How Many Times Must We Prove Where We Belong?

Inspired by a Rahat Indori clip and one of his remembered lines, Santosh Nair reflects on identity, home and the pain of having one's belonging questioned. The column asks whether the deeper test lies not in proving where we belong, but in examining why we sometimes doubt someone else's belonging.

Yesterday, I heard Rahat Indori’s clip, and I was so moved by it that I listened to it again. At first, I smiled. He was telling the story with his familiar humour. Someone had called him a “jihadi,” and he joked about spending the night wondering what he had done to deserve this new identity. But slowly the humour disappeared. Something deeper entered his voice. This was no longer a poet answering an accusation. It was an old man asking a very simple question: after spending an entire life in one country, how many times must a human being explain that this is his home? His answer eventually became one of his remembered lines: “When I die, give me a separate identity; write Hindustan on my forehead with my blood.” (Main jab mar jau, meri alag pahchaan likh dena, lahu se meri peshani pe Hindustan likh dena) The verse is well documented in accounts of his poetry and public life.

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When does belonging begin to require an explanation?

I kept thinking about that line long after the clip ended. Not because of the word “Hindustan.” Because of the word “identity.” A five-year-old child does not normally wake up wondering whether he belongs to his home. He simply runs through its rooms. He knows where the........

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