Ustad Bismillah Khan
Shekhar Gupta pays homage to Ustad Bismillah Khan who passed away recently. This is a tribute not only to Khan saheb’s art (”Khan Saheb’s was a talent worthy of Bharat Ratna and immortality”) and the kind of person he was (”You could touch his innocence with bare hands in the heavy monsoon air”) but also to what might for some represent the passing away of the ideal Indian Muslim:
Why did Khan Saheb not migrate to Pakistan with Partition? “Arre, will I ever leave my Benares?” he asked. “I went to Pakistan for a few hours,” he said, “just to be able to say I’ve been there. I knew I would never last there.” And what is so special about Benares, his glorified slum of a haveli in a grandly named Bharat Ratna Ustad Bismillah Khan Street that had more potholes than footholds, and more heaps of chicken entrails from nearby meat shops, than garbage heaps from homes? “My temples are here,” he said, “Balaji and Mangala Gauri.” Without them, he asked, how would he make any music? As a Muslim he could not go inside the temples. But, so what? “I would just go behind the temples and touch the wall from outside. You bring gangajal, you can go inside to offer it, but I can just as well touch the stone from outside. It’s the same. I just have to put my hand to them.”
We want our Muslims to be half-Hindus. Gupta doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say that Indian Muslims have bought into an alien notion of global jihad. He argues the opposite. In fact, he goes on to say that when even when some Indian Muslims engage in terrorist acts, they are doing so not in support of some pan-Islamic cause but only as an attack on our secular nationalism.
I don’t share this optimism. Neither about those Muslims, nor about our secular nationalism. Actually, people like the great Bismillah Khan would, in relative terms, be exceptions–among Muslims and certainly among Hindus. We might all live together as an unavoidable strategy of survival but the gracious and accomodating world that was Khan saheb’s is increasingly alien to us. Our problems on that front, as Gupta rightly remarks, are entirely indigenous, and our solutions too will have to be that. In that picture, the villain is not only the Muslim who wants to tear apart the fabric that someone like Khan saheb wore naturally, as if it were a shawl; it will have to include the faces of men who’re guilty of having incited murder in our midst, men like Lal Krishna Advani and Balasaheb Thackeray.
