The Twice-Born by Aatish Taseer

Author:Aatish Taseer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: null
ISBN: 9789353023898
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING CLASS IN India is small, powerful, and easily identifiable by its wealth, its speech, and what seem almost like racial differences. As Aldous Huxley once wrote of the British in India, they “are accepted much as paper money is accepted, because there is a general belief that [they] are worth something.” But were the currency to lose its value, then the Indian, “without any violence, merely by quietly refusing to accept” westernized India at its own valuation, could reduce the power of that class to impotence.

A few weeks before my return to Benares, the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld the capital sentence handed down to my father’s killer. It was meant to be good news, a sign of the hardening resolve of the Pakistani state, but I could think only of the testimony my father’s killer gave the court, which had been translated into tortured English:

On the faithful day, I being member of Elite Force I was deployed as one of the member of Escort Guard of Salman Taseer, the Governor Punjab. In Koh-i-Sar Market, the Governor with another after having lunch in a restaurant walked to his vehicle. In adjoining mosque I went for urinating in the washroom and for making ablution. When I came out with my gun, I came across Salman Taseer. Then I had the occasion to address him, “Your honour being the Governor had remarked about blasphemy law as black law, if so it was unbecoming of you.” Upon this he suddenly shouted and said, “Not only that it is black law, but also it is my shit.” Being a Muslim I lost control and under grave and suddenly provocation, I pressed the trigger and he lay dead in front of me. I have no repentance and I did it for “Tahafuz-i-Namoos-i-Rasool” [protection of the honour of the Prophet]. Salman offered me grave and sudden provocation. I was justified to kill him kindly see my accompanying written statement U/s 265(F)(5) of Cr. P. C.

Pakistan was not India. India was a democracy. There was a credible state in India that had not been undermined by military coups every decade; India had a long tradition of press freedoms and the peaceful transfer of power. Hinduism, with its great pluralism, and none of the doctrinal strictness of the monotheistic faiths, could never serve the needs of politics the way Islam could. Yet the underlying shape of society was the same. Both places had the same class of interpreters; both had a new middle class—untouched by colonization, but not spared globalization—that had awoken, as if out of a sleep, to the discovery that all power and wealth was concentrated in the hands of a godless, deracinated few. They awoke with rage to a world they had no hand in making, with a profound sense in both countries of being trifled with—a belief that Western ideas and norms had been used against them to maintain the power of a ruling class that was as good as foreign.

In the

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