BEING THE OTHER: THE MUSLIM IN INDIA
By Saeed Naqvi
Aleph Book Company Price Rs 510 Pages 256
Saeed Naqvi was born in 1940, I in 1974. Naqvi went to Lucknow’s La Martinière, I to an Urdu seminary in my ‘unelectrified’ village. After Partition, some of Naqvi’s family moved to Karachi, mine didn’t even make it across Bihar.
In 1991, I moved to Delhi. I was a compulsive reader of newspapers, in part to improve my English. The columnists I read included Arvind Das, Dipankar Gupta, Girilal Jain, M.V. Kamath, Sham Lal, T.N. Madan, K.R. Malkani, T.K. Oommen and, yes, Saeed Naqvi.
It was a time of grisly mobilisation leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The masjid was mostly referred to as the “disputed structure”. Ironically, it became…
