In his lavish autobiography, Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie expresses bewilderment at the decision of his father Anis to choose Pakistan over India late in his life. We are not provided the precise year in which Anis and his family took residence in Karachi. We are told only this much — at the time of their departure Rushdie was studying in a British school, which he had joined as a 13-year-old in 1961. But we know the year of their shift because of the disclosure made to an Indian magazine by Rushdie’s lawyer, Vijay Shankardass, who claimed Anis left India in 1963, flying to England first and then to Karachi.
Anis’s decision was inexplicable to Rushdie, for his father was “a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God” and whom Islam fascinated because it was the “only one of the great world religions to be born within recorded history.” He particularly found inspiring the 12th century philosopher, Ibn Rushd, who was “at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time”, and adopted his name — therefore, the title Rushdie. Anis believed the sequence of verses in the Qur’an were jumbled up, occasionally visited the Idgah for the “ritual up-and-down of prayers”, and loved his liquor, under the influence of which he often behaved intemperately.
How could Anis then opt for Pakistan, thereby tacitly accepting the two-nation theory, which claimed Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations? Rushdie writes, palpably bewildered: “They didn’t enjoy living in Karachi…Nor did their reasons for moving ring true. They felt, they said, increasingly alien in India as Muslims. They wanted, they said, to find good Muslims for their daughters. It was bewildering. After a lifetime of happy irreligion they were using religious rationales.” Not persuaded, Rushdie suspects there must have been a business and tax problems, or “other real-world problems that had driven them to sell the home to which they were devoted and abandon the city they loved. Something was fishy here.”
Rushdie smells something fishy because he erroneously believes the embracing of Pakistan necessarily reflects the person’s religiosity. Rushdie does not say this explicitly, but it is a conclusion you draw as he refuses to accept they could feel alienated as Muslims because of their “happy irreligion.” Yet the reasons for Indian Muslims to migrate to Pakistan were manifold, ranging from their faith in the idea of Pakistan to their fear of Hindu-Muslims riots to the possibility of securing greater pecuniary gains in a new nation-state. The issue of language too was a factor. Litterateurs such as Niaz Fatehpuri and Josh Malihabadi opted for Pakistan because they were sceptical about the future of Urdu in India, believing its government would show preference for Hindi, as it eventually did.
It is astonishing that Rushdie should have perceived a direct co-relation between Pakistan and religiosity, and in the process misreading the history of the subcontinent. Doesn’t Rushdie know that the idea of Pakistan was a modernist project, mooted and fought by those who too, like his father, lived a life of happy irreligion? Indeed, among the most delicious ironies underlying the demand for Pakistan was the robust opposition it encountered from ulema, or Islamic scholars, those who were the very antithesis of Anis.
For instance, Jamiat-Ulama-e-Hind (JUH) was an eager partner of the Congress in its many battles against the British, and advocated all religious communities must unite to participate in the movement to throw off the British yoke. Expressing his unequivocal opposition to the two-nation theory, JUH’s Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmad Madani argued that it was not necessary that a “nation, to be a nation, should share the same religion and culture” and profusely quoted from the Qur’an to bolster his case. In the months before the Partition, Madani and Congress leader Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad toured countrywide to canvass against the Muslim League’s campaign for Pakistan, courageously countenancing the ire of those who favoured the division of the subcontinent.
Even Maulana Abul Maududi, counted among the leading proponents of political Islam, was opposed to the idea of Pakistan, but subsequently shifted there, following the Partition, perhaps quite disastrously for the new nation. Yet we must eschew the tendency Rushdie demonstrates in locating neat binaries in the past. Thus, for instance, a faction of JUH under the aegis of Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani broke away and campaigned in favour of Pakistan, often stoking the insecurities of Hindus and Sikhs and fanning in many outlandish ways the aspirations of Muslim peasants. Indeed, religiosity engendered as much support as it spawned opposition against the two-nation theory.
For many Muslims, the decision to stay in India or migrate to Pakistan was a consequence of their individual experiences. Take the great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, whose family members were imploring him to join them in Lahore. Yet he stonewalled these entreaties until the night his friend and actor Ashok Kumar drove him home, taking a route through a Muslim locality infamous for its hotheaded residents. In the colony, Manto was left aghast — a mob surrounded their car and joyously welcomed the actor. Manto took it as an epiphany; he was not safe in India because a murderous mob, whether Hindu or Muslim, could not identify him, his religion or his ideology. He crossed over to Pakistan, where such apprehensions were bound to be minimal, predominantly Muslim as it was and still is.
Perhaps Anis’s fears were similar to Manto’s, persisting through the 1950s because of the overhang of Partition. In an attempt to reimage Anis’s social milieu, I called Asghar Ali Engineer, a Muslim reformer, and asked him whether there were incidents in Bombay that could have made as irreligious a personality as Anis feel alienated. Not in Bombay, said Engineer, but talked at length about the horror of the first major post-Partition riot in Jabalpur in 1961, which generated headlines countrywide and shocked even the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Could the Jabalpur riot have prompted Anis to shift to Pakistan?
In the 1960s, India witnessed a rash of riots, including in the state of Maharashtra. Perhaps we can imagine Anis, sitting in the study of his Karachi home, tippling and marvelling at the sagacity of his decision to abandon India. It is a sentiment his son, based in England, could not have understood. I could not but chuckle as I read Rushdie describe, on page 554, the response of fellow writers to his decision to accept Delhi’s offer of a five-year visa and visit India. Louis de Bernieres cautioned him against it, saying Indian Muslims could mistake his visit as an insult. Rushdie notes sarcastically, “De Bernieres then delivered a short lecture on the history of Hindu-Muslim politics to a writer whose entire creative and intellectual life had engaged with that subject and who, just possibly, knew more about it than the author (Bernieres) of a novel that had notoriously distorted the history of the Greek Communist resistance to the World War II Italian invasion forces…” Clearly, Rushdie needs to read his history anew.
The author is a Delhi-based writer and can be reached at [email protected]