Joy
In Meatless Days, we see Dadi, the grandmother as believing
in God and berating Satan at first. Sometimes though, the narrator is not
sure whether she delighted more in God or food. Anyway, we are told that
she stops cars and preached to them about God. Since this family story
is somehow compared to the national history, during the trying times of
Dadi and the family, she stopped praying. This is an allusion to the times
when Pakistan is leaving Islam, so to say, in times of turmoil also (the
times of civil war). When General Zia declared the Islamization of Pakistan,
in the text we have “God as leaving home to
join the government.¡¨ In the movie Masala we see how
Krishna lost its power on the people or has lost its being useful, so to
say, especially when Krishna himself offered help and he was rejected with
the people saying
“we don’t
need you anymore.¡¨ I guess as human beings, we can use religion
or we think God only if we are in need and we have no one or nothing to
hold on to. Or as in the movie I’ve mentioned,
Krishna is portrayed in a western suit, so the idea there is that religion
or God can be corrupted. The grandmother in that movie even manipulated
God or Krishna. And so it seems that there is weakening of faith among
the people especially as migrants where there is this sense of loss of
everything, especially identity. That’s why
the plane has to explode in Masala because of the loss of everything,
and everything includes one’s religion.
In these two works we see how the faith of the people has weakened and
how religion does not answer anymore to the needs of the people. Maybe
the idea of believing in God is heavily connected with the idea of a God
who gives whatever one asks. Or like the prayer of the children in Salaam
Bombay, there is this sense of a god who makes everything all right
but the children experienced the opposite as their situation gets worse.
Religion, therefore, is used as a means to protect the system or preserve
an ideology.
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