In Good Faith

In Good Faith

Saba Naqvi

Language: English

Pages: 104

ISBN: 8129138697

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Engaging and eloquent, In Good Faith makes a brilliant case for pluralism in India through examples of communities that live in perfect communal harmony with one another.

In an age when the idea of the religious community is determined by stereotypes and old fault lines, Saba Naqvi takes a journey across the country in search of her own identity among people, communities and shrines that challenge our predetermined notions of what makes a Muslim or a Hindu. Along the way, she finds places and people on the periphery of absolute identities, culling out a unique space for themselves in an orthodox, exclusivist society. In Good Faith is a journalistic account of the discovery of an India that at times defies belief the India of faraway shrines in quaint little places, and of communities and individuals who reach out to a common God. From the Muslim forest goddess of Bengal to an unknown facet of the Shivaji legend in Maharashtra; from the disputed origins of the Shirdi Sai Baba to shrines across the land that are both temple and dargah this book shows how, in these little pockets, the idea of a tolerant India still survives. These neglected ground realities, argues the author, these little islands of pluralism, music, art and culture, may yet provide a counter to fundamentalism.

Companions of Paradise

Hussein: An Entertainment

Maharana Pratap: Born King & a Fearless Warrior

The Brave: Param Vir Chakra Stories

A Beggar at the Gate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shrine was originally a mazhaar. Although there is no scholarly study of the shrine, it does find a mention in the Ahmadnagar District Gazetteer compiled by the British: ‘Madhi is a noted place of pilgrimage with a shrine or a dargah of the Musalman-Hindu saint Shah Ramzan Mahi Savar or Kanobha. He is believed to have come to the region in 1350 where he was converted to Islam by one Sadat Ali. After travelling for some years, he came to Madhi in 1380 and died here at the age of ninety.’ The saint.

The moonlit night, Those with stomach aches, Those with eye sores. Each and every one prays with devotion, And is relieved of the affliction; Hassan and Hussain and the happy Imam, Qasim dulah’s palanquin has started, Twelve Imams. The vows taken have been fulfilled, And the boon of pregnancy granted to the sterile. Aside from worshipping at the established Ashurkhanas, during Moharram, Hindu localities install their own Alams under makeshift tents. In Vijayanagram, I counted thirty.

Powers. And it is not just the unlettered who seek the Pir’s blessings. V. Srivastava, a senior statistical officer in the State government, has been visiting the dargah for the last three years because he believes that the Pir cured his spondylitis. But it was Ram Avtar, a daily wage earner, who most succinctly summed up the reasons for visiting the shrine: ‘Who has the money to visit a doctor? And if I go to a government hospital I will spend the whole day there and lose out on my daily.

Impact on Indian civilization than the enumeration of Muslims in post-Partition India would suggest. Centuries of Muslim rule during the medieval period left an indelible mark on India. Most of the Muslim rulers who made their way to India, most notably the Great Mughals, were settlers in the land, not colonisers like the British who replaced them. They married local women, built great cities and monuments (the Taj Mahal is an abiding symbol of India), and it was in the Muslim courts that the.

Trains, across states in buses and, in some instances, reached the final destination in a village by bullock cart or on foot. When I stopped and resumed regular work as a journalist, many people would ask me why those articles were never compiled in the form of a book. I never had a good answer. The truth was that, somewhere along the way, I had also begun to doubt the work itself. That’s why it took me so long to give it serious shape. Having collected the material over several years, I became.

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