A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  If my sister’s birth took away some of the magic out of this prehistoric world pervaded by my mother’s abiding but diffuse presence, and dimmed its luminescence, then it was not because of her quiet intrusion but because I was already moving into the world of my father and family, a world that is paradoxically both wider and narrower than the one I had inhabited with my mother. The birth of my sister coincided with the dawn of my consciousness and the beginnings of my identity.

  In July 1943, three months before the expected date of my sister’s birth, my mother and I came to Lahore to stay with my grandparents. Daughters always delivered their babies at their parents’ homes. The protective aura of their mothers, aunts and other older female members of the family that surrounded them through the process of birth and connected them to its mystery, not in awe and anxiety but in reassurance and faith, was considered more important than mundane medical considerations.

  My father stayed behind in Sargodha, now a city of more than two million inhabitants, located 175 kilometres northwest of Lahore. At the time, in the 1940s, Sargodha had a population of less than one hundred thousand people. Lying in a flat plain that owed its fertility to the canal from the river Jhelum which had brought prosperity to the region, Sargodha was the market town and district headquarters for the surrounding villages. Ox carts laden with wheat, sugarcane and kinus, the blood-red oranges we called ‘malta’, were a common sight in the Ameena, Kachehri and Anarkali bazaars that comprised the heart of the town. My father, who was a magistrate in the British colonial administrative set-up, could not accompany us to Lahore because of pressure of work. Early during their rule, confronted with the task of ruling a vast country with their small numbers, the British had combined both judicial and executive functions at the district level. My father’s work thus varied from presiding over a trial court in the town and maintaining law and order in the district, to overseeing the collection of land revenue, inspecting land records, and adjudicating land and other disputes in the villages. He intended to join us at the beginning of October when the birth was imminent.

  In the early and mid-1940s, with a population of almost 700,000, Lahore was the second largest city in north India after Delhi. It prided itself on having been the cultural centre of the region since the second half of the nineteenth century when many intellectuals from Delhi sought refuge in the Punjab after the 1857 uprising against the British and the city became a centre of Urdu and Persian literary activity. Lahore’s pre-eminence was further cemented with the integration of Punjab in British India when a number of modern educational institutions, schools and colleges, including the province’s first medical and law colleges, were established.

  Hospitable to modern Western ideas and trends, Lahore looked down upon Delhi, the capital of British India, as an old-fashioned and provincial city peopled with dull bureaucrats. This attitude was not unlike that of Bombay towards Delhi in the second half of the twentieth century. In my grandparents’ times, there were 250,000 Hindus and Sikhs living in Lahore; the rest were Muslims. This number would shrink to less than 10,000 in August 1947 with the end of the British colonial rule as tensions between Hindus and Muslims mounted on the eve of the country’s division into the independent states of India and Pakistan and Lahore was awarded to Pakistan. By the end of August 1947, there would be less than a thousand Hindus and Sikhs left.1 Thousands would move to India as refugees while thousands of others were killed in the carnage that accompanied the partition of Punjab.

  In 1943, though, this future was unthinkable, an attribute of most futures. Lahore was a peaceful city where the various religious communities lived in considerable harmony and mutual economic interdependence even while they continued to follow their own traditions and lifestyles. Some neighbourhoods of the city were entirely Hindu and Sikh, others were mixed, while others were solely Muslim. Although in a majority, Muslims were almost absent from business, the civil services or other modern professions. Most Muslims were either artisans or workers employed in the craft and manufacturing industries. Even in the old city, most of the grand mansions or havelis belonged to Hindus and Sikhs. Historians have offered different explanations on the backwardness of Punjabi Muslims. Some maintain that they lagged behind in the acquisition of education because the Sikh rulers of pre-British Punjab were reluctant to hire Muslims in government services. Others aver that since Sikh rule lasted for no more than fifty years, the roots of Muslim backwardness go back earlier to the Mughal or even the Sultanate period of Indian history. In contrast to the Persian-speaking foreign elite, locally converted Muslims were not given jobs in the Mughal adminisration. The Mughals preferred better qualified Hindus to low caste converts to Islam who were referred to generically as ‘Julaha’ (weavers) and were looked down upon by the Persian-speaking Mughal elite.2

  The opportunities presented with the opening up of the educational system after Punjab was integrated into British India were mostly grabbed by Hindus and Sikhs. They flocked to modern schools, colleges and universities to become lawyers, doctors, scientists, academics, as also enter the government bureaucracy. In a mere fifty years, from 1870 to 1920, Hindus and Sikhs constituted a vibrant middle class of almost a third of Lahore’s total population of 300,000.3 My mother’s father, a surgeon, was in the first wave of this burgeoning middle class while my father, who entered the province’s civil service, was carried in by the second wave.

  Besides the religious divisions, Lahore in the 1940s was also witness to another divide: between a quintessentially Indian inner city within old, crumbling walls and new residential areas outside the walled city whose residents had embraced a West-inspired modernity and a hybrid lifestyle that combined their Indian roots with European, or rather, British, pretensions. They were the precursors of the urban middle and upper classes of contemporary India whose object of emulation and desire has now shifted from Britain to the United States.

  My father’s sprawling family, on the verge of entering this class—my father was the first one to do so—lived in a three-storey house in one of the many narrow lanes or galis in Machhi Hatta, burrowed deep in the innards of the old city. My mother’s family, on the other hand, lived in a spacious single-storey bungalow near Lawrence Gardens, named after a British viceroy, outside the walled city. Like many other houses around Lawrence Gardens, belonging to high court judges, doctors, as also rich businessmen and a couple of members of Muslim landed aristocracy such as the Tiwanas, my surgeon-grandfather’s bungalow was fronted by a large lawn with lush shetoot, jamun and mango trees that were a boy’s delight in summer when they bore fruit. My grandfather’s small hospital, where my mother was slated for her delivery, was in the same area on the nearby Nisbet Road.

  Lawrence Gardens was one of the more desirable residential addresses of modern Lahore. It was an area that boasted of such symbols of modernity as Faletti’s Hotel where upper class Indian women dressed fashionably in chiffon saris and understated but expensive jewellery met for tea and cucumber sandwiches in the afternoons. At the time of partition of the country in August 1947, it was in Faletti’s grand ballroom that British officials and their wives, the remnants of the colonial administration, were dancing to the genteel music of a Goan orchestra imported from Bombay while arsonists’ fires raged in the neighbourhoods around them.

  My childhood memory of my mother’s father is not of a person but of a presence. It is a dour presence, not unlike that of the righteous Swedish pastor in Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical film, Fanny and Alexander. I experienced Pitaji, as my grandfather was called, as a shadow that lifted in the morning when he left the house for his hospital in Nisbet Road and muffled the gaiety and life that sprang up in his absence when he returned in the evening. It was as if the volume control of sound—made by my grandmother, uncles, aunts, visiting relatives, servants—was suddenly turned up after he left and turned down when his American-made grey (or was it blue?) De Soto car turned into the gate and entered the driveway. My mother would quickly ‘Sh-h’ me if I w
as too boisterous. If I needed to go from our room to the veranda or the garden outside, I was careful to tread quietly in the passage outside the living room where he sat drinking his evening whisky and soda. This was in winter. In summer, a servant took the whisky and soda outside to the freshly watered lawn where he lounged on a planter’s chair holding court with his sons and daughters as, one after the other, they brought him up to date on the progress in their studies.

  My later impression of Pitaji is of a hard man who was harder on himself than on others. As one of the best-known surgeons of Lahore, honoured with the title of Rai Bahadur by the British, he carried himself as someone weighed down by serious responsibilities who expected that at least his family did not add to his burden with their minor complaints and concerns. On the other hand, his feeling of self-importance, which he shared with most surgeons, did not stand in the way of his being a devoted patriarch concerned with the welfare of each member of the family and one who made all the major decisions. My grandmother, though, carefully prepared the groundwork for his decisions relating to their children’s marriage alliances. After his death, I heard my uncles and aunts sometimes talk of Pitaji as a man who had a rough exterior but a heart of gold. Whereas the former part of the statement was certainly true, I wonder how much of the latter was a pious wish.

  I do not know much about Pitaji’s background except that he was orphaned at an early age and that his family was from a village in the district of Hafizabad. His father had been a minor functionary in the revenue administration of the British and the family had fallen on hard times after his death. Pitaji’s long road from a village boyhood to the heights of the medical profession in Lahore was paved with intellectual brilliance, hard work and a strong sense of integrity. Although he had adopted a Western mode of life—wearing tailored suits, smelly socks and shoes instead of open, airy sandals more suited for Lahore’s hot summers, going bareheaded rather than wearing a turban, eating tasteless porridge and toast rather than stuffed parathas or deep-fried fluffy puris with spiced potatoes for breakfast—his village origins had not completely disappeared. One of my childhood memories, although I am not sure whether this one is from the period I am writing about here, is watching with fascination the preparation of his hookah in the kitchen: the brass base being filled with water, the ball of raw tobacco laced with jaggery placed carefully on burning coals in the baked clay bowl at the top of the stem, the acrid smoke curling up into the air. Instead of smoking a cigarette with his evening whisky, Pitaji preferred to puff on the hookah.

  Pitaji’s move into the Westernized urban upper middle class had also meant his jettisoning of the established sanatan dharma Hindu religious tradition in which he had been raised. He became an enthusiastic member of the Arya Samaj, a reformist movement that had begun to gather steam in northern and western India at the end of the nineteenth century. A product of Hinduism’s encounter with Western modernity, the Arya Samaj sought to counter the criticism of Hinduism by Christian missionaries by enunciating ten principles of which one, for instance, was that one should not only be content with one’s own welfare, but should also look for contentment in the welfare of others. Oddly enough, the Arya Samaj wanted to modernize Hinduism with a call to Hindus to return to its Vedic fundamentals. It condemned the profusion of Hindu gods and goddesses, idolatry, ancestor worship, pilgrimage, priests, the belief in avatars or incarnations of God, as also the social evils of the caste system, untouchability and child marriage on the grounds that all these lack Vedic sanction.

  I am not sure how many of Pitaji’s siblings who had not made the same economic, intellectual and emotional journey shared his new religious convictions. My grandmother certainly did not share his ‘Protestant’ sentiments, preferring instead the familiarity of her more catholic sanatan dharma, although she was much too astute a woman to disagree with him openly. An illiterate girl when he married her, she learnt English at the age of twenty because she insisted on accompanying him to Edinburgh where he went to train as a surgeon after his medical education in Lahore. To Pitaji’s credit, he was diligent in teaching her English for two hours every evening for six months before their departure. Characteristically, his way of teaching her was not to use a primer for beginners but by reading from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities; well into old age, she remembered the first sentence of her unusual textbook; ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’

  Mataji, as everyone called her, was a remarkable woman, full of vitality and common sense, who presided over the household like a village goddess who, unlike the more dignified and distant father gods, is earthy, mundane, and fully attuned to the uncertainties and troubles of daily life. She was midwife to several births in the servants’ quarters, looked after the kitchen and the vegetable gardens, and managed the cowsheds where she personally helped out in calving and dispensed remedies for sick animals. Yet, when the occasion demanded, she could also join in the conversations with Pitaji’s Westernized friends. Like other women in the family, Mataji intuitively recognized—and passed on this intuition to my mother—that religion belongs to a plane of enchantment beyond the commonplace reality of ordinary lives. If it has to mean anything, then it must convey the experience of magic, of enchantment—nothing more, nothing less. I believe she was right. One can say of religious practice what the great jazz musician Duke Ellington wanted to convey about the soul of jazz when he titled one of his songs ‘It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing’. The gods and goddesses of the old faith may be illusory, but they and their myths are necessary and even desirable illusions that light up the narrow, mundane world of daily existence, a world that has always been ‘inadequate to our experience and unequal to bear the burden of our hopes’. For brief periods of time, immersion in the rituals, pilgrimages and other baroque practices of traditional Hinduism lets us transcend what Yeats called ‘the desolation of reality’ in a way the dry Arya Samaj Protestantism of my grandfather’s more ‘modern’ religious faith could never have done.

  In the four months of 1943 we stayed in Lahore, I remember my mother as often being weepy. At such times, she was apt to abruptly gather me in a tight embrace from which I would struggle to wriggle out. From the letters she wrote to my father, I can see that my mother was unhappy in her parents’ home. In part, I can now attribute her distress to a pre-partum condition which pushed up a buried ambivalence towards my father, or rather men in general, up to the surface as when she writes, ‘Often having tired myself with tears I am writing this letter to you. Day before yesterday I was feeling quite dull and yesterday I wept like a child . . . I feel I have nobody to console me. Now I realize that you have spoiled me. If something happens to me on my baby’s birth I hope you will keep Sudhir well, though I know you will turn out to be like other devils.’

  Other letters make it clear that the chief cause of her unhappiness is her feeling that she is the disadvantaged daughter, a poor relative who struggles to keep up appearances while she seethes inside with a feeling of entitlement. In the letters, there is a precise accounting of money she has spent, borrowed from my grandmother or her sister and which needs to be repaid. She seems fearful that my father will accuse her of wasting money. My father’s monthly salary of around three hundred and fifty rupees before tax and various deductions was perhaps enough to maintain the standard of living expected from a junior member of the provincial civil services. But it did not leave much extra for exigencies, such as expenses related to the birth of a child or for presents for the many relatives when we visited Lahore; there was always someone getting married or a child being born in my parents’ large extended families. In addition, my father, for all his other admirable qualities, was what he would call ‘careful’ with money. The few occasions I ever saw my parents squabbling were related to money; my father accusing my mother of being a spendthrift, which she was not, or at least not when she would secretly slip me some notes she had saved from her household money so that I could fulfil an urgent child
hood wish.

  The real cause of my mother’s unhappiness when she visited Lahore, I suspect, was that it brought to the surface her unacknowledged feelings of envy of her two younger sisters and resentment towards her mother who she needed and loved but also held responsible for her lot. My mother felt that she had married below her station. She was the eldest of the three beautiful daughters of Rai Bahadur Ganesh Das Kapur, Fellow Royal College of Surgeons, one of the most eminent doctors of Punjab. My father was the son of a building contractor whose family was ‘Lahori’, despised denizens of the bazaars of the walled city. In one of her letters in 1942 to my father from Dalhousie, a hill station in north India to which, following the example of the British, the well-off citizens of Punjab’s larger cities like Lahore, Amritsar, Ludhiana and Jullundhar went for the summer months to escape the heat of the plains and where she was vacationing with her family, I read:

  On the Mall there is always a rush but decent class is not much to be seen. You see Amritsaris and Lahoris. Pushpa your niece is also here along with Om Prakash [her husband]. He has a little flat of Rupees 100 p.m. with two rooms. Two friends are sharing with their wives and children.