[Reader-list] c space shuddha if he were to look for refuge in saddar, karachi
rehan ansari
rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 28 19:41:20 IST 2001
A Conversation with Ajmal Kamal
" I was watching Liza Minelli's "Cabaret" on video
at a friend's place one August night, when his younger brother
slammed open the door to announce in a voice choking with
excitement: "Bhaijan! General Zia mar gaya!" We thought it was
too good to believe. But, well, it was true.
That night, sitting in a yellow minibus, going back to my place in
North Karachi, I was amazed at the fact that not one person in the
bus even mentioned the news or uttered the name of the killed
dictator. Then, in my dazed state, the torment and anger of the
past eleven years passed through my agitated mind. This man, I
thought, had destroyed more than a third of my life. Now, I was
almost certain, everything would change, although I could not hope
to get back the eleven years that had passed under the shadow of
a cruel dictatorship. Now, thirteen years further down the line, I
cannot help smiling sadly at my innocence which I was to lose
soon enough."
In the Saddar of Karachi there is Zainab Market, a market of export reject shirts, t-shirts, jeans and you get the picture. I didn�t like going into the maze of Zainab Market back when I went to school, at Karachi Grammar School, also in Saddar, or now. I was mostly driven through the early morning traffic and the end of school traffic, and in those timeless Karachi afternoons when the sky and the air become one sheen of heat Zainab Market was just a place that I passed for 13 years of afternoons, or an afternoon that stretched the years 1975-1988, on the way to and fro from school. Now I went there because I had heard of a book store/caf�/ publishing house/ on top of Zainab Market.
Like any book store it had book shelves. But the shelves in the middle of the room had wheels and I learnt that that was so so that the shelves could be moved to the side for the fortnightly film club. The last film that was shown was a film by Gautam Ghosh. The next film to be shown is Satyajit Ray's last film.
Past the bookshelves was a kitchenette with a sign saying Tea and Coffee 10 rupees, please help yourself�Past the kitchenette is an office by a balcony full of potted plants. Ajmal Kamal sits among flowers, great light and a lovely breeze.
I had first heard of Ajmal Kamal when I saw in a bookstore in Lahore the journal of contemporary writing that Ajmal Kamal edits. AAJ has contemporary writing in Urdu, writing translated from several Indian languages, as well as writing translated from English. So what you may get in an issue of AAJ, and there have been 33 of them since 1988 is something from (I list the contributors to the 33rd issue) Vaikom Mohammed Bashir, Fehmida Riaz, Joseph Conrad, Rajesh Joshi, Nirmal Verma, Uday Prakash, Goethe, Minno Bhandari, Sameen Danishwar, June Ailya, Zeeshan Sahil, William Teen, and Milan Kundera.
The publishing house is called City Press and I picked up their recent publication Understanding Karachi (Planning and Reform for the Future). Understanding Karachi is written by Arif Hasan, an architect and prot�g� of Akhtar Hameed Khan.
The book was lying in the pride of place of the bookstore and I also picked it up to see what Ajmal Kamal chose to publish. In the book I looked up Saddar and realized why I had never stopped in Saddar in those 13 years.
The first chapter called Karachi's prepartition history says that Saddar was part of the European part of town, that Karachi boomed along with Bombay because of the cotton trade during the years of the American Civil War and that Karachi had the first municipal committee in all of India. By 1947 Saddar consisted of wide roads on a grid iron-plan, , residential areas dominated by Goans, Parsis and Europeans. The bazaar was dominated by churches, missionary schools, community halls and civic buildings. In the second chapter on post partition Karachi he writes that the 600000 refugees who came lived in refugee settlements in walking distance from saddar bazaar. A short distance from the bazaar a university ws established in 1952, and the federal secretariat was constructed adjacent to the bazaar. The older educational institutins and the courts of law were already in the vicinity. Thus within 4 years of the creation of Pakistan saddar became the centre of the city with a unique cosmopolitan culture and karachi became a high density multi class city.
So how did Saddar become a place by the late 70s, so easily drive passable?
In 1953 student riots erupted, supported by the city's proletariat, and a number of governments fell in a year. When Ayub Khan came he shifted the capital to Islamabad, working class migrants were discouraged from living in the city centre. Satellite towns were developed 25 km from the city centre.. Present day Karachi university is nowhere near saddar. The port, the working classes, the university, the industries were now at the 4 corners of a city and since there was no proper network at the time the entire movement was through saddar and saddar became a drive through and a drive by.
I finished my cup of tea and on my way to the kitchenette realized that all the books in the bookstore were either fiction, poetry, culture studies or urban planning, and almost all had something to do with Karachi.
------
Our conversation about his motivation as a publisher was a conversation about the nature of innocence, hope, optimism and survival in the face of the Zia years and its legacy.
He is in his mid 40s and I am in my early 30s but we both found that we share an era as our formative experience: we have in common are the 11 years of General Zia.
People of my generation, I said to him, urban, from Karachi and Lahore professional families, who were young teenagers in the late 70s, have not recovered from dictatorship, segregation and Islamisation. They are the children of men and women who were young in very optimistic times-- the late 50s and early 60's, the Ayubian era of nation-building. Their children, us, were designed to experience optimism. When we were on the verge of adulthood it was the late 70's and all hell broke loose: Bhutto's sharaab peena and khoon peena, General Zia's smile and the Afghan Jihad. Those times represent the extra-judicial killing of my generation's optimism.
This is how he responded:
My family had settled in Hyderabad in 1965 after living briefly at
several places in the then West Pakistan. I came to Karachi in
1976 to study engineering. Which means that I jumped directly
into the political turmoil of 1977. I was 19, and beginning to know
Karachi, and life, when Gen Zia imposed his Martial Law. I
watched the city change before my eyes. It was in a DCET hostel
that I first heard about a new kind of gun called "Kalashnikov".
Well, we all saw it dominating the atmosphere in the days ahead. I
was plodding through an academic discipline I did not have my
heart in. Most of the time I read English and Urdu books, tried
(unsuccessfully) to write poetry, learned to translate from English
into Urdu, watched the parochial students politics from a distance,
experienced my share of the sexual barrenness that used to be
the lot of young men in those days. (I do not if things have
changed for young men today.) I went back to Hyderabad in 1981
to while away my jobless days there. Brought out an anthology of
Urdu and translated writings called "aaj" pehli kitab" the same
year. It was meant to be first of a series, which could not become
a reality till September 1989 when I was able to launch it as a
quarterly journal.
I was watching Liza Minelli's "Cabaret" on video
at a friend's place one August night, when his younger brother
slammed open the door to announce in a voice choking with
excitement: "Bhaijan! General Zia mar gaya!" We thought it was
too good to believe. But, well, it was true.
That night, sitting in a yellow minibus, going back to my place in
North Karachi, I was amazed at the fact that not one person in the
bus even mentioned the news or uttered the name of the killed
dictator. Then, in my dazed state, the torment and anger of the
past eleven years passed through my agitated mind. This man, I
thought, had destroyed more than a third of my life. Now, I was
almost certain, everything would change, although I could not hope
to get back the eleven years that had passed under the shadow of
a cruel dictatorship. Now, thirteen years further down the line, I
cannot help smiling sadly at my innocence which I was to lose
soon enough.
Yes, it was not hope that we lost in an "extra-judicial killing" (I do
not remember if I had it in the first place) but innocence. By which
I mean the ability to see things in black and white. How simple it
was for us to think that once democracy returned, everything
would be all right. I remember watching Benazir Bhutto, our darling
of those na�ve days, on the TV screen in the lounge of Saddar's
Hotel Sarawan, declare in her imperious style and charmingly
flawed Urdu: "Aaj se law ministry awam ki law ministry ho gi!" She
was, at that moment, appointing Aitezaz Ahsan as her Legal
Eagle. And we were gullible enough to take it at face value,
literally. What we were to discover later is common knowledge
today.
Hope, to me, is an intellectual stance. It may or may not have
anything to do with the objective conditions. (What do we know
about the objective reality anyway? We have nothing but a very
fragmented subjective perception of it.) You need hope as you
need fuel for a car. Because you need to go on. You just cannot
sit down and decide whether the good has at least 51% chances
to prevail over evil before embarking on what you want to - have to -
do. This kind of calculation is valid only for those who have a
zero-one option of continue to feel frustrated here or to join their
folks in the States. Most of us, obviously, do not have that kind of
a choice. For those to whom life has not been kind, the only
choice is the oldest one: to be or not to be. They require their daily
ration of hope in order merely to survive, just as they need to have
their national identity card ready to be checked by the cruel and
greedy policeman in the night returning to their home in a far flung
abadi. And they somehow manage to get it.
We lost innocence, not in a police encounter, but through a
process of realisation. It is the realisation of our own past history
as a nation state, the realisation of, if you will, the so-called
post-colonial experience so wonderfully described for us by, for
instance, Abdul Razzak Gurnah, the writer from Zanzibar, in his
"Admiring Silence".
---------------------------------
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