DELHI BY HEART

by Raza Rumi

  This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims ‘arriving’ in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees.

  Present in Delhi and witness to this calamitous millennium, I find his rant chilling. He wrote about the absence of Hindu monuments in the north and lack of Hindu records of this period indicating the ‘grinding down of Hindu India.’ Not just that, Akbar for the first time is referred to as the ‘terrible Akbar’ who destroyed Orissa. And hear what he had to say about ‘useless’ Mughal buildings:

  They are a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan. In India they speak of the desert. They cover enormous spaces and they make me think of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up. Humayun’s tomb is, I suppose, the chastest and the best. The Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.

  Naipaul denied the almost universally accepted tenet of Indian secularism by writing that India did not have a secular character. He also states that Partition was the right choice; otherwise an undivided India would have found it difficult to deal with a huge minority. And India’s espousal of nuclear weapons was also welcomed by the great author: ‘…I actually think that the subcontinent is safer now.’ Quite logically, therefore, Gandhi, ‘uneducated and never a thinker’ was summarily dismissed by Naipaul. The cleverly packaged and eloquently written revisionism is one of the many reasons for an anti-historical attitude to Delhi’s Muslim past.

  As the taxi passed through the jam-packed roads squeezed by brazen encroachments, I wonder about the signages on modern boards—Kidwai Nagar, Hazrat Nizamuddin, Jain Mandir, Okhla, Jamia, Saket etc. Delhi is a multi-petalled lotus like the Baha’i Temple and should be nurtured. This city belongs to all South Asians; those who are in a perpetual state of self-hatred may leave it alone.

  14

  Familiar, Unfamiliar?

  O

  n a sunny, wintry morning in 2007 I was introduced to S. Irfan Habib, a Delhi-based historian who has the same name as that of the Aligarh-based legendary historian of India. Professor Habib instantly clicked with me, a Pakistani, and told me about his pleasant experiences during his visit to Lahore, and of course, made some insightful comments on India, Pakistan and their shared histories—three characters that always accompany me in Delhi. I was meeting, for a change, an ‘educated’ Indian Muslim who was not making snide remarks about Pakistan and how it is not secular and how wonderfully secular India is. How easy it is to adopt a nationalistic identity! Irfan Habib’s integrity when he talks of the Indo-Pakistani reality or any other issue stems from a curious mix of old-world ideology and an objective sense of history.

  As we talked, I was awed by Habib’s doctoral thesis on Bhagat Singh and his comrades. He taught history for several years in UP until he moved to Delhi in 1982 and absorbed himself in the capital buzz. He worked for years at the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies. His research interests therefore shifted to the history of science.

  Habib’s ancestors, the Saiyads of Barha from UP migrated from Persia in the early medieval period and were known to be vanguards in the Mughal armies. This reminds me of Ghalib and his insistence on his warrior lineage. In the twilight of the Mughal era, soon after the death of Aurangzeb, the famed Syed brothers, Husain Ali and Hasan Ali were known as the kingmakers. They acquired unlimited power after Aurangzeb’s death and installed and removed Mughal emperors at will. They were Habib’s ancestors. His grandfather, Hakim Syed Habib Hasan was a prominent student of the celebrated Hakim Ajmal Khan and among the first batch of students graduating from Tibbiya College, Delhi, in 1919. The younger hakim, Habib’s grandfather Syed Habib Hasan, spent few years working in Ajmal Khan’s matab (clinic) in Ballimaran before setting up his own medical practice in Jansath, Muzaffarnagar.

  When we met, Irfan Habib was preparing to go to Lahore to launch his book on Bhagat Singh. The book was extremely well received given the resonance of the shared hero of both countries. The enigmatic and brave Singh is beyond a research ‘subject’ for Habib. Habib wrote, Bhagat Singh ‘was not only against communal and divisive politics, he hated and mocked the Indian caste system which makes people untouchable on the basis of their birth in a particular caste. He reiterated that all exploitations—economic, social or cultural—had to go if we want to build a strong nation.’ As my knowledge of Bhagat Singh gets refreshed by a first-rate researcher, I am reminded that his sacrifice ‘has the potential to enliven millions of struggling lives.’ Our own South Asian Che Guevara, ‘Bhagat Singh continues to inspire all those who are committed to secular socialist values and reject caste based hierarchical society.’ The most intriguing discovery for me was that despite his marginalization, Bhagat Singh, found a supporter in mainstream politics in Jinnah. We read that Jinnah, isolated and dismayed by the encroachment of religion in politics at that time, rose in support of Bhagat Singh. In his incisive speech to the Constituent Assembly on 12 and 14 September 1929, Jinnah harshly condemned criminal colonial rule and the government’s actions against revolutionaries. He said,

  The man who goes on hunger strike has a soul. He is moved by the soul and he believes in the justice of his cause; he is not an ordinary criminal who is guilty of a cold-blooded, sordid, wicked crime… It is the system, this damnable system of government which is resented by the people… And the last words I wish to address to the government are, try and concentrate your mind on the root cause and the more you concentrate on the root cause, the less difficulties and inconveniences there will be for you to face, and thank heaven that the money of the taxpayer will not be wasted in prosecuting men, nay citizens, who are fighting and struggling for the freedom of their country.

  In Pakistan, we have conveniently forgotten the nature and trajectory of our freedom struggle. All non-Muslims are grouped in one single category which is completely rejected by the rulers of Pakistan irrespective of their message and their history. The same fate met Bhagat Singh. That he was supported by Jinnah is a fact never mentioned in the corridors of power or in the textbooks of Pakistan. It is not surprising, though. Bhagat Singh, a symbol of resistance, could never be the hero of a government that, for decades, has not represented the will of the people.

  The other area that Habib has been active concerns communal harmony and dialogues around this thorny theme. His voice is undeniably strong and direct:

  There has been a lot of noise about rethinking in Islam, particularly post September 11, 2001. I feel it is long overdue and September 11 has just given us a rude shock to get into action. Within India, Godhra and the ensuing Gujarat carnage has added urgency to the question of rethinking, making us conscious of the fact that there is something seriously wrong somewhere. If September 11 and Godhra are the ugly faces of Islam, then the burning of Graham Staines and his children and the ongoing Gujarat carnage is the depraved and distorted face of Hinduism. Both are threats to the secular and pluralist fabric of India.

  Habib’s frustrations are not academic. He is also an activist, and, of late, has been using Twitter to speak out. He rightly says that Islam did not undergo any meaningful reform to cope with the challenges of modernity. Attempts at ijtihad, a reasoned struggle and rethinking to reform Islam, have been sabotaged by woolly arguments saying that Islam is beyond time and context, thus any talk of ‘rethinking’ is un-Islamic. This was seen during the nineteenth century when Syed Ahmed Khan, Jamaluddin Afghani, Mohammad Abduh and others gave a call for ijtihad.1

  Habib quotes Alam Khundmiri, a thinker from Hyderabad (1922-1983), who argued that most Muslim social
reform movements have been trapped by the flawed reasoning that equates medieval religious tradition with Islam forgetting that Islam itself revolted against the superstitions of the age. In a piece that Habib shared with me he writes:

  Another much talked about feature of Islam is the shariah. It is being interpreted in its most revile form by the believers themselves and in the process inviting ridicule and scorn of the civilised world. The shariah is perceived as a divine code of conduct applicable forever without any spatial or temporal constraints. This has led to serious complications with respect to women’s rights. It is unfortunate that in Islam religiosity and morality have become synonymous with legality, while in fact legality should be subordinate to a moral and ethical vision. There is an urgent need to make necessary changes in the shariah under the Quranic gaze so that it conforms to the moral fervour of the Prophet and the ethical vision of Islam.2

  This rare and candid self-examination is counterpoised by his analysis of what happened to Hinduism and ‘its vulgarization at the hands of Sangh Parivar.’

  As we talk and exchange letters, I get a better understanding of Habib’s insight. He calls the Parivar a cohort of ‘rabble-rousers’ who have appointed themselves as representatives of Hinduism and all its followers. While the cohort is quick to condemn its ‘bete noire, Islam’, it ends up echoing and mirroring what the Islamists do. As Habib puts it, they ‘have brazenly adopted the most un-Hindu version of Hinduism called Hindutva, propounded by Vir Savarkar in the early last century.’ I am even more fascinated when Habib informs us that Savarkar was an avowed atheist and ‘had no qualms in defacing Hinduism to suit his politics of social engineering.’ This brand of politicking masked as faith was shunned for years and decades until L. K. Advani regurgitated it in the 1990s ‘providing it legitimacy and respect,’ complains Habib.

  The construct of ‘cultural nationalism’ promoted by Advani was also rooted in the ‘the mischievous ideology of Savarkar who unabashedly made Hindutva and nationalism interchangeable.’ Little wonder then that such a narrow vision made Maulana Azad, Bacha Khan, Ajmal Khan and other Muslim luminaries shun the concept of cultural nationalism pushed by the Sangh Parivar.

  This particularist worldview was in direct opposition to the nationalism articulated by Jamaluddin Afghani, who in the 1880s, identified the composite ‘strength of Indian nationalism’ where myriad communities were united against colonial rule. Afghani highlighted the notion of a shared secular heritage of a grand civilization not unlike Qurratulain Hyder’s romantic view of the Indian past forerunning the Nehruvian concept of Indian history in the book The Discovery of India.

  This unique, commonly experienced and lived heritage was not mired in religious discourse or exclusivism. Habib holds that Hindutva is ‘unfortunately rooted in the revival of a sectarian past and not the common past of all Indians. It seeks to construct an unadulterated Indian past after a careful sifting of icons and ideas, leaving out a large section from our heritage as something not only alien but also defiling.’ A more serious lament by my erudite friend is the simmering reality that Hindutva’s ‘concerted hammering of lies’ has engulfed a sizeable number of Hindus. The electorate’s verdict, however, has been clear in the elections—extremist ideology should stay far from matters of national governance.

  Jihadi Islam, or what many Western academics have referred to as political Islam or Islamism, plays a similar game. The Hindutva and Islamist discourses denude personal and collective spirituality and rob them of their intrinsic humanity. Hatreds thus invoke the constructed pasts of glory, virility, victory and war. The present therefore is perverted and the future turned into a nightmare. Little wonder then that Naipaul, the hero of global adulation, keeps drumming away that reconciliation is not possible. These narratives, as I suggest, rather humbly, to Habib are embedded in our past but not insurmountable. Not at all.

  The best counterpoint to harking back to an exclusivism dusted in gold is to revive what we have shared and continue to share—namely our civilizational and cultural values.

  And a creative Delhi duo, young and fiery, dastangohs3 of the twenty-first century, is doing just that.

  Once upon a time, the gullies and kuchas of Shajahanabad must have echoed with stories of dastangohs or story-tellers. The crowds gathered in front of kabab stalls, chai khanas and masjids, must have listened awestruck at the wonderful tales of kings, lovers, vazirs, poets, khwajas, seducers, hakims and fakirs. The story-teller would impersonate each character—his voice regal when he is the Emperor, high-pitched when depicting the romantic longing of an imprisoned princess and shrill when describing the nagging of a toothless old crone. When the story needed a description of a bazaar, the dastangoh would use the coarse dialect of commoners and for the royal chambers, a sophisticated Persian with unparalled elegance.

  That world, which has disappeared, is now being lovingly resurrected in Delhi. Not under the shadows of the Jama Masjid, but in air-conditioned playhouses of the India International Centre and the India Habitat Centre. It was this zest for the text, good old-fashioned narration, the fantastical details and scope for improvisation in performance that attracted Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain to the world of Dastangoi.

  I first saw Farooqui performing Dastangoi on a soft winter afternoon in an auditorium in Delhi University. That was also the first time in my life I was watching Dastangoi. I had missed their performances in Pakistan. The words of the daastaan had been one-dimensional for me until this evening, much like reading Shakespeare but never actually getting an opportunity to see his plays on stage, the original reason for which they were written. So it was a pleasantly giddy feeling to finally watch and not read a daastaan. Those words which I had encountered on pages earlier sprung to real life.

  Both Farooqui and Husain wore white kurtas and pajamas with muslin caps and looked as if they were part of the audience, seated on a simple masnad. Such a bare setting but powerful. I wondered then if they found the re-birthing of the dead form of Dastangoi challenging and difficult especially because of the culture of short attention spans these days.

  I recalled my meeting with Farooqui earlier at the India International Centre during one of my visits to Delhi. He was not the quintessential dastangoh in his medieval apparel that I had seen in the media. Rather he wore a pair of jeans and looked very modern. He has a thoughtful face and is pleasantly neck deep in Urdu literature. He must be pretty bohemian, I mused, since he has rejected a formal career and pursues his passions, namely, Dastangoi. Farooqui told me how humanist and realistic writings had displaced gupbazzi. I hope that gupbaazi would be back in vogue once again. For the time being, this duo have kept Dastangoi alive.

  Farooqui, the modern-day dastangoh, did a bit of homework. He drew lessons from a three-minute precious tape stored in a London library. The recording had the piece of a daastaan narrated by Mir Baqar Ali, perhaps the last great dastangoh of Delhi. Ali would hold weekly mehfils at his residence in Bhojla Pahari near Jama Masjid. The entry fee was one anna. During the performance, Ali, a thin, spindly man would become an imperial monarch in one instant, a humble beggar in the next. His grasp over lifestyle, culture and language was dazzling. In his book, Dilli Ki Chand Ajeeb Hastiyan, Ashraf Subhui says that once during a performance, Mir Baqar Ali mentioned twenty-five types of musical instruments, nineteen kinds of wrestling equipment and forty-three types of wrestling holds among other descriptions. If the story had even a passing anecdote concerning medicines, Ali would consult a hakim on medicinal herbs and diseases. Popular lore has it that one evening his listeners rushed to see a bioscope which had newly arrived in the city. The story-teller’s heart broke. He parted company with daastaans and started selling paan. He died in 1928 and the curtain came down on Dastangoi.

  It was raised again in 2008 with the publication of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, a Pakistani-Canadian writer, from a forty-six volume Urdu edition published in 1855 by Ghalib Lakhnavi and later revised by Abdulla
h Bilgrami. This English language edition has 948 pages of high drama, suspense, thrills, and enough romance to captivate the imagination of the new generation nurtured on a diet of western adventures—Star Trek, Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. Free of colonial influence and loaded with unfettered imagination, these fantasies open up alternative worlds without hammering any point home except a subtle humanism and what is known in Urdu as insaan dosti.

  Tilism-e-Hoshruba, the great daastaan of all times, was my childhood and adolescent obsession in Lahore. Bachon ka Baagh, a Pakistani magazine for children, would print small, sanitized stories from Hoshruba. At the age of eleven, my uncle gifted me a Tilism version of seven volumes edited by the Urdu writer, Raees Ahmed Jafri. Ustad Allah Bakhsh’s paintings would adorn the covers and make these volumes even more spellbinding—a world of fairies, demons, ogres and princes. Only with age I could understand the cumbersome Persianized language of the introductions.

  The Tilism was my constant companion. I still vividly remember my excitement each time as I would read the part where Hamza’s grandson, Asad Sherdil, would enter the Tilism and reach a garden where a white gateway would open ‘like the arms of the beloved.’ I was overawed by the powers of Hamza as he breathed the Great Name on the corpse of his slain son that turned out to be made of lentil flour! I was riveted by the antics of his companion and trickster, Amar, who could assume any disguise and outmanoeuvre the most powerful wizards with the help of galeem and zambeel—magical gifts that had been bestowed on him by the prophets.

  While undoubtedly the cultural references are mostly Islamic in essence, there is a subtle secular spirit embedded in the tale. It is a pleasure-oriented, almost hedonistic world where there are no barriers and no inhibitions. Endless fantasy allows for cultural mingling where believers and non-believers interact, copulate and befriend in a no-holds-barred fashion.