Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea.
Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was action. Students of different faiths did their namaz or prayers separately, everything else together. Religion was not denied, but it was shown its rightful place.
When we were at Nasr School, we took all of it for granted, never suspecting goals or visions or manifestoes. It seemed natural for us that school should have both namaz and Diwali melas, that our classmates would fast during Ramzan and feast at Christmas. Maybe this is the reason for my rage and incomprehension when people around me casually describe neighbourhoods and towns as having “too many Muslims” in the way people might say “too many mosquitoes”.
It was not an easy act to pull off in the Hyderabad of the 1980s. Communal riots began on the flimsiest of pretexts and fear would ripple through the school. I remember panic-stricken phone calls to car-owning parents, who arrived and carried away groups of girls to drop them home before the riot came too close. The next day, we would return to school as if nothing had happened.
The school was identifiably Muslim: there was a signboard over the main gate with the name of the school, which means “Victory” in Arabic, inscribed below with a line in Arabic from the Koran, that means, “With God’s help victory is near.” Though murderous vigilantes didn’t roam the streets then, as they do now in certain parts of India, it was still a city divided down religious lines. Creating a school like Nasr was an act of wild courage and imagination.
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