Rampur, UTTAR PRADESH:

Was the adrak halwa truly created for an ailing Nawab? Determined to find the origins of the halwa, food researcher Tarana Khan looks for clues in Rampur’s libraries, kitchens and at a local halwa festival.

We needed to cook adrak halwa urgently before publishing it in our series on forgotten foods for Scroll.in. Pakistani writer Muneeza Shamsie had inherited the sweetmeat recipe from her parents’ cooking diary, and added it to an article on her family’s gastronomic journey from Rampur to Karachi. The recipe required three straight hours of cooking. But since there was a shortage of gas supply in her country, I—as the curator of the series—gallantly stepped in. My old cook Akhtar bhai and I could take turns to stir and sauté the halwa. I was curious about the roots of adrak halwa,a specialty of my hometown Rampur.

Muneeza’s mother, Jahanara Habibullah, was the sister-in-law of Nawab Raza Ali Khan (ruled 1930-1949), and had experienced the best culinary traditions of the famed Rampur royal dastarkhwan. She had written in detail about the cuisine in her memoir, Remembrance of Days Past: Glimpses of a Princely State During the Raj. Their household in Karachi had two Rampur khansamas (male chefs), Sabir and Amjad, who had transported Rampur’s culinary traditions to Pakistan. The recipe for adrak halwa was adapted by Muneeza’s gourmand father, Isha’at Habibullah, from the cooking techniques of the two khansamas.

But adrak halwa no longer appears at our dining table during winter. The image of adrak halwa being cooked for my grandfather and set in a silver bowl from which Nana Abba took a spoonful on cold winter mornings is probably a family memory that predates my childhood. In fact, I don’t remember ever eating it as a child.

Culinary wisdom—which I must have accessed through collective memory—dictated that October, the month of tender ginger shoots, was the best time to cook the halwa. Muneeza’s recipe called for an elaborate list of ingredients, and a painstaking procedure which began with soaking the shoots overnight, and grinding it thrice on the sil-batta with some milk.

I conserved manpower, aka Akhtar bhai, for sauteing while I used the mixer grinder. The ginger paste needed to first be put through a sieve to remove the fibres, and then cooked in milk, ghee, and cream till it was thick enough to drop from a spoon. The real work began when we added sugar, and sautéd it to a deep golden hue. It took an hour of vigorous stirring for the ghee to separate from the halwa, and form a thick glistening layer. I unscrupulously drained it by half.

I tested the halwa on my unsuspecting cousin and his non-Rampuri wife. The wife curled her lips, and said she’d never had a more obnoxious sweet dish. My cousin asked for a second helping. I loved the halwa, but it had a sharp, spicy and gingery aftertaste that clung to the back of my throat. My husband said it tasted like hakim’s majoun (medical concoction), and that I should have sautéed it more; he remembered a darker adrak halwa being cooked in his ancestral home. I gritted my teeth, smiled, and told him to join us in sauteing the next time we prepared the halwa.

Muneeza’s recipe called for an elaborate list of ingredients, and a painstaking procedure which began with soaking the shoots overnight, and grinding it thrice on the sil-batta with some milk.

His comment also amused me, though. Citing a blanket oral history, several articles and food blogs mention that the halwa was devised by the Rampur khansamas when a Nawab was advised by his hakim to eat ginger for knee pain. The Nawab, who hated ginger, was surreptitiously fed the halwa, and grew fond of it. Always a curious food researcher, I decided to dig deeper.

Was it created for an ailing Nawab in the huge Rampur kitchens, or was it an organic amalgamation of multiple cuisines of that period? Culinary exchanges were the norm of the time, and the Rampur cuisine had acquired several dishes and modified their Pathan cuisine under the influence of the Mughal and Awadhi cuisines. Working on a research project centred around culinary memory and lost heritage varieties, I had been translating nineteenth century cookbook manuscripts preserved in the Rampur Raza Library. I turned to these to find the origins of the halwa.

Digging in libraries and kitchens

Known to be culinary connoisseurs, Rampur Nawabs used their elaborate dining tables as a facet of diplomacy. Persian cookbook manuscripts were collected and commissioned by the Nawabs as we collect recipe books—a frame of reference and a guide for culinary transformation. Some of the Persian cookbook manuscripts at the Raza Library are copies of original Mughal or Awadhi cookbooks; a few were commissioned by the Nawabs as reference books of sorts.

One slim volume, Nuskha hai ta’am (Food Recipes), identifies Nawab Kalbe Ali Khan (ruled 1865-1887) as its author. It begins rather unconventionally, with recipes of 11 halwas, most of them variations of the iconic sohan halwa. Adrak halwa doesn’t find a mention in this manual of Rampur cuisine. Another cookbook, Risala dar tarkeeb ta’am (Compilation of Recipes), written under the patronage of Khansaheb Muhammad Shah Khan of Nankar—possibly a nobleman from Rampur tehsil of Nankar—was collected in 1816. This also doesn’t mention the adrak halwa in its repertoire of Mughal and Awadh-inspired dishes. These two volumes are the only ones written under the patronage of Rampur aristocracy.

However, two other volumes—the Risala dar tarkeeb ta’am and Khwaan e Neymat (The Receptacle of Divine Bounty)—contain recipes similar to adrak halwa. It calls for just three ingredients: ginger, sugar and ghee. No milk, cream, spices, and aromatics are prescribed. Published in 1876, Alwaan e Neymat (The Highest Divine Bounty), an Urdu cookbook by Munshi Bulaqi Das Dehlvi, has a similar recipe too.

Interestingly, all the three recipes call for blanching adrak before it is ground to reduce the spicy aftertaste. Adrak halwa was therefore definitely cooked in the nineteenth century in Mughal cuisine. Haft Khwan Shaukat, the oldest surviving cookbook printed in Rampur which ran three editions (1873,1881 and 1883), also doesn’t include the adrak halwa.

I next looked through Shahi Dastarkhwaan—a Rampur cuisine cookbook written by a Rampuri khansama and published in 1957—with several dishes from Rampur cuisine of that time. Latafat Ali Khan Rampuri, the author of Shahi Dastarkhwaan (Royal Dining), describes an elaborate adrak halwa recipe with the list of ingredients corresponding to Muneeza’s heirloom recipe—milk, cream, spices and aromatics along with the basic three ingredients. As in Muneeza’s recipe, no blanching is involved. Rather, the ground ginger is to be boiled in milk. Ali Khan ends with the important line: “Ye halwa Rampur ki tarz par banane ki tarkeeb hai, ummeed hai ki pasand farmaya jayega.” (This halwa is prepared by the special Rampur recipe, I hope you like it.)

At some point in Rampur’s culinary history, the adrak halwa evolved—in the hands of the Rampuri khansamas—into an exquisite sweetmeat with a differentiated procedure and sumptuous ingredients. Today, it is rarely cooked in Rampur households, possibly due to the time and effort involved. Most Rampuris buy adrak halwa from Amanat Bhai’s shop, renowned for its halwa sohan. So that’s where my quest took me next: the kitchen workshop above the famous Amanat Bhai ki Laal Dukan.

Amanat Khan set up shop in the 1930s outside the Rampur fort, and became known for supplying halwa sohan, boondi ladoos and other sweets to Nawab Sayed Raza Ali Khan (ruled 1930-1949), his son Nawab Sayed Murataza Ali Khan as well as for other members of the royal family. The shop is now looked after by Amanat bhai’s grandson, Haris Raza, who inherited the business and recipes from his father.

Haris measured out samnak (wheat germ flour) and semolina, mixed it in milk, and cooked it in a large kadhai; he added ginger paste when the mixture became brownish. This was a completely different recipe for adrak halwa. Samnak is the base for Rampuri halwa sohan, and is never used in adrak halwa. Amanat bhai’s adrak halwa—which is fabulous, with only a slight gingery tang—is a variation of halwa sohan adapted for popular taste.

Most Rampuris buy adrak halwa from Amanat Bhai’s shop, renowned for its halwa sohan. So that’s where my quest took me next: the kitchen workshop above the famous Amanat Bhai ki Laal Dukan.

As the stars of my halwa journey aligned, the district administration of Rampur, in collaboration with the Women’s Welfare Department, decided to organise a halwa festival in October 2021. All the khansamas and women chefs of Rampur—who had started home catering during the covid-19 pandemic—were invited to participate in Zaika-e-Rampur, a halwa-tasting festival. The ingenuity of Rampur khansamas was on full display at the festival. There were several weird and fabulous halwas we tasted that day, including neem halwa, meat halwa, turmeric halwa, and dates halwa.

I had already been working with some khansamas to revive the heirloom dishes of the Rampuri cuisine through our project, ‘Forgotten Foods: Culinary memories and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India’ under the lead of University of Sheffield. The series on Scroll.in was a part of this project. As a social impact effort, we sponsored chef Suroor and Bhura khansama—both local chefs of Rampur—in setting up their stall at Zaika-e-Rampur.

Since my halwa of interest was adrak, I watched Bhura bhai closely as he fashioned a rustic wood chulha, set a large degh on it, and prepared the ginger paste. I was in for a surprise when he fried the ginger paste in ghee for a few minutes, and then cooked it in milk. The frying mellows the aftertaste, he told me. There was no blanching, or boiling in milk. Even the dry fruits for garnish were fried, and added to the halwa.

This was the fourth recipe I had come across, indicative of the circuitous transformations that adrak halwa had undergone through the centuries. Interestingly, the other Rampur khansamas like Mehfooz khansama, who owns a popular restaurant in the city, use the same procedure as Bhura bhai. Some others add jaggery and honey instead of sugar.

I have tasted at least seven variations of adrak halwa through my research, and can say with some authority that the oral history of the Nawab with knee pain cannot be corroborated. Adrak halwa in Rampur—at some point at the beginning of the twentieth century—took on an elaborate form quite different from the Mughal-Awadh style. The people of Rampur made it a part of their winter halwas—one they ate with gusto to combat the cold and heal stiff joints—until it seeped into culinary memories and almost-forgotten manuscripts.

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Dr. Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and food historian based in Rampur. Her articles on Rampur cuisine, culture and oral history have appeared in Eaten Magazine, Al Jazeera, Scroll, The Wire, Open Magazine and DailyO. Her book on Rampur cuisine, ‘Rampuri Cuisine: Food History, Memories and Recipes’, will be published by Penguin India in 2022. She is currently working on a Global Challenges Research Fund and Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project, ‘Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India’. She also curated the Forgotten Foods series of articles on Scroll for the project and is currently co-editing an anthology ‘Forgotten Foods: a Culinary Journey Through Muslim South Asia’.

source: http://www.thelocavore.in / The Locavore / Home> Culture / by Dr Tarana Hussain Khan / July 12th, 2022

INDIA:

The official video of Pasha Bhai, a new hip-hop song written and sung by Bengaluru-based artist Mohammad Affan Pasha has over 30,000 views on YouTube. In it he is rapping on the streets, not in any upmarket part of the IT city, but in its underbelly on Bazaar Road, surrounded by other young men of the neighbourhood. They are grooving to a catchy tune in the vocabulary of their locale—not Kannada, nor Urdu or English. The song is in a language of home and hearth—Dakhni.

Often called proto-Urdu or Qadim-Urdu which means old Urdu, the Dakhni language is having a contemporary moment with songs, dances, appearances on Instagram reels, and plenty of comedy. Dakhni literally means “of the Deccan” and is spoken in large parts of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. The dialect sounds like an amalgamation of Hindustani, Telugu, Marathi. Those not familiar with its sound outside the region would recognise it instantly as how the actor Mehmood Ali often spoke in Bollywood films or most recently, what artist Danish Sait uses for his satirical videos.

Dakhni is an Indo-Aryan language that dates back to the 14th century. There were many waves in which Dakhni is said to have evolved, but its key origin is dated to Mohammad bin Tughlaq’s migration of the capital of the Delhi Sultanate from Delhi to Daulatabad, carrying townspeople thousands of kilometres into the Vindhyas. Gradually, the language they spoke in the north developed into a local version with many inputs from the south.

The language is sometimes mistakenly seen as limited to Hyderabad, and Hyderabadi Urdu. “Dakhni died as a written language, but remained a spoken language, even till today,” Yunus Lasania, a journalist and history enthusiast, told me, as he read a couplet off his iPad. “The creation of Dakhni in the 14th or 15th centuries resulted in Dakhni, Urdu and also some Persian and Arabic words entering vocabularies of regional languages like Telugu.” Lasania pointed to the word roju which means day in Telugu and comes from the word roz with the same meaning in Persian. “Today, in Hyderabad and the Deccan, we speak in Dakhni, but read and write in the standardised modern Urdu, which we mostly don’t speak in.” 

Pasha told me of the time when he would write in “straight Urdu” but the lines sounded flat and left him cold. It was only when he began expressing himself in his own language—the one he spoke on the streets and to his friends and family—that it lit up the studio. The enthusiastic response he got when recording on the streets or from fans has completely surprised him. “They say north Indian languages are assertive and can convey aggression better,” he said. “Sure, Dakhni is not aggressive, but it is vibrant, playful and informal. Our idiom is personal and it has a twist which these other languages do not have. It is energetic, sounds rooted and the metaphors we use come straight from our everyday lives.”

In the current moment, Dakhni is seeing a sort of resurgence, an awareness of it not witnessed in popular culture since actor Ali livened up the Hindustani and straight-Urdu speaking Bombay cine-world with his sprinkling of nakko, hallu, jaatu, kaiko in films like Padosan. It was so entwined with comedy in his rendition that few realised that the language has the evolution and history of India embedded within it. The renewed interest in Dakhni today stands as a counter to the political casting of Urdu as a “foreign” language and the insistence on the supremacy of Hindi as the only truly Indian tongue. Dakhni, a coalescence of many linguistic strands and a blend of cultures, stands a bulwark against this singular political narrative.

Rida Tharana is a Bengaluru-based Instagram influencer, who presently makes content in Dakhni and has 600,000 followers. She told me that she makes it a point to write a caption, or a few lines under the Dakhni content that talk about the language itself. “I am keen that my followers love the language like I do,” she said. Tharana’s series of Mom reels are popular on Instagram, riffing on mothers and expectations of their children. The language the mother-daughter characters speak in is Dakhni. Both Pasha and Tharana told me that Dakhni speakers have often experienced a degree of shame while conversing in Dakhni, hesitant that they may be mocked for it. Slowly, they have ventured to wear it on their sleeves. They told me that radio jockeys in Bengaluru, artists like Danish Sait and even popular jockeys in Chennai like Zoha Sanofar make it a point to use the language and deliver the punch in their lines in Dakhni.

Zoe Woodbury High is a doctoral scholar at the University of Chicago, researching culture during the reign of Ibrahim Adil Shah II, part of Bijapur’s Adil Shahi dynasty. She reckons that with its unique place on the Indian map, Bijapur can be termed the centre of present-day Dakhni. The city in northern Karnataka has infused the language with Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu. She told me that what she finds fascinating is how Dakhni transcends the linguistic boundaries of the states. “It travels far and its map can be placed right above the boundaries meant to demarcate Marathi-speaking, Kannada-speaking and Telugu-speaking people,” she said. “It creates its own zone of usage, defying the political boundaries of states.”

At present, Dakhni is a language that has no script associated with it and no codified dictionary or grammar. It is seen as informal and provides a classic instance of what the writer and critic UR Ananthamurthy called a language of the backyard, languages used extensively in homes or by women to communicate with family, children or others they needed to interact with. These languages were evocative and intimate. But it was something people did not write in or use in formal interactions with the world. The languages of the front yard were ones in which official business was conducted and in which you interacted with the state when you needed to. “Women played a big role in keeping Dakhni alive for hundreds of years,” Sajjad Shahid, a visiting professor at the University of Hyderabad, told me. “It was not the language of officials and scholars who would straighten up and use the more formal Persian, Urdu or later Telugu.”

Dakhni is not recorded as a language by the Indian Census and several Dakhni speakers record Urdu as their mother tongue. The 2011 Census recorded 5,07,72,631 Urdu speakers in India, which is a drop of 1.5 percent since 2001. Other than Konkani, Urdu is the only other scheduled language to show a drop. Interestingly, the number of Urdu speakers in the south—that is Telangana and Karnataka—have risen and they outnumber their northern counterparts. At a time when Urdu is under a concerted political attack, more so in northern states, with it being labelled as a language of Muslim invaders, Dakhni opens a new frontier in this debate. Dakhni may have been the petri dish that allowed Urdu, as we know of it now, to have blossomed.

The founder of Hyderabad, Mohammad Quli Qutb Shah, wrote in Dakhni and was a great contributor to Dakhni literature. However, Dakhni suffered after the 18th century, when, due to the Mughal conquests of the Deccan and the creation of modern Urdu, poets started shifting to Urdu for patronage. The nizams came as Mughal-appointed governors of the Deccan in 1724 and made Persian and then Urdu, official languages in the region.

Over the years, as patronage to Persian and Urdu was stepped up and literary work stopped in Dakhni, the importance of Dakhni shrank and it was reduced to being seen as a mongrel language. It found itself reduced to a dialect just like Braj Bhasha or Awadhi in the north. “This change-over was complete by the middle of the 18th century when Dakhni-Urdu ceased to be a literary medium except in the far off Karnatak and Mysore regions,” the historian HK Sherwani wrote.

“The tragedy is that with the advent of so much entertainment on television flooding homes for nearly 30 years now, a certain kind of language has been uniformly spread across the country,” Shahid said. “This may have had some advantages, but the downside is the disappearance of so many words, variety, vocabulary and idiom of many minor languages and Dakhni too. That is a big loss.” Lasania is not so gloomy. In the new and young and spirited Dakhni music and popular usage, he sees a new route for a revival of the language. “Dakhni is not pure or hung up about being straight,” he said. “It has elements of Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu and has seen so many ebbs and flows.”

When an ill-informed debate on Urdu being “foreign” is conducted routinely in an attempt to brand it as an outsider tongue, the vintage of Dakhni acts as a counter to this disinformation. It is Dakhni which is the precursor of what we now know as Urdu. To appreciate how it developed in the bazars of the Deccan centuries ago, continuing to retain its links with a host of other Indian languages is not just cultural trivia, but a fact with political implications. The Bharatiya Janata Party government’s thrust in the cultural sphere is on characterising the past as homogenous and Hindi and Hindu alone as truly native. Dakhni, in which we find Urdu, Sanskrit, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada and Marathi blended in one language, is a counter symbol reminding us that so many diverse cultures that constitute India are equally indigenous, old, and born of confluence and not exclusion.

Dakhni’s greatest quality is that it is a capacious bowl of words, similes and styles, borrowing from multiple languages and always being open to absorbing new influences. This will ensure it thrives, as it has over centuries. With more artists curious about it and choosing to perform in Dakhni, its afterlife is significant, especially in today’s political context. Dakhni’s re-emergence and its spirited and assertive embrace by younger speakers, may well be a metaphor of the impossibility of one singular narrative dominating and being imposed on the country. India’s pluralism is rooted in its many backyards. Ask any of the Dakhni rappers. They are singing it loud on the streets.

SEEMA CHISHTI is a writer and journalist based in Delhi. She was formerly the Delhi editor for BBC India and a deputy editor at the Indian Express. She is the co-author of Note by Note, The India Story (1947-2017) and the author of Anees and Sumitra, Tales & Recipes from a Khichdi Family.

source: http://www.caravanmagazine.in / The Caravan / Home> Culture> Commentary / by Seema Chishti / October 18th, 2022

NEW DELHI:

Mushtari Khatoon supervised the evacuation of 50 men, women and children, including a mother, who jumped across three rooftops carrying her six-day-old baby to reach safety.

When the phone rang early on the morning of 25 February—Mushtari Khatoon, her husband Mohammed Hakim and their three teenaged children were asleep in their home in north-east Delhi’s Chandu Nagar. As Hakim handed her the phone and Mushtari grabbed it, a chill ran through her spine. “They are going to kill us, Chachi! For God’s sake, save us!” howled her young nephew Muhammad Niyaj at the other end.

The petite Mushtari, 42, rushed out in a blind panic to Khajuri Khas, across the dusty, broken road, from where her family had called. Trouble had been brewing, but no one had imagined the cauldron of communal hatred would boil over with such vengeance in Delhi, which was hosting US President Donald Trump at the time. This madness took away 53 lives, both Muslims and Hindus, and left hundreds homeless and orphaned, in the north-eastern fringes of the capital.

Reaching the lanes of Khajuri Khas, Mushtari watched in disbelief as hundreds of armed men shouting “Jai Shri Ram” flooded the narrow lanes, dressed in riot-police gear. “Carrying petrol bombs, country-made pistols, lathis and tear-gas shells, they went on the rampage,” Fayaz Alam, Mushtari’s nephew, says.

“I trembled within, but knew I had to jump in, else my family would be killed,” recalls Mushtari. She ferried them, making five trips cross to her home in Chandu Nagar, a Muslim-majority area. On her last round, however, she got stuck along with a crowd, their lives hanging by a thin thread.

Khajuri Khas is a grubby urban settlement, where homes of Hindus and Muslims lie cheek-by-jowl with small businesses dotting the lanes. Skirted by open drains and the sludgy Chand Bagh nullah, it is home to migrant labourers who came here to build a better life. Mushtari and her large clan are among them.

Growing up in Bihar’s Khagaria district, Mushtari is a homemaker with only basic skills that would see her through in Delhi. However, that day she stood up to blind terror with the power of a matriarch.“The mob targeted Muslim households and forced them to leave their homes,” says Mohammad Munazir, who lost his small, windowless house, built with his life savings, in the mayhem.“I called the police at least 10 times, as did others, but nothing,” says Mushtari, a week later. The rioters busted doorways, broke open shutters and hounded out victims, while spitting communal taunts at them. Then they unleashed large-scale loot and arson. Targeted by the mob, some 150 terrified people took shelter on one Mehboob’s roof, escorted by paramilitary men. Meanwhile, the basement had been set ablaze. “We had no place to escape, and waited for a grisly end on that rooftop,” says 22-year-old student Mushahid.

Hysterical with fear, they explored their next move, when the paramilitary men ordered that the men must stay and the women and children should leave. “This is when I put my foot down. ‘Everyone will leave, else we will all die here’ I told them firmly,” says Mushtari. She then supervised the evacuation of 50 men, women and children, including a mother, who jumped across three rooftops carrying her six-day-old baby to reach safety.

These nine families were in her care, when we visited, in two tiny rooms, where they took turns to sleep. The couple opened up their home and hearts to create a safe house for these refugees of hatred.

As we walk back through the charred remains of destroyed homes, broken glass and the many dreams that died that day in Khajuri Khas, Mushtari clasps my hand, her eyes welling up in grief. This is the woman, who saved more lives than any policeman that day.

source: http://www.readersdigest.in / Reader’s Digest / Home> True Stories> Heroes / by Sanghamitra Chakraborty / April 27th, 2020

MADHYA PRADESH:

Riyaz Zaman and Mustafa Qamar Zaman decided to donate their entire standing crop to the state asking for the wheat to be distributed among the underprivileged.

Two brothers in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna district toiled away on their wheat field for months tending the crop with the hope of making a decent profit. But with the coronavirus pandemic striking terror and bringing the country to a standstill, they decided to donate the entire harvest to the state so that the poor and the needy can be fed.

The duo, Riyaz Zaman and Mustafa Qamar Zaman, approached the Guna district administration and expressed interest in donating their standing crop in an area of 25 bighas (around 6 acres) to the state.

The district administration swung into action immediately. Led by Guna district collector S. Vishwanathan, the local administration took possession of the land and started harvesting the crop.

“They are devout Muslims belonging to the Bohra community, and they wanted to do their bit for the state and the country. Hence, they dedicated the crop with the condition that this would be distributed among the poor,” says R. B. Sindoskar, the deputy collector of Guna, who is overseeing the harvest of the crop.

Talking to Reader’s Digest, Sindoskar said that the crop once cut would yield more than 100 quintals of wheat, which will be donated to the state granary.

The crop in the field located in the Bhullan Pura area of the Guna district, Sindoskar says, has almost been cut, and it is being transported to a granary in Guna. Sindoskar estimates that at today’s rates, the wheat would cost around ₹2 lakh.

The teachings of the Bohra Muslim community religious head Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin—that helping those in need is the greatest service to humankind—was the inspiration behind the two brothers’ charitable effort.

“They have set an example for others,” says Sindoskar, also adding that the wheat will indeed be distributed for the cause the brothers intended.

source: http://www.readersdigest.in / Reader’s Digest / Home> True Stories> Heroes / by V Kumara Swamy / April 20th, 2020

NEW DELHI:

While Mustafabad heals, Al Hind Hospital is now a sanctuary—over 50 people, left homeless by the politics of hate, are housed there.

24 February 2020 was a busy day at Al Hind Hospital at Delhi’s Old Mustafabad. This three-storied hospital, in a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood, found itself in the eye of a communal storm, and its founding doctor—40-year-old M. A. Anwar, a migrant from Bihar—thrust into the foreground.

“Patients started coming in from 2:30–3 a.m. The facility is small; we didn’t have the infrastructure, but became the only refuge for those who needed medical help,” Anwar says.

Through the next few days of communal fire, nearly 600 patients streamed in, turning the first floor into a makeshift emergency ward. Mattresses and sheets were requisitioned, ropes were strung across the room to hang drip feeds. Alarmingly, many of the injuries Anwar treated were from bullets and pellets; some were worse. “Every wound I witnessed wasn’t just trauma—it was plain savagery. They spread a man’s legs until his groin split in half.”

“There were attacks everywhere. All the entry points into Mustafabad were barricaded,” he continues. “We tried to call ambulances but the Centralized Accident Trauma Services, meant for this very purpose, flatly refused.” The police were no better. “We had wheeled out a patient with a severe head injury on a stretcher, and others with pellet injuries, about a quarter of a kilometre from here.” When an ambulance organized by some of Anwar’s doctor friends reached, the police refused entry. “They said, ‘Our constable was killed, so how does it matter if eight or 10 of yours also die’. Kids with pellet injuries were beaten up mercilessly by men in uniform.” 

Handicapped by institutional failure, Anwar found himself doubting his ability to help. But, he found his resolve soon, “I decided, we will try our best. For the rest, kudrat [nature] will take its course.” 

His faith paid off. Justice S. Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court was to hear a plea on 25 February on allowing safe passage to the wounded from Al Hind Hospital to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, which was better equipped to treat these severe injuries. Advocate Suroor Mander arranged for Anwar to testify on the desperate situation at the hospital. “The honourable judge—simply doing his duty, listening to those affected—saved us.”

Doing one’s duty—and doing it well—is exactly what sets Anwar apart too. Not abandoning his station, even when he had the opportunity to, speaks volumes of his commitment to his profession. “It is during times of trouble that a doctor is needed. I didn’t have the time to think it through, but had I fled that day with my family, I would have lived with the regret that I didn’t do my duty. I have just done my job.”

Witnessing this scale of violence could shake anyone’s faith inhumanity but Anwar disagrees: “We all have our conscience. It’s been suppressed to an extent in some; sometimes it feels like it has taken leave of others. But everyone has a sense of what is right. And everyone knows what happened was wrong,even if they don’t have the courage to speak up.”

While Mustafabad heals, Al Hind Hospital is now a sanctuary—over 50 people, left homeless by the politics of hate, are housed there. “We are trying to rehabilitate them. Give them rent and rations for a couple of months; most of them had low-income jobs, so we are also trying to find them work. Currently, we are building a database of those who want to help and those in need—to bring them together.”

Anwar moved to Delhi almost 18 years ago from Bihar’s Champaran district. After he decided to pursue a career in medicine, his mother would tell him, that once he became a doctor, he shouldn’t charge fees. “I think, now, I have kept her word,” he laughs.

source: http://www.readersdigest.in / Reader’s Digest / Home> True Stories> Heroes / by Naorem Anuja / April 29th, 2020

INDIA:

In the mid 1940s, as the Muslim League began to realise its vision of a separate nation state for the subcontinent’s Muslim population under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, it met with resistance not only from the Congress’ high command but also from the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind (JUH), a political organisation that was founded in 1919. In this excerpt from Venkat Dhulipala’s Creating a New Medina, the leader of the JUH, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, presents his reasons for his opposition to the Muslim League and the two-nation theory.

The JUH now formed a separate party, the Azad Muslim Parliamentary Board, to fight the elections and ward off the criticism that it was merely a handmaiden of the Congress. Its chief campaigner was Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, the principal of the Darul Uloom, Deoband, and one of the foremost Islamic scholars in the country. Madani, as his name suggests, had an intimate connection with Medina as he had been a renowned teacher of Hadith in that holy city for nearly fifteen years. Madani remained steadfast in his advocacy of a composite undivided India and emerged as the most prominent alim opposed to the ML and its Pakistan demand. Reacting to the accusation that he had ‘joined the Hindus’, he wrote to a correspondent in Rawalpindi

You write that I have joined the Hindus and you are stunned by that. Why do you get affected by such propaganda?  Muslims have been together with the Hindus since they moved to Hindustan. And I have been with them since I was born. I was born and raised here. If two people live together in the same country, same city, they will share lot of things with each other. Till the time there are Muslims in India, they will be together with the Hindus. In the bazaars, in homes, in railways, trams, in buses, lorries, in stations, colleges, post offices, jails, police stations, courts, councils, assemblies, hotels, etc. You tell me where and when we don’t meet them or are not together with them? You are a zamindar. Are not your tenants Hindus? You are a trader; don’t you buy and sell from Hindus?  You are a lawyer don’t you have Hindu clients? You are in a district or municipal board; won’t you be dealing with Hindus? Who is not with the Hindus? All ten crore Muslims of India are guilty then of being with the Hindus.

Madani believed that the ‘fundamental institution of contemporary political life was the territorial nation-state’ and India was indeed such a State . The main problem facing India was British imperialism which could only be overthrown through a joint Hindu-Muslim struggle. This would have the effect of also freeing other parts of Islamic world from British yoke, since it was control over India that allowed them to hold on to their worldwide Empire. Madani opposed Pakistan since he saw it as a British ploy to divide and weaken the nationalist movement and extend British control over the subcontinent. He pointed to their dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and reducing its component parts to colonial appendages. Madani therefore attacked ML and Pakistan in a number of different ways. To begin with, he accused Jinnah of deliberately not coming up with a concrete plan about Pakistan. Quoting a news report from the Haqiqat of Lucknow, he pointed out that when Jinnah was asked at a press conference in Karachi about what Pakistan meant, the Qaid asked for more time to provide clarifications on the matter. On being pressed further, Jinnah directed the inquisitive newsman to existing writings and his own statements on Pakistan. When a Muslim editor reportedly pointed out that he had read all the existing literature and concluded that Pakistan was suicidal for the Indian Muslims, Jinnah got upset and refused to take further questions. For Madani this meant that Mr. Jinnah till date had not fully thought through or worked out the implications of Pakistan.

By contrast, Madani claimed that he himself had thought deeply on the matter and proceeded to lay out Pakistan’s devastating consequences for the Indian Muslims. While earlier JUH commentators had highlighted its dangers for the ‘minority provinces’ Muslims, Madani added that even those belonging to the majority provinces would find themselves in the lurch. He made it clear that according to the principles of the Lahore Resolution itself, existing provincial boundaries would have to be altered. It would entail Muslims in eastern Punjab and western Bengal being excluded from Pakistan. After all numerical majority was the deemed principle for partition, and non-Muslim districts in the Muslim majority areas could not be forced to join Pakistan. Assam too would not be a part of Pakistan as Muslims were a small minority in the Brahmaputra Valley. Madani noted that Iqbal too had talked of severing the Ambala division from Punjab to make it more religiously homogenous. By echoing the official Congress stance on the issue of territorial division Madani squarely called into question Jinnah and Liaquat’s claims that Pakistan would include six provinces in their entirety.    

Madani also ridiculed the idea that Pakistan would be an Islamic State based on principles of the Sharia. He noted that the Asr-i Jadid of Calcutta had quoted Jinnah as saying that Pakistan’s constitution would be created by a Constituent Assembly elected by its people. Madani also referred to the Shahbaz of Lahore that carried an Urdu translation of Jinnah’s interview to the News Chronicle of London, in which he likened Pakistan to a European style democracy. Jinnah had also made it clear that Pakistan’s basic industries would be state controlled thus making it more akin to a socialist State. Madani’s extensive and careful citation of various newspaper reports in his pamphlets against Pakistan attests to the importance of the popular press not only in terms of being a critical site for debating Pakistan but also as a vehicle for dissemination of information and ideas to a wide audience.

Madani was however selective in quoting Jinnah since he largely ignored his many public statements wherein the Qaid asserted that Pakistan’s government would be established according the principles of the Sharia. Even if Madani quoted one such speech where Jinnah asked the minority provinces Muslims to sacrifice themselves for the purpose of establishing such a State, he dismissed it as a charade (dhong). After all Jinnah was not a practicing Muslim and Islamic practices had no meaning for him. The JUH ulama would go on to call Jinnah Kafir-iAzam and Churchill’s showboy. Madani also pointed out that Jinnah did not particularly care for even the worldly needs of fellow Muslims. Jinnah had after all sacrificed Muslim legislative majorities in Punjab and Bengal in the 1916 Pact. Closer home, Madani noted that the staff of Jinnah’s newspaper the Dawn, included only three Muslims while it had six Hindus, two Christians, a Jew, and even a Qadiani such as Z.A Suleri.

The League’s anti-Islamic character, its close association with the imperialist government, its dangerous ploy of Pakistan and the devastating consequences it would have for Indian Muslims were themes that Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani reiterated in a number of pamphlets on the eve of the elections as he tried to wean Muslim voters away from the ML. These were pithily summarized in a widely circulated appeal to the Muslim voter that listed all the anti-Muslim activities of the ML over the past three decades.

1)      The ML had betrayed Islam by undermining a comprehensive Shariat Bill in the Central Assembly by adding conditions that rendered it useless and dead.

2)       The ML toed the government line by passing the Divorce (Khula) Bill which made it unnecessary for Muslim judges to adjudicate divorce in Muslim families. When the JUH ulama sought to redress this issue by introducing a Qazi Bill, the ML at the government’s behest opposed and killed this bill since it did not want the ulama to be invested with any authority.

3)      The ML had co-operated with the government to enable the passage of the Army Bill even though 500 ulama signed a fatwa opposing it.

4)      The ML had not objected to the transfer of the Shahidgunj court case from Punjab to Calcutta thus sinking the Muslim cause forever in the Bay of Bengal.

5)      The ML supported amendments to the Civil Marriage Act allowing marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims even though it knew that such marriages were against the Quran.

6)      The ML forced the Sarda bill upon Muslims with government help even though the ulama protested against such an imposition.

7)      The ML signed the Lucknow Pact of 1916 reducing the Muslims to legislative minorities in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal.

8)      During the 1930 Round Table Conference, the ML got together with Europeans, Indian Christians, and Anglo-Indians and again reduced Bengal and Punjab Muslims to a minority in their own province, making their demand for establishing Pakistan in these very areas rather ironic.

9)      The ML repeated this despicable tactic again after the Communal Award of 1932.

10)  The ML supported the government in imposing stiff conditions for obtaining drivers licenses making life more difficult for poor drivers.

11)   The ML did not condemn the government for shooting dead 47 Muslims who were part of a public procession mourning the hanging of Abdul Qayyum by the Sind government.

12)  The ML government in Bengal was responsible for the death of 35 lakh people during the Bengal famine, a majority of who were Muslims.

13)  The government of Sir Nazimuddin was extremely corrupt and government contracts were mostly handed over to friends and relatives of the high and mighty including many Hindus.

14)  The Central government dropped 700 bombs from the air upon the NWFP as part of its offensive against the rebellion killing a number of Muslims. When the Congress member from Madras, Mr. Satyamurthy introduced a motion to condemn these wanton acts of the government, the ML did not support him and instead kept silent.

15)   While the ML raised a hue and cry over atrocities perpetrated upon Muslims in the minority provinces by the Congress governments, when Rajendra Prasad offered an enquiry to be headed by the Chief Justice of the Federal Court, the ML flatly declined and instead demanded a royal commission to probe the charges.

16)  The ML did not raise even a murmur of protest when the government itself declined to set up a Royal Commission for this purpose.

17)  The ML did nothing for the cause of the Palestinians or the Muslims of Zanzibar.

An excerpt from Venkat Dhulipala’s Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India.  Reproduced with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

VENKAT DHULIPALA :Venkat Dhulipala is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and teaches courses on the history of modern South Asia, comparative colonial histories and introductory surveys in Global History.

source: http://www.caravanmagazine.in / The Caravan / Home> News> History / by Venkat Dhulipala / March 08th, 2015