq for descendants of the Prophet. It was the practice in those days for a Shia who had done well to put up an imambara, as a place where religious discourses might take place.
In the 19th century an ancestor had served at the court of the last Nawab of Oude. When this ruler was exiled to Calcutta by the British, Rashid’s ancestor had gone with him, and this ancestor had lived in Calcutta until his death in the 1880s. Rashid’s mother’s father was an administrator in one of the bigger princely states. He looked after everyone in his family; he wrote poetry; a
nd he dressed like an Edwardian gentleman. Rashid thought – going only by photographs – that this grandfather looked a little like Bertrand Russell.
Rashid’s father’s father was the first one in his family to learn English. He worked in the railways, in what was then the new railway station of Lucknow – and it is still one of the more impressive buildings of Lucknow. Rashid’s father, when he was of age, thought he would go into the police service. At that time upper-class Muslims, landowners, went into the professions; they did law and medicine. People like Rashid’s father went into the police service or the administration. Rashid thought that his father was a handsome man. He was five feet eight, which made him an inch or two taller than Rashid. He was slightly marked by smallpox; but at that time nearly everybody had pock-marks.
In those days, if you were someone like Rashid’s father, it was easy to join the police service. Somebody took you to the English officer and offered you for the service. The officer would say, ‘Send him from the day after.’ This happened to Rashid’s father. He joined the force as an assistant superintendent; this was the starting officer-rank. But he lasted only three days. He didn’t like the drills, and he couldn’t bear the abusive language of the instructors. He couldn’t see it as just part of the game, part of the toughening-up process; he wanted to get out right away.
He decided after that to go into business. He and his brother opened a shop in Lucknow that sold cameras and photographic equipment. This was in 1911, the year of the coronation of the King-Emperor George V: the high-water mark of the British Empire, and the British Indian Raj. The camera shop that Rashid’s father started in that year did well in imperial India. It suited the place; it developed with photography itself, and became one of the best shops of its kind. Branches were opened in other Indian cities, mainly the hill resorts, where people went for their summer holidays. The Lucknow shop was in the main shopping street called Hazratgunj. In those imperial days Hazratgunj – now crowded and a mess – was sprayed with water every evening by a municipal van.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 46