IT WAS a long life, Ghalib was still alive when my grandfather was born. My father was born near Lucknow in 1910, and grew up at a time when Muslim culture was yet unselfconscious and assertive in the long afterglow of Muslim power still suffusing society in the northern provinces of India. Traditions of this culture provided the framework for his life’s interests.

Syed Hashim Raza was initially drawn to journalism, not only from personal inclination: the heroes of his time were writers. As Indian politics gathered steam, the 1920s were a period of fiery journalism and writers of the time were in the vanguard of the liberation movement. His earliest hero was Mohammad Ali Jauhar, then editing ‘Comrade’; the other person he admired was Maulana Hasrat Mohani, with his ‘Humsafar’. He respected their talent and authority, their courage and integrity.

However, the ambition to follow in their footsteps remained stillborn. The ICS had become a ‘mettle’ test for many with some academic accomplishment and he sat successfully for the examination, becoming a member of the 1934-ICS batch. More than tinges of nostalgia remained, though, for the road not taken; a strong interest in writing and in literary forums remained intact all his life. At Oxford, as an ICS probationer, he appears to have spent the time not taken up by learning how to ride and to speak Marathi in organizing literary and political events, and seminar discussions with several prominent Indian figures visiting the UK, including Mr Jinnah and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. I recently came across an old letter from Mr B.K. Nehru, his ICS batchmate, quoting Urdu couplets composed by my father and read by him at an Oxford Majlis gathering — and I noted that Mr B.K. Nehru’s was the calligraphic Urdu handwriting of those who first learnt to write with bamboo quills on wooden ‘takhtis’.

Indeed, until his service in Maharashtra, in 1935, my father had little appreciation for an India that precluded his own sense of ‘Indian’ identity. In the UP of his youth, common traditions of language, dress and etiquette among the urban middle class frequently dissipated the influence of religious differences. Hindu-Muslim society shared social backgrounds, landed classes intertwined with urban professionals.

He was little prepared for the circumstances he encountered in Maharashtra/Gujarat. The region’s history, and the sources of its economic development, and how those factors shaped the interests, attitudes and character of society had created a society markedly different from the India he knew. Cultural activity was more linked to the traditions of Hindu religion, and Gandhi’s stirring of ‘nationalism’ was, in the region, reinforcing Hindi revivalism.

While he found the early years of his service there stimulating, differences of culture, language and a ‘world view’ persuaded my father that he would remain an outsider in the province. As the Bombay presidency then included Sindh, in 1938 he obtained a transfer from Nasik to Karachi as AC, Tharparkar. Sindh felt to him almost like coming home. He spent 20 of the remaining 28 years of his service working all over Sindh, and later in corporate life. In his retirement, Karachi was home — ‘Hamari Manzil’, as he named his house.

CHALLENGE OF PARTITION: At partition, he was DM, then administrator, Karachi, until 1951. The city’s population was to increase fourfold, from 600,000 people to 2.5 million over this period. The continuing challenge throughout was provision of supplies and rudimentary settlement of refugees, arriving in tens of thousands each week, and the maintenance of civic harmony, with limited resources at hand. At the same time, the administrator’s job was complicated by the establishment of the new central government in Karachi.

His authority was often compromised by uncoordinated pre-emption by the centre, whereas, in common perception, the administrator possessed the powers of redress. It was a time of ‘vigilante’ democracy. Some may remember the frequency and fast mobilization of protest processions in those days. Given the punishing conditions of refugee life, these were treated with sympathy and tolerance, and a great deal of the administration’s time and powers of ingenuity were dedicated to dismantling protest through persuasion, strictly without the use of force.

Though many factors contributed to the passing of those early, cluttered years without serious crisis, the patient idealism of all the public servants of the day made an important contribution. For my father, the job’s unceasing demands eviscerated in the headiness of having a role in the reality coming alive in the region. The crush of issues that required urgent response meant that normal bureaucratic procedure had to be set aside.

Much had to be decided directly, and face to face. While it may have tested the good humour of many, his natural interest in human affairs made direct interaction with people something he took quite in his stride, and with patience and forbearance.

Refugee settlement was a major preoccupation. Randomly emerging new settlements needed a modicum of access to services, however crude and jerry built, and the allocation of evacuee property had to be escalated to take pressure off ‘squatting’ and forcible occupation.

A committee covering evacuee property had been formed by the Karachi administration. All claims for allocation of local property had to be validated by providing title deeds for property of similar value left behind in India. (In an ironical instance, my father came across an individual who produced title deeds over land in Hardoi district, UP. My father recognized the property; it had been part of a larger landholding that had belonged to his great-grandfather, confiscated by the British in 1857 after he had fled to Nepal with other ‘rebels’ who had stood with the Oudh Court. The family returned from Nepal several years later, and the individual who had ‘inherited’ the estate demonstrated a sense of honour in giving back a part of it, which then became the base for the family home; in a village called Naitoni).

Inevitably, there were multiple claimants for each available evacuee property, and rivalry could be keen. In one hotly contested case, an individual’s claim had succeeded against desperate machinations of all rivals. This individual had chosen to litter his written exchanges to the committee with Urdu verse, quoting liberally from Ghalib throughout.

My father’s fondness for poetry may have become known; for a couple of months afterwards, the committee received a plethora of applications entirely in verse, and formal notification had to be issued to warn that applications in verse would be disregarded ... And even Ustad Qamar Jalalvi had noted, one day in Jang:

Huzoor, is ko bhee koee jagah allot karein,

Yay Urdu bhee hamarey saath lut kay aee hay

But Qamar Jalalvi need not have worried. Urdu flourished.

Partition brought the various traditions of Urdu, from across India, into a single city. For my father, the rapid proliferation of Urdu media and of its literary forums was exhilarating in itself, and being able to help and encourage all this was an attendant blessing of place and time.

Karachi rapidly developed a distinct, urban character of its own. The migrants were largely white collar professionals and craftsmen, used to self-employment, not traditionally reliant on ‘notables’ or intermediaries. With the government, and the country’s major business houses headquartered in Karachi, access to decision makers was quite readily available, and the watchful and critical role of the press kept common issues in the public eye.

There was an aggressive sense of personal ‘rights’ about that time, a sense that government and business were accountable to the people. It became, quickly, a culturally self-aware city, linked by traditional bonds of familiarity with styles and themes in writing, satire, drama, and music. Newspapers, magazines and the cult of the coffee house developed rapidly. Urdu drama quickly became a ‘popular’ event, and plays were staged regularly in Denso Hall, Katrak Hall and under shamianas in open grounds. Cultural education remained a tradition in family life, and served as the link between generations, and within society.

Many aspects of that early culture were to decay with time and circumstance. With all its problems, Karachi is a vigorous and cosmopolitan city, and personal initiative and improvization provide what quite inadequate governmental resources cannot.

However, in its continuing evolution as a national frontier of economic opportunity, the fostering of the city’s cultural identity would have needed organization and recurring support from the administration and its businessmen. In the absence of such support, its role as the national ‘economic engine’ would increasingly come to dominate the character of the city, with the inevitable fragmentation of its society as income disparities broadened, but without the cultural links that could moderate the implications of such differences.

One of my father’s recurring issues with the central government at the time had to do with its progressive restriction, then clampdown, on the inflow of refugees. He took some satisfaction in the fact that he was able, more than once, to get the allowable number increased by several tens of thousands.

Later in his service, as chief settlement commissioner from 1958 to 1960, he returned to work for refugee settlement. Here, again, he pushed hard, without much luck, to have the government dissolve the distinction between refugees from ‘agreed’ versus ‘non-agreed’ areas, for entitlement to compensation in Pakistan.

The fundamental needs though, pucca housing and municipal services, had still remained substantially unaddressed by 1958. Millions still lived in jhuggis with disease prone water and sanitation arrangements.

Gen Azam Khan, who was rehabilitation minister under Ayub Khan at the time, undertook the long lingering task, and by 1960, the great part of resettlement had been completed.

My father developed great respect for Gen Azam’s ‘can do’ attitude in railroading through the resources that were necessary for the task, and he stayed in touch with him until the general’s death in the 1970s.

READY FOR CHANGE: My father left government service in 1965, when he was 55. He was ready for change. The imperial service, he had originally joined, had been invested with the powers of a massive empire, and though the very substantial authority of its agents was derived from it, and not something ‘earned’ by them as individuals, they assumed the ‘trusteeship’ with integrity and purpose.

In the ICS, the British had refined a highly efficient form of managing matrices, simplifying the complexity of providing the full range of public and security services, across the subcontinent, via the coordinating aegis of a single service. At partition, there were 650 ICS officers, for a population of 400 million.

He moved to Karachi, and managed Spencer’s, a large, national distribution business, as its managing director, until 1988. He had great regard for the founding owner of the organization he managed, Mr Badrul Islam. He maintained a foothold in public affairs throughout, serving on public service commissions and on various Pakistan delegations to the United Nations. He spent a good deal of time in work associated with the Quaid-i-Azam Trust and associated charities.

Living in Karachi, he found unceasing distraction in the city’s literary, media-based, and social activities, frequently participating, often contributing. The extended family, once scattered all over Pakistan and Karachi, had, over time, settled into a small area of Defence and Clifton, and with their proximity, a cross-generational link, with associations from his childhood, was established.

The slowing down of physical activity made him an even more voracious reader, and his reservoir of anecdotes, verses and historical pastiches continued to accumulate. The huge power of his memory worked like a magic engine — his reminiscences often resonant with the power of the original emotion, unsullied and unrevised with the passage of years. Age brought him no nearer to leaning on the wisdom we attribute to those with long and successful lives; he was as little inclined to passing judgement on the times, or on people, or to moralization, as ever; human frailty left him sometimes bemused, never angry or critical.

He understood the mutability of things, celebrated life and praised God for the privilege. To him, the ‘travelling’ was all. He was a person who would have lived fully at any time ... and not a little of his gift was the awareness that life was incomplete without time for the inclusion and the indulgence of others.

Kyunkar sambhaaltey hamein woh nakhuda jo khud

sahil ki afiyat sey bhanwar dekhtey rahey;

Manzil ki dhun mein, abla paa, chal kharey huey

aur shahsawar gard-i-safar dekhtay rahey

(Hashim Raza)