Why This Daughter Of An Interfaith Couple Shared Their Love Story
A story told through food, the birth of a new nation, memories, and two protagonists, to “puncture the false narrative of hate”.
When the Indian Prime Minister compared shamshans and qabristans in a 2017 election campaign in Uttar Pradesh to supposedly highlight his rivals’ ‘appeasement’ policies towards Muslims, journalist and author Seema Chishti said it “cut deep”.
“As one who laid each of her parents to rest, one in a shamshan and another in a qabristan, I can testify that it felt exactly the same,” she writes in her new book Sumitra and Anees: Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family.
Chishti, the only daughter of Sumitra and Anees—who were Hindu and Muslim, South Indian and North Indian, vegetarian and meat-eating and whose names in Sanskrit and Arabic respectively translated to ‘good friends’—grew up in a syncretic or ‘khichdi’ home that shaped her pastiche of India, a country where fraternity was once a “living proposition”.
Sumitra whose dreams were shaped under the open sky of the washroom in her home where she first imagined leaving to study and travel, and in whose name now a medal is awarded to a student every year in the Mysore college where she topped her BA programme in economics; and Anees whose father had immense faith in the diversity of India and who chucked his statistician life to write including one early piece, an ‘astringent review’ of VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. His nephew says Anees was a “blend of being, belonging and thinking that we all cherished and seem to have lost for some time now.”
Sumitra Chishti and Anees Chishti, in Mysore, in 2004. (Photograph: Seema Chishti)
“I became confidently an aadhi pixie, aadhi goblin, as a school friend once described me,” Chishti says about growing up with her parents, likening India’s cultural diversity and co-existence to the Amazon rainforest.
Sumitra and Anees are no more but if they were to fall in love in today’s India, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Anees, who was from Uttar Pradesh, might be arrested under ‘love-jihad’ laws, now used aggressively against interfaith couples in several Bharatiya Janata Party-run states. It’s easy to understand why this affirmation of love between two communities has become a clear target for those spreading hate and divisiveness.
“That couples find each other, find love and happiness, discover a new shared identity, that romantic or conjugal relations nurture, means that they cross divides with a possibility of staying happily ever after, makes the Eternal Anger project much harder to keep going,” Chishti writes.
Sumitra and Anees Chishti, in 1996. (Photograph: Seema Chishti)
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly on India Love Project, an Instagram platform I co-founded in 2020, where family members who oppose and are suspicious of us-and-them unions are won over by the love and sheer grit of their children and eventually create their own mixed worlds of food and celebration. In Chishti’s world too, the kitchen in her parents’ home became the keeper of the “composite secrets and essence of India” and she includes the recipes her mother lovingly compiled for her.
“This book of dishes, of all kinds, routinely put down for a daughter she felt did not have the time to learn cooking, has acquired a different meaning now that people are being attacked for what they choose to eat, drink, read, and, of course, who they befriend or choose to spend their lives with,” she writes. The recipes are an eclectic collection from Karnataka, where Sumitra was born, to Uttar Pradesh, Anees’ home.
So mutton biryani rests cheek-to-cheek with coconut milk and veggies.
Book cover of Seema Chishti's 'Sumitra and Anees'.
Chishti’s family history has also been touched by individuals who spoke up and made a difference. My favourite is the story of Thakur Kamla Singh, a neighbour, lawyer, and close friend of Anees. It was post-Partition 1947 and there were rumours that Muslim families might be attacked. Singh showed up at the couple’s home with a lathi and asked for a chair. “He sat in the chair and made it known to the people around that he would be sitting outside the house for the whole night, if necessary, and whomsoever dared to bring any harm to our family would have to encounter him before anyone else is touched,” Chishti writes. “This was enough to send the right signals to the miscreants who might have been planning to create trouble.”
Chishti says the time has come for those who believe that India is for all Indians to speak up in every way they can and showcase their lived realities. Sumitra and Anees, a story told through food, the birth of a new nation, memories, and notes of the two protagonists, is her attempt to “puncture the false narrative of hate and separateness”.
“That is the reason I have been compelled to tell the story of that India, through the story of my parents meeting, marrying, and settling, even though they were fiercely protective of each other and their privacy and would never have dreamt of articulating it publicly, let alone printing it,” she writes.
Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.
The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.