A Large White Crescent -- Review

Toheed Ahmad (ed.), A Large White Crescent: Readings in Dialogue Among Civilizations: The Pakistani Experience, Apa Publications, Lahore, 2011

At a time when Pakistan is being viewed as a rogue state bent upon a path of conflict and confrontation, we have a new book that speaks for the need for dialogue. It does so by offering a collection of readings from sources as diverse as Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Al-Beruni, Muhammad Bin Qasim and Eqbal Ahmad, Dara Shikoh and Shah Waliullah, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Amir Khusrau, M. A Jinnah and Ubaidullah Sindhi. Evidently, the book offers a potpourri of views; that it should include those who were born, in some cases, centuries before the birth of the ‘idea’ of Pakistan is illustrative. It shows, to my mind, a willingness, even need, to appropriate ideas and images that can reconstitute a legacy of thought, one that is more in tune with the exigencies of the times, and one that is more plural, more accepting of differences.

That such an approach is ‘healthy’ and ‘positive’ goes without saying. What needs to be stressed, however, is the editor’s candour. In his Introduction, Toheed Ahmad writes, ‘But all agree that the expectation explosion generated at the independence of this country in 1947, especially concerning national ideology and distributive justice, remains unfulfilled.’ His impulse in compiling these readings from across the spectrum of social, religious and political thought is to facilitate ‘cross-cultural communication’ and provide a selection of texts that will ‘serve as a profitable reading for the practitioners and theoreticians of the fast developing field of cultural diplomacy.’ Frankly, it is this last, the bit about ‘cultural diplomacy’ that piqued my curiosity. For, as we all know, it is seldom the content of such anthologies that reveals anything new; it is more the choice, the editorial voice or the intent behind a critical inclusion (or exclusion) that is far more interesting in an edited volume.

Parts of Touheed’s Ahmad’s A Large White Crescent is old wine in a new bottle, parts are not. First the old wine – full-bodied and still heady though it is; the fairly well-documented writings of Hali, Sir Syed, Iqbal fall in this category. Altaf Husain Hali’s Mussadas-Madd-o-Jazar-e-Islam (‘Story in Verse of the Ebb and Flow of Islam’) was regarded by no less a person than Sir Syed Ahmad as the harbinger of the new and the modern in Urdu literature. Hali, Deputy Nazir Ahmad, Maulvi Zakaullah and others formed a bridge between the old masters and the revivalists; they visualized a world not in terms of Islam but within the framework of a colonized world where one’s claims for survival and prosperity would be buttressed by one’s ability to come to terms with western enlightenment, all the while holding on to the staff of one’s own deep-rooted faith. The sort of optimistic Muslim response displayed by Hali in the Mussadas involved, unlike the revivalist Waliullahi tradition, not the rejection of colonial rule but its acceptance so that he arrived at a seemingly ‘subservient’ position not because he was an unquestioning admirer of British rule but because of his deep engagement with colonial rule and its manifestations. Men like Hali, Zakaullah and Nazir Ahmad – who had served the British government in one capacity or another -- saw colonialism as a necessary evil for it would, they believed most sincerely, pave the way for social re-engineering and open up prospects of growth and prosperity for all Indians, in which the Muslims too would partake.

Similarly, Sir Syed’s pamphlet Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind (‘Causes of the Indian Mutiny’) is written from the point of view of a colonized person. Written in 1858, this is the closest he comes to giving a candid account of the grievances against British Rule among the common man. But this too is written from the point of view of the loyalist who is at pains to clarify the ‘misapprehensions of the intentions of the government’ where he hastens to add, ‘had there been a native of Hindustan in the Legislative Council, the people would have never fallen into such errors.’ Sir Syed, it must be remembered, was knighted by the British in 1879 and remained all through his life a loyal subject of Her Majesty’s Government. Far from a critique of British policies, the Asbab…begins thus: ‘The proclamation issued by Her Majesty contains such ample redress for every grievance, which led up to that revolt,  that a man writing on the subject feels his pen fall from his hands.’

Unlike Sir Syed, Iqbal was no unquestioning admirer In contrast to the former’s largely self-acquired wisdom of the ways of the world, Iqbal (1877-1938) drew on the best resources of a liberal Western education. Educated at the prestigious Government College, and at Trinity College, Cambridge and in Heidelberg and Munich in Germany and also a Bar-at-Law, Iqbal was eminently well placed to question western enlightenment and English materialism on philosophical and religious grounds. However, despite his trenchant criticism of the imperial government, he surprisingly enough accepted a Knighthood in 1922. In 1927 he was elected to the Punjab Legislative Council. The philosophical essence of his writings is distilled in a series of six lectures delivered during 1928-29 at the universities in Aligarh, Hyderabad and Madras entitled Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. A section on Ijtehad has been selected by Touheed: ‘the word literally means to exert. In the terminology of Islamic law, it means to exert with a view to form an independent judgment on a legal question.’ Iqbal’s Presidential address at the Allahabad session of the All-India Muslim league in 1930 is also included; it was here that he fully propounded the idea of a separate homeland for India’s Muslims as their ‘final destiny’.

Now, we come to the new wine. The Sialkot-born, Sikh-convert Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872-1944), was a particularly fiery sort of Muslim alim, given to passionate devotion to nationalism as well as high adventure and political drama. Following in the footsteps of Maulana Mahmud Hasan of Deoband, he had left India, during World War I, to seek support of the Central Powers for a Pan-Islamic revolution in India in what came to be known as the Silk Letter Conspiracy. He reached Kabul in 1915 to rally the Afghan Amir to attack India, and shortly thereafter offered his support to Raja Mahendra Pratap's plans for a revolution in India with German support. Always a firebrand, he joined the Provisional Government of India formed in Kabul in December 1915. After several years in Kabul where he met a Turko-German delegation and men like Maulvi Barkatullah, Ubaidullah left for Russia in 1922. In Moscow he observed, at first hand, how the socialist ideology was a quick tool for mobilizing people and gaining results. Subsequently, Ubaidullah Sindhi spent two years in Turkey and, passing through many countries, eventually reached Hijaz where he spent about 14 years learning and pondering over the philosophy of Islam in the light of Shah Walliullah’s teachings. Upon his return to India, he became not just a vocal anti-imperialist but more importantly, the defender of a new social order. Tauheed has done literary historians a great service by reviving his legacy, putting together his plans documenting a Hindustani University in Kabul; the great pity is that he does so with no references, no dates, no footnoting, nothing to aid the serious scholar.

The same disregard for detail mars much of the book. The editorial notes prefacing each section are frugal, to say the least. Moreover, parts of the book are about neither dialogue nor diplomacy – cultural or otherwise. The section on Sport seems to be an altogether unnecessary insertion and is more in the nature of a straight-out eulogy. It is precisely this sort of reliving past glories and resting on one’s oars that Pakistan can do without at the present moment. The section does little else but put together editorials and reports from the 1950s that eulogise Pakistan’s victories in the field of squash and cricket.

Still, A Large White Crescent deserves to be read; for, it shows how Pakistani writers and opinion-makers view themselves and their country, how they locate themselves in the cross-currents of debate and discussion within the Islamic framework and, more importantly, where they draw their inspiration and intellectual sustenance for the trajectory they wish to forge for their fellow countrymen. The inclusion of a token non-Muslim, namely Justice Cornelius is, to my mind, diluted since the learned Judge, according to Touheed, ‘followed the moral compass of Islam’ and was, apparently, more Muslim than the Muslims. It makes A Large White Crescent more a ‘monologue’ than a ‘dialogue’ as it purports to be, but that is another matter.

(This review was published in HIMAL South Asia, Dec 2011)

My talk on Delhi, 20 Dec 2011, India Habitat Centre

I am giving a talk on Invisible Delhi: the Neglected Monuments of Delhi and the City You See But Don't See.

Date: Tuesday, 20 December

Venue: Casuarina Hall, Basement, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

Time: 7.00 pm.

Talk organised by INTACH and Delhi Tourism

All are welcome.

Dilli Durbar of 1911

As we in Delhi vacillate whether to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Coronation Durbar or not, it might be useful to look at some of the contemporary responses to the Dilli Durbar. Like nearly everything else in modern Indian history, we find there is no uniform, monochromatic, monolithic response either to the shifting of the imperial capital or the presence of firang royalty in one’s midst.

Held in Delhi on the 12^th day of December 1911, the coronation durbar was an occasion where, with great pomp and ceremony, King George V and Queen Mary were proclaimed the Emperor and Empress of India. Princes, noblemen, landed gentry and persons of rank and repute sat under a gilded canopy, each according to his stature in the colonial pecking order, to hear His Royal Highness address His subjects. While this durbar, the third and last of its kind held in Delhi, was significant for various reasons, chiefly it marked the return of the imperial capital to Delhi from Calcutta and heralded the onset of near-feverish building activity in the new city. A bit like the Commonwealth Games 99 years later, the Delhi Durbar of 1911 marked frantic preparations to ‘present’ the city to the world. While some preparations for the durbar, such as those in Coronation Park, were of a temporary nature to serve the purpose of the brief royal visit, several other blueprints were shortly drawn up that would, over the next twenty years, transform the hilly outcrops that lay beyond Shajahanabad into a grand imperial city.

While the royal couple had laid the foundation stone for the new capital city within the durbar camp, it was eventually decided to shift it elsewhere: somewhere sufficiently far away from the old city of the Mughals so that the distinction between the Old and the New Delhi would be sharply evident. The village of Raisina offered a salubrious air and excellent views of the surrounding countryside from its top; moreover, it had enough space all around for a new city, laid out according to a grand master plan, to spread itself out. By 1912 Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker were commissioned to build the new capital: one that would reflect the aims and aspirations of a city that would, henceforth, be not merely the beating heart of the political entity that was India but also embody the Imperial vision in its fullest and minutest detail.

To return to the momentous event of December 1911, it must be noted that the Delhi Durbar had evoked mixed reactions among the Indian populace. This high point of British rule in India was viewed and interpreted in different ways by different people. There was the satirical, questioning Urdu poet Akbar Illahabadi (1846-1921) deriding the Durbar because he saw it as an affront to national pride:

            They are favoured with rising fortune:
            The seven-fold heavens belong to them.

Theirs is the cup and theirs the wine:

Only the eyes are mine: the rest belongs to them.

Ahmed Ali’s seminal novel, Twilight in Delhi, carries a similarly sharp critique of colonial excess in his portrayal of the grief and heartbreak of Delhi’s Muslims through the character of Mir Nihal who goes to see the royal procession, and notes:

The procession passed by the Jama Masjid whose façade had been vulgarly decorated with a garland of golden writing containing slavish greetings from the Indian Mussalmans to the English King, displaying the treachery of the priestly class to their people and Islam.

We get yet another response to the Delhi Durbar in the writings of influential Urdu writers and editors. A few months before the Dilli Durbar, on 22 June 1911, King George V’s coronation had been celebrated by the Muslims of Lahore at a gathering in the Shahi Mosque, and among the speakers was the poet, Iqbal who emphasized the Muslims’ bounden duty to bear allegiance to the ruler of the day.

There was another response, too, to the Delhi Durbar -- one of acquiescence, even celebration – in other parts of the country. Rabindranath Tagore’s, Jana gana mana which was later to become India’s National Anthem, was first sung in Calcutta to celebrate the ‘Dilli Durbar’ at the annual session of the Congress, under the leadership of moderates like Surendranath Banerjee who had decided to accord an appropriate welcome to the visiting royal couple. Besides adopting a loyalty resolution, the leaders arranged for the singing of a suitable song to mark the occasion. The sequence of events on December 27 1911, on the second day of the session, was as follows: (a) singing of Jana gana mana adhinayaka; (b) reading out of messages of goodwill received from well-wishers including Ramsay McDonald, the British Labour Prime Minister; (c) adoption of the loyalty resolution; and (d) singing of a Hindi song in praise of the King specially composed for this purpose.

(. This article appeared in The Indian Express, The Real Page 3, 11 December 2011.)

Hindustani Awaaz: Literature, Culture and Society: Muharram

Hindustani Awaaz: Literature, Culture and Society: Muharram: Qatl-e-Husain asl mein marg-e-Yazid hai Islam zinda hota hai har Karbala ke baad The murder of Husain is actually the of Yezid ...

NDTV Interview -- with Sunil Sethi on 'Just Books'

Given below is link of my interview with Sunil Sethi on his show 'Just Books' on NDTV Profit, 5 Nov 2011

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/just-books/rakhshanda-jalil-on-her-book-release/215400

Q & A -- Sunday Guardian, 13 Nov 2011

I would like to look like my mother <><> <><>     Q. On a clear day, when the sun is out, who do you see when you look at your reflection in the mirror? A. I see my dear old friend Rakhshanda Jalil in the mirror; she's been a good friend. Q. What do you loathe in the reflection? What do you love and what do you fear? A. There is nothing that I dislike or fear in particular about my reflection. Q. Which facial feature do you consider your most attractive? Why? A. My favourite feature would have be my squint. Someone once told me that my squint gives me a faraway look and I quite like the idea of that.. Q. If age has changed the way you look, what do you miss the most, if anything at all? A. I miss the suppleness in my walk; I used to walk differently when I was younger. I guess you could say that I miss the spring in my step. Q. In the last year, have you ever wished you looked different? If yes, when? A. Yes, especially whenever I go to my children's school for parent-teacher sessions. Mothers nowadays seem to be getting younger by the day. Q. Who would you most like to look like? A. My mother, I think she's ageing very well. Age hasn't dimmed her curiosity or the sparkle in her eyes. She has this gleam in her eyes that makes her look much younger and she is very curious about the world around her.

Simla -- Lost Glory

Memory is a cruel thing; it preserves people and places in the formaldehyde of timelessness, saving them from the cruel ravages of age and circumstance. Nothing demonstrates this better than the so-called ‘trip down memory lane’, for seldom does such a trip culminate in a happy balance of expectation and reality. A recent trip Shimla proved just how chimeral a thing is memory, especial from one’s childhood.

Invited to present a paper at the Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla (IIAS), I jumped at the chance of revisiting the erstwhile capital of colonial India. Housed in the former Vice Regal Lodge, the IIAS is a place of rare beauty and splendour quite apart from being the country’s premier destination for academics, scholars and writers. While it is always an honour to speak at an international gathering of scholars, for me the occasion was a special one. For, it meant revisiting a place that held many happy memories from my childhood. My grandfather had been a Fellow here in the 1970s, working on the influence of western literature on Urdu. It was here, in this venerable institution, among its walnut wood panelled cubicles and its lofty-ceilinged library that he had organised seminars and written books drawing attention to, among other things, Iqbaliyat, a hitherto neglected area of scholarly study in India. He and my grandmother had lived in one of the quaint properties (called Delville) that dotted the Institute’s vast, rolling acres. And it was here that we, my siblings and I, had gambolled in our summer vacations during his tenure, revelling not merely in the escape from the oppressive heat of the plains but in the secluded grandeur of the Institute and its environs. To be invited to this oasis of calm and beauty as an adult was, thus, not merely an honour but an occasion to revisit the past, needless to say a carefree past.

Young as I was when I had last visited Shimla, I had been enraptured by its pristine beauty, its scenic nooks and crannies and its ever-smiling, ever-cheerful Himachali people. Going back, after nearly thirty years everything – except for the cheerful Himachali people – has changed, changed irrevocably. The drive up from Kalka station is prescient with the ominous changes ahead. A traffic snarl greets us as we are halfway up the first climb at Parwanoo. The hills, once clad in dense green, are pockmarked; the pine, rhododendron and oak that once clothed these hills in such abundance have been felled in large swathes to build box-like high-rise flats. Solan -- once renowned for its breweries, sanatoriums, fruit orchards and Wordsworthian cottages -- is dusty and muggy. Worse still, it sprouts Mcdonalds, Subway, et al. Already, I find myself missing the squeaky clean roadside dhabas that served piping hot rajma-chawal and aloo ke paranthe. The few old-fashioned dhabas that remain now serve ‘chow-main’, ‘Maggi noodal’ and ‘burger-pattis’, many bearing boards in Bengali and Gujrati to woo the big spenders from these two states.

Once called the ‘Queen of the Hills’ for it housed the summer capital of the colonial government, Shimla is a travesty of its former self. Its aura of genteel refinement, its salubrious pine-scented air, its row of sedate eateries and glass-fronted shops are all gone; in its place are the worst specimens of crass consumerism. The venerable shops on the stately Mall are gone, sold out or so completely revamped as to be unrecognisable. Gaindamull, from where we bought handmade fudge and glugged cold coffee in glass bottles, is an anonymous, self-service super store. The small, family-owned shops are all gone; in their place stand swanky, chain stores -- even a Tommy Hilifiger store, which I noted with some satisfaction, is empty save for a bored-looking expensively-dressed salesperson. Tara Hall, the country’s premier boarding school for girls, now takes in only day scholars. Scandal Point on the Ridge, once a haunt of fashionably-dressed who’s-who, is swamped with street hawkers though the Church of Scotland still manages to raise its stately head above the squalor of its surroundings.

Hoping to find some connection with the past, I walk into the India Coffee House, a franchise of the All-India Coffee Growers’ Cooperative. Set up in the 1950s, these lookalike coffeehouses popularised coffee and south Indian food such as idli-dosa-vada and are ubiquitous in most of the older cities. Long before the Baristas and the Café Coffee Days set up shop in Indian cities, it was these coffeehouses -- uniformly furnished in uninspiring browns and employing the most doddering old waiters imaginable -- that managed, at frugal prices, to attune the north Indian palate to the stronger South Indian tastes and smells. Unfortunately, here too, in this last bastion of old-fashioned middle-class India, that elusive connection with the past is missing: the coffee tastes of tepid dishwater and the vadas are stone cold. With some misgivings, I gaze at a moth-eaten poster of Padmini, a film actress of yester-years, assuring me she loves her morning cup of coffee. Disconsolately, I swivel around to gaze out of the casement windows. The view outside, however, is as stunning as the ones kept safe in the storehouse of my memory. The setting sun has clothed the mountain ridges with the most luscious hues of apricot, peach and vermillion. The sonorous sound of temple bells wafts up from the Lower Bazar; God is in His heaven and all seems right with the world. However, a short walk along the Mall soon disabuses me of any good will towards this deflowered Queen of the Hills that the spectacular sunset may has generated. The olde order has changeth; yielding place to a new that is coarse, chaotic and crass.

I return to the Institute hoping something here will rekindle old memories in all their pristine glory. Built from 1884-88 as a home for the then-Viceroy Lord Dufferin, the Vice Regal Lodge is a delightful mix of Elizabethan and Scottish architectural styles and motifs. Its statuesque proportions, its turrets and towers, chandelier-lit passages, solid oakwood furniture, majestic staircases, as well as the stunning view commanded by its location on the Observatory Hill combine to make it one of the finest surviving relics of the raj. After independence, it became the Presidential retreat but upon the philosopher-academic-president Dr Radhakrishnan’s suggestion, it was turned into an institution of higher learning and the President’s retreat was shifted to Chharabra, on the outskirts of Shimla. Inaugurated in October 1965, it was envisaged as a haven of intellectual freedom, an experiment in intellectual autonomy.

However, a paucity of funds has prompted the Institute to permit – for a ticket of Rs 50 each -- busloads of tourists to tramp through its historic premises. Home to several meetings and conferences of national and international significance -- notable among these being: the Shimla Accord of 1914 to negotiate the status of Tibet; and the Shimla Conference of 1945 between the Viceroy Archibald Wavell and political leaders such as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Nehru, Jinnah, Azad, Tiwana and Tara Singh – there is history at every footstep. Guided tours take gawping visitors across its carved grey Himalayan stone exteriors, through its wood-panelled stairways and corridors, past gilded mirrors and ornate fireplaces; their flashing cameras, high-pitched chatter and ringing cellphones jarring in the stillness of this scholarly retreat. Worse still are the monkeys that are vicious, aggressive and everywhere! Once to be found largely in the vicinity of Jakhoo Hill which had an ancient temple devoted to Lord Hanuman and where, to please the deity, visitors fed the monkeys that had occupied this hilltop for generations, this simian menace has swamped the entire mountain range.

One can walk among the many winding pug-dandies that spill out from the Institute – some going down to the tiny bazar of Boileuganj (pronounced Balooganj by coolie and scholar alike), others towards the cottages that dot the 100-acres of densely-wooded mountain slopes – only with a stout stick or a sturdy fellow scholar. For, the monkeys are known to get up close and personal, especially with lady visitors whom, they have rightly guessed, are more easily intimidated. I visit my old home, Dellville, and find it overgrown with weeds, rundown and a far cry from the romantic cottage that nestled in my memory. Evidently, the resource crunch is everywhere.

I come down the mountain to my home in the plains, reciting this fragment that my grandfather was fond of reciting:

Tuk dekh liya, dil shad kiya, khush waqt huye aur chal nikle.

 (The occasion was to read a paper entitled   ‘Songs for all Seasons: The Oral Tradition in Urdu Literature’, 10-12 October 2011, International Seminar on Orality: Word, Text and Beyond, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.)