Column For 11th May 2003

Atal Behari Vajpeyi, Prime Minister of India can talk about a last chance for peace in his lifetime because in India, unlike Europe and the USA, death is not a forbidden subject. This may be because the Hindu looks upon death not as a full stop but as a comma, semi colon (;) or, at best, a colon (:).

The doctrine of Karma and the chain of life death and rebirths are as real for a Hindu as death itself. Moreover a very large number of Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, are influenced by mysticism. For the Sufi Death is the reunion of the finite soul with the infinite, a merger and a fulfillment. The word used for the passing of a Shaikh [Master] is not Death (Murrg) but Union (Wisaal).

It is against this background that we can appreciate Lala Kidar Nath Gupta (born 1st May 1915) beginning a telephone conversation with the verse

Paseiy murrg meireiy mazaar pur diyaa kaheen joa jalaa diyaa
Useiy aah! Daamaneiy baadaa neiy sareiy shaam hee seiy bujhaa diyaa

It is unlikely that anyone would, after my death, light up my grave with a waxen candle or an oil lamp. And even if someone did actually light a lamp, my fate is such that the wind is bound to snuff it out. (Night will be forlorn and desolate).’

Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’ wrote this verse as he awaited death to release him from his life term imprisonment and exile. The British had emerged victorious in 1857 and wreaked sanguine vengeance upon him and his followers.
No one today remembers ‘Zafar’ or the cause for which he fought and suffered the deaths of twenty-one members of his family besides his own trials tribulations and exile. His verses were on everyone’s lips as long as Urdu was alive and flourishing. Lala Kidar Nath learnt Urdu and Persian at school. He recollected Zafar’s verse as he himself is old and lonely and thoughts of the final departure crowd his mind. He cannot share the verse with his children and grandchildren because they are Urdu illiterate. This culture fracture has impoverished even family relationships.

Long years ago there was a war to oust the British from India. Its causes were detailed in a Proclamation of 25th August 1857 issued by the court in Dillee presided over by Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’.

All classes of the people of India are being ruined under the tyranny and oppression of the infidel and treacherous English’. Zamindars have felt the pressures of excessive and exorbitant revenue demand and have seen their lands sold from under them, and have been dragged into court and there disgraced by petty suitors. Merchants have likewise been subjected to numerous fines and taxes while the English have monopolized all the lucrative trade including indigo cloth and opium.

Under an independent government all these exactions will cease and “honour and dignity’ respected. Moreover Indians will once again be eligible for posts of high responsibility and lucrative emoluments from which they had been excluded by the English….’

The uprising has been dismissed as being a ‘Sepoy Mutiny’. The educated Bengali community took pains to express its abiding loyalty to the British. The British Indian Association, the Mohammedan Association and some Calcutta organizations sent Addresses to the Government House Calcutta asserting their support.

Even the Government of a free India, a hundred years later called the uprising ‘1857’ and refused to give it due honour. It occurred long enough ago (146 years or six generations) to be non-existent in the consciousness of the billion Indians and the hundreds of millions Pakistanis and Bangladesh who inhabit the country today.

Only those who are seventy- five or eighty-years-old and know Urdu bond with what even the bitterest Hindu communalist, V.D.Savarkar, called ‘The First War For Indian IndependenceI’. His book with that title was published in 1907, before the British broke his spirit in Penal Settlement Andamans. They released him after they had achieved their objective and he had repeatedly and most abjectly apologized for having opposed them and become, along with his family and followers, a willing pawn in the Imperial game of ‘Divide and Rule’.

The major attack mounted by the British and their toadies was on the common Indian culture. Whatever Indians did whether it was to wear angrakhas or chew betel (Paan) listen to music in all its many forms of Dhrupad. Khayal, Thumri Dadra Chaiti or Ghazal, watch dance and drama and compose poetry was declared effete and degenerate. The common language of the North, Urdu, which had pockets in all marketplaces and courts of India was subjected to sustained vicious and vitriolic attack. The most successful ploy used by the British was to declare Urdu to be a ‘Muslim’ language. A brand new language ‘Hindi’ had to be manufactured to give the Hindus allegedly made dumb by centuries of oppressive Muslim rule a tongue of their own.

The stirring slogan ‘Inqilaab Zindaabaad’ became the epitaph of the dying language.

Hindi was to break India into three bits in 1947 and Urdu caught up by breaking Pakistan into two.

Now that an attempt is about being made to bridge gaps perhaps Musharraf and Vajpeyi should jointly probe history.

Why were Hindus and Muslims together against the British in 1857 and how did they fracture into the mutually hostile shrapnel called India and Pakistan killing half a million and rendering tens of millions homeless in 1947? What poison was spread in the ninety intervening years?

Perhaps Bahadur Shah’s bones may still make it to Khwaja Qutub’s shrine in Mehrauli and Urdu regain its rightful place. While there is life there is hope!