Skip to main content

When Arif Mohammed Khan becomes a Hindu

Pic from Manorama


Arif Mohammad Khan, the governor of Kerala, declared himself a Hindu yesterday while addressing the Hindu Conclave at Thiruvananthapuram. The term Hindu is not religious but geographical, he asserted with his characteristic disarming smile. ‘Hindu’ is a geographical term denoting the people of a region, the whole of India.

I was excited. Patriotism surged in my veins. Goosebumps embraced my entire body. I am a Hindu, I said to myself. Now I can enter the temple which has been denying entry to famous people like K J Yesudas because of the temple authority’s ignorance about what ‘Hindu’ means. ‘No entry for non-Hindus,’ says a board outside that temple (and many other temples in Kerala). But my governor gave me hope. So I went to the temple.

The board is still there. The temple looks slightly different from usual. The crowd is less and there are a lot of police around. Something is wrong, I can see. Maybe, Mr Khan has inspired a lot of other Indians like me and there is some security problem for the Lord Krishna, the presiding deity of the temple.

I notice a helicopter in the playground of the nearby college. Soon I learn that the son of the richest man in the world [that title keeps switching from person to person] is here along with his fiancée. No devotee will be allowed inside the temple gate until the country’s heirs leave. So I choose to wait outside.

“Why are you here?” The board asks me. That board which has been staring at me for quite some time with the inscription about no entry for non-Hindus.

I explain to the board that I am a Hindu according to the Khan theorem.

“What Hindu?” The board questions me. “A Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya, Shudra… You are not even an untouchable Hindu and you want to enter a caste Hindu temple!” The board spits out.

This is getting complicated, I say to myself as I walk to the nearby ‘cool bar’ to have a cool pineapple juice and contemplate on how to get geography and caste in the same circle of definitions.

The TV of the cool bar says that Akhilesh Yadav was stopped from entering the Pitambara Devi Temple in Lucknow. “Shown black flags by activists of Hindutva outfits during his visit to Pitambara Devi Temple in Lucknow’s Daliganj on Saturday, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav alleged that the BJP sent its goons to stop him from entering the temple, and that this is part of the ruling party’s antipathy towards people from backward communities visiting temples.”

Dear Mr Khan, will you please check which premise of your theorem is wrong?

On the way back, the passenger on the next seat in the KSRTC bus tells me an  anecdote.

A man was standing the brink of the Venduruthy Bridge in the middle of the night. He was apparently going to commit suicide by jumping into the backwaters. A person who happened to pass by stopped his bike and asked the potential suicide to give him a minute.

“Are you a Hindu?” the biker asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“I am a Hindu too. A Brahmin or Kshatriya or Vaishya or…?”

“A Kshatriya.”

“How nice! I am one too. Nair or Menon or Pillai or …?”

“Nair.”

“Fantastic! I am a Nair too. Kiriyath Nair or Marar or Chembotti Nair or …?”

“Marar.”

“Oh! Then you die, wretch.” And he pushed him over. He was a proud Chembotti Nair.

I laughed. I knew it wasn’t a joke. But what is not a joke in this country anymore?

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 29, 2023 at 2:57 PM

    Hari OM
    'Tis a conundrum, without doubt... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathJanuary 30, 2023 at 11:14 AM

    Good one in your inimitable brand of sarcasm! But then as you say, today there is hardly any difference between reality and a joke/sarcasm.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jenn JilksJanuary 31, 2023 at 8:01 AM

    Well that was quite a read!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...
9 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...
9 comments
Read more