Archive for the ‘The Way We Were’ Category
Of sea voyages and lexical ruminations
Back in the nineteenth century, when well-heeled English civil servants and army officers (as opposed to their less well-off counterparts) coming out to postings in Karachi or other parts of British India used to book their passage on steamships belonging to the P & O Shipping Line, they would specify a port cabin on the outward-bound voyage and a starboard cabin on the homeward-bound voyage – on the theory that port-side cabins were supposed to be cooler than starboard-side cabins on the way out and starboard-side cabins cooler than port-side cabins on the way home, those, of course, being the days when there was no air-conditioning or even electric fans.
Fishy tales from the past
If you’re a trout fisherman like me, one of the problems of living in Karachi is that you’re more than a thousand miles from the nearest trout stream. Sure, there is plenty of sea-fishing along the Karachi coast. The waters around Charna Island are a good place for marlin and the waters off Cape Monze teem with black pomfret on moonlit nights. There is also some reasonably good freshwater fishing within striking distance of Karachi.If you want to catch trout, however, you have to travel all the way to the upper reaches of the Kunhar River in the Kaghan Valley or the upper reaches of the Swat River. Pandhar Lake, near the headwaters of the Gilgit River, is also good place for trout. Read the rest of this entry »
Nobody in Karachi whistles anymore
In the Karachi of the old days, the city of my youth, one often used to hear people whistling a jaunty tune as they cycled home at night after a movie. Many things in Karachi have changed since then, mostly for the worse. Which probably explains why nobody in Karachi whistles anymore – or, if they do, they do so in secret, as if it were a crime. Indeed, whistling has become so rare now that a whole generation of Karachiites has grown up not even knowing how to whistle – at least not in the way that many members of my generation could whistle entire songs in the old days, including catchy ditties like “Awaara Hoon Mein”, “Jambalaya” and “The Happy Whistler” Some of us could even whistle classical pieces like Ravel’s “Bolero” and Dvorjak’s “New World Symphony”. Read the rest of this entry »
The old days versus the new days
A journalist colleague of mine whom I hold in high esteem recently accused me of living in the past. I could argue that all of us live in the past because the past is all we have to go by, the future not yet having arrived and the present having the awkward habit of slipping into the past in less time than it takes to say Rip Van Winkle – unless, of course, one stutters. Which, I’m happy to say, I don’t. At least not yet, though one never knows what might happen in the future. I mean, can any of us guarantee that we won’t start stuttering a few years down the road from now? No, we can’t, just as we can’t really guarantee anything about the future. As Paul Valery once said, even the future isn’t what it used to be. Read the rest of this entry »
Of yesteryear’s heroes and villains
I, for one, do not agree with the much quoted adage: “Pity the nation that needs heroes.” I think every nation needs heroes, and a nation that doesn’t have any heroes is the poorer for it. Heroic deeds uplift the spirit. They show us humanity at it best. I think British Prime Minister David Lloyd George got it right when he said in a speech in November 1918 (soon after the end of the First World War): “What is our task? To make Britain a country fit for heroes to live in.” Read the rest of this entry »
Architectural lessons from the past
Given the fact that the City of Karachi (as opposed to the Village of Mai Kolachi, from which the city’s name is said to be derived) is barely one hundred and fifty years old, it is hardly surprising that it is not exactly bristling with examples of great architecture from the past.
Not that it is bristling with examples of great architecture from the post-1947 period either. Indeed, one could count the great buildings built in the city since 1947 on the fingers of one hand and probably still have a finger or two left to spare. Read the rest of this entry »
A Karachiite’s lowdown on Shakespeare
Karachi’s English-language evening newspapers have long been a source of entertainment for the city’s residents. Back in the 1980s, a Karachi eveninger once ran a sensational front-page story under a headline stating that the infamous Charles Sobraj, who was serving a long prison sentence in India for allegedly murdering more than a dozen foreign tourists in various Asian countries including India, and had recently escaped from prison, had been “spotted near Hawke’s Bay.” Read the rest of this entry »
Concerning great sportswriters of yore
If one were asked to name the best sportswriter that Karachi has ever produced, one would probably vote for the late Omar Kureishi. His sports pieces, of course, were mostly about cricket, though he did occasionally pen a piece about other sports – in addition to numerous pieces about growing up in Bombay, his days as a student at Berkley University in America (where he was a contemporary of Art Buchwald and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), and his long stint as head of PIA’s public relations department. Read the rest of this entry »
Liaquat and Jinnah shared many attributes – Part II
The first part of this article appeared in these columns on Sunday, March 5. This is the second part.
Although almost twenty years younger than Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah and different in temperament in several respects, Liaquat Ali Khan established a closer working relationship with Mr Jinnah than anyone else. Their personal life shared a number of attributes and they both subscribed to modernist views. Both were men of unimpeachable integrity and democrats to the core in their political beliefs. The Quaid himself acknowledged the closeness of their relationship and the trust he placed in Liaquat when he described him as his “right-hand man.”
Liaquat and Jinnah shared many attributes
Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was born in Karachi. He died in an ambulance on the streets of Karachi on August 11, 1948 as he was being driven to the Governor-General’s House from the PAF base at Mauripur on his return from Ziarat. And he is, of course, buried in Karachi – in a mausoleum designed by a Bombay-based Indian architect, Yahya Merchant, who also designed the Quaid’s house in Bombay. Mr Jinnah’s sister, Miss Fatima Jinnah, lived in Karachi from August 1947 until her death in the 1960s. She, too, is buried in Karachi.
Liaquat Ali Khan, the Quaid’s trusted lieutenant, and, like his leader, a man of unimpeachable integrity, was born in Karnal in eastern Punjab. He resided for more than four years as Pakistan’s first prime minister in what was then the Prime Minister’s House and is today the State Guest House opposite the Sindh Club in Karachi. He died in Rawalpindi on October 16, 1951, struck down by an assassin’s bullet while addressing a political rally. His body was brought to Karachi for burial. Hundreds of thousands of Karachiites turned out for his funeral. He is buried in a modest structure next to the Quaid’s Mazar.
Liaquat’s wife, Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, a great personality in her own right, lived in Karachi for the last twenty-five years of her life (after serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to Holland in the 1950s and to Italy in the ‘60s). She was Governor of Sindh in the mid-1970s, and remains the only woman ever to be appointed governor of a Pakistani province. She was also the first recipient of the United Nations’ Human Rights Award. She died in Karachi in July 1990, and is buried next to her husband.
Liaquat’s and Begum Liaquat’s two sons both live in Karachi. Liaquatabad, in Karachi, is named after their father, as are the Liaquat Hospital and many other institutions.. The Home Economics College in Karachi was founded by their mother, as was the All-Pakistan Women’s Association – the country’s first and still premier organisation for women. APWA, too, is headquartered in Karachi.
Thus, Karachi has very close ties to both Mr Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan. It seems fitting, therefore, that the book “Dear Mr Jinnah” – selected correspondence between Liaquat and Mr Jinnah covering the period 1937 to 1947 – should have been published by the Karachi-based Pakistan branch of Oxford University Press.
Almost twenty years younger than Mr Jinnah, Liaquat established a closer working relationship with the Quaid than anyone else. Their personal life shared a number of attributes and they both subscribed to modernist views. Both were men of honour and democrats to the core in their political beliefs.
In the years leading up to partition and the creation of Pakistan, Mr Jinnah and Liaquat corresponded regularly. It is some of these letters that have been collected in “Dear Mr Jinnah”, a book edited by Professor Roger D. Long.
The title of the book comes from the form of address that Liaquat usually used in his letters to the Quaid.. The book gives a fascinating insight into the relationship between the two statesmen and of the decade during which they worked to establish the Muslim League as the political voice of Muslims in South Asia and to create Pakistan.
Dr Long, who is currently completing a biography of Liaquat Ali Khan, has an MA and Ph.D from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he studied with Professor Stanley Wolpert, a leading American academic and specialist on South Asia who some years ago published what is arguably the best biography of Mr Jinnah to date. Dr Long requested Professor Wolpert to write the Foreword to “Dear Mr Jinnah”.
In his Foreword, Professor Wolpert writes: “Professor Roger D. Long is to be universally congratulated for the painstaking work he has done in editing and introducing so many of Liaquat’s most important letters to and from Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, during the last historic decade of Mr Jinnah’s life, leading to the birth of Pakistan.”
Professor Wolpert adds: “Dr Long has not only culled Liaquat’s most interesting letters from a wide range of archival sources, but has given us illuminating insights into the vital relationship between Pakistan’s ‘Great Leader’ and his most faithful lieutenant in the Muslim League and in young Pakistan’s first Cabinet, little of which has hitherto been properly appreciated.”
The book is a prelude to Dr Long’s comprehensive “Life of Liaquat Ali Khan,” on which he has been working for over a decade, and which, when published, will, in Professor Wolpert’s words, “add more historic flesh to this skeletal outline of but one decade of Liaquat’s daily labours in organising and supporting the Muslim League, helping his Quaid-e-Azam to strengthen it, so that together they could finally bring their premier ‘platform’ of Pakistan from its ‘dream’ status to its State of reality as an Independent Nation.”
Professor Wolpert’s exceedingly successful volume on Mr Jinnah led several people to suggest he follow that up with a book on Liaquat. Instead, as Dr Long tells us, Professor Wolpert “very generously suggested” that Dr Long do so and he lent him some of his research materials to assist him in his research.
In his long list of Acknowledgements, Dr Long says that he owes “a very special debt of gratitude to indeed” to Liaquat’s and Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s elder son, Asharaf Liaquat Ali Khan, and Ashraf’s wife, Patricia, and to Ashraf’s younger brother, Akbar Liaquat Ali Khan, and Akbar’s wife, Durre.
Dr Long writes: “During my visits to Karachi they have been very helpful, wonderful company, and exceedingly hospitable. Ashraf and Akbar have shared their memories of their father Liaquat Ali Khan with me, as well as of their equally remarkable mother, Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, and they have gone out of their way to introduce me to a number of people in Karachi.”
Liaquat Ali Khan is one of the unsung heroes of the Pakistan Movement. He was totally dedicated to its cause and to the leadership of Mr Jinnah, whom he held in the highest esteem – as so many of his letters to the Quaid make abundantly clear. Mr Jinnah, too, held Liaquat Ali Khan in the highest regard. Many of his letters to Liaquat testify to that fact, even though Mr Jinnah was not one usually given to overt displays of emotion.
Both men were educated in Law at the Inns of Court in London, and although Mr Jinnah was one of the most brilliant and most successful lawyers in Bombay in pre-partition India, Liaquat did not practice law –preferring, instead, to go into politics in the United Provinces on his return from England. In 1936, soon after the promulgation by the British of the Government of India Act of 1935, Mr Jinnah chose Liaquat as the General Secretary of the All-India Muslim League. The rest, as they say, is history.
Liaquat was born into the landed gentry in eastern Punjab on October 1, 1895. He was the second son of the Nawab of Karnal by his second wife. A nawabzada by birth, Liaquat was a man of the people by temperament – modest, unassuming and kind. He exhibited the same traits during his four-year stint as Pakistan’s first prime minister. He never stood on protocol and his door was always open to the people. He gave his life for this country, but never sought any personal gain. When he died, he had only 700 hundred rupees in his bank account and owned no house or any other property here.
In his Introduction to ‘Dear Mr Jinnah,’ Dr Long writes: “Liaquat was amiable and warm-hearted with an enormous capacity for mimicking and imitating voices. He enjoyed his food and liked to dress well. In 1910, at the age of 15, he was the first member of his family to attend a public institution of education when he persuaded his father to be allowed to attend the M.A.O. College at Aligarh, the premier institute in India for the education of Muslims (later to become Aligarh University).”
As Dr Long notes, Liaquat “became the quintessential ‘Aligarh man’. He was made a monitor of his hostel and became a cricket captain. After matriculation he entered the college, graduating in 1918.” In 1919 he sailed for England and Oxford University. (To be continued.)