Mumbai Matrix & the Maulana: Essay, Calligraphy & Translation by H Masud Taj

In The Matrix Neo chooses between a red pill and a blue pill; a choice between waking up to unsettling truth (red pill) or remaining content and cocooned in ignorance (blue pill). A decade earlier, without knowing, I chose the red pill on the sidewalk of Mumbai.

When crossing from Flora Fountain to Veer Nariman  Road sidewalk, with mouth-watering aroma wafting from the CTO Vadapav,  you would get to browse books lining the BSNL fence; one of the several sidewalk books stalls of Bombay (no longer extant, alas!). There I saw the book by Hormasji Maneckji Seervai. I picked it up for the wrong reasons as then I was a young architect and Seervai a scion of the famous Wadia Master Builders. Seervai (“like a Lion”) was architect of a different sort: he served for seventeen years as a lion-hearted Advocate-General for the Government of Bombay, later Maharashtra, upholding the Zoroastrian tenets of “Humata, hokhta, hvarshta“: Good thoughts, good words and good deeds. He went on to receive the Padma Vibhushan in 1972, be elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, the highest academic honor in Britain in 1981and received from the International Bar Association a “Living Legends of Law Award of Recognition” in 1994.

Seervai’s book “Partitition of India: Legend and Reality” was in my hands and its subtitle had the blue and red pill. Having swallowed patriotic legends of partition, blue pills galore, the time had come for a reality check; time for the red pill. The price of the second-hand copy fell within the Pitkar Litmus Test (less than the cost of photocopying the book). I bought it and began reading. The book turned out to be a political page-turner; an academic whodunit.

The partition of India resulted in over a million deaths. Who should be held responsible? Since gaining Independence we have three contradictory versions: India blames Pakistan for the partition, Pakistan blames India, and England blames both. Each country promotes its own version in various shades of patriotic propaganda. The citizen of each country believed its version true and others biased.

The impasse broke when England decided to declassify and give unrestricted access to all the Transfer of Power documents published in 12 volumes by 1983. The 7482 documents occupying 12,480 pages became Seervai’s primary source. He had access to all that took place behind the scenes. He opens his account with the startling admission that “the popular view in India is that the partition of India was brought about by the disappointed ambition, the vanity and the intransigence of one man, and one man only, Mahomed Ali Jinnah. This view receives no support from the materials now available to students of history” (p.4). Jinnah appears forthright and transparent in his actions. After all, the title of the book by Ian Bryant Wells, Coordinator of Intelligence Studies in the Faculty of Law, Queensland University, says it all “Jinnah – Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.” So if Jinnah was not responsible for the partition of India, then who?

The ball, according to Seervai’s research, lay not in Pakistan but among the British and the Indian actors.

Of the two British involved in the transfer of power, Wavell comes across unscathed and Mountbatten as a war criminal with his vanity “monstrous, his ambition unbridled.” (p.131). Reviewing the book, the Economist of London (21-27 April 1990) said; “As for the massacres and population exchanges Mr. Seervai proves his case that it was Mountbatten who was largely responsible. … thanks to Mr. Seervai’s concise and rigorous presentation of the material there must be a reappraisal of reputations.”  Who else did the reputations in plural refer to? A whole lot of Indians, according to Seervai: Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Rajendra Prasad. Only Maulana Azad emerges unscathed. Seervai devotes his final Postscript to him titling it “Shattered Dreams” because “all that Azad dreamed of for the Congress, for Hindu-Muslim unity, and for the unity of India, lay shattered at his feet. But the failure of his dreams did not detach him from the Congress or make him lose faith in India’s destiny.” (p. VIII).

Each year on November 11, designated Education Day, India commemorates the birthday of this pioneering Minister of Education.  Under his watch, primary education became free and made compulsory for children up to secondary school. He established the All India Council for Secondary Education Commission for reforming the structure of the secondary schools as well as pioneered the Indian Institutes of Technology, School of Planning and Architecture, and the regulating body University Grants Commission. As a recipient of India’s highest award for civilians, the Bharat Ratna, he himself was homeschooled in traditional Islamic education by his scholarly father, Maulana Syed Mohammad Khairuddin, and other Islamic scholars and went on to publish his own 1770 pages Tarjuman ul Quran (Urdu commentary on the Quran). As his biographer wrote “The Qur’an inspired all his thinking.” (M Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, p. 457). Perhaps crusading Chief Ministers need to reign in their misplaced zeal in persecuting madrasas.

Seervai has another Post Script titled “Building Bridges” after Gandhi’s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi’s book, Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter. Seervai ends his Preface saying Rajmohan “has made a fair and objective study of Eight eminent Muslims who influenced the political life of India in the twentieth century… All who value the unity and integrity of India must acknowledge their indebtedness to Rajmohan Gandhi for his courage in writing this wise and thought-provoking book. And they should join him in the hope that “some Hindus may, God willing, find themselves moving closer to Muslims than they were, even as the writer of these pages did.”(p. VIII).

The book ought to carry a Statutory Warning as it shatters the prevailing zeitgeist of legends nurturing hatred of Muslims. Reading the book is like taking the red pill: you wake up to the reality of drawing close to Muslims! This is love jihad of the intellectual sort.

Among 579 footnotes, the one by Oliver Cromwell (p.115) stipulates unflinching honesty: “Paint me as I am.” Seervai does so, closing the book with stanzas dedicated to Maulana Azad:

There is no failure for the good and wise:
What though their seed should fall by the wayside,
And the birds snatch it, – yet the birds are fed;
Or they shall bear it far across the tide
To give rich harvests, after thou art dead.

Seeds have a knack of developing unseen as their roots burrow deeper into the earth to empower the shoot to spring forth in spring. The darkest hour of the night foretells the breaking of dawn. Or as Faiz would say,

guloñ meñ rañg bhare bād-e-nau-bahār chale
chale bhī aao ki gulshan kā kārobār chale
Let the breeze colour the flowers, let the blossom begin
So please come, it is with your coming spring begins.

 

Note: Partition of India: Legend & Reality by H M Seervai can be downloaded from Documen. Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter by Rajmohan Gandhi can be downloaded from the OiiPDF Library.  The calligraphic plates of Maulana Calligram and the Faiz Ghazal can be downloaded from the author’s Academia page.

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This author in The Beacon