കൗതുകം

“New Delhi/Greater Noida, India - After a year in India, Zaharaddeen Muhammed, 27, knows enough Hindi to understand what bander means. Monkey. But it isn’t even the daily derogatory comments that make him doubt his decision to swap his university in Nigeria for a two-year master’s degree programme in chemistry at Noida International University. Nor is it the questions about personal hygiene, the unsolicited touching of his hair or the endless staring. It is his failure to interact with Indian people on a deeper level.

“People often look at me as if I am different, and hard to be trusted,” the tall, softly spoken student explains. “I try to be friendly. I speak Hindi and always laugh. But when I offer biscuits to the neighbours’ children, they don’t accept.”

After a year, one of Zaharaddeen’s biggest wishes remains unfulfilled: to be invited to an Indian wedding.

“I am a big fan of Bollywood,” he explains about why he wanted to come to India. “I did not come for the school because there are enough good universities back home. But I wanted to learn about this other culture and interact with the people here.”

While he speaks with his Indian classmates at the university, a 75-acre campus accommodating students from more than 20 countries, and some of them also showed up for an international cultural event he helped to organise, none of these encounters lead to friendships.

“I have never been at an Indian person’s home, as a friend. No one has visited me,” Zaharaddeen says.

READ MORE: Africans decry ‘discrimination’ in India

Zaharaddeen rents two rooms on the first floor of a three-storey house in Greater Noida, a residential area on the outskirts of Noida, a satellite town east of New Delhi and part of what is called the National Capital Region. The house is about an hour’s drive south after crossing the River Yamuna which runs along Delhi’s east side.

Noida International University, one of five private universities in the city attracting students from all over the world, is another 20 minutes’ drive by bus or auto rickshaw along a newly constructed expressway, surrounded by barren fields and opposite a Formula 1 racing circuit that was built in 2011.

The university hostels are all off-campus. Zaharaddeen opted out of living in them because he likes to cook his own meals and he’d heard that the hostel canteens only serve vegetarian food.

A friend from Nigeria, who was already in India, found his current house for him. The ground floor is also rented out to a student from Nigeria.

“My landlord is an extremely good person,” Zaharaddeen says. Although he has had some bad experiences with Indian people, many of them are good, he stresses. And he doesn’t want to generalise.

“That would be a huge mistake. Because it is Indians often generalising about all people from Africa that makes us feel unsafe.”

‘Racism at every turn’

Zaharaddeen is a member of the Association of African Students in India, which last month announced a protest rally at New Delhi’s protest street Janter Manter.

“African students no longer feel safe in India; we have to deal with racism at every turn,” said the announcement.

The rally was planned after the Congolese teacher Masonda Kitanda Olivier died in an attack in Delhi in May. A week later, six Africans, including two women and a priest who was on his way home with his wife and baby, were attacked by men with cricket bats.

Earlier this year, a female student from Tanzania was beaten and stripped in Bangalore by an angry mob, in response to a fatal accident caused by a Sudanese student unknown to her.

Zaharaddeen speaks with horror about the attack in Bangalore: “She was just walking there. It could have happened to any of us.”

In each of the cases, the police said that racism had nothing to do with it. But for the student association and the Group of African Heads of Missions, it had, and the time had come to take up the issue at a higher level.” 

How many of the women who work on turning out Ikat, Chanderi, Puneri, Laheriya, Bandhej, Bomkai, Gadwal, Narayanpet, Maheshwari, Kantha and Kanjeevaram and other fine material can actually afford those saris? The average life expectancy of some weavers in some of those towns those products come from has gone down to around 50 years in recent times, according to some news reports.

The sari is the ultimate weapon in the kitty of a lot of people: it helps wrap up a lot of freedoms. Wrap women in Ikat, Chanderi, Puneri etc., and tie up the lower castes in the production of Ikat, Chanderi, Puneri etc. For the sangh parivar the sari has totemic significance, refined sensibilties are Congressi liberal Tharoor’s excuse. Mr.Tharoor and the RSS top brass might prescribe the sari as essential hindu-fashionwear for women, but would they suggest weaving as a career for their children? Or fishing? Scavenging? Tanning? Toddy tapping?

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Tradition, culture, nation, women, beauty. It is necessary to look beyond all those pleasantly commonsensical terms at the pernicious ideology that animates them. To look at the other side of the enthralling sari which conceals the not so pretty story of its weaver.

The net effect of the ruling classes clinging to views such as Shashi Tharoor’s is that the number of handlooms in India, which was around 20 lakhs in early nineteenth century, has now grown to around 23.55 lakhs.

Did anyone say ‘industrial revolution’? Well, that happened in the U.K., (and sundry other places in the west) where the number of handlooms, which was around 2 lakhs in early nineteenth century, has now shrunk to just a couple of hundreds or so, mostly owned by hobbyists, in all probability.

Ellavarkkum Hridayam Niranja Puthuvalsaraashamsakal

Keralappiravi Ashasmsakal

Wishing all my fellow Malayalis a very happy Keralappiravi! May we all get free tickets and long enough holidays in the motherland.

Deepavali Ashamsakal!