MY recent column on Irfan Pathan (or on "the importance of being Irfan", as someone has dubbed it) elicited a fair amount of reaction from my readers. We can discount the purely cricketing responses — including from some who churlishly felt that the teenager's contribution to India's cricketing triumphs in Pakistan was not as great as my column implied — on the grounds that they have somewhat missed the point. I was not suggesting that Irfan's wickets were more valuable than Balaji's or that his impressive 49 could stand alongside Sehwag's 309 or Dravid's 270 (or even — have we forgotten him already? — Tendulkar's 194 not out.) It was enough that he had done well, become an automatic selection in the team and brought his vigour and his talent to the national cause. My case was that in so doing, Irfan Pathan, a Gujarati Muslim of (to put it territorially) "Pakistani" ethnic origin, had repudiated those who had allowed themselves to forget (or who had consciously denied) an indestructible Indian idea — that our country is large enough and diverse enough to embrace everyone who chooses to belong to it, whatever be their caste, creed, colour, costume or custom. Irfan Pathan, I argued, stood for a vision of Indianness directly opposed to that of the killers of Gujarat, and promulgated by the Togadias and their toadies.

A number of readers liked the piece — but their praise is also not the point of this column. Of the many who disagreed with it, two, in my view, made strikingly interesting arguments that deserve the attention of my regular readers. One was passed on to me from an Internet discussion group that had reacted to my piece; the other was sent to me directly by an eminent Indian academician. One I disagree with, the other I accept. Both are worth discussing here today.

The first, by a chat-room discussant called Saurabh, also objected to my "attempts to build up Pathan as the star of the Indian victory". He felt I was echoing Imran Khan's statements "downplaying India's team effort" and felt the problem lay in Pakistanis' "inability to believe they can be beaten fair and square by India (unless of course it is Muslims who are responsible for their defeat)". I shall forebear from commenting on this piece on social psychology except to say that I do not share it. But Saurabh then went on to hail Bal Thackeray's comments reacting to what he called "Zaheer Khan's nice putdown of his Pakistani interviewer". (Zaheer had, I understand, retorted to a question about how he felt as a Muslim playing for India by pointing out that it was his country, he had grown up there, and it had made him who he was.) Thackeray, Saurabh explained, "immediately endorsed him as a `true Indian Muslim'. That runs contrary to Tharoor's script of the Hindu Right as being unprepared to accept an Indian Muslim as Indian."

Now this takes me aback a bit. I had thought Thackeray's comment nauseatingly patronising, the equivalent of an anti-Semite bestowing the label of "good Jew". Are we now, in the enlightened first decade of the 21st Century, to accept the notion that the leader of a Hindu-chauvinist political party is entitled to certify who is, or is not, a "true Indian Muslim"? The notion is as offensive as it is unsustainable. I admire Zaheer's forthright defence of his birthright no less than Thackeray does. But my point is precisely that an Indian Muslim should be free to define his Muslimness as he sees fit (in Irfan's case, with overt expressions of his piety, hardly surprising in a muezzin's son) without in any way diminishing his claim to Indianness. An Indian Muslim is simply that: an Indian and a Muslim. It is not for Mr. Thackeray and his ilk to determine what makes him a "true Indian Muslim".

The second notable critique came from Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calicut in Kerala. "As an educated Uttar Pradesh Muslim," Prof. Hasnain wrote, "I felt humiliated that when some player or film actor performs for India, then the majority community feels that Muslims are patriotic Indians." I was again taken aback, since the last thing I had intended was to humiliate any Indian Muslim by my celebration of Irfan, but the good professor went on to explain: "there are hundreds and thousands of Muslims who are performing for India in various fields and nobody wants to acknowledge their contribution." In Kerala alone, Prof. Hasnain argued, there are over 150 Muslim-funded institutions in the Malabar region providing medical education, and training nurses, paramedics, engineers, and teachers in fields as varied as Arts and Sciences, hospitality management, and costume and fashion design. These are "high-quality institutions", he explained, reflecting an estimated total investment of around 1,000 crore Indian rupees, entirely provided by individuals belonging to the Muslim community. And here's the rub: the students who attend these colleges, according to the professor, "are 90 per cent non-Muslim boys and girls". There are, he adds, similar institutions in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. "In my view," Prof. Hasnain concludes, "Irfan is not the standing, leaping, glorious repudiation of the killers of Muslims in Gujarat, but certainly the Muslim institution- builders of South India in general and Kerala in particular are the shining examples."

I accept the good Professor's rebuke, but with one mild expression of self-defence. To celebrate one individual as representing a larger idea is not to deny that there are other examples that affirm the same idea. Irfan and cricket had captured the national imagination at the time; it was not unreasonable for a columnist to seize on them to make his point. No doubt there are worthier examples of Indian Muslims repudiating the assumptions of the murderous chauvinists of Gujarat and elsewhere. I am glad that Prof. Hasnain has allowed me to bring one of them to the attention of this newspaper's readers. I would welcome other examples that readers might wish to send in. This is a conversation well worth continuing.