I’d said to myself: Why don’t I do my own Bhartiya-karan, that is, Indianise myself, before someone else thinks of doing it? The first problem was my name. Perhaps you don’t know: my name is Iqbal Chand. It occurred to me that “Iqbal” is an Arabic word. What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name? And so, I changed my name to Kangaal Chand. As it happens, this name is far better suited to my financial condition considering that “kangaal” means “poor”. And why just me, it suits the rest of my country too.
The second problem that arose was of the dress. There was no trace of Indianness in the pants, coat and tie that I wore. In fact, all three were a reflection of my slave mentality. I was amazed that I had worn them all this while. I decided to wear pajamas instead of pants. But then, a certain Persian person told me that the pajama had come to India from Iran. And so, I began to wear dhoti and kurta. But not a kameez, as the word “kameez”, too, is of Arabic origin and it reeks of the stench and stink of an Arab!
The third problem was of hair! After all, was it not treachery against the country, a blatant form of antinationalism, to keep one’s hair fashioned in the English style? I instructed the barber to keep only one lock of long hair at the back of my head and shave off the rest. He did exactly that. I had seen images from ancient India showing men with long and lush moustaches. Following their example, I began to grow my moustache. When my friends saw the large moustache on my somewhat small face, they assumed that I had put on a fake one, possibly because I was acting in some play. Forget my friends, when I saw myself in this new look, I began to feel that I had been created not by God, but Shankar, the cartoonist. But I did not lose heart. One has to do all manner of things to be Indian.
An excerpt from a story by Kanhaiyalal Kapoor in ‘Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?: Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers’, edited and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil.
As the posting on BP (and the comments) are pretty fast and furious; my capacity to edit and moderate is getting pretty stretched..
Thanks for sharing.
Sounds like a great book. Too bad relations between India and Pakistan are so bad that even books can’t flow across borders (neither can medicines etc).
My dad published a book of transcreations of Faiz Sahab’s poetry (“Transgressions: Poems Inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz”). The book had to be published separately in India and in Pakistan precisely because there is no trade between the countries.
On the story itself: It’s only underscoring the message of how foolish it is to attempt to divide up a common culture that evolved over hundreds of years. Both nation-states have only existed for approximately 80 years. Urdu (for example) is much older.
India as civilization existed since long before islamic colonization happened. This so called common culture doesnot exist aa shown in 1947. Rest you can find common culture with britishers too, doesnot absolve their colonization excesses.