by Raza Rumi
Qadir was his closest friend in Lahore and when Singh and his family had to move, it was Qadir who took over charge of their property. They had to split permanently, irreversibly.
Singh’s obituary for Qadir opens with these lines:
My closest friend of many years lay dying; I could not go to his bedside. His wife and children were only an hour and a half ’s flight from me; I could not go to see them. I could not ring them up or write to them. And when he died, I was not there to comfort them. They are Pakistani, I am Indian. What kind of neighbours are we? What right have we to call ourselves civilised?
Singh’s trauma is instructive. He does not belittle the existence of a separate Pakistan, nor does he call for a re-unification. Like a pragmatic sage, he calls for a civilizational consciousness where acrimonies of the past can be overcome through grace.
As he sips on his precious one drink of Scotch with soda, I start looking at him with a growing feeling of familiarity. I am not overawed by his larger-than-life persona nor does his Sikh turban unnerve my textbook conception of the ‘non-Muslim’. His warmth is almost infectious, disproving his well-known lack of patience with visitors to his durbar. Well, I am with Sadia, so that helps. We speak in a special type of English littered with Punjabi phrases, Urdu couplets and Hindustani, all forming a peculiar semantics that is comprehensible to those present in the room.
Sadia and Khushwant flirt in a manner that reincarnates Electra in twenty-first-century Delhi. Just a while ago, Khushwant was half-teasing and half-complaining that I was her new young companion. While I blush away, Sadia ignores the comment, merely joking that I have the same name as her husband from Pakistan. The air never gets quite cleared. Singh draws up a flamboyant picture of Sadia; she keeps on explaining how she has evolved over the years—a new-age Sufi girl. Still half-laughing, Singh flicks through the manuscript of the translations of the great Urdu poets that he is undertaking, with, he confesses, much trepidation. While heaping innumerable praises upon Urdu and its poetry, he mourns the incomprehensibility of Ghalib’s verse. Urdu poetry with its nuances, twists and the delicacy of expressing the banal and the metaphysical in the same breath has inspired him to devotion. He puts the manuscript in my hands and inquires whether he has translated the verse properly. I am part flattered, part nonplussed. As a result, I spend the next twenty minutes glancing through the script and then stop at these melodious lines from Mir, another of Delhi’s ‘grand people’. At Singh’s request, I recite:
Mir ji zarad hote jaate hain
Kya kahin tum ne bhi kiya hai ishq?
Mir, you seem to be getting paler by the day,
Have you too fallen in love?
I break into heartfelt praise even though not all his translations are technically sound or capture the lyricism. This is the curse of the Urdu poetry of the ustads—the beauty begins to fade away the moment a translator commences his procrustean task. The old wine does not go well with new bottles. On the state of Urdu, Singh recites this couplet by Khurshid Afsar Bisrani:
Ab urdu kya hai, ek kothey ki tawaif hai
Mazaa har ek leta hai mohabbat kaun karta hai?
What is Urdu now but a prostitute in a brothel
Everyone has fun with her, but who really loves her?
That a ninety-eight-year-old man, despite ill health, is keeping the Urdu torch ablaze is enough to make any Urdu devotee overjoyed. Hopefully, these translations will serve to create a wider understanding of Urdu in India and abroad.
It is 8 p.m. and time for Khushwant Singh to retire. He is notorious for his discipline and for kicking out guests. Once, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi arrived late for a planned dinner. Singh said hello and went to bed. His baffled son was left to entertain India’s PM. However, I do manage to squeeze in a little discussion on his book, The End of India, which I had read a year ago. It may not be the best book in his legacy but its timing was most opportune. When India was wounded from within after the ghastly Gujarat violence, this book reinforced the value of a nonnegotiable creed which, for the lack of any better phrase, one calls ‘secularism’, the core of what India’s founding fathers had stood for. Not the secularism of Western Europe, but a homegrown desi compact, achieved and executed for more than a thousand years. He wrote:
It is wrong and counterproductive to pretend that communalism is something that the Sangh Parivar invented in India. The Sangh’s genius was in creating a monster out of existing prejudices. The Congress, especially under Indira Gandhi, played its own dirty role. The BJP is only more dangerous because of its brazenness… everybody has blood on their hands. Every religious or ethnic group in India can and has been incited to kill and plunder… Just about everyone killing everyone else.
I remind him of the term ‘fundoo’ that he used in the introduction. He explains, as does the introduction, that the term and its current explanation came from a novella written by Gita Hariharan. She defines the word: ‘Fundoo: fundamentalist, fascist, obscurantist, terrorist. And the made-in-India brand, the communalist—a deceptively innocuous other-community hater’. Delhi is fortunate to be the home of a man with such uncompromising and unflinching faith in not just a secular India but in an India that is at peace within and without.
Another of Khushwant Singh’s lasting contributions is his magnum opus, The History of the Sikhs, an erudite yet readable account, striking for its attempt to shed biases. One marvels at Singh’s effort to rise above what he must have received as the ‘real version of truth’ from the annals of his community’s written and oral accounts. If anything, his celebrated novel, Train to Pakistan, recounts the amity that existed between Sikhs and Muslims in Mano Majra, a village in Punjab, only to be upturned by the violence of Partition. I admire Singh’s secularism and his iconoclastic status—neither high-brow nor laced with ideological pretensions. The well known Singh slogan, ‘sex, scotch, and scholarship,’ also the title of one of his later books of essays, is the persona he uses to undermine the still-extant Victorian middle-class ethos. Both ‘sex’ and ‘scotch’ ironically, are not Singh’s lifestyle symbols but a cover for his individualism which is famous for its unvarnished truth and the demolishing of religious claptrap.
I meet Singh a year later, and again the year after that. Each time I am fortunate to meet him with only a few people around him, thereby enabling an atmosphere where one could probe his memory a little deeper and the expanse of his spirit with ease. During our last meeting, his little Sony television flashed images of a victorious Narendra Modi who had won state elections in Gujarat in December 2007. The predictions of Indian media gurus did not come true once again and Modi’s opposition was dejected.
Singh was evidently disturbed, even though he tried to crack joke upon joke about the ‘imagined’ defeat of Modi. But we, the attendees of his durbar, were under a mild spell of depression—Sadia Dehlvi, an enlightened Indian-Muslim woman, me, the non-Indian from a country that is supposed to have created Modis of a different kind, and another visitor, an Indian Christian, sharing the same anguish. Beneath the eye of time, identity is a house built on sand. In his book, The End of India, Khushwant Singh writes:
Nehru was the first and probably only leader of the time who sensed that the challenge to India’s democracy would come not from communism but from a resurgence of religious fanaticism… what would become of predominantly Hindu India now that it was truly independent for the first time in centuries? …when Dr Rajendra Prasad agreed to inaugurate the newly rebuilt temple at Somnath, Nehru sent a strong note protesting that the president of a secular state had no business to involve himself in religious matters.
The feeling that Hindus had been deprived of their legacy and humiliated by foreigners had deep roots. For eight centuries, Muslim dynasties had ruled the country and many Muslim rulers had destroyed Hindu temples. This was not peculiar to the Muslim rulers of India. In almost all ancient and medieval societies, this was the norm. Hindu rulers too, for instance, had persecuted Buddhists and Jains and destroyed the
ir places of worship.
Further, Singh holds that ‘…the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is anti-Muslim, anti-Christian and anti-Left. As long as it remained on the fringes of mainstream politics, it could be dismissed as a lunatic group. Not anymore.’
It was no longer just politics and propaganda which was escalating the cancer of extremism ailing both India and Pakistan at the societal and, more worryingly, personal levels. Poisonous textbooks, jingoism and twisted constructs of nation states had shaped a region which denied its own history and worse, obsessed with a vendetta that was coming to resemble a collective suicide arrangement. Year 1947 was a watershed, but to turn it into perpetual hostile militancy of two well-armed nations, and later, a third one in the form of Bangladesh, was a clear recipe for disaster.
Each meeting with Singh exalts my Delhi experience but each time it leaves more questions unanswered. There is, of course, his familiar exclamation, ‘Ah, this boy is from my hometown!’ What a strange sense of being locked in the middle of ‘otherness’! Strange that it is true and odd that it is a mere memory that would soon be trampled by the ‘relentless time-horse’, to use a metaphor from Ghalib.
Time has that strange effect that makes us want to forget and yet relive the past. Khushwant Singh’s narratives of Lahore and the Punjabi identity are replete with unshed tears and nostalgia. A cesspool of bitterness exists under the feet that walk on Delhi streets. Imagined boundaries constantly punctuate geographical borders. The ghost of Partition lives in every corner of Delhi in hidden tombs. Present-day immigration into larger Delhi is a continuum of what happened in that humid summer of 1947.
Independence, often indistinguishable from Partition, entailed a migration of people that defies mythology. It was nothing short of ethnic cleansing even though the term was not invented those days. Seven million Muslims and almost the same number of Hindus and Sikhs crossed the border on either side and found new homes, new countries. Millions lost their lives under the maladministration of the Empire while hundreds of thousands of women were raped. It is said that in the Punjab, nearly one hundred thousand people were never to be found. They were lost in the blurred victory of the new nation states. Missing? They are the invisible fodder of history.
On a hot summer afternoon, I read some personal accounts of those who had experienced Partition. Nothing has affected me more than these chilling lines by Alok Bhalla:10
My earliest memory is of a remote summer afternoon in Delhi in 1948. That day lies so far back in my biography that I sometimes wonder if what I remember ever really happened; if I haven’t made some nightmarish image into a part of my being. Recently, however, my mother confirmed that the essential details of my remembrance were accurate enough. The day was like any other usual hot day in Delhi. The sun was harsh and indifferent; the dust was full of the dry buzz of flies and the smell of tar. The courtyard of our small house was surrounded by a high wall which was washed with white lime so that it could absorb the glare of the sun and resist the hot winds. The entrance to our house was through a small green door with a black chain lock on it. Three brick and cement steps led down from the door to the level of the road below and its burden of leaves outside. The details are important; their ordinariness is necessary both as evidence and as boundaries against the phantasmagoric. For without being sure that my memory is located in the real world, I cannot hope to make an ethical enquiry into the history of my age and place.
I recall that as I unlocked the door to our house, I saw the body of a man stretched out on the steps below. He was lying face down. His bag had fallen near his feet; it was open and a few common household things had scattered out of it. His limbs were in disarray, his clothes were soaked in blood and the sun had begun to darken his skin. There was no one in the street, not even the usual garbage dog. My father had heard the sound of the chain on the door and had hurried out. Later, he told me that the man, marked with so many wounds, had earlier in the day sought shelter in our house. He was a Muslim trader who had been chased into our locality by violent men seeking revenge for blood spilled in Pakistan. We were Hindus and he had stayed with us in safety for a few hours. Towards noon, my father had gone out to see if the streets were safe. The man was obviously anxious to get back to his family. My father had looked about the street carefully and had thought that the man could negotiate his way back to his own neighbourhood without fear. Too late had my father realised that he had failed to notice one of the shadowy corners of the wall marking the grounds of old St Stephen’s College in Kashmiri Gate. The man had turned back and had tried to reach our house again. My father had forgotten his name. There were too many who had been killed.
Delhi was drained of 3.3 lakh Muslims and 5 lakh non-Muslims from the newly created ‘Pakistan’ rushed in. This was chaotic for the city—perhaps unmatched since the devastation wrought by the Mongols or what followed when the Mutiny of 1857 turned into a War of Independence. A city of Empires turns into a vast refugee camp reeling in the pre-monsoon heat and humidity of Lahore and Delhi. That August brought the dark world of Hades out into the daylight. Blood fell with rain. Relief came to those lingering wounds destined not to heal. The agony was not peculiar to any religious community—it was personal, shared and universal.
Khushwant Singh is not alone. Another Lahore-wala who had to become a Delhi resident was Pran Nevile. A diplomat and patriot, Nevile has not let go of Lahore. His fine musings on Lahore and nostalgia for a lost identity are widely known.
The first time I met Pran Nevile was in Lahore. He was there to launch his re-published book, Lahore: A Sentimental Journey, which documents his memories of Lahore, the city where he grew up. It was a monsoon evening, heavy and still, much like the weather when his family packed their bags for Delhi. Unusually fit and active for a man who has lived over seven decades, he appeared timeless. Sitting in Lahore, he traversed various paths and entire cities in his conversation. Having travelled the world as a foreign office star, Nevile could never ever forget his hometown of Lahore.
When I read Nevile’s book, I knew what this crisscrossing was all about. The love of his city, so deep-rooted and honest, made the events of 1947 appear treacherous and evil. He transported his readers into the idyll that Lahore was. He unpacked its composite culture with much nostalgia, ‘I belong to a generation born and brought up in Lahore. Even after four decades, my emotional attachments to this great city are as deep as ever,’ he admits. In another conversation, he declares, ‘In a way… I never left Lahore because it was always with me… I am an un-reconstructed Lahoria, you can say, who never thought he would live anywhere else.’11
When riots shook Lahore in July 1947, Nevile’s siblings moved to Delhi, but his parents were reluctant to migrate. Finally persuaded by their Muslim friends, the parents also left with a fantastical certitude that they would return after the dust had settled. That has been the tragedy of Partition. Many, including Nevile’s parents, who left in the flurry of events, were convinced that they would return to their homes, villages and cities. This was never to happen. The red lines merely grew thicker across the canvas of history. Nevile now leads a group of Lahore’s former residents who meet regularly and share the memory of a city that yet lives with them. Perhaps my maternal aunt thought the same about her Amritsar and her countless friends.
While driving on a busy Delhi road, I notice a small signboard that says ‘Chirag Dilli’, the area where the recluse saint lived and is now buried. Figures from an ancient and recent past still linger on Delhi’s lanes. It is another matter that most of the residents of this overgrown metropolis have forgotten these tales.
Fables have furthered Sufi and Bhakti thought and practice. Memory needs a playground, it seeks indulgence and reconciliation and it harks back to the unity now lost. Pran Nevile and Khushwant Singh try to inject some order into the chaos of their ruptured memories.
But demons also need peace.
3
Meeting Again
T
here ca
nnot be a more haunting expression of shared tragedy than a poem, ‘Lali akhiaan di payee dusdi aye’ (The Bloodshot Eyes Bear Testimony of Many a Tear), written immediately after Partition by Ustad Daman (1911–1984), a Lahore-based proletarian poet. It described what happened to Punjabis during those bloody months. It is a poem that was oft-recited in Old Lahore’s busy streets and baithaks. My father would read about these perfidious times to us:
None of us may utter
but you know and so do we
a great deal have you lost
and so have we;
who was to foresee this struggle for freedom
would tear things apart, destroy so heavily
much pain much suffering have you borne
and so have we;
Yet there is hope
regeneration and new life awaits us
though many a death you died
and so did we;
Those who were awake and alert
robbed, exploited, emasculated us
while for centuries you slept in stupor
and so did we:
These bloodshot eyes bear testimony
many a tear
you did shed
and so did we.1
Some years after Partition, this poem was recited at a mushaira in India. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was present at the occasion and he is reported to have cried when he heard this poem. Ustad Daman was asked twice to relocate to India but he did not. As he remarked to Ali Sardar Jafri, he feared that in Pakistan he would be killed by the mullahs while in India he would be eaten alive by the pundits.
Following the tradition of Bhakti poets which entails living a simple life closer to ordinary folk, Daman was a tailor by profession and remained a wage earner all his life. In 1947, he lost his wife and child only to find and lose them again, this time to disease. The treatment was costly and his friends bore the burial expenses. Since he sympathized with the politics of Indian nationalism, the mobs burnt his house, his books and poetry. This was when he shifted to the outer part of the Badshahi Mosque where he lived for the rest of his life. An extraordinary life disrupted and fractured. A migrant in his home country, he did not have to go anywhere to suffer the pain but understood it well.