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World
according to Aunt Agatha
I had
barely returned from an assignment when I found myself plonk in
the middle of a discussion, in my own living room, on Islamic fundamentalism.
My Aunt Agatha was holding forth on the recent seminar she had attended
in Dhaka on the ‘‘South Asian people’s union against
fundamentalism and communalism’’. Along with Air Marshal
Asghar Khan, journalist M.B. Naqvi, she was part of the Pakistani
delegation to the seminar.
A word
about ‘‘Aunt Agatha’’. The youngest of my mother’s
four sisters, Alia Imam was a fiery orator during her university
days in Lucknow from where she obtained her doctorate on ‘‘the
contribution of Urdu poetry to the struggle for freedom’’
under the guidance of the distinguished critic Ehtesham Hussain.
The work was hailed as something of a landmark in the ’50s.
Since
I was the eldest son of her eldest sister, she took it upon herself
to deflect me from my sporting interests (largely cricket). In this
enterprise she became a nag and a good candidate for the title of
‘‘Aunt Agatha’’, straight out of Wodehouse whom
she described ‘‘as culturally the wrong influence’’,
one who would be a wall between me and ‘‘high seriousness’’.
Whether
Wodehouse came in the way of my intellectual evolution is debatable,
but Aunt Agatha’s PhD came in the way of her marriage. In Avadh’s
Shia community in post-Partition India, for a young woman to be
attractive and cultured was an essential precondition for the marriage
market but a PhD too intimidating for the young men on show. She
was overqualified.
Occasion
produces the man. Ultimately Saiyid Ka zim Imam, some sort of a
scion of the decaying Avadh aristocracy and an engineer, took up
the challenge. But there was a twist to the story which, in the
context of deteriorating Indo-Pak ties, became something of a tragedy.
Kazim Imam was in Sweden when they got married but soon returned
to Pakistan from where she was expelled for having been critical
of Ayub Khan’s military pact with the US. She went to Beijing
with her husband where she taught Urdu literature at the university.
The cultural revolution uprooted them from China as well.
Bravely,
she set up the Indo-Pak Friendship Association in Pakistan. From
day one she has been convinced that the only salvation for India
and Pakistan is the sort of friendship (or apparent friendship)
which exists between the US and Canada. Since this ‘‘friendship’’
has been elusive, Aunt Agatha, like many thinking Pakistanis, has,
in her mind, been something of an exile. Over the years she has
been an academic (has written several books), a political dabbler,
even a professional dilettante.
So
when I saw her in my drawing room engaged in a discussion which
issued from the Dhaka seminar, what struck me was the general cheerfulness
of her demeanour. It did not take long to discover the essential
source of her cheerfulness: the pr- ospect of a Vajpayee-Musharraf
summit. ‘‘Is it the real thing this time?’’
she asked. She was prompt to correct a detail in my last column.
I had said Musharraf has to look over his shoulders, be confident
that he has the professional fundamentalists and the army hawks
in control. The people of Pakistan, like the people of India, want
peace.
Her
point was that the ‘‘army hawks’’ at this stage
may be something of a cliche, that Musharraf being an army man has
developed a system of formal consultations with the army top brass.
His firm statement to the clergy the other day can only be explained
by the fact that he is well on the way to creating a consensus in
the army against accentuating religious fervour by resorting as
a tactic to a sterile anti-Indianism. It seems to be sinking in
that India cannot be a credible ‘‘other’’ against
which Pakistani nationalism can be sharpened in perpetuity. India
is a burgeoning democracy of countless strands, a land of infinite
variety beneath a common civilisational canopy. Only simple societies
can be painted as the “other”.
The
revivalist movement in Islam worldwide has numerous, complex factors
informing it: a sense of frustration at having lost out to the technologically
superior West, a crisis of identity in the context of rapid globalisation,
a sense of humiliation at Muslim (Arab) impotence on Palestine,
Bosnia, Chechnya, among other issues. The Taliban, for instance,
derive from the most fiercely puritanical Muslim revivalist movement
in 18th century Arabia. But the trouble with the revivalist agenda
is that it seeks to revert to the ‘‘purity of life in
the days of the Prophet’’. This revival is possible only
in Saudi Arabia where it happened in the first place. But Egypt,
Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, India are a blend of numerous cultures
on which Islam is a durable layer. Its social and cultural manifestations
have to reflect the civilisations on which it operated.
‘‘What
are you driving at?’’ I asked Aunt Agatha. ‘‘The
tussle between the revivalists and those who wish to see Pakistan
as a modern, Islamic state has sharpened,’’ she said.
‘‘And Musharraf has understood that more and more Pakistanis
are embarrassed that today they are being identified with global
terrorism.’’ That is why Musharraf’s visit carries
hope and we have to be sensitive to the fact that this is a high-wire
act, she said.
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