I was saddened, no, enraged, by a podcast which claims to be about Urdu poetry and which I had really been excited about. The first episode I listened to was about Faiz’s Hum dekhein gey, which I translated a few months ago when it was used in the Kashmir protests. It’s being used in protests in India again, and is getting abuse by the Hindu nationalists for being anti-Hindu, so the podcast tried to explain that it wasn’t. But the approach it took was a very wrong-headed one, claiming that the poem has nothing to do with Islam at all when all the imagery in it is Islamic. As though Islam takes away from its beautiful revolutionary message, as though it’s a taint to be ignored, as though only by stripping away Islam from it can make it acceptably secular and non-Hindu. I found it really upsetting, and most of all that the ones making that point were Indian Muslims themselves, people like Javed Akhtar.
Indians are far more, to use the modern parlance, triggered, by Pakistan than Pakistanis are by India.