The other side of the veil

SOCIETY

IN THE OFFICE (before this one) where I worked, I had a colleague, a reasonable young woman I thought, until she returned, one summer, from a holiday in Kashmir, her native state, headscarf firmly in place. To put it mildly, I was horrified. Here was a "normal" girl as I knew her, English-speaking, articulate, schooled in the metropolis way of being and this joining of the ranks of the hijab-sporting seemed to be utterly regressive.

More than that, it was symbolic of everything that was going wrong with people like us. Instead of following our liberal "" often misguided and sometimes impossibly naive "" parents of the 70s, we were treading into territory perhaps not quite visited by any of our preceding generations "" even in those horrific pre-War days. In short, stuck between the shaka-going ideologue (also in the same office) and the quiet assertion of the newly-"Talibanised", people like us were clearly in a minority.

Of course, this was pre-9/11 and pre-pre-Muslim women in Europe asserting their right to dress how they pleased in the face of "liberal" Western sensibilities, themselves clearly threatened by Islamic symbolism.

But all the subsequent events and years only added to my discomfort at such visible embracings of "culture" and "tradition" by young, urban people I could otherwise identify with. Tradition and regression were interchangeable, weren't they? It seemed but natural then that all sensible women "" for taboos are clearly gender-biased "" all over the world question their communal/social moorings.

Then, I stumbled upon The Bookseller of Kabul. Written by a Norwegian journalist, Asne Seierstad, the book was an account of an Afghan family "" restrictions, impositions, downright cruelty on the womenfolk very much in place "" in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban.

The book was first published almost five years ago and since then has become one of the biggest bestsellers in English. The huge success has been helped, no doubt, by the prevailing political climate, the face-off between cultures, but also possibly by the fact that the aftermath of the publishing proved to be so controversial: the Rais family, around whom the narrative was structured, took the author to court and last year, the wife applied for asylum saying that it had become impossible for the family to live in Kabul. But my interest in the book is different.

To get a closer glimpse of the Afghan life au naturale, Seierstad often went around completely veiled like the rest of the women. The advantage was obvious"" she could observe without being scrutinised herself. And indeed the book, though sloppily written in parts, is a close enough account of an alien culture.

But what it has also done is introduce the concept of the veil being a liberator in some senses. The argument is not new. It has often been advanced, in fact, to curb the fundamental liberties of many a womenfolk. But navigating the rough streets of Delhi, past the shifty guys at bus-stands and corners, waiting for a difficult-to-come-by auto to drive you home in the gathering dusk, one reaches a new understanding.

In Gwalior, in the days when the Scindia court still ruled, my grandmother, the daughter of an important minister, would be accorded almost-royal "respect". When she went shopping, stores would be cleared out, a purdah drawn so that the ladies could carry on unhindered.

The car outside was, of course, curtained too. In the modern world, we shudder at accounts emerging out of societies such as Saudi Arabia where the religious police comes after you if you step out sans an abaya, where women are not allowed to drive because what if, horror of horrors, a tyre burst and they needed a stranger's help on the road? One is thankful that one is not part of that world. On the other hand, liberty or not, there are a few days honestly, when we would return to that Gwalior of yore.