What the burqa and the bindi (and the hijab) stand for in our books, and in our current lives

An essay published on the website Scroll.in:

There’s a scene in Prayaag Akbar’s 2017 novel Leila that never made it to the Netflix adaptation. In a not-too-distant dystopian future of water shortage, Riz and Shalini throw a grand poolside party for Leila’s third birthday. The children get their fill of inflatable slides, the parents of champagne. It’s a posh, Westernised crowd, where the women are comfortable leaving a shirt slightly unbuttoned, or showing some leg through the slit in a long dress. So Shalini’s sister-in-law Gazala stands out by being “sheathed in a flowing single-pleat abaya... with a dusty-pink silk hijab that brings out her alabaster complexion.”

“Cheeks glowing with rouge,” Akbar’s description continues. “This is probably as much sun as she ever gets.” The bitchiness is explainable as Shalini’s, not the author’s. But given Akbar’s otherwise nuanced characterisations, Gazala seems an easy stand-in for tradition-bound Muslim femininity. She is somehow both decorative and covered up, and never gets to speak. Her burqa does the talking.

Earlier, Shalini’s reluctance to live in the Muslim sector with her husband’s family is also routed through the veil. “Look, no disrespect to Gazala...,” she tells her brother-in-law Naz. “But I don’t want my daughter in a burqa.” In response, Naz shames Shalini – for offering him a beer, for not knowing that her maid has taken her child out. And Gazala, his hijab-wearing wife, gets held up as the contrast to the liberated, cosmopolitan Shalini: “She might not know as much about the world as you. But she knows our culture.”

Typecasting the burqa

 

The fact that Gazala’s burqa stands in for her is disappointing, but not surprising. No matter where one looks, it seems that the burqa comes to us always already loaded with meaning – and rarely a positive one. In Indian popular culture, it has long been trotted out either as a comic disguise worn by the Hindi film hero, from Shammi Kapoor to Rishi Kapoor to Aamir Khan in Delhi Belly, or as a symbol of women’s oppression. Sometimes, as in the dubious Islamicate subplot of the recent Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl, it is both.

Feminists don’t necessarily do better: even a thoughtful film like Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha can only see the burqa as the agent of the teenaged Rehana’s oppression. Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy is a welcome exception, giving us in Alia Bhatt’s lovely Safeena a headscarf-wearing Muslim girl who is neither a prude nor a pushover. Bhatt is also burqa-clad in Meghna Gulzar’s superb Raazi, where her fetching coloured hijab does fascinating triple duty as good Muslim, good daughter-in-law – and spy.

In Alice Albinia’s 2011 novel Leela’s Book, too, the burqa has the quality of subterfuge. First, an upper class Hindu woman purchases it secretly, hiding it from her liberal Muslim husband. Then her young Muslim maid Aisha takes it from its hiding place, wearing it to walk through her own neighbourhood unrecognised. It is an “Arab-style burqa”, heavy and black “with some gauzy thin material over the eyes”, writes Albinia, such as “some women in the basti [Nizamuddin] now wore”.
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It allows Aisha to rescue the man she loves from unjust police custody, but Albinia the author cannot resist describing her character’s experience of wearing it as a limiting one. The burqa is too big for Aisha; the tree canopy seems denser and darker through it; her lover does not recognise her in it: “he peered at her, disturbed by the distance this... fabric put between them: it was as if they were seeing each other through a crowd of people”. The liberal non-burqa-wearer, it seems, can only attribute to the burqa-wearer a sense of alienation from herself and the world.

A sign of unfreedom

 

One way to normalise the burqa’s existence is not to dwell on it. In Altaf Tyrewala’s whipsmart novel No God In Sight (2005), we meet multiple Muslim female characters without being told if they veil. And when someone does, that doesn’t become the important thing about them. Jeyna-Bi’s burqa attracts attention because it is fluorescent orange, not simply because she’s got one. In the accepting cultural mix of Tyrewala’s Mumbai, a burqa can be a topic of banter, it can get sadly soiled when poor Jeyna-Bi throws up her portion of a wedding feast. It can be, in effect, just another piece of clothing.

But the space for such a perspective is steadily narrowing. Since mid-December 2019, as unprecedented numbers of Indian Muslim women have emerged into public space to protest against the discriminatory religious basis of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the burqa has become even more heavily charged with meaning. Not all the women protesting in Shaheen Bagh (or the many female-led sit-ins it inspired nationwide) wore a veil or headscarf. But the fact that so many did seems to have caused great bafflement and unease.

Because the burqa has become, for anyone who does not wear one, a sign of unfreedom. And if you aren’t free, how can you possibly be out on the streets, resisting an oppressive state? How can you be the living embodiment of oppressed Muslim womanhood that the Hindu right claims to be saving from Muslim men, and simultaneously be leading a political protest?

And so, according to the Sangh’s Whatsapp factory, the lakhs of women who sat out in the wind and weather for three months, while braving police lathis, abusive goons and horrific communal violence, were not doing it to claim their threatened rights as Indian citizens, but for Rs 500 a day and free biryani. What is chilling is that so many other Indians want to believe that canard.

We saw another glimpse of that suspicion and ill-will on March 23, when the mainstream media reported the police destruction of the gloriously democratic art-filled protest sites at Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere as some sort of desperate public health measure – as though the women had not already vacated the sites.

Wearing an identity

This tarring of burqa-clad women as not being legitimate citizens with legitimate concerns dovetailed perfectly with the Prime Minister’s statement in December that those protesting against the CAA-NRC “can be recognised by their clothes”. That shamelessly partisan taunting of a community fighting its own legal marginalisation has sparked a new kind of battle, with people turning their marked bodies into sites of symbolic display.

Refusing to be shamed for wearing burqas, caps or other identifiable markers of their community, many Muslim protesters have instead responded by embracing them. But histories of religious populism elsewhere suggest that such a move can be a double bind. In Meena Kandasamy’s recent novel Exquisite Cadavers, a Tunisian film-school student in London finds his white British teachers pushing him to tell his country’s history through the hijab.

A French-influenced secular diktat banned headscarves in Tunisia in 1981 – so when the dictatorship was unseated, wearing the hijab became a form of community identity. The Islamic right exploited people’s desire to reclaim their religion, and a country where a hijab-wearing “Arabian Barbie” had once caused a liberal outcry, Kandasamy writes, became one that provided the largest number of foreign fighters to the dreaded Daesh.

Closer home, as the recent violence in North East Delhi makes clear, such defiant wearing of religious identity on the body reaches its tragic, terrifying limits when social fissures widen into the abyss of communal violence. Symbols have power: they can mark us or unmark us, divide or unite. In Leela’s Book, the same Hindu woman once buys a packet of gold-embossed bindis for the maid Aisha, only to have her Muslim husband tell her, “They don’t wear bindis”.

Fear and loathing

Among the fascinating ways in which women have chosen to express cross-community solidarities these last few months is the interlacing of burqas and bindis. The young poet Nabiya Khan’s words rang out across many anti-CAA-NRC posters: “Aayega Inqilab, Pehen Ke Burqa Bindi Aur Hijab”.

Optimists of various stripes are bringing bindis and burqas together. But those whose minds are filled with poison can only see conquest, not mingling. To such commentators, like the virulently anti-Muslim “Katyayani” on hindupost.in, a poster saying “Women Will Destroy Hindu Rashtra” with a fierce female face wearing both a bindi and a headscarf, with sunglasses on her head and her tongue out, looks like a “demonised” Kali “surrendering” to the Islamic veil.

Another anti-CAA-NRC poster, of three women wearing both bindis and burqas, underscored by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s now-viral poetic challenge to all dictatorships “Hum Dekhenge” (“We shall see”), seems to the same writer a call to “to ‘free’ bindi-sporting Hindu women by converting them into burqa-clad ones”.

Communal polarisation now involves a repeated insistence that the way people look is who they are – and yet when what is on display doesn’t fit the entrenched majoritarian narrative, then suddenly it is dismissed. “Bharatiya women of non-sanatani faith are also sometimes seen sporting the bindi, but that is just how a demography raised in mixed-culture behaves,” declares Katyayani when faced with the sociological fact of non-Hindu bindi-wearers.

No God In Sight contains a biting scene in which a young (upper middle class Hindu) wife must report her missing (Muslim) husband to the police. She wears her most saffron-like nylon sari, and borrows a mangalsutra and a bindi from her maid Gangu-bai, hoping that the Mumbai police will treat her complaint more seriously if she looks like a practising Hindu. They tell her to go to Pakistan.

Published in Scroll, 28 Mar 2020

Alice Albinia: Epic Trawler

While Alice Albinia, the non-fiction writer, refuses to tell a well-worn tale, Albinia the novelist succumbs easily to reductive depictions



Alice Albina’s first book was non-fiction, a historical travelogue called Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River that took birth in her head, she tells us, when she was “twenty-three years old, sitting in the heat of [her] rooftop flat in Delhi, reading the Rig Veda”. Albinia’s second book is fiction, a novel called Leela’s Book, for which, too, the idea came to her in Delhi, this time while reading the Mahabharata, “India’s devastating, adventurous epic about a warring family”, as she has recently called it.

But despite each having an ancient Hindu text as its source of original inspiration, the two books couldn’t be more different. Empires of the Indus is a diligently researched and carefully structured account of the once-great river, moving slowly back in time (from the present to 5,000 years ago) and simultaneously northwards—from Karachi, the river’s mouth, to the place traditionally considered its source, the Senge Khabab (Lion’s Mouth) in Tibet. In contrast with the dense-with-information yet leisurely pace of Empires, Leela’s Book unfolds almost breathlessly, in Hindi film fashion, during a North Indian wedding.

But the differences don’t end there. Albinia’s earlier narrative was marvellously low-key. As it wove its way from Karachi via Sindh and up into the upper reaches of Gilgit, where the language and prehistoric rock art still bear traces of the region’s Rig Vedic roots, one felt the keenness of the writer’s desire to understand the people she was writing about. More often than not, they were the most marginal groups in Pakistan: the low-caste Hindu sweepers of Clifton; the Sheedis of Thatta, who trace their origins to their slave ancestors from Zanzibar; the socialist Sufis of 17th century Sindh and the mixed crowds who come to their dargahs.

Her new novel seems low-key to begin with; it opens with a wedding not even festive enough to meet the expectations of the young Muslim girl who works as a maid in the groom’s family home: ‘There were no special lights or flower arrangements, no visiting tailors from South Delhi or jewellers from Chandni Chowk, no breathless delivery boys with huge boxes of crockery… [no] marigolds and candles, jasmine blossom and giggling girl cousins.’ But it is soon clear that the understatedness of the wedding is merely a foil for the epic drama of the events that unfold around it: involving warring patriarchs, estranged siblings reuniting, children discovering lost parents (or being adopted by new ones), and plenty of sex of all kinds — godly and mortal, straight and gay, pleasurably consensual and horrifically non-consensual.

Albinia also seems to have exchanged her interest in marginal histories for the epic Great Tradition: the Mahabharata itself. Much has been made of the relationship between Albinia’s contemporary story and the Mahabharata, but in fact there is no attempt to make the new narrative map the older epic in terms of plot or characters. All Albinia does is wrap her present-day story in a playful account of the centuries-old tug-of-war between Vyasa, author of the epic, and Ganesh, its godly scribe, both also making appearances in mortal form. Ostensibly at the core of the plot is a recurring interest in the messy business of co-authorship—whether of epics, poetry or children. But Albinia’s real concern is still what it was in Empires of the Indus: the question of how people deal with their cultural inheritance.

The characters of Leela’s Book are all driven by their differing relationships with their heritage, whether defined broadly at the level of community or nation, or at the level of individuals and families. There is Meera Bose, the Calcutta girl of the 1960s who decides to follow up her Anglophone education and Presidency College training in English literature with a stint in Shantiniketan to acquaint herself with her Bengali—and Indian—literary roots. There is her sister Leela, who is her partner in this venture, but who decides to renounce her roots by moving to America and refusing to entertain any thoughts of India, going so far as to prevent her husband Hari from naming his company “Dharma or Karma or even Bharata”, insisting on Harry Couture instead. There is Hari himself, whose move to America is resented by his brother Shiva Prasad for being so infuriatingly smooth: ‘instead of struggling with the cultural and religious void which was the USA, …instead of coming home sheepishly to the family scarred and subdued by the whole experience, Hari had seemed to flourish’. But unlike Leela, Hari has not given up on his origins; he makes secret visits to Jackson Heights and secret plans to return to India, triggered by the Kasturba Gandhi Marg house that is Leela’s inheritance (‘Does a house represent a root?’). There is the younger generation—Bharati, who does not see what is arresting about India’s anarchy, but is deeply invested in what she considers her personal poetic legacy; or Ram, who is scornful of the immediate past and only interested in the historical when it can be an extravagant form of ornamentation.

The primary dramatis personae, of course, are Shiva Prasad Sharma, Sanghi ideologue, and Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi, left-liberal Sanskrit professor with a complicated connection to Leela. Sunita, the virginal, slightly silly daughter of Shiva Prasad, is marrying Ash, promising genetics scholar and son of Vyasa. Albinia clearly intends these two upper-middle-class families — and especially their respective heads — as stand-ins for radically different ways of being in contemporary India. (She never quite dwells on the fact that both families bear North Indian Brahmin surnames, making them at some baseline level not so radically different from each other.)

Shiva Prasad is presented to us as not merely right-wing but deeply anti-Muslim (he disowns his favourite daughter Urvashi once she marries a Muslim), caste-obsessed (he thinks running a newspaper is “demeaning for a Brahmin”), a linguistic fundamentalist (it is “unpatriotic to promote the colonial language”) and anti-globalisation (it is “wicked to do business with immoral global corporations”). He is also delusional, dreaming of a political career that everyone except him knows will never materialise, and spending his days dictating an autobiography in which the crucial setpiece is his childhood career as nationalist speechifier-and-young militant Krishna. The final part of this caricature is his obsession with the ‘nascent Arya Gene Project’: a quest to identify ‘a gene in high-caste Hindus that allowed them to trace their lineage back to the race of Aryas, who had composed the Vedas thousands of years ago’ and ‘prove that these noble bearers of Arya civilisation were indigenous to India’.

Shiva Prasad is thus established as a bully, bigot and bit of a fool. But none of these things prepares us for what is to come — his brutish rape of a young woman whose sole crime is that she is Muslim: with an imagined deity showing him the route to ‘the assuaging of [his] own failings as a father, to the avenging of crimes against innocent Hindu populations, to revenge against the barbaric Muslim man who had taken virginal Urvashi as his nautch girl’. The book’s primary practising Hindu thus goes from being a figure of ridicule to an embodiment of evil, a man whose religious beliefs push him into frenzied violence against the innocent. His secular bete noir Ved Vyasa, in contrast, is not only successful but also the owner of a sharp intelligence that will always manage to trump Shiva Prasad at his own game— whether it’s speaking better Sanskrit on TV or successfully arranging an alliance between their families for his own ends.

Albinia has said in a newspaper interview that Shiva Prasad did undergo a transformation in the process of her writing the novel: “He started as a comic figure. Then I thought I can’t just have a comedy. That’s not what it was about.” The ‘it’ presumably refers to the rise of Hindutva, and the BJP’s time in power, which Albinia witnessed for over two years, from 1999 to 2002. It was an embattled time for anyone concerned with tradition; it still is. But Albinia’s presentation of secularists like Vyasa, for whom culture has little to do with religion, or worse, the ‘Lady Professor’ who goes on about ‘the inherent ridiculousness of Hinduism’ on rationalist grounds (‘A god with a blue face? An elephant-headed scribe? Phantoms of trees and mountains?’) as the only alternative to the Shiva Prasads of the world belies the very possibility of a critical but lived engagement with tradition. And it seems a pity that Albinia, whose stellar first book exhibits such a dogged refusal to tread the well-worn path and tell the well-worn tale, should have succumbed to such a reductive depiction of Hindu-ness versus secular-ness. In Empires, there is a moment when Albinia muses about ‘what it must be like to live in the Pakistan of the Indian media: a grimly religious, violently black-hearted nation, apparently the opposite of everything that pluralist India stood for’. There is much about Leela’s Book that is just as absurdly binary.

Published in Open magazine, 25th June 2011