When Nobody went to Shaheen Bagh

Inside Out

The well-known American spiritual teacher, Richard Alpert, aka Baba Ram Dass, featured in a 2019 documentary on his life and teachings titled Becoming Nobody, that came out months before he died. It’s a curious phrase -- ‘becoming nobody’ -- that could be taken to stand for the essence of what Ram Dass taught over a lifetime of 88 years. “The game is not about becoming somebody. It is about becoming nobody,” he held.

What exactly did Ram Dass mean? Well, I was given a small taste of what the teaching was hinting at during a recent trip to Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh. Yes, the very same locality that has come to symbolise Muslim women’s protest against discriminatory laws and the State’s use of violence against protesters — among them Jamia Millia Islamia students, with families in Shaheen Bagh.

Having mooted the idea of a reporting assignment after weeks of looking at images of Shaheen Bagh on social media feeds, I found myself conflicted about the trip on landing in the national capital from Bengaluru. A journalist’s enthusiasm for what promised to be a good story and a strongly-held belief in the righteousness of the women’s cause had propelled me to undertake the trip, but there was something I had not admitted even to myself about Shaheen Bagh that was making me anxious deep down.

It’s no overstatement that Hindus and Muslims, generally speaking, have lived together in Independent India without any real understanding of each others’ lives and conditions. There is no dearth of handy stereotypes that have become ingrained in each community’s way of thinking about the other. There are many regular tropes about Muslims that circulate in our culture (I’m not even going in the direction of the more virulent ones): Muslims as the unknown and unfathomable ‘other’; a community that may or may not be completely comfortable with their identity as Indians; those with a tendency to religious fanaticism that could be easily brought to the mainstream, etc. You can fit in whatever stereotype you want in the blank where there is a lack of knowledge about the condition of ordinary Muslims and their lives.

It seems I, too, was holding on to images about Shaheen Bagh and Muslims in general. This was the source of the disturbance. Although I had taught myself the trick of appearing completely tolerant and even objective, not just to others but even to my own self, stereotypes and images about Muslims continued to work in my psyche.

Now, the whole deal about stereotypes is that these are images you have bought into or built up, either in relation to or in opposition to who you think you are. This is a part of your somebodiness, your identity. So, what I was really feeling was a threat to the sense of self I had built up for myself unconsciously.

If this story has anything of worth at all, then it has to do with the fact that I actually made the trip and spoke with the women of Shaheen Bagh. Had I not, I would have continued to hold on to the images I had invented, believing them to be true since no one else but I could challenge them!

Here’s what I found in Shaheen Bagh: A group of women — practising Muslim women, many of them wearing burqas — with fears, anger, hopes and dreams that could have been those of a million other women across India. I found women protesting against an attack on their children who studied in Jamia; women resisting because they were fearful about the future of the small kids they were so lovingly and painstakingly bringing up and into whose upbringing they were pouring much of what they had. The trip forced me to confront — for the first time — whether I was any ‘different’ from them, or they from me.

If I have to put into words how I felt after my Shaheen Bagh visit, I won’t hesitate to use the word ‘free’. Yes, this is azadi. Perhaps of the real kind. The kind that makes us nobodies again, and thus makes a meeting of hearts possible between those separated by their minds.