| November 06, 2008 | Thursday | Ziqa'ad 7, 1429 |
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To face the past together
AT last America has shown bravery in facing its past. Barack Obama’s election as the country’s first black president could not be possible without a people who took the defining step to exorcise the demons of the slave trade upon which their country was founded.
The Obama victory is not any less significant than the triumph of human goodness over human evil witnessed elsewhere.
The Holocaust museums of Europe have carefully preserved the symbols of our murky past. In Cambodia and Rwanda, where ideologically driven or ethnically motivated genocide occurred more recently, their people have set up museums with relics of human atrocity stoically mirroring their reality, which we should hope has been consigned to the past. Bangladesh too has a memorial for the victims of the 1971 genocide of its citizens carried out by Pakistani troops and their Bengali collaborators.
Why is there no similar memorial to the massacre that we inflicted on ourselves with bare hands, swords, daggers and fire in 1947? Salima Hashmi asked her father Faiz Ahmad Faiz why even he, the sensitive leftist intellectual that he was, could write no more than just one poem that pertained to the Partition. “It was too big for us,” he told her. Writers like Manto did explore the theme of Partition, mostly mocking its absurdity and unbelievable mindlessness. In India Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon also made a tentative beginning but mainly from the feminist perspective.
No one really seems to have studied the madness that gripped us then and still threatens to revisit us ever so often. Even in art there was no Guernica or Picasso to capture the horror of the rivers of blood that flowed freely for weeks without shame or guilt just 61 years ago. Is there no lesson for us from that past?
My own feeling is that part of our reluctance to look the horrors of Partition in the eye has to do with the mythology we wallow in, of a superior people who believe in and taught the world Ahimsa. The massacres interfere with this myth. When the impish lyricist Javed Akhtar was offered an award in Patna, if I remember right, he was described as a symbol of India’s tradition of non-violence. He turned it down, saying he was as much a violent man as any Indian. Javed Akhtar added that Gandhi, India’s symbol of non-violence, was needed precisely to restrain an otherwise violent people. “You need soap when there is filth.”
The other reason I can offer to partly explain the absence of a Holocaust museum or something like it in India or Pakistan is that, unlike Europe, there was no victor in 1947. The two countries were created as independent nations and the bloodshed was the price they paid for this peculiarly violence-laced freedom.
In the absence of a victor, the narrative of Partition would need as many interpretations as there were sides to celebrate or reject it. However, there was a time when people, more so the left-oriented people, across the borders shared their worldview with comrades on the other side. In this way there was no dispute in the narrative.
That nexus has weakened. Instead a new set of participants with a nearly opposite view of history to the left have linked up across the frontiers from their respective states. We all more or less know that religious extremism is threatening to snuff out the remaining liberal spaces in South Asia, more specifically from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as never before. At the same time radical ethnic groups, comprising as many sides as there are to a conflict, are playing havoc in Sri Lanka, while similar groups elsewhere have not resolved their dangerous misgivings, for example in Nepal or Bhutan.
There is thus a negative and even destructive nexus that prevails across the region of people who have little to do with their shared past and more to do with their shared prejudices. Therefore, when an admired progressive activist and art historian from Pakistan like Salima Hashmi revealed during a discussion in Delhi that she had been “deliberately cautious” about overtly linking up with groups in India that are fighting for secular and democratic rights, she was heard with disbelief. Quizzed, she argued with considerable logic that it was best left to her Indian comrades to fight their own fight against communalism and religious fascism. Any explicit intervention by a foreigner, especially one coming from Pakistan, in such matters would strengthen the hand of right-wing reaction and, in fact, harm those they set out to help.
No matter how painfully absurd the daughter of Faiz Ahmad Faiz may have sounded, she made sense, to use a cliché, at a pragmatic level of the argument. Implied in her responses was a fear, real or imaginary, which she did not state but could be gleaned or sensed. The system on both sides that worked to defeat the solidarity of the liberal people across the borders and encouraged reactionary affinities to strike root has become a deterrent to the spirit of solidarity that once thrived.
What if Salima Hashmi spoke out stridently for, say, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat), the group named after communist playwright and activist Safdar Hashmi, and the next Indian high commissioner was advised to go slow in granting her otherwise generous share of visas? Such an eventuality would require her to suspend the remaining good work she does of cross-pollination of the creative arts in South Asia and beyond.
As she spoke on the complex and unresolved subject of the shadow of Partition on Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, including on their arts, my mind drifted to the emotive poem her father wrote on his country’s separation from what became Bangladesh. Hum ke thehrey ajnabi was, as far as I am aware, written by a grieving comrade at the pain inflicted on his Bengali compatriots by others who too he had considered his own. It was a delicate issue then and remains one today. But Faiz did intervene in cross-border matters. And so did Fehmida Riaz among a few others.
Tum bilkul hum jaisey nikley, ab tak kahaa’n chhupey thay bhai
Wo ghaamadpan wo jaahilpan jismey humney sadi gawaa’i
Ab pohnchi hai dwaar tumhaarey, arey badhai, bahot badhai.
(Now it seems my Indian friends that you too will burn
We endured the zealots for years, now it’s your turn
You were free from ignorance and that was a saving grace
Today we cheer you cynically on the strange embrace.)
The barbs in her tragicomic poem didn’t miss their target at an impromptu mushaira at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University a few years ago. An Indian army man who was listening to her whipped out his pistol. He was apparently unhappy about being reminded that his country had drifted into the rotten ways of religious bigotry that Pakistan had endured for decades. I rescued Fehmida and Ahmad Faraz and drove them away from the mushaira at breakneck speed. Facing our past still remains an act of bravery. We need to exorcise our demons like the Americans did on Tuesday.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
