Memories gleaming in autumnal light
Syed Badrul Ahsan tracks down nostalgia in three admirable works
Serajul Islam Choudhury was one of the luckier ones in 1971. Or was he? He moved from place to place, from one home to another, in the knowledge that the Pakistan army would not let him out of its sights. He could have done the easy thing, something that quite a few expected him to do. Syed Sajjad Hussain and Syed Ali Ashraf, both of whom had preceded him in teaching and both of whom had feelings distinctly kindly toward him, offered him teaching positions in West Pakistan. The idea was simple: Pakistan's military establishment needed proof that Choudhury was loyal to the state, that indeed he had nothing in common with the rebels who had opted to wage war for an independent Bangladesh. But neither the authorities nor his two well-wishers had much idea about the steely side of Choudhury's character. His intense sense of nationalism made it hard for him to turn his back on his oppressed nation. He chose not to go to West Pakistan. Neither did he have any wish to be at Dhaka University when he knew full well that he could be picked up by the soldiers any time and swiftly dispatched. For Bengalis who were exiles in their homeland in 1971, life was an ordeal beyond measure. And that truth emerges once more in these memoirs, for that is what they are, the respected academic has come forth with. And memoirs being what they are, they are also revealing of the gradual progression from schoolboy to retired teacher that Choudhury has been. It must have been jarring for him to make his way to Dacca (as it was then spelt) from Calcutta in the aftermath of partition. The world was certainly getting smaller for him and his sibling, but there was the understandable part of it too. Choudhury's parents hailed from East Bengal, which clearly left them with no option but to leave what was about to turn into West Bengal and move into territory that had always been their own. In the event, Serajul Islam Choudhury ended up doing rather well for himself. He made friends at school here and then at college. The story reads like a who's who, or individuals who would be who's who, in Bangladesh. His fellow students were Ghyasuddin and Shafiq Rehman. The former, intensely intellectuality defining him, would be murdered in the Bangladesh war by the cohorts of the Pakistan army; and the latter would go on to be a leading figure in Bangladesh's journalism. There were others Choudhury does not forget to remember; and he remembers with a tinge of sadness that they are all now past mortality. And speaking of mortality, he speaks with feeling and quiet passion about Najma Jesmin Choudhury, the academic he married and who would eventually die of cancer. You can feel the pain in Choudhury's narration of the tale. You could slice the agony with a knife. On a broader scale, the agony takes on a cultural-political dimension. The title of the book says it all. Choudhury is the traveller, on two journeys. The interpretation is yours. It could all be about the times he spent as a schoolboy till partition in 1947 and then all the way through to his adulthood in Pakistan. Or you could segment the story into the Pakistan period and the Bangladesh era. A particular charm of the work is that the writer does not succumb to the temptations of the ego but goes on to provide his views of politics and life as they shaped up before him. And do not forget that underpinning his observation of events is Choudhury's distinctive belief in the ability and inherent strength of socialism to bring about positive change in the lives of the people of this part of the world. But, then, he has not failed noticing the damage done to leftist politics, indeed to nationalism, through such measures as educational exchange programmes offered by the West. He cites instances of individuals who started off with leftwing idealism but then were weaned away from it by the bigger, though not necessarily beneficial, pull of capitalism. Abdullah al Muti is one of the lost souls Choudhury cites. And there are others as well. The sad if not bitter truth, for Choudhury as also for men and women who have held fast to ideology, is that idealism has systematically taken a battering. And that has come about in two ways. In the first place, the state has carefully turned into a machine of oppression. In the second, capitalism has steadily pushed values across the precipice. The people have hardly mattered. Dui Jatrae Ek Jatri is a procession of men and events as we have known them in our times. Choudhury's reflections on the determined assaults made on the Bengali language, coupled as they are with a presentation of Bengalis all too willing to discard their heritage in favour of an uncertain, spurious Pakistani nationalism, are a grim reminder of the darkness that symbolised the nearly quarter century that elapsed between 1947 and 1971. The poet Golam Mustafa ended up being an Ayub Khan acolyte. Worse, the foremost of intellectuals that was Syed Sajjad Hussain would mutate into a loyal, unabashed Pakistani at the precise moment when he could have done the opposite. And yet there was K.M.A. Munim, friend of Hussain's but unwilling to look away from the horrors the Pakistan army was busy inflicting on Bengalis. Munim was in the queue of death on 25 March 1971, ready to be shot by the Pakistanis. But one of the soldiers took pity on him and let him out of that growing spectacle of murder. Munim went away to his village. Syed Sajjad Hussain travelled to the West, to rebut reports of Pakistani atrocities on its Bengali population. This happens to be a book you cannot easily put down. It brims over with a retelling of events you know of. Or should be reminded of. Sayeed Ahmad's preoccupation with culture has proved enduring. Need evidence? Observe the title of the work under review. He has been a bureaucrat, but even as he has remained in the service of the republic, Ahmad has been unwavering in his belief that for him what fundamentally matters is a link to and an exposition of culture. And it is culture that straddles nations and regions, as this compilation of essays demonstrates so well. Sayeed Ahmad pursues culture, literally, through making his way to the lands where he spots powerful heritage, undisturbed by moving time, at work. Obviously, Japan occupies a major part of the book as it does the author's imagination. In the eighteen years between 1963 and 1981, the writer made quite a few trips to the Land of the Rising Sun, each visit throwing up new ideas for him and especially owing to the rapidity of change the country was going through in all this time. As such visits go, though, it is always the first that leaves some of the most lasting impressions on the traveller. And so it is with Ahmad and his wife, the beautiful Parveen. There is the amusing; and then there is the pleasing. The amusing comes when Sayeed Ahmad and his wife, unable to communicate across the language barrier with the ticket seller at Tokyo railway station, nevertheless manage to acquire two tickets for Kyoto; subsequently they rush to the station on what they think is the day of departure, only to be told by a ticket checker in broken English (tomorrow, tomorrow) that their journey is for the next day. And the pleasure? It comes with a visit to a geisha, a happening made possible through an expression of desire on Parveen's part. Initially embarrassed at the request made to their hosts, Sayeed Ahmad is soon convinced by them that geisha culture is part of tradition. And then the inevitable happens. There is sake to drink. A geisha plays the 'ethereal notes of the Samisen with delicate fingers'. And the writer feels like a lord as yet another geisha lights a cigarette for him and props up the cushions for him to recline on. There are the irritating aspects of travel as well. On a trip to Brazil, Sayeed Ahmad finds his pocket picked by a 'black boy' who quickly melts into the crowd. If that is bothersome, what happens later is positively outrageous. The chief of the local police station, unwilling to file a report on the incident without a greasing of his palms, gives short shrift to the complainants, one being the visitor and another the charge d'affaires at the Bangladesh embassy. Matters eventually do get sorted out, though, but not without loud grumbling and scowling from the officer. There is then the matter of China. Culture apart, Ahmad raises the matter of the Cultural Revolution and the damaged individuals it left behind by the roadside. The scholar Huang Zuolin, humiliated in the course of the revolution like so many thousands of others, nevertheless tries to put all the bitterness behind him as he speaks to Ahmad of his travels in Europe and his education at Cambridge. The Cultural Revolution left China maimed. Huang is a constant reminder of that brutal assault on human intellect. Clearly, one of the most gripping of articles in the compilation is that on Bertolt Brecht and the women in his life. For literature enthusiasts with precious little knowledge of the man Brecht, this is an uninterrupted journey through the landscape of the playwright's life. There were, notes the writer, adoring women in Brecht's life. What more could a man ask for? Names familiar to an earlier generation and perhaps made hazy in these times rise and fall like the waves of a turbulent sea. Hedda Kuhn, Paula Benholzar, Marianne Zoff, Helene Weigel, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Carola Nehar and so many others make it to the list of the playwright's wives or lovers or mistresses. One cannot but be amazed that with all these distractions Brecht yet managed to produce plays that have upheld some of the highest standards in aesthetics. In Pursuit of Culture does something to our rather philistine sensibilities. It makes us take a peek into a world that may have vanished already. There is forever a profundity of magic about old songs. You hear them all day, and then you wish to hear them again. Think of the Saigal number, jab dil hi toot gaya / hum jee ke kya karenge. Your voice may not approach the tenor or quality that Saigal's possessed, but you will still be tempted to hum it. The reason is plain nostalgia for an era defined by lyrical purity. Or it could be that the song reminds you of love lost long ago. And that is why, or how, melodies of the past come alive. Or let us correct ourselves. Those melodies stay alive, as this riveting work on the songs that have lingered powerfully as memories so clearly demonstrates. A particular kind of beauty defines the work, in the sense that it not only is a recapitulation of old songs but is also a series of accounts of the lives of those who made the music possible. The biographical details relate to the singers. In a very necessary way, they also tell the tales of the music directors and the lyricists behind the voices in the songs. Think of Suraiya, the beautiful woman who was both singer and actress. In wo paas rahe ya door rahe / nazron mein samayen rahte hain, it is the soul in a woman yearning for her lover, on celluloid. And yet when you read about the loneliness that Suraiya plodded through till her death, you have that certain feeling that the song was destined to be about herself. She loved Dev Anand; and he wanted her badly. It was Suraiya's grandmother who came in the way. And then there is Mohammad Rafi, truly the man of versatility because of the immensity of moods his voice could create. In songs like yaad na jaaye beete dino ki and tere mere sapne ab ek hi rang hai, he creates pathos that no one else can. Wonder of wonders again, there is the brisk mohabbat choome jin ke haath / jawani paaon parhe din raat. That sheer talent would have gone missing had Rafi not persevered. He remains a legend, despite the parochialism of some unwilling to accord him the recognition he so richly deserves. With Talat Mehmood, it is the sadness of a musical stream you find coursing through the songs. In raat ne kya kya khwab dikhaye / rang bhare sau jaal bichhae, you feel that trembling in the voice, as you feel it in jalte hain jis ke liye / teri ankhon ke diye. It is a book that makes you stop in your tracks, makes you look behind your shoulder for the times you have lost to nature. If songs are about dreams, if you have woven those dreams in your youth, there is a fair chance that in middle age, or even in fast approaching senility, you will awaken to some of the old feelings in all the innocence you can muster. Remember Lata Mangeshkar's hum ne dekhi hai in ankhon se mehekti khushboo? And Suman Kalyanpur's dil gham se jal raha hai jale? And Mukesh's tu kahe agar jeevan bhar main geet sunata jaaoon? They are all here, ready to jump out of the pages, ready to punctuate with a tentative spring the rising autumn of your life.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments