Creating and Recreating the Muslim: Zahir Janmohamed Reviews 'Ways of Remembering'

Zahir Janmohamed

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In February 2005, three years after the Gujarat pogrom, a group of about forty South Asian organizations in the US and Canada formed together to lobby the United States government to deny a US visa to the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

In a piece published in the Asian Age, published on March 21, 2005, a few days after Modi’s visa was denied, the scholar and activist Angana Chatterji wrote that she and other activists  called this  group the Coalition Against Genocide because, “The events of 28 February 2002-2 March 2002, constitute genocide under the United Nations Genocide Convention.”

In one fell swoop, Chatterji was both expanding the events of 2002, and also profoundly reducing and misreading those very events.

I was, I should state, a member of the Coalition Against Genocide, although I never cared for the group’s name. I was living in Washington DC at the time, and in the runup to Modi’s visa denial, I met with staff at the US State Department and in the US Congress to share my eye-witness account about how Modi failed to uphold religious freedom in 2002. For me, the Coalition Against Genocide represented something exceptional, something beautiful: a group of Indians of different faiths and castes coming together in the diaspora to denounce an event that remains a stain on India’s history. And yet, I never liked the group’s use of the word “genocide.”

The problem, of course, is that there is no perfect word to describe what transpired in Gujarat in 2002. A riot is clearly not the right word, as it implies an equal clash. The events of 2002 were too lopsided and too orchestrated to use that word. During my interviews in Ahmedabad on the aftermath of the pogrom, conducted during the years 2011 to 2018, Muslims most often used the word “ve din,” or those days, to describe 2002. That phrase seems apt, a sort of recognition that words cannot suffice to describe the horror of what occurred. Some Gujarati Muslims used “toofan,” or storm; others “aag,” or fire. A few used “danga,” or riot, but “danga” tended to disappear once intimacy and trust was established, when the façade was lifted, and people stopped pretending that the violence was proportional (and anything but state-planned).

Pogrom is my preferred word, if only because it testifies to the organized nature of the violence, but that word is lacking too. It implies that the violence occurred for a fixed duration of time. What struck me about the violence is that it both eliminated—and produced—Indian Muslim life, history, and personhood. In this essay, I shall explore how the pogrom produced new Muslim subjects, and how, in many ways, the violence never ended.

Today the word genocide is in common usage and for good reason. According to legal scholars and human rights groups, Israel committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. For a genocide to occur, according to the UN, there must be an intent to destroy a group in part or in whole. Since the outbreak of the recent war, Israel has destroyed all of the universities in Gaza, as well as 80% of its schools, leading many to call what occurred there to be a modern day “scholasticide.”

While there were efforts to eliminate a population—namely, Muslims—during the pogrom of Gujarat, there were also efforts to enlarge that population, or rather, the perception of that population. On the first day of the pogrom, for example, the tomb of the 17th century Urdu Vali Gujarati poet was destroyed by Hindu mobs. More than twenty years later, it has yet to be rebuilt, in large due to the Gujarat government.

In destroying that tomb, Hindu nationalists sought to create a new narrative for Vali Gujarati, a syncretic poet who once wrote, “Gujarat ke firaaq se hai khaar khaar di,” or “my heart is thorn-filled with longing for Gujarat.” 

Up until that point, Vali Gujarati had been mostly forgotten, except to the most ardent of literature fans of Gujarat. But suddenly, in 2002, Vali Gujarati gained a much bigger size, which fit the Hindu nationalist rhetoric of Hindus being besieged by a looming Muslim presence. Vali Gujarati’s tomb, in the middle of the road, was something drivers once ignored, but Hindu nationalists turned it into a symbol, as yet another example of Muslims trying to “invade” a “Hindu” part of town. Destroying the tomb was, then, sort of an act of creation, a way of making new meaning, a meaning that could then be mobilized to fit the Hindu nationalist agenda.

Ismaili Muslims—a subsect of Islam often not regarded as “Muslims” by other Muslims—shared these same sentiments with me during my interviews, that a new narrative for them had been created and formed with the rise of Modi’s politics. Maleka Divecha, whose husband Akbar Divecha was a sitting High Court Judge of Gujarat when Hindus burned down their home in Ahmedabad in 2002, told the publication The Week in April 2002, “All these years, it never occurred to us that we were Muslims and therefore different.” 

Before 2002, the Divechas occupied a sort of third space in India, not quite viewed as Muslims by Muslims or as Hindus by Hindus. That all changed in 2002, and it is one of the great ironies of Modi’s tenure in Gujarat: he both eliminated and produced Muslims.

The Zionist narrative, in contrast, is eliminationist by design. This is why, for example, early Zionists were fond of saying, “Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land.” It makes the claim for Israel by denying Palestinian existence. But this playbook doesn’t work for Hindu nationalists. Hindu nationalists require Muslims to exist for three critical reasons: first, to define themselves, second, to launder their image abroad; third, to express their perceived magnanimity.

On the first point, while Hindu nationalism often exhibits flashes of genocidal violence and intent, it relies on a Muslim presence and “threat” to justify its existence. It is, after all, a movement to define what India is by what India is not: India is not Mughals, or non-veg, or Aamir Khan, or Urdu. The heritage walk in Ahmedabad, run by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, begins at a mandir and ends at a masjid. That very journey says everything about the way Ahmedabad sees itself: as once a great Hindu city that has now become Muslim (hence the need for Hindu nationalism to “correct” this history).

On the second point, Hindu nationalists, unlike Islamic fundamentalists, desperately want and need American adoration. This is why, for example, we saw Modi touching the feet of an Indian Muslim war veteran in Varanasi soon after he won the Lok Sabha election in 2014. For an Indian audience, the choice of Varanasi made sense: Modi was making a statement about India’s essential “Hindu-ness.” However, for a global audience, that display allowed Modi to persuade Americans to believe that India had not strayed too far from Gandhi’s ideals. As the political scientist Ghanshyam Shah told me in 2015, not long after Modi’s first Lok Sabha victory, Modi wants and needs Muslims, so long as they are on his terms.

On the third point, Hindu nationalism sees itself as capacious, as welcoming of Indians of all backgrounds, so long as it is on its terms, something Modi has said before in interviews.

Perhaps a more apt word to describe 2002 might be Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic, a word that Palestinians use to describe the creation of Israel. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, the Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi writes that, “Palestinians have long argued that the Nakba is not a finite event but an ongoing process of violent dispossession.” 

This, I would argue, is how we should conceive of the 2002 pogrom: as event that continues to occur. This brings me back to Chatterji’s article and the way she frames the 2002 pogrom as a fixed time event from 28 February to 2March. Indeed, much of the most brutal events of the violence did occur in those first few days, but the violence lasted for months. For example, Muslims who returned to their places of employment were told they were no longer wanted; kids who returned to school were told they were not welcome; Muslims who tried to get married and leave the state, were attacked by Hindu nationalists on their wedding day. Even Hindus who continued to conduct business with Muslims were attacked, including Piyush Desai, the once head of the tea conglomerate “Wagh Bakri.” The economic boycott on Muslims was so punitive that the sociologist Nandini Sundar, in her essay in Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, referred to it as “economicide” (Sundar, 108).

Earlier generation of writers and scholars who wrote about the pogrom in Gujarat wrestled with the usual questions—who is responsible and what happened. But a newer generation is examining, I would argue, a more pressing and difficult question: what happens after violence?

The answer, it turns out, is more violence.

Oishik Sircar’s new book, Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India, published by Cambridge University Press, is an essential and impassioned work of scholarship that complicates how we understand the aftermath of the 2002 pogrom.

In it, he explores how “the shared narrative of law and cinema participates in the ordering of the collective memory, which produces ways of remembering that acknowledge the horror of the pogrom and simultaneously rationalise it as aberrant.” (Sircar, 3)

Sircar first developed an interest in the subject while a student at ILS Law College in Pune. He visited a Muslim relief camp in Ahmedabad during the 2002 pogrom and observed how the Bollywood stars plastered inside of rickshaws, and on the billboards around the city, became companions in his effort to make meaning of the pogrom. About a decade later, he returned to Ahmedabad for field work as a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne. He began to notice, especially among liberals, how critics of Narendra Modi framed the conversation around 2002 as a contestation between remembering the pogrom and forgetting the pogrom. He found this method to be flawed, if only because it ignored the very nature and desire of power to create new memories that suit its political agenda.

“It would have been far easier,” Sircar told me when I interviewed him, “to contest the Hindu Right if they made this a memory vs forgetting issue—because those in opposition to Hindutva will know which side to choose. But when it is memory vs memory, sometimes you almost unknowingly become foot soldiers of the project.” In this way, Sircar argues, memory becomes “a sight of pedagogy.”

For Sircar, memory is reconstructed through two principal means: law and cinema, which he views as “two key narratives of India’s secular legal imagination.” To support his argument, he provides an analysis of the judgment in Zahira Habibulla H Sheikh and Another v State of Gujarat  (‘Best Bakery case’) and examines the plots of three Hindi language films released after the pogrom: Dev (2004), Parzania (2007), and Kai Po Che (2013).

In the Best Bakery case, an armed mob attacked a Muslim owned bakery in Vadodara on March 1, 2002, killing 14 people, including three Hindus and eleven Muslims, nine from the Sheikh family. Zahira Sheikh, a witness to the attack, testified about what she saw in one of India’s most high profile and controversial trials.

In Ways of Remembering, Sircar is not interested in “a critique of the case and its judgements.” Instead, he aims to “narrativise the complex story of the legal journey of the case and to signpost a set of tropes in the judgments that have been used as narrative devices in the writing of the texts.” (Sircar, 45)

This, I would argue, is a welcome change. So much of the conversation around Gujarat 2002, especially among liberals, is whether or not the courts got it “right.” This is understandable, especially since justice has eluded many. But Sircar pushes us to keep looking, to notice how the courts are not just issuing judgements but are also constructing meaning and language around the pogrom that, inevitably, seep into society, film, and collective memory.

I observed in this younger Muslims in Ahmedabad, who were only a few years old when the 2002 pogrom occurred. Many told me that their parents refuse to talk to them about the violence. The reasons are varied. There is a stigma in talking about 2002, especially as a Muslim, as there is a sense that a virtuous Muslim is one who should move on, something that even the liberal politician Shashi Tharoor argued once (he later retracted). Moreover, schools, colleges, and universities in Gujarat generally avoid talking about the pogrom, which means that for younger Muslims, they have to piece together what they know about 2002 from films, books, and media.

I witnessed this with Kai Po Che, a film that was released while I was living in Ahmedabad. The movie is about three friends, two Hindu and one Muslim, whose lives in Ahmedabad are upended by the Gujarat earthquake of 2001 and the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. When the earthquake happens, the director Abishek Kapoor gives us extended shots of the damage caused and the loss of life. The movie then cuts to intermission, forcing us to sit with the grief caused by the earthquake. But it falters when it shows the pogrom, not really showing us the grief from that event, as if the hurt from the earthquake mattered more than the pogrom. When 2002 is show, it is a site of chaos, with frenzied mobs of equal numbers of Muslims and Hindus out on the street, fighting as if in a scene from the TV show, Game of Thrones. Even the Muslim ghetto has a gate on it so big that a battle ram must be used to enter, a detail that made my Muslims friends and I laugh when we saw it at the Ahmedabad One mall.

The reality of the 2002 pogrom was, of course, different: the violence was methodical, organized, and disciplined, as Human Rights Watch reported. It was also profoundly lopsided, with Hindus in the thousands filling the streets, and Muslims remaining inside out of fear. And yet, for some young Muslims I met, they internalized this visual image of the riots being battle of two sides. Muslims, they would tell me, were also at fault in 2002, because they fought back against Hindus, something they learned, partly, from films like Kai Po Che.

Films like Kai Po Che do not show police officers standing by idly, as Hindu mobs attacked Muslim businesses, nor do they show how some Muslims, including the slain member of parliament, Ehsan Jafri, made up to 200 phone calls for help to senior leaders in the Gujarat government to no avail, according to the Times of India.

When I interviewed young Muslims of Gujarat, I would often try to correct this image they have of the pogrom, of it being a site of chaos, of the mobs being equal in size, but I was never quite successful. “Zahir bhai,” they would tell me: “I saw it.”

I do think films like Kai Po Che, in hindsight, created and eliminated space to talk about the pogrom. It allowed Muslims a chance to see on screen an event that shaped their lives in Gujarat. It created more opening to discuss the violence, and that too, just a year before Modi’s first Lok Sabha win. But the depiction of the 2002 pogrom, as Sircar argues in his book, suited a Hindu narrative that left the state, and the law, off the hook.

During my interviews with Muslims in Gujarat, during the period 2011 to 2017, many spoke about the limits of what they could, and could not, do. I will never forget being with a Gujarati Muslim friend at an electronics store in Ahmedabad in December 2012. The customer service was terrible, and I could see my friend growing aggravated. Others around us—Gujarati Hindus—felt the space to berate the employee for his slow service, but my friend held his anger in, pushing it down more and more. Later that night, his anger came out when we were at dinner in the Muslim ghetto of Juhapura, and he told me that sometimes, his anger comes out in the worst of moments, when he is with his wife or kids or parents.

How did he learn to conceal and suppress all that anger? It would be unfair to say that this started in 2002, or with Modi. The angry Indian male, after all, is a tired, old trope of Indian films. But Sircar’s book reveals that the process of making meaning of 2002—and whose hurt matters from that pogrom—is something that Indian cinema helped to produce.

Think about the well-intentioned movie Mulk, released in 2018, in which a Muslim appears as a sort of “Magical Negro,” a plot device for liberal Hindus to feel more comfortable with India’s descent into fascism and ethnic cleansing. At the end of the movie, the Muslim character says that Indians need to stop thinking of “we,” and “them,” but instead to think of “us.”

Israeli cinema, I should note, is absent of these sorts of narratives: you do not get films about Israelis helping out beleaguered Palestinians. But American cinema is filled with these tropes, of white Americans—like in the movie The Help—acting as a sort of “civilizing agent” for Black Americans, to help them “find their way.” The reason, I argue, is that Hindu nationalism, like white nationalism, is a project unwilling to acknowledge to itself what it is. It needs Muslims to tell itself a different story, that it is not out to eliminate the Muslim, but rather to reform the Muslim, to train the Muslim, to tame the Muslim—much like we see in so much of American treatment of Black subjects.

A virtuous Muslim then, the film Mulk seems to suggest, is one who annihilates himself, who sublimates himself. This is, after all, exactly what my friend did in the electronics store all those years ago: he pushed his humiliation down because he had internalized the belief that his anger has no place in this “new India.”

But when we were alone, in the Muslim ghetto, a different side emerged. All he spoke about that evening is that someday, he wishes he could be like Salman Khan.

Was it his muscles or his style or his adoring female fans that he coveted, I asked him?

“No,” he said. “It’s his walk. Straight, upright, proud.”

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Zahir Janmohamed is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin college. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, and many other publications. Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International and in the US Congress. 

This is part of a book round-table on Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Volume 1, Cambridge University Press 2024) by Oishik Sircar.