Umar Nizar
The elitist literary journal `The Paris Review’ had something strange about its submission policy. Everything had to be sent by snail mail. There was no online portal for writers to log in, nor were they accepting e-mail correspondence. This often resulted in unfortunate occurrences, as when a budding poet would, in all innocence, shell out a significant sum in Indian Rupees to approach the distant editor overseas. These letters would often be accompanied by entreaties such as `be my Graham Greene’ etc, moving up the cringe ladder. But the review itself has taken a cringe turn because of its often snooty and out-of-place elitism.
Banu Mushtaq, the amazingly brave and evocative writer from the Bandaya movement in Karnataka, winning the International Man Booker Prize in 2025, was one of the most inspiring as well as heartening literary developments of the year. The freedom with which this writer wields her pen and the free-flowing, yet deeply humane quality of her imagination couldn’t have failed to grab the attention of sensitive readers. Coming from a literary landscape littered with the demises of stalwarts such as Gauri Lankesh and Kalburgi, the courage shown by this writer alone suffices to make her one of the major practitioners of the literary craft in India today. But was she given her due?
Elitist literary magazines in Indian vernacular languages, such as the `Mathrubhumi’ in Malayalam, were not to be left behind. They had that rare picture of a beaming Muslim woman splashed across their cover pages, albeit accompanied by stories that pitied, and yet did not empathize with the plight of Muslim women in India and the world over. But in all their glocality, such vernacular magazines had the sensibility not to exoticize one of their own writers. But not `The Paris Review’. The short story that it chose to carry from Mushtaq’s `Heart Lamp’ bears the insignia of colonial validation and the phallic gaze of the predatory male.
The story in question deals with the circumcision of boys in a village in Karnataka. The event is liminal in that it is both a rite of passage and also one of the most important events in a person’s life, and yet is mentioned only as a minor footnote to it. This gives the event of the circumcision the aura of liminality. But Mushtaq leaves such theoretical deconstructionist circumcisionary meditations that the late French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida was wont to perform in his abstruse works of philosophical literature, once the craze in post-colonial circles in JNU and elsewhere.
Mushtaq’s story has circumcision of boys at its centre, and she actually gives a slice of life portrayal. It is an insider’s unflinching gaze that perhaps only a mother alone can bestow on her kids. What elevates Mushtaq’s realistic treatment of the ritual circumcision is her humane treatment of the underlying economic hardships of the rural Muslim community in Karnataka, who have to foot the hefty bill for the ritual feast and the accompanying festivities of a circumcision ritual. To circumvent this, the community organizes a mass circumcision of boys. This is told from an insider’s point of view. The heartbreaking twist comes towards the end, which is not a major plot point in the story. One of the boys in the story, to be circumcised, is a rather grown-up adolescent, perhaps in his early teens, whom the circumcision ritual, for want of money, had eluded. The predicament of the boy whose circumcision as a mass spectacle unveils before a curious public is related with sensitivity and heartbreaking honesty by Mushtaq. The public sniggering prompted by the belatedness of the circumcision is not intended to evoke concupiscence. But in French eyes, it becomes salacious and a prurient supplement to the grunge underbelly of elite literature inhabited by de Sade and later by Jean Genet. It actually becomes the vernacular literary manifestation of the image of the pubes by none less than Gustave Courbet himself. The grace and decorum of Indian and Islamic traditions are thwarted from being interpellated into the domain of Western prize cultures, which is the debt that has to be paid. In Indic terms, the concepts of matr rin, pitr rin, rishi rin (debt towards mother, father, monks, etc) have a new addition, viz. publisher rin. The editor of `The Paris Review’ might not have wept reading the story, but I am certain Mushtaq did while writing it.
The ritual stripping of an adolescent boy for circumcision and the concomitant public inspection is the unmentionable core of the story. There existed corporeal nudity contra injunctions and edicts concerning `aurat’ in the Islamicate publics, but also close inspection of the male genitalia by prospective customers, including women, in the public space. The spatial separation of the harem and the souk becomes slightly blurred here. Male slaves had to be displayed in public auctions in the nude. They were thus available for visual consumption, with flimsy coverings over the genitalia. The inspection of the `property’ by customers is a prime element in this early modern `window shopping’. The pious Muslim and the non-practising/cultural Muslim had a veritable dislike for nudity in its various manifestations, and public nudity was not a feature of early modern Islamicate civilizations. The display and sale of bodies created a psychological bulwark against the inhuman practice- a counterpublics of post-human Islamic thought in the early modern era. What `The Paris Review’ fails to look at is the double coding of Islamic humanism/universalism with post-humanism. The locus of visual narratives provided by the visual anticipation of the female pleasure in the female gaze, contra Laura Mulvey, provides a nexus of emancipation with counter-emancipation.
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Umar Nizarudeen was at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Round Table India, Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection, etc.
