We were far more liberal then

Jawed Naqvi
Dawn, 24 October

AT most railway stations in British India, so I am told, there were separate water pitchers kept for Hindu passengers and Muslim passengers. A label on each read Hindu water and Muslim water. We divided colours too. Green became known as Islamic even though no Green Party of the dozens that exist today is covertly or overtly Muslim.

Similarly, saffron came to be identified among Hindus as a colour of tyaag or sacrifice even though saffron, to my knowledge, is grown exclusively in Christian Spain, Muslim Iran and predominantly Muslim Kashmir. Some of this cussedness is recent. In the old days we were more liberal.

The imposing entrance to Delhi’s Purana Qila, a mediaeval fortress built in stages by Mughal Emperor Humayun and his Afghan challenger Sher Shah Suri, is decorated with a large six-cornered star. In today’s context the design would be seen as a Jewish symbol — the Star of David. Another engraving on the gate looks like a lotus, widely acknowledged as a symbol of Buddhism, but which has been co-opted recently as an insignia of Hindu revivalism, and election symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Can we conclude that at least some of the Muslim rulers of India were not as bigoted as many of us have become today? Or is it possible that India’s former rulers had no time to waste on what was kosher or what was haram in art? Nowadays we must emphasise the five-pointed star with the crescent as a symbol of Islam.

The Red Cross has had to create a Red Crescent for the noble movement to become acceptable in Muslim countries. Similarly, little do we realise that the five-point star has a recent origin. It was in the Ottoman era of Sultan Salim that the first separation took place between the religious flag and the national flag. The national flag was red with a crescent and the religious flag was green with a crescent. Only later, a five-cornered star was added to symbolise the five pillars of Islam.

Theodor Herzl popularised the Star of David as the symbol of the new Zionist movement. I am told Jews wanted to have a simple geometric symbol to identify Judaism in the manner in which the Christian community employed the cross. But today’s Iranians won’t have any of that. They will not wear a tie because it reminds them of the Christian cross.

It would, of course, be a mistake to assume that our rigid attitude towards art, including its colours and geometrical symbols stems from some kind of Third World atavism. Cultural morbidity in this respect has attained a glorious high in the United States and its alter ego, Israel.

Now we are told that the US Navy will be spending about $600,000 to redesign or camouflage a 1960s barracks building in San Diego because of complaints that it looks like a swastika when viewed from the air. I am deluged with emails on the issue.

In the past, says one reader, this might have been a problem only for the occasional air traveller who happened to be over Coronado Island, but with the advent of aerial mapping and visualisation tools like Google Earth, everyone can see anything from the sky. In fact, many people have made a game out of finding oddities in satellite photos.

Now it’s one thing to see landmarks like this and snicker over a designer’s missteps 40 years ago (the navy says it noticed the shape but that it didn’t think anyone would see it from above), but it’s another thing altogether to complain to the navy about the shape of a building when viewed from space. But people really seem to have the time on their hands: the navy says it’s been inundated with complaints; enough, to justify spending that much money on new structures and extra bushes. It’s the first known case of its kind.

Mediaeval poet saint Kabir mocked missionaries of spiritual zeal thus: ‘Man na rangaye, rangaye jogi kapda.’ (The ascetic colours his clothes saffron but keeps his mind safely locked away in the darkness of his being.) If some obscurantist Jewish lobbyists are behind the campaign to change the shape of a 40-year-old building, it would be prudent for them to also check their own runaway neo-Nazis.

According to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, young Jewish groups are turning to the Nazi ideology. ‘Anti-Semitism has been swelling recently in Europe, and also in the Jewish state. Not long ago, the first Israeli neo-Nazi Internet site was launched. More precisely, it is an Israeli site in the Russian language. Who says there are no original productions here?’ the newspaper wrote recently.

The site is well organised, according to the paper. It has text and pictures showing the activists of the organisation, ‘The White Israeli Union’, some of them in Israel Defence Forces uniforms on the background of army camps and saluting with a raised arm. The expanded text is divided into sub-sections. There is one on ‘Who we are’, where the managers of the site introduce themselves as ‘Ilya from Haifa and Andrei from Arad’, and it is narrated there that the members of the organisation are ‘people who have pride in themselves and are sick of living among the dirty bastards’.

There is a section on ‘Who our enemies are’, where all the ‘enemies’ are extensively documented: the Jews, the Arabs, the immigrants from all Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, the Moroccans, the foreign workers — in short, the ‘black-asses’. In the material about the Arabs there is even a practical suggestion to enlist in the Israeli army a combat unit, in order to get weapons and begin to shoot at them in every possible circumstance.

‘Those who follow phenomena of this sort say that in its structure and content, the site resembles neo-Nazi sites in Russia, and strong connections exist between the activists here and the activists there,’ says the Haaretz. In the forum on the local site, there is an ambivalent attitude towards the fact that these proud white people are living in Israel. There are those who attack them for this and there are those who say that it is in fact important that some of ‘our people’ be in the ‘Jews’ state’ too.

The members who live in Israel explain that they want to defend the true Russian person on Israeli soil. They have a mission and so do, it seems, the people behind the swastika controversy, the graffiti vendors, the Danish cartoonist and those who are sworn to kill him. All art is useless, said Oscar Wilde. That was way before its religious zealots gave it a new purpose.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com