In bad faith

Fri, Jul 4 02:18 AM

Had the film Aamir been a thriller about an innocent trapped by the mafia into crime, it would have been as gripping. But then it would not have been set in Mumbai's oldest Muslim ghetto, where, according to the film, every bylane harbours people ostensibly doing innocuous jobs, but actually working for a shadowy Boss. In an earlier, innocent era, the Boss would have been a slightly comic smuggler. Today he is the deadly serious Muslim terrorist out to avenge the injustices caused to his community.

Only the beard, namaz and azaan are missing from this stereotype of the Muslim terrorist. Otherwise it's all there: the prayer mat, the cap, the lavish meal with every conceivable meat, the paan, the spittoon. As are all the other trappings: the minarets, the narrow lanes, the chunks of hanging meat, butchers with namaz caps chopping away. Not a pretty world at all, and one wonders what those living in it would think, watching it portrayed on screen as a den of filth, violence, crime and unquestioned obedience to jehadi bosses in Pakistan and all over the Islamic world.

This squalor is part of the wrongs done to our community, the terrorist tells the squeaky clean, handsome, and completely secular yet devout Muslim hero. (Of course someone like him must love a Hindu.) Should we be grateful that our filmmakers have moved from biryani-sherwani- qurbani socials to the injustices meted out to Muslims?

If the first depicted an enchanting but completely unreal world, the latter world is only too real in its physical depiction. That's why the recent trend of films on Muslim terrorism are so dangerous. They project the popular image of the youngMuslim-turning-terrorist so technically well, that those who know hardly anyone living in these ghettos will be even more apprehensive of them.

It's not as if these ghettos don't contain in them a hundred stories waiting to be told about deprivation, neglect and injustice. But many of these have resulted not in revengeful terrorism but in redoubled struggles to overcome. The residents who step gingerly around mounds of garbage in lanes where butchers ply their trade in the open, pay municipal taxes as regularly or irregularly as those living in Hindu colonies, but rarely see a garbage-collection truck. Pan-stained rickety stairs don't always lead to empty rooms reserved for bombers. Sometimes they lead to informal classrooms filled with first-generation learners trying to get ahead in school year by agonising year by rushing here to study after cooking and cleaning for their families.

In one such building in Mumbai lives bank employee Iqbal who wrote Shivaji's biography in Urdu; in another, lives computer teacher Shabana Qureishi, whose modest salary barely supports her younger brother's college education. Their father and elder brother were killed by local boys she identified as Shiv Sainiks in the '92-'93 riots. And when will our filmmakers turn their cameras towards the other ghettos in Mumbai, where too, young men are exhorted to revenge, but by tilak-wearing saffron-clad supremos?

The writer, a freelance journalist, has covered the '92-'93 Mumbai riots jyotipunwani@gmail.com

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