"Ahmedabad, 6 AM"
Written Feb 8th, 2006
The air in Ahmedabad, ranked one of the most polluted cities in the world, is pleasantly clean in the early morning. The streets are placid in the heart of this metropole. As I am getting ready for my flight to Bangalore, insisting that my hotel serve me something more than toast and coffee for breakfast, I return to my room , waiting for my aloo paratha and curd. At six sharp, loud prayers to Lord Rama echo through the streets amplified on a low-end P.A. system which does nothing for sound quality, but effectively hushes even the car horns and traffic noises that have been my constant companions all night as I hope for sleep.
I am sure these prayers can be heard from a mile around, and they are emitted from what sounds like less than a block from my hotel. Hotel “Good Night” is situated across a busy street from Sidi Sayeed’s Mosque, one of a few major mosques that, alongside the likes of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, constitute Ahmedabad’s most important landmarks. Gandhi, the icon of Indian independence, is highly revered throughout Gujarat with a sort of pride of state; and it seems that historically, national independence is impossibly interconnected with the Pakistan-India partition. Ahmedabad is a home of Hindu-Muslim diversity and fairly recent race riots and mass killings of Muslims. Sidi Sayeed’s Mosque (and my hotel with it) is placed where the (appropriately named) Nehru Bridge empties into Lal Darwaj, a large market in the center of Ahmedabad.
As these prayers echo through the streets waking up the impossible number of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks on this mild morning in early Spring, I wonder how Ahmedabad’s Muslims feel on awakening to these daily prayers à la age of technology. I wonder if Hinduism has now become the invasive and oppressive force in this subcontinent. Yet, I consider how feeling “infringed upon” is, in India, a virtually foreign trait, and I wonder even more if I am simply an over-sensitive American. In India following the initial mutual bloodshed of Partition, Muslims and Hindus have remained in a latent conflict.
As far as I have read, the BJP, the political party that ousted the Congress Party and brought in great progress for India, has a bit of a history of pro-Hindu (read: anti-Muslim) liaisons and policies. On the flip side, it is current government policy to help sponsor pilgrimages to Mecca for the Islamic pious, yet, the state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, confiscates donations to Hindu temples. Secularism in India has thus far meant not sponsoring Hindu beliefs and supporting other faiths to give them a ‘fair chance.’ This creates an obvious racial tension, so when violence breaks, blood is already boiling, resulting in things like the mass slaughter of Muslims.
However, unsure if it is owing to Indian optimism or simply racial supremacy, as I talked with a Hindu ex-patriot of Ahmedabad a few days ago in my first good political discussion of this trip, he said wide-eyed and straight faced, “The Muslims and Hindus do live in harmony in Ahmedabad.” I eventually gave up pressing my point about the killings and decided it was yet another example of the confounding nature of Indian culture. Even as I am writing this conclusion in the Airport, a clumsy announcer closes his boarding call with “…namaskar.”—the traditional Hindu salutation.
The air in Ahmedabad, ranked one of the most polluted cities in the world, is pleasantly clean in the early morning. The streets are placid in the heart of this metropole. As I am getting ready for my flight to Bangalore, insisting that my hotel serve me something more than toast and coffee for breakfast, I return to my room , waiting for my aloo paratha and curd. At six sharp, loud prayers to Lord Rama echo through the streets amplified on a low-end P.A. system which does nothing for sound quality, but effectively hushes even the car horns and traffic noises that have been my constant companions all night as I hope for sleep.
I am sure these prayers can be heard from a mile around, and they are emitted from what sounds like less than a block from my hotel. Hotel “Good Night” is situated across a busy street from Sidi Sayeed’s Mosque, one of a few major mosques that, alongside the likes of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, constitute Ahmedabad’s most important landmarks. Gandhi, the icon of Indian independence, is highly revered throughout Gujarat with a sort of pride of state; and it seems that historically, national independence is impossibly interconnected with the Pakistan-India partition. Ahmedabad is a home of Hindu-Muslim diversity and fairly recent race riots and mass killings of Muslims. Sidi Sayeed’s Mosque (and my hotel with it) is placed where the (appropriately named) Nehru Bridge empties into Lal Darwaj, a large market in the center of Ahmedabad.
As these prayers echo through the streets waking up the impossible number of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks on this mild morning in early Spring, I wonder how Ahmedabad’s Muslims feel on awakening to these daily prayers à la age of technology. I wonder if Hinduism has now become the invasive and oppressive force in this subcontinent. Yet, I consider how feeling “infringed upon” is, in India, a virtually foreign trait, and I wonder even more if I am simply an over-sensitive American. In India following the initial mutual bloodshed of Partition, Muslims and Hindus have remained in a latent conflict.
As far as I have read, the BJP, the political party that ousted the Congress Party and brought in great progress for India, has a bit of a history of pro-Hindu (read: anti-Muslim) liaisons and policies. On the flip side, it is current government policy to help sponsor pilgrimages to Mecca for the Islamic pious, yet, the state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, confiscates donations to Hindu temples. Secularism in India has thus far meant not sponsoring Hindu beliefs and supporting other faiths to give them a ‘fair chance.’ This creates an obvious racial tension, so when violence breaks, blood is already boiling, resulting in things like the mass slaughter of Muslims.
However, unsure if it is owing to Indian optimism or simply racial supremacy, as I talked with a Hindu ex-patriot of Ahmedabad a few days ago in my first good political discussion of this trip, he said wide-eyed and straight faced, “The Muslims and Hindus do live in harmony in Ahmedabad.” I eventually gave up pressing my point about the killings and decided it was yet another example of the confounding nature of Indian culture. Even as I am writing this conclusion in the Airport, a clumsy announcer closes his boarding call with “…namaskar.”—the traditional Hindu salutation.
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