April 28, 2002

AT 65 when most people would hang up their boots and walk into the sunset, the eminent broadcaster and writer Raza Ali Abidi is leading a busy and fruitful life. He was in Karachi on the invitation of the British Council to conduct a two-day workshop on translations for journalists of Urdu and regional languages.

He still writes and presents programmes for the broadcasting corporation, but now as a casual artist/writer. And what has he gained from the BBC? “The level of recognition and popularity that I achieved is something I couldn’t have imagined. I couldn’t get even a fraction of that in my 15 years of journalism. Also while staying in the UK, I had access to books, videos, audios, films, advice and expertise, which I couldn’t have dreamt of in India or Pakistan.”

The librarians there are highly cooperative, even the one heading a small library, in the locality, where he stays, arranges immediately for a publication when he asks for it, even if the library doesn’t have it.

Three of Abidi’s books are transcriptions of his radio programmes. His first research-based serial for the BBC was christened Kutub khanay. He visited the India Office Library and the British Library and unearthed several rare books written in Urdu. The programme soon began to enjoy a wide audience for in 15-minutes a listener got a lot of information about one particular book. It was designed to run for 12 weeks and thanks to the response from the listeners and Abidi’s own interest in the venture the programme ran for 120 weeks. That was in the seventies.

Later he learnt from Faiz Ahmad Faiz that there was a large number of rare Urdu books and manuscripts in India and Pakistan which needed to be unearthed. Abidi then undertook long and arduous trips across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. He travelled from Kolkata to Tonk and from Lahore to Mysore. He interviewed at least 50 people — scholars, librarians, sellers of rare books and dealers of manuscripts. But he worked more intensely in two regions — Sindh in Pakistan and Bhopal in India

Abidi returned with 40 hours of recording and pruned it to make 24 weekly programmes which rivalled the success and popularity of the earlier version of Kutub khanay. The serial was published in a book form in Pakistan and the printed version has been quite a success too. But his bestseller so far, has been Jarnaili sadak, which too was based on a BBC radio serial. It is all about the Grand Trunk Road that connects Peshawar with Kolkata. It was originally built by Sher Shah Suri and with minor variations rebuilt by the British. The king, according to Abidi, built the highway from Kolkata to Peshawar, while the Brits rebuilt it the other way round. During the War of Independence the road building came to a halt but once the colonial power put down, what they call, the mutiny, work was resumed.

The idea of Jarnaili sadak cropped up in the mind of his section head, David Page, who had taught English in Peshawar, and was impressed with the achievements of King Sher Shah Suri. Thus in the mid-eighties Abidi once again embarked on his Indo-Pak odyssey. Starting his journey from Peshawar, Abidi left by road for Lahore.

He couldn’t cross into India, because in those days due to disturbances in East Punjab foreigners were not allowed to enter the Indian state, so he flew from Lahore to the Indian capital from where he resumed his journey on road, travelling for most of the time in public buses, sometimes in taxis, and on a couple of occasions even on the bullock cart. He got to live in all sorts of places from five-star hotels to seedy and grubby living places, depending on the availability of accommodation in each town that he broke his journey for the day.

Several editions of Jarnaili sadak have been published from Pakistan and at least two from India. Had the book been published in the Devnagri script, its sales across the Wagah border would have been manifold.

Abidi’s third major serial on the BBC radio Sher darya has also been published in a book form. It is on the River Indus and it went into 60 episodes on the radio. He started his journey from Ladakh in Kashmir and ended it at Shah Bunder at the mouth of the delta. Since he couldn’t cross the Line of Control in Kashmir, he came right up to there and then went back to New Delhi from where he flew to Lahore. And interestingly enough, he resumed his journey from our side of the Line of Control.

But Raza Ali Abidi’s favourite book is Rail Kahani, and this was also based on a radio serial which he completed shortly before his retirement. He started from Quetta and travelled right up to Calcutta. On this occasion he was able to cross the Indo-Pak border, when he took the Samjhota Express.

During the course of his journey, he interviewed some coolies, old engine drivers, veteran ticket checkers, electricians and of course passengers at various stations and different trains. It also encompasses the early history of the railways in the subcontinent.

“The first train to run in the subcontinent was between Bombay and Thana, now a suburb of the megacity?” I try to check my knowledge. “Right, but do you know that the railway track from Calcutta to the coal mines in West Bengal was laid at the same time. However, the train service couldn’t start. The ship which was to unload the steam engine to haul that train was taken by mistake to Australia, so the service was delayed. Incidentally, the first locomotive to run on the soil of South Asia was on a track built near his home town Roorkee. It carried material for the building up of the Ganges canal,” he adds to my information.

Abidi’s next venture can be described as popular history. It’s being serialized in an Urdu monthly Raabta and should appear in book form after about three months. It’s about Munshi Abdul Karim, a khidmatgar of the great Queen Victoria, who employed a few Urdu knowing khidmatgars to learn Urdu from them, so that she could converse with the maharanis and begums of the states in India.

“Queen Victoria, who took pride in being called the Qaiser-i-Hind, was in love with India, which was truly the jewel in her crown,” he adds. When asked if she had had an affair with Munshi Abdul Karim, Abidi says, “So some people say, but had that been true she wouldn’t have signed some of her letters to him as ‘Your mother’. After her death, all the khidmatgars were sent back to India.”

Raza Ali Abidi was born in 1936 in Roorkee, a small town in UP close to the Haryana border, which has been known for having a top class engineering college, which later became a prestigious engineering university.

Abidi got his early education in Roorkee before the family migrated to the newly created country three years after Partition. He did his Matric from Bahadur Yar Jung School, Karachi, where the headmaster was the famous Urdu critic, Jameel Jalibi, and his Urdu teacher, none other than Khawaja Moinuddin, the well known playwright.

After graduating in Arts in 1957, Abidi joined a leading Urdu newspaper and later did a couple of stints with two other papers. In 1958, he got a short scholarship to study journalism at the Thomson Foundation’s Institute of Journalism at Cardiff. On his return to Karachi he resumed his work as a journalist.

In 1972 he got a job at Bush House as a programme assistant in the Urdu service of the BBC and continued to be so until 12 years ago when he became the deputy head of the Urdu service.

Abidi has begun to research on Begum Samro, the Kashmiri wife of Monsieur Sombre, the French mercenary in the service of the Mughal king, Shah Alam, who gifted her with the small Sardhana state, whose army she led after the death of her husband, even though she observed purdah. She later converted into a Catholic and built a church in the mini state. All this will be covered in Abidi’s next book. Abidi also has to his credit 16 booklets that he wrote for children after his retirement in 1996. Eight of these have been published by the government of Punjab. The print run of these books is huge — 30,000 copies. The cover price is quite cheap — a mere Rs3.

Music is just as great a passion for him as travelling, reading, researching and writing. He has collected a large number of film songs from the thirties and the forties — some of them quite rare. With the help of a computer programme, he ‘cleans’ the songs and deletes the scratchy sound of the stylus on the records, which is transferred on the tapes with the song itself. He has sold these ‘corrected recordings’ to an American recording company, which sends him a cheque for $100 every month, he reveals smilingly.

His forays in this field can be a subject of another article. “Let’s leave this for another sitting,” he says, as the clock strikes 12 midnight.

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