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 competitiv
e 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.
Then the language started changing. Children over here were learning Hindi, and Muslim parents did not teach their children Urdu. We literally murdered Urdu. There was no preservation, such as the Armenians did for their language or the Jews did for Hebrew. Next to the religion, the language was dearest to the Muslim heart, because that was the essence of his identity. Urdu was not far from Hindustani, the lingua franca of the elite of the north-west. But Hindustani started changing, started to be more Sanskritized, became Hindi.’
In 1971 Rashid’s parents went to Pakistan for the wedding of the brother who had migrated a few years before. While they were there, the second Indo-Pakistan war, the war over Bangladesh, occurred. Rashid’s father, now very old, died in Pakistan at that time; his mother stayed on with the married son.
‘Another strand was broken in my relationships. Up to this time I had been apprenticed to my father’s shop. But when he passed away in Pakistan – and since the business was collapsing anyway – I closed it down.’
The shop had been started 60 years before, in the year of the coronation of the King-Emperor George V; it was closed down in the year the state of Pakistan broke into two. The whole life of the shop – though Rashid didn’t make the point – had been contained between those two historical moments.
Rashid began to drift. He went to England and did odd jobs there. He sold six-month accident insurance for two pounds and five pounds from door to door. He had to knock and say, ‘Good morning, are you the proprietor? My name is Rashid, and I believe this will interest you.’ He hated the business of knocking on doors. One day – memories of Landau, the watch-seller, in the very big corner shop in Lucknow came to Rashid – a Jewish antique dealer from France opened to him, and told him, with some concern, that he wouldn’t make it as an insurance salesman in London and he should go back to India. Rashid went to work in a pancake house. He worked in a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. He learned to cut a chicken into nine equal pieces with an electric saw and to deep-fry the pieces for 11 minutes. He cut up 120 chickens a day.
He left England after two years. He went to Pakistan. He found they had no ‘identity crisis’ there; religion was not a man’s distinguishing feature. But he didn’t like the Pakistan money culture, the business aggressiveness of people who, when they had been in Lucknow, had been more easy-going. He didn’t like the boasting about money and possessions; in Lucknow that simply wasn’t done. He left, and went back to India, to Bombay, and worked for three years in an export company.
He was waiting for an inheritance. He was hoping to use that to go into the real estate business. But then he ran into a communal-minded official, and he began to find all kinds of obstructions thrown in his way. The litigation he had started then had gone on and on. He was near the end now, and the chances were that he was going to get what was his; but he had wasted many active years.
‘I had never faced a communal problem before. Communal riots were something that happened to the lower classes. It’s like the ethnic trouble you hear about in Pakistan. When I read or hear about it, I know that my brother won’t be involved, that his house will be far away from the trouble. So, here, I mixed with my Hindu friends and never gave the matter a thought – until I had to face the wrath of a communal officer. That did shake me – that a man, just by the flick of his pen, could change my life so much.
The Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 was a watershed not only in Muslim lives, but also in Hindu-Muslim relationships. The myth of Muslim superiority was all finished. Here was India playing a decisive role in the sub-continent. Every Muslim had a soft corner in his heart for Pakistan, and everyone was sad that the experiment had failed after less than 25 years. The dream had died. Then the Pakistani soldiers were prisoners of war for two years. That was a constant reminder.
‘I would feel a change taking place in personal relationships. My Hindu friends started lecturing. “What are Muslims doing with themselves?” They started becoming reformist about the Muslim faith and what they saw as our archaic practices. “How long are you Muslims going to carry on like this? How long are you going to be so dependent on your mullahs, your mohallas?” The sad fact was that there was a lot of truth in what they said. I was hurt, but we had to take it.’
The main palace of the last Nawab of Oude, the Kaiserbagh Palace in Lucknow, was nearly all destroyed by the British during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In 1867, when British power seemed secure again, unchallenged, the surviving wing of the Kaiserbagh was given to the Raja of Mahmudabad as a city residence.
Almost 70 years later, the descendant of the Raja became the treasurer of the Muslim League, and campaigned for the formation of a separate Muslim state of Pakistan. Pakistan came into being 10 years later. And then – as though he hadn’t fully worked out the consequences of the creation of Pakistan: Lucknow was in India, and many hundreds of miles away from Pakistan – the Raja found that he had made himself a wanderer. It wasn’t until 1957 that he commited himself to the state for which he had campaigned. In that year he became a Pakistani citizen; with the result that, during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, all the Raja’s property in Lucknow, the palaces and land, were taken over by the Indian government as enemy property.
The family property was still alien (rather than enemy) property. But petitions had been made to the Indian government, and the Raja’s son, Amir, now lived in the Kaiserbagh Palace that had been granted by the British to his ancestor 120 years before.
I had met Amir in Parveen’s drawing-room. He was in Indian evening dress, the long coat, the tight trousers. He was a small man, delicate in visage, sturdy in body, and he had the manner of a prince. An English public school and some years at Cambridge had given him an English style. But when I next met him, in the library of his palace, he was to tell me that when he spoke another language, Urdu, say, and when he was with people – Muslims, Shias – who might have looked up to him as a prince and a defender of the faith, he was quite different. Recent history had given him many styles, many personalities; had imposed strains on him such as his ancestors hadn’t known.
Amir was now in state politics, and for three years or so had been a member of the Legislative Assembly in the Congress interest. His father had belonged to the Muslim League, which in the 1930s and 1940s had been opposed to the Congress. But now in India the Congress was the party that best served the interest of Muslims; and, in a further twist, as a politician Amir used the title, Raja of Mahmudabad, to establish the link with his forebears, and to give ‘a focus of identification’ to the local Shia and Muslim community.
His father’s association with Pakistan could have been politically damaging; but Amir said that the people of Mahmudabad, 80 per cent of whom were Hindu, had never shown him or his family any hostility. And Amir honoured his father’s memory. His father was a deeply religious man, with streaks of mysticism. He hated his caste, Amir said.
‘My father never wanted to be a ruler. He couldn’t bring himself to be a raja. He was most uneasy about benefiting from it. He thought income earned from property was tainted, since it wasn’t earned by the sweat of one’s brow.’
That idea had come to Amir’s father when he was a child. It was an idea he had got from his mother. She, Amir’s father’s mother, came from a family of poor Muslim scholars who considered learning to be superior to wealth.
‘My father’s father was a maharaja, a man of personality, but not a socialist. He married for a second time, and relations between him and my father became strained. This was no doubt when my father developed his attitude to his caste. One of the first things I heard from my father – which I later understood to be one of the teachings of Ali – was: “You will not find abundant wealth without finding by its side the rights of people that have been trampled.” And: “No rich morsel is eaten without there being in it
the hunger of those who have worked for it.” ’
I said that such statements applied to poor or feudal countries. They couldn’t apply to all countries.
Amir said, ‘People in England may not be able to understand the kind of destitution and misery that exists in India.’
Though Amir didn’t say so directly, it might have been his father’s religious nature that made him campaign for a separate Islamic state of Pakistan – not merely a homeland for Muslims, but a religious state. Amir’s father began wearing homespun when he was very young. When, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the Muslim League, he gave up music, which he and the rest of the family had loved – Indian classical music, western classical, Iranian classical.
Amir was born in 1943. When he was two years old, his ears were pierced. It was the custom in Muslim countries for slaves’ ears to be pierced; and the piercing of Amir’s ears meant that he had been sold to the Imam: the child had been pledged to the service of the Shia faith. This service began soon. When India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Amir, then aged four, started on a wandering life with his father and mother.
‘After partition my father left India. He was a very committed man, but he wasn’t a politician. Just before independence we were in Baluchistan, in Quetta, in what had become Pakistan. On the day of independence we crossed the border into Iran. We went to Zahedan, and from there we went in two buses to Mashhad, and then to Tehran. We went on to Iraq by air. The convoy followed by road. This was in 1948.’