Knowing Indians while growing up and studying abroad is very different than when living in Pakistan

By Imaduddin Ahmed

Having grown up in England and attended college in California, I saw my Indian or Indian diaspora friends only as fellow South Asians – brown brothers and sisters with similar tastes and values who supported the wrong cricket team, some praying in a different way. It wasn’t until I moved to Pakistan for a few years that I started seeing how much South Asians attempted to differentiate themselves.

In Pakistan, I inquired and discovered what caste my Hindu ancestors belonged to, catalysed by a question by a colleague on my first day at work at a women’s rights NGO.

I learnt the South Asian prejudices that beauty was predicated on a light skin-tone and, for men, sharp features and height. I learnt too that these features were associated with higher caste Indians and with Muslims – descendants of invaders were regarded as more beautiful than the indigenous people who had constructed the Indus’s most ancient civilisations.

Why, then, the likes of Shiv Sena targets Muslims in India as foreigners (whose ancestors were mostly Hindu), seems a bit arbitrary. It was in Pakistan that I learnt how, in spite of inhabiting an Islamic republic, Pakistanis retain their un-Islamic caste prejudices, and that these prejudices allow many to feel superior, as well as to treat Christians, often the descendants of Dalits, as untouchables. While learning how somewhat physically different we were from many Indians, I also learnt how similar our mentalities were.

For all the prejudices I ridiculed, I found myself starting to subconsciously imbibe them, and my recent friendships with Indians and Hindus were coloured by them. Where I previously yearned for dark and lovely South Asian girls, I started favouring the light-skinned ones, and I’ve enjoyed teasing Brahmin girls I’ve dated that they had lost their caste. (Apparently for fear of losing hers, one of my ancestors refused to share the crockery her son had used, or hug him, after he converted to Islam). I now guess (to myself) a person’s caste by considering their surname and looks, and try to figure out whether their life choices (profession, partner, extra-curricular activities) have been affected by it.

Hussein (name changed to protect privacy) was the first Indian friend I made after moving to Pakistan. We connected through blogging while I was in Lahore, and he in Mumbai.

We were initially drawn to each other by a fascination with each other’s otherness. He wanted to know what Pakistan was like, his thirst having been whet by a book called Husband of a Fanatic about my (and Amitava Kumar’s) relatives in Pakistan, and about Hindu extremism in India. I had never known a Muslim Indian, and wanted to know if he felt marginalised, what his daily struggles were, and which cricket team he supported. (I myself failed Norman Tebbit’s test of being a true Brit for supporting Pakistan).

When we finally met in the UK, he shared with me Tehelka’s coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and details of his own tragic loss in those riots.

Despite seeing an indecent proportion of his compatriots support the man responsible for inciting those riots, he says that he is glad that his grandparents didn’t cross the border. I understand his view: whereas in India, you aren’t safe if you’re a Muslim, in Pakistan you aren’t safe if you’re the wrong type of Muslim. Pakistan and India aren’t too dissimilar.

Urdu translation by Mayur R. Indi for Friendships Across Borders at this link.

British and Pakistani, Imaduddin Ahmed has blogged as ‘The Lost Pakistani’ for GQ India and co-authored ‘Pakistan, Rebranded’ with Kapil Komireddi for The Boston Globe. This article is part of a fortnightly series for Aman ki Asha from Friendships Across Borders: Aao Dosti Karein, an initiative to promote friendship between Pakistanis and Indians – www.facebook.com/fabaaodostikarein