Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  He (Chima’s father) had come to Lahore in early August to take the family away; he couldn’t stand the crowds and felt there should be a mix of people where he lived. But the riots prevented him and so it was a stroke of fate that they stayed back in Pakistan. The Chimas’ journey back in time was full of happy memories and their present tinged with sadness and nostalgia. Khalid was deeply affected by what he felt were the other consequences of the political compulsions of Partition and the demand for it. People suffered so much—the murder, rape, looting, the transfer of population (the largest in the world). But what he took as a personal loss was that a cosmopolitan, multireligious, forward-looking, pluralist society was destroyed for all time. ‘I think the world is the poorer for that. Though I did not suffer any personal inconvenience but this is what I have suffered.’

  Religion, he felt, was something personal and that no one bothered about the other person’s religion—until Zia’s time. That was when people started wearing religion on their shirtsleeves. Partition was not a footnote in history, and he felt it was important to take stock of it by itself and the social consequences, and inform future generations of its process and the feelings of people who went through it—no one came out unscathed. ‘The present generation needs to be informed that things were not what they are told they were—things were different but I doubt if it can ever come back. Because there is a complete absence of any other kind of society or community and the few that are left don’t feel very comfortable. Even among Muslims, look at what Taliban is doing—they have their apologists and also their supporters.’

  His wife, Nasreen Chima, a former teacher, got increasingly animated as she drew on her memories which went back to the time when she was eight or nine years old in Jhelum. She came from a political family—her grandfather was a member of the Constituent Assembly and her mother Rashida Ahsan was a well-known activist and classmate and close friend of actor Zohra Sehgal.

  At the Queen Mary College in Lahore, Rashida had been a staunch member of Congress before she joined the Muslim League (ML). When Bhagat Singh was tried and sentenced, Rashida and her friends wrote placards in blood, and her uncle who was a magistrate told her not to go out, fearing trouble. He said he would get them distributed—such was the spirit that Bhagat Singh evoked.

  Nasreen remembered the transfers and change of schools which became a routine affair, and her parents who became active in politics after they joined the Muslim League. Her parents never forced religion on her. Her mother led processions, and Nasreen as a young girl would sneak into the front without her knowing. It was the men who were jailed first for leading processions till her mother motivated women to step out. One woman was equal to a hundred men, her mother would say. Nasreen enjoyed the marches and the slogans: ‘Down with the government’; ‘We will make Pakistan even if we have to get our throats slit’. She enjoyed the thrill of defiance, and recalled that everyone was in high spirits before the dawn of freedom.

  Immediately after Partition, her house was like a refugee camp. She said if the massacres had not happened, then this migration would not have taken place; if the migration had not happened, Pakistan would have been a plural, diverse, multi-ethnic, multilingual, multireligious and tolerant society. ‘Now we are not; we are intolerant, sectarian. We are going through hell—I don’t know how it will end.’ She also feared for her secular ideals.

  Nasreen’s friend from a minority community told her one day, ‘You are [in] a practical minority; you are more of a minority than we are, because your thinking [is shared by only] a small group.’ In Nasreen’s view, state and religion should be kept separate—religion was a personal matter and the state should be neutral and secular.

  More matter of fact is Dr Qureishi, a professor at Quaid-i-Azam University. He was eleven at the time of Partition and lived in Sargodha where his father was in the police. He was one of the few Muslim students in the Sanathan Dharm High School. Once he went to school wearing a Jinnah badge, and in a jiffy he was mobbed by the older students who saw a potential rebel, and was given what he called a verbal thrashing. Only the intervention of a senior teacher saved him from a beating. Emotions ran high, but luckily Sargodha was spared the Hindu–Muslim riots.

  They used to live in the police lines and very near to it there were refugee camps; he could hear the screams when villagers raided them. ‘I didn’t know if it was kidnapping or if people were robbing the camps. I could see later on that the caravans had moved from the camp—the old and infirm, young boys, women—on carts, walking, or using whatever means of transport they could get. At the same time we saw people coming from India at the airport; the planes would arrive from India with well-to-do Muslims; sometimes planes owned by the Nizam of Hyderabad would come.’

  He had a lot of friends among Hindus and Sikhs. ‘It never occurred to us that this would happen, but this is a reality—we can’t turn our heads from it and I wish it had not happened the way it did. A fallout is that even today we don’t have good relations between the two countries . . . There was a feeling [in 1947] that this was an abnormal situation and it would get better. The human casualty—both psychological and otherwise—was staggering.’ He thought an objective history of the times has not yet been written either in India or Pakistan, and emotions are still strong on both sides. It would be useful to historians of the future to realize what had happened, he said, suggesting a joint venture by Pakistani and Indian historians to move away from that emotional involvement and write an objective history on what happened to them in later life. It was a trauma, and trauma never goes away, he said.

  The CAP Oral History Project, the first of its kind, was started in 2008 by a group of young people documenting narratives of Partition. Swaleha Alam Shahzada, the CAP executive director, was keen on preserving the narratives and diverse oral histories of ordinary people, which would otherwise have been lost forever. The CAP has more than 2500 hours of audio and over 50,000 images, and the idea was to have a consolidated archive accessible to the public.

  Partition and the making of a writer

  Partition produced some powerful and iconic writing, and even if he is not as revered as Saadat Hasan Manto, Intizar Hussain carved a place for himself in the pantheon of writers of that period. I was really sorry to hear of his death in February 2016, nearly two years after I had interviewed him when he attended the Islamabad Literature Festival in April 2014. He was a simple man, with a quiet sense of humour; he laughed a lot and was a little uncomfortable talking about his writing—something that came naturally to him. I had read his work translated from the Urdu and from a familiar name, he became someone I could talk to. He confessed that if it wasn’t for Partition, he probably wouldn’t have become a writer. Fond of literary criticism, with T.S. Eliot being a favourite, he didn’t like fiction much, and wrote as a hobby. Words came easily to him and he had studied languages in his BA, including English, Urdu and Persian literature, with a master’s in Urdu. He was fond of the Mahabharata and the Jataka Tales, and for him the first pain of separation was felt by the Pandavas when they were exiled. ‘The first Partition was in the Mahabharata,’ he said, ‘and then it was me when I was exiled (laughing). The pain of leaving one’s land, only the Pandavas and I knew. The Mahabharata is such a powerful narrative of that pain.’ In his novel Basti, he brings in a lot of Hindu stories and myths.

  He walked with a stout stick, and after the programme where he launched a collection of his articles, he sat in a corner surrounded by fans, signing his books. He was in the thick of things in June 1947, when he completed his MA. There was tension because of riots, and localities were emptying out fast. Every day a new house would be locked up as residents left in panic. It was this silence and desolation that formed the theme of his first short story.

  ‘I thought I should write about this and I liked reportage as a genre. Striking events were taking place before my eyes and I wrote my first short story, “Kayuma Ki Dukan”,’ he said. The story is about a shop, an adda in his
kasba. People used to meet there and chat till late into the night, but after the riots the shop was closed.

  ‘As a writer of fiction I was born with Pakistan. In the past I was not very fond of it, but Partition made me a fiction writer,’ he said. Hussain was born near Aligarh in a town called Dibai on 21 December 1925. He laughed and said that he wasn’t yet ninety as people believed. In 1947, his family, including his five sisters, was not keen on moving to the new country but he and his friends went to Pakistan. Those who went were sure they would come back and it wasn’t forever. People packed their things and left, giving their keys to their Hindu neighbours. There is a similar situation in his novel Basti.

  Hussain wanted to be a teacher and he thought his master’s in Urdu had equipped him for that, but when he arrived in Lahore he didn’t get a job. Then Faiz Ahmad Faiz was launching a new paper and he went for an interview. He said he felt scared as ‘Faiz saab’ didn’t speak much. He asked a few questions and fell silent. ‘He then asked me to wait for a call. I thought I wouldn’t get the job and in the meanwhile I got the editor’s post in a weekly, but there was some controversy and things took a turn for the worse,’ he said.

  Then came the call from Faiz offering him a job in Karachi at his paper Imroze. But it didn’t last long. That was when he decided that he wanted to be a serious writer. His first compilation of short stories, Streets and Lanes,4 was about what he had left behind—the composite culture of Ram Leela, Holi, Id, Moharram. He delved into myth and folklore—Baital Pachisi, the story of Shakuntala, Panchatantra—and absorbed these elements into his writing. ‘I was familiar with Hindu mythology and Jataka Tales, and when Alok Bhalla came and visited me he wanted to translate my work and showcase all this. I was one of the few writers in Pakistan who used Hindu mythology,’ he said.

  The first English translation of his short stories, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories,5 was a result of Bhalla’s search for stories on Partition. ‘At that time he said to me there is Manto and there is you,’ smiled Hussain, pleased with that allusion. He was not overly worried about the translation. ‘It is, after all, just that a translation,’ he said. He joked that of late he found himself giving more and more speeches. Once he was asked to speak about the writer Nirmal Verma, a man he had met once and who was rather taciturn, but he had read Verma’s work and liked it. Nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, he wrote five novels and seven collections of short stories. He hadn’t written a novel after Aage Samandar Hai in the 1980s.

  The partition of India was hotly debated and the question had now gone beyond writers, and historians had taken over, he felt. ‘I am not a historian—gaya hai saanp ab lakir pita kar (the snake has gone, now beat the trail it has left behind). What is the point of weeping over Partition? There was no expectation of a deep divide, but the riots changed things, especially in the Punjab,’ he said. As a writer, his main interest was in linking the past with the present. His work is evocative of Partition and the dilemma of people in the two new countries.

  Uninterrupted dialogue

  I met a lot of Indians in Islamabad whom I probably wouldn’t have met back home. Soon after I got there in August 2013, there was a visit by a large delegation of MPs led by Mani Shankar Aiyar who sent out very positive signals. They were grilled by the Pakistani media on the hostility to Pakistan in India, and the MPs in response declared there was a large constituency for peace there. Over fifty parliamentarians from Pakistan and thirteen MPs from India took part in the fifth round of the two-day dialogue facilitated by the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT).

  Aiyar said that no one was in favour of Pakistan-bashing, and Shah Mehmood Qureshi from the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf said that the Indian MPs were going back with a clear message that India-bashing was no longer fashionable in Pakistan politics.

  Even Kirti Azad of the Bharatiya Janata Party accepted the need for talks, but he said that the terror issue had to be resolved. He joked, ‘We enjoy Pakistan-bashing on the cricket field.’ Qureshi said that in Pakistan there was no desire for war and though there was a large constituency for peace, there was growing frustration on both sides since the pace of talks was not in step with the desires of the people. The joint statement issued by the MPs urged India and Pakistan to jointly examine issues of climate change and environmental impact assessment, improvement in bilateral trade, activation of gas supplies to Pakistan from India as well as power trading; it also touched on issues such as granting MFN status to India, opening banks of either country in the other to facilitate trade exchanges, improving the visa regime, and expanding existing agreements on handling of humanitarian issues. One of the MPs was Asaduddin Owaisi but he was instructed not to speak, and as a result he didn’t even reply to a TV reporter’s question asking for his opinion on the lunch! Owaisi grinned and joked, ‘I have been warned not to speak since I spew hate speech!’

  Soon after this bonhomie, in a video broadcast, Shashi Tharoor accused the civilian government of not being entirely in control in Pakistan. Tharoor, who was then the Union minister of state for human resource development, said that the Mumbai attacks five years ago and the recent LoC incidents had shown a gap between Pakistan’s official statement and the military’s action, and the civilian government even if sincere, was not entirely in control of the security apparatus.

  The video broadcast of his speech threatened to disrupt the Indo-Pak Young Entrepreneurs Bilateral Summit jointly organized by the Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Young Indians and the Commonwealth Asia Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs (CAAYE). The organizers were upset that the statement was made on a non-political platform and cut it short.

  The young Indian entrepreneurs were just getting used to a different Pakistan, far different from their preconceived ideas. They were shocked by the ‘development’ that Pakistan had undergone; a young woman was impressed by the motorway from Lahore to the capital, while others marvelled at the presence of food chains such as Dunkin’ Donuts, which goes unreported in the Indian media.

  Some were amazed at the IT Park in Lahore and felt that Pakistan was not all that different from India. However, back home, the Indian business community felt that Pakistan was a backward country and there were ‘negative perceptions about technical, intellectual and economic capacities’, according to a Pakistani businessman I spoke to.

  Better than Kingfisher

  A country with prohibition has one of the best breweries in the subcontinent. A friend said this brewery went to the ‘wrong’ side! Murree Brewery is a shared legacy and one of the oldest breweries, and it was a pity I couldn’t go there. I felt cheated, a bit like Private Job Shepherd Waterhouse who was denied Murree beer over a century ago while on a British campaign.6 Ian Stephens wrote in 1952 that the ‘Murree area during 1946–47 was the scene of wild doings. Hindu, Sikh and some British property had been attacked. Muslim puritans burned down the famous brewery, source of much pleasure for Allied troops during World War II.’7

  The ruins are all that is left. I met the Parsi owner and its chief executive officer, Isphanyar Bhandara, who was a PMLN member of the National Assembly as well, at a press conference and he agreed to give me an interview later in Islamabad itself.8

  Back to Private Waterhouse who was climbing up the Murree hill on 28 April 1869. He, like the rest of the 19th foot regiment of the British Army, was hopeful of some beer at the famous brewery. But after a six-mile hike there was disappointment in store. He wrote in his diary, ‘I started this morning at 4 am but the column did not leave till 6 o’clock, the road is so steep that the Ambulances had to start a long time first. We had to get out and walk several times . . . before we got to the Brewery which is 6 miles from Murree. This Brewery is a very notable place, sending Beer to all parts of India, while we was [sic] at the Brewery the column came up to the Officer in Command, he tried to get each man one pint of Beer but he could not.’9

  Waterhouse t
ravelled to the Murree hill station nine years after it was established by Edward Dyer with the express purpose of manufacturing beer for thirsty British troops in the subcontinent, instead of getting it all the way from England. In 1889, there were twenty-five breweries in India, and the Murree Brewery had the largest share of production at 37.9 per cent, with units at Murree, Rawalpindi, Ootacamund, Bangalore, Quetta and Ceylon, according to George Watt’s A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India. Yet today, the brewery has no place in the country of its origin.

  Bhandara was very keen on launching Murree in India, and some years ago signed a deal with an Indian businessman. He was disappointed that the venture which gave the rights to a Sikkim-based brewery owned by actor Danny Denzongpa, had not taken off due to ‘bureaucratic hurdles and red tape’. Bhandara is not in this for money—it’s a dream for him to see Murree beer in India, since it had its roots there and he wants it to be sold there.

  He was chuffed though that since the beer is made from Australian barley, it is better than Indian beer. He gets hops from Germany and has an Indian and German consultant. ‘I can say that our beer, without prejudice, is better than Kingfisher’s.’ Though most people think the brewery was set up by his family, that was not the case. ‘It came into my family in 1947. At that time my grandfather, Peshotan Bhandara, was a director when Mr Radcliffe decided to draw the line. My grandparents stayed back on this side but the Hindu partners decided to leave. It was a purchase of convenience and he bought over the British and Hindu stakeholders.’

  The brewery’s first manager, Edward Dyer, was the father of Colonel Reginald Dyer, the Butcher of Amritsar who had ordered the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919. From Ghora Gali on Murree which had low temperatures and ideal conditions for making beer, the brewery moved to its present-day location in 1889 in the plains of the garrison city of Rawalpindi because of space constraints, almost becoming its first occupants.