Musings
Delhi Days . . .
Red Fort, Delhi. Photo: Zahedul I Khan
A blossoming park in Delhi. Photo: Zahedul I Khan
The owner of the little bookshop at Shankar Market in the Connaught Circus area is a scholar. It is in his talk of books, in his ability to know what sort of books you need that you assess the man. I was browsing through the pages of a book on Sufism when he stepped forward with a load of works dealing with Rumi and the Bhagavad Gita, suggesting that I take a look. Well, I did take a look, so much so that I ended up buying a whole load, including a history of Urdu literature.
There is a certain affability about Delhi at this time of year that you cannot miss. You are at a point between the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, a season when Diwali comes in all its colours and stays that way before departing, making sure that there will soon be days when hordes of people will enter the world of marriage. It is also a time when much deliberation takes place and intellectual blossoming is in the air. If on the one hand you are part of a dialogue on shared perspectives regarding the future of the rivers that unite India with Bangladesh, you are on the other quite likely to be a participant in a spirited observance of the birth centenary of the celebrated journalist Nikhil Chakravartty.
So there is this wonderful, almost poetic ambience where you speak, and hear others speak, of the flow of waters down the mighty rivers Jamuna, Meghna and Brahmaputra before moving on to deliberate on an individual whose life constantly rested on principles in which was reflected a soul that had no room for compromise on the values that sustain life. I have known the rivers that crisscross the subcontinent, all the way from the Indus to the Karnaphuli. And I knew Nikhil Chakravartty during the final remaining years of his life. It was in Delhi, on a cold November day long ago, that he spoke to me of Partition, of how democracy needed to be sustained in countries relentlessly battered by autocracy. As the cold wind tore through us, leaving us in a state of the near frozen, Chakravartty spoke to me of his friendship with Bangabandhu, of the magical moment of their reunion in 1972, almost a quarter century after they had last met in the year when India lay sundered in two.
So Delhi, for me, was this time a celebration of Chakravartty in his myriad dimensions. He would be a hundred years old were he alive. It feels rather strange to imagine that Richard Nixon too would be a hundred years old this year. But there the comparison comes to a stop, for Nikhil Chakravartty and Nixon were two men as different from each other as light is separate from darkness. Chakravartty was a socialist; he was a principled journalist who was among that tiny group of media people who refused to genuflect before Indira Gandhi's emergency. And Nixon, brilliant foreign policy strategist that he was, was nevertheless a foul-mouthed western politician in whom sophistication was far outweighed by things Machiavellian. That was the thought which kept coming back to me as I heard Muchkund Dubey and JV Naik expound on the values that Nikhil Chakravartty kept alive all his life.
As I write, I wait to hear Kamal Hossain speak on Chakravartty, even though I have already gone through the paper he has sent to the organizers — the Centre for Media Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Editors Guild of India and Nikhil Chakravartty Foundation — in celebration of the man. Pakistan's Mubashar Hasan will sadly not be coming to Delhi after all. It would have been quite an occasion observing him and Kamal Hossain interact again. The two men, if you recall, were part of the abortive political negotiations involving the Awami League, the Pakistan People's Party and the Yahya Khan junta in Dhaka in March 1971. Hossain assisted Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; and Hasan aided Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Years ago, I asked Kamal Hossain if he was planning to write a book on politics as he saw it shaping up around him. He has done that, given us a good account of the history he has been instrumental in the making of. Years ago, in Lahore, I wanted to know from Mubashar Hasan if he meant to write anything on the happenings of 1971. I remember the sadness in his eyes as he told me softly, 'What is there to write, after all that has happened?' I do not know if he has produced a book after all. I would have asked him were he to make it to Delhi.
As winter prepares to step into homes and gardens and on to the streets of this sprawling city, I go around thinking of Pandit Nehru, of the politics Jinnah pursued here before he went off to his Pakistan, of the chaos that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination twenty nine years ago. My parents passed through Delhi on their way to Quetta in the 1950s, with me as a baby in their arms. And I recall the desperation with which Mirza Ghalib must have moved around the city, looking for economic sustenance and that necessary inebriation that would inject the spark into his poetry.
Delhi is a reminder of history. It is also a remembrance of old socializing. My friends Sandra Leitner and Thierry Costanzo, in Austria and France, tell me they miss the good old winter we spent at JNU last year, in the company of others. Rakesh Batabyal and Sumit Mukherjee, who have invited me to the Nikhil Chakravartty conference, ask me to preside over a session of the deliberations before I present my own paper the following day. And pure delight comes through fresh meetings with Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan, all academics who have turned out to be great friends ready for a conversation on the nature of contemporary intellectual ferment.
Someone tells me Khushwant Singh's newest book is out. And I know I must look once again for that work on Mohammad Rafi, written by his daughter-in-law, that I was silly enough not to buy the last time I was in Delhi.
There are places you do not want to say goodbye to. There are cities — London, Delhi, Kolkata, Quetta — that will always be home for you.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments