by Raza Rumi
Gandhi, in that season of Independence, stayed in Delhi and went from neighbourhood to neighbourhood to arrest the violence and bring about a truce between India and Pakistan and between Hindus and Muslims. Within months of his effective campaigning and fasting for these causes, he was assassinated. The greatest icon of modern Indian consciousness was an irritant in the dark world of Hindu fundamentalists. From 1934 to 1948, six attempts were made to kill him. The last one, by Nathuram Godse, was successful.
Delhi must have witnessed one of its coldest days on 30 January 1948. The country must have needed Gandhi’s sacrifice to nurture its complex society and the new state. Over time, this gruesome murder of India’s greatest leader has slipped into relative oblivion. The grievances of the assassins were that Gandhi supported the creation of Pakistan, he was fasting for the payment of dues worth Rs 55 crore to Pakistan and his ‘appeasement’ of Muslims were making Muslims more belligerent. Appeasement has become the bane of Indian politics. The major policy plank of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been to end this policy of appeasement (of minorities) and Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi implemented a harrowing version of this political aim.
The same day we visit Gandhi’s cenotaphs at Raj Ghat. We park the car under the keekar trees and walk. The monsoon breeze has cooled the air. There are a few flower-sellers with heaps of marigolds. Bunty and I walk to the shrine and, passing through well-kept lawns, we reach the unostentatious marble platform. Not many visitors are around. This is a peaceful afternoon. As we return, I see an exquisite structure at some distance and find out that it is Zeenatul Masjid, the beauty of the mosques, built by Emperor Aurangzeb’s daughter.
A Mughal mosque overlooks Gandhi’s cenotaphs and the silent Jamuna flows, or rather trickles through most of the year, at a close distance. It is a shrunken river that has been filled with the blood and corpses of past sufferers but now it is choking with sewage and pollution. From Indraprastha to the Sultanate and the Mughal takht of Dilli, the Jamuna has witnessed centuries of violence and has changed its course several times but has been faithful to Delhi.
I hold a mustard flower in my hand and put it inside the copy of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi that I have with me. In Delhi, time and again, I think of Ahmed Ali who could never return to the city he loved. Twilight in Delhi is a fine novel that portrays the decline and commercialization of Delhi during the colonial era. Delhi here is a Muslim character that lives in harmony with its non-Muslim residents but has to face modernity that is eating into its traditional character.
I know that the Hindi writer, Krishna Sobti, lives in Delhi. I want to meet her but somehow I cannot. Her stories, a few of which have been translated, have fascinating accounts of a composite culture that is fading worldwide. She was studying in Lahore in 1947 and had come to Delhi to spend her birthday. What a celebration it must have been! Momentous and life-changing, for she could never go back to Lahore. That evening of 15 August, when India was going to awaken to freedom, she and her brother celebrated the anticipated arrival of the long-hopedfor Independence. Sweets were prepared, speeches made and an impromptu exhibition of photographs of freedom fighters was arranged in their Delhi house.
The young Krishna Sobti and her brother invited everyone to congregate in the veranda of the house and started serving the sweets. But the visitors, rather than feeling happy, began to leave one by one. Was this independence or uprooting? Unknown to the Sobtis, this question was on the minds of millions of Indians that day.
Krishna’s autobiography, Zindaginamah, plays with three languages—Punjabi, Persian/Urdu and Hindi—deliberately, thereby making a loud proclamation that there is nothing simplistic even in the anonymous villages of India. There are no linear histories, no simplistic solutions or causes. Life, time and events are all jumbled up and ordinary people, away from high politics, take this complexity in their stride. In this shared world there is no need to shed one’s religious identities; coexistence between humans is not merely a possibility but a reality. And in today’s world, there is no need to shed national identities for they are real. But coexistence is still the natural order of things, a kind of Darwinian impulse only sabotaged by suicidal maniacs.
Krishna’s story is in so many ways reminiscent of what Fatima Jinnah, sister of Quaid-e-Azam and a politician in her own right, had to say in June 1947 to a visitor. When her Lahori friend, Kishwar Abid, visited her in Delhi and found that the floors of the house were being polished, she was shocked, wondering how this Delhi house would be retained in view of the imminent Independence and Partition looming on the horizon. We would come here for vacations, Fatima Jinnah had said. The great leader of Pakistan, Jinnah himself, had also intended to keep his Bombay house; he wanted to visit Bombay frequently and spend time there after his retirement. Jinnah’s house in Bombay is still an unresolved issue—a plank for sloganeering and jingoism.
Bizarre, people would say. But no one could really imagine the extent of the carnage and bitterness and the suddenness of it all. Not even the steel-frame of the colonial administration. What a traumatic summer and how unpredictable it was!
The schizophrenia of that summer and the preceding months was mind-boggling. The Muslims of India had multiple voices. Jinnah held that the ‘problem in India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of an international character, and must be treated as such… it is a dream that Hindus and Muslims can evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has gone far beyond the limits, and is the cause of most of our troubles, and will lead India to destruction, if we fail to revise our actions in time.’
Reversing his earlier ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ stand, his discourse, as articulated in his 1940 presidential address to the All India Muslim League was final:
The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literature. They neither intermarry, nor inter-dine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on and of life are different.
However, concurrent to Jinnah’s 1940 address, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad addressed the Congress as its president. He summarized the nationalist Muslim viewpoint thus:
Eleven hundred years of common history [of Islam and Hinduism] have enriched India with our common achievements. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour… These thousand years of our joint life [have] moulded us into a common nationality… whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.
Reconciliation efforts were initiated and there was dialogue. The last of the plans to save the unity of India was packaged under the Cabinet Mission proposals that ensured a weak centre and strong regional centres with provincial autonomy. In 1946, Jinnah agreed and Azad was biased in its favour too. However, the hard line represented by Patel and intellectualized by Nehru, rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan. Patel like many Congress leaders was opposed to confederal structure for post-Independence. The Congress eventually ‘accepted’ the Plan in June 1946. However, Nehru hinted at an infamous press conference in Bombay on 10 July 1946, as the incoming president of Congress, that his party, with its absolute majority in the House, did not consider itself bound by the scheme of the Cabinet Mission Plan.10
But this was no start of a clean, linear narration of history. How could the complex web of shared centuries be separated so easily? A bittersweet irony in post-Partition Pakistan was that Pakistan’s first national anthem was composed by Jagannath Azad, a Lahore-based Hindu, upon Jinnah’s request. The national anthem written by Azad was sent to Jinnah who approved it in a few hours. It was sung for the first time on Pakistan Radio, Karachi, then the capital of Pakistan. The opening lines were:
Oh land of Pa
kistan, each particle of yours is being
illuminated by stars.
Even your dust has been brightened like a rainbow.11
Days before his death in 2005, Jagannath Azad recalled the circumstances under which he was asked by Jinnah to write Pakistan’s national anthem,
In August 1947, when mayhem had struck the whole Indian subcontinent, I was in Lahore working for a literary newspaper. All my relatives had left for India and for me to think of leaving Lahore was painful. I decided to take a chance and stay on for some time. My Muslim friends requested me to stay on and took responsibility for my safety. On the morning of August 9, 1947, there was a message from Pakistan’s first Governor General, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was through a friend working in Radio Lahore who called me to his office. He told me, ‘Quaid-e-Azam wants you to write a national anthem for Pakistan.’ I told them it would be difficult to pen it in five days and my friend pleaded that as the request has come from the tallest leader of Pakistan, I should consider his request. On much persistence, I agreed.
Azad further related that Jinnah wanted the anthem to be written by an Urdu-knowing Hindu, ‘Through this, I believe Jinnah Sahib wanted to sow the roots of secularism in a Pakistan where intolerance had no place.’ Jinnah had already made his intentions clear in his inaugural speech as the governor general of Pakistan on 11 August 1947. In that speech he declared, ‘You will find that in course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.’
Azad moved to India later. The Partition project was accomplished as the new states of India and Pakistan moved towards selective positions of nationalism.
And on the other side, the song, ‘Sare jahan se achha, Hindustan hamara,’ composed by Mohammad Iqbal, poet of the east, is still the most popular patriotic Indian song. We were fed with the version that one fine day, Iqbal had seen a dream for Pakistan and Jinnah implemented it despite the evil designs of the Hindus and the British. But then, why was ‘Sare jahan se achha’ sung in India, I used to wonder as a child. Only with the passing of years did I find out that the mishmash of history, fascinating as it was, was pretty tough to unravel and make sense of.
Bunty is keen that I should visit the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib with him. We first drive to Connaught Place (CP) for an errand. Built by the British in the nineteenth century, CP represents Raj nostalgia. The white-colonnaded shopping area encircles a park in the somewhat Raj attempt to create an English aesthetics driven by homesickness where the streets of London were recreated to provide sahibs and memsahibs with a piece of home. Today, Connaught Place is fully independent and fully Indianized, complete with beggars and hawkers and Hindi film music.
United Coffee House, a highlight of CP, was a venue for intellectual and literary discussions until it was razed for the construction of a larger market. But the Standard Restaurant from the Raj still stands. However, the Raj menu has been replaced with globalized food. Kake Da Dhaba and Kwality, serving Punjabi food, are more popular in CP than was the case earlier. Wengers, however, still serves savouries, cakes and sandwiches reminiscent of the Raj. I liked CP. It was home again for me—the Raj Mall Road in Lahore and the feel of Murree Mall with quaint shops and colonial architecture. But CP is a grander version, given that Delhi was the resplendent jewel in the Empire’s crown.
The Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, not far from CP, used to be the bungalow of Raja Jai Singh Amber, a noble at the court of Emperor Aurangzeb. The eighth Sikh Guru, Shri Harkishan, stayed here for a few months as a guest of the Raja. Over centuries, this place has been a pilgrimage site for both Hindus and Sikhs. Bangla Sahib has been upgraded and spruced up. Modern interventions in its architecture are obvious. There is a well which offers holy water to pilgrims; Bunty insists that I drink the amrit and I do.
The Sikh guards looked splendid in their turbans and swords. Devotees bathed in the beautiful pond while several pilgrims slept in various corners of the gurdwara compound. The soothing strains of shabad kirtan lent the ambience an elevation and calm. The Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred book of the Sikhs, was lovingly protected and cherished by priests who swirled pankhas over it. Outside, the place was thronging with Sardars and women dressed in flower-patterned shalwar-kameezes.
We ate the sacred and delicious halwa prasad. I guess Bunty was eager to show me his bit of heritage after our treks to various parts of Delhi.
The gurdwara also runs social service organizations in its vicinity. The local Sikh community runs a hospital in the basement of the gurdwara and also manages the Khalsa Girls School in the adjacent building. I then force Bunty to go with me to the art gallery downstairs. The Sikh general, Sardar Bhagel Singh, had overseen the erection of nine Sikh shrines in Delhi in 1783 during the time of Shah Alam II. Today, the art gallery remembers him daily since it has been named after the good general.
I have one question though—did Raja Jai Singh Amber know that his patron was to, as popular history goes, order the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur?12 Whilst Aurangzeb was a short-sighted man, drunk on narrow puritanism, singling him out has become a punching bag for Hindu communalism. I want to recite this verse by B.D. Pandey to Bunty, but refrain. I recite it later to others as I just cannot control the urge to do so:
Hazaaron saal ki yeh daastan;
Aur yaad haiy unko sirf itna;
Kay Aalamgir zaalim thaa,
Hindukush thaa, sitamgur tha.
All they remember of a long thousand years’ tale
[Is] that Aurangzeb was tyrannical, a cruel Hindu-killer.
Violence is embedded in the histories of South Asia and seems widely accepted as if it was inevitable. No violence can ever be inevitable.
The trauma of 1947, barely healed or forgotten, was to take a new shape in 1984. The murder of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of Independence and Partition, by two Sikh guards, led to an unending spate of killings and persecution of the Sikh minority. Mongols, Turks, mutineers, English soldiers and the mobs of 1947—all came together to create a new nightmare for Delhi that has neither healed nor been forgotten. Bunty was too young but he remembers hiding somewhere for days with no food. His father repeated the horror saga to make him relive and remember what should not be forgotten:
In Delhi, the names of Sikhs were taken out from ration card lists by area ration shop owners. The neighbourhood we lived in went through premeditated attacks. The cinema, owned partly by a Sikh, was burnt down, a chemist shop that belonged to a Sikh met the same fate, a Sikh grocery store owner could hardly find anything in his store as everything was looted and burnt. All the houses in my locality owned by Sikhs were set on fire. But today we see the same businesses back up and running by Wahe Guru’s mehers (blessings). Lots of my friends were surprised to see me and my family alive when we returned. I had no hard feelings for Hindus earlier, but the way my friends reacted, made me think twice about the trust I could put in them. Everyone was blaming the whole situation on politicians and goonda elements but I believe it was more than that. Or else why would school-going kids feel surprised (not in a good way) upon the return of their (Sikh) classmates after such a bloodbath in the city? Obviously, at their homes, their parents and elders must have been talking against Sikhs. Anyway, we do not hate Hindus. How can we? Our best friends and relatives are Hindus, but a string once broken will always have a knot in the middle.
Bunty and I remain silent for many awkward moments. I don’t fancy hearing this narration anymore.
My blog acquaintance, a lady—such relationships are now possible—was also in Delhi. Her life changed on that autumnal day of judgment in 1984. Her journals, intimate, public and haunting, are her way of coping:
My husband, son, two brothers, two cousins and my two unborn daughters were killed. Suni, my cousin sister, her not-yet-born daughter and I survived.
I was badly beaten and was in a coma for several weeks. When I wo
ke up, I started keeping this journal… For me, the journal is as natural as for me to breathe; it has been a part of my life from the time I first learned to write. The language and some of the sentiments expressed, especially toward Hindus, are pretty rough. I apologise for neither. Although I rarely use such language and I long ago stopped blaming the Hindus for what happened, given the time and circumstances, I think both are entirely appropriate.
But Delhi is not daunted. Its expanse and spirit copes with tremors well. The surface fault-lines are real but so is the world underneath. The phoenix has no choice but to rise again and again.
Our history teacher, Major T, was a big, round man with a wry sense of humour. By sheer accident of circumstances he ended up at the high school after a career in the army’s Education Corps and later the Foreign Service of Pakistan. Wherever he worked, he was critical, sharp and fiercely independent in his views. His stint at the Foreign Office was cut short by the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who wrote adverse remarks in his personal file that plainly declared him to be a threat of sorts to the Pakistani establishment.
The reason was simple. Major T challenged official history and the touted ‘ideology of Pakistan’. He was not alone in this contested terrain. Many Pakistani scholars have argued, with the help of historical records, that the term, ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ is a construction that was non-existent at the time of Pakistan’s creation. Justice Munir has very clearly identified the first time when this phrase was coined. In his monograph, From Jinnah to Zia, he writes:
The Quaid-e-Azam never used the words, ‘Ideology of Pakistan…’ For fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ was not known to anybody until in 1962, a solitary member of the Jama’at-i-Islami used the words for the first time when the Political Parties Bill was being discussed. On this, Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, who recently retired as President of Pakistan, rose from his seat and objected that the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ shall have to be defined. The member who had proposed the original amendment replied that the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ was Islam. 13