"The clouds are moving ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with dense clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj.
These lines were written by Mohsin Kakorvi, a Muslim poet, to celebrate not Lord Krishna's birthday but that of the Prophet Muhammad. Awadh, the author's birthplace, was steeped in this sort of syncretism in which Hinduism and Islam celebrated and complemented each other and Urdu culture merged with Brajbhasha and Awadhi.
Sadly, this glorious culture has been regularly destroyed over the past century. In many ways, Awadh stood for everything that independent India could have become, a land in which people of different faiths co-existed peacefully and created a culture that drew upon the best that each community had to offer. Instead, what we have today is a pale shadow of the harmony that once existed. Everywhere there are incidents of communal propaganda, sectarian murder, and divisive politics. And there seems to be no stopping the forces that are destroying the country.
In this remarkable book ,Being the Other: The Muslim in India, which is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various inadvertent and deliberate acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million Muslims in India, Saeed Naqvi looks at how the divisions between Hindus and Muslims began in the modern era. The British were the first to exploit these divisions between the communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the run-up to Independence, and its immediate aftermath, some of India's greatest leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, and others only served to drive the communities further apart. Successive governments..