The play, which is partly set in a TV studio, charts people’s initial bewilderment at the sudden loss to the nation of every single Muslim.
The cover of Naqvi’s book(photo credit: COURTESY SAEED NAQVI)ByNEVILLE TELLERJerusalem Report logo small (credit: JPOST STAFF)
Saeed Naqvi is a veteran Indian journalist who also anchors a long-running current affairs program on India’s national television network. He describes his new literary work, The Muslim Vanishes, as a fable. It is a fable presented to us in the form of a stage play, a format that certainly gives his concept an impact and immediacy that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.
There are 200 million Muslims living in today’s India, often described as the world’s largest democracy. Naqvi decided to explore the true impact of that Muslim minority on what is a majority Hindu state. So he conceived a fantastic scenario: suppose that suddenly, without warning, all 200 million Muslims disappeared, simply vanished. What would the effect be on Indian society and democracy?
The play, which is partly set in a TV studio, charts people’s initial bewilderment at the sudden loss to the nation of every single Muslim. This reaction is followed pretty quickly by the seizure of Muslim houses, businesses and farms by mainly lower caste Hindus. The sudden access to power by the lower caste sends shock waves through the upper-caste establishment. The persistence of the caste system in modern Hindu society provides a key to the importance of the Muslim minority in India’s democratic process.
Ever since independence, India has continued to be ruled by higher-caste Hindus. If Indian democracy relied solely on Hindu voters, the upper caste establishment would be heavily outvoted. To stay in power, it has relied on the Muslim minority vote. So in the aftermath of the Muslim disappearance, the establishment insists on deferring any election until the Muslims have been persuaded to return.
An official investigation is set up to discover why the Muslims departed in bulk. This judicial inquiry forms an important element of the play. In court, a Hindu and a Muslim spokesman cross-question each other and also witnesses drawn from India’s history, in an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the two communities going back to the very foundation of Islam. In fact, it goes back even further, for the point is made that those who initially converted to Islam were of the same stock as those who did not. What emerges is both the intimate and virtually inextricable relationship between them, and also a history of Hindu maltreatment of, and indifference to, its Muslim minority.
Demonstrators hold signs and chant slogans as they march in solidarity with the people of Kashmir, during a rally in Karachi (credit: REUTERS)
During the debate, the Muslim spokesman claims that India should never have been partitioned. “But,” he continues, “if Jinnah’s two-nation theory of separate states for Hindus and Muslims was to be accepted, then the outcome should not have been so lopsided... If a consequence of partition was the creation of a Muslim state of Pakistan, then India should logically have become Hindustan.”
The Hindu spokesman explains that if India’s founding fathers had gone down this route, they could not have laid claim to Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state. Kashmir was a major reason why India declared that it would be a secular state, and Kashmir has remained an unresolved issue between India and Pakistan ever since.
Naqvi introduces into this essentially domestic social and political maelstrom a bizarre Israeli element. As if to prove how inseparable the two communities are, a small group of Hindu men had been in the process of converting to Islam when the Muslims vanished. Although they had undergone circumcision, they had not yet embraced Islam and had been left behind. Neither one thing nor another, they called themselves “Mohammadia Hindu,” and the authorities accepted their status, believing it would be a way of bringing Muslims into the Hindu fold.
Their situation appealed to lower-caste Hindus, who started to get circumcised. In the play, a TV reporter appears on-screen describing the great pressure of what he describes as “the nascent circumcision industry. It has had to build newer, larger facilities to accommodate the anticipated rush to be circumcised. I am standing at the site of the new facilities built with Israeli help. This is exclusive footage of what the construction will look like when it is completed. It will be equipped with the latest laser technology, which so far has been used by Jews in Israel, New York and elsewhere. Jews and Muslims are two communities in which circumcision has religious sanction. Such ultra-modern facilities to be set up in the various metros of India is a unique experiment. This is the first time in history that machines are circumcising Muslims. Normally circumcision is a manual operation supervised by clerics.”
Yes The Muslim Vanishes is a fantastic fable, but Naqvi has succeeded in using it to scrutinize the origins, the complex history and what might lie ahead for the Muslim minority in a Hindu-majority nation. It is a masterful and informed insight into the past, present and possible future of one of the world’s major developing nations. ■
