A Question of survival

When we speak of Muslims, quite often it is the aspect of faith that consumes and overshadows the livelihood dimension. The social and economic conditions of Muslims across the globe, and especially in the sub-continent, does not often generate a passionate debate as the one that we are currently witnessing with regard to the 13-storey 'Islamic Centre' or 'mosque' planned two blocks away from the 9/11 ground zero. (An interesting aside: There is a nomenclature politics here. If you are in favour you call it an 'Islamic Centre,' something that has a benign modern twang, or else you condemn it as a 'mosque').

But what recently struck me as an exception and a huge corrective to this overwhelming prejudice, if not a conspiracy, is the Kolkata project of the renowned British author and journalist Jeremy Seabrook. [In the interests of full disclosure I should state here that I have known Jeremy ever since my student days in London. He was officially my mentor when I was a Chevening scholar. Most recently, he wrote a foreword for my book - Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue - The Anxieties of a Local Culture' (Navakarnataka, 2008)]

Jeremy spent many months in Kolkata in the last couple of years and has produced an intense narrative, in his uniquely polemical style, on how the urban Muslims 'live, work, love and die' in the slums of Topsia, Tangra, Tiljala and Beniapukur among others. The narrative eloquently resonates the condition of ordinary Muslims across underdeveloped economies. I, who had the privilege of reading it as it was getting ready for publication in London, found it so dark and disturbing that I couldn't gather words for a reaction. As the reading experience slowly sunk in, it occurred that this narrative doubly illustrates the dry statistics of the 2006 Sachar panel report and in fact, goes beyond to portray the starkness of the situation, which unfortunately never finds a place in mainstream discourse. It made me wonder if only an outside view could be so illuminating of something that we tend to treat so casually

Full report here Outlook