Bare Life

WHEN I OVERCOME THE FORCES THAT may have silenced the musicality of Indian history, I recount growing up in an India that had deep friendship with the historic Palestine through an intimate festooning of mutual imagination. Legends have it that Baba Farid, the beloved poet and mystic, traveled to East Jerusalem in the early-thirteenth-century Ottoman Empire. His presence touched those whom he encountered, and seven centuries later, the place where he lived is still known as Al-Hindi Serai, a shrine that has welcomed murids or the desirous ones who seek union with the mystic teacher. Not so long ago, the Nizam of Hyderabad, an independent monarchy in the Deccan before it joined the Indian Union post-independence, presented chandeliers to adorn Al-Aqsa Mosque. Beside the chandeliers lie the sepia-toned images of fallen Indian soldiers who fought alongside Allied forces against the Ottoman Empire. Around forty soldiers were buried in two cemeteries in Gaza far away from the motherland but closer to Baba Farid. While the market-driven, globalized world reduces cultures to forms of consumptions such as the promise of “authentic” hummus, zaatar, and künefe in supermarkets, in the deep recess of Indian imagination, Palestine flickers as a tall, burly man in keffiyeh we came to recognize as Yasser Arafat.

Perhaps it was the memory of the long night of British colonization of India, with its wounds still quite fresh in the mind of its people, that the new republic of India found connection with the political struggle of South Africa and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Soon after its independence, India was the first country to sever diplomatic, cultural, or commercial relations with the apartheid government of South Africa. India was the first non-Arab country to recognize the PLO as the only legitimate representation of Palestinians. Through Arafat, India could acknowledge that Palestinians “carried an olive branch in one hand and the freedom fighter's gun in the