The Lucknow qawwal and ‘love jihad’

Published September 9, 2014
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

A POPULAR qawwal from Lucknow was invited to perform in Lahore, or so goes the apocryphal story I heard from a wit in Mumbai.

On his first day at the farshi soirée, right in the first row, replete with enormous sausage pillows and glistening white sheets, sat the leading Lahori connoisseurs of music. The genial qawwal was clad in Lucknow’s trademark flower-patterned sherwani and a matching cap. As he cleared his throat to align the singing voice with the third black key of the harmonium, a music enthusiast spotted the possibility that the evening was going to start with an overdone religious composition.

“Can we start with Heer instead?” The request from the front row befuddled the qawwal. “What is Heer, please? I’ve never sung it before,” the visitor pleaded.

They told him the story of Heer-Ranjha, how it was similar to Romeo-Juliet, Laila-Majnu, Abla-Antaar. It was about the tragedy of two doomed lovers — but chiefly about the girl, Heer, who dared to love Ranjha, a handsome lad from a rival village. In the end they both died, targeted by hatred spawned by their rival communities. The story moved the qawwal to tears and he could not sing that evening.

The next day he was to perform at Kasur where he pre-empted the hosts by confessing to his ignorance about Heer. Why not Sohni-Mahiwal then, came the collective request. It was, after all, yet another story of a local girl eloping with a boy from a banished community and how they both died in the end in each other’s arms. Requests followed elsewhere for the visitor to try singing the poems to Sassi-Punnu, Mirza-Sahiban and so forth.


Modi must get to know more about true love and its many celebrations across the mosaic he sees as a monolithic Hindu nation.


The gentleman from Lucknow was deeply affected by what he heard and returned home sooner than his family had thought he would. Upon being quizzed by his two young daughters about the hasty retreat, the qawwal was all praise for his Lahori hosts. They were a lovely people, very generous with their hospitality. “Lekin mujhey laga ke waha’n ke har ghar se koi larka ya larki bhaagey huey hai’n.” (I got a distinct feeling that a boy or a girl had eloped from every home I visited.)

To many of India’s cultural simpletons itching to join Hindutva’s battle against Quixotic windmills called ‘love jihad’ the story of Rani Rupmati and Baz Bahadur of Malwa would perhaps be even more complicated.

Belonging to the period of Emperor Akbar, the popular tragedy has a Muslim hero and a Muslim villain. One falls in love with a Hindu singer and marries her (according to Hindu and Muslim rites) while the other covets her as a bad guy would in a Hindi film, and in so doing defeats her husband Baz Bahadur in a battle. Tragically, the villain thereby forces the singer-queen to kill herself with poison.

There have been reports out of Tokyo about the percussion prowess of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a recent visit to Japan. The reports were sketchy, and it was not clear if and how the prime minister showed up as a trained player of drums, and of what kind — tabla, dholak, pakhavaj, mridangam, bongo. Or was he flaunting his skills with ancient Japan’s taiko drums?

What we can say with some degree of certainty, with the hindsight of his self-limiting politics of identity, is that, much like the qawwal from Lucknow, the prime minister needs to open up his cultural (and musical) apertures. He too must get to know more about true love and its many celebrations across the sprawling mosaic he sees as a monolithic Hindu nation, between boys and girls, men and women of different beliefs and languages.

After all, Mr Modi is only a manifestation of his patriarchal Hindutva flock, the leader of a party that is quietly acquiescing in, when it is not actively canvassing for, a cultural and physical segregation of simple folk — Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs that make up the beautifully complex Indian milieu.

The idea of ‘love jihad’ — a derogatory name coined for those Muslim boys who marry or befriend a Hindu girl to convert her to their religion — is an insult, among others, to the memory of the legendary Aruna Asaf Ali. Hindutva votaries would see the Gandhian revolutionary as a Hindu woman who betrayed her religion by taking a Muslim husband who became India’s first ambassador to the United States.

It would be demeaning to discuss in this context the lumpenised Hindutva perception of love and marriage outside hidebound religious and caste barriers, the narrow ideology it shores up. Acharya Giriraj Kishore, an ageing leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad told my journalist niece (who took a Hindu husband) a bizarre secret. Muslim men get surgery done “to give pleasure to our women”.

The Hindutva mobilisation in western Uttar Pradesh has spawned politically useful but overwhelmingly fictitious claims of Muslim men raping Hindu women or converting them by force. Crucial by-elections are due shortly for the Uttar Pradesh assembly where Mr Modi’s party did exceedingly well in May but could be struggling this time. While it is never too difficult to find the odd incident that matches the accusation of religiously inspired ‘marriages’ the claims mostly have an electorally handy purpose.

Mr Modi had similarly eliminated the joyous participation of Muslim girls and boys in the predominantly Hindu, but culturally mixed, dandiya dance celebrations in Gujarat. Did that deter Hansal Mehta though, the Gujarati filmmaker of opposite view to come up with an amazing rebuttal of Hindutva in his award-winning movie Shahid? Or did it stop him from marrying Safina Husain, a robustly professional Muslim woman who runs an educational NGO for disadvantaged girls of different religions?

Mr Modi has sought comfort in religious motifs. The legend of Heer-Ranjha would disturb him just as it troubled the qawwal from Lucknow.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 9th , 2014

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