MARXISTS & MINORITIES

I am back in Kolkata, the city where I was born, after a gap of almost two decades. Little has changed: the buildings are as dreadfully ugly as when I last saw them; the traffic still snarls and moves at snail's pace; and the pollution as dense and stifling. But this time I am in Bengal for something new: to do a quick visit of some Muslim institutions. I have little time to engage in anything even remotely resembling in-depth field-work, and so the impressions I gain are just that—impressionistic. But, still, I think I can get a sort of sense of things, a little more than just a glimpse of Muslim life in West Bengal —almost a fourth of whose population is Muslim.

The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences has invited me as a speaker for its three-day conference on Muslims in Contemporary India. Apparently, this is the first time the Centre is conducting a seminar on a Muslim-related issue. Few, if any, seem to have done any field work at all. This is hardly surprising: after all, how many people really want to 'dirty' their hands in the field, tramping around hamlets and slums? If you regularly read newspapers, there was nothing new for you in what these wordy professors endlessly pontificated about all through those three days. But a number of non-Muslim speakers, including government officials, openly recognize what they consider a structural bias against Muslims in the wider Bengali society and even within the state apparatus—and this in a state that has been consistently ruled by a self-styled 'Leftist' government for over three decades.

After the conference got over, I spent a couple of days in Kolkata, exploring the streets on my own. I first visited the office of the Jamaat-e Islami, located in a crowded, largely Muslim-dominated mohalla in central Kolkata and accessible from a narrow entrance, just about broad enough for me to pass through, and then up a dark corridor lit by a bare bulb. Its amir, Rahmat Ali Khan says the Jamaat has established a technical school in a town in the Malda district, a girls' academy in the South 24 Paraganas, where it also had an orphanage, and was working on building a school in Howrah. Khan echoes the popular disenchantment of Muslims with the Left Front government and a rapid shift of their support in evidence to Mamta Banerjee's Trinamul Congress, although he did have a few good words to say about the current government's ability to control communal violence.

The Indo-Arab Cultural Association, set up 40 years ago, is another of the few Muslim institutions in Kolkata of any note. It is housed in a graceful colonial-style mansion off the busy Park Circus in the heart of the city. Despite its venerable age, it does not even have an introductory leaflet.
The affable 26-year old Sabir Ghaffar had recently taken over as General Secretary, seems to be trying to infuse some life into it. The Association had recently launched a six-month Arabic language programme, but Ghaffar complained of high drop-out rates. It had also started English classes in a madrassa in the North 24 Paraganas district.

Two years ago, with support from the American Embassy, the Association had launched a madrassa teachers' training programme. Under the programme, the Association had published a slim text, awkwardly titled 'Colouring Islam'—a children's coluring book using Islamic motifs. I expressed my reservations about accepting American government money for what was obviously, from the American government's perspective, a politically-loaded project. Why couldn't the institute generate its own funds for this activity, I wondered?

The Bengali Muslims (who include Muslims of Bangladesh too) are, Ghaffar pointed out, the single largest Muslim ethnic group in the world after the Arabs. 'But still we don't have much of a voice,' he complained. The few Kolkata-based Muslim organizations that existed, he said, were dominated by Urdu-speaking Muslims, some of whom continued to look down on their native Bengali-speaking co-religionists. On the other hand, the largely 'upper' caste Hindu or bhadrolok-controlled Bengali and English media in West Bengal turned a completely blind eye to the state's Muslims or published something negative.

My next port of call was the West Bengal Urdu Academy, housed in a decrepit building in Taltola that bordered an enormous, and gravely neglected, rubbish-dump, where impoverished children dressed in rags competed with dogs for discarded vegetables and rotting fruit. The office was filthy, to put it baldly. Cobwebs, thick as curtains, crawled about the walls where the Academy's books were dumped in towering piles, hidden under sheets of dust and grime. The Academy's catalogue revealed that it had published nothing at all on the history and contemporary conditions of the state's Urdu-speakers. All it had were a couple of tomes on Urdu poetry—whose titles did not rouse my interest.

Next I headed to the neighbouring Madrasa Aliya, a vast colonial building set behind an imposing wall, littered with political graffiti and posters of film stars. This institution has an impressive history—it was established in 1781 by Lord Hastings to train a class of Islamic clerics who could work with the East India Company. At its prime, the Madrasa Aliya was a noted centre of Islamic scholarship. Of that past 'glory', almost nothing remains today, however. A vast sea of slummy tenements, built with canvas sheets and slivers of tin over fragile bamboo frames, dotted with piles of accumulating garbage and hillocks of fresh human excreta encircles, the Madrasa's walls. Women—desperately poor—cooked on paraffin stoves on the narrow pavement, while a team of toddlers whooped around chasing a deflated football through the enveloping filth.

I slipped through the gates and climbed up a flight of broad stairs, stained with streaks of paan-spittle, into the main building. I wanted to visit the library, which, I presumed, contained tomes dating back to Hastings' time, but it was shut.

I trudged off to the premises of the West Bengal Board of Madrasa Education, located just across the street. Seated behind a dizzying pile of files, I spotted a bespectacled woman, who sported a giant bindi on her forehead. My query in English for any information evoked only an angry waving of hand towards a poorly lit stairway.

I ascended the stairway, and passed by a couple of office rooms. Men and women clicked away at ancient typewriters, while others gossiped or slurped tea. Several chairs, set before file-laden desks, were empty, even though it was early afternoon—their occupants had, presumably, slipped off early for the day. Two men grunted in their seats in deep slumber. In one room, a giant poster of the late lamented Jyoti Basu, former 'Marxist' Chief Minister of West Bengal, graced the wall. 'Jyoti Basu Amar Rahe!', it piously screamed. Evidently, the Madrasa Board was just another government agency to promote the ruling political party.

I arrived at the office of the Secretary, where I asked him for literature in English about the Board. He did not have anything with him, he confessed, and advised me to approach one of his many subordinates, who was seated in another room, on another floor. This man leaned against a towering pillar of files, and was clearly not pleased with my arrival. 'I am not sure if we have published any such literature,' he grunted. He turned to his peon and asked, 'Have we?', but the peon was as clueless as he, and, before him, the Secretary had been. He asked me for my address, promising to post me something if he did come across it.

It's been almost half a year now, but I have received nothing so far.

That, then, in brief, was what I saw of Muslim life in Kolkata in that hurried, week-long trip.