Thursday, August 11, 2011

Islam in Tamil Nadu

South India is India.
But it is so different from North.
It has work culture.
North doesn't.
North lives on politics. Of course there are notable exceptions.
South too has politics (and they can rub salt on your wounds-sorry to be frank) but they do not live on that.
From Muslim point of view Tamil Nadu is sort of least prominent out of the four main southern states.
Andhra has the Nizam connection.
Karnataka the Tipu Sultan connection.
Kerala has the oldest Islam connection.
That leaves us with Tamil Nadu.
But the Islam and Muslim connection in this case is not weaker in any sense.
For a northern person it is a pleasantry that Tamil Nadu is the border state for Urdu. Beyond it (if we may say so) there is no Urdu.
A Hyderabadi friend was laughing at Tamil Nadu Urdu.
He might be justified in his own right-Tamil Nadu Urdu (not the Madarsa Urdu but the Urdu spoken by the people in Urdu pockets) is not Delhi Urdu, or Lucknow Urdu, or Hyderabad Urdu.
But it is endearing Urdu. Exactly the way Maharashtrian Urdu is endearing in its own way.
Of course your poor Alig has a bias for Madras, err Chennai vis-a-vis Delhi-Mumbai-Kolkata.
Who knows what contributions to the Religion of Allah these people will make in future.
For the time being we know that the best Urdu monthly on Islam comes from there. That is Dawat-ul-Haq from Pernambut.
And just look at this blog-what a young girl can do single handedly!
(And if you are a Muslim from Tamil Nadu and find that this post is not a comprehensive post on Islam in Tamil Nadu then your complain is fully justified but the onus is on you only to develop a comprehensive Wikipedia page on this topic.)