Daily Times

I suspended my series on my recent seven-week lecture tour of India to cover the May 2013 Pakistan election. It also gave me a chance to do some book reviews. It is time to resume the Indian series. On February 5, 2013, I bid farewell to my Initiatives of Change family at the Asia Plateau, Panchgani. Among those who live on the campus, Shri Ravindra Rao and Shri Suresh Khatri became close friends of mine.

My next stop was Nagpur. My host there, Ajay Deshpande, and I had been corresponding for years on Indian film music and many of our favourite singers and music-directors were the same. Lata Mangeshkar and music-director C Ramchandra, both Maharashtrians, had together created magic many times. One of my all-time favourite song of theirs is “Ye zindagi ussi kee hai, jo kisi ka ho gaya.” One can die listening to it if one had a choice. Its enchanting lyrics were composed by a Punjabi, Rajendra Krishan, who hailed from Jalalpur Jattan, some 90 kilometres north of Lahore.

Ajay Deshpande is a young man in his 40s. A successful engineer he has set up a successful construction business though I wondered when he got time to attend to his business interests since music seemed to be part of his existence 24-hours in a day. So, now finally we met. Thus began the longest car drive in my life. After the two Punjabs, Maharashtra is that administrative unit in the subcontinent that I have travelled most in. I can never express enough my admiration for Deshpande’s hospitality.

Wherever we drove I could see the Muslim presence. Their shops with Islamic names, green banners, mosques, shrines, women in burqa and men with typical Islamic beards, was indicative of the fact that they were an integral part of Indian life. And, of course, the azan could be heard wherever we went. Some nasty communal rioting wrecked peace in Maharashtra’s main city, Mumbai in the 1990s and the late Bal Thackeray was notorious for Pakistan bashing, but the wisdom of the sufis and sages is too deeply rooted in Indian soil to spread such communal poison too deeply.

We had been driving for hours and it was dark all round. Deshpande told me that he had recently spoken to Dr Irfan Anwar, a political scientist like me, based in the US. Dr Anwar is the son of legendary Pakistani music-director Khawaja Khurshid Anwar. Deshpande called him on his mobile. After a few attempts contact was established and in the pitch dark of a February night when we were passing through thick woods, where I was told many wild animals were to be found, two Lahoris talked to each other. Khawaja Khurshid Anwar was born in Lahore just 30 metres away from our house on Temple Road.

Dr Anwar remembered seeing me flying kites from our house top. I too could recall him, though the last time we saw each other from roof tops must have been at least 50 years ago. Courtesy the communication revolution and the good offices of a fine Maharashtrian, we conversed for quite some time. We also exchanged notes on India-Pakistan relations and what we could do as concerned and responsible academics to help normalise them. It was a very pleasant exchange of views.

At Aurangabad, which was roughly halfway to Nagpur, we broke journey for the night. Next morning we first went to the tomb of the last Great Moghul, Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir (1616-1707). It was the simplest of constructions, not at all in the style of his predecessors. The guide told us that Aurangzeb had left instructions that no fancy edifice was to be constructed over his grave and that had been respected. I was, however, surprised to find out that a shrine next to his grave belonged to a Qadri sufi who I was told was his spiritual guide. I would have thought his spiritual guide would be from the Naqshbandi order, which is famous for its strict adherence to the Sharia. We know that his rival and elder brother, Dara Shikoh, belonged to the Qadri order and was a disciple of Mian Meer of Lahore. However, it seems both had their sufi orientation in the Qadri order.

As I stood there I thought of the Badshahi Mosque of Lahore, the biggest open mosque in the world, I believe, that Aurangzeb had built. Once upon a time the Mughal Empire over which this man ruled extended from Aurangabad in the south to Lahore and beyond in the north-west. In Pakistan he is celebrated as a hero and the real founder of the Two Nation Theory. In India he is not remembered kindly though and my friend Aakar Patel told me that Aurangzeb was an extremely competent administrator and general.

Aurangabad had another connection with Pakistan and Lahore. The founder of the Jama’at-e-Islami Syed Abul Ala Maududi was born in Aurangabad and began his journalistic career in Hyderabad State to which Aurangabad belonged before the princely states were abolished in 1956 when linguistic units replaced the existing boundaries that existed between the Indian Union and the princely states. Nobody can doubt that Maududi attained the status of Pakistan’s undisputed ideologue of Islamic fundamentalism. Did he do it by undermining, what some maintain was Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s secular vision of Pakistan, or, he extended the underlying logic of the Two Nation Theory to its ultimate, though arguably from Jinnah’s point of view, unintended limit? This we can discuss another time.

Aurangabad has a strong Muslim presence; 38 percent of the population is Muslim and many famous historical mosques are to be found there. Green flags were flying all around.

(To be continued)

The writer is a PhD (Stockholm University); Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University; and Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Karachi: Oxford Unversity Press, 2013; The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com