TRANQUEBAR
ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
Alternative Realities is a travelogue, a memoir, a satire and a feminist critique of Muslim women's lives, interwoven with the author's own ongoing struggles as a Muslim woman.
Each chapter presents personal stories of women living in cities, small towns and villages in India, Pakistan and Bangladeshthe three lands to which Nighat Gandhi belongs. In writing their stories, she attempts to break the silence enshrouding Muslim women's sexuality, and the ways in which they negotiate the restrictions placed on their freedoms within the framework of their culture. Women like Ghazala, who prefers the life of a second wife, 'living like a married single woman', to being bound within the ties of a conventional marriage; Nusrat and QT who believe theirs is a normal marriage, except that they are both women; Nisho, who refuses to accept that her transsexuality should deny her the right to love, and Firdaus, writer and feminist, who can walk out of a loveless marriage but not give up on love, with or without marriage.
Nighat also explores her own story as a woman who dared to make choices that pitted her against her family and cultures. Alternative Realities is her jihad or struggle to deconstruct the demeaning stereotypes that prevail about all Muslim women. It is a reflection of the myriad ways in which, despite these misogynistic forces, they continue to weave webs of love and peace in their own lives and in the lives of those they live with.
Nighat Gandhi is a writer, mother, Sufi wanderer, and mental health counsellor. She spent her formative years in Dhaka and Karachi, and has subsequently spent many years in India and the United States. She consciously identifies as a citizen of South Asia to transcend limitations imposed by narrow nationalisms. She is the author of Ghalib at Dusk and Other Stories (Tranquebar, 2009) and What I am Today, I Won't Remain Tomorrow: Conversations With Survivors of Abuse (Yoda Press, 2010).
ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
Love in the Lives of Muslim Women
Nighat M. Gandhi
TRANQUEBAR PRESS
An imprint of westland ltd
61, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600 095
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93, 1st Floor, Sham Lal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002
First published in India by Tranquebar, an imprint of westland ltd, 2013
First e-book edition: 2013
Copyright Nighat M. Gandhi 2013
The chapter 'Siraat-e-MustaqeemThe Straight Path' (p. 139) first appeared in the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Lesbian Sexuality .
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-93-83260-32-4
Typeset in Aldine401 BT by SRYA, New Delhi
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.
Afreen texted me on a day I was feeling particularly despondent about completing this book: 'Say what you feel emphatically, or you may stagnate the growth of something beautiful and regret it later .'
This book is dedicated to all who love and live emphatically .
Contents
Acknowledgements
I owe my deepest gratitude to all who shared their life stories with me. Some did not become a part of this book, but continue to enrich my heart, and perhaps belong to another book. Thanks to relatives and friends, and friends' relatives who threw open their homes for me. Without their open-hearted hospitality it wouldn't be possible to find safe and comfortable places to stay as a woman travelling alone, especially in places with no hotels or hostels. Without the unwavering support and encouragement of my daughters, I wouldn't have been able to leave them as often as I did to go off on my journeys. And without the chequered life lived in my three homelands, this book would be inconceivable. So, shukriya India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Preface
What is this book about? A travelogue, a memoir, biography? A book about Muslim women? Why women? Why only Muslim? Let me tell you how I came to write this book. In telling you of the hows, the whys and whats might emerge.
Some of the hows: How I chafed at the tiresome image propagated by the media of the Muslim woman as oppressed, veiled, victimized, with no voice of her own. How I wanted to weave my loves into my writing. How those loves transformed me and eventually turned into the writing of this book. When I started thinking abouttravelling, writing, meeting peopleI realized how any unearthing of me was also about the revelations carried in things, places and people. Disclosures about me were about me to the extent that they were about my impressions and interactions with things, places and people. I wandered for three years in my three homelands collecting these impressions. In towns and villages of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, meeting women in these villages and towns, and in their kitchens, courtyards and workplaces, we spoke of their loves and mine.
Al-Ghazali, the eleventh-century Sufi psychologist and philosopher, valued travel as an indispensable tool for spiritual growth. True travel, or safar, according to Ghazali was not just the physical movement of a traveller from one place to another. Safar was about the inner journey of the heart and mind that revealed the truth of one to oneself, and took one closer to that state known variously as enlightenment, self-realization, self-knowledge, satori, fana the sort of intimacy with ourselves of which we are all seekers in some measure. My safar to places of my past led me to intimacy with myself. Revealed who I am to me.
Every so often during my journeys I met people, or arrived at places that seemed so perfect in their tininess and caring that the heart ached to settle down, not move on. I tore myself away though the desire to tarry was great, the invitations many! Rent a cottage in the mountains, shack up at the edge of some village, or reside in a Buddhist nunnery? The eighteenth-century Sufi poet of Sind, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai wandered the forests in the company of yogis before building his abode in the wilderness outside his hometown, where he lived in exile and composed exquisite poetry about seekers and lovers who journeyed for union with Truth. Bhitai had warned about the human tendency to confuse campgrounds with permanence, and only the determined could hope to steer clear:
jis se guzre hain beniyazana
Raah aisi bhi ek nikali hai
that which can be traversed unattached;
such a singular path the seeker carves
Another how: How do I justify writing this book in an over-booked world, with far more books than readers? Is artistic creation always an act of self-cherishing? And my answer is yes, the ego is definitely involved in the production of art. Who in the world cares about me writing this book more than I do? But then what artist can make art without passionate desire? Egotistical striving is only a partial explanation because the inspiration for making art seems to come from somewhere deep inside or beyond the self. Whenever I want to give up, something urges me on. And whenever I write under the influence of that something, unburdened by questions of value or worth, whatever I write in those hours is devoid of the scathing criticism, inertia, judgment and insecurities of my ego.
