April 22, 2008...11:14 am
Ahmed Bashir’s wayward heart
by Akmal Aleemi
In all the years that I have lived in America – 35 to be exact – and in the four years since Ahmed Bashir died at the age of 81 from liver cancer, I never once dreamt about him, except some days ago. I dreamed that I was walking out of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. with my wife, Mumtaz. I ask her to wait for me in an area where there are several food outlets and to meet me in half an hour at the main entrance. I go out looking for my car which I had parked at some distance. I notice a group of people sitting out on a kind of porch. Among them, I see Ahmed Bashir, the intellectual, journalist and novelist, whom I used to call Lala. I was a friend of his talented younger brother, Akhtar Aksi, who died in his youth in Lahore in the 1950s.
In the dream, Ahmed Bashir sees me, smiles, but says nothing. I sit down in front of him and ask, “Lala, I have read Dil Bhatkay Ga . You call it a novel but it is a mix of journalism and fiction. Why?”
He seems to want to answer my question but fails to do so. I suddenly realise that he cannot talk. Then with some difficulty and much effort, all he says is, “Master Madan.” Master Madan was a boy prodigy who died in his teens but whose voice continues to haunt us through the few recordings he left behind. I remember that Mumtaz is by now waiting for me and I leave.
That was my dream and it woke me up. It was 4:45 on a Saturday morning. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. I got out of bed, went into my basement where I keep my books and picked up Dil Bhatkay Ga . It is dedicated to his children, one of whom, Humayun, is a successful businessman in Baltimore, Maryland. Like many of his generation, he disapproves that his father chose a profession which could only guarantee poverty. I wondered what Master Madan had to do with my dream. Then it came to me. Ahmed Bashir was one of the few attais of Lahore, like Ayub Rumani, G.A. Farooq, Saeed Malik and Khurshid Anwar, and so it made perfect sense that he should mention Master Madan. The term attai is how professional musicians describe those whose knowledge of classical music is great but who are not born into a family of professional musicians. I also thought of Neela Parbat , a movie Ahmed Bashir made with music by the great Ustad Jhanday Khan (though he makes no mention of that in his book). Neela Parbat was a huge flop and all the money that he had borrowed from his family to put into it was lost.
Ahmed Bashir was addicted to speaking the truth, a habit that put him in trouble time after time.He was one of the pioneers of modern Urdu journalism. When I worked for Imroze, he told me that he was hired to write features for the paper by Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat while they were being regaled with drink and music at a kotha in Hira Mandi. During Zia-ul-Haq’s dark rule, eight clerics called for Ahmed Bashir’s severe punishment (one wanted him beheaded) for writing about his drinking. Ahmed Bashir got even with them by writing a hard-hitting piece that exposed the hypocrisy and religiosity of these fake, self-proclaimed men of God. He was an ardent Marxist who was never afraid of criticising the shortcomings of communist leaders, be it at home or abroad. He attacked the conduct of the Pakistani armed forces in East Pakistan in 1971 in an editorial in Musawat and earned the wrath of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He ardently believed in the validity of the theory of economic management as enunciated by Marx and Lenin, even after the Soviet Union had fallen.
In his book Jo Milay Thai Rastay Mein, a sketch on Warris Mir, who was being targeted by mullahs, Ahmed Bashir writes, “Is this the will of God that the majority of Muslims should rely on alms and giveaways like zakat, sadqa and khairat to survive?What then is the point of taking pride in humanity and individual creative force? While poverty increases by the minute, zakat is to be paid only once a year at the rate of 2.5 percent. Our economic system is based on capitalism, whose greatest value lies in interest, which is forbidden, but we do not live on an island. We are part of the global system of capitalism. That being so, how can we banish interest! What we need is ijtehad .” Obviously, a man expressing such views has to be on every cleric’s hit list.
About Maj. Muhammad Ishaq, who was jailed with Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sajjad Zaheer for the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy, Ahmed Bashir writes, “Maj. Ishaq who knew about the conspiracy, did not know that certain elders of the Communist Party, for example, Syed Sajjad Zaheer, were close friends of Begum Shahnawaz, the mother-in-law of Gen. Akbar Khan. Since Liaquat Ali Khan had largely ignored Begum Shahnawaz after independence, they were keen to bring about the ouster of his government. Maj. Ishaq did not know Syed Sajjad Zaheer. He did not know any member of the Communist Party. He came to Lahore to persuade Syed Sajjad Zaheer not to get involved in the family dispute. He wrote a long letter to Sajjad Zaheer and then forgot all about it because Gen. Akbar Khan and other estranged army officers in Kashmir had changed their mind in the meanwhile. The intentions of the Government of Pakistan were different. Liaquat Ali Khan did not want this opportunity to slip by. He arrested all the rebel officers. Maj. Ishaq was not arrested in the first round. His turn came later when his letter to Sajjad Zaheer was recovered from the communist leader’s house.” Akbar and Ishaq were among the army officers who had fought bravely in the Kashmir War butfelt dejected after Liaquat, under international pressure, agreed to a ceasefire.
About the memorable peasants’ conference held in Toba Tek Singh by Maulana Bhashani around the time of the 1970 elections, Ahmed Bashir writes, “The Toba Tek Singh Conference came like a storm and passed, leaving behind only the sliver of revolution. In West Pakistan, Bhutto’s Islamic Socialism was raising its head like a cobra.People had begun to whirl around it like a tornado, but those who mattered were not ready to accept Islamic or scientific socialism. The landlords of Punjab and Sindh were shivering in their shoes. The capitalists who were subservient to American and Western capital felt as if the blood in their veins was drying up. The mullahs were boiling with anger because a few mortal human being men were trying to change what the mullahs believed was the will of God. The bureaucracy was always a worshipper of the past;its ideals and views unchanged since the time of the East India Company.”
Like all great men, Ahmed Bashir left no one behind who could come even close to his passion for the demolition of what Bhutto once called “the abominable status quo.”
Akmal Aleemi lives in Washington and is a broadcaster and writer
2 Comments
April 23, 2008 at 7:16 am
An insightful article. Ahmed Bashir was the grandfather of my best friend - from his daughter Neelam Bashir - and I had always heard much about “baray abba”.
I had an opportunity once to walk into his room while my friend was paying him a visit and I was immediately enthralled by the bookshelf bursting with books that were not “ordinary” - in fact many which were not commonly heard of or simply banned altogether. When I mentioned that he took great pride in it and said that unfortunately he had lost much of his precious collection to “borrowers”. But his eye still twinkled when he informed me, with the calmest of tones, that his head could be had many times over for those volumes still with him!
Another thing that caught my eye, and a bit of my greed, was the collection of Marxist leaders’ portraits lining the top of a shelve on a wall across his bed. They sat there distinguished, sternly gazing down from their red backdrops, adding to the mischievous play at austerity in the room!
These then were the images I was left with after my brief rendezvous with Ahmed Bashir. It was much later I found out how prominent a person he was and how his notorious controversies are favourite anecdotes at intellectual gatherings.
I will be sure to forward this article to his wonderful family.
April 24, 2008 at 7:40 pm
yes
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