By Vivek Menezes
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As the co-founders and co-curators of the Goa Arts + Literature Festival (GALF), it was inexpressibly moving to sit alongside our beloved Jnanpith Award winner Damodar “Bhaiee” Mauzo during the soul-stirring inauguration of its 14th edition this past Thursday at International Centre Goa. The great Naga writer and one-woman cultural renaissance Dr. Easterine Kire spoke with great insight about ignoring the boxes that are so often imposed on so-called “margins” like Nagaland and Goa, and yet another national treasure, the Delhi-based literary/intellectual powerhouse Dr. Rakshanda Jalil touched us very deeply with heartbreaking vulnerability, saying “on this glorious day, in this wonderful setting, it seems strange to talk about fear, and I thought long and hard whether I should or not, but then I decided if not at GALF where else can one speak one’s mind? Where else can one speak of one’s deepest, darkest fears?”
Jalil is an extraordinary authorial force and Indian literary luminary, a hugely productive scholar, editor, translator, anthologist, and searingly direct voice of reason who has written some of the most essential books of our times, including my personal recommendation for all Indians to read at this fraught juncture, the 2019 But You Don’t Look Like A Muslim, which she presented at GALF that year.
This time around, she started by registering appreciation for how our vibrant, unique little festival has remained focused by the late, all-time-great poet Eunice de Souza’s insight about “ways of belonging”. In that context, Jalil admitted she is “concerned about the dark underbelly of belonging, the forces of othering that are gathering like dark clouds over our country.” She said, “so, this evening I want to talk about fear, a fear that is very real for very many of us, one that rubs away insidiously at the idea of belonging. While I will mostly talk about the fear that Muslims in India feel, I know that fear is shared by many – by other minorities in India, by communities who find themselves on the margins and many from the minority community who sense and share this fear, some of whom gather in echo chambers to vent [or] Gham ghalat karna as it is referred to in Urdu.”
Jalil said, “I must confess to a crushing fear, one that weighs my chest with an inexorable weight and makes it difficult to breathe sometimes. Yes, with all my privileges – of education, of class, of having friends in ‘high places’ – I feel scared, more scared than I have ever been in my entire life. I must also confess to an almost persistent depression, like a low-grade fever, over the past few years, that doesn’t quite halt the daily rhythm of life; it just slows you down by its continuous, relentless presence in your life making you feel sad and somehow empty, as though a great deal that one has taken for granted all one’s adult life is like sand slipping through one’s fingers.”
There were audible murmurs of agreement when Jalil said “I suspect I am not alone in this” and continued, “I feel this fear and depression among a great many Muslims in urban India. I hear it in their silences. I sense it in their steadfast refusal to get drawn into political debates. I notice it in their stoicism in the face of virulent hate swirling about in school and college WhatsApp groups as well as RWA/housing society group chats. I spot it in the hastily withdrawn social media posts drawing attention to some recent communal outrage or atrocity. I recognize it in their zeal to distance themselves from instances of any sort of violence, be it a Muslim man killing his Hindu girlfriend and chopping her into pieces or a Muslim man killing his non-Muslim partner in a business dispute – where the perpetrator, not the victim, is a Muslim. If my own fear and despair and that of others like me, is so palpable and pronounced, what of those Muslims who are doubly marginalized by their poverty and illiteracy? Or vulnerable because they don’t have the safeguards and barriers, however flimsy, that ‘people like us’ have in our gated communities and cushioned lives? What of those who live on the edge of survival because they must perforce go out into the real world every single day to eke out a living?”
We all know there are no quick or easy answers to these questions, but it is pointless to deny they are an everyday reality that will have to be addressed if India’s grand national aspirations are to be achieved. Jalil said “all I am asking for is an acknowledgement of this fear, a fear that I have about being a Muslim in India today. A fear that is shared – in different ways and in different degrees – not just by Muslims but by other minority groups, by adivasis, by LGBT communities…but still, it would be a sad day if one were to give in to fear or simply feel sorry for oneself. I am not a politician or an activist. I am only a writer. Words are all I have, and I want to use them as tools in the only way a writer can: I can bear witness; I can speak up; I can record and chronicle both for the present and for posterity To come back to fear its only antidote, I do believe, is empathy, cultivating the ability to say, I am not you, but I see you, I hear you. Remember these lines from To Kill a Mocking Bird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature
Festival)
