AN art critic, political commentator, and prolific writer, F.S. Aijazuddin has come up with his 18th book that sails the choppy seas of the ‘fickle’ ’70s to record for posterity events whose traumatic consequences are still with us. The 20th century’s seventh decade — the time frame of Aijazuddin’s second book of memoirs — begins with the Bhutto era and ends when Gen Ziaul Haq is still ruling the roost. He is harsh on both, because political changes and the accompanying shake-up in Pakistan’s corporate structure created problems which were, for him, as much national as personal.

As the book shows, Aijazuddin’s personality combines an art critic’s placidity with the pitiless pursuit of a profession that couldn’t be more antithetical to art: business and finance. Yet the combination of the two incompatibles didn’t prevent Aijazuddin from having a full and self-fulfilling life, enriched by his love of the fine arts, a taste for the very best on the globe, including Ingrid Bergman (“I almost converted to Christianity”), glittering dinners “with a waiter in attendance behind every diner,” cricket as Imtiaz Ahmed’s opening partner, a family man to the extent of being obsessive, a teacher, and finally an OBE diplomat. For him, the world of art is a bower, not far from the madding crowd, but in the midst of it all. Thus, art and the nerve-wracking charms of a mundane career is what the book is about, and he seems to revel in it.

A taste of what Aijazuddin had to go through in building his career in the troubled 1970s is the very title of chapter 10, ‘Blood-letting at NFC.’ As finance and planning director of the National Fertiliser Company, art lover Aijazuddin went about setting up fertiliser plants, managing tractor manufacture, and sorting out pay scales in an atmosphere reeking of suspicion and intrigue.

The Fickle ’70s (MEMOIR) | By F.S. Aijazuddin | Sang-e-Meel, Lahore | ISBN: 978-9693529685 | 396pp.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s swipe at the tycoons was bound to cause massive managerial problems, and the author records the chaos expansively. If it were in his power, Gen Zia would have denationalised the taken-over units in one go, but he dithered, possibly because the political antenna of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) — his allies in ousting Bhutto — must have alerted him to the possibility of a union backlash. No one would have been more aware of possible unrest among workers than the PNA’s secretary general, Professor Abdul Ghafoor Ahmed, whom Gen Zia, “a tin-hat Caesar,” made head of the Board of Industrial Management.

Prof Ghafoor does find a fleeting mention in the book, but Aijazuddin dwells largely on his own experiences and troubles which the industry and he himself faced in an intricate web of bureaucracy characterised by ego, ambition, jealousy, and fear among “cringing conspirators.” As he records in his diary, a certain colleague “accused me of manoeuvring to supplant him from the GM-ship,” and a palmist told him something was blocking his progress — “either a spell or just some well-aimed shaft of jealousy.” Likening himself to Cassandra, Aijazuddin writes: “even after all these years I can see how manipulative I must have been in securing a position for which I felt professionally and administratively qualified.”

A meticulous keeper of record and diary, Aijazuddin writes about boardroom proceedings and banter in detail, often to the boredom of the reader, but manages to convey the chaos that reigned in the public sector despite the presence of some undoubtedly competent hands. Through caustic comments, the author laces his opinion about people and policies with wit and humour. He replies, for instance, sardonically but within the limits of officialese, to a section officer who asks why the return of the Italian dead at state expense was included in a given contract. Aijazuddin says that he had checked with PIA that it would be cheaper to “ship a dead expatriate in a recumbent posture than send him alive in an upright condition. There is, therefore, a potential saving to the public exchequer.”

The diary portion is a book unto itself, replete with some very original comments away from the corporate snarl: “The two signatories to the Shimla Agreement, who bargained and haggled over 93,211 POWs [...] today find themselves behind bars — ZAB in Rawalpindi and Mrs IG in Delhi”; Ghulam Ishaq Khan “more a pickled than a seasoned bureaucrat,” with a “mandarin’s fingers [...] incapable of identifying priorities”; Gen Zia “a tawdry, opinionated and guile-less imitation of Yahya Khan”; cousin Abida Hussain “a turncoat”; or a remarkable twist to the popular Muslim belief when he visits the USSR on an official trip: “In Moscow metro, cleanliness is next to anti-Godlessness.” There is no doubt he has a powerful pen, and the account of his daughter’s birth could be a piece from a gripping novel.

Aijazuddin’s passion, however, is art, and that takes him around the world not as a museum habitué, but as an authority invited on lecture tours by some of the world’s leading art galleries and academies. Of the books he has written, four, I believe, are on art, the first one being Pahari Paintings and Sikh Portraits at the Lahore Museum, which established him as a recognised international expert on art in the Sikh era. He even pilfers objets d’art — “stolen, and therefore all the more precious.”

No matter how deep he is in the thick of bureaucratic farragoes, the author keeps returning to the world of art, as if haunted by guilt, to get lost in arcane arguments about art and artists with legends such as Abdur Rahman Chughtai and his friend W.G. Archer. He was beholden to the Archers and dwells at length not only on his long association with them, but with the artist couple’s own life where their very existence revolved around art, especially South Asian. He cried when Archer committed suicide in his London home. Pakistan also lost Shakir Ali and Chughtai during this period.

His Indian connections, however, give insight into the kind of high-voltage relationship Pakistanis and Indians have, for they are never far from a flare-up, even when the discussants exercise restraint. At a meeting in Hyderabad, an Indian sarcastically remarks about a Muslim’s ability to fully comprehend a given Hindu classic. Aijazuddin’s reply cannot be reproduced for reasons of space, but the academic altercation shows how an Indo-Pakistani argument, even if it is about art, is never far from turning into a UN General Assembly slugfest. Or when a Sikh lady asks his wife if Gen Yahya wasn’t “a lecher?” Mrs Aijazuddin, whose uncle Yahya was, snaps back: “No more so than Ranjit Singh, really.”

The book will interest students of the history of art in South Asia besides those doing research on Pakistan’s cataclysmic ’70s. It is difficult sometimes to distinguish between quotes from the diary and the text, for the printers have chosen the same font. The book needs fresh proofreading, and the index is shockingly brief.

The reviewer is Dawn’s Readers’ Editor.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 5th, 2017