When Salma, a young Muslim girl in a south Indian village, was 13 years old, her family locked her up for 25 years, forbidding her to study and forcing her into marriage.
During that time, words were Salma’s salvation, as she began to covertly compose poems on scraps of paper, and through an intricate system was able to sneak them out of the house, eventually getting them into the hands of a publisher.
She was eventually recognised as the most famous Tamil poet in India, and a documentary about her life featured recently at the Sundance film festival in the US.
What fascinated me was not only Salma’s story of extraordinary courage and resilience. Even more intriguing was the fact that, although Salma was Muslim, she thought and wrote in Tamil – something that is rare, and sometimes unheard of here in South Africa.
I recall a conversation many years ago with a former Indian consul-general in Durban, Latha Reddy, who remarked on how strange it was that most Indian people in South Africa failed to differentiate between culture and religion.
She said that, although religious tensions do exist between communities in some towns and cities in India, all of which are well documented, people showed a far greater understanding of the difference between culture and religion.
For instance, it’s not uncommon to see Muslim families there speak in the Tamil tongue, wear saris and visit Dravidian temples in India, just as it is not unusual to come across Hindu families speaking Urdu and visiting Muslim shrines and mosques on the subcontinent.
She said she found little evidence of this crossover among local members of the Indian community.
What is also interesting is how many Indians who belong to the Christian faith, especially the more established churches, tend to see themselves as leaning towards a more European culture in the way they dress, their manner of speaking, their choice of music (no bhangra, please, we’re Christians), as well as their social and cultural norms.
I’ve encountered local pastors who frown on their women congregants who choose to wear saris to church services.
On the other side of the coin, I have also seen some priests who encourage their parishioners to worship and sing in Indian vernacular languages.
Where did we go wrong?
To answer that question, I first tried to define the difference between culture and religion. There are many definitions, of course, but one that most resonates with me went something like this:
“Culture is the way of life, including education, art, sociability, manners, music and speaking, including slang. Culture does involve religion. But religion stands alone. Religion, in some ways, dictates how people act in their culture, giving them rites and rituals to perform, which enriches the culture. So, culture is the way you live, and religion (if any) influences culture. Religion can create its own culture, and many times does.”
The playwright and author Ronnie Govender says the issue reminded him of the banter he had with stage actors Mohammed Ali and Essop Khan in the days when he was directing and training them.
“Ali is what is referred to as a Madrassi Muslim, while Khan is a Pathan. I joked that many, many years ago, our grandfathers were tilling the soil in Tamil Nadu, minding their own business, when the Muslim invader suddenly arrived. He put his sword to their necks and demanded that they convert to Islam or have their heads lopped off. Ali’s grandfather immediately become a Muslim, but my grandfather grabbed the sword and lopped off the head of the invader.”
“We had a good laugh, but the joke hides the grim reality of the generational destruction and conflict set off by proselytising religions.”
Govender said that, while former Hindus in India, especially in the lower castes, who have been converted to Christianity and Islam, have retained their language and much of their culture, this is not so in South Africa and other similar diasporic societies.
“Perhaps this is due to the greater self-consciousness of younger and smaller cultural and religious groupings, especially in SA’s historically racialised and ethnicised communities.
“Perhaps, also, the self-consciousness was buttressed by a reactionary distortion of the militancy born out of resistance to the deprivation of human rights.
“In other words, the local charou may not be as passive as his Indian counterpart.”
Attorney and social commentator Saber Ahmed Jazbhay, a Muslim by faith, says he was fortunate to have had a fairly varied cultural and religious experience when he was young.
“I was born and bred in Warwick Avenue, and I was brought up in the home of a Tamil. I fire-walked, ate sour porridge, fasted when it became necessary in Tamil culture. I lit the lamp and stood in prayer religiously.
“During Easter and Christmas, I spent time with Christians. During Muharram, my Tamil and Hindi friends joined in the religious festivities. All this made me strong and wise.”
To find out where we went wrong, Jazbhay said he could quite easily blame apartheid and the Group Areas Act that uprooted communities, and “we became scatterlings and prey to its prophets”. But the answer did not lie there.
“We forgot who we were, conditioned by history to think and act in compartments, looking at our neighbour as ‘the other’ if he was not in our compartment.
“We chose to educate ourselves to evolve, but to remain in those compartments, occasionally breaching them for cosmetic purposes. When apartheid uprooted us, we also got uprooted from ourselves. We became sophisticated in ‘ghettoisation’ thinking.”
Author Aziz Hassim says religion is really a belief system. “Mere mortals have no right to play God and judge others by their own ethnic standards. I believe God must shake his head in despair at man’s folly.”
The last word is from writer/columnist Ashwin Desai, who recalls that his grandmother, Florence Rowley, spoke Tamil, always wore a sari, and never missed a service at the cathedral, as is befitting a staunch Catholic.
“I have a wonderful picture of her in a sari on pilgrimage to Lourdes in France.
“My mother, too, always wore a sari. This was, of course, the power of (the late church leader) Pastor JF Rowlands, who nurtured the sari.”
To reinforce his point on religion and culture, Desai quipped: “I always tell a leading member of the Tamil Federation, the day when the organisation has as its president a Muslim, they would have finally liberated themselves. You should have seen the look on his face!”