“No man is an island
But some are pretty wet;
Leave that tempting stone unturned
You never know what you’ll get... “
From The Book of Cautions by Bachchoo

My maternal grandfather, Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Antia, had been granted, on his retirement from the Land Records Office in Pune, this petty title by Lord Linlithgow, Viceroy of India — for — wait for it — services to land records! Whatever these might be. The certificate announcing the award hung proudly in our sitting room and the gold medal on a blue ribbon formed, I believe, part of the meagre family treasure.
I was encouraged to be proud of my grandfather’s achievements and services to land records, even though an envious neighbour’s lad insisted that the title, handed out to Indians by the colonial administration, proved that my grandfather was a lickspittle to the Raj and a traitor to India. This neighbour’s lad didn’t in other moods care for the country. His ambition was to go to Australia. He boasted that his skin was fair enough to allow him to pass as Italian and rush in where darker-skinned Indians would be barred from treading.
Another neighbour said his only chance of going to Australia was to have himself deported to the Andaman Islands as a murderer or serious felon and then Oz would be a hop, skip and jump away. He never made it.
But to get back to my grandfather — he had evolved a routine in his retirement of each morning extracting several Stanley Gibbons stamp-collecting albums out of a wooden cabinet in our sitting room and settling down at a green-felt-covered trestle table on the veranda. He would sift through and reorder his vast collection of international postage stamps. They were then mounted on “hinges”, thumbnail sized pieces of transparent paper gummed on one side, which he licked to effect this operation.
He would, in his beige cotton jacket, pore over these albums for hours before lunch. Then the nap and evening walk with a walking stick and hat, down to where other old Parsi and assorted gentlemen sat around on the pavement of Mahatma Gandhi Road outside Fisher’s Hat shop and passed the time by talking politics, swapping community gossip about whose property had fallen under the bailiff’s hammer and bemoaning the passing of the Raj.
The other major interruption to the stamp-collecting duties and sometimes to the evening walk, were the regular visits of one Amtullah Bai. This lady wore a burqa and if one saw her on the street all you would see through the slit were her bright eyeballs. She was a young lady, though in my childhood all ladies were, to me, of a certain age and unattainability. She would come to the veranda and go into secret conclave with my grandfather, removing her hood and revealing her face and her hair. She wouldn’t mind if my grandfather, myself and the women of the house saw her publicly hidden face. She and mamawaji would sift through sheaves of papers appertaining to the ownership of land and properties to which she had disputed claims.
My aunts referred to her, behind their father’s back, as his veiled girlfriend. It was a joke but I remember thinking her pretty and sometimes on passing women wearing burqas, would wonder if it was she sailing past. An awkward chit of a lad though I was, I understood that her tradition forbade her to identify herself to me by voice or gesture in the street.
Though it was apparent that she and her persuasion of Muslims didn’t have the freedom to walk or cycle about with bared heads and visible faces, as my brazen aunts and sisters, every other woman of my acquaintance and the unveiled millions of Hindu and even Muslim India did, I never thought of Amtullah Bai or other burqanasheens as oppressed.
Now several feminist generations and gestations later, Belgium has become the first country in Europe to ban the full veil. President Nicholas Sarkozy of France has proposed a law which will ban the wearing of the veil in public. The justification for the order is that the access to a person’s features is necessary to instantly establish identity, fight terrorism and provide services such as those of doctors and teachers whose patients and pupils need to see the faces of those attending to or teaching them. It is a moot point. Pupils can be taught by computers which don’t have faces and surgical patients don’t always observe their surgeons under the knife.
French feminist groups contend that the veil is, like female circumcision, an imposition of traditional, patriarchal males. In recognition of this contention the proposed law against burqas will caution women who transgress from coming out in public and impose small fines and will in contrast punish any man who forces a woman into a burqa with severe months in jail and swingeing fines.
I have no way of knowing what the burqanasheens of France think of the order about to be perpetrated but have on record the opinions of articulate British women who wear the veil, some of them recent converts to Islam who grew up without it in families and traditions far removed from any cover-up. These women say they have assumed the burqa voluntarily and not through any male coercion.
The French feminists and President are undoubtedly aware that it is very difficult to persuade people who protest against such an assertion that they are oppressed.
Karl Marx must have thought that it would be self-evident to the proletariat that they were oppressed by the capitalist system and Marxists have subsequently believed that even if the prols are not spontaneously aware of this oppression it can and must be explained to them by the Party and other agitators. They have to be made aware that they have nothing to lose but their chains and with the right instruction, they will be.
While wishing French feminists and the state the best of luck in persuading burqanasheens that that they have nothing to lose but their invisibility, I can’t see women in their thousands voluntarily and symbolically unveiling on the Champs Elysee.