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TWO friends from Pakistan sent me Akbar Ilahabadi’s couplet the other day, one aware that I was making a short trip to England, the other possibly timing the verse by fluke. ‘Sidhaarein sheikh Kaabe ko hum Inglistan dekhenge/ Wo dekhe’n ghar khuda ka, hum khuda ki shaan dekhenge.’ (The sheikh heads to the Holy Kaaba, while I set off for England/ He gets to see the house of God, as I shall see God’s majesty.)
The humour of the couplet has revealed itself in waves over the last couple of days in England. Let’s recount two or three moments when I could not help smiling at its amazing relevance to anyone visiting England.
The 69-year-old Lala, who does odd jobs at friendly homes in the Bury district of Lancashire arrived in Akbar’s Inglistan in 2011. He told me he was a fugitive from “violent mullahs” in Pakistan. His father Chaudhry Mohammed Ghaus was an acclaimed wrestler from Hoshiarpur, now part of Indian Punjab. “The English were very fond of him. But when they invited him to come to England he refused. He said we are fighting you. How can I come to your country?”
Lala laughs wryly. He had Christian friends in Lahore and stood by them when the mullahs fouled them. Their wrath drove him to England. He lives on temporary permits, an impediment to his returning to Pakistan even for brief visits. Lala is enamoured of British indulgence in letting him be. Not surprisingly, he is partial to Jeremy Corbyn.
A visit to the 17th-century Chetham’s Library in Manchester can be an experience that is unique to Inglistan.
A traffic jam outside the Old Trafford cricket stadium in Manchester revealed a throng of Pakistanis in a festive mood, replete with the national flag and a slice of hooliganism that English soccer louts are more notorious for. Where else could a Pakistani youngster shout insults at a white man caught in a traffic jam except in Inglistan? Cricket is a British heritage, and the Pakistanis beat the host team by nine wickets at Old Trafford. The white man applauded. Akbar Ilahabadi would smile.
Akbar was also alluding to a non-material culture that comes with Britain’s visual splendour. What strikes one is a societal evolution the monuments embrace and reflect, a refined tradition oil-pressed from the blood and gore of British history.
I am not aware of an Indian king who beheaded his wives to marry another. But England doesn’t seem to have had a Wajid Ali Shah either, a king better known for composing music and ballets than administration. However, where if not in England would you find a king who abdicated his throne to marry the woman he loved? Akbar didn’t live long enough to witness this Inglistani romance but he may have had some idea.
A visit to the 17th-century Chetham’s Library in Manchester can be an experience that is unique to Inglistan. This is not because Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met there to begin a lifelong subversion of capitalism, thereby of England. Their meetings in the library’s bay window on the first floor were conspiratorial, and, if the duo had their way, the revolution would begin from England, not Russia or Germany. This phase of Marx’s life is not known to his followers as the fact that their guru lies resting in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Chetham’s Library is where the Communist Manifesto was conceived.
(Being familiar with Highgate Cemetery and not the Chetham’s Library reminds one of a frustrated Uzbek travel agent dealing with Indians visiting Tashkent. Every man and woman from India, he complained, wants to know in which hotel in the city former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died. “We want to ask the curious visitors, will they at least tell us where Shastri was born too,” the agent grumbled to one erring group.)
England’s social mosaic forms an essential element in the splendour that may have impressed the maverick poet. Britain’s former colonies embellished the splendour with their talent. Creative men and women from the subcontinent have adopted England as their second home. Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru and others who railed against British rule learnt the grammar of dissent in and from England.
Adding to the irony were rebels from the subcontinent with a wider political aperture than a mere national cause. They advocated global revolution to the chagrin of Britain’s intelligence community. Left-wing students emerged at different periods as British citizens whose roots lay in the subcontinent and elsewhere though their ideological canvas spread to the far corners of an unequal world.
Lord Chetham was an industrialist who secured a 15th-century building to run a school for abandoned and impoverished boys thrown up by Dickensian England in its industrial frenzy. The books Marx and Engels read at the library in the summer of 1845 are still held affectionately with many thousand older tomes. Marx’s reading list included John Aikin’s A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester (London, 1795), Frederick Morten Eden’s The State of the Poor (London 1795), and William Petty’s Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic (London 1699). Akbar’s ready wit and British humour would have blended nicely on a Virgin train to London.
A verse would have gushed forth from the toilet whose users’ instructions reads: “Please don’t flush nappies, sanitary towels, paper towels, gum, old phones, unpaid bills, junk mail, your ex’s sweater, hopes, dreams or goldfish down the toilet.” England’s majesty was sublime and ridiculous.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn September 13th, 2016
