Review Article
Reading, in this season of remembering
In this season of victory, it is the intense moments of sadness, going back more than four decades, that come back to remind you of the enormity of commitment and involvement Bengalis went through in 1971. Only a couple of days ago, it was the memory of some of our best citizens, those we knew up close as well as from a distance, we brought alive once again in our collective national consciousness, for all the right reasons in the world. And if you have before you the stories that come associated with men like Professor Ghyasuddin Ahmad, it is the darkness of a soon-to-end war you go back to. The academic was one of scores seized by the al-Badr goon squads of the Pakistan occupation army on the eve of victory, never to return home alive. None of those abducted by the assassins, shadows of whom we spot in the mayhem on our streets launched by their successor generation in these times of what is clearly a twilight struggle, came back home. They were compelled to go the way of all flesh because the goal of the killers was simple: leave the new state of Bangladesh impoverished in the dawn of its freedom.
In Achho Nishidin Achho Protikhone, edited with love and care by Anisuzzaman, Farida Banu, Dr. Rashiduddin Ahmad, Hamida Banu and Atiqa Botul Khanam, you get not just the story of an individual but the history of a nation as well. Professor Ghyasuddin Ahmad was not your ordinary academic. There was political belief in him, an emotion which clearly informed people of the concerns that assailed him as a Bengali. Those concerns necessarily touched on the future of the Bengali nation; and particularly after 25 March 1971, he believed --- as so many others did --- that there was only one road that lay open before the nation. And that was liberty. It would be tortuous, it would be uncertain, it would be dark and peopled by evils of a sundry nature. But it would need to be traversed. And that was what Ahmad did. He paid the price for doing so. Everyone kidnapped by the state of Pakistan in those final desperate moments of an oddity born of a spurious two-nation theory paid the price.
In this work, therefore, it is the world of Professor Ghyasuddin Ahmad --- and by extension the world of every other martyr we remember in the gathering darkness of winter --- that is explored by some of our living scholars and historians and, of course, by Ahmad's grieving family. Salahuddin Ahmed, Serajul Islam Choudhury, Nilima Ibrahim, Sardar Fazlul Karim, Naimuddin Ahmed, Mokammel Haq, Razia Khan, Sonia Amin, Mofidul Haq, Kazi Madina, Rashid Haider and a whole panoply of intellectuals come together to pay tribute to a man who touched the lives not only of his pupils but also that of his larger nation. Published by Shahitya Prakash in December 2006, the work is certainly a rich, ready reference for students of Bangladesh's history. It is a book you can always go back to, if historical truth is what you uphold.
The end of the year is also a pretty good time to reflect on the books that have been read in the preceding months or those that are being read or those that will be read in the days and weeks to be. Last year Nazrul's Bandhonhara was launched in its English translation in Dhaka, to much acclaim. It surely goes to the credit of The Reading Circle that it undertook this rather gigantic task of going for the translation. Something, as they say, is always lost in translation. But then there are translations that hold your attention, that are indeed riveting. This translation of Bandhonhara promises to be one work that could make a difference. I am yet to read it and when I do, I know that old bug, the urge to review, will take hold of my imagination and I could actually end up doing a critique of the work.
Essay matters
Which reminds me. I have in hand a copy of Ramachandra Guha's relatively new work, Patriots & Partisans. Now, Guha has always been a fascinating writer and has proved to be exceedingly brilliant in dealing with a diversity of topics. A few years ago, recovering from an ailment, I whiled away the days going through his coruscating work on the history of cricket and the stars who have given that particular shine to the game through the decades. I have never been a cricket buff. Indeed, sports have always been my Achilles' heel, for the fundamental reason that there is hardly a game which I understand. Despite all such inadequacies, though, I did manage to go through the entirety of that fascinating work on cricket. I am not sure I understand cricket better as a result of that reading, but it was certainly enlightening going through the stories of the players and commentators who today are legends in the history of the game.
Guha's new book, the one I have in hand, is of course on a political level. Basically a collection of essays on a diversity of subjects, the work is a revelation of a liberal mind at work. More significantly, it is a hint of the objectivity that writers must pursue if they mean to be taken seriously. Ramachandra Guha gives you his take on Hindutva. He calls this particular chapter on the topic 'Hindutva Hate Mail', which ought to be a broad hint of where he means to take you. There is too the quite saddening write-up on India's first prime minister, one that Guha titles 'Verdicts on Nehru: The Rise and Fall of a Reputation'. The tenor is one of Nehru being studied on the larger canvas of history. Guha's sympathy for Nehru is unmistakable. The Nehruvian concept of society, of socialism, of diplomacy --- all of these are put under the scanner. And among those peering through the scanner are politicians, such as L.K. Advani, whose politics has generally been at a far remove from that of Nehru. In this one chapter, you tend to observe Nehru through the prism of a lifetime. Even the Mountbattens are pulled into the picture.
Before we move on, though, we must not fail to read the especially exhilarating chapter, 'A Short History of Congress Chamchagiri', in this eminently readable work. If Guha has been kind, even deferential, to Nehru, he makes it clear that he does not have a similar opinion about his descendants. Dismissive of Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi and even Rahul Gandhi, he is seemingly willing not to touch Indira Gandhi. But you get a trifle worried when Guha informs you that Nehru had no wish to see Indira Gandhi as his political successor. If that was truly so, how does one explain the fact that in the late 1950s Indira Gandhi served as president of the Indian National Congress for a year? Nehru may have disapproved of Indira's role here, but, again, he seemed content to go along with it once the reality came to pass.
'What have I done?'
Reading about politics gives you the kind of energy that often refuses to burn out. And when such reading happens to relate to particular countries, the energy seems all the more pronounced. There is Anatole Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country. If you have been going the endless turmoil Pakistan has been muddling through, you might get a sense of this absolutely thought-provoking work. It traces the history of Pakistan's politics and the key actors in the drama that has been playing out as tragedy and farce and comedy or a combination of all three since the country's eastern wing went its own way to become Bangladesh in 1971. Lieven wonders --- and that is something that will complement your thoughts --- how East and West Pakistan, separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory, with such a yawning gap in culture, even thought of being a single state. People in West Pakistan never considered the Bengalis of East Pakistan Muslim or Pakistani enough to be treated fairly, either in the political or economic sense. The break that occurred in 1971 therefore had to come.
And then Lieven moves on, to a critical assessment of the troubles that assail present-day Pakistan from a whole range of directions. The feudal nature of its politics, its industrial base, the dominance of the Punjab in nearly every sphere of life and, of course, the role of the military in nearly every area of socio-political activity are the issues Lieven focuses on. Pakistan has for a very large number of people around the world been in a state of relentless decline, sliding into nearly a failed state, which is something that not many Pakistanis will agree with. You only need to go through Apocalypse Pakistan, from Francesca Marino and Beniamino Natale. Published by Niyogi Books, the sub-heading of the work nearly says it all: an anatomy of 'the world's most dangerous nation'. When you observe the fragile nature of its politics, the weakness of its institutions and the battering it has been getting from both the Pakistani Taliban and American drone attacks, it is that old question asked by Tariq Ali years ago --- 'Can Pakistan Survive?' --- which ominously raises its head once again. At this point in history, you cannot quite say that Pakistan will go the way of the Soviet Union, but you are pretty sure that it will wobble through, at least in the foreseeable future. And here is again cause to remember Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Even after so many decades have gone by, you cannot but be amazed by the man. There was not much of emotion in him and it did not occur to him that, like Gandhi and Nehru and Azad, he needed to wage a struggle to have the British colonialists out of India. His insensitivities to the sufferings of millions of Hindus and Muslims remain the stuff of bad legend. But if there was any regret on Jinnah's part about the damage he and his Muslim League had caused to the country, to both Muslims and Hindus, it comes through in Kuldip Nayar's recently published memoirs, Beyond the Lines. The story comes from Mazhar Ali Khan, who told only his wife Tahera about it, making her promise to keep it within her. Years, many years, later, Tahera Mazhar Ali would spill it out to Nayar: Jinnah, surveying the sordid scene of refugees moving to India and Pakistan in the early days of Partition, is for the first time horrified by the enormity of what has happened. "What have I done?" That is what escaped his lips. He said nothing more.
Two men
There have been innumerable books on Partition and there will be more. Sixty five years after the departure of the British, you still come across serious debate on who or what could have been responsible for the tragedy. The burden of guilt falls, for the most part, on Jinnah. But there are also those who fervently believe that Nehru has to share part of the blame. What if he had not made those incendiary comments on the Congress' attitude to the Cabinet Mission Plan? What if Jinnah had been offered the position of independent India's first prime minister? Should Mountbatten and Radcliffe not have been pilloried for the manifest damage they did to generations of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who had inhabited India for centuries? And why did Gandhi not insist, a little more assertively than he did, that India stay as one indivisible country? These are questions that will be asked long into the future. And the answers will always be a muddle, all of them betraying agitated states of mind in those expected to respond to the questions. And while you reflect on it all, consider reading Roderick Matthews' engrossing work on Partition. He calls the work Jinnah Vs. Gandhi, a title which gives you a fairly good idea of what the writer means to talk about. In simple terms, it is a comparative study of the personalities and politics of the two men who played pivotal roles in the shaping of an India moving toward freedom as well as vivisection in the later part of the 1940s. As you read through the book, two questions always pop up before you, as they pop up before the writer. First, how did Gandhi, trained to be a barrister in England, end up wearing homespun cloth and becoming a man of the masses? Second, how did Jinnah, a modern man happy in emulating the English in his profession and social dealings, decline to being the founding father of a state based on the narrow concept of religion?
Answers to these queries will elude you, at least for now. Which is when you might try a different tack. Go to Jeremy Seabrook and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui's People Without History: India's Muslim Ghettoes. You feel the pain of these people as you read of the dismal lives they lead, in places like Beniapukur, Tiljala Road and Tangra. The communal politics of the 1940s, of the Muslim League's obduracy and the Congress' indifference (toward the end) has stymied the future of these people. When your history goes missing, when past, present and future are indistinguishable one from another, you know where you need to point the finger.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star
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