| 12 September 2004 | Sunday | 26 Rajab 1425 |
Exorcising Sir Aurel Stein's ghost
The passing of Ashfaque Ahmed
One writes in the ambience of a scary darkness caused by a an almost city-wide power failure on a Friday evening in September, just a day before 9/11 anniversary, and somehow the original subject of a book fair revived at the beautiful Frere Gardens becoming low on priority.
Indeed we will talk of the book fair, though somehow one cynically wonders whether it is truly possible to promote books in a society where the graph of materialism is rising gradually and so shamelessly.
This is not to underrate the admirable efforts of the City Nazim Naimatullah Khan, who has taken more than personal interest to ensure that this book fair stands revived. One wonders what the nazim felt about half of the city plunging into darkness, as if that darkness symbolized more than a simple power failure. A failure in good governance ? Just that?
Of course, ever since the Sunday last, when the Frere Hall book fair was reopened, thoughts had gone out to book fairs that the city had seen in the past, like those held by British Council, and the American Centre, which, besides being occasions to buy books, were also comprehensive intellectual and academic events, providing excellent platforms for relevant circles.
Nostalgia drives one down the memory lane, and one realizes that the institution of book fairs and related occasions, seem to have evaporated. The joy and the inner strength that books bring seems to be a lost ideal.
The Frere Hall book fair, which appears to have been an off and on exercise, was closed down last on May 29 after two bomb blasts near the Pakistan American Cultural Centre. Before that, in August last year the Sindh government reportedly closed down the book fair at the request of the American consul general in town.
With two bomb hoaxes this week relating to the US consulate general, one has serious doubts whether the book fair will be held this week and whether, on a long-term basis, the fair can be held successfully. For given the nature, degree and the perspective that is available vis-a-vis insecurity that exists in the society, it is a big question mark if at all people will find it practical and convenient to visit this book fair.
The discouraging security measures, the repeated and annoying road closures, and diversions that have become a regular feature of life around the Frere Hall, US consulate General, PIDC House, Dr Ziauddin Road, Club Road, and so on, all combine to create a not so encouraging environment for such activities.
It is appalling and suffocating to see the traffic chaos (bottlenecks and congestions appear respectable options and descriptions) that is routine, in the locality now, and with charged parking having come to an end, and with the forthcoming Ideas 2004 programmes scheduled to begin from next week, it is very simple to imagine the frustrations of ordinary citizens. I know people who avoid the area, and those who have stopped bringing their cars, for there is no parking space available, ever since the city government also closed down the open parking lot outside the Bagh-e-Jinnah.
Following the end to charged parking in Sindh capital, it is truly amazing, and disappointing, in fact, to realize that no one has spoken of the need to restore charged parking sooner than later, in view of the disorder that has resulted as a consequence to the ban.
To hold this book fair regularly and successfully, there should be people willing, or able to come to it, which means that the authorities concerned must facilitate accessibility to the Frere Hall. It also means that the booksellers must be motivated, and on a sustained basis, and an overall congenial atmosphere be allowed to prevail. It needs a secure environment, free from humiliation that security personnel can subject ordinary citizens to.
The last week's book fair had people parking their cars somewhere near Hotel Metropole. Can you imagine that? A news report in this daily said that visitors to the book fair had to deposit their identity cards at the security checkpoints to go to the fair. Of course, there are security threats, and those are real life issues, but what times do we dwell in, is something well worth philosophizing about.
What I have failed to comprehend is why at all regular book fairs cannot be held all over the city, making it convenient for the citizens from the length and breadth of Karachi to come to them. If the city can have Bachat bazaars on Tuesdays, Sundays, and Fridays (just about every day when it suits them), why can there not be book bazaars, though on a smaller scale but regular? If there can be car bazaars and other business propositions for the common man, why this society lacks the desire and yearning for books?
Did this society feel that books were irrelevant, or that it knew enough for its day to day living, asked one disgusted Karachi citizen, who complained that the price of books had turned unaffordable for him. The city government could initiate some steps to make the district-wise book exhibitions possible. It is an idea worth trying.
Indeed the cost of books is truly a disturbing proposition, especially when you realize that books are cheaper in India, Ok. Let stop comparing the book publishing scene here with that of India. It is an unfair comparison. Yet the fact remains that books are steadily becoming expensive, and even when booksellers and publishers here offer what they term "attractive discounts" on new books, the buyers stay away.
By the way there are two book fairs on in the city at this point in time, which are arranged by Paramount and the Oxford University Press, and the both organizations hold these annual fairs in September, and one hope that the fairs are successful.
One also hopes that the Frere Hall book fair will continue, and that the endeavour and the persistence of the City Nazim Naimatullah Khan will be rewarded. But one says this with a tinge of uncertainty, and I wish it wasn't so. For given the insecurity context that we all know exists, it is perhaps "asking for the moon" to have book fairs with such high profile security umbrellas as there are for the US consulate general and the CG's residence.
And with the Japanese consulate general coming up opposite the Marriott Hotel, it makes one wonder whether this particular part of the city will ever be the same old peaceful place again.
Whether the Frere Hall will ever return to the people of this city, or, rather be returned to the citizens here. Right now, the Karachiites seem to have lost this lovely garden for good.
I find it hard to end on the book fair theme. The city-wide power failure continues. I have written under rechargeable light, fortunately available. The light within, also dim. A book fair trembling as if.
Exorcising Sir Aurel Stein's ghost
There is a general belief among archeologists that the potter's wheel and the bow were 'invented' as "first acts" in the early civilizations of Mohenjodaro and Harappa some time in 5000 BC or after. Probably similar acts were part of the "learning to be efficient" and surviving process in other civilizations, lest we get it in our feeble 'patriotic' heads that Punjabis and Sindhis invented the 'potter's wheel' and the 'bow'.
Maybe they did, and only scientific research can answer such monumental questions, for ideas do travel, even over oceans, as Thor Heyerdahl proved in the Kon Tiki Expedition, a school days favourite book. In this peace our interest is in the language spoken in Lahore and how it evolved over time. From central Sindh to upper Punjab, regional variations of the Dravidian language evolved from originally Dravidian terms and phonetics to Aryan Prakritic languages resulting from the numerous Aryan invasions.
The Vedic writings and the Mauryan, Buddhist and Gandhara texts followed this as the "second act". Since then the influences have been unending - Greek, Afghan, central Asian, Mongolian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, even French to a limited extent, and then English for over 100 years. The result of these immense experimentations has been the standard Punjabi that is accepted as Lahori Punjabi.
The language that we speak in Lahore today, is therefore, the inheritance of our history going back to our roots in those early times, even beyond 5000 BC. As the great poet Faiz once said: "Everything that we have is our culture". The very phase "Shahr-e-Lahore" was used for the first time by the earliest known Punjabi poet Saad Salman as he lay captured in a prison in Afghanistan, the first known intellectual victim of the numerous Afghan invasions that wrecked Lahore time and again. He is known to have died in the year 1121 AD. According to Amir Khusrau he left behind "a treasure of poetry of three 'dewans' in Arabic, Hindi and Persian". Those 'treasures' have been lost, it seems, forever.
The agrarian prosperity of Punjab, with Lahore being its granary, gave rise to a settled civilization - the Indus Valley Civilization. The languages of Sindh and Punjab were originally influenced by the old Dravidian phonetics and words and later by the Aryan-Sanskrit/Prakritic languages. Later Persian and Arabic scripts and words were used. The problem lay in the fact that they were not written languages.
Sir Bartle Frere the Commissioner of Sindh, under the initiative of Sir Richard Burton, and Orientalist, and with the help of local scholars Munshi Thanwardas and Mirza Sadiq Ali Baig, evolved a 52-letter Sindhi alphabet that is still in vogue today. This did not happen in the Punjab? Punjabi never became the official language in Punjab even in the days of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Sikh scholars did all their work in Persian. Once the ruler, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, died, within ten years the entire State of the Punjab disintegrated. This does happen when dictators leave.
In the last years of Sikh rule with anarchy spreading in Punjab, Ranjit Singh's wife "Rani Jindan" invited the British to takeover. It is a fact of history that the majority of the people of Punjab welcomed the British; such was the shattered social condition. These events led to the official language of Lahore becoming English. Even today it is the functional official language, which does not speak much for a civilization as old as ours, probably among the oldest in the world.
Why this aversion to writing things down in our own mother-tongue? This question has vexed me since I was a student. This is where we must introduce one of the greatest advocates of written Punjabi that we have forgotten all about. His efforts to introduce Punjabi in the schools of the Punjab met with'mysterious' resistance. He is never mentioned, and yet he is the founder of some great educational and research undertakings that still exist in Lahore.
Just how many of us have ever heard of Sir Aurel Stein? This great Hungarian archaeologist and explorer, a man knighted for his immense scholarship, brought all his scholarship and research to enrich the Oriental College of Lahore as one of the world's leading institutions researching languages- ancient, old and modern.
Today the Oriental College of Lahore is a sad reminder of its glorious past, an institution once unrivalled in the world. I visited it last week to search for a manuscript, and outside the gate sat "bearded hoodlums" who tried to force me to seek admission after joining their "Jehadi organization". I merely read them a line from the great Bullah Shah and they turned their noses away.
This is the state of the 'great' institution today that was left by the great Aurel Stein, the original explorer of the Silk Route treasures. An outstanding explorer and archaeologist of the remote deserts of Eastern Central Asia, he fought many rivals in the opening decades of the last century to uncover evidence of long-host civilizations that had lain buried for up to 2,000 years in tombs, tips and temples beneath the desert sands.
He discovered spectacular remains, including the earliest dated printed book, the "Diamond Sutra", and thousands of every day objects that offer an unprecedented glimpse into the life of ordinary people. In all he trekked some 25,000 miles along the Silk Road- in fact a whole network of trade routes, from precarious mountain paths to sandy tracks across desert wastes. From the shores of the Mediterranean to the ancient heartland of China, passing through some of the greatest empires the world has ever known. All these great treasures he brought to Lahore.
It is a fact of much speculation as to how the immense treasures left to the Oriental College, Lahore, have found their way to the museums of China, France, Germany and Japan, not to speak of the British Museum, who, allegedly, a month before the Partition Plan of 1947, removed a majority of the treasures of Sir Aurel Stein.
Who was this great man and where did he come from? Born in Budapest, he spoke Hungarian and German at home, and then learned English, French, Greek and Latin at school in Dresden, where he developed a passionate ambition to retrace the epic military marches of Alexander the Great. This led him to Vienna to study Sanskrit and comparative philosophy for his first degree, then to Leipzig and finally to Tubingen, where he obtained his PhD in Old Persian and Indology.
A keen Anglophile, he moved to England to study Punjabi and to learn about life in India from Theodore Duka, a fellow-Hungarian who had been a surgeon-colonel in the Indian Medical Service and was researching a biography of Alexander Csoma de Koros, the Hungarian scholar and linguist who had travelled to Central Asia in the early 19th century seeking the origins of the Hungarians. He pinpointed them to Lahore.
So the Hungarians were here much before the British, seeking their origins, and working to introduce Punjabi as a core subject in the schools of the Punjab. Yet he held important posts throughout his career, starting as the Principal of the Oriental College in Lahore and become the Registrar of the Punjab University. His home was to remain Lahore for the rest of his life.From 1910 to 1929 he was Superintendent of the Indian Archaeological Survey. He became British subject in 1904 and was knighted in 1912.
Yet his "forgotten" effort to introduce Punjabi as the core learning subject never came to light. Somewhere in the library of the Oriental College, Lahore, lie his basic textbooks for the Punjabi language. One source informs that they were removed in 1947 to the British Museum Library. Just what happened to what he described as his most important mission, we will never know.
Punjab remains without its own mother-tongue being taught to their own children. Lahori Punjabi is spoken, and spoken well and widely. Yet it remains unwritten in our schools. Maybe the ghost of Sir Aurel Stein needs to be exorcised, for the spirit always was willing.
The passing of Ashfaque Ahmed
THE biggest loss suffered the other day by the literary circles of Lahore was the passing away of Ashfaque Ahmed. The very name conjures up several memories; one can actually see that familiar face explaining some finer point on the TV screen to a group of listeners. He was a writer, a dramatist and a broadcaster of note plus also a sufi. All in all, he was respected and loved by anyone who ever met him. It was always a pleasure listening to his interesting talk whenever he chose to speak.
Ashfaque Ahmed got famous with his radio feature, Talqeen Shah, which represented a character wearing a double mask. He deftly placed him in a morally confused world. In fact, Talqeen Shah was presented as a prototype of the social challenge which was causing harm to the psyche of the common man. It goes to Ashfaque Ahmed's credit that he managed to depict a hypocritical society through this radio feature which went on for years.
In later TV plays, and even in his short stories, Ashfaque Ahmed portrayed the decline and fall in human nature. This made him think of ways to arrest this decline.
Ashfaque Ahmed has not only written several plays for TV, but he also holds a high place among the short story writers of the era. He came to be known as the rising star of the generation which came after Manto, Krishan Chander and Ismet Chughtai. Following the basis of values laid down for a short story, he relied on realism and created characters and situations typical of the middle class reality.
Ashfaque Ahmed was always sore about the cleavage in the moral life of the human being in our developing social environment. During his last days, he constantly gave indication of his philosophical-cum-mystical thinking. He also tried to dispel the doubts about the Babas he revered. His contention was that the Babas he referred to could be found in any shape. It was not necessary that they would be sporting a grey beard and having strings of beads around their neck. A Baba, he said, could even be from the bureaucracy or be a student at the Oxford University.
Every known writer was present to accompany Ashfaque Ahmed on his last journey. But what surprised me was that the ladies present on the occasion almost outnumbered the men.
* * * * *
The latest issue of the literary monthly, Adab-e-Latif, carries two articles of my choice. One is about the great Russian write of the 19th century, Fedor Dostoevsky, and the other about a local intellectual-cum-writer, Dr Attiya Syed. But first about the Russian.
In the article written by Dr Ziaul Hasan, the author feels that Dostoevsky does not strictly conform to the parameters laid down for novel writing nor does he adhere to the rules of grammar. This is a strong statement, indeed. However, he avers that the way Dostoevsky puts his thoughts across in black and white succeeds in attracting the readers. The author further contends that the characters in his novels belong to the scum of society; yet he portrays them in such a manner that they appear dignified.
In other words, Dostoevsky portrays his characters objectively, not critically. The writer also believes that Dostoevsky has not criticised the religious beliefs in Brothers Karamazov but has only presented the way of thinking of the various characters. That way he has portrayed the hidden conflicts in their mind.
There is no denying that Brothers Karamazov, despite being somewhat vertiginous, is a masterpiece of world fiction. By encapsulating the intricate Russian soul, rather by defining 'russkost' or the essence of the Russian spirit, Dostoevsky has won enduring popularity. Moreover, the ideas propounded by him in his novels are philosophical as openly acknowledged by Nietzsche and Freud. Both Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov revolve around the grisly killing of elderly people. But then Dostoevsky masterfully uses the situation to provide a microcosm of Russian society in that period and humanity in general.
Now about Dr Attiya Syed. She seems to have made a thorough study of the short stories of the German writer, Peter Bischel, and has even mentioned the conflict in the thoughts of the philosopher, Heiddeger, and Bischel. Attiya has very rightly termed Bischel's short stories as afsanchey - mini-stories, because of their brevity. But then she finds a lacuna in his thoughts. Like a true philosopher, she observes that Bischel does not seem to be thinking like a true German in his stories. Explaining, she says that Bischel was basically a Swiss who lived in Germany and wrote in that language. That was probably the reason that his thoughts were different from the born Germans.
The same issue of Adab-i-Latif carries an article by professors A.B. Ashraf and Salma Benali of Turkey about Attiya Syed's short story writing. Her first collection appeared in 1995 under the title Shehr-i-Haul but the writers have concentrated on her second collection, Hikayat-i-Junun. They have specially appreciated her for maintaining the element of the story in her writings as it had, unfortunately, been thrown in the background when people resorted to abstract tales. Besides the variety in her observations and descriptions she has the ability of presenting harsh realities in an acceptable form.
The writers have further observed that Attiya's short stories are not only philosophical but also poetic. She has the ability to weave a gripping story around an insignificant incident.Although most of the stories in this collection have been written in foreign locales, their plots are straightforward. Moreover, the stories are not padded with unnecessary words which is a rare quality.