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BOOKREVIEWBOOKREVIEW
The status of Urdu and minorities in India
BY AQUILA ISMAIL
Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics By C.M. Naim Published by City Press 316 Madina City Mall, Abdullah Haroon Road, Saddar, Karachi 213pp: Rs.225
he translated verse of Urfi sets the pace for C. M. Naim’s eclectic (the author’s own words) collection of short stories and polemics The verse goes like this: T
Don’t think you’re so smart if you weren’t deceived by the mirage; You were simply not thirsty enough.
So begins the author’s own journey into the elu sive world of defining the years that go behind making a man. It is not a revelation of his physical experiences, although that too has been men tioned in the sense of trying to define Exile, Hijrat or what? C.M.Naim analyzes the present with the keen sense of a liberal not mired in or even influenced by the obscurantism and discrim ination displayed by many writers on both sides of the divide. He is a Muslim and from the subconti nent where the partition gave rise many ide ological, philosophical and religious confusions. These confusions have yet to be cleared and one feels that the issues have ended up getting more muddled up and indeed have been allowed to become so.
The collection consists of eighteen polemics and five short stories. The topics range from the status of Urdu in India, minority rights or human rights, the terrible tyranny of the majority which effec tively turns upon itself, internalizing so to say, the need to use force and injustice upon it’s own com munity. Also included is a comment on the atti tude of the Indian Muslim Press in the creation of Bangladesh. For us who have recently undergone the ignominy heaped on us by the same press know the power the written mass-media word can have in shaping the destiny of nations and com-munities.
The title piece is the author’s own effort to iden tify himself as a South Asian Muslim with the Indian past but he questions “….who am I, and what is India, and how far into the past do we go?” He then aptly concludes “…one is not born into a tradition or heritage; one has to claim it, and claim all of it, the ‘good’ with the ‘bad’… Otherwise one lets oneself be deluded by ‘myths and inventions,’ a particularly threatening possibility given the politics of identity….”
There are five short stories, works of fiction, and they are superb. The most gripping is ‘The Outcast’ where the ‘pulling of the entrails, and the ‘settling of the crows and vultures to enjoy a feast, sends shivers down the spine. The short sto ries are far too few and leave one yearning for more. Could it be that the realist academic has sacrificed his acumen as as a storyteller to ‘take the easy way out’ to ‘get things off his chest’?
C.M.Naim makes no pretences of arriving at any kind of solution for the South Asian Muslims or anyone else. All he wants and does is to put things in his perspective and the reader cannot help but begin to think of who he or she really is devoid of the official history and stripped of the prejudices that have been dinned into us. In every piece-be it on the status of the Aligarh Muslim University, or the frightening tyranny of the majority on either side-the author upholds the right of the individual and laments the fact that the individual has no place in national poli-
tics or even heritage. To quote an excerpt from his polemic, “The “Muslim Problem’ in India,” where he concludes: “The communal problem in India is not that people do not have freedom of religion, but that an individual cannot yet enjoy freedom of conscience without suffering reprisals at the hand of one organized group or another. We have allowed for too long in our country an exploitation and brutalisation of the individual by the dictators of one kind of group solidarity or another. We have not struggled to make the indi-vidual the fundamental unit in our national poli-ty. Instead, we have let him be submerged by groups whose authority does not arise from a social contract or from the fact that the members consciously and of their own choosing share some social-ethical concerns, but whose relationship with, and the authority over, the individual comes about merely from the chance event of his birth (for example, religious groups, linguistic groups.) This trend must end, and this pattern must change, if the man in India is to survive.” Unquote. Alas! If only this could be heard by the ‘elite’ of both the countries. Also very telling is the remark that that there really is no ‘Muslim Problem in India but but only the Problems of the Muslims.
C.M. Naim’s personal experience of the parti tion-he lived in Bara Banki and was about thirteen years old schoolboy-is best exemplified by the piece entitled “Two Days”. These were the two days, one in August when the India came into being. The other day is that day in January 1948 when Gandhi was assassinated and it was feared that perhaps a Muslim was the assassin. After the literal siege was over Naim says, “On the surface it was still very much life-as-usual for most of us, but underneath we no longer had that old convic tion that what was paramount in everything that concerned us was our own say. Now we were con vinced that everyone and everything we held dear was at the mercy of someone else’s whim.” How so many of us can translate this into our own lives!
Of course the most telling polemic, for us fed up as we are from the need to have superhuman heroes as leaders, is “Iqbal, Jinnah and Pakistan: The Vision and the Reality”. It tells us to wake up and face reality that the desire for the creation of Pakistan was not a selfless act descended as it were from the heavens to save the Muslims from the tyranny of the Hindus or indeed to save Islam, remembering that there are more Muslims n India that there are in Pakistan, but one of class and regional interest. Naim exhorts the people of Pakistan to “thaw out the charisma that seems to have frozen around Iqbal and Jinnah, and make them more real and human and thus more rele-vant.” The many recorded remarks and speeches of both have been quoted. These are not the ones we generally hear about.
C. M. Naim uses a curiously simple language with none of the frills that non-English writers of the language are prone to using. He makes no claims of starting a debate. All he shares with us what his mind and reason told him about events and circumstances. It is for us to begin our own thought process to at least begin to decipher our heritage and our history.
The author lives in America and teaches at the University of Chicago in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations: