Muslim Situation in India

The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), and the Eastern Regional Centre of the Indian Council of Social Science Research organised a seminar on "Muslim Situation in India: Contemporary Questions", at the CSSSC, during 24-26 February 2010.

This was indeed an important event in the life of this city. And the quality and seriousness of the seminar proceedings was indeed noteworthy. The list of speakers is given below.

Inaugural address: Dr. S.S.Z. Adnan, Chairperson, West Bengal Minorities Commission

Keynote Address : "Disparities among Socio-religious Groups in India: A Perspective for Intervention", Amitabh Kundu, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

"The Muslim as Victim, the Muslim as Agent: Religion as a Social Category", M. G. Valenta, University of Amsterdam.

"Reforming the Indian Madrasas", Yoginder Sikand, National Law School, Bangalore.

"Health Status of Muslims in India: Some evidences from NSSO and NFHS", Sachidanand Sinha, JNU, New Delhi.

"Towards Analyzing the Muslim Situation in India – Perspectives from Community, Society and State", Rahim Mondal, North Bengal University.

Special Lecture: "Muslims in Contemporary India", Asghar Ali Engineer, Mumbai.

"Socio-religious Group Disparities in Levels of Living in India: Is Positive Discrimination an Effective Policy Option ?", Amaresh Dubey, JNU, New Delhi.

"Religious Minorities and Public Goods in Rural West Bengal: Results from a Large Scale Survey", Pranab Kumar Das, Saibal Kar and Madhumanti Kayal, CSSSC, Calcutta.

"Poverty, Employment and Education: Towards Explaining Backwardness of Muslims in Rural West Bengal", Zakir Husain, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.

"Migrants into Peasants: Agrarian Economy and Contemporary History of Assam", Arup Saikia, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

"Work, trade and identity among the Qureshis of Delhi and Ansaris of Banaras", Zarin Ahmed, Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.

'Politics of Violence and Production of Ethnic Spaces in Mumbai", Abdul Shaban, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

"Muslim in the Metropolis: A View from the Grassroots", V. Ramaswamy and Amina Khatoon, Howrah Pilot Project, Howrah.

"On the Difficulty of Being a Muslim", Raziuddin Aquil, Delhi University

"Explaining Population Growth differentials between Hindus and Muslims in West Bengal: Thinking of a research agenda", Sohel Firdos, CSSSC, Calcutta.

Panel Discussion: Muslims as Minorities - Practices and Policies

Speakers: Mohd. Salim, Chairman, West Bengal Minority Development & Finance Corporation, Anjan Ghosh, Fellow, CSSSC, Sugata Marjit, RBI Professor and Director, CSSSC.

Some truths about Muslims

by MKA Siddiqui

Constituting over 10.6 million persons, or 25.2 per cent of the total population of West Bengal, 84.26 per cent of the Muslims are rural-based, while 15.74 per cent live in urban areas. Those in the rural areas are predominantly peasants and agricultural labour. In the city they are mainly artisans and handicraftsmen, as well as small traders.

Muslims constitute about 21 percent of Calcutta’s total population. Over 75 per cent of them live in slums or bastis around the Central Business District, in unimaginably bad housing condition, while a substantial number of the rest inhabit the older areas which do not differ from the slums.

A sample survey of the slum-dwelling Muslims showed that:

64.92 % are born in the slum, 12.58 % are born in the city (Calcutta), 3.90 % are born in West Bengal and 18.58 % are from the neighbouring states.

Male / Female Ratio among Muslims is 1000: 841, compared to the total population ratio of 1000:799.

The data discounts the idea that Muslim population in the slums is a "floating" population. Rather it is rooted in the city.

The living condition of the vast bulk of the Muslims can be judged from the fact over 65 per cent of the Muslim families, of the average size of 6.65 members, occupy from 67-160 sq.ft. of space, in which they live and work, engaging themselves in various crafts. The details are as follows:

2.31% occupied up to 66 sq.ft., 19.61% occupied 66-86 sq.ft., 17.12% occupied 81-100 sq.ft., 15.96% occupied 101-120 sq.ft., 2.12% occupied 121-140 sq.ft., 8.27% occupied 141-160 sq.ft., 5.00% occupied 161-180 sq.ft., 3.46% occupied 181-200 sq.ft. and 5.00% occupied 350 sq.ft. and above.

The occupational structure of the Muslims in the city differs sharply from that of the non-Muslims, in so far as Muslims are not only left to themselves for their own support but quite often face challenges from the socio-political system and often get dislodged from some of the comparatively more comfortable niches they carve out for themselves.

According to a survey of age grades in the Muslim population, numbering 926,769 in the city, those from 6-18 years, constituting about 40 %, or numbering 307,000, are supposed to be normally in educational institutions, but their enrollment figure did not exceed 15,000, or 4%. If we take into account all sorts of maktabs, madrasas, private schools, the enrollment figure does not exceed 9% of the total. Thus 91% of the boys and girls have no chance of going to school because they have no schools to go to, nor their socio-economic condition allows them to do so.

A large proportion of the lucky 4% or 15,000 who have the good fortune of getting admission in affiliated schools, drop out before reaching school final stage. The drop-outs have been estimated to be 80% of the total number enrolled. It is tragic that not less than 75% of the total number of Muslim children of school going age serve as child labour, absolutely unhindered by the administration.

Out of total number of over 600 schools in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation area, there are only 43 Urdu medium schools, and actually only 27 of these are recognized and the rest remain unrecognized.

Consequently the educational attainment of the Muslims in Calcutta was found to be as follows:

16.95% can only sign, 14.19% have studied up to primary level, 6.23% have studied up to secondary level, 2.75% have studied up to higher secondary level and 0.17% have studied up to graduate level or above.

But what is cause for a greater worry is the fact that the rate of literacy of Muslims in Calcutta is much lower today than what it was on the eve of Independence in 1947.

This is not the occasion to go back to the historical developments leading to a systematic downward mobility of the Muslims in the city and recession of their ‘social expectation’ that adversely affected their educational achievement. How they were simply made a tool in the hands of the dominant, to be utilized in their socio-economic endeavour. Muslims had taken this trend as their destiny until the very recent past.

Today they are gaining a vague consciousness of the gigantic problems that confront them, which are larger in proportion to the resources at their disposal. They are also not aware of the path that can lead them to achieve the goal, avoiding complications.

The plight of the people of this region is not only reflected in extremely bad living condition, political disempowerment, negligible employment in the organized sector, low level of literacy and education, marginality of their occupational pursuit and incredibly bad housing condition, but also the fact that they are the victims of the most sophisticated form of parochialism that shelters behind modernity and secularism. This has resulted in a low level of ‘social expectation’ and consequently retarded development.

The key to the solution lies in correct understanding, through hard and irrefutable facts, and through motivating and enabling the members of the community to take appropriate action for their solution.

The Divided City

I attended a book launch and reading and discussion with the author, last week, on 27 January 2010. The author was Suad Amiry, a Palestinian architect and writer.

That was indeed interesting. Ms Amiry was attractive, lively, articulate and witty, a great raconteur. Her story about her journey with her puppy through Israeli checkpoints to get the latter vaccinated was absolutely hilarious. Her account of the emergence and rise of Hamas was brilliant. It was difficult not to be infatuated with Ms Amiry!

But the venue was inappropriate, otherwise many more people could have been present. Perhaps the organisers had a private programme in mind! But I would have thought that given the person in question, and the subject of her book, this was something that should have been thrown open to the public.

Calcutta has its public places, where public meetings, conventions etc take place. When one thinks "public" one has to look at things very critically: for instance, is the very venue of an event something that implicitly or explicitly excludes some? How can one ensure maximal public participation? Through engaging with the public domain, and getting acquainted with the people, activities, places and so on, one is schooled in public domain activity. People lacking this experience do not even know that they are devoid of a certain vital knowledge. When they try to organise something, their attempts therefore have a slightly pathetic (and yet never un-arrogant) quality, but they are quite unaware of this. The public domain means self-effacement, and reaching out, and learning, and sharing, and collaborating.

I was fortunate to have served an apprenticeship in public activism in an organisation that was committed in every way to the cause of the public domain of Calcutta.

Calcutta is a peculiar city. Its intelligentsia would be found expressing solidarity with people in Palestine and elsewhere; but they remain callously, chronically apathetic and oblivious to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of slum-dwellers in their own city, who live a sub-human existence. I guess that's the normal hypocrisy of India's babu-class and today's Bengali bhadralok.

I have been working for the last 25 years with the city's squatters and slum-dwellers, for their rights. Since 1997, I have been working in one large, old, jute-workers' slum in Howrah (across the river from Calcutta), trying to build leadership and capabilities for community development among the youth of this predominantly Muslim slum. After hearing Mr Amiry's talk, I was keen to introduce her to my grassrots colleagues and the slum women. I thought her account of everyday resistance and struggle of Palestinian people would resonate with the slum women - who cannot take even a basic thing, like a toilet, for granted.

In 2000, I had visited a Palestinian village, near Nablus, and attended a meeting of a women's self-help group. After hearing me speak about the conditions of life in Howrah's slums, a woman said that when they felt the difficulties of their life they should remember that there are others in even greater difficulty, for whom their prayers should be directed.

I should add something more about my great city, Calcutta, which is held up to be a symbol of diversity and tolerance...

Calcutta is a city that is completely divided, along religious lines. Muslims constitute about 20% of the city population, and are almost entirely confined to ghettos in various enclaves of the city, something that happened in the early 1960s after repeated outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim riots. An overwhelming proportion of Muslims in Calcutta live in slums. The Muslim population is also predominantly a labouring and artisanal one. Muslims in Calcutta and in the state of West Bengal have experienced acute socio-economic marginalisation in the last 2-3 decades.

It is almost impossible for a Muslim family to get a place to live anywhere in the city except in / around the Muslim ghettos.

Muslim slums in the city are among the oldest, largest, most congested and environmentally degraded settlements. Disaggregated health statistics reveal the real nature of urban inequality and institutionalised deprivation. For instance, infant mortality rates for the Muslim population in Howrah (where we work ) are significantly higher than that for Hindus. This basically reflects the slum-non slum differential in environmental health risks, and the fact that Muslims live predominantly in slum neighbourhoods.

While the intelligentsia of Calcutta prides itself on being fiercely secular and tolerant, the truth is that most educated Hindus in the city would never have had any substantive intercourse with a Muslim in their lives. And yet they would not hesitate to express their opinion on Muslims, Islam etc.

Almost every one in a typical intellectuals' gathering - like this one I attended - would be Hindu. Yet that is considered to be a citizens' forum, rather than a Hindu one. But a gathering of Muslim intellectuals would be seen by Hindus as an exclusively Muslim affair, rather than a civic gathering. Hindu - is Indian, the mainstream. Muslim - is the other, an aberration.

To paraphrase something I was told recently, in West Bengal there is no exclusion as such, but inclusion is a big problem!

Yet, there are those who are different, and try to make a difference! That is the real spirit of Calcutta, but that would rarely be found among the glitterati and literati, the intelligentsia and the academics.

Howard Davidson is a friend from Canada who spends a couple of months in Calcutta every winter. In the course of a discussion with him a couple of days ago, about the socio-economic and educational status of Muslims in Calcutta, he suddenly remarked that depriving a community of education is nothing short of calculated ethnocide.

Catching the magic of Glass

Remain in peace in the unity of God and walk blindly in the clear straight path of your obligations...

If God wishes more from you his inspiration will make you know it.

JD Salinger, 1958

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

Holden Caulfield, in Catcher in the Rye

I first heard about JD Salinger and his Catcher in the Rye when I was a college student in Calcutta, more than 30 years ago. My sister Sita had got that from a library, and my father told me that so much had been made about the book but he had now read it and was unable to fathom what the book, and all the hullabaloo, was about!

I read Catcher after that, and later Franny and Zooey, when I was still a university student. That left a quietly powerful impression, and was then largely forgotten. I think some years later I read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. When my own fiction writing urge began surfacing, about 20 years ago - a natural outcome of reading a lot of fine literature - I found that there was strong influence of Salinger, and specifically the stories relating to the Glass family.

In 2003, on a visit to London after many years, I came upon and picked up a copy of Catcher and read it again a few months later, after my return to Calcutta. And thus began my "second innings" with JDS, but of course, by now, I too had been through the experience of life, and of walking along the mystic path. Visiting a bookshop with my sons in early 2004, I came upon Salinger's Nine Stories and the Raise High volume and picked those up. Reading them, soon after - I was finally in the inescapable grip or clutch of Salinger, and the magic of the Glass saga. I frantically searched for Franny and Zooey, which I was fortunate to find. I devoured that too.

But we were now living in the internet age, so thanks to Google, I could find so much on the net, by and about Salinger and his writing. I was also fortunate to be able to read Salinger's "uncollected" stories (i.e. those which had been published in various magazines but not collected in one volume). This included "Hapworth", his last published story, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. I read what several people, well-known writers, critics, had written about Salinger. I found myself differing from them. I read about the various purportedly eccentric things he had supposedly said or done.

Read the cover story in Time magazine on JD Salinger, which appeared on 15 September 1961.

I also came upon the wonderful Dead Caulfieds site, and began communicating by email with Kenneth Slawenski, the site owner. I am simply a reader-lover of literature, while Kenneth also has the faculties of a literary critic. So we had an interesting dialogue about JDS and his writing.

Since then I have been a translator of the stories of Bengali anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra. He is also a reclusive, stubbornly principled, cantankerous, eccentric, cussed, and yet endearing, person. But I have been fortunate to win his trust and confidence. So now it is easier for me to understand Salinger.

I knew Salinger was of an advanced age, and every now and then - just like I used to do vis-a-vis Studds Terkel - made a mental calculation of how old he must be, and thought about him awhile. In fact just some days before Salinger pased away (on 27 January), I had reflected that he would be 91 now. I only learnt about his demise on 29 Jan. As it turns out, my son Rituraj has chosen Catcher for his high school graded study. So I subsequently gave my copy of the book to him and searched through my computer for articles I had downloaded that might be relevant to him. And so I was once again deep inside Salinger-dom.

I also wrote to Kenneth.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on his passing away.

Kenneth replied:

I was shocked by the news of Salinger's passing. I had heard that he was recovering well from hip surgery last spring and lulled myself with the belief that he would be around for a number of years to come. Extreme old age is not unusual in the Salinger family and while many laughed at him for his meager diet of organic vegetables in the 1960s, no one was scoffing in 2009 when he turned 90.

An amazing thing has happened here that gives me encouragement even at this sad time. In honor of the author, people have started to read and are discovering Salinger and his works in unprecedented numbers. YouTube is bursting with tributes sent in by ordinary people reading The Catcher in the Rye. Catcher is presently the #5 bestselling book in the nation - and would probably be #1 if it were obtainable. Even Amazon.com has run out of copies. Not only of Catcher, but all four Salinger books.

That is a tribute even Salinger would have enjoyed. The only one that really matters.

I reproduce below my reply to Kenneth.

.....

JDS was simply a magician, the allure, mystique, infatuation and pull he created for many people with those few books - that was the magic wrought by the writing.

As far as I can see and understand, JDS was of a strongly mystic disposition, though he also had several other uncommon and powerful elements in his make-up (e.g. military action service). There was also a rich creative synthesis of these multiple dispositions.

He experienced transcendence in his own being, and in his (latter) stories, and specifically through the Glass stories, he sought to write about being and transcendence. I suppose he had experienced for himself how reading and intellection can bring such transcendence.

What JDS lacked in terms of quantity (of disclosed or published output), he more than made up with the intensity of the work. Few writers with a much larger body of work achieve the kind of powerful hold over readers that he did.

There is a big gap between JDS and people in the domain of "literary-" or literature. But I would think his hold is largely outside the literary world, among (thinking) people who are only fiction / literature readers-lovers (like me), not scholars or teachers or literary critics etc. So when people in the literature world have criticised his writing (and his persona as deduced by them from his writing), that may be quite irrelevant.

He has a place even just within the literary domain, simply in terms of his superior story-telling craftsmanship. But JDS saw himself in the wider canvas of life, of public culture, and the thinking, sensitive, aesthetic, self-educating individual within that, writing as a medium within that. And essentially he was writing for people like himself; solitary mystic individuals, men I guess, who have been formed and re-formed through literature. He did connect to and become part of the mystic stream, flowing through the ages, of literature / epic / saga / mythology, and in turn helped to renew that grand stream, in his own time, from his own place .

My own disposition is not to form opinions or judge, but simply to try to understand, with the totality before me accepted as a given; to try to get inside him and his head, to share, to witness. So that is the relation I have to him and his work. From that perspective, I don't find things he said or did to be incomprehensible, just as I don't agree with things said by others (e.g. comments on Hapworth). I think it is an important part of the Glass saga, it is not redundant vis a vis the rest of the saga, for me, it stands well by itself, for someone who has been inside the Glass saga. (There should also be a long gap between the readers' "Glass-enclosure" and the reading of Hapwworth! Like a music composer, and in keeping with his quality-over-quantity nature, JDS also knew well the powerful value and quality of "silence", in the saga of his life and writing.)

Given his reclusive life and secured inaccessibility, his passing away makes no difference. The other way of saying this is that, he was alive (and eternal), and he continues to be alive (and eternal)! His passing away will hopefully have the positive effect of a renewed interest and appraisal and celebration of his writing.

Maybe he made arrangements for his work from his "silent" years to be made public at some later juncture. Who knows!

I guess one could call JDS a writers' writer rather than a writer.

Unfortunately, my father passed away long before I could have told him what the "hullabaloo" about Catcher was about! But I'm sure, by the end of his life, when his innate mystic disposition surfaced, no such explanation was needed.

.....

Farewell, dear friend, and all strength for your onward journey. You remain in our hearts.

Read Adam Gopnik's obituary in The New Yorker here and a tribute by Lillian Ross here.

The quote in the beginning of this post appears on the Dead Caulfields site.

A question of taste

Great products, according to Steven Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and the present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing”.