A singular life in plural India

In India today it is difficult to imagine a period of uninterrupted communal harmony, with reports of lynching, hate speech and bigotry surfacing with rising frequency.

- Akankshya Abismruta

So it comes as no surprise that an Indian Muslim woman feels the need to tell the story of her life in which she was often sheltered and accepted by Hindus around her. Syeda Saiyidain Hameed's memoir, A Drop in the Ocean, reveals the India that once was, a plural state for which the liberal elite waxes nostalgic, and the India that could be by defeating rising Islamophobia.

This renowned social activist and former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission speaks candidly of her life in India and Canada. In doing so, she asserts all her identities: Indian, Kashmiri, Muslim, woman, wife, mother, social activist, author and translator. She highlights the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, the syncretic Hindu and Muslim cultural tradition of north India, in which she grew up in Delhi, and expresses her wish to preserve it. She fills her prose with poems ranging from Ghalib to Yeats and Faiz. Her ancestry traces back to the Prophet Muhammad's lineage, including her great-grandfather, Maulana Hali, who was one of the first Urdu poets to write feminist verses in 1905.