A letter from Karnataka: Udupi, Class of 2022

Mehek (who seeks to be identified only by her second name) got over the shock to shout back at her “friend” and the others in his group. “I said, there are so many of you to take on one girl. If you have the courage, why don’t one of you step forward,” she screamed, her eyes brimming with angry tears.

It was a moment the cameras captured, launching Mehek alongside Muskaan — the girl from Mandya’s PES College who assuredly walked past a rowdy crowd that chased her waving saffron shawls — as the young faces determined to push back in the face of the latest communal flashpoint to have enveloped Udupi, the coastal Karnataka district that’s almost split down the middle over the right of young women to wear their hijab or head scarves to classrooms.

What started in the Government Pre-University College for Girls in Udupi town on December 27, when around six girls who insisted on wearing the hijab to their classrooms were thrown out, has since then spread to other colleges in the district and the state, where, waving a government circular, colleges such as MGM, which have for decades allowed students to wear the hijab to classrooms, suddenly shut the gates on them.

At Udupi’s MGM College, one of the flashpoints, “I wear the hijab even at home. How can I just take it off?” says Sana, a student here. (Express photo by Uma Vishnu)

Most Muslim students in these parts come to colleges in their burqas, which they remove in the “ladies room” before proceeding to class. The hijab is usually the scarf or dupatta that’s wound around their heads. The policy on the hijab, thus far, had been left to individual colleges.

While the question of whether the Udupi girls college — where the matter first came up — ever allowed hijabs in its classrooms continues to be in a grey zone, with both the protesting students and the management submitting photographs and other evidence to support their respective claims, the matter turned political as the Campus Front of India, the student wing of the Muslim radical outfit, the Popular Front of India, moved in to back the girls. Pro-Hindutva groups, too, jumped in the fray, turning up outside colleges in saffron shawls and asking to be allowed inside, making this almost a point of no-return.

With colleges shut until temporarily, Udupi nervously awaits a final word from the Karnataka High Court. On Friday, the court released an interim order for colleges to reopen and for students to refrain from wearing clothes that are not prescribed under colleges’ uniform norms.

Two of the girls from the Udupi college, who are among the six protesters. (Express photo by Uma Vishnu)

The principal of a government-aided college, which was among those that witnessed tension over hijabs last week, said on condition of anonymity, “I have been in this field for 30-35 years. Never have I seen anything like this. Never have Muslim girls insisted on wearing the hijab like this… Some girls used to come in shawls, not the hijab… The hijab has become a communal word. There are miscreants at work behind this.”

On men in saffron shawls turning up at his college gate, he said, “That was a reaction to what happened in Udupi (where the issue first took place).”

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In Udupi, a temple town by the Arabian Sea that has lent its name to one of the most popular vegetarian cuisines, those who wistfully talk about the communal harmony the town once witnessed cite the story of Haji Abdullah — an early 20th Century philanthropist and businessman who founded Corporation Bank — and how he is said to have donated land for the town’s Krishna temple and even oil to light its lamps. Besides the several banks that came up here — Corporation, Syndicate, Vijaya and Canara banks, each catering to different castes and communities — the area also has a rich educational legacy of schools set up during the British era.

Now, in the midst of one of the most divisive issues to have rocked Udupi, there is little trace of that storied past, with the “us” and “them” binary finding its way into everyday conversations.

As he drives around Udupi town, Ramesh Naik, 64, a taxi driver, says, “The government should be strict. How can they come to school in their hijab when there is a uniform? So they’ll do whatever they want to do in Hindustan and we stand by and watch? Are the children coming to school for education or to do religion? My daughter (a second-year student of Artificial Intelligence in a Mangalore college) sometimes says she won’t wear the bindi. Will I make her sit at home?”

While neighbouring Dakshina Kannada district, which has Mangalore as its headquarters, has been a known communal hotbed, the embers mostly spared Udupi, which has a smaller Muslim community — 8.22% of the population, as compared to Dakshina Kannada, where Muslims make up 24% of the population, according to the 2011 Census.

Muslim students wearing Hijab during a protest against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Express Photo By Praveen Khanna)

Many trace the Hindu-Muslim schism in this region to the days after the Babri Masjid demolition and the ghettoisation of Muslims that followed. “Muslims in coastal Karnataka speak a language called Beary while Hindus mostly speak Tulu, besides Konkani. Those growing up in the pre-Babri demolition days, including me, grew up speaking Beary and Tulu. But the ghettoisation of the 1990s meant that a large number of Muslims and Hindus had no reason to interact with each other. So now, they don’t speak each other’s languages and stay out of each other’s lives. Their worlds meet for the first time in these PU colleges that are grounds for organisations like the ABVP on one side and the Campus Front of India on the other,” says Muneer Katipalla, 46, who grew in these parts and is state president of the Left-affiliated Democratic Youth Federation of India.

In the 2018 Assembly elections, the BJP won 17 seats out of 19 in coastal Karnataka, with the Congress ending up with a mere two seats.

In a sign of evident polarisation, in the December urban local polls, the SDPI, for the first time, won five seats in Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts.

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Sana, 21, has been feeling this creeping sense of hostility for a while — mostly in the class WhatsApp groups or her classmates’ Instagram posts on the CAA and NRC and casually cruel remarks strewn with the “go to Pakistan” line.

“Until now at least, my Hindu classmates were fine in person, but online is where they become different people. It hurts to read these messages, but I can’t leave the WhatsApp group either because there are college-related announcements there. So I simply put them on mute,” says Sana, a Master’s student at MGM.

Sana, whose second name is being withheld for reasons of privacy, started wearing the hijab in Class 8, when she joined a school run by a Muslim trust. “Now I wear it even at home. My mother tells me it’s not good for my hair to be wearing it all the time, but now the hijab is a part of me. How can I take it off just because someone else doesn’t like it?” says Sana, the eldest of three siblings. Her younger sister, who is in Class 9, also wears the hijab.

At their home, metres from the MGM campus, Sana’s mother, who is without a hijab at home today, says she makes it a point to wear one when she steps out, along with her burqa. “While we were in school and college, we never wore the hijab or the burqa. We just wore a dupatta like the other girls. Tab itna knowledge nahin tha religion ke baare mein. We didn’t know what was right and wrong,” says the 45-year-old homemaker.

With the politics over the hijab forcing 16- to 20-year-olds to take grown-up positions on friendships and fraternity, the “right and the wrong”, the middle ground, like the pathway leading up to the MGM College that Tuesday afternoon, is increasingly getting crowded out.

In picture, Muslim women with student members of PSU (Lalkaar) protesting against Hijab ban at Plaza in Sector 17 of Chandigarh on Friday. (Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh)

Yet, for a 16-year-old, Alman speaks with rare clarity on what is at stake.

“It’s just somebody’s political agenda. So some people tell me the hijab affects them. I want to ask them, why doesn’t the Sikh turban affect you? Why doesn’t the kada that some wear on their wrists affect you? Just as nobody has the right to tell them to remove this because they are uncomfortable, it’s not right to ask these girls to remove their hijab,” says the Ist PUC student at MGM.

“For instance, in all the schools we attended, we had Sarswati puja. We never had a problem attending the puja because we respected it… not tolerated. That’s a wrong word,” he adds, standing outside the gate with a few other boys in solidarity with the Muslim girls in hijab.

As the boys tuck their I-cards in their shirt pockets to protect their identities, one of them looks at the crowd in saffron turbans on the other side of the pathway and says, “Some of them told me, ‘you are Hindu and you support these girls?’. I have never looked at religion while making friends, so why I should do that now?”

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“Hey, you wore a hijab while in school, didn’t you?” asks Amrith Shenoy, 45, of his long-lost classmate whom he recently tracked down to the flat opposite his in an upscale residential area in Udupi. “No, I never did,” responds the friend (she didn’t want to be named for this story). “Of course you did!”… “Would I know better or you?”

The banter, shorn of the anxieties that has gripped most of the town, is a keepsake of more innocent times.

Shenoy, a businessman and a Congress leader who is Udupi president of Sahabalave or ‘Peaceful Co-existence’, a grouping of anti-BJP, anti-government parties and bodies in Udupi, says that for most people of his generation and older, personal and religious choices never came in the way of friendships.

“I grew up in my maternal home, a strict Brahmin household where even onion or beetroot didn’t enter the kitchen. But my friends Akram and Altaf would come home to watch cricket matches and I would go to their homes and sit with them while they ate biriyani. I went to a government school with daily shlokas and Ganesh pujas. Things were very peaceful. We never saw our classmates through the prism of religion. There was orthodoxy those days, but no hatred.”

But sometime in the early 2000s, things began changing in Udupi. “Hindu samajotsavas began to be organised, where Pravin Togadia and others would make speeches, and young people attended these. Gradually, your name alone wasn’t enough to deal with you. There were other considerations — your religion, caste, what you wore,” he says.

His friend and classmate, now a homemaker and mother of two, says, “The hijab is an unnecessary controversy. We wear it for our own protection. It’s like the mask you wear now. That’s for your protection. Will you take it off because somebody else has a problem with it? And anyway, why should my hijab threaten you or make you uncomfortable? If anyone has to feel uncomfortable, it’s me, I am the one wearing it.” She is a mother of two, including a 10-year-old who prefers fancier hijabs to her cotton ones.

Her neighbour Sabina Begum, 36, also a homemaker, is bewildered that something as personal as what she wears is now the subject of a communal standoff.

“It’s my right to wear the hijab. No one can take that away from me. No one has asked me to wear it; there is no fatwa, no order. The Quran says women must wear it for their protection and we follow that,” says Begum, adding that her eight-year-old daughter “loves wearing the hijab”. For now, though, she only wears it to her Arabic classes. “She will wear it too, when she grows up.”

Manipal is barely five kilometres away from Udupi, yet there couldn’t be a world more distant. An elite, cosmopolitan university town whose life revolves around the campus and its food joints, there are few jagged edges of identity or politics to poke its happy bubble.

As she leaves the food court of the Kasturba Medical College, adjusting the scarf around her head, Fatima, a BSc Biotech student at the university who preferred to identify herself by a single name, sits down to chat. “I have heard about it, not very clued in, though,” she says of the row that has gripped Udupi. “Anyway, no one here cares about what you wear or what you do. My parents ask me to be careful and I tell them, ‘Oh, but that’s happening in Udupi.’ And then I realise, Udupi is right here,” she adds.

The hijab, she is clear, falls in a very personal space. “No one has forced me to wear it. I grew up in the Gulf, which is probably when I started wearing it. Today, if I want to, I can take it off now and no one will know or ask. But I wear it because we have been taught God wants us to wear it. It’s my individual choice.”

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Back at her home, waiting for the court verdict, Mehek says she is not scared. “None of us are scared. In fact, my mother is proud of me,” she says. “After what happened at the gate, when I got home, she was crying. My cousin had told her about the incident, and told her to keep me home for a while, that it’s not safe. But when my mother saw me, she asked me to take the scooter and pick my sister from school,” says Mehek, the eldest of four siblings.

If someone is a “little scared”, it’s Mehek’s father, who works at the Malpe dock in Udupi. “He is like, what if something happens to you,” she says.

“Hum ne galat thodi kiya hai. Dar kis liye (We haven’t done anything wrong, why should we be scared?),” says Mehek’s 36-year-old mother. “I have worn the hijab since I was three. We are all used to wearing it. It’s now a part of us, our bodies. My two elder daughters wear it; once the younger ones (a five-year-old and a two-year-old) come of age, they will wear it too. It’s for their protection. Why should others have a problem?”

Her second daughter, now in Class 10, hopes to join the same college as Mehek. “I am nervous. I hope they let us in with the hijab next year,” says the 15-year-old.

Is Mehek worried about an adverse court verdict? “No,” she smiles. “Even then I’ll go and stand at the gate in my hijab. I am not protesting. I am just asking them to let me in… People call me brave. But anyone in that situation would have done that. Humare peeche aur bhi log khade hain. If we don’t speak up, how will they have the courage?”

On that frayed friendship, though, she is willing to concede a bit. “I won’t approach him. But if he does, ek minute bhi bina soche I’ll talk to him,” she smiles.