Although they were now living this wandering life, Amir’s father had transferred no money out of India. All he had taken with him were books and carpets.
‘My father was invited to return to India on certain conditions – that he took no part in public life, that he condemned the Nizam of Hyderabad, and that he spoke out against cow-slaughter. These conditions were not acceptable to my father. He said he was willing to give an undertaking not to eat beef personally, but he couldn’t speak out against cow-slaughter, because beef was the cheapest food for Muslims.’
They went, in Iraq, still with Indian passports, to Kerbala. This was the site of the battle where Hussain, son of Ali, had died; it was sacred ground to Shias. On this sacred ground there arose in Amir’s father’s mind – perhaps it had been there all along – some idea of having his son become an ayatollah, a Shia divine. In 1950 Amir, aged seven, was sent to a religious school in Kerbala. He stayed at the school for two years. And then his father – who had begun to earn a livelihood by importing tea and jute from India – changed his mind, and decided that Amir should have a secular education, after all. This didn’t mean, Amir said, a turning away from the religious side of things. Ali himself had said, The best form of worship is reflection and thought, and there is no form of worship that is better than reflection, thought and knowledge.’ Before Ali, the Prophet had said, ‘Acquire knowledge if you have to go to China.’
I asked Amir, ‘What did they mean by knowledge?’
He said, ‘Ali was once asked, “What is knowledge?” He said, “Knowledge is of two kinds. One is the knowledge of religions.” And that is interesting – the plural, religions, rather than religion. “The other is the knowledge of the physical world.” ’
The first idea was that Amir should be sent to a Jesuit school outside India. But then it was decided to send Amir and his mother back to Lucknow; and in Lucknow Amir, now in his 10th year, was enrolled at the Anglo-Indian school of La Martinière. This was when Amir – who had seemed so English in Parveen’s drawing-room – began to speak English; until then his languages had been Urdu and Persian.
Culture upon culture now: because the boy who went to La Martinière felt, after his time in Iraq, that part of him was Arab or Iranian. After his classes at La Martinière there were special religious lessons at home every day, in the very room of the palace where we were now sitting – cool, with the solid brick-work of old Lucknow, with a terrazzo floor, and with bookshelves inset in the damp-marked, whitewashed walls.
The Muslim and Shia festivals were also constant reminders of the faith. Amir took 12 days off for Mohurram – ‘The principal of La Martinière was most disapproving’ – and a further four days for the 40th day after the martyrdom. At the end of Mohurram there were another eight days off, and there were four days more in Ramadan – the month of purification, and of the martyrdom of Ali, and of the beginning of the revelation of the Koran.
During his time at La Martinière Amir was living in the palace with his mother, his two aunts, and his father’s brother and his wife. To protect him from untoward influences, he was not allowed to visit other boys or to become involved with their families. He had his own guardian, a childless man, who stayed in the palace day and night. This man – who also had a knowledge of Urdu and Persian which Amir found remarkable – followed Amir ‘like a shadow’, even when the boy went to the cinema or a restaurant. At La Martinière he would wait in the car, or just outside it, sitting on a carpet on the ground, while Amir was at his classes.
‘As a result of this I became a reticent person, extremely withdrawn. I had difficulty in talking. If there were outsiders, I found it impossible to open my mouth.
‘I used to wear philacteries underneath my shirt, and boys at school would feel them and tease me. The other thing I used to wear were ear-rings, in my pierced ears. I used to wear an emerald in my right ear, and a ruby in the left. This looked very strange, and I would twist both my ears and hide the stones behind the ear lobe. I took these off – I was permitted to take them off – when I went to England, after the end of my schooling here.’
All this time the Raja, Amir’s father, had been living in Iraq. But then in 1957, 10 years after the creation of Pakistan, he took the step which was to cause his family a good deal of hardship: the Raja went to Pakistan, and changed his Indian passport for a Pakistani one.
Amir said, ‘My mother became very ill when she heard the news, right here. My mother is a rani in her own right, a woman of great pride. She never tried to take anything from my father. She was also religious. She lost both her parents when she was nine. She was ill when she heard the news about my father in Pakistan, because she felt that the great crises of 1947 had passed – not one voice had been raised in Mahmudabad against my father. Nehru met my father and asked him to think again, and to keep his Indian passport. Nehru said, “You’ve always acted impulsively. We all would be happy if you return and take your passport back.” My father said, “One cannot change one’s nationality like one’s clothes.” ’
And Pakistan didn’t work out for the Raja. He had had the idea of going into politics, but then he discovered that it wouldn’t do for him. He was a Shia, in a country with a Sunni majority; he didn’t have a local language in Pakistan; and he was a mohajir, a foreigner. His political ideas had also changed. In the 1930s and 1940s, when he was very young, he had wanted Pakistan to be a religious state. He thought now that it should be a secular state. He didn’t believe that the Pakistan army would stand for that kind of politics. So he left Pakistan and began to travel again. He spent much time in the old imperial capital, London.
It might have seemed from this account that, in his young man’s agitation for the creation of Pakistan, the Raja had been irresponsible; that he hadn’t foreseen the political convulsions or worked out the human consequences; that other people had been asked to pay for his Muslim and Shia piety, while he himself had been keeping his options open for as long as possible. Iraq, Pakistan, England, India – these were all countries to which he might have gone, as a man of standing.
But people have their own ideas of their predicament. Of this wandering stage of his father’s life Amir said, ‘I think it was almost like a penance, you see. I feel it was necessary for him to undergo the same process of homelessness that other people had gone through when they left India and went to Pakistan.
‘I used to visit him every year. One of the books he made me read was Pearey Lal’s Gandhi: the Last Phase. He was greatly moved by the fact that at the time of independence Gandhi was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t in Delhi. He was in Calcutta, mourning and grieving for the tragedies of that city.’ The tragedies of the religious riots of 1946, which marked the beginning of the end for the city of Calcutta. ‘In the Shia way of feeling, if there is grief and mourning on one hand, and celebration on the other, the Shia tilts to the grief.’
After Amir had finished his schooling at La Martinière his parents didn’t know what to do with him, and he lost some time. At last, in 1961, when he was eighteen, he was taken by his father to England and placed in a public school. That was when he was allowed to take off his ear-rings. On the way to England they stopped off in Lebanon, where the Raja had many friends; and later they did a tour of Europe. In Paris they went to a casino and a night-club: the Raja wanted his son to see what these places were like, and he wanted his son to see them first with his father as his companion.
At eighteen, Amir was somewhat old for a public school. But he spent three years there, until he got into Cambridge, to do mathematics.
‘I wasn’t treated too badly at school. I was still withdrawn. I was friendly with a few boys. I cherished my faith. For me it was a sort of armour. For me the fact that something is secret and personal and internalized gives it a new dimension and a strength. The fact that you can’t perform or express it, what you feel, heightens the experience, the power of that.’
Amir was to enter Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1965. Before that, he was
taken by his father on a tour of Pakistan and the Middle East. They met Shia divines, and in Lebanon they stayed with Sayed Musa Sadr.
‘I heard world affairs discussed between my father and him in language and idiom which later became part of the Iranian revolution and the uprising in Lebanon. They talked of the presence of the western powers in Lebanon, the kind of regime that existed in Iraq – oppressive, anti-religious. They talked about the Shah in Iran. They talked about the need for bringing about a revolution on the principles of Ali – which I thought most Utopian, and said so to my father.’
After this Shia exaltation, this talk of revolution and the rule of Ali, there was calamity. So far, the Raja’s political actions and gestures had been without great personal consequences. Now, overnight, everything changed. In September 1965, a few weeks before Amir went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, there was war between India and Pakistan, and all the Raja of Mahmudabad’s property in India was declared enemy property. Had the Raja foreseen that consequence when he became a Pakistani citizen in 1957 – or when, 30 years before, he had started to to agitate for a separate Muslim state?
Amir said, ‘Our palace in Mahmudabad, the Qila, was totally sealed – the place where I had grown up, and my father and his forebears. None of my family was permitted to enter it. All the income was taken by the Government of India through the Custodian of Enemy Property. The Cambridge term was about to begin. I got letters from home, saying how the Armed Constabulary had come and surrounded the Qila and sealed every door. Although there was this terrible blow, my family never thought of moving to Pakistan.
The Qila was sealed for a year and a half, during which time there were two big robberies. An enormous amount of very valuable things was taken away. During this period my uncle and my mother petitioned the government to permit them to observe Mohurram in the Qila – that had been our family tradition. Permission was eventually given, with the condition that they were confined to two rooms and one bathroom. They accepted the condition, and they went and lived in verandahs. The imambaras were open, though – that was where the Mohurram ceremonies actually took place.
‘I was in Cambridge all this time. I was very distressed. My work suffered. A lot of people didn’t know all the background. I talked to my tutor. I used to read the life of Ali, for consolation. And certain chapters and verses of the Koran.’
I asked what the verses of the Koran were.
Amir said, reconstructing a verse from memory, ‘ “I give good tidings to those who are not weak but have been weakened.” Let me get the actual verse. I know it very well. I will have no trouble finding it.’
He got up from the white-covered table at which we were sitting, went to the next room, and came back with a small blue-covered book. But he couldn’t find the verse in that book. He went to shelves on the opposite wall, took down a bigger book, came and sat again at the table. While he looked in the book he said, This verse occurs again and again in the Irani revolution.’ He sometimes said ‘Irani’ for ‘Iranian’. At last he found the verse. He read it to himself first of all. I could see that he was moved. Then he read it aloud to me.
‘ “And we wished to be gracious to those who were being oppressed in the land, to make them leaders, and to establish a firm place for them in the land, and to show Pharaoh and Haman and the hosts at their hands the very things against which they were taking precautions.” ’ He paused, and said, ‘This gives an understanding of the Shiites right from the time of Imam Ali onwards. The “oppressed” here doesn’t mean someone inherently weak, but those who have been made weak by circumstances, and have latent in them the power of faith and action.
‘I used to read this at Cambridge. It’s a promise, you see, a promise of God’s. This is actually about the children of Israel, but it has been used throughout the history of the Shiites as a promise of deliverance.’
Amir read further in his big book, read the fine print of notes, and said, ‘It’s one of the Meccan revelations. Before the flight to Medina. The Meccan revelations are noted for their poetry.’
I said, ‘While the Prophet was still only a prophet?’
Amir said, ‘That might suggest he stopped being a Prophet, and would be blasphemous.’
‘Before he became a ruler? While he was still without temporal power?’
‘That would be better.’ He said again, ‘The Meccan revelations are well known for their poetic quality.’
While Amir was trying in this way in Cambridge to reconcile himself to the loss of the family property, his father was in Pakistan again. But the next year the Raja came to England, to work at the Islamic Institute in Regent’s Park; and he stayed there while Amir did his studies. It was now open to the Raja, as someone working in England, to become a British subject again. If he had done so, he would have ceased to be an ‘enemy’ or an ‘alien’, and the Indian government would have released his property in Lucknow and Mahmudabad. But the Raja preferred to carry the cross of his Pakistani citizenship, though it was still bringing hardship to his family.
Amir’s academic work developed. After he had done his Cambridge degree, he went to Imperial College in London; and then he went back to Cambridge, to the Institute of Astronomy.
‘Things quietened down. I reconciled myself to the situation at home, and resolved to undo some of the problems. But the problems remain. The Qila at Mahmudabad is open now. I use it and maintain it, but it is still not our property. Were it not for my mother’s investments and so forth, it would be impossible to live there.’
In 1971 there was the Indo-Pakistan war over Bangladesh.
‘It was a blow from which my father never recovered. He died two years later. He was very unhappy when he died – this unparallelled bloodshed by the Pakistan army in Bangladesh, and the materialistic crassness of Pakistan itself. He was very unhappy about the types of rulers and the classes that had come up.’
Amir took his father’s body to the shrine of Mashhad in eastern Iran. The Raja had hoped, when Amir was a child, that Amir might have become a famous ayatollah, in the Iranian tradition. This hadn’t happened; but Amir was greatly moved by the journey to Mashhad with his father’s body.
‘Some of the ulema, the religious teachers who had known my father, made the announcement that the body of an alim, a Shia divine, a servant of the faith, had come from London. And my father was buried just outside the shrine, in a cemetery where many eminent theologians had been buried. The burial was intended to be temporary – the final burial was to be in Kerbala in Iraq. In 1976 I heard from the Iranians that the Shah had given orders for the cemetery to be turned into a park, and that there was a danger that my father’s grave might have been obliterated. But when I went to Mashhad I found that, owing to the intervention of Mr Bhutto’ – the prime minister of Pakistan: the Raja had died a Pakistan citizen – ‘my father’s body had been reburied within the inner shrine.’
So in death the devout Raja had found a kind of fulfilment. His political and religious passion had bequeathed many languages, many cultures, many modes of thought and emotion to his son. He had had his son’s ears pierced, to pledge him to the service of the faith; and Amir had indeed inherited something of his father’s passion. But with that – his academic work in Cambridge and London had been in astronomy – Amir had also developed religious doubts.
‘These doubts began at school and continued at university, and at periods became intense. But the totality of my experience – which is of an historical or cultural nature – is so deep and ingrained in my being that it’s now indelible. It’s a sort of dialectical process, in which religion, and the concerns of the real world, unfold for me a path in a dialectical manner. I veer towards religion to seek support in worldly matters. And that brings me back to doubts, and then back again to religion. I move back and forth between both worlds.’
(He had arrived, it seemed, at the Hindu idea of opposites: the worldly life, the life of the spirit: loukika, vaidhika. But that idea didn’t interest him.) At Cambri
dge he had been attracted by some aspects of Marxism. He was especially attracted by the Marxist attempt to analyse history scientifically. But it was his Shia faith that made him receptive to the larger Marxist idea.
‘There are a great number of elements and contradictions in my way of thinking. The aspect of Marxism which drew me was its concern with bringing about a just and more equitable society, especially for the oppressed, the insulted and the injured. My instinct was to go to Trotsky and Che Guevara, neither of whom succeeded, though their message lived. Kerbala, you see.’ Kerbala, where Hussain, son of Ali, had perished. ‘So the world picture given me by Marxism ran into my own religious picture.’
It was this mixture of historical and religious ideas that reconciled him to the long Muslim decline here in Lucknow.
‘I find solace in both ways of thinking. The historical way shows me that human destiny is above this – our sufferings, our little problems. This idea of human destiny shows me that we are really moving towards a better world, in spite of all the trouble and conflagration. The religious way teaches me endurance, reconciliation with the divine plan of which this is a part, but with hope and belief in a better future. The Koranic verse I read out to you has been the sustenance of so many peoples throughout the world.
‘I felt in my own case it was a great help I was a Shia, because from childhood I was acquainted with people who had fought for ideals and had been vanquished, ostensibly by earthly power, and yet had left such a profound imprint on history. I feel proud that most of my ancestors didn’t care about material success so much as about what they believed in. I am very proud of my father’s life.’ His father admired Gandhi. The fact that his possessions were spectacles, sandals, a staff, a few changes of clothes, and books, brought him nearer to the ideal of the Shia ruler, as Ali was. The link between my father and Gandhi was that he realized that religion could be used to bring about a great change of consciousness – about the world and the place of men in it – and also to bring men to action.’
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 48