An Assertive Acknowledgement of the plight of Indian Muslims today
TW: Mentions of Mob Murders // Lynchings // Gauraksha
In September 2015, just over a year after India had unanimously voted to power the genocidal government of Narendra Modi, a violent crowd of Hindu vigilantes had attacked and brutally murdered Mohammad Akhlaq of Dadri. The murder took place at his house, and was carried out after a temple loudspeaker had declared that Akhlaq was storing beef in his refrigerator. The ruling dispensation chose to stay silent over the entire incident. Six years on, the Dadri model has been replicated large-scale across the breadth of the country, from Rajasthan to Assam. There is today a special category of Hindu vigilantes — gaurakshaks — that specifically carries out with such murders and then boasts about them unabashedly through posts on Social Media. The ruling party at the centre has chosen to continue with the silence, apart from occasional bursts of vehement support for these killers, or stray comments attempting to term them as fringe even as they continue to become more mainstream by the day.
Days after Akhlaq’s death, reports had come out that the meat obtained from Akhlaq’s fridge was of goat, not a cow. But that didn’t matter then to his corpse. Or to his murderers. And that nugget of fact is irrelevant also to feature-debutant Fahim Irshad, the director of Aani Maani. Set in a small town in Uttar Pradesh some time after Yogi Adityanath banned slaughterhouses, Fahim’s story revolves around a young Muslim — also ominously named Akhlaq(ue), nicknamed Bhutto — who runs a kabab shop. When the ban sets in, his family members suggest that he should shift to selling chicken, or even making kababs out of vegetables. But he refuses. Akhlaque adamantly replies that “kabab to bade ka hi banega (the kababs will only be made of beef)”. Through these instances in his film, Fahim unapologetically asserts that Muslims in India do in fact consume beef, and that the state has really got no business in meddling into what is on someone’s plate. And anyway, what really is on a Muslim’s plate, or fridge, has actually never mattered to the murderers. The meat has always been secondary to gaurakshaks.
For long in the Hindustani movie landscape, political films which have dealt with the lives of Muslims have ghettoised them in dark color tones, sombre ominous background scores, a hopeless existence, and in literal ghettos as their habitats. By contrast, Aani Maani is playfully bright, colorful, and has a lively background score. Apart from the night shots, the film is full of sunlight, of mutual bickering that is often characteristic of any family in India, of the tiny things which make up a life. This is in clear juxtaposition to the unpleasant backstories these characters are given. A bride who does not know Urdu, a young man who was in jail under a bogus case for eight years and struggles to deal with that trauma everyday, a divorced daughter who lives in her maternal house with her young child, a family that clashes with itself all the time.
Fahim paints a picture of hope even in the face of devastation, and notes how even when a hateful political class reduces their entire identities to what they eat, there are so many more things that living requires giving attention to. Fahim’s story is not about beef, but he does not forget to remind his audience every now and then how it has come to very singularly define the existence of Muslims in this country. The film itself is titled after a game children play in their courtyards in small towns like Bhutto’s, as opposed to being named Gosht or Kabab. Of course, there are a couple of instances when the execution does seem to fumble a little, but it never takes the viewer away from the focus of the story, which is the family and the house. It is only the oppressor whose gaze is singular, who defines the oppressed just by the ordeals they have faced, who refuses to look at them with an ounce of dignity, in life or in death.
In December 2019, when the anti-CAA protests had erupted in Northern India, I was in Assam to spend my winter holidays. A friend had arranged a screening of Kaifi Azmi and MS Sathyu’s Garam Hava. It was the first time I was watching the film. Set in the aftermath of the partition and Gandhi’s assassination, the movie deals with protagonist Salim Mirza and his unflinching hope, patriotism for his motherland, and faith in the new divided India. Even as his family constantly faces suspicion, betrayal, loss, and disrespect in the new nation, he decides to stay on, for a better and more hopeful future. Salim Mirza’s love and devotion for his motherland despite all the hatred him and his family face went on to define the characterisation of the good Muslim, both in popular culture and popular discourse. However, almost half a century since Garam Hava first released, Saleem Mirza is dead. The hope which he had come to characterise has died too.
Seven and a half decades after our tryst with destiny, Muslims in India face yet another New India. On the surface, their existence in this New India is characterised by a constant state of surveillance, by authorities which will police their food, their clothes, their sexual partners, and the religion of their spouses. On a deeper level, none of that matters. And perhaps the best piece of resistance in this hostility is to not have an unending faith in the system, but just simply enjoying life and its small things. The biggest resistance is not in believing in institutions designed to humilliate you further, but in enjoying a plateful of khasta as a family, in racing across wheat fields, in pickling in pickling raw mangoes, in learning the alphabet. The biggest resistance to assured state-sanctioned murder is then, perhaps, playing Aani Maani in the courtyard.
