Socially progressive Kerala moves backwards

Rajesh Ramachandran
Mail Today Edit Page, September 8, 2010
MY HOME town is at least 1186 years old. It could be a few centuries older than that, but I am sticking to the Malayalam calendar that says we are in year 1186. The calendar was issued at and named after my small town, Kollam. Fortunately, it still remains small as the East India Company didn’t choose to set shop or open a Presidency college there.
The antiquity of my town is immensely relevant to the raging debate on purdah.In neighbouring Alleppey district a Christian school was recently under attack for not allowing headscarf in class. A Muslim girl from Kasargode, the northern tip of Kerala, is being harassed for wearing jeans. A teacher in a Kolkata university is being hounded by her students for not covering herself from head to toe. And a professor of minority studies in a Delhi university lifting her veil to get herself photographed for a newspaper article is defending the choice of wearing this piece of dress as “ the unfolding of the recovery of the Islamic self”.
What Islamic self does the veil recover? My port town, a centre of international trade when Kolkata and Mumbai were not even plotted on the Asian maritime map, is supposed to have hosted all the major religions of the world at various points in history. By the 9th century, about the time the Malayalam calendar was inaugurated, Jews, Persians and Palestinians were supposed to have been granted land by a Hindu ruler.
Attire
They all had come in without the purdah! Nobody had for centuries even seen what a burqa looks like in our part of the country. Even as a child the only glimpse of the burqa I had was at the railway station or the bus stand, worn obviously by some visiting Muslim stranger.
Even in north Kerala or Malabar with its history of Tippu Sultan’s invasion and organic trade links with Arabia — Arabs used to marry into local Muslim families — the burqa was a rarity and mostly worn by moneyed women who had traveled for Haj and returned with the baggage of orthodoxy. There are many who insist that, traditionally, less than five per cent of Malabar’s women were hooded and wrapped up.
Malayali men, primarily Hindus, never used to cover their torsos and their women till a century ago only used a piece of cloth, not dissimilar to the mundu or dhoti, to cover their breasts.
Till the mid to late 19th century, stitched loose blouses were largely used by those who had converted to Christianity and Islam. While Christian women wore these blouses with the traditional mundu , the only addition for Muslim women was a piece of headcloth, which never ever covered the face. It was more of a headgear and never a veil.
By the 1970s this traditional attire gave way to modern sarees and like everybody else, Muslim women too switched to the easy- to- wash polyester sarees. The only allowance for the ultra- orthodox was the length of the sleeves, which dropped a little below the elbow, and they covered their heads with the pallu of the saree, the way President Pratibha Patil does it now.
Thangal Kunju Musaliyar, a cashew exporter and one of the world’s biggest individual employers of his times, had set up Kerala’s first privately managed engineering college and a college for the arts and sciences in Kollam in 1958 and 1965 respectively. No Muslim student or teacher used to go to these two colleges in the burqa or hijab till the 1990s. Even in these ‘ Muslim’ educational institutions most women teachers left their head uncovered and prayer during the holy month was an individual’s choice. Interestingly, no woman in this visionary’s family used to wear the alien dress till the 1990s.
Masjid
The working classes were no different. The Muslim domestic help at the Hindu upper caste Sanskrit teacher’s house, or her friend who peeled nuts at the Muslim entrepreneur’s cashew factory could not obviously afford to bother about the length of the sleeves of her blouse or the pallu over her head. She worked like everybody else at homes and factories that brought militant trade unionism and precious dollars to Kollam, each diluting the other.
Any woman who has travelled to Kerala would agree that the male gaze is at its worst there. But, rich home- makers, teachers, teachers, government officials, lawyers, doctors, domestic helps, cashew workers, they all dealt with it as women, and not as Muslims. The Muslim woman was everywoman.
But no longer! The demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindutva goons gave the best opportunity to their Islamist counterparts to talk about ‘ recovering the Islamic self”. Soon after the idea of India was challenged by Gandhi’s killers in a murderous Rath Yatra that culminated in riots and Mumbai’s serial bomb blasts, the radical Islamist cleric Abdul Nasser Madani, also from Kollam, left his stamp on my home town. Madani’s Islamic Sevak Sangh rose to ‘ secure’ the insecure Muslim man. Continuing the tradition of colonising the female mind and body, insecure men threw the purdah over Muslim women.
Religious revivalism brought in personal proselytisers like those of the Tablighi Jamaat, again a north Indian import, who, inviting women to their congregation, insisted on the dress code of the desert.
The process ended in a community stepping aside and declaring that it is different, that it is the ‘ other’. A new identity was being created for the orthodox Muslim, an identity that stuck out in the Malayali milieu like the black cap of the RSS volunteer. Or like the red strings Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad boys tie on each other’s wrist on Raksha Bandhan day to mark the saffron brotherhood.
Talibanisation
Muslim fundamentalists were merely continuing with their hypocrisy. After shouting the ‘ Pakistan or Kabristan’ slogan in the run up to the Partition, none of the Muslim League leaders or cadre of Kerala migrated to Pakistan; instead they got transformed into the Indian Union Muslim League and went on to rule the state as a constituent of the Left and the Congress- led ruling fronts.
Now, Madani’s village, Karunagapally, is shrouded in purdah, though he is trying desperately to shake off his radical past and be part of the political mainstream by aligning with the Left front in Kerala. Others, more deadly, have taken over from him. Now, any perceived injury to religious pride is assuaged by barbaric Taliban- like actions. The hands of a Christian college teacher who used the prophet’s name in a question paper were chopped off in broad daylight, while he was on his way back from the Sunday mass. Muhammed is the most common Muslim name and all that the teacher did was to call a fictitious character by that name.
Purdah has no place in my home town and is a sign of the imposition of an alien culture and its dress code. Many young girls are being forced to wear it over their jeans and T- shirts, clearly proving what choice they have over covering their bodies. The cultural identity of the Malayali Muslim as defined by dress in all its traditional glory is the ‘ blouse- mundu- headgear’ attire with large gold earrings. Why don’t the votaries of purdah try this out? After all, the purdah is for us what the mundu would be for them.
rajesh.ramachandran@mailtoday.in