India (60 page)

She wanted to go into ‘secular’ politics; and she meant that she wanted to go, as a Muslim woman, into the politics of the state. This ambition in no way diluted her religious faith. Certain aspects of the Muslim faith were ‘the law’, she said: they couldn’t be discussed. Such an aspect was the aspect of women’s rights.

Women enjoyed many rights under Islam. They didn’t need to have their rights – which were in any case ‘the law’ – amended by the state. They enjoyed the right, for instance, of inheriting property from their parents; Hindu women had no such right. Whatever was given to a Muslim wife during marriage was hers to keep; that wasn’t so with western women. When a marriage was arranged a man undertook to pay a woman a certain sum if he divorced her. That was enough; the idea of maintenance was repugnant to a Muslim woman. When a woman became a wife, it didn’t mean that she had become a servant. After a divorce a husband became a stranger, and there was no question of a woman taking money from him afterwards. Other countries or communities could think of modifying the rights of people according to the needs of the time. But the Koran had laid down the law for Muslims for all time.

The words were strong, but Parveen spoke them easily, when – with Rashid to help with her English – she came to the hotel to talk of her political work. She was a defender of the faith. But the faith – complete, fully formulated – sat lightly on her. At her social level it was even part of her certainty and strength, and seemed to equip her for the public life she wanted to enter.

She had a talent for organizing. She was off that day to meet – informally – a young woman who had been suggested as a prospective bride for her brother. She would go to this far-off town; she would call on a friend. In the friend’s house – and apparently quite by chance – there would be the young woman her brother wanted her to meet.

Life was going on for Parveen. She didn’t have Rashid’s dark
vision. Rashid was a bachelor. He was a reader, a solitary. He brooded; his mood changed easily. He loved his apartment; he loved retreating to it.

As for the Muslims of the chowk or bazaar – of course, Parveen said, they were trapped in their ignorance, and it was hard to get through to them. But though people spoke of this ignorance and constriction as a specifically Muslim problem, many other groups in India were in a similar position – people in the rural areas, the scheduled castes.

Perhaps it was that comparison that depressed Rashid. Muslims had once ruled here, set the tone. Now they had been depleted by the middle-class migration to Pakistan; and, in spite of the esteem in which individuals were held, as a group they ranked low.

Rashid was of an old Shia Muslim family. An ancestor in the mid-18th century had been a trader, with seven ships plying out of Bombay. Perhaps they hadn’t really been ships, Rashid said; perhaps they had been only dhows. But that ancestor had done well. He had even built an
imambara
, a replica of one of the Shia mausoleums erected in Iran and Iraq for descendants of the Prophet. It was the practice in those days for a Shia who had done well to put up an imambara, as a place where religious discourses might take place.

In the 19th century an ancestor had served at the court of the last Nawab of Oude. When this ruler was exiled to Calcutta by the British, Rashid’s ancestor had gone with him, and this ancestor had lived in Calcutta until his death in the 1880s. Rashid’s mother’s father was an administrator in one of the bigger princely states. He looked after everyone in his family; he wrote poetry; and he dressed like an Edwardian gentleman. Rashid thought – going only by photographs – that this grandfather looked a little like Bertrand Russell.

Rashid’s father’s father was the first one in his family to learn English. He worked in the railways, in what was then the new railway station of Lucknow – and it is still one of the more impressive buildings of Lucknow. Rashid’s father, when he was of age, thought he would go into the police service. At that time upper-class Muslims, landowners, went into the professions; they did law and medicine. People like Rashid’s father went into the
police service or the administration. Rashid thought that his father was a handsome man. He was five feet eight, which made him an inch or two taller than Rashid. He was slightly marked by smallpox; but at that time nearly everybody had pock-marks.

In those days, if you were someone like Rashid’s father, it was easy to join the police service. Somebody took you to the English officer and offered you for the service. The officer would say, ‘Send him from the day after.’ This happened to Rashid’s father. He joined the force as an assistant superintendent; this was the starting officer-rank. But he lasted only three days. He didn’t like the drills, and he couldn’t bear the abusive language of the instructors. He couldn’t see it as just part of the game, part of the toughening-up process; he wanted to get out right away.

He decided after that to go into business. He and his brother opened a shop in Lucknow that sold cameras and photographic equipment. This was in 1911, the year of the coronation of the King-Emperor George V: the high-water mark of the British Empire, and the British Indian Raj. The camera shop that Rashid’s father started in that year did well in imperial India. It suited the place; it developed with photography itself, and became one of the best shops of its kind. Branches were opened in other Indian cities, mainly the hill resorts, where people went for their summer holidays. The Lucknow shop was in the main shopping street called Hazratgunj. In those imperial days Hazratgunj – now crowded and a mess – was sprayed with water every evening by a municipal van.

The other shops in Hazratgunj were owned by Englishmen and Jews and Parsis. Rashid especially remembered the shop of a Jew called Landau. Landau had a very big corner shop, and he sold watches. The walk-way outside his shop was roofed or canopied by the floor above. There were wrought-iron pillars downstairs; the residence part of the building was upstairs, with a verandah with slender pillared arches, echoing the solider pillars below. Anderson Brothers were tailors; they closed after independence in 1947. Another tailor was MacGregor. He didn’t leave in 1947; he stayed on in Lucknow and died there. MacGregor had Indian royalty and Englishmen among his customers, and men from the Indian Civil Service. ‘You could tell that a coat had been made by “Mac”,’ Rashid said. ‘People wore them 30 years on.’

Rashid, who was born in 1944, remembered his father’s shop as
having showcases in Burma teak. They had been made in Lucknow by Muslim artisans, working to his father’s designs. The shop was like a club; outsiders and idlers were nervous of going in. ‘Money wasn’t the main thing. People came to meet my father and their other friends there.’

Rashid’s family house was in old Lucknow. It had a separate section for the women. Guests couldn’t go into the main house. They stayed in the drawing-room, which was right at the front of the house and had a separate entrance. The furniture in that drawing-room was in the English style, made in Lucknow: enormous pieces, very uncomfortable. At the back of the drawing-room were a few other rooms, and then there was the courtyard of the main house. In summer the family slept out in the courtyard. Water was first thrown on the courtyard to cool it. The servants then laid out the string beds in rows, and put up mosquito nets on bamboo poles. There was a stand for pitchers in which drinking water was kept, to cool for the next day. A big square table was in a corner of the courtyard; it was covered by a white cloth and had a coloured tablecloth in the centre. Food was put on that square table. Dinner was at nine, when Rashid’s father came back from the shop.

Almost as soon as Rashid had got to know this ordered middle-class family life, the family fortunes began to change. When independence came in 1947, Rashid’s father wanted to migrate to Pakistan. He had a nephew who was looking after the branch in the hill town of Mussoorie; he asked this nephew to take the stock from Mussoorie to the shop in Karachi, which was now in Pakistan. The nephew did so; but, in the chaos of those days, the nephew got the Karachi shop transferred to his own name.

‘So my father was left high and dry. He gave up the idea of moving to Pakistan.’

‘What happened to your cousin?’

‘He lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. He mucked up the shop, and was reduced to bringing provisions for the school his wife ran. You might say that he was punished. But that brought no joy to us.’

Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan began to come to Lucknow.

‘They were strange to us. The people behind our house, though not very rich, were an educated Muslim family. In 1947 they went
to Pakistan. Their house was then assigned to a refugee family. One memory that stays in my mind was how the mother of the new family used to make their children defecate on pieces of paper and throw it over the common wall into our courtyard. We made a fuss, and they understood, and stopped. They probably came from the Punjab, although I don’t know.

‘Slowly you could see new signboards coming up in the town. The old shops belonged to Muslims. Now on the new boards you saw different names. Instead of the staid, English kind of shops you saw garish shops, brightly lit, with music. In Aminabad, old Lucknow, the Sindhis put up rows and rows of cloth shops. The first thing they started doing was shouting and asking you to come into their shops. “Come in, sister. Come and see.” This was unheard-of among us. No glass cases there. Rickety little boxes. But a lot of those people who came then have now put up enormous shops full of chrome and glass.

They were better businessmen than we were. They were better salesmen. They would sell smuggled goods – we never touched them. They would work on turnover rather than a decent margin. And our stocks began to get old and shop-soiled, and less in demand.’

In 1951 the
zamindari
system of land tenure was abolished. ‘Land holdings were reduced. Hereditary rights were taken away from the major portion. The zamindari system had been established by the British in 1828. It replaced the Mogul
mansabdari
system, whereby land rights were given to people and they were required to supply a certain number of horses when required – in the mansabdari system your status depended on the number of horses you were assigned. So, in 1951, a lot of the zamindars or big landlords who had big houses in Lucknow – absentee landlords – had to adjust to changing times. A lot of them left for Pakistan. The abolition of zamindari removed our clientele in one fell swoop. All of a sudden the economy changed. And the English customers left. Our shop was “by appointment” to several governors of the province – it was that respected.

‘Hazratgunj stopped being whitewashed. The roads were dirtier. You found a lot of pavement shops. It became impossible to walk on the footpaths. The whole atmosphere changed.’

With this calamity in business, there was a family tragedy. The family had a summer house in Mussoorie, and there one summer
Rashid’s elder brother was drowned. Altogether, the years just before and after independence had brought blow after blow for Rashid’s father: the very bad Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta in 1946, the partition in 1947 and the loss of the Karachi shop, the abolition of zamindari, and now the loss of the elder son.

It was harder for the old than the young. Rashid was at the famous Anglo-Indian school in Lucknow, La Martinière, and he was very happy there. La Martinière had been founded by an 18th-century French adventurer, Claude Martin, who, having come to India, had taken service with the Nawabs of Oude. He had an Indian wife or wives, and at his death he left part of his great fortune to set up schools for Eurasian children. A hundred and fifty years on, La Martinière at Lucknow still had a mixed, cosmopolitan atmosphere; and Rashid, during this time of family stress, was able to grow up with a certain amount of security, and almost in a kind of political innocence.

‘We had boys from every community in the school, all from the same middle-class background. The families knew each other. I took my world for granted. It was there, the family was there, the extended family, the cousins. Religion was just part of life. It wasn’t a burden. A lot of things helped there – the school, and the friends who came to call at my father’s house: they were people of all religions. We were made to read the Koran with a succession of moulvis, but we never got beyond the first chapter.

‘Our father never forced us to go to the mosque, and I personally have never been. It was my temperament: there was no death-of-God attitude in that. We would go to the
majlis
, at the imambara or at friends’ houses, ostensibly to listen to religious discourses about the battle of Kerbala and the death of Hussain, the son of Ali. But, really, it was a social thing. This was the Shia side, as against the purely Islamic part, of our upbringing. The one thing my father was absolutely firm about was that on the 10th day of Mohurram we would go barefoot to Taalkatora-Karabala, a graveyard with an imambara where Shias were buried. This was an opportunity to visit the family graves also.’

Inevitably, as he grew up, Rashid became aware of all that independence and partition meant.

‘It was a foregone conclusion that my sister would marry a Pakistani boy, because Muslims in India weren’t doing so well, and the Pakistanis themselves wanted to marry a girl from the old
country. Muslims in India weren’t doing well, because after partition there were no jobs for them, and a general lack of opportunity. There was the resentment of the majority community. It was but natural. First you fight to get a country, and then you refuse to go.

‘It was also the survival of the fittest working. Every Muslim house split after partition. There wasn’t a family that wasn’t affected. Parents stayed back, sons went away. The ones who stayed back were not ready to face the jungle. A lot of them were landlords, and they lacked the competitive spirit. My brother did brilliantly in his studies, in India and then in the United States. When he came back to India he couldn’t get a job for six months. He went to Pakistan and got a job right away.