India (61 page)

Then the language started changing. Children over here were learning Hindi, and Muslim parents did not teach their children Urdu. We literally murdered Urdu. There was no preservation, such as the Armenians did for their language or the Jews did for Hebrew. Next to the religion, the language was dearest to the Muslim heart, because that was the essence of his identity. Urdu was not far from Hindustani, the lingua franca of the elite of the north-west. But Hindustani started changing, started to be more Sanskritized, became Hindi.’

In 1971 Rashid’s parents went to Pakistan for the wedding of the brother who had migrated a few years before. While they were there, the second Indo-Pakistan war, the war over Bangladesh, occurred. Rashid’s father, now very old, died in Pakistan at that time; his mother stayed on with the married son.

‘Another strand was broken in my relationships. Up to this time I had been apprenticed to my father’s shop. But when he passed away in Pakistan – and since the business was collapsing anyway – I closed it down.’

The shop had been started 60 years before, in the year of the coronation of the King-Emperor George V; it was closed down in the year the state of Pakistan broke into two. The whole life of the shop – though Rashid didn’t make the point – had been contained between those two historical moments.

Rashid began to drift. He went to England and did odd jobs there. He sold six-month accident insurance for two pounds and five pounds from door to door. He had to knock and say, ‘Good morning, are you the proprietor? My name is Rashid, and I believe
this will interest you.’ He hated the business of knocking on doors. One day – memories of Landau, the watch-seller, in the very big corner shop in Lucknow came to Rashid – a Jewish antique dealer from France opened to him, and told him, with some concern, that he wouldn’t make it as an insurance salesman in London and he should go back to India. Rashid went to work in a pancake house. He worked in a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. He learned to cut a chicken into nine equal pieces with an electric saw and to deep-fry the pieces for 11 minutes. He cut up 120 chickens a day.

He left England after two years. He went to Pakistan. He found they had no ‘identity crisis’ there; religion was not a man’s distinguishing feature. But he didn’t like the Pakistan money culture, the business aggressiveness of people who, when they had been in Lucknow, had been more easy-going. He didn’t like the boasting about money and possessions; in Lucknow that simply wasn’t done. He left, and went back to India, to Bombay, and worked for three years in an export company.

He was waiting for an inheritance. He was hoping to use that to go into the real estate business. But then he ran into a communal-minded official, and he began to find all kinds of obstructions thrown in his way. The litigation he had started then had gone on and on. He was near the end now, and the chances were that he was going to get what was his; but he had wasted many active years.

‘I had never faced a communal problem before. Communal riots were something that happened to the lower classes. It’s like the ethnic trouble you hear about in Pakistan. When I read or hear about it, I know that my brother won’t be involved, that his house will be far away from the trouble. So, here, I mixed with my Hindu friends and never gave the matter a thought – until I had to face the wrath of a communal officer. That did shake me – that a man, just by the flick of his pen, could change my life so much.

The Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 was a watershed not only in Muslim lives, but also in Hindu-Muslim relationships. The myth of Muslim superiority was all finished. Here was India playing a decisive role in the sub-continent. Every Muslim had a soft corner in his heart for Pakistan, and everyone was sad that the experiment had failed after less than 25 years. The dream had died. Then the Pakistani soldiers were prisoners of war for two years. That was a constant reminder.

‘I would feel a change taking place in personal relationships. My Hindu friends started lecturing. “What are Muslims doing with themselves?” They started becoming reformist about the Muslim faith and what they saw as our archaic practices. “How long are you Muslims going to carry on like this? How long are you going to be so dependent on your mullahs, your
mohallas?
” The sad fact was that there was a lot of truth in what they said. I was hurt, but we had to take it.’

The main palace of the last Nawab of Oude, the Kaiserbagh Palace in Lucknow, was nearly all destroyed by the British during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In 1867, when British power seemed secure again, unchallenged, the surviving wing of the Kaiserbagh was given to the Raja of Mahmudabad as a city residence.

Almost 70 years later, the descendant of the Raja became the treasurer of the Muslim League, and campaigned for the formation of a separate Muslim state of Pakistan. Pakistan came into being 10 years later. And then – as though he hadn’t fully worked out the consequences of the creation of Pakistan: Lucknow was in India, and many hundreds of miles away from Pakistan – the Raja found that he had made himself a wanderer. It wasn’t until 1957 that he commited himself to the state for which he had campaigned. In that year he became a Pakistani citizen; with the result that, during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, all the Raja’s property in Lucknow, the palaces and land, were taken over by the Indian government as enemy property.

The family property was still alien (rather than enemy) property. But petitions had been made to the Indian government, and the Raja’s son, Amir, now lived in the Kaiserbagh Palace that had been granted by the British to his ancestor 120 years before.

I had met Amir in Parveen’s drawing-room. He was in Indian evening dress, the long coat, the tight trousers. He was a small man, delicate in visage, sturdy in body, and he had the manner of a prince. An English public school and some years at Cambridge had given him an English style. But when I next met him, in the library of his palace, he was to tell me that when he spoke another language, Urdu, say, and when he was with people – Muslims, Shias – who might have looked up to him as a prince and a defender of the faith, he was quite different. Recent history had given him
many styles, many personalities; had imposed strains on him such as his ancestors hadn’t known.

Amir was now in state politics, and for three years or so had been a member of the Legislative Assembly in the Congress interest. His father had belonged to the Muslim League, which in the 1930s and 1940s had been opposed to the Congress. But now in India the Congress was the party that best served the interest of Muslims; and, in a further twist, as a politician Amir used the title, Raja of Mahmudabad, to establish the link with his forebears, and to give ‘a focus of identification’ to the local Shia and Muslim community.

His father’s association with Pakistan could have been politically damaging; but Amir said that the people of Mahmudabad, 80 per cent of whom were Hindu, had never shown him or his family any hostility. And Amir honoured his father’s memory. His father was a deeply religious man, with streaks of mysticism. He hated his caste, Amir said.

‘My father never wanted to be a ruler. He couldn’t bring himself to be a raja. He was most uneasy about benefiting from it. He thought income earned from property was tainted, since it wasn’t earned by the sweat of one’s brow.’

That idea had come to Amir’s father when he was a child. It was an idea he had got from his mother. She, Amir’s father’s mother, came from a family of poor Muslim scholars who considered learning to be superior to wealth.

‘My father’s father was a maharaja, a man of personality, but not a socialist. He married for a second time, and relations between him and my father became strained. This was no doubt when my father developed his attitude to his caste. One of the first things I heard from my father – which I later understood to be one of the teachings of Ali – was: “You will not find abundant wealth without finding by its side the rights of people that have been trampled.” And: “No rich morsel is eaten without there being in it the hunger of those who have worked for it.” ’

I said that such statements applied to poor or feudal countries. They couldn’t apply to all countries.

Amir said, ‘People in England may not be able to understand the kind of destitution and misery that exists in India.’

Though Amir didn’t say so directly, it might have been his father’s religious nature that made him campaign for a separate
Islamic state of Pakistan – not merely a homeland for Muslims, but a religious state. Amir’s father began wearing homespun when he was very young. When, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the Muslim League, he gave up music, which he and the rest of the family had loved – Indian classical music, western classical, Iranian classical.

Amir was born in 1943. When he was two years old, his ears were pierced. It was the custom in Muslim countries for slaves’ ears to be pierced; and the piercing of Amir’s ears meant that he had been sold to the Imam: the child had been pledged to the service of the Shia faith. This service began soon. When India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Amir, then aged four, started on a wandering life with his father and mother.

‘After partition my father left India. He was a very committed man, but he wasn’t a politician. Just before independence we were in Baluchistan, in Quetta, in what had become Pakistan. On the day of independence we crossed the border into Iran. We went to Zahedan, and from there we went in two buses to Mashhad, and then to Tehran. We went on to Iraq by air. The convoy followed by road. This was in 1948.’

Although they were now living this wandering life, Amir’s father had transferred no money out of India. All he had taken with him were books and carpets.

‘My father was invited to return to India on certain conditions – that he took no part in public life, that he condemned the Nizam of Hyderabad, and that he spoke out against cow-slaughter. These conditions were not acceptable to my father. He said he was willing to give an undertaking not to eat beef personally, but he couldn’t speak out against cow-slaughter, because beef was the cheapest food for Muslims.’

They went, in Iraq, still with Indian passports, to Kerbala. This was the site of the battle where Hussain, son of Ali, had died; it was sacred ground to Shias. On this sacred ground there arose in Amir’s father’s mind – perhaps it had been there all along – some idea of having his son become an ayatollah, a Shia divine. In 1950 Amir, aged seven, was sent to a religious school in Kerbala. He stayed at the school for two years. And then his father – who had begun to earn a livelihood by importing tea and jute from India – changed his mind, and decided that Amir should have a secular education, after all. This didn’t mean, Amir said, a turning away
from the religious side of things. Ali himself had said, The best form of worship is reflection and thought, and there is no form of worship that is better than reflection, thought and knowledge.’ Before Ali, the Prophet had said, ‘Acquire knowledge if you have to go to China.’

I asked Amir, ‘What did they mean by knowledge?’

He said, ‘Ali was once asked, “What is knowledge?” He said, “Knowledge is of two kinds. One is the knowledge of religions.” And that is interesting – the plural,
religions
, rather than religion. “The other is the knowledge of the physical world.” ’

The first idea was that Amir should be sent to a Jesuit school outside India. But then it was decided to send Amir and his mother back to Lucknow; and in Lucknow Amir, now in his 10th year, was enrolled at the Anglo-Indian school of La Martinière. This was when Amir – who had seemed so English in Parveen’s drawing-room – began to speak English; until then his languages had been Urdu and Persian.

Culture upon culture now: because the boy who went to La Martinière felt, after his time in Iraq, that part of him was Arab or Iranian. After his classes at La Martinière there were special religious lessons at home every day, in the very room of the palace where we were now sitting – cool, with the solid brick-work of old Lucknow, with a terrazzo floor, and with bookshelves inset in the damp-marked, whitewashed walls.

The Muslim and Shia festivals were also constant reminders of the faith. Amir took 12 days off for Mohurram – ‘The principal of La Martinière was most disapproving’ – and a further four days for the 40th day after the martyrdom. At the end of Mohurram there were another eight days off, and there were four days more in Ramadan – the month of purification, and of the martyrdom of Ali, and of the beginning of the revelation of the Koran.

During his time at La Martinière Amir was living in the palace with his mother, his two aunts, and his father’s brother and his wife. To protect him from untoward influences, he was not allowed to visit other boys or to become involved with their families. He had his own guardian, a childless man, who stayed in the palace day and night. This man – who also had a knowledge of Urdu and Persian which Amir found remarkable – followed Amir ‘like a shadow’, even when the boy went to the cinema or a restaurant. At
La Martinière he would wait in the car, or just outside it, sitting on a carpet on the ground, while Amir was at his classes.

‘As a result of this I became a reticent person, extremely withdrawn. I had difficulty in talking. If there were outsiders, I found it impossible to open my mouth.

‘I used to wear philacteries underneath my shirt, and boys at school would feel them and tease me. The other thing I used to wear were ear-rings, in my pierced ears. I used to wear an emerald in my right ear, and a ruby in the left. This looked very strange, and I would twist both my ears and hide the stones behind the ear lobe. I took these off – I was permitted to take them off – when I went to England, after the end of my schooling here.’

All this time the Raja, Amir’s father, had been living in Iraq. But then in 1957, 10 years after the creation of Pakistan, he took the step which was to cause his family a good deal of hardship: the Raja went to Pakistan, and changed his Indian passport for a Pakistani one.

Amir said, ‘My mother became very ill when she heard the news, right here. My mother is a rani in her own right, a woman of great pride. She never tried to take anything from my father. She was also religious. She lost both her parents when she was nine. She was ill when she heard the news about my father in Pakistan, because she felt that the great crises of 1947 had passed – not one voice had been raised in Mahmudabad against my father. Nehru met my father and asked him to think again, and to keep his Indian passport. Nehru said, “You’ve always acted impulsively. We all would be happy if you return and take your passport back.” My father said, “One cannot change one’s nationality like one’s clothes.” ’