I suppose the first signs of my awareness of being Muslim must lie in a story my parents often repeat at family gatherings. I must have been three or four and was at a children's birthday party, the table loaded with goodies. And then a plate of sausages came around and I loudly proclaimed that I did not eat "piggy-wiggy"! Being Muslim then was about food. That, and my name.
What does identity really mean? And how do we get a sense of it?
When I think of my childhood, I do remember a very strong sense of being Indian. The kind of nationalistic feeling bred at schools through Sara Jahan Se Achcha. I knew Iqbal had written it, and I remember feeling sort of sorry that he ended up on what we thought of as the wrong side of the border. This sense of being Indian also came from the fact that my great-grandfather had been President of India, Dr Zakir Husain. But feeling Indian is not the only thing I remember. I also remember feeling not too rich or too poor – because we didn't own an air conditioner but did own a car. I remember feeling smarter than many in my class – because I could speak better English. I remember feeling like a girl – because I wore skirts and wanted to prove that I could do anything I wanted to. In my everyday life, these feelings were much more frequent and so, much more important to me. For strangers that I encountered, though, these strands of my identity were not as important as my name. That was what the first question was almost always about. Samina is so obviously a Muslim name, and Mishra a Hindu caste name. It is rare for this to be treated casually in India.
The Maithil-Muslim
I grew up as a Muslim but my father came from a Maithil Brahmin family from Bihar. It was a fairly orthodox family, but not orthodox enough to have transmitted a sense of brahminical legacy to him. And so, when my father fell in love with my mother, he wasn't about to stop himself because she wasn't Hindu. His background was upper-class landed feudal, but he had been to a residential missionary school in Patna. In the 1960s, what mattered most to people like my father were Western liberal principles.