Sudhir Chandra: Let me tell you very quickly about the idea of the editors of Pratilipi. Their focus is on terror, especially on terror as an experience. So, in deference to their wishes, let me begin by asking if you’ve ever personally experienced any act of terror or been a witness to one?

T.N.Madan: Fortunately, no. But people close to me have been under threat. Not a major act of terrorism but under threat. Like my brother in 1990, when not only all that was being written in the local press, but all that was being said over the public address systems in the Mosques which they could hear, were threatening announcements asking the Kashmiri Pundits to go away because they were unable to make to a common Muslim cause… the word for the pundits was “mukhbir”. Of course, they gave an option that “you can join us.” And joining implied join the faith, join the movement and some quite serious threats for sometime were laced with additional statements like “you go away but leave your women behind.” So my brother was there, he heard this, he read this… he was, at the time, 70 years old. A retired principal of a college.

Sudhir Chandra: And was his family also there?

T.N.Madan: He was there, my mother, his wife and servants were there. He was a retired principal of a college which had been started in the 1940s by my father and some of his friends – by a group of people including my father, I should say. And so there were a lot of Muslim students who knew him, as first a teacher, later as principal of the college, so some of these people even came to him and told him that they would give him telephone numbers, they would give him various kinds of advice… if he paid some protection money… and one of his former students who was one of the major figures in the youth terrorist/separatist movement, he sent some of his younger colleagues to tell my brother that you don’t worry. But…

So these were the ways in which the thin edge of terrorism, without being immediately violent, reached people in their homes. And if you didn’t pay protection money, there were constant threats, that someone will come and attack you. And then there was the constant throwing of bombs, and slogans and noise which was a source of a great deal of distress to my bhabhi.

Sudhir Chandra: Throwing of bombs….?

T.N.Madan: Sadkon par, patthar mar diya, bam mar diya… (Throwing stones, throwing bombs on the roads…) It was going on all the time. Even Uma (Mrs. Madan) when she was there last time… She was there in October 1989, and she went shopping and there was a bomb-throwing incident near the shopping area where she was shopping.

Sudhir Chandra: But it had already begun in March-April 1989?

T.N.Madan: Yes. 88-89. It had already begun. I went there in the middle of 89 for a Kashmir University meeting. There was a hartaal there. Life had been disrupted – “Aaj hartaal hai” (“There’s a strike today“). I found it very hard to get to the university from my home.

Sudhir Chandra: And that incident you mentioned about your brother took place in 92?

T.N.Madan: No, no, no, no, no. This happened in 89.

Sudhir Chandra: Your brother was threatened in 89?

T.N.Madan: 89. 89.

Sudhir Chandra: That is almost the first year of… How long did they stay?

T.N.Madan: My mother came away in 89. My sister-in-law stayed back. I think she was much distressed because, you know, she was you can say the nervous type… koi avaaz zor se hui, koi dhamaka hua, to pareshan ho jati (she’d get anxious even if there was some loud noise). She also had blood pressure problems. And so… His children were abroad.

And then what happened was that he continued to stay. Then these incidents occurred… that we are protecting you. Agar koi aapko tang kare to yeh telephone number (if someone troubles you call this telephone number). But here, see, you have a situation where you’re told to behave in particular ways, otherwise you’ll be targeted.

And then that incident happened. Mufti Mohammed Saeed’s daughter was kidnapped. That turned the tide. Mufti Mohammaed Saeed was home minister in VP Singh’s newly formed government. There were demands of releasing militants… And then you know the whole story. Six people were released. Maulana Mohd. Azhar was one of them.

So sometime in 1990/91 he moved out. Locked the house and put a chowkidar there and came away. Thinking he was going to be shot. Like a lot of Kashmiris, they have an unreasonable fear of… so he went to live in Himachal. It was by the time we came back from US… Rented a house and… The chowkidar kept in touch with him. Then he stopped. And there were stories floated by people that the chowkidar’s wife had been kidnapped by militants and the chowkidar had been left with no choice but to join the militants. But then the occasional visitor – the shawl merchant would say, nahin sab theek hai, saman wahin hai (no, no, all is well, all your belongings are still there). And this was in 92. My brother died in 97. And in 98, Uma and I went. I was invited for some seminar or something.

Sab cheezein, bijli ki fitting, floor covering, furniture…. almariyan thee wall mein, carved cupboards, middle eastern and Chinese designs, dragons flowers the unpe, very ornately done… there were mirrors… all was taken. Darvaaze tod gaye the. Saari kitaabein. Saari kitaabein… (They broke the doors. And all the books… all the books…)

Sudhir Chandra: Since you saw all this, I’m not going to ask you what you felt about it. Because one can imagine it must’ve been a wrenching experience. But I want to ask you – having seen all this, experienced all this, do you think it will be possible for you as a social scientist to study or talk about terrorism? Let’s say in purely scholarly and academic terms?

T.N.Madan: I don’t see any problem. One can. We are trained to do these kinds of things. The personal can be separated but it cannot be forgotten cannot be eliminated… And when we went in 98, lots of things, you know… We found terrorists had burnt down a neighborhood nursery. The government had taken over one floor of our house. When we entered the house – severely damaged, robbed house – the best room in the house, which was a kind of a banquet room… the Persian word for these rooms was “Ravak”. Hamare Ravak mein uske bachche beech mein baithe… unko alif be pe padhaya ja raha hai (his children were sitting in our banquet hall, learning the alphabet).

So. But others suffered more. Mere mama hain, unka ghar jalaya gaya… Mere mousa hain unka ghar kaafi damage hua (One of my uncle’s houses was burned, another’s was badly damaged)… It was a house that was made unlike most Kashmiri houses… stone house… darvaaze, khidkiyan jo bhee thee jalayi gayee (the doors and windows were burnt)… So I think with the consequences of what happened there… one can focus on so many things, but what I have always felt is, what has happened there is, a way of life which had been based on a denial of things… Hindu Musalman khana nahin khate the… shadi byah nahin karte. Musalman mandir mein nahin jata tha, ja sakta tha. Hindu masjid mein nahin (Hindus and Muslims didn’t eat together, didn’t marry each other. A Muslim couldn’t go into a temple, a Hindi couldn’t go into a mosque) and yet people for this reason were not enemies.

Sudhir Chandra: What about that chowkidar whose wife was taken away by the terrorists… was he a Muslim?

T.N.Madan: Muslim, Muslim, Muslim… There was no question of putting a Hindu chowkidar… so he was a Muslim… the only way you could protect your house against possible militant attacks was that… we used to call them militants rather terrorists. So he was a Muslim… par fir woh gayab ho gaya… unke saath ho gaya. (but then he disappeared… he joined them.)

Sudhir: Despite the fact that his wife was abducted.

T.N.Madan: It was the story we heard. But coming back to what I was saying. In the aftermath of all this means two things, well there are many things. One of them is that a life which had been built on the basis of respect for differences, not acknowledgment necessarily of the worthiness of other guy’s way of life… “yeh to Muslim hai, aisa to karega hee, yeh to Hindu hai, aisa to karega hee par hum uspe jhagde kyon?” Yeh attitude tha… (“He’s a Muslim, he can’t help but act that way… He’s a Hindu, he can’t help but act like that… but why should we fight about this?” This was the attitude…) which I thought was an achievement in living peacefully… And in an article which I have just written for a festschrift, I recall how as a child, when I was 5 or 6, I learnt the Faitha by overhearing it. Humare ghar ke bagal mein maulvi saab ka ghar tha, unke chhote chhote bachche memorize karte the the Koran, which I could hear in my house… to woh padhte the bismilla urrahman urrahim, main apne ghar pe padhta tha bismilla urrahman urrahim… main unke saath… yeh bachpan tha… (A Maulvi lived in the house neighboring ours and his little children used to memorize the Koran which I could hear in my house. They’d read “bismillah urrahman urrahim” and I’d repeat in my house with them, “bismillah urrahman urrahim”… that’s the way it used to be.)

And it was at the age of seven that the Gayatri mantra was given to me. Isko padh le bhai… Before I got the Gayatri mantra in a formal initiation, I got the Fatiha by living in a mixed neighborhood… phir ghar gaya aur…

Also, at a non-personal level, one of the things I have often thought has been lost sight of is that, since 1990, a whole generation of young Muslim boys and girls born after 90 or just before, who have grown through the 90s, they’ve never seen Hindu boys and girls. And jo refugee camp mein Jammu mein, ya kahin aur jahan ab bhee baaki bache hon, Jammu mein to hain refugee camps, unmein jo bachche hain (and the children who have grown up in refugee camps in Jammu or wherever else) they have not seen a Muslim boy or girl. I used to play with Muslim boys.

So a generation has grown in Kashmir for whom the Hindu is absent. And by now, by 2005 to 2009, the absence itself is a trivial fact. Whereas in the camps the Muslim is presented as a memory, as a terrorist… jisne hamein ghar se bhagaya (who drove us out of our home). I don’t see lots of Muslims make much of haan yeh mukhbir tha, he was an informer for the Indian state. That was the argument which was used against the pundits earlier. But I just… it was something that has survived when the fact that these kids ask “Why are we miserable? Why are we in a camp? Why can’t we live in normal houses? Why don’t we have space? Because the Muslims have thrown us out!” So in the memory of the Kashmiri boy or girl who grew up in Jammu refugee camps and was perhaps even born there, it is the threatening terrorist.

Basharat Peer is a Kashmiri Muslim lad who is in his 30s. He belonged to a village in Kashmir – when militancy broke out he was 13 years old. He has written perhaps the most moving book that I have read about Kashmir during the 90s. And he says that when he went to school there were these empty chairs. The Pundit boys had gone away and he says we knew what had happened but nobody talked about it. The teachers changed. It is one of the most humane accounts of what had happened. He talks about military, he talks about how there was this whole romance of carrying a gun and not getting stuck with schools, studies and solving sums, he talks of this romance how youth in Kashmir, Muslim youth in the 90s, were seduced by this image of the militant. He says he wanted to be a militant… And he says his father put his headgear at his feet… a 13 year old boy’s feet. “Don’t do this”… his father was a civil servant and his grandfather was a schoolteacher and how they were this sane influence on this guy. And militants, sensing that his father was not pro-militant-aspirations, they tried to kill him. So he describes that incident. So he describes incidents of Muslim militants killing Muslims. He describes incidents of Indian army people raping Muslim women. But he does it with great calm. And he lives in New York now. “Curfewed Night” kitaab ka naam hai. Appeared recently. I found it very moving.

What I mean to say is that there are people like Basharat Peer who have lived this, lived through this, been attracted to the idea of being a militant. Been appalled to see them try and kill his parents. Missing his friends. He says he came back and went looking for his teachers. He traced one of them in a refugee camp. When he was talking with him there was some uneasiness. Then he was told to step out by the mother, the woman. She asked her husband and Basharat to just step outside so that her daughter who had just come from school could change clothes. There was only one room. So Basharat describes… belongs to that past which I hold dear… that here is someone who can write with such calm.

Sudhir Chandra: Evidently he could do it because he is in New York. Also that he became disillusioned with militancy… but the general run of Kashmiri Muslim youth…

T.N.Madan: There are two types. There are people who have gone through the kind of experience that Basharat has, who do not write like Basharat; people who make use of everything they can get from India, everything offered to them by India but are against India… well, maybe I am prejudiced too… but I find they are dishonest people… but that’s anguish… leave it.

Basharat’s book is a book of somebody who lived through the militancy. He describes how there was curfew and they were trying to carry a woman to the hospital who was in the last stage of her labor and an army officer helped. He doesn’t suppress incidents like that. And he also writes about the occasions when the army people would rape brides. There are types and types and types.

So I think, you know, Basharat Peer’s book… he uses the title “Curfewed Night” to say that for a long time raat ko hamesha curfew laga karta tha (for a long time, there was always curfew at night). And his love for his teachers, he was searching for them…

I think in Kashmir, terrorism has been what people, what Muslims have suffered.

Agha Ashraf Ali… unka ladka (his son) is an English poet… unse mulakat hui (I met him). He keeps telling me that, you know, he wants to talk to his friends… says Kashmiri Pundits woh to gayab hee ho gaye (the Kashmiri Pundits have disappeared). He invited me to a lunch, and Badri Raina of whom I had heard but never met. So Badri Raina ko bulaya… mujhe bulaya, apne kuchh rishtedaar, koi ex-students thode se log the… (so, he invited Badri Raina, and me and some of his relatives, some ex-students… a few people…)

So there are people like Agha Ashraf Ali who have the same kind of feeling I have. What was precious was lack of mutual hostility despite strong differences and stereotyping… I have also done an article about stereotypes and some of the stereotypes were very funny.

Sudhir Chandra: I want to go back to your brother and your sister. And you said there were worse sufferers.

T.N.Madan: Like my Mama.

Sudhir Chandra: Some difference in them after they were exiled from their home?

T.N.Madan: For instance, my sister who’s closer to me in age. Married in Allahabad. With us these days. She hates Muslims. I fight it everyday.

Sudhir Chandra: This is a later phenomenon? She wasn’t… earlier?

T.N.Madan: No. But now she is annoyed when we buy shawls from Kashmiris… There is a deep anger… So her reaction is like that. My other sister married in ’37. She has lived mostly outside, so I don’t think she has any formulated reaction, but her husband who retired as Director of Science and Education, is very negative. He says even now when we are no longer at home, bijli fail hoti hai to Jammu mein, ration ki kami hoti hai to Jammu mein, dawai kam hoti hai to Jammu mein… (if the lights go out, it’s in Jammu, if there’s shortage of rations, it’s in Jammu, if medicines fall short, it’s in Jammu…) Whether this is true or false is not material…

For him, even now after all that has been done… when Kashmiri Pundits mostly have settled down in Jammu. He says kya hai Kashmir, musalmaano ke liye hai (what is Kashmir? It’s for the Muslims). For years there was har 2 ghante bijli chali jati… (every 2 hours, the lights would go out) it lasted years… Gulam Nabi Azad was the man who did something for Jammu. So a bit of anger… hate…

Aur jab hum 98 mein gaye to hum 3 din hi rahe. 99 mein thoda jyada… kai logon se baat hui jyadatar sab polite (And then, when we went in 98 we stayed 3 days, a bit more in 99. We talked to a lot of people and most of them were polite) but sometimes a boatman or a liftman or somebody would say “Why did you leave?” “Who told you all this?” “What are you up to?” So there are people who are quite embarrassed… these are the people that… aapne padha tha woh? I had quoted one of the Hurriyat leaders on Kashmiri Pundits but Wajahat Habibullah, the Commissioner, Right for Information, he came out with a book… His is a kind of very fair account.

He says Kashmiri Pundits had no option, they had to leave and he says he pleaded with Jagmohan to go on television and say we’ll protect you.

Sudhir Chandra: But the boatman or liftman who… they must also be knowing you had no option?

T.N.Madan: Utna kaun sochta hai? Aap yeh tabhi sochenge (Who thinks that much? You’ll only think about that) when you share some small grief… But you see Wajahat Habibullah had… he says that an anti-Hindu sentiment developed in Kashmir politics among Kashmiri Muslims… bahut saari cheezein hui… but Wajahat, an IAS-man, as a civil servant who knows Kashmir inside out, he has no hesitation in saying that after the elections in 1986, it started to build up… with the number of streams that were converging and by 1990s there was no option but to leave…

But there are people like George Verghese. Ek seminar tha 2 saal pehle (At a seminar 2 years ago). Some Cambridge University people came and invited some people to talk about our contemporary problems in the context of secular state… to wahan pe… Prafulla Goradiane kaha ki sare mandir tod diye gaye (Goradia said all the temples had been torn down) and George Verghese who is very sober and very senior, he was very angry… kyon isko bulaya hai? (Why have you called him?) Who’s Goradia, spreading false information? No temples have been destroyed. And Goradia said come to Kashmir at my expense and I will show you, and if I’m proved wrong you can decide what punishment you’d like to…

I was appalled by this exchange. The people who worship in those temples, even if they have not been destroyed, even if they are there, even if Mr. Verghese is right and Mr. Goradia is wrong… How hardhearted can you be?

What people may call, places of worship are not necessarily regular temples in Kashmir. Hamare yahan to Bhairav kee bharmaar hai aur humare ghar ke paas tha ek ped jismein Mangaleshwar bhairay virajmaan the. Aur hum ja ke puja karte the us ped ki. Agar woh ped kat gaya to kya? (We had lots of places where Bhairav was worshipped. There was a tree near our home where Mangaleshwar dwelt and we worshipped that tree… So what if that tree was cut?)

Sudhir Chandra: Talking of… I think there is something about us and I’m including myself, liberals, progressives… There is a tendency to ignore a few things. I must confess that once I was struck by the fact that we liberals have not really cared for what happened to the Kashmiri Pundits. How they were driven out… camps they were living in. Believe me, I just could not understand what kind of blindness was it that made it impossible for us – many of us – to see it. I can see it now, and I’ve seen it for some years, but why I could not see… that’s a blindness that I cannot quite explain. I do remember the poignant preface you wrote to the 2nd edition of your Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pundits of Kashmir.

Would you not like to comment about our failure to see what happened?

T.N.Madan: I don’t, I don’t know how to comment. You see the word that you use – a key word perhaps – captures in itself the explanation. The indifference. If you are seen in the slightest way to be supportive of primordial identities of religion or language or caste. Then you are in a different sensibility. You are not a true liberal. A liberal does not see this because, in some sense, these things are not real. I don’t know. For me the big shock was Dr. Satish Saberwal. He shocked me when he said “No, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. Jagmohan wanted it so that musalmaan ka safaya kar sake. (so that the Muslims could be eliminated).”

Sudhir Chandra: Sorry I can’t follow that logic…

T.N.Madan: There was this big argument that the Pundits were sent away. He said that if the Pundits were out of the way, the Indian state, represented by the governor and the army, woh sab safaya karenge (they can eliminate) without collateral damage.

I said, how can you, how can you think that people will leave their homes, their property their jobs because of Jagmohan…? I said, my mother did not come, my brother did not come. Of course, one can say that a lot of people left. But what do you expect when there is a minority scattered, half in rural areas, half in cities, totaling about 200,000. Kashmiri Pundit will tell you 5 lakhs, 10 lakhs, but I’ve calculated and recalculated and re-recalculated, and the Pundits were not more than 250,000.

Somebody I met in Jammu, he’s a teacher, a distant cousin, my brother started a school for children called Tiny Tots, he was its headmaster. When all these guys were driven away the school fell into disarray, walls collapsing… and it was a neighborhood school. Earlier on, probably 90% children were Muslim and 10% were Hindu, but after, all 100% Muslim. They say it’s an institution serving Muslims. So they persuaded my cousin to go back as headmaster. And he told me, “Oh everything is so nice, they’re so nice to us.” I said, “Do you wear the tilak? Sari pehente ho wahan? Kaan mein pehente ho, lekin sar ko cover karke??” So you have this couple, they’re being treated very well because they are needed. So although the State Dept. estimates Kashmiri Pundits abhi bhi Kashmir mein hain (are still there in Kashmir). They are kind of compromised. They won’t wear the tilak, they won’t wear the sari, and they won’t wear the ear-pendant characteristic of a married pundit woman.

Sudhir Chandra: Considering what your brother heard, and he had students among the militants to help him, and the demand for protection money even from him… What is excessive fear? What is panic? If your brother…

T.N.Madan: And you know, my brother used to say what he paid probably was a small amount.

I remember, he says he consulted with his Muslim friends… Use laga main safe hoon (He thought he was safe). Friends said aaj tumse 5 sau maange ya 5 hazaar. Mano woh de diya (today they asked you for 500 or 5000. Consider you gave it to them.). Tomorrow they may ask you an amount which you cannot pay. What then? But my brother says that when he locked up the house, he was pretty sure that this was a temporary phenomenon. So he came and stayed with my sister. And when it was not working out he rented a house.

And so it would be a lie to say that Kashmiri Pundits, in terms of deaths, have suffered more than Muslims, no. Thousands of more Muslims have died in crossfire between militants and security forces.

So the point is that what terrorism has done to Kashmir is that it has turned on its own… killed Muslims. Kashmiri pundit honge kuchh hundred honge (If there are Kashmiri Pundits, they’ll only be a few hundred).

Sudhir Chandra: But casualties to unki hui hogi who stayed back. So it was for them to decide whether they should be…

T.N.Madan: True, true. But what I’m saying is a fact, that thousands of Muslims have died. And Muslims have died at the hands of both the sides. And I once talked to a police officer. “Professor sahib“, he said very sarcastically, “mere 10 jawan ja rahe hain, mere 20 jawan ja rahe hain truck mein. They are going through a market. Somebody throws a grenade. Pehle 2 jawan mar jaate hain. Ab kya? Bus rok doon? Neeche utroon? Suno suno aa jaao, batao kisne maara, usko hum pakdenge? Aap jaante hain kaisi situation hai (10 of my men, 20 of my men, are going through the market in a truk and someone throws a grenade. 2 of them die. What do I do? Stop the truck? Step out and say Listen, come here and tell me who threw the grenade – we’ll catch him? You know what the situation is) – I’ll hold an enquiry? Get witnesses, get informants? That’s not how the police functions… If my men have been attacked – this is the other side – I have to instill terror in people. Tum 2 mere maroge, main 20 maar doonga. (You kill 2 of mine, I kill 20 of yours). How do you expect me to say, okay you’ve killed 2 people, now we’ll hold an enquiry?”

So in a situation of terrorism the state acts out of necessity and conviction as a countering force of terrorism. So it was an undeclared war. “Aapne ek grenade phenk diya, to main kahan kisko dhoondhoon…” (Someone throws a grenade, now where do I go and search?)

Sudhir Chandra: So, there was excess from terrorists, there was excess from counter-terrorists. But this senior office could not have explained everything. He wouldn’t have asked his junior officers to rape…

T.N.Madan: No, no.

Sudhir Chandra: So there were excesses from both sides.

T.N.Madan: Yes. And similarly, somebody was trying to convince me that this is not the primary task of military… to counter-terrorism. Now this is an armed force. You expect them to prevent terrorist acts, they will use force. But this force has to be in certain defined limits, those limits are transgressed. Kal bhi, parson bhi, do mare gaye (yesterday, the day before, 2 were killed)… some gentle Kashmiri Muslims. They are the gentlest.

I know a young Kashmiri boy. He teaches sociology in Amar Singh College. Uska kal phone aaya humey Shivratri Mubarak kehne. Kashmiri Pundits ka bada festival hota hai yeh. Kai member uski family ke maare gaye. (He phoned yesterday to wish us on Shivratri – it’s a big festival for Kashmiri Pundits. Many members of his family were killed.)

Now he’s an interesting character. He belongs to one of the most militant towns… BA wagehra kiya tha (He’d done his BA)… So one day I was sitting in my office a man comes in who is visually a terrorist, is wearing the shareena, what they call the “shariya izhar”, has a long shirt, has a beard, black hair… He comes into my room and says “Adaab.” He sits down and then he tells me that he has been sent to me by someone I know. To mainey kaha, “Kya karoon aapke liye?” Bola, “Sir, main padhna chahta hoon. Wahan par militancy chalti hai, wahan main nahin rehna chahta hoon. Mainey mazdoori ka bhi kaam kiya hai, woh bhi kiya hai, yeh bhi kiya hai, humaare itne woh maare gaye, yeh mare gaye… main thak gaya hoon, main chhordna chahta hoon. Mujhe admission dila dijiye.” (So I asked him, What can I do for you? And he said Sir I want to study. I don’t want to stay in Kashmir there’s too much militancy. I’ve worked as a laborer, I’ve done this, I’ve done that… So many of my family were killed… I’m tired. I want to leave that place. Please get me admitted to the college.)

“Kis school mein?”

“M.Phil. mein.”

He was given admission. He wrote an M.Phil. Us dauraan uska bahnoi mara gaya (his sister’s husband was killed at the time). Ab in circumstances mein ladka… So he had to go. Aaya wapas, M.Phil. poora kiya (he came back, completed his M.Phil.), then he registered as a PhD student, he got a job teaching. So he’s teaching and he keeps in touch with me. And when we went in 98, he came with us to the house. Hamare ghar mein jo top floor tha was kind of a hall jahan baithakein bhi hoti thi aur jahan pe badi badi daavat bhi hoti thi, 50-60 log baithte the (the top floor of our house was a banquet hall that could seat 50-60 people)… Some neighborhood people had been raising chickens in that hall. It was littered with chicken droppings and it was filthy. And usne Uma aur mujhe pakad pakad kar kaha aap yahan se chalo, aap yahan se chalo… Use aabhaas tha hume kitna bura laga. (He said to me and Uma, please let’s go, he insisted, let’s go… He understood how we must be feeling). He just didn’t let us stay there. He dragged us away. Nahi Nahi aap chaliye, yahan se chaliye…

He’s a man in his 40s. And when I think of him, honestly, tears come to my eyes. When I read Basharat Peer’s book I felt a lump in my throat. So I miss that, I miss him, I miss… because I had friends…

Sudhir Chandra: Talking of lump in the throat, I want you to tell me something about your mother. She is more than a hundred now and she has seen all this. How does she feel…?

T.N.Madan: She has forgotten… obliterated. She doesn’t talk about all this. She talks about old times and Muslim neighbors. I was delivered by a Muslim midwife.

Sudhir Chandra: She will not talk about the recent things…?

T.N.Madan: The loss of the house and that kind of thing? No, no. If she talks about old times she’ll talk of these incidents… you know… the dependable neighbors, no birth injuries, perfect delivery at the hand of the traditional dai…

There were two twin brothers, one was miserable, the other was flourishing. And the miserable one was the one from whom we used to buy milk. He treated my mother almost like his own mother. And, you know, he was miserable. Never got married, long story of woe… Woh aake meri mother ke paas baith ke jaise bachcha maa ke paas baithta (He’d come and sit beside my mother like a child will sit besides its mother)… He got more from my mother than his own mother who had two sons, she had divided loyalties. And the elder brother used to say yeh to punditon ke ghar khana khaata hai (He eats at Pundits’ homes). So there were these things, they were always there. These strains were always there… Many people ate, but generally they expected that a Muslim would not eat at a Hindu’s and a Hindu not at a Muslim’s place These things were always there. We had… Arey yeh to bahut lambi kahani ho jayegi…

But I’ve said that all this talk of syncretic culture, composite culture… mujhe composite culture kahin nahin mila… matlab ek tolerance thee… chalo mandir masjid gurudwara sab… (I never found this composite culture anywhere… there was a tolerance, yes…)

Anyway, this is the kind of thing. I don’t know whether this all will be of use to you.

Sudhir Chandra: Sure, but earlier when you mentioned Basharat Peer, my response was – he can do it because he’s in New York. But now that you’ve mentioned this sociology student and this younger brother and it seems that there are Muslims even today in Kashmir…

T.N.Madan: So many of them. Yes, oh yes. There is Mohd. Ishaq Khan, a historian just retired who is not pro-India in the sense that he is not a Congress-man or a National Conference-man. He believes in some degree of political independence. But he is a devout supporter of Kashmir Islam.

He wrote a book on Kashmir’s transition in the medieval periods to Islam. And he is a Sufi. He has compiled a dictionary of Sufi Islam. He treats me with great respect. It was he who invited me last year to lecture at the University. He wrote a book, he asked me to write the Foreword. So you know there are… He has a political stance which leans more towards independence than… not Pakistan, because he’s anti-Wahabi-Islam…

But he treats me with great respect. And he invited me. I said I will give a lecture only if you let me argue for the study of comparative religion beyond the study of Islam. They said yes. I said won’t you people be in trouble? Main bolunga aur chala jaunga (I’ll say what I have to and leave)… They said no, no… So they arranged for me a lecture in the Gandhi Bhavan building… They had a bigger turnout than they expected so they shifted the venue within the same building, to the auditorium.

I got some very critical questions. Somebody called Baba said aapka itna achcha lecture tha, aap phir aaiyega (your lecture was great, you should come again). Baba told me that he was going to give a paper at a seminar on Hind Swaraj, on the Gandhian concept of decentralization or something – in a way, trying to derive legitimacy for a greater degree of autonomy from a Gandhian perspective.

Kaafi nahi hua? (Isn’t this enough?)

Sudhir Chandra: Kabhi kaafi nahi hota hai. Nahin, par aakhir mein aapne Gandhi ka naam liya.. theek hee hai. Gandhi ka naam… (It’s never enough. But, wait… in the end you mentioned Gandhi…)

T.N.Madan: No, I talked of Baba.

But, yes, things have changed a lot in the sense that when I went to give my lecture exactly a year ago in March, I did not see a strong presence of identifiable extremists. What I mean is that I didn’t see a lot of burqas. If I saw five burqas, I saw five bare heads. It’s not a Taliban kind of ambience… You should go to the shopping areas… What are people buying? Cars… DVDs… It has changed…