Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

Historian and scholar Tanika Sarkar notes that ‘there is a dark sexual obsession about the ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and over-fertile Muslim female ones.’ Recounting the unspeakable horrors perpetrated on Muslim women and children in the Gujarat carnage, she offers the following explanation: ‘In readings of community violence, rape is taken to be a sign of collective dishonouring of a community. The same patriarchal order that designates the female body as the symbol of lineage and community purity, would designate the entire collectivity as impure and polluted, once their woman is raped by an outsider.’ Sarkar goes on to describe the environment at shakhas where boys are fed legends of the rape of Hindu women during Partition and the abduction of Hindu women all through history by Muslim men, creating a perpetual fear of virile Muslim men luring away Hindu girls, ‘a kind of penis envy and anxiety about emasculation that can only be overcome by doing violent deeds’. And finally, there are the anxieties whipped up over generations about ‘Muslim fertility rates’, of their uncontrolled breeding and ‘the drying up of future [Hindu] progeny’. These attacks engender fear and anxiety about the future. Such attempts to saffronize the minds and outlook of Indians make common people, you and me, complicit in morally offensive steps, which of course is their purpose.