Our Racism
Zeno April 18, 2003
Tags: Art
Racism in a multitude of forms pervades the very fabric of Pakistani society. Our thoughts and speech betray an entrenched, dogmatic belief in the role of race, gender, religion,and ethnicity as primary determinants of human nature.
Where else would the term “bhooka (hungry) Bengali” pass paradoxically as both a term of denigration and of endearment? What child has not heard: “Beta, stop wolfing your food down like a bhooka Bengali” from an irate mother? Such is the callousness of language. A million killed in our names, yet the term finds its way into our lexicon. At least, the bhooka business lacks the directness of “of course we’re better off after ’71 – those dead thousands every monsoon are not our headache.” But then, that’s what Bengalis are to most people – fish-eating, drowning, starving masses, menial servants, or sugarcane juice-wallas. Bengali culture, art and literature do not feature in this worldview.
For me, this particular idea was illustrated most eloquently by J. Bhai, right after Eid lunch. For the sub-continent to progress, he explained, we need a lingua franca, which just so happens to be Urdu – our Urdu. In his view, all of us speak a variant of Urdu, even the Bengalis and the Tamils, so adopting Urdu as the de jure language of the subcontinent would solve all our problems. People would acquire education in what is (unbeknownst to them) “their” language, and economic prosperity would follow etc. What of the language riots of the ‘50s, protested Bhayeea, but I was too heavy in a post-paya stupor to offer much support.
Urdu, Bengalis, and even Tamils are familiar entities to Karachi-wallas. Jews are not. Which is what makes our casual anti-Semitism so unbelievable. How many times have I been chided by A. Mamu, for turning into a “Yahoodi”? Undisguised Shylockian metaphor, for the money-grubbing nephew who’s too lazy to get on the phone. The thought behind the chide is jovial I’m sure, even genial. The language, on the other hand, demonstrates the gulf between “us” and “them.”
Not to say that we discriminate against one religion alone. Another particularly egregious term is “choora.” Part religious, part ethnic, part class-based, “choora” has no clear analogue in English. To qualify, you have to be Christian, dark-skinned and a sweeper – two out of three is no good. A persistent image in my head is that of T. Mamu narrating the “choora” ancestry of one of his distant in-laws with great relish.
The phenomenon of Hindu-bashing is in a class of it’s own. Unless combined with Jew-bashing, in which case it assumes the unbeatable form of the famed Indo-Israeli axis, a veritable juggernaut for conspiracy theorists and grandmothers alike, RAW and Mossad rolled into one. The yearly Independence Day plays on PTV show it best: the cowardly, sniveling Hindu banya, conspiring with the British to put down innocent, suffering Muslims. From Kashmir to Hyderabad, from Gurdaspur to Amritsar, the pattern is clear. The only way for the Hindu to win is by deceit and super-sniveling, because an innate physical weakness leads to the inescapable calculus of 1 Muslim to 7 Hindus in manly combat.
Of course, none of us are actually of Indian descent. By a conservative estimate, several million landed with Mohammed bin Qasim (the day the first brick for Pakistan was laid, so narrated my 7th grade history), and immediately proceeded to procreate with great gusto, giving birth to the native population of what is now Pakistan. Any family with an ounce of sharam (shame) will produce incontrovertible documentation to this effect.
Towering above all the rest are the syeds, descendants of the Prophet himself. To this day, Ammi displays a reserved pride in the syedness of her dear mother, who sullied her gene pool by marrying into non-syeds, eventually leading to the filth that is me. Not so discreet is S. Mumani, who wears her syedness as a badge of honor, and feigns contempt for dear old Mamu and his inferior ancestry. Other than word-of-mouth, her ancestry was proven the day a pir’s wife forbade her to sit on the floor because she was recognized as a “shahzadi” (princess), and even by divine influence, the day T. Mamu nearly choked to death when he was laughing his head off at the story (I was strangely unaffected, the Almighty magnanimously forgave the sneer of a blasphemous child.)
Enough of the racism of dogma or superstition. The intellect finds much more believable ways of separating us from them. There is the recent tale of the very senior Navy admiral, confidently informing a drawing room full of people of the inevitability of American defeat in Iraq, because “the goras would run off with their tails between their legs when the desert summer began in earnest.” This state of Muslim denial is essentially boundless. I remember listening with great interest to another drawing room soldier in ’91 of a magnificent “Baghdad in the sands,” a precise replica of the real city, which the Americans were foolishly bombing. Once their bombs ran out, said Uncle, cool as anything, Saddam’s desert-hardened forces would emerge and wipe out the androgynous invaders.
Then there’s the racism of ethnicity, perhaps the most familiar one of all. Punjabi, Sindhi, Mohajir, Pathan – pick any two from the list, and there will be denigratory anecdotes of one for the other. The extremes are foolish, sometimes downright violent – the Punjabi, walking down a road with a gun and a single bullet, meets a snake and a Sindhi and shoots the Sindhi. The Pathan’s eternal penchant for little boys (turning him into a Quran-quoting maulvi makes an unbeatable dirty joke.) The Mohajir’s unenviable fate of either jumping or being thrown out of high-flying aircraft. The list is never-ending.
Then there’s the gentler, kinder racism of the educated. The gentleman in Gujrat, who asked Bhayeea (on a work-related trip) how he was supposed to deal with “his type.” The Aunty who asked Naddo to find a bride for her son, just “not an Urdu-speaking one.” Or even U’s comment, made only half in jest, about his wife being from Karachi, “but basically of good sort.” Poor old “Pindi,” in my first year of A-levels, who we ragged mercilessly for talking like he was from a “pind.” Choti Phuppo in the car with Ammi, soliloquizing about how violent “the Pathans” were, right in front of Yunus Khan. All of us at Shazia’s wedding, kidding about when the guests from the “other side” would start shooting or kidnapping us for ransom. And the follow-up joke of Shazia’s hubby’s unfortunate choice of words as to how many rotis he was supposed to “pick up” (which comes across in Urdu as “abduct.”) Mamu’s ongoing diatribes about the brusqueness of Punjabi culture, as opposed to the sophistication of “ours.” The Karachi-born mithai-walla in Islamabad, who handed us free mithai just because the “mellifluousness” of our Urdu reminded him of home. The merciless taunting of the kids in my school van – Punjab say hum nay kya paaya? chau-paya bhaee chau-paya (rather loosely, what did we get from Punjab? Four-legged beasts, four-legged beasts.) The fact that I was in college before I figured out why our middle-school physics teacher was unaffectionately dubbed “dagga.”
Other monstrosities like Mamu’s “women can’t drive or handle money,” and how shias reputedly spit in your food are stories in themselves.
In this age of racial profiling and INS registrations and deportations and Muslim-bashing, it is incumbent upon us to cast a critical eye on our own beliefs, peek into our own proverbial girebaans. Revolution, as Bhayeea put most succinctly, should begin in someone else’s home. My hope is that the correction of thought, language and action, will begin in our own.