The desi mindset

Ways of Being Desi  

Ziauddin Sardar

Penguin 

229 pages; Rs 599

Ziauddin Sardar’s Ways of Being Desi is a curious mishmash of several genres: Personal memoir, film criticism, and armchair political commentary, none of which coheres with the other, giving the book an unbaked feel.

As a Pakistani settled in London, Mr Sardar presents his personal struggles in obtaining a visa or dealing with the bureaucracy as an outcome of a typical desi culture that spans the entire subcontinent. While this may be partly true, his tendency to present the Indo-Pak conflict as emerging from a similar fatalism can jar for its refusal to contend with Pakistani duplicity.

To be sure, Mr Sardar presents Pakistan as a vagabond state with little claim to nationhood. He bewails Pakistan’s drawing inspiration from Wahhabi Islam and rightly criticises both the hold of the military on all aspects of public life and the intermingling of Islam and the state. But this analysis is not nearly as exhaustive as a book by a Pakistani merits.

At one point, he describes his experience trying to promote his book, Why Do People Hate America?, in the US barely a year after 9/11. This bare-faced gesture reminded me of the central character from Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, who, in spite of having made a name for himself on Wall Street, celebrates the falling of the Twin Towers. Incidentally, Mr Hamid finds mention in Mr Sardar’s book as one of a handful of Pakistanis who have stormed the world of English literature.

This tone-deafness extends to other realms. In the book’s longest chapter, “Dilip Kumar Made Me Do It”, Mr Sardar pens eulogies to Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, drawing comparisons between the rural innocence of the protagonists and the struggles and tribulations of a new nation. In long summaries of such classics as Kaagaz Ke Phool and Ganga Jumna, Mr Sardar excoriates a Westernised modernity displacing traditional livelihoods and ways of living. 

The tone is sentimental, bordering on the maudlin, with little thought given either to the irony of a Londoner speaking about the ills of forced Westernisation or the problem of pitting tradition and modernity as dichotomous opposites for a country and a time hungry for growth. Describing Pyaasa, Mr Sardar presents Meena’s refusal to marry Vijay —due to his inability to provide her with a financially secure home — as an indicator of “the growing consumerism, and attendant dehumanisation, in India”.

Towards the latter half of the same chapter, Mr Sardar — in a volte-face —picks up the cudgels against Amitabh Bachchan, presenting him as the anti-Dilip Kumar, “not the kind of actor who reflects on the genre he has created”. Calling Mr Bachchan “aloof”, “cold” and a one-trick pony, he theorises on the actor’s films with shocking short-sightedness. He sees no redeeming qualities in a star whose versatility and screen presence are the envy of many thespians.  

A distaste for the modern is also found in a later chapter on Urdu, in which Mr Sardar quotes Shashi Kapoor’s difficulty in learning the language for In Custody. Mr Sardar tracks the fall of Urdu as symbolic of the decline of the shared culture of India and Pakistan, and for good measure, adduces evidence on how the language is disappearing from its traditional home, Bollywood. While laudable, such criticism belongs to another time, leaving one with the feeling that Mr Sardar is pining for a period that has long been consigned to history. 

The most interesting parts of the book constitute sections in which Mr Sardar articulates his love for his homeland, evenings spent gorging gol guppas and paan. A chapter on the Urdu novelist Ibn-e-Safi brings out the deep-rooted culture of consumption of indigenous spy novels by Pakistanis. His descriptions of the South Asian community in London are similarly engaging. Mr Sardar dovetails an episode about being given Bihishti Zewar, a book of Islamic etiquette, to read into a stimulating discussion of the rights of Muslim women. 

The book’s last chapter, “My Vanishing Uncle”, is a wry look into the persona of Mr Sardar’s maternal uncle who turned out to be a mystic with a following. The title refers to his tendency to disappear at a moment’s notice, an eccentricity whose cause remained unknown for many years. This is a simple story, sprightly told, and makes for perhaps the best chapter in the book. 

Desi, any self-confident south Asian will tell you, is a mindset, and in this book, Ziauddin Sardar portrays the many strands that go into defining this inscrutable quality. He is not always successful but as a compendium of disparate strands, Ways of Being Desi is an adequate primer.