Daily Times

In these troubled times when the moral authority of the ruling class of Pakistan has touched the nadir, it should not be surprising that questions are being raised what went wrong, how and why. Answers to these questions will not be easy to find and may take a long time to be formulated by historians and social scientists. In these circumstances, fictional writing often provides the freedom needed to speculate and wonder and furnish insights into societal malfunctioning and the imperfections of humankind. Satire is a powerful tool that gifted writers can wield to lay bare the hypocrisy and machinations that underpin ruling class power games.

One of the greatest satirical novels, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, is a telling critique of the Communist regime that called the shots in Soviet Russia with an iron hand. Bulgakov wrote several versions of it but did not dare publish it. However, he continued to improve it and he was still working on it when he died in 1940. The final version, which is now considered the standard, was published as late as 1989.

Dr Najamul Sahar Butt, who lived for many years in the former Soviet Union from where he obtained his degree in medicine, has done us a great favour in translating Bulgakov’s classic from the original Russian text into Urdu (Master and Margarita, Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2011). Considering that the novel is a surrealistic exercise in human creativity and the Russian art of novel writing is so different from our own South Asian traditions, the translator deserves our praise for undertaking such a daunting task and performing it so well. In particular, the Urdu translation is so much easier to read than the English translation that I have consulted. However, he has changed some of the names from Russian to easier forms, something I wish he could have avoided.

The novel alternates between two settings. The first is 1930s Moscow, and the second Jerusalem, with Jesus’s trial and the predicaments of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor who does not want to sentence Jesus to crucifixion but had to do it.

The core story begins with the head of the Soviet literary bureaucracy, Mikhail Berely and a young modern poet, Paneer , also known as the ‘Homeless’, meeting at a famous restaurant exclusively meant for the Soviet elite. They meet to discuss a commissioned poem that Berely had asked Homeless to compose. The latter deviates from official ideology by making Jesus a real person. Mikhail wants Homeless to rewrite the poem because he asserts that Jesus never existed. He critiques religion and religious beliefs. While this discussion is going on a strange man named Professor Woland appears. Both Mikhail and Homeless can sense that he is not a native. Moreover, he can say things that convey the sense that he possesses extraordinary qualities. Woland assures them that Jesus existed. He begins the story of Pontius Pilate (the Roman Governor who against his will ordered the crucifixion of Christ). He also warns Mikhail that he will be decapitated before the day is out.

Things become further complicated when some assistants accompanying Woland begin to perform black magic tricks. As predicted, Mikhail is indeed decapitated by a streetcar. At this point Homeless decides to act against Woland and his gang and pursues them in the streets. When he tries to relate the happenings of the day to other people he is considered to be crazy and taken to an asylum. He meets the central character of the novel, the Master, in the asylum. He had been put there because the official literary elite professing atheism rejects his historical novel about Pontius Pilate and Christ. In despair, the Master burns his manuscript and turns his back on the ‘real’ world, including his devoted lover, Margarita.

Part two of the novel brings into focus Margarita, the Master’s mistress, who refuses to despair of her lover or his work. She attends the ball (dance) arranged by Woland. She accepts his offer to become a witch. The ball coincides with the night of Good Friday — the night when Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem. Learning to fly, she seeks retribution for the literary bureaucrats who condemned the Master to despair and madness.

On the other hand, when Woland offers to grant a special wish to Margarita she chooses to liberate a woman who was raped at the ball but killed her newborn baby and was condemned to prison for life. Woland grants her a second wish as the first one was not related to her own self. She chooses to liberate the Master and live in poverty and love with him; something that surprises both Woland and Jesus. However, the Master and Margarita leave civilisation. They do not lose faith in humanity but have to get away from civilisation and are denied salvation as they reject all dogmas, religious and secular. Thus, their freedom comes at a great cost.

If we now relate this great classic to our own conditions it would not be difficult to appreciate that similar, if not identical, conditions prevail in Pakistan. The Pakistani rich and privileged, especially those with access to the state machinery, variously described as the establishment or the deep state and so on, enjoy perks and privileges that greatly exceed those that the Communist bosses enjoyed. In Pakistan, we have exploited religion to mask the gross inequalities and injustices that are present in our society. The Soviet system disintegrated because it had stagnated since a long time and no effort was made to reform, or rather the reform process was initiated too late. Thus, the hopes that socialism had kindled for the liberation of humankind from want and oppression were dashed. Pakistan’s existence is also threatened: more by the moral bankruptcy of the ruling class rather than threats from some separatists or external forces.

In political terms, the moral of the story in The Master and Margarita is that only in an open society and democratic political milieu can citizens enjoy true freedom; that includes the right not to conform to any dogma, ideological or religious. Especially thinkers and writers need always to have the freedom to express their dissenting views and criticism of the status quo.

The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com