Comment

I thought I had my roots all sorted out, until recent explorations threw them into disarray.

Like L K Advani, who when in Mumbai recently, came by DNA, and in a discussion with the editors spoke movingly about his Karachi roots, so can I about Saharanpur in UP where my Ansaris come from.An exploration of roots can be pleasant, as Advani discovered. When in Karachi he was hailed as a great leader by everybody.

On my part, from the time I got off the train station at Saharanpur, and moved around in the city I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was swimming in my gene pool: I could see people who looked and spoke, like the men and women of my family.

Frankly it was a pleasant feeling. I certainly haven’t felt surrounded by my genes in all the years I have spent in Toronto, New York and Lahore.

I was probably thinking that Sahranpur is a mythical place, and that in fact there is no one place that my family “belongs” to, in any sense of that word. I was surprised. Roots exploration can also be creative, as when Advani felt inspired to call his fellow Karachiwallah Muhammed Ali Jinnah a great, secular leader. How he could admire both Sardar Patel and Jinnah is at first glance incomprehensible, until one realises that Advani probably admires strength in men.

But unlike Advani, a masterful politician, I am not able to derive anykind of keen control on my roots. In fact my roots recently gave me a nasty shock.

For the dozen years that I have been in and out of the India my experience has all been about the contemporary—journalism, writers, filmmakers, friends—as opposed to looking at ancestral history, and if I did it was a sidelong glance. What I did figure out, and was comfortable with, was an idea of my Ansaris being ordinary musulmans: Weaver caste people who sought self improvement in all sorts of ways. When a second cousin in Saharanpur dropped the last name ‘Ansari’ for ‘Sheikh’, and his wife explained that it’s because too many weavers have taken the name Ansari, I was reminded of the historian Gyan Pandey writing about the drive for caste promotion that can be documented in the region for two centuries.

Well-documented, and well-told by family members is the Ansari drive to modernity (learning English, going to Delhi, becoming secular/nationalist, headed to Jamia Millia), or putting their energies into strengthening tradition (the Deoband madressah is in Saharanpur district). Somehow the drive to self-improvement goes well with the post independence family history that I know of, of immigration to London, New York, Toronto. It is vaguely comforting: the notion of seeking something better.

But then I went looking for my mother’s roots in Rajasthan. It was shocking to know that what my nana and nani had said was all true! We were princes: mera ghora lao, and don’t-forget-the-talwar types. In Tijara, just short of Alwar, I saw the family’s havelis, mosques, graveyards, met the caretakers, who said I looked like my grandfather (it is uncanny that at Partition, that is when he left, he was the age I am now).

So, I am shaken up that we were elite somewhere, and more than that, it was a family that was so for 500 years (17 generations said my poor nana’s family tree, which we all laughed at), but was there to see in all the buildings of this citadel. Citadel! Yup, as clear as daylight. So whereas all this while I was comfortable with a history of struggle, of proving yourself, of uprooting, now it turns out there is a whole different history.

There was not a question of self-improvement, we had already arrived.