AT our first formal mess night at the Kakul Academy in 1967 (how time flies) a strange ceremony greeted our eyes. At table as Rooh Afza was poured into our liqueur glasses a cadet seated at one end stood up, raised his glass and uttered the mystifying words, "Mr Vice". At this we all stood up, raised our glasses and in loud voices intoned, "The President of Pakistan". The Rooh Afza, not quite the liquid I would fancy now, went down our throats.
What on earth were we up to? As officers of the Indian army in days gone by drank to the health of the Sovereign, we, following much the same tradition, were drinking to the health of the president, then Field Marshal Ayub Khan and later General Yahya.
Things soon became clearer. We were being trained as officers and 'gentlemen'. At Kakul the stress was on character-building and how we would fare in the face of adversity. Integrity was not to be compromised. Lying and cheating were the greatest sins in the calendar. And mess manners were to be impeccable.
In the civil and police academies it was the same. Hence the horse-riding and table manners and the inculcation of a standoffish attitude. While no one was gauche enough to say this explicitly, what we were supposed to acquire were the attributes of an English gentleman. That many of the budding officers had only a dim understanding of what this meant was of course a different matter.
Pakistan's elite classes were much more homogeneous than they are nowadays. English manners defined the upper classes everywhere. In period photographs it is common to see members of the gentry wearing evening clothes. In Sherbaz Mazari's book of reminiscences there is a photograph of him and Nawab Akbar Bugti at the races: in morning suits and hats. The Sahibs were at one level and the masses at another and the dividing line between the two was sharp and clearly demarcated.
But a flaw ran deep through this flummery. To all outward appearances the Pakistani upper classes were more British than their erstwhile masters. But this Britishness was on the surface: all form and little substance. At its core lay a great deal of confusion.
Being a gentleman in England or France or Czarist Russia was not only about horse races, balls, evening clothes and waltzing to the strains of the Blue Danube. More than these outward symbols of class it meant conforming to a certain code of honour. From public school to university and from there to the callings of adult life, adherence to this code is what defined a gentleman. He was the modern equivalent of the knight of the Middle Ages, the samurai of Japan, a member of the equestrian order in Rome. Indeed in all cultures where the martial tradition ran strong - Rajput, Maratha, Sikh, Afghan, whatever - he would have his counterpart.
But with the Pakistani Sahib there is a deep-seated problem. The Rajput, Sikh and Afghan derived his code of conduct and gallantry from his culture and history. When the European acted superior and paraded his colonial stuff, his attitude too fitted into a frame of history. His ideas of right and wrong, his conception of gentlemanly behaviour, his tastes and the culture these tastes reflected drew strength from a tradition going back to Homer and the earliest Greeks. His outlook on life thus had an historic memory.
What is the intellectual tradition to which the Pakistani Sahib can refer? Whence comes his inspiration? From a mishmash of two elements: the use of the English language as an end in itself, as opposed to English being a passport to an intellectual tradition; and visions of glory associated with India's Mughal past. To nothing more immediate or tangible can he (or rather we) relate. The British experience has left a powerful imprint on our psyche. The outward forms of that experience we have faithfully copied but its spirit we have failed to imbibe. This accounts in large part for our intellectual confusion.
It also accounts, I think, for the failure of our political class to master the problems of democracy and administration. Why must power lead always to excess? Why cannot its exercise be tempered with caution and moderation? To a great extent because the Sahib class, which is Pakistan's governing class, has no sense of history. To what models can it relate its conduct? In the light of what examples can it measure its steps?
The British experience has been reduced to a set of ephemera: turbaned waiters, leather sofas, chota pegs (or rather, since we like our whisky, burra pegs), tweed coats, cricket (now increasingly golf) and a vague nostalgia for an era when trains ran on time and things were more 'liberal'. Our public schools (Aitchison, Lawrence, etc) excel at turning out little scholars who can speak the English language with ease, have a confident manner but whose classical education does not go beyond a single play of Shakespeare's (that too because it is in the O Level curriculum).
Once upon a time institutions like Lahore's Government College and the Punjab University (and even places like Gordon College and Edwardes College) were homes to learning and produced students with a 'liberal' bent of mind. But with the collapse of college and university education Pakistan is producing a generation of political illiterates, with no sense of the past and little insight into the future.
This is not to say British public schools are nurseries of academic brilliance. But they are links in a chain which extends to the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There too you find the usual complement of time-servers and dunces. But there is also genuine learning which year after year chips away at the frontiers of knowledge, ever endeavouring to extend them, and sustains and enriches Britain's governing class. Much the same is true of other advanced countries.
What about India? In some ways it is better off than us. Up to the beginning of the 19th century the Indian mind knew very little of its past. It had no sense of history and Indian archaeology lay unexplored. Then under the impact of western and mainly English scholarship the past became a living reality for the Indian mind. Flushed with this discovery, an attempt was made to invent a past which never really existed, Nehru's 'Discovery of India' falling into this category of fiction writing.
Even so, the Hindu revivalism of the 19th century had an enlightened basis to it. But this movement was dragged in a different direction when Gandhi took Hindu nationalism closer to the people and gave it a reactionary colouring. Thus was drawn a sharper line between Hindus and Muslims. Thus was partition made inevitable. From Socrates onwards, popular causes have often led to unintended consequences.
But through all this India at least acquired a long line of heroes. The Pakistani pantheon by contrast is thinly peopled. Syed Ahmad Khan, Iqbal, Jinnah: that's about it. And even as far as these three are concerned efforts have been afoot to make them out to be what they were not. For the last 50 years and more Pakistan's clerics have tried putting a skull-cap on Jinnah while the Sahibs, awash in nostalgia, are drawing a line under their own failures by seeking the shortest passage out of the country.