The match, as it happens, was between India and Australia.
What does this have to do with Hindu-Muslim relations in general and with this book in particular, you might ask.
I can only answer with another anecdote.
Once, in the mid-1980s, a very important pillar of the secular establishment wrote an article for the Indian Express, for which I was then working. As is normally the custom, at the end of the article the paper ran a line about the author, who it described as an Indian Muslim.
A few days later came a rather testy letter to the editor from the author. He said he wanted to be described as a Muslim Indian.
My advice to those who read this book is that, before they draw any conclusions from it, they should remind themselves of both the above stories. If nothing else, they will at least bear the complexities of the communal issue in mind.
This applies especially to Mudhusree Dutta who made the film I live in Behrampada which is referred to in the subtitle of this book. Ms Dutta has also written an article in this volume describing how the film came about.
My film is about people who are considered outsiders in their own homeland, she writes.
Yes, I agree that this is terrible. But, please, who shapes this perception? How much are we as Indians willing to blame the Muslim intelligentsia for it? Why did the person I referred to above have to make such an issue of being a Muslim first and an Indian only next?
The fact is that the issue is far more complex than most liberals are willing to allow. And that is the chief failing of this book. It seeks to address a very complicated matter, which has literally scores of facets, in a rather discursive fashion.
Perhaps that is inevitable when the proceedings of seminars are published. Perhaps publishers should avoid the temptation.
That said, in this review I am not going to refer to the articles which describe the post-Ayodhya riots. Those were horrible. Everyone knows that and repetition in different ways by different people isnt going to add much to our knowledge.
Which excludes the first half of the book, leaving the second which consists of historians and others agonising over Hindu nationalism and its effect on security policy (Gordon), globalisation (Lakha), labour (Sherlock), politics (Hocking, Bailey
