Zara Chowdhary on Coming of Age During Anti-Muslim Violence in India and the U.S.

Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones is a devastating, timely memoir about survival, reclamation and what it means to exist on the margins of society and within your own familial unit. Zara speaks to us, raw and unfiltered, about growing up as a young muslim girl in Ahmedabad, India, in the aftermath of a train being burned. The incident, declared an “act of terrorism” by Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s then-chief minister, instigates anti-muslim sentiments, rouses Hindu mobs into rushing through Gujarat’s streets, villages, and towns, “looting, raping, and burning alive the state’s Muslim citizens.” A lockdown follows, Muslims are pushed into areas that slowly turn into ghettos, and the fear of a mob grows as days slow down for Zara and her family, and many others like them. 

While young Zara battles the confines of muslimhood, fast-approaching womanhood, and familial expectations alongside the fear of becoming another number, another body in the ongoing genocide, Chowdhary deftly expands the scope of the narrative by weaving other stories, of women raped, families destroyed, and also, lives sacrificed to save others. In between, we are acquainted with Punjabi verses, Zara’s grandfather’s love for sufism, her grandmother’s pride in Garba, young Zara’s refuge in Sanskrit, and these diffuse moments of horror. 

Chowdhary’s prose bites like her narrative. Underneath every word, every vivid image, is a rage that simmers, proving what Zara confesses to me: writing for her is an act of expulsion, something that boils out of her.

Writer, producer, and educator, Zara has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. She has worked for studios like Eros Entertainment, Red Chillies, and her work has aired on channels such as National Geographic India. Over Zoom on a Thursday evening, Zara and I talk about terrorism and the muslim boogeyman, navigating adolescence in a ghetto, language as reclamation, and more.

Bareerah Ghani: In an earlier chapter, you talk about the impact of America’s “war on terror” narrative on how the Godhra train incident itself was framed in the public eye. You write, “Americans make war and decimating an enemy look cool.” In another place, you mention representation in film, saying, “Cinema is always mocking and parodying my faith.” I would love to know your thoughts on the extent to which the shadow and influence of American propaganda and representation of Muslims in mass media can be reduced or even eradicated? 

Zara Chowdhary: I remember the exact moment of watching the twin towers crumble. I remember that sinking feeling when I heard the news saying, this is Islamic terror and jihadist, and the language was so fresh on the tongue, and so new, there was almost a greed with which people were chewing it up. A gluttonous feeling for, here we have a villain who we can throw all this language at, and look how terrifying this villain of this new age is! And having grown up also in a culture where cinema was very binary, there were only good heroes and terrible wart-faced villains, I knew instantly that the new villain of my generation was going to be a person of my faith. 

I was a 9th-grade student but it was so innate, that fear, because this was something that had been percolating in the air, especially in a place like India, for so long. We had the history of the partition. We had a bloody history of sixty years at that point, of just hatred and animosity, and constantly having to push ideas of Secularism at groups that really were happier to misunderstand each other. And then to see this language come in, in 2001, really felt like it had been glamorized, Hollywood-ized suddenly. Because the way America does these things is with swagger. Like when Afghanistan was being bombed, and the way that language and rhetoric seemed to empty those spaces of people. Those were just barren lands they were bombing, looking for that one bad guy, and there was no mention of the towns or the villages whom this was decimating. So this language of Islamic terror, it was the first time I had seen that happen. And less than six months later, in 2002, when the train burned in Godhra, hours in, when there hadn’t even been a forensic investigation, to have the leader of a modern Indian secular state look at the carnage and call it an act of terror, the word Islamic didn’t need to be added to that phrase anymore. It just hung in the air.

At the time, I was trying to pull away from faith, starting to question how much I felt like I belonged, how much this faith accepted me in my broken ways. And yet, something about that moment brought about this sense of gut level loyalty. And also, gut level pain. Knowing that everything that generations of your family have been, generations of Indians, Muslims across the world have been, has suddenly been put to question because of these few acts that have happened at the margins of the faith of such a major world religion.

I remember the exact moment of watching the twin towers crumble… I knew instantly that the new villain of my generation was going to be a person of my faith.

We know that propaganda can be both good and bad. I think if there’s storytelling, nuanced humanizing of people, there are ways for us to tear apart this idea of Islamic terror, and the stereotype of a Muslim. I see a lot of that work already underway, especially in my generation. Before we can be writers and engineers and doctors, we first have to be good Muslims, and be models in that way. Especially those who are artists and those who have a voice are trying to do that work to minimize some of that stereotyping. I don’t know how much you can eradicate something in a world where a villain is always needed, when you don’t want to look at systems and systemic issues, and you always need an Other, a bogeyman. It’s going to be very hard for us to completely erase this idea. And that’s the tension I’m always looking at – if, in a situation, whether it’s a Muslim, or another minority in another context who have been made into the Other, the villain, what are the bigger systemic issues that they’re trying to push under the carpet?

BG: In the book, you talk quite fondly about your life before the pogrom, how it was like growing up around different cultures and religions. I would love for you to share how such exposure played a role in the development of your identity as a muslim.

ZC: So the funny thing is, even though I was raised in this weird sort of family lockdown on this 8th story of a building for the first sixteen years, I always felt my sense of Muslimness very rooted to the land. I think all of us, to some degree, are defining our Muslimness in reaction to or in conversation with the world around us—the place we’re in, the country we’re in, the society we’ve been born into. And for me, my Muslimness at the time was very much being chiseled into shape by the fact that there were all these other faiths around me. I was very, very lucky. Whether it was through going to a convent school that Catholicism was such a huge part of my growing years, or the fact that we lived in a community of primarily Zoroastrian Parsis, who showed us what it means to seek asylum in a land and make it your own. To have generational stories be told to us, to have Jain women tie rakhi to my father. All of these really did inform my sense of Muslimness, because then I saw myself as just one of many. And I was able to understand that my existence didn’t impinge on the non-existence of someone else. In fact, it became better and somehow sweeter by the coexistence of all of these others. 

For me, the tensions for a lot of those years came as my neighborhood became more and more ghettoized. Because what happens in a ghetto is that you push together people who are all of the same kind. But there is no same kind, right? We’re all multifaceted beings. So in this little ghetto as well, you had a Muslim who was half Yemeni and half Gujarati, a Muslim who was some erstwhile royalty and still pretended to be that, you had somebody else who was Dawoodi Bohra Muslim, who are a different subsect, and have a very different understanding of the faith. You had rich and poor Muslims, you had caste as a divider between Muslims. So then, when you’re in that ghetto, and you start to compete and contrast amongst yourselves, that also starts to define what you want to be, and what kind of Muslim you want to be. 

BG: You talk about both the danger and comfort of being concentrated in a ghetto, how it can both heal you and also consume you. Can you talk a little bit about the duality of that experience while you were navigating adolescence, which is already a turbulent time for anybody but especially for girls?

ZC: I love this question! This was part of my obsession, really, with writing about Khanpur, my neighborhood. Because when you’re forced into these tiny spaces with all of these people who are, again, your people, your kind, you all live together on this one side of the river, there’s this comfort that if a big horde comes across the river in the middle of the night to torch us, we will all die together. It’s this kind of massive, existential comfort. But then, on the micro everyday level, there’s still the point of, if I want to go down to the grocer, I have to wear my dupata a certain way, because not only will the boys cat call at me, but some auntie will see them, and then she will go tell the liftwala who will go then tell my mom, who will say it to my daadi, and then I’ll be called out for it. So there’s this sort of daily exhaustion of living in a world where your whole identity comes down to every single act every day, and that judgment is so final and sticks with you, that by the time you’re ready to get married and leave, there’s a whole resume of what Zara did while she lived in Khanpur. Add to this the fact that we’re leaving this world on a daily basis, going across this bridge into what is the newer city, the modern side of the city, to the most prestigious school in town. What does it then mean to be the girls from the ghetto who are going into that part of town? The constant being looked down on, the scrutiny of our shalwars, the dissing of our food. And so that sense of unbelonging, even in a place like school, which is supposed to be your safe space, your space to learn and evolve in, it amplified that tension on a daily basis. 

BG: The heart of this book is belonging to a place, to people. An integral component is Amma’s story, how she’s treated like an outsider, her relationship severed with her own parents. So Amma pours herself into her daughters, giving them a sense of belonging. I’m curious about your thoughts on how daughters-in-law in patriarchal structures can reclaim their sense of belonging to their primary familial unit, their parents and siblings?

I think all of us, to some degree, are defining our Muslimness in reaction to or in conversation with the world around us.

ZC: I wish I had answers to how. This is actually where I’ve always leaned into Islam, to a big degree, because if you look at the text and what Islam tells you, you never belong to anybody but Allah. And that central tenet has always been foundational to me and I know it’s been foundational to my mother—this idea that you only return to that one source. That’s where you’ve come from, and that’s where you go back to, and therefore you do not belong to this earth, to a family, to a nation in the same way that you belong to that source. So that sort of more mystical, transcendental thinking is something I’ve found very helpful in rooting yourself and making a home within yourself, even if you’re surrounded by a system or a family where you don’t feel like you belong.

I was reading this really fascinating book this week, Islam and Anarchism by Mohamed Abdou, and he talks about how fascism is this mass psychology, and how all of us, because we have lived through colonialism, or through oppression in one form or the other, we all have little micro fascistic cells within us, we all have some amount of that oppressive ability within us. I think when you start to recognize that you could be oppressed or you could also be an oppressor, and you start to distinguish those things within yourself, that’s when you will find that you have agency and you have choice. Even in the most oppressed conditions, including during a genocide, you are not completely without agency. There are certain parts of you that are yours, that nobody can take away from you. When I look at Gaza right now, and I see people say, حَسْبُنَا اللَّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيلُ (Hasbunallah wa ni’mal-Wakil) that is them saying it is only this one source that is my witness, and is my everything. That’s an active agency as well, of giving everything of yourselves to this other caretaker, so that what is in front of you cannot oppress you.

BG: Wow, that’s a beautiful perspective. Thank you for sharing that. To stay on this idea of belonging, I love the way you talk about your love for Sanskrit. You write, “Saying it aloud makes me a part of its tangled mythology, gives me a place to belong.” Can you talk about your experience with the languages you know, and how they’ve offered you roots to ground yourself in?

ZC: I grew up in this incredible, strange intersection of different regional linguistic cultures. My father’s side, my granddad came from Punjab and so he had this love for Punjabi-Sufi poetry and Urdu. My grandmother on my dad’s side was from Gujarat and so for her, Gujarati including Gujarati film, theater, literature was something that she was always hungry for and and just very proud of.

On my mom’s side, my grandfather was part Pathan, and then the other side was South Indian. Somewhere back in the generations, I think they had spoken Pashto or Dari and the other side of the family spoke Tamil, and Telugu. So there was this rootedness to the south of India that was beautiful, and then the grandmother on that side came from the western coast, which is where a lot of the first Arab traders and sort of saints came when they came to the subcontinent via ships. So there was a lot of mix between this coastal community where the Alphonso Mangoes come from, and Arab influence. She was this strange mix of village person who loved oysters and mussels and mangoes, but also had this very Arab leaning ideas of texture and design, and aesthetic.

None of these people like each other but they embody their cultures and just by being themselves, they were pouring them into us, one way or the other. So for me, language was always that first place of refuge. I would try to write in all the different scripts, because I just loved how beautiful they looked. And there’s just so many sounds that your mouth could play around with. 

As a Hindi teacher now, I’ve had to learn how the different parts of your vocal system make different sounds. Suddenly, I have an appreciation for those of us who are born multilingual or into multilingual homes. I’m like, Oh, my goodness! I was learning how to use velar sounds, labial sounds and dental sounds, without knowing what I was doing. And this is the story for most Indians. They all grow up at these intersections of what their family culture is, versus the place culture, versus the space that they go to work in. That’s just the beauty of belonging to a place like India. And yet in all of this, Sanskrit is a mystery. It’s a classical language, not practiced as a spoken language. It’s only the language of the mythological texts, and then the language of prayer, the language of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism. For me, it was just a way to unlock certain things that were already being held away from me. So if you were growing up Muslim in the nineties, you were already being told, especially in places like Ahmedabad, that oh, these festivals are not for you. You’re not welcome here, or why are you singing these devotional songs. So for me, language was reclamation. It was a way of saying, No, I am from this land, and therefore the stories of Durga, of Parvati, of Shiv are mine, and as long as my mouth knows how to make those sounds, those stories will be mine. It was that struggle to belong through physiologically training yourself to belong.

BG: I’m curious, how many languages can you speak?

ZC: So English, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati are the ones I’m most comfortable with. But I can definitely fully understand Punjabi. I can understand Tamil pretty well, and Telugu, to a little degree. I lived in Bombay for 7 years, so Marathi feels very familiar to me.

BG: Love that! I’m really fascinated by written Hindi because my grandfather used to know it, and because my ancestry is from Bombay. My daadi I think knew Gujrati. We have an offshoot spoken language that is sort of like Gujarati, it’s called Memoni.

ZC: So what you call Memoni is what we call Kutchi. And that sort of Kutchi-Gujarati kind of spills into Sindhi, and if you hear Haryanvi in India, you’ll hear notions of that as well, because we were very much nomadic groups, trading groups that moved around and picked up bits of each other’s language. It’s why I’m a language teacher. I’m fascinated by how language moves and flows across the globe.

BG: You know I didn’t appreciate Urdu as much as I do now, and so I understand the concept of language as reclamation. As I’m trying to lean into my identity as a Pakistani, I have a growing fascination with that language. It’s from this desire to belong to that place, to that identity.

ZC: I’ll tell you a story. I was at this reading the other day in Chicago, at an art gallery, and after I finished it, the gallerists called me, and they’re like, Can you read Gujarati? I was like, yeah, of course I can. I studied it until like 7th grade. So they show me this painting that they’ve acquired, which is this intensely complicated canvas. There’s figures and there’s illustrations. But in the middle of all this and all around it, this artist has just hand scrawled in Gujarati in little sections. In some of them, he’s just naming birds and trees and in other places, he’s saying things like, my heart has this deep desire that one day somebody far away will look at this.

Just think about the fact that I am standing in a gallery in Chicago. This girl, who all her life has been told Gujarat doesn’t belong to you, and you don’t belong to Gujarat. And this Muslim Gujarati artist, who speaks nothing but Gujarati, who writes nothing but Gujarati. Nobody in that room can tell what is in his canvas, but I happen to be there, and I can.

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