Friday Times Helps Us to Lose Our Pakistani Identity

We Are All Converts

by Amitava Kumar

[The writer marries a Pakistani Muslim girl and writes about his conversation]

“Safdar, how did your parents take the news of your conversion?”

It was difficult for me to tell her that I had never thought that I had converted.

I think nani [the Muslim girl’s grandmother] knew that I did not think of myself as a Muslim…

During my visit to Karachi, a boy I met first apologized for posing a personal question, and then asked me if I had converted. I repeated to him the lines of poetry my friend Ajai Singh had writte in Lucknow: “Mian Aadha Hindu Hoon, Adha Musalman Hoon / Main Poora Hindustan Hoon (I am half a Hindu, half a Muslik / I am all of India)” I told the boy about nani calling me Safdar. I was also the one who responded to the name I’ve had since I was a boy. I wasn’t only one or the other; I was prepared to be both….

Pakistani writer Intizar Hussain says: “I’m a Muslim, but I always feel there is a Hindu sitting inside me. I still feel I’m an exile who wanders between Karbala and Ayodhya’. Born in India, Hussain migrated to Pakistan post-partition. I was struck by the beauty of his words, and his sense of sublime rootlessness.

Source: Friday Times, March 23-29, 2001

FAULTLINES EXPOSED

·         Friday Times picked up this piece from an Indian journal Outlook. A Hindu male has married a Pakistani girl who is incidentally related to both Asma Jehangir and General Musharraf. How nice!

 

·         To marry the girl named Mona, the man poses as if he has embraced Islam. But he makes a straight confession that he hasn’t.

 

·         The Friday Times highlights Intizar Hussain’s saying in which he talks of being a Muslim with a Hindu sitting inside him.

 

·         Here again one can see the campaign for a psychological union of the Pakistanis and Indians – a prelude to merger. It is the same theme that the Indians repeat hundred times a day that “we are one, you were Hindus, you became Muslims, though we are all Indians.”