Another spotlight on memoirs

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 by Khaled Ahmed

Pasnawisht aur Pas-e-Pasnawisht
By Prof Dr Pervez Perwazi; Naya Zamana
Publications Lahore 2007;
Pp640; Price Rs 600

This book is some kind of a treasury of memoirs. It is incredible how Prof Perwazi is able to track down anything smelling of autobiography. He is tough on people with inflated egos, but kind to people honestly writing impious truths

Prof Perwazi has read almost all the Urdu memoirs ever written and is something of an expert on what memoirs ought to be judged on the touchstone of classics written in Western literature. Autobiography is an act of ego. You write it because you want to write about yourself, which means you think you are worth writing about. Whose self is worth writing? Someone who has done great deeds or was witness to great deeds done by others. Yet, a memoir is irreducibly an act of justificatory egoism. And Prof Perwazi is a deflationary treasurer of the egos that get flaunted in books. He is in fertile ground because autobiography has always been the most popular genre in non-fiction.

The book is actually two volumes in one as it contains the first bunch of memoirs he had examined in 2003. The second bunch is just as good as the first, and Perwazi continues to cut deep where he thinks humbug is taking over from fact. He examines the semi-fiction memoir of Ahmad Bashir’s Dil Bhatkay Ga in which Bashir had needlessly rubbished journalist Abdul Majeed Salik as a spy for Lahore Special Branch under the British. On his evidence, Salik was a good man and Ahmad Bashir may be being simply mean, which he usually was. But Perwazi should read portraits of Muzaffar Ali Syed, Yadun ki Sargam, published in 2007, in which he has Soofi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum telling him that Salik came to visit him at his salon-like room at the Government College Hostel so he could inform on the likes of Faiz.

The book reviews Zafar Hasan Aibak’s adventures published in 1990 in the Hijrat Movement with Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi and notes that Amir Habibullah of Afghanistan had a number of legally married wives but kept a hundred slave girls culled from the beleaguered population of his state on the yardstick of beauty. He was hardly in the mood of doling out spare cash for these romantic Indian revolutionaries who thought Afghanistan was darul amaan (house of refuge). The fact today is that a Muslim state, far from being darul amaan, is the hothouse of Muslim-kill-Muslim violence.

Masud Khaddar-Posh, with his feisty untraditional character, appeals to Perwazi even though he would rather that his daughter had done a better job of introducing her father. Uncannily, Perwazi smells a dud from the genuine as he does with Abul Hassan Naghmi’s memoir of a career in Radio Pakistan. The man was a fake and has been nicely impaled. He examines the book by former IG Police Sardar Muhammad Chaudhry telling us that once when he hauled up a group of car-thieves he discovered that some of them were backed by the great Maulana Samiul Haq with a chit. In Mir Vilayat Ali’s memoir of Aligarh and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan he once again brings proof that Sir Syed was pushed out of his house by his mentally disturbed son Syed Mahmud and that Sir Syed’s last rites were completed with the help of money from Viqarul Mulk.

Altaf Gauhar is taken to account for boasting in his memoir that he had slapped and kicked an East Pakistani merchant for not being able to recite dua-e-qunoot, and rebukes him for informing, with wicked intent, that the great lawyer Manzur Qadir and the notorious Justice Munir of the Munir Report were atheists. It simply proved that the genius of Altaf Gauhar was frequently victim to flashes of ordinariness. He loves Akhlaq Ahmad Dehlavi’s accent on Radio Pakistan but catches him making a mistake in his memoir without losing his reverence for the great announcer.

From columnist Abid Ali Abid’s book Safar Adhi Sadi Ka, he culls the information that General Zia had called Zafar Ahmad Ansari to tell him to popularise the Islamic tenet that Pakistan could not have political parties or party-based elections. Ansari promised to carry out the mission in his famous Ansari Commission Report, but Abid refused. He reports that Hanif Ramay believed in Zia’s reversion to Islam and favoured partyless elections. Abid was a Memon devoted to Jamaat Islam; Khurram Murad was from Bhopal and arose as a leader of Jamaat Islami to allege in his memoir Lamhaat that MM Ahmad as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission had stated that the people of East Pakistan were all beggars and that he wouldn’t mind East Pakistan separating as it was a liability. Needless to say, Perwazi takes him to task for this nugget.

Among the judges the book examines, MAK Samdani comes out nicely from his book of memories, while Ajmal Mian suffers from contradictions he couldn’t cope with when his book is placed in concordance with his rival judge Sajjad Ali Shah’s book. Samdani ‘revealed’ nothing because he is such a ‘correct’ man, but then the problem is that if you are not going to name names why write the memoir? Perwazi simply could not ignore the nobility of Samdani which he knew outside of the book. But Perwazi has uncanny insight into the people he takes his scalpel to.

On Ambassador Saad Rashidul Khairi he is spot-on when he says the grandson of the great novelist Rashidul Khairi was full of unjustified malevolence towards his contemporaries. In fact he may have written the memoir to vent his un-exhausted venom. On authority of those who served under Ambassador Khairi, the reviewer can assert that the man lived on the malign energy provided by the towering rages he depended on for his authority in the embassies he served.

Correctly, Makhdoom Javed Hashmi’s carelessly put together book titled swaggeringly Main Baghi Hun is lampooned on the basis of Hashmi’s unholy readiness to serve as General Zia’s minister. Hashmi still recalls his half-baked student’s style of speaking, mixing shrieks with excessive windmilling gesticulation, head bobbing up and down. But Perwazi lets an equally egotistical Mukhtar Masud off the hook for personal reasons. He is correctly nitpicking about Nawab Sir Muhammad Yamin Khan and his multi-volume Nama-e-Amaal but it can’t be denied that the memoir has provided rich details about times that are otherwise lost to us. For instance, the time Muhammad Asad (né Leon Weiss) spent in jail in India during the Second World War as a POW is available only in this book. He also tells us who interceded with the Raj on Weiss’s behalf.

This book is some kind of a treasury of memoirs. It is incredible how Prof Perwazi is able to track down anything smelling of autobiography. He is tough on people with inflated egos, but kind to people honestly writing impious truths, like Amrita Pritam, and understanding of writers bluntly confessing to a rebellious disposition, like Abida Sultaan of Bhopal, although he missed the part where she clearly witnesses wounds inflicted on the body of Fatima Jinnah, when she went to see her after her death. Prof Perwazi has produced a most readable account of how people write about themselves in South Asia. *

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