A Pilgrimage Of Denial

It was a half-truth. The arrested terrorist was indeed the man who was born Dhiren Barot. However, following a visit to India in the early ’90s, the young Barot snapped ties with his family, rejected his ancestral faith and recreated himself as Eisa al-Hindi. Within a decade, Eisa progressed from jehad in Kashmir to planning terrorist strikes in New York.

Throughout history, some converts have tended to flaunt a new loyalty by viciously disavowing their inheritance. This curious blend of new realisation and self-hate has had both horrific and farcical consequences. From the Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Germany to the hippies who found nirvana in dope, counterculture became experiments in declasse.

These were extreme reactions to convoluted pangs of imaginary guilt. By the ’80s, liberal academia found a more acceptable outlet in multiculturalism, the newest battering ram against dominant cultures. A contrived cosmopolitanism provided a cover for what conservative writer Roger Scruton described as a "relentless scoffing at ordinary prohibitions and decencies and the shrill advocacy of alternatives that ordinary people are unable in their hearts to recognise".

Amitava Kumar’s journeys of self-discovery through India and Pakistan belong to this genre of multicultural perversity. A gifted writer from a normal, middle-class Bihari Hindu family, Kumar was one of those many Indians for whom the Ayodhya demolition of 1992 was a watershed. It filled him with fear and hatred of Hindu nationalism, transformed him into a secularist and made him more sensitive to the vulnerabilities of the ‘other’. In time, he joined the annual September influx of Indians to American universities and settled into the cultural studies industry.

Something else also happened. He met a Pakistani girl from a well-off Karachi family and they decided to get married in 1999, around the time India and Pakistan were fighting in the forbidding heights of Kargil.

It’s a touching story but not an unusual one. What was unusual, at least for a secularist, was that apart from a civil marriage, which would have sufficed in North America, he went through a Muslim ceremony. It involved him converting to Islam and assuming a Muslim name. His wife’s grandmother was pleased. "The groom is from Hindustan. And he has accepted Islam," she proudly told her friends and neighbours in Karachi.

The experience scarred Kumar. He could have dismissed the whole thing as a meaningless ritual aimed at placating some old biddies. He could, alternatively, have railed against an orthodoxy that tied the convergence of emotions to a convergence of faith.

He did neither. Instead, he became a poseur. "I felt good about myself for marrying ‘the enemy’. The thought gave me a small thrill. I was suddenly awash in altruism; its tepid tide cleansed me of a narrow, binding form of self-love. I also found others to partake of this feeling of well-being which I was experiencing." Later, in a slightly pathetic attempt to distract from his weakness of character, he rationalised his conversion as "the exploration of doubt or what I would call the benefits of half-faith."

Sadly, the "exploration of doubt" ends up as an exercise in repudiation. The India Kumar explores is riddled with hate, intolerance, petrified Muslims and provincial Hindus reeking of bigotry. Take this as a sample of his post-riot Gujarat: "There was now not even one Muslim business left in Gujarat. Men with beards were not being served in the restaurants as well as shops in the entire state." His conclusion is stark: "For any ordinary Muslim in India, the difficulty of ever crossing over into a larger community of the nation is a challenge."

This is not Gujarat; this is not ‘secular’ India; this is a caricature. Kumar also travels to Pakistan. What he finds there isn’t exactly appetising but he finds a way out: moral equivalence. To him, Pakistan is just a mirror image of India. When he thinks of the Hindus in Pakistan, his thoughts turn inevitably to the plight of Muslims in India. When he thinks of Kargil he doesn’t think of Pakistan’s unfinished agenda, he thinks of the army widows on both sides. It’s not a journey of discovery; it is a voyage of denial.

Veer Savarkar used to say a change of nationality need not accompany a change of religion. This book suggests his optimism was misplaced. Kumar and Barot, is there a difference?