by Irfan Yusuf
When the British divided India in 1947 into the two nations India and Pakistan in a deliberate colonial ‘divide and rule’ policy, they pitted Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs against each other. Indians of all faiths and no faith in particular who had previously fought shoulder to shoulder against the British Raj were now raping and pillaging and slaughtering each other.
Partition made a mess of everything. Predictably, Indian independence leaders were split along sectarian lines. The Indian Congress (informally led by Mahatma Gandhi and formally by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru) was firmly opposed to what became known as ‘Partition’. The Congress never painted itself as a sectarian or separatist entity, and had some prominent Muslim representatives. The Muslim League (led by a Bombay barrister named Mohammad Ali Jinnah) wanted a separate Muslim state carved out in those territories where the majority of the population was Muslim.
Indian Muslims were bitterly divided on the Muslim League’s support for Partition. Many bought the Muslim League’s message that Muslims represented a singular and separate nation from the rest of India. Others (including Indian Muslim religious authorities) regarded such ideas as grossly radical and destructive. Indeed, the scholars of one ultra-orthodox religious institution known as Darul Uloom Deoband, an institute for higher Islamic learning located in the North Indian town of Deoband, were most vocal in their opposition to the idea. They regarded Jinnah as a sinful man who could hardly speak a language or dialect commonly spoken by Indian Muslims (whether Sindhi, Pashto, Urdu, Bengali or Punjabi), and who openly flouted Islamic sacred law in his personal life.
My own family sits on the Partition fence. Dad’s family ended up in Pakistan, while Mum’s family stayed in India.
I’m not sure where my late Dada Abba (a respectful Urdu title which literally means ‘father’s father’) stood in relation to the Partition. My guess is that he was probably disinterested in the politics and wanted to be left to live peacefully where he was. He had a successful career as a barrister based in the semi-rural village of Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. It was a cosy job, and he also built up a thriving practice in land disputes and criminal law.
Dada Abba would have had little incentive to go to Pakistan. He was perhaps one of India’s most senior Muslim criminal lawyers, with a good reputation amongst India’s legal elite. Being located so close to the political capital, Dada Abba may well have been appointed to the bench had he stayed behind.
When the riots started in Delhi, Dada Abba and his family fled to the border town of Multan in Punjab. At that stage, Partition borders had already been announced, leading to much rioting, especially in towns and cities close to the border. Imagine being part of a Sikh family living in a small town and suddenly finding out you had become part of a vulnerable minority at the mercy of Muslim neighbours, some of whom were hell-bent on murdering any Sikh they could find as retribution for family members massacred by other Sikhs you never even knew existed. And imagine living in such an environment with no properly functioning police force or army to protect you.
Dada Abba always intended moving his family to Pakistan, and was a staunch supporter of Mr Jinnah’s Muslim League. Dada Abba and his family eventually settled in a home in Samnabad, a middle-class Lahore suburb. Dada Abba is buried in a cemetery across the road from his Lahore house.
Despite living in a middle-class home, Dada Abba struggled to provide his family with something resembling a middle-class existence. Unlike other lawyers in Lahore, he did not have the benefit of a steady client base from a nearby village. Despite impeccable criminal law credentials and experience, Dada Abba had no contacts in the local Lahore legal fraternity. He had to start his business again from scratch, often having to make money doing the work of junior barristers or clerks.
Dada Abba was of Mughal (a mixture of Turkish and Mongol) ancestry. He had a typical Turkish name—Mirza Yusuf Beg. My paternal grandmother (Dadi Amma, literally ‘dad’s mum’) was from the north-west province of Kashmir at the feet of the Himalayan mountains. Dada Abba died when my father was just sixteen years old. He suffered a heart attack whilst in court cross-examining a witness in a murder trial.
I refer to my maternal grandfather by the respectful Urdu title of ‘Nana Abba’ (literally ‘mum’s dad’). His name was Mirza Yaqub Beg Nami and he was also of Mughal ancestry. He taught philosophy at the Aligarh Muslim University, situated hundreds of miles from the border with Pakistan. He had no plans of moving his family to Pakistan and leaving behind the cushy job and comfortable home provided by the university. So he remained in India with his family following Partition.
Mum grew up in a large family, with five brothers and three sisters. Nana Abba wasn’t terribly religious in his personal life, but he did insist on certain cultural practices often associated with Islam. Among these was purdah, the strict segregation of women from public life, which was practised by aristocratic Indian families of all faiths including Hindus and Sikhs.
The word purdah literally means ‘curtain’. The institution of purdah involved families guarding the honour of their women by not allowing them to appear in public except in a manner where they could not be seen. For poorer families, especially farmers who had both male and female members working on the land, practising purdah was impossible. And with the vast majority of India’s population employed in farming, purdah was a luxury only the wealthy could afford.
It was common in those days for wealthy women to go out shopping whilst seated in a special compartment called a dohli. This was basically a large comfortable box-like structure with plenty of cushions for women to laze in whilst their male servants (or even male relatives) carried them. The curtains around the box had a screen through which the women could peek and decide which shop they would visit.
Women would also have their own private quarters in their home which no man (apart from direct relatives) dared enter. I guess this was the Indian equivalent of what some people call a harem, although I never heard that term being used by any South Asian relatives.
I wasn’t brought up to understand purdah as something oppressive to women, and was surprised that anyone could. My mother always spoke of purdah as an essential part of the luxurious existence aristocratic women of that time enjoyed. In fact, Mum would tell me how much fun it was to be carried in the dohli by her brothers (though Dad often speculates as to whether carrying Mum even at that age may have caused them some back injuries).
Mum’s father seemed obsessed with planes and would always make her go inside each time a plane flew over their house.
‘Daddy, I can’t see the people in the planes. Why should you be worried?’ she would say.
‘You may not be able to see them but how do you know they cannot see you?’ he would reply. It’s amazing what bionic vision Indian men could achieve in full flight.
Mum recalls the women’s quarters being a place where women enjoyed themselves. They were freed of any domestic duties, their husbands or fathers employing servants to perform all cooking and other chores. Men were expected to lavish gifts on their female relatives (and in-laws) using the household income which women were usually responsible for managing (no doubt to their own advantage). Men were also expected to do all the shopping for food and other household needs. Women only shopped to buy clothes, jewellery and other luxury items for themselves.
I imagined my mother and her friends reclining like Roman aristocrats on sofas holding bunches of grapes above their mouths, lazily chewing one grape at a time. Mum’s privileged existence came to an abrupt end when her father died without leaving much of an inheritance for his children. Mum’s family were forced to vacate their home provided by the university and they soon started to live a rather hand-to-mouth existence.
Mum moved to Pakistan in the early 1960s when she was in her early twenties. Her move was more out of necessity than any political consideration. She was invited to stay with her maternal uncle in Karachi who had a large home and a thriving business. It was around t
his time that she met, fell madly in love with and married a young scholar who would become my father.
Dad was quite a catch. He had finished a science degree from Punjab University and was granted a scholarship to study at the Australian National University. He finished his doctoral studies in Canberra in the mid-1960s, before I was born.
Mum’s own academic achievements were impressive. Despite being home-schooled by her father until Year 9, she completed a Bachelors degree in Urdu and Islamic Studies at Aligarh Muslim University, following this with a Masters degree in Urdu literature from Punjab University.
Mum spoke impeccable and polished Urdu. When I was very young, she’d often boast of how she’d astonished Dad with her education and erudition.
‘Your jokes about my English language skills are misplaced,’ she would say in the king’s Urdu. ‘You must realise that your father was a dashing young man who could easily have married any number of beautiful women from families of the highest status. However, he chose to marry me for my eloquence and my educational accomplishments as well as my beauty and refined fashion sense. At the time, I was in the rouge of high fashion and class.’
My elder siblings would be impressed by Mum’s words. I would look on like a stunned mullet, unable to understand Urdu. Mum would then repeat the same words in her DIY Hindlish (English with a very strong Indian accent), and we would all try our best not to roll around in absolute hysterics.
‘Your faadher he could marree any biyootifal voomun, but he marree me beecuz I only biyootifal voomun hoo hav maastarr dig-gree!’
We were terrible, and we laughed at her pronunciation.
‘Might I remind you,’ she would say in her haughty Urdu, ‘that I spent much of my young adult years ensuring that you, my beloved children, could converse fluently in Urdu.’
Our anticipatory giggles would lead her to become frustrated and declare in Hindlish: ‘I nevar lurn piraapar English as I ulwez is-spending time teaching yoo all to spik Hindi and Urdu!’
This was true. Many of her South Asian friends spoke much better English, though their kids couldn’t string together even a simple Urdu sentence. Instead of teaching their children Urdu, these mothers improved their own skills by always speaking English to their children.
After completing his PhD, Dad returned to Pakistan with his young family, to work in a research organisation in Karachi. That’s why I was born in Karachi, the southern port city of Pakistan, in September 1969.
I wasn’t the first boy in the family. Two years before my birth, my parents had a son named Imran who died at the age of two. Both my parents were shattered by Imran’s death.
Pakistanis (and other South Asians) have a strange relationship with white skin. Everyone wants to be as fair-skinned as possible as it is regarded as the epitome of beauty. Yet for some reason, white-skinned people of European ancestry (including North Americans, Aussies and New Zealanders) are sometimes referred to using the derogatory term of gora (‘white man’), gori (‘white woman’) and collectively as gorey.
Imran was fortunate enough to have fair skin. He was also quite tall and slim for his age. Mum sometimes speculated that Imran would have survived a bout of severe illness had he been a little chubbier. She says that after Imran passed away, she’d get up in the middle of the night to pray for another son, one who wasn’t as good-looking and fair-skinned. She actually wanted God to give her a chubby son. She also says she wanted a son who was devout. She certainly got the chubby part, but I guess she couldn’t have all her prayers answered!
In 1969 my father was about to be transferred to Dhaka, a town in the then troubled province of East Pakistan. Within months, that area was to erupt in nationalist fervour that would lead to a civil war and eventual war with India. Luckily Dad was able to avoid the war by taking up the offer of a job at an Australian university.
Unlike other migrants, including the first English convict fleets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our family didn’t arrive on a boat. We flew here. Though our luggage did get to sail the high seas.
Mum says that the first word she taught me to say was ‘Allah’. Most Indian parents teach their children to say ‘Abba’ (meaning ‘Daddy’) or something similar. However, Mum had a strong attachment to her religious devotions, even if her expression of these strongly resembled the religious devotion of her Hindu and Sikh friends.
This generation of Indians lived and breathed religious pluralism, so Mum often talked of her many classmates at Aligarh Muslim University who were from Hindu and Sikh families. It wasn’t an Australian-specific situation either. Before Partition in 1947, both of my paternal grandparents had many colleagues and friends from Hindu, Sikh and other religious communities.
That’s probably why my early Islamic upbringing was really a typical middle-class South Asian upbringing. The Indian subcontinent (also known as South Asia and consisting of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka) is home to people from many different ethnic and religious groups. People from all these countries, as well as families from Indian communities outside South Asia (such as Kenya and Fiji) formed part of our social circle and I knew them collectively to be ‘Indian’.
I was taught to refer to my South Asian elders as ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’ out of respect. My parents’ siblings were given special Urdu labels of respect (I didn’t actually learn these labels until I landed in Pakistan in 1976).
The middle-class Indians I grew up with in Sydney had a unique approach to religion. In some ways Indians are happy to show off the external trappings of their faith. It’s common, for instance, to see Indian men outwardly observing and expressing their faith in what Westerners would regard as over-the-top and loud. My Sikh uncles almost all sported turbans and beards and my Muslim uncles often wore ceremonial skullcaps even when they were not praying, especially if they were getting old. However, we never regarded such outward expressions of religious difference (at least among men) as signs of religious fanaticism. It was all quite normal.
Apart from ceremonial headgear, Indian uncles wore Western clothes. In the seventies that usually consisted of flared pants and ties wide enough to cover half their chests. Uncles who doubled as medical doctors often wore—you guessed it—safari suits. My South Asian aunties wore traditional Indian dress—saris or shalwar kameez (baggy trousers with a shirt long enough to fall to the thighs or knees). Women and girls who wore Western dress were regarded as loose (or ‘modern’) and uncultured. We always presumed that Indian aunts who wore Western-style skirts were probably from Christian communities who had adopted European ways. Still, many of my Indian Christian aunties would wear traditional Indian dress.
Indeed, we never distinguished between Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsee, Jew, Christian or Jain. What we all cared more about was the culture and language we shared.
I had a friend at the age of five, Pankaj, whose father died suddenly overseas. Pankaj’s family were Indian of Hindu faith and we attended the funeral in the traditional way. I, with my mum, went to his house dressed in ceremonial white. Mum helped organise the ceremonial prayers and comforted Pankaj’s grieving mother. Mum also helped cook for the event and lit the ceremonial incense sticks. Some prayers were said in a language I didn’t quite understand.
A few years later, another close family friend of Pakistani Muslim heritage also passed away. As before, I attended his house wearing ceremonial white, Mum cooked for the event and lit the ceremonial incense sticks, and prayers were said in a foreign language.
There wasn’t much variation in how we expressed our faith on important occasions. That’s not to say there weren’t religious divisions: my Hindu, Muslim and Sikh uncles made sure I knew of the communal bloodbath that claimed over one million lives during the 1947 Partition.
One image featured prominently in the harrowing stories they told me—trains arriving at Lahore and Amritsar railway stations filled the air with the stench of death, carriages turned coffins of innocent Muslims, Hindus and Si
khs massacred by religious militants. The irony is that these two cities are hardly 40 kilometres apart and, before Partition, had thriving Muslim and Sikh communities that shared a common language and culture and whose faiths were very similar.
But were all Partition massacres always initiated by militants? Or did they represent the responses of otherwise innocent people manipulated by militants spreading rumours? Or by survivors of massacres who saw family members butchered and raped and burned alive before their eyes?
Who knows. My uncles certainly had no idea who started all the madness. But they did want me to know that it happened. And that members of all communities suffered.
Because my parents wanted to make sure I could speak their mother tongue, we weren’t allowed to speak English at home or in the presence of our Indian and Pakistani aunties and uncles. It was instilled in us that to speak English in their company was rude, especially if you could speak even a tiny amount of Hindi or Urdu. This again reinforced in me the notion that what really mattered was language, not religion.
One of my Sikh uncles (let’s call him Dr Singh) loved telling jokes. South Asians tell Sikh jokes in the same way as English speakers tell Irish jokes. Sikhs were laughed at for being a little slow but they were known to be earnest and sincere. And in real life, they were ever prepared to take the piss out of themselves. And as always, the best Sikh jokes were told by Sikhs.
Politically correct Westerners tend to pronounce the word Sikh as ‘seek’. South Asians aren’t as sensitive, as I discovered one day when I was at Dr Singh’s place with my parents for dinner. I was five years old and had the flu. We’d just arrived when Dr Singh spoke to me in Hindlish and offered me a glass of coke.
‘Irfan, how bout gil-lass coke?’
‘No thank you, Uncle.’
‘Vy not, Irfan?’
‘Because I’m sick, Uncle.’
‘No, yoo not. Yoo Muslim!’