Choosing the hijab

Jean Paul Sartre once said: “We are our choices”. Just as with any other choice that one makes, my life has not been a smooth ride with mine. When I was in Std XI or XII, my childhood friends were unable to see me as one of them. Our paths, led by our personal choices, seemed to diverge. Seclusion became a part of my life.

It’s been more than 10 years of a love-hate relationship with the headscarf: the hijab. In retrospect, I think I wore it because my elder sister (who had taken it up a year before) would shop for very pretty Kashmiri silk headscarves. The patterns and the colours were sheer beauty. One fine day, as I was stepping out to go to the British Council library, I decided to wear it. Of course, at that time I didn’t realise how much that one ‘impulse’ would change my life and alter my experiences. I came to realise that this piece of cloth was not really about the act of covering — it was more about what the covering seemed to represent.

I come from an upper middle-class, fairly religious family. As a child, I do not remember religion (Islam) being a central part of our conversations, but there has always been an inherent, basic understanding of the ‘practise’ of it at home. Such a space enabled me to understand my faith in a very non-imposing manner. My sister and I met with diverse reactions within the family. Some saw us as suddenly transformed ‘good’ girls, perhaps even examples for younger cousins. To be confounded by social ideas early on encouraged me to be strong and unconventional in my individual choices.

From my multifaceted personal-cum-academic bond with the hijab, I have learnt that the hijab is a subjective piece of clothing, one that informs nuances in human experiences. To some it is deeply political, to others it is fiercely personal. And to me, eventually, it became both. It was an understanding of my own identity that I arrived at, above all else.

For someone who is engaged in feminist studies and research, I realised that working for women’s causes while wearing the hijab can only contribute to breaking the popular stereotypes about women, veiling and faith. I have never been feminist enough or religious enough for certain circles. The ‘conflict’ between these popular polarities is interesting. People at my university would go: “What is she doing in gender studies?” Similarly, when people in my Quran classes get to know about my area of research, they would dismiss me as ‘misguided’.

Increasingly, any woman wearing the headscarf is pegged as a threat to gender equality. The trope of associating all hijabi women with male oppression is simply lazy: not all of us are ‘forced to dress modestly’. Stereotyping comes easily, especially with the media refusing to represent a multiplicity of hijab-wearing women. An informed, emancipated woman wearing the hijab doesn’t fit into the dominant narrative of Islamophobia.

We need to accommodate a diversity of views — some women may unveil themselves as a symbol of liberation and some may find veiling empowering; and mind you, we are still talking about a binary. There is so much more that we erase conveniently, like the many kinds of veils, for example, and veiling as metaphor. Perhaps more freedom comes from being able to break this loop of either/or. Once, travelling on the metro, a ghoonghat -wearing woman had a bad fall while exiting the gate, and I rushed to pick her up. She probably didn’t see me, but the people waiting at the station were shocked to see my impulsive action. It is not necessarily about making a statement, but to be able to move beyond one’s identity and help an injured person, be it anyone. When you make such interventions, you bridge that fissure of prejudice between people, and that, to me, is liberation.

To tell you of another such experience, I will take you to Dublin (Ireland), where I had a fantastic time presenting a paper, leave aside a few off-hand remarks like “Oh, you know English!”. One day, I was taking a bus from Dublin when a man came over from across the busy street, pulled my headscarf and yelled: “GO HOME”. Experiencing something like this is very different from reading about it in the newspaper. I felt so violated that I slapped him and ran away.

Hijabi women going about their daily lives in the ‘Western world’, in spite of facing similar bullying incidents, give me tremendous courage. It is a form of peaceful resistance. I don’t let that one Ireland incident colour my experiences today. It is my individual act of resistance, which has been made possible by my understanding of the hijab. It has only enriched my subjectivity as a woman. Every time a definition of beauty/freedom is dictated to me, I like to defy it. Be it in terms of religion, clothing, beauty or academics, ideals discount our everyday experiences and place hierarchy in perspective.

I have noticed an interesting sequence of Facebook posts on this issue. Once there used to be posts that compared hijabi women to candies undisturbed by flies. Now, we have hijabi women being compared to i-Pad covers. We were candy once and now, we’re technological bling. But some of us want to be neither: we just want to be ourselves. And home is anywhere we choose to just be .

Nayema Nasir is an MPhil student, WomenGender Studies, at Ambedkar University, New Delhi

(As told to Rini Barman )

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