A review of "Muslims against partition" (Shamsul Islam)

• Kuldeep Kumar

The standard narrative about the Partition, actively propagated by the Hindu communalists and innocently believed by most Hindus, puts the onus on the Muslim masses that supported the Muslim League’s demand for a separate country. It is not uncommon to hear people referring to an area where Muslims live in substantial numbers as “Pakistan”. However, as a recently published book tells us, the reality is very different.

“Muslims Against Partition”, written by the multi-talented theatre activist, anti-communal propagandist and political scientist Shamsul Islam and published by Pharos Media and Publishing Pvt. Ltd., offers an eye-opening account of the way a large number of Muslim political leaders, thinkers and organisations opposed the idea of Pakistan and actively worked against it. Renowned historian Harbans Mukhia has penned a thought-provoking Foreword wherein he praises the writer for drawing our attention to the ambivalent attitude of the Congress to the question of communalism as it had many leaders who were sympathetic to the “exlusivist Hindu cause”.

All of us know about prominent Muslim leaders like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, M. A. Ansari, Asaf Ali and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad who fiercely opposed the communal politics of the Muslim League. However, since they were in the Congress, their opposition to the creation of a separate homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims is generally ignored. What is remembered is the fact that the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah was successful in mobilising the Muslim elite as well as Muslim masses in support of its Pakistan demand and had won most of the Muslim seats in the 1946 election to provincial assemblies. However, most people remain unaware that this fact conceals a vital aspect of reality. The Sixth Schedule of the 1935 Act had restricted the franchise on the basis of tax, property and educational qualifications, thus excluding the mass of peasants, the majority of shopkeepers and traders, and many others. Thus, as Shamsul Islam informs us quoting from Austin Granville’s book on the Indian Constitution, only 28.5 per cent of the adult populations of the provinces could cast their votes in the 1946 provincial assembly elections. This makes it amply clear that the Pakistan demand was not supported by the majority of Muslims because only a small percentage of the Muslim population was eligible to vote.

Nationalist Muslims had started expressing themselves as early as 1883 when the Congress was not even born and nationalism was in the early stages of its inception. Shamsul Islam’s book contains a very informative chapter on Muslim patriotic individuals and organisations. It tells us the inspiring story of Shibli Nomani who established a National School in Azamgarh in 1883 and actively opposed the Muslim League agenda of cooperation with the British and opposition to the Hindus. Nomani, who died a year after Jinnah’s entry into the League in 1913, castigated the organisation because “everyday the belief which is propagated, the emotion which is instigated is (that) Hindus are suppressing us and we must organise ourselves.”

In a chapter titled “Two-Nation Theory: Origin and Hindu-Muslim Variants”, Shamsul Islam underlines the fact that much before the Muslim League came up with the two-nation theory, leaders such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, B. S. Moonje and Lajpat Rai were championing a Hindu nation. Much before them, Raj Narain Basu (1826-1899), maternal grandfather of Aurobindo Ghosh, and his close associate Naba Gopal Mitra (1840-1894) had emerged as the co-fathers of Hindu nationalism. Eminent historian R. C. Majumdar has remarked that “Naba Gopal forestalled Jinnah’s theory of two nations by more than half a century”. So, the onus for spreading the belief that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations that could not peacefully co-exist with each other should first be placed at the door of Hindu leaders.

Of all the Muslim leaders who were opposed to the idea of Partition, the case of Allah Bakhsh seems to be most interesting. When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a derogatory reference to the Indian freedom struggle and Quit India Movement, Allah Bakhsh, who as head of the Ittehad Party was the Premier (chief minister) of Sind, decided to return his titles of Khan Bahadur and Order of the British Empire (OBE). Consequently, he was dismissed by the Viceroy. Later, he was assassinated by supporters of the Muslim League and his murder paved the way for the entry of the separatist organisation into Sind. The rest, as they say, is history.

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First Published in The Hindu

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The book is available on Amazone.in. Click here to buy it online. 

A tribute to Bhisham Sahni

Hindi Belt

by Kuldeep Kumar

Had he not passed away on July 11, 2003, Bhisham Sahni would have turned 100 today. Officially, that is. As he mentions in his autobiography “Aaj ke Ateet” (Today’s Pasts), his parents disagreed on his date of birth. His mother insisted that he was one year and eleven months younger to his elder brother Balraj but his father got his date of birth entered in the school records as August 8, 1915, thus making him younger by a few months more. It’s a measure of his stature as a political and cultural activist, short story writer, novelist, playwright and actor that even the Narendra Modi government at the Centre is celebrating his birth centenary through Sahitya Akademi although he was opposed to the political ideology of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Even those who are not familiar with Hindi literature know about his novel “Tamas” (Darkness) and the tele-serial of the same name made by Govind Nihalani who later turned it into a film as well. As a child, Bhisham Sahni had witnessed communal riots in his native Rawalpindi. As a young Congress worker, he campaigned against communal politics of the mid-1940s and experienced the horrors, forced displacement and unprecedented violence that preceded and followed the cataclysmic event of the Partition. His family too had to migrate to this side of the newly created border and had to wage a struggle to survive and settle down. After Yashpal’s “Jhootha Sach” (False Truth) and Rahi Masoom Raza’s “Aadha Gaon” (Half-a-Village), “Tamas” is the third significant novel through which a creative writer tries to understand as well as explain as to what went had gone wrong to bring such a monumental tragedy upon the Indian sub-continent.

The novel remained dormant for many years and the memories of the Partition were brought to the surface by a visit to the riot-hit Bhiwandi in 1971 in the company of his elder brother Balraj Sahni and some other colleagues. “Tamas” was published in 1974 by Rajkamal Prakashan and received the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award the very next year. At the moment, it has got inextricably attached with its writer’s name. It has been translated into many languages including English, French, German, Japanese, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kashmiri and Manipuri.

Such phenomenal popularity of a work often overshadows its writer’s other creations as had happened in the case of Shrilal Shukla who was known by his novel “Raag Darbari”. I became aware of this fact when recently, Ramesh Upadhyaya, a well-known fiction writer in Hindi, remarked that when he started reading Bhisham Sahni’s novel “Mayadas ki Madi”, he enjoyed it even more than reading “Tamas” and felt that from the point of view of the art of fiction writing, it was perhaps a better novel than “Tamas."

Although Bhisham Sahni wrote a number of excellent short stories, “Chief ki Dawat” remains the most admired of them. As a writer, what distinguished him was his humanism, compassion and an ability to bring into sharp relief the human essence of even a palpably inhuman situation. In his life as well as literature, he was a most unassuming person whose humility at times embarrassed others. His plays such as “Hanush”, “Madhavi” and “Kabira Khada Bazar Mein” proved to be great theatrical successes and he is perhaps one of the very few writers who have been awarded by both Sahitya Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi. He was also honoured with Padma Bhushan and Fellowship of the Sahitya Akademi.

Like his elder brother Balraj Sahni, Bhisham Sahni too was very closely associated with Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) that played a historic role in creating a pan-Indian progressive cultural movement and bringing artistes such as Ravi Shankar, Balraj Sahni, K A Abbas, Salil Chaudhary, Shailendra, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and many others on one platform. This experiece stood him in good stead when he acted in tele-serial “Tamas” and Saeed Mirza’s film “Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho”, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “Little Buddha” and Aparna Sen’s film “Mr. and Mrs. Iyer”. He also wrote the screenplay for Kumar Shahani’s film “Kasba”.

A Punjabi to the core, he chose to become a Hindi writer and managed to retain both the identities in a unique manner. He spelt his name as Bhisham (as Punjabis would pronounce it) in English and as Bhishma (the correct Sanskrit pronunciation) in Hindi. His other works included “Mayadas ki Madi”, “Kadiyan”, “Basanti” and “Neeloo, Neelima, Nilofar”. Most of his books were published by Rajkamal Prakashan whose literary journal “Nai Kahani” he had edited for some time in the early 1960s.
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साभार : द हिन्दू 

Vignettes of literature then and now

Kuldeep Kumar, a well known writer and columnist use to write a regular column on Hindi Belt in The Hindu. In this piece he has concentrated on ALOCHANA, the literary magazine published by Rajkamal Prakshan. The intellectual bankruptcy of hindi literature coupled with the its sharp decline in terms of readers and critics has found a voice in this short note. 

A vivid account of the journey of ‘Aalochana’ from a magazine devoted primarily to literary criticism to its present avatar of catering to social sciences. Like individuals, magazines too re-invent themselves. And when an iconic Hindi magazine like “Aalochana” (Criticism) does it, the event is bound to stir the literary world because over the past seven decades, the magazine has become a veritable institution. Its first issue had come out in October 1951 under the editorship of progressive critic Shivdan Singh Chauhan. During those days, Cold War was raging between the capitalist camp led by the United States and the socialist camp headed by the erstwhile Soviet Union. Hindi literature was not immune to this all-pervasive political-ideological struggle. Against this backdrop, it was significant that Rajkamal Prakashan decided to bring out such a trend-setting journal devoted mainly to literary criticism. Chauhan ably edited the magazine and shaped it into a significant critical voice that was heard with seriousness. However, he could bring out only six issues of the quarterly as, in early 1953, the publishers thought it fit to hand over the magazine to an editorial board comprising Dharmvir Bharati, Vijaydev Narayan Sahi, Raghuvansh and Brajeshwar Verma and assisted by Kshemchandra Suman.

It was a tectonic shift as nearly all members of the new editorial board were Cold Warriors. Although they edited 11 issues, they could not steer the magazine well and after a mere five years of its publication, “Aalochana” got its third editor in well-known critic of chhayawad 

(romanticism) Nand Dulare Vajpeyi. In 1963, Shivdan Singh Chauhan was recalled to edit the magazine. Namwar Singh, who had acquired a formidable reputation as an intellectual and literary critic even in his youth, was called upon to take charge of “Aalochana” in 1967. Although he remains associated with it even today as its Chief Editor, it is well known that for the past nearly two decades, he has been more or less performing a supervisory role 

while the magazine was being successively edited by Parmanand Srivastava and Arun Kamal. Vishnu Khare, Nandkishore Naval, Prabhat Ranjan and R. Chetankranti have also been associated with it as Assistant Editors at various stages.

Apoorvanand, a professor at the Hindi Department of the Delhi University and a well-known commentator, is the newest editor of “Aalochana”. He has brought out two issues of the magazine together as they focus on an assessment of the Indian democracy made by social

scientists. This has given rise to a fierce controversy on the pages of Hindi daily “Jansatta” about the ideal nature of a literary journal.

On May 30, 2014, I had begun this column by bemoaning the fact that “for various reasons, Hindi has primarily been a language of literature and journalism and very little has been written in it on social or natural sciences”. While the situation has not undergone a sea change, it has certainly improved and books and articles have started being written in Hindi on issues of social sciences.

Last year, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Vani Prakashan had started a “peer-reviewed” journal “Pratiman” devoted to social sciences. Two of its issues were also devoted to the just concluded Lok Sabha elections. 

Decrying the metamorphosis of “Aalochana” from a journal of literary criticism into one focusing primarily on social sciences, Shambhunath, a retired Hindi professor, drew a parallel between it and “Pratiman” and saw a conspiracy to promote the ideological stance of the ‘subaltern school’.

Though the attack did not make much sense as Shambhunath lambasted something which deserved a hearty welcome, he was perhaps driven to it as “Pratiman” and “Aalochana” happen to share quite a few contributors. This has naturally resulted in sharing the way they look at social and political issues although raising the bogey of ‘subaltern school’ does not cut much ice. While both the issues are well edited and contain very interesting reading material, one feels amused to notice a regular column “Namwar Ke Notes” wherein former students of Namwar Singh present their class notes, or in their absence, notes prepared by Singh himself for his lectures.

One is reminded of Ferdinand de Saussure, the great French linguist whose collated lecture notes were published in 1916 after three years of his death in the form of an epoch-changing book titled “Cours de linguistique générale”. This book laid the foundation of Structuralism as well as Semiology as it offered a synchronic linguistic model that could be used to analyse and explain various phenomena. A man of sharp intellect and vast erudition, Namwar Singh is an excellent teacher but he is no Saussure. No new critical concept or theory (for example, “objective correlative” in the case of T. S. Eliot, “ostranenie” (defamiliarisation) in the case of Viktor Shklovsky and “analysis of creative process” in the case of our very own Muktibodh can be attributed to him.