The fact that there are multiple histories rather than a history of the Partition is borne out by studying the literature produced on either side of the border created by the Partition. In contrast to Indian sentiments, a section of Pakistani writers viewed the creation of Pakistan as a logical culmination of a historical process and, therefore, a cause for joy rather than mourning, a reason to look forward rather than over one’s shoulder at what once was and had ceased to be. The breaking away of a section of population that was viewed as a tragedy of epic proportions by the ‘Congressi’ Muslims in India was perceived as a triumph of Islamic nationalism by the votaries of the Muslim League. Moreover, there was always one group (it could be Muslims or Hindus, Indians or Pakistanis, though it is often difficult to categorize as one or the other as the writers don’t always name the ‘other’ community) who felt it had been singled out (in comparison to the other) for the terrible retributions that accompanied Independence and was, therefore, more inclined to beat its chest. While Indian writers refer to the cataclysmic events of the year that was annus horribilis as batwara (literally meaning division but commonly referred to as partition or taqseem), for the Pakistani writers the year marked the beginning of azadi (freedom) and the existence of Pakistan as an independent country.
Two worlds – the lost and the emergent – fused and merged after 1947. In the years that followed, pathos, confusion and conflict reigned supreme. Delhi and Lucknow, the two great centres of Muslim culture in upper India, the London and the Paris of their milieu, lay decimated. Lahore and Karachi were bursting at the seams with strangers looking to put down roots in an alien soil that would henceforth be their home. The inhabitants of these new lands did not know whether to celebrate their hard-won independence or mourn the passing of an age. Should one celebrate the birth of a new nation? Should one rejoice at gaining independence at the end of a fierce and prolonged struggle? Or, should one mourn the loss of an age and an end of pluralism and syncretism? Should one search for new directions? Or, were all routes to regeneration irrevocably closed for this weary generation? These questions, and many others, jostle for answers in the outpourings of Partition chroniclers. To further compound this confusion, one set of writers who had written with joyous abandon on the coming azadi all through the 1940s adopted a taciturn silence. In the polarized arena of the Urdu literature of the late 40s and early 50s, the silence on the Partition could also possibly be due to the loquacity of a set of writers called the ‘progressives’. The more one group wrote about the horrors of Partition, the more the other side lapsed into a silence that seemed to obliterate individual suffering, loss and pain.
With the creation of Pakistan, several former progressives who were by now either vehemently opposed to the progressive ideology (most notably M.D. Taseer and Muhammad Hasan Askari) or uncomfortable with some of its jingoism (such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz) adopted defensive postures about an entirely new phenomenon – Pakistani tehzeeb or Pakistaniyat. Powerful literary critics and ideologues such as Askari expounded on the notion of a Pakistani national culture through a slew of columns, op-eds and essays. We get a glimpse of the expectations of the new state from its intellectuals in Qudratullah Shahab’s memoir Shahabnama, published though it was as late as 1986. Shahab is, however, not uncritical of the state of affairs. In the short story ‘Ya Khuda’, he exposes the hypocrisy of those who quote Iqbal yet indulge in the hoarding of scarce commodities, making a mockery of the cracks between state and society.
A necessary fallout of Partition was migration. The displacement, dislocation, uprootedness and alienation that came in the wake of the transfer of power have been well documented in both autobiographical accounts and works of fiction. While Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is the most well known and most anthologized depiction of the trauma caused by such forced removal from one’s ancestral land, much of the literature of this period is replete with examples of how the dearly beloved suddenly, virtually overnight, became forbidden, alien. Some showed pathos or stoic acceptance; others reacted with anger and hostility. Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi’s autobiographical, Dehli ki Bipta (The Lament of Delhi), written in the centuries-old elegiac shehr afsos tradition, is a haunting tribute to the vanished glory of Delhi, a glory he likens to other great ‘Muslim’ cities such as Córdoba and Granada. In lyrical prose, he recounts the irreversible changes wrought to the city’s moral, intellectual, cultural and social fabric by the outflow of its Muslim population and influx of refugees. In a similar vein, writers who left East Punjab to find a new home, sometimes barely a few kilometres across the new border, have waxed eloquent on how wonderful everything was in their old home and how everything new and different appears to be on ‘this’ side of the border. A case in point would be A. Hameed who wrote about Amristar (or ‘Ambarsar’ as it was pronounced by the locals), the city of his birth: ‘For me Amritsar is my lost Jerusalem and I am its wailing wall. I do not remember anything of Jerusalem; he must remember who forgets.’
Like everything else written during and about this period, migration too has been viewed and interpreted in different ways. As in the depiction of Partition-related violence, some writers catalogue the horrors witnessed on the way and the difficulties in finding safe refuges on the other side of newly demarcated borders; others depict it as hijrat, an experience akin to the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and, therefore, an experience that transcended human sufferings; still, others view it as salutary experiences with the potential to draw lessons from past mistakes.
Historians have argued for the need to view Partition-related violence, especially in the Punjab, as distinct from the communal riots that preceded and followed it given the ‘military precision’ with which they were planned. The riots, on the other hands, were largely spontaneous and sporadic, triggered often by something small and inconsequential though both had devastating effects such as the rape and abduction of women, desecration of holy places, loss of life and property and the generation of a mindless, primitive violence. This violence lies at the heart of much of the Partition literature and has been the cause of a great deal of debate among literary historians. Be that as it may, its value lies beyond literary voyeurism; it does, I believe, provide the historian with some sensitive insights into the impact of violence on ordinary people.
Much of this literature is personal and cathartic. A compulsive scraping of wounds, a cataloguing of unimaginable horrors and a depiction of a sick, momentarily depraved society is, often, the creative writer’s only way of exorcising the evil within. It served the needs of its times in a rough and ready sort of way but it was patchy, uneven, often incoherent. Much of it falls under what has been termed ‘waqti adab’, topical literature. Given the propensity of most writers to focus on violence and communal tensions, the Urdu critics have called these stories ‘fasadat ke afsane’, or riot literature, again serving to deflect the attention from Partition per se and turning the cause-and-effect equation upside down.
Equally worrying is the lack of historical awareness among the writers themselves. References to political events, resolutions, statements, etc. are vague; the focus is on the ‘impact’ of Partition on the common people rather than why the political leaders failed to resolve their disputes over power-sharing and ended up carving the country along religious lines. The Urdu writers, by and large, have been content to write of consequences rather than reasons, effects rather than causes of Partition. They have even deployed myths, allegories, fables to paint on vast canvases in broad brush strokes. This is evident in the titles of some of the most representative and anthologized of these works: ‘Jadein’ (Ismat Chughtai) or Udaas Naslein (Abdullah Hussain).
‘History alone will decide whether we have accepted wisely and correctly in accepting Partition,’ wrote Maulana Azad in India Wins Freedom. As far as the Urdu writer is concerned, the jury is still out. Moreover, a lot depends on the composition of the jury. Is it a Pakistani jury or an Indian one? For on the question of state and nationhood, the Urdu writers on e
ither side of the border seem to have little in common.
IV
THE RUBRIC OF RELIGION
1
ON SIGHTING THE EID MOON
I CANNOT IMAGINE EID WITHOUT the nervous anticipation of the previous night. Nor the beginning of Ramazan without the nail-biting tension of not knowing. Does one fast the next day, or does one not? Does one stay up all night cooking for the feast that must follow the next day, or does one keep all preparations on hold for another day? Does one set the alarm for the pre-dawn meal, or does one enjoy the luxury of sleeping a few more hours? For, everything depends on the sighting of the new moon, the hilal, the proverbial Eid ka chand which, quite literally, kal ho na ho!
The evening before Eid, people crowd on rooftops, vying to catch the first sight of the new moon, which is usually a silvery crescent skimming the tops of the tallest trees for a few short moments and gone in the twinkling of an eye. Soon after the iftaar and hurried maghrib prayer (especially hurried because the new moon can be sighted only for a few precious moments in the western sky), the young and the old rush outdoors to ‘sight’ the moon. The older, more experienced members of the family tell the younger ones where, exactly, to train the eyes, for the new moon is not high in the sky, nor is it very clearly visible. One must know exactly where to look. So, between excited cries of ‘There! There!’ or ‘Between those two trees,’ or ‘There, next to that bit of cloud!’ or ‘Just above that building over there’, everyone is craning their necks, standing on tiptoe, busy pointing and peering. The scene is unchanging, year after year, in families rich or poor, rural or urban, nuclear or joint.
A great deal of Urdu poetry centres on the Eid ka chand – ranging from flowery verses found in greeting cards to some delightfully evocative lyrics. Poets have waxed eloquent on the excitement surrounding the sighting of the new moon, its tremulous beauty, its delicate shape like an arched eyebrow perched on the forehead of the twilight sky, and the feverish anticipation it generates among its viewers. On its beauty, the late Shahryar had written:
Eid ke chand tujh nikalne se
Aasman-e-husn mein izafa hua
Eid Moon, with your appearance
The beauty of the sky is enhanced
On the delights that follow its sighting, Tilok Chand declared:
Door se yeh tera ishara hai
Auj par aish ka sitara hai
From a distance you have indicated
The delights that shall soon reach their zenith
Then there are the cornier sentiments associated with the opportunities of closeness afforded by the festivities, once written on Eid cards (popular until my childhood, but now yet another casualty of the SMS/WhatsApp culture) but now part of a vast oral archive:
Eid ka din hai gale aaj to mil le zalim
Rasm-e-duniya bhi hai, mauqa bhi hai, dastur bhi hai
It is Eid today, come embrace me, O cruel one
Tradition allows it, so does the time and occasion
The moon once sighted, or in its absence the news confirmed by TV and radio channels and increasingly via text messages, the telephone lines begin to jangle. ‘Mubarak ho, chand dikh gaya, kal Eid hai!’ (Congratulations, the moon has been sighted; it is Eid tomorrow!) And among women, more often than not, the greeting is followed by solicitous enquiries about one’s state of preparedness: Has the tailor given the clothes? Have you stocked up on enough keema for the kababs? Have you bought siwwaiyan? Is there enough milk? Have you set the curd and soaked urad dal for dahi bade? Are you done with your dusting, cleaning, polishing?
For me, chand raat, the night before Eid, conjures up images of my long-lost childhood: of frenetic activity and a great deal of excitement and clamour, young girls putting mehndi and trying on new dresses, the clatter of crockery being washed and stacked for the next day, masalas being fried and copious amounts of foods being cooked. While the men may lounge about smoking, chatting, drinking tea or eating – relaxing, as it were, after the month-long fasting - the women are usually busy preparing for the endless feasting the next day.
In almost all Muslim households, people drop in unannounced to exchange greetings and eat! Eid is open day – no invitations are issued and none are expected. Streams of visitors pour in to greet, embrace and partake of the goodies piled upon groaning tables. The day follows a similar pattern in most Muslim households. The women get up early to supervise the food, clean the house, especially the dining areas, lay out every bit of crockery and cutlery (despite this, the day entails endless dishwashing and no matter how many spoons and glasses you lay out, you always seem to run short). The men bathe, put on new (or failing that, clean) clothes, dab ittar (as all of these are deemed sunnat, that is performed by Prophet Muhammad in his lifetime) and go for the congregational Eid namaz jingling a lot of loose change which is meant to be distributed to the beggars who line up at the mosques.
In my childhood, I remember Eid mornings as a time of great hustle and bustle. My mother rushing from the kitchen to the buffet table, my father hurrying my brother who was always late for the namaz and because of whom both my father and brother ended up being the last people to catch the namaz, often offering it on the road since the masjid would be chock-a-block by the time they made it. My brother, who only ever went to the masjid on the occasion of the two Eids, would invariably not be able to find his seldom-used cap or more often than not, oversleep. My mother would rush from the kitchen to his room, chivvying him into hurrying up and ensuring he wore his new kurta pajama. My father would pace the living room, waiting for him while my sisters and I regaled each other with incidents of past Eids: who came wearing what, who gave how much Eidi money or how the biryani at Mrs X’s home was vastly superior to Mrs Y’s.
Over the years, the dramatis personae of my Eids have changed but the pattern has remained largely unchanged as has been the unfolding of the day. By 9.30 the men are usually back from the masjid and the doorbell has begun to ring endlessly, heralding the arrival of a deluge of visitors – everyone from safai-karamcharis, the late lamented dak-taar vibhag, friends, neighbours, colleagues (past and present) and an assorted gaggle of acquaintances and foodies. The deluge will show no signs of relenting until a little after lunch and then, after a short lull between 3.00 and 4.00 p.m. when the household draws a breath, the kitchen staff finishes washing mounds of used cutlery, men take a nap and women freshen up for the evening assault, the visitors start again. In between all this, one steals out for a few hurried calls – to elderly relatives, a handful of close neighbours and most importantly the graveyard. Men make time to visit the graveyard on their way back from the mosque; women at any point in the day should they want to (as I indeed do) though custom forbids women from going to graveyards.
Amidst the general bonhomie and good cheer, the excitement of new clothes and gifts, it is easy to forget that Eid is not merely an occasion to binge, grab Eidi money, visit melas and milans and display a conspicuous consumption of wealth; it carries an important message which is integral to the spirit of Islam. Its very name, Eid-ul-Fitr, is resonant with the message of thanksgiving and sharing. Every Muslim is duty-bound to pay the zakat-al-fitr before the end of the period of fasting. In earlier times this was a fixed amount of wheat, dates or barley for each member of the household. Nowadays, it is generally taken to be the money equivalent to two and half kilos of ghalla (wheat) per person.
Literally meaning ‘periodically returning’, Eid marks the end of the month of Ramzan and the period of fasting and abstinence. The very first Eid was celebrated in 624 AD by the Prophet Muhammad with his companions and relatives soon after winning the Battle of Badr. In the Prophet’s lifetime it began to be celebrated as one of the two canonical festivals, the other being the major festival of Eid-ul-Adha or the Festival of Sacrifice. He showed Muslims, through word and deed, that Eid was an occasion to celebrate not only the end of fasting, but also a time to thank Allah for His help and the strength He gave them throughout the previous month of Ramzan to practice sel
f-control. And lest they forget those less privileged, he instructed the Muslims to give alms in order ‘to purify the fast’. The Prophet bade everyone, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, to be a part of the celebration; he himself wore good if not new clothes, put ittar and offered congregational prayer in an open ground away from the city limits. He also instructed them to eat something, such as dates, before setting out for the namaz, a sunnat that has prompted mothers to chide their children to put something in their mouth first thing in the morning, for it is only Satan who fasts on the day of Eid!
Nazir Akbarabadi, the eighteenth-century people’s poet, summed the general sentiment on Eid day in most Muslim households, a sentiment applicable to this day, when he wrote:
Rozon ki sakhtiyon mein na hote agar aseer
To aisi Eid ki na khushi hoti dil pazeer
Had we not been captured by the severity of the roza
We would not have known the heart-warming joy of Eid
2
WHEN PIETY MEETS POETRY
BY THE LATE ELEVENTH CENTURY, veneration of the Prophet had begun to assume a visible form in different parts of the by-now burgeoning Islamic world. Celebrations of Maulid, the day of birth of the Prophet, on twelfth Rabi’ul-awwal, the third month of the Muslim lunar calendar, had begun to make an appearance. Piety increasingly began to take the form of poetry and song. Love for Hazrat Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, began to be expressed beautifully and eloquently in the poetry of the many languages of the Islamic world. The tradition continues - the day of the Prophet’s birth is still celebrated. From the eastern end of the Muslim world to the western, Maulid is a wonderful occasion for the pious to show their warm love of the Prophet in songs, poems and prayers. And hand-in-hand with Maulid has grown an entire poetic tradition – one that flies in the face of an orthodox view that considers all such celebrations as bid’at or a misguided form of innovation.
But You Don't Look Like a Muslim Page 15