DELHI BY HEART

by Raza Rumi

  Defence Colony market is perennially congested with badly managed traffic. We ate a couple of times at the brilliant Swagath, a South Indian seafood restaurant. On another occasion, we tried Colonel Kebabs which serves some well-done broiled meats, and Sagar, where I was introduced to the wonders of quickly assembled dosas, idlis, and inventive vegetarian thalis. Only in Delhi did I start to appreciate and love vegetarian cooking given the variety of flavours.

  Indians have no clue as to what a ‘defence’ housing area in Pakistan is like. These isolated, opulent and well-managed enclaves are the preserve of the retired as well as serving officials; many affluent civilians also live here. The layouts depict martial orderliness, the architecture loudly nouveau riche (with minor exceptions), and amid the planned streets and boulevards, the city remains culturally anonymous, as if robbed of historical and contextual identity. Such suburbia could be anywhere, outside a big US city or somewhere else.

  Modern, consumer-crazy Delhi, where money defines living, gives rise to a paradoxical amnesia and nostalgia about the past. So each day, the media carries a little ‘discovery’ about the city and its monuments. These crumbling monuments and the de-sensitization, therefore, paint a melancholic portrait of an otherwise vibrant city. As writer and bureaucrat Pawan Verma puts it:

  One of the peculiar things about Indians is that while they romanticise the remote past, they have little or no sense of history about more recent times… particularly distressing in a city like Delhi where countless monuments languish unnoticed amidst the ebb and flow of a city avalanched by its own municipal concerns. Educated people who live in Hauz Khas have no idea what the monument which gives their colony its name is. The same kind of historical lethargy afflicts most of those who live in and around Masjid Moth, Chirag Dilli, Siri, or Hazrat Nizamuddin.6

  Many like Pawan Verma, who love Delhi intimately, are pained by the atrophying of some of its most vital parts. A truncated Delhi, no matter how bursting with life it appears, will affect the rest of India as it shapes power, culture and ‘national’ identity. No part of North India, or for that matter, much of what is now Pakistan, can claim not to have been impacted by the happenings in Delhi over the centuries.

  Orhan Pamuk wrote in his book Istanbul, ‘Huzun rises out of the pain they feel for all that which has been lost, but it is also what compels them to invent new defeats and new ways to express their impoverishment.’ ‘Huzun’, the Turkish word for melancholy, has an Arabic root. Urdu has adopted this term and its derivative, ‘hazeen’ to describe melancholy, grief, or a feeling of deep spiritual loss. In his celebrated book, Pamuk describes the mood of his city and that of its collective residents as expressing huzun. But this huzun is a nuanced, often complex feeling signifying positive faith in change as well as a negative sense of resignation. There is melancholy but not morbidity. The residents of Istanbul live under the weight of a grand past, among the vestiges of a towering culture and civilization. However, this culture and civilization are now faded and the Istanbul-ites do not consider it a living civilization nor do they feel part of a grand continuum but have been severed from it by the adoption of western civilization.

  This disconnect is not resolved. In many respects, the older Delhi, especially the decaying Shahjahanbad with its predominantly Muslim population, reflects the same sense of conflict and wistfulness as Istanbul. This collective melancholy can be seen in some of the old residents of New Delhi too.

  With the decay of the Indian Islamic civilization and its irrelevance in the face of globalized western civilization, many Muslims of Delhi, generally speaking, find refuge in resignation. The Old Delhi-walas cling to memories of their glorious past with a sentimentality that feeds into their melancholy. This clinging defines who they are and gives them a sense of identity and security within a world in which they have been left behind. Similarly, all the sad scenes of their daily lives such as the poverty, squalor, the human drama at the Sufi shrines, beggars, street scenes and lifestyle are perpetuated almost as if these are loved, their melancholy perpetuated as a collective statement of identity. Until the middle of the twentieth century, a ‘Dilli-wala’ had a distinct identity which expressed itself in speech, manners, habits and pride in the city. This is no longer the case, writes Pawan Verma:

  The Delhi of today is a vast and nondescript aggregation of individual wants. It has no collective soul. It has indeed pole-vaulted beyond the decaying feudalism of the Walled City, and the expansive exclusivism of Lutyen’s Delhi, but only to fall in a huge ungovernable sprawl, a victim of its own amazingly haphazard over-reach.7

  Centuries of British rule created an unrectifiable wedge between modern India and that culture and civilization which immediately preceded the advent of the British. Lutyens was not all that wrong about the natives. Undeniably racist, but in a foretelling manner, his criticism of the ‘browns’ and their lack of concern for heritage was not too far from the truth. After Independence, crumbling governance, rampant corruption and neglect of planning have contributed to the decline of many a South Asian city.

  Old Delhi’s melancholy is also about the rise of individual gain and loss of collective identity. This fragmentation could be considered exciting as it can propel entrepreneurship and satisfy the gods of the market, but for a city and its culture Pawan Verma says:

  Those who would have saved Delhi have allowed it to die because they believed that the city could survive even if their only concern was their own well-being. It was a fatal mistake. Cities are sensitive creatures. They have a soul. They can survive periods of neglect. They cannot survive if their patrons are boors, smug in their little fortresses of individual gain, with no sense of pride in where they live…8

  11

  Rivers of Fire

  S

  omewhere, enmeshed in my yearnings to visit Delhi, lies my overwhelming desire to meet Qurratulain Hyder, the great Urdu writer. I finally meet her in NOIDA, a new suburb of Delhi, officially in Uttar Pradesh, the neigbouring state. The journey to get to Ainee Apa (as she is affectionately known in the Urdu-speaking world) took all these years. The two visits were memorable and extensive, but they remained incomplete. The third meeting never took place. She passed away in the August of 2007.

  Sadia exclaimed, when I told her I wished to see Ainee Apa, ‘Gosh, are you an Ainee fan as well? Visitors from Pakistan have two fixations, the Taj and Ainee Apa!’ Such was her stature among Urdu readers. Not that she was not known and respected in India perhaps more than any other Urdu writer but it was her Pakistani readership that ironically became the basis for her overawing metaphorical, larger than literary presence.

  She first entered my consciousness when I was in high school and since then I have read almost every word written by her. There was a time at college, when I composed a long letter to her that was never sent. Partly because it was too melodramatic (I had heard of her temperamental disposition) and also because she was allergic to hyperbolic praise. Over the years, I internalized the worlds she painted. Only later did I realize that a part of me has been perennially shaped by the magic of her writings. I still remember that glorious London summer in college when I finished Aakhir-i-Shab ke Humsafar (published in English as Fireflies in the Mist) I looked around and the world, as I knew it, was not the same place. Since then, I have been dwelling in her books.

  The Times Literary Supplement once wrote that she ought to be counted, along with her contemporaries, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera, as one of the world’s major writers. Her stories deal with the inextricability of Hindu and Muslim sub-cultures in terms of their literatures, poetics and music backgrounded by the historical forces of colonization, Independence and their impact on individual lives. Her magnum opus, Aag ka Darya (translated by her as River of Fire), undertook a groundbreaking examination of issues of identity within the South Asian civilization. Darya is to Urdu fiction what A Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.

  Born in UP in 1927, Qurratulain belonged to an
accomplished upper-crust family of writers. Educated in Lucknow, she had a stint in London as a young reporter on Fleet Street before immigrating to Pakistan after the Partition and returning to India around 1962. She was awarded the Jnanpith, India’s highest literary award and before that, the Sahitya Akademi and Ghalib awards. Later, she received the Padma Shri, one of India’s premier government honours to civilians.

  It was no coincidence that she lived for so many years in Delhi and also died in the city though her hometown was Lucknow. She must have felt an uncanny sense of ease here, the city that was so old and yet so new. Her NOIDA house was located in the rather soulless modern suburb of the megapolis. So naturally, Qurratulain’s sense of history and her ability to traverse the past and present with equal facility came alive in Delhi.

  On my first visit to Delhi, I am invited for lunch at Ainee Apa’s house. Travel to NOIDA took some suburban time. Sadia and her visiting cousin from the United States accompanied me. We cross the Jamuna and headed towards the suburb. Hurriedly, I bought rajnigandha flowers from under a jamun tree, and as I was doing so, I wondered why life was treating me so nicely. Well, I was, after all, buying flowers for none other than Ainee Apa. That was rare good fortune indeed!

  We reached a small town house in the quiet and anonymous lanes of Sector 16. These lanes do not know its residents. We made our way somehow. NOIDA’s sectors and streets are devoid of a lived history. Does it matter if they are not aware of Ainee Apa? Perhaps not.

  Rehana, the domestic help, greeted us as we entered the Ainee sanctum. In her living room, she sat on a large divan in a semi-recline and ferociously moved her pankha. She looked more like a person from the fast-fading Muslim nobility, a character that she would have adroitly portrayed. A guest was reading aloud from an Urdu magazine and she was intently listening to him. As we find out later, her eyesight had also submerged itself into the twilight of her memories and lost visions.

  We were warmly greeted and she was excited to see Sadia and her cousin. When I was introduced, she took notice of me and politely asked me to feel at home despite the power breakdown. She apologized repeatedly for the humid afternoon. But she was not the woman I had seen in pictures. Time, an important aspect of her novels, had depleted her energies and her once-celebrated beauty. She was evidently frail but there was nevertheless something electric in her manner and conversation which took me a while to register. Her house is full of books, each room covered from top to bottom with bookshelves. The walls are adorned with her paintings which she has made over a decade, some of which I recognized as sketches in her books and book covers.

  Mindful of her celebrated irritation with small talk, I launched into a more flowing dialogue. She hurled several questions in my direction on Indo-Pak relations, the visa policies of both countries and my views on the ‘peace process’. I was a bit taken aback and hence unable to offer any coherent replies. Nevertheless, I conjured up some answers that were cautiously optimistic. She appeared amused, saying that her generation suffered incredibly due to conflict. My contemporaries and I have to now rise to the occasion. I can appreciate Ainee Apa’s point given that the world that she has lived in with its composite Indo-Muslim culture is dead and the RSS and Lashkar, illegitimate children of historical upheavals, are better known than Mir and Kabir.

  She wanted to know about the intellectuals of Pakistan and I was once again thrown off balance. But I managed to stutter something about the once historical absence of the Pakistani middle class now changing and growing into an articulate and urban social sector, though I chose not to mention the crass consumerism and the innate conservatism of this new bourgeoisie. I mentioned Kamal, the character from River of Fire, who is disillusioned by the aesthetics and the politics of the 1950s but sees no option than to integrate into the changing Pakistan. She smiled and avoided a direct answer by saying that that was an old tale. But it is not an old tale according to me as Kamal’s lines are prophetic:

  The joke is that those who raise the slogan of Islam in the loudest voices have nothing to do with the philosophy of this religion. The only thing they know is that the Muslims ruled Spain for 800 years, that they ruled Bharat for a thousand years, while the Ottomans kept East Europe subjugated for centuries. Apart from imperialism, no mention is ever made of Islam’s great humanism, nor is it considered necessary to speak about the open-heartedness of Arab seers, Iranian poets and Indian Sufis. There is no interest in the philosophy of Ali and Hussain. Islam is being presented as a violent religion and a violent way of life.1

  I noticed that Ainee had a terrific sense of humour, her sharp wit unaffected by age and illness. She joked about the idiosyncrasies of Pakistani and Indian politicians, of Muslim backwardness, especially citing a peculiar species that she mentions in her writings—Male, Muslim, Middle Class—MMM, a breed of men, hell-bent on maintaining status quo, nay, sending Muslims into a state of regression.

  We lunched in the dining room amidst more of her paintings and books. The atmosphere, despite the sultriness of the afternoon, was cheerful as we talked about the Raj, vanishing Anglo-Indians and Lucknow while the domestics swung hand-fans as we ate. She held that Zia-ul-Haq’s era damaged Pakistan irretrievably. Pakistan, she added, was progressing before Zia took over. She recalled how on the day Bhutto was hanged, everyone in Lucknow seemed desolate. At the Lucknow railway station, a peasant woman crying in the waiting room told her, ‘Yeh kaisay log hain ke apnay raja ko mar diya? ’ (‘What kind of people are these who kill their own king?’) I was nothing short of being completely enchanted by her quaint eastern UP Urdu intonations.

  Like the great Urdu master, Mir, Ainee also belonged to Lucknow and Delhi, dividing her life between these two cities separated by a thirteen-year long interlude in Pakistan and England. Lucknow, permanent neighbour of consciousness, constantly lived in her psyche and conversation. She insisted that I should visit Lucknow on my next trip but God (and visa) willing, that is yet to happen. I make a tongue-in-cheek statement about how the ‘Lucknow nostalgia industry’ is alive and kicking in some parts of Karachi. She liked my blasphemous remark and wondered how I can be Punjabi given that I speak fairly decent Urdu. But I am now used to this identity crisis.

  I began to get a little more familiar and started discussing her books and, a little gingerly, the author herself. Her answers were delightfully original and utterly self-effacing. She said that her parents were born at least a hundred years before their time. Her father’s liberal outlook and her mother’s love for the arts were her primary inspirations. She never got married; how could she find a man capable of complementing her? I suppose her rich inner universe made up for the loneliness in exceptional individuals such as her.

  When Ainee moved back to India in 1961, this was not the country she had left behind in 1947. Her world in any case had gone topsy turvy by then. She accepted the changes with grace and her historical broad-mindedness had prepared her for the transitions that centuries make. In her words:

  What is India all about, what is the problem, why are we so full of problems, why are we like no other country? It’s because there’s too much history, we have too much of everything, and some of it is excellence but too much of excellence in one country, one period over so many centuries creates problem, it’s not a simple story, it becomes a very complicated story…

  Like elsewhere in the subcontinent, history, as compiled, documented and distilled, is the history of rulers and later, the state as ruler. For example, the Indian nationalist discourse had its counterpoint in the two-nation theory—the notion that Hindus and Muslims were two separate ‘nations’—used to justify Pakistan’s creation. Other narratives, perhaps best typified by the jurist H.M. Seervai’s frank interpretation, were, by and large, sidelined. In a contested terrain such as this one, Qurratulain Hyder took no sides and came up with what was later to become a major discipline of historical studies—examining Indo-Pak history from ‘below’ and from the point of view of people rather than rulers, nobles and co
urt historians.

  Ainee’s book Aag ka Darya was written and published in the highly charged atmosphere of the post-Partition Indian subcontinent, when these two new nation states were re-writing their histories. In Pakistan, Aag ka Darya was a sensation right from when it was published in 1959, creating controversies, which in turn, became the hallmark of the book. Several right-wing Pakistani critics and the establishment interpreted the novel to be a negation of the two-nation theory with a subtle endorsement of Indian nationalism. Aag ka Darya, for the scale of its canvas, historical consciousness and characterization, surpasses most novels written in any language.

  A central and recurring character, Abdul Mansur Kamaluddin of Nishapur, son of a Persian mother and an Arab father, arrives in Hindustan in the fifteenth century. It is Kamaluddin’s description of India that sets the contours of modern Indo-Muslim consciousness:

  Leaving the world of kings, rajas and commanders, Kamal saw the other world. This other world was inhabited by labourers, barbers, shoe smiths, peasants and poor artisans. This was the democratic Hindustan ruled by saints who patronised artisans and their guilds. The egalitarianism of Islam was profoundly influencing these Hindu bhaktas. Islam was being spread by peace-loving Sufis—here the sword was irrelevant. Tormented over centuries, the untouchables were chanting ‘Ram’ with these sankats without the intercession of upper caste Brahmins… This was a unique world that was beyond Hindu and Muslim identities. Here love reigned and Kamal was in search of insaan.2

  By exploring the pain of partition and reiterating that ‘civilization’ was a larger domain than a ‘nation’, Qurratulain Hyder made her point in Pakistan and to the limited Urdu readership in India. It was, however, through English translations and Hindi versions of her novels that this point was made in mainstream India. Kumkum Sangari’s assessment sums up Ainee’s weltanschauung well: